100 and 89.

This midwinter resurrection takes place in the Valley. Los Angeles, California, where I have been living for months. In two days I fly home.

Until last week I lived in the office. Sometimes with colleagues – a rapper, an entrepreneur, a militantly disciplined former serviceman, an occasional photographer…the list goes on.

Then the CEO’s mother moved in. I fled the one bedroom apartment in Central Hollywood, where strange, fragmented, half-broken characters from across the States rolled in and out without much warning. While there, I became so convinced that I, as the only permanent fixture, was starring in a secret reality show I had someone check the place for cameras in my second fortnight. That episode-to-episode article retrospective will roll out in time.

The exotic, chaotic adventures that have punctuated this trip are first-class novel material. For now though, I am escaping the claustrophobic mania that goes with being boxed behind bars from dawn till dusk.  Live-work spaces are not the one.

 

 

 

100 and 88.

It’s November and I have just published my first article with Disorder Magazine.

http://www.disordermagazine.com/2014/11/18/scottee-interview/

100 and 78.

There were no midgets at the Emerald Ball. For one night Wolfson College was transformed into early twentieth century Kansas, with scarecrows and tin men and a handpainted yellow brick road taped from wall to floor of the Upper Common Room. I woke up mid-afternoon Sunday bruised and black-eyed, having lost half my chin somewhere between 5am shots with the kitchen staff and fleeing through the fire escape with a bucket of looted sundried tomatoes.

There was a laserquest set up, briefly, on the lawn and a ceilidh band. Twenty drummers in black outside the library, and inside, the evangelical Nigerian scientist still reading through the screams and vomit hurled recklessly at its windows by the crowd. Upstairs, uneaten baskets of enormous pastries clotted together with greyed cream: appetising. I lost my key and befriended the blind porter. Photo evidence suggests that I launched an aggressive tribal dance attack to reach the front of the 4am survivors picture.

24 hrs later: a trail of lost shoes in the Porters’ Lodge, an unclaimed engagement ring left at lost and found and my return to the library.

It was a lot of fun. 

100 and 73.

Saturday: three masked DJs and a voodoo doll on the Wolfson stage. We won the College DJ competition. 

The married steward turned fifty halfway into our set, paraded across the dancefloor and opened the upstairs bar. Then he came out as gay. 

At the end of Sunday I realised the voodoo doll was missing. Found it arms flailing, still grinning, sitting outside the annexe staring towards my bedroom window. Scary. 

100 and 72.

Halloween marks the beginnings of winter. Last night we had fireworks on the College island, beside the punting lake which, for four days now, has been out of season. Autumn at Wolfson has hitherto been without cold and without panic; it is impossible to be lonely within the confines of this haunted annexe.

 Last night was for cross-dressing, and I was hauled over a college wall by the ghost of Anne Boleyn. We broke into St Anthony’s as a troupe of drag queens in white fox and blonde wigs, girls in dungarees, and masks and glitter and Donna Summer. Running through college beforehand, sober, shouting through bonfire crowds to our lawn on the river: this is so wonderful.

We had a sleepover last night. Three drag queens in blankets, cooking pasta and listening to Cher before the inevitable Recovery Sunday. What a weekend. 

100 and 64.

Update: dinners and dinners, Rod Stewart, theatre, cooking and clubs and dancing and work for the South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive. And tomorrow I see the room I will be living in for the next nine months.

100 and 39.

I am staying in an Arabic school in Beirut and last night I DJ’ed Lebanon’s biggest Thursday night out, in a club where the roof opens to the sky at dawn.