When you come back after a year, and there are the same people, sitting in the same places, beers held at the same angles, having the same conversation.

It fills me with a chilling existential dread.

Happy Bloomsday innit

Turn to face the strange

Hahahahahahahaaa. That Ishmael. "I have come to believe in the total malleability of human nature: anybody can be anybody."

That was when we were young and zealous Nietzscheans and before this lapse into a morbid and impotent fatalism.


It is time, again:

Face the world and walk out into the strange. Find what you fear, and do it.

I am a brain in a bath tub

Life is great

Pour me more bubble bath, please





get your own strange ribbon here

leafing through a book like "the correspondance of henry miller and anaïs nin", it makes me wonder what sort of legacies the writers of my generation will leave behind. "the collected facebook updates of alex nichols"?

it's too cold to write

i have a theory, based in part on observing lazy's narcissism, and in part on seeing on the webstats how many people click through from here onto their own blogs, that most people spend more time admiring their own blogs than they ever have to spare for others'

sometimes lazy hates people. so he stays in bed all weekend with his russian fucking course book, a volume of borges in fucking portuguese, a friend's novel he hasn't finished reading yet, and a bottle of scotch whiskey. 36 hours later his liver hurts alarmingly and he decides to give up drinking. life feels empty...

Fun facts about transport in São Paulo

A law against drunk driving finally came into force a little over half a year ago but hasn't really changed anything. Everyone still drives around completely out of their tree.

If there is such a thing as a São Paulo bus map, I still haven't been able to find it. Asking people helps, although often even the drivers don't know where they're going.

Bus stops are always located in the middle of blocks and well away from train and metro stations, rather than at corners of the crossings of main roads and rail routes.

Passengers in Metrô and train stations always stand on the escalators and never stand on one side to allow people who want to walk up to pass. Further, if there is a ludicrously crowded escalator, and a completely empty set of normal stairs, everyone will still try to pack onto the escalator. These people love escalators.

Morning and evening rush hours see traffic on main routes, in ten lanes and three layers (including elevated and underground), going absolutely nowhere.

Futebol!

Best reason ever for supporting a football team (because isn't your team as arbitrary as everything else?) :

About as remote as you can get in São Paulo state, where the paved road ends and a dirt track goes off into the bush, but still only a few hours from the city, you can still find the odd Indian village. A friend of mine is a lawyer, and she has taken up a case for land rights on behalf of some Guaranis.

They all support Palmeiras (="palms") in the village. The old Indian guy explained: the palm tree is sacred to us. The world was born from a palm tree. We eat palmito (palm heart). The birds which are messengers of the spirits perch in the palm tree.

Therefore, we are all faithful to Palmeiras.


Oh and I met Sócrates, Brazilian football legend from the 70s, in the bar a while back. These days he is getting a bit alcoholised and he was completely sloshed. Like Gazza. I asked him what he thought of English football.

"It's a load of shit," he said. "Just like the football in any country."


[From a more-or-less indifferent football fan in England I have become a complete devotee in Brazil. Just like I follow cricket when I'm in India or Pakistan - it is very difficult not to be caught up in the feverish excitement. I used to make money betting on the cricket in India, back when Pakistan was still a team to be reckoned with, because no matter how poor the chances, it seemed to be utterly inconceivable to people that anyone would want to bet on Pakistan (ancestral enemy...) winning. Not only that, but in Brazil it's a different game, a beautiful virtuoso game compared to the tactical workmanlike football of Europe.]

Life and games

Lazy has recently taking up playing poker. He's pretty good at it too, until he crosses a certain line of drunkeness and throws all his money away on silly bluffs. Better late than never to the game, as always...

We have always enjoyed chess, and seen card games as somehow slightly inferior. But really, poker is every bit as strategic. You have no control over the cards you're dealt, but you have to fight the best fight you can with them... and if you stay cool, you can convince the opposition that you have a much better hand than you really do. Not to mention the power of money - once you're winning and have a big pile of chips in front of you, it gives you so much more freedom of action than the little guys.

As such, it is infinitely more like real life than the idealised one-on-one battle that is chess.

Aliens go home!

There is this conceit that you come across in science fiction sometimes - I am reminded because I watched the recent re-make of The Day the Earth Stood Still yesterday (in low quality and dubbed badly into Portuguese, both of which probably improved the film) -- there is this conceit -

An alien from a hyper-advanced culture beyond our imaginings where all suffering and stupidity has been banished descends to earth to study us... accepts human limitations to live a human life in a human body among us... and mission finished, refuses to return to his blissful and transcendent alien life

- that there is something noble about the human condition...

something noble in the squalor of it.

Memory and desire stirring

"Do not sit to think what you should write - sit to write what you have thought."

That sounds very much like Dr. Johnson again. See the very first post on realgem - he had the distinction of opening for us.

Very well then. Consider:

You have no way of knowing how your memory will record the present that you are experiencing now.

(This thought flashes into my head as sun blinds me as I cross Br. Faria Lima into on-coming traffic, and somehow I am certain I will remember this moment, if one of the madly weaving cars doesn't get me in the next five seconds at least.)

I feel nostalgia for the bizarrest things, things that were hellish at the time.

(Cursing at pain in a hospital bed, unable to sleep for pain, cursing the nurse who refused to bring me more morphine...)

Conversely, sheer ecstasy sometimes becomes flat, pale and tasteless when played back by memory.

Particle accelerator

"The medium is the message."

I still don't fully grok what Marshall Macluhan meant by this gnomic statement, but I can generalise it to apply to various contexts. Right now I am thinking of the difference between composing on a computer screen, as opposed to and compared with an old-fashioned (electric) typewriter, and longhand, with a pen, on paper. Surely different regions of the brain are active - different sets of motor neurons, certainly - but how do these connections being lit up impact on other connections elsewhere in the brain? Specifically those to do with "creativity", so-called - maybe "synthesis" would be better, originality being protecting your sources - and those to do with "language"? (All gods are one. So are all languages. Discuss. 3000 words.)

"Phenomenal consciousness is defined as a subjective that experiences itself."

Similarly with the idea of things remaining in an undetermined state until they are observed, from the field of sub-atomic physics. What effect does the "observer" ("reader") have on the "experiment" (the writing)?

A simple particle accelerator...

sdfhsrth
ypoirh hnvbn
.......x...we.as. hgahdf......aerhadfhafd....asgdfgBANG!sdagfd
hbpoisfuhz\xcv
qn tmx
r
:
.
w

(particle or wave? 2000 words. 50% of final score.)

Metametametameta

I and some friends, we all go to see Synecdoche New York. I look it up afterwards, and apparently it was released early last year. It takes time to sub-title a convoluted epic like that into Portuguese.

As we wait for the film to start, I ask Mr Farewell- novelist and poker player of distinction - whether he ever hears voices. On or off drugs, he asks. I explain my conviction that - if you learn to hear it, if you learn to heed its voice, if you have the supreme courage to follow its lead, even when it leads to strange and insane places - you can trust the voice. It will always know. The voice of the deep mind, the voice of your daemon, in the ancient Greek sense, the voice of your holy guardian angel.

Synecdoche New York is a bizarre, sprawling, complicated film, one of those meta-narratives about a theatre production that flips and turns inside-out and swallows all the actors' lives and swallows the film you are watching and swallows New York City. It takes us about an hour afterwards to decide whether we even liked it or not, but walking out of the cinema, it is clear that this is no ordinary production. The dazed looks on the faces of the people walking out say everything. It is a long time since I saw a film that startled me so, that gave so much to wonder at and think about, even if it dragged at points.

Towards the end, after theatre director Caden has replaced himself with someone playing him, both in the theatre piece that has been growing and developing for 17 years now and in real life, now indistinguishable, and the set in its ridiculously enormous warehouse has expanded to encompass much of NYC, and the actor playing the director replaces the director and - I shouldn't be trying to explain -

and the new director gives Caden an earpiece, through which he hears...

yes, a little voice in his head. "Wake up now" it tells him. "Spend about 10 minutes staring melancholically at the view out of the window, and then yawn, get up and stretch..." And so on and on, irrevocably, until the final scene and the final instruction.

We walk out of the cinema, walk down Consolação, and stumble across a new building site, some grandiose parking scheme. It is eerily like the film poster, the absurdly huge theatre set that houses a city, with its dirigible flying around inside.

Sometimes real life puts the final unforgettable details on artistic experience...

I'm not all darkness!

As promised! Fluffy kittens! Brazilian pussy!

This is a cat which I thankfully no longer live with. Its Brazilian-ness shows in how affectionate ("carinhoso") and needy ("carente") it is.

I find it noteworthy because I have never met a cat like this before. It is almost like a dog in a cat's body. It wags its tail when it is pleased. It begs for food and affection. It responds to its own name. It has a compulsive need for attention. For all this it used to earn a vicious kick that would take it sailing behind the stove whenever it approached me with its fucking pleading puppy-dog eyes.

The hands race around the clock, the numbers flick forward on the time display. Clouds race across the sky, shadows rotate around their bases.

Then time lurches again, slows to an imperceptible crawl.

Unpredictably.

And sickly, impossibly, slows further. Did it stop? There is no way of knowing. Did it go into reverse and run backwards? There is no way anyone will ever know.

I cannot trust anything any more. I am becoming glued to my phone's digital watch display. I glanced away, once, and when I looked back three hours had passed, it was already evening and I had missed work.

It is time to go.

what a life wasted, that could have been spent drinking on street corners....

"April is the cruellest month..."

[i miss being a heroin addict although i would never go back. life becomes so simple... the best year of my life, now in the delusion of retrospect, which i am not fool enough to fall for, was between summer '05 and summer '06, when i had a place to sit, a lot of interesting work, a doctor who wrote me morphine, and a sweet young girl... of course, you always have to pay everything back... this song evokes a deep nostalgia for that time...]

30-sec post that took a lot longer

London, São Paulo, Cuenca, Istanbul, Katmandu, Peshawar, Mapusa.

Geography is just an excuse.

The sky is out of tune and out of focus, like a broken black and white tv.

I'm going to get a cachaça and sit in Largo Sta Cecília by the church and watch the girls and pigeons and chat with the homeless dudes.

Wherever I go, the same discontent, the same longing for a place far away.

I like it here, but I miss a girl in England. ["hips like cinderella... lying there like you're tame..."] I'm a lot more sentimental and a lot less cold than I had thought. There are lots of girls here, after all, everyone keeps reminding me.

And everywhere.

It's so goddamn arbitrary.

I got robbed last night, finally. Well they only got a packet of Marlboros, my travel card and about R$10. I held on to my phone for dear life, which is vital for the numbers, and sort of sentimental cause I bought it in Kabul and it writes text messages in Persian. I never walk around with my wallet, because it would be a disaster. I would probably wake up a week later under the minhocão with all my bank accounts empty.

And it was my own fault, anyway, which is fine and educational, otherwise I would be kicking myself. But there are places where you can't walk head down and lost in your thoughts. If I had been awake and walking fast and aggressively like I usually do it would never have happened. And not only that, but the little voice would have told me where to go. But I was perversely ignoring the little voice last night. (The little voice? Yes, the little voice. It knows exactly what's right for you. You just have to have the courage to follow its lead...)

I was incredibly impressed. In London, if five kids rushed you in the street, they would really fuck you up. Stab you, probably. These kids, street kids, eyes almost glowing with glue and hunger, came out of nowhere, and one each wrapped himself around my arms, legs and head, and dipped my pockets.

It was almost gentle. I hit one of them and bit the arm of the one trying to put me in a headlock, but they were gone. They had no interest in hurting me for the sake of it.

Everyone warns me about violence here. Not to walk in certain places at night. I do anyway. It is violence born of desperation. Not out of sheer malice and sadism, like you will find on almost any street in London. Violence is still violence for all that, and you will still be dead if someone puts a bullet in you. But.

It's different.

So. I carried on walking. This old homeless dude of incredible dignity and gravitas who had seen the show called me over. I sat down with him there on the pavement. It was a dodgy side street in Republica that lots of people I know here would walk a mile to avoid. He said if it had got serious he would have intervened. I shrugged and sat there for a while and talked. I didn't really give a damn. He pointed out people on the street to me, empty ghosts moving in empty darkness: "Look, he's keeping look out... And look, that's a victim, wandering up that way all innocent..." A police car slowed to shine lights on us. A worried-looking civilian woman was looking out of the window with the cops. He greeted her as if he knew her, the car speeded on. "Do I know her? Hahaha. No, she's been robbed and they're looking around... But the cops drive that way, the robbers have always gone that way."

All the street people knew him. These guys came up and he handed them bread out of this big plastic bag he had. Another mugger passed by on his way rob someone and the old guy wished him luck. "You understood what he was talking about?" - "Yeah, he's on his way to work."

And then I walked. It was worth it, to meet Mario. I left him the last of my change, and then realised I didn't have any cigarettes, which led to the final comedy of the night. I stopped this guy on São João to ask him for a smoke, but he had just thrown away the packet and was on his last one, so he offered to smoke it with me.

Overly camp gay dude. "You're not Brazilian, are you?" - "No, I'm English." - "Really? I lived in London for three years!" and he drops into English. I generally refuse to speak English with most people, maybe on the "When in Rome..." principle, so I maintain my side of the conversation in Portuguese, smoke with him, and walk as soon as possible.

He calls me back as I am walking away. "Yeah, what's up?" I say.

"You're not English, are you?"

better late than never?

Is this blog really so unremittingly dark all the time? (Lazy aka Mikey laughs a lot. Too much, probably. You will have to blame me, the alter ego.)

Next post will be about a cat. With cute photo.

They can't kill an animated cadaver.
Can't curse the damned.
Can't send a lunatic mad.

(dead blogs I loved)

I just want to find somewhere that feels like home.

-Hahahahahahaaa fool. Not this life, not for you.

"The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land." (Hugo of St. Victor)

Inertia creeps

[dark and strange clip from Massive Attack. you probably know the music, but it's worth watching the video if you never saw it before]

Spit on providence

outside pharmacy, New Cross Rd, South London, spring 2007...

Fucked up woman clutching a tin of Tennents Super and tucking paper bag with fresh methadone bottle into tracksuit pocket: "So I 'ad to go dahn there an' sort it myself, 'cause that cunt from the social was too lazy to make one phone call for me! Can you believe it? It's no wonder you 'ave to drink! 'Ow was they thinking I was gonna survive? More 'an £400 they owed me in income support that they was tryin' to get away wiv not payin' me! I tell you, it's fucked up man!"

outside bar, Praça Roosevelt, central São Paulo, recently...

I go in to buy cigarettes, come out tearing the packet open and almost walk into a group of ragged dirty men gathered around a cart full of items scavenged from the rubbish. One of them politely asks me for a cigarette, I hand out cigarettes to all of them without thinking about it, carry on walking fast without stopping to listen to their thanks, my mind on other things. One of them calls after me, I keep walking, he calls again, I turn, he walks up to me. "Thank-you very much," he says, sincerity palpable. "We're not beggars. We're not." It is incredibly important for him that I understand this.

Keep walking

Return to São Paulo in a cursing rage. A black depression falls as soon as I enter the apartment that doesn't feel like home. Why oh why didn't I stay in Rio, for another few days at least? I already cleared my schedule until next week.

It's the bank's fault, I remember. Stop kicking yourself. I ran out of money and my card wouldn't work. So I had to get a ride back. But I'm sure if I had tried harder I could have found a way to organise things. On the ride home I am in sick regret, knowing I won't have the chance to go back for a long time. I despair of ever doing anything right. I know I will never make a correct decision in my life.

The apartment nauseates me. I can't stay in here. I get out on the street. The card still doesn't work and I have R$1. I buy a pinga and knock it back. I keep walking, avoiding my usual circuit of bars, because I will see people I know who will buy me drinks, and I don't want that, not now. I go back to the flat but still can't bear to see it and still can't sleep. I collect a handful of 5 and 10-centavos from the shelf and back to the street.

Walk and walk. Watch the transvestites, eavesdrop on the conversations of whores with their customers, sit on the pavement with the homeless, watching the traffic and smoking. Count the change, buy a beer and a last pack of the cheapest cigarettes. Determine to stay in the street all night, whatever happens, and not go back to that goddamn apartment. But my God I would like to drink.

This is when I spot a strange character propositioning women in the street. He looks like a cross between Borat and a Kabul street junkie. He is well fucked-up, but at the same time one of those people I instantly know is sound. We walk. He keeps asking people for directions to places he knows perfectly well. He babbles to me in portuspanglish until I tell him to shut up and speak one language at a time. He buys five papers of coke. We keep walking aimlessly.

It turns out he is an agent of cosmic balance. A well fucked-up character, interned many times, who seems to have been sent to restore the balance to my feverish mind. We drink pinga with grizzled old beggars, shoot snooker with traficantes, joke with whores, loud samba and old Corinthians games. Moment by moment my head is straightening out. We share cigarettes with street kids out of their heads on crack and glue, he sets me up with some hopeless girl, street people in rags ply us with stinking cheap aguardente and Paraguayan cigarettes. The rage and loathing is dissipating. Walk through tunnels, the zombie-movie streets of Cracklandia, over bridges and elevated causeways. Find another bar and sit for a time, and then keep walking. Seeing this side of the city is worth more to me than any number of beaches or palm trees or girls in bikinis.

Does cosmic balance exist?

Are there critical points in time, cusps of action, nodes in the web of destiny, crossroads of fate? Sensitive moments, critical times when your action or your intention or your words or your thoughts determine the course of the future and set your trajectory through the universe? Was deciding to leave Rio the afternoon before one of these points?

Is it so?

Or is it really never too late?

Tomorrow finally arrives. I go home and sleep, free of the crawling loathing.

[how can a city of 15 million seem so small sometimes?]

Human, all too human

Cockroaches are just too much like humans.

They want to live too much.

We were at a barbeque all fucked up and decided to conduct a genocide of the fuckers. Because after all, genocide is fun. Spray insect poison down the drains and smack them with a shoe as they go running.

My God, they adapt their tactics so quickly, it's like they have telepathy and they're broadcasting radio to each other. At first it was easy hunting, but then it just got impossible.

I hit one and wounded it and it played dead, thinking I would go after the others. Fucker. So I hit it again and it rolled like a fucking US marine or something and rushed for cover behind a loose tile. I hunted it down and smacked it with the shoe again and it vanished. I found it in the shoe - somehow it had jumped in there. I threw it on the ground and hit it again and this time, my God, it swarmed up onto my hand and jumped right for my face.

I finally killed the little fucker.

Human, all too human.

The main difference is they're harder to kill. You can hit one and it smashes into pieces, and when you come back half an hour later it has glued itself together with its own ichor and crawled off bleeding. You can cut a cockroach's head off and it will die of starvation, about a week later, after spawning hundreds of others.

YOU tell the truth, and let THEM deal with it