nixsight

• @harrymylandIV Heh. Puppy! #
• http://www.sugarboukas.com/X/DCFM/wDCFM01 – Don’t Cry For Me, I’m Already Dead. Beautiful, beautiful comic. Go. Read. Now. #
• Now I has a long weekend! Ho ho ho! #

• Just spanked Girl One’s bum by way of goodbye, then realised we were in public. Hm. #
• It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life… #
• Just recalled a daft amount of time last night – around 10 minutes – confused that 1985 to 95 came to 11 years. I am tiredstupid, obviously. #
• @warrenellis It’s pretty easy, if you’ve removed the internal organs first… #
• @kellysue We got a £2000 – which is around $20,000 – vet bill last month which has me sympathising the hell out of that sentiment… #
• (That sentence was completely broken – maybe I need more Red Bull.) #
• @kellysue Nothing quite so serious – she had dramatic symptoms to a simple infection, so ended up having emergency treatment & 2 overnights. #
• @kellysue Of course, I dramatically exaggerated the £/$ rate for fun, so may have made it sound worse than it was. But it WAS pretty scary! #
• The “comment notifier” plugin on nixsight & EW sends the most absurd Engrish notifications to the users. I kinda want to leave them like it. #
• Dammit, now I feel incredibly guilty for making a daft joke out of the cost of the dog. When insurance isn’t claimed yet. Sorry, @kellysue #
• @Kellysue Ta! Girl One may never get over the trauma of having dog blood over everything we were wearing on the day, tho. STUPID bleedy dog! #

I haven’t had a chance to sit down properly with Sharon Lewis newest album, The Hour Lilies – like all of Lewis’ work, it’s subtle and quiet, and I know from experience that her work rewards closer attention then I’ve given it.

But the song “Lost Soul” just came on, and it is beautiful, and seems pertinent at the moment, so I want to share it with you.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Sharon Lewis – Lost Soul

There’s video, too, of Lewis performing the song at a house concert, although the sound quality isn’t perfect.

It is turning out to be a sad week, so to try and distract myself, and maybe generate some enthusiasm for tomorrow night (when if all goes to plan, Girl One and I will be watching Dark Knight), here is the next part of the meme from last week, as inspired by Rol.
(more…)

• @wilw … is it your birthday? Grin. Happy Birthday Mr Wheaton. Without you, the internet would be rubbish. #
• Trying to organise my thoughts about some very bad news I got last night. #
• Spaced@ComicCon – Edgar Wright just said that Raising Arizona was the film that made him want to direct. Man, I need to see that film again. #
• http://uk.youtube.com/user/cos2mwiz Has lots of nice Comic Con video. #
• Oh dear. I’ve got a bit of a crush on the big-eyed brown-haired girl on the stupid rolling video in the Match dot com ad at myspace. #
• We are talking about eating horrid meats in our office. We can go ages without a chat, so it’s always strange what gets us going… #
• @joshhechinger Thanks, sir. It’s worse for other people, of course. I don’t like what it says about me, how self-absorbed my response is. #

It’s all mad, of course, none of this process of life and death and what happens around it works the way it should – seeing the loss of someone shimmering across your family’s Facebook status reports, or reading the grief of strangers in your cousin’s MySpace comments is too abstract, too much a sign that the way we relate to each other, respond to each other, is in a state of flux or free-fall. A wake is what’s needed, really, but you can’t really have a wake through the web. In theory, the technology allows unlimited communication and discussion.

In reality it’s a medium that involves throwing out one-way communication and inviting others to respond. It looks like instant interaction, but more often than not, it isn’t.

To paraphrase a Xander, I have too many thoughts today.

I got a call at a time last night that is never a good sign. My big little sister called, and after a few seconds of greeting, broke down a little bit a lot.

Through the worry and noise I managed to piece together a broken version of the story that she had an only marginally less broken version of.

I have two God-brothers. They are the sons of the absolutely wonderful people who christened me, as difficult as it is to believe that I was ever christened. My godfather is a solid and loving Cypriot man – handsome, sturdy and reserved, with a dry and mischievous sense of humour that you have to wait around to see, and a warm and generous side. My godmother is a Devonshire rose – a funny and bright lady who looks slight, light and delicate alongside many of the other women in my family – but with a raucous laugh, and an ability to hold her own alongside the bombastic Greeks. I remember that she can’t pronounce the Greek word for godmother – nouna – but always uses it anyway.

At my sister’s wedding last year, I saw my godparents, and decided that I needed to keep better contact with them. My extended family is huge, and I’ve always lived a long way away – I’ve used both of those as excuses to lose track of people, but it’s just that I’m lazy, really. But my godparents have always been good to me, and I love them very much.

I’ve always kind of idolised their two boys, too. Anton is a little older than me, Philip is a little younger.

I didn’t have an older brother, so it was easy to look up to Anton – he was brash and smart, tall and handsome, and liked geeky things like I did, but always seemed so confident and cool – the combination was so exotic and alien to me at the time.

I probably had more in common with Philip, but at the time I didn’t think that they and I were really even living in the same world, they were so much cooler. Philip was a much prettier child then I, quieter than his brother, and more quixotic. He had, I remember in retrospect, an introspective tendency that I would have related to a lot, but at the time I felt like that trait was something which distanced me from normal people, and desperately wished I didn’t have it.

(Quixotic, incidentally, doesn’t mean what I thought it meant when I wrote it, but it suits Phil, I think. A better word would have been ethereal.)

As the years went on, I saw the brothers less and less – well, saw less of my family altogether. My cousin George talks over in his blog about teenage exploits that he and Phil shared, and I realise now that I was totally apart from that – that in fact, I barely saw George for ages, let alone anyone else. Later, Anton would work with my dad, and he and his then-wife would see a lot of my sisters and my parents, but I was on my own path back then, living a distance from any of them, and working things out on my own.

Anton got successful. At the same time Phil, like me, needed to work things out on his own, from what I can gather.

I saw them rarely, at family parties. When I deigned to attend, Phil often wasn’t about. I remember at one party, Phil turned up with a girlfriend and some friends. She was beautiful, I remember that much (I didn’t get to go out with girls like that, back then, just have them as friends). Phil might have had dreadlocks then, or might have had them later, but I remember him with them. I think I desperately wanted to fit in with their group at that party, off in the front room, misbehaving. But that wasn’t who I was around my family. I had camouflage. I didn’t fit with the men in the family, so found myself with the women, rather then forge my own path.

It seemed like Phil was making choices with how he lived his life – and whether he realised it or not, he seemed to be good at anything he tried to do. By contrast, my life felt like compromise.

The thing is, we were probably different sides of the same damn coin, he and I. I think we had a lot of the same issues with ourselves. It might have been an accident of brain-chemistry, or of upbringing, that meant that Phil’s life was dialled up that much higher than mine. Where his parents provided support, mine left me to my own devices. Where I was moving from house to house, town to town, school to school, Phil had stability, so maybe it was a lack of distraction that made him turn his attention on himself.

My head has always been a little full of noise, but I’ve tended to externalise, turn my introspective out. I complain. I blame the world, or my parents, or think of that noise as a symptom of the instability that I see around me. The fact is, I’m not living in the world when I do it, but it provides enough of an illusion for me and everyone around me to get through it. It makes me a not very nice person, sometimes, I know that, but it keeps my feelings about myself generally good, these days.

I don’t think I ever heard Phil complain – where growing up, I was probably a right whiner. I think he had higher expectations of himself then the world around him did – almost a perfect opposite response to my own, but all coming from the same place, the same or similar personality quirks, the same pressures. When things got too much for him, he took himself out of the equation, went away somewhere, instead – physically and figuratively. So his lifestyle was a little erratic – for more then a year I was living in a squat with a bunch of crusties, sneaking in to festivals and getting a bed as benefit from their scams. Those guys were jerks, middle class tourists out for whatever they could get – I suspect that Phil was nicer.

I only heard about Philip’s ongoing troubles peripherally. It was difficult to get too worked up about them, in my twenties – at the time that people were worrying about his occasional disappearances, I would go for months and sometimes years without any contact with family – as concerns about his lifestyle came up, I was doing a fairly good job of keeping my own drug-taking and general fucking about out of the family news – and if people talked about his mental state, well, they didn’t know how depressed or lonely I got sometimes – so I figured someone as much cooler and proactive then me as Phil would be just fine.

The last few times I heard about Philip’s life, it seemed like he’d settled into a less turbulent pattern.

So my big little sister telling me, last night, that he was gone – that somehow he had ended up in the water, down there in Plymouth, and when his body came back to us, some other part of him had kept on going, out of reach – has left me a little at a loss. I don’t know how he ended up there – whether by accident, or something else. There are no end of ways that something so tragic can happen, when you don’t spend all of your life at work or at home. And whatever Phil’s problems were, he had a lot of good in his life, so it is impossible to draw any conclusions about how that life led him here.

But he was young, and loved, and the fact that he had spent too much of his life in a state of turmoil seems to make the loss of him worse, somehow – because thirty years of grace and contentment trumps three-score and ten of sadness any day, and Phil had the potential of that life right there, right inside him and around him, even if he found himself out of synch with it sometimes.

This post has probably seemed a little self-absorbed. To tell the truth, it has run longer then I thought it might – I felt I had to say something, but George has already said more then I ever could.

He was George’s God-brother too, and they had been close, closer than Phil and I.

My big little sister, too, had always adored Philip, a fondness that had been around even longer then her thing for MJ Fox.

Phil and I, we moved in different circles that were the same. We could have been the closest of friends, except that we weren’t. Sometimes people are isolated, more often people isolate themselves. And I doubt he and I being close would have made any difference to how things have been, and are now – but it is an unhappy accident of personalities that we never got to see how much we could have had in common, and now never will.

At the very least, if I’d been around through any of his troubles, I’d have told him that you have to keep on keeping on – because sometimes that’s all you can do.You don’t have to succeed, you don’t have to be hard on yourself – you occupy the same space and time as a master as a servant, in the end, and really, that’s okay.

It’d make as little sense to him as it probably does to everyone reading this, but I’d feel better for having said it.

Of course, I never did make that extra effort to stay in contact with my godparents after my sister’s wedding – and of course I wish I had. Everything I say will sound cheap, now, after the fact – some words are meaningless when they aren’t said out loud, and to the right people. But my thoughts go out to them, and Anton, and George and his parents, and my big little sister, and everyone else who is touched by the loss of Philip.

• Office is new hardware heaven/hell? It’s like Christmas. Graphic cards, headphones, webcams for all, & 2 IT techs of our own all morning. #
• Road-testing new headphones – http://tinyurl.com/56whht – Lovely sound, but all weight rests on ears & is achey on glasses. Which seems odd. #
• Oh iTunes on our work network, why dost thou mock me? I know you’re installed so stop telling me you bloody well aren’t… #
• @harrymylandIV Wait, what? Is that a joke what you’ve just made up, or a real something? Because it looks like a joke… #
• But… but what is WikiUpload.com? Is THAT a joke? A delivery system for that one file? Which I will listen to in a minute, @harrymylandIV! #
• When Collins & Herring have stopped fillocking in my ear, I will listen to this motherlovin’ Mario/JayZ track. But wikiupload.com still odd. #
• @joshhechinger Oh yes it is… am listening right now… @harrymylandIV Thanks for pointing me at the JayZ/Mario mashup! It works perfect. #

• Dog One & Girl One are sunbathing out in the garden. Watching them while I work on Elephant Words admin. A lovely Sunday afternoon, so far. #
• Righto – Next wave of EW writers have profiles and pictures on the wall of fame. It looks depressingly male at the moment, but still cool! #
• Oh god, TVerse, in all the excitement, I forgot – Girl One got tickets for Billy Bragg as an anniversary present! I’m going to see BB again! #
• Congrats, @rantz1. It is, indeed, a piece of work. Glad it is getting the attention it deserves! #
• @groonk It also has one of my fave uses of music in any tv show ever. The visuals are plenty but the choice of Lemon Jelly is pitch perfect! #
• @emmavieceli Oh, wow, that sucks ass. Hope you get better soon. Does it hurt? #
• @groonk, why yes of course! It’s The Staunton Lick, I believe… Wonderful choice of track. The music throughout Spaced is perfect, though. #

• @groonk Yeah, I’m not cut out for it. I share too much info, and insist on properly linking/representing each film with trailers/imdb links! #
• @groonk Hence having to break it down into more then one post… not right or proper for a meme, I’m sure…! #