Bedazzled

I wonder what the last three months would have been like, had I not been made to stay back late at work, again, like Cinderella, for a deadline that never happened (to add insult to injury).

Less obsessive, certainly, but it’s been fun, kind of, and I do now have that photo of Karl I can use to frighten the horses (and children and other animals, large and small, and probably anyone of a nervous disposition…)

"" (Watch on YouTube)

It wasn’t something I’d planned. I was chugging away, reading my John Le Carre, watching cool classic 60s films, all for UNCLE fics that spooled out in my head but never committed to paper. To be honest, I was loving the books more, I came to adore George Smiley and pals, and the films, oh, give me that mid-twentieth century aesthetic.

So it wasn’t really something I’d planned at all, and I didn’t think I’d be that upset (it wasn’t the first time I’d missed out on things for work). But I was. Then I decided to go see the film anyway, and work, ahem, sabotaged me, three times (one more night and a weekend). Seriously Kirk-blocked.

Okay, so now I was upset. I think it was the grief, too, over Anton’s sudden and awful death that twisted the knife deeper than it ever should have gone. It hurt. And I was unwell, so unwell I tore my retina being unwell.

So, exhausted, grieving, unable to have my own life, I got up at 2am on a Sunday, for crazy work deadlines again, in deepest darkest middle of winter, and worked until midday. Then, instead of going to see the film, I had to take myself to the hospital to get my eye checked. That took eight hours.

By the time I managed to get home I was beyond tired, scared, hurt, upset, woozy from quality hospital meds and my eyes blown so wide open that everything was starbursts. The first JJ Abrams film was on telly and so, you know, I thought something was better than nothing.

Ok, so I was high, exhausted and everything was lights and I’m watching Mr Lens Flare and then this golden boy, this sun king, Apollo himself, walks on screen, and dazzled doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was… glorious.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Simple Minds - Glittering Prize

I’ll never experience anything like it ever again. I know I was off my nut, delirious, but man, it was fun. It moved me, as they used to say.

So now I’m a goner, trawling through his back catalogue, searching for that elusive hit. I know it’s stupid, but what else am I’m gonna do with my waste of a life, and it took my mind off the very real possibility I’m going blind (not to mention other RL merde).

Which is why I was playing ‘if it’s the last thing I see’, and, for a whole month, the universe decided to play along: Foxtel was screening wall to wall filmography, the JB bargain bin overfloweth and every second billboard and bus stop at the posh end of town was graced by his cheesy mug. It was like being in the Matrix, in really was. It was fun.

And besides, the filmography wasn’t that bad. Okay, there were a couple of films that I’d fork my own eyes over if I had to watch again (but my eyes are already forked), but the kid does good work, every time. And he’s funny, and I saw him drop references to Vermeer and Hopper in the same sentence. And he seems to have a thing for that mid-twentieth century aesthetic I still can’t leave alone. So I'm smitten, a bit, just a bit.

But I know I’m being annoying. Macbeth, the house possum who usually sleeps mere millimetres of asbestos away from where I sleep (as in ‘sleep no more, Macbeth doth murder sleep’) screams and stomps to the other side of the house now if I play a YouTube clip. Sorry, possum (this is what happens when you raise your possums to be serious anglophiles).

And yet, I don’t want to stop, just to please others. I’m having fun. I’m waking up at 2am in the morning (that might be Macbeth coming back after a night on the tiles, but still) with the story going so fast I can’t get it down. Housework is neglected while I spend hours just trying to capture some of it before it vanishes. It’s like I’ve been waiting since I was a kid to write this, and now I can’t stop.

Well, the writing part yes because I still do 18 hour days at work, so no writing, but they have yet to find a way to stop it playing out in my head.

It’s a pity, because it could be some of my best. It’s like I’ve been teaching myself how to do this, since forever, reading books, going to every Shakespeare play I could my whole like, just so I could drop a line here of there. Stupid, I know, but, I think that’s exactly what I’ve done, in a round about way.

This is my last time, let me have fun. (More to the point, let me have some of my freakin’ TIL so I can fill up another notebook of silliness). No one will ever see it, but I just want to get it out of my head. It’s been in there too long.

So yeah, they should have let me go that day, three months ago. None of this would have happened. No films, no cons, no meeting old friends, no ferries at sunset, no finishing off something I tried to write when I was seven. Yeah, you damn well should have let me go.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

The Dandy Warhols - You Were The Last High

Meanwhile, the bus stop is infested with redback spiders again. These are the little bastards that'll drop you dead if you don't get immediate medical attention (and used to drop you dead when I was growing up). But last time when I rang the council, all I got was 'yes, my three-yeard-old niece is also scared of spiders'. Bitch. Well, let the spiders swarm then, see if I care (well, I care a bit, I don't like hanging around deadly spiders, no matter how small and pretty they are).

Dammit, Jim

I don’t know why I fret about wasting my time and not living a right and proper, i.e. normal life.

For one, normal just wasn’t on the cards – I came out wrong, and was subsequently violently abused every way you can imagine, and then some. So no, no normal life for me. Abby Normal, that’s me. Screwed up damaged goods, abandoned and alone.

But even if you were to criticise my priorities and task management skills, let me tell you, I’m so badly screwed over by others I barely have the time and opportunity to make my own errors of judgement. Fer instance, I’ve just lost over four days on unpaid overtime to jobs that are going nowhere except oblivion.

Now we’ll never know how much of that time would have been spent diligently on cleaning the bathroom, sewing new kitchen curtains or dealing with the wasteland that was the backyard (thanks to the very nasty neighbours I’ve not been out there in ages) or, as is more likely these days, watching average movies and scribbling extremely bad fan fic, so it doesn’t matter. Not at all. Nothing matters.

Though I could have filled up another notebook in four days (and maybe have cleaned the bathroom), maybe even two notebooks. I’ll never know. And all for nothing. Nothing.

Yeah, I don’t know why I’m constantly pouting and sulking and carrying on like a teenager, either.

At least, frantically checking my phone, I’ve found a possible screen date for Hell or High Water. I figured it’d have a release date now, because I was spoiled for the ending the other day. Damn freakin’ Americans. They’ve all seen it, so what does it matter to the rest of us? Ah well, I knew how it was gonna end anyway, I guess, that type of film never ends well.

Still, gonna go see it, because I love neo-westerns (see my box sets of Justified), and, you know, Chris Pine.

Oh, deal with it. He’s been on my radar for a while, since he’s a repeated offender as far as turning up in projects with Brit boys I like (Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alan Rickman, James Corden, etc.) and, well, tough. I need a little sugar to get me through what is shaping to be another character forming month.

All mod cons

Current playlist: Two Door Cinema Club, Bad Decisions

I think I was a little harsh on my previous year-long re-obsession with the Man From UNCLE. Because it was fun. Aside from giving me an excuse to dust off the DVDs and my collection (I was a notorious collector so I have the books, magazines, comics, etc.).

And there were a couple of trips to Melbourne, because the NGV love their mid-twentieth century modernism, and they had exhibitions on mid-twentieth century Danish design and mid-twentieth century Australian fashion and fashion photography.-

There were also that trip to the UK that involved some fun scouting of locations, the accidental mod walk of London (the one that started with Carnaby Street and ended with The Jam exhibition), and seeing the film again in Leicester Square, because I try to be in my shabby hotel room as little as possible in London (you pay $$$ for very little compared to local hotels, for shame, London, for shame).

There was a side visit to Bletchley Park, the ultimate spy theme park, which I also loved (Turing pilgrimage).

Not to mention getting into John Le Carre. My Dad tried to get me to read him when I was younger, because they were proper spy novels, and had no volcano lairs. I left them alone for the very same reason. And I’m glad I did, because coming to them now as a thoroughly embittered civil servant, I get it, I really get it, as its 90% hair tearing office politics and only 10% Checkpoint Charlie shenanigans, if you’re lucky.

By happy coincidence, my reading coincided with The Night Manager on TV and I won tickets to see Our Kind Of Traitor (by then I was fan enough to answer the quiz without resort to Google).

So, yes, my year of wallowing in the spy genre was fun and satisfying. Educational, even (as there’s a lot to learn about the Cold War that I never knew when I was actually living it).

So I don’t want to say it was a waste of time. I loved my days out in London and Melbourne. I loved re-watching old films like To Catch a Thief and North By Northwest. I loved playing my old 60s CDs and records.

I’ve read up on Philby, watched all the films, discovered Agatha Christie wrote a lot of spy novels disguised as ‘Tec fic, revisited Buchan and Fleming and dabbled with Greene.

Yeah, don’t call it a year wasted, because honestly, I achieved little else. But I saw some groovy threads, heard some groovy tunes, saw some pleasing Danish chairs and discovered a new favourite author. Not a waste of my time. Please don’t call it that.