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