D and I were invited to a Bruce Lee Festival at Marcus’s for New Year’s Eve but we declined. Even though I find boys can be pretty interesting on their own, when you get a few of them together their maturity level collapses in a v alarming way. They think a car chase is intellectually challenging. Disha agrees. She says it sometimes strikes her as absolutely amazing that all of the Great Thinkers are men. It doesn’t really seem possible. So since Disha’s parents went out last night, D and I spent a quiet New Year’s Eve at hers. In anticipation of this momentous upcoming year, we both wore black jeans and tops, and black lipstick and eyeshadow. The effect was excruciatingly DP. There was a bottle of white wine in the fridge, and Disha said we could take it because her parents had had so much to drink over the last week they wouldn’t notice. I’d nicked a couple of fags from Sigmund’s LAST pack (this time he says he really is giving up for good). We don’t smoke, of course (never mind the heart disease etc., have you SEEN what nicotine does to your TEETH?), but we reckoned it was a special occasion so we should try it the once. (And also MASSES of Great Artists and Writers have been addicted to tobacco as well as alcohol, so we reckoned it was fitting for the beginning of the Dark Phase.) Disha managed a whole one, but I was coughing too much to exactly enjoy it, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. But the wine was great. (If I have to be addicted to something because of my Creative Spirit I would definitely prefer white wine to something that could give you cancer and ruin your smile. Plus Willow says white wine’s NOT FATTENING, and everything else I like is!!! We lit a bunch of candles and some incense, found a jazz programme on the radio, and sat on the floor of Disha’s room. We talked for HOURS. Mainly about life. It was all v deep and intense, and v intellectual. Disha said it was too bad the wine wasn’t one of those bottles in a straw basket, since that was much more Dark Phase than Chardonnay, but I said wine was the drink of intellectuals no matter what it was in. D puked in her waste bin in the middle of the night, but the wine must’ve knocked me out because I didn’t hear her. Neither of us even had a headache today. But Disha told her mum she thought she had a touch of flu, so she didn’t even have to clean out the waste bin herself.
I don’t believe in making New Year’s resolutions. I believe in constant and continuous personal growth. My parents, being très mundane, make resolutions every year – and usually break them by noon on January first. So, this isn’t a resolution, but one thing I am going to do this year is listen to more jazz. Disha and I really enjoyed the programme on the radio last night, even though a lot of the time there wasn’t any tune you could actually recognize. But that’s because jazz is the music of the intellectual, so it’s meant to be like that. In our house all that’s usually played is the music of the bourgeois (Sigmund’s Capital Gold and the MC’s classical tapes) and the depraved (the noise Justin listens to). And also I’m going on a diet. It’s not like I’m OBESE or anything, but artists, writers and intellectuals in a Dark Phase tend to be lean. (Disha said that’s because they’re usually too poor to eat, but I pointed out that the artist who sold her bed to Saatchi and Saatchi isn’t poor, and Disha said that just because someone put your bed in a gallery didn’t make you Rembrandt, who anyway was FAT. I hope she’s not going to spend the Dark Phase being argumentative.)
When I got back to the House of Horror, the MC and Sigmund had had another MAJOR ROW. I knew as soon as I got into the flat because Jupiter was watching telly in the living-room and the MC and Willow were muttering darkly in the kitchen. Sigmund only emerged from the Bunker for supper, and they didn’t say a word to each other for the whole meal. Personally I prefer it when they’re not speaking since at least it’s quiet.