I'm Still Here

Hello, world of blog. I'm still here. I'm busy. I'm writing my dissertation and I don't have a lot of time for anything else. I'm happy, but feeling a lot of other emotions besides. (I have a wounded child to take care of. It's me.)

My Favourite Cat

I want to talk a little bit about depression and creativity.

There was a time when depression was a demon sitting on my chest, a stomach full of acid I couldn't throw up, an undertow in the water, a dark magnetism stealing life from me. Now, depression is like a favourite cat that sleeps on my bed.

There are people we love in our lives, and animals and places and moods and posessions. Some of them, we wouldn't be parted from, no matter how bitter or heavy they can be, because they remind us who we are, and our reason for being in the world.

"We are wounded again in the same place" writes Jeanette Winterson, and I know what she means. "This doesn't turn us into victims. Rather, we are people in search of a transformation of the real."

When I write, I am on that kind of a search. To say something true, and be heard by someone else. To share, and be transformed.

I learned I could write when I was six or seven years old. It was the most wonderful thing I'd ever known since I learned to read. The most empowering thing, the thing with the most integrity, and yet... it opened a door to a world of forbidden things.

In my family, there are stories you don't tell.

I am a survivor, from a family of survivors. And I never wanted to survive. To flourish, yes, but to survive, no. It makes very little difference whether I am the corpse and you are the pall bearer, or the other way around. The year I discovered I could write, I discovered death. People around me started dying. I didn't make them die; I know that. But I asked questions, and I learned what people do and don't talk about, and what grown ups are afraid of.

The year of six and seven was the year I was expelled from the Garden of Eden. I had eaten from the tree of knowledge, and life would not be the same again.

Last week, my mother showed me some writing. It was quite a shock to me. It was mine. They were poems I had written, but not in my writing; they were in my nana's handwriting. My grandmother must have taken my books and copied out my words to keep for herself.

From the moment I learned to write, I learned to censor myself, to please others. That lies heavy on me, and always has done. And I know that I censored myself to protect my family.

We are people in search of a transformation of the real. And my favourite cat sleeps on my bed, and I have bad dreams, and I hear her purring.

Fathers and Sons

After a day of remembering, (and a little re-imagining), today is Talk Like A Pirate Day.

So here's Jack Sparrow for you, talkin' the talk and walkin' the walk, with his dear old dad, a.k.a. the world's most dignified drug abuser, Keith Richards.

What I couldn't have learned, from a father like that...

Like the man says: it's not about living forever.
It's about living with yourself forever.

Inspirational Joker Pussy

My thesis has turned me into a menace to society.

I'm searching for inspiration. Writing the methodology chapter of my PhD thesis, which feels as dry as dust, and I don't want it to be, because it's an interesting topic, it's just that the conventions of academic writing mean I'm not allowed to perform it like stand up comedy, or perform it like a dialogue.

I don't even know if I'm allowed to say the word "I". So meh and fiddlesticks. A decision was taken to explore, yada yada

I am going to sink into a deep bath of warm, bubbly water, and play Jeff Buckley very loudly. Fuck you, world of dust-covered library shelves. I shall be interesting!

Writing is Difficult

Writing is a bitch...

I've been on the road for a week, doing various kinds of things to earn a living. And I've had fun, and done well. I've been meeting people, talking, discussing problems, analysing businesses, and offering advice.

Now I have to write a bunch of reports, and though I know I can, and I want to, I hate it. It feels like it's going to be a struggle.

When I was six years old, I discovered I could write, and it was the most magical, powerful, and wonderful thing ever. I took to it like a duck to water, and by the age of eight I had my picture in the papers.

Writing, before the stars were torn down

When I was thirteen, I can remember being at home, sitting at my desk, and staring at the wall, and looking at the pen in my hands, and thinking I was sick and tired of being popular and successful.

A lot of things happened when I was thirteeen. Bad things, mostly. Regular readers of Hot Vimto may remember The House on Sandygate Lane. That was where we went to live when I was thirtteen. That's the great, hot, dry solid lump of a story that I set out to share with you last summer, and it's still stuck in my belly, making me vomit, and worse.

I'm going to hand over my voice to Sia now. Bless her, she's messed up and twisted, but she writes great songs. I sing along with her, and I dream that one day she will rescue from a dark, twisted sexual relationship with Amanda Palmer, and we will be free to love and cherish one another.

Until that day comes, we are siamese twins, conjoined at the groin and the liver.

Healing is difficult
Often results in psychosomatic
I admit to enjoying drugs
They get rid of tension, boredom and static.

Hate those adverse side-effects
Forcing the people who love me to scatter
Excuse me for being such a hypocrite
The way I see it really doesn't matter.

Why do you cock your head
To the side when you look at me?
Why are my skills in bed
More important than sanity?

To tell you the truth
I can't believe I love you so much
So much in fact that I don't know
Whether to weep or wind my watch
I have a sick sense of humour
It amazes me how points it scores
I'm addicted to vice
My best friends are pushers,
My boyfriends are whores.

Simple to see why I breathe
No one bothers me completely.

Simple to see why I breathe
No one bothers me completely.

Waking up next to you
Your morning breath
Reminds me of Lucy
The flies in the front room
Buzz round my head
And try to seduce me

If I contract illness
The last thing I want
Is to pass it to others
Fucking leaves guilt pangs
When I start forgetting
The names of my lovers

Why do you cock your head
To the side when you look at me?
Why are my skills in bed
More important than sanity?
written and perfomed by
SIA FURLER

Writing and Honesty

I haven't blogged much recently, I know. I have felt like blogging, but have been preoccupied with writing and honesty. It's a hard topic to explain, but I can share this:

1. Writing honestly frees up my insides. It clears all the accumulated nard down there and releses energy, so that I can be creative again.
   
   
2. Writing honestly involves writing as though there wasn't an audience. Writing proper sentences, not just scribbling rough notes. Doing real writing, not a rehearsal for writing. But writing as though I didn't care what my audience thought about me.

I do care what you think about me. (I don't mean you, per se, I mean whoever reads me.) I also care about what I have to say. And communicating ideas requires some compassion, and some persuasiveness... but also, I've realised, a readiness to step back from both of those qualities. To step a little further away from you, and closer to me.

Thought for the Day

"I do not mind being contradicted,
and I am unperturbed when I am attacked,
but I confess I have slight misgivings
when I hear myself being explained."
Lord Balfour

My Queer Studies

I hope you'll excuse me for deviating from my normal standards of trivia and frippery to discuss something that matters to me.


Some of you know, and some of you don't, that I've been working on a PhD thesis, and a fine old mad-making piece of merriment it has proved to be.


I've been researching Lloyd's of London: how the insurance industry negotiates contracts, and the difficulties of designing an electronic environment to negotiate in, instead of doing everything face to face in this fine, shiny building on the corner of Lime Street.

Over the weekend I discovered an important concept that explains something what I've been trying to explain. To my surprise, the insight comes from Queer Studies; specifically, it comes from the insights we get once we stop thinking about nature and culture as fundamentally separate, and look at meeting the universe halfway: how we perform the world into existence by the ways we study it, interpret it, and try to change it.

So there you have it: the application of Queer Theory to the insurance industry. For example, performing New Orleans into existence, again, after Hurricane Katrina. (That seems to be a very slow project.)

I shouldn't allow myself to get distracted, but there's another chapter in the same anthology called 'An Unfinished Conversation About Glowing Green Bunnies'. I mean, that's got to be worth a read, hasn't it?

Now and then I cower

Now and then I cower and I
Need to find empowerment.

Empowerment is paramount
To how I can begin to mount
A plan that I can implement
To make a dent on ignorance


Instead of drunk belligerence
The dissidence of miscreants
Especially in this instance

With the never ending persistence
To use the words in each sentence
As if they were blunt instruments

To beat a hole in the defence
Of beauty and her innocence
Which serves to build resistance
in spite of all my good intents.

Scroobius Pip

Drunk Emails

When we were kids, the television was our babysitter.
The Internet is not our babysitter.
The Internet is a drunk librarian, who never stops talking,
and is always trying to get into our pants.

When I send you drunk e-mails,
And you send me no reply,
Where is the love you feel,
That you give me in the daytime?


Yes these are loaded questions,
Sent to you late at night,
But baby I still need answers,
That I'll take to heart at sunrise.


When I send you drunk e-mails,
And you send me no reply,
Where is the love you feel,
That you give me in the daytime?



Chock-full of typos I know,
Language and grammar die,
Questions that must be asked though,
I won't have the heart at sunrise.


When I send you drunk e-mails,
Why do you not reply?

THE SMALL SINS