Unreliable information since 1972
At around 5 am this morning, I semi-woke, looked at the clock, and then “realised” (in the way that one does when one is still mostly asleep, and actually still dreaming a bit) that it was Saturday, December 17th, (not even a real date this year) and that I had just begun a week off work, in the run up to Christmas. I fell back into my pillows and blissful unconsciousness with a grateful sigh.
So the alarm clock came as something of a nasty shock.
Home for the evening, bored. Entertain me by answering the following, please.
I have been limping all bloody day. It is hassle I could well do without, as it is kind of connected to the fact I am supposed to refrain from doing anything that would cause my thigh muscles on my left leg to get too much use for the next while, walking is ok, but anything strenuous is out for at week to two weeks. This in annoying, as I’d just gone up a weight step on my leg presses (I’m aiming for twice my own weight, and closing on it quite nicely), and by the time I’m back to doing them, I’ll probably be back where I was.
Slightly more pressingly on the getting lard off front, can anyone suggest to me a good means of getting 1/2 an hour’s aerobic exercise without using my legs? No, hopping while on a treadmill is not practical, you bastards. Swimming also not an option.
This simultaneously winds me up something rotten, and makes me laugh – the incongruity of the headline, and the word “omnibologist”. Say it with me now…
THE WITCH: Hi, I’m a sexually mature woman of power and confidence.
C.S. LEWIS: Ah! Kill it, lion Jesus!
This is now indelibly drawn onto my left thigh. Which is nice. The endorphins rather wore off on the train home, which was less pleasant, as I had to stand the whole way back. It was only half an hour, but I could have done without it just then, you know?
Still, I think we can file today under “win”.
As in: the absolute certainty that an external entity whose nature you cannot define has just reached inside you, and switched something around such that your comprehension of the world and your place in it can never, ever, be the same again?
I have, once, about five years back. It’s not something you’ll ever get me to talk about. I have my suspicions as to what it really was was, but nonetheless, the easiest definition of it is a religious experience. I firmly believe that no-one who hasn’t had that Damascene moment has any business claiming to have “faith” in a damn thing, because what they’re doing is believing in a Sky Daddy because someone told them to, not because they genuinely feel it. (Actually, I think that even people who have had a moment like that are believing in a Sky Daddy, but I digress – tonight’s topic is not the nature of faith.)
The reason I bring it up is that I am back from a My Bloody Valentine gig. It was not a religious experience. But it was as close to an artificially induced one as I have ever come.
I have been to an awful lot of gigs, by many different kinds of band. I have been to extreme metal nights. I have been to quiet folk nights. I have been chemically off my tits at dance nights. I have left gigs and clubs going “that was awesome!” and “wow!” and “fucking brilliant!” I have never, ever before left a gig shaking slightly, and needing to take a few minutes on autopilot while I got my brain back up to full cognition because the sound had obliterated all concious thought for the ten minutes before.
I know and love the vibration of heavy bass. This was not that. This was, sound as full body immersion, sound as a physical thing, as a taste. It has almost certainly changed my relationship with music in the same way that eating Heston Blumenthal’s cooking changed my relationship with food.
Yes, it’s all explicable as “sensory overload”. That’s exactly what it was. Sound, and sound alone having the same effect as drugs. Here, then, is my question: why have I not seen a band outside of MBV doing this? Why can I not go to a gig like that more than once in 15 years?
I have just started re-reading HST’s The Great Shark Hunt (after finishing a book about him, I thought I’d re-read something by him), and I come across this piece of writing from “Fear and Loathing In The Bunker”, first published in the New York Times, talking about the Nixon administration.
“It has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashionable, or even safe, among millions of people who only two years ago thought that anybody who disagreed openly with “the Government” was either paranoid or subversive. Political candidates, in 1974 at least, are going to have to deal with angry, disillusioned electorate that is not likely to settle for flag-waving and pompous bullshit.”
This would seem to me to be the difference between 1974 and now, politically speaking: I just don’t have it in me to be convinced that any US presidential campaign isn’t all “flag-waving and pompous bullshit”, or that the majority of the American electorate are clever enough to tell the difference between that and policy that will actually make a difference.