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So, today’s the day, we finally get to find out who Americans think is best equipped to lead their nation, the old guy and the mental bint, or some black guy and wots-his-face.
Joy of joys.
Obviously I’m aware that they aren’t their real names, the media here in the UK has been force-feeding us every-minute-fucking-detail of the farce that is ‘campaigning’ for what feel like the last year, how could I not know? I just can’t be called upon to take any real interest beyond the actual outcome. Ultimately, the supine toads who run the UK will be taking orders from whichever hopeful ascends the throne secures the big desk in the Oval Office, that is the only piece of information that concerns me.
Obviously I’d like it if the black guy won, mainly because I want to see what all the racists will do in response, but I’m not going to hold my breath. It’s a shame really, I know quite a few Americans, they’re a warm and friendly bunch devoid of the usual stereotypes you’d associate with their nation and genial in a way that we British are yet to master. The fact that they’ve been universally tarred by the idiocy with which their supreme decision maker has blundered about the world is unfortunate and unjust.
Well, in most cases. There are, of course, always a few exceptions.
UPDATE OF DOOM!
A black president, that’s pretty cool. 
The daylight hours bleed away into tiny shards of half-light, drawing ever in on themselves as temperatures plummet and the skies fill with a cold grey malevolence that bears down sullenly on the world. Winter is here.
Once upon a time she was beautiful; crisp, and clear and bright, not the bedraggled spectacle we now endure. To glimpse her would wick away the breath and send shivers down the spine as though cold fingers danced about your skin. Look at her now; clad in dirty leaves and muddy smears, the grim spectre of Winter’s past, a crude imitation, shorn of silvery white and forced into tattered rags that bring a cold more biting for all that it is less clean.
I miss the Winter of old; the cold and ice and wonder of her, the light over snowbound fields, the frosty sparkle of her stars, the scent of the world beneath her tread. Yet it is her grey impostor that sits with me, shrouded in mists and rain beneath her cloak of grey, not Winter, not anymore.
Is nonetheless true.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth– more than ruin, more even than death.
Bertrand Russell
Look at me, being all deep and meaningful-like.
There’s a market for this sort of thing.
A misogynistic one, obviously, but it’s out there.
Love unrequited is a crushing yoke;
but if you see love as a game,
a trophy,
then unrequited love’s absurd, a joke–
like Cyrano de Bergerac’s odd profile.
One day a hard-boiled Russian in the theater
said to his wife, in words that clearly hurt her:
“Why does this Cyrano upset you all?
The fool!
Now I, for instance, I would never
allow some bitch to get me in a fever…
I’d simply find another one–
that’s all.”
Behind his wife’s reproachful eyes there gleamed
a beaten, widowed look of desperation.
From every pore her husband oozed,
it seemed,
the lethal sweat of crude self-satisfaction.
How many are like him–
great healthy men,
who, lacking the capacity to suffer,
call women “chicks” or “broads”;
it sounds much tougher.
Yet am I not myself a bit like them?
We yawn
and play at shabby little passions,
discarding hearts as though they’re last year’s fashions,
afraid of tragedy,
afraid to pay.
And you and I, no doubt, are being weaklings
whenever we so often force our feelings
to take the easier,
less binding way.
I often hear the inner coward whining,
from murky depths my impulse undermining:
“Hey, careful now;
don’t get involved…”
I weakly take the line of least resistance,
and lose, who knows, from sheer lack of persistence,
a priceless chance of unrequited love.
A man who’s clever and can use his head
can always count on a response from women,
for poor Cyrano’s chivalry’s not dead:
it is not men who show it now, but women.
In love you’re either chivalrous
or you
don’t love.
All men of one law stand indicted:
if you can’t love with love that’s unrequited,
you cannot love–no matter what you do.
God grant us grace that we may know the pain
of fruitless longing,
unreturned emotion,
delightful torment as we wait in vain:
the hapless happiness of vain devotion.
For secretly I’m longing to be brave,
to warm my ice-cold heart with passion’s burning;
in lukewarm love affairs enmeshed,
I rave
of unrequited love and hopeless yearning.
Some would have you believe that tonight, as the witching hour draws near, the very walls of reality itself become mutable and torn as the spirits of the dead squirm through seeping cracks and fetid gullies to return to the world of the living.
This is of course bollocks. Dead people, in my experience, are renowned in every sense for remaining dead; the one notable exception being Jesus, who, technically, is a zombie*. And even if the dead didn’t remain firmly in the hereafter, I really don’t see why they’d adhere to an entirely arbitrary date to make their return. Do you honestly think the vengeful spirit of Hitler would wait until the end of October to invade the world of the living? Of course not, he’d come back in June and make a push towards Moscow ultimately being exorcised sometime in late December. Caught out by the cold, see?
Then there’s the whole ‘New Year’ thing, with Wiccans, Pagans and Neo-Pagans banging on about how their holiday was subsumed into Christianity and blah, blah, blah, whatever. It’s not as though any of the rites they carry out date any further back than the Romantic Movement that swept Europe in the 18th century. Which is fine, whatever works, right? But all the black lace, Olde Worlde incantations and eye-liner, really? You’re supposed to be practicing a religion, not pretending you’re Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.
Finally, there’s the reality of Halloween, someone knocking at your door every five minutes to demand sweets. Brilliant, you can use a doorbell, fuck off.
* Presumably he now turns cabbages into braiiiinnnnns or some such.
Because I am a deeply flawed human being, I exhibited all the hallmarks of panic and trepidation on Tuesday when I began considering the possibility that two of my friends were in the process of stitching me right up. This might seem a little uncharitable, but there is a common humour between us that would have found such stitching gratifying.
Imagine, then, my unbridled joy upon discovering that we were not, as I’d previously suspected, going speed dating; we were off to see The Woman in Black. I have never been so relieved or excited in my entire life; it turns out that I do like surprises after all.
And ghost stories, I love ghost stories. There’s something primal about the way they tease and taunt the imagination until you’re hooked and, quite despite yourself, subject to the sudden shocks and frights of your own suggestible mind. The Woman in Black is one such tale, and the acting marvellously done. Quite simply, last night’s trip to the theatre was the best birthday present I’ve ever received.
Well, if you don’t count my catching Lindsay’s cold/flu/plague thing it was, and even then it’s a close run thing.
I do love satire.
Way back in September, two of my favourite people handed me a token by way of a birthday gift. On said token was an invitation to “an evening of fun with Lindsay and Susie, 29th October, bring a white hanky” which, frankly, could mean anything.
However, it’s now the day before and something’s occurred to me - it was the white hankie that did it – I’m being set up. Something about the whole debacle smacks of speed dating/blind dates, two things I hate with all the bile at my disposal, and now I’m edgy as fuck. I hate surprises, and I mean really hate surprises.
It’s for that reason that I sincerely hope I’m wrong and we’re just off to the theatre to see Macbeth or The Woman in Black, the hankie and cloak and dagger stuff just being a clever ruse. I’m suspicious though, and the internets tell me this, and I am afraid.
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