i wonder where he got his scars

I never say how lovely tea is.
I've actually managed to have a nap (o noes! the evil nap!), and I'm perking myself up with a cuppa...and o, dear God it is one of the most fabulous things.
I just listened to your single, Nicky, and I think it's...very you. You little fruitsation, you. I had this sudden, awful, wonderful memory of you playing me those sad little punk songs you used to write about me (which were never terribly complimentary, but hey, we were sixteen). I still don't like your nasal, whingey, Blink 182 voice, but awh...you're all growed up and making music!
So, there's this graphic novel. It was written by a bloke called Gibson Twist, and the art is done (I think) by Ben Steeves, and, as it was Gibson's birthday just a bit ago, I'm going to go ahead and tell everyone I know (via blog) that he's a pretty brilliant bloke, and his work is probably the most realism you're ever going to get from a webcomic. Go look at it.
Erm. Yes. I've been trying to write poetry.
I'm not getting away with it.
I mean, it's good stuff.
But it's pointless.
If you can find a point in it, please tell me.
This one's called L'Enfant Trouvé, une femme. (pretentious? moi?)

O, Hadasseh,
daughter of the
morning, did you fall
to earth like lightning?
Did you make a
storm of absinthe in your
sugar-jewelled tea-cup?

The fairest broken
nightingale sings tinny
lullabies, harmonised
to delicate, edible
suede-soft whispers
in the dread of
summer nights.

I am the child of
promise, leaked,
by aneurysm, onto your
shoulder, haemhorraged
grey matter, composing,
composing, the ode
to joy, deafly.

This is your volatile
tenderness; a vacuous
seduction, a holocaust;
the tanned-tissue lamps
are given to Diogenes,
with my heart thrown
wide open, just for you.
(fin)
and scales.
Also, TERRY PRATCHETT!

nous sommes les etranges

Ack. The weekend came and went, and I had forgotten just how lovely it is to crank up the hotel's heat. Guh. It's freezing in my house. *grouchy face.*
Oh. You guys.
I really shouldn't be surprised about this, but yesterday morning some retards at IHOP mistook me for a man.
It was epic.
As if I don't feel wretched enough on Sunday mornings.
Anyhow, the server thought it was hilarious, but she gave them the evil eye for me. Downright decent of her, I say.
Oh, and I'm looking to do a study of a Bougereau, just with some gender-tweaks.
Stay tuned!

speaking of which...

I think it was the watercolours' fault, but I had a dream last night that Josh was giving me a real dressing-down about something...I may have bent him over the bar again and started flicking quarters toward him, or maybe I was flirting with Monica, but he went off like a tiny little hot-man firecracker, and my spine snapped straight and suddenly all I could think of was him pulling my hair.
Yes. I need help.
But how random was that?
Oh, and pray for me. The weekend approacheth.

last today, i swear to sweet little baby jesus

i really, really regret not asking josh to sit for me.
that's all, really.

okay, okay, okay!

I had a look at my blog and realised that in order to find shallower posts, you'd have to bang up Paris Hilton's webpage, but in all honesty, sometimes that sort of nonsense is required for me to make it through very cold days.
Maybe long, warm boots and Hugh Jackman's chest are the only things that evoke that sort of very deep, emotional response in me.
Well, not really. I like puppies, whole bunches. And new pictures of Drake make me go to complete mush. I'm surprised every time I realise he has Betsy's doofy grin, or that their eyes are the same shape, and he has Julia's ears, or that the kid is two fucking years old, and I'm missing him being a toddler.
It's cool...I'll just have to make it up to him when he's old enough to remember, and I'm not skint as a Weasley.
Guh.
I am knackered, and properly, too.
Oh. Wayne Barlowe really, honest-to-god scares me.

Australia!

I forgot how happy Hugh Jackman's chest made me.
I think I'm actually getting a little choked up.
It's been so long, Hugh...hold me.

YAY!

I don't think I've ever been so in love.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so to make it finite.
G.K. Chesterton said that. The trouble is, it reminds me of something Douglas Adams said, and so makes me giggle. I don't think the point of Orthodoxy was to make me giggle.
Erm...I did, however, manage a really brilliant character study when I'd finished the first three chapters and a bit of the fourth. I'm not sure why, I think Chesterton's style of dictation is just so diametrically opposed to mine that it woke something up. Nasty little habit, that.
Also, I'd just gotten a new moleskine note-book, and those things demand to be talked into, in whatever way you want.
People should trade their therapists in for a book deal and several hundred moleskine notebooks.
There would be a huge ruddy upswing in the lit market.
Oh. Yes. I've been thinking of selling out to the Strathmore trading card movement. Come on, it's such a cute idea!
O God...I've found the boots I want.
http://chineselaundry.com/indShoe.asp?type=b&store=c&id=3514&sess=10210859835717728

Hey, Baby!

Oi.
So I've got a couple of days away from home before the big weekend comes charging along like an enraged rhinocerous who's had a decidedly uninviting run-in with Steven Segal's hair cream.
Figured I would give an update to the old coughalong blog, despite its cirrohated condition as of late.
I can't say I've got anything, really, to post. Just the usual. I've been considering starting to read a lot (and I mean a ruddy LOT) of nonfiction, cause my bookshelf is overpopulated with self-gratifying nonsense by Sacher-Masoch and Jacqueline Carey. Sensing a pattern, here?
So my first foray into the whole shambling nonsense was going to be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I got sidetracked by The Feminine Mistake, which I, personally, think, is hilarious, even though puns are against my religion. It's not strictly a pun.
Oh, and I've decided, tentatively, on a title for my novel. What do you think of Drink up the Sea. You could do a whole lot with a title like that. And no, it's not Biblical, I'm afraid. It's from Nietschze's parable of the madman.
In other news, I hate my neck muscles. They're all cramped along my right side.
I've been looking for a link to give you, but I can't find one. So, I guess I'll leave you with nothing.

Enschuldigung, ich bin ein Amerikanner

I desperately want a nape piercing.
Get better, Chris, or I will personally induce your third back surgery.
This is very, deeply annoying. I went to my bookstore yesterday, specifically to find and buy a moleskine notebook, pocket-sized, squared paper, and they didn't have one. It was, to say the least, ridiculous. Of course, I did, somehow, manage to buy myself a dress and a pair of adorable pedal pushers, but that's beside the point. How am I going to be creative on the go without my favourite notebook?
Maybe the Lord's trying to teach me a lesson about buying overpriced journals.
It's getting colder, and for some reason, my dry-cleaning hasn't been picked up. This means, of course, that I am going to have to finish painting the miniature that I've started, for some reason or other.
I am sick to death of abstractism (she said, in her rambling way).
Actually, I was thinking of poetry.
I was sitting, two weeks or so ago, beside a thoughtful young man who was quoting a poem, and I, very guiltily, half-listening, realised that I've forgotten all or nearly all of the poetry that I used to know by heart. Even William Blake's 'Tyger.'
Well, we'll have to just deal with it, shan't we?
I wrote a flash fic the other night. It's very, very short, and doesn't have an end, so I'll type it up here.
Warning: contains profanity and uber-fluff.

She was very, very thirsty when she got out of bed; so thirsty that a litre of water wouldn't help. Neither did tea, or juice, or beer. She tried it all, and slunk back to her room feeling rather defeated.
He was still asleep, broad back solidly toward her, ink-strewn right shoulder traced by the light flickering sneakily through the drapes. The sun had come up outside, but it was still very dark in her room. It was meant to be.
She didn't want to disturb him, of course, because logically, that would be very unkind. He would growl nonsense words, and be rather cross, even if he did curl a possessive arm round her and pull her decisively into his very warm chest, and kiss her closed, dry mouth with his soft cherub's lips. Obviously, she wouldn't do that. She very much wanted to, though.
Instead, she sat at the edge of the bed, fumbling for the cardboard box on her end table, and match (she didn't hold with lighters), and struck up a Davidoff. She could only just make out the bold lettering pasted on the front of the box, 'rauchen ist tödlich!'--and the little skull and crossbones. She couldn't read the fine print, though, in the dark.
She inhaled deeply, feeling tar and nicotine spread through her choked, shrivelled lungs. She liked this very much; it was extraordinary, relaxing. Never as good as him, of course. She'd admitted this not very long ago, and only to herself. She liked him more than smoking her long German cigarettes, more than she liked swimming in a cool tropical ocean, more than eating shortbread or drinking beer brewed by Trappist monks in Belgium.
'Stop fucking smoking that utter shite.' he growled, almost unintelligibly. She couldn't help smiling. 'I'm going to tear every single fag up, and feed them to my mother's goldfish. She's going to be very upset with you when they take ill.' her smile deepened.
'And why,' she luxuriated in one more long drag before stubbing out the hardly started cigarette, 'would she be upset with me, seeing as you've fed them my fags?'
He turned round, grey green eyes glowing just faintly, phosphorently, in the near darkness. 'Because, obviously, you've compelled me, with your filthy habit,' he took her round the middle, with embarrassing effortlessness, and dragged her down beside him.

In Idleness We Forget

I realise that I haven't been very active on here. But let's face it, I have approximately three readers, all of whom are Andre. That's life. I'll deal with it.
Anyhow, I was reading Psalm nineteen this morning, and a phrase from verse four leapt out at me. I'm not all that into Biblical poetry, but this was stunning, and I realise that it was the only phrase that could ever be the title for my great novel, to be completed before I'm thirty. Which means I have about nine and a half years more. But anyhow, the verse says,

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun.

And I was thinking, wow. A Tabernacle for the Sun, M. Deutsch, would look really fabulous on a leather spine in bold black ink. So I googled to see whether it was an available book title, and guess what. Some bird called Linda Proud has already snatched it up. For some bolloxed novel about a Venetian runaway. How lame is that? I mean, honestly. Mine would at least have been contemporary and transgressive and borderline gonzo. Let's face it, I write compellingly.
Giggle.
None of you have ever read my serious fictional work, and we're going to leave it like that until I'm thirty, all right?
Anyhow. So that's all through with, and I was thinking and thinking about another title, cause nothing sums up what I want to write about as much as that phrase.
It's like Hebrew names. I love Hebrew names, and should I ever have babies (they will be with David Tennant, or Daniel Craig, let's not mistake things), they're going to have good Hebrew names, even if I end up with a little girl called Mannaseh and a little boy called Devorit.
But, yeah, I've come to the conclusion that whatever novel I write, the title's probably going to be something out of the Bible, and not because of this nonsense trend that's come out about writing faux-shocking things about religious canon (take that, Dan Brown!). It probably won't have anything obvious to do with the Bible, and you're going to have to squint very hard to see the very deep philosophical and social statements I'll be making, but oh, trust me, they'll be around. Hidden in long, langourous scenes about lovers touching one another with their finger-tips as they asphyxiate in tombs, or a screaming old man making sacrifices to Baal-Jupiter, kneeling in the brick-red Arizona desert, sucking water from aloe vera plants and cutting his feet to ribbons on the Mojave rocks.
Oh, yes, you will squint.
And you will be wrung out like a dishrag.
Move over, Ian McEwan, I'm going to make people cry like you've never dreamed!

On the Metro

You might remember, if you've known me long enough, how a long, long, time ago I was madly in love with a tall, slim brunet with big blue eyes and a flirty wink. He was called 'Drake,' but I determinedly called him my Adonis.
Well.
He has been effectively replaced.
By a skinny little man who gives me free coffee and shortbread.
I love my Nicky.
I will fight you for him, Aimee.
Also, David Tennant.
Here, c'est moi.