Dreaming psychopaths

Jesus, what a crazy dream I had last night. In it, my brother's girlfriend was a psycho. I came down to breakfast, made a cursory comment about her making noise and she stabbed my shoulder with a fork. I staggered to the cupboard, drew out a pyrex dish and conked her on the head. That's all I can remember. Weird...

D'you really give a fuck?

A persistent cough, first felt on Thursday, exacerbated surely by heavy drinking on successive Friday and Saturday, is keeping me up this Sunday night. The robitussin having failed to stymie the grating at the upper reaches of my respiratory system, I have turned to the written word to soften my night. Notebook resting on my lap, acoustic music (Dylan, Travis, Keziah Jones) harping through the small speakers, I'm reflecting on where my year long hiatus is taking me.

Where was I when I decided to put the brakes on back in August? In a professional rut. I would get to work at 8am, motor on bile until past 10pm, leave the office, eat microwaved leftovers of leftovers, and not stop thinking about work until sleep finally overtook me at 2am. On Thursday nights, I'd step out with the team and forget things. On Fridays, I'd try to obliterate myself on single malt. In short, I just gave too much of a fuck about one thing - work, the central pillar of my life. To be fair, I knew that things weren't right, and I took all that my friends said on board. I blamed the job, I made plans, I stood up dates, and all along I knew all I needed was just... time. Or at least, a better appreciation of time.

And now that time has been granted, how do I feel about... work? Well, to be frank, I just don't give a fuck.

Now, I can't wait to get through the day to the evening, to spend a couple of hours deep in the heart of the library, to drink happily into an oblivion of my own choosing, to write words with ease and without shame. Whilst I take care about the work I do at the Institute, it doesn't plague me after hours. I let it go, because my interest veers back to a literary course, a critical course, one that was always there but remained undertrod. So, is not giving a fuck the cure to unhappiness? Not really. To say such a thing would be facile and if anything, it's the symptom of a mind better divided. Neither should it be reflective of any sense of dispassion on my part - desire has instead been re-purposed, channeled through the sluice of self-examination into a pregnant reservoir of freedom. At the moment, I'm seeing it as a therapeutic question, a question to control the mind, like a paper bag over the mouth of the hyperventilator.

Could I could go back to my job, or take another, and still feel this way? Or would the dam give way to a gush of furious stress and absorption, sell my mind back into slavery, working for the Man? I am building, building away, and hope that this sense of matter stays true.

Note: I haven't forgotten that I would share thoughts on The New York Trilogy. I'm putting together my thoughts, piecing ideas as I did essays at university. I was so taken by the book that I spent Saturday morning in the reading room of the London Library (Londoners - I recommend this place as a paradisiaque hideaway), having raided the shelves for anything Auster-related I could find. I still plan to write my thoughts up, but at the moment everything is in notes. My academic specialisation having been literary criticism, I intend to retrieve my critical faculty and do justice in what I write.

The science of small things (and minds)

This evening, I went down to a public debate at the ICA on Nanotechnology. The "science of small things" is getting to be the next big thing in the politics of science, and I felt it would be remiss of me to pass up a bit of education, so I packed up work at 6:30 and trotted down the Strand towards Trafalgar Square.

Walking down to the venue, I felt a shiver of guilt as we passed beneath Admiralty Arch. I still haven't told Zandria (boss) that I have been called back for another interview at the PM's Strategy Unit - she's been looking tired and frustrated recently, and I didn't want to add to her woes by raising the spectre of further staff attrition. I'm wondering what I'll do if there's the prospect of policy work there - I'm conscious that I'd be letting Zandria down, but aren't you supposed to be ruthless in politics? I can sense a moral test on the horizon. Then again, it's just an interview and nothing may even come of it...

As for the event itself, it placed into stark relief just how poor the level of debate is in this country. There were a couple of scientists who made conscise, impassioned pleas for a curb on sensationalism, the kind that prompts the media to print pictures of tiny robotic submarines hurtling through arteries and torpedoing viruses. Apparently, nanobots just wouldn't work this way as the physics of mechanical design don't scale down that far. The viscosity of water is such that, at the molecular level, flowing through it would be extremely difficult for any kind of nano-scale motorised robot. Despite these pleas, and instead of asking for clarification on how nanotechnology could be purposefully employed, the audience persisted with inane questions about apocalyptic visions of matter being obliterated like in some hollywood blockbuster.

More surprisingly for me, the debate was chaired by a researcher from Demos, which is supposed to be one of the leading UK think tanks. Disappointingly, he did nothing to steer the debate or reject repetitive questioning. To think, I was disappointed when these guys didn't offer me a fucking job!

So what of nanotechnology? People want to embark on the ethical debate over the rights and wrongs of it, but I feel we are not even at the stage where this is possible. We simply don't know what the technology can actually do for us, beyond the "InnerSpace" theorising, and without this understanding we're nowhere close to debating rights and wrongs!

Banished by single malt

Margarita returned. She had "excused" herself temporarily, and was now waiting only for me to do the same. A trade in the discipline of human material, if you will.

I had slept fitfully in her absence, my doze broken by neck tensions, clenched hands. The inadvertent hunger tugged at the inner reaches of my gut and - in thinking of her - my thigh...

My throat was beginning to rasp, the nascent itch of a cold. I turned to the barman and ordered some more single malt - one for myself and one for her.

"Of course, I didn't ask for the whiskey," she said, as the glass was settled onto a paper mat in front of her.

"You must drink it"

Margarita leaned down toward the glass and snatched at the amber with her nose. The tips at the crescent of her mouth unfolded, and the scowl of scrutiny gave way to an intrigued smile. She put her hand out to the glass and slapped her hand over the rim. She brought the other hand close, and in a swift turn of the wrist, cupped both together. Bringing the hollow of her closed palms to her face, she pulled her hands apart and, eyes clamped shut, drew in the vapour.

The intoxication was immediate. Her eyes glistened, focusing at a point several feet beyond my face. Her head began to loll forward, jerk back up and roll from side to side. She pressed a hand to my nape and drew me close to where her other hand wsa touching the bar. With the wandering fingertip, she traced out an appeal:

"I-a-m d-r-u-n-k, a-n-d t-i-r-e-d, s-o y-o-u m-u-s-t w-a-k-e u-p n-o-w."

Saddened, I raised my head to look back up at her, but by now she had begun to fade. The glow of her red nail was the last light to vanish.

A Winter Wedding

This weekend was spent down in the South West, at Paul and Nadine's wedding, and a fine weekend it was.

I worked with Paul from 2002 until early this year, he was my supervisor and we became friends through long, hard hours designing process and organisation in the most unglamorous of locations. Having to travel all over the UK for work, he eventually left the firm to train as a teacher and settle down with Nadine.

Opening highlight was the drive down. The fact that I left London to drive down to Somerset at 6pm on Friday meant that it was a night drive. Beyond a long stretch of traffic heading out of the city, the darkness turned what was a forbidding 4-hour journey into an atmospheric night time drive on asphalt, the cats eyes glowing and arcing into the distance. The last half hour of the journey was spent bombing down winding country lanes in the pitch darkness, hi-beams on, ground giving and rising unpredictably - thoroughly exhilarating, and reminded me of my LA-San Fran drive up the coastal highway a few years back. Niamh arrived before me and phoned my mobile when I was supposed to be about ten minutes away, yet such was my entrancement with the roads that I double backed a couple of times and took twice that time to get there. All in all, it took just over 4 hours, and I arrived at the manor house in time to hook up for a drink with Paul and his posse before the bar closed.

I stocked up on good sounds for the drive, and it was smooth grooves all the way. In the discreet warmth of the cockpit, I sang aloud. R Kelly's "Happy People" got put on "repeat 1" for about 20 minutes(!)

It must have been strange for Paul - the two years working on those projects was a bizarre time for all of us. As I remember, we were all doing 14+ hour days and he missed Nadine, and we weren't getting much success with the project, but it struck me that the people attending the wedding from that time hit it off immediately. We'd all "come through" it, so it made things seem distant and safe. Some of them had ditched their high salaries and left the horrific pressure behind them. They're living lives where financial precarity is balanced out with love and family. The cliché that absence makes the heart grow fonder is not without basis. Not having seen some of the peeps for such a long time, I was moved to see them now in their new states of parenthood, marital bliss, homely satisfaction. I find it somewhat redemptive, rediscovering affection for friends you don't see but who you have always liked because they're, well, just decent people by nature and that's not something that changes. It's an affirmation of the human capacity for good things.

I abandoned my camera in the suit pocket for most of the evening, but I recovered attention sufficiently to take a few snatched shots. I've posted a couple below, just for the hell of it...

Note: For the unknowing, and despite the pair theme, I'd point out that none of the below are couples - Chris is married and has a kid, Niamh's currently single, as am I, and Clodagh (my ex-boss) is most definitely already attached!

Paul's Wedding: Niamh and Chris

Paul's Wedding: Clodagh and I

I the wanderer, she the Carthaginian

For nights, I lay awake, supine, my rise-and-fall, breathing, until I noticed the sound of my own exhalation.

Outside, the hammering had finally ended, and the clouds had quit the night sky, bequeathing moonlight to the pavement. As I wandered outside to inspect the completion of the road-digging, the light from the bar burst forth, caught the moonrays flush on the jaw, and I spun around to stare into the window (I have a flash of Hopper's "Nighthawks").

Inside, the cocktail-drinking intellectuelles smiled coyly and beckoned from beyond to where I hovered in the floating world. The first, she pulls to the fore and extending her wrist across the threshold she draws me inside, to where the scent of tobacco freshly burning abounds.

Inside, I signal the barman, and order a large single malt, specifying a cold glass but without ice. Margarita orders her namesake, and it comes with near instantaneity, a sparkling crust at the glass' rim. I am tempted to call for a cigar, but before conscience and craving can be resolved, my companion interrupts with the first of her probing interrogatives:

"Why?"

"Why what?" I reply

"Why the cigar?"

"I don't have one, and I didn't ask for one"

"I know"

"So why ask?"

"I asked that first" (She grins, coolly)

I pause, perturbed at the immediate convolution the dialogue has taken. I was hoping for something sweeter, simpler, better to access some kind of easyspeak. No matter, this is the falling of the dice, there are many throws to be played. I make my case:

"I haven't smoked in a while. I leave it mostly to occasion, and even then I indulge myself sparingly. The scent of the smoke, it sent me elsewhere (even though elsewhere is as I am now, not being fully conscious). As in the midst of an indiscriminate crowd; like catching a wisp of wafting perfume, the scent triggering an old familiarity; so reminiscent of a lover long gone - for a moment, you reclaim the sensation of love, and desire overcomes."

"What you speak of," she laughs breathily, knowingly, "are the residues of sweeter harmony."

Sweeter harmony! How apt! Indeed the past was sweeter, and I know this to be true. Confounded by the bewitching turn of her phrase, my mind gathers pace, friction melting away into the slipstream of her candour.

Disoriented, I call for the Romeo y Julieta No.2.

The cigar is bought for sterling in double digits. The aluminium tube lets forth a soft wheeze as the cap is twisted off. I draw out the roll and, not having a cutter to hand, push the butt of a match into the nub. Testing the draw with a deep inhalation, simultaneously I separate the sheath of cedarwood and place the tip into the candle flame. I hold it, as a taper, to the open folds of the cigar and puff, puff, pout my lips into a ring and O...

Margarita is not impressed.

"A disgusting habit," her voice raises, "and do not think to redeem it through your little pantomime of method!" So quick is her temper, that by the last word, she is shouting.

Our conversation immediately changes tack, the fault at my doorstep for having baited the violence of this dream-vision, coaxing the coals of her immaculate feminine incarnation. I try authority:

"Everyone else, in every other building on this street, under all manner of influence, is asleep." I remonstrate, "and with all the conversation that is to come, mind your mouth doesn't wake them."

"It is not just here. In America, they're asleep too," she points out. "We don't see it, because we think they are hours behind, so it appears to us that when we are at night they are barely at dusk - we fantasise that light remains there. But we fail to see that, whatever hours we yield, there is always the point of the night where we are all in darkness, and night falls upon us all."

I smile, knowingly: "What you have said is not untrue. They may be asleep, yet for us to speak loudly it is to no consequence for them. For from here they cannot hear us."

There was a pause of recognition, a softening of her look. Our eyes met with equity, and so we edged and eddied into a conversation of politics...

Holds barred

Frustration abounds. I am finding my experience of the not-for-profit sector demanding in its need for adjustments in style. The professional culture I have been schooled in whilst part of the corporate environment is clashing with the correctness of the voluntary sphere. It would appear a natural contrast - people join the voluntary sector because they are good people, with good intentions and are, largely, sensitive enough to follow conscience instead of the pound signs. This sensitivity creates etiquette, and people play out politesse and non-confrontation as par for the course. Against this civility and behavioural protocol, I am blunt and unaccommodating. My desire to serve the altruistic cause is competing with the conditioned tendency to aggressive, capitalistic bloodlust. Usually, in the mode of work, I aspire both to brass-knuckle results focus and to machinal efficiency - objectives, immediacy, process, strategy... there is no time for waste. I try to do it with a smile, but I submit my dedication exclusively to the task - as though in worship - and I expect similar from my team.

In the voluntary sector, I'm struggling to maintain the elaborate etiquette of deference. Sometimes, in meetings, I detect reticence and an avoidance of difficult issues, especially when people's feelings are at stake. At times, I feel deep compassion for the accommodation that this emotional engagement brings, but then the docile ground founders. My instinct is to be direct - not with intention to hurt, but in expectation that emotion is suspended when discussing the issue, so as to reach the answer. To divorce the passion, so that rational thought can take stage. There have been moments recently where this has been taken for insensitivity, and I have been perturbed at the thought that to some my words may have barbs.

Nightshift

Outside they're digging up the road. At 1.30am.

Here I am, about to hit the pillow to set myself adrift to think about world order and clever ladies drinking cocktails (a dubious combination, but strangely rewarding - what better to discuss with a clever lady than visions of global harmony?), and a pneumatic drill is beginning to pound through the glazing. How long will it last? I cannot know, but only wait until the silence falls again.

I am now confronted with the challenging of meshing the pounding into my intellectual bar & booze dreams... Suggestions are welcome...

Slumber Breaks

OK, so finally I have my laptop open in bed, it's 1.25am and an entry in the blog after a lull in my posting. Several events have conspired to my absence from my own little corner of cyberspace. Obviously, the outcome of the election across the pond was the big thing. On the Thursday afterwards, I went down to the LSE for a public debate on US foreign policy in the 2nd term. Robin Cook was there, John Kampfner as well. The event was populated by US ex-pats, and worried internationalists (like me!) and the mood was grim. I couldn't bring myself to write a post on the outcome of the US elections. I also started work at the Institute a couple of weeks ago, and things have been busy from the off.

All in all, I am enjoying working at the Institute for Citizenship. The team is small, and I like the flexibility of the hours - and the dress code: nice to be able to dress down when I don't have any meetings. At the moment, I am "programme managing" a project to set up a parliamentary commission. It's totally different to anything I've ever done before, and I think I am bringing my own inimitable style to it. Tonight, I put the finishing touches to a 30-slide PowerPoint deck, in which I expressed my floating passions in abstract diagrammatic constructs.

We already have a rival commission that's been launched this week. They have a flash website, a few celebrity names and a populist feel to them - theirs is not parliamentary, and markets itself on being "not the usual band of civil servants and ex-MPs". I think their omission of the parliamentarians is a mistake - they're preaching engagement without any attempt to reinforce the core democratic power in the land. Style, yes they have it - it remains to see if the substance will be there. They seem to be promising a lot, but I think there are flaws in their approach. For one thing, I think they are going to launch with a bang, then lose momentum. I am hopeful, however, that ours will distinguish itself through a strategy of expansive resonance!

Britney's Bush

I read today that Britney is a Republican who has publicly endorsed Bush. Christ almighty... It boggles the mind that those swing voters who are probably suffering identity crises (such is the limitation of the undecided) may make their minds up based on Britney's preference.