Good goddamn if it isn’t cold

Every year around Chinese New Year Hong Kong gets really cold, but it only happens about twice during the winter and lasts around 3 days. A few old people die because they’re not prepared, and the rest of the population dresses up in their most wintery outfits, which is a lot of fun. None of the regular people have heating in their house – this is the 7th place I’ve lived in here, and it is the first place that has hot water (apart from the shower). This year is extreme though, even under my Hello Kitty fleece blanket plus my 'white cloud' feather down duvet, it is still cold. It is kind of fun, actually, and I like to dress up in hats and scarves, but being part English, I thought I had to mention the weather.

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Baby and I have reached new levels of unreality, thanks to the wonders of Nintendo DS Lite and the game “Dōbutsu no Mori (どうぶつの森)”, or “Animal Crossing”. I now have my own town called “Domville”, and she lives in “Harvdom”. Even when we are in separate countries we can visit each other if we’re near a wifi connection. Our conversations weave in and out of real life and virtual life. Part of me is adding value to my imagined existence, and the other is starting to think that conventional existence is more hollow than it is made out to be.
Or maybe that’s just me.

Rearticulation

I’m not sure if this looks like anything to other people, but it’s feeling more and more like the restaurant I used to visit most days in my late twenties.
When I was a little boy, I had a fantasy that I might one day recreate an image exactly how it is seen with the human eye. In my juvenile mind, this entailed painting a picture with the edges all blurred, because I felt that when you looked at something, only the point you were looking at was in sharp focus, and everything, from that point out, becomes gradually more and more out of focus. I felt if I accomplished this accurately, and people looked at this picture, they would be transformed somehow – it would be like the renaissance, when someone figured perspective out, and visual communication was never be the same again.
Now I think something similar, but slightly different. I think I don’t see anything in focus. I just see colours and lines and these are combined with temperature and smell and the other senses somehow. It is combined with all sorts of things, but essentially it is a blur of sensation, tinged with a bit of memory and a bit of expectation.

What the devil wanted

The second last time I was in Japan I spent a lot of time in my head formulating a story of a man who was delivering sake on the devil's orders. Over the course of his deliveries the man drank more and more of the sake, and cheated the people he was delivering to more and more to compensate for his lasciviousness, until he met the ultimate delivery recipient, who was the devil himself. Unable to cover up his cheating ways, the man was finally exposed, only to discover his actions were exactly what the devil wanted of him.

Ah, I love a happy ending.

One of my great friends is the BBC 6 Music radio DJ Chris Hawkins. Like most of my friends, he exists more in virtual reality than in old-style physical, tangible reality. We have had a minor scuffle recently over Ryan Adams. I am willing to put Ryan Adams up as one of the greatest living artists, next to Bob Dylan, myself and possibly Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Chris, on the other hand, hates him. Chris is violently mistaken, of course. As evidence, I offer some of the lyrics to Ryan Adams’ “What the Devil Wanted”:

My idle hands
They are but tools
Apply them well
And you will loose

It’s what the devil wanted
What the devil wanted from me

Put your lover to your chest
Put all your fears to rest
Forever, baby
Ah, ah
Forever, baby

All my time is wasteful now
All my time is wasteful now
All my time is wasteful now

Ah, ah, ah, baby

The bounce back

All tonight’s pictures are unfinished or still too wet to scan. I’m visibly excited, I think it must be the influx of energy you get after you recover from a cold, combined with anger. This must be what Joan of Arc felt like. It reminds me of the happiest week of my life, when I was accidentally prescribed steroids in college.
Imagine waking up and literally hitting the ground running, going non-stop till you collapse for one hour of sleep, feeling your heart thudding inside your rib cage, which seems to be moments away from cracking wide open from the pressure. What a momentous week – drawings and paintings on every free spot in my room, I moved from one to another, letting them dry while I worked on others, day and night, breaking only for coffee and pills and laundry. By the end of the week I was sure I was going to die if I carried on. Fortunately the pills ran out and unfortunately life slowed down to it’s natural pace.
Reality, I always hated you.

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Tonight’s soundtrack:
Radiohead: “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”
Radiohead: “Killer Cars (Mogadon Version)”
Ike Turner: “Jesus Loves Me”
Whiskeytown: “What The Devil Wanted”
Jerry Lee Lewis (with Buddy Guy): “Hadacohl Boogie”

... all over and over again, till i was ready to strangle something to death.

Outside

I went outside today, my first day in two weeks as a not-sick person. It was nice outside. Outside has people and shops and I even saw a big, black dog. I hope to go outside again soon.

I liked Ike

“I know regardless of what I've done, good and bad, it took it all to make me what I am today", Ike Turner

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I watched “A Streetcar Named Desire” on a plane recently. Even though I’ve seen it many times, it was still better than all the other movies available. Every time I encounter this play I progress a little bit. This time, for the first time, I felt pity for Blanche. Initially I was so taken by the beautiful, swaggering Stanley I had nothing but contempt for her. I never knew he raped her till I read the play. The first time I saw the movie after I read the play it seemed obvious, but this time I was again unsure if they actually implied this in the movie or not. Either way, what an amazing study of violence and the human condition. I’ve noticed recently that when I yell, I affect a Stanley Kowalski accent. I know it’s bad to romanticize such men, but when you’re surrounded by hollow people, it’s just so appealing to release yourself with abandon, regardless of what may or not be right or wrong.

Born again atheist

That was an awful 2 weeks. At the end I was casually contemplating suicide rather than spend another day suffering the common cold. Now I’ve entered that beautiful stretch of recovery time. It’s great when you get life handed back to you, and all your blind, reckless, futile ambitions rage up again in full force. This weekend I tidied up my desk and moved a set of drawers. There’s no stopping me. I have plans, big plans, I’m going to be great, and everyone’s going to like me.

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This is a sketch I made a long time ago of myself masturbating. It was a brilliant concept – the violent frenzy of impending orgasm both reflected in, and affecting the drawing. Technically, though, it can easily slip into chaos. All-in-all, though, a fine step in the right direction.

Insult to injury

It started as an annoying, persistent cough, and then became a battle of might between my lungs and some stubborn piece of phlegm holding sanctuary somewhere deep, deep down. Somewhere near the beginning I pulled a muscle in my back from the heaving. Supporting myself on the sink, my body defiantly went into convulsions trying to cough up something that I was starting to think didn’t actually exist. The pain was amazing and the convulsions and choking made me start to vomit. I tasted the spit and salty tears in my mouth and I had a kind of nostalgia of youth and sickness and heartbreak, then I looked in the mirror. Apart from the zigzag of dozens of tiny, red veins, the colour in my eyes was gone, my mouth was all distorted, I looked like the corpse of a man who had drowned – you could see the struggle and panic, but the battle was long lost.
Then the doorbell rang. I didn’t think and obediently answered it, putting on my mask, partly to hide myself, and partly as an explanation I was sick without having to talk much. It was Josie, delivering the banners we’d ordered for Japan. She came in and started to arrange them, saying “I’m sick too” between sniffles, then she took a clear look at my face and said “You’re really sick” and pretty much bolted out the door, telling me I can pay her later.
I’ve never been a monster before. I quite liked it, striking terror into people by my mere appearance. I can see myself, the monster on the third floor, up all night, making poisoned candy to give to unassuming children in the park. People will pity me sometimes, and I will abuse them and cackle with laughter as they run away. I won’t have any visitors, apart from one well-dressed man from the bank who visits on the first Wednesday of every month. I will cultivate an obsession with Natalie Wood and all my plants will be dead.

Hurry tomorrow

Wrong design is happy to announce we will be formally backing Barack Obama to be president of the United States. After careful consideration, I think his wife would make a really good first lady.
I was excited thinking Bush II would be leaving this year, but then I realized he won’t be out till Jan 2009. I guess there’s still a little time to make some smart investments in mortuaries in the Middle East. Then I started thinking maybe someone will kill him before then, and then I realized he has the perfect security against assassination – Dick Cheney. What could be worse than Bush II as US president? Dick Cheney. How clever, they really thought of everything. I also realized for the first time that together they are “Bush & Dick”. That’s funny, right? Why did I never see that before?

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This is drawn from photos of “the Palace”, my favorite restaurant till it closed down and became a real estate office. I don’t know what it was really called – we used to call it the “Gangster’s Palace” because it was full of working guys – sweaty men with no shirts on eating in a run-down hole-in-the-wall, just like the great HK movies they used to make before 1997 when China asked the film industry not to produce anything that made it look like the police didn’t have a firm and trustworthy hand on society.

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My illustrious cold has developed into a persistent, dry cough. I know the routine well. This will subside into an annoying little cough that seems to hang around for weeks. Soon my body will pass the barrier from fighting into healing, and I’ll be full of ambition and an urgent need to impregnate my wife. That, and seeing enormous lumps of what I imagine to be ambergris coming out of my body, are my favorite parts.

Tamed

Deep in the slithery grip of a cold, slowly working the disease out of my system in large, dark green clumps of mucus torn violently from my lungs, I am strangely calm. I dreamed of half-eaten hamsters – one half the cute, furry, white face and fore-paws, walking gaily along, it’s back half, dragging behind it, like a chicken wing with the flesh chewed off, just one bone left, the other one being picked at by some monster rabbit with webbed feet, wrapped in something like a rolled-up carpet of earth, in a cage, in the garden.
I’m not angry anymore, I’m not even participating. I’m disappointed, but it doesn’t matter.