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I'm increasingly struck (and perplexed) by the degree of retrospection people around me "suffer" from... kids my age entrenched in their university years, pointing towards an inevitable middle age of nostalgia and retrospective glorification... in my case I suppose it makes sense: oxfordians will not be keen to devalue the importance of the sheer hell they've been through...

maybe there's something wrong with me, but I've never looked back on my university days with anything but the analytic eye of a mortician, shuddering with relief not to be the analysand...

I disliked / pitied / feared / hated most or all of my tutors (a very easy thing to do in the oxbridge system, a sheltered crystall bubble of an ecosystem that generates frail, secluded flowers burdened with unique dysfunctions that would never survive in the real world...). the days were a constant neurotic haze of building insecurity, ceaseless deadlines (3 essays a week!) and abject fear, shadowed by the looming and immanent apocalypse of Finals.

for four years we had no formal assesment. no evaluation, no marks, no coursework, no nothing. maybe a bit of informal banter, pointless comments in the margins of essays, but no solid ground to stand on. except, of course, if you didn't do "well enough" during the course they'd kick you out...

final degree marks in the Oxford system are based entirely, 100%, on your marks in a series of 8-14 devastating examinations pitched in a two-week period, give or take a few weeks... four years of hardcore education down the drain if you have a bad day, or a migraine. not to mention the unspeakable shame branded on your forehead if you "don't do well enough"...

one guy I knew handed his dissertation in one day late, in philosophy and physics, did his exams, waited for months... and the oxford authorities refused him a degree, on the basis of his missing a deadline. four years with nothing to show for it, not even a Pass degree. what would you do?

basically, it was hell. I was confused, angry, directionless, abstracted and subject to a harrowing regime of pointless academic exercises that served only to constantly prove to critical authorities that you were worthy of the utmost honour of eventually receiving the privilege of registering for an Oxford examination, at some point in a couple of years. nothing was done to prepare us for Finals. the tutorial regime had nothing to do with exam skills, though in some ways it was just as harrowing and fruitless... three times a week you had to produce a defensible thesis, over six or seven pages, that would stand up to critical scrutiny when presented orally to your tutor, a man of often 40 years of experience in ego warfare with young souls...

to alleviate and attenuate I, and numerous others, pumped ourselves full of psychedelics and psychotropics; to keep the smoldering, flickering candle-flame of love for the intellect alive I read everything but what I was meant to read; I studied yoga, runic mysticism, beat poetry and the qabalah to claim my intellectual territory for myself, and erode the mass of useless self-perpetuating information my brain was filling up with.

every day was grey and tinged with discomfort, fear and misery. I was constantly on edge, constantly insecure, like a ferret in a cage.

it was basically, fundamentally, essentially and incontrovertibly grim, and I hated it.

and now I find people around me who went to university with me waxing lyrical, talking into the late hours after the pub about who fancied who and who kissed who and who did what to whom with what and when and why... and I just feel like slapping them awake and yelling "it's been three years for chrissake! wake up!!! you're gonna end up telling kids about how "university years were the best years of your lives" in a few years!!!".

sad pathetic middleaged memory prospectors. to RL people: please shoot me if I end up spouting sick facile pontificating gibberish about my halcyon days rather than trying to live in the present. please.

[this was all precipated by realising that a friend of mine still uses the name of the college she started at <i>seven</i> years ago as a password to her e-mail account... for chrissake...]

our visual arts editor, sexy pixie has decided to drop out of the corporate world and join an ashram in thailand for a few months... this entails taking special "temporary" vows, shaving her head and living like a nun. given that I didn't give her her nomer by accident, this is a source of some amusement to me.

but hey. maybe that's an option for me too? not living like a nun, I suppose... but a few months of monastic life?

hmmmm... nah.

a few quick soundbites about myself: I'm 23, a soon-to-be-former web copywriter for a London startup. for the last year I've been living with four other kids in a semi-derelict warehouse in the east end. we're being kicked out soon, however: the proverbial kick in the backside to move out and up and onto (hopefully) greater things.

in my case, this means going "home" to Norway, my "native country" to gather my wits, plan a few months of travelling and write up my research proposals for a project I'm hoping to start in January next year...

forget technopolitics and cyborg bodies, forget the rainforest (for the time being), globalisation, decentralised international network structures, whatever...

think reindeer farming.

considering registering a domain name, for blogging purposes and to keep a presence online even if OD should slink out of the realms of financial viability (as the present rash of pop-ups might seem to indicate...). particularly as I'm going to drop out of the broadband world for a few months at least come the end of september, this is a mighty good idea, I reckon.

now, this is a major decision for me, as I need to choose a name that is dignified and reflects my inner nature. [yeah yeah. oxymoron. shut up.]

I have two options in mind, seeing that sangreal.com, sangreal.net and sangreal.org are all taken...

one is to go for esoteric domain names: sangreal.cx (Christmas island) or sangreal.tp (East Timor) are both (affordable) options, without too many complications in terms of registration...

the other one is to abandon my nomer and pick a relatively memorable .com or .net address, along the lines of say mytractorisblue.com or fuckeduplittlepixie.net...

any suggestions?

I am in Norway for the week-end. The plane caught fire and had to be dramatically evacuated before take-off at Stansted. cue hysteric flight attendants and a trip on those funky yellow slide-things that jut out from the emergency exits.

very exiting.

the norwegian crown prince has married a single mother with a past in dubious artsy porn films and a career record on the house scene. fairy tale wedding for the 21st century, cinderella etc.

and my grandmother has gone off the deep end in the psychic swimming pool of life. since I was home last we suspect she's had a minor stroke: she refuses to eat and doesn't understand how to open doors. I am fairly freakd out by this. more later...

I put it down with the full weight of my 200 pounds (I'm not fat, I'm big-boned. I'll have you know.) on one of those vicious little three-pronged socket-things that lurk face up in between the tall heaps of laundy in my room...

and now there are three gaping bleeding holes in the fucking sole of my foot!

I don't know what to do. I don't want to die...

what is wrong here!

since I wrote that last entry, 15 minutes ago, I've had two long sharp shards of glass and a sliver of some sharp undescribed ceramic substance penetrate my foot!!!

I leave bloody footprints.

OUCH!!!

my left foot is developing a persecution complex. obviously I have angered the God of Sharp Things You Step On With Your Left Foot...

atonement, but how...

I shall probably be taking the leap into the great unknown sometime in October, crossing the atlantic divide for a while to go and see my little bro at Cornell, drop by Boston and nueva york... then maybe greyhound around for a bit or something.

any ideas? (besides packing a bulletproof vest and bags of glass pearls and trinkets for the natives, that is)...

I quite often have dreams about parasites. white writhing worms inching through flesh, emerging from my nostrils, burrowing into my skin... finding them in toilet bowls etc. Who knows why. It's always been an obsessive fear of mine, though it has receded somewhat in recent years. I used to be convinced on a regular basis that worms were eating my brain bit by bit. (for all I know they're still doing it, but it's not a burning fear anymore...)

last night I had another one, but it was different. this time around, the parasites were hundreds of tiny, white, insectlike mites stuck just under the surface of my skin, visible through the skin, eating holes in it. hundreds of tiny holes through my skin revealed an underlying eaten-out emptiness.

pretty grim.

we may not know when we are leaving, but there are unmistakable signs in the air. the mice are running ripe and rampant through the flat, in great stampeding flocks of healthy, hearty, bushy-tailed squeaking beasties... someone threw a stone through my flatmates window the other day; it's cracked. there is a veritable mountain, 30' tall and at least 80' in diameter, of rotting garbage in the courtyard, because the garbagemen no longer bother to come in and empty things... this morning the toilet suddenly burst, spurting jets of apparently transparent but still unsavory water across the floor. the shower floor is broken so you can only stand in one corner...

and the flies. man, the god-damned flies. great buzzing swarms in the tropical heat, crawling through the garbage and buzzing and buzzing, laying eggs everywhere and padding on their filthy plague-ridden feet through any exposed food-surface... blackening with their dessicated bodies the thick strips of flypaper that hang loosely and idly in the sweltering, immobile air of the living room...

man. we are in the last days of an era. this morning I suggested we should barricade the gates against the historical barbarians, flutter just laughed a hollow, dark laugh...

I expect news of the terrible earthquake to come through soon, just about the time when we discover that rustpot wasn't dead after all, we had merely buried him before his time in the garbage burial-mound outside where he lay, palpitating with the fear and growing madness, for seven days and seven nights before he finally clawed his way out, emaciated and reeking of garbage, to wrest open the wooden double doors that lead up to the flat and lay a swathe of carnage through the pale and hollow-eyed flatmates in the flat above...

just remember. you heard it here first.

in this time of disintegration, I realise that there have been no updates for too long... hence, brief biotexts on my compadres and fellows in the derelict lifestyle experiment that was our dalston warehouse:

- rustpot is gone. whether he disappeared home to reading and a work placement in a prison, on his way to cambridge and an MPhil in Criminology, or whether he lies buried under the kilo-ton of rotting garbage and baby diapers and abused kids conveniently "lost" by the african church in our courtyard... I'll let you figure out for yourself. his relationship with cheeky cow seems to be working well, on the basis of a mutual commitment on both sides to iron out the differences.

- crank is buying a house with mortgage-backing by his absent papa, who believes now is the time for estate-market investment... initial budget assesment lies around 250k... so he's happy. he also freelances with biblical slut, they've set up their own little IT consulting firm. (anonymity be damned. if they object, let them object. I doubt they'll be harassed by deranged internet terrorists who read this... though you never know I suppose...)

- brash is wandering into the enclosed by infinitely productive spaces of the London art scene, sharing a gigantic warehouse space, cum studios, with one of the New Contemporaries and several other selected artist friends... he is also taking up an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmith's, the reputable institution that has produced such eminent talents as Damien Hirst in recent years... so his path is set to greater heights.

- flutter is perhaps the most uncertain of the lot these days, though she might take up a residence in a squat near New Cross, where a friend of a friend has gained "squatter's rights" that she's reluctant to reliniquish just because she's got a high-flying job somewhere else. so flutter might become squatter in residence there. she also wants to paint, get some money to sort out her finances, and get a reasonable job.

and finally of course there's me, who is clueless but largely inclined to leave the country for a while. perhaps to return for a DPhil at Sussex in January, if I can find someone willing to let me research them. (not having much luck at the moment)... plus about six other projects that probably will never crystallise, as the amount of stuff I finish off in my head and get bored with before any of it ever turns into solid results or action is surmounted only by the amount of time I spend worrying about the fact that none of it ever gets done...

so there.

...slept in til 2pm in a bed by an open window, in the fashionable west end. very nice. shapeless dreams for once not accompanied by the subliminal hum of police sirens.

very deliberately did not bring my laptop, which is left sleeping its powerless electric non-dreams in dalston all by itself, loyal, faithful and password-protected so not even its best friends or its mother would be able to make contact.

hehe.

so I am drawn and enticed neither by games nor seriousness today. very excellent, indeed.

my reflection in the monitor screen still looks sooo tired though. huge puffy bags of lack-of-sleep under my eyes, funny stale taste of toxicity at the back of my mouth.

will proceed to secure chocolate almond croissant later, if there be any left. this is a safe and secure ritual tradition here, to the point where my anticipated presence on certain days is communicated even to the new arrivals in the bakery, so that series of girly little 16-year things from the mediterranean arrive armed with the knowledge to giggle and flutter their eyelashes at me and ask me if I want "anything else" with my chocolate croissant.

perhaps I am a creature of habit.

it would seem so, in certain respects, as the man at the coffe republic begins making my large mocha not when I arrive at the till and ask for it, but when he sees me coming down the street outside. and he grins, knowingly, sharing my long history of only sporadically interrupted mochas like no one else.

but hey. I hear a chocolate-filled almond croissant calling my name. time to go now.

there was no chocolate croissant there. I had to make do with a normal one, which however much it excelled in its almonded-ness could nevere equal the twin hybrid pleasure of an almonder filled to the brim with luscious thick chocolate... poor creature condemned to mediocrity by the very attribute that defined it, namely that it was an almond croissant without chocolate. "the condition that defines my being myself simultaneously condemns me to gastronomical mediocrity". how terribly sad. if it had been anything else, like the chocolate almond croissant it was obviously destined not to be, it would not have been itself, and hence its gastronomic brilliance would be the brilliance of someone else. it could only be itself, and "itself" had the attribute of "NOT excellent".

incensed existential claustrophobia.

I am a prison that I can not escape, because in escaping it I cease to be me. so if I stop being claustrophobic I am no longer my (/this particular) "self". one of my selves, the one that feels claustrophobic about being itself, exists intermittently but forever only in this condition of egoistic claustrophobia.

but I digress. perhaps the croissant had unbeknownst to me already learned the virtue of amor fati, and accepted with love its position in the donut wheel of existence. its "predicament" was perhaps merely a projected interpretation by yours truly of its position, illuminated mainly by my yearning desire for a morning almond croissant with chocolate, not without it.

...and now it is six and I have obviously nothing to do. time to return to my old haunts and begin packing my stuff for the inevitable eviction.

had a very strange dream last night / this morning... involved driving a gigantic truck around on some epic undefined journey, running it through the flowerbeds of illustrious hotels and ruining them... it also involved a gallery of freaks that probably represented submerged elements of my personality... and from each one I had to learn something, a skill or a magic spell or whatever...

the most striking one was a character i encountered early on in the dream, then later when he had been surgically "enhanced" by one of the other people in the dream... with an edward scissorhands latex cyborg straitjacket suit (no scissors) and both hands permanently welded to a pistonlike metal contraption jutting from his crotch that, well, pistoned... industrially. both hands had been turned into metal things that moved violently and regularly up and down. like a machine.

this particular guy would just lie on the floor with a permanent gaping, tranced out, pained expression on his face and a hairdo likle cosmo from seinfeld, while the hand-metal-piston penis crotch-"thing" that his arms ended in moved up and down, unstoppable, spurting jizz in regular throbs out on the floor.

I don't have a clue what I was meant to learn from this. maybe my life runs too much in concentric, narcissistic, mechanical circles at the moment. other ideas?

hum.

at the office, as usual.

mildly bored, thinking more about research project than about any work-related subject. my current idea (ecuador people have not gotten back to me) is to examine the sami situation in the north of norway in terms of post-colonial anthropological theory. original, interesting subject, but it entails spending a fair share of my fieldwork living as a reindeer herder... hmmmm... might compromise my urban cool... but it would open the doors to a whole world of fascinating cultural experiences and meaningful future work... besides allowing me to come to terms with my Norwegian cultural baggage. analysing my own formative discourses of the nation-state etc. ... and lots of clean, wholesome living, overwhelming aesthetic experiences in the bosom of mother nature up north etc...

on another topic, sangreal the undead hunter is now 12th level, armed with two longswords +2, one dragonslayer and one of vampiric regeneration (freaky concept... the sword regenerates the user every time it damages someone)... he's done the whole book, from euthanising a dying god and battling demons in hell to buying ale for underage village kids. quite cool but pricey, in terms of bags under eyes and screwed-up sleeping patterns....

no news about kicking-out from warehouse yet, but we live in anticipation of the day to come when the officials break down the doors and gun us down mercilessly because they've all assimilated the ethos of american b-movie coppers and shoot first, never mind the questions...

feeling quite indifferent to things these days. not quite sure what to make of it, or how to break the pattern... bahah. think I might go and have a coffee...

man on my way from the office yesterday, sitting on a step outside Liverpool Street station. the most perfect human ovoid I've ever seen. I'm not even exagerating. usually when someone is egg-shaped it means that they're really fat, with protruding belly and double chins etc.

obviously this guy was quite fat. but the remarkable thing was that this fat was distributed in a solid and homogenous fashion around his body, and even his skeletal structure seemed designed explicitly to convey egg-shapedness: his ribcage, the angle of his neck on his torso, the way his jutted or strutted out from his upper body at an angle, like overfilled sausages. his entire body looked taut, and firm, and perfectly spherical.

his roundness was perched between a pair of not abnormally short little legs jutting out to either side, so it looked like he was a huge egg just balancing on the ground, with a disgruntled scowl perched on his lumpen face, and his presumably ivory eggshapedness wrapped in a tight black t-shirt which revealed his unnerving lack of breasts (unlike most other fat men of that magnitude: this one made me wonder whether he even had a navel, or whether they didn't need that in the gene lab they made him in).... grey stubble-beard and angry bloodshot little eyes darting back and forth across the pavement without settling on anything. there may have been a bottle in a paper bag next to him, but I'm not sure. it would undermine his uniqueness if he was just a pavement drunk, I suppose, but my mind still wants to typecast him... on reflection, I'm sure he did <i>not</i> have a bottle in a brown paper bag.

I don't think he was a drunk. he was just a curious, middle-aged, slightly discontented egg-shaped man, sitting on the steps outside liverpool street station.

he made me wonder whether he'd been egg-shaped all his life, or whether this had emerged in later years. whether he was, in fact, a playground humpty dumpty who survived his fall, or in fact even climbed down, and was consigned to those years of thickening sickening twilight decline that inevitably are referred to as ever after in the fairy tales. --- if he had fallen, by this time he would have been a cultural icon, and in this country of paedohysteria there would be a nationwide campaign in his name to abolish high walls... "the humpty dumpty anti-wall child protection fund". and chris morris would be frying eggs on nationwide tv and be exiled and fried himself by mobs of raging vigilantes who stormed corporate headquarters in a misguided attempt to demolish "barriers to entry" so children wouldn't fall off them... instead, this particular egg-shaped man was consigned to anonymity, sitting on a porch outside liverpool street station on a random August thursday evening.

rather famous and dead or just alive? good question, difficult to ask because only one side of the argument's demographic can give their arguments.

I hurried my pace a bit past him. I mean, what if he hatched on me? surely...

age of acquarius my ass:

1. solar eclipse on the summer solstice of the year 2001.

2. chosen people go to war against the palestinians.

3. etna and other volcanoes erupting all over the world.

4. the monkey lord reigns in the west.

4a. missile shields disturb world peace.

4b. kyoto treaty discarded by the 666 bush-beast.

5. open sea at the north pole causes island kingdoms to sink under the waves in the pacific.

6. human clones to be born in 2002.

7. 17-year old in London found with armor-piercing anti-tank weaponry.

and those are just off the top of my head...

Israel suicide bombing yesterday, lots of civilian causalties. Two militant muslim organisations have claimed responsibility, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

but...

"the hunt [for the bomber's identity] was also complicated by the fact that Islamic Jihad initially named the bomber as Hussein Omar Nabu Naaseh, but then withdrew his name when his family said he was alive."

p2, Evening Standard, 10.08.01

hello-oooo... now that is one stupid misstep, if the situation is what is seems... your son has gone to Jerusalem for a holiday. then, a muslim terrorist organisation reveals not only that he's on their payrolls, but that they've sent him there are as a suicide bomber... what do you do? how do you react? what on earth were the terrorists thinking, giving away the name of their suicide volunteer...

and why has the man not been arrested? and how exactly does little Omar explain that? ladidadidaa, in his hotel room planning where to place the kamikaze blast, then phone rings: "mom, no, don't worry, no no, I'm fine, it's all ok. It's for a good cause you see...". or, "no, don't worry, they just found my name by accident. I'm not really involved with them.". ending, presumably with "ok, I'm coming home"... imagine his situation... the international media, not to mention friends, family, everyone knowing you're planning to bomb yourself and x number of civilians with you in a kamikaze political protest... pretty difficult to imagine...

ok, I admit I'm sick. but the situation is pretty funny. in a dark kind of way.