they’re coming to take duane barry away

I finished knitting my X File friend’s Duane Barry Alien Delusion Scarf on Monday night. It’s a bit clever because the whole thing looks stripy head on, but when you angle it backwards and forwards the aliens come in and go out of focus. I like it, but I’m not sure my X Files friend will ever wear it, unless she happens to go on an Arctic expedition one day. Perhaps she will keep it somewhere, rolled up like a scroll. Maybe she will unroll it one day when I am far far away, and remember the time we wanted to believe.

Apart from knitting, I have mostly been skiving off trying to be a logical person. I have been reading Monkey by Wu Ch’êng-ên instead, and listening to Damon Albarn’s music project based on the same. The dog is moulting, and I have been pulling out his hair by the handful. I have taken the jigsaw puzzle to pieces, and hidden the pieces from the cat. I have relapsed into date addiction. I have been invited to have a flu vaccine with the over-65s next month. I feel old and tired enough to take the doctors up on it this year. I’ll be sure to take some knitting to do while I wait.

glue sniffing is so passé

Apparently, in Australia kids lick cane toads to get high. This is the most useful thing I have learned on week two of the how-to-be-a-logical-person course I am doing. I am so bored of trying to be logical, if a Class A toad were to hop into my room right now I think I would be tempted to lick it.

Nothing much has happened, apart from I went to the dentist on Monday and had two more teeth filled. Toads or no toads, the world has gone somewhat David Lynch on me this week, probably because I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I feel a bit like the rambling mad Japanese girl towards the end of Inland Empire, the one with the friend who lives in Pomona, wears a blonde wig and owns a pet monkey, if I remember rightly. I have had profuse verbal diarrhoea all week, and have been given a few strange looks. People have been looking at me with furrowed brows. I don’t think I have been making much sense. I blame it on trying to be logical. Trying to be logical is turning my brain into mushy peas.

I have three aliens left to knit on my X Files friend’s scarf. I finished my brother’s jigsaw puzzle about thirty minutes ago. There were five pieces missing, but it was okay in the end because I found the cat’s hiding place. He had hidden the missing pieces under the table, along with a couple of pigeon feathers. There isn’t enough light and I don’t do flash photography, so I will take a photograph of the finished jigsaw puzzle tomorrow. After I take a photo of it, I suppose I will take it to pieces. The jigsaw puzzle, I mean.

i’m just your average thundercats ho

I have survived the first week of the on-line course I have to do for work, to learn how to be a logical person. So far, I have learned that being logical is incredibly boring. And that I don’t like ‘discussing’ things on the internet, especially when the people I have to discuss things with use far too many exclamation marks and ’emoticons’ (that’s what my brother says they are called, anyway). Yes, yes, I can hear you already, there’s no need to shout. And don’t you wink at me with your semi-colon, either. I know for a fact you are as old and uncool as I am. I don’t say this to them, of course. I just bury my head in the keyboard and groan.

For another five weeks, my life will revolve round going to work and doing this course when I get home. I haven’t had a chance to do much else this week. I am slowly but surely burning all of my CDs on to the hard drive my best friend gave me for my birthday. So far I have burned four days and three hours worth of songs. I have been listening to a lot of music I had completely forgotten about. I had completely forgotten about The Moldy Peaches, for example. Kimya Dawson and Adam Green are funny, in a completely deadpan, illogical kind of way. That is the kind of funny I like. I saw them once at the Sheffield Leadmill. They were dressed up as a rabbit and Robin Hood. Apart from listening to The Moldy Peaches and wishing they were on my course, I have been knitting a few rows at a time of the Duane Barry Alien Delusion Scarf for my X Files friend. I have also been doing my brother’s jigsaw puzzle a few pieces at a time. I haven’t got very far. I fear I am fighting a losing battle, because I keep seeing my subversive feline flatmate wandering past with random pieces of jigsaw puzzle in his mouth. I haven’t figured out where he is hiding them yet. I hope he isn’t taking them outside. The cat is bemused by wool, but he is obsessed with abducting my jigsaw puzzle, one piece at a time.

By the way, on the subject of The X Files, I am reading a book of Japanese Tales, and have learned that aliens had invaded Japan already in medieval times. They’re coming in 2012, my arse.

captain is a cowboy killer

That’s it. I have got everything done on my list*. Today is the last day of my summer wasting. I am trying not to think about tomorrow.Until tomorrow, I am going to carry on in the same vein as yesterday. I am going to fend off the cat by shouting mclusky at him, so I can get on with the rest of my jigsaw puzzle, not to mention my life. I dread to think how many pieces of either he has taken already and hidden away.

*Okay, so I haven’t written about Season One of The X Files yet. But technically that wasn’t on my list. Maybe I’ll write about Season One when the next film comes out in 2012.

the elephant returns to earth

Here goes nothing. Pretty much as soon as William was born, Mulder disappeared to hide from the super soldiers, leaving Scully behind to be a single mother. Queue wailing music as Scully stares forlornly into space, but only until William starts moving the mobile above his crib with his mind, which convinces Scully that her ‘miracle baby’ is an alien, after all. Meanwhile, Doggett was forced to drop his investigation into Deputy Director Kersh. There was a woman who could breathe underwater, who turned out to be a super soldier, who used to be a friend of Doggett’s in the marines. She was quite nice, apart from she was in the habit of holding people underwater until they drowned, but another friend of Doggett’s from the marines who was also a super soldier wasn’t so nice. His name was Knowle Rohrer. You could tell who the super soldiers were because they were indestructible, and also because they had prominent bones in their necks. Knowle Rohrer was on a ship with a secret lab that may or may not have contained Scully’s ova in some sort of Jiffy bag attached to a revolving washing line, but the ship exploded before Scully (who had left her mother looking after William) was able to find out. Then an old married couple who were in the middle of playing a game of SCRABBLE® were killed by a demon. Only it wasn’t a demon really, it was a schizophrenic man in a mental hospital who had the ability to kill people in horrible ways remotely. Doggett and Reyes solved the case, but only once it was too late, and with a little help from Scully, who by then had returned to the FBI as a pathology instructor at the Academy in Quantico (‘Quannaco’). Presumably her mother was looking after the baby while she was at work. After that, in a different world, a man who could travel between parallel universes shot Doggett with Reyes’ gun, which he’d taken from her after he’d cut out her tongue, and the wrong Doggett, who survived but had locked-in syndrome, wound up in the wrong world. The right Reyes had to pull the plug on his life support machine to get the right Doggett back. There was a boy with pheromones that made him a kind of Pied Piper of flies. Then Mulder sent his ‘Dearest Dana’ an e-mail, but their secret meeting was thwarted by the nosy super soldiers, even though it transpired the super soldiers weren’t as indestructible as they seemed, when one was finished off by no more than their proximity to a certain kind of magnetic rock, which was quite an oversight on the part of their alien creators, but still. Doggett had his memory and one of his shoes taken away from him in Mexico. A bunch of reformed criminals were skinned alive. There was a second UFO in Canada like the one Scully found on the Ivory Coast. This UFO seemed to have both the power to heal and the power to kill. It also seemed to need Scully’s baby, who was duly kidnapped by a bunch of UFO worshippers. Scully gave the Lone Gunmen, who she had put in charge of the baby because she didn’t trust her mother to keep him safe, some dirty looks. But everything worked out in the end. Scully found William alive and well amid the charred corpses of the UFO worshippers, with the UFO nowhere to be seen. If I remember rightly, that was the episode Jim out of Neighbours made his first appearance as a super soldier. It was back to Doggett and Reyes after that, and almost straight away Reyes was in a car accident. A doctor put her into a coma on purpose, and said she was brain dead. Everyone said her machine should be switched off, except Doggett, who figured out Reyes wasn’t brain dead but trapped in a hospital inside an orderly called Audrey Pauley’s head. Then Doggett was almost killed by the wrong side of a cable guy’s split personality. Burt Reynolds was an all-singing, all-dancing, checkers-loving numerologist with a boot full of music CDs. Agent Harrison, Doggett’s one-time Mulder-loving partner from accounting, persuaded him (Doggett) to investigate an X File involving a boy with a maliciously over-active imagination. Scully post-mortemed a cat on her kitchen table, while Doggett, Reyes and Harrison fended off imaginary scary monsters. The Lone Gunmen died as heroes, having saved the world from a suicide bomber with a fluorescent bio-weapon wrapped in shark’s cartilage implanted in his chest. A man with a disfigured face turned up claiming he was Mulder, but was actually Mulder’s half-brother Jeffrey Spender, who somehow had survived being shot by his (and Mulder’s) father, the Cigarette Smoking Man. Spender injected William in the head with something, I’m guessing ‘the vaccine’. Scully got angry, but when she had William checked out at the hospital, the doctors said he was ‘normal’, as in not an alien. That was more than Scully could cope with, so she gave her baby up for adoption. Doggett finally found out who killed his son, and threw his ashes into the sea. Then there was a lonely psychokinetic man who lived in a house with the Brady Bunch. And THEN there was ‘The Truth’. Mulder broke his cover (he’d been hiding with Gibson Praise in the Arizona desert, as it turned out), and was promptly arrested, having supposedly killed the super soldier Knowle Rohrer without the aid of magnets, which everyone knows is impossible. Mulder was put on trial, and to cut a long story short, everyone, even all his old enemies, came back to testify on his behalf. A lot of dead people came back as well, but as they couldn’t testify, they just hung round and spoke to Mulder instead. Even Krycek had some friendly advice to offer. But what chance did Mulder stand with the juddery-jawed Walter Skinner defending him, no jury, and judges like Deputy Director Kersh and Jim the super soldier out of Neighbours? In a word none, and Mulder was sentenced to death by lethal injection. But Mulder escaped with Scully thanks to Kersh, who seemed to have decided to jump on the bandwaggon and be Mulder’s friend, too. He told Mulder to head north and leave the country, but Mulder and Scully went south instead, to see the Cigarette Smoking Man, who had survived his cerebral disease, not to mention being pushed down the stairs in his wheelchair by Krycek and Marita Covarrubias. He looked like a hippy and was still puffing away through his tracheostomy tube. Mulder and Scully demanded ‘The Truth’. ‘The Truth’, it seems, is that the aliens are coming to get us, in 2012. Mulder and Scully left, and the Cigarette Smoking Man was blown up by the government. Doggett and Reyes looked on as Knowle Roher was really killed by a magnetic rock. Mulder and Scully went to bed, feeling a bit more optimistic than usual, even though they were ‘on the run’, and thanks to Scully they had lost their son. The end.

papier-mâché project, phase one

Here are the first photos of my papier-mâché hand in the making. It is supposed to be a right hand, but it is starting to look more like a left one. That, unfortunately, does matter quite a lot for my purposes, but I’m not sure what there is to be done. [photos missing]

I have never made a papier-mâché anything before, and I am enjoying myself, not least because it is making me feel incredibly French. I am also enjoying making a mess. I am making a right mess. My papier-mâché hand is drying now, ready for its next layer of flour and water and newspaper, which I will apply after work tomorrow.

I am off work today for working on Saturday. Apart from making the hand, I have been waiting for the parcel I arranged to have redelivered. I am slightly nervous, because it is yet to arrive. I am excited about this parcel because I know what it is, but I am not allowed to open it until Friday. I hope it gets here by Friday. I have also finished what I can of Issue Five of The Elephant Returns, which will be out just as soon as my papier-mâché hand is complete.

I am running out of things to do on my list. The last big thing left is to finish writing about The X Files. My head hurts just thinking about Season Nine. I might go and make some popcorn and see how I feel after that.

gezunteit

I am doing quite well with my list. After getting up ridiculously early and going to work yesterday morning, I sorted out the passport photos I need for my application to sit the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. The seat in the photo booth was broken, so I had to lean forwards and hover to make my face and eyes fit in their designated places. In the photographs, I have a slightly furrowed brow, and look as though I am about to take off.

Then I went to the health food shop to buy dates and popping corn. I also went to a haberdashery (I like that word, it sounds like sneezing) and bought the wool for my next few knitting projects. Wool is expensive, but I was thinking about it on my way home, and at least it is less expensive than cigarettes. This big pile of wool cost less than all the cigarettes I used to smoke in a month.

It was tempting to start knitting when I got home, but I made myself fill out the JLPT application form, arrange a parcel to be redelivered, and write about The X Files instead. I’m not exactly sure why I am writing about The X Files. Maybe I thought it would be funny. Maybe I spent so much of my time watching them this summer, I want to have something to show for it. Or maybe, because I started writing about them, I feel the need to finish, which would be unfortunate, as I still have Season Nine to write about. Oh, and Season One. I just remembered I haven’t written about Season One yet.

After I gave up writing about The X Files last night, I read about how to make papier-mâché. I also looked on the internet for a new pair of trainers to replace my old falling apart ones, but I got bored and wrote a few e-mails instead. I asked my best friend if he knows what ‘Puis-je le donner un coup de pied?’ means. He thinks it means ‘Can you kick it?’, too, but he is about as rubbish as I am at French. He said he would check with l’homme Français, who from what I understand is still dans La France avec l’enfant.

I wrote an essay for The Elephant Returns today. I also sorted out the pictures for the translation. I went out to buy the Observer, but only to make papier-mâché with. I also bought flour. I picked up a chew for the dog, and also the duvet he wet himself on last month. Then I sat in the sun with the him for an hour, and finally finished reading The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. After I finish writing this, I am going to read the book I am reviewing for The Elephant Returns, in between having tea, going for a walk with the dog, and sleeping.

I only hope I can keep this up. I have one week left until I turn into a pumpkin.

the elephant is out there

Now then. Where was I?

Oh yes. The X Files were finished again. On their return from Antarctica, Mulder and Scully re-encountered the ‘more human than human’ Gibson Praise, and went chasing heat-loving aliens that burst forth from body cavities, until they (Mulder and Scully) lost them (the aliens and Gibson Praise) in a power station somewhere in Arizona. I think it was Arizona. Having been reassigned to the mean, horrible and nasty Deputy Director Kersh, Mulder got in trouble for driving ever westward with Patrick Crump, a somewhat unpleasant man with an exploding petrous temporal bone. Then Mulder went to the Bermuda Triangle to find a ghost ship called The Queen Anne, on board which he was punched in the face by a woman who looked remarkably like Scully, who back in the real world was kissing Assistant Director Skinner, who on the ship was a Nazi, but an all right one, unlike Agent Spender and the Cigarette Smoking Man, who it goes without saying were evil. Then, in a Freaky Friday moment, Mulder swapped places with a Man In Black called Morris Fletcher at Area 51. Mulder-as-Morris did a little dance in his white boxer shorts, while Morris-as-Mulder bought a water bed and spanked Scully on her backside. Scully saw through him, of course. Once he was back to his old self, Mulder lured Scully into a haunted house on the night before Christmas, where the two of them shot each other, only they didn’t really. There was a devil that was desperate to have a human baby, and a woman who was desperate to have a devil baby. A cow fell from the sky in Kansas and almost landed on Mulder. Skinner was almost killed by a scruffy-looking man in a wig, who turned out to be the one-armed Alex Krycek with an ingenious remote control. There was a man who couldn’t die that spent his never-ending life taking photos of death. Cassandra Spender was returned. It transpired that she was the world’s first alien-human hybrid. It got very confusing after that, and Cassandra and the dodgy men in the Syndicate, apart from the Cigarette Smoking Man, were set on fire by the faceless aliens. The Cigarette Smoking Man shot his son, Jeffrey Spender, for being a disappointment compared to his other son, Mulder, who was then put back on the X Files, with Scully. The first thing Mulder and Scully did was go to Florida to fight a man-eating sea monster in a hurricane. Then they relived the same Monday over and over again until they got it right, went undercover as a married couple in suburbia, and chased a phantom man-dog. There was a man who could pass through anything except glass, which ultimately lead to his undoing. Scully became a character in a novel about hearts being ripped out of bodies, which Mulder’s creepy next door neighbour was writing. Later, it transpired that the best baseball players are, in fact, alien. The Lone Gunmen were caught up in a conspiracy in Las Vagas. They enlisted the help of Scully, but Scully was too giggly and girly and high on something or other to be of much use. She almost smoked another cigarette, which was almost lit by Morris Fletcher, only she’d forgotten who Morris Fletcher was as soon as he and Mulder switched places again at Area 51. Once she got back from Las Vagas, Scully unwittingly got high again, with Mulder this time, on giant subterranean man-eating magic mushrooms. After that Mulder went mad, and Scully found a spaceship on the Ivory Coast.

While Scully was busy making rubbings of the spaceship and discovering that human beings originally came from outer space, Mulder was screaming like a banshee and bouncing round a padded room. Skinner went to find Michael Kritschgau, and between them they pumped Mulder full of drugs in an effort to sort his head out, which worked to a limited extent. Things soon got messy, but it was okay because Scully came home. Mulder was abducted by the Cigarette Smoking Man in a Darth Vadar moment (‘I am your father’), seemingly to begin an idyllic, X Files-free life with (Dirty) Diana Fowley, only that wasn’t what actually happened. The Cigarette Smoking Man was just messing with his head, apart from the father part. Scully came to save Mulder in the nick of time, and Mulder realized he preferred her, really, which is a good job because the next day someone, probably the Cigarette Smoking Man, shot Diana dead. Mulder got over that surprisingly quickly and, with Scully, was soon stalking a starving-hungry, obsessive-compulsive, brain-eating burger joint employee, who for some reason had detachable ears. They also stalked a necromancer and some zombies, and Mulder snogged Scully on millennium eve. Then there were the kids who could move faster than the eye can see. And THEN there was Henry Weems, the one-eyed luckiest man in the world, the man with the Goldberg machines. Donnie Pfaster, the death fetishist-cum-devil, came back for Scully, his ‘girly-girl’. He should have known better than mess with Scully, besides which he still wasn’t sure about her hair type. There was a magician with no legs and a spinning head. Mulder was attacked by one priest or other and his snakes. Or actually maybe one of the priests was a snake. I can’t remember. Mulder’s mother killed herself, and Mulder saw his sister, who as I understand it really was abducted by aliens and experimented on, but the government was involved somehow. In any case, she was brought up at an army base with her other brother, Agent Spender, until she died and turned into starlight, along with lots of other suffering little children. Then Mulder and Scully went back to chasing werewolves, claw monsters, and bee men. They got trapped in a virtual reality game with a scantily clad Angelina Jolie lookalike. There was a simple but scary voodoo man who was inspired, amongst other things, to microwave his victims like ‘popping corn’. Scully went on a date (kind of) with the Cigarette Smoking Man, much to Mulder’s disgust. There was an outwardly perfect town with a seedy underbelly, an angry, repressed housewife, and ravens. Scully slowed down, had a religious experience, and had sex with Mulder. In an unrelated incident, Mulder almost died because he passively smoked a cigarette infested with killer tobacco beetles. Scully saved him, because she is a ‘Medical Doctor’. Then there were more zombies, dancing ones, this time. A pair of doppelgängers created havoc every time they crossed paths. A djinn was released from an rug and made wishes come true in unfortunate, literal ways, but it wasn’t all bad because Scully got to post mortem an invisible man. Then Mulder and Scully went back to Oregon, the place in the pilot episode, in search of more UFOs. Scully collapsed. Mulder was abducted by aliens as Skinner looked on. Skinner went to the hospital to tell Scully, who it turned out was pregnant.

An agent called John Doggett was assigned by Deputy Director Kersh to find Mulder. Scully didn’t like Doggett and threw water at him. With Mulder gone, Scully and Skinner took it upon themselves to believe everything without question, and went to Arizona in search of Gibson Praise, and the spaceship Mulder was on with a load of people from Oregon, being tortured by the alien bounty hunter. The alien bounty hunter was also looking for Gibson Praise, doing so in the form of Mulder, which confused Doggett, but not Scully and Skinner. No one found the spaceship or Mulder. Gibson Praise just kind of disappeared, I think. Doggett pissed Kersh off and replaced Mulder on the X Files. His first case involved a human bat, and in his second he rescued Scully, who had wandered off on her own in the middle of nowhere, and had a giant slug forcibly implanted in her spine by a religious cult. There was a scary boy who turned out to be dead, who was returned unchanged to his parents years after being kidnapped. A lawyer friend of Doggett’s was charged with murdering his wife, only he couldn’t remember, because he was living his life in reverse. Doggett didn’t believe him, but Scully did. Then Scully had to go into hospital, leaving Doggett to sort out a man with a third eye in his forehead, who killed people in their dreams with a big axe. Doggett found his own third eye and almost killed Scully with the same big axe. Then there was a man with x-ray vision who just wanted to be loved, a man who was supposed to be dead but wasn’t because he was made of metal, and a Indian beggar man with no legs who gained entry to stow away in the abdomens of fat Americans by way of their rectums. Doggett and Skinner learned that, before he was abducted, Mulder was dying of the cerebral disease that had sent him mad for a while and was triggered by the spaceship Scully found on the Ivory Coast. He’d had a headstone made and everything. There was a sickly soul-eater that Mulder had declined to be consumed and regurgitated by, but who saved Doggett’s life at the expense of its own. Then Doggett went underground to save commuters from a killer sweat-activated organism that was fluorescent green. There were alien babies, and Scully got paranoid that her baby was an alien. Then Mulder’s fellow abductees started to be returned one at a time. The lucky ones were healed by Jeremiah Smith, but he flew away in a UFO just as Mulder was returned. Mulder was dead. There was a funeral, but a few months later Skinner had him dug up again, because another similarly dead abductee called Billy Miles had come back to life. Only he hadn’t. He’d come back as an indestructible alien super soldier to colonize the earth. Alex Krycek reappeared and told Skinner there was a way to get the real Mulder back, as long as Skinner made sure Scully’s baby was never born. Skinner took it upon himself to kill Mulder instead, in so doing saving his life, with a little help from Scully and her anti-virals. So Mulder was back. He didn’t like Doggett much, and they bickered for a while over the coming alien invasion, whether the evil that killed Doggett’s young son was contagious, and what to do with a bunch of men infected with black oil out at sea on a rig. But then Mulder was sacked by the FBI, Scully went off on her maternity leave, and everyone made friends. Doggett was given a young and excitable new partner called Harrison, who was from the accounting department, and was an ardent fan of Mulder and Scully. After she was almost killed by a lizard man, she went back to accounting. Meanwhile, Scully was about to give birth, and all of a sudden the super soldiers were after her baby, and she got paranoid again that her baby was an alien. She ran away with Doggett’s friend Reyes to a secret location to have the baby, while Mulder, Doggett and Skinner dealt with the super soldiers, who were seemingly everywhere. Skinner also dealt with Krycek once and for all, by shooting him in his head. In spite of all this effort, the super soldiers caught up with Scully and Reyes, and things became tense. But once the baby was born, the super soldiers quietly left. Mulder and Scully were reunited, and bonded with each other and their baby, who Scully named William, after Mulder’s father who Krycek had shot. Reyes became Doggett’s partner on the X Files, and together they vowed to bring down Deputy Director Kersh, who they suspected was in league with the super soldiers.

I can’t take this any more. I’m going to stop now.

i am not sure i want to believe

I have survived my first week back at work. I am getting used to being dizzy. Whenever I move, I feel a bit like I am on a boat. But I have stopped being seasick now, and am unfazed when a wall or the floor rushes at me, as they are wont to do if I move too suddenly or fast. It really is possible to get used to anything, given time.

My UFO friend and I went to Dudley after work on Wednesday. We sat in a pub called the Bostin Fittle for several hours. ‘Bostin Fittle’ is a brilliant name for a pub. I was hungry for the first time in weeks, and ate a great big spicy bean burger and chips. Then my friend and I went to the cinema to see the new X Files film. It was bad, but not as bad as I thought it might be. It was silly, but more than anything I thought it was sad. Mulder and Scully seemed old, tired, slow and depressed. Scully’s face didn’t look quite right in a (I’m guessing) plastic surgery kind of way, and Mulder’s was wider than before. He looked better with a beard. There were no aliens, but, predictably, there were bad Russians. Not so predictably, there was a Rottweiler body with a Staffordshire Bull Terrier head grafted on at the neck, which reminded me of my dog, sort of.

I am glad I went to see the film, mostly because now I have watched all nine seasons again plus both of the films, I feel ready to get on with the rest of my life, at long last. I’m not sure about wanting to believe, but there are a lot of other things I want to do. I want to finish reading The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. I want to knit an alien illusion scarf. I want to put together the next issue of The Elephant Returns. I want to hurry up and pass those exams so I can go back to Japan. I seem to want to do something new every day at the moment. I was watching the Olympics earlier, and decided I want to be a Chinese gymnast. Who knows, maybe a good shake is what my vestibular system needs.

order odonata

The cat caught a dragonfly yesterday. I have no idea where he finds these things. I have never seen a real dragonfly in this country before, and I have lived in this country for twenty three years. The only places I have seen dragonflies in this country are on record sleeves, and also on the front of a T-shirt my best friend used to wear, on the back of which were giant letters that said ‘LSD’.

The dragonfly the cat caught was missing a leg and appeared to be in shock, but it was still alive. It squirmed when I touched it. It was almost as big as my hand. I felt bad taking photos of it. Afterwards, I picked the worst of the cat’s hairs off it and put it outside. When I looked about an hour later, it was gone. I hope the cat didn’t catch it again. I hope it managed to fly away.

I have been off sick for the last few weeks. The world went all grainy and cross-processed and green first of all, then I got the chills and was sleepy and dizzy for about five days. I felt a little better after that and got out of bed, but when I woke up the next day the world wouldn’t stay still. I fell over when I stood up. I threw up when I moved. It was like a scene from The Exorcist. I have been seeing an over-enthusiastic doctor who says he is interested in epilepsy in dogs. I don’t have epilepsy and I am not a dog. I don’t think this doctor has a clue what is wrong with me, but he is okay. I have to go back for some blood test results next week. I am going to make the doctor let me go back to work, because I am bored of being off sick, and being off sick is even more boring than being at work.

I am still dizzy, but I have been up and about more since Friday. I have been to the shop. I have sat in the Cholera Pit with the dog, and I have staggered round the Barley Mow with him twice now. I have been reading. I have worked on the Guardian’s ultimate summer pop quiz. I have almost finished it. I don’t know what ‘puis-je le donner un coup de pied?’ means, or whether The Shins will really change my life (I doubt it, somehow). I don’t know which geometric shape is missing from ‘Dr _’ by Dr _. I believe that the probability that Take That are exaggerating when they claim to have sung a million love songs is high, but I am yet to figure out how to express that in numerical terms. I was never very good at maths. I am impressed I have managed to answer the rest of the questions, even the ones with square roots.

I have lost the will to watch any more X Files for the time being. My brother thinks The X Files are what made me sick in the first place, and perhaps he is right. I haven’t mentioned this to my over-enthusiastic doctor, because I don’t think he would want to believe. Speaking of X Files, my new upstairs neighbour, the one who looks like Diana Fowley, and the boyfriend she screams with at night, the one who looks like the alien bounty hunter, have disappeared, along with their big black Mercedes with the tinted windows. Come to think of it, they disappeared about when I got sick. I’m not sure what that means.

the elephant was abducted by aliens

Here is what has happened since the last time I wrote.

Mulder and Scully wanted to believe in little green men (well, Mulder did), but The X Files were taken away from them. So they chased a giant fluke through the sewers of New Jersey for a while instead. Later, someone sprayed a town with LSD and people started seeing messages in machines. The messages were telling them to ‘Kill ’em. Kill ’em all’. Quite a few people died, until Mulder worked it out and saved the day. Alex Krycek appeared, looking like he belonged in a boy band. A sleepless Vietnam veteran who could project images into people’s minds was out for revenge and killed some more people, including himself. In the meantime, A. D. Skinner told Mulder how he nearly died in ‘Nam, and Skinner and Mulder bonded, sort of. Duane Barry was abducted again, but no one believed him. So he kidnapped Scully and got her abducted instead, but it didn’t do him much good, because Krycek killed him anyway, before he (Krycek) disappeared. Mulder was sad and slept with a vampire. Then Scully came back and nearly died, but lived in the end, which made Mulder happy. But he was also angry, because he suspected Cigarette Smoking Man was involved in Scully’s abduction somehow. Skinner reopened The X Files, supposedly because ‘that is what they are most afraid of’, but really he did it to shut Mulder up. Then there was a killer fungus in a volcano, bovine somatotropin (or was it?) in the food chain, and magic mushrooms in an old people’s home. A nice woman got pregnant and turned into an evil killer man. Scully was almost killed for her hair and her nails by a death fetishist called Donnie. The devil turned up at a high school, and it rained toads. There was some kind of weird Haitian voodoo involving dead people that weren’t really dead. The Alien Bounty Hunter appeared. So did Mulder’s sister Samantha, who had been abducted by aliens in 1973 (or had she?). Only it wasn’t Samantha because the Alien Bounty Hunter made her disintegrate into green goo. Mulder got angry again, ran off and was infected with an alien retrovirus. Scully saved him, though, so everything was okay. Then an elephant was abducted by aliens. Mulder and Scully were exposed to free radicles on a ghost ship, got very old, and very nearly died. Then they hung out at a sideshow, which was funny. Scully ate a locust and Mulder pulled a coin out of her ear. Then Mulder took part in a Transylvanean exorcism. A lethal disease involving exploding pustules was unleashed by a sinister drug company. A mad scientist got stuck in a particle accelerator and his shadow turned into dark matter. Scully was almost eaten by cannibals, either that or she was almost turned into chicken feed. Somewhere in the middle of all of this Mulder’s dad (who was hiding something) and Scully’s sister Melissa were shot, by Alex Krycek, no less. Mulder’s drinking water was spiked with acid and he got even angrier than usual, so angry that Scully had to shoot him to shut him up and keep him out of the way while she sorted his life out for him, again, which Mulder didn’t thank her for, as usual. Then Mulder was blown up along with a bunch of dead aliens (or were they?) by the Cigarette Smoking Man.

Only somehow he wasn’t blown up, and a Native American man called Albert saved his life. Skinner told Cigarette Smoking Man to pucker up and kiss his ass. Mulder and Scully found lots (and lots) of files, including files about abductees like Scully, and Mulder’s sister Samantha. There was a kid who could summon lightening, or maybe he really was lightening. Mulder trod on a pie, and Scully acquired a dog she named Queequeg. A man who was executed on the electric chair came back as a fly. There was a fat-sucking stalker, and a bitter and twisted quadruple-amputee astral-projector soldier. There was a woman who died for a little girl who was being held prisoner in a dungeon in the woods. There was an alien autopsy (or was it?), and lots of women like Scully who had been abducted by aliens (or had they?), had implants put in their necks, and were subsequently dying. There was a bomb on a train, but Mulder was saved by X, his informer who relpaced Deep Throat, who was shot at the end of Season One. Deep Throat was the one who taught Mulder and Scully to ‘Trust No One’, and they certainly didn’t, especially not X. But I digress. There was a boy with stigmata who Scully was sent to save. Scully said she didn’t believe in aliens, but she believed in God. There were cockroaches, too, and a Doctor with big breasts called Bambi Barenbaum, who Scully was jealous of. Scully took up smoking. Mulder almost turned into a gargoyle. Krycek was infected with Black Oil in Hong Kong. He was locked in a silo with a spaceship by Cigarette Smoking Man. Mulder very nearly shot Scully, and himself, thanks to the malevolent suggestions of a carbohydrate-loving man called Pusher, who had a temporal lobe tumour. There were killer cats and psychotropic cactus (at least I think it was cactus). There was an organ donation lottery in Chinatown. There were more alien abductions, or were they military cover-ups? Skinner strangled a prostitute, but made up some excuse about a woman in a red coat and got away with it somehow. Scully’s dog Queequeg was eaten by either an alligator or a monster called ‘Big Blue’. Scully watched too much TV and got paranoid. Mulder didn’t for a change, but only because he is red-green colour blind. Mulder’s mum had a stroke after a row at Martha’s Vineyard with Cigarette Smoking Man. Mulder tried to get a man (or was he?) called Jeremiah Smith to save her, but this man (or was he?) disappeared, and Cigarette Smoking Man got the Alien Bounty Hunter to save Mulder’s mum instead, while Mulder was off hanging out with more clones of his sister, who weren’t his sister, really. Meanwhile someone shot Mulder’s informer X. But it was okay because Mulder got a brand new blonde informer at the UN called Marita Covarrubias.

Then there was a somewhat grotesque but strangely lovable incestuous family in Home, Pennsylvania called the Peacocks. And a white black man who sucked out people’s pituitary glands. There was deception, inveiglement and obfuscation. And a mad lobotomist on stilts who projected his darkest thoughts onto photographic film. Mulder met someone he loved in a previous life in the field where he died (yawn). A cosmetic surgeon got confused and viciously liposuctioned to death a patient he was meant to be doing a face-lift on. Within forty-two minutes, in between killing JFK and Martin Luther King, the Cigarette Smoking Man received more rejection letters from publishers than I have during my whole lifetime, which made me feel a bit better. Mulder went to Tunguska and was experimented on with Black Oil. Krycek had his arm amputated against his will, which served him right for being a double-crossing double agent, of course, and also stopped him looking like he belonged in a boy band. Mulder briefly wondered if his sister Samantha hadn’t been abducted by aliens, after all (after all he has seen!), but by a paedophile. Then he got over it and went chasing El Chupacabra, who was possibly an alien (according to Mulder and the Mexicans), or possibly just a man with a bad case of athlete’s foot (according to Scully). A man who was like a giant salamander hinted that Scully had cancer. Scully was upset and got a tattoo with ergot in. Then she found out that not only did she have cancer, but her cancer was a government conspiracy (even though Mulder still suspected it was caused by aliens). She decided that she wasn’t going to let either cancer or the government (or aliens, for that matter) stop her. So she helped Mulder track down a dead Jewish man who was out for revenge, and also an invisible Vietnam veteran who was meant to be dead but wasn’t really (another government conspiracy) and was out for revenge. Then she helped Mulder discover that a plane crash was caused partly by aliens, but mostly by a government conspiracy. Then a bunch of cryobiologists (I think) who hadn’t even met yet were frozen to death by their leader who came back from the future. A man with an unusual amount of subcutaneous spindles of striated muscle locked Mulder in a cupboard, assumed his identity, got Scully drunk, and almost seduced her. In an effort to get a cure for Scully’s cancer from the Cigarette Smoking Man, Skinner tried to cover up a bunch of bees infected with smallpox, but failed miserably. Meanwhile, Scully kept having spontaneous nosebleeds because she had cancer. She could also see dead people because she was dying. Mulder got high on ketamine and had a hole drilled in his head, in yet another botched attempt to remember what *really* happened to his sister Samantha. Then he shot himself when he realized for years he had believed the lie. Aliens aren’t real.

Only joking! And Mulder hadn’t actually shot himself. The body was some government conspirator or other’s. While he was ‘dead’, while Scully was dying, and while Skinner was covering for him, Mulder made a new friend in the Department of Defence called Kritschgau. Then some stuff happened in the Pentagon, and Mulder came back to life, Scully was cured, and it all turned out to be someone called Blevins’ fault (or was it?). Cigarette Smoking Man shot Blevins. Then, for some reason, there was a flashback to The Lone Gunmen meeting at a conference for computer geeks. Mulder and X were there, too. Then Mulder and Scully got lost in the woods when they were meant to be on a team building course. Then they met a Cher-loving Mutant who was going around gassing people in his village so he could impregnate them. But he was a good person really, he only wanted to make friends. Then Scully got a phone call from her dead sister Melissa and found out that, while she (Scully) was abducted, she had a daughter called Emily, who was in fact part alien, and eventually died mostly because Scully killed her in the process of stubbornly trying to save her, because she (Scully) is a ‘Medical Doctor’. Sigh. Pusher came back, only he didn’t. It was his sister, who also happened to have a temporal lobe tumour, not to mention the power of suggestion. Some bad grown-ups who weren’t bad really were killed by a bunch of sick trees. There was an evil doll who did the Hokey Cokey and wanted to play, not to mention bang people’s heads with hammers. Mulder was sucked into the internet and lost both of his arms. Then there was a sheriff with bucked teeth, and a vampire pizza delivery boy. Some Alien Rebels turned up and set Scully and her alien abductee (or were they?) friends on fire. They all died, except Scully, and her new friend Cassandra Spender, who was abducted by aliens (or was she?) instead. (Cassandra happened to be the mother of Jeffrey Spender, another FBI agent and yet another enemy of Mulder’s, and also the son of the Cigarette Smoking Man, who was meant to be dead, but wasn’t really.) As if that wasn’t enough, it turned out Joseph McCarthy, who was a friend of both Cigarette Smoking Man and Mulder’s dead dad (who had been hiding something) hadn’t been hunting communists, after all, but aliens. Four girls with extra digits and vestigial wings had their eyes burned out by either a Seraphim of a Nephalim (I didn’t really follow that part). Mulder became a terrorist, had his little finger broken, and narrowly escaped having to shoot someone. Then he saw a monster, who happened to be the manager of a call centre, turning people into zombies and hiding in the light. After that he was reunited with his old flame (dirty) Diana Fowley. Scully became insanely jealous, and sulked with her new friend Gibson Praise, a boy chess genius (actually a cheat who could read minds, and who might just be ‘more human than human’, ie an alien). Then the Cigarette Smoking Man burnt down Mulder’s office, and The X Files were finished once more.

Then there was more Black Oil, a bomb, aliens, and yet another government conspiracy. Mulder and Scully almost snogged, but Scully was stung by a bee and taken away. Mulder went looking for her and found her in Antartica. While he was there he saw a UFO that Scully didn’t see. When they got back to Washington, The X Files were opened again. Mulder believes again, Scully still doesn’t, and we are back to the beginning again.

This is about all that has happened since the last time I wrote. It is also about where my brain exploded at the end of last week.

beyond the sea, gender bender, lazarus, young at heart, e.b.e, miracle man, shapes, darkness falls, tooms, born again, roland, the erlenmeyer flask

Those are all The X Files I watched today. I feel tired now, and slightly paranoid, but at least I have remained calm.

Other things I have done today: I sat in the Cholera Pit in the sunshine. I finished the Guardian crossword, with a little help from my brother. I got ‘bunfight’, which is a ‘grand tea party or huge argument’, and my brother got ‘quorum’, which apparently is a ‘number validating a meeting’. I have never heard of that word, but my brother knew it straight away when I asked him, when he phoned to see if I wanted any of his rom-com DVDs. My brother owns a lot of rom-com DVDs, and he is planning on selling them. He said he knew ‘quorum’ because of The West Wing. Apart from rom-coms, my brother is about as obsessed with The West Wing as I am with The X Files.

I told my brother the last thing I need in my life at the moment is romantic comedy. What I need I think is to throw a load of buns at my new upstairs neighbour. That would be funny.

ghost in the machine, ice, space, fallen angel, eve, fire

I am getting into this X Files thing. I have watched nine episodes of Season One since last night. I (want to) believe I can get all nine seasons watched by August, as long as I am prepared not to get anything else done in the meantime, which I think I am. Prepared, I mean. Not to get anything else done. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable sacrifice to make, in the interest of the truth, which I know is out there. Somewhere.

I was thirteen years younger and at university when I watched The X Files the first time round. Each week, my best friend and I would watch The X Files in the TV room at the halls of residence where we lived (actually the halls next door to the halls where we lived, as ours didn’t have a TV room). We’d been shipped out of London to the field station in the wilderness by then, and watching The X Files was the highlight of our week. We liked to think we were a kind of Mulder and Scully in our own right, and we were, in a way. At the field station, my best friend’s room was our basement. We became avid UFO watchers, and were responsible for unearthing one of the most closely guarded extra-terrestrial secrets of modern times, involving Finsbury Park station. We discovered a way of travelling on the Circle Line other than clockwise or anti-clockwise. We encountered the devil in the guise of Miles Davis. We experienced ‘time loss’ at Chelsea Bridge. We went on numerous ‘field trips’, amongst other places to Dartmoor, Cornwall’s very own Area 51. Most of the other students were wary of our inherent spookiness, and the rest were shape-shifting alien bounty hunters. The college was run by a Syndicate with a sinister agenda of global domination, but we had a number of informers there, the most notable being a drunken Scottish lecturer who confided in us about all manner of cover-ups, including a plague unleashed by a group of rogue alien-virologist hybrids in the mid-eighties, which brought about the near-extinction of the bovine race.

After we graduated, I lost touch with The X Files for a while. If I remember rightly, my best friend and I watched most of Seasons Two through Four while we were at the field station. A few years ago, following my best friend’s lead, I bought all nine series (plus film) on DVD. This is my second time round watching The X Files in full. I still love The X Files, but I miss watching them with my best friend. My best friend and I have promised each other not to ever get old and dull like the real Mulder and Scully. I fear we may be fighting a losing battle. I fear ‘we might not be who we are’, especially lately. Still, at least my best friend and I will never sell out by becoming romantically involved or having a baby. Whatever happens, I want my life to be one big X File, and I want the X File that is my life to remain unexplained.

conduit, the jersey devil, shadows

At three o’clock this morning, I learned that my new upstairs neighbour is a screamer. Marvellous. The cat ran away and the dog looked scared. I put my head under my pillow. She kept screaming and screaming and screaming something that sounded like ‘Hygiene! Hygiene! Hygiene!’ I’m sorry for writing about this. I promise I will try not to write any more about my new upstairs neighbour, but I had to get that off my chest.

I want to be abducted by aliens at Lake Okobogee.

pilot, deep throat, squeeze

It is still mostly raining, with occasional bursts of sunshine. Someone else was leaving at work today. I ate five little cake things plus a piece of caramel and apple pie before I went home. My new upstairs neighbour started moving in yesterday. So far, she has filled my wheelie bin with her rubbish, plus the post that arrived for me yesterday, including my train pass for next month. She has complained to the company that manages the flats that the dog and the cat living downstairs (ie the dog and the cat I live with) are unhygienic. She has gassed the hall with air freshener. It has displaced the oxygen in my flat. The dog looks bemused. The cat keeps sneezing, and has vomited once. I am missing the old man and his saxophone. I finished the 1kg bag of dates yesterday.

I had a go at the 2006 Level 1 Japanese Language Proficiency Test against the clock this evening. I passed with flying colours. I fear I have peaked too soon. I was talking to my best friend the other night, and told him if I passed this practise test, I might see if I could watch all nine series of The X Files again by the beginning of August, which is when the new X Files film comes out. I was only joking, but after I finished marking the test, I was overcome by air freshener fumes. I phoned my brother and asked if I could have Season One back.

The dog and I met my brother in the street, half way between our respective flats. My brother handed over the DVDs. It was like a scene out of The X Files. The dog and I were Mulder and Scully, and my brother was Deep Throat. Mulder lay on the pavement while Deep Throat and I talked for a while about extra-terrestrial biological entities, conspiracy theories, and chemical warfare. Deep Throat is as depressed as I am. I smoked one of his cigarettes.

I have watched the first three episodes of Season One tonight. Mulder and Scully have bad hair, and they are wearing ill-shaped clothes. I like them like that. I don’t think I will manage to get through all nine seasons by August, but I am going to give it a damn good try. I feel a little better already. I have opened both of my windows, and my flat is like a wind tunnel. I am going to bed now. I am hoping by the time I wake up all the air freshener will be gone. I am not going to get angry. I am just going to keep watching The X Files.

musings of the cigarette smoking woman

Work could have been worse this week, and anyway this week is over now because it’s Good Friday today. Well, it’s over until tomorrow, at least. I have to work tomorrow morning, but I am trying not to think about that.

For tea last night I made a aubergine-y potato-y tomato-y thing. I managed not to explode the mustard seeds all over the kitchen this time, but most of my right hand is yellow because I had an accident with the tumeric. I think I might have inhaled some tumeric as well. The back of my throat feels a bit scorched. Or maybe it was the chilli. Apart from extending life, expanding consciousness and being vital to space travel, the spices have a lot to answer for. I was still starving after tea last night, so I ate the Easter egg I bought for my brother.

I am still smoking. If I was a character in The X Files, I would be the Cigarette Smoking Man. I haven’t killed anyone this week, but I did grill some haddock on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I thought bad thoughts about the cat. I have had about as much success with my writing as CSM had with his. Sometimes I feel like the whole world is against me. I want to bring down the government, especially a certain ministry of the Japanese one. I don’t have many friends. I wonder if people are only nice to me because they are scared of me. I’m not scary, though. I’m just trying to cover up the fact that I’m inept. I would like to live in a shed all by myself in the mountains. Another thing I would like is for Walter Skinner to tell me to pucker up and kiss his ass, and do that jaw-judder thing. And, like I said, I am still smoking. I wish someone would come along in a helicopter and blow me to smithereens. I would have to stop smoking then.

Blimey, I’ve just looked out of the window and a blizzard is raging outside. I’m glad I don’t have to go anywhere further than the Cholera Pit today. I was going to go and buy my brother a replacement Easter egg later, but maybe I won’t now. I’d probably only wind up eating it anyway.

whirling dervish

It was my best friend’s birthday last month, and I bought these hina matsuri dolls for him in Osaka. They remind me of us, and those nights we used to dance frenetically to deep trance and ritual beats at Matsuri events all over London, in places like glowing big tops just across Chelsea Bridge.

A lot has changed since my best friend and I were students ten years ago, but some things have remained reassuringly the same. Since Friday night, apart from watching Heroes, my best friend and I have invented fictional alter-egos, studied the Goldberg variation, and stayed up late talking about Schrödinger’s cat and butterfly wings. We have reached expert level at The X Files trivia quiz. We should soon be savants. I made a flying turtle for my best friend’s boyfriend, but it’s a bit rubbish so I decided not to let it leave my flat. I don’t think it would have survived the journey down the motorway, anyway. Its wings look like they are about to fall off. Once I run out of clingfilm, I’m going to make my best friend and his boyfriend a kaleidoscope instead.

My best friend has gone home, back to his DIY hell. I am still here, with all the studying I have to do. But I feel a little lighter now, and I hope my best friend does, too. When we were students, we were inseparable — we don’t see each other very often now, but when we do I feel more like my old self, back in the day when if life was shit we just danced the night away, safe in the knowledge that somehow or other everything would be okay.

The cat has come home and the dog is sleeping. There is a squirrel outside struggling to drag a big, dirty apple core up a tree. The wind is howling. It’s cold, but not cold enough for the heating to kick in. I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. I don’t want this weekend to end.