What's freedom babe?

Another day, another death

2011-12-07T08:07:00.009+11:00

It was the same time last year, maybe even to the day. 7^th December that A W took his life by jumping from an 8^th floor window in Bondi , days after we fired him from our three piece music act. It was the first time I watched a plain wooden coffin get put into the ground. Dust blew about the hot earth and the roughly painted, and sadly cheap nature of the container told me it wasn’t wholly unexpected. I didn’t know him all that well, it devastated my last surviving partner in musical crime though, they had been friends since childhood. I knew the good days couldn’t last , and they had only just bloody arrived too. I took it as a warning. I was sinking into the bad things associated with my love of music again; Drink, drugs, trying to fuck everything. It was time to stop. I finished off gigs for Christmas and then left Bondi. It had been 3 years and I have to admit, I thought I could have stayed there for life quite happily. That is the nature of death when we look beyond the pain, get over the horizon of its texture on our hearts. Leave the day behind. Suicide is the most cruel of deaths, for the living. But death, when all is said and done, is emotionless , inevitable, and just a transformation from one form to another.

My mum seemed overly eager to get the news to me. I am not sure why. I found myself wondering if she is taking medication over there in the city of Lost Angels. I hoped not. She had thus far avoided making herself into a duck faced plastic caricature, as is the way in Hell A, so maybe there was hope.

Honey, F has had a death in the family, S's older sister committed suicide, thought I should let you know

It stopped my morning rush. I was bound for work, the one day a week I work in the city , a 2.5 hour train ride, mad dash for 5 hours without stopping, followed by the same train ride in reverse. Its worth it for the free time I get most of the rest of the week. I don't quite know how the hell I got my life into this great position, but long may it last. So I stared at the message. It had positively ruined my breakfast. I didn't care much for suicides. There had been too many, in fact it was the most common form of death in my life by far. It irked me. When so many things were out to get us, that we should get ourselves.

S was the guy who ended up with the girl I should have ended up with, but blew it. I blew it consciously and decidedly, but was always quite baffled by the speed with which she picked up someone new, the fact that it was the bass player in my recently defunct band, and a work colleague of hers, just added to the sensation that maybe it hadn't been totally my doing. This was a common one, I noticed, where ending of relationships had been concerned. I had pretty much always ended them, or rather, I thought I had. But women clearly have ways.

The discovery to me was also one that was a little disconcerting more because it didnt seem to bother me all that much. After 7 years of what was, in the main part, a pretty good relationship. I left her. Less than 2 weeks later, while letting myself into the house we owned still, to collect the last of my things, I discovered a used condom draped over the bin in the bedroom. This was the woman who had had sex with less people than you could count on one hand.

It was an echo of a similar feeling I felt this morning, staring out of the window as I was now, feeling a gnawing discomfort in the belly thanks to death, to change, to the end of something, and yet recognizing that really I should be thankful for the things I do have right here, right now. And I was, I truly was, but death sucked, most especially suicide. I clicked on Facebook and saw a ton of messages and condolences, I wasn't sure quite how my mum thought I would miss such an event. She wasnt turning into one of those feeders on dark news, was she? I shuddered and let the thought go. I wrote a short, plain, not very interesting message privately to F, and then left the house for the train.

F had spent the larger part of last year harassing me for the failed relationship that ended over 6 years ago now, as well as any other shortcomings she could think of at the time. I had 'wasted the best years of her life'. Etc..etc.. I felt like the subject of a Pogues Christmas song. I also, at first, felt a hint of guilt but it was for a short period of time and then I just started to feel pissed off with the harassment. So I ignored further emails. She had a point, sure, but it was 6 fucking years ago. In fairness to her, when her next baby popped out she seemed to calm down. Hormones. Who'd a thought it. It was born the day before my birthday, the 3^rd in my family, or close to family, to do so. Was life trying to make a memorial of me, or was I being slowly pushed out? Either way, she calmed down a bit and the emails trailed off as motherhood took hold for the second time. And then this.

So they changed the new-borns name to N in memory of S's older sister and I had a quick peek on the facebook site under her name because I just couldnt help it. I was a rubbernecker like the rest of them, but I wanted to know. Suicide mystified me. The whys and wherefores. And A's terminal exit last year had been messy, flopping around on the ledge of a balcony for a good couple of minutes before passing as I got to hear all about at the funeral, from the landlady who had found him 'Like a fish gasping' were the words that really stuck in my mind. He had taken a running dive at a landing window on a Friday evening hours after spending quality time at his young niece's birthday party. It must have turned him inwards far enough to explode outwards in a random moment as he climbed the stairs, no doubt drunk and/or having a severe polar moment. Enough to make you run at a closed window? Why not just run at the closed window of life, it seems easier somehow.

N had a picture of herself smiling, possibly a little on the zany side, with a large black teddy bear. It didnt seem particularly odd except that this woman had just committed suicide. Her facebook was private, so there was nothing more to see here. But on her wall was a status message saying she had just befriended three people recently and was married. Shit. That sucked. Mr N was going to be having a breakdown for sure. I wondered if the word 'married' was something to do with the whole saga. I also noted she lived in Sydney. S was from Oz. He had a few issues himself lurking in there, you don't play bass in my band without me figuring out your dark side at least a little bit. The boy was...haunted, might be a word. I guess it was in part why I felt more happy for him than angry the day I found his man spit in my waste bin. He seemed like he needed a good woman. And I realized, that weird morning, that rather than annoyed, I actually felt like I was off the hook. It was a sense of relief, like I had permission to get on with my life and stop beating myself up over it. As a result, of course, she seemed to think I was a cold-hearted bastard who couldn't care less about anyone or anything. She had no idea that it had taken me years to achieve such a state of grace. And a lot of pain it had taken too. But not enough to make me jump out an 8^th floor window, get married, or hang myself, nor find God. Not yet anyway.

Though Remember, Jesus is the reason for the season.

Right on.

See you in hell, then.

happy fucking christmas

Over and out

The Grotesque (Part II)

2011-11-07T12:34:00.005+11:00

' Are you really considering getting on that insane merri-go-round one more time?'

So I started downloading and watching music documentaries. I was feeding something inside me. I needed to understand something about the path I had chosen through life so long ago, the one that led to The Crossroads, yea, that crossroad. I had been there. I'd met him, seriously I did, in a field one night in about '87 in Oxfordshire someplace, and I had refused him at the time, or so I thought, but I wasnt so sure now.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was clear to me that I had , since that date, lived the rock and roll lifestyle without doing too much of the rock and roll. I'd had the power gifted to me, and instead of using it to actually 'make it', I had just got lots of sex, and high all the time, with the occasional bit of music thrown in if I had to do it. I mean, if you are getting laid and getting high already, why bother doing the gigs?

But there was, I also realised, a certain freedom in coming out the end of that. Without the cash, success, or full-time gigging lifestyle, I'd survived, for one thing. And I hadn't yet been stuck into a pigeon-hole musically. Only by the few people who knew me, at least, but in that regards, I was still kind of a blank canvas publicly. The down side was that now I wanted to be a musician again, I was actually just an ex-druggie , too old to be interested in notching up one-night stands, and musically; a never-has-been. And when you are coming back to music as an unknown in your 40's, who the hell is going to buy your music, let alone be around to start a band with? Everyone has retired to working and family life. In fact the very idea of it suggests the need for some serious therapy.

There was another thing, the teachers at AIM music college, where I had enlisted as much to learn production skills as to find a way to give up music, had pointed it out to me,

'You are better off than us, we have to work in music to make a living and we never have time to focus on our own stuff, we have families and work all day. You on the other hand work in I.T., so you have some spare change, you have no family, so you have more time and energy, and you dont use up all your musical energy on other peoples music. You really are in a good position.'

They had a point.

So here I was with some free time, and with it I was hungrily lapping up documentaries about bands and artists I loved or was interested in, and while I did it, I tried to observe what it was inside me that was seeking to be fed. Then while watching The Doors – Classic Albums documentary, Perry Farrell from Jane's Addiction said something about musicians having this strangeness inside themselves, and they pull it out, and offer it up, and it is strange but they kind of like it too. And it was in that explanation that I somehow grasped, for the first time, the elusive thing in me that wanted feeding, that hungered to be recognised, that longed for the stage, and the lights, and the drugs, and the women, the fame, and the glory, and to write the best song in the world, and of course, to be adored. And it was 'strange', it was almost hiding in there. It wasn't sensitive so much, because it was bloody stubborn and defined already by its own nature as much as being driven by it. But it existed uncomfortably within me, it wouldn't just die and go away, but it couldnt seem to find a way to happily come out and express itself either. And a word popped up in my head, and it described it quite perfectly, and that name was 'The Grotesque'

I give some wiki definitions here:

The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow....

...grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks.

In art, performance, and literature, grotesque, however, may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as empathic pity

It was a perfect description to me. There is something painful and piteous about the expression of music, it seeks approval for itself to exist out in the world happily, it needs it, and that need is what makes it something that hides, almost lurks, in the soul like a timid child, an innocent, yet somehow an oddity. For me at least. It carries with it a sense of the predicted future, of change, and that creates reaction, and that reaction isnt always good, but it is a reaction. A reaction by the listener to the Grotesque. It's a freak show.

Making music for me is, and I hate to admit this, slightly Gollum-ish. It brings the feeling of being a freak to the fore, and I then find myself needing to seek approval for my existence, if someone knocks it, I scurry back into my cave and stroke 'my precious', as it were, until I feel better. I love the power it gives me, and I hate it's power over me.

So, as I observed myself watching these documentaries, I noticed I was doing a couple of things. I was seeking inspiration, or more precisely, trying to find support and confidence from others who appeared to have 'made it' , that had 'the grotesque' within in them, it troubled them, and yet they seemed confident enough in their music to have gone for it anyway.

Listening to Bono, in 'From the Sky Down', describe how he took on pieces of past musicians or elements in the world, and with them he built a mask to wear in order to protect himself. I understood that. And they all came out in his performance, or his clothing, or his show, or his mannerisms on stage. It was a shield. To protect that thing, as much as to protect himself from that thing . To enable it to come out into the light, and do its thing, and not change him, or damage him.

I had also to consider that there had been an element of self-sabotage along the way for me, something Anthony Robbins had put me onto was that if we have conflicting needs then we are unable to progress, as one need pulls us one way, and the other goes in the opposite direction. We have to resolve these inner conflicts, but first we have to recognise them. It wasnt until 2007 that I recognised one of those; much as I longed for fame, the stage, the recognition. I feared giving myself away or getting it wrong, or being labelled, or losing my privacy, or dying in a champagne supernova. The conflict was that, as much as I wanted to make it, I really didnt want to either. The reasons made up a long list; I feared not being strong enough to handle fame. I didnt really actually like the look of fame. I didnt want to lose my freedom. I was a bit lazy too. I didnt like the idea of touring. I didnt want to rise up to have to fall down, and I was well aware that if you didnt fall down, the press sure liked to shoot you down. I didnt much like the industry, nor the game. But at the same time, just sitting at home making music wasnt enough, learning the art of music was not enough, nor was playing gigs to a small loyal crowd going to be enough. I was in a state of permanent conflict and inner turmoil with music. Hungering to make it, yet struggling to avoid it too, fearful of it.

In fact when I considered it , I wasnt really sure what I wanted. And that was probably why I hadnt really gone for it properly either. That, and then there was the obvious lack of self-confidence in my own singing ability which drove me forward and then backwards in equally erratic force, so that essentially I went nowhere, but thought about doing stuff a lot, planned a lot, but ultimately, didnt do a lot.

Watching the Jim Morrison doco called 'When you are Strange' surprised me to hear that he doubted his singing ability too, even at his peak. I would kill for his voice. And as the story unfolded it was clear that the rest of the band were much more skilled musicians in their own right than he was, he didnt know an A major from a B Minor, which probably pushed him further into a sense of low self-worth, which he made up for by becoming more and more of a spectacle, and a drunk. To some extent their abilities held them up through the insanity.

Something else I could relate to when I considered the last few gigs I did in England, Cornbury festival acoustic tent where I was so drunk I couldnt tune my guitar, and asked the audience to help me out. No one did. They wanted someone sober who could play to come on instead. 4 hours earlier I had played one of the best renditions of Sympathy for the Devil I had ever done with a band. I'd been drunk then too and the response had been uplifting enough to make me play the acoustic tent later. I couldnt even see the strings. I found solace in more drugs, and sex with some random.

The footage of Jim Morrison working on the last album shows him with twitches and ticks and drunk all the time, so much of a mess that Paul Rothchild, the producer, walks out and does not return. Though in the end it probably helped make the album, it didnt help Jim avoid his ultimate fate, which was clearly sealed by then regardless. His girlfriend-inspired attempt to pull up involved him giving up music, and moving to Paris to try to be the 'poet' , which is where he had come to music from, and where he felt more at home. As the poet, the shaman. That is more what he was, he ended up a musician by accident really, and then as a result, in the '27 club'; dead famous. But then didnt Jesus get it at 32 and he did everything right, allegedly.

The poet and shaman

I wondered about this. I related to Mr Mojo more on these terms, even though I could play a few instruments with confidence, though I couldnt sing with confidence, much to my chagrin I wanted to, I needed to for some reason. I needed a voice. But now, I wasnt sure it was really the music that was the essence of what it was all about for me. I loved making music, but at the risk of being sacrilegious, I couldnt give a rats ass for the music itself. I didnt collect music or learn all about every musician. I just had particular things I liked, or related to, and that was it. The poetry, and the shamanism of it, I liked more. In particular, the shamanism of it. That is more where I felt my 'Grotesque' became defined.

So, I was trying to define my Grotesque. I was also trying to learn from my mistakes, learn from those who walked before me, and also, it is fair to say, figure out a way to do it one last time and do it right, maybe even big. I felt I deserved big. It was the ego maniac in me, or was it the truth, I didnt know yet. My Grotesque was a freak amongst the world of the grotesque, I felt it deserved recognition as such ...or rather, it had been in its day.

I was in now my 40's ! Wtf was I thinking. Once again I had to ask myself, is this really how I want to be spending my time?

I watched a doco on Lemmy. That made me laugh. I used to see him in the St Moritz propping up the bar, a part of the furniture always there. It was a good doco. He is a good example of how to survive the industry and still be yourself. Handled it better than Jim, but then was he really a shaman type? Silently, I felt yes, maybe in his own way he was. He came from Anglesey after all, the last bastion of defense in pagan Albion by the druids before the Romans slaughtered them. Besides, only a looney shaman could wear shorts like that and get away with it. Heavy Metal was never my kind of music but I liked the documentary, and then all the shots of him on his own on the tour bus watching crap TV traveling alone to shows. How did he live like that? God knows. I wasnt sure I could do it. I needed more input to my life. Maybe he was an accidental superstar.

I watched more documentaries, ones that I would not normally be drawn to, yet interestingly I found a commonality in each that related to me somewhere, to my path, my dreams and ambitions as a musician.

Metallica – Some kind of Monster. Music I really did not like, and yet how much had my bands been just like that, albeit without very many fans at all, and certainly no record deals. But the story was the same; the struggle, the dream, the longing to feel worthy, feel recognised as what you feel you are, a musician, if that it be. I found it interesting that the people we would look at and consider as having made it, they were also still looking to their heroes trying to feel like they had made it. Weird. Did anyone ever really make it?

Anvil – the real, live Spinal Tap. A classic story. A pair of 50 year olds playing metal that only a bunch of people have ever heard of, and even less really liked, unable to give up, finally 'making it' as a result of the documentation of their inability to do anything other than fail dismally at 'making it.' The exquisite irony.

It all lead to the same basic questions – What qualifies as 'making it?' , what is it really, what would satisfy that, if satisfying it was really what was needed, and why am I still hungering for it at all.

Answering these questions would , I hoped, lead me to know what to do about it.

The Grotesque (Part I)

2011-11-07T08:15:00.002+11:00

This isnt exactly a blog post, so much as a journal, or an observation, or an attempt to try to dig out my soul. I havent written for a while, I have been in a place of peace: inner peace, I guess. After all what is there to write about when you are happy?

I now live in a beautiful, spacious, flat overlooking the ocean in Kiama, Australia. I work only two days a week in my own business, and it is enough to survive and pay the rent. I have a beautiful girlfriend who I am in love with, and will marry. She gives me just enough space to feel comfortable, just enough love to feel I don't own her. She has two kids, a boy 8 and a girl 4, who I seem to have adopted with ease thus quelling any fears I was passing the age of having a family and going to die alone. And she is independent enough to be non-plussed by my controlling side when it tries to come out.

You could say life is perfect, and it has been this way since earlier this year. And best of all, BEST OF ALL...I am making music again, and it is prolific. I have a back room converted into the beginnings of a healthy home studio. This is great news to me, as just having passed my 45th birthday, I have spent the last, nearly, decade thinking music was pretty much over for me, and trying to figure out how to replace it.

So, I guess this post is about music, about what music is for me. And though at 45 years old you would imagine that I should understand that very well, I have discovered that the truth is, I really actually don't know what it means to me at all, nor what it is really for, nor how to approach it to feel a sense of true satisfaction in it's execution. It's changed, I've changed, the world has changed, the industry has changed, the availability of music has changed, the money in music has changed, the style has changed, the reason for making it has changed, the future has changed. Everything has changed. And with an awareness that I was clearly preparing to dive back into it, with possibly even more gusto than I had felt in my youth, I realized it was important that I knew what the fuck I was diving into it for this time.

I needed a reason, a purpose, a strategy. She'd hurt me before, or maybe I should say that I had hurt myself along the way; singing to her from beneath the light of the streetlamp under her window, I had gotten in spots of trouble here and there. But I couldn't afford to make the same mistakes again, and I didn't want to feel that sense of weakness, anxiety, frustration, directionlessness, or meaninglessness, again. I didnt want to feel lost when trying to woo her. If I didnt stop to consider my actions, you could be sure that I would get lost again. But despite the sense of fear, of insanity too; insanity at the idea of being 45 years old and trying to make music. And that sense of uncommon un-certainty of direction, which would descend so often that I never quite understood, and which would make me tail off from any idea , and ultimately give it up. But there was an undeniable certainty of purpose and fatefulness about it all this time, something inside me was calling me to duty, and that excited me. I always KNEW I was born to make music even if it was just for a while, even if ultimately I might very well give it all up, and try my hand at writing, or something else instead.

I have spent the last 5 years seeking a way to give up something I had invested most all of my life into. It took a lot of work but I had almost achieved an acquiescence to the sense of failure that came to me whenever I thought about music. That was the hardest thing, the cruelest thing; I felt she had lured me, all along, to be suckling from her bosom only to end up shoving a dried-up teat into my mouth and laughing at me. I couldn't understand why, all my life, I had held onto the steadfast belief, and internal drive, the certainty that I was going to 'make it' despite everything everyone said to me, only to discover in the end they were right; it had been a dream, a delusion, nay, a lie. I had not only to accept that music was over for me, and that I had failed, but worse that my intuition and self-confidence could not be trusted either.

That was a confusing and hard thing, the hardest part was to accept it all without falling apart.

So I turned the corner, and finally started to let go, accept that music was over for me, but that my life had to carry on.

Then what happens?

A collaboration from a few years ago with some random friend in Sydney gets signed up by a label in the UK and cut to vinyl. It ends up reaching over 50,000 hits on Youtube and getting airplay in the very clubs I used to frequent. It's like fucking making it without trying, and in a genre I wasn't even really working in !
The irony of it all wasn’t lost on me, but it did something else for me. Two things in fact. Firstly, it gave me the feeling that, at last, after nearly 30 years going nowhere in the music business, I had finally made it, I had put my name on the god damn wall, somewhere down the bottom, but that wasn't the point, I was up there. I didn't make any money out of it at all, I made probably about 100 english pounds in total, but that is the ridiculous state of the music industry today, and a whole other story which is a part of why I write this now. But what else it did for me, and probably most importantly, is it gave me back my confidence. Enough to consider whether really, honestly, truthfully, had I given music up ?

She'd got me. Like a true woman, played me to the very limits and then when I finally stopped chasing her, she flipped the script. My god, in a funny way I actually thought it was beautiful. I fell in love with her all over again. And at the same time my life changed for the better, as I said in the first part of this post.

And that brings me to the here and now.

2011-04-15T02:38:00.001+10:00

Right now it feels to me as if all you could ever give me was nothing

Excerpt from 'Sperm Wars' by Robin Baker

2011-04-10T19:06:00.005+10:00

It is late on a Saturday night and a man and woman in their late twenties are getting ready for bed. As they drift around their rooms, attending to the minutiae of life, they are naked. For them, this is usual and of no sexual importance. They are no longer excited by simply being naked in each other's presence. In fact, they now scarcely notice each other's bodies. As it is Saturday night, they know they will have sex before they go to sleep. Yet, as they vacantly pursue their separate routines, there is no hint of foreplay, even when on occasion their paths cause their bodies to brush past each other.
It is a week since they had sex — last Saturday, in fact. Four years ago, when they first met, they had sex at least once a day (except during her menstrual periods, when neither of them was particularly keen). In those early days they would have ridiculed the possibility of intercourse only once in a whole Week. Now, once a week had become more and more common, even though their usual routine was still to have sex twice a week. Until, that is, two months ago when they had given up using contraception.
Not that they were in any rush to have children. They hadn't yet contemplated the earnest nightly conception campaigns that some of their thirty-something friends had delighted in describing to them. Rather, they preferred to leave it to fate (and so far fate had decreed 'no conception'). They had both found mild sexual excitement in the possibility of conception and for a while their rate had returned to three or four times a week. This week, however, had been different. A couple of separate nights out and, if they were honest, an unexplained coolness between them had conspired against their ever quite getting round to sex. The usual warmth of their relationship had not fully returned until this Saturday morning as they drove on a pre-arranged visit to her sister. Even now, as they eventually got into bed, they could both still feel the legacy of the week's coolness. It was with some tentativeness that the man made his first faltering contacts with his partner's bare body. Once started, however, they quickly slipped into their usual routine.
He begins by gently kissing her face and stroking her breasts. Then they kiss deeply. He strokes her legs to her knees. After a while, he moves down and sucks her nipples. All this time, she cursorily strokes his back and buttocks. Tonight, as is often the case, she cannot concentrate and her mind keeps slipping back to conversations with her sister earlier in the day. She is jolted back to the present when he places his hand between her legs, moves her longest pubic hairs, opens her lips and inserts a finger to check if she is wet. He thinks she is ready. She knows she is not and winces at the prospect of unlubricated penetration. She moves her hand, finds his penis and gently squeezes, in part to see how ready he is but primarily to delay his moving into position. Briefly, her ploy works. He pauses to savour the sensation and responds with half-hearted massage of her genitals. Even though his massage misses her clitoris by a centimetre, he detects (or imagines) an increase in wetness on his finger inside her vagina. He moves his hand and begins to shift his body into the missionary position. She keeps her hand on his penis, and when the moment comes helps to guide its swollen tip into position. She leaves her hand between them for a few seconds to stop him pushing too hard, too soon (she is still nowhere near moist enough). Then, she has no alternative But to abandon the act to him. It takes a while before his gentle working backwards and forwards makes her lubricants really start to flow and his penis is able to enter fully.
Until she was lubricated, the woman had focused her mind on his and her genitals and the mechanics of penetration. But once she is lubricated and he begins the routine of thrusting, her mind drifts back to her sister. Her attention returns to the present only when he makes an uncomfortable movement. Despite her abstractedness, years of practice allow her to time the quiet noises in her throat to the man's thrusts. Then, suddenly, her mind jumps back to Wednesday night and the man who had flirted with her when she was out with a group of her female friends. Now, in her mind, it is him on top of her. Her heart speeds up, her breathing quickens, and her noises get louder. But just as her fantasy begins to take shape and she feels she might even come, her partner makes a particularly awkward thrust. Her fantasy disappears. The moment has gone, and the next second she realises he is ejaculating. She makes a sound for each of his contractions, then relaxes with him as his penis shrinks inside her. Impatient for him to remove his now dead weight, she coughs, gently. His limp appendage is ejected, he moves off her and they slip into their usual post-coital embrace. Both feel guilty at not having made more effort for their partner's sake and both feel depressed. Briefly, they exchange untruths over how pleasurable everything had been before eventually drifting into post-coital sleep.

So what of 2011 and the coming days?

2011-04-07T21:18:00.007+10:00

Well apart from us being 4 months into it already, I just have a feeling we are on the edge of an era of big things

You could say this is inspired by the 2012 phenomena, and before you start, no I dont buy into the doom story, it's just another year as far as I can tell, but, maybe it is an opportunity for people with a consciousness, to raise it a bit.

What does that mean?

Basically, tune out of the shit stuff and into the good

If life is just a perception

then let's choose what we perceive

.

My meditation work, which has been a 4 year journey so far, bumped up a gear this last year. Right now I am working on Osho's 112 meditations based on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra

wtf? you may ask

and well you may ask it

The first meditation is the one Buddha, and he was quite possibly a real chap, found enlightenment through. Just the one. Called Anapana, focusing on his breathe going in and out the nostrils and he thereby achieved enlightenment, stopped the world, stopped the monkey brain from reacting

I was having a dig around with these funky meditation techniques and then happened upon 48 to 50, and was pleasantly surprised to find them relating to sex and how to go about it

Meditation was, after all, supposedly invented as a way to achieve a state of bliss otherwise only achieved during sex

not the humpy bumpy scratchy shimmy bang bang bang uh uh sex, the other sort, involving being quite still and highly aware of everything until the body starts shaking, and it does, I can attest to this phenomena

Though personally I actually quite like it feral, but that's just me

So meditation is what I am working hard at, whenever I can, which is quite a lot, and it is doing me good, I would never say it is a cure, like I am still punchy as fuck and prone to sleeping with the wrong kinds of women....but then I dont actually see these as problems anyway, but I digress

So what of 2011 and the coming days?

Well my suggestion to us would be this,

Get ourselves a nice place in the sun it doesnt have to be expensive,
Make our lives about lifestyle choices, fuck trying to get rich, we'll never get there
Make it about the moment, bugger later, later we are all dead and that's a fact
Learn tantra and meditation - trust me you need them both in your life
the secret to both is simple, stop trying to do something.
Manifestation is the way forward - dont work your ass off for it, intend it towards you
Do a vision board - 3 days it took me and blew my mind it worked so well

and that's enough from me for today, now I need.... to stop trying to do something

Actually I may knock out a quick jizz-free wank first , and then that

coz that's the kind of guy I am

Here is a piccie of the place I love to be, things seem all ok when I am there....

Gods Bless you all, Goddesses too, here's to a bright fuckin future coz we all deserve it

: )

2010 was the year that...

2011-04-07T20:14:00.015+10:00

I got fired

I sold everything I owned, again

I gave up smoking

I meditated every day, most of the day, for 3 months and went wherever the road took me

I completed my circuit of Australia, started on a bicycle in Katherine in 2007 and finished on foot in Cooktown 2010

I sat in front of a tree in Cooktown for 3 days, until I experienced what Buddhists mean by 'the true nature of existence is emptiness'

I returned to Sydney broke but in exactly the right head space

I started a business in I.T.

I had free time and money

I let go of some bad things that had followed me for too long, and defined me for too long

I had to let go of a relationship with a girl I thought could be 'the one'

I started drumming congas, and getting paid for it

I said goodbye to a suicide friend and watched him go into the earth in a black wooden box

I rented two places at once, one in Sydney, one on a cliff-top ocean view setting in Kiama

I finally let go of the dream of being a musician, then within months, I was released on a CD published by a record label in the UK. In 30 years of trying to make it in the music industry, this had never happened before

I made my first vision board

I said goodbye to Bondi

I am back

2011-04-07T19:34:00.006+10:00

Wordpress didnt really work out for me. I feel in need of some skull-bloggery again and I may have some time here and there to do a bit, so , dusting good ol blogspot dot off....

And may I suggest following my other blog too, Daily Blog, if only because it has a photo of one of my favourite nipples on it -

http://thesmilingbean.blogspot.com/

Illiteracy in bigger chunks

2010-09-20T17:05:00.002+10:00

found a website to publish my scrawls so probably wont be back here so much
havent used wordpress at all either for that matter...no time at the moment

if you come by here and want to read more from me, visit this site and seek out my various publications all for free.....

http://www.wattpad.com/user/mdkberry

:)

Evolve and survive....its another of my mottos

2010-02-09T09:46:00.002+11:00

http://foxyfree.wordpress.com

grief and the real Pandora

2010-01-27T10:23:00.007+11:00

I went to Confest, never been, the lift seemed to fall into place, the timing, well a relative died two days before and I needed space to grieve.
work wasnt working out.
I needed out of the city. it fell together. it felt right.

I had just finished making a divining tool. started it in 2006 in Wales on a retreat with an African shaman (...yawn) yea I know, we pseudo-hippies just cant stop looking for answers under these god awful banners but, you've got to keep looking everywhere without judgement when you know the hounds are chasing ever on, fueled by those consuming flames, and getting closer each day.

So, I threw the bones...looked and saw....ritual, things needed, to be addressed, for my Nan and my Aunt. Both now dead, but grief is a strange thing. I didnt do it right until I did it right. Let go to the pain, not for a few hours silently alone together in some cold church, but for a few days in the heart of the natural world. I had learnt from Malidome Some, of the Dagara tribe, a process. So I figured I would follow it.....them bones....d'em bones...thrown down and like a compass they seemed to show me the way. How did I know this stuff? I wasnt sure at all, but I did.

I knew I needed water, to heal, I knew my gran had some stuff there needed addressing, I didnt know what, my aunty too, so it seemed. I knew Nature was to be the arena, it was all in there, clear as clear could be. Then me. l'il ol me. I was in there too. my gifts. my magic. a little deeper. I was about to go a little deeper.

that is what d'em bones were saying.

I felt kind of like Bambi that first day trying to walk up the creek barefoot slipping over rocks, until I got to a quiet water-hole that caught my attention. I saw a small cave and knew it was the place to set a shrine to the beings that lived around there, to ask for welcome and acceptance and to ask forgiveness for my intrusion, just simple respect really. Then another spot seemed to flicker in the corner of my eye and made me look. it was by the water and I knew was just right for setting as a shrine to my dead, my relatives, my Nan, my Aunty and in some ways my entire lineage going right back to the beginning. Dont you wonder sometimes what we might find there if you could touch them again, speak to them again, like some Avatar world.

and people go to the movies for it. Why not go into nature, since its there. doh! too obvious maybe. and scary. Easier to buy a ticket and some popcorn then to dribble listlessly, unblinking for three hours, feeling fluffy yet strangely sad when it stops, and like you might be in heaven if you dreamed or wished it hard enough, but instead get in your metal car and drive through concrete streets, to walk into your box-like fabricated house and get into nylon sheets, and cry yourself to sleep because how can it possibly really exist? Yet for a moment the child in you was brave enough to want it more than anything in this life, or the next?

so I do my stuff, set the shrines up. speak out loud, feel stupid, like a city slicker in the wild, just totally out of place, stumbling loudly, crunching sticks and generally making a noisy nuisance of myself in the garden of the gods. but I dont really care for my own stupidity and embarrasment because today I am fuelled by death, my wrath at its theft, the sense of loss, the sense of needing to do something to help this pain , this gnawing in my guts , to make it move along, to know it, to go into it. to deal with it. and fucking well deal with it the right way. so I feel stupid? so what. listen, or kill me. I dont really mind which.

I speak my thoughts out loud, let that place know my intention for being there, for setting up the shrine, for wanting to find healing, not just for me, but for my family, my Nan and my Aunty , the things they never got to do , the things they never got to fix, the things that hurt them, broke them, suffered them, the things they loved, the things they did and didnt dare do, the places and people in this beautiful world that they never got to say goodbye to, or say sorry to, or say thankyou for, or to forgive, or to love, or even maybe to hate.. I am here, right now to address all this, for them. for me. for them. for the living, for the dead. maybe even for you.

then ...once it is said, out there, put out there, said, done...I stop.

look around, sit down

and more importantly...

shut the fuck up.

silence.

silence.

the minutes pass....

my mind calms....the cogs of the machine slowly calm ...a little.
I was considering ways to dig it out with a kitchen knife once, I am glad I didnt. Now, I just sit still until it calms to a lull, a dull thud that seems so loud when you enter the utter silence of nature. then something else starts to grow, a sound. I think at first it is inside, then I realise it is crickets.

it grows.

louder

until it is so loud it almost hurts my ears.
little legs, hundreds of little legs scratching making that amazing sound that actually hits me like soft bullets. I can feel them making out my shape with their sound, assessing me, reading me.
undoing me.
what is this?

I sit in it.

bathed in the sound.

and something else occurs to me.

that sound just shut the machine whir in my head off completely.

I sink into it. happy because despite the fire ant that just chomped into my foot and the mosquitos that are right now drilling my back for blood, and the ...JESUS H CHRIST !... those are leeches I can see wiggling between my toes....yuk....despite all this taxation by nature on my body, those god damn crickets are cleansing me of something far more intrusive, demanding, deadly and quite possibly evil.

I sink into natures' bossom. home again, she devours me. quite literally. it hurts, physically, and it hurts like fuck emotionally, but spiritually I know just where I am at, and with that I enter what some might now call Pandora, and the roller coaster ride of turmoil we have come to call grieving begins.

2009-12-28T11:33:00.002+11:00

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?

How To Survive In Paradise. Part 1.

2009-12-28T11:25:00.002+11:00

‘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.

Living in a Paradise Postcode

2009-12-15T09:50:00.004+11:00

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.

2009 This was the year that….

2009-12-12T10:23:00.008+11:00

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

2009-12-12T10:20:00.001+11:00

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.

2009-12-03T08:50:00.002+11:00

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.

2009-11-24T10:45:00.002+11:00

I am feeling swept over by a girl
probably half my age, not much more
a good energy; beautiful, likeable, strong
and so far, completely uninterested in me!
I approached her, …… is her name, she is R.....,
which I have to admit I rarely get along with,
I just don’t seem to trust them at all,
but this is not the point today.
Today, I question my motives.
It’s all too desperate to be true.
Been around this game with myself before;
How I like to kid myself ‘she may be the one’.
How we like to play with that mirage of the self.
Project out of us, and she reflects back from the world
a perfection.
That no girl could hope to live up to.
But, how long have I waited for the one,
that could move me closest to the ultimate essence?
How long have I waited for the one
who I could trust to overwhelm me with beauty, inside and out?
Who I would know to be true, and trust not to one day steal away with
the gemstone of my soul.

Today, I don’t mind.
I revel in it, because,
I know I won’t get to bask in light such as hers for much longer.
It’s just an echo of a past I once might have owned.
Charged down, masculine and powerful, into the fray to win her heart.
Oh, to win her heart and not be
just an echo, of who I once was.
Having instead to accept who I am, and who I am not.
Who I can, and who I cannot ever be.
Letting go of that hunger and longing.
Letting go of what now, I see, was only ever going to be
a need, an imbalance, a vacuum, an emptiness I longed for to fill.

I watch now the projection, as it shines from her skin:
The shape of her hips, the curve of her breasts, the gentle arch of her back.
Her hair long and golden, her scent alluring, dreamy, sexual and sensual.
Her movements, everything I ever wanted her to be.
Yes, she bears it well, my goddess, my princess, my love.
The urge to be in love.
Ha!
I had forgotten.
It has been such a long, long time.

2009-11-24T10:41:00.001+11:00

She took another life last night,
my goddess, the ocean.
I stood out on the sands watching the search lights cover the water
Maybe a shark, I thought.
The rip was too calm to have taken him out of the bay so fast.
Yea, maybe a shark.
Someone asked me what had happened.
I looked at the scene and looked back at them. I resisted saying it was a lost dog.
Then I saw his friend.
Sat on a surfboard, the police with dimmed torch lights on his face, asking him questions.
I moved a little closer. Saw his eyes. The confusion, the uncertainty, the disbelief.
Life.
No one expected it to be taken away from us.
And worse.
Taken away from our friends.
That hurt more.
The air thudded as the metal bird flew closer
Lights scanned across the beach and for a moment we lit up
Like a scene from some tragedy,
Always the voyeurs and the vampires in the wings.
The shadow self
Beating a parallel tale
To the story of our lives.
Our heart beats
That so soon to stop
Unexpectedly
And be dragged away
Under the water
By her servants, and soldiers,
Her angels and devils of the deep
Sharks and those fish with jet black eyes
Death, so hollow,
So fearful
So abhorrent, it is everything we are not.
She took another life last night,
My goddess, the ocean.
A sacrifice so that we all might live to worship her another day.
He was 29 years old. Made just a small paragraph in the news.
No one very much knew
That he was gone at all.
He left a bicycle, a surfboard and a friend
who would always remember
That moment on a beach somewhere,
in some unfamiliar country, in some unfamiliar time, in some unfamiliar life
When he woke up to a moment
And how much
that moment really hurt.

2009-11-22T09:14:00.005+11:00

'Can I have your number?' I asked her.

She mumbled something about not being in the right place for that at this time. her eyes were on the ground. her feet fidgeting, I could almost see perspiration on her brow. she avoided my eyes. I stopped listening. looked over her shoulder, I could still see her lips move but wasnt paying attention as she went into some kind of unconscious drama. I stood still as I could, politely waiting for it to complete.

'....its not that I dont like you...'

New surfboards out in the shop across the road. I tried to make out the label but it was hard from that distance.

'...my last boyfriend.....'

I was running out of things to look at and my eyes came back to her but she was finishing up.

'um...oh....a I have to go talk to a friend of mine who just came in, bye.'

It was all quite amusing, amazing, disturbing even. I tried to remember the last time someone had gone to quite such lengths to say everything but what they were really thinking. Though I wasnt sure quite what that might have been. I had asked for her number, to go for a drink, so see if we got on, if we could be friends, and who knows, maybe later lovers, I genuinely hadnt thought much past the fact that she appealed to me on some level. I guess that was the extent of my thinking in asking. I now kind of wished I hadnt bothered.

For her. Had I just asked to molest her, or get married?

rejection.

I didnt mind it.

but the lengths people go to avoid making you feel it. yet all along I felt it anyway, dragged out like a slow death. Maybe a simple 'no' would have a been a lot easier on both of us. I was left simply intrigued as to what was wrong with the way that had just played out and why I had caused such a reaction. I had little idea what it was and I was never likely to know.

I had a friend who used to stare at girls until they would come over and demand he explain what he was staring at, at which point he would say -
'I was imagining what you would look like bent over with my prick up your ass'
I recall the first time I heard him say it, and was waiting for hell to break loose, mind you he was a big guy, but she just huffed and turned and walked off.
20 minutes later she left with him. I never quite understood that. Actually , maybe I did.

I looked back over at her, she was talking animatedly but I noticed she was putting little glances over at me. I guess to see if I was still looking. I was never any good at Game, I just blurted out what I thought, cut to the chase. It was honest if nothing else. I hoped so at least. I wasnt even sure I was interested in playing, wasnt interested in anything other than some company at some future time. I wasnt looking for a lay or a girlfriend. I didnt think so but you never really knew what the mind was up to on the lower levels.

I looked around the room. It was late, another night done and dusted. I would go home alone. I didnt mind, there was something easier about it. I left into the street, pleasingly sober, I liked that. Walked past a bar, people falling out of it ugly drunk. It wasnt pretty and I recalled something someone had said to me earlier that day

'If insects disappeared off the planet life would be gone in less than 50 years, but if Mankind disappeared off the planet, it would thrive'

I walked to the bus, stepped over a drunk, dodged a fight, eyed a bit of skirt headed for the clubs in town, got on the bus and wondered why nature let us stay in her heart as long as she had. Maybe we were good for something, but to be honest, I couldnt see what it was.

2009-11-14T10:23:00.003+11:00

Its a funny old game.

Here I am watching the weekend begin amazed I am alive, It IS FUCKING AMAZING.

just another day, and yet...

breathing. what is breathing all about.

I sat there this morning reading through my diaries of school days, nearly finished now, nearly ready I am not sure what for. Of a time when I was supposed to take a scholarship to Harrow and ended up. well to be honest, getting truly fucked by some bad experiences and then seeing the machine, the truth, and of course dropping out.
I ended up in Harrow anyway, by the fates.
Used to sit on the hill, where Byron used to wile away the hours. I felt him there, felt the kin-ship there, the ghost. I would watch the sun set over West England, London. See the planes rising from Heathrow into the pink, red sky.
Knowing one day I would be on one of those and never return.

And yet today, watching the sun rise in Bondi, I recalled it so powerfully that the Hill pulled me back and for a moment I was there. It made me jump. That is the power. The earth, the magic of some places.

Did you know the first ever car crash in England happened on that hill, did you know the first ever train crash victim is buried in the little church on that hill, did you know that hill is the highest point between there and the mountains in Urals all the way across to the East. And there are other things too. strange things about that hill.

I know magic, I have lived it, I have walked it and I walk it now. deeper each day but with more clarity too. I thought it was madness I was bound for but now I realise it is something else.

As I step across the wet sand and feel the power of the female goddess that is out there in the oceans in Bondi. I know stuff. fucking weird stuff sometimes. But I know. I see. I am a seer. that's just how it is. just who I am. Byron would have been proud.

Yea, I see it now. I graduated from Harrow like I was supposed to, maybe the streets of Harrow not the school, but in some little way it happened that I gained knowledge there, on that hill and then, like I knew I would, I began to fly.

2009-09-27T07:40:00.000+10:00

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.

2009-06-20T22:47:00.002+10:00

Take all your hopes and dreams to a casino. And throw them on the rocks.
That is what I do.
Stand watching a fish swimming round in endless circles.
Dropping chips like lucky charms on the low dozen. turns dirty. 21 times.
It should have come in by now.
I swear it has bounced out of the 4 and 12 like some magnetic propulsion is at work behind the scenes.
Couple of chinese men looking shifty.
I buy a beer and try to remind myself why I came.

Stand outside, smoking, looking out over the harbour.
Glass partition. High. To stop me throwing myself off.
Just in case.
'Chicago' starlights glitter.
And that fish just keeps swimming round and round.

Am I happy? I lost my shirt. I knew I would.
took me two and a half hours.
I've had worse days.
Put it all on 12,8 and 5.
Just in case.
Finally it came in.
on 7.
Motherfucker!
I retire to the Losers Lounge for buffet. Via one more beer that I recieve.
Last.

I see my reflection, worn out playboy's eyes.
I, the fish, keep swimming round and round.
Looking for food, shelter, love.
I am done here. Spent. Yes.
There is some satisfaction in that.
Being a loser? Of course it hurts some,
but then being a winner is such a hard position to maintain.
No one does. Not really.
Dont believe the hype.
We all go up, to come down eventually.

See faces I have seen here all night. A little drunk now.
Smile at 'Star City Hostess'
Her legs a little more cellulite than I might have expected. But pretty.
Our conversation wont last.

I think about sex. Had I been a winner. 12, 8, 5.
I would be buffing the ass of a fit young hooker, and ordering cocaine instead of writing this.
It has been known.
On those extra special nights when the fish stop swimming, and your number comes in.
They dont last long but they do happen.
And then.
Then. We live like kings and every song is our tune, and every spank of that peachy, paid for, piece of ass echoes through the chambers of penthouse suites and high roller's minds.

And there.
In that brief moment.
Hopes and dreams thrown at rocks become diamonds
and we can say for a moment back there,
we really lived it well.

F.E.A.R.

2009-05-29T19:26:00.007+10:00

Today is brought to you by the letters F.E.A.R
fucking stuff. gets on my boobies.

this week I got the flu, thought it was that piglet type. so being a socially responsibly type, I locked myself up preparing to DIE of something ball bleedingly gruelling. It wasnt so bad, just a bit ...you know...weird. Then went to the docs and she wasnt concerned in the slightest about piglets or anything I had done with or to gods small pinky things. cool. kind of. so swine flu maybe is MEDIA FUCKING HYPE as per frickin usual.

feeling better after two days off work either way.

still I am a bit feisty today and up for kicking the shit out of something if you have any suggestions.
because
of
F.E.A.R
that cock sucking, nipple tweaking, ring tucking in, type of feeling has come back around.

last night fellow workeee called me to suggest my job may be on the line

'you're walking a one way street' was his terminology.

which i kind of expected as I am a workshy fop
and my boss is a sadistic ass with attitude problems kind of like mine
except he is the boss and I am not
ergo
problem

so monday will be the telling moment and the more I think about it I feel like causing it. fuck em.
are there any jobs out there?
I dont know. most would say not.
so there is a little
F.E.A.R right about now.

layer one
of the stuff

then there is the thing about having to move back to UK if I run out of money or

eat from bins

the second isnt really that appealing
I may have to start the revolution for real
this sucks.
it takes much responsibility and thinking about, and then amassing of weaponry, and pamphlets so people know why they are revolting.
did I mean that.
yes probably.

plus I am too lazy

which some days annoys me a bit.
I love just being
not doing
just ....being

sitting about doing a lot of fuck all forever until death.
that is my idea of a good life.

I have done....yea pretty much everything now pigs fly
so,

I just want to sit back and watch it all go by
but no.

I have to work in a fucking corporate environment or
die of hunger
it dont seem right.

I am moaning
I am sure your tale is far worse than mine today and I bang on
so fuck it

enough!

today was brought to me by F.E.A.R
I am over it

fuck em

I am moving to Melbourne though
that much is decided somewhere in the mind
the how
has yet
to transpire itself

2009-05-15T23:23:00.003+10:00

And it is happening again
roller girl hip swing comes by smiling at me
and I join her on the waltzer as the music spins
away we fly on soft magical words, and love growing in the midst of hearts
full of illusion
full of dreams
and kids we will have
and white picket fences
and perfect heaven in perfect lives
we will be
I will bring you this
and it will never shatter like all our lives have shattered until now
Christ, I would, I do believe
again and again and again
and I love you, to leave you eventually
in pain in selfishness of slammed doors and punched walls, and shouting,
and broken souls
abandoned in a planet lonely
to be picked up by another broken brother
pretending, like me, to be some shining knight
and on it goes
and down I go
sabotage my own good soul
with murder and sex and violence and savagery
of wounded knees
to which I fall
to which I fall
again and again
for you
all for you
Romeo, a fake all along
and all because we were just wanting to believe
that something could be good
forever
there is no forever here
just truth as raw as its deal
every time
still I believe like a child
as the body grows old
and the spirit tries so hard to grow
so that ultimately we may rise to be
the gods and goddesses
we truly, deeply are
and I wont lose you
even though I lost you
and we can be rising in love's vapour
rising through the emptiness together, alone, together, alone, together
just to believe
just to believe
I forever will believe
that you and me
that we
can somehow make it
into a real world of the imagined, conjured, beautiful things
that we will make, designed to fly
high above and beyond
this grey world they pulled us down into
of pain, so much pain
how did they ever come to make me think
it was so wrong to be
what we so naturally be
when it has been so hard to open up freely
to this new direction
this new dimension
a tear drop of the gods
through which we could so easily slip away and play

2009-05-15T21:55:00.002+10:00

winds blow across the tops of high mountains
where no man stands
and the sun beats down upon days in some kind of eternity
where we sit and wait for change to come
fear biting into the hearts of all
just children of time here
not really knowing anything of this place they find themselves
laws of the universe they can't ever hope to beat against
it goes on here
on and on
forever
even if they were not here, it would be the same
and the cry goes out
as the masses assemble in confusion
looking to anyone for help
hands stretched out like they used to see on tv
and never believe it would one day be them
and the fear, the fear bites in
crushing their bravery
and their hearts
and their homes
and their hunger grows greater
to be released, to escape it all
and they wonder
how did it come to be this way
when we had such dreams, such wishes, such hopes, such futures
such brightness and joy and fun in living
that once was
and now
now what
now how can we stage the revolution
to usurp the gods and bring down the laws
that make scarcity the way of it all
as it was so it shall ever be
until the veil breaks
and some how escape becomes a real thing
can it be
can it ever be like the dream
when fear bites so deep like this
when love cannot sustain
when food becomes famine
and light becomes dark
only intention is left to cry out for
the freedom paradise could bring

viva la revolution

2009-05-13T22:01:00.002+10:00

he made it to the ocean, dropped his bags down on the sand, stayed a year and a day.
let the destruction and the bitterness ride out on the waves.
let the sharks swim and circle and threaten in their hunger,
and the waves smash down on his frame
his spirit crying to be released
from the muscles and blood and flesh
that carried him again
across time and land and yet another life
under the stars where the truth, they said, is written
and someone lit a lantern and let it float up into the skies
and someone else whispered 'love' and everyone leaned in to hear
but heard nothing
hungry like the sharks
for their own completion in the end
but never here,
never in this world
will it ever be complete
and that was the sadness and the fuel for the destruction
and the source of the bitterness
and he knew
it was why he came to the ocean
10,000 miles away from home that didnt even exist anymore

he stood out on the shore
bare feet on the sands
each grain battered into its smallest form
by millions of years
and here, now, to be here now
underneath his feet
as he pissed into the ocean
and it lit up phosphorescent
like the stars
he floated in space a while
a smile on his lips
knowing that he was right in the place he was meant to be
and though he had lost everything he had ever loved in his life
every love in his life
can you really grasp that feeling? I dont know.
everything gone
except for the light he followed through all those lives
endlessly

he looked out over those waves
into the depth
into the eye of the deep
stared right into it
with everything his soul knew
and it shone into the void with it's own light
and he knew it was all that was needed
and everything else
was just the rattling chatter
of skeletons who had let their love
become skinned to the bone
by the fear and the absence of soul

2009-05-07T21:47:00.003+10:00

i'm just not one of the beautiful people anymore
not sure I really used to be come to think of it, but youth sparkles.
moist
there is a good word.

we are all bridges to the other side
we can feel the light of it shine through
into this world
if we become silent enough

no more guests running rampant round the mind
thoughts come and they go
feelings come and they go
experiences come and they go
but something inside is always there
ageless
timeless
silent
unnameable
conscious
unchanged since the day we were born into this place

I like that

meditation is a big pain in the ass
but it does have it's beneficial side

after a night of uncertain connections that seem to have become lost
in some flat barren emptiness where words feel dead
yet seem to fly around like machine gun bullets from uzi lips
I find myself in silence watching the bloodbath murder of the real

and I am left to walk home alone with questions
of why friends sometimes cant be friends
meditation saves me
from more pointless thoughts
that have no end
but bubble up endlessly, without real substance other than to distract and irritate
and tell me nothing at all about the situation that just was.

so into quiet I go
and into the silent sea I go
to swim the dark depths
of the other side
stretching out from within me on into the beyond
the big blue
quiet
and serene
and still
as it is there

where loneliness does not exist
because there are no thoughts to tell you
how your mind imagines it to be
because it isnt at all the scary thing
we have been led to believe

If I could whisper a word tonight
or maybe just a sound
and have it lead you back to where it began for you
I would
and from in that wholeness of being
from in recognition of how it used to be for us
like innocents to the fear and the crush
set you free again

2009-05-06T20:27:00.002+10:00

times up and times down
times around and around and around

on a bed of nails she makes me wait
and I wait, with or without you

I am throwing myself into it all again
I dont know reasons why not
other than it hurts
but then what is a little hurt
makes you know you are alive right.

and you give yourself away

as you do, because it is all you know
you can fight it, fight yourself
but where does that leave you except
nowhere anywhere anyway

used to be easier, I am sure it did
but having said that this game hasnt yet gotten too hard
I just dont seem so interested to play is all
the numbers go by me
on the bus, on the train, in the bar, in the street
and I see the eyes and maybe catch a smile
and its just numbers
and I am just not that interested anymore
in the shallow connection

its got to be able to hurt
else what am I doing it for
it's got to be able to pull the love out of me
kicking and screaming, and passion and
playing with my delirium
delirium
madness
my sanctuary
my lover
the bed in the night and the dreams and the illusions
that feel so real
like we are high, on drugs
and some ways wish we were dying
just so it could stay like this forever
my sweetheart

it was just before dawn, one miserably morning in black 44
when the forward commander was told to sit tight
when he asked that his men be withdrawn
and the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back the enemy tanks for a while
and the anzio brdigehead was held for the price
of a few hundred ordnary lives

and as ever I wonder in the spaces between acting
just what it's all about
and the question seems foolish in it's own way
feel nostalgic for a moment
think about friends I'll never see again
and all those good good times
to be missed
and savoured

and some kind of life
is always going on
to swim away in
if I desired
into the chaos
and the lovely confusion it brings
connections
all these people I know
and grow
with
towards the knowing
of what this moment really be
and quietly now in this little place
I sit in love
and enjoy the smile
as it beams out from somewhere deep within

2009-05-02T07:45:00.009+10:00

I was just getting to the bottom of the escalators at Kings Cross station when I heard it. Like a gunshot. then the train, screeching to a stop. I knew what had happened straight away. I waited for the screams but none came. I stepped into the throng of people, slow moving, incredulous, uncertain. I could feel it. I looked, we always look, we have to know. I knew.
It had happened no more than 10 yards from me. no blood. no bits. but a guard looking down under the train. The emotional bomb wave bursting across people as they understood what had happened. like a nuclear device gone off, I felt it in my belly. growing. people silent. moving. not sure what they were feeling in themselves. trying to gauge it. the bottomlessness of it in the belly and the mind. the unknowable. death does this. suicide. does this. someones last moment on earth born witness to. shit. why did I have to have go and walk into this.

I was silent. observing. too familiar with death to feel the fear reaction. just the suppression. the shutdown. readiness to act. cold. calculating. looking instead at the people around me. such different reactions starting to take place. one man, drunk grabbing people, talking right into their faces

'did you hear it. sounded like a gun. maaan what did they do that for. the trains arent going to be running now'

his energy was ugly. I moved away from him. a girl being comforted by a train guard. she was staring. not speaking, no longer really inside herself. locked up. I could see the eyes. shock. she was gone. the guard trying to take her name and address.
she was just looking into the last place she saw a living being before they leapt.
then a big guy, another guard, starts trying to take control of the situation, move everyone away. he is completely freaked out. angry. scared. reacting by trying to take control. I move away from him too.
I dont like this.
dont like the feeling in me.
this is bad. this is real bad. this is not good.
the sensation that a soul is around here now. lost. confused. gone from this earth.
I look for the signs. why did i walk into this? just yards from me. people gone from the station. maybe just ten of us now lingering. everyone just stood confused. not knowing what to do. I look at the Bondi line, wondering if the train will come but knowing nothing will move now.
the driver comes out of his carriage for the first time. he says something. sounds like he is asking if he should move the train. I see nothing in his reaction. it is as if it never happened.

'you alright mate' shouts another guard up to him from where they are looking under the train trying to figure if the person is alive still.
the driver doesnt respond. just stands there for a moment and says it again.

'should I move the train?'

I dont know what to do here. I feel I should do something, feel like I walked into this for a reason. I have no idea why I am thinking this.
I look around. there is nothing to be done here. this is just the scene of a suicide.
I step back onto the escalator and ride it up to the top.
look at my hands. not shaking yet.
check myself. my emotions. I am cold. there is a cold feeling in my backbone.
I keep thinking about the soul. the spirit. the dead.
where do we go? what happens out there? where is that person? one minute here the next minute gone.

as I climb the escalator I think to myself, this is what they looked at, their last walk knowing that they were going to die down there on the tracks. I try to take it in. looking for something, I am not sure what.
I step out through the ticket gates, people coming in to the station. the guards stopping them. telling them the trains wont be going tonight.
people excited, see it in the eyes. we havent changed since Roman times.

'Are they dead mate?' a guy asks me , his eyes wide. I just walk past him. stupid hunger in him I dont want to honour with response right now.

I step up the last set of escalators that take me to the street. into Kings Cross. the living hell, and as I do I spot the posters on either side of the walls. it makes me angry in ways I cant explain to see them. about ICE and the deadly effects. people scratching sores on the skin, bodies in hospital wards. all with the eyes, clear and dilated, big and scared. Pictures designed to shock, to fuck with your head. I realise this person walked past all this. in the lowest state of their life, to see the eyes in the posters, adverts created by some misguided idiots, where is the fucking love? You dont need this when you are whacked out on drugs, you need the opposite to recover! they are postering hell with pictures of HELL as if that is going to make some ICE head feel like giving it up! all its going to do is make them want to kill themselves. fucking idiots. this is the world we live in. full of fucking idiots. I am angry. its my reaction, finally starting to surface. As I walk into the street to the throng of lights and drunks and druggies and the night time madness and beauty that is Kings Cross, that is the human world we live in today all over this planet. I want to scream at the top of my fucking lungs

'WHERE IS THE LOVE YOU STUPID BASTARDS!'

I know then I am not going to do well tonight. I really actually didnt need this at all right now. I see the ambulance arrive. makes me wonder how the hell they clean these things up. Trains wont be running for a long while that is for sure.
I wonder who it was. didnt even know if it was a male or a female, a boy or a girl, a crack head or a suit lost out on the stock market. Why did I walk into this tonight?

I catch a bus back to bondi. people talking about it on there.
I feel low. the drop. it is coming now.
not good. I need to talk to someone.

I buy some candles from the store. I want to light something to dispel the ghosts that are hanging round me now. Its late I am not sure who to ring. I open my email. message from my recently ex-beau. she is back in town and asking if I want to meet up tomorrow. I need something. I email her. mention my night. then give it five minutes and ring. she doesnt answer. I see a mail come in a little later.

'sorry too tired to ring. speak tomorrow'.

that figures.

I lay on my bed. after her reaction I dont any longer feel like talking to anyone. It isnt something you can really share. Just brings people down into the fear and leaves them there wanting to be somewhere else.

I look at the dancing shadows from my candle. its on my altar where I keep the things that connect me to the otherside. to my own journey, to my own time after this life. things we become aware of as the days go by and death kisses our skin once or twice. you learn. but tonight. that was in my face. I was right by it. I felt it. felt the explosion of the body in my ears, and the end of a life. I can feel it now as I write.
I lie there. looking into those shadows. feeling real fucking raw. life to death. death to life. the cycle. the awareness when it comes. the pain of that. the void. the void gives us nothing back when we stare into it. I stop staring. start to breathe again. each breathe in like the first I ever took, each breathe out, like the last I will ever take. its all in there. just between the breathes. our whole story.

I just breathe
and lie there
letting the feelings bubble up and release out my throat as small sobs.
there is nothing else I can do but let it out right now
each sound a prayer for the lost and the dying on this crazy planet
for the ghosts and the departed
and those who are afraid
and alone
and dont know who they are

tough days these are. jesus so fucking tough.
yet
I am here still
I am here
there must be worth in that.
though sometimes it makes so little sense
I know it is ok
if we just keep breathing
and wishing the darkness into light

I put on Telepopmusik - Just Breathe and let it repeat play until I fall asleep.

"If you're frightened of dying and then you hold on
You'll see devils tearing your life away
But, if you've made your peace
Then the devils are really angels
Freeing you from the Earth..."

2009-04-24T21:17:00.004+10:00

Friday night in, the day knocked me out
work stripping energy from me, too much
this is not a good place to be, my eyes hurt, my heart tired
holding out against the feeling inside that this is so wrong
it's a time I recognise
time to change
time to free-fall into space
into the fear
into the void
all the voices of my fathers and teachers in my head
'dont be such a damn fool. you need stability, you need security'
but my heart is being crushed here
a death zone growing harder each day
starving the spirit
killing me softly

I cant stay in this
I just cant
I tried once before 7 years ago
and it did for me then
rewired my brain
in to the mistake
I cant do that to myself a second time
it has taken too much work to bring myself back
to try to learn from that time
when I should have moved, shifted, changed but didnt know how
it is that same feeling now
and I am afraid the same

I hear the quiet voice inside me tonight
I see the cliff face I have come to
another dead end.
I know it could be death down there
destitution
loneliness
pain
the end
down there on the rocks
but I have to believe
that so too it could be salvation
rising on the thermals that might catch me
blown by the gods
as I relinquish control
and they take me higher into the stratosphere
closer to the place I belong
to the paradise
I saw in dreams
so long ago

Its been a long journey
one I must have chosen even at the beginning
to be this way
forever facing darker depths
forever facing this moment alone
with the hounds of hell still upon my trail
and no one to share the solitary decision
the last goodbye
to leap or die
it is leap or die
If I stay in this
I will become like stone
and forever regret not being true
to that voice inside
that no one ever taught me how to trust in
but myself
how do you trust yourself?
and the energy I knew I had hidden there somewhere
if I could only let go
that made me run at the wall
and jump
in faith
knowing
that none of it ever really existed at all

The Other Side

2009-04-23T21:08:00.003+10:00

I wont say things are looking up, but you know what, things....you know the rest.

beautiful...strange.....I REALLY do love that tune. by bedrock if you dont know it. download it. shut your eyes. feel the power. it is there. I remember where it began. I was in some club in London, Turnmills. it was 6am I was off my tits and so was everyone else. it was the early 90's. it was ecstacy. it was tribal. I found the vision. it dropped down on me. I looked down. on the floor was this vortex. going down. I wanted to step on it but I knew I would disappear somewhere. so I turned to my pal. Chris was his name.

'can you see that'
'a whirlpool'
'fuck! you can see it'
'yea what about it'
'what you had'
'pill and some acid'
'oooh got acid'
'yea, here you are'
'cool'

and so began the 90's for me and I can hardly remember most of it. but I know it was beautiful and it was strange and though I came back down. eventually. something remained in my heart. the dream. the vision. the opening to something else, a way. of seeing, of being. something beautiful, something divine. something magical. a new world free of it all.
and it is here still
available
and though hell is all around me
and the solitude of this time has nearly killed me
suddenly in the dark I see a light
it has always been there. I just forgot to look
distracted by the madness , the coldness, the aloneness of it all
the life, the death, the travelling on. the endless moving on through people and towns and time and places. the sadness of it sometimes too much to bear.
the endings the beginnings I am so afriad of
because I know they will end, they always do.
and yet such amazing people who come into my life
like you Parmella despite all that pain we went through and probably still will,
fuck. I wouldnt miss this for the world.
and as I rise, because I will. it is what I was destined to do
death is nothing
loss is nothing
love is everything
and when it is beautiful and precious and strange
that is when I love it all the most
and for this life I will be
eternally grateful
fuck
I am feeling it tonight
I hope you all are too.
because it is times like these, I know we could change this god forsaken world
into something worth living in
and I dont mean disarming the nukes or saving the poor and the pandas,
I mean evolving into the beings we should always have been
beautiful...strange....
and full of love and vision that goes so far beyond the walls they keep us in, they taught us to exist in.
it is no surprise we are afraid
and so unable to just let go
we know of nothing else
and yet
we have some of us seen the other side
and though it hurts to remember
to be honest I will never be able to forget
its in my heart and travels with me
on wherever it may be

put on your favourite tune
put it up loud
and let go
I'll be there tonight
on the otherside

2009-04-17T21:23:00.002+10:00

and so the dust starts to settle at last
the roller coaster slows to a halt
and I get off
and have a quick vomit, because I never was much good on those rides.
but I feel better for it
not sure I want to go again for a while though
just gonna sit over here for a minute and let the world spin
and watch
and catch my breathe
and smile some

Self pitying sonovabitch but tonight I can't be bothered to hide my ugliness

2009-04-14T18:42:00.002+10:00

I saw the headline in the paper on the way home tonight -

‘Mel Gibson being divorced’

and it seemed such a silly thing and yet behind my shades I felt tears well up that had been held at bay. The ocean of my soul wanted to break free and I didn’t know how to stop it.
I felt a shame shiver through me for it. And tried to smile to myself.
Self pity. I always fall for it eventually. Dark horse in the heart stirring again.
So I sat there as the rail car rattled and people read and people thought about things.
And it seemed finally I was facing something I hadn’t really faced these last few weeks and the more I thought about why I was crying the more I realised this was about a lot bigger time than just this week. And I let it come in to me. I let myself remember and the sadness of my life overwhelmed me. And I have to explain one threaded tale of why I am often such a miserable wretch.

I was glad for those shades.

I always knew I would come to Australia. When I was a kid I knew when I used to run about my grandparents garden in the English summer in a sleepy village called Bampton where church bells rang out on Sundays and cars went by every now and then, I’d smell the honeysuckle in the mornings and chase a few wasps with a stick then run in for breakfast to watch Skippy the bush kangaroo on TV. Those blue skies and a talking kangaroo. I wanted to be there one day.

When I saw Mad Max years later that blew me away too. I ended up growing up all over the place. Someone gave me a guitar at 15 and then it was rock and roll all the way. I could hide in the dream.

I moved to Oxford got in a couple of bands but we just got wasted and managed about 3 songs in as many years. I can’t remember half of those days. The girl I got engaged to left and I went down a bad rabbit hole until an opportunity came my way out of the blue. I was never much good at being stoned I couldn’t remember a thing.

I left Oxford for London on a whim. Got offered to sing in a band called Romeo Suspect and it felt right. Kipped on my brothers sofa knowing dreams of rock stardom would be mine. That journey up to London, leaving the mess of my teenage life behind was such a beautiful thing. I knew I was free again in that moment. Like Dick Whittingtons cat, maaaan I was going to find the gold.
I saw a rainbow over Notting Hill as the coach drove up the a40 entering the city and I made a wish –

‘Don’t make me famous until I can handle it’

I’d already crashed on acid, speed and glue, probably smoke too but like I said I never remembered anything when I smoked. I knew what I was like and I was hungry for it all. I hadn’t even got near the cocaine, ectascy and designer drugs by then.

Maybe something heard me. Heard my wish.

10 years later and it wasn’t happening. It hurt for years as age took me away from all that I could have been. Man that hurt. Slow and agonising. I know the meaning of Defeat. I know it in my bones. I had owned the dream for a long while; the drugs, the women, the excess for years and yet I never got that stardom I so longed for. I felt so robbed, couldn’t understand it. I had trusted the signs and trusted the Gods and followed them at the sacrifice of all else.

In the end I was forced to give it up, I joined the rat race. It was fear. I was broke. Beaten. The band wasn’t happening. Music had been my world. It was over. I didn’t know how to end something I had invested so much of my life and love in.

So I tried to settle down. Got with a beautiful office girl, got a house, a job that could have been for life. And sat there one day. Old. Alone, cocained out of my brain staring at the wallpaper that I owned. I finally owned something. She was out. 7 years we had been together and I just knew in an instant that this was it for me. This was the happiness normal people longed for. I was in it. And I was lost. I didn’t know what this was. It fucked with me so much that day. She came home drunk. I lost it. I left. I never went back.

2 years later after living in a van for a few months then getting a small room in the middle of Harrow I realised one embarrassing day that I was in fact just waiting to die. I also realised I needed to leave London to do it. And again out of the blue opportunity came. I thought that was my last walk. To Australia. The dream I had as a kid came back to me, my first dream. I was going to Australia to die. It all made perfect sense. It was kind of tidy in its play out.

So I spent my savings on a touring bicycle and cleared off all my debts and so as not to make a mess somewhere people would find me I headed off up to the Northern Terrority to meet my maker. I figured it would be less of a concern for my family there. I don’t quite know why. I didn’t know what else I could do. Let the devil come to meet me and make it there out of the way where people can make assumptions about what happened but never really know. I was ok with it. It had to happen someplace, right.

He came on the third day.

48 degrees heat passing out sick on the side of the road somewhere between Katherine and Broome. I have no idea where I was. It got dark and I could smell death. I was heat struck and delirious and ready to go to the devil. Fuck it. I had nothing left. I let it go. And waited to experience that final thing. I had no idea what it would be but it would bring relief. Then something kicked in. A fucking survival instinct. I wasn’t ready for that. Some stupid part of me thought I had something to do. It seemed so obvious. So without choice or volition, I did all I could to fight what was coming and next thing I know I made it to Broome. About a month actually but again. I don’t recall much of it.

I felt refreshed and excited, like god gave a shit and had plans for me once again. So I hit a bar to celebrate, pulled a girl , went home with her , fucked her, and promptly got in a fist fight with her flat mate. I had to leave Broome the next day. I fucking hated myself again. Things were back to normal. I was too chicken shit to do myself in, so I went back to Sydney instead to get a job, figure out what to do next and try to stay out of trouble for once. What the hell were the gods up to, I was supposed to be dead?

That was a year ago.

Here I am.

I still have no idea why.

The train rattled into Bondi tonight.
Tears dropped down my face. It is amazing how much passes through your mind in a short space of time. Mel Gibson getting divorced and splashed all over the paper. The whole fucking world knowing his business and as my heart was breaking, or maybe starting to recover I have no fucking idea right now, I was just so glad of those shades and being anonymous. Being a fucking nobody was suddenly very ok in my book. I couldn’t imagine what this moment for me right now would be like if every fucker knew my name and who I was and saw me crying. I thanked the gods in retrospect because they saved my sorry ass again and I had no idea all this time. They never let me be famous. They had honoured my wish when I showed up in London. I wouldn’t have survived it at all. Too much of a dumb cunt. They were doing something now. I didn’t know why but it obviously was for some reason.

I don’t know why I spilled it here, or to who, or for what. Glimpses into gold. Glimpses into the truth. Glimpses into the self and the dreams and the lust and the death and the perception of a man. Brothers and sisters and sufferings the world over. No respite, no sanctuary, no hope in many ways. And I haven’t done much to help any of them, only my selfish self and I didn’t help me much either in the end . Dark. Painful. Cold and Lonely is stuff we just have to experience every now and then. Remind ourselves how fragile we are. And remind ourselves who we are and where we have been. Become humbled again by the immensity of it all and the meaninglessness of us as individuals. Fuck famous, it makes the kill so much more complicated and so much crueller. Try and die and they wont let you. It is a mystery.

Come back to the centre. Look around and see we are just here right now and we have no idea what for, not really. Just to be. But anonymity suddenly makes a lot of fucking sense. I could cry and no one would know who I was. No one could care less, so I cried. It was for myself, not Mel, but that was ok. It had to happen somewhere. Thanks Mel.

I walked out the station hopped on the bus. Breathed the air of the ocean as I reached my small room down the North end of the beach. Yea I was alone again but this recent lost love, my first in Oz, would heal and the devil didn’t seem to know my address. Not yet. Not yet. And I may die tonight as lightening and thunder breaks outside, and on my last breathe I may wonder what it was all for. But if I don’t get taken tonight then tomorrow will be the future and something will come along.

Tomorrow I want to do something for someone else for a change. I’ve always wanted to I just have never known how.

2009-04-13T12:07:00.002+10:00

I saw my direction today for the first time in years.

I just spent 3 days at Vipassana meditating in silence. It started off tough. I was frustrated because I meditate a lot and thought I would be ahead of the game. I was way off. Took me the whole first day to get my mind quiet and focused on a single spot. One frustrating fight with the self. but I got there.

that night I slept more than 4 hours, first time in weeks. I needed it and sprang up at 4am, first in the hall, into the silence. I love it. like a duck to water. no talking just going in somewhere and waiting to see what shows up.

that was my next annoyance.

spent most of the day with either the uncannily clear image of my new boss in my head. (A South African arrogant son of a bitch whom right now I detest because he holds my balls in his hand and he is squeezing.) So that was ...nice
and then it was...HER....when he wasnt in there, she was. doing whatever it is she is doing right now with whoever she is doing it.
you know
you really need this stuff in your head, crystal clear, when you are trying to meditate.

So about half way through the day and we break for lunch and I have to go lie down because this whole 'getting away' thing seems to have backfired somewhat. Everyone I wanted to get away from is beautifully emblazoned in my mind in glorious motion technicolour, all the clearer because I am in silence and meditating. fuckin a! what to do.

then as I lie on my bed watching a spider eat a fly which seems strangely poetic at that moment. It dawns on me. There is something I am missing here. The reason I am not getting past all this.

I guess I wanted to sit and chill and stare at stars and peacocks and have a beautiful Zen experience. I should have known better. It was time to get right into my shit and face the music. so I did.

I spent the next half of the afternoon locked up in a 2x4 cell with no windows and no sound and no light. Its the place to be, let me tell you. Terror becomes some kind of freedom in there. Ever seen Midnight Express? You get right into the pain. I mean. RIGHT INTO THE CENTRE OF THAT MOTHERFIUCKING PAIN. and you sit there. squirming. in the prison or your body and into the prison of your own making. knowing it is you and yours alone and you created it and only you can get yourself out, but you cant. YOU CANT. you cunt. YOU CUNT.
you hate yourself. you hate everything. you want to die. DIE DIE DIE. just fucking please STOP IT ALL STOP. But the door is shut and there is no where to go. no where to run. this is it. and you know it. it is time to let go to it.
and so
eventually
after 4 hours
and very fucking sore everything
it stops.

it
just
stops

it had to
eventually

and so

it

did

and right then I knew none of it really was that big a deal
none of it really ever had a hold on me
I just empowered it
for some reason
that would take too long to explain
and I breathed in
as the hurting stopped
and there it was
the way forward
for me
nothing changed
except maybe my outlook
the shit was the same, it wasnt going anywhere
it was going to be there and it was going to fuck with me as much if not more so
than it had been up til now.
but the single difference was
I now had a plan
I knew why it was there and of what use it was going to be to me.

so to my boss and to... HER.
bring it on
because in the end
you may well be the very thing that saves me

Diamonds

2009-04-05T20:28:00.003+10:00

coal, soot, carbon, blood, spit, jealousy, anger, frustration, rage, fire, pressure
in the pressure of eternity. stood dying in my room, crushed in the unbelievable pain of it all. going into it, going into it, not letting go, not letting up
keep going in. deeper. into the pain. I have to know this now.
I have to feel it all this time.
tastes like coal and soot. dirty blackness inside, places where they began, this life
somewhere beyond this life, somewhere in the beginning, of me, of me,
keep going until there is no more pain
screaming into the night air
as it implodes
and all agonies start to change
I knew they would, I knew they had to eventually
turn to a sweet ecstacy
until there is nothing left to suffer, nothing left to feel
and I find myself lifting up, rising
coming up for air
breathing deep and hard
bursting through the veil
feel the sex in me
heat like fire,
getting hot like life
in the black
of being so empty
take a new form
and what was a lie
hid a truth all along
there are no words for this freedom
maybe love, but that doesnt describe it

The beautiful lie

2009-04-04T08:19:00.003+11:00

I guess I am ready for this. I guess it has come into my life right on time.

At my most solitary, at my most vulnerable, at my most weak. When there is no one around to turn to and take my mind off it, just walls and oceans and long emptiness. The movie plays and she is the star. I have nothing else to do but watch. Is this the story of my own end? The tragedy of whatever I thought Love could be.

I realise I haven’t really been hurt by a woman in many years. It is long overdue. I have left a lot of carnage behind me and in seeing how one has finally gotten to me, I understand that yes, I liked the control it gave me too. I was in balance while someone else needed me, floundered, a little piece of them dying in my hands. Truth is, that felt good. Manipulation, control. Unaware even, that I was doing it so well. Feeding off it. It elevated me and I flew. Energy I didn’t have was suddenly mine. Vampiric almost.

I’d hate myself for it if I could.

But then here I am, watching the girl who managed to finally open me up somehow, put a blade in the wound and turn it. The sweet smile, the words of love she spoke to me before she left still echo as I fall away. I still believe her, even as I watch myself bleeding to death from the wound she has created. How fucking stupid we humans are sometimes. ‘I love you’. How deadly those words are.

It is not her, I tell myself, she is better than this. When she is finished with these other lovers she will come back to me. But she wont. I already know this. Or rather , she will but she was never really there, it was just her need to have something to hold, to pretend in too.

The beautiful lie.

It was always only ever going to be a beautiful lie. We both wanted to believe it. This result was inevitable. I knew this even as I started. And still I let go. Still I opened up. And still the pain came. Letting go totally, I hoped it would free me, I trusted.

It didn’t work at all.

The cruel part, and this is what could drive me to put a slap on her to be honest, is that I get to read all this shit going on via the internet. Indirect love letters of some weird kind to whoever is in her life at that moment, whoever is her love in the minute. Jesus! I would SO do that too if I could, but I am not a hooker, not a woman.
I meet a person of the opposite sex who actually connects with me about once every 2 years at best. She meets someone every time she steps out the door.

And she goes there with them.

I guess there is an honesty in that. Wouldn’t all women do it if they could. Would not all men?

And that’s when it gets strange. Because I would and I know it. So how come I am currently dying like a lost and needy bitch at the hands of this she-devil? I have no idea. I wake to pain, I fall asleep to pain. Heart pain. That gutting sensation that even other people can see in me. Something has been drained from my energy. A Loss. A depletion. I am as good as dead right now. That is what happens when you say those three little words to someone and they then turn and give it away. GIVE IT AWAY. Like it was nothing. Like you are nothing more than another blip in the moment. And you thought you were so special. You needed to be so special. You needed someone else to make you that way. That is what sucks.

There was another girl once, years ago I got like this with. There was something about her. She held me in her hand and she killed me quick. I hated her for it. Looking back I was too childish to handle such power in a person. Now, I just know that I have to. Somehow find a way. To keep that destructive power she has over me at a distance, yet not turn on her. Not hurt her back. Not try to destroy her, or wish her wrong in anyway. There are so many lessons in all this. lessons I could not even dream to face back then. I have become strong, but I have to be stronger. all the while trying to keep that pain at bay and not let her do more damage. She is trying to, whether she knows it or not.

This is the crisis of us all in the world today. We love and someone hurts us when we do. The one we love is the one that will hurt us. The one we let go to. Is the one that will destroy us. If we are lucky they will hide this side from us. This control they know they have suddenly, that feeds them and gives them power that they accept and take and play with. It is down to their nature. And if they hide it, which most people do, then we will never need to know and we can pretend all is ok and all is well, but truth is. There is no love, not that way. It seems we don’t really love the one, we love the many. I never wanted to believe it, but how can I deny it now? How? It is a truth and it is staring me in the face. I just cant deal with it yet.

And this is the pain for me today, and so far, I have no answer, but I don’t want to live anymore in the beautiful lie.

2009-03-22T11:32:00.002+11:00

For some reason my LSD days have been coming up again.

Happiness is not a brown microdot while watching Pink Floyd's - The Wall.

I think when you have sat through that experience you can say you have made some kind of grade in the LSD fraternity. Probably should have those letters after my name. I am amazed I dont have a number tattooed on my wrist and a white front door with big locks on. I understand this is nothing to be proud of.

But why after so many years is this stuff coming up for me at the moment? Maybe my body is finally offloading all the highs I put myself through: 2ci, 2cb, dmt, lsd, heroin, crack, smack, ice, cocaine, glue, petrol, tippex thinners, you name it and we take it in the search for that unnameble something.

maybe just some fucking peace from the demons.

I stick to booze and cigarettes now. and have for the last year or so. Life is too fucking insane as it is to be honest. I dont need the additionals. The demons are all still there of course. I wouldnt say being straight is a great substitute. In fact most days I really dont like it one bit.

so insomnia has become my new unwanted friend.

And I am pretty sure it is related to the drug years the more I find myself waking up to it. spangled mindage. I was supposed to be dead before I got 32 like all good rock stars, and here I am 10 years on still walking about like a gormless grinning guppy.

god decided to make it a slow kill.

but I could swear the sharks are circling.

but nevermind that old chestnut, what of insomnia...

I wake at usually somewhere between 2 and 4am and my mind is off like a rabid dog salivating after some such nonsense that seems so relevant at that time of day. 2 hours later I realise I have been thinking over and over some inconsequential moment, yesterday morning it was an acid trip some 20 years ago.

bitch.

the fucking sad thing is that Hunter S Thompson really paved the way to the truth about drugs that all of us high-seekers completely ignore. That in the end, after you stop taking them and the audience stops laughing at how funny you are, you are left with a mind that is confused and a shotgun that is loaded. I mean, blowing your head off while talking to the wife on the phone is a bit off really, it says a lot. It was the inspiration for me to really try to stop so....hell....maybe he did do something good.

There is no pain you are receding
a distant ship smoke on the horizon
you are only coming through in waves
your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
when I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse
out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
the child has grown the dream has gone
I have become comfortably numb

I got up at 4am after waiting for my mind to give it a rest. twenty minutes and I couldnt get it under control. I was pissed off actually and hung out my bathroom window looking at the night and smoking. Staring at the cages on the neighbours windows and seeing how much my life is like that. Just bars up. I do everything to escape these chains. I got high to escape these chains. I will die to escape these chains. Just let me the fuck out of this pain that goes round and round without any kind of god damn answer to it.

I read all the healing books, I have done Vipassana, gone to doctors, gone to healers, shamans, lovers, friends, the wise, the insane, the truth. I meditate two or three times a day. I give up the drugs. I give up the fucking lot and am left with these 4am suicidal insanities. They fuck with me deeply.

I wont do it. I dont own a shotgun and I am far too chicken shit. I just live on the dark side of the moon and watch the sun go down each day and know the demons will return tonight, and I will see them and know them and still they will control some part of me I never even liked.

this isnt self pity. It is just the question. inspired by friends who know exactly this same fucked up story because my friends seem to know this pain too. and you probably do too. and thats what makes all this so fucking strange. here we are. wanting salvation and getting nothing but more shit for our troubles.

its the head. the god damn head. the thing I got high to escape. and now I can't even do that anymore. son of a bitch.

watch the sharks circle.
not long now
and this will be the last fists up, try to act brave, give a good final showboat fight in the chaos of all this nonsense.
punch something, a little blood
I'll feel good about that, as I go down.
smiling.
asking god if my face hurt his fist.

fuck it frankly, none of us ever had a hope, just a lie. I hate the lie.

but I guess in truth, I am still grateful for it all, how strange is that. The love especially. The love was what made it all worth it. To love. Just once or twice. Thankyou for that if nothing else.

I am nose up to The Wall again.
banging.
but there is nothing here.
nothing at all.
there never was.
just emptiness in space.

I put the cigarette out, go back to bed alone.

I look at the clock - 5.35am.
put a t-shirt over my head and wonder what comes next.

I will stay here.
I will get up tomorrow and go through it all again.
I will try to get through
to better myself as a person
and all that crap,
to rise up,
to surface from this ocean of dark death,
darker past,
and the deep emotional disturbances
I hide from in the day.

Killing Joke - Love Like Blood

2009-03-21T08:31:00.001+11:00

We must play our lives like soldiers in the field
But life is short i'm running faster all the time
Strength and beauty destined to decay
So cut the rose in full bloom
'til the fearless come and the act is done
A love like blood, a love like blood

Everyday through all frustration and despair
Love and hate fight with burning hearts
'til legends live and man is god again
and self-preservation rules the day no more

We must dream of promised lands and fields
That never fade in season
As we move towards no end we learn to die
Red tears are shed on grey
'til the fearless come and the act is done
A love like blood, a love like blood

2009-03-20T21:42:00.000+11:00

It's never going to be easy
the things we chase
always seem to belong to somebody else
everyone makes it look so simple to attain
as they cruise by in gilded cages of gold
and I remain in the alley with the one-trip ghosts
blade in my hand to deal with the enemy
laugh running down empty streets
crazy drunk or high beyond care
or just insane
because its the way to survive this bullshit

its taken all these days to find something worth keeping
and yet the blood trickles down my heart like an open wound
fists up, shadow boxing dont work so well against this army
fortifications round your heart
you arent ever going to give in
watch me die trying to scale your walls
and see you smile
knowing you wont ever have to pretend again
to anyone
except yourself

here comes the morning
another one I have to face in some way
and try to explain to myself
what the fuck I am doing this for
I have no idea, I never did
just play the part
like it will make any kind of difference
to any of us
in the end

2009-03-19T23:24:00.000+11:00

I feel broken, disbanded, lying on the floor
of a chaotic explosion
brick dust and smoke fly away into the air above me
I am winded
but breathing
and I smile
I remember this...this is the weakness
this is when men cannot be men but fall
from tall heights as the world spins
and it all comes crashing down
this is ok.
to feel pain is ok.
pain means
I am still alive.
tomorrow I will get up
but for now
I am just going to lie here
right here
and watch the dust float about me
and laugh a little
or maybe cry
I havent decided yet

2009-03-19T22:34:00.000+11:00

I felt it shift again tonight
that elusive truth
we grasp for always
through the moments as they slip by us
I try to sink into it now
try to hold one feeling in place
that might tell me
that the future will bring home
and it will feel like the place I belong
the place I can rest
and feel safe enough
not to chase rainbows
across darkening skies anymore
I love you
more truly than I have ever loved
and yet
and yet
it could slip away and be lost in the dust
trampled in the stampede of all that is to come
and if I try to hold onto it
I might die
and if I let it go
it may be lost for good this time
All I can do is watch
and quietly pray
that it grows strong enough
to make it through
I surrender to trust because, as ever
it is all I can do.

2009-03-14T01:39:00.000+11:00

2am and it is like the good old days. wide awake and ready to take on the world.
except this time I am not high

I do miss it, so.

but tomorrow I will be glad

and tomorrow. what of tomorrow.

the current love of my life. and yes it is love. I dont know why or how it has happened but I recognise the signs.

she is a hooker.
how crazy is that
the universe does like to slap me about sometimes.

so I rock up to her place. a hotel where she has been working.
it is afternoon. late. the sun is shining and I am whistling a little ditty. possibly smash it up by the damned. as I stroll into the lobby and nod to the concierge who looks at me with a smile that tells me he thinks I am another punter.
I dont correct him because in a way he is right.

life is like that
it is all about deals and transactions
even love
we are all prostitutes.
no point kidding ourselves
just hustle like the rest of them
and try to steal some for yourself before your time is up.
I am a cat burglar and a damn good one.
you dont need me to explain the pussy pun there do you.

I knock on her door. she opens.
there is something electric about her
she has had three sessions today.
I pause for a moment
uncertain quite how I am going to react
wait. observe the self
ready for explosions that dont come.
I am pleased at my learnedness
and step in

we eat.
it is almost like family together at the table
roast chicken. some salad
love is there
I smile at her
she smiles at me
it is warm
glowing
beautiful
precious

I wonder when it will end and how.

it is only natural

fear.

always a fear.

I tell her.

she understands
but doesnt molly coddle.
she is tough
she has to be.
it has been tough for her too.
this life.
and that is what makes it beautiful.

I guess we are true people
we have true hearts
not broken into bitterness and hatred
not turned into games of control
of destruction
of ownership
of cowardice in the face of the pain.

she steps over to me
sits on my lap
her hair drops down over me and a breast teases me a hello from inside the dressing gown she is wearing.
I look at it.
soft and beautiful
somehow pure
I dont know how
I sigh
feel love in my heart grow with the intake of breath
does it matter that less than an hour ago another man lay on her, lay in her.
strangely
it doesnt.
and yet
my mind sometimes wants to scream
and if others knew, what would they say to my mind
to convince it to implode
I toy with these thoughts
and then feel it overwhelmed by desire for her
in the moment
this moment
it is all that matters
and I sink into that
without any fear at all
with absolute ease
because I belong there
in love and I have already made the decision
that it will be ok
because death will come before we even have time to think about the beautiful moments we forgot to take and wished we had when they came along

and we fell together into a truth that was between us, only us. and no one else
and that was when I understood it for what it is.

Intimacy

2009-02-28T10:35:00.000+11:00

I am changing

big things coming, moving, shifting

and thank fucking christ it is about time

the scorpion, the snake,
willing to drop it's guard for a moment.
am I?
am I willing?
have I a choice?

Will my enemies come for me now? of course they will. It will be their call. All I can do is let go.

I bought a book called Intimacy by Osho, the bigger man is willing to face the fear that is Love, surely. I figured I need to learn something here.

other than the involuntary outburst of laughter that brought the 'guru' section of Borders bookstore to a momentary stand still when I read the line -

'intimacy means exposing yourself before strangers'

I found the message I was needing right after that in its pages.

I can't get past the first chaper at the moment, I just keep going over it. finding something new release inside me from the words. I want to share a few

...intimacy brings you close to a stranger. you have to drop all your defenses; only then is intimacy possible. and the fear is that if you drop all your defenses, all your masks, who knows what the stranger will do with you?....

...everybody wants intimacy because otherwise you are alone in this universe...you want to be intimate with the other person... you want them to drop their defenses....but you are not dropping your defenses.....

....you have to accept yourself in totality....You have been condemned by everyobdy you have learned one thing: self-condemnation. You go on hiding it, it is not something beautiful to show others. You know ugly things are hidden in you, you know evil things are hidden in you, you know animal is hidden in you.

....If you are simple, loving, open, intimate, you create a paradise around you. If you are closed, constantly on the defensive, always worried that someone may come to know your thoughts, your dreams, your perversions, you are living in hell.

..we are fragile beings - the most fragile in existence. this frailty is not something to be condemned-it is the highest expression of consciousness....the higher expression of anything becomes weaker....it's beauty is because of its not being strong.....everything that is beautiful is going to be very momentary....all you can say is "I am in love with you this moment, and I will give my totality to you. about the next moment I know nothing."

nodoby knows anything about the future...the only thing that is in your hands is your life....by opening yourself to many people you become richer. And if you can live in deep love, in deep friendship, in deep intimacy with many people, you have lived rightly....

without intimacy you are surrounded by strangers, with intimacy you are surrounded by friends, by people who love you.

everybody is afraid of intimacy

2009-02-26T21:20:00.001+11:00

I was walking back from the toilet, in a rush, I had to get back in the room and pick a valentine. I was afraid if I left it too late I would get someone…well…less than savoury and too close to my own age.

There she was. Walking towards the door as I got back. I saw the name tag stuck to her arm and her profile was pretty. She was in red. In fact she was damn hot.

‘Excuse me,’ I said with the best charming glint in the eye I could muster.

‘Would you be my valentine?’ Words we had been told to use in wooing the fairer sex. I felt silly but what the hell.

She looked at me. Into my eyes deeper than I had expected. It caught me out actually. I felt a little foolish in the silence that hung there. She knew I was a player, a charmer and in that silence, I knew she knew.

‘Er….no’ she said quite simply no apology, no excuses. Just turned her head, not rude or dismissive, but just clearly made up her mind. She walked into the room.

I was smitten, the bitch!

But I must have done something right because later when I was chatting with other people after the night ended she seemed to warm to me. I made a joke out of her directness. I admired it. No bullshit, you had to respect that.

‘Why did you say no?’ I asked her, not out of any overblown belief that I am anything special but just because I wanted to know just what women of substance did see in my act. I knew it was an act, I thought they did too.

‘You weren’t placed in yourself’ she said. And I understood I was dealing with someone of quality then. I wanted to hug her. It being Tantric night you could do these things. So I asked if I could and she said yes. It was warmth. There was something in there I felt could ignite. I hadn’t expected that. I thought she was hot, tough, but I didn’t think she had soul. I was wrong.

We got together a few days later and some kind of crazy whirlwind took off around me. It was wilder than I was expecting or had ever dreamed she would be like, and yet…yet now I realise I had been wishing for this lately. I had. And now here it was coming to me like a gift from the universe. She was tantric, she did it for a living. She brought people up out of themselves sexually, spiritually, for 600 dollars an hour. I was getting it for free.

It was different. Subtly so. The sex was not like sex, no humping like a crazy animal as fast and furious as you could make it, riding on the frenzy, and nor was it slow and deep like some Barry White record. This was motionless, breathing, waiting, in stillness, sinking into yourself, being there and then the breathe took off and waves, pulses of ecstacy shot through the body up the backbone. You didn’t need to come it was somehow complete in itself. I have to admit, I felt out of my depth. This woman was not interested in being ridden like an untameble pony into submission. My normal sexual conquistador behaviour was totally neutralised. I didn’t quite know how to deal with it. I found myself trying to be a better man than I was. Trying to be deeper, more Tantric, more knowledgeable. The cracks showed. It came as a shock to me. I secretly thought I was hot in the sack. I knew nothing. Nada. Not a thing compared to this woman. She was…’present’…. is the word they use and I can see why. Her eyes watched me the whole time, beautiful, serene, self aware, no need of anything, just giving because that is what she did. She could see all of me. Knowing I was far from up to scratch. I felt like a performing monkey whose act had been seen before too many times to be of much interest. The more we went on, the more it felt like she was humouring me. Sheeeet. The worst thing a man can feel; Libido loss, self doubt. Tantra was suddenly becoming my nemesis.

OK. It wasn’t that bad. And it was great sex. I did ok in the end. She was cool. I had a good week. She thought I was hot. I thought she was on frickin fire. I learnt so much about myself it is untrue. But just when you think you have ridden out the storm and got a handle on your male egomania and start feeling like the king of the jungle…..I get a phone call….

‘Come over. I am in my flat in the city.’

Moments later I am there ready for the next heady experience of surrender, love, stillness in my naïve attempts to achieve sexual and spiritual bliss.

We talk a while. I start to feel like I am falling in love with this woman. She is something else. I know she does this for a living. Hey aren’t we all prostitutes in some way? I am trying to deal with that balance in the back of my mind. She doesn’t hide the fact.

Then she tells me about the phone conversation she has just had with this guy, a guru of sorts. I know him. We have spoken. He knows his stuff. She tells me all about how she finally started to feel him inside her. This is from a phone call. They were deep breathing I discover on questioning her in detail. Two and half hours. Her in orgasm. Touched by this magic motherfucking love god, and yes of course he was black. Sonovabitch!

And this is my question….how in gods name do you make love to a woman you are falling in love with after being told that. I tried my best but she just wasn’t there anymore.

My heart died on the spot.

I have a long way to go.

I had no idea.

M

2009-02-21T10:39:00.000+11:00

http://www.ilike.com/artist/Mark+Berry+Music/track/Wakin%27+Up

2009-02-15T18:23:00.000+11:00

She held me in a hug
I felt her breathe, the rhythm of it
I relaxed and breathed out trying to find her pace.
Letting it all go, sinking into her arms.
Felt the tension in my grip around her,
unconscious struggles of the day
still locked up in my muscles, man's muscles.
Let it go, let it all go.
My head coming to rest on her neck
Sweet scent
Rose petals.
I felt us both give in a little
Man to woman, woman to man
belly’s gently touching
but it is my heart that feels warmed.
I listen for the beat
wondering if they are starting to beat in time.
This is nothing more
than the pulse of life
tuning in.
A moment ago I felt tense, caught up in
the social chaos.
One hug, one real hug
was all it took
to dawn into the age of Aquarius.
My part to play in the great cosmic order of things today,
was just to let go,
and so I did.

Valentines Day 14th February 2009

2009-02-12T22:07:00.000+11:00

Rain drips down from grey skies.
Sun gone, maybe it will return someday to warm the heart.
Back to life.
Rolling in the fried haze of a sleepless night again. So many.
Throw the legs out of the bed. That small child doesn’t want to go.
You must. Berry, you must. Be a man.
It’s the law. To work. To be this rat on the wheel.
Of life.
What a life. What a dream turned so real. I can feel it on my skin this morning.
Cutting to find me. In there. Alarm blaring. Cruel into the ears.
Must I do this again. Find the strength. Oh god. If only a woman was with me now.
To comfort. The heart in the grey.
And so it begins.
Another day. Wish it was the weekend so I could fry bacon. The smell of fresh percolating coffee. The smile of it. Almost a love. These little things touch so deep.
Meaning. None here. Must find it. Not in my shoes or holed socks as I walk to the bathroom pantless just for amusement.
Maybe a hint in the picture of sunny beach scenes that hangs on my wall to cover the blotches of badly painted magnolia in a bland rented room.
Something tries to ruin every hope in a man. And we fight it.
Step out to the rain.
The waves high and merciless out there. Some fools on the ocean trying to find a thrill
7am. Death is hunting already. Do they not know this.
Cross the road without incident. First proof that I might yet make it if I keep going.
And pay attention.
Sleep and toxins loiter in the bags under my eyes.
Harsh. I feel 52. I am not.
Stand at the bus stop. Don’t get too close to people, I want them to think I look good.
Safety in distance.
What is that?
Small puppy bounding along.
Jesus! I almost forgot that once I thought it was all quite wonderful too.
Smile inside for a brief moment but it is precious and wakes me to something I'd nearly lost. Pup tramples up to my feet and stops for a moment.
Looks up. I see the eyes dilate in puppy questions.
Me just big dog. Woof.
It moves on. Sniffing. Bouncing. The owners brought to life by their surrogate child.
One day they will say things like
‘ Don’t you wish he could have stayed that way’
And they will secretly wish to trade him in for another puppy
But they wont.
Duty and guilt.
And maybe a little bit of love.
But not today. Today puppy is full of the sun that hides behind the clouds,
the one we all wish wouldn’t.
Clouds that have come to taunt us, and test us.
All these years, all these millions of mornings
We awake again to the truth we don’t quite know what to do with.
Stepping closer each day to something.
Off he goes. Happy as a lambkin. Into the distance. All quite wonderful and in place.
Thankyou puppy for making me remember
How it should be and probably is.

The 333 is halfway to the 666

2009-02-10T21:45:00.000+11:00

I had this long thing about death I wanted to write but then it seemed so inappropriate with what is going on in Victoria at the moment.

Anyway I used to think LSD could save the world,
then I took too much of it.

and I suspect Tantra will be the same for me after I get through with a lawsuit for placing an un-asked-for hand on the breast of a stranger on the bus.

'Are you familiar with the way of the Tantric Mongoose' I said to her

'Get your fucking slimy hand off me, you creep' told me that she wasnt, and that she might now also be a difficult subject to convince.

That is the thanks we get for trying to guide the unwilling masses to the higher levels of existence.

not that it really happened

but I do think about it on the 333 each morning,
as I sit in relative silence,
cramped amongst strangers,
wondering what the hell we are all doing there.
trying to stare out the window
and not talk
too much
about anything
worth talking about

2009-02-01T13:19:00.000+11:00

I lay her down against the cool cotton sheets, her fingers clutch gently at my side. I feel her nails, and feel her longing, the invisible pull from inside her. The need.

‘Not yet’, I whisper close to her ear.

She makes a sound of feigned disapproval and curls her head into her shoulder, her eyes close, body twisting lightly in shy reflex. I can see the ripple of energy flutter through her stomach and I smile to myself. I love this moment. This is where it all begins, where ordinary people, living ordinary lives, find something more powerful than they ever knew existed, and all along it was right there at their fingertips.

I kiss her neck just gently, to re-assure. I don’t want her to arouse, I need her calm for this, at least for now.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asks expectantly.

‘Just relax’, I say ‘ breathe… deeper down…that’s it’.

The candle splutters a bit on the mantle and I feel the cooling air of the fan on my back, it feels good in this night heat. I shut my eyes and sink deeper in, looking down into myself, feeling the glow of life, feeling for where I begin. My mind quiets, something in this energy does that, like maybe sex is meditation.

My hand comes up almost by itself, following something. I don’t even really know what it is. I get flashes of it sometimes, see a woman, her hair blonde and long, blue eyes sparkling, some thought tells me it is a mermaid but I know that isn’t right. She moves, she is energy, pure, divine. I don’t know what this is, but I hold silent and still as she comes into me, flows through me, and then it begins. I feel it like heat, like love, like a beautiful truth. I welcome her and my hand moves over the naked body of this girl, not touching, just moving unseen warmth over her, through her, moving it round, letting it rise of itself. Patient. I follow.

A shudder rises up my back from within. I open my eyes, a flush is on her chest and the cheeks of her face, her breathing is getting faster, getting deeper.

‘That’s it’, I say ‘Let it go, breathe, let the sound out’

Her hips move a little, her breath in gasps. The sound finally breaks in her throat as she starts to give in. This isn’t me, this is her, her gift, her connection back to what she was a part of all along but never knew. Putting it all back into place, this is the return.

Her sighs grow louder and she starts to stretch out and move rolling in slow, powerful spasms. You can see it pulsing through her like waves. I sit back and watch, there is nothing more to do other than just be here, be witness to a girl relinquishing to the goddess, and becoming one.

And I know this is as it should be, as it once was, before they shut us all down, stole our connection, before they inflicted emotional wounds on us all in the war to take control, to turn this planet into a prison, to make us desperate, lost and insane. There were temples for this once, for men and for women. To heal them, to bring them back to themselves when they were lost, disconnected from the source of things. But they destroyed them, built over their ground and replaced them with lies, deceipt and a powerful guilt, and with that they murdered the spirit of women and men, for no other reason than to enslave them. Until what we really are, what power we have, is forgotten.

‘This is the truth,' I tell her, 'this is freedom, babe’

She opens her eyes just a little, a shimmer of sweat on her body making it glow in the dim light. I see the warmth of life in there, see that gorgeous glitter in the sheen of eyes truly alive. She knows. She knew all along.

‘How could I have forgotten this?’ she pants between breathes.

‘Sssssh’ I say and softly close her eyes again. ‘It’s just time for you to claim it back’

2009-01-31T17:57:00.000+11:00

I step out from my front door.
been here 6 months now and still it hits me
the ocean blue, the clear skies, the warm air... beautiful.

I made it.

So they keep telling me back home, not understanding just what it feels like to sacrifice everything, and I mean, everything for a shot at paradise.
I'd do it. They always knew if anyone would, I would. I like to try to live up to peoples expectations sometimes. Let them live my lie, or is it the other way round.

I ran and leapt from the bridge. flying for a moment, until I start to fall. Icarus you crazy bastard. My Grandad said to me on his death bed, we die a thousand times before it ends.
This was one of my deaths I guess. Shedding a skin.
Escaped the grey concrete, the city anger cooking in it's own voilent retarded insanity. Hooks deep into me. Escaped the drugs, the fools, the crazy highs twisting minds closer towards schizophrenic ends. Escape the place I knew I never really belonged, and yet, and yet...

'You lucky bastard, you made it'
they say to me. The line crackles.
'Sure baby' I say, 'I am a winner'
and I leave it at that. Like Lucky Luke not wanting to let them down, not wanting them to see the cracks, the fear, the intense nights so solitary staring at the oceans of paradise wondering what the fuck I am doing there. Nothing coming. nothing working out. Nothing but me. here. somewhere I dont even know. Lost. Am I lost. What am I. Who the hell is this person I am.

Creeping slowly desperate and destitute in the dark on through sipped whisky and clinging to self-control you arent even sure exists. Just pretend. Keep pretending.
hanging on
waiting
for something
not death, fuck death
not madness, fuck madness
but waiting for something
maybe someone
yea maybe company
to stroke my skin, to whisper in my ear,
to bring soft female delight to pass the time
in paradise.

Then finally, she comes, like divine light through the empty neon lit streets, and through time to my door.
she knocks.
'I would have waited forever for you', I say
'I know' she says a look teasing in her eye.
She steps to me.
I feel her enter in.
I am in paradise
yea, I made it, sacrificed everything and I made it.
I got my story now.
I kiss the night and fall into the oceans and into her arms
I am soul
come alive through the eye of death
and sacrifice

2008-12-16T21:44:00.000+11:00

These are the things I can't share
but often wish I could
somehow let you see them,
let you in.
Like a secret I once gazed upon
in a place far away
if only you could have been there
to witness it too.
I wish you had
It was glorious, it was magical, it was..
out of this world.
These are the things I can not share
but often wish I could
somehow let you see them
and you would know too.

White birds

2008-12-16T21:37:00.000+11:00

What will happen to this memory
when I am gone
Where will this exquisite taste be
the one that lingers now
as I recall
watching from the train window
into the high blue sky
summer afternoon, 10,000 miles away from
the land I was born and all I have ever known
watching the white birds in the distance
rising into thermals
so Graceful, so peaceful
magic there, like an arrow it pierced me
and I was so alive in it
that a tear broke free and dropped down my cheek
and my heart ached with a joy
beautiful and painful to experience
I could not really grasp it
though it completely overwhelmed me
but I knew, that was just how it was here
and I wondered alone as the train began to roll
and the birds reached the apex and glidered away,
I wondered, what will happen to this memory when I am gone
where will this exquisite taste be

He's more elusive than the scarlet pimpernel

2008-12-08T21:25:00.000+11:00

I dont think I am back here yet. I just started bumping into people who write. You have to listen to these things.

2008-12-08T21:09:00.000+11:00

Sweet dreams that play around my head
I found my church by the ocean
restored a feeling lost to childhood english summers
a happy smile, a warm embrace of life.
I'll always miss you and the times we used to share
there will be no forgetting the blood on my hands
broken hearts, broken homes, broken lives, broken spirits
of grey pavement streets and running violence through the night.
but on the breathe I sank inside
on the hunt for redemption
sacrifice it all, at any cost to reach that place.
I'll always miss you, there will be no forgetting
but I made it, and in this sweet dream that envelops me,
I died, but when I woke, it was to something beautiful.

fuckadoodleday it's been 3 months

2008-10-24T20:42:00.000+11:00

since my last post.

been locked in an orgasm actually
discovered tantra, like proper cool.

'nuff said, regular programs will commence shortly :)

2008-07-20T20:58:00.000+10:00

'If you could do anything in the world right now, what would you do?' she asked.

I thought a while.

'I would fuck my way into heaven' I finally replied.

'You're really quite strange' she said with a laugh.

'Am I?' I replied. It wasnt the first time I had heard it said. I never really quite understood what it meant. Surely everything was strange until we got used to it.

'You're not happy, are you?' she said.

'Are you?' I asked.

'Yea, most of the time. Life is what you make it' was her reply.

'I guess I still dont know what to make of it' I said.

'Oh god, you can be so miserable sometimes!' and she gently slapped my arm.

'I find it hard to ignore the injustices' I said , maybe a little defensively.
'I want to believe in happiness and beauty and heaven more than anything but...'

I didnt know how to finish my point, so I didnt.

We sat quietly for a while. She thought about dresses and social occasions. I wondered about why I always took conversations down dead end streets. I never seemed to learn from my mistakes. Like a broken record. I suddenly felt weak, petty and embarrased. I felt myself blush with a sense of self-loathing. I didnt know how it was I had become this way, not when, not why. I was stranded on a desert island with only mirages for company. I wanted to say something funny, something hilarious. I wanted to lighten the mood, bring joy, jump and dance and clap and sing.

We sat there. A chasm between us. It was up to me to cross but I didnt know how. It struck me that I might never find someone I had everything in common with, the thought of being alone forever was suddenly terrifying. The walls were closing in. I had the sudden urge to make a dash for the door and start running.

She looked at me. The silence was dragging on a little too long. I could think of nothing to fill it. I noticed her take a subtle look at her watch. People required constant entertainment. You could not just sit in silence with a person like we could with animals. I wondered why it was like that.

'I think there is a good film on at 9' she said.

The TV was designed for just such moments. To help you avoid life or to save a bored relationship. I didnt tell her this. I just grunted an affirmation.

'What is with you?' she half laughed.

'I just want to fuck my way into heaven' I repeated after a moment.

I noticed a little glint flicker in her eye. It aroused me. I liked that.
I put my hand gently against her neck and stroked it down over her right breast. When I reached the nippled I crossed it slowly. I held her gaze all the while.

'I'd do anything to set us free' I said and I truly meant it.
'It's not so bad' she said as if wishing me to feel how good she felt. But I knew how it ended. I could read fortunes, it had always been a curse. In the end you lose. The last thing you feel will not be pleasure, but fear mixed with pain. I could never shut that out, much as I tried.

I continued to caress her. We warmed to the body chemistry. This we had in common. It was love in the moment. Wholesome and genuine love and there was some kind of salvation in that.

I felt an erection start to build lazily and shifted in my chair.

'So, are you going to fuck me into heaven or what?' she asked, moving her face closer to mine.

I gave it my best shot and maybe we even reached it for a while. We stayed together nearly two years. She had an affair with a journalist and I left. I'd call her up sometimes just to chat but she didnt want to know me anymore. That hurt more than the affair. He'd even tried to pick a fight with me in a bar sometime later. I was about to punch him in the throat but thought better of it. The desire to kill him right where he stood was so powerful it scared me. Instead I just turned and walked out.

3am pass out

2008-07-14T20:30:00.000+10:00

The time seems to have been racing of late,
And I am at the end of another night again
Where I find 2am sees me just warming up, but alone.
Wandering home, grab a cab.
Try to talk
To the stranger
That makes no sense to me, and I sure don’t make sense.
Various different toxins working in me
None of which
Seem now to bring me any kind of peace.
Just a hunger
Insatiable hunger

I have tried so many ways to appease this
And it is clear the more I try, the deeper and more demanding it becomes.
Maybe a smoke will cure it. I smoke. But it doesn’t.
Maybe more booze will cure it.
It doesn’t
More drugs, more sex, more food, more fucking ANYTHING!
So long as it is bad for me,
it works for a while.
Then the vacuum returns.
Bigger and meaner.
It is right in here.
Right now,
I can feel it.

A hollowness
The hunger.
For what? I don’t know
Sometimes I think it is maybe just life longing to die.
I don’t wish to be morbid
Just ask the question
What is this?
That is never cured in me
and aches, so much, just to be at peace.
This night
At 2.30am
As I sit and type
Into the moment
Alive, really as alive as it gets.
You don’t get more alive than this!
I know,
I have lived.
And time speeds up some more
Reminding me
I have no time.

2008-07-10T22:42:00.001+10:00

the magnetic fields - strange powers

2008-07-10T22:18:00.000+10:00

you call it madness
I call it sanctuary

why is life so futile?
she asked me

probably the wrong person to ask
I said

I put on 'Private Investigations' by Dire Straits
pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge, a rose, Oyster Bay

someone banged on the wall from next door.

'TOO LOUD?' I shouted
but didnt move.
If I had heard a response I would have shouted profanities.
sometimes you just got to let the ears bleed.
despite the discomfort of your neighbours.
they'll be ok tomorrow.
but hell, we might die tonight

if it were not for the music
that plays
to save our souls

to save our souls

there's a funny thing

S.O.S

how many times I have laid drunk across my bed vomiting into a plastic bag, thinking

S.O.S

still no one comes.

I been playing that tune for years

'...scarred for life, no compensation, private investigation...'

but I had no answer for her.
nothing that would relieve the part of her that hurt.

maybe you are polar, or just artistic
I finally said

austistic, more like
was the response.

oh you are a dark horsey, ney

I smiled and we chinked our drinks. two lost souls making like it all meant something in that drunken haze. and it did in some little way.

I kept smelling cheap perfume, mine, not hers.
I wondered if I would ever get some class
but I figured not
why bother
why pretend, I am something I am not.
just a hot blooded gypsy at best
and not exactly the romantic kind

it wasnt long before I began to feel the wolf salivating somewhere inside.
locked in his kennel. chained and tethered. like it did any good.
I would never change.
just howl at the moon
and sometimes she'd come play with me
frolic in the wilds
in the heat
in the lust
where we both found it safe
but others often feared.
funny that.
how our wild hearts tame so easily
but some remain wild forever

2008-07-09T22:10:00.001+10:00

and I told her,

Don't believe that I am an honest man,
there's no solid ground here to build truth on

And she smiled,
and stroked my brow

I stood once in the place where the last of the wild men held off the Romans,
it was where the old ways ended, right there. I could see the fight, I could smell the fire. It was across the water, a place called Anglesey. They were butchered.

What are you on about?
She laughed

I didnt really know how to explain it,
sudden thoughts, random and yet not

I dont know, I said, who I know these things for

Her eyes were blue as sapphire, as corny as it may sound, I could see dreams in them.
That was beautiful to me.
To see that life.

Mine weren't lost, it is just that when you've seen the end of the world through the bottom of a thousand glasses, the wait doesn't seem to appeal quite so much.

Listen gorgeous, I said in the best Sam Spade I could manage. We've got some hours of romance left yet. Why dont I take you somewhere you'll never forget.

She seemed intrigued, I could feel her excitement.

We left the bar into the orange street lights and the rain. Took her car out into the country, I directed her where to go. It was a hill, some way into Wiltshire. High up in the mists it looked out over the world. Lights of cities at night could be seen miles away, a train snaked across the land in the distance, the sound bringing the feeling of sighs. It was beautiful from up here. A cold wind blew, but that just helped to keep the people away. I liked that. We were alone, the two of us. Completely.

You're crazy, you know that
she looked at me, a little confused yet slightly charmed.

Sure I am, kid.
But I knew the magic of that hill, and how it worked;
it moved you, all you had to do was sit up there a while, in the dark.
Things happened up there.

I watched for the signs, that would tell me if we should stay or go.
I pulled out a bottle of Captain Morgan's rum and we took nips til our bellys felt warm.
Two owls hooted in the distant valley and the moon broke through the clouds lighting our shadows infront of us onto the grass.
The mist was light, but better than any Hollow wood movie could have done.
Then it hit,
and I felt her calm upon my arm.
Felt her relax.
Into the place I always had been,
into the mystery

It's beautiful, she whispered.
And it was.
And I knew.

This is when the fear lets you go
all the troubles of the day no longer have power over you,
where the joy comes back, like your childhood, all at once.

It's freedom baby. That's where it is.

I took out a small blue box I'd owned since I didnt know when, on it was a glittering hollogram, I twirled it in my fingers.
It had stars sparkling all the light of the moon that reflected in its depths,
and I felt her gaze marry with mine in there.
Two owls hooted in the valley,
the mist came in,
and we were gone.

In the end, I arrived at the ocean

2008-07-08T21:19:00.000+10:00

I slipped that jacket over my shoulders, it felt good to be in it again. Security warmed my muscles, I smiled and stared out into the dark blackness of the ocean.

I loved the ocean at night, the fear, you could smell it. Where did it go, out there, our fear, I mean? Seemed like I could feel death itself touching me, a wave crashed loudly and made me jump. When your mind was dead from a day in the city, this was the place to come, hear the roar, stand before nature beating the rhythms of life. A little wake up touch.

The ocean and the mountains, the two places the Machine will never reach. Thank god. We can find our true path to freedom there. It's maybe why we love them. Love to stare at them in a day dream, remembering a feeling our ancestors knew. The concrete cannot block them out, cannot nullify our souls in these places, this is the wild truth.

This is where I have come, to stand tonight, and look out knowing I live just a short walk away, yea, that jacket feels good, like my iron shirt, my chi. I feel it return, into the depths of me. I fucking made it. It was THE road to hell but I fucking made it. Aint nothing gonna stop me now. I thought as a another wave broke and soaked my feet in cold. Except that of course. But I have time, and while I have, its good things I will do.

red umbrella in the sunshine

2008-07-07T21:21:00.000+10:00

Took a break through lunch, I was in the city so strolled through Martin Place and sat on a bench to watch the women going by. Think I am falling in love with Sydney. Found myself staring at the sun shining off the tall buildings, listening to a man play some bad spanish guitar, it made me laugh, he was so bad it was comical.
Exactly what was needed.
Things had changed already and I noted it.
I had strolled this street many times on the way back to where I had been staying the past six months, but it was only now I had my own place, finally.
Shit, maybe I was starting to feel at home.

I was beginning to relax a bit, the first time in over a year.
Thought I would love travelling, but I didnt, it made me nervous, insecure.
I almost envied the stupidity of backpackers.
that and their money.
mine had run out.
it wasnt the first time,
but it was the first time I had no rescue.
Had been lost for a while back there, lost inside.
Still, things had turned out ok, as they often did, and I was in a place now,
I had somewhere to shut the door on the world.
light the candles, spill the wine, and listen to classical music.
funny how much we change.
funny how much we follow in the footsteps of others.

A girl walked by, she stood out from the crowd, something about her as much as she was carrying a bright red chinese umbrella and twirling it happily. I smiled at her and she grinned back. Wasnt ready yet to talk to people. Had barely spoken to strangers since being here. I didnt feel comfortable yet, it was starting to happen though. Yea, things were changing. The darkness inside was lifting.
I knew it was going to be alright.
She carried on by,
the guitarist played,
the sun shone,
alone and happy,
that's a good place to be.

2008-07-06T00:18:00.000+10:00

cj bolland - it aint gonna be me
XTC - runaways

2008-07-06T00:14:00.001+10:00

I think it is the same for everyone , but the people who could save us are the ones that dont give a shit.

2008-07-06T00:09:00.001+10:00

black fingernails, red wine

Alicia

2008-07-05T23:08:00.000+10:00

I’d been about a year living in Bristol when I returned to Oxford and to my old group of friends. I was about 21 or 22, the year possibly around 1988. At that point I was single for the first time since I was 15. I had split up with a girl of 6 years who had been my first love, and my only fiancé to this day. I learnt a lesson there. I hadn’t handled it well and it took me the time in Bristol to start to bring myself back from a bad place. It hadn’t been helped by an acid trip gone wrong at the same time as my life spent in love was degenerating. So, I eventually returned to Oxford and into a shared house with some of my old buddies. Things had changed between us, but I hoped it would improve. They were my school friends but the split with my girlfriend had created some kind of irreparable catharsis in my relationship with my friends, I never really understood it. Bristol had been a hard time, I was alone with my dreams there and I missed company. My longed for dream was that of getting my band going. My band was in Oxford, so I gravitated back there eventually. I should have known it was over for us, but something new had happened to me; I had grown my hair, I had started to get a new confidence and shine that I had never owned during my claustrophobic relationship. Women were finally starting to look at me. I had loved Nick, I know that even more today than back then, but that love had a dark side; it had throttled us both to some extent, we were too young, we both had too much going for us to stay together, but breaking up had been soul destroying and messy, I had been totally devoted to her right up until the end. I didn’t know how to flirt or chase women. I had given that desire up the moment I fell in love with her. Could I have stayed with her forever and been happy? I don’t think so, I think my nature, or maybe even destiny, demanded something else from me. Finally, aged 22, after having slept with only 3 women in my life, I found myself at the crossroads, like it or not. It seemed I was attractive to women, and so I leapt eagerly into the opportunity to become a Romeo. I remember the night it happened, the very moment it began, her name was Alicia.

I was in a pub called the Gloucester Arms in Oxford with my drummer, Dave. We had just bought drinks and I was feeling excited by grand ideas that would never even get close to materialising, big bands dreams, every kid has them, most lose them along the way, it took me 40 years, I always found it hard to let dead horses go. A blonde girl came up to me and pronounced she wanted to fuck me. The look of envy on Dave’s face was something I would soon come to regret, it ruptured our friendship forever and ruined any chances of our band getting together. But this had never happened to me before; women wanting me was totally new. I left with her not long after that. She took me to a big house in the country just outside of Kidlington where she looked after horses, I don’t know where it was, but I felt like royalty that night, I was a vagabond gypsy, on top of the world. She was older than me, she was a hunter, a broken woman in many ways that I understand better now, but had no comprehension of back then. She carried out her promise, but she was too crazy for me. We saw each other on and off for about a month before she cut me off cold and I never heard from her again. I didn’t mind, I couldn’t really get with her trying to horsewhip me, and screaming inanities while bouncing viciously on my bits, then wanting me to beat her. I found it hilarious, but disturbing. I was just a simple country boy still. One of the last times I slept with her, I found a piece of paper under my bed not long after she left. She had been playing the ‘dice game’ listing things to do and then following how the dice rolled. They involved choices between having a picnic, leaving without saying a word, or sucking me off before picking a fight. It was too much for my young mind to understand. I felt I was with a much older woman, though she was only a few years older than me, still she was far more worldly wise and cynical, not to mention kinky. She would laugh at my dreams that I fearlessly expressed at that time. She called them ‘noble but naive’ and she was right. It didn’t hurt me, I thought she was an injured soul, lost, beyond saving. I wasn’t wrong, I just didn’t know I was on that same road. She knew, but she hurt too much to care. She fell for me in some way; one night after she had driven me to a bar in Islington, driving back, she said she was in love with me. I had few feelings for her other than a sort of self-centred pity and she was a fun fuck, obviously. I said she just needed something to hold onto, it wasn’t love, and that was where our relationship ended. I guess she didn’t want to feel again, and I wasn’t someone she could trust, I was starting to rise. She just wanted to control something, or be loved, or cared for in a way I couldn’t give. I felt sorry for her, but I was scared of her too. I thought I could do better, and that she was busted, but the truth was I just hadn’t been broken yet. I was healing from love wounds, but it wouldn’t be long before I found myself hurting, longing, wondering the same. Just another soul stretched beyond repair in the zoo.

I found myself in that same Islington bar she took me to 4 or 5 years later when I would unsuspectingly walk into it not long after moving to Mount Pleasant. It was a strange experience to be hit with the recollection like a deja-vu, it cut deep and left me wondering about destiny, and the way we seem to sometimes be delivered to places by people. Things connected up. Alicia had been the one to take me to London, the one to lead me into a new way of being, the one who showed me lust and it’s cruel yet oddly honest bounty. Two years later I had moved up to London, drawn by that same lust. My thoughts were of Alicia that night, I was flying high on drugs and seeing things from another angle. I had been through a lot of tough stuff by then. I was still a Romeo, so I liked to think, really I was just a slut. Things had changed. I was a hunter now. I was hungry for that same virginal shine that was now missing in me, eager to feed on some kind of innocence anywhere I could find it. I was one of the fallen, one of the beaten, one of the hurting, looking for true love, but taking lust instead, yet never getting enough to satisfy that strange, perennial emptiness. Lust was easier; it was colder, pleasurably selfish, it didn’t hurt or leave you vulnerable, and I think I preferred it that way.

I still wonder about Alicia, I seem to see things about her clearer now. I am fonder of her memory, I didn’t realise how much she had been hurt or what that meant, now I do. Now I understand how beautiful she was, kind too, but if I met her again tomorrow it wouldn’t be any different. It’s the romance of the lost moment, reality just never comes close, it would always develop to be an empty disappointment in comparison. But that was were it all began for me, with that girl that night. The magic landed on me and stayed for about 15 years.

*

I sit now alone in a recently rented apartment in Sydney, I am near the beach and trying to make things come together. Trying to find my little piece of happiness. I am no further in life than I was back then, no closer to love, no closer to making sense, no closer to succeeding in anything much. I have the same money in my bank that I did aged 22. That would be zero. I am pretty sure I have been through all the pains and cynicism that I could ever experience. Been through loves, and lusts, yet here I am still; alone, sighing, wondering at this feeling that lingers on each day, so much entwined in life that it must be an integral part of it. And on those lonely nights as I sip Chivas mixed with water over ice, a nostalgia comes, now that I am too old to use the glitter to attract company on lonely nights, even if I went out looking I know I would find nothing. I am not suffering; I have strength and a philosophical outlook, but I have to admit I miss those beautiful days, miss the magic, miss the Alicia’s that would come save me from the moment that might fall, and does now. I don’t know why I was given that gift or why it was gradually taken away. That’s life, right? It sure was good while it lasted and I made the most of it, knowing damn well it would soon be gone, but it makes no difference, maybe it is worse that I had it. But I have to say I felt blessed for a while, and I am grateful for having been granted that to experience. I took a big bite of the peach, but hot damn if I don’t miss the taste now it is gone.

The brief moments of feeling complete and content come when I am so fucked up I can’t speak or feel pain too much, knowing the fall back down is going to hurt so much more than going without would have done, but still people like me have to hurl ourselves at it, it is just what we do. It’s a cruel life whoever you are, don’t let anyone kid you otherwise. Devil or saint. There is no satisfaction to be had here, I still can’t decide if it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved. To have been high and lived, or never to have lived. Either way it fucking hurts. I keep hearing those words a schoolteacher loved to say; ‘What you’ve never had, you never miss’ and he was right, the old bastard, but knowing that doesn’t leave us anywhere better, does it? Still we hunger, and still we are denied the pearl. One day soon I’ll die and be gone like all of us, it makes no sense, but that’s just how it is. How close did we get to nailing it?

I put the radio on and hunt for a station that works, it’s a new country, I am lost here. I find 106.5 where Richard talks patronisingly with his soft and velvety voice to lost lovers desperate to express their deepest emotions. Love songs play predictably gushing, new and old. Some take me back, some just hit me where it hurts. I sip the 12 year old whisky; the only salve I’ve got to hand, legally acceptable in Amsterdam. And I write into the computer surrounded by cold walls I cannot see through, and never will.

Tears fall upon tears
for all eternity
The damned have their dreams of salvation
but the righteous and good
will live forever
in fear of falling.

An old boy called Dave

2008-06-26T21:41:00.000+10:00

Some friends where going to Glastonbury town for the weekend and invited me along with them. I wasn’t doing anything special so I agreed. They were the right kind of people to go to Glastonbury with; kind, spiritual, genuine and intelligent. I usually went to the West Country with more nefarious characters; druggies who liked to rave and get high, so I figured it would make a nice change. There were 8 of us - three couples, a single girl and myself. The plan was to stay in one of the hippy retreats at the bottom of the Tor and explore. I’d been to Glastonbury town a few times I knew it quite well; the chalice well, the site of king Arthur and Guinevere’s grave, the Tor, the witches, the druids, the stories. I knew a lot about this world, you could say I came from it in some ways. I was a Glastonbury festival veteran, I must have been to 15 of them at least. It used to be my Mecca right up until the year the fences finally went up strong enough that they actually managed to keep illegal revellers out. It had to happen in the end, the law was about to shut it down for good, but that was the year Glastonbury Festival lost its real heart beat. It would never be the same again. You need the wildness, and it just won’t get it back. It is a corporate event now. Everything changes, it is just how it goes. Life cycles. The festival is something I could write a book about of itself, hell, maybe one day I will, but this story is about something else, it just so happens to have taken place in Glastonbury Town.

So we hired an 8-seater and drove the 150 miles from London to Somerset after work on a Friday night. It was winter but wasn’t too cold or harsh. Maybe it was spring I don’t exactly remember, but it sure wasn’t summer. We all stayed in a wood cabin on the grounds of the retreat. There was chanting and meditation in the evening, the usual vegetarian dishes, and lesbian hippies all over the place being twee and talking bollocks. Such places always made me sarcastic and obnoxious. I just didn’t seem to settle well into the whole pseudo-spiritual-environmentally-sound thing, which is strange considering how much of a freak I am and what I have seen and done. I always feel a little let down by them somehow, distanced. Like, where is the spunk? It’s all a little pretentious, or maybe I am. I am never certain. Well I tried to go along with it and play nice. My friends were the same, but seemed better adept at being polite and fitting in than I. So I snuck out for cigarettes and wondered when we would all go out drinking so that I could try and pull something. We found a crazy party in the end with drunken West Country cider drinkers playing ukuleles and cross-dressing, t’was quite a night. I started to think it had been a good move getting myself out of London for a change. We got up early the next day, hardly hung over, and raring to get out and about round the town. It is a great place to visit even if you aren’t a hippy. It’s small, but there is magic there, this is the true Isle of Avalon, and if you are even slightly bent towards a spiritual nature then I guarantee there is no better place in the world to have weird and amazing experiences. It is always good, always odd, and always somehow feminine, but I digress.

We did the town, and by the afternoon were ready for the walk up the Tor. For those who don’t know, the Tor is a medieval building atop a strangely layered hill that rises sharply above Glastonbury town. A king hung a monk up there once to prove some point, and there are strange tales about a Badgerman who lives inside the hill. Good old England. You can see the Tor for miles around and it has many legends associated with it. It is a powerful place. The sun was out, it was a calm day, but crisp, and we ascended from the far side up a zigzag path that had seats occasionally for to rest ones tired butt. It was at one of these seats that the single girl, J, met an old guy called Dave. I noticed him immediately because he made me laugh, well his hat did, it was torn in the middle, a flat cap clearly the worse for wear. I had walked past him and nodded hello, then snickered to myself, and continued on. J being the beautiful character that she is, decided to stop and chat, and the next thing we know she has invited him to join our little soiree up to the top of the Tor. Not a big deal, but as Dave’s story unfolded I was touched by J’s perceptiveness to know that this guy really needed something like this to happen just at that moment.

I can be a pretty ignorant son-of-a-bitch at the best of times, but it wasn’t long before I caught snippets of the conversation between J and the old boy, and my curiosity drew me to walk with them. It turned out Dave was 80 years old. He looked pretty good for it, I thought. He could still hold his own in the walk up the Tor. He said it was the first time he had gotten out of his house in a few months. Turned out his wife had died about 2 months previous and he had gone into a state of shock. She had been the only woman in his life; this guy was true old-school British. When she had died his world had, unsurprisingly, fallen apart. He said the last of their good friends had died a few years back and so when she went he realised he had no more friends on this earth. He had no other family alive, but we didn’t ask why. It had hit him hard, he said, and his collapse had been total. He was unable to make sense of the world for a while. For anyone who has had any kind of cathartic shock in life you will know that when these things happen you cease to be capable of functioning, and so it was his body and mind had shutdown. He said he got steadily worse until he ended up laid in bed for 2 days, covered in his own faeces, totally out of his mind, unable to eat, or move, and no idea what to do other than wait for death, and so he waited. What upset him the most was that no one from the local church they had attended for the last few years rang, or came to see how he was doing. Dave was a Christian. He was devastated by the realisation that all those god fearing so-called do-gooders had been so selfish. He couldn’t understand it. In the end, after a couple more days, he managed to get up and clean himself and left the house to get some food. All this had happened a few days previously. He had walked out from his home that morning to the Tor hoping to try to start getting himself back on track, he couldn’t afford the bus fare either and was waiting a few days to collect his next pension, what little it was.

I was shocked by his story and more so, that I had not picked up on his state at all. He just looked like another old boy sat on a bench enjoying the air. I had walked passed so many of them in my time and never considered it much. It got me thinking; how many people had I passed in my life and ignored, yet had this kind of story and just wanted someone to tell it to, some stranger to connect with? You just wouldn’t know to look at them. The loneliness of growing old was so unavoidable as you become more and more distant from people, with less and less reason, or ability, to communicate to strangers who would really probably rather ignore you. I had been pretty blasé towards him, I was always like this, and I had no idea until then just how bad I was. I had seen that loneliness before too, with my Granddad and my Gran. It dawned on me that there was no escaping this fate for any of us. The only way out was an early death and no one wanted that. Life was so god damn cruel. The future was a pretty scary place.

Dave hung out with us for the day, he was so revitalised by having human contact it was a beautiful thing to see. He said he had never met people like us, always hanging round older people as he had, but he was no fuddy duddy, he’d had many adventures in his life, a few of which he told us about. You could see the glow in his eyes as he recounted them and the pleasure he took in having an audience that actually was interested to listen. I wondered what kind of life he must have been living the past few years and what kind of people he’d had to suffer just to find company. The human world can be so full of coldness and false pretence. He kept saying how different we were, but I knew we were just younger, it was changing for us every day, getting a little harder and more isolated.

We took him back to the retreat and the lesbians made a big fuss of him, danced with him, fed him, and generally totally won me over for being able to give the guy a bit of love that he really deserved. I was shamed to admit they were better people than me after all, they knew how to give love to a stranger. Another thing that amazed me about Dave was how he had no bitterness in his soul whatsoever. I was 40 and already 40 times more twisted over life than this guy, and my story was nothing compared to his. But there was an unspoken fear there, we all sensed it in our own ways, it was our fear; the reflection he brought to us that made us look into our own lonesome souls and quake in terror at the inevitable day that this would happen to us, that we would find ourselves alone, love-lost, and helpless. I guess this is why all those churchgoers shunned him, instead bowing to their false sanctuary they called the Church of God, going each Sunday to put a little money in the charity tray just to buy off the guilt they must feel, because I figured everyone of them knew damn well they were avoiding Dave.

The sad thing was, or maybe it wasn’t sad at all, but on the journey home the next morning after what had been a life changing weekend in many ways, I sat in the back staring out the window at the rain falling on the queues of cars taking the M4 motorway back to the Big Smoke, when a thought struck me; Had anyone bothered to get a contact number or address for him? I asked, knowing I wasn’t the sort to stay in touch, but thinking they might, of course no one had.

That was the way it went sometimes, you fell into a moment, you passed people like ships in the night, experienced something profound yet often disturbing, and then it was gone like dust through your fingers before you could grab the goodness in it. A guilty silence descended, but I knew we had done something right, there was nothing more we could have done really. The experiences came and went, like life did, and we had shared it in the best possible way. If we had clung on, it wouldn’t have kept the magic, it happened how it happened and it was right, I felt sure. I snuggled down, pulling my jacket round me, and listened to the hum of the engine and the music play quietly, watching the red car lights lead me back to one of the biggest cities in the world and yet a place where you could live in anonymity without speaking to a soul for years, all the while surrounded by over a million people. Makes you wonder about us all really. How cold we get, how uncommunicative we become as the years go by, and how hard it is to stay happy, so god damn hard just to believe everything is going to be ok in the end.

The Blue Butterfly

2008-06-22T10:11:00.000+10:00

It lay shimmering in the African morning sun. Iridescent blue that appealed to my eyes. I crouched down to look closer and saw it was a beautiful blue butterfly. The way the sun created such rich, deep colours on its wings fascinated me. But something about it was not right. Moving its wings slowly, not flapping, and it was lying on its side. It was about the size of my hand, but I had the small hands of a six year old. A shadow came over the sun and I looked up.

‘What you got there? said my mum.

‘A butterfly mum, I think it’s broken’ I said.

I could see something in her eyes change as she looked more closely at it. I didn’t understand that look.

‘Can I keep it?’ I asked

‘Well its probably best to let it be’ she said

‘I’ll look after it, I am sure I can fix it’ I was pretty convinced of my abilities, all it took was love, right?

In the end she relented, but there was something that annoyed me in the way she did. It felt like she was hiding something from me.

I took the butterfly to my room, put it on a shelf and watched it. I could see its little proboscis moving in and out. I willed it to get better, I spoke to it, tried to gently touch it and stroke it, but dust came off on my fingers when I did, so I didn’t touch it again. I made some prayers to God, made some promises to be good if he fixed my little friend. Then I got my eye up real close and peered at it. It had such strange big and round, black eyes. I wondered what it was seeing. My Gran came in.

‘What do butterflies eat Nan?’ I asked

‘You could try giving it some honey’. I thought it was a great idea.

I fetched some and placed a small amount by its head as near to that flicking proboscis as I could get. I stayed for maybe an hour watching it, praying it would fix. I knew it would. I loved it so much, I knew it was going to be grateful to me and stay with me.. There was a kid at school who had a pet a crow that would sit on his shoulder. I wanted a crow. I didn’t know how you got one, he never told us. He never said much at all, he was pretty cool though.

‘Dinner’s ready Mark’ I heard my mum shout. I didn’t want to go but I knew they would insist.

At dinner I sat staring out the window thinking about the butterfly, I was eager to get back but my family had rules about eating; Kids never left the table until all the family had finished. It always frustrated me, there was always something better to be doing, usually out in the garden, especially in Africa, there was so much to see, I loved it there. It was so alive, in any bit of dirt you could find something. All adults seemed to want to do was talk, and about really boring things. Their voices brought my mind back, it sounded like they were talking about me, but I wasn’t sure.

‘He’s got to learn sometime Meredith’ said Gran.

‘Learn what?’ I asked.

‘We aren’t talking about you dear’ my mum lied, giving me another look I didn’t understand.

Why was she sad? I wanted to hug mum. There was something odd about Gran though, she was pretty scary, I wasn’t sure I liked her. She always showed me kindness, but to a kid, her worldly wisdom made little sense, she was a tough old bird.

When they finally let me go it was from a silence. All their eyes followed me out. I ran down the corridor to my room, burst through the door hoping to find the butterfly flying around, but it wasn’t. It was still in the same position I had left it, except now it was motionless. It looked just as beautiful, nothing about it had changed, nothing in the colour of it’s wings, or the eyes, there was nothing that really showed me much of anything, it just didn’t move anymore. I pushed at it. I couldn’t understand this. How could it not be moving, why would God not fix it after I had promised. I didn’t understand what this was.

My mum came in. She had tears in her eyes, and as soon as I saw her I burst into tears too. I wasn’t really sure why, there was a feeling growing in my belly that I had never known before, it was vast and uncomfortable, it was painful and I didn’t want it to be there, I wanted it to stop growing but it wouldn’t, it grew until it had consumed the warm feeling that was normally inside me. As it did all I could do was cry, and the more I cried, the more my mum cried.

‘Why wont it move any more mum?’ I sobbed
‘Its dead, darling. God wanted it to go to heaven to be with him’
‘Why couldn’t he let it stay here with me?’
‘I don’t know darling’

She had no answer for me, nothing that I could understand. I cried until I felt sick. After a day or two I got used to that funny feeling in my belly, or maybe it just went away again, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the butterfly or why God hadn’t let me keep it. I wouldn’t cheer up. I couldn’t, instead I sulked about the house, being scolded occasionally by my Gran for not ‘being a little more grown up’. I guess I was a sensitive kid.

I was moping about in the garden when I heard a voice,
‘Mark, come with me’ it was Smart, the gardener who worked at my Grans house. I had never spoken to him before, he was a really old black man and that scared me, I still wasn’t used to people with black skin. They seemed to keep themselves very separate from us, he never sat at dinner with us, and I never heard Gran invite him. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do.

‘Come, come’ he said again in his African twang, and pulled gently at my hand.

In the end curiosity got the better of me as much as his insistence, and I followed him out into the garden. He took me to the rockery and carefully held my shoulders for support as he got me to lean over a small bush and look on the other side. What I saw there was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. There were two snakes curled up enjoying the sun. I had never seen a snake before. I looked at Smart and he beamed at me. I beamed right back, I liked Smart, and best of all that pain in my belly was gone too.

The other world

2008-06-21T21:15:00.000+10:00

I was struggling to see straight. We had been in the club for about 6 hours and there was another 6 hours to go, if we wanted it. I could feel the pills wearing off. I could see P chewing his jaw. He saw me looking at him,

‘What you laughing at?’ He asked

I couldn’t reply. I was still too whacked out. I just raised my slitted eyelids and dropped them back down again. Too much trouble. I think I was chewing my jaw too.

N came over. He had something in his hand and pushed it towards my mouth. I struggled to stop him. The reaction made my voice work again though I noticed that colours were still blurring too bright to make much sense of anything. God the music was loud.

‘What the f...!’ I pushed his hand away. ‘What is it?’ I asked. He was grinning at me.

‘Acid’ he said conspiratorially.

‘Oh, ok’

For some reason this was fine, and I took it and popped it into my mouth. Felt that ever so subtle slither of ether-like glisten on my taste buds that told me it was the real deal. I swallowed, and gulped it down with a bottle of beer he had in his hand. I already felt more awake just from knowing what was coming next.

We went higher that night. Maybe 7 of us. At one point I tapped C on the shoulder and pointed to a man walking across the smoke filled dance floor.

‘Blue Dragon’ C said.

‘Come from the underworld’ I replied.

We both knew. We watched to see where this creature would go. It drifted off into the smoke and was gone. Then a woman came up. She was all arms and zest, like a jumping cricket. She had a cricket soul. We could see it. She offered us a smoke on her fat reefer and we breathed it in. The three of us enveloped for a while in a cloud of weed. I don’t know what was said but something passed between us.

A little higher we went, a little higher, and a little higher. Edging up to the place where you would never remember, not even therapy could reach it because it made no sense. It was the other world. It felt like the place we really belonged. Everyone was happy when they got there, there was a calm and peace that decended and a joy too. An openness. I never understood why it was so hard for us to get there. We had to do so much. blow our minds. Sure there was fear, that followed us in, from this world. Always the fear but you could control it for a while. But when you fell, oh dear christ, then it went down like Icarus.

I tapped C again and pointed to the ground near our feet. This happened every time. He smiled.

‘Vortex’ I said, ‘ I think that is where all this comes from’
He nodded. He understood. It was good to share the vision. I felt good. Kindred spirits I rarely found.
The energy in this place was different to anywhere I had ever been. I reckoned it was some kind of portal to the otherworld. It was the only explanation I had.

Then F walked by. He appeared to be on something of a mission. He was wearing nothing but some tight lyrca bicycle shorts and a Vietnam US helmet.
We watched him make his way past us to the DJ booth whereupon we heard him try to order chips from the DJ. Unsurprisingly this didn’t go well. F was an insistent sort.

I don’t remember too much else. The acid and poppers were taking me out of the last bit of mind where memory could function. F returned past us. Disgruntled at his failure to acquire chips and aided by a suprisingly understanding member of Scorpion Security. C and me struggled to stop laughing long enough to observe him moments later attempting to unscrew the top of a black guys baldhead. That was too much, and I fell on the floor clutching at my stomach.

I have no idea how I got home or even if I did. This was commonplace in London clubs in the mid 90’s. The party moved on but my visions remain. They had always been there really, I just learnt to slip into the state of mind where I could see. We all have it. I just never came back from that once it opened up, some people are like that. I don’t mind. I would share them, but they make no sense in this world, so would be of no use to you.

Put those thoughts to paper

2008-06-21T20:42:00.000+10:00

What is this longing to be free? Keeps me up at night burning the midnight oil. Keeps me fighting through life living for the dream. Keeps the fire in my blood. What is this mission I am inexorably bound to. Like a captain on a crewless ghost ship damned to sail the seas looking for a land that is lost in time. What is this? Why is this in me?

I have always been strange. It wasnt drugs that did this. Maybe it was all the travel as a kid, never settling down. Maybe it was this, or maybe it was that. It only became a bother to me when I could no longer control it. When it took me over. That is when it became something of a curse.

I have been an adventurer, but never quite became a superhero. Which is a shame as I would have done great things, but I suppose we can’t have everything. But when the adventure trail cools, and I sit of an evening with a candle on the table, pen in hand, and my ship gently sways from side to side still moving through quiet waters, I find myself back to that same place. That same lament. That same question, that same why.

What is this longing to be free? Free of what? I am not sure I even know.

Glitter in the eyes

2008-06-21T18:57:00.000+10:00

Walked down to the end of Rushcutter bay. It seems to be the place I go when I need a Saturday afternoon chat with ...whatever might be out there listening.

I sat on the wall at the end and watched the sun glitter off the ocean, sparkling into my half closed eyes. It felt most divine. I let my mind undo reality for a while. Felt good. Took the pain of the hangover off.

Then a tune I had downloaded came on my iPod; Passion by Gat Decor. It threw me because I hadn’t heard this tune since I was high on ecstasy back in Turnmills in London during the 90’s. That glitter in the eyes mixed with the flood of joy at such an unexpected recollection hit me hard, and I remembered we nearly made it. We touched heaven on those nights. So far out of our minds we were insane enough to be liberated for a moment. It was tribal and wild. Half naked stomping about a club, feeling the love, dancing like bastards, like we had escaped the suffering, the pain, the drudgery of real life. For a few hours we had.

It’s a cruel twist that most of the people on that journey back then are now either dead, or struggling with inner demons from the effect of long term drug abuse. Glimpsing heaven has a high price. No one wanted to come down, so generally we didn’t. I don’t think drugs are a bad thing. I think we are searching for something, and there are going to be causalities until we get there. If we ever do. Freedom costs lives. We are trying to direct our evolution, speed it up.

I felt ok in my reverie looking out on the Harbour. I felt pleased with myself that I had made it this far. I was living on the other side of the world. Lost the good friends, but escaped the bad. Next week would see me move to Bondi, finally getting to live by the sea again. Last night was a full moon. It felt like a change had come, my phone broke too, so I lost all the numbers of people I had met since being here in Sydney. It was a new beginning and I knew this. I understood the rules of destiny. So I went out and got drunk alone in a club. Enjoyed the music. Always following the music.

I walked back home through the afternoon sun and Kings Cross. I was feeling pretty good. As I walked up the back streets I noticed two people at the top by a phone. It was a deserted street. I suddenly knew there was something bad about these two. I could see it. I can’t explain that, but my instincts are fine-tuned. I trust them. I was right. As I got closer I could see the eyes, I could see the effects of ICE wearing off. I crossed the road. They looked at me. It was jungle. We all knew something, like fucking telepathy. I knew they would kill me for money, and were high and in a bad place, and they knew that I knew it. I felt the chill of fear. Could this be it for me? I wondered. The creatures shifted as if trying to figure if they could take me. I knew they could, but I couldn’t let them know it. I then slipped into my own dark place. Nothing mattered there. I caught the eyes again and in that moment the bad stopped. No one wants hell to descend, everyone wants the easy life. Hell is a look in the eyes that means it. I figure all three of us were already in hell, none of us needed to make it any worse. It would have got bloody.

Fuck ICE. I am glad I gave up full-time narcotic abuse before that stuff hit the streets.

I pass the trouble, turn into the main road and am glad to see normal humans milling around doing what they do, shopping and talking and shit. That was close. It’s always too close. This is the world I live in. It is ugly and cruel. It is hungry and dangerous. It is nature in all her murderous glory. Beautiful to observe, terrifying to experience.

All we wanted was a shot at freedom, a real chance to make it, we never made it, we ended up in Hell. But some of us survive yet. We saw heaven, almost believed she was a real place, almost dared to believe. In a week I will be by the sea and my journey will continue. Maybe I am still a believer. I just don’t really know anymore. It is like I am in auto-pilot willing to fight only because I dont know what else to do.

Yea, but I don't remember much...

2008-06-19T22:00:00.000+10:00

Maybe you should write your memoirs – she said.

I thought about it. I had already noticed how past forty things start to get a little, well, you have memories and that’s it. The zing has gone. I already said how I felt it go. It’s cruel. Watching the world spin on without you.

I decided not to reply. I would think about it a while. I still figured I had the music in me. I loved the music, the music loved me, sometimes. I wasn’t ready to be a writer. I could write shit for days, but when I tried to say something honest, from the heart, it always seemed to come out wrong. It never read right. Nah, I wasn’t ready yet to write my memoirs.

I was in a limbo, some kind of formative stage where nothing more was going to happen in life, nothing pleasant at least, but neither was any of what had happened going to make much sense. Not yet. I couldn’t lay claim to wisdom. I was too young. 50 maybe. If I could live that long.

So what to do for the next 10 years?

I didn’t gamble anymore, it bored me. I didn’t fuck any more, it just wasn’t satisfying like it used to be. Whores didn’t do it for me. I wasn’t interested in love, it just hurt or made demands I wasn’t very good at living up to. I didn’t drink anymore, hang on, I drank like a fucking fish so that was a lie, but I had eased back on the drugs. I was pretty much clean. Jesus! No wonder life looked bland. I had chosen LIFE. And it seemed life was pretty boring as a straight guy. How had it come to this? Oh yea, I had decided to step out of the gutter for a moment and get a job. I was alive and almost healthy but as a result, shame of all shames, I was B.O.R.E.D.

I wondered how easy it would be to score some acid in this town. I saw a bus go by, a sign on the side said ‘Follow the Music’, I wondered what it could mean. Hell, I didn’t need acid! I still hadn’t come down since that brown microdot in ’86.

This was true.

Hmmm, my memoirs. I sure had done a lot of stuff, most of it crazy too. I figured I was a good candidate for a memoir. I just had no idea where to begin or how to write it. Or even why. What was the point? What would I be trying to say? Who would be interested? I checked the number of people who had visited my blog: about 400 since it began in June 2007. It wasn’t many, and of them only 3 had dared to leave messages. That wasn’t exactly a fan club. So whom was I kidding here? Who the fuck would read my memoir?

It was a good point and one that troubled me. The more I thought about it, the more I found myself asking what life had been all about. Never a good thing. Especially when you’re still caught in it’s pincers and feeling the squeeze, smelling it’s breathe and seeing the ugly smile of the crustaceous beastie, that surely will devour this sweet soul long before it gets a chance to truly shine. Aint that always the way here.

Fuck the fucking fucker!

I shall call it ‘Memoirs of the Brave but Stupid’, and it shall be a stormy tempest of truth and heroism. Oh aye.

Ever wondered why you felt you were possessed by the Devil?

2008-06-15T16:15:00.000+10:00

When you can’t find explanations for things that are hard to define, it sometimes helps to look at them from a different perspective.

There is a labyrinth of impenetrable darkness inside everyone. Kind of like a blind spot. Most of the time we don’t go in there, but sometimes we end up in there and get lost for a while. Sometimes things follow us back from there and we never get free of them again. Sometimes things come to us from there without us doing anything to provoke or call them.

For whatever reason today’s world wants to deny it even exists. We are scared of it. Anyone who shows signs of being in there is someone we go out of our way to avoid, in case they pull us in with them. Then there are the strong ones, the ones who go in there regularly and what they find in there they use to good effect in the world. They are usually powerful people and usually blinded by their own power. It is the nature of everything that comes from that place to be impossible to pin down, impossible to see directly, yet it is strangely attractive to us on a deep level. It has the effect of making humans behave in bizarre ways. Without certain key things to protect us, we don’t stand a chance against the effect of what happens in there. People who spend too long in there, or end up in there by disaster in their lives, or by accident, generally go crazy and often stay that way. Fear is the key to knowing that place and recognising when it is touching our lives. Fear is also the reason we have deliberately sort to avoid it all our lives, as have many generations before us.

This is a precursor to something that I have been trying to get a perspective on but failed to for years. Trying to find a way to understand and reference the things I have seen or that have effected me, but for which I have found no reference points in the culture I am born into. It is a real enough place because it is based on perception. As soon as our perception of the real world alters we find ourselves functioning from within this other place. Usually uncontrollably and with a constant sense of terror and fear that forces us to try to escape it. The things we find in there lead us to question our lives, our sanity, and our reason d’etre. They often appear to reach beyond our lifetime, and that is when things can become a problem in our current lives as a direct result of entering in there.

It is a doorway, the indigenous people who existed most everywhere around the planet before modern man, seem to have referred to it as ‘the spirit world’ or ‘the other side’ and dealt with it in far more deliberate and controlled ways than modern man does. There is a good chance a lot of the emotional problem experienced by modern man are a direct result of avoiding dealing with what lies in the darkness beyond that doorway we find within.

Emotional problems, inexplicable outbursts, uncontrollable sources of anxiety can often be traced to this darkness within us. Trying to resolve it with our current perspective clearly fails to work because it doesn’t provide us the tools with which we need to manipulate any part of us touched by it. To get to the root of it we need to look at it in ways that make little sense except in context of the rules of this labrynthical, inexplicable and mysterious aspect of us. It requires suspending our modern rationales and letting something older, and to some extent larger, come into play.

There is a danger here; in opening up to something that can affect us in ways our minds radar cannot pick up we risk bringing effects upon our lives that are uncontrollable, unexpected, and far reaching. In this regard an attempt to heal something can very quickly become a recipe for disaster that might take years, if not lifetimes, to put right. The seriousness of this point cannot be stressed enough. As a result any practices that help open a person up should rightfully be veiled in secrecy and protected simply in order to protect those who might stumble upon it.

It is not something we really ever have to be concerned with in our lives, other than as a dinner conversation topic, unless we find ourselves caught in an internal quandary that negatively affects our daily lives and defies curing by normal methods. It is under these circumstances that we have to draw on other forms of knowledge in order to bring about a harmonious solution and restore balance to our lives again. It is often a simple remedy that precipitates a cure, the hard part is reaching the place in which we can find that cure.

Karma, Past lives, Possession are all elements that are relevant in the context of this part ourselves. Anxiety, violence, fear and a sense of loss of control are all common attributes experienced when working in this area of ourselves.

To bring about a balance to agitation experienced within us we need to follow the symptoms to their root, into the labyrinth of impenetrable darkness and let another part of ourselves take over from the mind in leading us to a solution. In doing this we begin to find these symptoms are a cry for help from a part of us that runs deeper than our individual lifetimes. In trying to understand this concept it may help to think of our bodies having genetic imprints that we have inherited, this is easy for our minds to accept and explains to some extent how and why we function the way we do in this life; based on a long and evolved lineage of people going back to the beginning of man, and even life on earth. A grand notion, but one science has enabled us to accept. And so it is with the emotional and spiritual aspects of ourselves, through entering into that doorway we start to come across the long line of inherited experiences, lifetimes, that connect up to the living energy that we are today. From this perspective it isn’t too hard to understand how unresolved issues, emotions and actions that are nothing to do with our current lives, can come to have a bearing on us, all the while having their root somewhere else. Hence the difficulty in dealing with the cause of our reactions when we have no explanation or point of reference for them in this life, hence too the failure to bring about a solution. It is for this reason we have to go much deeper.

Looking at it in this way we can estimate that most people alive today and part of the Western culture have potentially at least 50 generations of people in their families between their indigenous ancestors and themselves. It is unlikely that any of those 50 generations ever dealt with their emotional issues in the terms we have discussed here. Is it also possible that we have 50 generations within us that are not necessarily our blood family, but our own ‘past lives’ dating back to a time when we ourselves might have been part of an indigenous culture that was aware of an ‘other side’ or ‘spirit world’ and actively sought to placate problems of an emotional and spiritual nature by delving into it on those terms.

It isn’t so difficult, then, to imagine that there are a lot of unresolved problems that could have filtered down to us today. Problems we probably would feel we have no responsibility to address, let alone consider. But what if we are wrong? What if the very clue to resolving many of our problems we experience today lies in putting into balance problems caused by people of yesterday? If we knew doing this would help us to live happier lives would it still be something we would be willing to refuse responsibility for?

Finding the problem is one thing, resolving it is another altogether. But the first step is in revealing the true root of the problems we experience within ourselves today. Shining a light on aspects of it that we have probably intuited all along but never had the method by which to hear what our inner being has been trying to tell us. In revealing this mystery to our minds it is possible we will set in motion that which will allow us to unravel the tension that has vibrated within us across time, and vibrates in us today. It is rarely a pretty experience nor an easy going one to face. But unless we address it, it will continue to vibrate in our lives, and resonate with the world outside us as we walk through it, and therein lies the root cause of our turmoil.

Ever wondered why you felt you were possessed by the Devil?

Sanctuary

2008-06-15T12:18:00.001+10:00

I get in, its been a long hard day, I could have gone for a drink to take the edge off but something drew me home instead. I light a candle on my bedside table. Switch the light off and sit on the bed catching my breathe.

This is my sanctuary.

I look at the shadows dance about from the flickering light. The figurines that make up what I guess you could call my shrine. It is a shrine of sorts. Each one reminding me of something out there, a god maybe, a force, energy, or guiding light that we communicate with on such a deep level that words mean little to try to express it. They've been with me some years now. This is my personal religion, this is how I work.
I feel myself relax a little. This is where things make sense, not out there in the machine. In here I am some kind of shaman. I laugh to think of it. What must I look like sat here in a business suit in front of a candle, light dancing about over small figurines and little totems? Like a kid with his toys.

That anxiety is in me still, the one that tugs at the guts all the waking day. The ache. Sometimes so powerful it drives me crazy. I know what I have to do. This is why I came home tonight. I had to. I need to dress the wound that never heals.

I straighten my back, half shut my eyes, let my mind drop a little, focus on the breathe moving in and out of my nostrils and try to bring that nagging wildness that jumps and lunges inside to some kind of silence.

It takes me a while. Maybe 20 minutes and then I feel it. It is subtle, like a slow stilling of shaken water, but as it calms and the ripples inside become almost nothing, then I know I am there. I feel the anxiety dissipate, like a mirage that I had been unavoidably engrossed, obsessed with. Feeding it with my own energy all along. I feel it then, a smile from deep, deep inside. It doesnt rise onto my face but it is there within glowing inside me and spreading through my body, it feels beautiful, like a gigantic warmth and I remember again how it feels to be happy and strong. I stay there for as long as I can. Sometimes an hour but rarely more. The distractions come, maybe a thought or a sudden feeling of boredom, or some noise outside, but something always comes and breaks in. The world is so demanding, on the inside as well as out.

I am enveloped in an exquisite feeling. It's one I have spent a long time nurturing and growing. I wonder about it, wonder why I can't hold it unless I drop into this silence. Eventually I have to leave it. Surface again to the world to function, and it doesnt take long before I am fighting the demons again, feeling overwhelmed and confused and agitated. They are there waiting for me outside the door, one day their barbs and poisons will get through my armour, will get in, and that day will be my last. I know this. I dont pretend I am not afraid. But this is my church, here in this room tonight but it could be anywhere, I could make it out of mud and bones because that is where it all began. I believe it is the same for us all.

I open my eyes. I can feel a shine on them. I smile. Why didnt they teach us how to do this at school? This is what we need, this that has kept me alive these past few years. I look in the candle. The atmosphere in the room so different now to when I arrived. I've shaken it off. I know this is a special flame I keep burning, maybe this is my task, yea maybe it is. Maybe one day it will all make sense why it is with me, why I carry it here in the midst of the machine, the land of the spiritually dead, the world of amnesiacs. We stew in a pain that we can't ever let go until we remember where we came from and why we came. I hold the light tonight. This is the campfire and all are welcome, if they only knew.

I have my freedom. I have my escape whenever I need it. This is why I am not afraid anymore. This is why I can look at the dirt and decay, the agony and death, the bitter cruel darkness of any part of life. I can look right at it and know - as much as it can painfully devour us, it can never really touch us at all.

For all or nothing

2008-06-14T19:45:00.001+10:00

Something has got me mystified at the moment. The way we get opened up by life. It cuts to the bone. You recognise others who have been wounded that deep. It’s all the way. Only a few manage to stay sane, any bum on the street is a classic case of the fallen. The others, ones like maybe you and me, we manage to pretend, manage to remain functioning in our lives somehow. I don’t understand it. I have given up everything, been thrown and leapt into death and the fires of insanity, and yet sprung back each time. Alive again. Maybe not even wanting to be, but in truth, not really much caring either way. It’s almost a gift.

All I ever wanted was the world to respond, the universe out there, just to do something that showed it had a value to our existence, however small we may be.

I watch everyone each day. Are they all so blind to what is happening about them. Floating on a rock spinning out of control in God knows what kind of creation? And yet the most important thing to them is something so inconsequential as what is on the TV next, or what they can do to impress someone, to belong. That’s what I call crazy.

People think it’s depression. I even wonder myself sometimes, but it isn’t depression, it is a darkness, sure, but it is a powerful truth. A fearless truth. It has its purpose. Life in a foxhole. Staring at the shadows knowing the unknown lies behind them, fills them, waiting for us. Looking at them too long sucks the shine out of your eyes. That’s the danger. That was my mistake in the end. Looking too long and too hard in the hope of finding an answer, a cure for the fallen. I was warned, I just couldn’t listen, wouldn’t listen. Not interested. Give me one punch at God, just one good one. The difference between us is that I’ll help him back up and give him a hug and maybe say something like ‘see how it feels, now don’t do it again’. I wont leave him in the dirt.

It isn’t a cry for help, or a tear from a broken heart, it isn’t a wish for better days, or a fear of loneliness, or any thing of the kind. It’s deliberately living with a poison in your veins because there has to be a solution for all, and it won’t be found any other way.

The ugliness of truth

2008-06-01T14:49:00.000+10:00

I am struggling to survive
I feel pretty alone here, I just dont connect with people. I look at faces as they pass by me and as the weeks become months this becomes a painful recognition that I am failing to have any kind of meaningful communication with anyone. It creates an isolating feeling that snowballs.
I struggle to stay afloat.
I begin to understand why people take their lives rather than continue on
when all seems hopeless
but I believe I am better than that.
I believe I am stronger.
I know the truth is I am not, but if I dont pretend to be...
I can see the fall below
and I wont survive it.
I have to pretend,
so I do.
I make like it will all work itself out
eventually.
I lie to myself.
I know what is coming.

People dont like to talk about this kind of thing.
They get scared being reminded of their own isolation and fear.
So I dont speak about it.
Who would I tell anyway.

Right now I am broke.
This means I have no place to live
so I sponge off my family for comfort and a room
This can only go on for so long.
I dont feel secure but I have shelter.
I see the months go by and the pay checks arent enough to bring me up
from the pit.
I hold steady
I consider this something
It leaves me with just enough to drink
I dont hurt when I drink
but I hurt double when I am hungover.

I am lonely.
I never thought I would hear myself say that
but I am lonely as hell right now, if I am honest.
just to feel a human touch again would be something
this barren time
has left me needy for comfort
I never used to be needy. I dont understand this in myself.
I try to block it out
but it cant be blocked out.
not this kind of thing.
I tried paying for a whore
but it was an empty experience. so fake. and left me feeling more alone than before
and a lot poorer.

Drunk in a cab on the way home from a party I had to gatecrash to get invited to
I held a girls hand.
I never realised how much warmth comes from a woman's hand
when you need it so much.
I told her. She smiled awkwardly.
I tried to kiss her.
She pushed me away
‘I have a boyfriend’ she lied. I knew she didnt.
But she kept hold of my hand
and I was grateful for that.
When she got out, I saw the black cab driver had been staring at us all along in the mirror.
‘What?’ I said angrily, more hurt at being reminded how cold life was,
and how my selfish and desperate attempts had been watched without my realising.
I didnt understand his reply.
I wanted to be mean;
‘Just fucking drive the car mate’ I said, and looked out the window to take my mind off it all.
I didnt feel guilty.
I could see his eyes, and in them I could see something I didnt like. I saw that in a lot of people.

I wondered how long this would last.
I wondered how long I would miss home that didnt even exist for me anymore.
I wondered how long it would be before I had a life around me again
and not empty weekends spent walking round a city full of people
all busy going somewhere.
While I waited.
Not knowing what I was waiting for,
or why.
Looking at women.
Wondering why talking to people was so god damn hard.
I'd get drunk alone in bars
but that just attracted strange looks and strange and mean people. Lost souls.
I had joined their ranks and that was unexpected.

Destiny brought me here
but for what? for this?
I didnt understand how this had happened.
I used to be friendly. It was so easy once.

Now I was living terrified of the future. The emptiness of it. The pain of it. Every morning waking up from a bad nights sleep, maybe three or four hours at most. Looking at the bags under my eyes and fighting to throw off a heavy emptiness in my belly that came from knowing no meaning in your life. none at all. A sick feeling. A sickness I can't explain, but if you have felt it too, you will know.
It comes with a sense that there is nothing more than this.
That this is the truth of things.

Waiting for the pay check.
Spent before it arrives.
Hating the job,
but needing it more.
And no where to go on a Friday night.
Unable to talk to people for more than a few minutes
because something hurts too much inside.
It's like it wants to burst out and smother everything.
Slowly becoming a bitter anger.
like a lost and damned spirit
got caught in my soul.
somewhere along the way.
This is not me.
How did I become this?

This is the ugliness of truth
when we are in it
people cannot get near to us.
and we fall back
alone
into something cruel and cold beyond belief.
emptiness.
this is not a place to die.
but there is no way to fight it.
and there is no escape.
I do not know what comes next.

So, you wanna save the world ?

2008-06-01T13:34:00.001+10:00

What is the point in trying to change the world?
The world is just some big reflection of what is going on inside of us.
The way we act in it, tells a story about how we are in ourselves.
People who want to save the world, it seems to me, want saving themselves.

and so on.

I sat in on a meditation class, they told me ‘I does not exist’ and proceeded to prove to me why. I got the idea. But grasping it to the bosom and really experiencing it, was not so easy. So ‘I currently does exist’
but is working on it.

I emailed someone from blog world, in retrospect it was a mistake. I either said too much or didn’t say enough. The reply. Well, the reply was silence. I have this effect on people. I am the kind of guy who gets bitten by dogs that have ‘never done that before, it must be something about you’

Correct. Something about me. That’s nice. Maybe it is my polecat scent.

Anyway I emailed this person and what I wanted to say was this –

‘Look, I actually understand you better than you think, I have no idea why, we have had similar things happen to us in our lives, bad things, real bad things, maybe that is it, but right now it seems to me you are slowly becoming a caricature of yourself, and instead of using whatever gift you have for good, you are heading down a path where your power will desert you and instead of owning it, as you think you do now, you will become what you fear. You are fishing with that shit and it aint good for you.‘

Yea pretty dramatic and judgemental stuff huh, which is why I didn’t write it and instead wibbled on like a homo and as a result got no reply.

You are probably also getting the hang of why otherwise placid dogs attack me. But enough about me and my ways. We were talking about saving the world and god knows, right about now it needs it.

I was thinking of starting a new religion. In fact what the hell, this calls for a whole new post...

2008-05-27T21:22:00.000+10:00

at what temperature does cheese become a gas?

Time matters not

2008-05-27T21:09:00.000+10:00

Excuse the time-line jumpiness of some of the below posts, I found them lost in the dark dusty folders on my 'puter and so stuck them up here since they needed some reason to be.

On the first day of dying..

2008-05-27T21:07:00.001+10:00

Oh my god! old age is for real. I don’t know whether to fight it or just acquiesce. What do you do? you wont believe it when it starts to hit you. Its just a dull ache in the wrist and feet. A slight sense of difficulty getting out of bed, something, something in everything. It’s there I can feel it. I am sensitive. It’s just a hint, a whisper of it. but I seen it, felt it. Its not a death, it's just a door that shut while I was asleep last night and now I cant open it. In fact there is no door anymore just a wall. Like someone came in an pasted over it when I wasn’t looking. Like there never was a door. And its one less room I got in my house. One less place I can visit. but I remember there was a door there I am sure.

The sun is setting on a day that did something strange to me but I have no idea what. Beautiful red cloud summer skies, London. The overground train heading home. Harrow. more hell tomorrow but I am not scared only scarred. Youth gone and going. I did it well but not well enough to get to keep it. Got to learn now to adjust to this new way. It’s tough, tough and hard for me. don’t sink too deep that you get lost. Don’t give in so much that you stop. But don’t pretend you still are what you once were. Got to evolve. or maybe devolve. Now more than ever I need to find grace and elegance, panache and sophistication. Don’t let me replace my youth with pigeon eyes, regret and desperation. But don’t let me give up the light, the life, the lust. Oh! the lust. That’s what I will miss the most. My goddess; Lust. Too long calm and peaceful. This degeneration that has hit me today, needs her cure more than ever. Her touch could salve all my fears. Lady Lust. Let me pray to her now. A quiet personal prayer. come save me. come save me please. Don’t leave me to die here on the battlefield of my life. amongst shot and bloody memories. SEND A FUCKING AMBULANCE! I’m alive for christs sake! I am a celebrity get me out of here.

I can feel it in my veins. old age. Don’t believe them, it isn’t natural at all. It’s murder. Life is trying to murder me. Slow poison killing my life force. I feel it. sensitive enough still. blacking me out. trying to. I cant win. like an old git in a nursing home, they are upping the dose but the old bastard lives on. still eventually they’ll get him and have his bed, his air, his space. BASTARDS! life itself turns against you, the air, your blood, something , the spirits. Its that time. Its your time too. read and learn. You are allowed no more than this. You get to where I am. ready for immortality, wise enough that you almost know everything and that’s when it starts to fade out on you, something pulls the plug. They fucking got me. Bastards!

Tiger

2008-05-27T20:58:00.001+10:00

Where am I?
sat in a room,
the sound of light opera fills the air.
the occasional car going by outside
an early summer warmth, the heating is off,
as is the sun, for it is night.
I sense waves of the invisible around me.
Saw reflections on windows tonight
fancied them to be ghosts of the ancient Chinese art
come to watch progress of what they began and passed down.
The night is calm, my computer hums.
Where are we?
Alive in motion I suppose, orbiting.
Everything orbits,
Even thoughts orbit in the mind’s eye.
a tiger jumps in there, I don’t know why or from where.
It inflates within me and I let it.
Feel its paws in my hands, its soft white-fur belly in my chest.
Tiger, tiger burning bright…
and all that jazz.
What am I?
Destiny was not that strong in me, so I remained a wanderer
merely flirted with the arts
never really becoming passionate for long.
Changing, always, hunting novelty,
wanting to belong but moving on.
Nothing original or satisfying
but not bland enough to be dissatisfying either.
Just mediocre and medium like the rest.
Nothing wrong, but neither is it right.
Tonight I want to change my life,
but tomorrow it will just carry on as was.
Now is not the time to be writing but it is the only time I have got.
Days, long drawn out days watching the clock,
desperate to escape my binds.
No where to run
no way to alter the path of the moving train.
Come alive in me tiger
I beg of you, come alive.

Up-tilted erection

2008-05-27T20:55:00.000+10:00

I’ve got to try for a new angle
Its all out there in the world
Crazy whores, gambling, guns, drugs, sex, violence
Most times you avoid it but sometimes
You wish you could find it.
It’s a tough thing putting your life in order.
It’s worse still when you succeed,
only to discover boredom is more deadly
than any nightlife poor man’s street hustle, or hunt to survive.
And you sit and watch the TV, not even thinking.
Dressed in an ill fitting suit, slouched in a tired chair
bent by routine into the shape of your ass.
Your wife cooks cheap GM food in the kitchen
and a film of wafer thin adipocre covers your eyes in a glaze.
Your kids are outside getting dirty in the trash,
but you are over, you don’t even drink no more.
Just watch the news with a vacant stare and wait for the football
So you can go to bed and get up again tomorrow and do it all again.
You drift off for a moment and dream of shoving a chrome dildo shaped like a rhino horn up the ass of a prostitute…
Your wife wakes you up with a plate of beef and soggy potatoes
You rest it on your up-tilted erection and watch it slowly fade.

Infidelity and lust

2008-05-27T19:28:00.000+10:00

I get up to a beautiful March day, the sun is rising and throwing warm golden light onto the houses at the back of my yard. Birds sing and traffic flies by. Things aint so bad, I tell myself. I still have some fire in the blood with which to push on through.
Yes I do.
So I fumble about my room and find a different set of shades, I put them on. Rose tinted motherfuckers and things look even better. Fuck, I might even feel a sense of happiness and peace today if I keep working at it. Last night I heard a tap at my bedroom door. I let her in. She looked bemused, a little forlorn, a little confused. She carried in her bossom and womb healing ju-ju for me. She didnt know this, she was just following and instinct. I was thirsty and I was ready to drink greedily, savagely from her.

‘Can I come in?’ she asked politely but before she had finished I had grabbed her wrist, thrown her against the wall, shut the door and was pushing my tongue like a snake deep into her mouth. I was mining for ore, my energy was tunneling into her looking for life giving sustenance, the stuff only women can bring to a man. She submitted to me, she felt good and that made me feel better. She felt hot and that released the dragon and it broke free, through my finger tips it soared pulling at her belt, ripping her trousers down to her ankles, snake tongue kissing again, deeply, lovingly in the magic of newness and forbidden lust. We were alight, like fireflies if you could have seen us, the soft penumbra of my candle lit room flickered shadows round the wall, ancient spirits all come to watch and feast on the moment. This was the animal world, animist and spiritual, this was sex. I turned her around and slipped into her, we both cooed to feel that chemistry ignite and we rolled into it, pushed into it, we burned in its combusting flame, and it felt good. It felt like life was real for a moment. It felt like we were free because we were.

A noise disturbed us, reality had come in the front door downstairs and in a moment the alchemy turned on itself and a poison broke into the purity of the mix. The poison of guilt, fear, panic, realisation. In an instant all hell broke lose where moments before we had let our minds go, had relinquished control to some normally dormant force within us both, we had been creating private volcanic beauty, growing it in the moment, cleansing ourselves with it, healing ourselves with that ju-ju. Now the poison spread fast, through our relaxed shields it went meeting no resistance and straight into our hearts like a dagger, a hyperdemic needle.

‘Get dressed!’ she hissed
‘Oh fuck him, he wont come in here’ I said adamantly and annoyed to be disturbed by anything in such a perfect moment. They were too rare to waste for anyone, not even for Justice or Death.
‘He cant know’ she said
‘He wont if you can be convincing and stop panicking!’ I insisted.

She knew what I was saying, she breathed deeply, tied the buckle on her belt. Checked her hair and stared at me with a more relaxed smile. I was sitting on the bed, my loose trousers already back on after the first panic. I just watched her and tried to calm myself. I knew strength and confidence and above all complete dishonesty were needed at this moment and they required calm. I was making myself calm, slowly the mood overtook her rabid refrain and she knew what I knew. She breathed deeply again.

‘So...’ I said and paused a while as if to lead her into the next line of a play. She just stood there staring into my eyes. This wasnt quite what I meant. Calm was one thing, numb passivity was another.

‘....so, I can cut your hair with a bit of a shatter style to it or we can just trim it and keep the shape you have. By the way what are we going to do about that incident with the landlord, I dont think it was us and there is no reason we should have to pay.’

She looked a little uncertain as I began to talk nonsense, but it dawned on her that we needed to bring ourselves back down. Slowly it got through. She began to play along. The game of life. We were back. We would get away with it this time. When the clatter of noise outside my room stopped she left and returned to hers. I breathed a sigh of relief. I didnt feel good about what had happened but I refused to feel bad. I lay on my bed and smoked for a while staring out into the night. I understood this, I did. But I didnt like it, and yet, somehow, as long as it was only ever our secret, as long as it never broke into the light of any one else's mind, then it was a good thing. She was healing ju-ju to me, and I was the same to her. This much I knew. This was the truth. But if anyone ever found out, the opposite would become true. And in that lay the very core of life’s paradox.

I also understood something else; the reason we feel guilty is because we dont want it to happen to us. Guilt is based on self interest. I wondered if I was as cold a person as I would be judged to be if this tale came out. All I ever wanted was to feel that magic heal me. I never meant to hurt anyone but the price of mining for those diamonds is a high one, sometimes the highest, there is always going to be blood of the heart spilled for it someplace. On the one hand I felt happier than I had for months as I lay in that bed, I knew sex was the cure in that moment, the chemistry of it healed, the magic of fresh lust was the ingredient not love, not familiarity, but quick burning instantaneous lust, the sort that doesnt last. That was the stuff. Maybe I was addicted to it, or maybe I was cured by it. I couldnt tell. I felt happy, I felt released, I felt peace and contentment. But on the other hand I felt like the lowest bastard ever to walk the earth, and by rights, that was exactly what I was.

Days spent too busy surviving to write...

2008-05-27T19:15:00.000+10:00

Been so busy no time to write. No inclination as life roller-coastered me down a crazy tube. I am in Sydney still, for the record. Been working, struggling to keep my head above the debt line. But I can't complain. I have new friends here, I think they'll become good friends, and my brother is my life line when things get tough. I decided the lifestyle was better if a little more cruel somehow. So I am building a new life, I saw the date of my return to UK come and go. I watched the plane fly up from Sydney airport and said goodbye to a part of myself that went with it. I felt all the tears of loss and pain. I'll miss them all; good friends, good times, good days. All swopped for the loneliness of a city I am unknown in. Why? Just because something in my soul said it was time to follow opportunity so I did. Disobey the gods at your peril.

I lit a smoke, let the puff drift out over the balcony, catch the air and disappear. I imagined it took my homesick blues and nostalgia with it. I needed a distraction else I was likely to get dark and mean. So I took the lift down to the street, wandered around Kings Cross for a while letting the wildness soothe me, then fell into a bar and got blind drunk to celebrate or mourn I wasnt quite sure. 3 hours later, still alone but with double vision, a middle aged hooker suggested we shoot up cocaine and have sex.
'I'm retired' I said, knowing that in truth the only thing stopping me was probably the fact I had spent all my cash on booze.
I stumbled back to the flat, passed out on the bed in my clothes and woke up to a hang over. Welcome to Australia, I thought, they are gonna love me here.

I am i

2008-02-25T22:04:00.000+11:00

I only notice the loneliness when I am in the company of people. Surrounded by strangers I have to talk to, I find I have nothing to say, I find it hurts.

Got an email today from my step-dad, he is 69 and just got dumped. He moved to Vermont from Corsica for this woman, on her insistence, who now has decided to return to her ex-husband in Switzerland or some such where. I am not laying blame here...but for fucks sake. Women are crazy, you learn this with time, yet it still catches you out. Until someone devises a truly workable alternative, we are stuck with them.

I like the cafe culture, I have come to feel at my most stable and peaceful in a quiet corner of a bustling city cafe where I can write undisturbed, where people I will never have to speak to drift by me never to be seen again. We will never run out of new faces to look at and I am glad. Even from the darkest, most cruel and cold nights I can find solace here in the daylight, in anonymity, amongst all these strangers, with just a pen for company. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. I can relax here. Here, I am happy to let life slowly slip away from me. Other peoples busy-ness somehow exonerates me from it all.

I have a fucking big smile on my face and a warm feeling in my heart. A melancholic tune plays in the background and twangs a little on my heartstrings, just enough to make me feel this moment is real. I suddenly feel like striking a guitar pose and shouting at the top of my lungs – ‘FUCK YEA!’

I have to return to my digs shortly, have to talk to people again, people I know. I have to make sense. Say not what I am thinking, but what is appropriate and acceptable and least likely to cause offense. I will speak and listen to emptiness and wonder why or what could possibly be said to make it better.

I don’t believe I will die before tasting love again. I hope I can meet its expectations. I had hoped to find fulfilment out here in this new country. I guess I always was a romantic dreamer. Who knows, maybe she exists, maybe she does. Just try to remember – women are crazy. It’s not hard to make it work, you just have to play it right; Don’t sink too deep in comfort, don’t let too much of yourself go, and always keep an eye on the exit routes.

I sat by the pool today, watched a man pull a small terrapin from a plastic box. He petted its head then kissed it, all the while talking coochy-coo. I was struck by how contentedly in love he looked. It was some kind of bliss. The thought struck me that he was crazy. Ha! Like we aren’t all driven gently into complete fucking lunacy. I concluded that I was happy for him. I smiled a genuine smile when he looked at me, it gave me a warm feeling, and that seemed somehow a good thing, like it mattered.

Then, I leant my head back, looked up high above the tower block I currently wait in. The sun burning into my skin, burning into my eyes, at once loving yet looking for ways to kill me at the same time. That’s how it is. And love is just another burning sun.

Wars rage someplace far away, man pushes computers into space trying to figure out where, what and why he is. All the while birds, animals and plants just do their thing and already know, or just don’t care. I lie here wondering about all the things there are to wonder, while across from me a simpleton finds completion in an inch long amphibian that can't ever speak or act to hurt him. My step-dad sleeps a fitful sleep of pending pain and anguish on the other side of the world, a pain and loss he is probably too old to heal. Somewhere a new life just entered the world as another one exited. My heart pumps blood without me ever having asked it to, and I have no idea why I came here or what I am supposed to do with it at all.

A sunburst refracts off a broken window not far from where I sit splitting all the colours of life into my eyes and across my words. I feel wondrous. I feel alive, afraid, and despite all my fears or maybe because of them, I am hungry for it.

The last time I fell in love ....

2008-02-25T21:33:00.001+11:00

My last five liaisons with women had been disasters one way or another. Coming at a time in my life when I was at my least secure just cemented their demented fear into my subconscious. I didn’t notice it happen, just one day I saw a pretty girl across a bar and a sweat came over me. Next thing I am outside walking home rather than face talking to her. This went on for some months before I realised what was wrong; I was afraid of women, I was afraid of the consequences of talking to one.

I hadn’t felt the warmth of another body in over 8 months, hadn’t heard the words of whispered companionship that gave you meaning for being here in so long it was having a deeply negative effect on me. I was becoming withdrawn and freaked out. Now, I was more likely to push away comfort than embrace it. I was watching this happen to me, and I couldn’t figure what to do about it.

The last time I had slept with a girl had gotten me into a fistfight with her housemate within 15 minutes of consummating the act. The time before that I hadn’t even slept with the girl, she just lay in my bed all night talking, the next day her boyfriend knocked on my door while I was cooking dinner. He threatened to knife me, I threatened to knock him out with a frying pan full of sizzling chicken. It was an interesting standoff. He left. 2 days later I fucked her out of spite. I was angry with him for giving me shit over something I had gone out of my way to avoid. The other tales all run much the same - a litany of bad experiences, lust gone wrong, innocent pleasure turned into evil and sometimes violent, hurtful chaos. Irreparable damage. Now, I was gun-shy, psychologically expectant of trouble if I dared to seek comfort in a female.

I took the only option available to me other than turning queer – I was in a strange town, in a strange country and apparently prostitution was legal here. I stepped up. Waited for a full moon, somehow that seemed the right time. I hailed a taxicab, he was Asian.
‘Where can I get some fucky fucky” I enquired.
‘Whaa?’ he said
‘You know ‘ I made a motion, ‘get some skin, flesh, woman, fucky’
‘You want a brothel’ he said laughing
‘You got it’ I replied.

The first two he took me to had snapping trolls, uglier than sin and scarier than the devils own mother. I wouldn’t have fucked them if they had paid me. In fact I feared for my life and bolted out of the door at the first opportunity. I was starting to think maybe it was time to just shoot myself and be done with it all. I gave it one more chance. The last place was pricier but was exactly what I was looking for. Funny how things can change if you just hold out long enough, and are willing to throw all you have left in the world at it.

I lay on a bed in a mirrored room as Ella stripped and we considered how she would best go to work on satisfying my 200 bucks. She was gorgeous, but it was a rare time in my life when I just wasn’t interested in sex. I wanted her to hold me, to let me near her without the fear of something bad happening to me. Women had driven me to this. I was a fucking mess. God, she was beautiful. The best-looking hooker I had ever seen. She didn’t understand my need for tenderness and she was certainly in no mood to reciprocate it. She was a hooker, I was a punter - a cold dish of unpalatable food. Even so, holding her, breathing her skin, smelling her scent overwhelmed me. I felt like crying in happiness. My eyes shut, my dreams of love, communion with another, the human touch, the sharing, the belief, it was something beautiful, it was something. It sparked again inside me and came back to life. I could believe again. It fed my emptiness.

But the body is a funny thing, it sure doesn’t work by reason. It works on feeling and I let myself open to the idea of love in there. Love maybe of the essence of what women are. It was unbelievably pure to me because it was safe, and I hadnt felt it in too long. I had bought it. It was mine for 30 minutes and for a change it wouldn’t try to kill me. My body liked that. Liked it a lot.

As I stood outside the house of sin some time later, under the awning of a bus stop smiling like an alley cat and blowing smoke up into the blue, moonlit night on the far side of a town I didn’t belong or even much know, it dawned on me that I had gone from the frying pan into the fire; I had fallen in love with a whore called Ella and there was little doubt in my mind that she didn’t love me. That’s the thing, that’s the bitch of it all if you are honest, because you just know that every which way you turn here, you’re gonna lose.

Where I belong

2008-02-21T21:54:00.001+11:00

Morning down Oxford Street. Sunny.
Brisk walk to Crown street. INXS’s old studios.
Last few weeks for the first time I have begun to relax here. Still got some tension in the jaw, strange how some things are beyond our control yet within us, all we can do is wait and beat a path towards their resolve, if they wish it be.
Read a morning paper, I always arrive early, especially on a first date.
8am, an hour to go.
Sit in the Sacred Ground cafe. A dog eyes me from the street in wonder. The sun makes the day fresh. The studio awaits; where I belong, my home, my sacred ground.

The triad of change

2008-02-19T22:53:00.000+11:00

I have this theory...

There is a real simple formula
you could call it the key to life
but it will take you a lifetime to figure out how to use it.
we are lazy like that.
its a human thing.

its no great secret really
its just three empty words in the wrong hands
but it can unlock the universe if you let it.

3 is the number of dynamics and change.

thinking
reacting
silence

that's it!
the triad
I knew you'd be amazed.

if you can be bothered with it, here is the explanation -

thinking=suffering
reacting=conditioning
silence=freedom

Since the day we learnt to think we have taken on the experience of suffering. thinking creates suffering, creates misery. thinking is the seed of the experience of suffering.

Reacting is what we have learnt to do towards everything.
We are conditioned to repeat the same thinking over and over, bound up by our reactions, and so we develop the sense of suffering.
it deepens and it grows.

If you stop reacting you can stop thinking,
if you stop thinking you can stop the experience of suffering,
you undo the suffering.
or rather, it undoes itself.
as if it never existed.
because it only existed since we learnt to think it into existence.

the way to achieve this
is through silence.
true mental silence.
no thinking.

Silence is probably the hardest thing a human can learn to achieve
the whole world is thinking all day.
its almost a law,
some would say it is a disease.
If you try to stop doing it
you'll risk being outcast
laughed at
ridiculed
the suffering will hurt all the more.

its just how it is.

besides which,
we have been thinking for most of our life
ever since we got taught how to
its not easy to unlearn something and replace it with emptiness.

which is why it would take a lifetime to master
and no one has the time
so nothing will change for me or for you,
in this lifetime
but then why should we expect it to?

whats the rush?

this lifetime, the next, what the hell does it matter, we'll get there eventually because where else is there to go?

and one of these days
we'll be so bored of going round in circles all the time
we'll just say
oh fuck it.
and that will be the day
we start to see things change.

I didnt forget you

2008-02-19T22:07:00.000+11:00

I have been away a long while.
travelling. seeing the world.
spending every last cent
until I was left with nothing.
like burning in some kind of celestial fire
letting everything go
reminding the gods I am here and I am willing to go the distance.

I have been on the other side
trying to make sense of the things we are afraid to face
things we all try to avoid
ultimate things
not good things, painful things
scary things
the fears.

I stood today naked in front of the mirror and took a good look at myself.
I felt I had neglected myself to some degree, not my body,
I mean deeper, on a deeper level.
I stood there, staring into my own eyes, something I guess we all have done
wondering just what is looking back.
and then I said three simple words -
'I love you'
It felt awkward at first, like narcissism
but then it clicked and I understood;
'I love you' was my way of saying thanks to myself,
and maybe a little apology too, for making it so hard when I dont think it really needed to be.

I think it is time I stopped travelling now.
just let the calm descend again.
I travelled many thousands of miles,
alone, sleeping in deserts, woods, far away places amongst nature and the stars
and other times alone on the streets of unfamiliar cities with the hounds of hell growling at me from the shadows.
I did these things.
I have been down to the bottom and seen what is there.
You cannot win in that place.
but somehow you have to come to terms with the fear without it stealing your soul.
They say I am tough, say I am one of the toughest
but I know the fragility of human life
is not something you can ever trust, or hope to save.

I stood there before the mirror.
The person looking back at me was stranger than I could ever hope to really know.
it was ancient and that scared me
the fact I was aware of it.
I suddenly felt incredibly weird and alone.

but then I saw something,
caught a glimmer of it for a moment deep in the eyes, something I had nearly lost, like the sudden silver flash of a fish in dark waters.
and it made me smile.
It was beauty.
maybe I wasnt such a mean son of a bitch after all.
I hadn't forgotten love,
no,
I guess I had just hidden her deep, deep down,
kept her safe
in my soul
in my heart
where she belongs.

when I find that calm
I will let her shine again
and you can come to me
no longer afraid
and I will embrace you
and kiss your forehead
and the thing you fear most, afraid even to mention
will be brought safely home.
I will be the one to tell you
that everything is going to be ok.

Dante's Inferno

2008-02-18T23:07:00.000+11:00

A crystalline pain searing through my blood.
Is this just some chemical reaction loosed of a gland, or is the world about me turning, looking to crush me down?
I see red, I feel the dragon stir, vengeance, to WAR!
I stand on a balcony over-looking the city, and call council on myself by light of burnt tobacco.
All years of Buddhist teaching weigh in, and thank Christ!
Without it I would have been slain dead by the jackals many moons ago.
But oh! If only it were able to neutralise the hot blood that easy, wouldn’t life just be a breeze.
Instead demons swirl at night, come the wolf’s hour - ugly grotesques disguised and cloaked as thoughts.
Wish I could banish them and reach a peace in sleep but something sinister lives there too.
My god! Are we cursed? Are we damned?
Sometimes it feels to be that way.
Who hasn’t cried alone in the night, howled at the moon, tortured by some unseen, unknown. At once beyond our boundaries, yet somehow, without doubt, the Self.
And in a strange and tired way, I do take some joy from the mystery, because I know there is little I can do.
I should have died young and good looking, as in having the audacity to achieve survival, I am left feeling like a man caught in the strained grimace of a shit that will not budge again for all eternity.

Wooden hot box

2008-02-18T23:05:00.000+11:00

I took to exercising after Christmas. It was in part to lose some belly fat and admittedly because I was just bored and lonesome. During this time I made a discovery; If I pushed myself beyond 30 minutes I experienced a euphoric sense of confidence. It was subtle, but having been depressed for the better part of 4 years it was a noticeable difference.
I liked it.
So I kept at it.
Then, as a treat, and to serve as a carrot to do that damn exercise, I gave myself a relaxing 15 minutes in a sauna at the end.
I often had it to myself.
So I threw Eucalyptus oil in the water, turned out the light, and sat naked in the dark.
The heat and exertion pushed me to the edge.
Sometimes I even got an erection, it felt good.

I found something there, in that small wooden box.
I found the veil thinned, I found the lines of sanity blurred.
I felt fear, a tremor, and a terror as the heat grew and at some point I realised
I had re-created for myself an ancient ritual -
The Sweat Lodge.
A place where the mind was forced into submission by the gods of heat, and vows were offered up into what could easily be a spiritual moment, a holy cauldron.
I spoke to my family there, the dead, my happy ancestors.
I asked for guidance there, and did a lot of thinking.
Through that heat I could feel the winds of the other side, and I fancied that they listened to me as I called out.
Then finally when I could take it no more, the heat pushing me to unconsciousness, I would stumble out and let a cold shower bring me back down to earth.
It felt good to know that even in the heart of this soulless machine, I could find a place to connect with the gods.

Once upon a time...

2008-02-18T22:33:00.001+11:00

There was a time when the only thing that mattered to me was my guitar.
Every moment I was away from it was a longing to hold it in my arms. But more than that, it was the pluck of the strings, the joy of finding notes resonate together like forgotten melancholy. Join one on two and tunes unfold.
That was all that mattered to me.
Not because I was ignorant towards the world, nor uncaring, just because whatever made me, also created within me a rule, a law, maybe even a curse; unless I was locked into the arms of a song, I could feel no peace. It was as simple as that.
It was a passion.

I played everyday until I was 27. I waited for her for all those years. Thinking of nothing but her. Dreaming of her, every minute of every day believing she would one day be mine, completely. In the end hunger, loneliness, and the emptiness of the wait drove me to seek a cure to my longing. I found it in the world of man; in work, in money, in friends and good times. No, it wasn’t all bad. But I missed her, and my dream of her, once clear, began to fade. It became an echo. Something I could vaguely remember, but never quite recall.

I write this now aged 41. Already in many ways a veteran of the world. I found myself thinking about her today. So I took pen to paper and let my story fall out onto the page. I feel a shiver in my backbone as I write, and a sigh makes my chest rise then fall. There is a tear there too but it does not swell. She was a mystery to me all along.

Grandfather clock in a country house

2008-02-18T22:19:00.000+11:00

I miss certain moods; the space, the silence, the slow tick of a grandfather clock in a country house where time seemed to almost burst in fat, rich tension.

Here, like London, I feel like a boat in rapids.
You get addicted to this, addicted to speed. I guess at it’s core lies the thrill of death. But I miss that mood. Pure inspiration, pure thought and feeling.
Indulgent? maybe a little, but then it offered the chance to take life in, to ponder it.
Here, there is only time to live it.
But when I want to steal away, find that peace again, I have to work at it. Fight to slow down. Cut swathe through the sensation of imminent boredom and the illusion of monstrous anxieties, which really are just shadows cast by my former self, a trick of the light.
Call a halt.
Call it to a stop!

And here I lie now. Sipping gently at the moment and maybe letting a cheeky smile play about my lips. Let others race about instead, the machine turning; the grind that never stops.
I just lie here.
Staring up at the clouds passing between me and the sun.
There isnt a lot going through my mind right now and to be honest, I find some relief in that.

Rushcutter Bay

2008-02-18T22:10:00.001+11:00

Now me and this place are starting to have some history together. I take a walk down to the point at the end of Rushcutter bay. It looks back, north west, to the city and the harbour bridge. I feel strength breathe in me, I feel pride, like maybe I fucking made it after all, yea, maybe I did.
I escaped that drizzling rat gutter. Swapped for a place just as cold and dangerous beneath the smiling surface, but I’d sooner meet my end here in the sun beside the sea with some kind of belief in my heart, than back there in the cold, grey lament of a failed life.

It’s never going to be easy, and it is always going to be a big fucking joke to someone. And I am still making all those schoolboy errors that lose me favour and somedays lose me friends too. But I found a picture, got sent it by my mum, in fact, and it is of me, before the bastards got hold me and turned me into what I am now. And I was smiling, a big toothy grin, and I was happy. And just to know and remember I felt that once, yea, that was enough. It made it ok, you know, whatever happens.

Pull her down by the wings

2007-12-17T21:39:00.001+11:00

She moves about you, just out of your reach
It is all about the tease, it is part of the ritual
I guess you could call this the build up
She knows, at least you feel she does.
‘Don’t deny me’ you say to her through gritted teeth
but there is something you enjoy about this game too.
You sit, pen in mouth, nonchalant air, for all the world to see
The paragon of composure.
You imagine this to be desirous and attractive to the opposite sex.
And to wreak envy upon any competition, alpha or beta.
You fancy your look and poise say;
‘I am a man who knows what he is doing and needs nothing’,
inside it is a different story.
One of angst, longing.
Stuck in the eternal cycle of chasing, hunting, finding, laying and moving on.
You never find peace, never find completion.
You catch her move again from the corner of your eye.
‘Come to me’, you will her,
but nothing.
She pushes you to your limits.
Remaining just out of reach.
You want her more than ever.
Forever aloof, forever present, her scent in the air.
And just sometimes.
Once or twice in a lifetime maybe.
You catch her.
She struggles a bit,
You pull her down by the wings, and rape her onto the page.
For a while you feel a sense of relief
And then, for a brief moment, you are that man.

Into the dirt

2007-12-17T21:23:00.000+11:00

I took a tyre iron to his head
I recall thinking there must be a precise degree of pressure to knock a man unconscious but not kill him.
As I made my move, I pushed it a little
Just to be certain.
Some of these fucking retards have thick, impenetrable skulls.
Hard to crack.
I took a second swing.
I wouldn’t say it felt good; it was out and out murder, to be sure.
But there was a certain sense of justice, righteousness in the act.
I felt divine and powerful.
I felt the back of the net.
I locked onto death and with needlepoint, rocket powered precision,
I swing fast.
Three times.
And down he went, into the dirt
Dead.

This man was a terrorist; he had killed dozens of innocent people.
No, wait...
This man was a German; I was making my escape from a Panzer division 1940.
This man was a creep, a paedophile. I took my chance in the prison.
This man was no one I knew. I took his wallet.
This man was a traffic warden, that’ll teach the cunt.
This man was your friend, yea, maybe that makes it different.

What I love about life, and what scares me senseless about it too,
is that life hangs in the balance of your current perception,
and whoever can tell the most convincing story wins.
My point was, I guess; never believe anyone,
but most of all, don’t trust your emotions.

The Resistance

2007-12-17T21:11:00.000+11:00

Intensity, passion, depth.
It scares me to reveal this side of me
I am not totally sure why.
Maybe it is the sense of intrusion I feel, as whatever it is I am, pierces your armour like an x-ray.
I may miss subtle observations and glaringly obvious reactions,
but at the core, I see it all.
Everything revealed
It is beautiful. Utterly overwhelmingly beautiful.
But,
To reveal that, to bring that up to the surface in this world?
It’s like landing fish beneath a flock of hungry gulls.
So I pretend, but I pretend badly
And in the end I risk becoming a caricature of myself.
Or worse; drunk on the ability to know what you wish to keep secret.
I understand desire, I understand death, and I understand you.
But it may not be easy to talk on such things
Not here, not now.
Keep beauty hidden in the deep until it is safe to reveal.

There is a subtle but deadly war raging, and you should be aware
that we are the hunted.
If you understand this, then maybe your duty lies
with The Resistance

Magic, mystery and fate

2007-11-28T21:14:00.000+11:00

I haven’t written about love for a long time,
because I haven’t felt it.
Sometimes it is best to lock our jewels and precious stones away safely.
Sometimes, we find ourselves amongst wolves and jackals, running alone through the night.
A thin blade glitters, concealed within a discreet hand.
When this dark night ends, maybe I will have time and freedom enough
to take from its box that beautiful, blue, precious gemstone.
I'll gaze into it again.
See the dancing lights of magic, mystery and fate.
Hear the mesmeric sound of distant girls laughter, of soft panpipes and flowing water.
Smell the sweet scent of rose and jasmine.
Feel the intoxicating sensuality of another’s touch;
Ecstasy, bliss, peace and completion.
And then maybe I shall begin again
my search
for what I once found
in you.

For Corrina

Snapshot of a certain moment

2007-11-28T21:09:00.000+11:00

I have a snapshot of a certain moment
It comes around every now and then
The movie is different, the delivery, the package it comes wrapped up in,
but the effect upon me is always the same;
Fear, terror, incredulity, frozen, FROZEN! Run, RUN!
Survival at all costs, kill if I have to.
Survival at all costs.