'Its hard to be happy when you always want something you haven't got', Ian said. As I walk around the streets of this city lists of the things that I terribly miss make themselves in my head. I come back and Yo La Tengo sing just be thankful for what youve got. Its the week before Easter, its spring, it gets dark quite late though not as late as in Scotland. Or even London. Theres a part of my mind dedicated to thinking about another place, sometimes I worry that it is bigger than the one that thinks about the world here. Then I go out, and I am overwhelmed by light and colours and smells and by the clarity of it all. In and between all that, I realised its easier to be a little sad than to be a little happy. Its easy to pine for what you dont have. It hard to acknowledge the fact that the world around you is a lively colourful place and there a lot of things for which you can be thankful and a little bit happy. Even though you dont have a lot of what you long for. Yesterday I spend most of the day in a house in the country, or, well, somewhere outside the city. I spend most of the day in it and only came out when it was almost dark, and got wet running around and in and under and between green things. It would be nice if I were a fairy in another lifetime. When I took the bus back into the city, it felt a bit different to be there, in the way things feel when youve been away to somewhere different and come back. I got off at the wrong bus stop and ended up walking quite a bit to get home, and I felt a bit like a ten year old coming back from a school excursion. I came back to a big dark silent flat that seemed to hang there, four flours above the ground just to let the night wind blow through it and to have music played in it. I went out again for a bit, on the way up I remembered to look right and up as I was crossing a big street, I saw the fullish moon rising above a mountain and looking orange, and were surprised even if it was the fourth time in a row this had happened. On the way down I looked again, then I took another way down, and run for half of it. Sometimes I think of Lazy Line Painter Jane when I start running in the street, sometimes I think of Ian, sometimes I dont think at all. Or I think of different things. This time I wanted to cry, not out of sadness, but out of something else I didnt have words about. It had something to do with the night and with the lists of the things I terribly miss in my head. Then I came back (again), to find Ian had written: Saturday night: I have days when I want to hug the world. I want to run up to each person I see, clamp them between my thighs, and plant a huge smacker on their rosy-red lips. I want to sing, dance, and shout. I want to raise the world in a great big, happy, revolution. Thankfully, these are few and far between. And I am able to resist such urges. The masses do not want to be woken in a happy revolution, they find their joy in separation and disdain. Such behaviour would earn me nothing but opprobrium and a bruised face. And there's nothing special about that. I can get that simply by visiting Coventry. I read it holding my breath and I wanted to cry again. It took me a while but I realised that the reason I wanted to cry when running down the street was, as I put it last night, because the world is a big, mysterious, magical place, just as the night stretching out around me was, but people don't pay notice to it. And the world, instead of being what Ian called a happy revolution, is a place of separation and disdain. Do you know why I like Belle and Sebastian? Do you know why my favourite film is Together (Tillsammans, by Lukas Moodysson) ? Do you know why I like you? Well, for lots of little reasons too. But mostly cause theyre all part of that happy revolution. Now I know what I have been telling you to keep the faith in all along. zoziepop xx _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ 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! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+