I'm watching this doc on Netflix about murder-by-torture of a little boy in Los Angeles, thinking - if this was fiction, nobody would buy a script like that's it's just total overkill. Like five different terrible lives happened to the same one boy. You mean he was stabbed AND strangled repeatedly? He had to sleep in a cubbie AND he was fed cat litter? He had a broken skull AND broken ribs that he had to pretend weren't there while going to school? He was shot with BB guns AND had his teeth knocked out? The trial is not so much about the parents as it is about the social workers and the sheriff's office who knew and did nothing and why was that case noting special until some random media outlet picked it up, but I haven't gotten that far in yet. So far I'm just watching and thinking: what a cheesy script, there's no way anyone would find this realistic. I forget how fucked up people can be. 

Kissing (and teeth, but mostly kissing)

As everyone knows, I am a super kissy person. For all the good sex, I can kiss for hours on end and not just mouth to mouth - I sometimes pick a part of G's body and nuzzle against it with my lips and eyelashes for ages, like a knuckle or a side of his waist or something entirely random. Nothing erotic about it. He may as well be asleep or read or watch a film. It is no wonder that prostitutes charge more for kissing, because if you're not feeling it, there is really no way to sell it. There is a scene in a movie I am very fond of called Dear Frankie, where the two main characters stare at one another for a really long time and it is obvious they both want to kiss and will not for many reasons, and it is not until she makes for the smallest move forward that he moves, too. It is so deeply respectful and hopeful and kind. So much hope in that little gesture of allowing someone so close, allowing yourself to be connected to another human being. (Sad movie, but it does end optimistically, even for the adults. Likely the only movie I like Gerard Butler in.)

I spoke with a friend about how it feels to have a dentist touch my mouth - the word I used was gynecological. It is really, really invasive and private, having someone's latex-clad fingers in my mouth, hurting my lips and stuffing cotton into my cheeks. Other doctors don't bother me, not having blood drawn or having to take off my shirt or being weighed and measured or have my precious eyes checked. I can totally daydream through being touched by strangers on those occasions; they're just unpleasant, not really intrusive. Touching my mouth, though. I think half the energy I burnt though in that chair is suppressing the gag reflex. It's necessary, because I keep coughing and choking and spitting up and ruining his work. But it happens a lot. And for the rest of the day, my mouth is off-limits. 

Some new stuff soon to be ready ... :) Glimmer glamour shimmer shammer

Found old farm ruins

... while the boys were fixing a boar-plowed meadow, I rummaged around the woods and found this old farmstead, abandoned after a fire. Back in the day, in school, we were encouraged to sketch out the layout, the interesting details, try to guess who lived here, what did they do, what happened, why was the place not restored ... The main building was too damaged and overgrown to measure (if you didn't have the measuring tape, you were supposed to kind of use your feet one in front of another to get the basic distances), but the secondary domicile was padlocked and better preserved. Still, 30 years in this climate is too long for any building to remain once the vines take off the roof and the roof gives. 

Bars on the windows were slightly decorative. Both the fact there were bars and that they were nice indicates better off housing. 

I don't know yet what this was, some kind of strain or press, either for carpenter work or making barrels? 

Melted bottles indicate fire. You see them often in ruins.

The second building.

A very nice door on the second building.

Remains of the wine press.

Remains of the large barrels (500 liters?)

?

Don't you just hate it when you're getting ready to tell everyone you had to see a dentist about a filling and someone else (a young father of two small kids, no less) says: Ye, my wife's doing fine now, they removed one of her kidneys, but the other one is working just fine...

I mean. It's kinda hard to convince the crowd your week sucked after that one. Being a drama queen is nowhere as easy as people think. 

Eleven in the evening ... it's still a little hard to eat, but the General brought me a small chicken cheeseburger and I snorted that juicy crunchy salad bitch like it's the last cheeseburger in the world.  (Have to cut it up first, but okay. Small steps.) Now the bliss of carbs is washing over me and I am slowly forgetting my cabbage ball hurts. In a few minutes, I will be sleeping next to G, who has a little bit of a cold and is (consequently) snoring like an oversized bumblebee stuck under a plastic bucket. The vibrations are so soothing. He's really warm, too. I sleep with my damaged cheek pressed to his side tummy.

I've mulled through about thirty paints, still about a dozen to go. Sleepy a little and tired a lot. Little bit of morbid thoughts. Probably shouldn't be watching Dead Like Me. :D Wrote a 'if you're reading this, I am dead as fuck' letter to G, but it's just shit he already knows fifty times over.

If there are almost 700 infected people on Diamond Princess and the novel coronavirus has a 2.6% mortality rate on average, how come nobody died? Like, at all? 

Well. So that's root canal.

Now I know.


Fuck me.

Whether it was the half-opened window or the fact the Korant banished the winter over the weekend, but I woke up today to brilliant sunshine and spring birds singing. 

Not sure how familiar the rest of the regions are with the Kurant, he used to be an old god of loud party and screwing, but that is a scary pack of men dressed in an elaborate monster costume, wearing many very large cowbells, jumping and dancing and making a tremendous noise. Their job is to scare winter away. They also scare most of everyone else. 

Alas the costume is too expensive and the effort far too strenuous to go at it half-heartedly, otherwise I would have encouraged the General to join the group long ago. They are erotic as all.

General's cure for fear of dying

I checked the arrangement of pebbles in the mud between us. “He said something good to me the other day. He knows I am so very awfully afraid of dying.”

“But he is a soldier, is he not?”

“Oh, he gets it now, since he knows me. So, I was trying to sugar down the events of … what happened in that midway house when Morphei lost it … My heart could have failed and it would not be the first time Morphei almost separated my self from my body. Either for malicious or annoitive ambition, he would end my myselfness to render me either gone or … someone else. Anyway. Sepp is calm about such things and I could never understand how he could be so despondent – and he's not. He said he is grateful. He said: No amount of days knowing you would be enough. But we had a good run. You had chocolate every day, good sex every day, you read so many poems and you travelled everywhere, sharp pencils and blunt swords. You saved a life. You saw so much art and were asked to make so many decisions. Who, in measure of hand dealt to humans, could have had a better run?..”

“He is strange for a soldier.”

"No, I am really not a nightmare, this really is real ..."

Haha. Another new for me.
In fact, when studying dreams and nocturnal brain dynamics, one of the ways to wake yourself up instantly, as said, was to become aware you are dreaming. This engages the frontal lobe, otherwise unengaged part of the dreaming brain, and janks you awake.
        As per usual these days, while waiting for the dentist to confirm our appointment, I have bad dreams about teeth. In this dream my own was unavailable and a colleague of mine took me to see an alternative - but this woman was rude and cruel and dismissive and would not listen to my priority list (the broken tooth first, as I worry I may damage it further when eating, then the one most hurting and then the rest.) She put that mold thing around the aching one - the mold that hurt impossibly the last time, where the dentist reconstructed the damage from the decrepit crown), and when I was walking home, face numb from the painkiller, I could sense that tooth was so stressed it was coming out. This caused me to tongue it and tongue other parts of the mouth and suddenly, the faster I ran down the VERY long street (one of those London endless ones) more of my dental reconstruction of the previous years was coming undone - finally an iron, rusty flakes of the prosthesis of the top of my mouth with several back teeth attached came undone and beneath it, more flakes of iron fake. Finally I stopped running, my hands full of iron and teeth and said: what the fuck is this, is this a nightmare?

And, I kid you not, the nightmare itself began to try and gaslight me. No, of course it's not a nightmare, of course it's real. In a voice that clearly stated I caught it overplaying the frustration, caught it with its pants down.
       That has never happened to me before. It was hilarious. An embarrassed nightmare backpedaling on an overkill of a phobia. The dream then lingered a little, for a few minutes, me carrying what remained of my teeth in the palm of my hand, and I wasn't feeling so worried anymore. Rather amused, to be honest. 

Please explain to me how plankton is not extraterrestrial?

General's line of the week

G returns to bed in the middle of the evening, (we woke up and decided to continue watching Dredd.) He spoons behind me and we watch the movie on a laptop. 

Me: Um ... is that my toffee pudding I smell on your breath?

G: Damn, I was hoping to disguise it with your raspberry chocolate and your diet Coke. 

General, the toffee pudding thief, doesn't like toffee pudding, he only likes chocolate. So I usually make about 20 cups for him and four for myself, on account of not being able to each much solids. He goes through his lot in two days like a storm. I guess inertia makes him switch to mine. 

    (I have a drawer in the fridge that contains 'my' things, things I don't want others to eat. That drawer is sacred!)

ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME?! ANOTHER TOOTH BROKE?? WHAT AM I, A FUCKING iPHONE PREVIOUS GENERATION - I HIT 43 AND ALL MY TEETH JUST START DROPPING OUT??

Papa Jordan's self-imposed gulag

Looks like those filthy commies are good for something after all. The expert on all things anti-socialism flies himself to Moscow in a last ditched effort to keep himself alive. Hard to know what will kill him first - burnout, starvation or the amount of shit he takes, but I do hope he doesn't die. Not so much because he would be missed, the guy's done enough, more than most on the subject of human rights, really; but because it's important to know not all well-spoken advocates for freedom of speech are such drama queen pussies. Yelling, crying, pouting, those things were adorable! not so adorable as being a psychologist an unable to see the tempo he was running milking his self-help book for all it was worth was not sustainable and then when the spotlight moved from him to his ill-fortunate spouse, he lost the reins and it all spiraled down. He's been known to think he reacts very violently to elements that inspire depression. So it's a little off-putting a trained professional cannot follow a map. An addiction doctor not being able to suspect drugs cause addiction.

I dream about that guy, did I ever tell you? He is impossible to talk to normally, but will always screech really loud to draw bystander attention when doing so and we sometimes spend ages yelling and play-insulting one another in dreams. I haven't for a long while now, but usually, after news like these, I do. Tonight he yelled: I am not arguing with you, because you disappoint me!

Bit of a projection there, but ... get your shit together, swizzle stick. And eat a salad. You are not done.

Birds of Prey TV show from 2002

Were all people back then color-blind? Did old white men think this is what bad-ass women have to look like to be considered bad-ass? In ...... wait for it ...... BLACK LEATHER?! Harley had ... MESSY hair ?? Kinda. But hey, Black Canary was white as fuck. Check out the fake tits and lips on the Huntress, tho. Sweet. 

Praising the costume and bling design for the 2020 version :))

Fun enough fact: it wasn't a bad movie

It wasn't a GOOD movie, but everyone screaming how impossibly shiiiite Birds of Prey is, is just not true. Dude, nobody goes in expecting Akira Kurosawa. It's a cartoonish, hysterical, R-rated comic-book movie with half a script. But there are a lot of really entertaining things about it and if you don't go in DECIDED it's shite, there's gonna be your money's worth of comic book movie moments. 

The actors all do a good job, with what they've got. Fight scenes and camerawork are very good, costumes are great, the lead is enthralling - you can hardly watch anything else while she's on-screen, the sandwich storyline is adorable, there's hyena and the settings are great. It's not a GOOD movie, like Fast and Furious 2 -139 aren't GOOD, but people making this film wanted to make the most of it. The police-station shoot-out is adorable. Violence is really really violent. I didn't hate the pacing and jump-cuts as much as I was told I should. Did I mention there is a hyena? :D 

Holy fuck, I WANT this O.O

General's on me reading him a Bukowski poem

   Me: "You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you."
     G: "I'm a marble?!"