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I'm in London.

on the train down from Stansted I sat next to a group of 20-something Swedes, one of whom provided me with this brilliant little gem. "2001. yes. a strange year. year of the boomerangs."

funny thing is, he was really talking about the Swedish parliament. still, it almost blew my cover... [ok, I was eavesdropping while pretending to be English. his cute blonde girlfriend kept looking at me. sue me.]

on the topic of which [suing me], I found a letter here from Holland and Barrett's legal director, saying that after their "investigation" into my Reservoir Dogs incident a while back, they "specifically refute" my claims and "reserve the right to expel me from any of their premises"...

which is, if you think about it, quite absurd.

just goes to show that even democratic consumerism... is a doomed project for the "underdog" that can't secure legal counsel and backing...

I suppose one just shrugs and moves on though. [maybe a little bit more disillusioned with corporate ethics. maybe. not unexpectedly though...]

and, the bottom line: happy new year.

hopefully.

not much to say today. news were a horror caravan; by the time they'd finished with murders, disappearances, conflagrations, bushfires and other carnage they only had room for one more item.

aptly, they chose to get a representative from an insurance company to talk about natural catastrophes and how insurance companies were bracing themselves for them...

which I found depressing, in a vaguely amusing sort of way. suppose it would have been unprofessional to squeeze in a story about "lost kitten found on roof" or something.

would have been nice though.

today was very cold.

the first thing I noticed when I padded out to the living room this morning was the sea, which stretches out down below the living room windows: today it was a deep dark metallic silvery gray, solid all the way down. like treacle.

no waves, but rather thin, immense concentric ripples moving slowly across the face of it. you could see the deep currents on the surface. occasionally the wind would race across, ruffling the surface into lightning sheets of creases and tiny ripples that flew across the thick flat liquid waters.

it looked and behaved like molten metal; a vast dull gentle mass of liquid mercury, gelid and slow and immensely cold. reluctant to stir, slow like an enormous fat unblinking lizard lying on a flat rock in the bright but freezing winter sun.

after breakfast I went out and scampered on the snowy cliffs down by the sea for a bit, came back and fell asleep on the sofa. when I woke the sun had set and the wind was howling around the corners of the house.

"...they are shipping in powerful new "thermobaric" bombs designed to suck up air -- and extinguish human life -- in the defensive tunnel complexes of eastern Afghanistan..."

thermobaric weapons. Fuel Air Explosives. vacuum bombs.

weapons that create an enormous cloud of superheated fuel plasma which expands outwards like a fireball shockwave, at incredible speed, creating a powerful vacuum.

they kill you either with the force of the blast, the burn damage, or by internal injuries. the vacuum cause your lungs to collapse, you see. 

check out the CND website

what I wonder is, who creates these weapons? not the people that use them, surely...

every one of these weapons come from the research budget of Western military powers. you create a weapon, and it will fall in the hands of your enemies.

so maybe you should stop, then.

I slept horrendously two nights ago.

I spent the entire night dreaming that I was in an endless arctic ice-field, nearly naked, feezing. it was dark, very dark, and around me were hundreds of madly grinning little demon Eskimos with yellow faces and enormous, vicious-looking serrated bone knives. the little monsters were keeping themselves busy in the cold arctic night by slaughtering thousands and thousands of huge, lumbering walruses, slicing  them open with sharp knives while still alive…

and the walruses were screaming. my god were they screaming… 

SKREEEEEECCCHHH!! SQRUEEEEAAAK!!!! SKREEEEEEEEECCH!!  

it was a scene from hell. everywhere around me were the moaning, twisting, bleeding carcasses of dead and dying walruses with their cubs, and between them ran the gleeful little arctic imps with their obscenely large implements, slicing and cutting and slicing. and over everything rose the tortured, screaming  chorus:

SKREEEEEECCCHHH!! SQRUEEEEAAAK!!!! SKREEEEEEEEECCH!! 

walrus blubber and blood and steaming walrus carcasses were scattered everywhere; the entire night I waded knee deep in blood and icy slush, trying to avoid the roving packs of 2-foot berserk Eskimo imps and ignore the bulk of dying walruses around me.

the Eskimos seemed to be killing the walruses in batches, because the screams would start every few minutes, tear through me for about half a minute, then abate again…

SKREEEEEECCCHHH!! SQRUEEEEAAAK!!!! SKREEEEEEEEECCH!!

it was horrific. interminable, long years of walrus massacre in the freezing cold dark arctic night.

I finally drifted out of sleep and realised, slowly, that I was in my bed and not, after all, covered in walrus blood. I drew a sigh of relief, then lay watching the ceiling for a few seconds...

then…

SKREEEEEECCCHHH!! SQRUEEEEAAAK!!!!SKREEEEEEEEECCH!!

I nearly screamed.

then I nearly pounced on the source of that horrendous nightmarish sound. 

then I blinked, and I looked again.

and it turned out the source of all my suffering was the rotating lamp on my desk, one of those bush-like flexible fibre-optic glass-fibre lamps that stick up, with hundreds of tiny points of light at the end of every cable... every few minutes it gets stuck, somehow, against some random thing standing next to it. and when it meets resistance it makes a horrendous jarring screeching sound.

which, to my mind at least, is just like the sound of a dying walrus.

apparently.

heh. forget my rants and raves of the day.

I just found some of my old journals from university. rambling and incoherent documents, written in english, spanish, norwegian and german but partly in now-illegible hebrew shorthand code [I could read it at the time...].

they're pretty strange. intense and looming, but most of all utterly conceited, incoherent documents. self-aggrandizing, but also genuinely weird. 

immersed in everything pop-mystical, from Neurolinguistic Programming to the qabalah, steeped in Jung and runic mysticism and other strange, nepharious shit that prompted self-important rambles like the following:

"[november?] 7th? [1996] Saw the wild confusing message my subconscious was giving me: masks, masks & more masks: each mask a universe, a link to the past & to the future. Codification? Whoever writes this becomes a mask, not only obsolete by the constancy of internal logic, but also (consider this) just a separate state of expression of mind: a kind of trance that conveys only inappropriately the mystification of language & the psychocosm.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DUCKS."

besides rambling pseudopoetry and quasi-intellectual marginalia, the journals are full of little bits and pieces like the following:

"elementary sigillization|visualization: resulted in the manifestation of a similar face to the erotognostic sigillization" [if you know what I'm actually talking about here you'd be disgusted...]

"today, 27th [october 1996]: how have I felt today? hungry, powerful, ecstatic."

"2nd of December: great big black disgusting torpid matter fills my body. strange & unexpected tremors ripple through my sleepless, all-too-solid flesh..."

was also very insecure at the time. feelings of inadequacy were expressed in little scrawled pieces like this pseudo-Kafkaesque three-sentence story in the margin of one of the journals:

"Once there was a great artist who had never produced a work. his potential had been assessed by a wonderful machine of great value to mankind. When his first exhibition was revealed, he was quietly taken aside and shot, and a more experienced artist took his name and place. [dog poop]."

hmmmm...

ok. reflections on the disillusioning state of Norway's human stock, as exemplified in its political exemplars, aside:

things are going really badly for us, aren't they.

I watched Channel 2's 9 o'clock news today. funny. being in Norway, one perceives more clearly than anywhere else the way the imagined geography of the world, as it is constructed in your particular location, distorts the importance of the NEWS.

let me illustrate:

the three headlines of the night were domestic issues. 1. shop owner in Drammen robbed of clothes collection. 2. 94 year old lady has garden excavated by ruthless commercialists. 3. finally, something about sports.

middle east and afghanistan were squeezed into 30 seconds between numbers 2 and 3.

very interesting. quite a relief in fact.

particularly given that GWBush's words of wisdom imparted to a weary world were [literally] "weey're goaaan geyddim".

the man hardly speaks english.

terrified, I retract whatever I said about the Bondevik being the monkey man.

at least, bondevik is a monkey in a jungle, where everyone worries about the same bananas [metaphorically speaking].

GWBush on the other hand is a hairy, thickbrowed little ook-ook monkey transplanted to an office chair in the white house. very different ball game.

[though still baseball. difficult to teach a fucking stupid animal new tricks, innit...]

"ook ook grrrbl ook eek". no mister president. no bananas for you yet. now, try reading your speech again...

at least he can [presumably] order bananas and blowjobs at will from his compliant office staff.

presumably he also gets [metaphorical] bananas for performing tricks. "veeeery good Bush-boy. here's a few hundred million bananas for *cough cough* charity. now say Caspian Pipeline Consortium... that's it, goooooood boy..."

the alleged human being who is at the alleged helm of the alleged free world is in fact the only human being I've ever set my eyes on that belongs to the realm of primatology.

back to basics. back to the American way.

yeah. BACK about 2 million years of human evolution.

primeval journalist: hello mister president: how the f**k did you come to a position of such absolute power?

monkey president: "ook ook". [transl.: lots of bananas. and friends in high places.]

journalist: in trees?

monkey president: "ook!" [transl.: no. florida.]

democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for all the others.

the problem of democracy is, the majority of the people get exactly what they deserve.

the problem of US democracy is, the majority of the rest of the world gets what the US electorate deserves too.

unilaterally. "ker-SHOVE" is the sound of those metaphoric bananas going up the wrong way, unilaterally, with the full backing of Wolfowitz and the Banana imperialists at the Pentagon...

"yes, I know we grow these bananas in the first place. say that again and we'll arrest you. what you have to understand, dear mister American public, is that we either shove... or we're shoved.

we have to shove them who's the boss here. by shoving those little afghans the power of homegrown American bananas, we'll prevent the future imbananation of American citizens."

did anyone in the US catch the story of the Afghan family that was killed by recklessly dumped aid packages?

it's too stupid to be ironic.

meanwhile, the israeli government, safe that the president has enough bananas to keep him occupied, proudly steps in for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

demons. I don't have the words for it. consummate evil.

thank our dear defunct G-d for Shimon Peres who denounces Sharon.

too little of a good thing, too late, and too insignificant. but at least he tries.

just wait for it. "Peres assassinated by Palestinian terrorists". [/mossad].

on that note I am going to bed with a copy of Larson's Far Side. truth is stranger than fiction. and at least, strangeness in fiction has some kind of meaning.

gute nacht.

for those of you fortunate enough not to know, Kjell Magne Bondevik is the prime minister of norway.

I will refer to him as The Subhumanoid.

all you need to know about the Subhumanoid is -

last time he was in power, he got so stressed he took a six-week vacation from running the country. he got depressed, you see.

then his government left after a particularly disgraceful handling of a particular political affair. too complex for summarization. 

then bondevik had the shamelessness to run for prime minister again. and the norwegian public ludicrously voted him back into power. he surfed into power on the back of a political party composed of little old ladies [the Norwegian Christian Popular Party] ... because they pitied him, is the only plausible explanation.

this time around the only even remotely plausible reason he is back is to prove himself.

[the implication of this is that to him, and to all around him, Norwegian politics is a playground for his personal dramas of therapy and vindication. "look mommy, I can do it!". the sad thing is, politics in this country is so inconsequential that they're probably right. and it doesnt really matter...]

----

this would not be so bad, or so annoying, were it not for the utterly invertebrate nature of the subhumanoid.

the subhumanoid is a political jellyfish, a drifting plancton-eating lump of transparent flesh... disgustingly eager for power, a dully ignorant Abraham eager to sacrifice not just Isaac but his entire life and family to the God of political power...

the man is an ordained priest, but categorically denies that there are any ethical problems surrounding the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas of Afghanistan.

hello? HELLO? "turn the other cheek"...

----

to cut a long ranting story short, the subhumanoid is the political totem of the massenmensch. spineless, unprincipled, greedy, selfish and with no more awareness of the complexity of human life and democratic institutions than the hermit crab understands the process that went into creating the snail shell he moves into when its occupant dies...

shallow, greedy, unwholesome, ludicrous and utterly convinced of his own adequacy as a human being. [a conviction that is often found in directly inverse proportion to the actually quality it is held about...]

he represents the turn of the screw of mediocrity in norwegian politics: from the welfare state to the kindergarten state.

I'm serious when I say that one day, I will write a book about him. I even have a name for it: "Monkey Man in the Jungle of Democracy: notes to the political ascension of the massenmensch."

----

tremble, bondevik. the hour will come when you will wash ashore and be stranded on the beach like the spineless sea creature you are.

<--- this is you. THIS IS YOU I TELL YOU!!! REPENT!!!

and little kids will poke sticks in you and throw rocks at you, and you will be left to dry, slowly and excruciatingly, in the sun, until there is nothing but a patch of jargon and a few irkily upbeat photos left of you.

just you wait

a remarkable thing happened to me yesterday.

I went to Cambridge to check out the lay of the land, and see whether I might enjoy spending three years of my life there, chained to the academic wheel...

my first impressions were unfavourable. the topology of the city is very similar to oxford, the unreal city of dreaming spires where I spent four miserable and claustrophobic years for my BA... cold and with the sort of impossible geography that reminds you of an Escher painting.

[the sort of place where you half expect people to come walking down the street along the walls, at right angles to the ground, lost in their own abstractions...]

so I was grumping and skeptical when I arrived at the Scott Polar Research Institute. I had a look around, nice building, pictures of penguins and quaint ethnic artifacts from the bipolar regions on the walls; a bit museal in tone. I went up to the reception and asked casually for Dr Vitebsky [readers might remember he's the guy I quoted at the beginning of my reindeer research proposal]: was he in?

he was.

five minutes later I was sitting in his office, slackjawed with awe, trying to formulate myself into some semblance of coherence, nervous as hell.

he was a nice, jovial bald man with an enormous grin and twinkling eyes. instantly likable stuff.

then, the mysterious cosmic force of meaningful randomness [that takes charge of my life at times like these] reared its head.

"what is your background, then?"

"erm.. well... *stutter gulp* I did my BA at Oxford, modern languages, then an MA in anthropology at SOAS, finishing in 2000..."

"really? I was external examiner for that year. what was your dissertation subject?"

*small voice*: "alien abduction phenomena..."

"what?"

"*gulp*... alien abduction phenomena."

"No!"

At this point the venerable professor Vitebsky threw his arms out and shouted "I remember that one!!!".

I was dumbfounded. Eh?

It turns out he had found the dissertation so interesting that he had breached academic codes of conduct and circulated it around to his students for comment. he even remembered some of my footnotes!!!

man, I couldn't believe it. really.

we spent some of the remainder of the meeting discussing the dissertation, the problems of doing abduction fieldwork without having been abducted yourself, you know, standard anthropological banter... *grin*.

----

so it looks like I might be going to Cambridge now... man, the weird twists of fate...

let the world spin like a rotting apple in space. today I don't care.