Excitement and Being Thick

Reading - The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
Watching - Everything on the box that I've recorded for the last 6 months - god bless the summer holidays xxx
Listening - Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones

Excitement levels were worrying me recently. I was worried that I was not getting excited enough about upcoming events in my life. For example I'm going to Australia with Sophia and I was not feeling excitement of traveling to the other side of the world and meeting my new family. I was looking forward to it but I wasn't as excited as I thought I would be. I wonder if this a modern condition that afflicts us all? We have so many great things in our lives on a regular basis that perhaps we never have time to get excited about things anymore.

Maybe a solution to this is to actually think about upcoming things so as to actually look forward to them? Anyway I'm excited now as I'm off tmrw. The airplane is one of the most exciting things for me. I love the process of traveling and flying. 24 hours of flight strikes fear into some people but to me it is heaven. 24 hours of time to read, watch movies and basically be pampered. Then the wonders of exploring a new country and meeting my new family - so exciting!

Reading Martin Amis' 'The Pregnant Widow' which is quite phenomenal. I'm flying through it and the ideas in it are very complex. It deals with the sexual revolution and the emergence of feminism. The style is confrontational, brash and concise. There are moments when I'm flying through it and others when I'm turning back through pages, figuring things out.

It is one of those books which really does highlight to me that I am quite thick. I know that I could never write something of this magnitude. I'm capable of understanding it and seeing its place within history but I could never achieve anything like it. I love the idea of writing and have written a number of plays over the years but the scale, ability and technique demonstrated everyday by novelists, film-makers, journalists and poets really grounds you in reality and shows you how thick you basically are. Maybe thick is the wrong word? Maybe unspectacular?

Amis makes a hilarious yet moving point about poo in the novel where the main character Keith discusses the sadness of defecation where we leave the 'dead concerns of yesterday behind us' and are 'humiliated by the emanation of decay'. Brilliant and funny yet sad.