![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd dimensions
Feb. 27th, 2012 07:09 pmGraffito visible from the DLR: YOU ARE BEING WATCHED.
Can you feel anything?
All Londoners are real people. Each lives in their own world made of paper and wires and fashion statements; some sing to themselves, forgetting the others are there. Once or twice a day, someone else's dream bubble might brush against your own, and you might smile at them, and they might smile back.
I never did get to go help my brother sort the house out and that is unfair, and I knew it, and I asked (with reference to Witches Abroad obv) if the clearout was a shovel job or a match job. He told me they filled ten skips.
TEN.
GET RID OF ALL YOUR STUFF, GUYS. IF YOU ARE NOT USING IT, THROW IT AWAY ASAP, BEFORE YOU DIE AND SOMEONE ELSE HAS TO DO IT FOR YOU.
I think we're all going a little mad in different ways; we are three very different people. H wants to travel the world for a while. Z just had her wedding blessing (this would be her third wedding event) and is about to leave for a month-long holiday in Asia. I just threw my life off a cliff and I know it, but at least there weren't any real surprises when Jay and I were playing with my deck together; whereas he drew all minors, which, hey, he just doesn't do.
I am so not kidding when I say I don't have a lot of family. The wedding blessing party was cause for Z's inlaws to call for a mass family reunion. Z reached as far as second cousins, and what she got was H and me+M, our maternal uncle plus his wife, and one of our father's remaining cousins with her very quiet husband; regards were sent by the uncle's son+wife+newborn brat, and by a couple of other second cousins who couldn't make it. Jay and Kathie came too, because always.
I have met my second cousins maybe twice each and couldn't pick them out of a crowd; figure they mostly avoided my father. I greeted the one who showed up warmly, and sent my love to her absent sister; she may as well have been a stranger, as if family is an opportunity to love strangers.
I was already not living in no 30. Z's husband noted my strange expression on the stairs, carrying things, asked if I was saying goodbye to it; I explained that I did that years ago (and didn't explain that I was thinking about getting back into writing my stupid dubcon fic.) As we drove away I looked out at the other things I'm no longer doing; eating cheap baklava, walking on Ealing Common after dark, skating down to the Chiswick Roundabout and working on tricks in the huge empty space under the flyover; being west london, living through my feet. It was already over and had been for years. I am learning Plumstead and Woolwich, the razorwired-off residential streets around the Royal Artillery Barracks, the psychadelic cheeselump temporary structures for the Olympics, the things on the other side of the river. We drove the full arc of the South Circular, and here I am living London from a one-eighty; other side of the mirror and a little closer to the rushing waters. Would that I had the energy to leave the house.
Z insisted on bringing her tomato plant with her - the one that took over the entire kitchen window and is supported mostly by a coathanger over the curtain rail - and it is a sign of the company I keep that I suggested she train it to attack intruders.
There are piles of books all over the new house in Plumstead. Some of Z's bookcases haven't been filled yet and others have yet to be assembled, and this is kind of an issue when you are living with the accumulated pulp obsessions of three generations on your back.
And I was alone in a boxroom at 2am and contemplating rereading the LHM, then discovered that the one bit of it in my proximity was vol 2. I have never felt so first world problems in my entire life.
Once I've moved, I am very much hoping I can build this kind of social situation up in Boston. Tons of sleeping space, a few giant floor cushions, endless supplies of teabags and bikkits, friends coming and going; six of us this weekend, somewhere between five and seven next. I am so sick of not having this; joyless and distrustful in my basement flat with my dog and my sicknasty mind is not enough, and that means I need to move somewhere I can feel joy and trust people.
Can you feel anything?
All Londoners are real people. Each lives in their own world made of paper and wires and fashion statements; some sing to themselves, forgetting the others are there. Once or twice a day, someone else's dream bubble might brush against your own, and you might smile at them, and they might smile back.
I never did get to go help my brother sort the house out and that is unfair, and I knew it, and I asked (with reference to Witches Abroad obv) if the clearout was a shovel job or a match job. He told me they filled ten skips.
TEN.
GET RID OF ALL YOUR STUFF, GUYS. IF YOU ARE NOT USING IT, THROW IT AWAY ASAP, BEFORE YOU DIE AND SOMEONE ELSE HAS TO DO IT FOR YOU.
I think we're all going a little mad in different ways; we are three very different people. H wants to travel the world for a while. Z just had her wedding blessing (this would be her third wedding event) and is about to leave for a month-long holiday in Asia. I just threw my life off a cliff and I know it, but at least there weren't any real surprises when Jay and I were playing with my deck together; whereas he drew all minors, which, hey, he just doesn't do.
I am so not kidding when I say I don't have a lot of family. The wedding blessing party was cause for Z's inlaws to call for a mass family reunion. Z reached as far as second cousins, and what she got was H and me+M, our maternal uncle plus his wife, and one of our father's remaining cousins with her very quiet husband; regards were sent by the uncle's son+wife+newborn brat, and by a couple of other second cousins who couldn't make it. Jay and Kathie came too, because always.
I have met my second cousins maybe twice each and couldn't pick them out of a crowd; figure they mostly avoided my father. I greeted the one who showed up warmly, and sent my love to her absent sister; she may as well have been a stranger, as if family is an opportunity to love strangers.
I was already not living in no 30. Z's husband noted my strange expression on the stairs, carrying things, asked if I was saying goodbye to it; I explained that I did that years ago (and didn't explain that I was thinking about getting back into writing my stupid dubcon fic.) As we drove away I looked out at the other things I'm no longer doing; eating cheap baklava, walking on Ealing Common after dark, skating down to the Chiswick Roundabout and working on tricks in the huge empty space under the flyover; being west london, living through my feet. It was already over and had been for years. I am learning Plumstead and Woolwich, the razorwired-off residential streets around the Royal Artillery Barracks, the psychadelic cheeselump temporary structures for the Olympics, the things on the other side of the river. We drove the full arc of the South Circular, and here I am living London from a one-eighty; other side of the mirror and a little closer to the rushing waters. Would that I had the energy to leave the house.
Z insisted on bringing her tomato plant with her - the one that took over the entire kitchen window and is supported mostly by a coathanger over the curtain rail - and it is a sign of the company I keep that I suggested she train it to attack intruders.
There are piles of books all over the new house in Plumstead. Some of Z's bookcases haven't been filled yet and others have yet to be assembled, and this is kind of an issue when you are living with the accumulated pulp obsessions of three generations on your back.
And I was alone in a boxroom at 2am and contemplating rereading the LHM, then discovered that the one bit of it in my proximity was vol 2. I have never felt so first world problems in my entire life.
Once I've moved, I am very much hoping I can build this kind of social situation up in Boston. Tons of sleeping space, a few giant floor cushions, endless supplies of teabags and bikkits, friends coming and going; six of us this weekend, somewhere between five and seven next. I am so sick of not having this; joyless and distrustful in my basement flat with my dog and my sicknasty mind is not enough, and that means I need to move somewhere I can feel joy and trust people.