Not Feeling Very Anything

I'm not feeling very anything at the moment. I feel I have some emotion blockage thats probably like an antibody, stopping me feel too strongly about anything - and it's probably because there's a real frustration about lots of different things. Lots of things are annoying me of course, but I've obviously got a failsafe mechanism at the moment that is refusing to get more than mildly annoyed by them at all. This morning I got off the bus at the university and walked past fifty gridlocked buses (at least) - taking over an hour to get to work in total - all because of the Labour Party Conference. The City Council's been congratulating itself on getting the big event into town, yet God knows how many thousands of people were late into work today; whilst the government is "going green" with the fashion. Nobody ever seems to go green by staying at home these days, it all involves a conference, preferably somewhere distant. But I'm hardly worked up about these contradictions. I didn't even get worked up about the posters for the Stop the War Coalition. Amongst the things that people were marching against were: that we shouldn't go to war on Iran, and that we should abandon Trident. Since the only realistic reason we would go to war on Iran is because they were developing nuclear weapons there's an absurd collation of ideas that means that those marching (or at least those writing the posters) are in favour of an independent nuclear deterrent for Iran, and against an independent nuclear detterent for the UK. I know it's supposed to be the sign of a first class mind to hold too contradictory ideas simultaneously, but let this be the exception that proves the rule. And I'm still not that bothered. I'm not even sure I can work out whether I prefer Blair, Brown or Cameron or some yet to be genetically engineered hybrid of the three (let's call such a beast Milliband). As one's work becomes increasingly Kafkaesque (will the project be extended before it's ended - which sounds like a Lenny Kravitz song) I'm not sure which conclusion I want here either. In the week that anti-ageist legislation is coming into focus, reading about the young Nick Laird and others being shortlisted for the "under 30" Dylan Thomas award should make me feel old, but doesn't. Everyone of my age seems to write nostalgically about the seventies/eighties - Badly Drawn Boy's new song, David Mitchell's latest novel, for instance. Puzzled at my own lack of nostalgia, I found this from a song I recorded, oh, God, it must have been 1994, called "J. Swift Remembers."

J. Swift Remembers playing drainies
Watney’s Party Six, out of reach at parties
Should have been asleep
Drainpipe jeans, hair cropped to the skin
Ra-ra skirted ingénues, bubble perms

...it begins - there I've done that. No need to write a novel about it now.