wishy washy
these are the days i find most infuriating - when the sun shines teasingly thru miniscule tears in the thick grey sky - as tho to gloat: i'm here but you shaln't have me. like some slag with her sewn-up fanny out. so then everything under that sky boils beneath, suffocates and sweats; and each breath tastes second hand and filthy like it came from an emphesemiac's lungs. the sun should either shine clean down or not bother trying. and clouds...either piss themselves or piss off. what's the use of them hanging around in a pack, layering upon one another so that outdoors feels the same as being forced under a ragged grey duvet, beneath which your brother has farted. twice.

i do sometimes wonder if my attitude towards these seemingly everyday things tells tales on me. who else would boil up like a pan of milk over something so fixed as the weather? a little white brat maybe chugging down the street in a pissy nappy - but no adult man, just this side of his thirtieth birthday. maybe there's a rugrat in me then - stamping on the balls of his tidgy yellow feet in a fandango of fury - or a snot-nosed rumplestiltskin, battering his trotters on the hard wooden floorboards so that mummy might hear. if there is, i must forgive him, for his anger is an energy of sorts... well, at least when the blood is fizzing in my veins like that i can feel it there.

i guess my problem isn't control so much as aversion to blah. i don't demand that the sun have his hat on everyday - just that when he does it's a visor. and if instead it rains, let it be enough to float noah's ark. it's the wishy-washy business in between that offends me. if something must be bad, let it be very bad - thunder, not drizzle; showgirls, not donnie darko; murder, not missing child....that way i'll know where i am.

my classes this term are pretty shit - though there are few new interesting people...well two actually. both of them elderly women, but in different ways. the first is a stuffy old monster with the face and manners of pd james. she speaks in a clipped baritone that commands respect and wears beige polyester trousers, like some old bull dyke. more interesting tho are her stories which are outrageously bad. as i say - if bad must be at all let it be in excelcis. and how. it would seem that ms james scours the broadsheet press for a story that takes her fancy then pretty much types it up word for word as it might have appeared there. these stories are not an inroad into the human angle for her, but an opportunity for precis, which she then reads aloud to us all without shame. the first story (about a woman suffering injustice on the gaza strip) was a fucking riot. just cold facts arranged as tho by an automaton. i fancy there are xbox 360s with more soul and poetry than that old statue.

the other woman is a type encountered surprisingly often in classes like mine - the sort i call for short hand 'the baby jane'. they tend to have faces like sultanas that they attempt to paint over with startling colours and frame with peroxide curls. a woman at my class a few terms ago shockingly resembled a burnt barbie...all sinew and brown excess skin. this one is more presentable, but in other ways more of a riddle. i'd say she was somewhere between fifty and sixty - so a good deal has sagged. if she had courtney love's money it would all be tucked up behind her ears, i'm sure - but she hasn't so she just sports her hair, and her kinder-whore look circa '92. her eyes are most engaging - dreamy and childlike that look upon things lingeringly as if for the first time. and this is all matched by a marilyn monroe voice which stutters around sentences and draws out words for all the blood in them. when she has something to say about a piece of writing, it is usually some incidental quirk which made her 'feel something down her spine.' and by the time she's managed to get it out, 2 hours are over and people are packing up their notepads. if i had to guess i'd say valium.

so yes, i enjoy people like this in my classes - they fire my imagination. the other types get on my tits. like the pregnant bitch who sits caressing her ugly camel's hump as tho it were a prize marrow. she read in her first week, which i was kind enough to critique for her. i made notes in the margin of her shit chick-lit story, pointing out where the dialogue was flagging. three weeks later she read again - a story this time about 'attending a new writing class.' one of her characters says 'oh but they write on your work. it's scary.'
to which another asks her 'oh what do they write?.'
'well someone wrote in stubby blue ink  that my dialogue was dull.'
cue: a drawn out compost heap of self-pity meant to wreak revenge on her cruel critic. (moi)

when she was finished i began to scribble fervently on this new piece, explaining to her the nature of criticism, opinion and it's uses. perhaps she had been used to a different style of criticism - or maybe she had mistaken herself for a writer of genius, who just so happened to have stopped by a weekday college class to cheer it up with magic and music, en route to picking up her nobel prize...whatever the case she got what i try always to give: honest reaction - and i expect the same from whomever evalautes my own work. why else bother to go there at all, if not for that?

anyway - i envy her unborn baby. think of the fairy tales it's sour-faced mummy will tell it. stories bustling with details about skinny lattes and laddered tights, and the hilarious embarrassment between the sexes. should red riding hood have that chocolate brownie and then have to do the cabbage soup diet for the rest of week - which will just be murder if it raises its ugly head when she does finally get the big bad wolf into the sheets. what's a girl to do?

 if she asked me i'd tell her straight: just fucking drop dead. i'd write it in stubby blue ink. or shit.