Cofvefe

Something. Today I have already done something. I’ve done coming into town for coffee and that’s where I am right now, coffeeing. Because I can make any word I like a verb and you can’t stop me – I’ve got bits of paper to say I’m allowed to fuck about with the English language.

Sunday mornings in coffee shops are the same as most other days in coffee shops apart from the fact that more of the people drinking coffee seem to be really hungover. The coffee is a nectar for them, a balm, a panacea for broken livers and the ghost memories of putting traffic cones on their heads and showing late night drivers their bottom. Well, that’s what I used to get up to when I was drunk. And sometimes when I wasn’t.

Two days of going no further than an armchair in my living room and then back to bed in my bedding room were more voluntary than enforced, which is the way I like it, the way it is, get on the good foot. Yeah. If I had the funk and was black and was called James Brown then I’d be James Brown but I’m not so I can’t be. What was I saying? Oh yes, now I’m in an armchair in a coffee shop. They don’t have a room with beds in right next to the room with chairs and tables in but that’s ok cos I’m going to have another coffee. It’s the same as cocaine only it doesn’t make your face look like it’s turned inside out, eh Mr Gove?

All mimsy were the horrid Goves and that mole Raab’s a cunt. (with apologies to Lewis Carroll)

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You Could Leave Your Government Unlocked…

Nothing. Or an approximation of. That was my Saturday.

Breathing happened so that’s something. Eating happened but in a really detached way that ensured no actual cooking was part of the equation. Sleep definitely happened. And then happened again. And several times after that. And will again soon. Watching Killing Eve happened because I’ve decided to be old school and watch the thing one episode per week instead of binging the lot like a kid with cake. Oh, and cake happened but that’s covered by eating I guess. Eating is a chore but cake isn’t so I don’t know if I classify it as eating or as sexually charged yumminess.

No. I. Don’t. Shag. Cakes.

The weather is still stolen from an early spring month because the inept government used up all the June weather while arguing about whether Brexit means Brexit or whether it means let’s have a different cunt for Prime Minister a while because the last one is broken now. (What they didn’t know, viewers, is that the last one was broken when she was given the job and so will the next one be but the next one will definitely be a cunt and they won’t care because they’re Tories)

And now some more sleeping. Not with Tories, you sick fucking pervert.

He Cites References, He Scores!

Modern Humanities Research Association. MHRA, if you want to refer to them without taking up so many syllables. It’s been a long time since I checked their style guide but spent maybe an hour this morning reading through some of the many pages they have dedicated to ensuring academic work of a humanities type nature is presented using the codes and customs they accept.

As I’ve said, I don’t yet know how sustainable my attempts to work towards a thesis will prove to be because of my stupid health. And even if they are sustainable, submission of said thesis is a long, long way off. But it’s good practise to practise good, ain’t it? (sic)

I wrote up notes after that then done a face speak with our man in American. We are the funniest people in the universe and you should pay money to hear us make you laugh. Well, make one another laugh. In fact, I don’t care if you listen or not, just give us lots and lots of money because we’re awesome and won’t spend it on stupidity. Most of it will be spent on cake.

And now I am not working or speak facing for the rest of the daytime or early evening because of football of the Women’s World Cup variety being all over Friday telly. Scotland are currently losing and it offends my surname. Come on, ladies, start some winning now.

S’Wet

There is some weather out there that belongs in April, not June. Maybe it belongs in March, seeing as how the temperature has gone all wanky cold, but the rain and rain and rain and slight stop for some not rain then more rain and rain and rain is totally un-June and can fuck the fuck off.

What’s that, Climate Crisis Denier? You think this proves you’re right to say the world isn’t getting hotter? Far be it from me to bring facts into your cosy little idiocy but the science of climate change does show that a hotter planet means more moisture sucked up from the surface of the earth into the sky from whence it will rain back down more heavily. Yes, really. Oh fuck off is the earth flat! That’s not even the same subject.

Aside from a brief town-shaped trip to buy groceries I’ve spent the day indoors again. I’ve written up some notes, downloaded a few articles with potential in terms of shaping my research, eaten some of the groceries and taken to my bed. With. A. Hot. Water. Bottle. In June. Stupid bloody weather stuff.

Like A South-Bound Freight Train

One of the books I looked through as part of my research for last week’s conference was a biography of Karl Marx subtitled ‘Man and Fighter’. Now I am unable to get the image of Marx as a boxer to leave my mind. His luxuriant beard waxed so it glistens under the lights and, of course, deep-red shorts.

The weigh-in would be awesome as I don’t expect he’d be especially good at trash talk:

Fury: You’re going down like your mum does on sailors.

Marx: Er, well, I’m going to deny you control of your own means of production, you knobstick.

Fury: I seen more meat on a butcher’s dog.

Marx: I have nothing to lose but my chains, which, um, aren’t literal chains of course, but if they were, I’d, I’d, well I wouldn’t do anything to you with them because that would simply be a sick parody of the hierarchical oppression of capitalism.

Sky Sports would have trouble selling that one, which would actually please Marx so maybe he’s perfect at trash talk after all. But if he had to step away from the ring, what other sport might Karl have a go at?

Golf would probably strike him as the reification of natural resources which have been violently transformed from environment into commodity.

Football is a team game and some of the best managers of the past professed to a socialist perspective – Shankly, Ferguson, Trotsky (managed Forest Green Rovers for two months in the late 1990s*) – so Marx might potentially be a great coach. Then again, the division of manager from players is another hierarchical construct so perhaps he’d rather just be playing left-back for a tight-knit bunch of nobodies in an unfashionable League One team?

Polo? Elitist nonsense.

Water Polo? Slightly less elitist but no less nonsensical.

Golf Polo? Not a sport at all.

Oh well, Karl, it’s the boxing or the spending endless days in the British Library researching all that ‘economic shit’ (your words, Mr Marx) to write Das Kapital. 

Marx: You gonna be my bitch, you scum sucking penny-weight. I will destroy you. I am the greatest. I’m beautiful. What’s my name? WHAT’S MY NAME?

*Of course he didn’t, idiot.

He Didn’t Start The Fire…Or So He Says

I’m not a personal friend of Billy Joel so I can’t call him up in the middle of the night and ask if he would sing that line “In the middle of the night” from one of his songs to make me feel better about being awake in the middle of the night. 

River of Dreams? Is it? I don’t know. Which is another reason I’m not a personal friend of Mr Joel, I suppose. My friend Steve will know. I am too allowed friends with the same name as me.

So. It’s the middle of the night. I am awake. Grrr! I’m tired in the body parts but my brain won’t shut down. Possibly because of a spider. Yesterday I had a little run in with a spider. I’ve been experimenting with letting it live quite openly on a kitchen window sill for a week or so. I am phobic so even though it was a reasonably small spider I still felt my phobic stuff gnawing at me when I could see it doing spidery movements while I washed up or reached perilously close to where it was living in order to get coffee from a shelf.

When I was a young boy a middle of the night traumatic thing happened with a very big spider that resulted not only in me developing my phobia but also me getting shouted at and hit by my father. The vulnerability I feel when my spider phobia kicks off is probably far more about him and how frightened I was of his reactions on a daily basis than it is about arachnids. But that’s trauma for you, a specific trigger can take you right back to feelings of vulnerability and terror even when they have nothing directly to do with the real reason for your terror and fear.

Yeah, so yesterday I noticed the spider had extended its web along the bottom of the window and thought I might open the window when it was there and encourage it to piss off outside. It didn’t understand what I was telling it because it didn’t speak human, only spider, and it ran down onto the worktop much too close to me. I panicked and hit it with a wooden spoon. Sorry spider, I’ve deaded you. And perpetuated my phobia. And feel bad for being such a scaredy.

I’ve been on high alert ever since, despite the knowledge that the spider is deceased, that I murdered it and now Buddha hates me. Spider anxiety. Triggered shit from long ago  which ain’t about spiders at all. Even from beyond the grave my father still affects me, which doesn’t seem fair.

I’d have made a really crap Robert the Bruce: “Holy fuck there’s a spider, kill it kill it. No, run away out of this cave and let’s go surrender to the Sassenach bastards we’re hiding from.”

Mehnday

A Monday, you say? So soon? Didn’t we just have a Monday? I’m not really a fan of them, truth be told. They’re so start of the week. They’re made of loud and busy. They taste of not enough Sunday.

My body is now telling me how hard it worked last week to get me through the conference. It has a not very subtle way of telling me; basically it makes everything hurt and assumes breathing might be optional. In which case my Monday may not be made of loud or busy; it may be made of zzzzz. And crying.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll find time to write to the calendar about too many Mondays in every week. In green ink. Or blood. And with lots of terrible swears.