things move around

Never really bothered keeping in touch
with mates from uni -
can’t say I think about Bob much,
or Will, or that puny bloke
I met in Irish lit., the one who spoke
with a phony fecker accent. What was his name?
I hung around with him all the same.

I barely think about old pals at all.
I changed my number:
I expect that’s why they don’t call.
Yes, I’m cool as a cucumber, getting
on with life, no time for internetting,
browsing through Friends Reunited,
witnessing my aloofness indicted.

I have a fairly strong contempt for people who use fonts other than Arial 9 or 10. My boss for example, I recently changed a document of his from Book Antiqua to Arial, and he came into my ofice and asked me why I did that. Actually what he said was “was there a reason why you changed the font?” As if I would do such a thing for no reason at all, as if I were some kind of reasonless animal, a macaque. Worse than a macaque, a fish, something with no brain at all. I told him he could change it back if he wanted, and he did, the cunt.

Maybe I am a font-fascist, but that’s not the point. Or it is the point but it’s a legitimate point; I feel justified in my contempt. I can’t help but take fonts personally. If someone gives me a document and it’s in Palatino Linotype, or Book Antiqua, or horror of horrors, this happened recently, Comic Sans MS, I take it as a personal insult, an affront. An affont. Because I don’t know why. Because of the assumption that I will passively assent to the use of an amateur font in the production of a professional document.

And people who use two spaces between sentences. That’s really offensive and uncalled-for. Also what is it with people putting their periods inside their parentheses? I must have seen this a thousand times, it’s rampant. Sometimes I feel as though everything I know, or think I know, about punctuation, grammar and style is a cruel joke, a delusion implanted in my mind by some demon, and everyone else is looking at me, thinking, “look at him with his Arial 10-point, he really must be some kind of a cunt.”

Our daughter will be almost 13 months old this Hallowe’en, and naturally Kate and I have been pondering what we should dress her up as when we cart her round the neighbourhood in search of loot in a ceremony meaningless to her, hilarious for us and probably quite annoying for the neighbourhood.

I’ve narrowed it down to three options. The first is to get the biggest pumpkin we can find, make the appropriate incisions, and fit it around her with her legs, arms and head sticking out. Then find a smaller pumpkin, cut some eye holes in it and put that on her head. Voila - a walking pumpkin. Terrifying - yet terrifyingly cute!

Then I thought it would be funny to dress her up as a Nazgul from Lord of the Rings. She doesn’t make Nazgul noises like she used to when she was tiny, so we’d have to carry a covert cassette player with pre-recorded Nazgul sound effects, so people would quake with fear at her approach, dogs bark, horses bolt, etc.

And of course there’s always the classic “ghost” costume, consisting of a white sheet tossed casually over the kid’s head. This is cute but the downside is people might think she’s meant to be E.T. in his / her / its ghost costume - when she’d actually just be herself in a ghost costume, nothing to do with E.T. at all. I fucking hate E.T.

Or she could go as a strawberry. No cleverness here, we’d just be renting a strawberry costume.

What do you think?

Edit: the form isn’t working, but I’m leaving it up there because it looks cool. Follow this link to vote, instead!

There is an intermittent roaring sound coming from the street outside my office. It sounds like a blowtorch - like a Monty Python-style God is reaching down with a gigantic blowtorch and making a crude crème brûlée out of the Vancouver Club across the road. I imagine the early lunch crowd of bloated businessmen fleeing, neckties flapping over shoulders, paunches held steady with both hands.

Dare I turn around and watch? I went there a few times in my previous job and I remember the ploughman’s was sublime.

You know the adverts for painkillers where they talk about ‘targeted pain relief’, usually with the aid of animated blue pain-seeking missiles of relief tearing through the body unerringly in the direction of the red, throbbing pain?

Well last night I suffered a gashed tongue at dinner, which continued to sting after being cauterized with eau de vie. So when I got home I took two ibuprofen and rather than swallow them, placed them on my tongue, where they dissolved, surprisingly quickly, directly into the wound.

And so to bed.

I was trying to complete an important form on the internet, but my baby daughter kept rearing up Godzilla-style and bashing my keyboard with her chubby little hands. Eventually the last drop of my patience evaporated in the crucible of her persistence.

I found a spare keyboard, plugged it in to a spare P.C. and gave it to her. As she logged in to her MySpace account, I was able to discern her password from her keystrokes. It was ”P1aY6r0uP”.

On my way into work, two blocks from the office, there’s a new apartment building, the driveway of which forms a shortcut between the road and the seawall. This shortcut was popular until the building was completed and the few millionaires who actually decided to live in their new apartments began moving in. At this point, the management of the building employed a security guard whose sole remit is apparently to prevent non-residents from walking across the driveway from the street to the seawall, or vice versa.

The security guard is a pallid, disaffected-looking bloke, mid to late twenties I’d say. His hair is short and springy, his lips are thin and unexpressive, his eyes inert. I have passed him twice a day for the last four months or so. In the sunshine, he sits, just off the street, on a fold-up chair, elbows on knees, staring into space, sometimes smoking, always with his earphones in, staring off at nothing: not even at what’s right in front of him. When he smokes, his cigarette dangles listlessly from his hand in between methodical drags. In the rain, he shelters under a temporary wooden lean-to erected nearby by a construction crew. He never reads, or paces, or fidgets; he has abandoned any thought of staving off oblivion and instead surrendered himself to it. Perhaps he’s illiterate. Ennui has consumed him and radiates from him, slowing time for passers-by, thickening the air in the morning when I pass by him on my way to work, and in the evening when I return. Perhaps he’s an automaton.

I just had cause to write the words “Keith, is that you?”

Even taken out of all context, it strikes me that there is something doleful about the words “Keith, is that you?” Who is Keith? And who is doing the asking, and why? And what is it about this bald interrogative that makes it sound, to my ears at least, so plaintive?

It’s not the same if we substitute another name for “Keith”:

“Malcom, is that you?” “Donald, is that you?”

It’s not the same. There is something specific and profound about Keith, or perhaps about the absence of Keith, which makes the words more dolorous than they ought to be, whoever “Keith” may be.

The dual-purpose hat / coat stand, which stands in the corner of the tax guys’ windowless office, is bare. This in itself tells us nothing, for none of the tax guys are in the habit of hanging their coats on the stand, and as for hats, all three eschew them entirely. Therefore the hat / coat stand is bare whether or not one or more tax guys, at a given time, occupies the room. However, there are other, more reliable indicators of the vacancy or otherwise of the unspeakably beige chamber which is the sometime habitation of these men. The timid tap-a-tap of a desktop calculator. The infrequent creak of an ergonomic chair. A closed door, for the door is closed only when a more senior tax professional is present, conferring with our heroes in hushed tones (are there any other tones in which one might confer?) And borne out into the corridor, on a foetid zephyr of conditioned air, very faint, but definitely present, the psychic odour of despair.

And of course, the tax guys themselves, visible, doing what it is that they do. But let’s not go there.

At the weekend the Vancouver Sun ran a special entitled “Living in the Age of Terror”. It looked at the consequences of 9/11 for a few disparate individuals in B.C. - the army reservist, the small business owner, the Canadian muslim, you know the drill. The usual “nothing’s changed but everything has changed”.

The interview with the muslim, ‘whose family fled Baghdad for Canada to escape the regime of Saddam Hussein,’ starts reasonably enough - ‘”My wife wears the hijab. When we go to the mall, you can see people looking, there’s a different look now in some people’s eyes after 9/11.”‘ At this point you feel some sympathy for the guy. After all, he’s not a fanatic; he ‘cherishes his adopted country [Canada]’ and ‘has close-cropped hair, western clothes and perfect English’. Clearly the intent of the journalist was to get a thoughtful, Canadian muslim reaction to perhaps counter the images of fanaticism in people’s minds. Ashir’s confession that ‘”a few weeks ago, my wife and two other Muslim women were in a park, and someone gave them a rude gesture. To go home. She’s a Canadian”‘ evokes genuine concern.

‘The occasional stereotyping is hardly a great hardship, he acknowledges. But with each new terrorist attack, or the discovery of alleged terrorists or terrorist plots in Canada, Ashir worries that a cloud of suspicion grows.’ Poor guy - we’re with him here. The actions of a few crazed theists are making him an innocent suspect, and there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s nice to know there are ordinary, tolerant muslims who just want to get on with their lives - Ashir is a computer programmer for the government. But then it gets weird. At this point I might as well just quote the article in full:

While Ashir denounces terrorism and all attacks on civilians, such as 9/11, he has turned his family’s living room into a shrine to his political beliefs. One wall of his living room features a life-sized portrait of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the organization that Canada has deemed a terrorist organization. On the other is a picture of former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini. On his television are Arab-language newscasts pulled down by satellite dish from Iran and Syria and Lebanon.

“I don’t have Shaw cable [the local cable TV service],” he explains, as his TV flashes a re-created scene of an Israeli soldier slapping an Arab woman. “I can’t take all the western media always talking about mosques and terrorism. “For me the fascist is [U.S. President George] Bush. He is the terrorist.”

As the tea is finished, and his guest readies for departure, Ashir lets it be known that, as a devout Muslim, he’s not afraid to go and fight Americans in Iraq, or die tomorrow doing so.

“If I am called back to Iraq, I will go,” he said. “If there is a call to jihad, I will go. So will many others.”

And you finish the article and apart from thinking “well just fucking go, then. Have there not been enough calls to jihad?” you feel pity for the journalist. You can see him or her sitting there in this Hezbollah shrine in the leafy Victoria suburb, listening to this unhinged ranting, thinking, “fucking hell, they told me this guy was a moderate. How the hell do I write this one up? Oh, bollocks to it.”

Link (from “Sense of unease” on).

You know things are fucked up when you find yourself feeling pity for a journalist.