Tonight's poem is T.S. Eliot, because I've just read a piece on concentration and distraction that quotes him. I worry about that sometimes. There are mornings when skimming and scanning becomes so compulsive that it makes my regular anxiety bubble up (like the frozen beer in our kitchen) and explode. My interest in an article wanes long before it should. One of the books on this phenomenon/moral panic that the author cites is Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. I'll get it so that I can prohibit my students from surfing in class.

Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot - extract
III
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy.
Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

First,
eructation:a burp! Nice.
tumid: adjective 1 (of a part of the body) swollen or bulging. 2 (of language) pompous or bombastic.
Oxford Dictionary

I'm not even one of the people Eliot was talking about (although, I supposed I really am...) and I feel ashamed of my

Le weekend

Went to see the Whitecaps on the weekend. Right now I can hear the Guantanamo Bay interrogation video playing. What a bunch of c*nts. OR good investigators - time will tell.
I hate mascots.

The Best Awful

So since last time I've had something to really be depressed about, as they say. It's not funny then and it isn't now. Mr. Fish finally decided to answer one of my queries about things being wrong or not (since he was making it plainly plain that they were) and it seems his unhappiness has reached the stage where even he is going to do something about it. Fast-forward through a few days of swollen eyes, drunkenness, cigarettes, and awkward talks, and it's decided: we're going to spend some time apart, him going back off into the wild to recapture the feeling he had earlier this year before suburban ennui and midlife crisis derailed him; me going to my homeland for 3 weeks to see family.

I intended to write right away, demanding to know what was so awful about his life? OK, I'm not that comfortable with this suburban child-having, hardware and homeware-loving culture either at times, but as I said, I felt it would be ungracious to complain too much.

At first I was bereft, shower-sobbing, vodka-swilling, moaning bereft; and then I made a mental list of "People Who Are/Were Worse Off Than Me" in the relationship stakes, which I'll now reproduce here digitally:

1. Mary-Louise Parker.

Hottie longterm boyfriend hooked up with ingenue blonde while she was 7 months pregnant - who the FUCK bounces back from that? (Her, of course, and I am aware of the fact that she is one of Mr. Fish's favourites).

2. Mia Farrow

It is not possible for me to discover nude pictures of my adopted daughter at my partner's house; nor will the world's media gain possession of all the sordid details.

3. The woman whose husband took her to the Grand Canyon and pushed her off because it was cheaper than getting a divorce.

This is true; see 'Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon' by Michael Ghiglieri.

It must be time for some Anne Sexton, or maybe some Plath?

Killing The Love

by Anne Sexton

I am the love killer,

I am murdering the music we thought so special,

that blazed between us, over and over.

I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.

I am pushing knives through the hands

that created two into one.

Our hands do not bleed at this,

they lie still in their dishonor.

I am taking the boats of our beds

and swamping them, letting them cough on the sea

and choke on it and go down into nothing.

I am stuffing your mouth with your

promises and watching

you vomit them out upon my face.

The Camp we directed?

I have gassed the campers.

Now I am alone with the dead,

flying off bridges,

hurling myself like a beer can into the wastebasket.

I am flying like a single red rose,

leaving a jet streamof solitude

and yet I feel nothing,

though I fly and hurl, my insides are empty

and my face is as blank as a wall.

Shall I call the funeral director?

He could put our two bodies into one pink casket,

those bodies from before,

and someone might send flowers,

and someone might come to mourn

and it would be in the obits,

and people would know that something died,

is no more, speaks no more, won't even

drive a car again and all of that.

When a life is over,

the one you were living for,

where do you go?