Let me know
if you're coming
and I'll set aside a
mask and some beads
just for you.

Baking

Australian Lamingtons and banana-nut bread from a 1940s Southern cookbook.

New Year's Day, Brighton Marina

the science of the thing; but ye seem to me to be born blind, and believe in your way you do still care something for your daughter after coming in the afternoon, with porters bringing chairs and tables, found it was surely a strange neighbourhood and house for a young lady to be

Insomnia Cure, Hong Kong

First, choose the type of zombie you'll be confronting. They can be classic, slow-movers as in the original Night of the Living Dead, or they can move fast, 28 Days Later-style. Are animals affected? Because you'll want to stay away from the wet markets and other places where locals buy live food. Think through the details of the infection. Are you immune only because you haven't been bitten? Or is this a more apocalyptic situation--is there a disease you alone are immune to, in addition to the zombies (a sort of double alien threat you'll eventually have to confront, a la Day of the Triffids)? What kills the zombies? Is it the traditional destroying of the brainstem, and if so, are organs able to live on independently of their bodies if this brain stem remains intact? Do the zombies retreat when it's light outside? Take some time to consider all these possibilities before deciding.

Next, start to plan your immediate escape route. You are in a massive modern hotel with non-opening windows. This is not good. Think through every escape route, every guest, worker, visiting prostitute that might now be wandering the hallways, either livng or zombified. Who will you save? Is it worth checking down the hallway that your mother-in-law has not yet been turned into a zombie? If you call her on the phone, will the ringing of the phone alert the zombies in the hallway to her living presence? The elevators are certainly not safe, but the emeregency stairwells are a deathtrap as well. What would it take to break the windows and crawl along the ledge to mother-in-law's room, and then to make it all the way down to the walkway along the bay? What sort(s) of weapon can be found in a hotel room? Is there any way of making it the eight storeys downstairs to one of the restaurants where more suitable tools could be found? Or is the risk of re-animated abolone, sharks' fins, gigantic lobsters, and night cleaners too great? Consider all of this many times over, and in different ways.

What are your prospects if you escape the hotel? Where will you go? Hong Kong is an isalnd; you are on Kowloon, on the mainland. It makes sense to get across the bay and eventually band together with other living people to clear the island of all zombies, using the surrounding water as a barrier. Of course, this will be a problem if they learn to walk underwater as in the remake of Dawn of the Dead.

As always, the only hope of long-term survival is knowing how to pilot a plane or helicoptor. But this thought doesn't help your insomnia. Instead, re-imagine your escape plan from the hotel to the island, and how you go about hiding from, and disposing of, zombies once there. Keep going. It'll be light out soon.

Excerpts From Recent Text Messages

Those doorknobs are £62. Each.

Making my mark.

Well, Angus, you want Zoe, you gots to talk to me!

Landslide at Hay Heath, might not be going anywhere.

It's not like they're Jean Painleve.

Don't vomit on me!

We are Ready to Rock with Debbie.

Liverpool is weird.

The woman's father ran the paper mill in Crossett!

Butcher has good lookin mince.

CARRIE!

It's a dark day isn't it.

Go Carrie!

Oh wait, you can't get this text.

Is Strada too fancy?

Alcoholic Gun Club

Spam of the Day

Why is the crowing of a rooster so regular, so persistent?
Although these swallows often nest as single pairs in cavities or nesting boxes, both adults and juveniles now gather on electrical wires by the dozens, socializing before they migrate. Driving the freeway or a narrow country road, you may glance up to a light pole where a large hawk sits in plain view. Ravens often travel in pairs, while crows are seen in larger groups.
Without flapping, it traces a leisurely, rising circle.
Herons nest in colonies, constructing their stick nests in adjoining trees or cramming several nests into one tree.
Quick and agile in rushing white water, they dive to the bottom of mountain streams for food, and use fast-flowing rivers for breeding.
This nondescript bird steps off a small boulder right into the torrent, and begins to peer under water.
Small forest birds, such as nuthatches and creepers may spend the night huddled together in tree cavities.
Putting out a feeder is easy.
Male Raggiana Birds of Paradise perform elaborate displays to attract females, sometimes even hanging upside-down with their wings pointing upward.
Just for a LARK, MARTIN and JAY decided to have a SWALLOW.
Their lives and ours depend on the daily transformation of sunlight, through photosynthesis, into energy.

Guy Fawkes Night

This Weekend

Going to this, wish I were going to this, feeling inspired by this, unpacking boxes, writing about Chapter 5 of this.

Getting There

Befores and Afters

Today

Carpets ripped out and removed; wallpaper removed; upstairs floor sanded, stained and varnished; upstairs rooms painted, downstairs prepped; closet doors removed; kitchen door removed; kitchen cleaned, awaiting replacement; shed and patio cleared; floorboards awaiting placement on Friday; light fixtures ordered; rest of painting happening now; old flat packed; utilities switched over; closet floor varnished and walls painted and bathroom deepcleaned tomorrow; attic conversion starting Saturday; electrician and plumber coming next week; etc etc etc

Ectoplasmic Residue

A Few Days Ago

2 Weeks Ago

Choosing them isn't.

Please Stand By

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Piper decided to pull her weight (seeing as she's not contributed much to the purchase of our new house) and helped M. pack for his weekend in Berlin.

Magic Music Days

Today as I walked past the our neighbourhood chemist where the young homeless drug addicts queue up in the mornings to get their methadone, I noticed one of them was wearing a very garish and familiar t-shirt. The shirt was bright purple and flourescent pink and yellow and green and stated "Disney Magic Music Days!". I once owned a couple of these t-shirts because I endured the magic music days of Disney World at least a couple of times in junior high and high school, after our school band, like many others througout America, spent humilating weekends washing cars and selling candy door to door to raise money to pay Disney to bus us the many many hours to Florida to march in some parade around the amusement park. My guess is that Euro Disney has started a similar programme for kids in Europe, and just look where the UK ones end up: outside the chemist waiting to layer what's left of last night's heroin with NHS meth.

Somethin' Strange in My Neighborhood

Coming across
this window cleaner's
mode of transport
--it even says
"Who you gonna call?"--
thrilled me
even more than
all the guys
dressed like
my boys
at Bestival.
Gotta get
that thesis
written...

M. was in France for 24 hours to assess a show and he came home around 6am smelling of New Orleans! I haven't got to chat with him yet about what he ate or what else he got up to, but his clothes have that distinct and yet impossible-to-put-your-finger-on aroma of sweet and spice and pralines and red beans and rice and beignets and spices that go in a crawfish boil that you sometimes smell randomly around parts of New Orleans. The only other time I've smelled that in Europe was when we went to a Senegalese restaurant in Paris a couple of years ago that served the best boudin I'd had in years. In fact, it was the only boudin I'd had in years.

Ghosts in My New House

We are purchasing a house in Kemptown, meaning we’ll stick around the UK for another year or two at least. It was supposedly used to house workers at the mill that was in the area in the 19th century. We take possession next Wednesday.

I'm two Fall songs in one lately ("There's a Ghost in My House" and "My New House"). Three times this month I have dreamed that the house is haunted. The first dream was terrifying and short; I was being chased in the dark. In the second dream, the current elderly owner of the house was desperate to impart some information to me. She did so in the form of a book of newspaper clippings that described the death of a little girl (Rosemary?) and her mum, who then appeared to me as ghosts. There was something to do with facial mutilation maybe. When I woke up M. asked if I'd had a nightmare and I felt sad and insisted on calling it a “scary dream” because "nightmare" seemed insulting to the ghosts somehow. The third dream had to with ghosts haunting us overhead as streaks of light and sound and me having to shout at them that we meant no harm and wanted to live in peace with them and that they better stop.

In response, I've been re-reading Anelia Jaffe's Jungian An Archetypal Approach To Death Dreams and Ghosts. Though simplisitic Jung-talk about the collectivity of supernatural experiences, it nonetheless drew my attention the figure of the gray man that Anna Karenina sees in her dreams, and then again just as she throws herself under the train. Funny to see him described by Jaffe as a "spirit-maniken" with all the automatonic connotations that holds for me. What to make of ghosts in dreams anyway? When two such vectors of the uncanny meet, maybe it kinda becomes banal and overly obvious. A pair of flapping wings back to the time of the US Civil War, as Mark E sang. As expected.

Bestival

Saturday, 5:45am

Pearls of Genius

My brother has written a funny account of his acting job for a Chinese film about Peral S. Buck (who was played by his girlfriend). On set on Mt Lushan, he took this photo of some beautiful prose of Pearl's, which reveals why she was so lauded as writer:

Years Gone By and I'd Say We've Kicked Some Ass

Happy 3rd year, bbbbbbaby! Who knew this song was about extreme sports?