the use of a line

the collective history of humans is a difficult thing to put your finger on and say there, which is a way of gathering things together, bunching them to form a point at which something occurred.  this is partly because every thing stands in for some thing other, saying i am this thing when it is clear to every one that it is not that thing, but despite these problems it would appear that at some point, due to some forces (which are never measurable, less measurable than penises [who can say whose is bigger?], though forces are able to be felt, but the feeling will depend on the fullness of the bladder, what one has eaten in the morning, etc) families stopped including people, and people stopped becoming families. many people do still ‘have families’, but these are throwbacks to another era, and eventually they will fall into the slowness of past things, and they will be funny to us, like foreskins, or the absence thereof, they will sound immediately familiar and strange, as does the term water closet. the complete alienation of people and families can be seen in the way that a suburb that is a-good-place-to-raise-children, now never coincides with a-good-place-in-which-to-be-a-human-being. well may we look back on these days and say ah, back then we were workers. we may even form images of picking dried paint from our fingers with our dried-out nails. and it is good that we will say and do this. for a line is a completely slick thing. or a completely barbed thing. it can be slid in anywhere. it will take hold anyway. there is nothing unique about them. people say them all over the world, all the time. mothers say fucking hell, get off the bike. but equally, we might say fuck you you stupid yuppie bitch. and each line meets the other on its own terms. each one is a form. form being a deformation of from. so each is from something other. things begin to take on their own force. is this a logical progression? it is definitely a progression of words. maybe things have come too far now for us o follow the lines back, maybe we can never become families. it is us and them now. the continual question that never turns from me is: do you actually mean any of this? but all i can say is that i want to say it. which in some languages would be enough. the mothers don’t know that i would have said sorry.

 

writing rongs.

so is that, like learning how to write, or how to read, or teaching people? ‘cos i can’t even read the newspaper,

it doesn’t sound right. i can’t follow it.

how do we read it? one breath at a time, i suppose. but with medication breaks, of course.

 

unlinked

i think there’s a wasted mexicano two computers down who understantably thinks that no one understands his güey and pedo and maría. funnily enough, he has an english inflection on his ah huhs. he seems tired. he is yawning through all kinds of syllables.

yesterday was day three of my ten day working streak (the two days’ rest are both uni days), and i arrived home with a headache that i’d carried for several hours at the bakery. i wanted to get some painkillers at work but didn’t have any cash on me, so tried to drink water instead. once home i looked for some panadol, but only found my nolotil ampules that i bought in villaviciosa, a little village in asturias, in which i watched australia lose to italy, brokenhearted in the silence of the ciderhouse. i read over the instructions again. they said not to use them if you didn’t have a prescription from your doctor, and that their main use was in oncology patients. i thought about snapping the glass neck on one of them, and chucking it in a glass of water, but decided against it. i’ll just have a shower, i thought. that idea changed to a bath, and i went to grab my cultural studies reader and the bi-carb soda i bought last week. i tipped a bit of the powder in the water (as i’d read on the side of the box the other night) and held myself above the bathwater. i poured straight cold water in and moved the water to even it out. i rolled a towel up and placed it beneath my head to read. i liked this. i felt like someone from a book i had read or a movie i had watched. maybe a movie adapted from a book. french or italian or english. maybe george orwell. i thought of sharing bathwater in my childhood. i thought of sharing baths in my childhood. i thought of hearing of my grandfather jumping in the freshly boiled water for his bath when he was young. the water scolding his feet, him slipping with the shock, burning his torso. seeing him shirtless on my last family holiday, the slight folds, those things that grow like moles but aren’t, the scars from the surgery on his lungs as a kid. and then such strength.

claro que te quiero maria, como no te voy a querer. it’s odd understanding something that you’re not really meant to understand. it’s a weird kind of voyeurism that i don’t quite know how to respond to.

note. if you use the mac labs in building two of uts, the ones next to the it help desk, always use the ones along the right hand wall. they load probably five times faster, and have updated versions of firefox. i don’t know why this is. also, if you use these labs, you wil be relentlessly counted by it staff.

 

to think

to think, a few days ago sitting in the toilet in my place of work, half crying. the hard close of my throat clenching clenching, the wet eyes, the way that breathing seems to make you ten times lighter with each breath. and not at all because the chef had told me to fuck off, i couldn’t actually give a shit about that. maybe half because i hadn’t told him to fuck off back. but the other half for everything else.

and then yesterday, a few embellishments and photocopies, and suddenly, in the afternoon, a new house. the one we had hoped for!