These days I’m finding myself tapping all my fingers against my thumb, rapping out a constant rhythm like I’m counting the fingers, making sure they are all there. I catch myself gazing out into space, eyes focused on the nothing just beyond the nowhere. I find myself wanting to unplug from the world and escape somewhere; retreat to a place that’s probably only ever inside myself. I wish I had one of those cartoon holes I could just lay on the ground and drop through. Out of sight.

The simplest, dumbest things bring tears to my eyes. Like this morning standing in the kitchen, hearing Glen Campell singing about cleaning his gun and dreaming of Galveston. Pow! It just hit. Or those lines in ‘Wichita Lineman’ that go ‘I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time’: making my heart creak and crack one more time. All over again.


posted by duke harringay at 6:42 PM

The weather is making me confused. It’s like I can’t tell if I’m getting to the end of the Summer term or the end of summer itself. Outside it’s like one of those Bladerunner type weather systems, all darkness and rain and steam. My body hates it.


posted by duke harringay at 7:45 PM

My year 8 classes are making posters for imaginary movies starring the monsters they have designed. And it’s a funny thing, but a lot of their posters are for sequels: ‘Hell House 3’, ‘Mr Stoner Returns’, ‘Chanic 2’, ‘The Return of Dr Evil’ and so on. It’s like they have no concept of the beginnings of things. Even their ‘original’ ideas are for something several stages removed from any kind of origin. It’s weird; like ‘sequence’ is an alien concept and they just drop in somewhere arbitrarily on a line they probably don’t even realise exists in the first place. And I can’t decide if this is depressing or fantastic.


posted by duke harringay at 7:43 PM

Question:
Did the Delgados appropriate the title of their wonderful ‘Pull The Wires From The Wall’ (1998) from Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995), or are both references to an earlier source that I’m unaware of? The Coupland reference, incidentally, in case you want to look it up, is on one of the pages of ‘subconscious’ text. A page that has ‘Champaign-Urbana’ in large text at the top. Nice name for a band, don’t you think?


posted by duke harringay at 9:45 AM