Good things about my back pain

Last year, after several years of having a weak back, something snapped and I now can't bend down or lift things without planning. It doesn't always go wrong but it is a risk do to these things.

Things I have trouble with sometimes include getting dressed, getting things out of low drawers, moving large books, and standing up for a whole day. If I try these things and it goes badly I trigger some stabbing pain that makes it impossible to move.

This is kind of scary as I worry I will be stuck. It also hurts a lot.

 After 10 months of some kind of, as yet elusive, back pain, seven physio appointments, four GP appointments, two occupational health appointments and a disability advisor, I am now seeing an NHS physiotherapist. I don't know my prognosis.

 However, here are the good things the back pain has brought me.
1. I have got better at asking people for help
2. This has given me the chance to deepen my relationships and appreciate people’s kindness
3. While my overall fitness is down, the strength of my abdominal muscles has increased through daily exercise. This means I may one day be able to do some circus skills.
4. Being unable to exercise has reinforced its importance to me, and I am more likely to keep it up when I can exercise again. This will improve my overall health and lifespan.
5. Not drinking due to painkillers has saved me money, meaning I have to work less and can do more art. It also prevents me worrying about money and gives me more free time when I am not hungover.
6. Wearing a back brace distorts my fat and body so much that I feel very slim and cool when I take it off.
7. People have been so kind.

When Facebook decides you are non-human

Last month, Facebook decided I wasn't a person. When I logged on, I learnt I no longer deserved a personal 'profile', but should instead have a business 'page' to interact with my public. As far as I know I'm not a sentient zaibatsu, or a fan site for Cheez-strings, or a reality show contestant, but Facebook didn't ask or give me the chance to say this.

I had, by an algorithm or a human, been classified as non-human and thus my account, as it was, needed to be removed. With my options narrowed to transition to a business page or no facebook, I went with transition. I saved a copy of my years of flirtations, laughs, battles and drunken photos just in case. This was foresightful, as I would never have got them back.

As a business or public figure page, life was very different. I obviously wasn't interested in other people unless they 'interacted' with me, so no updates from others. I wasn't a person, so couldn't attend events, or be invited to them. Messages and post replies were optional and mainly hidden, unless they crossed a certain algorithmically-determined threshold, in case I got distracted from counting my money. For (presumably privacy?) reasons, I couldn't see the number of people who 'liked' me, or who they were, so couldn't transplant all my friends to a new personal account.

I could still post words and pictures, and people could reply. Their replies and likes and activity was graphed, and I received little updates telling me which of my posts were 'performing' best and that I should consider saying more like that, or paying for them to be seen by more people. About a tenth of my friends saw what I posted: wouldn't I like to contact all of them? In short, I was the proud owner of an electronic echo chamber where my friends were ranked and graphed, I was constantly being invited to buy popularity, and I didn't get invited to parties. Life as a business was very much like being a teenager.

More worrying, though, was how much of my life I lost when I lost Facebook. I'm studying, and my fellow students share schedule changes, mutual support, and ideas on a private Facebook group. To learn with my peers I need Facebook. My shared house is administrated through a Facebook group. If I want to know about parties, internet downtime or kitchen storage, I need Facebook. My mum has Facebook to keep up with my life, and I have friends who prefer Facebook messages to emails. I joined Facebook in the first place because I was missing invites to parties. Hey, everyone was on there, and it was just a tickbox, and seriously, inviting 50 people personally?

Facebook is easy. And it's good. It's good to share photos and news and jokes with people far away, and to hear about people's lives without needing to ask. It's a big world with lots of good people in it and I like to hear from them without needing mad administrative skills. I missed it; I asked Facebook to explain why they chucked me, and reinstate me. There was no reply, so I tried living without it, and made a new profile a few months later.

We're now trapped into a service that can eject you without a second thought, with no reason or appeal. Facebook can cut off from your housemates, your classmates, your family and friends and they won't even tell you why. And when you tell your friends what happened (if you can: how many of your 'friends' do you have emails and phone numbers for?) they will try to stay in touch, or try and remember to tell you that the washing machine is being repaired, but it's just too easy to post and forget.

Ease of use favours a centralised service run by a single company, and aimed at the lowest common denominator. Facebook-dependent people are not the ones running exotic operating systems or working from the command line. Any centralised service invites dependence upon those running it. Do you trust Facebook to decide what you see and who you can talk to? Forget me. Do you trust them to keep your private messages private and not hand material over to law enforcement without good reason?

Homophobes and people scared of breasts have successfully got people and materials banned from the platform. Small businesses and artists can no longer update their fans with news: unless they pay, only a fraction of people who asked for updates will see them. The Facebook insistence on real names puts people at risk and denies genuine identities in the name of preventing abuse which still happens. Facebook are not angels, despite their blue, friendly appearance. And even if you are happy with them now, they have a history of moving the goalposts.

If you have to trust a single company to mediate your social interactions, your photo collection and your past, is this the best one? It may be: we are running a bit low on good guys, and hell, you need to share selfies somewhere. You probably won't run into issues, other than a deluge of Farmville invites, social faux pas and gender-role-reinforcing ads.

Or, you may want to start cultivating a backup network – collecting emails and numbers –, and take a record of your data and photos, in case one day Facebook decides you, too, are not a person.

Think about it, puny humans. BEEP.

Sexual deviants and their broken fingers

Occasions when I have been sexually harassed, what I did, how it worked out, and what I would change in future. I post this in hope of sharing ideas with others for how to deal with shitty behaviour, and of learning how I can deal better with it myself.

The Creeping Creepshow Creep 

Location: Punk gig in Leipzig at Wave Gothik Treffen festival
Situation: I took off my T-shirt during a slow song and stood to one side to cool down in my bikini top. A thoroughly fucked man crept up behind me and hilariously undid it in the manner of a 10 year old. I clasped my bikini to me and turned round to chastise him, and he pulled at it from under my hands.
What I did: Gave up trying to preserve modesty in the face of his yanking, accepted that people were going to see my tits and decked him.
What happened: He kept laughing. Some of the other German punks around were shocked. One gave me his jacket and one held the dude, and I hit him in a big wide loopy John Wayne smack. He showed no indication at all that it hurt. I put on my clothes, walked away and stayed away from him (although saw the end of the gig). Other dudes moved in to keep an eye on me.
What I'd change: Why didn’t I tell the bouncers?!? I guess I thought that because I was just wearing a bikini, or because I was at a punk gig, they wouldn't care: or that because I hit the man, I was in the wrong.
 I must also learn to hit harder.

The international linguist 

Location: The 390 bus from Euston to Camden, London.
Situation: Dude in his ~fifties sits by me and starts attempting to chat me up, with hey babies, where are you goings, and what are you doings.
What I did: Ignored his first few ‘Hey baby’s, then responded in a made up language for a bit before declaring to the bus 'Hi, everyone: this dude thinks he has a chance with me: does anyone know anyone more his age and level?'
What happened: He persisted in trying to interact with my made up language for ten minutes, until I made a public declaration, at which he looked embarrassed.
What I'd change: Not a thing.

Wandering little fingers 

Location: Stiff Little Fingers gig, Hackey, London
The situation: I was wearing a bra with a fishnet top. A big dude, probably 40 or so (I was 18), came over and grabbed my breasts as handles while humping me from behind.
What I did: Grabbed his little fingers and bent back until he let go
What happened: Some crunching. Then he fucked off back to his mates.
What I'd change: I feel I should have warned him first.

The StopCheck

Location: A bus stop in north London, late at night having overshot my stop
Situation: A mid 20s dude came over to the bus stop, asked me what I was doing there, talked to me, invited me back to his place, asked if I was a man or a woman, groped me to check my answer.
What I did: Asked what his mother would think of him groping strange women at bus stops.
What happened: He looked embarrassed and said 'don't bring my mum into this'. Kept talking at me, with less hands, until my bus came.
What I'd change: I would have liked to make him feel more bad about what he was doing. Or hit him. But we were alone.

The 'It's different for a girl' 

Location: Synthetic Culture, goth night club in London Situation: I was watching a pole dancer perform. When she finished her set she came down and squeezed my tits.
What I did: Said 'excuse me, I don't think we've been introduced'.
What happened: She explained she was horny and missing her boyfriend. I moved on without questioning whether he had tits.
What I'd change: I was too polite. I should have made it clear her behaviour was unacceptable even though she was female.

I have a few more. I should also obviously say I tend to recall the ones which were particularly extreme, or turned out particularly well: there's probably also a load of banal stuff which just slips my mind. I am 1m69, between 75 and 85 kg and have trained in several martial arts, although I am not very good at them and currently extremely unfit. Responding forcefully has never worked out badly for me although I recently read of a case where it very much did, so do be aware.

Lessons learnt:

• Watch out for buses.
• Finger locks get you everywhere.
• Guys at punk gigs are overexcited by breasts.
• Some girls are idiots.

Why I am not wearing a poppy

Death is awful. Death meted out by humans more so. 

I imagine myself on the battlefield, shivering, having signed up thinking I would be part of a show of strength, something proud, against darkness and evil, and I would come home. Realising that my 'fight' -  a competition to see who can throw away more warm, living, loving bodies - is against an enemy just like us, doing what they believe to be right, and the only way I can get through this is to throw more bodies down in front of me. Bodies that were men and women, bodies that had favourite foods and hopes and loves, it's them or me. If I believe enough in what I was told I mow them down like meat; if not I roll over and die. Those are the choices.  

I don't know how you come out of that human. I would melt down in that situation.

So I have time and comfort and support and love for conscripts, for people who didn't know what they were getting into, for people who signed up and regretted and ran. People who did dark things, trapped in those dark places and tormented after, throughout history and now; those people I feel for so much. For them I would wear a poppy, if it helps the dead at all. I have always felt that the most relevant part of the 'glorious dead' was the 'dead' part.

But not all soldiers are forced, not here, not now. Some come to it voluntarily, some enjoy it, some don't question or realise what they are doing. It's a profession that attracts bullies and sadists. People who choose to kill people. I cannot support that. Those people are the willing arms of those who lead us into war, they are the muscle that lets them do it, and every body sent home is another reason to fight more, because they dared attack our brave lads. (Our brave lads who firebomb them nightly.) 

Enlisting soldiers are, at best, a tool for governments to play at popularity, at machismo, at aggression. And the cost of using these tools - of psychiatric care, of rehabilitation, of physiotherapy, of funds for dependant wives, husbands, children, parents - should fall to charity? Governments have little in the way of morals - an organism reborn every 4 years has little time to develop a conscience - but the need for a cold hard line of cash to repair their toy soldiers might make them more cautious about breaking them. But no, a shaking donation bucket and a white feather shame campaign is the way to support children without fathers and fathers without legs or sleep.

We have sent our soldiers - all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds signed up for all kinds of reasons - into war based on misinformation, lies, and reputation; lacking intelligence, weapons and resources. They killed tens of thousands of civilians - the Iraq Body Count alone stands at more than 115,000 civilian deaths. We murderered and we created murderers and a paper poppy is not enough to staunch that wound. 

A red one won't even show the blood.

I am donating to the Red Cross instead.

('But what about the World Wars?' 'Those soldiers died to keep us free!' 'You can only say that because the soldiers keep you safe'.. 

1. It's impossible to establish what would have happened if we hadn't gone to war, or if we'd fought differently, or smarter and with less deaths. Noone can know what would have happened.  

2. The fact that you need to go back to 1945 to cite a war that is commonly accepted to have justification does not inspire my confidence in military policy and practice over the last 70 years.

3. If my country can go to war based on no evidence and without a democratic mandate I'm not sure how free I am.)

I suck Satan's cock.

I suck Satan's cock almost daily. 

People come and ask me how to get what they want. I want to tell them work hard, be good, try hard, take chances, be lucky - but they've heard there is a quick way. So the sacred cow (that's me, by the way) gives the magic cock a suck and it squirts dark thoughts right into the shill gland at the back of my throat.

It talks to me about customer journey, about profiling, client messages, about social marketing and buzz and dynamic environments and telling stories, weaving interesting stories, selling stories.

No, I try and say, that isn't what story means, stories are for bedtime, fireside. You're thinking of stuffing truth in one of 12 acceptable delivery formats, doping and plumping with human interest and serving in snack size portions to desperate hacks. You've mistaken caring for a ticked list of boxes. People are better than believing who shouts the loudest and the most.

But the cock keeps shooting into my mouth, and those balls are nowhere near empty. Each spurt down my throat covers another piece of what is good and beautiful. I choke up around what is being done to what I thought I believed in. Where is my air?

I should pull off. Why don't I pull off? My bank manager and my landlord hold my head steady, stroke my throat and ease the darkness down.

I could bite. Why don't I bite? I bare my teeth ready and the people who want my help rub my back. They trust me. They asked for my help. If I bite, they will be taken too, taken and processed and ground up. They are good people. I can't bite.

I make a feed, I lock it down and fillet my rage into 140 chars or less. FUCK YOU I scream at the devil. My fingers flick frantically across the keyboard, as I trickle a puny back channel to counter the thick streams coming stronger in my mouth.

Put my sigil on them, says the devil's cock. Render unto Satan what is Satan's. They want to belong - let them belong to me. Brand the bastards who ask for it, lifting their quivering rumps in anticipation.

They want it. They don't know what they're asking. They're children begging for junk food. What do I say? I've got my mouth full myself.

One meal? In a good cause? One meal won't destroy the population and one refusal won't turn the congealed tide of trademarked slop.

It's hard to think with Satan's cock in your throat.

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Things I didn't have the nerve to publish.

work sucks, as if you didn't know.

work sucks, as if you didn't know. I don't know how we did it, but we slipped and made a system where you give five days to get two. Yeah, on paper, on contract, it's only 35 / 168 signed away - as if anyone works 9 to 5 anymore. Oh Dusty, I'd kill for 9-5. It's 9-6, 9-7, 9-9 and only up.

but beyond that there's more, the trimmings eating in - the morning hauling up, the mute commute, the rare, endangered lunchhour for paying bills and sending packets. The team drinks, the gym because you don't have time to walk outside, the late night supermarkets where you buy what's left after the stay at home parents have descended for their locust offsprint, the trains that take their time back because work is what matters - before you're home again with nothing more to give.

Crashed on the sofa with your other life waiting, looking at you accusingly, and no appetite for anything but telly pap. I can't be an inspired artist in the two hours before bed, even when I force myself to stay awake because I don't want to give in and abandon consciousness until the next drudgeday starts.

occasional midweek oasis when i steal in the bars, the nightclasses, the fights, the gigs, the music the . i overdo it, up and out at the sniff of real life, and the morning doesn't matter, until it does, with the shame and the sickness and the excuses to visit anywhere that's not fluorescent lit and consensus airconditioned. moanday morning, swearing off, no more life except in designated living zones.

The big glimmering weekend, the mountains beckoning all slogging weeklong trudgedays finally to the foothills of friday nights, I barrel into the fresh springs, and drink and drink to lose the inhibitions i nurture in cubefarms to regain fringe views and political heat and forget that 54 little hours later i'll be waiting to have my head held under again.

moanday

screwsday

grudgeday

trudgeday

cryday

What a way to make a living and not live.

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more things i wrote and didn't post at the time. I need to work on that, huh.

I don't want to go back on the medication

I don't. I don't want to be a symbiote again, dependent on the chemicals and the doctor's whims to get through the days. I want my lover to stay with the woman he met, not a pathetic hybrid, a new fake person.

But I've lost happiness. How can you lose happiness? What sort of stupid evolutionary fuckup is this? What is the point of this stupid emotion?

My tears serve no purpose. I don't suffer for a reason, I don't draw motivation from it: in fact I do less as this salty, sobbing mess than I ever did before.

I have no purpose to my life and at the moment my missions are not cry in front of people and to try and stop eating at some point.

Medication is a crutch. But crutches are there so you can keep going.

When the levee breaks

Another thing I wrote and didn't publish. Publish now.
__________________
 I woke up yesterday crying and I've been crying ever since. My face is blank but my eyes are streaming like a widow who's just had a facial. I asked them why but they won't say. Bastards.

 I've been feeling pressure building inside me for days. Not explosive steam pressure, smooth relentless pressure of sheets of green water, death soup, pushing against a crumbling tired dam.

 My water table is rising. I'm a skin bag now and every step I take squelches. When it reached my throat yesterday I clammed up, trying to choke it back, but I had to breathe sometime and it overflowed past those blocks.  Today it reached my eyes and they were the ones to crack. They gave out on me and leaked, the weak bastards. With each lurch forward the cold water sloshes against my sockets and blurps out of the bulging lids.

 Bits of me sail with it as the stream lurches out, escaping the mineral traces that make even the weak skin bag I am more than water. Sweeps and seeps away the molecules of flavour and flecks of cheer suspended in even a wet thing like me. Straight out of my traitor eyes my core goes, lost in osmosis as my diluted self pools on the ground.

 I can't find the spring the water comes from, but I know it's deep and strong enough to fill me up again and again, rinsing my innards transparent and taut as tumours. The water passing through me grinds me smooth. Nothing but a tubeworm in the vent.

 Maybe my eyes know where the spring begins, the source of the torrent reaming me out. But the flimsy bastards wouldn't tell me, would never help me. My last levee against the formless flood and they quit.

Save yourselves if you like, fuckers: you'll not last long teteering on the flow leaving me. You'll fall, and lie, and molder like sad olives in the puddle that was us before you cracked.

Urban de-spray

So I wrote this a while back and didn't publish because I'm a lemon, but I still like it so it's going up.
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Do you like graffiti or not, London?

You commission graffiti artists to decorate the Olympic village, to put up themed street art in skate parks. If you're paying a tame painter to do something on the theme of community then their command of spray paints and perspective is amazing, and it's so gritty, and urban, and emblematic of your regeneration project.

But the minute the artist is doing it because they have something genuine to say, because they want to put their stamp on their environment, to spend their time and money and risk their liberty in order to communicate with every goddamn passerby in that neighbourhood - that's malicious mindless vandalism. Got it? If you're not being paid (or being Banksy, for some reason the sole graffiti -artist- around) it's mindless and it's meaningless. If you want to be recognised as an artist with a message you need to be a corporate sponsor's baggy trousered hand puppet.

Never mind that the corporates already own the billboards, the screens, the papers, the public transport network. They own words like love and beauty and summer and they use them to sell chips and face cream and souvenirs.  In return for your expression, your daydreams on the tube, they'll decide what you want and you can give them your money for it. Motherfucking bargain of the motherfucking year.

But their greed and their power is their weakness. They are so greedy people shut down. stop noticing their clamour as they shout all the time for you to like them, follow them, flash your loyalty card, buy your children their cuddly toys, because you can't ever care enough for their exponential profit projections. 

And that's why they're interested in graffiti because they think we haven't noticed them leaching it yet. They think we can't tell the difference between someone's urban improvements and an exploration of brand values rendered in pantone matched colours. 

They think we're stupid.

And now they are scared that their poodles - and hey, I got nothing against tame graf artists, poodles gotta eat, man, like the rest of us - might still have a few teeth. Right at the back. Usually saved for grinding Supa-Dehydrogenated Texturized Meet-U-Like biscuits, but maybe they could skin a nose or two. So they wire their mouths shut.

And so the police - servants of the people, keeping us safe and orderly - go find an urban artist  - who's done work for the olympics for Christ's sake, that's how they know where to find him - and tell him he can't have paint. Can't travel in his city. Can't go near the bloody Olympics show that you've sold to the world on the strength of all us urban cool cats and handbag dogs. 

You'd make cool Britannia hobble her patent-stiletto'd lambeth walk on cut hamstrings because you're scared that your fucking people might have feelings and expressions that your fucking branding partners don't approve of.

Some might say that a country exists for people, not to generate profits for synthetic entities.

Others might say: fetch the markers

Nowhere Notimes (part 3)

Oh my gosh wrestling is fun, and the Northern boys are really giving it their all: but it's hard to be half hearted on a trampoline.

__________________________

Chris asks me if I'd spend 10 minutes digging. I say sure, but I know I'm going back to painting my beloved toilets with Natalie afterwards.

I go to join the guys - a team of 4 working to fill in a trench. It's mid afternoon and rather hot in the desert, and there's a lot of dust that needs to be shifted to fill that space. It's also booty short day. 


So the first thing visitors to the festival see is a row of us shifting dust and flashing flesh. People shout encouragement and ask when our calendar will be out as they drive past. 


Goku welcomes newcomers 'to Nowhere, the festival of the working class', and you can see a flicker of concern pass across the hippies' faces when they think that maybe they've signed up for a week of digging holes rsather than hedonism. Naturally, we don't reassure them. 

The hole never seems to be full and we're stuck into the repetition of digging now, with our hands doing the action despite the blisters coming. I'm getting tired, and these guys were digging long before I came to help out. The sun pounds down, but we don't want to leave the job undone so we count off. Just fifty shovelfuls more. Another fifty. Another.

And eventually, the hole is filled and we have saved at least two hippies from breaking themselves falling down holes. We are working class heroes, we tell each other, and are rewarded with a cold beer and an extra helping of tomatoes at dinner. 

__________________________

We're drinking martini on top of the toolshed, but becuase I'm up there with French contingent, olives are provided.

__________________________

I touch Raven's arm and ask where he got his scars, stupidly not remembering that it might be a painful question. He tells me about getting run over in Thailand, being broken and unconscious for weeks and his mum choosing to leave him there in the country he loved rather than fly him back to Ireland. And he tells me about his healing and the care he had from friends and strangers there, showing me a bracelet made of tiny knots in single strand cotton thread. Each one is a day his friend fasted and prayed for him. 

It's a personal story he told me and I feel like I pried. I joke he's a cyborg now (though technically he is). He smiles and chats but there seems to be sadness under there. 

I think about robots and taking on someone else's pain selflessly. Would machines do that for us? I remember the eastern art which is all over the place, and draw a golden robot on a lotus. 

For an hour I'm lost in sepia markers and watercolour, and people tell me what I'm doing is good. Normally my art is private, because who would be interested to see it? But here they can look if the want, and apparently they do. Raven likes it so I cut it out of my sketchbook and give it to him. 

A funny sort of gift; feels like it was never really mine anyway. A product of the dust.

I like to think of it on his wall in Ireland, a piece of me in a place I've never been. 

__________________________

"Those are the most beautiful toilets we've ever had. They're like us - pretty on the outside, but underneath seriously fucked up."

__________________________

There's a bearded cowboy sat on the living room art car I like the look of, so I climb on up and pounce on him. He seems happy about that, and he's in assless chaps and goes by 'assless chaps' as a name, so that's easy. On his other side is the Weimar styled cabaret host I spent the early evening appreciating. who regaled us with his opus 'baby shark' earlier. 

Balloons fly over us, tethered to the car and buffeted into our faces by the wind. 

Arkem starts up 'balls in my face, balls in my face' and the rhythm is like a nursery rhyme or a train.. Balls in my face, I join in, and we chant it out over the dark desert filled with revellers like stumbling glow worms.

Balls in my face all over the place running out of space it's a disgrace all these balls in my balls in my balls in my face

__________________________

I'm dressed as a fusion of warriors from across the world, in a chain mail bikini with my body painted in blue swirls like Celtic woad, my face in moko, my hair in a Mohican. This is how I want to look.

___________________________

SCARING IS CARING 

__________________________

Nicholas Immaculate, resident camp king of decor, is having difficulty with his headpiece - it won't adhere because of the heat, and he can't possibly be seen without something dramatic on his head. To avoid having an undecorated head, he asks me if I'll do his face paint  as I 'am the only one he'll trust with it', concerned about being attacked by floral hippy designs.

I am insanely flattered, but also nervous, because this man has taste.

 He sits on the floor and I paint his head in candy neon stripes and swirls - he enjoys the feeling of the brush on his head and we talk about his house and boyfriend and upcoming moves.

__________________________

I'm drinking cappuccino made by Martin outside his camp's cottage, discussing alternative financial methods for government funding beyond the issuing of bonds. Martin is trying earnestly to stop making coffee for people, but cannot say no to a pretty young man.

 _________________________

I didn't know Joey, but I fucking hope that if I go before my friends, they write my name on everyone, drink to me, and insist that my favourite song gets played 3 times in every set.

_________________________

WELL COME ON

Nowhere Notimes (part 2)

The pirates have taken their ship and their cannon and gone raiding. I'm in the kitchen washing potatoes but I see them go, and I also see one of the guys from babysham pulling an Elmer Fudd and sneaking along with the signs from their camp while they left it unguarded.
_______________________________

 I'm talking to a drag queen called Jessica behind the Italian camp's luxury. I say I don't know what a lapdance actually involved, and she says she's never given one, so we rectify that.
_______________________________

The pirates get back and a big roar goes up when they realise their signs are missing. I come out just in time to see a tricorned and gilded posse advancing with their ship towards the Pervy Whims cottage, now boldly displaying the Pillage Village sign and with its garden filled with gay men, exuberantly breasted women, and sympathisers swinging their handbags menacingly before launching them in a volley.
 _______________________________

A couple are saying their wedding vows under the main stage in the Middle of Nowhere. This community means a lot to people. I sit near the back with my new friend Jack. #I could never get married', I say to him. He asks why and I say I was in a relationship for five years and I was so happy, and I thought it was great and perfect.. and it ended and I'd been so wrong about the whole of it. And I cry quietly and my voice breaks up and I'm apologising as he says 'Come here, you', pulls me over for a hug and holds me until it's bearable again.
_______________________________

 The pirates get past the wall of handbags and discover that the happiest camp in the world are pretty good with their tools and have screwed their stolen signs to their territory. They are a bit nonplussed until they remember they came armed and make with a shower of ballpool balls, cutlasses and jets of water.
_______________________________


 I'm feeling the heat and ask for easy, shaded work in the afternoon. Chris leads me to the gate where Natalie is painting, and says I can cut her stencils. She sketches some evil grinning little sperm and I cut them from tetrapaks so we can spray them on. The gate is designed by Ellen and spreads like a red cone, opening as a square-fronted temple and tapering to purple and pink drapery. The theme of the event is Rebirth Earth, and the gate will begin like Indian temple and finish as a vulva.

As me and Natalie talk it becomes clear we have similar phallic, curlicued visions for the temple freize, and we roller and draw the pieces together and they match. It's a novel experience for me to work with anyone artistic, let alone someone whose lines go the way mine do.

_______________________________


Krampouz, the French camp, are doling out exquisitely thin proper french crepe. I eat mine with chocolate from teh biggest jar of nutella I have ever seen while wearing a leatherman style peaked cap I find around, and they let me borrow it to wear for the evening. So I paint on a moustache and strut around.

_______________________________


There is a rope bondage jam and I always have more to learn, so I head up to the camp and partner with a beautiful lost boy with orange stripes on his cheeks. He's never been roped before, and he's so young: I tie his arm across his chest like a patriot and his other arm behind him, and check in with him every other knot to see how he's feeling. He seems to like it and his friends laugh in surprise to see him so bound up. I think he looks beautiful, and then I let him tie me.

I hope he keeps exploring.

_______________________________

Babycham has a cabaret and Megs comes on stage and sings Minnie the Moocher acapella. Her voice is like granulated honey and she stomps and owns that dusty stage.

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I've been drinking and dancing all day but I don't want to stop and so I'm dancing like a mad thing, jumping up and down and climbing platforms and doing some burlesque of pole dancing on a rough squarecut pole. As people wander into camp friendly puppy me goes over and asks them to dance with me, I want to befriend everyone and make them happy. 'Nah,' says one girl,  'It's funny just watching you.'
________________________________

I get hold of the laptop and put on the Cramps I've been jonesing for all week. I dance and mouth 'tomorrow we'll fell like we've been hit by a truck'.. He smiles and drags out in a voice like the purr of an engine 'It's sooooo hard to imagine you as a psychobilly fan.'

________________________________

Now, I wanna be face-to-face.

Nowhere Notimes (part 1)

 The buses have arrived and I rush down with the crowd to meet them. I don't know what I'm doing but I'm genuinely thrilled to meet a new batch of people who I trust to be cool, show them how excited I am and show them what we have built for them.
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On the ukelele it says 'this machine kills diminuitive fascists'. __________________________________
The firespinning pit is opened up. I've had a few drinks but I've been spinning years, and fire is irresistible.. I pick up a heavy staff and realise The billowing cotton skirt I'm wearing is incompatible with fire, so I strip it off and spin in my pants. The area is surrounded by leds and onlookers chatting and half watching. I step in and let the familiar sensations of shifting weight and momentum, and the zip of roaring fire past my head, take over. I only hit myself in the leg once.
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Ginger Dave *is* hotter than Malaka.
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 After a day at the presses working on the newsheet, Abi is spinning feel-good soul and rock and roll to the Werkhaus. Tristan tells us proudly 'That's my wife. Isn't she something? Go, Abi, go!' Wearing a dust-covered duster, Til (who's been working on lighting all week) takes my hands and we spin out into my best attempt at a swing dance. I don't know the moves but spinning round like kids in a playground and being whirled into twirls and passing over and under and weaving round hands is really fun, and whenever I go the wrong way I just dissolve into laughter, because I can't stop smiling and everything feels golden.

 ___________________________________

 "This is exactly the right place in the world for me to be right now", I message home after a first day working until I'm tired with sexy, energetic, practical dreamers, sick, helpful cynics with genuine smiles.
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It's Pride and we take to the playa dust to process after the converted-caravan pirate ship as it bears along the Samba crew, decked out in rainbows for the occasion. I can't say no to the samba beat and I bounce along beside and behind for an hour or so, wearing blue body paint and chainmail. We finish up at Ubertown and a DJ breaks out a mix of mid-nineties cheese from the back of the radio and speaker studded art car. It's golden hour as the sun sets over the rocky mountains surrounding us, and the crowd try to remember the moves to the macarena. Eventually, pirates, post-apocalyptics, dusty freaks and holiday makers wiggle their hips, jump, clap and turn ninety degrees as one, with not a hint of post-modern Shoreditch irony to be seen.

 ___________________________________

YOU CAN'T *MAKE* ME STOP DANCING, I write on whatever I can find. ___________________________________
 I'm delivering the paper to smiling, welcoming faces at each camp I visit in a desert-blow parody of surburbia. 'We don't have paper boys and girls, we have paper freaks' comments someone.. it hadn't even occurred to me that my outfit was outlandish. Pinstripe shorts, red fishnet stockings, boots, 10cm long spike collar and a cargo-net top is what I'd wear normally, given free choice.
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 All is full of dust and love.
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The last day starts with a hot mess served by an unnaturally cheery Nurse and a team with pink facepaint lipstick smeared round their mouths. It's lush and accompanied by whiskey and Annika declaiming 'First proper food I've had all week. I don't know who's running this kitchen but they're shit. Proper food at last.'

Annika runs the kitchen. She raids our ice freezer for bottles of booze people have stored there and declares them destined for punch.

'It's not stealing, it's non-consensual sharing!'

She aims the judge at unsuspecting mouths.

 'Do you consent to this punch?'

'Yes...?'

'NO! THIS IS NON-CONSENSUAL PUNCH.'

And whatever, we drink, and the punch keeps being racked up, and Werkhaus has a party going with vodka and juice on ice at fucking 10 o clock on the last day because we can. And also because we can we hijack the music and put on some non-electronic music. Those of us who love our rock smile as the real instruments make the air shake just like they did when they were recorded.

'I didn't realise how much I missed guitars', says Natalie. Fuck it's good to hear guitars again.

You've gotta FIGHT. for your RIGHT. to PAAAAAAAAAAAAAR-TAY!

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I lose my heart on the burning sand.

Love is a packed lunch

My rucksack is smallish and black and has everything I need for the moment. It's not much.  In the back, wrapped in a bag from Marks and Spencer's, there is a parcel of food for me that my mum made. A small prepacked salad, a Tupperware container, an apple, and a small foil- shrink-wrapped chocolate bar trying to be healthy. I open the Tupperware and the sandwich inside has been cut into a tangram so it fits under the protection of the plastic box. Two large slides of soft whole meal bread, hand sliced lettuCe, soft cheese and cheddar -  product of careful knife work and considered selection.

My mother continues her 26 years of care for me, much of it involving food preparation and her lifetime of serving for a family as cook and more. She doesn't think about it anymore - half custom, half duty - but I feel loved by the care she puts into preparing a perfect little meal for me.  She's been feeding me fruit since I was little, but it's been more important since my dad died of bowel cancer. My odds on getting it too aren't great, but are improved by fruit and veg.

Filling someone's basic needs, the small things that don't rank respect or recognition, the incremental preventatives rather than the grand cures - taking the time to do the things that go unnoticed, that is love.

Small town living. Part of an occasional series.

Great things about my home town, pop 75k, thinking pop, approx 35 The cathedral toilets are twinned with a latrine in burundi. Not the cathedral, just the toilets - not with other toilets, just a latrine. There is a photo and a plaque the commemorate the cultural exchange. Shops consider 3-5.30 wednesday thru Friday to be acceptable opening hours for a business. Shops selling vertiginous sequinned union jack platforms, no less. There is an asparagus festival. It features gus the asparagus man making visits, a demonstration of asparagus tying, an asparagus crown - and for those who can't make it to the festival, there is the portable asparabus. 

Are you depressed?

(a non-exhaustive checklist)

Is there a big fucking lump of inability wedged just behind your voice box?

Are your tear reservoirs always dangerously close to running over?

Do you have to rack your brain to think of things you like, or things you would like?

Speaking of that, is the future any more than something to be got on with?

Are you sleeping to avoid being conscious?

Have you taken your medication?

Then congratulations, this is just how your life is.

To hurt is human

He said he never wanted to see me hurt.

So I handed him the most recent scientific papers on the possibility of time travel, a packet of condoms, and my mum's address in 1985. Good luck with that.

London's burning.. and you've got nothing to say?

Dear Facebook and Twitter (at least those segments of it I pay attention to);

Yesterday, in response to the police shooting and killing a man in Tottenham – no reasons have been given, although theories abound and the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating already, which is highly unusual – there was rioting in the streets, two patrol cars torched, several shops burnt. The people living above these shops had to leave their homes and now only have the clothes on their backs. The rioters looted and burnt many things, 8 police officers are in hospital.

From a BBC report:

“Local resident David Akinsanya, 46, said several shop windows had been smashed. "It's really bad," he said. "There are two police cars on fire. I'm feeling unsafe. It looks like it's going to get very tasty. I saw a guy getting attacked." Maria Robinson, another resident, told the BBC: "The police seem very frightened at the moment, people are unstoppable. They've broken into various businesses, jewellery shops, bookies, it's absolutely crazy. They've beaten up a man for talking to the fire brigade." “

I live a mile from both regions of riots. I was away this weekend, just got back. Many of my local shops are closed – shutters are down. The sirens are running constantly. Fire engines and patrol cars stuffed with police are in the streets.

And noone is talking about this on social media, and this is fucking weird, all right? I have a lot of leftie friends who have said nothing, barring a few comments about robbing JD sports for tracksuits or other chav-baiting comments.

However, you had very strong views about:

Ian Tomlinson dying after he was attacked by a police officer

Jody MacIntyre being maltreated by a police officer

The riots following the anti-cuts protest in June

Why is this different? I don't expect anyone to support this rioting. But I kinda thought there might be concern and questions... and their lack is causing me to ask questions. I'm not telling you what to do but I am megaconfused.

Things on my mind:

Was shooting Mark Duggan 'reasonable force'?

There was strong feeling around here when Smiley Culture died under odd circumstances while being searched by the police, in April. . I suspect there are many other dodgy situations and the police rep is hardly high at the moment.

People protest and riot when they are angry and ignored. Tottenham is what politicians call underprivileged and everyone else calls poor and desperate. The burnt out buildings are just down the road from the Job Centre I was going to. It was very busy. In an environment where people are poor and desperate and put-upon, they're more ready to riot. For everyone's safety, if not our wellbeing (I suspect they don't really care about either but it's inarguable that dead people don't vote) it would be in the govt's interest to try and reduce these desperate conditions and the chasm between the guys who make the rules and the guys who take the hits.

If you wanna see how I'm scared it might go, check out the comments on this youtube video of the news reporting the events.

I've had White Riot in my head all day.

“Brixton in South London was an area with serious social and economic problems. The whole United Kingdom was affected by a recession by 1981, but the local African-Caribbean community was suffering particularly high unemployment, poor housing? higher than average crime rate.[6]
In the preceding months there had been growing unease between the police and the inhabitants of Lambeth.[2]”

Wikipedia on the Brixton Riots

This Way To Freedom

I passed a sign saying 'Freedom ->'. So naturally I got off the bus at the next stop and followed it. I was returning from an exam somewhere in London's East End - land of curry, eels and asymmetric fringes - and in the mood for proving my self-determination after being shuffled from assessment to assessment. So I followed my urges and the black and red arrows.

They led between two shabby shops, into a narrow alley between two recent, offensively perky red building, snaked round the left hand corner and entered a dim fire escape. Mounting the arabesqued carpet, I progressed up, wondering whether the arrows exempted me from trespassing charges, and entered a moderately sized-room with bookcases on all walls and a bespectacled young man with Sideshow Bob hair leaning nonchalantly on his chair while reading in the corner.

I may have deceived you, dear reader, into thinking I was bolder and more absurdist than I am. I had an inkling I was entering a radical politics zone by the black and red of the sign, and the fact I passed the ASS office (Advisory Squatting Service) on my way down the alley.

All the same, I tentatively approached the bloke and enquired if this was the anarchist bookshop. He said yes, and authorised me to browse. I flicked through a few magazines exhorting me to support anarchists in jail for hitting pigs, and wandered round lookng at the categories - feminism and anarchism, anarchism for children, historical anarchism, artistic anarchism - before trailing back and admitting I didn't know anything much at all about anarchism.

He asked what I thought of when people mentioned anarchism. I said "Men in beards sitting around slamming their fists on tables and demanding something ought to be done." He was shocked and hurt that I didn't associate it with action of any kind, and sent me off with a seminal work to read (Bakunin, I seem to recall. Central point seemed to be that as anarchism develops everyone will magically stop being a selfish bastard, citing a few studies that did not convince me when considered in the context of the entire history of the world, ever).

At this point an older anarchist with grey hair came in. We shall call him Dave, for no discernable reason.

Sideshow Bakunin greeted him in a distressed tone. "Those kids were hanging round here again, Dave. They were lobbing stuff at us."

Dave seemed to not share his worries, and explained that he had had some success talking to young delinquents, and through the use of sweet reason had persuaded them to pick up the litter they had left there.

"Yeah, well, litter maybe, Dave, but they were throwing big things. We have broken windows. One of them nearly hit Judy with a plank of wood, man! A plank of wood!"

"Did you try talking to them?" Dave repeated his faith in negotiation.

"They just kept throwing things! In the end I had to call the police..."

Bless their little black hearts, foiled by a load of violent yoofs not listening to sweet syndicalist reason.

--this is all 100% true, save the inevitable distortions of memory--

The Recession of Hope

My stupid little self was excited when they said we were in a recession. I'd read about the shanty towns in '29. I'd listened to the punk political rants of the eighties. I thought it would spark political interest and change. Selfishly, I thought I'd be OK.

The first years I was. I got the odd job, lived cheap, didn't notice the pinch. But three years on it's wearing thin. My friends and I have graduated university and we're being wasted. Noone wants to use our skills. Our brains are rotting. We're losing hope and even though there's more to life than work, it saps you not having it.

No overall drive, no part of anything bigger, no reason to get up or leave the house. No money for fun, driving a wedge between you and anyone with a job. No future plans.

No future.

Plenty of time though to sit around and watch the news, to see the Government cutting your handouts, to see the economy contract, to see the layoffs and the pain and the columns from the Guardianistas about how they've suffered too as now they can't buy a large pack of organic smoked salmon.

Plenty of time to call the dole office and ask where your money is, to recieve no answers, to go in for meetings and try and be ignored and resented and to count the pennies and pray for money back and debts recalled and that somehow holidays become free.

It's harder every morning to get up, and if my CV was honest it would read more like a prostitute's calling card. All services offered for money.

Read this.

Lockpick Pornography

This is an order.

Samples:

"I used to steal from heterosexuals for political reasons. Anything owned by a straight white yuppie is bought with oppression. The hetero-normative ownership paradigm is a tyrant belief system that deserves to be undermined on every front, from political protest to petty thievery.

Now I'm a little more honest about it. I can admit that I steal from straight people because I just don't like them. I made myself a t-shirt that says "I break into heterosexual houses so I can masturbate in their heterosexual kitchens.""


"I want to make bumper stickers for politicians and gay rights advocates. They would read 'My other pro-tolerance message is also condescending."

Novel content later, children. For now you need righteousness down your fucking throats.