Standing on the edges of Winter, contemplating the jump.

Creatures

I feel like a mole in the sunlight , I've got no idea how to function,

Or possibly a goat in the lions enclosure, knowingly about to be pounced on.

I can't work out how to fix things or even if I really want to,

My thoughts are messy, buzzing flies and right inside it all is you.

My dogs keep smelling my clothes and me, the fear is seeping from my pores,

I've no idea how to do this anymore. All I want to be is yours.

I wake up every morning feeling sick, I'm not pregnant or likely to be, I think it's all the anger inside of me, dripping corrosively.

Doors to automatic

Sometimes someone says something to you and it hurts so badly it rings in your ears. It makes your eyes smart, your nails make marks in your hands from the tension. It makes you so angry you can't speak and you just want to scream but somehow your voice has been taken away and who's going to hear it anyway?

Probably you're shaking.

Look out for that feeling if it happens to you. You'll know it when it comes. You'll feel hurt and angry and righteous and affronted. Look out for that feeling, and welcome it because its called the Truth.

And you don't like it, you don't believe it, because how the fuck do they know what you're thinking anyway? For a while too you're in denial, you just want to stay in your bubble, because its much easier there with your calm lies and gentle reasoning. (If someone screams in the bubble and no-one is there to hear it was there really a scream? )

Without the bubble the world is a horrible scary place full of...thought. Rawness. Picking at the sores of love? Elation. Devastation. Or even just emotion, which is bad enough because you've tried long and hard to shut it down, to close it off, doors to automatic and cross check.

You see, without the bubble you might actually have to do something. Be something, change something. Paralysed with indecision isn't the place to be when the soft walls are no longer there to support you, when you don't have your blinkers on anymore. And you know that if you step outside you might discover an inner melancholia you didn't even realise you had.

You might.

So you stay there, Lalala with your fingers in your ears pretending not to hear, desperately pretending not to hear and not to believe it because if you do you might actually have to start living, breathing, really being.

And stop just existing instead.

First draft of The Crazy Gravy Train

Sometimes I have panic attacks in the supermarket because I can't find real, true food to feed my family with, 

It's all just sell, sell, sell and E numbers and additives.

And extra salt and extra sugar and pass the doughnuts please, darling, 

flick, flick, flick through the food adverts to the next TV reality Prince Charming.

And then I think how shallow it is when I am surrounded by choice, to be panicking,  

This sweat and fear and needing to leave is not damaging,

It's just option paralysis, a rich Western neurosis; we are paying the price,

Instead of having nothing to eat we deliberate over a hundred different brands of rice.

Part of the problem is our constant reliance on big pharma prescription chemicals,

Being told that it's good to numb your feelings makes me polemical,

This laughable contemporary plague is a self-perpetuating myth of us,

Chasing our own tail like a crazy dog, like Oroborus.

But we're so numb now there aren't even 'best bits', our 'TV highlights',

We've got no creativity, no elation, we're lacking insight.

We're creaking wearily toward a mono-future of calm self-destruction,

Controlled by the companies that feed us our feeling interruption.

(This isn't finished yet.  Or even a little bit sorted but I'm posting it anyhow. I've got a lot else to write in it about anti-depressants and society).

Communal creation

I've just been reading about a beautiful project which maps the centre of Toronto using hand drawn maps done by people who were asked for directions.

I think there's something hauntingly beautiful about the idea of all the individual drawn directions coming together to create the whole picture, as if somehow the citizens of Toronto created their own space just by drawing it.

http://www.futurefarmers.com/survey/collaborativemap.php

I can't even begin to tell you. The people who know couldn't tell you. No-one can tell you because it's not our story, and it's not fair.

Ssssh.

Jesus God how do you switch your writing brain off when it's on again?

I remember now why I liked Facebook, all the numb zombie-like scrolling down and refreshing, thinking about other people's lunches was what was replacing this constant, annoying chatter which is filling my brain and trying to get out of my hand.

STAND FIRM, STRIKE HARD.

At the hospital this morning I see a young couple in the main entrance. He is clearly a soldier, he's got that young, hunky squaddie look, really cropped hair and is in a wheelchair. She's wearing a jacket that has print on the back which reads:

STAND FIRM
STRIKE HARD

I am intrigued and a little bit nosey and casually manoeuvre myself into place to see what it says on the front. Worcester Foresters...something something...regiment.

I look it up on the Internet and its an army regiment. I suppose if you are a forester then standing firm and striking hard is the ideal thing to do, and I can see how that has also been adopted as the motto for this army regiment. It's a strong image.

So the soldier is just wheeling his chair along casually and talking to his partner when all of a sudden we get out the revolving door and he launches into a brilliant series of tricks and wheel spins in his chair, all the while carrying on talking. He's like a kid with a BMX, doing tidy mini-wheelies as he goes along, tipping the chair right back, stopping, starting. Spinning. It's brilliant.

Then they get to the car park and they get in the lift and because they don't have to pay and we do they are quicker than us and they are gone.

And I think:

STAND FIRM
STRIKE HARD

And if none of that works, learn how to do nifty, little wheelies in your wheelchair.

On not being spam.

Apparently, I am spam. I'm not sure I believe this, in particular as I'm far to vain to be such a boring thing. However, more than one person has said this so whilst I deplore the idea of being assigned the 'so dull as not worth bothering' tag by a random computer programme I must accept that it is somehow true and that sadly I have not been identified as in any way special. In some email clients you can mark people as 'NOT JUNK' which I like because almost all the people I actually want to correspond with are not junk at all, else I wouldn't be corresponding.

I feel offended. In my inbox everyday there are emails from people with far more unlikely email addresses than mine, most of them spam. My email client doesn't seem to distinguish between good, bad, rubbish or just plain ludicrous; 'You are due a tax rebate of £3,562. Click here to enter your details for payment.' This is ludicrous because I haven't earned enough to even pay that much tax in a very long time, let alone be due it as a rebate. They really should check the income status of the people they send those emails to, otherwise it's a big waste of everyone's time, theirs and mine. In fact if I was an Internet crook I'd definitely try and target my spam more carefully, perhaps even do a little market research.

But then you see sending things out into the Internet isn't my style at all, I'm far more picky than that. So if you ever get an email from me you should count yourself very lucky indeed. And also somehow let your email client know that I'm a little more important than spam.

On (un)recklessness

She thinks she might give up being reckless. It's very under-appreciated and it takes a lot of work, a lot of time and commitment for, lately, what seems to be very little reward.

It's not something that she is by nature anyway; she really has to try to be it. And is being un-reckless really that dreadful? Would she definitely end up in a job she hates, sitting on the sofa in the evenings, in front of the TV, with limited interaction?

She's seriously considering changing it all. A return to her uninteresting, sensible self, innocuous and dull, instead of living this ludicrously painful, excruciatingly worrying attempt at life on the edge.

Time doesn't heal any fucking wounds. It just makes me a little less likely to want to stab someone.

A lack of divinity

I don't believe in God and I have no particular allegiance to the idea of Divinity. I went to church when I was a little girl but that was really just for the social life - the Sunday school teacher made really good flapjacks and was motherly, at a time when my Mother had become bedridden for a few years with depression.

I've done a lot of drugs and have had mystical experiences with the best of them, just like the rest of them. I've been there with the one consciousness and I've spent my time in a sweat lodge. Been there with the spirit animal. Done that.


But since my Father died and nothing happened I decided that there clearly wasn't anything interesting in the 'other side' because if there was he would have done his utter damnedest to make sure I knew.

NOTHING HAPPENED.

He died, this man, this man who was obviously crucially important to me. He was an atheist who knew he was going to the earth and that was it when he died. So if he was wrong....and then he went somewhere else he would have DEFINITELY made a big deal about it. And yet still nothing happened.

No ghosts. No weirdness. No falling objects, no lights going on and off. No crazy messages written in blood on the wall. No letters from the grave. No coldness. No spooky feelings. Nothing. Not a damn thing.

NO. THING.

So I am a non-believer. It's not really rational, not in a SCIENCE FACT kind of way, although I am far more inclined to believe in a wormy old carcass than some kind of guiding light. It would just take a lot to convince me that there was any kind of after-life; I would have to have my own near death experience, because yours just wouldn't be enough. Not now. Not then. Not ever.

I'm telling you this because today I watched two brilliant TED talks that got me thinking about the idea of oneness. These TED talks both ended with standing ovations, and were both real life stories, told by women. In places they are uncomfortable for me, as I say, 'Divinity' is not something I recognise. But in the first instance the story of the poet being 'chased' by a poem is moving and special, and in the second story I align myself with this lady of science, a brain scientist who experienced something so remarkable it reduced her to tears on a stage in front of her audience.

I want people to watch them both. Don't just watch one and not the other - find the time to watch them together.

And then?

I don't know.

Lets talk about it.



http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html



http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Derby rosters

So I didn't make the roster for the Manchester game and I know it's because I'm injured and everything, I know that. But I can't help feeling gutted anyway. And the worst part is, of course I know how important it is for us to field a strong team and a weak injured link does not a strong team make, and I wouldn't want to be rostered anyway when we have so many brilliant skaters now.

My rational brain knows this. But still.

Sob.

The derby love.

There is a sort of desire I have for skating which is unstoppable.

Even though each time I do it I know my knee will end up all swollen and hurting I still can't not skate.

My rational brain knows that I shouldn't be doing it but emotionally I am completely compelled. It's like an illicit lover, obsessive and all consuming and really fucking dangerous, but you just can't stop doing it anyway even though you know it's hopelessly bad for you and will end in many, many tears.

Writing not to you.

I just want to make it clear here that I'm not writing about you. For instance, if I write about the fact that a random man bit me for no reason at all in a nightclub once and you did that; that was you and you recall it, well then yes, that bit clearly is about you.

But most of this isn't about you, it's not about anyone, not even me. It's just writing.

Except when it isn't, and I'm writing to you, but you'll know that won't you?

Because you did it.

...

....

.....

I've got the blackest pile of slimy gloom hanging over my head, dripping down into my eyes and burying me.

48 ways

I keep writing beginnings. I keep starting things, making notes and jotting down the ideas of things, spawning little tiny projects that remain unfulfilled. I can't stop it. I'm not sure why it's happening, maybe it's the beginning of writing again after a long break, I don't know.

But I want them to grow. I want to send them off out into the Universe and have them return full and complete and ready for the world.

Instead I've got a notebook full of strange little two word notes that say things like:

48 ways.

New beginnings.

Everyone has written everything. There is nothing left to write. All the words are used and I am casting about for topics left write about. Every time I think of something it immediately sounds trite and cliched. Yeah I can't sleep - so can't half the world and they've all already written about how each dark second becomes a lonely hour. They've written about longing, and wishing and hoping, waiting and worrying into the dawn. They've told all the tales of sitting, working, drunk with exhaustion from the night before.

They've used up all the words and there are none left for me that haven't already been chewed over millions of times before.

I wrote this for Dirty Bristow magazine. It's in issue 2, called 'Beast'.

Most of the time as an adult woman with two children, when you tell people you rollerskate they laugh and then automatically tend to imagine glitter and 80's roller discos and leotards. Either that or they picture you careering down a hill as a child hanging off your sister's bike, wearing a set of four wheels on each of your feet that are precariously attached with tiny straps of leather. And probably falling down and scraping your knee, because that's most people's experience of basic rollerskating.

Rollerskating doesn't have a very hard image. Or at least it didn't, but I think that's changing increasingly and rapidly. Suddenly the fastest growing sport in the UK is the sport I play and it's rollerskating but not as you know it. The kind of rollerskating I do involves wearing a mouth guard, knee pads, elbow guards, wrist guards and a helmet. And that's not wimpy over-caution, it's what is expected and legal in order for you to get on the track. Referrees come and check your safety equipment before you start skating and people who remove their mouthguards on the track are instantly sent off.

At the last bout I played in one skater broke her ankle in three places and one girl broke her finger. The girl who broke her finger was just warming up and hadn't even begun to skate against the other team. At the last bout I played in I was so nervous as I approached the start line that I was crying and I don't cry very easily. (Well I do, but only about terribly sad things like footage on wildlife programmes of baby elephants who have become separated from their Mother and are following the herd's tracks but devastatingly, the wrong way). I don't generally tend to cry about pain, or confrontation and I am not a nervous person. I'm also not the sort to choose a full contact sport, I don't even much like touching people I don't know and I don't mean that in a rude way, but I came to skating in a roundabout way.

It started with the lethargy of cyberspace, posting, circa 2006 in the vaguely Gothic internet teenspace known as Livejournal, not, I hasten to add because I was either Gothic or teen, but it was in the youthful days of the internet when sometimes you could find quite sensible adult people in strange, slightly inappropriate spaces. A rather intelligent 30-something woman from Chicago also used to post there and she skated for a Roller Derby team called Windy City. I followed her blog and accidentally fell in love with the idea of the sport and the sort of 'infinitely cooler than the suicide girls' type women who appeared to frequent it. After a year or so of reading about it I did a bit of searching for a UK Roller Derby team and discovered the Birmingham Blitz Dames. I found a flyer. I looked at their website. I had fuzzy little daydreams where I imagined myself belting round a Roller Derby track generally being awesome in roller skates, I saw myself being a brilliant roller girl, knocking women flying here and there, Queen of the rink. But I was too scared to actually contact them. These women were seriously cool, intelligent, hard and no-nonsense. I would never have fitted in.

I'd just like to say at this point that I was never picked last at school for games or anything. It would be cool to tell you that I was the kid who was never chosen, but it's not true. I was pretty good at sports actually, used to run fast and for a long time, played Left Half at Hockey, Wing Attack at Netball. But that was a long time ago and then I had a child, got out of the sporting habit. Of course I ponced around at Ashtanga yoga a little bit pretending I had all the gen on the Ujai breath (it's a bit like pretending to be Darth Vader, that's all you really need to know) and I went to the gym under sufferance occasionally. But I wasn't 'sporty' and I certainly wasn't cool enough to be a rollergirl.

Then one day my boyfriend went to the Chamber of Commerce for one of those 'setting up your new business' courses and the Blitz Dames were there learning all about how to run their league finances properly. He told them I was wussing out about joining and they basically ordered me down to a newbie practice.
So I went. I don't know how to explain now what it was like. It's all the clichés – I never looked back, it's my reason for living and this is why; they say that everybody needs a 'third place'. You have home, you have work and you should also have a third place which ideally has nothing to do with the first two. Your third place is supposed to be the space that you can truly be yourself and yet have nothing expected of you or demanded of you. I'd read that, heard about it, but I never used to believe it. I didn't think I needed a space away from home or work, even though my home and work blend into one because I work from home as a Designer Maker with my boyfriend. I didn't think I needed any extraneous activity, and then I took up Derby.

Skating on the derby track is the only place that I have truly ever just been myself; that in the moment, visceral being-ness that comes with absolute physical exertion, with pushing yourself to the limit, with the threat of injury at any moment unless your whole mind is focussed on exactly what you should be doing.

Derby is the kind of game that takes away all your boundaries. It engulfs you, it completely obsesses you and it allows you to be who you really are without having to apologise, to temper your behaviour or in some way fit in with a pre-determined stereotype of 'woman'. In Roller Derby you create your own alter-ego. You choose a name and you skate under that name, rollergirls have names with words in like 'Fierce' and 'Killer'. 'Bitter' and 'Vortex'. 'Helen Fury', 'Violet Attack'. Where else can a woman do that? It's not just a mental thing, Derby accepts and actually needs all sorts of shapes and sizes of women; some of the best skaters both here and in the U.S are not average size. There are skinny, tall, fat, short, big boobed, tiny boobed...every type of physical woman is represented. You can look round the derby community and you can make no stereotypical judgement. You see only one constant and that's commitment.

For me the derby love manifested itself instantly, the week after my first practice I bought skates and all the safety gear and then I attended every single practice available to me from that point onwards. I passed my basic skills and became an intermediate skater, I learned how to bout. I learned how to hit and be hit safely, how to knock people down, how to stay up, how to skate fast and hard and long (to the point where you're retching as your skating because you're so knackered and all you want to do collapse on the floor) and finally, after a year and a half of three practices a week, I made the travel team.


In learning this sport I have hurt my knee, my neck, my ankle, I've had rink rash more times than I can remember (rink rash, for the uninitiated, is a certain kind of amazing diamond-patterned bruise which comes from falling very hard and skidding along the floor in fishnet tights). I've knocked someone down so far they skidded out the door, I've knocked someone into the wall. I've not done any of it maliciously or because I didn't like the opposing skater, I've done it because it's my job as a blocker to get the opponents blockers out of the way of my jammer.

It is the greatest female sport ever invented and it soothes my soul. It melts my heart like a brand new lover and I am devoted to it. There is something about it which takes over your brain and it becomes all you can think about. Normal everyday women, hardworking ordinary women suddenly start behaving like teenage boys consuming porn; hunting all over the internet for rollerderby blogs, perving over wheels and stoppers on derby shopping sites. Women who never dreamed of talking technical suddenly converse with great knowledge on the subject of wheel hardness, or the best way to clean bearings. It's like it takes over your mind. Small, neat and elegant women become hellish, violent whirlwinds on the track, women who have never confronted anyone in their lives suddenly begin to paint skulls on their faces and channel their years of pent-up anger into being the best blocker in the league. You can sit at work all day and hate your life, be resentful of other people, have no channel for your anger. Or you could take up a sport. My sport is Roller Derby, and it allows women to be furious and brilliant, to skate vigorously and to win. It turns the taboo into the celebrated. It champions bruises.


I know a skater called Rip Lashes. She is a tiny person, delicate and perfect. Kind. One day at work she was trying to recruit people for the Blitz Dames when one of her colleagues asked if there were any other Roller teams in Birmingham.

"Sure," Lashes said, "There's one more." So her colleague said, jokingly, "Oh I might join them then." And Lashes replied with total certainty, "If you do I will find you on the track AND I WILL TAKE YOU DOWN." Utterly serious, shocking herself.


I know a lot of women who say they do not have a violent side. I say get on the track and bring it on. But I would, wouldn't I?


Because my name is Izzy Dauntless. And I am a rollergirl.





Blitz Dames

Flicking through some images on the internet I came across a piece of text on the side of something curved that I couldn't read completely. All I could read was:

"evidently means rain
at Mr Todd's."


I'm writing it here so I remember it because I want to use it in some sort of piece of jewellery.

I've lost all my comments here on my blog when it got transferred over to blogger from my old site. I don't know why that matters, other than that it makes me feel like I am somehow more real; when actual other people comment.

Having said that lots of the time it was a shitstorm about feminism, or more often than that just silly abuse. So perhaps this is better. Just me, talking into the nothingness, and with no apparent listener.

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On what the baby can say

The baby can now say many words and so has decided that sentences are the only way forward. His version of a sentence needs some slight rearrangement ("Cup all gone, more cup?") but on the whole he's doing very well with the whole speaking thing.

Given that he's only 18 months I think that being able to say, "My Daddy a man." is a grand achievement.

In other news he has become obsessed with Nee-naws and wakes up first thing in the morning saying, "Nee naw? Nee naw?" because he once saw one go up the road out of his bedroom window first thing in the morning and now thinks this should be a regular occurrence.

He also sits in the car whispering, "Nee naw, Nee NAW, NEE NAW." over and over again like a little mantra, as if saying it repeatedly will somehow attract them to him; The mating call of an emergency vehicle.

A really cool woman that I know slightly via the internet (and who also loves roller derby) divides her life up into segements. She has work, play, hobby and pastime. Within those categories she places all the things she does; roller derby comes under play, work is office but also laundry, pastime is watching lost. So that's very organised, but she also says that she has whittled her life right down to the things she likes doing best. Because perhaps in the past she had things like 'quilting' and theatre production' in her hobbies, now she just has 'writing'. She says that life is hard enough concentrating on the main things you do, without having all the other little categories all adding up and wanting input from you.

She has taken this idea of division of time to the extreme level, with weekly charts divided up into time groups and even pre-planned menus.

I don't think I could do that; for one, she doesn't have kids. But I'm thinking that in the main it's an excellent system. I might try it.