The Absurdity of Being

I am sometimes embarrassed by my lack of consistency and my inability to maintain things, but here I go again… I start writing, almost regularly and then life comes along in it’s fancy overcoat, to lead me astray, only to abandon me later, in the countryside, face down in a ditch with my clothes on back to front… I just can’t seem to resist distraction, even though I know it does me no good. The curse of the short attention span… I am going to maintain this blog though, regardless of what shiny temptations life throws at me (he pledged). If nothing else, it will be a small record of my short stay here on earth to be read by me in my geriatricy, and perhaps map a course not to be followed by anyone wishing fulfillment or satisfaction. I raise my glass to the start of another weary blog, and the end of private disaster…

world weary is a good expression. It’s how I feel most of the time. I genuinely think I’ll just stop sometimes, my heart will just say “no more” and shut down. Everybody else seems so able to cope with everything it just compounds my unfailing inability to cope with anything. I wander awkwardly in and out of situations other people breeze through and deliberate endlessly over decisions other people make in the blink of an eye. When I speak to people I feel like i’m talking a different language, they lose interest in what I’m saying because they can’t see the point in it and I lose interest in saying it because they don’t understand. Sometimes I think it would be easier if my life was a musical and I just sang how I felt to people, orchestration would magically appear from the bushes, I would burst into song and… there you have it, everybody knows how everybody feels, sorted. I fear if I tried this the bushes would let me down and I would grind to an uncomfortable halt, mid line… I have no choice but to continue as I always have. When I need to get something out, I hide away and record it in a song, when I see something beautiful, I take a picture of it. Somewhere, some time, somebody will see or hear them and know what I meant. That’s good enough (even if I do feel like this bike)

…a hot, uncomfortable night, someones television lightly entertains them in a sticky room next door or somewhere, BBC world service drifting through from the kitchen, the constant hum of the blades of the fan on a spindle, cutting the thick, heavy air, a list of things I need to do and a headful of things I want to do, unable to do any of them for the suffocating heat and the lethargy that accompanies it…
if I can fend off the heat long enough to actually do some work, there’ll be a free album to download from my website called “lamb” which was recorded live. It’s just ten songs stripped down to an electric guitar and a voice, pretty much what you would hear if you were somewhere I was playing, but given that I can’t do that just now, this is a kind of replacement. If you can’t download it’s okay, I’ll send you a proper copy though the post, just send a mailing address. For now though back to the clock lazily dragging it’s heavy hands through the simmering air…
Goodnight world
Cold dreams

Do you ever just get to the point where you can’t accept any new information? I’m at that point. I can take pictures with my lomo and I can still write, but that is about it. Periodically the speed of life and the colours and the noise all just get too much and I look away for a second and crash into a wall. I then spend what seems like a colourless eternity in a kind of psychological traction, unable to do anything useful at all… Great… It would be good if you could just opt out of this mad existence for a while and hibernate or something, but you can’t. As soon as you go out of step for a second you’re dragged back by the relentless flow of progress. It feels sometimes like we’re all part of some massive parade all marching in the same direction as close to each other as is possible and if you try to stop you’re either picked up by the flow of the crowd and swept away or you’re trampled underfoot. Not great choices. Keep marching, stay alert, keep eyes wide open, (and it might be okay)

Far more successful pretending to be artists this time, no Japanese gardens but we did wander around Princes Street gardens looking at trees. Weather was very Parisian, damp & bright. Slightly rediculous Donegal racing cap in place, managed to avoid syphilis, met an owl in Tron Square and a bear collector outside John Knoxs’ house. We bought a huge amount of halva and entered the museum in chamber Street, posing as romanies, unfortunately there were so many people in the building their combined damp warmth hit us in the face like a rag soaked in chloroform. We left the building like rats from a docking ship… Tip: If ever you’re faced with the chance to contain a large number of damp humans in a warm, airless room, Don’t.

Well here we go again… Pretending to be artists… This time we’re going to a Japanese garden and its the height of the blossom season. I’m going to be Gauguin and wear an absurd hat and Mindy will be Vincent Van Gogh in all but the beard… Hopefully we don’t take it to the point where I die of syphilis and Mindy shoots herself in a cornfield. That would be an awful lot to get into one day though, it should be fine… Just waiting for the copies of the album to come back from the pressing plant now…

What a day… Spoke relentlessly to people on the phone for hours about total nonsense… stared at a screen trying to work out why it was dark blue and didn’t seem to like me any more… but… I did finally finish the cover to this album after what seems like decades… some days start wrong, stay wrong, and end wrong… The trick is, if something does work out, focus on it and run to bed as quickly as possible before you’re killed by your own shadow… Thats where I’m going now…

There’s an interesting point… If you believe in destiny and that some things (possibly all things) are destined to happen, are our attempts to control things entirely futile? We spend so much time and energy trying to engineer our placement on earth and in society (and in relationships) that we miss the best aspects of life, the tiny things that for no definable or logical reason make us happy, and why, when destiny will win anyway? If we could train ourselves not to believe we have a chance of changing things but rather went with the natural flow and made the most of the choices destiny makes for us, would we not be happier? It sometimes feels like you’re spending your whole time bashing a square peg into a round hole… I saw a little girl on princes Street in Edinburgh who had it all worked out. She was out with her parents and had been given a beautiful big, red balloon. She was striding along with her arm extended, fully engaged with holding on to this balloon and preventing its escape and then… it was gone. The helium had won and the balloon shot towards the sky like a horse from a box. The child, rather than stamp her feet and demand another one, just stood watching the balloon fulfill it’s destiny, smiling as though she’d just freed a captive bird. We should learn to enjoy destiny, I think if we did, we would enjoy everything more.