20 May 2006

Feels Like A Sunday In Some Ways

I don't know how many of you will recognise the header as part of a mid-60s Donovan lyric, which starts out, "It's Saturday night, it feels like a Sunday in some ways." It's kind of like that here today, even it's really only Saturday afternoon, though seeming to verge on evening already because of the relentlessly gloomy clouds that seem to have settled in for the duration (of what? the day? weekend? month? summer?), along with cold, gusty winds and fitful bursts of rain. Yes, it's droughting again, and this week the water companies/government (although they've been privatised, they're essentially the same thing except when it comes to claiming profits (private companies and their shareholders only) or taking responsibility (nobody; who were you expecting?) are promising to sail great ships up the Thames loaded with fresh drinking water from God knows where. Perhaps they'll also tow in icebergs from the north coast of Greenland or Iceland, setting off another incarnation of the Cod War. Nobody (apart from myself and pretty much everybody else I've talked to) seems to have thought of the seemingly more obvious solution of stringing a pipeline up to Yorkshire or Scotland or any of the other northern provinces where they have water coming out of their ears and probably any other available orifice. They can send us their rubbish weather, no doubt they can spare a bit of water as well.

But I want to stop myself before I slip off into full-fledged rant-mode. The other night, after getting home from the Zatopeks / Punchpuppet / Griswalds show, I rather foolishly or fanatically sat up until 5 am composing a diatribe about the numbers of people who routinely don't pay to ride on trains and buses and compared it to the bad old days of New York City, when public transport became essentially a free-fire zone for anti-social elements of all stripes. I got myself worked up into a full-on self-righteous snit, only to hit "save" and see my couple hours work disappear forever into the ether. Well, perhaps it turned up somewhere on some other virtual world, but nowhere that I seem able to access. And that's not the worst of it; I had already written most of the post you're (hopefully) reading now only to have my browser freeze up on me, once more swallowing alive all my fervid jottings.

So now I'm trying to reconstruct from memory what I'd already written, and in the process forgetting most of what I was originally intending to write about, other than that it's Saturday, yes, and feels like a Sunday in that aimless, "I really ought to get out and do something but there's nothing to do and the weather's crap anyway" sort of way. Which isn't completely true; I'm going to wrap up in my winter clothes (British version, not American snow-and-ice Antarctic expedition variety) and brave the elements before terminal melancholy sets in and I start recycling Smiths or Potatomen lyrics into attempts at meaningful prose. My room's a mess, but it's a mess that will wait for me to come home and glower at it again. More later.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Never compose anything substantial in your browser, Larry. Do it in a word processor you've got on your computer and then copy/paste it.

I, too, have learned this the hard hard hard way. Nothing like pouring your brains into something for a couple hours and then watching it vaporize.

In other news, the weather is shit (cold, rainy, etc.) even here in sunny OC. I blame you, naturally.