M60+ by katharine eastman
No no no no no no will I never ever never ever learn not to not never ain't-ever to make promises in public - this isn't the beautiful disastrous rough gtr and crummy keys thing that I said I was going to do yesterday and which I must make RIGHT NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - no this is .... oh it's okay I suppose. Anyway I am going to stop agonising about what I'm doing and will do and promise to do and all that blaaahhhghghghg - from now on it's Live In The Cliche (Moment) - the same moment we've all been living in forever and none of us ever remembers cos I've got a bill I can't pay tomorrow and an embarrassing incident I can't forget from yesterday.
Yesterday in a desperate attempt to find god I threw aside the Book Of Tai Chi (good exercise) (the book-throwing bit) and turned off the soda bread oven and smashed my head thru the half-painted beautiful-painting canvas and stamped on my seedlings and sent out a huge electronic circular to all my "friends" telling them to Fuck The Fuck Off You Cunting Fucks - I can't afford the Christmas Card postage - and life suddenly simplified - the Important Thing is that there is no important thing. That is the life-changing revelation that dazzled me yesterday and will change me forever. Yes I knew it since forever, so did you, everyone knows that it's all wonderful shit ...... except sometimes you can't QUITE believe it.
There's always that needling little Guardian article that pops up and talks about someone who's doing something weird and she seems to have found some meaning and even (is it even possible ????) happiness. So yesterday at about 4pm I got up and thought I'd sample this Living malarky, see if I get that same Bill Nighy-ish revolution before my wife dies of some weird lung condition and I'm trapped in my dementia-house to starve oh what a sad-as-all-the-others ending.
Often my favourite cinema gives out free biscuits if you go in the afternoon. But I knew I was too late for that, and even though I know that sugar is the enemy, it really is, I nipped into Asda and bought six of their big long Value packs of biscuits - that's about 180000 biscuits - and walked over to the cinema to watch I'm Still Here, a Brazilian film about a family having a tough time during the 1970s and onwards thanks to the military dictatorship.
Usually I get all the wrapper-crinkling eating stuff out of the way while the adverts are still going on interminably. But even "interminable" wasn't long enough to eat all those biscuits and I admit it, I was annoying. I mean, bloody hell, a Brazilian film about a family being tortured, you expect to be the only person in the cinema. Not a bit of it - the place was packed - I'm guessing that word-of-mouth had finally reached everyone (even me) that it is a brilliant film - a hellovalot better if you haven't got some greedy chump munching cheap biscuits all through it, and yes the actor died in the end, he always does.
But oh god - I suppose the film loses a bit of oomph as it goes along, plus I got tired what with all the eating, and somewhen during it I fell asleep, and I only woke when the film had ended and people wanted to get past me. I was sitting at the end of the row - and oh lordy there on the aisle running up from the screen in front of me to the Exit behind me was a trail of all my broken biscuits where I'd spilled them out of the packets and then people had trodden in them in the dark to have pees and things cos the film is quite long.
I went straight from there to Heartbreakers to watch M60 and a couple of support bands - Kiwi (?) were quite good, and Harvey J Dodgson (?) (quite good), and M60 themselves were pretty terrible, the same tuneless song over and over again. I'd met a pal there as arranged - I'm now past the age (or never reached it) where going to gigs on my own is at all tolerable - and us two plus a couple of couples in the room were the Oldies - ie we looked like the (grand)parents of the band - everyone else in the room was very much student-age, and there were lots of them and they were friendly and charming and intelligent and delightful and cheerful and it is very sad that people of my age-ish have voted in cunts for decades before they were even born, governments that have taken away all purpose, all discipline (the good sort of discipline), all kindness, all sense of "society", and left them with this country where half the population are going around pretending everything is all right and if we just keep on fakely smiling we'll get thru it somehow, and the half of us who have nothing to spend any money on except cheap crap snacks to munch loudly as we sit and watch the whole shit-show unravel around us - wouldn't miss it for anything, it is my whole purpose.
recorded this morning, photo near Beaulieu a few weeks ago
