The Belgian Optimist, Starring Colin Firth and a Beautiful Girl

Colin Firth and Gary Oldman had lunch together in the restaurant I work at in London. It was on one of my days off—I didn’t find out about it until the next day. It was probably for the best. Can you imagine how gitty I would’ve been around Colin Firth? I would have kept on calling him Darcy the whole time, to begin with. Secondly I would have, no doubt awkwardly, tried to lead him into a conversation in which I present my theory that his acting career is such an appropriate metaphor of my life in London, that I’m his doppelgänger (conceptually speaking, not vernacularly). What kind of ghostly coincidence is it that I thought of the haunting spirit of Firth’s character archetype as providing the framework for my London life—only to have this ghost escape into the ether, me arriving a day late?

So poetic! Horatio tried to capture the ghost of King Hamlet in speech but was late. Life is always late because you’re always chasing. Love and work and politics and art—it’s always deferred. Had I been at work that day, the chase would’ve been over. Killing the metaphor, killing the dream.


I was in Belgium for a few days with some friends. My mate Jon is a good bloke—he’s got one hell of a blunt sense of humour. Rough around the edges but with a big heart, few people like Jon demonstrate such a high degree of legitimate concern for others around him and the ones he cares about. I met him through working together at the campus newspaper at McMaster. I was a regular columnist and Jon was the assistant photography editor.


Jon is spending a couple of months in the city of Ghent, northwest of Brussels, before heading off for the latter half of summer to work as a tour guide throughout Europe for sightseers. He invited me to stay with him for a couple of days; coincidentally and fortunately, the weekend that was most convenient for me to visit was the same weekend a mutual friend of ours, a lovely girl named Medina, was also visiting Jon. Jon and I also met Medina through the school newspaper, and she’s spending her summer couch surfing across Europe. Medina could easily be a female version of Darcy, in a certain context of course. Beautifully beautiful but with an ostensible and peculiar, almost cynic, character, if you act prideful around her you won’t get to know the real girl, which would be an unjustifiable shame.



Getting incredibly drunk off Belgian beer Rochefort 10 in the very traditional European city of Ghent with these great people helped me to realize that chasing what can’t be understood, the unattainable, is what is worth doing in life. Somebody who doesn’t understand this notion is Chuck Klosterman.

I’ll tell you why I don’t like Chuck Klosterman. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. By that I mean I don’t particularly dislike Chuck Klosterman. Sure, he’s a better writer than most people. Yes, he’s funnier and wittier than the run of the mill. And yes, I’ll admit he’s a more acute observer of pop culture’s subtext than your average bear. Actually, I don’t know if that’s much of a large accomplishment; but at least Klosterman can analyze the subtext without sounding contrived.

Is he better than Nick Hornby though, as some commentators have argued? Hornby, regarded by many as one of Britain’s most celebrated living writers, and seen by some as Klosterman’s British counterpart, doesn’t piss me off the way Klosterman does, that’s for sure. I think GQ (in praising Klosterman) said it best: he is “sometimes exasperating but almost always engaging.” I have no beef with the principle that the best writers, thinkers, artists, what have you, are the ones with whom you disagree to the point of sheer frustration; but from a personal perspective I don’t apply that principle to Klosterman. I find Klosterman the most engaging when I do agree with him and when he’s not angering me. His analyses of Billy Joel or Morrissey, or Val Kilmer, or Saturday morning cartoons, or MTV, or whatever, or his awesome hypothetical questions, are fascinating because they are well written, nuanced, and clever. That’s the Chuck Klosterman I enjoy. He mostly sticks to these guns in Chuck Klosterman IV, which is why it’s a half-decent book.

The Chuck Klosterman that I can’t stand is the one who tries to blame pop culture, specifically romantic comedy movies, and even more specifically John Cusack, for why normal human beings will never be able to have meaningful romantic relationships.

Put your hand up if you’ve seen Fever Pitch. I’m not talking about the American film adaptation starring Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore (which actually isn’t bad). No, no, I mean the British romantic comedy Fever Pitch starring Colin Firth, based on a Nick Hornby book, no less.

It’s great—probably one of the best movies out there. Low budget and character-driven, it has all the makings of a classic. Colin Firth plays a teacher with a long-standing love affair for the Arsenal Football Club. His Arsenal fandom borders on obsession, and it deeply complicates a blooming but ambiguous sexual and romantic tension with a new teacher at the school he works at, who herself is puzzled by his laissez-faire teaching methods, yet alone by his fascination with Arsenal. Oh yeah, she’s a beautiful girl.

What makes the film great is that Firth’s character’s relationship with Arsenal and football is in the foreground and not the background. Of course Hornby’s book, the source material, is an autobiographical collection of essays about Hornby’s love for football, and not a romance novel. In both book and film, we get a glimpse of the real conditions of British life, empathizing for why football is so integral to one’s upbringing and consciousness—and it doesn’t always make meeting girls so perfect-going.

Klosterman thinks “every woman born between 1965 and 1978” (my emphasis), is so fixated by John Cusack in Say Anything, the go-to teen romance movie of the late 1980s, that it clouds their ability to focus on real-life relationships and more realistic romantic encounters and situations. Klosterman extends the vitriol to When Harry Met Sally, accusing the film of giving infinite false hope to every optimist in love with their opposite-sex platonic best friend. Basically Klosterman thinks pop culture is ruining society, specifically our ability to love. Bummer, dude.

In another essay, Klosterman argues soccer will never live up to its potential in the U.S. It is a sport not worthy of North America’s attention because it is not competitive enough, and more significantly, it is inherently too inclusive, the one sport that allows America’s “outcast” culture to float by elementary school extracurriculars before they are old enough to realize they can shop at Hot Topic and American Apparel. It’s the sport kids bullshit their way through before discovering hipsterdom, according to Klosterman. And although he never explicitly mentions him in the essay, Klosterman put the following name in the essay title as an implicit attack on the Fever Pitch-culture: Nick Hornby.

Outside of sports, Klosterman claims to be “apolitical” but his interrelated analyses on Cusack and soccer make one fact, to me at least, abundantly clear: Klosterman is an unironic Platonist and a closet ideological Republican who refuses to accept the world we live in is one of mutual vulnerabilities. Football’s inclusiveness is what makes it so economically and culturally significant to everywhere in the world except North America, especially Africa. The flip-side of Klosterman’s narcissistic, Westernized hatred for soccer is what keeps a poor, starving 10-year-old in Kenya from utter and absolute despair, possibly even death. Klosterman cynically whines that it’s too inclusive without realizing that inclusivity is all we have in this world keeping us from going over the edge.

Just as football gives the possibility of hope to every child in the developing world who has no reason to hope, no viable reason to have hope for anything, Colin Firth goes for the impossible scenario, something Klosterman fails to realize in his jaded Say Anything attack. Is my argument flawed because Mr. Darcy does eventually get Elizabeth Bennet, or that Mark Darcy wins Bridget Jones’s heart in the end? No, because like I said earlier, it’s all about the chase—and I don’t mean that in the romantic, courting sense; I mean it in the abstract metaphorical sense about chasing ourselves, but our deferred selves, just as I was a day late meeting Colin Firth. (Also, how fucked up is it that Helen Fielding named the character Darcy?) You can’t dismiss romantic comedy movies as unrealistic about love because a guy and a girl fall for each other in the end. That’s like dismissing action movies because they have explosions. Call me crazy, but the typical scenario of two characters falling in love after hating each other is far from clichéd, it’s actually wonderfully brilliant. It turns the impossible into the possible—the kind of hope upon which inclusivity, whether political, social, or cultural, relies. Football does the same thing, and so does Colin Firth. It should go without saying that between Aidan and Big in Sex and the City, Colin Firth would undoubtedly be Aidan, yet Big gets the girl. Aidan’s experiences with Carrie are still just as valuable as they would have been had he and Carrie married. Had they not even occurred in the first place, in other words, if Carrie hypothetically knew she would be choosing Big in the end, thus prompting her to bypass dating Aidan in the first place—well fuck, hope and inclusivity can go right out the window. It’s the hope from romance and football that allows us to learn about ourselves, which is to say each other. But we’re always late, we are always a day behind; otherwise we would reach full self-actualization, which sounds like the most boring and dangerous neo-Nietzschean death to political free will of which I can think.

Rochefort 10 and many other Belgian beers have a high alcohol content of ten percent or more. Many of the beers are brewed by monks in a Belgian monastery. Drinking these beers is like doing cocaine or riding a bike for the first time. They bring out the best and the worst of you, simultaneously.


Belgium is the country where Jon met his last love, a girl who eventually tore his heart out of his body, like in that scene in Temple of Doom. Yet Jon took us to his favourite pub, mostly because there’s a girl working there on whom he has a crush. He didn’t let the past hamper his hope for the future, no matter how dim. I say dim both metaphorically and literally—the whole pub was lit only by candlelight. Outside, almost all of Ghent is built on brick streets, with old buildings dating back many centuries. The history and the architecture are indescribable. Earlier Jon had introduced Medina and I to a local friend of his, a blind guy named Didier, whose amazingly expansive knowledge about music gives credence to the “heightened other senses” myth. Didier showed us a time—and we let the culture of Ghent consume us. Canals run through the city rampantly, and the centre of Ghent consists of countless pub patios and vendors selling chips with mayonnaise (fries are Belgium’s national dish, so naturally, they tasted amazing), all overlooking the canals and surrounded by many ancient buildings, one of which was a very splendid-looking castle.


Returning to the dim pub over candlelight and Belgian beer in a very old building, in the place where Jon remained upbeat in spite of, well, Mola Ram; the place where Medina wondered why all of her relationships have expiry dates; and the place where I wondered why all of my relationships have starter-ignition problems (and where I bordered on melancholy for having left a girl behind back home), all three of us had reasons to be cynical and pessimistic. It’s what Klosterman can’t escape: the girl who left him for a John Cusack movie. What he didn’t realize is what the night in Ghent all helped us to realize, while we happily continued drinking outside near the canal and the magically-lit buildings reflected in both the night sky and the still water: bonding together meaningfully and learning that there’s more to life than blaming others, whether it be in Ghent or elsewhere. As we learned from each other that night, sharing stories and experiences, that just because love is deferred, or something we have never, and will never, experience, doesn’t mean we don’t deserve it—doesn’t mean we have to give up hope. That is ultimately what I think Colin Firth would’ve said to me. That or, “Look, can you just get me a napkin?”

Welcome to Madchester

I swung by Manchester recently to visit a friend. Ben Small, a chap I had met back in Hamilton over a year ago, lives in Leeds, a short distance from the ‘Chester. I met Ben at McMaster, where he had been attending for a year on a student exchange, but he’s back in England now, being a guy.

Ben plans on spending his summer in Chicago, and he’s already got a couple of writing internships lined up in the city. One of them is for a music publication, if I recall correctly. During the job interview over Skype, Ben and the employer bonded over a mutual love for the band American Football. Yeah boi. Neither of the internships pay, so to finance his trip he is going to have to either find a pub job on the side in the Windy City, or hope the wind blows his mouth right onto some guy’s cock as a means of income. We’ve all been there.

Until he leaves for Chicago, however, Ben is trying to maximize his time back home. Naturally, that means getting drunk and playing as many punk shows with his band as possible. He invited me to see his band play in Manchester one night. “We’ll show you a time,” he assured me. “Us punks are an inclusive bunch, don’t worry.”

Little more encapsulates the punk ethos than that: community. I knew I would be in good hands, welcomed, befriended, and with the knowledge that I would be in the company of hospitable people. A common thread runs through every punk scene from one side of the Atlantic to the other: a space its peoples create to lose yourself in the moment. An emancipatory escapism rooted in the history of the genre; there are many things wrong and unjust with the world, but for 120 fast-paced, head-spinning seconds, a new world is born, and everyone is welcomed as a citizen. It’s the environment of a punk venue, the spatiality of the mosh pit.

Manchester has a rich history regarding the interconnected relationship between spatiality and subversiveness. Guy Debord famously recontextualized the French word dérive (literal English translation: “drift” or “drifting”) as a term to convey subversive acts that incorporate psychogeography. It’s more than just getting lost in a city, intentionally wandering adrift as a way to subvert the mapped and structured architecture of an urban landscape. A dérive denotes a contradictory interaction with one’s environment: on the one hand, it requires a conscious awareness of how one’s space is indeed a reflection of themselves, in other words, having a knowledge of the possibilities and utilizations of the space around us and thus how we can shape it; on the other hand, it requires us to drop all of our regular activities and usual motives for movement and action—as Debord would say, to simply let ourselves “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters” to be found there.

Subversion is a key factor here, and certainly Manchester’s anti-establishment history is impressive. The city provided a healthy contribution to the birth of 19th-century communism as we know it. It was Manchester that inspired Engels’s groundbreaking book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Marx visited his friend in Manchester often, where the two collaborated on their theories. To this day, Manchester’s Chetham’s Library preserves Marx and Engels’s frequent study desk as well as the shelf holding the very economics books Marx read at the time.

Some of the U.K.’s largest worker trade and labour unions, most notably, the Trades Union Congress, got their starts in the hush-hush, hustle and rush of basement gatherings in Manchester pubs. In North America, the term “working class” is treated as a beat-up opportunistic release for the other 80% of the population to have their cake and eat it too; “working class” is CNN’s dried-up hooker. In a smooth continuation from the Industrial Revolution, Manchester adopted the romanticized 20th-century English image of a rainy working-class city and ran with it. The city’s beauty is in what the bricks of its antiquated buildings don’t say. They have stories to tell but they remain silent because it’s raining outside, too many people are scurrying by with no time to listen, and there’s too much melancholy for the bricks not to hold back. Mothers working crowds at Piccadilly Gardens; babies crying past the distant street-lamp glow; kids falling over before the pub and tram rush; a hurried girl has to smoke nice and slow. That’s entertainment!

Punk music was one of the many torchbearers to grab the mantle of social justice and social activism and run with it in the latter half of the 20th century. Despite originating from London, it was in Manchester where The Sex Pistols really started to bloom. Many consider their June 1976 Manchester concert to be the band’s springboard to international recognition—indeed, it helped introduce the genre of punk itself to the world. Both Morrissey and members of Joy Division/New Order had attended that concert, well before The Smiths or Joy Division ever had a name for themselves. The concert served as a major catalyst for the birth of punk rock and future subgenres that came out of Manchester in later years, such as “Madchester”—of which early New Order was a feature player.

Madchester proceeded England’s mod revival movement and is commonly regarded as a main precursor to grunge. Its defining characteristic was its combination of punk rock with more rhythmic sounds. Punk provides the space, and rhythm provides the catalyst for movement. Madchester didn’t aim to corporatize punk or to incorporate it into the mainstream (although that’s what ended up happening). It was just a bunch of punk kids who wanted to dance more. Sex Pistols songs have melody, yes, but they are warped under too much bullshit noise and distortion. Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten are in the history books for good reasons, but none of which include their songwriting prowess.

All punk bands in Manchester from the past couple of decades and up to today live and die under the shadow of Madchester. Stay punk and give us a space to dance that we create with you. Turn the mosh pit into a metaphorical image of our other selves that we never see, the other world that we simultaneously and contradictorily create but consciously let ourselves be drawn and lost into. I walked right into a dérive in Manchester, and my glasses broke as a result. It was the time of my life.

I met up with Ben in the early evening at the venue, on the second floor of a pub in central Manchester. Outside, the establishment had a chalkboard on which was written “PUNK/SKA BANDS ALL DAY, 3-11 P.M.” in block letters. Welcome to Manchester.



I arrived a couple of hours late and missed the first few bands. Ben’s band wasn’t on for another hour or so, so we grabbed a beer and went back upstairs to watch a metal band shred some Wheaties. As is expected with the genre, they were all wonderfully talented musicians, but their melodies were boring and they lacked stage presence. There was probably close to 200 or so people in attendance, but none of them were responding to the music and I didn’t know anybody. I was starting to wonder into what I had gotten myself—it certainly wasn’t punk, yet alone ska, but my bigger worry was the lack of movement from the crowd and interaction between them. No community, no dérives. Ben, upon noticing my malaise, told me not to worry. “This is the only metal band on the bill,” he yelled in my ear over the pulsing noise. “C’mon, let’s go meet some people.”

Outside having a cigarette we got talking to others. It was overcast outside but not raining. They were all happy—they were all dry. A lot of people scattered around different areas outside the pub ended up knowing each other. They were all friends, they all played in each other’s bands, they all partied and got drunk with each other, and they were all ecstatic to meet me.

Some guys I bonded with especially well. It wasn’t long before we would go out exploring the city in between bands’ sets. No awkwardness arose; Ben’s presence wasn’t even needed. The next few hours brought forth a barrage of punk and pop-punk bands (and a ska band, of course). I was expecting mediocre three- and four-chord patterned, high school-esque pop-punk music. My presumption was fortunately short-sighted. These bands were good—real good. These kids knew how to write catchy punk and pop-punk songs: invest properly in decent equipment, balance out the distortion, add in a sing-along, have more nuanced parts than just power chords, and dance, dance. Ben came on stage with his band Throwing Stuff, dedicated a song to me, and then the next thing I know people were Throwing Ben. His friends' band, Leagues Apart, pleasantly brought back nostalgic times reminiscent of 1990's styled thrash punk.



A drummer from one punk band would get on stage and front a ska band, playing trombone. Another drummer hopped on stage randomly and subbed for a heavy punk band that worked the crowd well. All the while I photographed the kids getting lost in the space, but having an awareness nonetheless of what was going on around them. Bonding was happening in the movement; everybody subverted the structure of their lives by getting closer with each other while contradictorily getting further apart, from themselves, from what exactly was going on. I put the camera down and joined in the fun—my glasses fell off and were trampled on quickly.



The frame was bent horribly and the lens missing; I could barely see a thing. It didn’t matter though, because the world I was viewing with my glasses through the camera was upside down—it’s the very principle of a camera obscura. I was trying to trivialize the Manchester dérive by freezing it in time. Debord contextualized his whole concept of the dérive on Marx’s thesis that everywhere around man the spaces surrounding him are images of himself—of his own creation. The landscape is alive, and seeing it upside down treats the space and the people around you as comatose. My glasses bring the world into focus. The dérive I thrusted myself into was a statement and a half: we create the world around us in our own image, but trying to focus it inclines us to merely stare. Passive spectators are voyeurs of themselves without realizing it. The punk show in Manchester was a response, a passionate subversion to the cultural systematization of the conditions of the downtrodden mother, the crying baby, the lost kids, and the browbeaten teen girl. Manchester is a living organism of its own. Dance, dance. Live it, live it.

Dancing in the Fog

I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Oh, London! My sin! I promised to many of you I would write regularly. London has consumed my soul. I cannot be expected to write to you consistently. How could I? To write, love—I know: It is a promise to myself as much as it is to any of you. What do I as a writer owe after making an oath to share and express the poetics of my experience?

This journal entry is about my employment at Rotunda Bar and Restaurant in London. Work, yes, I know; such a topic risks dreadful boredom. However, it seems all I do is work. Rotunda is my poetics. Its place and its people help me glide through the fog of London. If you have never walked through London fog then you don’t really know what life is all about. I hope that came off as more honest than it did judgemental—after all, life is never fully lucid, and nothing is as blurry as the haze of London.

Some maintain that art deludes. Young Marx, an avid scholar of pre-Socratic Greek philosophy and a lover of Italian Renaissance literature, grew into a man who mocked the arts with his metaphor of dancing tables.

Others insist “the play’s the thing.” Just ask Hamlet.

Of course, Voltaire and Flaubert did not see eye to eye about London. Both Frenchmen, London took the exiled Volatire in, much to the writer’s delight. The constant fog of London, its dreary sense of constitutionalism, commerce, and civility warmed his spirits. Flaubert detested the fog. What good are constitutionalism, commerce, and civility if everything is so fucking dreary? Voltaire tried to romanticize the fog; Flaubert saw it for what it was—yet he still wrote. Fog is hazy, yes, but walking through it is how life happens.

I think writing is like sailing a ship through a patch of fog. We’re constantly trying to look through the telescope towards the coastline, the past, but the image is always out of focus. The ship, however, keeps sailing. Voltaire wasn’t smart enough to realize what the fog was; Marx did but foolishly wished for only sunny days. Flaubert…well, he just wrote incessantly.

The restaurant, Rotunda, is on the main floor of a building called Kings Place, about a two-minute walk from the famous King’s Cross St. Pancras station. One morning, some years ago, a very wealthy and artistically inclined individual, Peter Millican, woke out of his bed and decided that he wanted to build his own concert venue. A performance space for classical, folk, and jazz musicians to gather, pontificate, and, of course, play their music for the public. Throw in an art gallery outside the concert halls, add tasteful comedy and theatre to the mix, a fine-dining restaurant, and lease the upper-floor offices to companies of significant cultural importance, and you’ve got a deal, Peter Millican said, speaking to himself while brewing his morning coffee.

In the past couple weeks alone, I have served entrée meals of fancy French names I embarrassingly mispronounce to everyone from the director of communications for Nick Clegg, U.K.’s deputy prime minister, to the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The former was delightfully outgoing; the latter a little bit more reserved yet still polite, the kind of quiet dignity you get for having your own Wikipedia page because you are in charge of the U.K.’s most respected newspaper, I suppose. I served him for a second time tonight actually, and despite my charming best he still didn’t give me a job. I served two other senior reporters from The Guardian tonight as well. I see a lot of Guardian employees actually, because they lease the majority of the upper-floor office spaces in Kings Place. The hub of U.K. and international media is at my fingertips. I serve at least two or three VIP tables a night, mostly CEOs of large companies and shit like that. Kings Place is currently preparing for an upcoming visit from Princess Anne, the older sister of Prince Charles. All the while, gondolas float by the Regent’s Canal that borders the restaurant’s terrace.

The building hosts public lectures and discussions every Monday night on art, culture, politics, and science, and there is a forthcoming themed tribute to Mozart in regards to some of the classical performances. “I only have to think about music and Mozart comes to mind,” writes Peter in the brochure scattered around the lobby. (Would you be surprised to find out Kings Place publishes their own magazine too?) Whenever I think of music I think of melody. If he wants to be specific with just one guy…I don’t know, go for it I guess. That’s like saying “Whenever I think of movies, I think of Cary Grant.” Okay, sure.

I experience the meanderings daily of London’s rich and famous. They are the people who run the city and Western Europe; some of them have a hand in running the world. I provide the fuel, the distraction—the guilt-killing subconsciously narcissistic good deed of their bland courtesy. Everything is beautiful…too beautiful. Did I mention the fucking gondolas? Fifty hours a week they dock within an arm’s reach of where I’m trying to take an order for a red wine I would never be able to afford with my own money. My daily fear is falling in as I stand on the edge, trying to recommend the Australian shiraz only to get a pompous “hmm…I feel as if the Chilean would better suit the palate of the afternoon—do haste please because we are quite eager for our wine”; then they talk about why the Middle East and North Africa are so fucked up. Beautiful people, eating beautiful food in a beautiful environment, talking about art, politics, and history to such a degree that I feel worthless. I wonder if any of them have ever set foot in Whitechapel.

It must be a fog, all of it. But then they leave, and when the lights go out strangers fall in love and we make life happen. I’ll tell you why I’ve never had a better job—despite many of these wankers. I’ve never had a job where the managers give you a beer to drink while you’re closing up shop—not just now and then but ritually—or a bottle of wine to take home with you or heck, in Europe, to drink on the street on your way to the Tube or bus station. Shit, I’ve never had a job where my bosses give me a beer while I’m still working and some fucking rich snob is complaining about his millefeuille, all the while I’m getting buzzed in the storage room. I’ve never had a job where I work with people from all walks of life. My French is laughable and I’m the only one who can’t speak at least two languages fluently. I’ve never had a job where after work we walk to the nearby club at least three or four times a week. Me, the Canadian, the sociable Swedish girl, the flamboyant Italian, the hilarious Pole, the suave Lithuanian, and the charmingly feuding New Zealander and Aussie, where we meet up with other employees already drunk and dancing. People here are much more gregarious, personal, and so much more willing to buy everyone else a round of drinks, and especially more liberal towards going out on an almost nightly basis, even if they are your boss.

I had promised to write more regularly but the truth is, fulfilling a promise is like a death sentence, killing the dancing—there’s nothing left to fulfil, nothing left to promise, nothing left to do. If we ever did get to the shoreline, past the fog to sunny days, we wouldn’t need the telescope, yet alone the ship.

I can only write sporadically but I fight on. It’s the best I can hope for, and it’s all I can do to navigate my way through the fog, to deal with the debilitating life of my too beautiful workplace for the hope of an aesthetic experience in which the play is the thing. The guests and the culture of Kings Place is a world of its own—the real art is what happens when the lights go out, where the conscience of the king is exposed on the dance floor somewhere in Angel in North London. When the lights go out and all we have is fog, I carry on, mostly too fleetingly to reflect adequately on the situation, but I write what I can to make sense of it nonetheless.

Now all that’s left to do is ponder the amusing coincidence that Marx’s daughter Eleanor was and continues to be Flaubert’s most celebrated translator. Are the tables winking at us when they dance? Marx, to raise such a girl, must have known that the tables dance, always dance in the fog, that life happens beyond the jejune. Oh, jejune, jejune, jejune…

Despite what some asshole may have told you, hell is not other people. It’s the fog I walk through daily. Only I deal with it.