Feels like you’re clutching at straws sometimes. Just to get a piece of life, a piece of the action. I got obsessed with music again for a while. Under headphones. Back from work. Days and nights. Weekends disappearing. I’d break and walk out to the ocean, see the beauties of Bondi strolling the front, sit smoking and wondering how the hell to break into their world and be accepted. I wanted a piece of something. Maybe just some female company to break my focus, but it wasn’t coming. I was in no state to appeal to anything healthy. So I carried on. It was one of those times when you are left waiting. Waiting. Clinging on to insane behaviour because somehow it was keeping me sane. I waited. Insanely.

Then the burning fever of it all broke, something shifted I don’t know what, felt cosmic, bigger than I, this time I had been under. I read my stars on the way to work. They read good and I needed that. The album was nearly finished, I was nearly finished. Just a few more days. I had holiday coming. 5 days. No money so I wasn’t going anywhere. But just to get off the wheel for a while was a relief. It had been a long, tough year but something told me I had made it through. Obsession isn’t always a bad thing. It keeps you holding your breath that little bit longer than you thought you could. You just stop thinking. Stop being human. Become a machine. Doing it. Whatever IT is. Mindless, soulless. Just doing it. Some shit stupid thing. For me it was music, an album of acoustic stuff. I took the break, lay in bed. Hit the studio finished the album. Lay in bed some more. I swear I was nearly pewking that last day having to listen to those songs for the thousandth time. But I knew, that above the meaninglessness of it all. I had come through something. The music didn’t matter. I hated it but understood why, so didn’t sabotage it. Just called it ‘Of Flesh, Blood, and bone’ like that had some kind of meaning. It did to me. I stepped out from under it all with a CD of tunes. My soul. It wasn’t worth much but to me it wrote the end of a big fucking era. It was something. And that was enough right there. If I had continued, madness would have taken me for sure.

I started drinking again then. Partly to celebrate and partly to shake the feeling of dryness, emptiness that finishing things produced. I broke down some. Had to speak to my family and they intuited something wrong in me. I didn’t like that. I needed to hide but it wasn’t going to work. I was too raw. Soul was bleeding after such intense isolation. Emotions went ballistic, off the scale, this way then that. Argh! Shake it, some how, shake back to life, back to humanity, back to reason. Bring back feelings, like love, like compassion, like purpose and meaning. Stop being such a fucking robotic soulless machine. Booze then more booze, then some Dutch courage took me and in the blindness I started to function again. Little by little. I felt me, down there a million fathoms deep. Little old me. A kid like creature. Covered in mud and slobber. White like Gollum from the years in the mind cave. Up. Into the light. Breaking, breathing sucking it in. realising that I had to laugh at it else I might go crazy for real. Return to being a normal human being. Not pretending but the real thing. Someone people could communicate with about normal stuff, days and TV shows and laughter and light and fun and so on, and so on. But getting back.

The ocean helped, the sunshine and those beauties with long legs and hair blowing over soft faces, eyes alive and loving, wanting to love, to tease, to shine and be honoured.

I sat in the bar until someone came to talk to me. Invited me to join them. The music of some band played in that place, we drank together, beer and tequila liquor until I was so drunk I couldn’t remember who I was. It was easy then. I made pretend like I was part of all this. This world, this game. But it clicked. It started to come back. To ignite and remember in me. It was a phenomenon brought to life. That I should get away with this and yet that I should suffer this. Made no sense. Either way. But I was onto it.

Hell came and it blew out the cobwebs and the morning light glowed redder than anything I had seen before. Red desert dust, they said. I thought the world was on fire. Who gives a damn for Armageddon, we all have one coming like it or not. No preachers on these shores, no lies, no judges, no bullshit, just glorious words and lives and loves, big loves, grown of lust and connections and struggles in a world of amnesiacs and hurt beings who act like they have no inkling of the journey they have made just to be here. Scared to wake up. Scared of the sacredness of it all. Not knowing how to be that little bit more. Shaking in the fear of awareness when it threatens to leap upon them and open their eyes. Little fish swimming up a womb river, morphing into beings that sit and wait in this place, big eyes, just eyes, looking, and mouths that say – ‘we are lost though, aren’t we?’ Lost in reflections of self projection. Sure. Lost. No one is lost. We are here. Play the part and swim in your own dark strangeness, create wonder that no one will notice. That’s just how it is. Expect nothing. Be nothing. And you can steal the world and touch another and risk to say - I love you now, but you owe me nothing.

And then it was over.

My brief sojourn to the fathomless place.

And I was back to work and onto the wheel, and it didn’t feel so bad, it made me feel quite normal again. Sometimes the grind is a healing thing. And the people who had annoyed me before , I kind of felt like hugging. Silent thankyous were duly given to my challengers. The game had changed, turned. Life moved on, eras passed away. Times, the times, like waves. Yet I was still here.

So I got me up and went and played some gigs. That got me out the flat. Then a couple of visits to a massage parlour one lunch time after sitting in a park and wondering what to do, brought me an unexpected moment of loving connection. Love pops up in the strangest places. Sweet kisses, and young life shining eyes and strokes that made me feel wanted in the cool fragrant darkness of a willow world scene. I’d grown old while I wasn’t looking, the mirror scared me now, but she didn’t seem to notice or care, just touched my face and brought her lips to meet mine. Sweet cherry taste. So unexpected, and pure. I didn’t know what to do. I touched her leg, let my fingers move over the silky flesh of her thigh and noticed the start of age lines on my hand of all places. The contrast of her against my wiry skin and bone seemed somehow right, I didn’t know why. We had something to offer each other. Something unspoken yet known to us both. A secret, un-shareable in the world because the world is insane and so full of cruelty that has no acceptance of some soft truths, just the callous media frenzy of shark-like fanaticism that feeds on anything beautiful and sucks it dry and to death. Guilt. Guilt and cruelty will rule here forever until kingdom come. But it will come.

And in that quiet darkness I was fed with a divine feeling that told me to keep clutching for those straws and fighting the same old useless blind fight, because once in a while the magic seemed to burst right through, and when it does, and you are wide awake and crying, screaming out amidst the suffering blandness of it all, right there. Right in that briefest of moments, it all comes alive, like it was nothing to have to wait so long, and you know. That beautiful little moment of truth and honesty and magic. So precious, and fragile, and brief. Was what you were living for all this time. And you found it in the most gentle touch.