tender tendrils

I made salad for dinner tonight. I noticed though I didn't have the heart to pull a few leaves off the herbs on the window sill for the dressing. Perhaps I need a pet.

cocktail hour

This evening I had a most fascinatingly sad experience. I escaped from work early, though taking my work with me ... so me and my work ran away together .... (that's an unrepetentent use of the strong pronoun in subject position there) ... and went to the pub. Being that in this part of the world beer and cigarettes can no longer be friends indoors but still remain the best of outdoor buddies, I sat outside the pub. As the weather is cooling considerably, sitting outside the pub is a sure sign you are a smoker. So crazy lady sits down and asks for a cigarette and then asks if she can smoke it with me. She doesn't wait for an answer and just starts sitting talking and smoking simultaneously (as was I). But this woman could not keep on topic. I don't mean she told a story with a million digressions; no. She could not maintain the thread of a topic across a stretch of language longer than the subject and the verb. The rest of the predicate lurched somewhere way beyond the semantic links that connected the subject to the verb. THe funny thing though was all her sentences were grammatically well formed though meaningless. And then I realised ... perhaps she suffered Williams Syndrome. People with this rare genetic disorder have vocabularies as every but their conversation is "socially responsive, fluent, correct in language content and appropriate to context, nevertheless is it curiously devoid of propositional content." (rather like this blog -ed). It was strange to listen to as it seemed that she was more interested in word play and rhythm and rhyme more than anything else... I wish I could remember some of the things she said exactly.

dear diary

I am about to finish off some work that talks about diaries, so i have dug out all my old cassettes. Yes tapes, always so unsatiasfactory to hold and look at while you listen to the music. So I am listening to the Smiths and remembering me listening to this years ago in the eighties. I am looking forward to reel around the fountain, always been my favourite.

I got an email from a friend the other day saying she couldn't believe how our lives have diverged. I too can't believe how I got here from that bedroom, that shoe-gazing ... pale and gangly then, and pale and gangly now, but I go live among not-so-technological people in my little shack, and I tell people some mildy important things. When I used to live in CZ to get home after drinking with MM I would have to cross the Labe/Elbe, so often cold and snowing, I with my collar turned up, would unzip my fly and urinate into that one of the major rivers of central Europe, and as my pee mingled with the water, the chemicals, the tributary that seviced the paint factory and was a different colour every day, I would always imagine my self on the map and wonder how the hell I got here. I may be closer to my point of origin now, in this hellhole Palmengrad not so different from UnL ... but I still wonder how I got here, and wonder what will happen next. Some of the things I thought would happen haven't happened yet, and am not sure if they ever will. This may be a good thing, as all it did was make me cry at bus stops.

Oh well, Morrissey is singing 'stop me if you've heard this one before. Nothing has changed. I still love you, only slightly less than I used to.

Too many teenage diaries, the fading empire of bedrooms and I'll leave it at that


ed's note: this may be in fact the new bridge, not built when Ludo was wazzing his way through Central Europe. This must be interpreted as an artist's impression of the scene.

in case you were wondering

Things are getting ever scarier in my workplace. The powers that be flicker and falter like a cheap lightbulb and are forever in crisis mode which means we the workers are never given any justifications for the cutbacks ... in anything but our workloads. My clients consider Wikipedia the last word on everything and I pace the halls in ever-demented circles anything that looks like work.
On the upside, I have new pants.
Two pairs.
One fancy and one pair of jeans.
Now that my war against Calvin Klein is over I have decided to embrace black again. So yes I am looking pretty much as I did in the eighties, though slightly less coiffured. This last aspect has presented me with a new anxiety ... perhaps I am sporting singer-songwriter hair ...

From time to time I worry that my blog is apolitical, and I fail to rail against the ills ravaging our society. And for that I do apologise. It is not that I don't have opinions on such matters or that I am not apalled by the continuing ... I was going to say Americanisation of the world but that is unfair ... I mean republicanisation of the world, but frankly I would be far less interesting on such matters than others. So I'm afraid you'll have to go elsewhere for current news and international crises ... though we did for a short period have a tsunami warning over our head ... but anxieties over self-presentation and impression management against the desolate backdrop of my social life ... as my English lecturer once said ... there is no good fuck in the wasteland ... will have to serve as entertainment.