The dead days that hang between Christmas and New Year.
During this time, I read something that I couldn't stop thinking about . I've heard it before but seeing it in print made me mull it over all day. "Everything in The Universe has its own frequency" . Everything resonates.
I was struck by the words and the meaning therein. Everything reacts to everything else. No one thing is a separate and individual occurrence. Things seen and unseen all connect. Sounds not even heard exist and cause movement. The Sun sings and the planets react.

The end of the year brings the same thoughts as the last. What awaits and what needs to be left behind. There has to be some change for me this year. I can't do the job I've done for so long for much longer. There is no joy in it, no sense of inspiration or newness. The changing of a name and using different colours doesn't make any change at all, not underneath. The realisation of a lost sense of wonder returns and I am once again facing the prospect of underwhelming and pointless exercises in dotting and crossing Is and Ts. How do people live like that? in a world of this is wrong and that isn't good enough?
Isn't it a wonder we are still here? 

The time over Christmas is probably the most routine destroying. All sense of what day it is is lost and the mind wanders over dangerous ground. Militant thoughts creep in and the desire to never go back returns. Time steals by under the guise of late nights and short days until I find myself looking at a clock and hear people counting down from ten. How did this happen? Then , it's back to the day to day of telling people how they should be living their lives. How they should be productive members of society. The society that cares.

I can hear the voices already"Why are doing it if you don't want to. Why don't you do something else and stop moaning"? 
I could ask this of thousands who do the same over and over everyday  whether in a job or in some other aspect of their lives. They would give any number of reasons: fear, love, duty , the belief they can't do anything else or just plain idleness. 

The list goes on. Many things keep people in places and situations when the finger points to red and the tank starts to rattle. My excuse, a procrastinator's brain. It's true,look it up.

Happy New Year

Tis the Season, it is now...

Over in the local live well for less shop, the masses are gathering. They wear that confused and dazed expression that people do at this point in the year. They push trolleys and shuffle around aisles. I half expect them to be mumbling, under their breath "I must buy something, I must buy something". 

I know, at some point soon..... I must join them. 
A  zombie with thought.

Buying means caring, right?

Outside , the weather starts to wear its winter coat. 
Early Christmas lights streaked through rainy glass
Inside, we dream  the warmth of past summers
Hoping the next year will give us what we've asked

???

Walking through the slowly decaying centre of my town...
For just a second , I caught something in the corner of my eye. Sitting at a table in the cafe downstairs, I could see a small child with sunken, hollow eyes. Skin the colour of a dead hand.
 Although it was only an instant, my mind raced through the possibles.
I'd finally broken through the veil of illusion and could see the dead.
I was witnessing a vision from a future not yet set. A small survivor from a terrible holocaust, somehow projected back as a warning against human hatred and ignorance. A bleak sigul that our future lies in cooperation and fairness for all.

It wasn't until the next second, when I saw another dressed as a pumpkin, that I realised what was really happening. 

Thinking about it now, she did seem a bit too happy to be a projection of a distant and brutal future. It was the can of pop that she stuck her grisly little mouth around that  put the lid on it.

A strange time of year. There's so many things hidden  behind garish costumes , bumper bags of sugary treats, bonfires and Christmas Trees.
 Life, death, the mingling of worlds seen and unseen, beginnings and ending...magic if you wil.

I carried on . My destination, one of the big four to buy some crisps.

I  live in truly contrary and confusing  times...

Looking in to other peoples' lives...

The longer you do something, the more you become immune to certain aspects of its nature.
Helping someone with an everyday thing , like accessing an email account, stumbling across the contents of someone elses life, the part no one else sees and finding out what really drives people. Curiosity, desire, want , the parts of us that have no place in a setting that dictates sensible, upstanding and decent behaviour.

Im not even sure that he was bothered about what I'd seen. Perhaps he wasn't. Perhaps that's the difference between someone who might have nothing to lose and someone like me.  I'm too aware of things I have to lose. That's why I'm such a coward in many respects, too much comfort and joy at stake to make a difference in a real sense. Too much discomfort in real rebellion.
Who's better off?

No where is the crack between the real and the made up more obvious than in this

We didn't mention the emails in his inbox, we just attached his updated  C.V ..

This joke is still on me....

It's not where you're from, it's what it does to you..

Just...
slightly left of centre
left out

left behind,
close enough to be the heart

 but somehow miss  the beat

two hours from everywhere
and miles away from anywhere,
the poor kid, playing keep up

born with clay for feet


always talk of " then" we had it
looking back to when they had it
never knowing they'd lost it

lives

 falling out of time

the big town schemers
throwing
small town believers
against the wall

whose bricks
pot dust
and marrow
bind

Remember the Future...

Remember what colour they told us the future would be,
Not black or white or any colour bound by  skin
Not the colour of any flag, 
Nothing to make this mine or yours or ours
The future would be silver
The colour of distant stars

Remember the life we would lead
A  promised time of endless leisure
Man's daily toil replaced by full automation
Forgotten and unknown, the words
Foreclosure
Redundant
Liquidation

Remember the word that would be the future
Robotic
Stainless as steel
Created in our own image
Man's companion in eternal order
Programmed never to be unsure
Uncertain or frightened,
Never ever Chaotic

How do you feel now you know
That the present is non of these

more of the same...

A week of boiling,
I get some idea now how Bukowski felt about his post office. 
Time for a new look on things and less of the "new job solves all problems" way out of this. It won't and I know it really. I took some time to think about what really lifts me and always the same is revealed...this!
No matter where I go, I'll always be looking for that unobtainable something, the  felt but never seen. The World is slowly becoming more unsettling and to be honest, I'm not sure anything I'm not already doing work wise is going to alleviate that for me. Better to stay, for now, and keep  working on the system from the inside. Sooner or later something will give.
 The soul needs to be fed and that's not going to be achieved without putting more effort into the writing and the letting out of all the ideas, no matter how disjointed and pointless they may seem.
So, more aimless ramblings and more looking at just how ridiculous yet fascinating and beautiful the everyday is.

For your appreciation

Throwing pebbles in ponds..

Making a decision about something,
Acting on that decision
Going through the process to ,hopefully, start the ball rolling down the steep and dangerous hill of change.

The contemplation after the event....could I have said things differently?
Hearing things that are good, no definite article though.

The waiting, the nagging feeling that it has all been in vain and you're exactly where you're supposed to be, the thought of it..
Being questioned with questions you'd rather not answer,
Others' actions impacting and making the ache to move all the more intense.

Finding yourself in the middle of something you never expected, then having guilt heaped upon you because of someone else's private fears. 

Sitting in the twilight, candle, soft lights,  the voice of reason and comfort from the other side of the table.

Above, the spark and slow fade of  satellites. Catching The Sun before they disappear back into the forever


Clearing the air with those you were really bothered about....finding the temporary peace again.

Back to waiting 

Welcome to the week so far.....

After the Event...

A week spent under the Rhodian Sun,

Time with the Mothers and Fathers of Democracy. They've not been visited for a long while and we forgot how they can be. The concept of a single currency  quite frankly, is something I don't want to debate. The concept of a single mentality, good luck with that one too. Perhaps someone should have looked at the different philosophies before deciding on a continents future. Ubermensch might want to sit at the table for his tea but what if the waiter isn't sure it's the same table from this morning. You get the picture. 

The entire week was a splendid journey through the mindset of Homer's children. For those who like the  straightforward excess of the "all inclusive" this journey is not for you. Those who are willing to look beyond shabby, outdated and "not as advertised in the criteria" the world of friendly, welcoming, easygoing and not easily forgettable awaits you. The warmth of a nation whose basic attitude is this is our home , you are welcome, oh, don't mind that our home happens to be a slightly motheaten and possibly, at one time, quite modern hotel put you off, it's still really our house. Our food is fresh and our smiles are real and you are our guests. This is how it worked and it worked very well. Anywhere you can lie on a settee with bare feet and play dominoes is more than my kind of place. We asked the question about austerity, debt and struggle.
Are things getting better, the answer, yes. Things are getting better but somethings run deep.

I wonder how we would have dealt with their problem? I hoped, in a similar way.

(cold war telly)

Anyway, the beach...

Beaches can be many things. Beginnings and endings, strips of land that slowly become waves or magnets for those who delight in absorbing the radiation from the slowly dying star we circle. The best ones are those that could be somewhere else, somewhen else. My delight then in the one we found at the end of the road..

Imagine, if you will, you are one of the last people on Earth...
All around you is the debris of those who decided to bug out when they saw the warning  sign of some unknown disaster. Plastic bottles, old fishing net, abandoned shoes the marks of their panicked fleeing. 
A deserted beach with only us on it, shingle, pebbles, Planet of The Apes waves,all this connecting with random thoughts becoming possible future and past in what could have been.. at some point what could be.

Amongst all this, signs of how people may have spent their last moments before they took the last coach out of Dodge. Makeshift table and chairs, ad hoc celebrations with friends and loved ones as they waited to pass into the unknown. The feelings and imaginings brought on by this kind of place are some of my favourite, the most intense. That fascination with how things could look when it's all come to some end , how our left behinds would tell our story. I have an obsession with the end of The World that strikes even in the middle of busy town centres. In the middle of everything.

The remains of someone's life. At some point busy, used and full of noise. The sense of an easy going community still there in the corners, rusting and cracked. Now, just fading colours and symbols on wood and concrete slowly giving in to entropy. I'm part of this world and I'm amazed by these things, things I know full well , things I recognise as once being something. What would a visitor from somewhere else imagine it to be, have been?

And Then....this. The remains of war. What would this conjure up. Although this is a part of very recent history, it already looks...alien. It is neither past nor present but something that could be from  a time not as yet realised. As soon as I saw it, I knew it for what it was. Remains of past occupation. The left behinds of the aggressor. Redundant now. Filled with the sound of the sea and the debris of those who have occupied since the shooting stopped. This too though, for all its bulk and look of abandoned life pod, I really wouldn't have been surprised to see Taylor and Landon walking away from it, is slowly becoming sand.

And then , it sort of became apparent. We live with the abandoned all around us, all the time. We perhaps don't see it but it's just there. We live with history that we're part of but at the same time distanced from. The things I saw and delighted in are part of my own world, the happenings of this morning universally speaking but already, I view them as something that's almost ancient. The remains of a civilisation long gone, not really remembered,almost mythical. In reality the hallmarks of my grandfather's generation, not eighty years old.

We walked on, the purchasing of an ice cream from one of the shops in town our new encouragement. I turned to smile at Yvonne and just then, I was caught in a huge, fast moving shadow that glided silently over the shingles. I looked up to see the airplane that had caused it, its engines not heard over the boom of the waves. I watched as it grew smaller and then banked, heading towards  somewhere else. Somewhere unknown.
 A suddenly sharp feeling hit, a tingle,the inevitable connection and a slow smile...there , I thought, goes the last coach out of Dodge.  

Where have you been?

The Universe told me something this week. It said, "You're not meant to do the thing you thought you would. Something else is meant for you and I will let you know when you're ready.
Ambition, desire, the want to do something else all these have been put before me recently. I felt the need for change but that hasn't happened, well, not how I wanted. I suppose I have to remind myself of  what I tell everyone else  when their ambitions and earthbound wants come to an abrupt end. Things happen for a reason. That doesn't always sit well with me but the voice that isn't mine tells me this so I go with it. 
There's the thing. I go with it. That's always been the way with me, going with it. The feelings of wanting to move on that I've been experiencing haven't really been about that, they never are . They're really feelings of me not listening to the inside me. The one that has always wanted to do other things. These things, unfortunately, won't pay for me to live in the world I was born into and there in lies the problem. Realism and self delusion are the opposite sides of one coin. I've thought about the past a lot lately and the way I used to be. Actually I still am but now I'm somehow more aware of the division between the everyday me and the one who waits for times when work and grown upness can give way to daydreaming, pondering and aimless creativity.

I think what I'm trying to say is that no matter how I may think I  need to be doing something else, or be somewhere else to make me happier, I don't not really. I don't need a job or a position to make me...me. I sometimes still fall prey to this but soon I realise that no matter what I do, I'd still be me doing it. In fact, the opposite can happen. The things I do,the work things somehow slowly leech away at that that make me..me.It's not always easy to follow the desired path of the employer and the natural tendency of passive subversion in the face of such can bring on intense feelings of wanting to cut off my nose to spite the face. So The Black Dog may come and find me from time to time but sooner or later, I pick up on the feeling that all I need, I carry around inside me. I always have. All things can be weathered.  
I thought for a while I needed to go away but I don't. I need to come back..

Are you feeling better ?

Spending time with a cough that's becoming a burning torture.
How there's nothing like a sounding like a Spandau every five minutes to magnify every little hicup and problem until all I want  is for everything and everyone just to cease to be, now.

Two or three days spent in dressing gown and under duvet, eyes like hot marbles that ache, too tired to be tired but no strength to stand up. When I do, bent like an old man. how has this happened since Friday? What have I done to bring this unrelenting punishment down upon myself? Is it as I've suspected, the ultimate irony?Me, always imagining what The World would be like after the next great plague being its first victim. The third night of it, the most intense dream of late. Sheets of paper, yellowed and covered in diagrams, faint pencil showing me things I don't understand but I somehow know. The constant sensation that each time I understand one way of it it's all erased and I'm shown another way. All through the night my feet won't stay still and I believe I can't sleep but I am sleeping. It ends, eventually, in dim light and with the best collection of words and phrases in my head for a while. Is this the beginning of the transformation? Am I about to become the fluid and constant writer of thoughts I secretly crave to be? No. It fades back  to whence it came and I am left with the dull ache and rattle of before. It feels as though this will continue for ever.  The  concept of eternal convalescence..

Ahh, but no. Soon I'm buckling under that inbuilt insistence to be a good drone and to return to work because I feel a little better. I cough and wheeze my way through the remainder of the week, not fully able to rid myself of the feeling that being slumped on a sette coughing until I taste metal  isn't somehow  far more enjoyable than most of this. Time to pull myself up or slide even further into detachment. Even the new tidier haircut won't hide that sort of slide for long.
Before I know where I am, I'm sitting in front of someone and we're talking about things to which I  am ambivalent. The rules and how things should look. I nod, I discuss, I agree, I do really but also I want to be eleswhere and not involved. The concerning and disconserting feelings that this will not go away but not being bothered at the same time because this simply doesn't matter. Not in  the big sense. I'm getting closer to avoidance. As happens in these situations, I find myself contemplating the usual two scenarios that pop in to my head. I wonder what would happen if I were to launch across the desk and start to pummel my unsuspecting opposite? Just keep hitting him until he stopped talking, throw down a rain of blows that knocked these foolish and rigid words he's speaking from his mouth so as to never hear them again. Unleash the howl that even now grows inside me. Throttle him.
Or just swear at him in the foulest of ways. Shout out loudly what I really think of him and his ideas both. End my verbal assult with a gob of spit for good measure and stop this nonsense dead so that it will never trouble me again.

 Of course these will never happen, I am not about to do this, he is only doing a job he likes and the things he talks of are not going to go away what ever I do but will remain, from now on.

 Launching across a desk.
I am still wondering though .

End of another week,
Not a mundaneone just slightly repetitive and over filled with the expectations of others. Sometimes, that fine line of supporting crosses over into almost full on dependence and the reality that you might be baby sitting unresourceful adults creeps in and tires you out. Makes you rely on your own support or dependency methods , what ever they may be. 

People can be the most demanding of creatures when all is well. Add to that, the prospect of putting them in a completely new environment and introcding the suggestion that life can at times demand a different outlook on things to elevate a present problem, well, you can find yourself on the road to slow and niggling confrontation with those you are tasked to guide . This is a factor of the so called "rewarding jobs" that involve the Holy Grail of any employment, the chance to help people .  Often though,at first, the help isn't recognised as such and for a while  the rocky hinterland of  uncertainty is where we set up camp. It is then down to dawn raids, skirmishes and full on attacks to get the point across that people do in fact have positive aspects and can help themselves to move out of the shit they're in. 

So having been cast down amongst the unsure, unwilling and the down right uncooperative this week, I've found solace in unexpected places . The almost constant listening to of Walk Away by Mr Waits, the words of Mr Watts and the investigation in to the nature of the snake in my shared unconscious as seen by Mr Jung, have more than held up my resolve to bludgeon through the built up years of resistance, denial, acceptance of fate and unwillingness to see  inner potential. Top this off with one of the best sunsets I've seen in a long while, a full on backlit sky and clouds that spoke of other realms than this. I am amazed at how beauty decides to show itself when unexpected. A reminder of how this can all work out in ways not yet thought of if we just look . A glimpse in to that part of me which I feel I have somehow  lost or forgotten  through over exposure to all the above. But, the human spirit is all about struggle in the face of the overwhelming. The constant daily trudge through the banal and often soul destroying for a peek at the wonderous.  Each of us pushing their own rock up their own mountain of forever , just to see it roll down again time after time.

 Here's an idea.Embrace this in all its pointless, frustrating and overwhelming ridiculousness. It can only make us stronger and less reliant on cheaply priced, widely available, high alcohol content lagers   

The want to write and create is somehow off set by the mummer of the documentary on UFOs somewhere behind me. Added to this, the knowledge that at some point, I have to take the bin through the week old snow to the top of the road is another nail in the coffin of self expression. 
I've stopped now to think and the flow gets stilted. It's like I have to mentally unfocus my mind, just let my fingers move and the words come. They don't necessarily make sense but the more I do it the more I realise they don't have to. Let all this be without plot as life itself is. Let all tumble forth in unlisted and uncollected nonsense. The key to it is don't aim for a theme, leave that to those who tell me what I should be listening to and watching, how I should view others' behaviour and be aghast at the demise of western civilisation. It's not new. Time and before the same outrage at it all. This too shall pass, like all else.  Yawns and brushing back of hair. The bin waits and I must answer the call of the coloured receptacle that ,as we speak, holds the remains of my consumerism. The bones of my processed prey in glass and plastic. Again the flow stops, too much thinking and reading of what I've written. Those who would view this and expect lucid comment I apologise . This isn't for you. 
The bin waits no longer. The trudge through the underlit gloom must happen. 
As much as we try to stop it, the cold of the this alien winter seeps through the bricks and  slowly,will cover us in our sleep.

Cup o Tea...

When I was small, This used to terrify me and draw me at the same time.
A scarecrow with a mind of its own,  an old man with a black top hat, dirty black suit  who seemed to inhabit hedgerows but had power over him and other scarecrows, who would appear at certain times, and behave like the now over used undead. I remember one episode when our  hero was called before a scarecrow court for some scarecrow themed crime.Possibly vegetable based or looking through a window in the dead of night type felony. That was the one that sticks in my head, the one with the other scarecrows. They came to bring him to his trial.  Stiff figures appeared through the corn like their present day  contemporaries, silent and dead eyed. I remember sitting and watching as they lumbered through the dry stalks. Their only purpose the apprehension of said strawy criminal.  Perhaps this instance was the start of my fascination with the passed on who rise up to plague the living. The origin of my dreams of resisting  the masses of grey and rotting all the sames who want to include me in their team.

One thing about him though, was his ability to change heads. A different head for different situations.  I don't know whether or not the intention was there, whether or not the writers were trying to say something about the nature of fitting in but  as I'm now a grown up, I find I'm doing exactly the same thing. 
It's now completely acceptable for me, as part of my own scarecrow society, to wear a work head, a weekend head , an out with people from work head and all the other heads I have for all the situations I could find myself in. It's expected of me.
 Should I want to wear one head all the time, well, that's when the problems start. What if I have the wrong head for the wrong day? What if my weekend head won't come off and I walk in on any given Monday with slightly the wrong attitude? Will it all come crashing down around my wrong head? I doubt it. It hasn't so far and I've worn the wrong head to more than one occasion before now. The possible truth is that  all my heads have the same ideas. They just come out randomly, regardless of the situation and not as The Crowman would always like them to.

More worrying than having to have numerous heads, is the fact that some other scarecrows only seem to have  the one worky head. This one, they never seem to take off and seem bent on trying to fill mine with their ideas on how I should think and be. Other scarecrows seemed to have no ideas in theirs. What's the Crow man going to do about that? He could try and fill them with his but he needs straw filled turnip heads like me for that.

Let's see which head I have on tomorrow.
 I'm hoping for the Cup o tea and slice of small group size one....
  

I have decided to be more positive about things this year. 

When returning from Christmas break and being faced with the straightforward "you don't want this job , do you "? as my friend and colleague was, there is little response other than the blatantly obvious or the tactfully deflective.
 We are all agreed , they have been taking classes on how to further demotivate people who have had enough of watching them fiddle while it all goes up in smoke. 

First step towards positivity, fuck it, it'll take care of itself...or lets all apply for other jobs.
Unfortunately, I cannot live on dreams and have a spouse , cat and dog to consider, so striding about the land delivering pearls of wisdom whilst wearing robes and sporting a beard big enough to strap under my belt is out of it.  Pity that, I feel I'd take to it rather well.

So, It's back to plan B, if ever I had one. 

1. Write more for me and then put it in a chest to be discovered after my death and then be hailed as a prophet well before my time.
2. Continue to play the game in the supposed real world and look for something else to do that's slightly less like working for The Job Centre, even though I don't .
3. Try to live more in the moment and not dream my life away. This is the most difficult because I've been doing it the longest.
4. Act on my ideas, not just think about it. 

Do I really want this job......seriously ?