Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Blog-Tag Drive-By
Well:

I hate to do a drive-by on you, Quentin, but...

Tag. You're it!.

I am now, officially, 'it'.

I have been blog-tagged by Amber Simmons.

Despite the fact that I have recently given a list of one hundred factoids about myself, I am now under the inescapable obligation to give five more. There will by a slight difference, however, since the previous one hundred were the first things to come into my head. This time I am working under one of the guiding principles of blog-tag, to provide five facts about myself that are not commonly known. This is difficult, because I think I have, by now, given away just about all that I'm willing to. I'm practically public property, in the words of someone or other, "easy meat and a reasonably good buy".

Nonetheless, after much rumination, I managed to come up with the following:

1) For a period in my life I was quite into transvesticism, and would wear a dress about the house, and sometimes go out for walks in that condition. However, I never had enough money to buy really nice dresses, and I wasn't very convincing. I had a kind of daydream of someday being a princess for a day and being utterly beautiful and irresistible, but it never happened. I even knew a girl for a while who wanted to go out on the town with me as a lesbian couple, but that never materialised, either, unfortunately. And now I'm older and all hope of me attaining such beauty, if it ever existed, has flown.

2) I started smoking at about the age of twelve. However, I wasn't really a heavy smoker, and never became really addicted until I went to Japan, in my twenties, where cigarettes were very cheap and life - for me - was very stressful. For a while in my life smoking was just about my only pleasure. I used to wash down my anti-depressants with green tea and go and stand on the balcony and smoke another wakaba cigarette, gazing out at the ugly sprawl of roads and buildings below.

3) I used to be a big fan of Tori Amos. I have seen her in concert a number of times (at least three). On the last occasion, I went with someone I did not know very well. I even paid for his ticket. He drove me there, but refused to go in, because he'd recently broken his arm and was afraid of getting it hurt. I tried to explain to him that Tori Amos gigs were not like that, but he wouldn't have it. He gave the ticket, instead, to a friend of his. When we came out he said he had sat in the car throughout and heard the whole caterwauling thing. I haven't actually listened to her music for some time. I wonder what she's doing at this very moment.

4) Obscurity is interesting to me in and of itself. For that reason, I like to get ultra-obscure references into the stories I write. I was very pleased when a friend and fellow-writer appreciated the Stryper reference in one of my stories. In the novel I am currently writing, one of the characters is based on an actress called Elizabeth Banks - no, not that Elizabeth Banks - who had a quirky little role in a short-lived children's magazine programme for the disabled on British television many years ago.

5) One of my all-time favourite films is Parents, directed by Bob Balaban. It concerns a young boy who suspects that his parents are feeding him human flesh. It is directed throughout from a child's-eye point of view, and reminds me very much of David Bowie's After All. I used to think it was quite significant that I share with Bowie the astrological conjunction of Moon and Pluto, which supposedly gives one a direct line to the unconscious. I remember a remark he is supposed to have made about LSD, that it didn't do much for him, because he was already in touch with his imagination.

Well, that's my five.

I now tag the following people. Should they wish to accept the challenge, their mission is to, well, do what I've just done:

Panda Shaving Torture, or possibly, Pandas Having Torture.

Wicked Lizard.

Lokutus Prime.

Cristolfo.