My song "A Little Time", about me hopefully going out with a Muslim woman to see Paul Heaton (Housemartins/Beautiful South) and Cerys Matthews (Catatonia) tonight
sociali...@yahoo.co.uk
today. "A Little Time" can be downloaded from
http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk/poems/a-little-time.mp3.
I have been a political prisoner on psychiatric wards on many
occasions since the summer of 1998 - after I was the only member of
the Socialist Party of England and Wales to speak in the debate at the
1998 European School of the CWI in favour of the Scottish Militant
Labour leadership's proposals to turn the Scottish Socialist Alliance
into a party (now the Scottish Socialist Party which had six members
elected to the Scottish parliament in 2003).
I am now an informal patient, in Nelson Ward, Manchester Royal
Infirmary (MRI), and would have been discharged several months ago if
it wasn't for the fact that I am homeless (and several thousand pounds
in debt so I can't afford to get somewhere to live unless I get
housing benefit which I have finally found out I can get). I am about
to start selling the Big Issue.
A then nurse once told me that if nurses see a former patient on the
street they are supposed to ignore them! She told me she would ignore
that rule, and may even go for a drink with them. However,
relationships between nurses and psychiatric patients, or former
patients, are strictly forbidden. Such a rule (probably enforceable by
the law) makes a certain amount of sense. After all, vulnerable
patients with mental health problems could be taken advantage of.
However, I have now been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, having mood
swings, being high when things are going well in my life and the world
and being low when things are going badly. This is a perfectly
rational response, and since I have a vital role to play in the world,
my mood swings are much greater than others in a similar situation.
Basically, there is nothing wrong with me.
There is a nurse who I previously fell for, on a previous admission at
the MRI, and didn't even realise she was Pakistani or a Muslim. As
Darius Danesh would say, I am colourblind!!! Earlier this week, she
told me that she doesn't know what love is and that all the men she
has had relationships with have tried to take advantage of her. This
helped me realise how strongly I feel for her, and that I want to help
her find out what love is, and how kind a man can be. [Actually, I
have a female-type mind, being less single-minded than men who have a
cause they are fighting for, and sometimes putting individuals I love
ahead of the cause.]
I am a virgin and, although the nurse hasn't told me, I'm sure she is
too (unless she has been raped and I'm sure she'd have told me by now
if that had happened to her). As a Muslim, she doesn't believe in sex
before marriage. I don't want to lose my virginity until the world is
free, because many women from my past with whom I have shared mutual
strong loving feelings have turned me down due to more important
considerations than personal enjoyment (due to the crucial role I have
in ensuring we have a really brilliant and hopefully mainly socialist
world).
This week has been the most monumentous in history, with the election
of a black president in the USA. I supported Barack Obama, on the
internet and putting out a newsletter, and want to celebrate that
brilliant achievement which probably puts an end to the prospect of
unethical capitalism triumphing in the world! The choice now is
between some form of much more ethical capitalism and a democratic
socialist society (which I think should involve proportional
representation by single transferable vote as well as hierarchies of
committees based on workplaces and local communities). Socialists
opposed to PR, particularly Marxists, are in a very weak position, so
a "dictatorship of the proletariat" with only the working class in
power is pretty much ruled out too.
I was very chuffed recently, when Paul Heaton (formerly of the very
political band The Housemartins and also The Beautiful South which
also did some political songs) invited my band Red Day to be a friend
of his at MySpace. I checked his page and saw that he is performing
tonight (Friday 7 November) at Manchester Ritz Ballroom along with
Cerys Matthews (formerly of Catatonia which were also political) and
another support band. I managed to get two tickets on Tuesday, at
quite a reasonable price. Obviously, this gig has been kept fairly
secret so that their biggest fans are able to attend.
I decided, when I saw the gig was on, that I would try to find one
woman to invite, and wouldn't go with anybody else, who would be a
second choice. That wouldn't have been at all romantic! When I shortly
afterwards found out that the nurse had never had a decent
relationship, I knew I wanted to go with her. I told her later on the
same day. She has not yet said that she will come, but she is working
on my ward on the late shift which finishes at about 9pm. This will be
the first time I see her after the US presidential election. Hopefully
she will realise that I have played a really good role in the world,
bearing Obama's stunning victory in mind, and be prepared to put up
with whatever consequences she may face for having some sort of
relationshop with me (or maybe just going on a single date). I will
say that she can pay for her ticket if she prefers, although I've paid
for it already and don't want the money.
I have told her, and will go ahead with my promise, that (even if she
adamantly tells me she will not come) I will wait outside the gig on
the off-chance that she eventually changes her mind about not coming
and eventually turns up. I couldn't face going in without her!
Besides, it's been such a great week politically, and I have written a
really good song ("A Little Time", which you can listen to on this
page) for her that should bowl her over, so I am very confident that
she will come to end this great week in a wonderful way!
If she doesn't come, I'll take it on the chin and hope that my self
sacrifice and romantic actions win her over in the future. If she does
face any sort of legal action over going out with me I will back her
up in court. I have never had a particularly good relationship (all
mine have been with psychiatric patients largely because I have spent
much more time with them and nurses than anyone else during the last
ten years and nurses have turned me down for reasons I've stated
above, although with one nurse we made arrangements to visit Australia
together before she let me down on the internet) and haven't had a
girlfriend since 2002, although I have had four dates with a former
patient earlier this year, but the spark wasn't there.
I have often felt that my life is far more interesting than the soap
operas that so many working and middle class people spend so long
watching - but this is now more of a (divine) comedy, like an episode
of Friends!!!
Anyway, sit back and listen to "A Little Time". You may notice I've
nicked bits from a fair number of other songs including Housemartins,
Catatonia and Beautiful South songs including the one with the same
title - but it is an original work of art in itself and I am dead
chuffed with it!
"A Little Time" can be downloaded from http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk/poems/a-little-time.mp3.
--
Steven Wallis, a socialist poet
http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk, http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1526122651,
http://www.myspace.com/socialiststeven, http://www.bebo.com/StevenW3777
sociali...@yahoo.co.uk
progea
sociali...@yahoo.co.uk
Some of you will think I am not really Steve Wallis - perhaps his twin
brother Steven or his younger brother Sean (who I pretended I was when
I outstayed my leave from a psychiatric ward in Glasgow to attend the
Convention of the Left in Manchester in September and hand out
leaflets outside the Labour Party conference that took place at that
time), or perhaps Bruce Edmonds (one of my ex-work colleagues at the
Centre for Policy Modelling, now part of the Business School,
Manchester Metropolitan University, where I developed my artificial
intelligence/simulation language SDML with help from other CPM
members, particularly Bruce, Scott and Marlyn) or maybe even mind
control expert Derren Brown...
I gave Bruce a password for the jirf.org website to put some SDML
files on, that I was not using (which I will pretend I have forgotten
the original intention of, I'm naughty like that sometimes!), because
they were too big to go by email (or perhaps AI software didn't let
them through, or perhaps Bruce pretended to have tried to send them so
that I would give him an ftp password).
Anyway, you can access jirf.org by ftp (ftp://jirf.org should work,
with user name "jirf.org" and password "pirateBay"). Obviously web
space providers have rules about not disclosing passwords, but
considering I put some of my favourite Katrina and the Waves and Latin
Quarter songs in the "html" directory of that site yesterday, it
seemed a good idea to open that website up as a new - better - pirate
bay on which people can share music and software. The rules about
disclosing passwords seem rather ridiculous when Micro$oft Windows
software sometimes warns you that ftp passwords are not encypted, and
therefore can be read by anybody or any program scanning email
transmissions! I've lost count of the number of times I've got
exasperated reading an email confirming I have registered with a
website and seen the password in plain text! Especially since I often
use the same password on different sites, although I now have several,
and they could easily provide a link to click on to allow you to rest
passwords. However, do we trust the website owners not to put the
passwords on an insecure website or put them on a laptop or memory
stick that goes missing (like many departments of Her Majesty's, hmmm,
Public and Secret Services)??? Isn't it better that they let you know
that your passwords are not secure rather than lulling people into a
false sense of security? Isn't it better that a British national
newspaper told people that chip-and-pin has been cracked, so a dodgy
shop or dodgy person working for a good shop or dodgy supplier can
provide a perfectly normal looking credit/debit card reader that nicks
your details and allows people to get money out of your account very
easily, but they didn't want to tell people earlier in case they got
worried! I could try to find a link to it on the internet or remember
the newspaper (I think it was the Daily Express or Mail - what, Daily
Mail, isn't this nuaghty me trying to mislead you into buying a right-
wing Tory/New Labour rag?)
So will I get sued by Cincom for distributing Smalltalk code? Well,
it's VisualWorks non-commercial and we had a deal with them that we
could supply VisualWorks for free with SDML. Oh, actually it was the
previous suppliers of VW (ParcPlace I think). Maybe that's why SDML is
not downloadable any more. Yes, it is, go to ftp://jirf.org!
But we supplied it without source code, as part of the agreement. And
it seemed sensible to avoid people getting bugs by doing something in
Smalltalk, so we did different versions (some with "debug Smalltalk"
options when an error occurred that enable you to get in the guts of
the language, that we used within the CPM, cfpm.org) while other users
got the stripped-down version. Or did they? While I was off work for a
while with supposed/real mental health problems, Scott Moss (director
of the CPM who boasted that he once got hit by a policeman's truncheon
at an anti-war demo and got involved in student politics at the London
School of Economics to disrupt/wreck the left) distributed it with
source code intact. And of course those of you who want to download
the sources file can find it in the "current rest.zip" file that Bruce
nicely supplied for me.
That's it for now. I'm getting peckish! There is a VisualWorks non-
commercial mailing list, which I'm on with another email address
(buster_bl...@yahoo.co.uk - what is Buster Block I hear you all
exclaim, or maybe not but I like to have a sense of humour) and I'll
send this message there shortly.
WARNING: The version of VisualWorks we used (copyright stuff below)
doesn't work very well with Windows XP (sabotage by naughty Cincom
people methinks); you sometimes need to click on a blank area of a pop-
up window if a menu just won't go away, you may need to press Control-
Y (interrupt replacing the old Control-C now used for copy/paste
operations) and occasionally even Control-ALT-Delete if it still
hangs. I have been planning to port it into a newer version of VW, and
maybe I'll do that before Monday when ukfast.net's lawyers will have
been contacted by Cincom, Scott Moss, Bruce Edmonds, Jacqueline Rice,
Priya (warcry) Reddy, Derren Brown or the ubiquitous Jo from the
Samaritans (joke), to try to close down jirf.org and perhaps my twin
brother's other websites, particularly the one with www.revolutionaryplatform.net/forum
on - after all, epople have posted porn to it! I'm obviously a sex
offender! Joke! No, it isn't!
VisualWorks® NonCommercial, Release 5i.2 of July 14, 2000
Copyright © 2000, 1999 Cincom Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This product contains copyrighted third-party software.
Portions © 1999 Advanced Boolean Concepts, Ltd.
Portions © 1999 AppNet Systems, Inc.
Portions © 1999 IC&C GmbH Software Foundations.
[Interlude: Jacqueline, I'll never forget your mobile phone number,
which hopefully your horrible husband who phoned me after midnight
obviously pissed complaining that my mobile number was on your phone,
thinking I'd phoned you when really you'd put the number that I gave
you on your phone indicating you wanted to stay in touch. I love you.
Are you sure you don't want to President of the European Union?
Doesn't redirecting rice-for-president from the fairly ridiculous task
of getting Condoleezza Rice president of the USA in 2012 (or is it -
Barack Obama is just too nice; wouldn't it be boring if there were no
more wars, poverty, environmental destruction, racism, homophobia,
etc. - oh yes, Phil Frampton was right - homosexuality is a bourgeois
devation, but I like it and am TRANS myself as Jennie Killip,
Manchester University Student Union women's officer explained to me)
to get you elected President of the European Union?!? Oh yes,
elections for EU president, that sounds good rather than selection by
ministers!!!! I know you said you just want a baby (with me since you
can't with your husband because IT's a robot) but it's a woman's
prerogrative to change her mind!!! I should know, I am one!!!!
Stephanie Kimberley Wallis, that is!]
This is a great internet cafe, where you can even download software,
but piratebay.com software doesn't work here. [And Farah works here -
maybe she'll go out with her first non-Muslim when she reads this
message and realises what a great role I'm playing. Or will she refuse
to read it like she did with my more recent offerings being loyal to
her wholly good fiance? What a boring time the world would have if
everybody was good. Yvonne Dunbar of "Resurrection" fame explained to
me what heaven was like (I even thought she'd been there, silly me, or
was I?) and it sounded so dull! We mustn't let good people completely
triumph over bad; that's why "Does It Matter If God Exists?" failed to
wow the Students Got Talent judges!] Just Dodgy programmers in league
with the corporate software/music firms methinks! Use the new Pirate
Bay and copy files elsewhere on the internet before ftp://jirf.org
gets closed down!!!!
Actually, the music files are poor quality; winLAME preRelease 4 even
warned me that converting from one lossy format (WMA) to another (MP3)
degrades quality and I chose a fairly small file size. So maybe KATW/
Latin Quarter record labels won't complain. You never know; Katrina
Leskanich (whose version of Kirsty MacColl's/Tracey Ullman's "You
Don't Know" is sublime and on her MySpace page last time I looked,
although my take on that song in "42" is quite good too (NOT),
dediscated to a certain Ms Rice)
Anyway, it's time to dispatch this rambling message into cyberspace.
You can find my new playlists on Facebook (searching for "Steven
Wallis Manchester" should find me unless the lovely Libertarian
programmers there have taken a sudden dislike to the nasty me!!!!) or
go to
http://view.playlist.com/user/28498804 (playlist.com is great for
music playlists but up to now the choice has been a bit bland; if
others use my new Pirate Bay or take similar action against censorship
by putting MP3 files on websites, it'll be brilliant and people won't
have to put up with MySpace cesnorship or migrate to hi5 as
Solidarity's Lorraine Barrie seemed to suggest (via my old
buste...@fsmail.net account no longer active)). It is compatible
with MySpace, Facebook and jsut about every social networking site
apart from Multiply and Bebo... [And I can't be bothered to go back
and edit "jsut" into "just" even though expalining that I can't be
bnothered to do tha ttakes much longer than doing it!!!!]
And I'll supply a link to get you listening to my former favourite
song of all time (now it depends what mood I'm in what song I prefer;
Randy Crawford's "Almaz" and Latin Quarter's "The Colourscheme" are
others). Go to www.jirf.org/Katrina%20and%20the%20Waves%20-%20Walking%20Where%20The%20Roses%20Grow.mp3
(not sure if that link will work in your browser, delete spaces if
necessary). [I'm not planning to censor the new Pirate Bay but would
urge people to put artist and song titles in filenames; you can use
dashes instead of spaces that turn into those horrible "%20"
characters if you prefer...]
Fraternally/comradely/sisterly, Steve(n).