Sinister: Photos of insomniacs, doin' what they do best...

[LookingDownward at xxx.com]

Ahoy-hoy?

It's supposed to snow to-morrow. It's cloudy now, but it was a terribly 
pretty night:  cold and clear, a perfect night for a long walk; the moon 
wasn't quite full yet, but through teary eyes it almost seemed that way. Hmm. 
I need to work on that spontaneous crying thing. I need to get "hard". Any 
advice?

It's a shame, though, as when I did my last bit of clothes-shopping, I was 
banking on global warming coming quickly enough (a spurious bit of logic 
designed to fritter away money on books full of recipes I'll never dare 
attempt), so I've got nary a bit of wooly clothing suitable for making 
snow-angels, which I've not done in years. That's as I don't have a lawn, but 
I'm determined to find a bit of park whiteness to wade through to-morrow 
morning, to get promptly soaked, and to *never* shake this sniffle I've got.

Kickball, for whomever asked, is just like baseball except it's played with a 
large red rubber or foam ball (or a slightly deflated football if it's 
handy), and you kick it in lieu of swinging a bat. The way we played it as 
kids, though, was that instead of needing to use the ball to directly conduct 
your negative energy to the base-runner, you could lob it at him to get him 
'out'. The trouble with that was that the people who, I presume (I've since 
moved far, far away) turned into the sort of people who made Woodstock '99 
such fun, decided that the game was only fun when they were heaving the ball 
at somebody's head--it didn't matter whose. They would miss more often than 
not, and the ball would fly into the outfield, and the score would be so high 
that it wouldn't matter anymore, 'cos it wasn't about who could kick the 
ball, but who wasn't clever enough to get out of the way. Which was, too 
often, me. But I grew up to getting spitballs thrown at me, and then, 
eventually, rocks and lacrosse balls. And that was *before* the assumptive 
homophobia entered..

I turned on VH-1's "The List" (which, for those of you that aren't familiar 
with it, is a loosely arranged group of quasi-celebrities from television, 
film, and music who debated the greatest something-or other in the history of 
music, but from a quasi-defined, VH-1 friendly standpoint, all to be 
ultimately subjected to the discerning insight of VH-1 viewers)--tonight they 
were going over the greatest singer/songwriter; I nearly retched when they 
axed Ray Davies from the list (not necessarily 'cos I'm a huge Kinks fan, but 
'cos he was the most out-of the way of the list besides Barry Manilow... and 
although I love Mandy and Copa Cabana as much as I'm sure everybody else in 
the world does, my knowledge of his work is thus confined). There is a 
point... I was absolutely swooning over this boy on the show in a leather 
jacket whose name turned out to be Jason Falkland... and I think I read 
somewhere that he's currently playing guitar in Air's travelling band. I'm 
sure he must have done something else to merit his stand on the show with two 
people from Ally McBeal and the Pink Power Ranger, but I dunno what. So, 
please, I beg of all of you wonderful people, if you've got anything nice to 
say about him, would you e-mail me it? I've a feeling I'll need some positive 
opinion to reinforce my memories of what will most likely be a series of 
relatively naughty dreams about him (which will most likely involve 
peach-flavoured tea and apple-and-cheese sandwiches consumed from striped 
cushions while XTC plays in the background..).

And I would like to echo Jim's condolences to anybody who's obligated to work 
with the rabble. Unless of course one's in a such a spot where one's got a 
deucedly charming old man standing behind oneself, singing into one's ear 
charming French children's songs, such that one not only forgets the 
immediate joy of difficult labour in the name of a good cause, but that one 
also forgets the lingering resentment over having to get up at 5 in the 
morning over holidays to work for several hours for nothing tangible but the 
uncomfortable situation of picking at a salad one doesn't want to eat as one 
tossed it by sticking one's arms in it up to the shoulders (the aversion is 
expected to be stronger if one has particularly long arms) hours earlier, 
while constantly reliving the sight and smell of USDA Grade-A beef being 
taken out of government-issue tins (which, for those who have never 
experienced it first-hand, is probably a topic for an entirely different post 
on an assuredly different list). Or, naturally, any equivalent situation.

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