Hello, all you Sinister and yet somehow dextrous people-- I'm not about to leave for work, so I won't have to make this short. My friend Peri is not on this list but should be. I'll put her in the nursery soon, but pending that, I can tell lies about her. Peri lives in a basement flat here in Nova Gorica, and she has a garden she uses for lying in when the sun shines. Sunday the sun is beaming out of a deep blue sky and spring is on its sprockets. Slavic proto-crocuses are popping out of the ground everywhere with such speed that you really cant go around unshod, and from my flat on the fourth floor I can see all my neighbors daffodils daffodiling madly out of their window boxes. My window boxes contain nothing more lush than empty Lako cans, but I am planning to sow them with great green fields of cilantro. About the time that I am doing my regular Sunday errand, going to the hipermercato to verify that there is not now nor will there ever be again any coconut milk, Peri is reading a text message on her phone and gnashing her teeth and kicking her curvy brown naugahyde sofa and dashing her phone into billions of shiny Finnish shards. The text message reads: I LOVE YOU and it comes from someone who patently DOES NOT. In the middle of a hot flat part of Argentina this Monday morning there is a beautiful red-haired girl, woman, really, who is seven hours behind me and so its only still early there as I write this but she is going to wake up soon and move from the big bed to the desk at the foot of it and check her email. And she is going to read something that will make her cry almost certainly and pound on the keyboard in grief and relief and maybe rend her raiment if any and rub ashes into her lovely red hair (which is dyed, actually). And thinking about that message, lurking there in her inbox waiting to pounce, makes me feel slightly ill, as though I had mailed her some anthrax (the spores, not the band). But also slightly better. I liked Sinister Digest #777 very much, very much indeed. Thanks to everyone who contributed to making #777 so very nice. Fernandos post made me think about some things, like stars and how bright they are when you live in a dark place, like that flat part of Argentina was. There was plenty to make my existence there less than ideal, like the insect population for one, and letting the red-haired girl talk me out of going to Sao Paulo and Rio in October, but the stars were always amazing and made me pretty happy, although sometimes I worried that I would get a starburn from them because they were so brilliant and huge over my head. I wish I could I could buy Fernando a powerful telescope so that he could write a post describing the rings of Saturn for us all. And just yesterday, as I was watching the daffodils do what they do in all my neighbors windowboxes, the most beautiful girl came out onto her terrace into the sun, off there to the left, a bit far away, really, across the green space, and I noticed that she didnt have any curtains in the windows, not even decadent yet rather boring floor-length brown velvet curtains, or any Gustav Klimt prints on the walls or anything else; her flat looked like a tautologous hollow cavity and I was wondering if she had just moved into the place, and I wished that I could find a way to offer to help her unpack and put up her curtains, which I have never actually done but I am sure I would be really good at. It occurred to me that all of us should have our telephone numbers painted in huge numbers on the outsides of our flats, so that if you saw someone interesting you could phone them, rather than having to resort to smoke signals (hazardous) or stalking (time-consuming). The blocks of flats across the way from me are full of people with lives and plants and ice-blue television screens and drying laundry. It is like watching a gigantic ant farm, and I am an ant on the opposite side, but no one ever watches me the way I was watching this cute girl in her black tank-top that in the springtime revealed her navel, whose existence I was sure of, but couldnt actually observe at such a distance, like the rings of Saturn. Fernando should lend me his binoculars. On the thread of getting parcels in the post, I agree completely with what Liz Daplyn et alia say about this thrill. But if you are trying to double your summer vacation by staying up all night, and if by chance you are, oh, I dont know, OUT OF YOUR BOX when you order things, the thrill is increased one-billion-fold, because then you arent even expecting a package and so when it arrives it feels as if you have some rich and eccentric auntie you never knew about but who knows all about you and is sending you perfect gifts. This is how I came to own a Belle & Sebastian tea towel. I think. I am not advocating substance abuse (as I usually do), but merely pointing out that sometimes dulling the old critical faculties as LD put it can have its unforeseen benefits. Then again, it can make one lose ones brand-new black v-neck in a bar one shouldnt really have been in in the first place. If only I had purchased that v-neck via mail-order, I could be Savoring The Rich Irony right now. Since I have neglected to pay the bill, the council have shut off the poetry in my flat. There was a problem with my pay processing for a time there, which was really stressing me out, along with the deportation threat and everything else, mostly related to girls or lack of them. Now that the sun is here and other things are resolving themselves I am better, and not nearly so misanthropic as my last, Zamfir-damning, post would lead one to believe. And my bank account shows a recent deposit so I can now pay my bills, which is a good thing since I was afraid they were going to shut off the gravity next, and I wouldn't want to wake up on the ceiling again. But I dont know who to speak to about getting the poetry reinstated. I want to thank Christina McDermott for teaching me the Russian for strip to the waist. I was wondering how to say that and now I know, useful, too, since Peri insists we go to Russia for our August holidays--we get the whole month free. She lived in Novosibersk for a time and wants to go back, claiming it is a top-notch spot to do some debauching. Knowing how to say padova ya padovnayen certainly cant hurt. Peri is always going on about debauching, and as I told her in Prague, where we didnt look up the fictional Pauline L. Shivers, as I told her, Peri, I said, you are all talk and then action. And then talk again. Its true. Watch her in Edinburgh to see. JDS Conectate a Internet GRATIS con Yahoo! Conexión: http://conexion.yahoo.com.ar +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+