I have been listening to Belle and Sebastian’s EPs a lot this week. I have had their songs with pithy one-liners like ‘I was surprised, I was happy for a day in 1975’, and ‘There are people going hungry far away, they’ve got nothing on their plates, and you’re filling your fat face with every different kind of cake’, and ‘Stuart’s staying in and he thinks it’s a sin that he has to leave the house at all’ going round and round inside my head. It’s been that kind of week. I got in a fight with one of the punters at work on Monday. I snapped at one of the grumpy old men on Thursday. Today, I have been thinking bad thoughts about somebody else closer to home. Thinking bad thoughts about this person brought more Belle and Sebastian to mind, titles of their songs this time — ‘Judy is a Dickslap’, for instance, or ‘Take Your Carriage Clock and Shove It’. The person who I’ve been thinking bad thoughts about isn’t called Judy, but their name rhymes with Judy, or at least I can make it, sort of.
I am generally pretty good at keeping the bad thoughts I think about people to myself, and usually they don’t last for long. But on Monday and yesterday I didn’t manage to keep them to myself, and the bad thoughts I have been thinking today won’t go away. They won’t go away, but they are shifting, and now I am starting to think bad thoughts about myself. This is what always happens. I feel justified to begin with, but I wind up feeling guilty. Eventually, I feel guilty enough to apologize, but when I do people have either forgotten I was horrible in the first place, didn’t even notice, or they don’t know what I am talking about because I never actually said anything in so many words. Which only makes me feel worse. I don’t know why it makes me feel worse, exactly. It might have something to do with the fact that people are so nice about how horrible I am. I think I’d feel a bit better if people were horrible back.
Apart from that, this week has been okay. In between the bad thoughts, I have been reasonably content. I noticed the daffodils are out in the Cholera Pit today. I don’t think they were out yesterday, but they might have been. Also, I have lived in Britain for exactly twenty-three years today. We moved here from Japan on this day in 1985. I can’t remember what I was like in 1985. I was probably about the same as I am now, only smaller, and I had better eyesight back then.
the cat rehomed 