I think I'm a train wreck.

Apparently sleep is not an activity my body is willing to 
participate in.

Argh.  It's all Job's fault.

Anyway; here's my peace offering to the demons of mental stability.


SAINT VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE

Today I am the terrorist of love,
and I wage a war amongst Hallmark cards
and exploding bottles of perfumed scent;
every second toe-to-toe with the enemy,
no man's land left to the scars and shell holes
of week after week huddled in trenches,
spent praying for invisibility,
agonising over the call to charge
which blows a thousand times and never comes.

Do you understand your heroism?
That need for glory burning in your gut
like fire, incense and tracer bullets
unfolding bizarrely against your ribs
and driving you onward, onward, higher
till the rockets leave you shell-shocked and cold,
flat on your back amidst the mud and rain.

Speak no more of fire; O, say you'll speak no more.

We measure out our days in postcard stamps,
sent winging in from Paris or Madrid;
Sealed With A Loving Kiss, sent second class
and spun to make the sentences sound new.
'I miss you, love you, see you soon'; adieu!

With business trips and hotel rooms and guilt
we fight our wars, and timidly appease
our foes from flower stores and chocolate shops;
from every wall and card our Captain stares,
exhorting further misery and light;
good old Saint Valentine, master of spin,
reinvents Goebbels with arrows and wings.

I should be (able to be) asleep...

"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true."
-- Demosthenes

 Gracious but I am exceedingly tired.  And I have a lecture 
tomorrow morning at 8.45am .  And I'm not really doing anything productive; instead, I'm sitting here typing blankly and realising that the most interesting thing that's in my head is how using a semi-colon instead of a full-stop in the middle of this sentence makes a grammatical broken third.  I hate nights like these - not surprisingly, they're when I get most of my work done.

 Have you ever sat down and marvelled at just what a ridiculously complicated, amusing and easily manipulated machine the human brain is?  Because, to be honest, I never have.  Never have, that is, until now!  When (of course) the whole problem will no doubt unravel its age-old mysteries merely for the pleasure of my tiredness-tortured brain; that is, after all, why psychologists and philosophers throughout the age have never quite managed to crack such bastions of shadow and ignorance - they haven't been tired enough.  I tell ya, it all makes sense right now.
 Anyway, I was trying to figure out exactly what facility in the human psyche makes it so susceptible to self-deception.  Not so much on a grande mal scale of completely breaking from reality and wandering off into fairy-land or whatever else turns you on, but rather the subtle twisting of what you can be fairly certain is true into what you would like the world to be like.  Overconfidence, for example, or even underconfidence: to be unsure of your abilities is one thing, but what possible advantage is there to consciously deluding yourself about what you're capable of doing?  It's not like it's something natural selection would have kept going, either - confidence may be attractive, but I'm not sure consistently overstretching yourself is.  Or constant self-deprecation, either.  Meh.
 It's not like I've got any solution, of course, or really any particular idea of why it happens, either: it just amazes me day-in, day-out how American Scientists can convince themselves that global warming really isn't happening, or Comical Ali actually broadcast with a straight face that the Iraqi army is defeating the Americans in the war, or 30 stone men and women claim that they believe they're more beautiful the way they are than if they lost a bit of the ol' poundage.  I actually sit with my jaw hanging near to the ground at the media reports at least once everyday, always thinking exactly the same thing: "surely they can't really believe that; surely they're just making it up."  Scary thing is, the more times it happens, the less sure of that I get.  Is it the new dominant gene, the new natural selection meilleur attribut?  Self-hypnosis, self-deception, self-confidence; what's the difference?

 And if I didn't believe there's a God hanging around somewhere, would I hate myself for wanting to pray?  

 Self-deception?


 I need to go to bed.  All I do past midnight is play Risk, watch films and write bad poetry.

"
CANTILEVER

Life is the place you swing, not looking down,
the earth god's mechanical suspenders,
wrist thick threads on the worldloom's warp and weft.
Love is the music you find in traffic,
our clarion call to the likeminded;
when we fall, we fall together in style -
together they'll hang us high, pretty girl,
and ne'er will wind nor waves nor sky unbolt our lips.
I feel in you the steel spider strands of mercy,
tension and stability in perfect balance;
teach me to spin cables, dangerous girl,
teach me to weave dreamcatchers for skyscraping dreams.

Even when life is a dirty street,
Monday morning on twelves lanes of car fumes
still lift me as only indelicate steel can;
so slender is the span before we're gone
but still you tower through and through my sight.
Bridge the space between romance and reality;
          lever and firm ground
          from which I move the world.
"


Your urban thought for the day is brought to you by a wall somewhere that might or might not be beautiful.  Apparently, it depends who you are.

Life or something.

"Summit meetings, bottled water, secret briefings, infant slaughter,
senate hearings, leather folders, absent weapons, brittle soldiers.
Hail the chief of hearts and minds, mortuaries, we draw the blinds,
shaft the poor, steal by stealth, least Judas went and hung himself;
How did we end up here?

We make the enemy confess, 
we're Jesus wearing battle dress;
chain 'em up and make 'em crawl,
God bangs his head against the wall;
salute the troops with grave concern,
body bags we never learn,
why interrogate the soul?
Dr. Strangelove's in control!
Woe to us, woe to you,
And think of all the revenue!
How did we end up here?

Hunting, fishing, chopping logs, breeding mad saliva dogs,
planted questions from the floor, it's easy to defile the law;
how did we end up here?
Rigged elections, weapons blast, even Satan's quite impressed!
Palaces and marble halls, every single empire falls;
how did we end up here?

We make the enemy confess, 
we're Jesus wearing battle dress;
chain 'em up and make 'em crawl
God bangs his head against the wall;
salute the troops with grave concern,
body bags we never learn,
why interrogate the soul?
Dr. Strangelove's in control!
Woe to us, woe to you,
But think of all the oil revenue!
How did we end up here..."

-- Martyn Joseph: 'How Did We End Up Here'

Just thought you might want to know that.