I share with you, my dear reader...

I think the madness that struck me a few days ago was PMS related. Bloated, knackered, looked like shit, felt like shit. Today the dam broke, and suddenly I'm feeling all better!

I'm in a sharing mood. Here goes.

Received an email from someone who used to work for me as a research assistant. Announcing that she is getting married! and I shall be receiving an invitation to their wedding banquet soon. Looking forward to seeing me! She wrote.

They have a website dedicated to their wedding. I am tempted to post it here for your entertainment, but then again, is it really entertainment? It is quite a well put together piece of work, obviously they had paid someone to do it. Yyou can see all the hundreds of wedding photos they spent tens of thousands of dollars on, taken in some studio, on Waterloo Road or in Taiwan or in Shenzhen, she so heavily padded and heavily made up that I could barely recognize her, and her husband-to-be looking like he's trying his best, in various suits and tuxedoes, one of which is trimmed white all over (the tux is black). They were photographed outside palaces, looking over chateaus, on the beach at dusk, holding cuddly toys, giving one another loving looks in awkward poses.

Anyway, you get the picture. It would be nasty of me to put the link here.

Oops!

Have been re-reading Charles Bukowski's journal. He's pretty old when he wrote this, and it is clear that writing is his thing. More than the race track, booze, and women. If you would allow me, here's a random selection:

"You know, somebody ought to invent a decent toenail clipper. I'm sure it can be done. The ones they give us to work wiht are really awkward and disheartening. I read where a guy on skid row tried to hold up al iquor store wiht a air of toinail clippers. It didn't work either. How did Dostoevsky cut his toenails? Van Gogh? Beethoven? Did they? I don't believe it. I used to let Linda do mine. She did an excellent job - only now and then she ot a little piced of flesh. Me, I 've had enough pain. Of any kind" (p. 31)

"I stay away from writers now - or people who call themselves writers. But from 1970 until about 1975 when I just decided to sit in one place and write or die, writers came by, all of them poets. POETS. and I discovered a curious thing: none of them had any visible means of support.....And gradually, I found out this secret, one by one. Most often in the background, well hidden, was the MOTHER. The motehr took care of these geniuses, got the rent and the food and the clothing" (pp. 85-86)

He writes about morons who drive like morons, he complains about nothing worth listening to on the radio, he describes what it's like to be at the after show party of a major rock star (who is an admirer of his work), he bitches about everything. Reminds you of anyone? He writes like a true amateur blogger, the good kind.

I am reminded of something Chuck Palanuik, wrote, a long time ago, in some newspaper or other, about writing. He said writing our own stories is taking control of those stories, of our lives, and everybody needs a bit of that, in one form or another, as a form of therapy, as a means of feeling like a human being. He suggested starting a new religion, called the Church of Stories. The teachings of this church is to help people develop the tools and skills to write their own stories.