Tough Decisions

This blog will be about the hard choices I have to make in my life everyday. For instance – London, or New York? Bread or cereal? Straight or bent? Top or Bottom (League of Legends)?

[tough-decisions]

"Can i get the burger?"

“Where are you thithing???!”

“What?”

“Where are you thithing??!”

“??!?!”

“where are you ttthhhhhhitting???”

“Ohhhhh where am I sitting!!! I don’t know”

oh god you twat can’t you tell she has a lisp and you made her repeat herself so many times always slow on the uptake aren’t you your conciliatory grin and meeting her eyes to show your humanity so useless she must be feeling so self-conscious you already knew didn’t you speech impediment when she first spoke but too preoccupied with yourself to realize dumbass grin you should have said you have beautiful hair but you always either come across fucking creepy or sarcastic only make her more self-conscious yes but yes it is a lovely platinum blonde she probably already knows that but words carry more power spoken in the voice of the other a stranger at that it would’ve made up for forcing her to lisp through thithing. thithing. tithing. OH SITTING what a prat you are well its not my fault insisting on working a service role despite speech impediment maybe she’ll put it down to the music being too loud after all i did ask is there anywhere quiet to sit i hope she thinks it’s not her it’s my ears its all that damned rap music and hypermasculine beats i’ve been listening or maybe she’ll just spit in my burger mustard and lispy saliva dressing on roast chicken definitely self-conscious she didn’t speak an answer just gesticulated wildly trying to say its noisy everywhere great now she’s self conscious about speaking how do you like it when people find it hard to understand your low rumbling voice and wonky accent wow she does have really nice hair though especially with that blue top probably super confident yeah no thanks to you asshole here’s my burger.

[tough-decisions]

Existential Despair

It is after a particularly severe bout of existential despair that this blog is given life. Apart from helping to focus my mind, it helps to give some substantiality to my existence which, since graduation, has been merely about moving from place to place, walking the earth, being purely passive, consuming, not creating, and living on the favors of others. Despite having inhaled, this morning, the largest and creamiest oysters I’ve had in my life (each the size of my hand, from fingertips to carpus (which size so blatantly consumptive might have exacerbated the despair)), my disinclination against traveling remains. Deprived of the comforts of routine my vessel is shriveling, reading comes in spurts and starts, and my drive to do anything at all dwindles with fatigue. Over the course of my existence I have had many memories of traveling and few, if none, have been formative. On the other hand being sedentary and even procrastinating has often pushed me in new directions.

But enough bitchin’.

My Day in Brief

As I write this I’m ingesting both a hefty mug of British milk and a bite of pecorino romano stolen from my kind host to see whether it is indeed American cows that give me the runs.

Burough Market

(Picture from TripAdvisor)

Thank you, google, because I’m so averse towards taking photos.

Oysters from Mersea which, I promise you, were twice the size of these.

512 hours by Marina Abramovic, Serpentine Gallery

I discovered this by chance while meandering aimlessly through hyde park. I’d previously been pretty impressed by some of the things she’s done but I don’t quite share the interest in “ritual and gesture” that this show was interested in, and I can’t blame one of the visitors to the show for feeling a little bit discouraged. In any case, this show was about ritual and gesture, removing the distance between artist and audience, and art without object. There were three rooms. In the main room, the audience was invited to stand / sit (with heavy duty noise reduction earmuffs) facing the center of the room. In the second, the audience was invited to walk thoughtfully and ritualistically from one end of the room to the other, and in the third, in which I participated and became a work of art (that, in fact, I already am), the audience sat hunched over a wobbly wooden desk confronted by a pile of rice and lentils and were told to “separate the lentils from the rice and count them”. Yes, the task was meditative for me, and the moment I put on the pair of heavy duty noise reduction earmuffs that came with doing the task I almost teared up because of a couple of nasty feelings that I’d been repressing chanced upon the imposed silence to break for the surface. But No, inviting the audience to participate in the art was nothing surprising, or crunchy, or particularly interesting, and I left after about a half hour after having drawn rice-shaped holes and lentil-shaped holes on the piece of paper provided, naming them “Rice filter” and “Lentil sieve”, accordingly, as well as scrawling “99 lentils but the rice ain’t 1”.

Guts are doing fine. Some truth to A1 A2 cow hypothesis?