Yesterday among other things I managed to drop extremely thick hot chocolate on the floor of a charity shop while juggling a book of poetry and reading from it. Said hot chocolate went everywhere, so I (having cleaned it up because I Ain't No Fuckin' Animal and those people are volunteers yo) bought the book by way of an apology; it is 1 poem a day, and Poetry Month started on Saturday, and I don't Feel It about writing my own so much at the moment [I owe the world post, or possibly poem, about looking for Hidden Things in other people as an experience that is specific to LGBT people, particularly when looking into the past, and the need to try to find some validation that you are real by finding others like you, and how much harder that is when "like you" isn't a heritable quality or a visible or even a cultural one, and is instead one which is often erased by people contemporaneously and in hindsight. Ref. stuff about Dr Barry].

POEMS.

April 1st:

A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover

Ancient person, for whom I
All the flattering youth defy,
Long be it ere thou grow old,
Aching, shaking, crazy, cold;
But still continue as thou art,
Ancient person of my heart.

On thy withered lips and dry,
Which like barren furrows lie,
Brooding kisses I will pour
Shall thy youthful [heat] restore
(Such kind showers in autumn fall,
And a second spring recall);
Nor from thee will ever part,
Ancient person of my heart.

Thy nobler part, which but to name
In our sex would be counted shame,
By age’s frozen grasp possessed,
From [his] ice shall be released,
And soothed by my reviving hand,
In former warmth and vigor stand.
All a lover’s wish can reach
For thy joy my love shall teach,
And for they pleasure shall improve
All that art can add to love.
Yet still I love thee without art,
Ancient person of my heart.

by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (yes, THAT one).

April 2nd.

Joining the Colours
(West Kents, Dublin, 1914)

There they go marching all in step so gay!
Smooth-cheeked and golden, food for shells and guns.
Blithely they go as to a wedding day,
The mothers' sons.

The drab street stares to see them row on row
On the high tram-tops, singing like the lark.
Too careless-gay for courage, singing they go
Into the dark.

With tin whistles, mouth-organs, any noise,
They pipe the way to glory and the grave;
Foolish and young, the gay and golden boys
Love cannot save.

High heart! High courage! The poor girls they kissed
Run with them: they shall kiss no more, alas!
Out of the mist they stepped - into the mist
Singing they pass.

by Katherine Tynan

April 3rd

Virtue

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like season'd timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.

by George Herbert.

BUT in between torturing me with a lot of nonsensical shit I won't go into and some tedious hypnogogic stuff which revealed how dull my priorities are at the moment (OMG WHAT IF THE REFURB AT THE GYM REMOVES EQUIPMENT I WANT TO USE? WHAT IF I'M ACTUALLY BEING VERY LAZY AFTER ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DOING TRX CLASSES WITH WEIGHTS WHY CAN I NOT STOMACH DOING CLASSES IS IT BECAUSE I AM LAZY), it also produced a thing which, untangled slowly by my waking mind and rationalised into something useful, works as the set-up for a story.

HERE IT IS

My brain couldn't work out who was the main character here. The person it followed longest looked like a young Ian Hislop & was a civil servant trying to sort out why some money had disappeared and then why someone had been murdered and then became alarmed because it looked like the Queen was at risk, then it turned out to be some giant capitalist conspiracy thing and one of the Royal Household (in this case a shady fucking mechanic, what the hell, who was also a HUGE LACONIC RUSSIAN okay subconscious) explained calmly to him that "parties" were dealing with the over-greedy company (although some higher-ups had fled on a plane in a dramatic stormy escape also thank you subconscious) and when the civil servant asked about the missing money (£60m, but that's... not actually very much in real terms) the mechanic said, "do you think her charities run themselves? do you think this country runs itself? do you think 'tourist money' is so huge?" and there was some fairly dark and in NO WAY BREXIT-DERIVED SHIT about how broke this country is. It was nice though because it at least implied she was very committed to her own peeps.

Secondarily it became apparent that someone was passing a lot of information in every direction, who turned out to be My Personal Favourite, the very damaged, very gay, and very promiscuous illegitimate son of the civil servant and one of the princesses (who had since died, potentially at her own hand, due to Very Poor Mental Health) from when he was a lot younger. Having grown up with whoever happened to be around - as an Embarrassment he was foisted out of the Royal Household and dumped on his natural father as soon as someone could find him, and told in no uncertain terms that his career would SUFFER MASSIVELY if he didn't keep this Out Of the Way, said son was broadly considered unwanted baggage by absolutely everyone, dumped at schools/moved around during holidays, occasionally roaming the corridors of power, and as unattended children so often are, Frequently The Target Of Sexual Predators. Becoming a manipulative, rumour-mongering, tale-bearing, shit-stirring, drug-using occasional spy and occasional prostitute depending on circumstances was almost, as far as he sees it, inevitable. Now Getting On A Bit (by his own standards at least) he deals more in information than sexual favours as he refuses to be a procurer. His relationship with his (unmarried/married to his job) father is Difficult & I think his own investigation into whatever death it is frequently deliberately obstructs his father's.

Thirdly, but non-protagonistly, there is illegitmate son's younger, legitimate half-brother, who has sOMEHOW (and this necessitates this very much not being set where/when/reality that it appeared in my dream because WTF) unexpectedly become the likely heir following the death of The Old Lady (who was somewhat younger in my dream than in real life, more like 60 than 80-something) and become embroiled in the edges of the entire affair. As someone not pegged for inheriting much more than his mother's mental illness and a perpetually absent father he'd also led an early life colliding with some of the same people who screwed up his older half brother, although with the stability of one place to go back to he didn't become as vicious; my dream ended with the elder of the two and the younger of the two engaged in a distinctly unhealthy flirtation while the older also imparted a series of warnings to the younger about the remaining dangerous parties in the civil service/world in general of the "don't end up like me" variety; the younger replied with inside knowledge of the royal household which, the elder being himself, he promptly sold on.

I have a feeling the mechanic had a bigger role in this. He had that air about him.

Anyway, that was the dream.

Blogs

I want to fail in a grander case, on quotation serendipity and the horrifying possibility that writing in the first person makes you immortal.

So last night I didn't sleep until I knocked myself with a sleeping pill and even then it took an abhorrently long time, when GUESS WHAT, I couldn't get out of bed again in the morning early enough to go to the gym (this is probably just as well as I am INCREDIBLY FUCKING SORE), and took myself off to, as mentioned on Tumblr, pay a man £200 (plus the deposit which was that again) to put me in a series of stress positions, inflict quite significant pain on the back of my knee and front of my shin in particular, and make me listen to the fucking Hodge twins and a video about a guy getting shot in the chest. And my internal organs tried to destroy me from within for no apparent reason and the only thing that would stop the pain was... alcohol! (A very small quantity, don't worry)

On the plus:
+ free chicken dinner
+ he's actually decent company
+ introduced him (and myself) to A Tribe Called Red (even if YouTube then decided that we also wanted to listen to other and ... not as electronica/sample-based ... First-Nations-hip-hop)
+ discovered that being shot in the chest with a shotgun and surviving leaves a man with a scar very similar to a mastectomy scar, in case i need other stories besides "shark bite", "heart surgery", and my favourite method of dealing with all intrusive inquiries, the "long hard stare and mind your own fucking business".
+ making Biko listen to "it came from the 80s: Dark Synthwave Mix" (which I have discovered is good to do art to and which he agrees) reminded him of the existence of Kung Fury, which is terrible but also hilarious
+ I finished reading Downriver and, having been Stockholmed into coping with Sinclair's prose style (it is... idiosyncratic), started Lights Out For The Territory, which is both easier to read (and less savage), and has also provided me with an absolute wealth of information about areas my bus route passes through and road names with which I am already very familiar (on Amhurst Road, people suspected of being members of the Angry Brigade holed up in the 80s. True story. The man who started what later became Cope Goliard press also lived there. True story). And Sinclair had the exact thought about Stoke Newington Police Station's architectural intent as I did, probably because it's ballachingly fucking obvious and obnoxiously simple.
+ I mean. A lot of tattoo also got done.

Then, after 9+ hours of blissful ignorance of the news, I came home and was greeted by "multiple people set on young man in Croydon [South London] after learning he is an asylum seeker", so thanks once again to the red tops for nurturing and validating these particular fucking demons in human form who've made my city one where it's TOTES OKAY to attack people for... not wanting to die. Maybe they could attack me. I definitely want to die.

[Semantically, the Cronx - as it insists on calling itself - isn't quite part of London, except parts of it claim to be. Anyway, it's a national joke, but it still has no business beating up asylum-seekers desperate enough to be in Croydon, and I hope their insides fucking rot]

And so far, I still not only cannot sleep but am not even PHYSICALLY tired, which at least kept me pinned to the bed while my brain just endlessly screeched on the last two nights. Sometimes bleating about The Bad Things and the total absence of future and hey did you know all your plans are bullshit and you should DIE DIE DIE NOW WHILE YOU CAN STILL DO IT WITH ANY KIND OF DIGNITY, sometimes literally just farting endless word noise at me like some kind of radio terrified of the off-switch. The relaxing music JUST ABOUT drowns out Jess's relentless snoring and can do NOTHING about my brain.

I mean, it slows down my heart-rate and helps my breathing but nothing short of a chemical sledgehammer will make my actual brain SHUT THE FUCK UP AND SLEEP.

I'm not blaming Brexit for this apart from the fact that this pretty much started When The Bad Thing.

I don't know if this works as an entire outline (I mean, I've left off the context etc, this is very much the bullet points) for Act One of Tourist's Guide but it's a better bare bones than I had:

( Read more...Collapse )

Unfortunately I think it also takes up a lot of the ground I was planning on using for Act Two, and has conflated them. Once again, lack of material is a serious problem. I know what Act Three ENDS with. I have a vague idea of how to get there. I GUESS Act ONE can end with a death, which immediately instills a sense of urgency, and I have a reasonable idea of whose.

I'm struggling with PoV stuff a bit. My instinct is always multiPoV but I think that kind of didn't work in Soft Inheritance?

GYM: Started and closed with military presses, which seems to be a functional way to approach things. This worked DESPITE me having to take not only two Night Nurse but also two (TWO) nuclear strength sleeping pills (The ones that are running out, you know) AND spend the occasional hour or two trying to persuade Jess to stop hitting me in the head and snoring at a volume that drowned out both my headphones and the PASSING TRAINS - thus being somewhat groggy and stupid when I got up. Still not feeling particularly like I'm getting anywhere with The Fitness. Maybe I should book one of the free PT sessions I have left. Get someone who knows what they're doing to bully me properly.

Blogs
TDoV, etc

Now to try to do the editing I didn't do yesterday, because my access to things was limited by bad sleep and phenomenally bad-tempered gf (I don't really blame her, she's in the middle of PERIOD HELL and worked a late shift back-to-back with an early shift, but on the other hand: I don't schedule her period cramps or her work shifts and I was listening to BIRDSONG, it's not exactly the most obnoxious music to play out loud).

Do not feel like sleeping or eating either apparently, thanks body.

[Last night went to see The Cat and the Owners of The Cat and drank wine and ate cake]

https://www.instagram.com/p/BSOmRdQhbIl/?taken-by=derekdesanges the cat
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSOxrFdhzIk/?taken-by=derekdesanges one cat owner and cat visitor

my brain decided that i wanted to be awake until dawn; my girlfriend decided that i wanted to hear her snoring over the relaxing music i'd valiantly stuffed into my ears; my body decided that i would be too tired to get up and walk to the gym; i then woke up at noon. thanks. waste. of. everything. so no gym.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ2ESEhMNh/?taken-by=derekdesanges at least i got to wear a vest. and shorts.

Went to the wellcome institute with ruthi, having arranged last night while drunk that we were going to do this

Making Nature featured taxidermy and parrots trying to tell humanity about their culture. A video that ended in a quote from Alex the African Grey. Apparently a piece of internet/animal behaviour ephemera only I remember.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ4xIJBUV8/?taken-by=derekdesanges hiding fox
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ493QBGgy/?taken-by=derekdesanges wig encyclopedia (i used to love this categorisation shit)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ5JMphZzl/?taken-by=derekdesanges aphophrycal
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ587rBS2w/?taken-by=derekdesanges badger
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ81snhL-C/?taken-by=derekdesanges owl
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ9Km2hS7P/?taken-by=derekdesanges post-natural
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ96rEBPNR/?taken-by=derekdesanges alcoholic rat
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ-PYIh59k/?taken-by=derekdesanges paper teeth
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSQ-_FihFqo/?taken-by=derekdesanges birdsong
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSRF95NBV9x/?taken-by=derekdesanges they had a dress-up-and-selfie section and i will never turn down the opportunity to get other people's lice on me
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSRMslvhwai/?taken-by=derekdesanges gift shoppe getting weird

tomorrow is tdov. i've blogged and am waiting on photos from jess, who is furious with me for... being in my own house i guess? but not being home yesterday, when it would have been convenient to her. anyway. once i have the photos i can queue that shit up, get sleeping pills in me, and have another crack at sleeping.

Did some stuff and went to some places. You know. I think I dined.

Monday I literally did nothing. Went up a hill with Jess. Was meant to go dancing but couldn't motivate myself. Woke up today in a disassociative state which hasn't gone at the time of writing. Mostly I just want to go back to sleep. Went to the gym for a disastrous workout (ref. disassociation makes it difficult to actually... do... things). Have a haircut late tonight. Somewhere in between now and then it might be useful to do something but tbh I'm paralysed with fear about tomorrow. It would be preferable to like, not be online and not talk or think about it. But I don't really know what else there is to do barring, IDK, noisily committing protest suicide.

(there's food photos on instagram. who cares. why do i bother posting. what the actual fuck is the point of chronicling this life.)

"Did you go to the gym today Derek?"
"No, I woke up at 4pm and literally couldn't walk; foam rollering and Deep Heat have stopped me looking like a velociraptor marionette and my dinner was a fucking milkshake, leave me alone."

Health status
bags under eyes: binliners
skin: developing Patches
muscles: extremely sore
bones: heavy
appetite: non-existent still
focus: what is this thing
coughing: unexpected and highly expectorant
conclusion: idk derek maybe you have exhausted your body's reserves
non-logical conclusion: oh yeah then why am i still FAT

(accidental vegetarianism today, which i only just realised; also, if you mix instant pad thai powder into your omelette with a little mirin it tastes fucking good, and I arrived too late at New Moon Loon to buy ajishima miso cups and I cannot think of anywhere else that sells them. I've looked in the JPC, See Woo, Oriental Delight, and Loon Feng so far. Maybe Sika Express?).

https://www.instagram.com/p/BSEk1DKBirx/ milkshake called a JESSICA. badly mixed and had a LUMP of frozen kale at the botton which i ate anyway
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSEmTIShVSK/ actual jessica hugging a lifesized bear in wilko
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSE5IorBsTs/ hungerford footbridge

Pray for me, my friends, because tonight is Sunday Papers, and that means the Rentafash are going to be giving their absolute worst about Wednesday's knobhead, complete with vague assertions that the actions of a man born in Kent five decades ago could have been averted by not letting people in from Romania (like the lady who got flung in the Thames).

Well I sure just got made to stand in the cold and walk around the entire Isle of Dogs because someone had glycerine on their fucking car.

STILL SICK, it's been nearly two weeks now, FUCK OFF.

(Worse today. I mean, my chest is not so bad but I am weak as a fucking kitten and horrible persistent calf cramps led to No Gym, which is frustrating, especially as I had Plans for reading the trans Peter Pan eBook on me bike time. Edited instead. Cannot concentrate on anything, however, or at least anything generative involving words. Not ideal).

[Trying to figure out, slowly, how Act 1 ends. I'm trying to work on the endings first, which has been successful with Act Three (because I know how the story ends) and Act Two (there's so much conflict in this book that there's stuff which needs resolving then, in order to allow the rest to happen), but I can't work out what to do about the end of Act 1, and spacing stuff out through a book is a problem I have. So. I could use some help with this but.]

Noted cognitive pollutant press bodies have been causing irritation and stress, and my workout wasn't great (apparently this is because I started off with running, which uses up all of something, but also my mp3 player had no battery left and the foot straps on the rowing machine weren't working properly and I overslept), so I have retaliated by refusing to be practical (not enough time for editing and not enough brain for book plotting, anyway); so I've just crawled up inside the book I'm reading and done something I haven't done in ages, ie, refuse to stop reading even when I'm walking. It's bad manners; I don't care. I am equal to the task, I have been since I was a child, I REFUSE TO CONNECT WITH REALITY, goodbye.

Well, the internet is (touch wood) up.

Here are some other things that happened.

1. Harassed for money twice by a man with a ten thousand yard stare of intimidating intensity.
2. First actual consistent sleep in about three days.
3. Went to buy groceries but then this:



(The old lady went after the confused, bleeding woman as she staggered angrily off; I figured that she probably wouldn't want to be chased by a man she didn't know, and went looking for soap and water because RANDOM STRANGER BLOOD between my fingers from picking her up. I eventually went and scrubbed myself in Wetherspoons since the cafe toilets at Morrisons were closed; on the way home saw both an ambulance with the Patient Assessment In Progress sign up and a stationary police car not far from where I'd run into the woman, and sort of hoped it was because the old lady had been able to get emergency services to her after all. She was fairly adamant that she wanted to "go home" and not to hospital at the time but also she'd very clearly had a fucking mighty crack to the head and couldn't stand up consistently.)

4. Got home two seconds after the Virgin engineer, and The News was relayed to me. I am now three-for-three on "terrorist or potential terrorist attack happens in London and I don't realise it because I'm busy doing something else" (see also: 2005 bombings, the Leytonstone stabbing - Not Terrorism because whatshisface was having a breakdown and thought he could see demons, everyone just decided it was terrorism because he shouted ALLAH AQBAH - and now this). I have Thoughts but they're pessimistic and conspiratorial and also very worried mostly about how this is going to impact British Muslims. And how shitty and racist the commentariat are going to be tonight.

5. Fannied around editing, backing things up, filing notes on stuff, uploaded art to Redbubble. Normal human activities. Did some push-ups for literally no reason.

6. Came into work to find an email from my boss telling me off about something minor which feels major just because it's been a Cursed Wednesday, I wish I'd gone to the gym instead of anything even though I am far too tired, and I can't bother Emma with space nonsense because she's on a plane. Admittedly she's on a plane TO the UK but I don't know if she's going to be Available while she's here. Also. Ugfghhh dhfv ishdvasca everything.

7. Oh and Robot Mother decided to Shame me with a blog article asking if I was eating too little to lose weight. But one of the symptoms is constipation and another is crankiness and I don't suffer from the former or more of the latter than can be explained by nightshift (see also symptom "tiredness"). And there were only four signs. And I don't need excuses after spending nearly a week cramming myself with the excuse of "being sick".

8. Why won't this fucking book just plot ITSELF.

So far Virgin have sent three (3) engineers. The first one (Friday) broke the internet. The second one (Monday) fixed it for an hour or two. The third one (today) didn't actually materialise; we were assured, when Lindsay went to the phone, that they were "outside" doing "external" work, and the customer service person had tried to reach them but their phone was busy. We didn't care because the internet finally started working!

For two hours.

It is now broken again. A fourth (4th) engineer is coming tomorrow, allegedly, to make this problem go away. Lindsay, every time, buys this nonsense. I am almost certain we're going to get a full week of this, minimum.

However, during the brief moments of internet function I managed to upload the art I did over the weekend and a recording for World Poetry Day:

bitcherel by eleanor brown, which I will one day commit to memory so I can fucking recite it on command
art

( Actually, the artCollapse )

I have passed through "being frustrated" re the internet shenanigans (tl;dr THIS FUCKING INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER ISN'T PROVIDING A SERVICE) and am now into acceptance, where I just deal with the fact that I will never, ever, ever catch up with my online admin or editing and that I am going to use my entire data allowance in ten seconds and Virgin Media can absolutely 100% choke on my tiny little dick.

I have continued to have the plague, and I have continued to refuse to actually recooperate because I'm too delirious to feel tired consistently (just having "OH GOD I'm GOING TO FAINT no wait I'm fine" moments and eating the ENTIRE EARTH).

(We tried to escape the No Internet on Friday and I had a disappointing dinner: https://www.instagram.com/p/BRwDGokBC3b/?taken-by=derekdesanges)

Saturday

Too ill/tired for gym, went to Holland Park/the Kyoto Garden for a walk & to abuse the cafe internet & to force myself to work on my outline for Tourist's Guide:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BRx12QmBV9s/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRx2BXMhvSN/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRx2I9CB0wS/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRx2SKMBXjd/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRx2bXABLbE/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRx2vqgB7ps/?taken-by=derekdesanges (video)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRx5itMhavq/?taken-by=derekdesanges <-- I shaved. I look twelve. When am I going to stop looking twelve every time I shave?

Then I went to Muji and WRESTLED a 5-shelf bookshelf home, assembled in 30 minutes (15 of which were faffing), shelved and organised books, and FINALLY HAVE SOME EMPTY SHELVES this is not a request to have them filled, they will fill up fast enough.

Got changed, discovered that the outfit you plan is LITERALLY NEVER the outfit you wear:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRykq3VhxI5/?taken-by=derekdesanges

And with Fred and Maud and two Polish couch-surfers they were hosting for the weekend, blagged ourselves into the Caravan Club, a NATIONAL TRUST fucking recreation of a 1930s underground queer club, perfect in every detail:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BRy_PxnBfb-/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRy_xdbBht3/?taken-by=derekdesanges (video)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRy__kcBQcz/?taken-by=derekdesanges my ugly-ass face
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRzAEcihlXC/?taken-by=derekdesanges this man behind me later seranaded me:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154129733351707&set=a.10151958016146707.1073741830.515906706&type=3
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRzAKnuBukf/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRzAR26h941/?taken-by=derekdesanges the woman on the left here, who danced in her spangly flapper underwear, was the same woman who taught me and ruthi to charleston. she's lovely & i'm going to sign up to more of her classes now.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRzAxyBBEia/?taken-by=derekdesanges (video)

Other people met: a couple who run an actual glitter-themed nightclub featuring unicorns and a glitter station; a man who earnestly told me "I'm a born-and-bred Londoner myself but what I love about this city is you could have been here a week and if you say it's your home you're a Londoner, no questions asked"; a person of no nominated gender who comes from Bournemouth and did a Salomé Dance of the Seven Veils (in the video) https://www.instagram.com/p/BR1E0Xyh1zQ/?taken-by=derekdesanges also; and a Macedonian PhD candidate whose thesis is on female dandies of the 20s and 30s. Furthermore, 3/4 of my drinks didn't get charged to my tab and it was too warm. Oh, and I accidentally volunteered myself (literally didn't listen and just yelled ME when asked for volunteers) to interpretative dance the role of Rico in Tricity Vogue's ukulele cover of the Cocobana.

Then we took the Polish girls to Wetherspoons because why the fuck not.

Sunday

Jess & I met up with Fiona at the Barbican Centre for a sojourn on the rooftop:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BR0fYnLBQmf/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR0pc41hDd1/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR0phSIhnZu/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR0plqyBAZr/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR0ppLNhghl/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR0p0tThqv8/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR0p4xohCRb/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR0p7_Yh5i_/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR0qJKSh-UD/?taken-by=derekdesanges (OUR ALBUM GENRE IS "ARID HOUSE" GUYS)

Then went to Crossrail place for more roof gardens (no time to get to Kensington Roof Gardens)

https://www.instagram.com/p/BR00Vw0BLs4/?taken-by=derekdesanges

On to find St Dunstan-in-the-East, which I've been meaning to do for ages:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BR1A_n2h15b/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR1BOo7h9vH/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BR1BqAzB5Mt/?taken-by=derekdesanges (video)

Then home via dinner and this charming view of Bow Church:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BR1HXk7hQUy/?taken-by=derekdesanges

Monday

Today I went to the gym and was cross a lot. I have drawn many things, and I had a brainwave about how to fix the aliens-and-gangland-murders-in-prohibition-NY book (make protagonist trans, which is now my solution to everything). I have progress snapshops and finished pics to upload. One day.

also i published a book

UGH UGH UGH (I know I'm ill and stuff but I am really fucking tempted just to get drunk)

Gym: I am never getting near the Smith machine ever again no matter how early I drag myself out of bed (sleep patterns still wanked, brain still thinks 1am-4am is for BEING AWAKE FOR NO REASON), crunch coughing fits, totally owned by bicep fucking curls but otoh tried a new thing (hip adduction) and it's a piece of of piss. Maybe I'll just do that until my crotch has muscles.

Editing: my fucking Surface Pro is being a pissbaby about ever charging. Solutions to the problem just drained more battery power. After emailing whatever edits I could to myself, I found the following on my other computer -
+ microsoft office not validated
+ microsoft office won't let me sign in with my microsoft id online because "gmail.com doesn't real"
+ finally open document for editing: it has saved LITERALLY NONE OF MY EDITS from today! NONE! 100% NOT SAVED ANY OF THEM despite regularly fucking saving! Thanks.
+ plans for going and enjoying the sunshine in Holland Park while working on book outline a bit therefore stymied by not being able to fucking do the fucking editing (and also by the sunshine disappearing).

despite breaking rank on calories yesterday due to illness (which is hilarious because i have no fucking appetite) i am once again IDIOTICALLY HUNGRY.

and it's st fucking padraig's fucking day and i live upstairs from an irish pub which is boisterous on the best of fridays...

blogs

therefore buy my book

(and then I went dancing).

Despite my best efforts to be on time I arrived at Rotherhithe half an hour early, and sat in the sun reading Downriver with some gross protein milkshake and meditating on the difference not only in racial demographics from area to area in London (Rotherhithe, from what little I saw, seemed to be predominantly white and working class, very different from where I live) but also body type (short, uneven men proliferate in South East London, becoming lumpy and asymmetrical in face & body, what I'd refer to as "quintessentially English" if I wanted to be mean).

This gave me time to work out which direction the entrance to the mouth of the tunnel was, so not an entire waste of time.

rotherhithe station is tiny and has railway pillars.

The tunnel itself was built in 1908 and the chief engineer revelled in the improbable name of "Maurice Fitzmaurice". It is a single bore tunnel extending just under a mile (0.9196 of a mile, in fact, or 1.48km) although if you include the terrifying traffic funnel at each end in which high tiled walls increase the sense of a descent into Hades rather effectively then it's pretty much bang on a mile.

The ominous tunnel mouth swallowed us, hankerchiefed and pollution-masked, and we wandered down along the narrow - though not as narrow as Sinclair made it sound - strip of pavement.

composite image.

Sinclair didn't make it all the way through, travelling alone, and was overcome by a case of existential claustrophobia; he bolted up one of the exit shafts and got horribly lost in Rotherhithe. In our day, some 30 years later, the exit shafts are all closed. The knobbly vestibules where the staircases (Edwardian, probably Listed) reside are now adorned with plaques telling you not to "linger" because of "exhaust fumes". We found a Wimpy box. Who the fuck was eating in a tunnel like this? Where is there still a Wimpy? Had we travelled back in time?

possibly we had.

A cyclist passed on the opposite side of the road, maskless, with a basket on his bike. Madness. Somewhere around the centre of the tunnel the ceiling and walls began to close in on me and I began to feel as if I had always been in the tunnel. I'd been born there, I'd die there, the tunnel was enternal and all-encompassing and frankly hellish. I made a joke of it to Charlie and the dizziness started to pass; this is why you take people down into places with you. Less in case you fall and break your neck and more so that there's someone to share the dread.

video of the Important Moment when we found the Light At The End Of The Tunnel.

We cheated the last leg, turning up the steps into a small park rather than funnelling back out with the aromatic traffic. I hacked up a lung onto the spring grass: we found an anenome, and later a whole bank covered in them.

Limehouse station was practically on top of us. We took to the tracks towards Greenwich, a cup of tea, and the strange seaside-town feel of somewhere that is still very much technically part of London. I can still taste cars in my sinuses.

The bus to Eltham from Greenwich takes ten million billion years, by the by. Eltham isn't really in London. Worth it for this spectacular display:

spring came on sudden.

At the top of what I think is Shooters Hill is Severndroog Castle, which is technically a watchtower and not a castle and also wasn't built in the medieval period so why the fuck would it be a castle (much like "Castle" Drogo in this respect); a castle, as any fule kno, is a combination of a smallholding and a military fort and an administrative centre. This place, otoh, had a tiny tiny cafe whose afternoon teas were on a Londonist List, Charlie and I shared some breand-and-butter-pudding (food of the GODS) and were accosted by an ownerless Puggle trailing its lead and eager to make our acquaintance and eat ALL the cake.

Also the castle door made the floor go gay

After a short break to a) pee and b) be mental about having touched two or three dogs already [Derek: happily eats shit off the mouse-infested kitchen floor but needs to alcohol sanitise his hands after touching living mammals, EXCEPT for cats and people he knows? Strangers & dogs = germs. Don't ask.], we went for a proper explore of Oxleas Woods, which are far larger than I was expecting, well-stocked with more dogs (Charlie made the acquaintance of a couple of girls with Yorkies and promptly lost their shit on being invited to hold one of said dogs).

composite including a second cafe we couldn't eat in because no cash. Not even for the £1 cups of tea. Includes at least one instance of two idiots (us) running down the side of Shooters Hill while yelling joyously because Sun! Running! No one allowed to tell you off for doing that when you're a grown-ass adult! Whee! And also one instance of gazing out over the panoramic view of South East London stretching on for absolutely fucking miles, and commenting, "This makes me feel very arrogant. Yes, I have conquered it."

(Plans hatched to attack the Green Chain walk in future, emphasis on Crystal Palace, Eltham Palace & Tudor Barn, Charlton House, and the Thames Barrier; some of these because I read about them in Brewers, some because I already knew about them and meant to visit, and the Barrier because of Sinclair but also because Josie Long used to do a bit about being sexually attracted to/romantically involved with the Thames Barrier [she's from Kent].)

bus to north greenwich took me both along a fucking motorway and also through what felt like an entirely different country. Still London, but looks like the suburbs of Paris mated with an American city and produced a terrifying architectural nightmare. No doubt it's filling up fast, people can't buy property in London quickly enough atm, but it's an eerie, fake-looking place.

Safely back in the welcoming embrace of normality/Shoreditch: tea in one place, matcha latte in another (but i really must remember that Shoreditch Grind's matcha lattes are gross), Downriver in both. Thought: remember seeing a Tumblr post about how the delineation of "species" is a human concept (meaning: the real world is more wishy-washy than that, categories are invented so that humans can make sense of stuff); it was on a specific blog and therefore the conclusion was "angry shouting about the oppressiveness of science in imposing order upon the chaotic systems of the world, something something white people", rather than on a different specific blog where I suspect the conclusion would have been "and that's why it's okay for me to fuck dogs". Although I'm sure the same argument could and probably has been made.

Then I went to a basement and injured myself repeatedly at the behest of a small Italian man who was trying very hard to look like the late George Michael, and on several occasions just flatly refused to do certain things because a) my back won't do that b) my knees won't do that and c) the person I have ended up partnered with for this bit physically cannot hold me up, she is half my size and I am heavy. It was not anything like as awkward as it could have been and I was not as embarrassed by it as me of ten years or even five years ago would have been, but parts of my body don't work, my reflexes are slow, and I am really ill. So it could have gone better.

Things I am looking for in a dance class:
+ beginners
+ instructor I can understand
+ not to have to touch people
+ not to have to bend over backwards since my back has some "fused vertebrae" flexibility issues
+ not banging my knees on the floor repeatedly, given that I still only have 3/4 of a kneecap between both knees as no amount of weight loss and working out will make my knee grow back
Things that have led to me making this list:
+ the absolute beginners introduction to contemporary dance class which very much did not fulfill any of those criteria, although it DOES get a weird cookie for being the only dance class I have ever been to where the men outnumbered the women.

NB majority of those men appeared to be straight and were universally very awkward. two had come with female friends, two had come in work clothes (jeans and shirts), three (including those two) volunteered the information that they worked in IT, one was clearly on-spectrum, and one more was very very muscular and very very awkward (he also had total alopecia, and braces, and was clearly very young). Also there was me, largely failing to remember to put anything together in a coherent manner and stridently not wanting to do things like "just let them take your weight! Lean back!"]

Conclusion after discussion on FB: Bhangra or Belly dancing might be good for me. Crawled along late to meet Jess, who was disappointed to discover that, despite having said the day before that I'd already made dinner for the day and thus entered it into the Robot Punishment Machine, I actually MEANT it and was therefore planning on going home (er, via the purchase of a large frozen fish) rather than going out for dinner with her. More or less collapsed on getting in and have now waved two fingers at my alarm around 7.30am and declared today to be a rest day as getting out of bed is making me make NOISES:

crunchy, wet, chest noises

and my entire self hurts.

my protein box arrived and tomorrow the announcement of THE NEXT NOVEL ON SALE shall go out like a shot around the world, or more probably sink without a trace into people's Friday lunches, but I suppose I can keep up a steady stream of nagging if I can stay awake.

I really should know better than to trust nerd men on whether or not a film is good, rather than "mediocre with some good lines but overall self-indulgent and over-simplistic, relying on its unmentioned but immediately obvious and jarring Christian propaganda byline and entrenched masculinity/daddy issues to get an emotional rise from the audience, and willing to sacrifice pacing and/or making sense in order to achieve them."

(That was Logan. I mean, I imagine it worked very well for some people. But I don't have the right kind of issues at ALL and father/child bonding, even when the father is largely an angry irredeemable mess - favourite type of character - and the child a rage-filled violent abuse-survivor with an institutionalised view of the world - favourite type of child - when the plot determines they have to have Emotional Times for Hollywood payoff for the sake of that section of the audience it just leaves me cold and makes me annoyed because it doesn't really work with the plot. Neither for that matter does casually throwing the entire major conspiracy of the movie into a couple of passing lines in order to concentrate on manpain, and I'm entirely guilty of that myself!)

Quick additional whinge ( Read more...Collapse )

I *did* gym. A pathetic little gym, intentionally so, in which I barely sweated, because of time & feebleness and just not really being awake (I basically walked out of bed and into the gym). Further impeded by gym bros (not my usual collection because not my usual time of day) being all over the fucking place and taking up multiple pieces of equipment at once to the point of casually making me get off something they'd earmarked? Not in a mean way just in a "I want to use that and you're entering set numbers into your phone ergo" ffs. And my lungs have started generating enormous horrible gurgling phlegm coughs with any exertion: HAYFEVER SEASON IS HERE. TiS THE SEASON FOR SNEEZIN. Ugh.

I forgot if I mentioned this so I should probably make a note of it:

the new gym plan is that I limit myself to 30 minute cardio workouts on work weeks, thus meaning I am not in the gym for long (around 40 minutes max, which makes it just over an hour including the walk there and back) and don't feel the pressure of time/waking up early so badly (and find it easier to access what I need because the cardio machines are never entirely full), and on my off weeks I concentrate solely on weights, whether free weight workouts or specific muscle groups, and leg raises/planks, which will encourage me to get my cardio in from walking to and from places instead of wanking around in the gym for 2 hours and never seeing anyone.

THOUGHTS?

The internet lied to me. But a good lie. It said Hardies wasn't open at 6.30am on a Sunday, but it was. Which meant I ate two (2) chicken burgers at 6.30am. Because.

(And then I had no sleep because of acute fucking intercostal pains and coughing so I learnt my fucking lesson there, didn't I)

Today I went to watch wrestling in a dank bunker in East London: a lucha libre tag team; an Iranian heel faced with "I RESPECT UR CULTURE" as a chant because half the audience refused to boo him; "clusterfuck" 6-man match degenerated into dance-off to the YMCA (video clip) & repeat nudity; two women repeatedly put each other through tables & slammed heads in doors & it wasn't even in wetherspoons (also chairs, hurling themselves out of the ring, thumbtacks, and dragging someone else in to punch someone in the face); camden fought japan, ending with ibushi driving a car into someone and literally firing a firework at himself before jumping on some audience members; will osprey ass.. oh i forgot some of the other chants: "nothing happened" and "put some pants on", and heckling a wrestler whose stage thing is "the lion kid" by singing literally the whole of The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

and then linds and i went to a "fairly upmarket" restaurant to have very very nice food and dissect meme culture using humour theory. (Sager + Wilde, and I used the word "juxtaposition" because you really have to).

In the book I'm reading, a woman has fucked a dog. I mention this because it didn't feel unexpected in the slightest. It's very much that specific kind of provocatively gritty-for-attention. Still enjoyable, but very much a grotesquerie more than it is a novel.

1. Mare Internum is great, so that's the second time someone's recced me a webcomic and I've enjoyed it, which I assume means people who pay attention. ;) It's good.
2. Here's an idea for me: maybe if I stopped assuming a workout needs to be at minimum 90 minutes long I might stop having to abandon days due to "not enough time" and then get in a foul mood about it. (Ya boy ain't made it to the gym today because he was fucking unable to get up until 4pm. Just. Paralysed with tiredness. Tomorrow I'm going to experiment with a short work-out, because otherwise I basically won't get to go to the gym more than twice this week, and that won't do).
3. GOING TO WATCH SHITTY WRESTLING TOMORROW BEFORE WORK. wOOOOOOO
4. App concept: something where you scan or enter food amounts, like you do on MFP, and you have it set up with your desired calories and macros, like you do on MFP, but it tells you what meals you can make with what you have entered that will still fit your macros so you don't DIE OF BOREDOM. Should mostly require: maths, end-user database entry (MFP macro database uses nutritional information built up by users entering stuff), access to recipes but also end-user database entry again.
5. Email from Holly: "I dreamt that you published a Max Stroke story called In The Hole Of The Mountain King."
6. Brainspam for Tourist's guide which hopefully makes up for the fact that I have totally forgotten what it was I wanted to say about Gogmagog because FUCKING ONENOTE:

It is not the article that matters, but the faith. There are 5 million pieces of the true cross, but a relic is still a relic. A. M. Bartholomew was born the son of a Christian man and woman, subtype: tabernaclist, but he converted; he is a child of Israel back to the birth of the sands the second is foreskin is gone. The Roman Wall is built of plaster and a tonne of tourist sweat baptises it into battlements, making mythology anew, waking Mithras in the nearby brickwork. It doesn't matter who killed five working girls in Whitechapel: it was all of those men and none of them. The girls still died, and die again and again, while Jack lives, and thrives, and lurks with his Lister knife in the imagination. True histories are built on lies. Money is traded on it, whims and hunches, lives lost to it. With each new retrospective the past is rewritten: Rhynwick the Monster, Rhynwick the fit-up, unlucky in Newgate. The dinosaurs ceaselessly mutate in our understanding: we are who we pretend to be.

Change is our birthright.

wolfy_writes is ASSAULTING ME; I am already reading one of the Ian Sinclair books I made Lindsay bring back from his library at his parents' house and now, as I struggle to get my shit together sufficiently to give away the pile of Sound Recording textbooks I have decided to remove to free up my shelves (*bitter laughter*) MORE IAN SINCLAIR arrives.

Been to give Charlie their book back this evening:

1. Stop being a ninny and write your gay porn.
2. Stop being a ninny and find out if the guy you want to fuck is still seeing someone or not.
3. Tell your GP that your shrink is a bucket of rusty nails and you want one who isn't a venereal disease in a human costume.
4. We're going to traverse the Rotherhithe Tunnel in our carefully-selected pollution masks and then we're going to CLEANSE OURSELVES in Oxleas Woods, MAKE A DATE, IT WILL HAPPEN.

Nothing else of value to report CHARLIE ARE YOU READING THIS but I have sequestered FREE falafel and am probably NOT going to the transmasc reading because no one will come with me.

"Starch is a type of complex carbohydrate that undergoes several different steps during digestion. Eventually starch is broken down into glucose, which is the main source of fuel for all cells. Since carbohydrates, like starch, play such a big role in providing energy, most of your caloric intake should come from this macronutrient."

Derek: eats no starches whatsoever because getting enough protein and vegetable matter means I CAN'T SPARE THE CALORIES FOR THIS

(I'm doing better because I've decided free food left for us at work doesn't count as "bad", since it's been fruit and salads so far - banana and pear yesterday, tuna niconase salad today - and I had to finish Jess's birthday chocolates because she didn't like them?!?!? But OOGLE BLOOGLE BLARGH BLARGH everything is DIFFICULT I swear I am just going to go back to living on Huel at this rate).

Okay if I don't remember to make a post I will look back on this week with total amnesia so:

this is what Charity will look like if she decides to be a genius locii.

Been talking people through various gender crises a lot at the moment. You know, with my intense authoritative assistance which amounts to "whatever you decide is ok and also you don't actually have to DECIDE as such".

Gym update/fail. Inexplicably tired, cut triceps, leg raises, running, rowing, and planks from the usual mess due to time, knee, lack of enthusiasm, and lack of access, but tried ab crunch machine thing which probably makes up for some of it a bit. Went in at a solid 50kg on that one because apparently my abs are already monstrous. Am now of course CONSTANTLY HUNGRY which yeah that's nice but fuck off, human corpse prison. Fifty points to the guy at the gym who turned up in a Refugees Welcome hoodie. Twenty points to the gym for sudden materialisation of functioning WiFi. Ten to Amazon for delivering my external harddrive the day they said they would; I don't have time to dump everything on that today but tomorrow is rest day so I guess I can do it then.

Vague, vague possibility I might meet An Actual Stranger to go to a stupid reading of some stupid queermo stories because I might as WELL live this fucking life if no one is going to like me on the merit of my actual self; time to put on the TRANS hat and the GAY cape and go and be a SELECTION OF IDENTITIES.

Immensely grateful, without sarcasm, that Liza bullies me into writing terrible pornography for her nightly otherwise I would produce literally nothing at the moment, and hate myself for it. This stuff still feels like it's being dragged out of me by force but I don't have to query the quality.

Desktop computer is being viciously uncooperative with the keyboard; tablet may or may not actually ever charge again, having fucksakesed itself JUST as I was in the process of doing the notes for the LAST chapter of Heavy; ya boy is naturally as tired as a river-beach cadaver and it's only WEDNESDAY. Do you remember "not feeling physically sore and tired all the fucking time" but WITHOUT having to take drugs because I think it's been a while and the last times I can actually call to mind have involved either booze or morphine.

Also I REALLY want to drink right now.

NEW BOOK IS IMMINENT, link contains cover preview.

"did u go to the gym on saturday morning like u were meant to" no i physically couldn't get out of bed because once again my brain decided that it didn't want to sleep until 5am. at 7am it wouldn't let me move; at 8.30am i thought i was probably okay with the gym but jess hadn't gone to work and wanted to go out for breakfast so i did that instead.

veggie fry-up

jess drew me

I spent most of the day engaged in computer set-up/file-sorting things, having picked up the new mouse and keyboard from the neighbours (I even ate dinner on the computer desk: having at least been food shopping).

Then I dressed up like this and went to GAY Late with Ruthi, which is like going to Duckie except there's sometimes airconditioning, the drinks are cheaper, the toilets are worse, there's a little more variation in clothing and lots more lesbians (and also straight women happily not having to deal with straight men); on the other hand it is exactly like Duckie in that I am largely invisible to all human beings until they are drunk enough that their standards drop and they can at least face dancing with me. The disparity between what my friends see and what strangers see when looking at my face is so huge it's impressive to think they exist in the same reality at all.

Cracked home via take-away, got to bed by four, woke up today around ten after some absolutely monster fucking nightmares, still drunk, and laid into dealing with the hangover before it could get a foothold. This has involved going to the farmers market (fresh air, exercise) for a sausage bun (sustenance, fats, salts, carbs, hot food) and a brownie (endorphins/oxytocin), and also a full litre of fortified vitamin/mineral glop mixed fruit juice with green tea thing, multiple cups of tea, and spending most of the daylight hours working on the cover for the book. Cover is largely complete, Photoshop works, tablet works, etc - no actual reason not to use it for drawing now.

Went to the pub for a late Sunday lunch & was forced to lurk angrily near the bar until some bloody weekend--tourists fucked off and let me have a table (I mean it's good for the pub but as I go there basically every damn day I feel a bit territorial about the place) for this: ze chicken.

And now I am lying down dealing with the ghost of a hangover, and trying to decide how best to waste my Sunday evening as being productive is out of the question but so unfortunately is a bath, thanks to my tattoo.

So yesterday.

After eating a metric fucktonne of biscuits and chocolate my brain woke me up to talk about maths. "Plot the graph of this equation!" "Brain that's going to be an exponential curve and it's a pointless equation for nothing." "You're right let's work out the equation for a circle -" "It's going to involve π and it's THREE THIRTY IN THE FUCKING MORNING GO TO SLEEP."

But it did not go to sleep. Around 5:20am when I'd run out of internet I issued the shit organ with an ultimatum, namely: go to sleep before 6.30 or I will get up and go to the gym an hour early and I will make you do a work-out like no other.

I was awake at 6.30 so I got up. It actually took me two and a half hours to get my shit together and stop getting distracted but that's still half an hour earlier than usual, and I delivered the promised workout; ie, I did EVERYTHING. E V E R Y T H I N G. Bench, squats, lats, FIVE sets of leg raises, lat raises, chest press, shoulder press, biceps (bit ropy), triceps, the twelve-minute walk/run cycle, rowing, steps, planking, push-ups, cross-trainer and just shy of 25 minutes of cycling and FUCK YOU.

TRIED to go to get my haircut but managed to leave my card and keys at home, which actually worked out fine because it meant I got to pick up a coffee while I was waiting for Lindsay and gave the staff at the station at chance to giggle at my necklace...

And then I went to get a haircut and be deluged in News That Will Necessitate A Change Of Habits (my hair is nice though, let's concentrate on the plus, and the dye job was approved of) then got on a train immediately and headed to South Kensington. Outfit reference</a> because this plus the "hated by the daily mail" badge will become relevant later (also synchronicity: this was also the day Octavian noted that histrionic fascist toilet rag the Heil's scream-raiser laptdog Andrew Pierce decided to call trans people - specifically children - "gender fascists". Which from the Fail is presumably praise...), and already on the way to the station I had one man give me a firm once-over of the "I don't know whether I like this or not" variety.

Waiting for Lindsay at South Ken. I got the much better response from a lumpen Boomer mounting the stairs, who glared with OPEN NAKED DISGUST at my sartorial choices; Linds and I stopped for tea and then went to see the Robots exhibition in a near-totally deserted Science Museum as opposed to the TEEMING HORDES plaguing the place a fortnight ago. I took a phenomenal quantity of photos (multiple photo scrolling set for summary) and videos (start here and work your way forward for individual photos and videos) mostly for the benefit of Douglas. Things from this exhibition will HAUNT MY NIGHTMARES, but very pleasant and so on, if not entirely worth £15 in my head because my internal concept of monetary value hasn't responded to inflation and is still stuck in 1999.

We raided the museum shop for things to give to Doug for his birthday and to amuse ourselves; Linds got a badge of Maria from Metropolis for his mum's birthday, and a set of three robot badges shared between me, Jess (in absentia) and Doug - Doug takes Cygan, a Strong Boy famous for crushing, Jess has George, an early British robot built and improved repeatedly over time by Alan Sale, beginning when he was twelve (!), and I have Eric, "the first British Robot", build in 1928.

Being hungry we stopped into Wasabi (for me) and Pret (for he) and I MASTERFULLY balanced eating a pot of edamame on a rush hour tube in the West-to-East dash from South Kensington to Forest Hill, which also necessitated standing on the constantly-moving join between two carriages on the Overground while reading out loud about various London trivia from Brewer's (I am going to ingest that entire book and then I will be an unstoppable pub quiz champion); also whining constantly about my hip socket which, in addition to WICKED HORRIBLE DOMS (guess what squat-lifting 50kg two days after squat-lifting 40kg on the Smith Machine did for me? IT MADE MY MUSCLES HURT, I can hardly walk today) was trying to murder me.

The Robot Zoo event was pretty much as I expected of it - badly-organised ("stand in the cold for ages in a queue, get pre-stamped, oh these people have rebelled and wandered inside anyway, these people are getting pissy, and ..."), small, but generally good fun if you were with the right person, which I wasn't, because Lindsay hates fun; pictures of the robots are on Instagram too, but I think he preferred the natural history gallery (also on Instagram), and we both enjoyed SUDDEN MICE as they were in their correct spot, ie, a box rather than MY BEDROOM CARPET BEING CHEEKY SHITS. Attempts to interest him in any of the actual EVENT stuff were fruitless; he willingly looked at the musical instrument gallery and the aquarium (who doesn't love an aquarium?), listened to some of the talk on robot and animal rights (it was pretty badly-balanced as a panel, one man doing all the talking over everyone else), had no interested in the band (i liked them, uptempo collection of world music instruments and a style somewhere between folk and jazz) was wishywashy about a drink (despite these being the cheapest cocktails I've seen in London), and flat-out refused to participate in the dress-up photo (which was the biggest bone of contention because his entire FB profile is selfies of him and Alice, and Alice is going down with him to meet his parents this weekend as part of Lindsay "coming out" to his parents about being poly, a terminology choice that he has been shouted at about, by me, repeatedly). "https://www.instagram.com/p/BRJjsCyha88/?taken-by=derekdesanges>"Prove you will even deign to be in a photo with me". *I* still did the photo but was so distracted by how annoying he was being that I didn't remember to get the fur collar for the whole Furry Pimp ensemble and ruined it. Sigh.

ANYWAY. Back to trying to set up this fucking computer.

I miss when computers told you to fuck off using impenetrable computer talk ("An error of type 3087892523 has occurred, go fuck yourself", "Syntax error, restarting now, fuck your unsaved work") as opposed to what Microsoft is currently doing about my attempts to sign in to my Windows account on a new PC, ie passive-aggressively murmuring "oops, something went wrong!" without any kind of indication how I can fix this, so I've turned the machine off and am ignoring it until it stops being a little turd.

In the last couple of days (since, I dunno, Sunday), spring cleaning has been my primary occupation, sparked by the arrival of the new PC and the need to install it at a desk which was, in the politest of terms, a fucking rat's nest. Lindsay has hoovered underneath it and the room now smells about 30% less like a funeral for the city's pest population. The computer is resolutely refusing to be cooperative and I need to buy a new mouse as none of the three (3) that there are in our house actually performs the functions of moving, pointing, and clicking with both buttons that are generally required of a mouse; two of them can click (sort of) but one only with the right button and one only with the left button, one of those two can't really move, and the third mouse doesn't connect as a pointing device at all. Wild.

Besides trying to reduce the amount of matter occupying my flat not much going on; on Sunday we made Dining Errors ("we will go to this place that caters to the desires of both of us in theory only to discover that it caters to neither of us and the dishes are tapas-sized and it's expensive and the decor is very much 100% American Business Traveller" - indeed some Americans on the next table insisted on talking to us), which were resolved by just upping and going to Five Guys afterward to fill the hole - it seemed like the right time to militantly eat complete trash; Communication Errors (Lindsay finally bothered to explain, somewhat too late, that when he said "I don't fancy steak" repeatedly what he meant was "I've been vegetarian for February and wanted to maintain that", and that I was supposed to divine this from magic, also that he doesn't trust me, someone who has repeatedly been vegetarian and who grew up with a vegetarian parent, to know a. that steak restaurants are obliged to provide a vegetarian option, b. where vegetarian restaurants are c. to enjoy vegetarian food DESPITE THE FACT WE HAVE BOTH BEEN TO MILDRED'S TOGETHER MULTIPLE TIMES AND REALLY ENJOYED IT), which were resolved by me repeatedly saying "I'm not a fucking mind-reader, Lindsay"; and Errors of Choice, namely "leaving Five Guys and discovering it was raining".

On Monday I intended to go for a run at the gym but my entire being rebelled against leaving the house due to the disgusting weather and the need to continue Doing Things (also waking up at nearly 4pm probably didn't help; having been ROYALLY SHAFTED by the 243 bus just deciding that "once every 10-12 minutes" during that part of the night meant "once every 1-2 hours", I got back rather later than I'd have liked, ie, after sunrise); boring, maintenance things like "more tidying" and "bleaching my hair" and "edit notes" that are necessary but don't bear much writing about.

Attempts to de-oil my entire being continue with the liberal application of charcoal-based soaps to the affected areas but I still look like a plague victim made of fucking adolescent buboes.

Yesterday was a moderate gymming session; I've still not nailed another 25 minute run and discovered that running AFTER weights means the weights are more effective but my motivation to run is non-existent because I'm beginning to find it very boring. Probably need to do something about that. Weights-wise I've consistently stayed at 40kg now I worked out that I was lifting from the wrong part of my chest on the bench, I'm "sort-of" at 47kg for some lat exercises and definitely at 48kg for others, and Tuesday I finally tried squats and found them pretty much less intimidating than I feared, going straight in at 40kg and progressing up to 45kg immediately (I'm guessing because you drive with your thighs & let's face it weak thighs has never been an issue for someone who's previously been carrying an 117kg carcass around on them; will go up to 50kg next time). Rowing & leg-lifts, previous bete noirs, have become significantly easier, and I slip less during leg lifts, which is unfortunate because it means I now have to do more of both of them and that takes up more TIME. If I actually tried to do everything I wanted in the gym in one fucking session I'd need to eat my lunch in there.

Had to leave early because tattooing; spent the remainder of the day listening to Biko (who has been having a hellish time but rather unusually for him has responded sensibly to it, ie: stopped smoking weed, made an appointment with a counsellor, tried to grasp what the fuck is going on in his head, and generally behaved like an adult), talking in a vague way about the crapness of toxic masculinity, and watching anime (I mentioned not having seen Howl's Moving Castle, he immediately went and put it on; I was a bit confused by how wildly the film plot deviates from the book but it's a charming film nonetheless and the strong anti-war message is not a bad addition; then was made to watch Vampire Hunter D which is as hilarious as it was the first time I watched it. VAMPIRES GO TO SPACE NOW. What a hot genre mess) in between reading the odd snippet of The First Men In The Moon. I occasionally forget that HG Wells lived so far into the 20th Century, you sort of associate him with Victoriana, but he died in 1946. What a champ, though. I love Wells.

With a little time left and a dessert place that opens until 11pm, me and the Jess went to said place for crepe because Pancake Day, which seemed a nice way to round off the day. Also her stepmother sent her a shitload of Thornton's fudge as a late birthday present so that's just hanging around the house smelling very strongly of sugar at the moment...

[Massively overslept today and am resting my tattoo from anything strenuous; we're going to see Doug later which should be excitement enough, what with a trip to ALDI in the offing as well. If only I could get this bloody computer set up...]

Blogs

Interconnectedness isn't just for hippies

"These alterations can include: a sense that self or the world is unreal (depersonalization and derealization); a loss of memory (amnesia); forgetting identity or assuming a new self (fugue); and fragmentation of identity or self into separate streams of consciousness (dissociative identity disorder, formerly termed multiple personality disorder) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder."

Fugue states being of course one of the reasons I overidentify with Billy Prior; most of the people I know who have DID or DID-like symptoms come from homes where there was a strong religious element in their abuse.

"Dissociation has been described as one of a constellation of symptoms experienced by some victims of multiple forms of childhood trauma, including physical, psychological, and sexual abuse."

"Other symptoms sometimes found along with dissociation in victims of traumatic abuse (often referred to as "sequelae to abuse") include anxiety, PTSD, low self-esteem, somatization, depression, chronic pain, interpersonal dysfunction, substance abuse, self-harm and suicidal ideation or actions."

I mention this because I've grasped that the current (as of writing) experience of "I don't think I have a physical self and I definitely don't have an identity and I can't remember what having feelings is like" is probably a disassociative state but I don't know when it started this evening and I have no idea what set it off.

OKAY I HAVE ORDERED A NEW DESKTOP COMPUTER
AND I HAVE TAKEN RECEIPT OF A WACOM THANK YOU wolfy_writes

also i just wrote a very pretentious essay and i'm inexplicably freezing

I think that's everything

Gym bullshit: (132 mins) My excuse for running nonsense this time is just "I looked at the plan for this week and it was literally just 25 minute runs and that sounded boring" which is childish. On the other hand, only doing a 12 minute walk/run cycle meant I wasn't a sweaty wreck and therefore managed to go back up to 40kg on the bench again *chinstroke* also doing three 10-12 minute walk/run cycles instead of one unbroken 30 minute walk/run cycle, with other bits of cardio (why is the step machine the actual devil?) and weights stuff (I am on a so much lower weight for shoulder press than everything else that it's actively horrifying) in between meant that overall I did mooooooore cardio? That's a thing.

I keep TRYING to do other shit but today's entire agenda was gym, shower, cook & eat, go to Lush and get more face gloop (& some "toothy tabs" because why the fuck not), and come to work. Didn't even have time to transfer edit notes.

BONUS: Something which I think is my PAOM vest is being held over a fucking customs charge, or rather a £4.05 customs charge and an £8 "handling fee". I hate Customs & Excise, and I know damn well if I got this stuff delivered to a USian friend and got them to ship it in different packaging for me it would still cost less being posted twice than dealing with this bullshit. Really fucking annoying, man.

I've done absolutely fuck all today besides have nightmares but this came out of quarantine so:

Il Pompinaro's Apprentice and the Witchcraft of Instant Paint

OKAY I CAN'T REMEMBER IF I UPDATED YESTERDAY BUT THE IMPORTANT THING IS a rest day was thrust upon me and I went crazybananas my first night back at work and today I did magic.

GYM BOTHERANCE: I have discovered the magic combination. After fuck-all sleep (like, 4 hours, thank you brain) I consumed one (1) knock-off Aldi porridge pot and one (1) 200mg caffeine pill, and then I made a series of strategic decisions including "don't try to do literally everything" and lo, he did FINALLY complete his stupid 25 minute run and also had a go on the step machine thing which is like trying to pull your feet out of sticky mud over and over again. And a bunch of weights and all that stuff.
Relatedly, and ignoring the fact that I need to dye my hair again, here is my back after a month and a half of lat pull-downs (currently functional at 45kg and sometimes pushing it at 47kg):



Anyway last night I had bad bus mojo and had a twenty minute wait at the interchange so I took the time to walk up from the junction to the police station (which is opposite the 24-hr bagel bakery that also sells really nice spiral bourekas and which I like to use as a form of personal torture; they also sell £1 cups of tea), which was fine - my brain was eating itself, but fine - then a guy pacing up and down the bus stop in a distinctly sketchy way came to talk to me, demanded that I take his hand, and asked for a favour:

Me: A money favour?
He: Do you have a cigarette?
Me: I don't
He: Could you give me money for cigarettes?
Me: I'm afraid I don't really have cash, it's all cards now [please don't mention the cash point just up there]
He: Could you grab me some from a shop? Just a packet of baccy or something?
Me: I'm waiting for the bus, mate, I don't want to miss it
He: Please can you help though I'm dying for one, I'll pay you back -- [he still has my hand and is talking in an increasingly agitated manner]
Me: Whoa. WHOA. CHILL a minute. Listen. [Eye contact] I can't help you, and I'm sorry. It will be okay.
He: [Long pause] [confused smile] You're alright.
He: [gets on a bus a minute later].

My brain decided to a) beat me up about what a terrible person I am for using that tactic on someone, b) obsess about the fact that I couldn't wash my hand c) then tell me I was horrible for wanting to wash my hand, which is a thing that only started after I worked in the brain archives ANYWAY, so I sat on my bus and repeatedly said I'M IN A RIVER AND MY THOUGHTS ARE WATER every time in my head; I got home, went to bed, and was promptly kept up by my brain insistently treating me to an inventory of every gross, questionable, or human thing my hands have ever touched in my entire life ["gross" apparently means "related to poop" or OTHER PEOPLE'S HANDS; my brain has no problem with blood or vomit?]; fortunately there is a squirt bottle of hand sanitiser on the bedside table so I was able to go FUCK YOU, ALCOHOL ALCOHOL, SHUT UP I'M SLEEPING.

(It did get revenge on me by waking me up after four hours though)

I suspect some of the mental is because I didn't go to the gym AND asked Abbi for sensible eating advice that actually falls within parameters I can stick to.

Greenwich, Mean Museums, Poor Calorie Management

Yesterday: No gym. Went to fling money at tattooist, who is back in the UK again unexpectedly, and therefore secure further work on m'leg. Then dragged my sartorially laughable self to Greenwich on an ill-conceived but well-executed whim. There follow many images and not a lot of words (save that I finished the stupid fic, that I did very little else work-wise, that all the museums are annoyingly expensive, that I bought a gold pencil and experienced some EMOTIONS about space, and that I did not go dancing).

The interchange between Overground and DLR at Shadwell: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqHHCXhxNu/?taken-by=derekdesanges
Composite of arriving by the museums and enjoying the view of winter sun: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqGmg-hCdi/?taken-by=derekdesanges
Video panorama of Greenwich park as seen from one of the colonnades between Queen's House and the National Maritime Gallery: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqG0ijhXr9/?taken-by=derekdesanges
Route to Queen's House, which was shut: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqKskrBdyg/?taken-by=derekdesanges (the couple in front of me had FANTASTIC outfits but I didn't want to bother them for a photo)
Composite of views from the viewing point at the top of the hill in Greenwich Park, next to the Royal Observatory: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqKlHUhoFq/?taken-by=derekdesanges
The observatory & Flamsteed's house: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqLZDlBYwv/?taken-by=derekdesanges
The Azimuth rotunda, containing mainly the life cycle of the Sun: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqMFOZh9mw/?taken-by=derekdesanges // https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqMKIYBBJo/?taken-by=derekdesanges
Planetarium: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqMP-fBoKZ/?taken-by=derekdesanges
Quotes from the timeline of Astronomy, from one of the free galleries: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqOegTBExt/?taken-by=derekdesanges
Interior and exterior views: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqQ8fJhS2Z/?taken-by=derekdesanges

I didn't take any of the winners and runners up of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition because I thought that would be rude, but they were pretty breathtaking and some of them included up to 157 hours of footage, condensed to show the galaxy at its most incredible.

View walking down the hill, you can see a bend of the Thames and the masts of the Cutty Sark: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqREFDhxS7/?taken-by=derekdesanges
Snowdrops (there were also crocuses): https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqRJfoBovn/?taken-by=derekdesanges
The mainline into Greenwich Station, seen from the bridge before the antiques market: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQqT1pRhxvX/?taken-by=derekdesanges

I very almost dropped money on a massage at the market; I'm normally vehemently against massage but I thought someone might be able to make my legs feel better. Then again if I'm going to do that might as well see a proper sports masseuse or something (And not some groady fuck off a dating app who includes "qualified massage therapist ;)" in their minimal profile. Fuck off, you creepy obvious rapist!)

Today

Gym Update, Or: How Has My Body Let Me Down THIS Time?

1. I took your advice, Facebook, and when I failed out of 40kg sets again I went back down to 37.5kg sets, but to punish my entire body for being shitty I made it do 3 x 7 instead of 3 x 5. Fuck you, body.
2. In the most hilarious instance of "fat person on a treadmill" that I have initiated to date, the OVERHANGING SKIN SACK on my stomach set off the emergency stop when I had 8 minutes left of a 25 minute run, bewildering me and throwing me off my stride which was profoundly annoying as I'd been doing fairly well up until that point; I tried to get back into it once I'd reset the entire stupid treadmill but only managed another minute or two; came back later and tried a different treadmill and got eight done then.

Everything else was either fine or very good and I got to eavesdrop on some teenagers; a girl telling her male friend that he should try cheerleading "you need LOTS of muscles for that" (she is of course not fucking wrong there, not that you need me to tell you that) and him being predictably tiresome about it, followed by her asserting while giggling that she could beat him in a fight (I do not doubt this and she'd probably be giggling while she did THAT too), and him blustering about how he had done kickboxing ("Done that," she replied), and unspecified various martial arts ("So have I"), and could break her kneecap ("Go on then, break it. Break it right now."); said boy is clearly on a hiding to nothing and will need to learn one day that when a girl giggles like that it is because the alternative is shoving her foot so far up your ass it's going to burst out of the top of your fucking head.

Other gym particles (I don't normally go on a Sunday so this is novel) included a VERY BUFF lesbian and her TINY ROUND GIRLFRIEND who was DOING HER VERY BEST, and they were both impressive & adorable. Almost everyone else was a scary white truck-driver murderer type. Prefer weekday morning people tbh.

OTHER: Having finished writing and typing up the silly Renaissance gayness yesterday, Liza filled in all the brackets for me, I filled in any she'd missed today, and now I'm waiting with bated breath for someone to take the bait and proof the damn thing so I can Melissa Snowdon it at the Orange Hellsite and distract people from the hell of reality.

[Did you know the first ever black mayor in Britain was elected in Battersea, London, just before WW1? His name was John Archer and he came from Liverpool.]

Went to see Moonlight with Ruthi; it produced a lot of very intense complicated feelings and some urgent Thoughts about interactions between masculinity and vulnerability and abuse and alllll the other shit, but unfortunately they're also massively tied up in the Many Feelings and will never make any sense, and so Ruthi and I went for dinner and Repression Alcohol afterward so that we could gently pick out individual moments or small observations to look at while leaving the rest firmly alone to fester:

1. Names are important throughout the narrative in connection with choice.
2. It's very beautiful cinematically
3. Pinter-esque pauses and incredible tension
4. A kind of positivity beneath everything that I didn't really register at the time
5. No hand-holding of the audience
6. A lot of tropes that I recognise from fanfiction, and recognising them as classic fanfiction tropes helped to alleviate the tension of some otherwise wildly emotional moments.
7. I am pre-emptively FUCKING FURIOUS that this is probably going to lose out to that garbage pile La La Land at the Oscars.

[for the interested: taking YET ANOTHER gym rest day because my tendon is still troubling me and my chest was too last night, but with any luck I should be able to pick up on Sunday; I am concerned about not being able to run though].

YESTERDAY: Did not gym because my Achilles tendon was being aptly-named. Put on ankle support, finally rewrote my outline, dragged my boyfriend into London under the threat of going to see an exhibition about Robots in history at the Science Museum; arrived to find it was half term and that the queue to get into the Science Museum was very much nope-inducing even to those appropriately loaded on bubble tea (or bubble coffee in my case). So we walked up to the Albert Memorial (https://www.instagram.com/p/BQk1bpzjw_0/?taken-by=derekdesanges), and I started on a lengthy rant about the history of British Imperialism and Lindsay chimed in with some stuff about Gibbons, and eventually we wandered into the Geographers' gallery where I'd somehow hoped they'd still be doing their exhibition of "The Unexplored Quarter" (photography from the Arabian peninsula) and they weren't, it was a lot of annoying and uninspiring art, but we looked at it all anyway, and by the time we got back down to the Science Museum the queue was managable again...

... And then they didn't have tickets available for the Robots until 4.30pm, and Lindsay "didn't want to stay out that late" (COME THE FUCK ON), was unenthused by my suggestion that we get late lunch after the tickets and then come back feeling reinvigorated, and eventually settled for looking at the Mathematics and Aviation galleries (typically quite empty, although not so empty as the Agriculture and Shipping galleries which were so barren they were removed and replaced with communications and information); Mathematics has changed (https://www.instagram.com/p/BQk1r_VDIjS/?taken-by=derekdesanges // https://www.instagram.com/p/BQk1yfGD6tv/?taken-by=derekdesanges) and while I can see that the current practical and application-based approach (which is a trifle nihilistic in places https://www.instagram.com/p/BQk1JB2jUrF/?taken-by=derekdesanges) is more engaging and likely to draw in visitors and impress upon them the importance of mathematics, I miss the dusty old dim hall full of wire constructs of impossible shapes and Babbage's brain in a jar tucked away in a corner minding its own business. Aviation has not changed: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQk2D40D0th/?taken-by=derekdesanges and the 1944 airman there is a definite Style Goal.

Unfortunately the entire MASSIVE HANGAR FULL OF LOUD CHILDREN AND HANGING PLANES AND TOO MUCH INFORMATION AND NOISE did a number on me head and I had to go and sit down and try to deal with the ongoing problem ("continual guilt/panic/anger about the relevance of what I am doing or reading or trying to learn at any given moment, with added panic about how much I will retain or understand") compounded by additional problem ("i am literally only intelligent enough to know how little I know and will ever know") and some angry stomping about how if I'd fucking pursued my earlier passing interest in non-linear mathematics, fluid dynamics, and modelling of turbulent systems as a ten-year-old I bloody well WOULD have understood it and might even have been able to DO something with my blasted fucking life.

On standing up I found I was dizzy and losing my balance so I found Lindsay and ate a packet of MEN'S POCKY Jess bought me the day before, while walking through the information and communications gallery and trying not to get distracted from telling a joke by the desire to yell about wavelength perception and FAILING AT THIS. [Interdisciplinary academic study seems to be coming more and more popular - the talk I went to about ww1 archaeology in Syria was the product of the cooperation between several different specialities, for example, and architecture in particular has always covered about a bajillion things - and I am very very interested in the ways in which different focuses can cover the same "thing" or area or event or whatever in a multitude of ways something something an object is also an event in time and evolutionary pressures are present when we decide what makes a building look beautiful because our preference for symmetry derives in part from an evolutionary preference for symmetrical-ish bodies supposed to be evidence of healthy/strong genes ETC, but this is even worse than wanting learn ONE thing. I want to know ALL THE THING and how the thing RELATE to all the other thing].

We went and bought astronaut ice cream and ate it outside:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQk6g7hDCbN/?taken-by=derekdesanges

Then we had afternoon tea at Tombo and I tried to unclog my brain:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQk9qBTjKWH/?taken-by=derekdesanges

And ended up having to go on a mission for paracetamol and water because my entire face hurt.

Lindsay and I parted ways because he was being... not obstructive exactly but gently uncooperative/cheerfully ... hrm. Evincing an interest in continuing whatever "I" wanted to do but making it clear at the same time that this would be an imposition. So I told him to go home, and went to the RA:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQlKI-SDiEE/?taken-by=derekdesanges

In order to have a nice self-indulgent anxiety attack in the bathroom.

Went to F&M on my way back towards Piccadilly:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQlMJMdDjJI/?taken-by=derekdesanges

Wasn't intending to buy anything but found A CHELSEA BUN and haven't had one in DECADES

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQlMOLyj7Oz/?taken-by=derekdesanges

After firmly plopping myself down in Waterstones basement to read more of my book (And being accidentally dragged into a conversation by a very beautiful man who wanted the help of m'self and the mother of a young boy [and the young boy himself] in describing what a crumpet was to his French friend - the best I could manage was "a sort of edible sponge" because I refuse to give up being horrible about things), then continuing in my HOPELESS QUEST for books about Hiroshi Yoshida (NONE) and getting sidetracked by the biography section to leaf through various Lawrence Biogs (1. Straight cis men are determined to make sure you are not allowed to have their heroes for any reason; 2. reminds me of cis women angrily refusing to let any "cross-dressing" "women" from history ever be fucking trans, but 1. is significantly more odious than 2. because at least with women's history it's a potent reminder of how The Patriarchy has written women into the margins of history whereas 1. is just "don't get your icky sexuality near my hero he can't have been a role model for me AND A DIRTY MASOCHISTIC QUEIRDO), only to discover that I have the fucking Michael Asher but not the Michael Korda, and what does it matter anyway when I don't have time to read any of them and he's much better in his own words --

--- went for dinner in Wasabi and took myself for a cocktail to finish my book: https://www.instagram.com/p/BQlXOZGh-6H/?taken-by=derekdesanges

Feeling militant about not going home I availed myself of cake and milkshake:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQlaQvvhXYr/?taken-by=derekdesanges

(Waiter had to recommend cake for me. I picked a milkshake to go with it but it wasn't available. Then the cake he recommended wasn't there. He came back and recommended another. Then he went off and returned with the first cake. "Magic," he said, grimly.)

AND THEN I ran out of go entirely and had to come home, ran into Jess at the bus-stop, and took a detour for fish and chips.

TODAY:

A long and brutal debate about whether to go to the gym. Having discovered MYSTERY HAEMATOMA [https://scontent-lht6-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/16819037_10154074366337531_8556411787549898829_o.jpg?oh=854b535e214bb3275e19916f54387927&oe=5938419F] and feeling generally appalling first thing in the morning I went back to bed. Got up again and decided not to be a weenus and just go on the bikes or something since that wouldn't do one to my Achilles tendon and such.

Final score: rowing, chest press (not bad), leg raises (went okay), lat pulldowns (did very well with these today), lat raises (Weird, don't like them), bicep curls (again did well with these), and closed with a standard 20 minutes of cycling. Only walking there and back seems to have bothered my foot, so NATURALLY I am about to walk to the cinema and back to see Moonlight at last.

Days when I don't run/bench do seem like I'm not really trying at all tbh.

Gym: I managed! The run! With the magic of New Trainers and porridge for breakfast and a good night's sleep and BOILING HATRED! And then! TWICE! I failed to complete the requisite sets! And my entire workout was a disordered mess! But at least some of it GOT DONE. And I dragged myself through more rowing and more cross-trainering and at least, AT LEAST, LJ/DW, I managed to do a five-set of bicep curls at 32kg. Got called BOSS again by the EXTREMELY HENCH dude who usually turns up to take the bench after me.

Slog: Blah blah edit notes blah blah typing up essay. (Still to do: editing in links, sending it to Dali; outline fiddling, finish the goddamn stupid Kapoople fic especially since Liza has started making noises about doing a Wank Yourself Clever short story about Mike Bently and Freud's theory of the Anal Stage).

World: Bodily forced Jess, who returned from the ENT specialist complaining that he hadn't listened to a single thing she said about her tonsils and also bearing gifts from the charity shop (I am now the proud possessor of a bandana "specifically for flagging" and some green cut-off Levi's), to come out of the flat and into London with me for Pleasantness. In practical terms it means we went to Whole Foods and she ate a chia pudding and swore at me about being hungry while I tried and failed to drink a cup of matcha in the cold, then went to the Japan Centre as promised and was sworn at some more because I wanted to look around before committing to eating anything - she eventually sat down to eat and left me to it, although the last laugh is evidently on me because they were out of plain steamed rice and my RAGE about Wasabi's failure to provide normal portion sizes instead of RICE BUCKETS continues - anyway blah blah purchases (and a server who played "let us compare piercings" with me, thus cementing my dental-nurse experience-bred theory that piercings exist so we can make unassuming small talk) and also the little JPC bookshop.

After some coaxing and more swearing I persuaded Jess that she wanted to go to Foyles for coffee, which was in hindsight a bad move as this culminated in a) protracted bitching in a very crowded cafe about subjects unsuited to public places, and b) buying books. I wasn't going to, but I found a copy of Shigeru Mizuki's Showa (the first volume) and liked the look of it and was BOILING WITH ANGER about self-inflicted problems ("I would like to be able to read! Just indulge myself in reading a lot! Instead of CONSTANTLY FEELING GUILTY because I ought to be writing or researching or reading something different or more relevant or more intelligent or worrying about how much I will remember, and tl;dr I really envy the woman from my old workplace who used to tear through 3-5 crappy crappy photoshop-covered fantasy romances a week because SHE WAS REALLY ENJOYING HERSELF AND I'M FUCKING NOT"), and then it was rush hour, so I bullied Jess towards Laduree to wait until the storm had passed...

(She decided she wanted to look in Fopp for YET MORE music biographies, as this is Jess's drug of choice, along with First Order slash fic, Supernatural things that do not bear speaking about, and James Herriot stories - and *I* fell over and bought a copy of The First Men On The Moon by HG Wells because it was £3 and I'd been primed by its inclusion in a beautiful hardcover in Foyles and also I haven't read that one and I *know* I like HG Wells even if I still haven't managed to finish When the Sleeper Wakes)

Laduree continues to be very nice, very pretty, very comfortable, and very expensive, with very polite staff and appalling service (last time: I hope you enjoy waiting ten years for a bill. This time: Oh right we're supposed to bring you EVERYTHING you ordered). Anyway, I had an orange blossom macaron and they're good. And started reading the introduction to Showa (1923-1939) to Jess; part of the way through this I realised I'd acquired an additional audience member in the form of a small girl with a sparkly butterfly brooch on her hat, who was standing at the next table eating sugar cubes from the bowl and watching with rather more rapt attention than Jess was.

Uhhhhh oh yeah also:

1. Boy in owl beanie allegedly checking me out in JPC (or just phenomenally awkward)
2. Horrible blump of a man made a weird fucking noise behind us both on the Tube platform then, having passed to stand further down, conspicuously rubbing his dick in a very much not just "rearranging the nuisance" manner. Jess convinced he was aiming this gesture at me, me largely convinced it was probably aimed at her.

Thanks, My Gender, I would like to rewind back to this morning and just have the Big Hench Man call me BOSS again tbh. That's about the level of interaction I can take on that front. Achilles Tendon has hurt ALL DAY and is hurting now, woohoo, and there's no date on when this is actually being released in the UK, if ever: http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/tom-of-finland-review-1201983671/

BUT IT EXISTS, AND THAT IS THE MAIN THING.

I decided I wasn't ill any more because I've been ill for five days and that's long enough (also I felt okay and continued to feel okay all the way to the gym). I proceeded to have a goddamn AWFUL run despite keeping the spend low enough that it was practically a jog, and my idiot MP3 player crapped out halfway (condensation from the case got into the controls and made it think I was constantly trying to adjust the volume, thereby making it impossible for me to play anything). Post-run things went alright; I got straight to the barbells and managed a wobbly but acceptable set-of-sets at 40kg (88lbs), then got straight to the lat machine and did some likewise unimpressive but technically existing set-of-sets at 45kg (100lbs), both of which are improvements on pre-sickness turnouts.

Being of a practical bent I limited myself after this to a) leg raises (still horrible), b) the chest press (which I didn't get the chance to return to during last pre-sickness workout so it was nagging in my mind), some leisurely rowing (took me 7 fucking minutes to get to 80kcal and normally it takes just over 5), skipped cross trainer because of dead mp3 player which would have made it boring and annoying, planked, threw in some press-ups for variety (baaaaad ones), then sat on the blasted bike for ten minutes. Againm boredom without music prevailed there as much as anything. Also, the Whey2Go sachets were as predictably repellent as everything else which is basically 100% protein.

It took a stupid amount of time to recover, then I humped myself back down to the supermarket (via the charity shop: it is spring and we are FINALLY clearing the piles and piles and piles and piles and piles of unwanted clothing/books etc) and hobbled home with Too Much Weight and then uh, went back to sleep for two hours after lunch...

Over-siesta'd, groggy, filled with dreams that were a hilarious overdose of Everything Bad We Could Think Of That Was Even Vaguely Plausible (thanks for reminding me of the shitty psycho boss I had literally more than a decade ago, I sure wanted to be frustrated by her to the point of violence), then stuck in Panic Mode: Subtype PARANOIA, I still managed to sort out the binders I'm meant to be mailing out, go to the goddamn supermarket AGAIN, and, as of just now, transfer more edit notes and churn out more of Liza's Kapoople fic.

For reference, the things I am trying to plug away at writing wise:

+ Moving edit notes / applying some edit notes to Heavy
+ Liza's silly Renaissance Kapoople fic
+ Dali's Masochism Essay (the deadline has helpfully been removed)
+ Re-order/tidy/rewrite various bits of the Outline for Tourist's Guide etc so I have a better idea of what I'm dealing with and hopefully add some more stuff.

Of course I'm now cocking well exhausted still (my legs: like noodles) and for some reason have a burn on my elbow? And Lindsay has passed out even though he was supposed to be bleaching my hair. Hey fucking ho fucking Monday.

Everything is very frustrating. After two days of basically doing very little but sleep (Friday evening I went to Kaspa's, on the bus, and read some of my book; Saturday afternoon I went to the train station cafe and to the pub, both just around the corner from me, and ditto) I then couldn't sleep particularly well Saturday night but was still fucking exhausted; now I'm still goddamn tired, haven't been to the gym for five days, feel angry as well as sick and worn out from doing NOTHING (today I walked to the other side of the park and back, with a break for breakfast in the middle. This wiped me out so badly that I had to take a fucking nap. Then I went for lunch in the pub and read the book. Ditto), haven't written, haven't done anything productive, am roiling in self-loathing and hatred of absolutely everyone else and want to set myself on fire.

Also I'm still BASTARD WELL ILL.

(It's failing to have the decency to manifest in symptoms I can really get to grips with beyond a painful face, occasional UNEXPECTED LUMPS OF LUNG FLYING OUT OF MY MOUTH, and being completely and utterly fucking exhausted all the fucking time. Naturally the "can't sleep" episode meant I was faking the entire thing and being self-pitying and should walk/gym but I couldn't actually stand up for long enough to do that).

On the plus side while my fucking PAOM vest still hasn't shown up (I've been woken up every day by H&M and ASOS deliveries for Jess though!) the new John Connolly book is, as proven, absorbing. I won't say "good", because it's fucking garbage, but it scratches a particular itch, which is apparently "increasingly didactic private detective pursues demons through Maine". That's ... pretty much the entire series, with breaks for "through Louisiana", "through the Czech Republic" (that was a trip) and "IDK some other part of the US, possibly the Mass. one with too many Sessesesesese in the name". As witnessed on every occasion I can be kept occupied with anything that's filed under Murder Mystery no matter how fucking bad it is.

NOW MAKE ME GET BETTER I'M BORED AND ANGRY AND I'VE RUN OUT OF PORNOGRPAHY*

* this is a lie the internet is infinite and so is the porn

lindsay was going to gym, so i was going to gym. i woke up and asked him if he was still coming; he insisted he felt like death, i went back to sleep for another two and a half hours.

what i have done today:

+ put things in bag for work
+ briefly fry some stuff and eat it
+ yogurt
+ eat
+ go back and lie on the bed
+ vaguely browse facebook
+ take photos of jess's face from uncomfortably close to
+ eat different stuff, now near work
+ apply deep heat to shoulder
+ apply vicks to chest
+ read a bit on the train

what i have not done today:

+ shower
+ wash my face
+ go to the gym
+ write
+ think coherently
+ stop generating massive quantities of fucking snot for five seconds

1. I feel like ass.
2. I thought I would wake up and feel less like ass, but that didn't happen.
3. I thought I might feel less like ass when I'd eaten but that didn't happen and also I have no appetite.
4. I am trying to bribe myself with expanded food consumption including strawberry milkshake (a good strawberry milkshake is pretty much the Nuclear Option) but this is somewhat stymied by the aforementioned lack of appetite/interest in food.
5. I therefore failed to a) put binders in packets to mail them out, b) finish editing the outline for Tourist's Guide, c) finish writing Dali's essay, d) even look at Liza's fic, e) feel anything about this, because I am too tired and dead-feeling.
6. I did manage to add more mark-up to another chapter for Heavy, at least. Chapter Nine is going to get a thorough gutting when my brain works - it's too waffly.
7. Attempts to perk myself up a bit: sambal belachan on my tofu noodles (let's face it, I was going to do that anyway, but at least I thought this would get my sinuses clear); switching reading material from The London Monster (which is DRAGGING) to Brewers's Dictionary Of London Phrase and Fable, which superstition says will make me a WHIZZO WRITER like a PROPER GROWN-UP; chicken katsu curry from Wasabi for later (I considered getting other stuff but was pole-axed by guilt about money and calories), a flat white from Pret accompanied by inexplicable flirting from the barista (guy I look like a WW2 soldier with TB trying to hitch-hike home to die, this is not an attractive look), a strawberry milkshake from Shakeshake accompanied by this view:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQQ8-zhjR9C/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BQQ9R8fDMOd/ (video link)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BQQ9qZUjsns/

and a mocha from the work coffee machine...

Broadly unsuccessful because my SOUL IS DEAD AND I AM DEAD

Jess at least enjoyed her birthday presents from me (two bear-related t-shirts in navy blue and black) and the company who sent her one of her birthday presents from Ret also sent some "fuck off alt-right scum" stickers. Lindsay hasn't actually managed to WRAP her presents yet because: we are dead and our souls are dead.

Summary: I feel like a sack of ass and have wanted to do nothing but pass out since I woke up BUT I AM AT WORK NOW. Also I currently look like a fucking German hiker.

I've had very little time today, despite getting up earlier than I expected and not taking as long at the gym as I'd allotted myself (made some good progress there in that I lifted some slightly heavier heavy things but my entire run more or less was filled with resentment and sore Achilles' tendons so it's probably a good thing that tomorrow is my scheduled CATHOLIC BULLSHIT day, also the dark hollows under my eyes are like wells and I feel like I'm going to pass out. NIGHT SHIFT WHEE). I mean, I had to go get my Hairs Did and then walk to the station and then etc etc and find some dinner so basically I've had no time.

Therefore I don't think it's entirely melodramatic to complain that I haven't managed to do the stuff I cavalierly said I was going to do (mail out binders to people, restructure/tidy book outline so far, add edit notes to document, work on Liza's fic, work on Dali's essay... probably a good thing Marika's too busy SORTING OUT HER WEDDING to get back to me about the proof-reading or I'd drown in shit I haven't done yet).

Anyway. There's always tomorrow I suppose.

[I am vaguely considering that if I eat more I might be able to lift more. Then again I am also considering the ACRES AND ACRES of prime real estate in TOTAL SELF-LOATHING that I have moved into recently and how likely it is that eating more will build me a mansion in the land of I HATE MYSELF in which I shall dwell eternally].

Here is a picture of my new necklace:



It says "cumdump". I am a classy boy.

Saturday
I achieved my first non-stop 20 minute run. Possibly in my entire life. Also worked on hanging leg raises, which are definitely a thing I can do but a thing that my body hates me for doing, especially my stomach, which is good because it means that bit may even be induced to sprout a muscle.

After another attempt at dying my hair and the non-appearance of a proper pink, the non-appearance of my YFLMD vest (still not here on Monday, fuck you PAOM), and a general sense of Probable Failure, I took Sam out first to fill us with caffeine in Costa, then through Soho and down to the Lord Moon on the Mall (it amuses me there are two Wetherspoons in Central London fairly close to each other which involve moons in the name - the Lord Moon on the Mall and the Moon Under Water [we will discount the Montagu Pike for a minute] - and yet I will not set fucking foot in the Moon Under Water and consider it Dodgy while the other, technically on Whitehall, I think is a Fine Establishment. Anyway. More caffeine. Then we went to Duckie.

Another ill-omen: Sam overheard a man at the cashpoint entertaining his female companions by saying "but when he opened his pants instead of a penis he had a vagina! It was hilarious". Yes, hilariouuuuuusssssssssssss. Utterly. Hilarious. [I have been waging attempted war on FB friends regarding how they refer to the many many figures of hatred in the media but I think they are once again missing the point and assuming that it's to do with personal rectitude or protecting the likes of Kellyanne Conway and what I actually mean is GUYS *AIM* YOUR PUNCHES]

Duckie was, for all that, okay. I spent a little while when it was quieter trying to teach Sam what I'd learned in the Charleston class; the cabaret act was a nice lady called Lorraine Bowen who has apparently been on Britain's Got Talent and did an admirable job of carefully blanking a drunk titwit who was invited to join the Crumble Line onstage and then tried to make the experience All About Him (Gays, eh? LET THE LADY DO HER ACT NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR MEDIOCRE DANCING OR FACE, MATE); the fans were broken again so it was an immediately UNBELIEVABLY SWEATY night.

Left early, as per, and in a slightly ill temper as two bottles of cider finally breaking the just-over-a-month without booze had the unfortunate side-effect of, as always, making react terribly badly to the run-of-the-mill Duckie combo of:

A. Being generally ignored by most people
B. Being utterly cut dead by anyone vaguely attractive I may have looked at
C. Being, unfortunately, sized up and groped by The Gross People

Leading me to question once again what exactly is so terribly wrong with me. Like, surely I am a LITTLE better than this? A little?

Stopped in for a planned late-night shitty chicken burger in Wood Green, in an unprecedentedly busy Shitty Chicken Emporium (Hardie's is closed so they get twice the custom), and felt genuinely quite peaceful and calm, surrounded by Wood Green's finest 2.30am people, who were primarily male, under 30, black, and watching the football on a large TV (this last brought me the revelation of why there had been so many people of the Real Ordinary British People variety in Middlesborough scarves on the tube earlier in the day: they beat Tottenham? At home? A world gone topsy-turvy, m8).

Sunday

A day of whinge and binge. Whinge because I was "inexplicably" tired and binge because that's what Sundays are for. Admittedly they're also meant to be for rest and what with post-midnight dancing/walking and the business of the day I actually hit a new Fitbit record (25k steps) without going to the gym...

We were going to go for "brunch" but by the time Sam had stopped faffing (my kingdom, btw: Jess does this. Lindsay does this, everyone does this: I go "we have to leave really soon/pretty much this exact instant in order to be on time" and they IMMEDIATELY. START. FAFFING. Then just as you are at the door - EVERY TIME - "Oh I might just nip to the loo". Why am I living with my Grandfather. My literal kingdom for people who just LEAVE WHEN THEY'RE TOLD TO) and we'd wended our way through the farmers' market and fannied around in Kimura and walked to Crouch End, with the intention of brunching at Edith's House, it was Actual Lunchtime, so I took us to Banners, instead:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQIawcmjraS/?taken-by=derekdesanges

(I made them replace the toast with plantain because PLANTAIN, and that iced mocha was made with chocolate ice cream instead of ice and cocoa).

We walked to Archway. It wouldn't have been much of a trial to walk to Camden but I didn't want to wear down Sam's legs and I NEEDED to walk to Archway after that fucking brunch thing. Got the tube to Camden, meandered shoppily along the high road, bouncing from side to side largely heedless of the alleged traffic; got Rose Milk bubble tea; tried to get into Chula for an espresso martini but were rudely cockblocked by the place's own popularity; stopped into the microdistillery so Sam could get more Camden Half Hitch Gin; discovered that the Army Surplus place, which has been going downhill for a while, has COMPLETELY RUN OUT OF GAS MASKS (intense paranoia about this), accidentally found and subsequently bought a 1957 pattern Army Greatcoat because this one is actually the right goddamn size for me instead of being MILES. TOO. BIG. then fished up in the Stables Market Cafe:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQIylFJjijT/?taken-by=derekdesanges
(Sam being delighted with the venue)

Following this we meandered back via a couple of shops, including the Hell that is Cyberdog (where we ... tested vibrator strength and were bemused by the gendering in the marketing: vibrators aimed at women are pink or purple and alien-looking and smooth and vibrators aimed at men are BLACK AND LOOK LIKE DICKS OR FISTS and called things like DEEP DRILL 8) which also contains an entire. Line. Of anime waifu fucking ... porn pillows and lube and just. A whole wall of Sex For MRAs, as far as I can tell.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQI9utojJY2/?taken-by=derekdesanges
Then we went to Chula and had the martini after all. Photo composite includes the disco balls in the Stables Market Cafe, the sign opposite the stupid army surplus place, and my hot chocolate at the cafe; not pictured, me making a fuss over some stupid stupid stupid post-apocalyptic leg warmers which cost more than my jeans, or the amount of time I spent contemplating lycra hotpants in CD.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQJBlVLjnp2/?taken-by=derekdesanges
Mildreds for dinner. I had Halloumi, and rose Harissa hummus, and spiced plum cheesecake; Sam decided she was all walked-out just as I got my second wind; we went home. I nipped out to Akdeniz to collect some more nonsense (Oreo ice cream sandwich bar, dates, bourek, that kind of thing) and managed to get sugar syrup from the baklava Jess requested (at length, after being POINTLESSLY COY when I asked if she wanted anything from the fucking shop?!?!!?) into the pocket and side of my new coat.

Monday

So far: gym went BADLY in that I didn't bother rowing and couldn't get more than five minutes done on the bike because someone had messed with the resistance setting and I don't know how to change that back, and someone was on the damn chest press when I was just about ready to do that then leave; but okay in that I managed a 400kcal walk/run cycle, barbells, lats, etc, etc, etc, etc. I suspect part of the difficulty may just be in that I am still knackered as fuck and was full of additional food weighing me down, also the relentless self-loathing may have put something of a kink in my ability to motivate myself.

Sam has just headed out to hop on the train to Gatwick; I have just finished another chapter of note transfer on Heavy and need to start getting my shit together to go back to work tonight. My knee hurts and I'm freezing; welcome back to Le Work.

Plan: I will go into town, it will be nice, I will buy Vaseline and Setsubun stuff and popcorn and rose dye for my hair and I will type up my writing and have a wander around.

Reality: I will go into town, it will rain constantly, Boots will have neither Vaseline nor rose dye for some reason, Whole Foods won't stock the popcorn I want (and neither will ANYWHERE ELSE) but I will be reduced to panic-buying a fucking protein bar because I'm about to faint because I forgot to eat the thing I was meant to eat before I left the house, the Setsubun stuff in the Japan Centre will have all sold out so I'll just binge-buy random nonsense and eat seaweed snacks in the street, I will be too wound up to enjoy wandering anyway and in a constant state of paranoid/panicky crisis about nothing in particular; I WILL actually manage to type up what I've written but I will hate every word of it and spend all day feeling ugly and stupid, I will find the Vaseline and hair dye in a different chemist but then after a lot of faff in the evening won't leave the hair dye on for long enough so I will be left with a crappy salmon/peach colour and need to dye it all over again (fortunately the bottle was on two-for-one); it will be dark early and raining and I will wander aimlessly around shops with aching legs as I try to avoid admitting defeat and going home.

At least I made an interesting dinner to make up for it.

Today I woke up feeling fairly opposed to the idea of going to the gym and facing the 20 minute unbroken run that C-2-5k has scheduled for me, but once I'd had breakfast and tea in bed I was a little more determined and all it took was a healthy "if you don't do this you've FAILED WEEK FIVE" to get me to move; after ten minutes it actually got a lot easier so there's me, completing the first unbroken 20 minute run in probably my entire fucking life. Other first: successfully did 20kg on the shoulder press, and used the weird-ass hanging thing do to do hanging leg raises which are absolute murder. Am now thoroughly fucking mutilated. And going to Duckie tonight come hell, high water global rise of fascism, bad hair, failure of my fucking vest to show up when I wanted it, or anything else. Cinderella SHALL go and fondle some balls.

(I also got an email from my gym congratulating me on going for a solid month, so that's... something. Here is a graph of my attendance in minutes:

)

Last night: after writing for a bit in one cafe, met up with Jess for coffee (having to explain repeatedly that I was in the food store literally visible from her workplace which she had somehow never noticed existing despite me talking about it on several occasions) dressed like this:


(https://www.instagram.com/p/BQA4i4kDYXD/ for other)

Which involved Lindsay "mothering" me (his own words) about the lie of said suit. It's his shirt, not that he ever wears it.

Following a coffee break and further updates on the ongoing relationship dramas of one of Jess's co-workers (she has the unfortunate characteristic of being a magnet for shitty, Shitty men, one presumes because she is - by Jess's account, I haven't seen her - extremely pretty, meaning shitty, shitty men feel entitled to her, and reasonably accommodating up to the point where she isn't any more, which she has apparently now been pushed to), I marched off to Broadgate to meet lanyon for dinner.

Shoryu was, foodwise, as pleasant as ever - voici (https://www.instagram.com/p/BQBUmNzD3Z9/?taken-by=derekdesanges) and ici (https://www.instagram.com/p/BQBfdkKj2GP/?taken-by=derekdesanges) - and we totally failed to avoid talking about The Awfulness, although at this point we were mostly fantasising about dying, I bribed L with chocolate ("If you're going to leave the country please remember you promised I could have an Exit Kit from the hospital pharmacy"), L accused me of making things happen by writing about them ("you did this with ebola! Now you're doing it with post-nuclear - CAN'T YOU WRITE SOMETHING A BIT MORE POSITIVE, I know it's not exactly your comfort zone--"), I admitted I was in actual fact planning to basically destroy reality entirely this year. Which really doesn't differentiate me much from most politicians at the moment.

But at least dinner was nice; I tried to persuade L that she wants to at least come to dance classes or something likewise FUN! And NOT ON THE INTERNET! before she is burnt out by the demands of work and the hell that is current politics in a country that is behaving almost as fucking dementedly as America and with even less excuse. Tramped back the way I'd come in order to buy some Pointless Health Nonsense from the place I'd been hanging around in before, and arrived home too late to really type up any of my writing.

I'm not sleeping particularly well at the moment - I've extended myself to buying a copy of "Weightless" so that I can listen to it when I'm not able to stream it - and last night hit wonderful new lows:

1. middle-of-the-night me managed to convince himself that the reason the internet wasn't working was because cutting off a means of communication between people was a necessary step in the fascist overthrow of society, and then my rational brain had a very hard slog convincing me that this wasn't happening yet, never mind that it wasn't going to happen at all.
2. on and off sleep featuring the usual cacophony of Shitty Dreams
3. hypnogogic hallucinations; my brain thought it could hear people's voices in the (entirely instrumental) music playing while I slept, that they were discussing something which was a danger to me (this is a common dream theme simply because of school dorm/shitty ex experiences where "people speaking in low voices near where I'm sleeping" DID presage acts of violence/vandalism aimed at me, so I tend to be Overly Likely to attribute it to that when I'm not operating with 100% of my brain; while I was struggling with sleep paralysis and trying to remove my headphones so I could listen for the people speaking and hear what they were saying more clearly, something heavy started to press on my chest (logic suggests this was probably just Jess's arm) at which point my brain went bananas and tried very hard to get my body to move enough to shout for help or throw off the thing that was trying to stop me getting away, which in real life translated to some frantic mumbling until I was sympathetically informed that I was having a bad dream. NO SHIT, SHERLOCK.

Surprisingly after all this I had a fairly good gym. The signs were not great at first; while running went okay it took until I'd finished lats and triceps AND biceps (the latter of which was a real fucking struggle for no apparent reason, even more strange considering the first two had been very good) before the pulley barbells became free, and then the guy who'd been hogging them (and mostly just sitting on the end of the bench) insisted on being helpful and clearing his weights away and putting the bench back down and being Friendly instead of fucking off. AND I couldn't find the weights I wanted because no one ELSE ever puts things back where they found them so was reduced to asking someone if anyone was using the correct ones when I finally located them - he was perfectly nice and friendly despite being built like he'd eaten two of me and then repeatedly deadlifted a further two of me for many years, and I got angry with myself for being affected by that (STUPID SOCIAL MONKEY WHY DOES THE REMOVAL OF A PERCEIVED THREAT MAKE YOU HAPPY YOU'RE PATHETIC) and THEN post barbells someone else who seems to more or less live in the damn gym was ALSO polite and cheerful (it's sunny. That's why) and I had to go away and row things until my brain stopped being a mess.

Speaking of messy brains: I continue to skip my way merrily through The Mint while doing my cool-down cycling and more than ever I want to pick up Lawrence by the shoulders and shake him repeatedly while shouting YOU ARE SERIOUSLY MENTALLY ILL AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE ALLOWED YOU TO DEAL WITH IT IN THIS WAY BECAUSE IT IS NOT HELPING YOU. [And it is too familiar].

It is Setsubun today. I plan to go into town when I've finished my edit notes. Gonna lob beans at Jess later, and Lindsay, if he's still here when she gets back from work.

Yesterday was Rest Day, or Catholic Bullshit Day, typified by me struggling to get out of bed around ten after several attempts, and with the amusement of Jess, who had been awake for two hours and couldn't understand why I was doing such an effective impression of a dead man. We went to the pub so I could shit out 1k+ of "introduction" to Dali's essay (poor Dali; she asks me for an essay about masochism and gets currently-unreferenced rambling about the creation of Western Christianity, the through line of the notions of sacrifice and devotion from Saxon liege-lords and early Christianity down into chivalric ideals and the creation of romanticism, some intense burbling about TE Lawrence and a little dismissive mumbling about social models of masochism vs psychological vs neurological vs mind your own damn business...), then Linds and I went to visit Doug. Due to Trains we managed to go to the big Aldi we keep passing on the way to his place and were duly swept away by a) the immense cheapness of all the knock-off brands b) the hilarious branding of the knock-off brands and c) how utterly gross and very avoidable any of the more perishable goods are. I would NOT be using that place for a fresh food shop and it's moderately alarming that people are encouraged to do so. I've never seen such miserable veg.

Doug was on fine form and reduced himself to tears of laughter over the idea of weaponised bonobos ("instead of flinging grenades just catapult a line of masturbating monkeys at them" and "the british command are used to standing around covered in primate spooge, it just reminds them of boarding school") while we were discussing, in interlocking rant format, the absence of decent history education, and the effect of the former in exacerbating the current Situation with The Global Rise of Fascism, or GRF, incidentally also the noise of dismay I make when I wake up now.

(Speaking of waking up, boy HOWDY have I been having some frankly Unnecessary nightmares, during the FIVE FUCKING MINUTES of sleep I got last night in between a brief sojourn to the living room floor to get away from the disgusting noises Jess was making; my brain also apparently refuses to switch off and go to sleep if I haven't gymmed it into submission, despite Linds and I both whining all day Wednesday about how Mysteriously Tired we were...).

Today, so far, I've been to the gym (length of workout truncated by having to wait for Lindsay, which I am still resentful of), wherein the 5-8-5-8 walk-run cycle was not as difficult as feared, I managed to get to the barbells and lat pulldowns (therefore the absence of time to do other weights work must be taken upon the chin), although the former was a bit of a pain as I did fine with an extra 2.5kg (bringing me up to the utterly feeble 37.5kg, which even when I'm generous about my own weight is still only about half of One Me) right up to the last rep, when my arms took a holiday and I nearly had a fun trip to the hospital with some smashed ribs.

I've also been to the dentist (very nearly late because WHAT IS THE LINEAR NATURE OF TIME and OH RIGHT IT TAKES AN AMOUNT OF TIME TO WALK A DISTANCE) and had my tooth filled (while gently hallucinating one of the more idyllic panels from the Garden of Earthly Delights, due to tiredness), and was relieved of £95. It was almost £127, but the dentist pointed out that I was being charged for something I'd already paid for, and sent the dental nurse out to remonstrate with reception about it. Evidently bonding with said dental nurse about our piercings was a good mood, because I would probably have just paid it.

Then I went for a coffee as a reward, which, as always, made me even more tired for some godforsaken reason, and was apologised to at annoying length by a small middle-aged man who bumped into me; considering how much time I spent yesterday and Tuesday just being barged by people I am not sure which bothers me more... could we not just devise some sort of middle ground where no one bumps into anyone and when they do they just apologise ONCE, without patting me on the fucking shoulder?

Remaining plans for the day: finish transferring edit notes for Chapter Five of Heavy, go into town with notebook to get further book brainstorming/fic slogging/essay writing out of the way (I have made some progress on the book and possibilities, also characters, but not much more with the actual Plot-Plot of it; will post later), meet Jess for coffee when she finishes work, meet lanyon for dinner a little after, somehow avoid talking about The Awfulness.

... LBR we're not going to avoid talking about The Awfulness. I am currently fantasising that the uncertainty and Sword of Damocles situation will be resolved by everyone just declaring war on each other already, instead of flinging threats around (I can't keep up; China threatened the US, the US threatened Mexico...)

Today: intended to do things, post-gym. Instead accidentally went to sleep for an hour and a half. Not consistently; I kept getting up and then being too tired and going back to bed. Eventually left for hangouts some time around four. The planned cafe trip, which was supposed to give me time to do a little writing work, turned into a shopping trip because this whole excursion was "do what Jess wants" time; ergo I did not get any writing work done but did get to play with colours in Lush (my eyelashes are currently gold) and bought a pair of jeans described by Jess as making me look like I'm about to go and have sex against a wall in the eighties and like I ought to be flagging.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BP78hr7DDFN/?taken-by=derekdesanges

we went to BAO for dinner:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BP8Jc5uj-xV/?taken-by=derekdesanges
https://www.instagram.com/p/BP8JjTBDqNZ/?taken-by=derekdesanges

Then for a post-dinner coffee:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BP8LhU7jTtt/?taken-by=derekdesanges

Then for fucking gelato which was about ten miles away and at which point I lost my temper because it had been raining all day and there are many things I cannot have to eat.

Now I am at home. I have not been productive. Tomorrow is a rest day which, on previous experience, will leave me in a bad mood. I don't have enough sleep aids to get me to sleep tonight because Lindsay has developed an approach to the shopping list which is ... unreal. (ref. why the fuck is there no milk).

Monday:

Gym - I manage to get to the barbells despite the late hour. SUCCESS. New run pattern surprisingly OK. Entire business surprisingly OK.

Social - Slightly late due to failure to fit cutting hair, showering, making dinner and eating dinner into the "somewhat less time than I realised" that I'd allotted; but turns out not to matter as the screening of Moonlight - which they hadn't bothered to mention on the website - was for Unlimited ticket holders only. As I don't cinema enough to make that kind of investment worthwhile, I don't have one, neither did Ruthi; I dragged us down to Kaspa's (via H&B to pick up more protein filth/see what was available) and was stymied in my attempt to have a smoothie + whey protein and ended up with an ice cream float. We passed the time mostly by dissecting the relationships & characters and writing style of The Charioteer, which is nice as most of the conversations I have had about that book recently either fall in the "incoherent emotional burbling", "set Andrew up with Bunny" - whyyyyy, and "i couldn't really get into that book [strong hinting for you to shut up about it]" camps.

Tuesday:

Always tired on Tuesdays. Gym'd - bad temper because I couldn't get to the barbells & there was a frumpy old man sitting on my favoured bike for like, the whole of time. Some progress made regardless but anger remained. Tonight is Ersatz Birthday; I have succeeded in transferring more edit notes but need to actually get somewhere in my attempts to write something for Dali re: social/psychological/personal observations on masochism.

I will make more of a fuss tomorrow but I published a nice distracting short story/piece which really isn't about anything very much apart from ritual sex murder.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MYDCTG9 // https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MYDCTG9

Once I'd dragged myself out of my dreams, which disappointingly have caught up to reality and insist on including the Bannon/Trump/Pence/Ryan situation (thanks) I grabbed Sam and went into town to see what was going on CNY-wise. We missed the main parade etc but there were a couple of stages and stalls and the shops were heaving (still managed to pick up some tai yaki and a black sesame moon cake), and also it has PISSED IT DOWN ALL DAY - I feel bad because Sam has the problem all my female friends with dyed hair have (weird men, usually drunk, insist on making lengthy conversation with them - this time I made Sam go stand in a different part of the shop), whereas I had the same thing *I* always have on occasions like this, which is the much less objectionable "standard-issue pretty girl asks the Obviously Gay White Dude to take her photo with $object", which happens to me at least once a week in central London.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BP2yRQCDmps/

We went to Bubbleology so that Sam could have her bubble tea, then next door to Tsujiri so I could have matcha sundae AND fucking latte -- https://www.instagram.com/p/BP2ylpLD5WC/ // https://www.instagram.com/p/BP2yuqpDPw5/

We sat in Starbucks a bit to avoid the rain, hung around in Gosh (Abi's comic, Transrealities, is there; I have a script for a comic I wrote a while back sitting with a friend of mine who wanted scripts so that may or may not ever materialise), then went to Duck & Rice where a) there was a lion dance, b) there was a drag queen quiz [much to Lindsay's annoyance as it was loud], and c) a man asked us for money for a bus home after his ride fucked off on him & was surprised when, actually having change for once, we gave him some when no one else would talk to him. This unfortunately prolonged the conversation somewhat but eh.

I was subtly dragged by a fortune cookie: https://www.instagram.com/p/BP298RiDMRr/

Dinner was OK but someone in the kitchen fucked up and cancelled Sam's order, leaving us to go find her food elsewhere (still raining) although this did give me the opportunity to sigh wistfully over the pretty boys working in the other shop (accurate term; all clearly in their early twenties and absurdly, unkissably beautiful); Lindsay has been a human-shaped sulk and it's really put an additional dampener on what should have been an okay day of non-restriction. FFS. [NVM. Cute bears started following me on Instagram].

And now I am in work early. Thoughts from the shower: America is currently doing the America thing in its most typical way - being VERY VERY BAD and commensurately VERY VERY GOOD incredibly loudly. The UK is also being very much itself; our Government is a shambles, we are trying to suck up to the absolute worst people possible (repressive regimes! YAY! OUR FAVOURITE! Fuck the EU! etc), and I am about ready to start burning people alive.

[Support your local Antifa: http://thing.bigcartel.com/product/10-000-x-10-000-dead-fascists-candles-antifa-legal-support-benefit]

Events: a man sent me 5 pictures of his dick and a load of gibberish about my genitals at 7am so I didn't get to sleep when I was intending to, meaning that I didn't get up when I was intending to, meaning that I didn't get to the gym (this was also in part because I had WICKED DOMs up until about half an hour ago and can hardly fucking walk).

So he's a tool, although the world is still burning down so I can't actually care very much about that.

I *did* manage to edit/transfer edit notes on another chapter so I will pretend this is a win. Marika has volunteered to take over from DH on proofing The Circle, so I might even get that out before we die of nuclear war. However, I'm supposed to be writing a 5,000 word essay on masochism and heroism for a friend and I haven't even THOUGHT about that so ahahahahahahah

By way of a cheer-up, help me decide how to spend my money: do I order a custom necklace (like this but in gold mirror and reading CUMDUMP because fuck you, that's why), or go to the tattooist in Hornsey that I forgot exists (but has a portfolio online which looks OK) and get my wrist tattoos of:

[LEFT]
Yet, I
was there

[RIGHT]
And I
am here.

???

WHY DON'T I HAVE A TAG FOR THE CIS BEING AT IT AGAIN

Good distraction while running: video screen of music videos where I still have my own music on and don't have to hear the terrible music.
Bad: Which causes me to forget that I should be pacing myself and to therefore stand on the front of the treadmill and nearly fall over.

For some reason the gym today was full of people I haven't seen in there before, VERY VERY VERY Lift Bro Hipsters (moustache, dorito shape, hipster tattoos) and some Very Clearly Gay teenagers and it was confusing and upsetting so I went and made myself sweat horribly so that I didn't have to contemplate the fact that I am a revolting sweaty potato.

I have new glasses though.

Lindsay is ill, Jess is ill, neither of them will talk to me about anything other than how ill they are and I am bored by this; Sam has arrived from Finland bringing a) emergency size (20cl) mintuu for when I can drink again and b) a big tin containing two bags of Tom of Finland coffee and as such she is now MY FAVOURITE PERSON.

Sunday is Day of Rest but also Day of CNY Parade so that should be a nice end to the work week; Monday I'm going to see Moonlight with Ruthi, Tuesday we're doing Ersatz Birthday for Jess because Linds and I are working on her birthday and so is she, Wednesday I'm visiting Doug, Thursday I'm going for dinner with lanyon, Friday is Setsubun so I should probably do something about that, Saturday Sam comes back from visiting Sal in the North and there are tentative plans for Duckie (I CAN BULLY SOMEONE TO COME DANCING, WOOOO), Sunday is possibly Pulp on Ice depending on the tickets. [and I'm getting my teeth seen to somewhere in there too].