I don’t know what becomes of us crazies in the end.
I dreamed last night of an old demi-god who frolicked with a lover and died when he should have been with his true woman. He was born again, but into regret of his mistake. That rebirth was me. Then I was someplace else and I saw the ‘one’ for me. She was stood by a wall. I knew her but couldn’t place her name, and then I woke
to another Friday.
To force myself up out of bed, to work, then to drink, then to a Casino, to lose, to drink some more and then go home.
What becomes of us?
I sit and watch the fan blowing the hot air around.
Thinking about it.
Dark clouds loom and drop rain on the summer. I am here. Writing.
About a life I lived. Maybe more than once. I just don’t know.
I have seen so very much of the truths that are the same for all of us, yet I know so very little.
What exactly we do seems to matter very little. Who we are, or what we try to be; Winners, Losers, Richmen or poor, Hunters, Achievers, Seekers or bums sat watching the slow failure of the human race. What we are, matters very little.
What matters more is that whatever it is we do we strive to remain awake, aware, watching, observing ourselves, become conscious, become present in the moment. All these things seem to me to be more important than what we are actually doing. And yet in the end, they really are not that important at all.
Then I got to thinking; what becomes of us crazies if there is no end?
Monday 28 December 2009
How To Survive In Paradise. Part 1.
‘They liked your song called ‘African Son Rise’ but they laughed when I played them ‘Been Down’’
‘What dya mean they laughed at it?’ I said.
I felt a momentary twinge. Felt weak, stupid, naive. Music did that to me. I righted myself quickly, but a mild tang remained. My mum was staying with a family in Africa, currently Rwanda, where she was helping victims of atrocities. I was living on a beach in Sydney. I guess just trying to help myself. There was a relative life-equation involved here; could a middle-class white boy from England have had it tough? It was exactly this kind of thing that gave me the urge to try to justify myself. This…This…guilt maybe. It is what had finally brought England to its knees. Lost its white identity. The guts gnawed at from the inside out. No, I hadn’t been gang raped, and I hadn’t had to take a machete to my sister. Hell, at least one of those was true.
What was a guy to do to get some respect, I wondered.
Though it was true I was in green pastures today, at least for now. It didn’t stop the fear though, nor the madness. Funny thing that. The stealth killers of Westerners. The mind had a way of torturing the soul when not occupied with matters of survival. 2000 years of civilsation proved it; if man was ever to really find a state of peace, all hell would break loose. He couldn’t handle it. He’d get bored and end up going insane or murdering his neighbour. Vice , pressure, hardships, poverty, suffering. These things we struggled daily to escape seemed, at the same time, to be the very things we needed in order to be qualified to live. If things got too good, too easy, there was some universal law that would address the balance by throwing in a curveball. Look at Aids, Cancer, obesity, peacetime murder and suicide rates, depression, drug addiction, even in some inverted way terrorism too. I read someplace that more people died in England in 2006 from suicide than from the Iraq war. How many miserable looking people lived in the West, how many people disatisfied with their life? You just had to look at the mounting massive public debt as people tried to satisfy the hole left by curing the daily struggle to survive. 100,000 units for a mortage? You were basically paying 100,000 units just for a feeling. Surely that defined insanity. And the closer you got to curing all ills, the meaner those stealth killers became. People just started to kill themselves. Maybe it had to be that way. All things must find balance. The universe demanded it. But, god damn it, ‘Been down’ was a good song.
‘Well, glad someone enjoyed it’ I relented, finding my sense of balance again. At least someone had listened to it, I figured.
There was a pause during which I realized how much I loved my mum. I could never live up to her amazing selflessness and ability to give. It just wasn’t in me the same.
‘When are you heading back, mum?’
‘I’ll be back around Xmas time, back home to L.A. I have Nairobi first then South Africa for a while to visit friends.’
‘Look after yourself out there, wont you’
I knew she would be ok. They still had respect for the Matriarch in Africa. As mean and cruel a continent as it was, I always felt she had a better chance surviving there than on the streets of L.A.
‘What dya mean they laughed at it?’ I said.
I felt a momentary twinge. Felt weak, stupid, naive. Music did that to me. I righted myself quickly, but a mild tang remained. My mum was staying with a family in Africa, currently Rwanda, where she was helping victims of atrocities. I was living on a beach in Sydney. I guess just trying to help myself. There was a relative life-equation involved here; could a middle-class white boy from England have had it tough? It was exactly this kind of thing that gave me the urge to try to justify myself. This…This…guilt maybe. It is what had finally brought England to its knees. Lost its white identity. The guts gnawed at from the inside out. No, I hadn’t been gang raped, and I hadn’t had to take a machete to my sister. Hell, at least one of those was true.
What was a guy to do to get some respect, I wondered.
Though it was true I was in green pastures today, at least for now. It didn’t stop the fear though, nor the madness. Funny thing that. The stealth killers of Westerners. The mind had a way of torturing the soul when not occupied with matters of survival. 2000 years of civilsation proved it; if man was ever to really find a state of peace, all hell would break loose. He couldn’t handle it. He’d get bored and end up going insane or murdering his neighbour. Vice , pressure, hardships, poverty, suffering. These things we struggled daily to escape seemed, at the same time, to be the very things we needed in order to be qualified to live. If things got too good, too easy, there was some universal law that would address the balance by throwing in a curveball. Look at Aids, Cancer, obesity, peacetime murder and suicide rates, depression, drug addiction, even in some inverted way terrorism too. I read someplace that more people died in England in 2006 from suicide than from the Iraq war. How many miserable looking people lived in the West, how many people disatisfied with their life? You just had to look at the mounting massive public debt as people tried to satisfy the hole left by curing the daily struggle to survive. 100,000 units for a mortage? You were basically paying 100,000 units just for a feeling. Surely that defined insanity. And the closer you got to curing all ills, the meaner those stealth killers became. People just started to kill themselves. Maybe it had to be that way. All things must find balance. The universe demanded it. But, god damn it, ‘Been down’ was a good song.
‘Well, glad someone enjoyed it’ I relented, finding my sense of balance again. At least someone had listened to it, I figured.
There was a pause during which I realized how much I loved my mum. I could never live up to her amazing selflessness and ability to give. It just wasn’t in me the same.
‘When are you heading back, mum?’
‘I’ll be back around Xmas time, back home to L.A. I have Nairobi first then South Africa for a while to visit friends.’
‘Look after yourself out there, wont you’
I knew she would be ok. They still had respect for the Matriarch in Africa. As mean and cruel a continent as it was, I always felt she had a better chance surviving there than on the streets of L.A.
Tuesday 15 December 2009
Living in a Paradise Postcode
Of all the people qualified to make it to paradise, I was actually quite high in the rankings. I had balls. I knew this. It wasn’t out of choice, just that through life I had gotten forced into corners from which I had learned to force my way out. I wasn’t actually very good at it, but once convinced with purpose I could find my way into most things. This had been my ace card during the years I lived in London. Having said that, one of my blind spots was knowing when I should be getting out. I tended to hang about too long in bad business. The problem was I didn’t imagine a better life existed anywhere, so dealing with shit day after day just seemed the norm. If I left this job it would be to another equally meaningless one. If I left this shitty town it will be to an equally shitty one. I knew the world was a lie and I knew wherever I went, whatever I did, I would still be the same person I always had been. So I saw nothing better anywhere. I didn’t really know what better meant. That was how my mind worked. But every now and then something stirred in me, something deep and when it did, in the blink of an eye I would be gone. I moved to London this way from Oxford and I moved to Sydney from London the same. I rarely looked back. Just dropped everything, everyone, and left town. Gone. Never to be heard from again.
Maybe one day I would become like some kind of shadowy legend figure. I liked the idea of it. The mystery. Let people imagine that in the end I finally got away. That would do. And so it was I now mosied the weekends away in what was one Paradise on Earth; Bondi Beach. Where I lived the dream. So they thought. Those I had left behind. I didn’t want to shake their illusion. It was like the film Cool Hand Luke only not quite so cool. People needed dreams, needed heroes and people they could look up to. We all did, even the ones that said they didn’t. Creatures of influence the lot of us. I had seen a lot of hate in mens eyes in my time for it, and a lot of deluded adoration from the ladies too. What the men didn’t know was that I was just as bitter and pained as them, if not more so, and what the women didn’t know, was that I was a useless self-centred shit underneath any stardust veneer, just like all the others. Though a couple had found that out the hard way. I didn’t like preying on peoples foolishness though, it wasn’t my style which was a pity really because I could have done pretty well for myself if I had the nature of a confidence trickster, but I didn’t. I had the opposite; A quite annoying desire to be habitually honest. Though if you scratched deep enough, that too was a lie.
So I finally made it out of the dirty, grey city of London where I had discovered dreams don’t last and the roads weren’t paved with gold but were rather paved in pure, cheap white snow-like disco dust. It wasn’t a bad time. 18 years of it. I had some good times and some tough ones but in the end I had just run out of the energy needed to make the most of a city like London. Truth was, she had been good to me. I didn’t think so in the last couple of years but looking back I know she was my town. My prime was lived on her streets. We had a love affair I wont ever forget. And then, just like I had always predicted, one day I got in one of those planes that I used to watch taking off from Heathrow while sat up on the Hill in Harrow often time feeling a bit whistful, and off I went and never looked back. That was it. 18 years getting to know a whole life, a whole bunch of friends, a city like the back of my hand. 18 years. Done. Walked off. Left it behind. It was like dying. In fact I thought I was going to. I went off into some lonely distant outback and waited for it to come. But to my surprise it didn’t come. So two months later I headed back to Sydney, got a job. Got a place by the ocean right on the front in Bondi Beach, and sat about waiting for life to start over again.
I’d made it to paradise. It was true. I would step out my door each morning heading for a job that wasn’t so bad as some I’d had. I would stand on the top step rising up and down on my toes letting off some pops of morning wind. A little excited because I was looking right at the turquoise blue ocean and white sands of one of the most famous beaches in the world. I would smile like a Cheshire cat and say to myself,
‘Marky boy, you fucking genius! You made it, my son, you absolutely fucking made it!’
And off I would trott to earn the money to stay in paradise, which is pretty much what my money went on. To live in paradise you need two things; Money for expensive rent, and something to do. I was just about getting away with the former and did fine with the latter for the first year and a half. It took about that long before I started to really wonder where I was at. The trouble with staring at paradise every day was that pretty soon you took it for granted. It was hard not to, maybe even impossible. People would hate you for such a comment, but it was true. Paradise only remained Paradise if it could be able to remain a dream. One of the cruel ,twisted truths in the movie we call life, is that the deepest and truest love you will ever feel is the unrequited kind. The dream must remain out of reach to remain a dream. It is the nature of things. We can never really have what it is we seek. That is the law. And once you get that law, once you figure it out. And many do. You start to wonder why you are seeking it in the first place. And there is no real answer to that. You realize that Paradise is an illusion just like everything else. Some tougher days it’s enough to make a man walk off into that beautiful blue ocean until breathing stops, and some have. Again, not really my style. But even so it was god damn beautiful and a place to come home of an evening and imagine I was being healed in some way. I think maybe I even was.
So I had finally done something a little better for myself but , like I said, there were still issues. It was endlessly this. I wasn’t even sure it could be figured out. You fixed one thing only to discover the sense of crisis in life had shifted to another. Now it was my loneliness and my age I was struggling with. Paradise was beautiful but I didn’t feel quite the same on the inside. I tried to. In fact some days I felt positively sinful for not feeling better about the fact that I was living the dream. I did a good job of it but there were farts in the ointment or whatever it is they say. I got pretty healthy for a time and happy too but it would be a lie to say it was perfect. It sure looked perfect and had a perfectness about it, pretty good post code too. 2026. But once you have made your environment idyllic it becomes glaringly obvious that the fault does not lie anywhere around you, but within you. Yes, my friends, you , YOU are to blame for everything you have a problem with. The ego, the I, the curse of mankind. That was what I came to see of myself. But I could not allow myself to fall there. I just couldn’t.
So I sat back, pulled on my board shorts and slipped a pair of soft-soled thongs onto my feet and stepped out into the balmy hot sunny day of yet another Sunday afternoon and strolled the beach looking at tanned blondes, rolling waves and swaythes of the finest golden summer sand this side of Christendom. I had made it. Here I was. Here, I finally was. In a paradise postcode. Sure I was still alone, sometimes lost, sometimes pretty confused and uncertain. Most of all about when the dream was going to end, and when would I be priced out of paradise. But while it was here. While I was right in the middle of it. Staring right down the barrel of the blue. For fucks sake, this was it. This was it! I’d god damn make sure I was going to appreciate every minute of it. Sip the gold and blue nectar of every last drop. Somehow Satan had made it back into Heaven and so far it seemed, no one had noticed.
Qualified.
Maybe one day I would become like some kind of shadowy legend figure. I liked the idea of it. The mystery. Let people imagine that in the end I finally got away. That would do. And so it was I now mosied the weekends away in what was one Paradise on Earth; Bondi Beach. Where I lived the dream. So they thought. Those I had left behind. I didn’t want to shake their illusion. It was like the film Cool Hand Luke only not quite so cool. People needed dreams, needed heroes and people they could look up to. We all did, even the ones that said they didn’t. Creatures of influence the lot of us. I had seen a lot of hate in mens eyes in my time for it, and a lot of deluded adoration from the ladies too. What the men didn’t know was that I was just as bitter and pained as them, if not more so, and what the women didn’t know, was that I was a useless self-centred shit underneath any stardust veneer, just like all the others. Though a couple had found that out the hard way. I didn’t like preying on peoples foolishness though, it wasn’t my style which was a pity really because I could have done pretty well for myself if I had the nature of a confidence trickster, but I didn’t. I had the opposite; A quite annoying desire to be habitually honest. Though if you scratched deep enough, that too was a lie.
So I finally made it out of the dirty, grey city of London where I had discovered dreams don’t last and the roads weren’t paved with gold but were rather paved in pure, cheap white snow-like disco dust. It wasn’t a bad time. 18 years of it. I had some good times and some tough ones but in the end I had just run out of the energy needed to make the most of a city like London. Truth was, she had been good to me. I didn’t think so in the last couple of years but looking back I know she was my town. My prime was lived on her streets. We had a love affair I wont ever forget. And then, just like I had always predicted, one day I got in one of those planes that I used to watch taking off from Heathrow while sat up on the Hill in Harrow often time feeling a bit whistful, and off I went and never looked back. That was it. 18 years getting to know a whole life, a whole bunch of friends, a city like the back of my hand. 18 years. Done. Walked off. Left it behind. It was like dying. In fact I thought I was going to. I went off into some lonely distant outback and waited for it to come. But to my surprise it didn’t come. So two months later I headed back to Sydney, got a job. Got a place by the ocean right on the front in Bondi Beach, and sat about waiting for life to start over again.
I’d made it to paradise. It was true. I would step out my door each morning heading for a job that wasn’t so bad as some I’d had. I would stand on the top step rising up and down on my toes letting off some pops of morning wind. A little excited because I was looking right at the turquoise blue ocean and white sands of one of the most famous beaches in the world. I would smile like a Cheshire cat and say to myself,
‘Marky boy, you fucking genius! You made it, my son, you absolutely fucking made it!’
And off I would trott to earn the money to stay in paradise, which is pretty much what my money went on. To live in paradise you need two things; Money for expensive rent, and something to do. I was just about getting away with the former and did fine with the latter for the first year and a half. It took about that long before I started to really wonder where I was at. The trouble with staring at paradise every day was that pretty soon you took it for granted. It was hard not to, maybe even impossible. People would hate you for such a comment, but it was true. Paradise only remained Paradise if it could be able to remain a dream. One of the cruel ,twisted truths in the movie we call life, is that the deepest and truest love you will ever feel is the unrequited kind. The dream must remain out of reach to remain a dream. It is the nature of things. We can never really have what it is we seek. That is the law. And once you get that law, once you figure it out. And many do. You start to wonder why you are seeking it in the first place. And there is no real answer to that. You realize that Paradise is an illusion just like everything else. Some tougher days it’s enough to make a man walk off into that beautiful blue ocean until breathing stops, and some have. Again, not really my style. But even so it was god damn beautiful and a place to come home of an evening and imagine I was being healed in some way. I think maybe I even was.
So I had finally done something a little better for myself but , like I said, there were still issues. It was endlessly this. I wasn’t even sure it could be figured out. You fixed one thing only to discover the sense of crisis in life had shifted to another. Now it was my loneliness and my age I was struggling with. Paradise was beautiful but I didn’t feel quite the same on the inside. I tried to. In fact some days I felt positively sinful for not feeling better about the fact that I was living the dream. I did a good job of it but there were farts in the ointment or whatever it is they say. I got pretty healthy for a time and happy too but it would be a lie to say it was perfect. It sure looked perfect and had a perfectness about it, pretty good post code too. 2026. But once you have made your environment idyllic it becomes glaringly obvious that the fault does not lie anywhere around you, but within you. Yes, my friends, you , YOU are to blame for everything you have a problem with. The ego, the I, the curse of mankind. That was what I came to see of myself. But I could not allow myself to fall there. I just couldn’t.
So I sat back, pulled on my board shorts and slipped a pair of soft-soled thongs onto my feet and stepped out into the balmy hot sunny day of yet another Sunday afternoon and strolled the beach looking at tanned blondes, rolling waves and swaythes of the finest golden summer sand this side of Christendom. I had made it. Here I was. Here, I finally was. In a paradise postcode. Sure I was still alone, sometimes lost, sometimes pretty confused and uncertain. Most of all about when the dream was going to end, and when would I be priced out of paradise. But while it was here. While I was right in the middle of it. Staring right down the barrel of the blue. For fucks sake, this was it. This was it! I’d god damn make sure I was going to appreciate every minute of it. Sip the gold and blue nectar of every last drop. Somehow Satan had made it back into Heaven and so far it seemed, no one had noticed.
Qualified.
Saturday 12 December 2009
2009 This was the year that….
I went drug free (excepting a slight altercation with some Methadrone and a bottle of vodka. And some reprobates I befriended one night in the Beach Road Hotel who insisted I join them)
I discovered I am prone to social leprocy and Facebook turettes.
I got my first genuine proposal of marriage. And she wasn’t joking.
I got my first genuine stalker. And she wasn’t joking.
I had more lovers in one fortnight than I had in the last 4 years
I accidently dated a hooker, it lasted a month
I completed my first book
I learnt some more about rejection
I felt I might not survive the year, mentally or physically but spiritually ...somehow I always felt ok.
I discovered being challenged is what makes you get up and get through it.
I grew up a little bit.
...but not too much.
I released another solo album that immediately sailed majestically into plummeting obscurity.
I rediscovered the reasons to see life as an amazing experience to be lived
I bought a drum
All in all it was a pretty good year
I discovered I am prone to social leprocy and Facebook turettes.
I got my first genuine proposal of marriage. And she wasn’t joking.
I got my first genuine stalker. And she wasn’t joking.
I had more lovers in one fortnight than I had in the last 4 years
I accidently dated a hooker, it lasted a month
I completed my first book
I learnt some more about rejection
I felt I might not survive the year, mentally or physically but spiritually ...somehow I always felt ok.
I discovered being challenged is what makes you get up and get through it.
I grew up a little bit.
...but not too much.
I released another solo album that immediately sailed majestically into plummeting obscurity.
I rediscovered the reasons to see life as an amazing experience to be lived
I bought a drum
All in all it was a pretty good year
Another night spent stumbling around, lost in a city I still don’t seem to know. It used to be easier or maybe it is just the same. I’m so used to dealing with it this way I just don’t know anymore. 2 drinks became 5, became 10, became …stumbling around. The one thing that stays the same, is the loneliness of it all. At which I laugh now, like an old friend you can always count on.
It struck me tonight, as I caught the eye of yet another woman I didn’t approach, that love, marriage, friendship, comfort, genuine kindness and things of the heart, the things women in truth, seem to love to give. You know, these things, they aren’t all that far away. As if I could just reach out to touch and it would be there. It was in her look; a question – was I brave enough to ask.
But tonight, like so many nights before. I just wasn’t able to step up. I couldn’t feel enough like a man, I guess. Not tonight. But I saw that look in her eye. Just like I’ve seen the depths in waters, and the distance in horizons, and the suns dropping low, and the darknesses falling gently down to let the stars come out to light the ways, and I know the loneliness, the fear, will not be forever.
It struck me tonight, as I caught the eye of yet another woman I didn’t approach, that love, marriage, friendship, comfort, genuine kindness and things of the heart, the things women in truth, seem to love to give. You know, these things, they aren’t all that far away. As if I could just reach out to touch and it would be there. It was in her look; a question – was I brave enough to ask.
But tonight, like so many nights before. I just wasn’t able to step up. I couldn’t feel enough like a man, I guess. Not tonight. But I saw that look in her eye. Just like I’ve seen the depths in waters, and the distance in horizons, and the suns dropping low, and the darknesses falling gently down to let the stars come out to light the ways, and I know the loneliness, the fear, will not be forever.
Thursday 3 December 2009
I finished my first book.
I say book, only because I dont know what else to call it, it isnt going to be published and it doesnt have existence in the world. It's just a 120 pages in a word document on a computer.
It's the raw dealio about 5 years that had a big effect on me. shaped me. set me on the road to who I am today. whatever the hell that is.
I never finished anything before quite so perfectly. In fact I dont think I ever finished anything before at all.
There was something about it's completion felt incredibly natural. It just flowed to a stop.
I started it about 8 months ago, found all the bits I needed to include, wrote it up, went through it correcting the mistakes, changed a couple of bits that seemed wrong and then there it was
done
I looked at it in a state of shock and pride this last weekend.
It was actually finished. There was nothing more to do or add or change at all.
It was perfect.
I have been making music for 25 years and I never felt a song complete. never. not like that. It was weird to me, new.
I dont know what this means
I called the book - 'Fear, Discipline, Latin and Lash' and after some deliberation sent it to an ex-girlfriend who always said she wanted to understand why I was the way I was.
I said I hoped it helped
and promised not to include her real name in the next one.
I say book, only because I dont know what else to call it, it isnt going to be published and it doesnt have existence in the world. It's just a 120 pages in a word document on a computer.
It's the raw dealio about 5 years that had a big effect on me. shaped me. set me on the road to who I am today. whatever the hell that is.
I never finished anything before quite so perfectly. In fact I dont think I ever finished anything before at all.
There was something about it's completion felt incredibly natural. It just flowed to a stop.
I started it about 8 months ago, found all the bits I needed to include, wrote it up, went through it correcting the mistakes, changed a couple of bits that seemed wrong and then there it was
done
I looked at it in a state of shock and pride this last weekend.
It was actually finished. There was nothing more to do or add or change at all.
It was perfect.
I have been making music for 25 years and I never felt a song complete. never. not like that. It was weird to me, new.
I dont know what this means
I called the book - 'Fear, Discipline, Latin and Lash' and after some deliberation sent it to an ex-girlfriend who always said she wanted to understand why I was the way I was.
I said I hoped it helped
and promised not to include her real name in the next one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)