Baby Bio: Vauxhall goes gurn-crazy for Plant Food

Oh, the gays do make me laugh. Apparently the new fun drug that's going around is mephedrone, which is currently legal, even though it could be analogous to controlled substances. Enterprising websites have sprung up all over the place, but what's really rather amusing is that the sites which sell it are packaging it as plant food so it can be posted out to customers, along with a warning that they're not to stuff it up their noses as it makes people gurn.

I'd not heard from anyone who'd tried it until this weekend (although obviously I knew it was around, just not what it does), when two different people told me about it. I guess it's the bank holiday effect that's making all the kids go crazy on plant food.

What is it like? One person said it was like Parma Violets crushed up with speed, saying it woke him up a bit, made everything a bit swimmy and then got boring. The other person said it had a brief euphoric effect, then made for wobbly legs and a disinhibitory/aphrodisiac effect. Apparently the hangover's not terrifically pretty either.

Meh, I don't care, I'm not going to take it, but it just makes me laugh to think about the clubs being full of muscular, raunchy men, dancing all sweaty and topless, snogging and groping each other, all the while snorting a little bump of Baby Bio to make it all seem a little bit less like they're spending eight hours standing on one foot and then the other, staring at a few flashing lights.

It reminds me of when I was about 12 and I convinced the other boys who couldn't be arsed with sports day that they should try to smoke grass. One handful of wet turf, rolled in a page from a Tricolore French textbook and bingo, the asthmatic kid who suffered more from gullibility than any respiratory difficulties managed to get out of the four by four hundred relay. I think I had to do the hundred metre sprint, though.

So, rekindle my school days and let me be an enabler. Go out there and jack up Baby Bio, kiddies.

Um. My weekend wasn't spent gurning in Fire or getting punch fucked by a queue of men in Hidden, instead I went to Duckie, had a free lunch at Smollensky's and walked through Ravencourt Park and was surrounded by bats. Bruce Wayne's a twat if he was scared of them, they're beautiful and so incredibly agile.

I don't think they snort Baby Bio, though. Go do it for the bats.

Changing Room

Changing Room, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

That'll teach me to take posey photos in changing rooms before going for a hair cut, won't it? Still. I'm back at the gym and I hope I'll look fitter than this soon.

Night!

A is for Antidisestablishmentarianism

I want to do an alphabet book of sesquipedalian words. Please post your favourites!

P is for pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, for instance!

Japanese Rope Bondage Life Drawing

Terrible photo of a drawing. Some days I think perhaps dropping the scanner on the floor was a bit of a mistake. Anyway, I went along to the Resistance Gallery in Bethnal Green last night for a Japanese Rope Bondage Life Drawing session. I have to say, I'm impressed at how it was done - difficult poses held well and you were left to your own devices for the main part. I chatted to some lovely people there and there were free wasabi peas, so I can't complain. It got a bit annoying during one complex pose where two women were suspended from the ceiling together because there were a lot of photographers there and the flashes got distracting and a few people were talking by the bar, but then I realised it was eleven thirty, I'd been there since eight and I was about to miss the last tube home, so I'm assuming it was nature's way of saying that by eleven, it's a social event.

I plan on going again if they do another one, definitely. In fact, if you know of any life drawing class (perhaps cheaper than this one - the £15 covered snacks and sake, but I am off the booze and I'd already eaten, so didn't need to pay for those), let me know and let's go do it. I really want to get back to basics and improve my observational drawing.

This morning, I'm being interviewed by Liberation Frequency magazine about my comics and art and stuff. I hope I can think of something vaguely lucid to say to them!

I am the best at what I dooooo!

I am the best at what I dooooo!, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

It's a gratuitous t-shirt shot. Sue me.

New Clothes

Do you like the t-shirt I'm wearing in this photo? Ah, I see, perhaps I got a little bit excited while taking it. It's a t-shirt from Pictures For Sad Children and says, "A brief history of art," followed by one person saying, "Look" and the next saying "Look at me" - it's really rather wonderful. Jonathan and I sat on the floor this morning like it was Christmas, opening our parcel from Topatoco, which is just as well, as the latest t-shirt from T-post wasn't really to my taste. It might end up on ebay unless some hipster reading this makes me a better offer for it.

The picture makes my eyes water a little bit.

Let's see, there's rather a lot for me to tell you about, isn't there? I told you about winning money for tongue skills at the Deaf pub, showed you how bad I still am at using Illustrator, told you about how my mother rotted her septum by snorting drugs and I posted a picture of some dead ladybirds. Clearly there's a lot more happening than that if those are the only things I've been telling you about.

Well, the trip to Malmö was awesome. We stayed in Erik's flat and managed to avoid leaving dirty syringes and burned spoons all over the place, so hopefully he won't be too upset with us when he gets home. I really like having a place we can squat in whenever we need a few days away. I might even use it as a refuge if I need to catch up some pace with my work while I'm at college. That was kind of my plan a few years back before all kinds of silly nonsense got in the way.

The staff at Gatwick were a hoot; they looked at our passports and made fun of where we'd both been born, tried to make lewd suggestions about Jonathan's banana and the man by the metal detector said, "I'm terribly sorry sir, I'm going to have to squeeze your nipple." Which he did, to check it was pierced, and then he accidentally hit me in the face while I was watching him do it. His colleague said I should sue and I told her I wouldn't stand a chance because clearly there wasn't enough CCTV going on there.

This time, they didn't check to see if my phone was on drugs. Just as well, considering the last time they swabbed my phone they missed a dodgy text message from Chris by about a minute. Phew, eh? Sadly, nothing to do with meth or bombs or anything like that.

What did we do in Malmö? Well, it was the Malmö festival, but sadly we missed the headline act, Lady Sovereign. I hope she confused the hell out of them all. Instead, we saw some parpy jazz bands and Neneh Cherry's sister or someone like that. She was great, but the sound engineer let her down. She had an annoying habit of wandering over to an electric drum and hitting it out of time, so we had a whale of a time hitting each other with empty coke bottles we'd filled with vodka.

I had a look for locally made comics, but couldn't find any, which I thought was a bit odd because Malmö apparently produces some good illustrators. I shall have to go back again and have a proper look around. The comics shop did have some rather fine looking Call of Cthulhu game books that are hard to find here now. Damn the stupid exchange rate and my tiny rucksack.

We had a day out in Copenhagen before the Danish Kronor threatened us with bankruptcy for wanting to buy some chewing gum and we fled back on the train to Malmö, our slightly dull but wonderfully familiar home from home. Needless to say the next few weeks will be a bit lean on my side and will probably eat up a fair chunk of Jonathan's redundancy money. Erk. That Start of Term macbook air might just have to wait for a little while yet.

I had a long talk with someone who is doing a PhD at Oxford and I have to say I did then take a look at how the PhD programme at arts.ac.uk looks and I might see if I can do well enough in the MA to look at doing something higher. It's funny, now the ADHD is diagnosed and I'm starting to notice stupid behaviours I've learned, I'm starting to feel like I can achieve all kinds of things I'd have thought impossible. I might write a little more about this at some point soon, so I won't bore you with it now.

Anyway, yes, Malmö was a really welcome little break for Jonathan and me and I've come back refreshed and ready to take over the world, or at least try to get my life in order.

I'm determined I'm going to do well at college, otherwise there's no point in devoting the next two years of my life to it. I'm planning on trying to do two days a week paid work, either with museums and galleries or as an interpreter (only little short bookings until I know my hands can take it), I'm hoping to make it to the gym four mornings a week, spend three days a week at college or on college work, get to the theatre once a fortnight, go to gallery openings whenever I can and generally live like the person I'm hoping to become. Of course, I'm still going to spend loads of time playing role-playing games and killing monsters on the xbox, but clearly this is all in the name of research!

Um. I've totally lost track of what I was talking about now, sorry. Um. Oh! I went back to the gym today. There were naked men all over the place, but I really couldn't be bothered with them. I'm not in crippling pain in my arms yet, so it might just be I'll be okay there now.

Err, that was it. You probably didn't get past the weird photo, did you?

The Unbending Trees

The concert last night was amazing and a real honour to get name-checked just before the encore. I'll write more about it when I put the next comic up (next Tuesday) but in the meantime, I've put the comic on the web shop, so if you'd like a copy, go across to the Cute But Sad Comics shop and get yourself a copy while they last!

Oh, and if you buy one, I might even tell you a secret.

Legal Eagle Schmeagle Beagle

Hi, mum!

So, I've emailed the PALS at Lewisham Hospital and asked about how I take the complaint I've placed against the hospital to the next level, having exhausted the local resolution stage. Here's the letter I got from the Chief Executive, with names changed to protect the (presumably) innocent and comments in sarcastic asides from me.

Dear Mr ZombieCoterie

I was concerned to hear of your experiences related to the planning of your surgery and post operative care after shoulder surgery. We aim to provide a high standard of service to the community we serve and I am genuinely disappointed when a patient indicates that we have failed to achieve this.

It wasn't shoulder surgery, it was ulnar decompression in my elbow...

Ms Marvel, Service Manager for Orthopaedics has carried out an investigation on my behalf which I trust will address the issues you have raised. Ms Marvel has also asked Spiderman, Orthopaedic Registrar, for his input.

You sat that the operation was delayed by a month until 15th May 2009. Ms Marvel has reviewed your records which show your initial care was under Doctor Octopus who worked as a Locum Consultant in Orthopaedics for 6 months. Unfortunately, Doctor Octopus left the Trust at the end of March as he had taken up a consultant post elsewherte. Captain America, Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon, kindly agreed to take over Doctor Octopus's patients and perform the surgery until the appointment of a new upper limb orthopaedic consultant. Your surgical pre-assessment date was linked to the initial operation date under the care of Doctor Octopus. I am so sorry that the reason for cancellation was not made clear to you.

You say that when you attended the Pre-assessment Clinic you did not see the surgeon or anaesthetist. On the day of your pre-assessment unfortunately Captain America and his Registrar were unavailable due to study leavel. Our normal practice is that all our patients are seen in the Pre-assessment Clinic and have a detailed discussion regarding the proposed surgery and postoperative period with a member of the surgical team. On that particular occasion neither Spiderman nor Captain America were available to have this discussion with you. Spiderman apologises that he did not realise on the day of the surgery that you had not had this discussion. He was under the impression that you had had an extensive discussion with the surgeon. Regarding not seeing the anaesthetist, Ms Marvel has discussed this with the Pre-assessment Department staff who have explained that when you brought up your 'Added to Waiting List" form you were asked to fill in a pre-screening questionnaire on which you would have given information about any previous medical history. The Nurse Practitioner at pre-assessment screens this information and, if necessary, a separate anaesthetic appointment would have been arranged for you.

We have recently reviewed the consenting process and all patients listed for upper limb orthopaedic surgery are now consented in Outpatient Clinic at the time of listing for surgery. This should minimise the risk of patients feeling uninformed regarding their planned surgery.

You say that postoperatively you did not see an orthopaedic surgeon or physiotherapist and were sent home with the message that an appointment would be sent in the post. Surgeons do not routinely see the patients postoperatively. Recovery has clear guidelines regarding discharge and work to the postoperative instructions described on the discharge summary by the doctor. The discharge summary stated that you were to be seen 6 weeks post surgery, and that your sutures were to be removed at the GP practice after 2 weeks. Spiderman would like to apologise for not making this clear on the day of surgery.

Ms Marvel spoke to Dr Susan Storm, Head of Physiotherapy, regarding postoperative physiotherapy and she has advised that is not routine practice to provide postoperative physiotherapy. If physiotherapy is necessary this is usually requested after the first follow-up appointment. The Invisible Woman has informed Ms Marvel that a physiotherapy appointment was organised for you which you attended on 2nd July 2009. Spiderman has agreed to write rehabilitation guidelines for upper limb surgery to ensure patients are aware what exercises can be started after surgery.

The issue here is more that the physiotherapist has, in two months, been able to remedy the very same problem as was operated on in the other arm. My left arm is pretty much healed without surgery as a result, so my issue is that if I'd had this physiotherapy intervention when the nerve compression was first diagnosed by the nerve conduction test I had at King's, I could have been healed by last Christmas and been back at work at the beginning of this year rather than being on benefits and unable to return to interpreting. I could also have avoided having my arm chopped up.

Your appointment was rescheduled to 12th August 2009. Ms Marvel has investigated this and has been unable to find a specific reason for the postponement as Spiderman and Captain America were both in clinic on 1st July. I understand from Ms Marvel that your appointment was brought forward to 15th July, which you attended. I do hope that with the physiotherapy you are now making a good recovery.

You say that on discharge you were given tiny plasters that were smaller than the incision. Ms Marvel discussed this with Professor Xavier, Matron for Riverside Theatres, and he would like to apologise for providing the wrong size plasters. The wound is packed in theatres and the nurses in Recovery are not aware of how large the incision is unless informed in the postoperative notes. Providing plasters smaller than the incision was not intentional and Matron X is sorry this happened.

I sincerely hope our explanations and apologies ahave addressed your concerns and that you are reassured that we have taken steps to minimise the recurrence of such a breakdown in communication. However, if you feel there are further issues arising from this matter, then please do not hesitate to contact the PALS Unit on 020 8333 3355 and they will be happy to discuss the matter further and, if necessary, set up a meeting with the relevant members of staff.

If, alternatively, you feel that the Local Resolution stage of the complaints procedure has been exhausted, you may wish to consult the complaints leaflet sent to you with the acknowledgement letter as it gives full details of what other courses of action are available to you.

Yours sincerely

Nick Fury,
Chief Executive

What are your thoughts on this? I'm not sure if by admitting they've not done things that are essential to ensuring I've given informed consent they are admitting negligence or quite what format the complaint takes from here. I think the Local Resolution has been exhausted, so I've asked PALS to let me know what I should do next. If it looks like I have a case for trying to claim back lost earnings or damages for the extra year I've been out of work then I will do so. I take particular issue with the discussion I had with Doctor Octopus when we got the results of the nerve conduction test and I asked specifically if I would stand any chance of healing without surgery and whether physiotherapy would help and he told me that I was being silly and that only surgery would help at that point. Turns out he was wrong, if the other side had the same problem (the nerve conduction test showed the same trouble both sides) and has been fixed without surgery. According to the physio it's really clear from the notes and from a quick inspection that the problem was to do with something in my neck and that I needed a lot of specific exercises to straighten my neck and improve my posture.

Ugh. Tell me I'm not being a crazy person and complaining about nothing, yes? I'm really quite disheartened about all of this and, to add to the general joy of it all, I appear to be getting a bit depressed by it all, as I'm sure is only appropriate.

Thank you!

Wanted Dead or Alive

I was talking to a guy in a pizza restaurant last night about the PhD he's doing about applied psycholinguistics in literature at Oxford. I want to do a PhD now, it sounds easy.

The Graveyard of Ladybirds

The area by the Turning Torso here in Malmö was covered in tens of thousands of dead ladybirds, their bodies tossed into piles like this by the wind.

Jonathan said:

When they came for the bees, I did nothing.

When they came for the ladybirds, I did nothing.

When they came for me, there was no-one left to save me.

I've never seen this many ladybirds in one place, and I've certainly never seen this many dead in one place. What a strange, sad sight!

Learning Illustrator, or My God, The Recession Sucks.

CV, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

So, um, I finally bothered to start fiddling with Illustrator and made this sort of CV thing to indicate that, generally, my life is getting steadily more awesome as I go along. I don't like how it looks just yet; the key is the wrong colour and there's still lots I could do to make it considerably more awesome than it is, but it's one way of avoiding the problems I have when trying to show a linear progression of jobs. I mean, I freelanced as an interpreter for hundreds of places.

I could also do a lot more with the skills section, but boredom was really starting to kick in by this point. I will also get rid of black type on red text, for it is the devil's own work and I would be committing access suicide if I were to try to pretend that was okay. Hmm, I don't think a CV's ever going to reflect what kind of a person I am, not unless it includes things like:

* Learned conversational Chinese Sign Language in ten days.
* Has taken pretty much every antidepressant drug on the market.
* Met the Queen (and didn't punch her!)
* Habitually and casually lies.
* Lazy in bed, but is told he's an okay lay.
* Is nicer and taller than he seems online, apparently.
* Can tie a knot in a cherry stalk with his tongue.

Okay, one of those is a lie. The one about lying, obviously.

The one about cherry stalks is true, though. When I was, hmm, twelve or something, we used to watch Twin Peaks and there was a scene where a girl wanted to get a job as a prostitute and her way of proving how good she'd be at that job was to tie a knot in a cherry stalk with her tongue. I decided there and then that I should learn to do this, so everyone would think I was fantastic in bed. It just seemed like a useful life skill, so I spent hours locked in my room with my face contorted.

Well, twenty-one years later, last night I was proved correct. Fred asked us along to the South London Society of Deaf Drunks so Jonotron could practice his BSL. He is, I have to say, awesome already. I'm incredibly impressed, and so were the Deafs. (Incidentally, I found out last night that predictive text says "Deafs" should be "feces" uh oh.) What I hadn't expected was that there would be party games.

Fred had a bucket of cherries and we all had to put a pound in the pot and take a cherry and then we had to tie a knot in the stalk and we had several elimination rounds and, of course, by the end, the only cherry stalks left were the ones that were really short. Naturally, I could only imagine I was trying out to be a hooker in a scary hotel and, therefore, won.

Fifteen quid for sex skills I learned as a child. I wonder where that fits on my CV...

Living Wired: Can I hack my life to get what I want?

I was in Belfast and Dublin for the weekend to visit Chris (who probably hates this photo of him in a café in Belfast with bras hanging from the ceiling). He's smart, driven and I'm quite sure he's destined to end up in far more awesome situations than I'd even know how to describe.

On the way back, I dug into a copy of Wired UK magazine and tried to enjoy the article about Dark Matter, despite it wibbling into the occasional lazy metaphor and, to my surprise, I succeeded. Mostly because of a sense of schadenfreude at the difficulties and sense of futility that the scientists were expressing at trying to prove that nothingness doesn't exist, or that nothingness exists, or at least that nothingness has matter. Add to that the desperation of the people from NASA whose quest to send people to other planets is starting to sound more and more like it's becoming just a theme park for wealthy people to pretend they're weightless for a little while, and I'm left with an impression of people piling their entire lives into utterly useless endeavours.

If they can waste 0.5% of the US's financial resources on toys like that, then why on earth shouldn't I devote my time, energy and intellect to similarly useless goals like getting to see the Bronchioles in a syndicated strip somewhere, or Tweaker Mum appearing in Butt Magazine? Why should I feel like it's not a meaningful pursuit to crave an income from drawing and writing however I can get it?

There was another article in there about how there are two fundamental problems you can have in life: You can know what you want but not how to get it, or you can not know what you want. I think that for a long time I didn't really know what I wanted, only what I wanted to run away from - an office job, a sense of feeling beholden to anyone, mice, post-traumatic stress and watered down soup. Now, I'm not a victim of any of those particularly (and I don't like my miso soup that strong anyway) so I need to be defining my goals in positive terms rather than in looking only at what they're not and trying to infer what they might be. Oh, it's so symbolic of the quest for dark matter, isn't it? The search for gravity in the void? Meh, I know what I want.

I'd like a regular income from drawing. I want to get a strip in a magazine or two by the time I finish my MA. I want to write and draw a graphic novel that someone else prints, markets and distributes by the time I'm 35 (or 40 if I'm busy with other fun things). I want to exhibit and sell drawings and paintings. I want Badger to break some more hearts. I want a puppy and a little space where I can grow carrots. I want money enough to be able to comfortably afford the trip to Burning Man, or another means of getting there each year. I want to be actively engaged in ways of making society a little bit happier.

There are so many life goals I've achieved - I've travelled, I've been on TV in comical ways, I've rotted half my brain cells with drugs, I've overcome depression, I've got a very solid group of friends around me and love on terms that I love. I don't feel like I'm living out someone else's script for how my life should be.

So, it's manifesto time. I know what I want, and perhaps it's time to try to bring some of this focus to bear and avoid getting side-tracked into things that I end up doing because I can't think of what I'd rather be doing. Like Chris and his mission to perform and direct, like Jonathan's mission to travel and find adventure while owning most of London, I think I can finally start to look past the pain and injuries that have defined so much of my life to date and start to look at the things I want to plant, rather than the things I want to bury. My hands may always be weak and my arm scarred, but I'm going to let that line on my arm be a reminder that I can't get drawing into being all things to all people if it's going to tear me into confetti trying to be seven things at once.

So, Wired magazine, in a year or two, you'll be writing about me and there'll be photos of me sat on a rooftop garden with a row of carrots, some home-made lemonade, a puppy at my feet and the biggest grin you've ever seen on my face.

Well, perhaps after I've finished reading Bizarre and wanting to sleep with girls with facial tattoos. Hmm, maybe that will go on my to-do list, too. Oh, and possibly a good night's sleep.

Naah, tattoo sex it is.

Cosmology and Conceit

Ok, I've got no real justification for getting so annoyed, but I've been reading yet another Introduction to Quantum Physics and "popular" science type book and I'm getting a little bit worked up by the tendency that writers have to veer towards the clumsily poetic. There's a bit in this book where they try to point out that every breath you take includes atoms that would have been Marilyn Monroe.

All this makes me think of is the crowd of worried family members gasping in horror as the Space Shuttle Challenger was vapourised. Marilyn Monroe breathed some of that same air and so were her breasts, the air that accidentally went up her skirt and so were the bits of spacecraft, technical instruments and beloved astro-noughts.

I really dislike the way theorists still veer towards a bit of anthropomorphism. Sure, as the universe unfolds before our deep space telescopes, dual-state kittens die half of the time and live the other and in the same way, the mutable universe becomes less ethereal and far less exciting as the possible becomes the actual. The poor universe, losing all its magic because we're being arrogant. Of course, we don't have to be so anthropocentric about it and we could say that the more we learn facts about the universe, we drive our particular strand of reality away from magic, divinity and possibility born of faith not belief.

Sooner or later, we'll be able to look far enough into the past to watch that miraculous moment where nothing became something and, well, I expect we'll be a bit disappointed with whatever we find. There's bound to be some smug satisfaction that we can observe (and presumably keep observing once we can look far enough) the instant where a void avoided itself and everything appeared at once. All matter (at least all that matters to us) we'll be able to peek at and nothing else will ever have existed.

Sure, the air we breathe contains atoms that were once Sylvester Stallone's dandruff, Prince Albert's pubic hair, but the more we understand, the less that's possible. The air contains no unicorn poop, no fairy farts, no dragon-ravished princess' froggy toes, so I guess it's only fair that they veer towards the most poetic options that they can, but making the cosmos romantic makes it a little less Romantic if you ask me.

We are all made of stars, cars, men called Lars, parallel bars, czars, guitars, cigars, bras, long lost Renoirs and most definitely, we are all made of scars.