Alasdair Watson

South, that is. I’m putting a short story together set is a fictionalised American South – a rural hick town, to be precise. I’m too worried about accuracy, but I’d like to know if some of the set dressing I’m using is halfway plausible, and I could use someone to bounce dialogue off, to check it for authenticity. Anyone out there willing to help? Drop me an email via the “talk to me link”, or leave a comment, if you’re seeing this on LJ….

Life proceeds largely unchanged. Have taken up swimming like a duck to weasel juggling. I used to be a reasonably strong swimmer when I was a kid, but I seem to have forgotten everything I’d learned, and have a distressing tendency to forget to use my legs, so my arms wind up protesting more than perhaps they might if I was swimming properly. Also, lack of goggles is preventing me from doing an adequate crawl, leaving my stuck with a doubtless slightly stupid-looking breaststroke. But despite that I’m enjoying it immensely, and plan to continue.

I’m listening to the excellent Barrage currently, but I saw Nick Cave play live on Saturday. As I already said, he was better last year, but what struck me was the near-complete absence of stuff from the new album – “Bring It On” and “Rock of Gibraltar” showed up, but that was about it. However, he did make a nice, subtle point about the difference between his old and new stuff, as the did a version of “West Country Girl” that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the likes of Let Love In, sitting comfotably alongside “Loverman” or the like, while the first half of Saturday night’s rendition of “The Mercy Seat” could almost have been from The Boatman’s Call – all the same notes were there, played at the same speed, just arranged a bit differently, to place the piano or guitars differently.

Currently reading “Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked”, an examination of that fairytale (and related topics), it’s origins, and how it, and interpretations of it have altered through the centuries. Next up “Stagolee shot Billy” a look at the origins of the ballad of Stagger Lee. By that time, I hope I’ll have got hold of the new Harry Potter book. Then I think I ought to re-read “Smart Mobs”.

I started this entry intending to talk about what I’d been doing, but I seem to have divereged into consumerism. Oh well.

Went to the Dev on Friday. May have been on crack. Saw Nick Cave play last night. He was better last year. Went for Gourmet Burgers tonight. Lovely.

Interview

If this is for real (and I’ve no reason to suspect it isn’t) then this is yet another entertaining example of the collossal bastardy of the US govt, and, more importantly, needs circulating. Caveat: features seriously disturbing pictures of badly deformed babies, made that way by the after-effects of Depleted Uranium dust, left behind by the ammunition the US used in it’s wars in the gulf, which is will not mow permit Iraq the tools to clean up. There’s a text piece as a lead in, so you won’t see any photos immediately on clicking, and it’s worth reading in itself – scroll down and look at a few of the photos, though, just to see how bad this actually can be – they’re where the visceral impact of the thing lies.

Yes, of course this could be spin. Those might be the sum total of all the deformed babies born in Iraq since Desert Storm. But even if they are, if there’s even a chance that more will be born, how can the US justify not permitting a clean up?

While I was blogging that last, Mr Page was doing the same, along with this related article from Yahoo News, which is about the increased rate of deformities in the children of Gulf War veterans. Apologies to our mutual friends for the duplication of linkage, but I think both of them need to be circulating widely…

I’m not posting the whole fucking thing, but I’m amused to note that according their system, the person on my friends list that I’ve been known the longest is the person I’m least compatible with, and the people I’m most compatible with (those that scored over 90%) are all people who I’ve hardly spent any time with, or indeed, never actually met face to face at all.

Summer’s hit Battersea Park. I’m beside the boating lake, drinking massively overpriced Red Bull, and contemplating a vareity of solutions to my current writers block.

Option 1: Drown myself. It’d be easy, and convenient, and with any luck it’d leave a few of these bastard children that are all over the damn damn park with something collosally traumatic to remember.

But on the downside, I’d be dead. And I don’t really want to be, so I think I can rule that one out.

Option 2) Just keep hammering my head off a wall. Well, I’m getting kind of tired of that, to be honest. I’m sick of dealing in substandard fragments of thought, and half-formed ideas. I need somethingto give soon, and let me actually write, rather than makes notes.

Option 3) Medication. Devolve back into my bad habits, and abuse my body with whiskey and coffee. This is my favourite option – I know that belting my brain sideways with those two will nearly always shake something loose. I’m not the only person I know that works like this, and I’m certainly willing to give it another go at this point.

The problem with this is manifold, though. Top of the list: it’s bad for me. My diet is still residing in the “fucked, but improving slowly” zone that it slipped to late last year, but my other habits are actually quite reasonable – my caffiene intake is minimal, these days, and I don’t drink more than a few measures in an average week. This is not the sort of level I can use to punch myself in the frontal lobes with – I need half a pot of coffee and a good double in me to get started, and I need to hold that level of wired over time. Additionally, coffee makes me want to smoke, and I’ve been having a hard enough time staying away from the fags for a while now.

Also: I’m not much fun to be around when I’ve medicined myself. I shut myself in my room, and fight with language, emerging only to refresh my drinks. This is not the sort of behaviour one can indulge in when one has a girlfriend one would like to keep seeing. It’s profoundly anti-social.

Still, I think it’s my best bet. And y’know, Fin gave me an espresso machine last night, which is practically an inivitation to anti-social behaviour.

So it’s out to buy a burr grinder with me tomorrow, and fresh coffee beans on Sunday.

In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the last of this Red Bull, and put some more notes together, in the summertime.

Sucked. Got up at my usual time, to find that one of my flatmates was running late, and was in the shower. So I wound up running late – not “late for work” late, just “later than I like my routine” late. My meeting this afternoon has been cancelled, too.

So, at lunch, I went to the gym. It was dry when I walked out the office door, but tipped it down within minutes, only to dry up as I got to the gym. It remained dry all through my workout, and right up to about thirty seconds after I left the gym. It’s dry again, now that I’m back in the office. And my workout was deeply unrewarding. I underperformed on just about every machine, and I don’t know why. So I’m feeling deeply disassified with myself. I don’t feel like I’ve had proprer exercise, and I’m damp.

This afternoon had better be better.

Pan fried zebra in red wine jus. Reminded me curiously of duck. Highly recommended, though.

Of course there are. I direct your attention to this (Nicked off Rachel, ta.