Tidy Updates

"We don't reach the light through endless analysis of the dark." Everyday Miracles Affirmations--Marianne Williamson.

A thoughtful update from a friend on Facebook. It had an accompanying link You could press the back button and get more and more inspired depending on how much time you had and how many miracles you needed. If you had no pressing schedule, you could fill up your part-time status with full-time lies. But she was busy today with the F section. Fassbinder to Fellini. She had done all the E's in an hour, but the F's took longer.

"The key to a successful career is realizing that it's not separate from the rest of your life, but is rather an extension of your most basic self. And your most basic self is love." -- Marianne Williamson

She liked it. It was more inspiring than the job page in the Guardian or the Women Like Us e-mails. "Like Us" Like who? You mean women who are raising a child and in the process, the career has....Where did the career go? Oh yes, it's uhm...under that pile of nappies. In the toy bin. I have glued several arms onto several action figures. Where does that go on my CV? Nursing? Model building?

Women like Us. You mean the women who, once they give birth to the child, they actually look after it themselves? Yeah. Those women.

Vanita practiced the affirmations mantra style while her nails dried. She meditated in the lotus position with her eyes closed to the distractions of the living room. The cactus needed watering. Road tax needed paying. That was about it really. Her Lego had been put away long ago. She lead a tidy life now apart from her jaunts to Hackney. That bit was quite unkempt.

Vanita  had been employed to tidy up Film Guy's dvd collection; archive his flat of floor to ceiling films. A to Z. Fellini before Hitchcock. Last Tango in Paris. Last Man Standing. The L section. Shuffle, reshuffle. He had every film and every analysis of every film that was ever made in his living room. Somehow, he managed to live there too. He would probably have a much better conversation with Isabella than I. And when I saw his flat, I was inspired to do some kind of Ikea magic on my own home or where ever he got those shelves from. Awed by his tidy life enshrouded in film.

A red globe lit up. "Eric Jacobs has sent you a gift on Mafia Wars." She hadn't seen Eric Jacobs since high school, but he was very generous with his gifts and always invited her to join him in fights. It was his sister she was friends with. Lisa was in Ohio now. He was a lawyer now, probably a successful one as he had a lot of time to play Mafia Wars. He probably played it from his oak or cherry desk. He probably played in between clients while his secretary did the follow up paperwork.  She used to play it in between tidying up Lego and toys. It was something she could win at. She had more hotels than Donald Trump. She knew she was losing otherwise, or so it felt some days.

She became rather dedicated to Mafia Wars. It was frustrating. Her friends...really, her real friends on Facebook; most of them had real lives and therefore, not enough time to take down an incoming shipment of cocaine off the Bay of Naples or furnish pistols for a duel in Cuba. She needed more helicopters. Despite her arsenal, she was losing fights as her mafia was too small. It was time for tactics. "Add 500 mafia members now". She thought of it, but hated to litter her facebook page with hundreds of strangers for the sake of winning a few wars. She valued her privacy.

And so, for the sake of her privacy, Fiona Tyne was born. Fiona was a lovely name. A lot of twenty year olds  smoking outside the nearby art school were called Fiona. It was shrek's girlfriend's name too. She googled "beautful woman...sexy woman" and came up with the perfect profile pic, then changed it for an photo of herself which her boyfriend had taken in his black and white phase.

Fiona was a man magnet. If she needed a private jet to get to the next stage of the game or fifty helicopters to boost her fire power, Fiona could get them for her right away. Fiona was popular worldwide. Many men wrote to her wanting to be more closely acquainted. She kept it brief. She only wanted to play the video game. She was a model who sometimes lived in New York or London. She could always be away on a shoot in case they ever dropped into town. She had to be somewhere as she didn't exist.

Upright like a hoover

She was a regular cleaner as upright as her hoover. She told herself this as she unbuttoned her coat to check for her keys before leaving. Too many pockets. Where had she put them? Not in there. It was a fashion pocket...a useless detail but just the right size for a condom. He was a newer client. Once a week on a Tuesday. It was her third week and things had become...hard to say....was it messy, sticky or just fine. Actually, it was all of the above.

His last maid was called Helga. Classic. She was all about potatoes and hygiene. She had more whiskers than his cat. He didn't dislike her, but he didn't get a fresh feeling either. She was tremendously German. "Will you be receiving your primary partner this evening?" she asked. "Receiving what?" She had begun referring to his girlfriend as his primary partner after finding some knickers that were not her size stuck between the headboard and the mattress. Primary.... It made him feel ape like. She knew more about him than his own underwear.

"In this case, I have taken care to remove your....magazines to a more discreet location." Her meticulous discretion was the last straw. No matter where he left them, they were always refiled in chronological order. He had to wonder how long that took her. He meant to tell her that a simple stack would be just fine, but it was a sticky subject. He chuckled to think of her applying for a librarian position and siting "alphabetizing Oui and Hustler." as one of her skills. She was cleaning the underside of his nails with a steak knife. His girlfriend knew about his magazines. She read them like bedtime stories.

There were twenty odd names on the buzzer. She couldn't recall his name immediately as, in her mind, she referred to him as Mr. Culture. He had programs from every form of entertainment strewn across the living room floor along with socks, tights, and wine glasses. He was not the sort to tidy up before the maid came.  Everything was left out. She pieced him together from the various detritus she found and smelled his suits. She'd only met him briefly.

He'd only met her briefly. She came highly recommended from a friend at work who said he fantasized about her daily. That'll do for me. Who cares if she cleans. I've got a cleaner.

She appeared in a very white cotton dress. He was imagining a nurse's cap on her head as he spoke with her. She had been speaking for some time. She knew about how to carefully dust keyboards, how to leave no streaks on windows, and how often certain things needed to be serviced. Hmm. That woke him up. She stopped talking. She must have asked a question. Her voice had floated all the way down to his groin. It had hypnotized him ever so slightly. 

Drink Me

Idyllic day painting....cutting up some floral paper into a checkerboard design. Big collage.

Thinking of a new cup series inspired by the lady downstairs.....Most annoying neighbor of the year. The deluxe version would use a special lead base paint that seeps slowly, cup by cup, into the award victim. Drink me.

Another one...You bring out the bunny boiler in me...a favorite valentines gift.
You bring out the psychopath in me. A best seller and a useful tactic in board meetings.
Alphabet cup but with nasty words as opposed to nice words.
Asshole Bitch Bastard Cunt Craphead Deadman.. no...no no.

Kitchen tool series...forks, spatulas, pots, graters. Tool box series...hammers, nails, pliers, wrenches. good idea. Sailing ship series...anchors, ropes, sextant, compass, sails. Bike series-wheels, gears, chains....manual, endo, hang five, bunny hop, footjam, tail whip, nose picking deffo dude, dialled, sick moves, nose plant, whip lash, cross bar, turbine peg wheelie, bar spin.

Sonic sea

The diver records the mating ritual of sonic crustaceans
Clit clat, clit clitter clat,  n thwap
His bubbles urp the bass line blacking blues
Sunk in the sand
Old leather shoes
He takes it back to the lab to mix it:
A martini of sea anenomes
Lap their tendrils against the coral
Wooing the eels with their underwater whispers
Tracks smooth as a stone
That slip from the hand and
Skip from the land to a ripple
That fades like sleek slither to its sandy bed in a hot pebbled quiver

G-Plan and Plan G

But I want my Lightening McQueen socks....."Come on. Any socks will do. Move it. Let's go. Where's your other shoe?" Another morning in just before the bell. She gave herself a gold star and took off into the rain. A piece of plexi for a picture frame sat in the recycling. Inspecting it, yes, it was just the right size to fit the recently broken frame at home. A nice piece of floral wrapping paper--perfect for the collage. She'd cut it up and make it part of the theme. Further on, someone had disposed of an Apple Mac screen by placing it on top of the parking ticket dispenser and put a handy step ladder underneath it. Ha ha. She took the step ladder too. A good score for so early in the morning.

Her entire flat was a monument to found furniture. A Swiss wooden curio with hexagonal paned glass doors rested on top of the 1950's Retro G-plan teak sideboard. They didn't really match , but they were both quality. They matched in that way. A friend had phoned her to tell her she'd seen its twin in an antique shop in Dorset selling for four hundred pounds. She sometimes looked at the thing thinking of the four hundred pounds and thinking of her friend who she hadn't seen lately. It only contained liquor and videos, out of date passports, instructions on how to assemble a lego watch, a voters card for Illinois. Nothing pressingly important.

She had spent out on the sofabed. It was fifty quid from Gumtree. It was beige, so it still looked new. She had definitely had her fifty quid out of it. How many people had slept on that bed? Paying guests of The Bloomsbury Bullet: Japanese girls on week intensives, business men fiddling their hotel receipts, LSE students awaiting their dorm allocations, house swappers, old friends and friends of friends and daughters of old friends friends. Just about everybody had a reason to stay. Sometimes it was to Big Ben the week away and sometimes it was to actually visit her. 

One Dancer

It was a long piece for one dancer despite his many trophies and accolades. The second time to be at Sadlers Wells in one week. The ballet was better. This was Flamenco, but I would have preferred a woman in a dress snapping away. This man was tap dancing. There was lovely Spanish acoustic guitar and a wailing singer singing away most likely about romance as they are Spaniards and that is what they do. He was very talented, but Ben was squirming and I was sitting there feeling like a fucking martyr for not having a proper date. Listening to romantic music with your six year old son is somehow not a party. Though, my boy is getting  a lot of culture.

We met a woman on the bus on the way there with a child. She asked intuitively if we were also going to the flamenco. Yes. The local ticket scheme. She had moved out of Holborn to Chinatown and said it was a breath of fresh air. Yes. She knew about the "Holborn Mafia" as they are called. I am on pleasant tea drinking terms with them. I turn a blind eye at their bling.

We walked home passed the square where we had once chatted with a man who had a nice dog and cool shoes. People hated him as his dog shat everywhere. He didn't seem maladjusted at all. He hated them as he picked up his dog's shit and they never noticed. And, they never used the square themselves, so why should they care if his dog shat or not? And the teens in the pagoda with their broken beer bottles did  a lot more damage.

We chatted with an American woman and her child. She recognised us from Tae kwon do. She also thought the show had been a bit samey. She talked about the elf game. You need a match and some small trees. Find the elves in the shadows. We parted at Merlin street. And then the  Easton with its deep green tiles where someone familiar sat dining with a girl in a beret. It looked a pleasant scene.

It was an accidental moment. It wasn't their usual hour or their usual route. She didn't mean to be there obscured by the condensation watching him with someone else. She pulled a tiny violin from her pocket, but all the strings had gone. The sheet music was too hard to read in the dark. She was out of practice and out of tunes. Reason pulled her away from the window. Her son was hungry. "Ask them if they have chips and ketchup." Reason walked them home.

She was a nice girl. "I could wear a beret too. I just need a beret."  She buried her last attempt at reason. Her son was hungry. He had made his own Margerita on a field trip at school.. He had demanded skittles during the intermission. "It's not a dinner," she quipped. Cold pizza was waiting. She got a few beers from Montana Wines and watched herself drink them in the kitchen while she chatted with her friend in Indiana. 

The Midas Toucher

"I got you better than back. I'm holding the Joker as well as the ace." he thought as he wrote her a lengthy message. It was anonymously complimentary. He had fathomed that she was an eternal beauty both inside and out just from glancing at a few profile pics. "You smile like no one is watching." There was an e-mail to accompany the brief facebook message. It betrayed itself as it was far too complicated to be real. A pub maniac from Chicago. Pubs are called bars in Chicago. A daughter called Tracie, then a paragraph later, Stacey. Serious typos. A dead wife called Doris. No one except her late Grandma's bridge partner was called Doris. That was years ago. That Doris was probably long gone too. It's someone weaving a tale that will end up asking for the wire transfer of funds to an account in Africa most likely. Some one having a little recreational cyber therapy. She sent a short reply. He had called her the Duchess of Castle Bridge. Hmm. Way beyond comprehension. too early in the morning.

A short walk to work. A sunny morning, but no time for a jaunt down to the river. An odd man appears and offers his services shining the brass letter box on the shop door. His opening sales pitch is too long. She interrupts him to ask how much it costs. He continues with his sales pitch...."Do you know how many people died of swine flue last year?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "Fifty. They got it from door knobs. I will clean your door knob too at no extra charge." "How much is it?".... He continues..."I will even clean the inside of your door frame here as it is brass also." Well. He certainly has a focus. A brass cleaning specialist.  He is the Midas Toucher. It says so on his card. A tenner. Ok. She relents.

He's got the job, but first thing he does is receive a phone call. He is not in a hurry to put the caller off. He tells excitedly how he has a new job. At this point, I take a look at the clock. In total, it took him over an hour. He did a good job, but will he be back next week. The only problem with brass is that it doesn't need cleaning that often.