Moment

I closed my eyes

at the flash in the sky

and hoped to be killed by the blast wave

We know where the Huntsman lives

 

We know about the author 
who likes getting off on torture
writing doorstops of smug thuggery 
to settle petty scores;

we know about her charity

enabling depravity 

from back alleys in Bucharest

to Port-au-Prince’s shores; 

we see the politicians

wink and make insinuations

to ensure your misdirection 

as, magicians of suspicion,

they hide the hand that disappears

their colleagues’ allegations;

the columnists who polish up 

once-tarnished reputations,

dressing up facilitation 

as rehabilitation, 

as they cutely euphemise

their grooming 

as ‘home-schooling’, 

call their trafficking ‘adoption’

and expect us to be fooled. 

But we see through

their find-the-lady hand-jive

and their prestidigitation.

We’re wise to their forces

and we know the fucking score.

We know where the lady is,

and we know who the groomers are,

and we know where the Huntsman lives

and we refuse to be prey anymore:

We know where the Huntsman lives. 

We’re breaking down his door. 

Thoughts on the WAG and SAG-AFTRA strikes

It's interesting how much work is going on to undermine the written word today, isn't it. 

It's interesting just how much work is going on 

to undermine the written word

today. I mean right now, in sweating offices and boardrooms,

men who are paid more money than I am ever going to see

before I shuffle off this mortal coil, are talking to shady guys

like the man I once met in a Baltimore restaurant

who seemed like the epitome of charming evil, 

to try and find the dirt to turn a snitch with,

and all with the intention

of replacing professional writers - not weirdoes like me,

who will always be shouting out here at the edge of the 

boarded-up shopfronts, but people paid to write the actual words

which millions remember, mimic, maul into ubiquity

with machines with which, we are told, will outwrite

Wilder, all the while unable 

to write more than a third-form book report. 

It's absolute exhaustion. Is this why

e said the mind was wider than the sky?

To satisfy the kind of men who dined with Harvey Weinstein? 

George Osborne Is Weak

 

And so is everyone soiling their pants over one of the Just Stop Oil people getting him point-blank with some orange confetti. Emphasis on 'some'. Look how little that lady is throwing at him, in my little collage piece above (which is just a bit of banter, right chaps? After all, I'm not even using simunition rounds...) . Look how little hits him! If you genuinely find this terrifying then look away now, because I'm about to blow your tiny, cowardly little mind. 

That's me covered in fake blood and very real confetti after the first prop rehearsal for Shotgun Wedding back in 2015. We learned two things from that rehearsal: one, that the literally underground venue we were using wasn't really set up for a situation where gallons of sugar syrup and food colouring were being thrown around, and, two, that the blood may have looked impressive but the confetti really didn't. So going forward, we decided to bulk out the confetti with dry rice. 

The thing about having handfuls of dry rice thrown at you by people who've been whipped up into a frenzy? That isn't like having confetti lightly tumble down upon and around you. That shit hurts. 

And here's me after the last performance of the tour, at which I specifically instructed the audience to try and throw rice with sufficient force to stop me performing (they didn't in the end, but it did get pretty close). As you can see, I'm absolutely plastered with the stuff. 

A tiny bit of confetti? Don't make me laugh. Frankly, from everything I hear about Georgie 'Porgie' Osborne lately, he wants to be thankful he didn't get hit with something much stronger than novelty wedding favors. I mean, I would have turned up with a brick before I read this Thursday's Popbitch...

Let me show you the tail of the scorpion...

'Capturing societies' in the Americas considered slave-taking as a mode of subsistence in its own right, but not in the usual sense of producing calories. Raiders almost invariably insisted that slaves were captured for their life force or 'vitality' - vitality which was consumed by the conquering group. - Davids Graeber & Wengrow, 'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity'

'[Franco] created orphans by the thousand, and he ate them by the score. And he created orphanages...more like madrasahs, really. Indoctrination with lashings - take that how you will - with lashings of orthodoxy and obscurantism. The children of murdered Republicans would be brainwashed with Mariolatry and hagiology. Their teachers were sadistic brides of Christ, and predatory bridegrooms of Christ. Further, in addition to children whose parents were dead, there were children of surviving Republican parents who were stolen in order to be re-educated.' - Jonathan Meades, Franco Building: Mass Tourism

'During Argentina’s bloody dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, military officials carried out the systematic theft of babies from political prisoners who were often executed without a trace.' - Al-Jazeera, 'Argentina identifies 131st baby kidnapped during dictatorship', 22/12/2022

'The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s, about 30 percent of Indigenous children were attending residential schools. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 30,000...' - Wikipedia, 'Canadian Indian residential school system' 

'An Associated Press (AP) investigation revealed in 2017 that more than 100 United Nations (UN) peacekeepers ran a child sex ring in Haiti over a 10-year period and none were ever jailed. The report further found that over the previous 12 years, there had been almost 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other UN personnel around the world.' - Wikipedia, 'Child sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers' 

'In Australia, between 1910 and the 1970s, governments, churches and welfare bodies forcibly removed many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. These children became known as the Stolen Generations. Their removal was sanctioned by various government policies (AIATSIS 2022a), which have left a legacy of trauma and loss that continues to affect First Nations communities, families and individuals today.' - Australia Together, 'The Stolen Generations: the forcible removal of First Nations children from their families' 

'In cases where adoption is in the child’s best interests, efforts should be made for the child to be adopted by a local family from his or her community and country and of origin...Exceptionally, if all prior efforts have been explored, or are not in the child’s best interests, then international adoption may be considered as an option.' - Lumos website, FAQs, 'What about adoption?'

'During World War II, around 200,000 ethnic Polish children as well as an unspecified number of children of other ethnicities were abducted from their homes and forcibly transported to Nazi Germany for purposes of forced labour, medical experimentation, or Germanization. An aim of the project was to acquire and "Germanize" children with purportedly Aryan-Nordic traits because Nazi officials believed that they were the descendants of German settlers who had emigrated to Poland. Those labelled "racially valuable" were forcibly Germanized in centres and then sent to German families and SS Home Schools.' - Wikipedia, 'Kidnapping of children by Nazi Germany'

'Oxfam failed to act on reports children were being sexually abused by its workers in Haiti in 2011...in one case, two emails...both said to be from a 13-year-old Haitian girl - alleged she and a 12-year-old friend had suffered physical abuse and other misconduct at the hands of Oxfam staff.' The Independent, 'Oxfam failed to act on reports its workers were raping girls as young as 12, damning report concludes' 

'Though better known for administering humanitarian aid around the world, USAID has a long history of engaging in intelligence work and meddling in the domestic politics of aid recipients. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the agency often partnered with the CIA’s now-shuttered Office of Public Safety, a department beset by allegations that it trained foreign police in "terror and torture techniques" and encouraged official brutality, according to a 1976 Government Accountability Office report... in 1973, Congress directed USAID to phase out its public safety program — which worked with the CIA to train foreign police forces...By the time the program was closed, USAID had helped train thousands of military personnel and police officers in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and other countries now notorious for their treatment of political dissidents.' - Foreign Policy magazine, ' "Cuban Twitter" and Other Times USAID Pretended To Be An Intelligence Agency" ' 

'In January 2015, Lumos began working in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere...On 31 July 2019 we launched a project to tackle human trafficking in partnership with USAID.' - Lumos website, 'Where We Work: Haiti' 

Ou wè li? Ou wè ke eskòpyon an? 

Enough

Not all of us

 are leaning into our lovers' 

clothed or unclothed shoulders, rolling into

and out of the curves of each other 

- but some of us are.

Not all of us 

have someone waiting

at the other side of the border,

not all of us rhyme safe and home yet

- but some of us do.

Not all of us

will fight. We do not always

find our courage at the moment when it might

be most of use

- but some of us will.

Not all of us will see the other side.

Not all of us. 

But some of us.

Enough? 

Of Brexit and my breakdown - a cashed eye closes

 This Monday marked a year since the death of my mother. A year ago, it seemed unlikely I would write the preceding sentence: I had always assumed, honestly, that I would also be destroyed by my mother's passing; had always told therapists that one of the few things which kept me from taking the final step towards ending my own life was my unwillingness to inflict that level of grief on her. In a way, the rightness of that instinct was only strengthened by the raw, eviscerating grief that I felt in those first weeks following her loss. The days and nights of crying almost constantly, the shrieks and moans of real deep grief, the almost physical pain of it: how could I have inflicted this on her?

So to say that I'm still alive a year later is genuinely unexpected. In large part, that has been due to the support of my friends and family, particularly the latter. In its way, depression, which I fell heavily back into towards the end of 2022, has also been a protector: that malaise robs you of the initiative to carry out the final act even as it makes you long for it more and more powerfully. Ask a professional, and they'll tell you: the real dangerous time for suicides among depressives is when we start turning the corner, when the right pills and therapy unlock our capacity to act ahead of our capacity to make peace with the world. But the factor in keeping me alive that has been most relevant to this blog in the past year has, of course, been my writing, and in particular finishing off what became Albian Dreams, itself the third instalment of a thematic trilogy of books which, themselves, formed the culmination of a process begun in the aftermath of the two catastrophic events of 2016 - of Brexit and my breakdown. 

So it's that, mainly, that I'm going to write about here. There will be more, much more, to write about my mother (and some of you will, I hope, have noticed the sly way in which Albian Dreams concludes with a nod towards her). I have a number of ideas for things rattling around in my head at the moment and while some of the smaller ones will probably need to be pushed out first just to clear the decks, probably the main one of those projects will be, of all things, a memoir. Yes, finally, after years of creating frames to try and slip the taint of the confessional, I kind of want to tell it straight for once. 

Well, ...ish.  I can already tell, even at this nebulous stage, that the memoir is going to involve a number of major digressions, mainly involving pro wrestling and the works of Wes Anderson, with particular reference to The Darjeeling Limited, but it will mainly, just be a memoir. No autofiction gimmicks, no placing in a larger political context, no alternate realities: just me writing about being me, and particularly being the me I've been since the end of 2019, when it became apparent that one of the things I inherited from mum was the debilitating, disfiguring and humiliating skin disease that ultimately developed into the cancer that killed her. That's quite a thing to deal with, and I don't think anyone can blame me for avoiding facing it head on in favour of taking psychic revenge for Brexit and carrying out an astral hit job on the Windsors, but these things must be faced up to eventually. And they will be. 

But before we go forward, it might be worth looking back over the cycle that we've reached the end of. So that's what we're going to do in the next few entries. 2016-2023 - what were all that about? 

In the meantime, though, please enjoy this reading of 'Not In Any Way That Matters', as recorded by James Whitman for King Ink: