[[[I moved everything. Sorry.]]]

Tonight the most disgusting man stared at me far too much of the time. We were sitting beside each other, facing the same direction, so it was entirely obvious. Every time the bus pulled up to a stop, he bumped his right elbow into my left pelvic bone. Ugh.

Eventually another seat opened up and I moved, but he kept turning around to stare at me more. Eventually I said “what? what?”

“nothing” he said.

“then stop staring”

“spoilt bitch”

Anyway, he got off at Vermont and as he stood up, turned for a final time to say “I get off here. You wanna come? Whore.”

Today I learnt that “The South” is not a geographical term. I’m still not entirely sure what officially counts as the south, I mean, The South — I know I’m not in it now but I’m pretty sure I’ve been there more than once, maybe even as many as four times, except that at least one of those times I was further north than I am right now. Hmm. The West’s exempt, yes? Cuz it wasn’t The West or anything back then? God, I’m foreign. Maybe I’m just doing this because my American accent sounds so horrid.

Plus, I screwed myself right up by throwing Tennessee in the Kentucky file. I’ve been there, I should know better.

After several years of being one of Those Girls, I retreated into reality and all the oh la la and ha cha cha I could stomach. It’s rather fun, you know. Sometimes I don’t get much of any worth done, but I’m working on that. There are some secret plans and obfuscated theories still hanging around, caught in those flashes of 2003 that are probably to blame for the dream I had this morning, a conversation between parties now-unknown :

“so, i guess it’s done?”
“are you kidding? it’s not done. you really think so?”
“well, secretly i’m fundamentally opposed to the concept of ‘done’. i believe in time travel.”

For what seemed like a long while pre California (2003 and the rest), time seemed quite solid even though I realised in theory that I had to be missing something. Nowadays, though, little cracks keep appearing through which I can slip back and forth (at will, it initially seemed, but now I’ve been time travelling a little in my dreams and am not sure how much my will’s involved in those.) I detailed a little of this with my brief air-travel-and-neil-young memoir the other week. My memory fails me sometimes, though, and I reread old stories like the fiction they were pretending to be because I forget where I was when I wrote them. The fast-forward button gets stuck sometimes. I might even be mistaken in thinking any of this is new to me. I could well’ve been jumping from time to time all along. Anyway, it helps that some of us have been documenting small moments for some time now, and I can spread our past lives out before me like faded and somewhat illegible treasure maps. What I’ve lost in memory I gain in perspective. What’s odd and unexpected, though, is the way lost squares of parchment keep arriving on my doorstep without a return address. Please reveal yourself, illuminator.

More from the BRMC shoot at Little Radio. The funniest part was when Christina and I stepped outside for a min and were giggling in wonderment at the melodrama and yelling that’s apparently inherent to film crews, when all of a sudden the yelling was directed at us for “watching” when we should be “interacting with each other.” Of course, we burst into horrified but-we’re-not-extras laughter and legged it.

tangier, 1967, on countess.etsy.com

There’s a story for this one. Not a story about the picture, but the other way around. It’s one of those stories I started ages ago and now can’t find, which probably means I deleted it or something.

It eventually involved blue-skinned girls locked in a basement, a gruesome murder and a boy who wrote desparate poetry in Spanish to try to win over a girl he might actually not like all that much but his teacher talked him into it cuz… you know the drill. I wrote it, it was never going to make sense, right?

Anyway, it started in Tangier, 1967. I should find it one of these days. I was writing it when I lived in that bedbug-ridden half-a-room on Preston Road.

I can picture myself at the computer, and everything else in the room, but I don’t for the life of me know where I put that story. It’s probably only saved in a long-misfiled email I sent to some poor bemused soul at four in the morning back in the bad old days.

[The necklace really is from Tangier, you know. I bought it on the dockside.]

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club shot a video for Berlin last night at Little Radio. I wish stages were always this brightly lit. I was back next day for Summer Camp: pictures soon. Restaurant!

More soon, after I get back from Little Radio again. I should just move in.

Intercontinental/Los Angeles-Century City: You can buy this on imagekind (see the link to your right), or you could go there and take your own.

Apparently Century City’s a magical place, according to the fabulous Brazilian who washed my feet as the helicopters circled overhead, then introduced me to colour therapy. I’d been in the steam room too long (almost impossible if you’re me) and got weird and painful stinging in my arms and legs the whole time I was in the chromotherapy tub.

I started thinking it’d be a great opening scene for one of those crime drama shows I enjoy so much, a CSI or so — Brazilian colour therapist returns to the treatment room to find a skinny naked English girl floating in the chromotherapy tub with her waist-length hair overflowing on either side and the underwater disco lights still flashing.

I was all excited to go to this show, but it turned out to be full of minor catastrophes including missing (what I think were probably) the best bits, developing a random toothache, losing the ability to take pictures, sobriety and then having to call a cab and pay through the nose to get home thanks to all of the above making it impossible to stay for a single second longer. Serves me right for having such a good time every day recently.

I did at least meet Aram, the Armenian cab driver who rescued me from all the drunk and overly chatty people, then called me “beautiful lady” repeatedly and told me I’m a good girl for going home to visit my parents. I somehow had just enough cash to pay.

Naughty Bodies is the only workout video I recommend.