Note to self...

I want to take Cam to Europe after I square away a few more debts and outstanding bills. Hopefully next year. Not to revisit the places I vaguely recall and love with all my hardened heart and arteries but rather to just amble and shamble over new landscapes at our leisure. A no name, poverty-pack Wild Swans At Coole, if you will.

My problem is, I somehow think I'll insist we stay there.

Live till our 90s, argue the spectrum of inconsequential and picayune thru' history making and world shattering, get back on the wine and Trappist lager and Gauloise Blondes, eat healthily and far too well every day and shout and manically gesticulate for everything from the greeting of strangers to the finding of colourful bugs and insects through to CRISPR and the new eugenics and arms races.

And run into the ocean naked, drunk and pissing ourselves laughing every other afternoon because that's just how the rules work over there.

Such irrational fears hound me daily.

In the most beautiful ways.

Such a perfect day...

So it begins...

Early on I was told that I was related to both King Niall of Ireland and Robert the Bruce of Scotland.
For four and a half decades, I learned that I'd been mispronouncing Martin Scorcese's surname.
Most of my life I knew of the curious fact that somewhere in Western Australia, outer space is actually closer than the next town.
Since I was a young man, I was informed the word 'kangaroo' meant 'No idea what you're on about'.
At some point or other in my twenties I learned that handshakes were originally devised to expose concealed knives and weapons at meetings.
A few years back I learned that many parts of Russia legally classified beer as a soft drink.
And now I'm pondering the fact that Canada means village or town, Canberra means place to meet, kvinden is not the plural for queens in Danish and pineapples are really fused berries.
So much uselessness and usefulness crowding in all the time.
So much worth knowing and worth avoiding all knowledge of.
So much we know and don't know all around us, all the time.
Goddammit, i need my first cup of tea for the day.
Let
the
day
start.

Someone who cares...

Thank. Fuck. For. Cordial.

The feeling when you've got the kettle on and you're convinced it's too hot for a cup of tea but you've got the kettle on anyway and you grunt one moment, sigh the next for reasons that have nothing to do with age or infirmity or reality, and everything to do with your exhausted imagination and you put clothes on to get some food in from the supermarket and maybe catch a movie but you left with the food and without the movie and your hand burns from getting it stuck in the letterbox to clean out the junk mail and now your glasses are fogging up in the fiery watery air and thank god for the battered couch and Netflix otherwise your sanity would have surely gone the way of your whimsies and your hopes and your schemes and your dreams which is what you wanted all along anyway.

Yeah.

That one.

Cool water.

Children queuing at the cinema.

I do not like this child gambit.
I do not like it. Not one bit.
I thought that I would drive my car
up to the local cinema
And while away an hour or so
Engrossed in something. I don't know -
Perhaps some fine adventure fare
With aviators in the air
Or love. Or better, love and war
Although we've seen it all before
In times like these it's good to go
And find a decent picture show
To sit back with a screen romance
Or, if you like, some song and dance.
Dystopia, if you so choose,
To mirror life and nightly news!
To think alone, lost in the dark
And come across a thread or spark
That surely must invigorate
my moribund thoughts of late.
But as I said, I do not like
When on whim I take the hike
Up to the local movie house
(though who am I to rail and grouse?!)
And turn the corner just to find -
and here, some horror comes to mind -
A queue! Or more a serpentine
Excited, squealing strange design
Comprised of nothing less or more
Of children and their parents poor
Who suffer, waiting foot and hand
On every tyrant in the land
Beneath the height of three foot two
(But what's a guardian to do?)
Well you can have it! All of you
For I will not now join your queue!
I'll wait until the darkness comes
By then you'll be in bed, my chums.
I'll loiter at the candy shelf
And have the damned place to myself!

Put a peephole in my brain...

The good Laird.

Raised his blunderbuss to the sky
(the only thing he couldn't miss)
and proceeded to blast it to pieces with wanton cries of,
"Tek that, ye sassenach fanny flaps! What do ye ken o'me noo, ye bastarts!"
And a shy woman walked past.
Plain in her beauty and profoundly beautiful in her ordinariness and he threw the blunderbuss on to the manicured lawn and grabbed low at her, with red and maddened face, whispering,
"Garn!  Gimme a swatch o'yer quim!" (pinch, pinch) "Gie's a feel of yer fanny and ye can cop a glimpse o'me bawbag, ya hackit fuckin' boot!" (grope, grope)
And she hurried on
and in justified and fearful tears would later tell the world that would not believe
or would laugh
or would turn away in the first blush of embarrassment, muttering 'neath its breath,
"But he'll make such a grand laird.  Give the fiefdom exactly the shake up it needs."
But the good laird cared not about the woman nor the fiefdom,
nor due diligence, nor protocol, nor justice of the land, nor the sick, nor even the the tired and poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, even as they sat him in the Manor.
And as the crofters and the merchants and those in blue and those in white and those of the gilded avenue and those of the rusted cul de sacs and those purple in the face with indignation and those thoughtful and resentful of a world that had promised but had yet to deliver and those with employment and those without, wrapped the tartan over his pained and unstable legs
("...from carrying the weight of the world for all of a wee second or two, ye know. It was too much for the brave man-bairn. It really was..."),
tears welled in his tired, reddened eyes from all the toys he could not buy, all the sandpits he was not allowed to play in or demolish ("but Sire!  You are NOT the only sovereign!"),
all the fools who would spurn his company,
("Has the Laird not had his nappy nap this arvy? And why not?! The Laird needs his nap!", whispered a faithful munter - and were they ALL not munters in the Laird's eyes?!) and
the good Laird  cried, "Where did I leave that cannon!  I want my cannon!  BRING ME MY CANNON!!!
The afternoon is young and I've not had my way with this barren and joyless day yet!".
And the toadies approached one after the other with their elephant guns and their grouse guns and their twenty millimeters and forty millimeters and the dusty Whippets and Males and Females and M4A3s and Chieftains and Leopards and Abrams and T-60s pulled fresh from the lots of museums the scoured land over, and B-36 Peacemakers and B-52s and F-117s and B-2s and all toys befitting such an important post.
And for a while, the good Laird Donald contented himself with pressing the small yellow buttons that opened and closed the doors on the silos, drooling and smiling blissfully.
Thus the long night slowly approached
As the pipers played their last before the new day.
A long way off.

McCullers' smile vs The Electoral College results.

I’m weeping silently now.

And I have no idea why.

I saw the photo of Carson McCullers laughing and the tears felt impossible to hold back

So I started to silently weep

For my own shoddy vanities and fruitless pretensions.

For the wave of bullshit descending upon us all.

For the somehow-ill president elect (rediculous/unpresidented).

For auld Albion and the United States of America - soon to take their ungloved, ham hock fists and smash themselves to pieces as they have done again and again in paroxysms of identity lack.

For the gloating storm of self-styled patriots of all persuasions taking power here, taking power there. Puppets of whom?  Masters of whom? Lampoon judges of what travesties of law or justice? Scarce able to repent for the damage they will cause here and there before they, as with their mythologised and feared and fear-filled predecessors, pay visit to one another, shoot and poison and garrotte and denounce and torture and disappear one another and all others besides.
Briefly clutching and clinging to their small power before disappearing in a drying stain of misdirection and historical footnotes.

For the overtaxed and overworked everywhere.
For the replaced and the replaceable to come.

For everyone who has ever signed on to the alluring emptiness of predatory demagogues through all time.

For the impatient who want it all and want it all NOW! These are the poor, sick fools we all need to watch out for.  This will be the epochal evil inside each of us that we really have to guard against.

For those bloated-to-the-point-of-bursting with conviction and certainty.

For those starving and skeletal because they KNOW.  And in knowing, certainty for them is as far away as the planet Neptune.

For the world that I have helped to build in my invisible and wretched, sub-atomic fashion.

And for you,

The helpless onlookers and caretakers of this mire.

But if it’s okay with you, I’d like to gaze upon the smile of Carson McCullers a while longer.

At least until I stop weeping.

The clouds will make a daisy chain...

Heroes and otherwise.

When I was a kid, I had so many heroes.  Musicians, explorers, generals and soldiers, great aviators and car makers.
The Fogertys and Dylans and Zappas and Coopers and Lennons and McCartneys, the Alexanders and Boyingtons and Richtofens and Bradleys and Rommels and Slims and Auchinlecks, the Northrops and Vogts and Miles and De Havillands and Kartvelis, the Bugattis and Buccialis and Saoutchiks.
Then from my late teens on, the hero worship started to fall away.
I'm not sure what filled that particular vacuum. Possibly life itself.
The paying of bills.  The decisions I've made - wrong or right.
But yeah, life just sort of gets in the way.
And now as I look at my autumn years approaching, I think I'm going back to a state of hero worship.
This time, though, it's visionaries and people who genuinely try to make the world better - whatever that might mean.
Anthropologists, zoologists, psychologists and psychiatric and social philosophers, Utopian economists, philanthropists, scientists, the humanists of every persuasion.
I look around and think, "Am I too late? After all, as many as half of my childhood heroes contributed to the decimation of this world, if only in the smallest and seemingly most innocent of ways.
Are we all simply too late?"
Is this how it plays out epoch to epoch, zenith to zenith and finally nadir to nadir?
How strange life is.

Heathen.

Two of 'em...

Sitting at the lights this afternoon.
I was surprised to hear myself softly saying, "The anguish... The anguish".
No emotion. No inflection.
And my mind lazily turned to people I love and sometimes, just sometimes, love well.
And those I do not love at all.
And the light turned green and we crawled along and the light turned red.
And I thought of those I'd known who had died or disappeared.
Talented. Not talented. But inspiring all the same. Still.
A classical octet barely audible on the Mazda's one good speaker.
And the light turned green and I was lucky enough to make it through.
Try it some time. "The anguish. The anguish". Feels good coming out of the mouth.
Instead of the other places we hide it.
If you were expecting a punchline, my friends, I'm sorry I don't have one.
Sometimes that's just where the patient, deadly rip takes you.
_____

Last night I thoughtdreamed of Scott Dobson
Shoulder length Beatle bob dark hair and insolent eyes.
Tall for his age and skinny as hell with the world's laziest smile.
And we'd ride our boards under the flats where he lived in Eagle Street
And the sun was good and his mum was good and she wouldn't give us any food but she would stand on the balcony and applaud because Scott was a great rider.
A hero. Taking on Nick Ravenscroft and the Dwyer brothers at the old Top Ryde Regional Shopping Center car-park. Deadliest hill a skateboard ever rolled down.
He'd handstand it, top to bottom, to the loud applause of everyone. And he'd stand at the end and just smile lazily. Not say a word.
And the pretty, well kept apartment blocks surrounded something more beautiful than art; the Beaurepaire tyre centre.
We could've wasted days tearing down the hill that ran beside and behind it.
Scarfing and filthying our new jeans sitting in tyres as we rode down.
We were about the same age and I had to go away from that place for a while.
When I came back he and his mum had moved.
Broke my heart.
Found out years later that had he lived past sixteen, he would've taken on the world.
But it seems they didn't know as much about tumours back in the summer of nineteen seventy seven as they do now.

"Sie sind nicht ein Bürger. Sie sind kein Griechisch. Sie sind nicht harmonisch, oder der Meister selber. Sie sind ein Vogel im Sturm."
Hermann Hesse.

Gates of steel.