ALL NANS ARE MUMS BUT NOT ALL MUMS ARE NANS AND NOT ALL NANS ARE NAN AND HERE IS WHY, LOVE DAN

On being told not to use the word idiot to each other as children, my cousins and my sisters and I


''Don't say idiot! Idiots are little boys in wheelchairs!'' 


Nan meant spastics, of course, though undoubtedly there are little boys in wheelchairs who are in addition to being spastics are idiots.

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS TAKES ITS TOLL ON ME

0603hrs

Return from tea preparation to find mum rifling through the vast amount of just time and things in boxes under the bed I am not sleeping on in the room I am staying in (everyone’s, but especially my younger sister’s, belongings are everywhere around the house – the spare bedroom in the house I lease has a room just for her detritus in suitcases) after complaining about how I was sitting and typing and en route to rearranging furniture on her birthday I said ‘’What the hell are you doing?! Go to breakfast! I said I’ll move it now [the bed against the wall, perhaps, to allow for table and chair to sit at]’’

‘’I’m looking for something’’

‘’WHAT?!’’

‘’One particular bell I am looking for’’

I reached into a drawer and retrieved the bell. I have an exceptional if unpredictable memory. Happy birthday. Already I have used ‘’I found your bell, what more do you want from me?!’’ ‘’At least you HAVE a bell’’ and ‘’I got you that bell!’’ and only half an hour has elapsed.

Events occur in real time.

0615hrs

Having told her (the refrain of both my parents ever ‘’show me when it’s done/don’t tell me you are doing something’’) I had actually written something and she would read it today I of course regretted it for a number of reasons, which temporarily is only two, to mind, but one being a fear of her dying on her way to or from breakfast thinking I have yet again made a claim or promise to go unfulfilled and be sad for me, which in turn opened one of the houses countless trapdoors. The entire house was made with trapdoors, very eco-friendly. 

PARAGRAPH FOR A SERIGRAPH

Of course I still paint, but they are worse each time, like a boxer’s fights. I want to say.

People remark this is low self esteem but in this instance it is twin towering ego, in that I don’t believe potential diminished with each finished piece, or that my paintings or printmaking is no good. I don’t do it with discipline or at all most of the time, which is a problem, and maybe in part due to low self esteem, but my saying so in what I genuinely believe is a joke is just showing off facility in expression and knowing if words are the weapon, say a nasty unsolicited validation (or a gentle one, and a rejection of it is a chance to talk more, to entertain more or get out) then I feel confident of at least mutually assured destruction. 

I DON'T REALLY CARE ABOUT STAR WARS OR GAME OF THRONES OR HARRY POTTER OR CARD GAMES OR BOARD GAMES OR SPORT

There, I said it. 
It's not quite inverted snobbery, which I am prone to, it is something else. Maybe it's just normal snobbery? It feels foreign to me now as I haven't cared for years and my consumption of sub par dreck quotidian: I look forward to the Canadian pilot season of shows for christ's sake. 

Just none of those.

THE PANDA IN THE NOT ENOUGH ROOM

**SPOILER ALERT: IT ANNOYED ME**

Yes, immediately, but not in your sample. 

Not in the one above and it is a picture cropped and in a tweet, so giant is a giant misnomer.

How is this an acceptable sentence from a journal of record? Explains? What in god fuck is going on in their heads? Most headlines? This is the 1st time, and I've missed trends before, most in fact, and this I've not seen. 

Additionally: everyone feeling festive? I am about to blow up, am doing so now, and I have exquisite existential misery and intractable physical ailments. Just like every year, except worse this year for a few reasons, one of which is that it's this one, so it is in a strict sense festive, yes. But back to the panda.

Can I spot the panda? Obviously. The tweeted pic however does not exhibit the panda so a millisecond scan of its perimeter when looking at the full version reveals the panda to be not quite right where it belongs.

The bottom right, here.

Crafty way to ruin a bit of xmas fun/be challenged by the pastime child of candy crush and a sudoku

PASS THE BUTTER

What appears as enmity or ill will is in fact just writing, trying be funny, trying to be honest. It's material and if it works or doesn't one way here it might some other way another place. The work comes first, the heat loss (which I believe is the definition of work in thermodynamics? Probably not and meaningless here anyway, something to type). It's also not necessarily true. It is crafted, well or not. I am full of laughter and I love my mother. Our favourite shared joke is from a Richard Prince canvas with a version of a joke on it, his:

Two psychiatrists, one to the other: I was having lunch with my mother the other day and I made a Freudian slip. I had meant to say ''Pass the butter'' but instead I said ''You fucking bitch you ruined my life!''

KILOMETRICODEPENDENT

Paint a picture of your mother for me. She wouldn’t like that.

Ah, the misinterpreted world of the Bond family, most especially misinterpreted by ourselves.

As a for instance.

Today is my mother’s birthday, and from where I am writing, literally the longest day of the year. I’ve stayed up too, which makes it all worse – her, this writing, my life – and even more like the eleventh series of 24 she wishes I could download her, although just series 3 would do for today though as that’s where I’m up to darling.

I mean none of this (all of it, I should have just said most or much or some of this) of course but it is coinciding with my plummet into bloggery [cast into dark eternity – hyperlink], which is in part to appease and please her. The mother.  But it would also require I don’t mean today is my mother’s birthday. In conversation this confused sally would be forgiven, my review of it will bring me to a precipice. As usual, it was something to say. A scream into the void.

Mum truly loves some of my painting and creative output (in fact my moving at all impresses her. ‘’Maybe it’s because you’re left-handed’’ ‘’It’s so painful watching you trying to do anything’’) so the following complicated anecdotes, brushstrokes of a portrait of her (and me, by me, for us), coming across as a bit Quentin Blake (you can guess I’m 33, right? You know where Wally is, Family Ties) will be fine with her surely? In time.

Probably twenty years into my painting she said to me ‘’I always saw you as a writer [I definitely won’t fail then, not like in art]’’. Admittedly she has said variations of this periodically in less conflicted settings. To wit, in the kitchen a few days ago when I wasn’t writing.

Additionally, she wasn’t only indirect: standing in the garage studio near me I once said, for something to say, on an unfinished painting, ‘’I’m not sure what to do with this one’’. To which she replied ‘’What? Apart from paint over it?’’ At least we were both correct.

So I am writing, which they now call typing, and have finally taken your ‘’Jesus Christ Dan just write a fucking blog’’ advice to heart, into digital eternity, if a success, to the thirty dozen.

I hope you find this activity is as ambiguous in motive, content, and interpretation as you had wished for my Solsticistic mother, Ma.

Love Dan.