A country lane cut through low flowing slopes, a soft dale where the broken tarmac runs like a river, fields on either side. Tree-lined and hedges. Blackberries abundant, though at the end of their growth. I came up here to find my balance.
The day had been muted, tired, sedated. And not bad for that. A little dream-like in fact. The mind not quite settled into the body. The body aching from the effort of holding in the mind. It took time to muddle my way through the door.
Sauntering along the seafront, this flicker of willpower was starting to give out. I was stopped by the pier. Ghosts, pleasant winds, the end of summer settling into my bones. Sat down in a haze, listening to the world go by. I wanted to lie in a concrete corner and sleep. Hours passed in the minutes spent, or so it seemed. Distant memories came to sit with me. Someone vaped a heady herb.
And there was a breeze, all day long. Along the promenade, between the trees, settling on the weary walker’s evening clothes and breathing there. It tasted like the first day of autumn, a good day for a countryside pilgrimage. And slowly I realised. Felt the flavour. Adjusted my mind through my almost-malaise. Began the walk. I was not a pilgrim looking for a specific place, just one who wants the journey. Time to feel the change.
The first blackberries I found, I reached as far back as I could into the brambles, past the thorns – finding those that looked untouched, hidden treasures. Placed my fingers over the berry, tugged. It split in two. Sweet mush.
The second came free easily – a sign that it’s ripe and ready – but the skin had started to wrinkle, one or two of its little globes had collapsed and spilt their juice the night before. I found one to taste and it only had half the flavour that had been there three or four weeks before.
All along my pilgrimage the blackberries seemed to be at the latter limit of their season. But some new ones were growing. Tough and small. I told myself I’d find out if it helps the bramble to pluck as many as possible – it does with other fruiting plants and flowers.
I walked and pondered. Pondered and walked. Past the quiet suburban houses, the delicately towering mansion – with a burrow of a dirt road between its weathered halves. Past the tiny terraced cottages that eclipse a new horror built across their gardens. The self-serve jam and book seller. The holiday caravan park. Along the weather-torn and thick-hedged lane – deeper into a place not quite colonised.
At the crossroads there’s a boundary. Not obvious until it is. The lane feeds off to private residences and the valley and wooded walks on one side, up an incline to go down on the other. Going forward, the furthest reaches of town have ended. You’re out in the beyond. Rare houses with colossal gardens, farm fields, fish ponds. A darkly-coated cat crossing the path and watching the foxes.
It’s here, at the right time of year, around dusk, the midges and the little creatures whizz about the hedge tops. And the tiny flyers swoop to catch them. Darting across your front, diving past your head. It can feel like you’re under attack until they impress on you their agility, their precision. Somehow, it starts to feel safe, and you can relax, watch the show.
But those critters were not out on this walk. Only the fruitflies scouting the blackberries, the fluttering wood pigeons and cawing distant seagulls.
It was a couple of hours, maybe three in total, to walk the walk and back – yet felt like decades flowing through the mind. Heavy, but pleasing in their weight as they moved.
I like to call the seasons as appropriately as I can. That is, I don’t like to claim them early. But this day in August was truly an autumn day, and a beautiful one at that. The leaves had not gone brown, the earth was not soaked, the sun not obscured by cloud. It was warm enough too. But the world had shifted. Autumn had entered it.
And above this rippling sea of mystical alteration, the moon, a pebble suspended too many miles away, perfectly placed. A shining eye, an egg, or a ghostly ship lurking among the swirling fog of cloud. I didn’t see it walking out – it was hanging at my back, priming its guns.
The walk ended where the lane cuts off, remainder swinging up to a car park and a busy road. You can continue along a dirt track – in Winter a long and muddy trench – to Fairlight. That segment, from up here down to the sea, is perhaps the finest in the territory. But it’s not for today.
I took another pull on the blackberries and found them uniform with their berry blood down the way. Of course – seasonal berries follow the seasons together. I knew I wouldn’t walk on to Fairlight, but I leant on the gate daydreaming for a while. Watching the field, letting time wander. Attending the threshold.
It was on the way back when the moon shot through the evening cloud, orange against murky blue-grey, startled me from my reverie. Ah, the moon! You again! Yes! And a phrase ran through my mind that bled back into a shifting classroom in an aged house where I first learned – first noticed – how to weave images with words.
…
Back when I was a kid, primary school, I wasn’t doing so well. For a moment (maybe some years) people thought I was an idiot, a no-hoper. Consigned to the lowest orders. Or at least the remedial maths class. I managed to convince my parents this came from my alienation – being bullied for years by teachers and students alike – and generally having no idea what I was supposed to be doing.
I liked hiding in small spaces under chairs and in cupboards.
I didn’t enjoy doing dull tasks for teachers I didn’t connect with, alongside students I’d rather pin to the table with a pair of scissors. I wasn’t violent, by the way, but something happens with humans when you strip them of all their sociable avenues for safety and satisfaction, instead make them either angry or miserable, usually both. Basically, the human in question starts to look for some kind of desperate resolution to their plight. For example, stabbing Taylor’s hand with a pair of safety scissors. It’s alright, I missed. Had to giggle at the idea that they were safety scissors after that.
Once I’d convinced my parents I wasn’t hopelessly deranged, my Dad – who’d recently lost everything and had some spare time on his hands – gave me a bootcamp over summer. I’m pretty sure I’d fucked up the 11+, or SATS or whatever it was called. So what he was doing was 1). trying to make me good enough to pass the entrance exam to a private, fee-paying school. And 2). trying to teach me enough sporting and social knowledge so I wouldn’t immediately be annihilated in that next school. Confidence building.
Almost makes me glad that his business was wiped out, because if it wasn’t I really don’t think he would’ve had the time for me. Funny how things go, isn’t it?
The “bootcamp” (we both liked our army stuff) paid off. I got into a decent school. And what made this school “decent” was not its reputation, not the networking opportunities (you know, the usual things people associate with private school), but the fact that the teachers actually cared about me. Actually wanted me to learn as a student and succeed as a person.
That, by the way, is the main thing that differentiates private from state, at least in my experience. And it’s that which you’re paying for, especially in those younger years. Confidence. A lot of folk seem to be paying for overconfidence and arrogance as well, but I’ve had an almost terminally low self-esteem for much of my life. So whatever excess on offer for others was more of a survival ration for me. A ration I was possibly allergic to.
It was in this new, private school that I first heard the phrase “the moon was a ghostly galleon”.
I think I actually enjoyed, even loved, every class at that school. Not sure about geography – though the geography teacher was a very wonderful human. However, it’s English I mostly associate with my internal and external world dramatically improving. There were personal landmarks within those English classes that still resonate with me today. Maths too actually. But given how my life panned out, English gets all the glory.
And it was in one of these English classes that we were being taught about metaphors. I wasn’t sure what a metaphor was, or why I needed to know. Then they brought out an example: “The moon was a ghostly galleon.” Immediately I thought, “Yes! The moon IS a ghostly galleon!”
You know, when the cloud cover goes a bit misty/foggy over its face, and it’s floating there, watching you, like some sort of Flying Dutchman in the sky. Sure I have reservations about whether it’s got cannon and a hold full of trade goods – but in many ways it does have those things. It carries so much meaning, and it can easily become fierce or threatening.
It still took me a while to get my head around the word “metaphor” – I never really liked having all these tools of linguistics neatly labelled – but that moon phrase completely changed my world. Knowing that you could use language like that. I mean it’s not just fun, it’s a better way of describing what’s going on. More accurate, more revealing. Before that lesson, I hadn’t really noticed that such a thing was possible I think.
I was out having a walk through the country earlier, and on my way back the sunset moon was hiding behind some clouds. The galleon itself. And the phrase returned, as it often does. So I stopped in a pub and wrote this. And this was shit, so in the days following, I wrote the text this post actually starts with.
I’ve maybe edited it out, but I felt like I was writing in a posh accent for a lot of this. Blame the Ginger Man if so.
Author: Merlin Pendragon
It was the dog that died / a land of ice cream 10-09-26
Counting the DaysEvery now and then I remember that you don’t have to keep watching your recommended and you can instead explore all kinds of weird and wonderful material on the Youtube. That said, I think these both came off my recommended.
I’m a dickhead and so I like Tom Stoppard. That is to say, I like annoying plays. That is to say, I like stuff an English Literature student would’ve heard of.
Back in the 1700s, Oliver Goldsmith wrote a poem, thus:
An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog
Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.
In Islington there was a man
Of whom the world might say,
That still a godly race he ran—
Whene’er he went to pray.
A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad—
When he put on his clothes.
And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.
This dog and man at first were friends;
But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man.
Around from all the neighbouring streets
The wond’ring neighbours ran,
And swore the dog had lost its wits
To bite so good a man.
The wound it seemed both sore and sad
To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad,
They swore the man would die.
But soon a wonder came to light
That showed the rogues they lied,—
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died!
End
I pulled that text from All Poetry, and I’m just saying that because their site looked pretty. It’s an old poem, so no-one owes anyone any copyright or whatever.
I found the poem because I watched a short film “It was the dog that died” based on a Tom Stoppard play. Slight plot spoilers, it’s about a double agent who’s done so many double and triple and quadruple bluffs that he no longer knows who’s side he’s on. Being a principled man, he therefore tries to do the only thing he reasonably can do in that situation, but an animal is unfortunately harmed in the process.
I like spies, I like Tom Stoppard, I’m starting to like Alan Bates as an actor, so all the ingredients are right. And I’m big into the 70s because I think it was the last time Britain had an almost coherent national identity, so I love looking back on it with my rose-tinted glasses and eating up bucketfuls of nostalgia that I – by rights – shouldn’t feel, since I wasn’t born then. Doesn’t nostalgia always hit harder when you weren’t actually there at the time?
Anyway, watching that film led me to “A Land of Ice Cream“, which feels like another play but might technically be an evening drama for the telly. It was written by Welshman Alun Richards, who I should probably now find out more about. And again, I love it for the peculiar nostalgia and the sense of impending doom. Basically, a successful Welsh Labour politician gets the train and finds some old friends. Slowly – or not so slowly – we realise he’s long since betrayed all the values he pretended to hold as a young politician and is now a fucking scumbag. But it’s the other characters that make this an interesting premise or observation. The people he casts aside.
In the background I’m brewing some writing about British culture – not because I’m some patriotic nationalist, but because we don’t seem to have any these days. People wheel out Grime as new British music culture, which it is, but it’s also not enough and has already sold out. What else have we got? And racism doesn’t count.
How to kill a revolution
I Don't Like PoliticsBuy it.
Sunny day. Brutally sunny day. Punishingly, horrifically sunny. Drought. I’m sitting in a shaded cafe, second floor, view of the fishing fleet, the pebble beach, and the open semi-industrial stretch of merciless concrete we sometimes use for shows and markets. Ferris wheel. Broken castle.
I wasn’t going to write about this. I was going to tell you how my thoughts on the Lakota have developed and altered since that post about the headdress (headress?) in December. But I’m sitting here, withering myself with a black coffee, iced. Stretching my sanity over my skull. And the music they’re playing is something like ‘top 60s and 70s hits for a sunny day’. Some of them I think fair enough, it’s pop, it’s nice, mellow summer fare. But we had a couple of exceptions.
The Doors to start with. And then Pink Floyd. The Doors I can understand. I might view them as a mystical act best enjoyed on hallucinogenic drugs or a chunk of crystalline ketamine, but I realise they have a rambling, pop-adjacent dimension that lets them be played here. Bollocks. Another tune, just as I’m writing this. “Show me the way to the next little girl – how? – don’t ask why – how? – don’t ask why. ” That’s not the kind of thing a normal person listens to. The jingling, circus-like jangling in the background. The horrific undertones of abuse, trauma and death.
It’s revolutionary music. Violent. Unpleasant. Confused. This is important. But instead it was purchased, and widely sold. Drugs become a method of sedation rather than revelation (sometimes the line between those is very slim).
They’re calling time. In the cafe. I have to break this illusion and leave mid-script. The whirring ferris wheel – ‘Warriors… come out to plaaaayyyaaaayyyy’ – and the mythical storm cut castle can return for their images another day.
I pack away my laptop, finish my coffee. Walk out via the exhibitions. Yes, this disgraceful place is a wealthy gallery. I mean, a gallery that exists because of people who can afford to buy art, invest in it, tens of thousands of the Queen’s sterling and rising, rent it. I go into the shadow realm, the darkened show. Lucien Freud and Henry someone. An invigilator with a book notices me, barely moves, approving – I’ll have at least five minutes to browse.
I don’t like the shows right now. Lots of sea stuff, blue, and then this Freud. There’s someone in their hallway gallery – the pauper’s spot, free to the public – who’s a bit more interesting.
I get out into the sun. Long past midday now. Five. That’s evening perhaps? Less blistering. See a little drinking den, the Jolly. Wooden cave with good light from the mouth. Best drinks in the old town. Plays this 60s, 70s stuff, not from a top 50 summer selection. Plays albums, plays curated personal collections. Can continue the discussion here. Re-establish the illusion.
Yes, Pink Floyd. They killed Syd. Hold on, we can’t go here yet, not yet. At the bar, picking out a delectable cider, old apple juice and maggots. Sipping this unclear brew, perching on a copper-topped table. Outside, behind the noise of the traffic, past the marching of passersby, the distant cackling of demented children – a ride out the front of Flamingo’s that plays this canned nightmare every ten or fifteen minutes to draw victims in.
I’m not sure if I can say that with any depth of understanding that Pink Floyd killed Syd, but there it is. Syd ate too much acid, sure. Went mad, of course. But his greatest sin? He didn’t want them to go big. Didn’t want the record deals and the ‘success’. If he was going to carry on, wanted more mad parties with little audiences, lights, noise, space travel. More like a psychedelic improv act. Roger wouldn’t allow that. Jeopardise his success. Syd’s mad they say, can’t be trusted.
But you know a revolution is mad. Completely insane. That doesn’t make it any less significant, necessary, maybe even beneficial. I’m not actually a fan of revolutions, real ones, myself – I think they do too much damage. But culturally, in the realms of metaphor and social comprehension, I like to think that’s alright. Damage needs to be done. Have to cut off the dead weight, burn the rot.
Believe me, I know this comes with a lot of casualties too. And I don’t feel so good about that. But I’m much more addicted to world-altering cultural change than I am to taking up arms and a bit of the old ultraviolence. Which is to say, I’m much more addicted to change than I am to staying still for the sake of a false security.
Revolution – politically – tends to be a bad thing. Heads will roll. It’s all set up that way. We gave all power to the Leviathan, as Hobbes said, so it would discourage anyone else from using its power to destroy. That means it’s inevitable that any attempt to wrestle that power back will lead to deaths, suffering. Violence is all the Leviathan has. If you take that away from it, it ceases to exist. It doesn’t want to die.
But in culture, the Leviathan has lost its control. I think it was never given control in the first place. I mean you have someone like Louis Absolut – is that what they call him? You know, the Sun King. You have someone like that, and it really looks as if they have an iron grip on the cultural scene as well as everything else. Terror reaching out across the vast web of popular fashion in 17th Century France. He had to engineer that though, fight for it. And it was not kept. The people were not quite content.
Culture isn’t even what the middle class says it is. Isn’t even what the artists and writers and musicians and promoters and commentators claim. It’s this great… flowing… of happening.
But modern capitalism is powerful enough, the leviathan is strong enough, to dam it and canal it and set up reservoirs. To make it look like it’s owned and controlled. Which, in turn, means you can do things that look like a revolution against that form of ‘government’. And they’ll be received like revolutions – they won’t bring the system down, the leading revolutionaries will become the new despots, or they’ll die.
And this is where we get to the crux of the argument: if you want to kill a revolution, you buy it.
For the socialists and so-called communists that have won revolutions, they were bought with power. For our cultural icons, like Jim Morrison, like Kurt Cobain, they were bought with money – but they didn’t like the result, and slowly collapsed into self-destruction. For many, many other cultural icons, they took the golden handshake, the 30 pieces, they became the new establishment. They are still becoming, on a regular basis, a controlled flow of talent, the new establishment.
You know, all this does actually relate to the Lakota. America bought them with horses, rifles and land. And then took their food. Killed them. Bought the remains with promises of not starving, integration, new careers, new lives. Peace. Drove them to destruction, depression, near-annihilation.
Whatever you might say about Native Americans, they are tough motherfuckers. Because after centuries of shit, there are still millions of them alive, preserving whatever parts of their native identity they can. It’s very phoenix, risen from the ashes. ‘I thought I killed you?’
I find them very inspiring. Hope my British pagan comrades can take the hint.
But as I was saying, the pre-ordained failure of revolutions is written very deep. Machiavelli said it well. Something like ‘a prince can either be feared or loved, and it is far better to be feared than loved’. That’s exactly the sentiment that fucks up revolutions before they’ve even begun. Fear is violence. And violence is what you’re revolting against, preferably. You can’t beat violence by being violent. You know? You can’t start a war for peace. It doesn’t work. But we are told, and we believe, very firmly, that this is exactly what all revolutions are trying to do. We have great annals of revolutionary movements proving this exact misconception.
Thing is, the ones that weren’t based in fear, that actually worked, those ones haven’t been documented. When folks’ dislike of violence and preference for community and co-operation prevails, no-one cares. I could say this is because the historians and the writers who’d talk about it are all part of the establishment, which they more or less are. I think there’s also a more subtle thing going on though: that peaceful co-existence is our natural state. Isn’t it unremarkable, in the most beautiful way, to just be doing what you’re supposed to do? Living your best life? Naturally?
Why would you bother commenting on it if it’s just good and nice to do and…normal? I don’t mean what’s normal now. Normal now is apocalyptic. And sure, there is some merit in talking about the good, the nice. People do it, all the time. I guess the point with that is, it doesn’t make headlines, it doesn’t make book sales, not on the scale that capitalism demands. Right?
We’re no longer at the point where the Leviathan has to crush all opposition. Pretend it never existed. We’re now at the point where your opposition can be sold. That is, modified, packaged, mass-produced. If it’s suitable. And if it’s not, it can be buried – not by ‘the establishment’, but by the people around you. Your friends, families and colleagues. Because it’s boring, basically. It’s not spasmodically explosive enough for their jacked up hormones – their broken emotional receptors.
The Leviathan hasn’t just started buying revolutions recently you know. As I say, there’s infrastructure in place. Dams, canals, reservoirs, for the culture. And for the politics, well, all those revolutions seem well-controlled as well. Orchestrated. Anyone seen the Revolution Will Not Be Televised? Well, yeah, long before Trump, America colluded with Venezuela’s capitalists to kill innocent people and make their oil cheaper, and they called it ‘a revolution’. And we only know about it by accident. Also because it failed, rather spectacularly.
If you stop thinking about individual capitalists and capitalist nations, and start just thinking about capitalism – the profit drive – itself… well then you’re glaring at the Leviathan. And it’s pissed. It doesn’t want you seeing all its tentacles fucking everything beneath the table.
Seriously, if you step back and take a look at the scale of capitalism, sometimes you’d be forgiven for thinking it has killed the very form of revolution itself. By purchase. Bought the rights and burned the only scripts.
But that’s where it’s good to remember these phoenix type characters. Being dead doesn’t even mean you’re dead, you know. Other scripts can be written, legal wordings overcome. The flow of culture cannot be stopped and cannot be dried. We want to get back to our goodly state of peaceful co-existence. We want to end this nightmare. That drive will not disappear.
The World’s a Bit More Like Piss 18-04-26
Counting the DaysEdit: Hey there. I’m now some days after the initial flurry that made this entry. Facing a similar alcohol-related issue in a much stiller place. It isn’t easy for me to do what I want. I want to write, I want to talk, I want to be a part of reality, whatever that is: the ever-changing maelstrom of real beauty and ugliness that makes its own kind of disturbing, drowned perfection whenever observed. Perhaps. Perhaps it’s nicer than that. And what I started with the other day was just thinking on these usual themes and thinking…
I just need to work this out. Problem is, I never do. Problem is, the way of working it out is to keep going at it indefinitely in the hope that enough small things change in order to make a big thing change.
So, diary or journal writing. Counting the days. Writing for the sake of making a statement at that moment in time, every time you can muster the power of your fingers, thumbs, hands, wrists, forearms… what other parts of the body are involved in writing? Your back?
I have a longstanding issue – I don’t feel like I have anything worth saying, but I also feel like I have to say it.
That’s feelings. The bubbling underworld, under your skin, inside your cells.
Rationally, I understand that I do occasionally come across interesting information that would be worth communicating. Rationally, I know the chances are that someone on the internet, someone in the whole wide world, will find me interesting regardless of whether I can see myself as such. Rationally, I know there must be at least some small value to my writing, which makes me feel like I should write. But I don’t feel that there’s value to my writing. Not most of the time.
I mean, what about work? You know. Clearly this isn’t paying my bills. So how and why am I doing it? If I’m not getting paid for writing, surely it’s a worthless waste of time? Isn’t that what our society says? Doesn’t it say I’m living in the lap of luxury, being able to waste my time and other resources like this? Shouldn’t I think how fortunate I am, shouldn’t I be ashamed?!
I’m brewing a little something on that. An article, a piece. I have many thoughts. Thoughts save me from the feelings, you see. And my life’s mission so far has been to get the thoughts and the feelings to make friends.
It’s complicated, at least in as much as my feelings are contradictory, sometimes my reasoning too. The flow of life means that you’ll occasionally bash against an obstacle and have to make your way through. The flow of life means, sometimes, that you’ll be struggling against your own psychology until the day you die. But it’s not always a struggle.
Put it this way, the flow of a river progresses smoothly until it doesn’t. The flow of a river is only stopped until it isn’t. Challenges are entirely natural, as is a lack of challenge. This only becomes strange when it’s your life, rather than a river you’re observing.
Settle down, Merlin. Have some focus here.
Okay, so. Humans are social creatures. I am a human. I think we malfunction a little if we can’t communicate enough, if we can’t both listen and be listened to. I’m an introvert, I have had low self-esteem for a long time. Being listened to is therefore something of a challenge for me. I won’t talk, I won’t feel like I need to. I won’t feel like it’s appropriate. But there is some part of my human self that needs it.
I have friends, of all kinds. I’m not currently sharing out the time between them as much as I’d like, but they’re still friends. I’m not sure how common this is, but I try to have lots of different friendships with all kinds of different people, not only (but partly) because I then have enough people to listen to all the different parts of myself. If I’m just following that objective, for the sake of this trail of thought, I need to be sharing time among them all in order to remain healthy. And failing that…
Well, failing that, diary entries begin to take on a slightly different character.
I guess, what I’m wrestling with here, is that I don’t want to just churn out a weird rant each day because that’s all I’m ready to string together at the time. I want to, I dunno, observe something interesting, useful, entertaining. But I’m dogged by this wild and severe anxiety. And half the time, to observe something good, you just need to chill the fuck out and be there for it. Minimal imposition, minimal objective. Just presence. Like a meditation of sorts.
Hard to meditate when you’re panicking. Not impossible, but hard.
I’m writing right now, mainly because of panic. A whole range of panics. And rather than untangling them, it feels better to write this. It’s like I’m packing them into an airlock and when the writing’s done, I can press that big red button on the side there and they’ll all be jettisoned out into space. Whether they might then endanger the structural integrity of the ship is not something we’re going to be thinking about today.
I’m on a train. The sky is blue. Everything should be hunky-dory. I need to piss. I’m drinking and worrying about drinking, but only drinking to make me worry less. It’s a tale as old as time. Or at least as old as rail travel.
I’m not sure I’m going to find a natural conclusion to this. But, that’s why I created “counting the days”. To try and remove the requirement, in my mind, for me to write with a certain structure in mind. I’m just writing, in this space, for the sake of passing the time. And maybe to jettison an errant emotion or two. Maybe to dislodge a log that’s stuck into the riverbed. Maybe to make me think less about pissing, because if I go to piss I’m probably going to lose my seat.
Piss? Do Brits like myself have a good, rude word for piss? We have wee, tinkle, slash. Hmm, I’m going to need to think about this. Do some research.
I saw a man piss on the bus a few weeks ago. Not piss himself. He’d drunk a bottle of vodka, most of it before he got on the bus. It was all catching up to him as the hour long journey progressed. Maybe half way through, or two thirds, it crashed into him with an unnatural vigour. He was sitting quietly, got his cock out, and pissed onto the floor of the bus. A big old puddle of piss. Dribbling all around the floor as the bus moved. He put his dick away, sat there like nothing had happened. He was chatting to and harassing the passengers within minutes, almost as if his shoes and trouser legs weren’t coated in his own urine.
It’s because of things like that that I have a strange affection for my own self-loathing, or at least my deep suspicion of pride. You can get drunk on pride, as much as you can get drunk on vodka. It’s all about believing that you can get away with something that you shouldn’t be able to get away with. And hey, there are times when that’s good, that’s useful. But there are also many times where it is not useful, is harmful.
Life is about balance, more or less. No one path will take you where you want to go. Some of one path, some of the other, and then between them you work out the new way. The holy triangle. Pfft, we should never think in terms of solids. The world doesn’t behave like solids.
The world’s a bit more like piss.
13-02-26 Lucky Thirteen
Counting the DaysHow do you folks out there feel about the number thirteen? Is it a mystical bringer of curses? A sign of bad dinner guests or strange lunar-solar phenomena? Anyone suffering from triskaidekaphobia in the crowd? Right now, I just feel like it’s spelt weird, and I’m wondering if that’s a rumour of what dyslexia is like – you look at a word, knowing that it’s familiar, but it just doesn’t seem right at all. I get that feeling a lot, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t seem to affect my spelling. I do edit as I go though, so maybe I just fix things on autopilot and don’t notice.
I forget, but writing has been my main thing since I was maybe six years old, when it was just the homework that created the least amount of suffering (though I still hated it and hid under a piano stool in a vainglorious effort to avoid it). I mean I’ve actually spent quite a long time learning how to write. How to ‘do writing’. I’m one of these self-diagnosed autistic people, but apart from that I can tell you I did not enjoy a lot of childhood, and I didn’t get good grades at school until I was maybe… well… could it have been 13?
Nah, it was around 12 and again, writing was what showed me the way. My Dad had forced me to learn a lot of the basics, and I appreciated that because it got me through school and because he was my Dad. But apart from the regular nod of confirmation I got from him that I was making progress, I remember specifically an English teacher. (I can see her face but I can’t remember her name right now.) Other things had been making me write more creatively and descriptively, including her classes, but there was one time I wrote this description of a scene under the ocean, and the way she talked to me about it – was as though I was a REAL writer, not just some snot-nosed kid going through the motions.
I guess I’ll always remember that as one of those precious early moments when I felt like I’d actually achieved something in the world.
Speaking of, I actually meant to write this about self-esteem. Been ruminating lately, this morning in particular, that I’ve spent most of my life incapable of finishing a big writing project. And this was not for lack of imagination. I could plan out a story and characters at quite a serious range. I could remember details and plot points, pull them apart, reconstruct them. I could sit doing research for hours, make comprehensive and informative notes. String ideas together, even obscure ones, so they made some kind of sense. I had all the ingredients that would develop into a bigger story at my fingertips.
But I hated myself. Which translates to, “this is a waste of your time” and “no-one will ever care” and “how will you make enough money to survive doing this?”. This was while I was making no money, was primarily unemployed, had a developing alcohol/binge-drinking problem and was habitually depressed. For a lot of my life, my imaginative capacity has been turned in on me. When I was a kid I would envisage impossible but startlingly realistic horrors poised to attack me at any and every moment. As an adult, I would find abstract and emotionally powerful methods of making myself feel worthless at any given moment of happiness or success.
To quote the Dude, “This is a bummer, man. It’s uh… a bummer.”
But you know, you spend maybe 20-25 years more or less actively trying to resolve your permanent depression and low self-esteem and, well, it’s funny, you actually make some progress. I’ve managed to make progress. I’m gonna say the mushrooms helped, for sure. I’m gonna say – controversial here – the drinking helped, at least in that ‘trial by fire’ kinda way that it put me in situations I never would’ve got into otherwise. Learning a bit about how to exist around people and making some good friends possibly helped most of all.
So it’s nice, you know? To feel like progress has been made. And in writing terms, I can now churn out a 2,500 word article in about three hours (the research – both accidental and deliberate – for that kinda speed takes a lot longer, but you accumilate ‘research’ all the time, so that’s not too big a problem).
I have folders with structures for bigger fiction stories. The most developed one on paper maybe has 10,000 words, building a world that my characters can live in. And it’s not like when I was kid – that I get bored or impatient after a page of writing. No, this is stuff I’m constantly coming back to, investing the time and effort, enjoying making these things come alive, however much I’m capable of that.
The anxiety and the doubt is still there – at this point I think it’s just part of my personality, and possibly quite an important part. But I’ve managed to circumnavigate or trick it enough that I can pursue bigger projects that I care about. And I just wanted to take a little moment this lunchtime to celebrate that. (And tempt fate I guess, hahaha.)
Number 13 factoids
Back to thirteen – because I refuse to abandon it as an evil number, shunned and chased about the streets like a leper, so visible it can’t be looked upon.
Apparently, the Knights Templar were (mostly) destroyed on 13 October 1307 – and as both an anarchist and a pagan I consider that an excellent sign.
Medieval monks struggled with thirteen because some years would have 13 full moons (about 37 in every 100 so I’m told), but they planned their church calendar around 12 full moons. And again, I laugh at their self-imposed misfortune. The pagan calendar has, roughly, four seasons divided into two subsections each. So eight periods of time that correspond more to vibe and plant behaviour than calendar date. We never really needed to worry about making people show up to the correct Saint’s day, because we just had a nature festival when the local village felt that time was right for a festival.
Thirteen used to represent femininity in ancient cultures because there’s that many lunar (and so, often, menstrual) cycles in a year. And Christian Patriarchy didn’t like that, so suspicions around the number grew.
I don’t have any issues with my Earth Mother though, and it always makes me smile a little that when we grow in the womb we all start with a female template – that’s the base model for humans. The Y chromosome makes it transform into a filthy mutant male (just kidding, I love men; even if they’re filthy mutants – that’s what makes them appealing).
By the way the term “patriarchy” comes from the five patriarchs of Graeco-Roman Christian faith – they were like five popes, basically. Christianity as we know it now (i.e. post-Roman) is very dad-orientated, but earlier Christianity includes women. Check out the gospel of Mary if you can. Seems to include women and psychedelics, and is therefore very wise. Possibly I imagined the psychedelics (religious cults of the time used hallucinogens and mild-altering plants a lot).
Thirteen is probably when a lot of people really get into puberty, so I can see why there might be some kind of primordial concern associated with it. But puberty is as great as it is terrible, and it’s a pretty necessary part of life for most folks. I reckon thirteen is more or less the same. It’s a funky little number, and not so bad for you.
Project Zomboid, Sunday 1st Feb 2026.
Counting the DaysEvery day I play this game I think it’s pointless and I need to stop. Every day it takes at least an hour longer than I meant it to. Food left cooking in the kitchen starts to burn, tasks are left undone, the sun sets before I’ve seen it risen. Still, I used to be worse than this, this is progress.
I figure that writing some of the in-game events into stories should help me get the addiction out of my mind. Otherwise it’s like intrusive thoughts. Remember to load your shotgun this time, don’t forget where you left your car. Think about patching the jacket or getting a new one. Is Mattie infected now? Is she going to die of zombification? I won’t know until I’ve played more, let the clock tick, revealed the horrible truth.
(In case it’s not clear, I don’t own a shotgun or a car. I do need to get my coat repaired IRL though.)
I made the character Mattie (Mathilda) last night. My excuse was that I was feeling overwhelmed and wanted a quick and easy Zomboid character to level out my brain. But this game doesn’t do that. Project Zomboid is so full of anxieties that it can be like playing a high-octane FPS, but all you’re doing is looting a grocery store of the food that hasn’t rotted. Playing it to level out is maybe like taking speed or smoking crack in order to go to sleep – doesn’t exactly make sense. But it does distract from the daily grind of real world anxieties, so I guess that’s why I like it.
Mattie is a military veteran. Because that was supposed to be easier to play. I also gave her loads of experience boosts and things so I wouldn’t have to spend hours and then days slowly training her skills. Played it too much last night and started playing it too much today. Before I pulled myself away from the game to get on with my Sunday, I had this incident.
You can get a mod for the game that adds NPCs, ‘human’ characters – where the game is usually just you and zombies wandering around shortly after the apocalypse. Most of the humans are nice, but every now and again one of them will try to rob you. This happened to me. And I was so offended by this poorly armed NPC trying to rob me that I tried to open up on her with a shotgun, but I hadn’t loaded it. So I pulled out one of my three pistols and shot her, but most of my rounds didn’t hit. And she managed to splutter out “stop”. I mean the NPCs mostly speak through canned phrases, but the meaning of that canned phrase was “stop”. But I’d already clicked – already pulled the trigger about five times and the bullets were going whether I liked it or not.
Anyway, this quite affected me. I really wouldn’t want to be the kind of person that murders someone just because I can. Even if that someone is an arsehole trying to rob me in the zombie apocalypse.
Most of the NPCs seem to spawn as married couples, so I knew the woman would have a husband nearby, but I didn’t know if he was well programmed enough to be hostile (I’m still learning how the mod works). So after killing about 20 zombies that were drawn by the noise of the pistol shots, one of which successfully jumped me in the dark and tore open my arm, I went back to the house and found the husband. I didn’t disturb him in case he tried to kill me, and it created this scene – he was sat on the sofa staring off into the distance. And for a moment it didn’t feel like standard NPC behaviour, but a broken man who’d just seen a stranger blast his wife apart.
So much for levelling out my brain, huh?
Day 4
“Drop your weapon,” she says, “drop your backpack!” She gestures with a homemade spear. Somewhere in the car park behind them shamblers groan and dither under the low lamplight.
Mattie slings the shotgun off her shoulder, levelling it at the woman’s torso, and pulls the trigger. Click. She’d forgotten to load it.
For a moment a look comes across the woman’s face like maybe shouting at the heavily armed cowgirl quietly passing by her house was not the best idea she’s ever had.
Mattie pulls out a police-issue 9mm and puts a round in the woman’s shoulder, she drops. Cries out. Whether calling to someone or not, Mattie can’t tell. Mattie fires another round, it misses. Her hand is shaking, the woman is getting up. Mattie fires another two rounds.
“Don’t shoot! I give up!” the woman shouts, wild with panic. Two, three, four rounds crash through her body. Most of the pistol clip must’ve gone, but she’s down and not moving.
Mattie mumbles something and holsters the 9mm.
In the sudden clarity she doesn’t have to look round to know every shambler for a few blocks will be heading this way. She arranges her gear. Looks round. Beneath the streetlights she can see ten, fifteen, twenty shamblers, more seem to be crawling over fences and crashing through bushes the longer she watches. She checks her knife, clenches her baton.
Half her mind says the fresh corpse will keep them busy long enough for her to get away. The other half says she has to protect the human she’s just killed, and that half, as insane as it is, wins out.
Half an hour later, covered in blood, a massive tear through the thick fabric of her jacket shoulder, she’s panting, her arm isn’t working properly. Another shambler comes at her. She shoves it to the ground as it hisses and gargles. Stomps its brittle skull into paste.
She tosses her jacket onto the ground and starts searching through her bag. Pulls out some alcohol wipes, cleans the cuts on her shoulder, groans as it stings. They’re deep, the flesh pulsing.
She bandages the wound, gets her jacket back on, another shambler advancing on her. She meekly bats it, grimacing in pain from her shoulder. It keeps coming. She dodges its hissing, chomping maw, shoves it to the ground, stomps it dead.
That looks like the last one. She doesn’t want to think about the wound. She pulls out some painkillers and a flask of tequila. Catches her breath.
The dead woman has nothing on her. Mattie carefully approaches the house she’d apparently been guarding. Peers through the window. A man sat on the sofa, giving a thousand yard stare to a blank tv screen. She watches him. He’s alive, but not moving.
Mattie leaves him and the dead woman behind. Drags herself to another nearby house. The front door is open, house looks empty. She raids the fridge for anything. Fruit and ice cream and the easiest things to eat. She’s leaning in the kitchen, chomping down ice cream like her life depends on it, listening to the faint scratching and grumbling she can hear coming from behind the bedroom door. Brain freeze.
She dumps the ice cream carton, pulls out her bloody baton. She flexes her arm. The painkillers are working enough. Carefully, she opens the door, and the shambler immediately stumbles out at her. She’s nimble on her feet. Leads it through the living room, out the open front door, cracks it on the head. The blow makes it pause. She hits it again and it falls down. Last hit finishes it with a crunch.
The street is pretty quiet now. Sun coming up on the horizon. Shamblers off in the distance, looking dazed, inactive.
She goes back into the house, closing the door behind her. Into the bedroom, closing the curtains when she sees the blood her boots have trailed across the carpet. She drops the shotgun, her bag. Takes herself into the shower. The water’s still running, at least for now.
She takes off her hat and stands under the shower, letting the water soak through everything. Rests her head against a cold tile. Closes her eyes.
A vision of the dead woman shakes her awake. She sees the red water pooling beneath her. Feels the weight of her clothes like so many days pretending to herself that it’s worth staying alive. She turns off the shower, sits down on the toilet seat, and falls asleep.
Supreme Problems #19
I Don't Like Politics, Notes, PoetryThe word ‘demos’
The word ‘demos’
The word ‘demos’
‘kratos’
People are a political concept they are an aggregate of their opinions and biases and the extent to which they will express those opinions and biases in a convincing way to a wide audience, especially a voting or otherwise competent audience
The word
The variance of meaning in human communication
I know that when they’re saying “this democracy” and “our democracy” and “our democratic values” this is a way of saving “your consent”, “your belief”, “your faith”
Boris Johnson is a threat to the British public’s faith in its own government’s ability
So the Supreme coming in must be and John Bercow’s calm statement that this building will resume its work must be
They are restoring FAITH, they are restoring the stock value for BP British Parliamentary Belief System
If there is not enough FAITH the whole edifice lies scalp bare scarred and withering
The whole nation is a small shitting dog with no owner to hold the leash
I don’t love this country or this government but this Supreme – this new Supreme – for restoring our morale through the FAITH in ourselves
The FAITH in our meaning
It’s meaningless except for the fact that we feel it and our feelings are not without
Importance
So the court that takes sovereignty away from parliament restores parliamentary sovereignty
and the Queen and the old money severed head speaking jar abide foaming and bleeding and screaming
but
Remember
sometimes the demon-fool, sometimes the jester, sometimes the pretender shows us what we are
which is when we become afraid.
stinking pissing fear is the enemy of all change, not only the bad
A Red Handkerchief on the Grass
PoetryBeen away a while. Here’s a new one I’m working on.
A Red Handkerchief on Grass (By accident I imagine a world where we could have sex, but you and they covet her)
i’m talking to you on the phone with the messages, you’re sending me them and I’m sleepy and in the bed and lying next to her and the sheets are up in me, the sun is coming through yellowy; outside the bed is cold inside the bed is warm
you’re talking in my inner ear with your messages and I’m sending you back, the phone is down and on the floor and in my inner eye you’re walking along this sunny afternoon street to me, you’re in her body and I know and you look at me knowingly but you don’t say why. We know it.
you walk over to me on the grass talking normally, her voice not like her, not unlike you, you sit down next to me talking the same message, there is a tree and a house, I don’t register what you’re saying but it is normal and alright.
I want to say I can’t look into her eyes with you in them, look a little too long, and see the mouth, nose, brows and in those features your face looking back, I want you to know I went to sleep wet and this is me dreaming
I’m reaching over to press down on the clit you’re wearing, soft cotton on top and pushing and you moaning, and warm overhanging in the sun, I’m mounting you, feeding you thru her, in the grass, in the heat
in a sharp movement you get up and back into your body, all in one swift motion but not quite, like a few frames of film were missing, and you walk off knowingly; behind you and next to me where we shared blood and semen, a red handkerchief lying flat out as if to absorb stains
I wake up wet and look over at her, sleeping in the white sheets in the yellow light, my hair is in my eyes, I reach for the phone and drop it again, I turn over and stretch out on the mattress and on the pillows, and I rub myself in the mattress, and it hurts in my heart but tenderly and I remember how you sometimes wish you are a woman too
Learning From the “Masters”
Communication as MagicEdit: I fucking hated poetry again for a short time lately, I forgot its value, I looked on it as a poor excuse for a few chatted sentences, and then, again, Dylan Thomas saved me and my sense of poetic value, of betrayed and crushed romance, breathing under the boot in rebellion.
I’ve been watching a couple of documentaries on distinctive artists recently: (google image them if you don’t know them) Francis Bacon and Stanislaw Szukalski. And while their personal moralities and lifestyles may seem, may in fact be, highly problematic to most people, you have to admit they have a talent for creating evocative imagery. I mean images that aren’t just what they seem. Images that refer to other feelings and experiences in the viewer, about which the artist probably only had a distant inkling…some feeling based on their own understanding of how deeply the image effected them on their imagining it, or the parts of it. I mean these images startle something crawling around in your head and in your body. Creatures climbing the ladder of your spine etc.
So I’ve decided I need to try and put some more of that into my own use of imagery in the poems. These guys from the documentaries go to town imagining and communicating what they’ve imagined. Lately, I’ve just been wanting to produce something that a reader somewhere might like. And I don’t think that’s the way to go about it. I still firmly believe you need to have a sense of what different readers think of your work, and that you need to interact with your readership, but you can’t really let them determine what you’re making. They can help with formulating the ideas that inform your creative work, but the work itself, unless you’re starting it as a collaboration, has to be yours. From your own private brain workshop, manufactured using the tools of your emotions, instincts, your fingers, your sweat. With art anyway. With that kind of art that you immediately say is “art”, because it’s so fucking artsy.
I guess that’s not always what I want to write/make, actually, now that I think about it.
There are exceptions, but work that comes from your soul really seems to be work that’s worth the creation going into it and that’s worth people seeing it.
At the moment I’m at a bit of an impasse. Whenever I try and start out on something new I get caught not knowing whether to go for smooth shapes or hair and dirt and rough. Maybe both are the way to go. After all, how can you really talk about one without having the other at least as a reference point, if not an immediate contradiction.
I’m trying to put aside time and space to dream out landscapes. This is something I used to do regularly when I was more of a romantic, and when I engaged less with the world anyway. I’d hide away from my surroundings even as they encroached on me with increasing meaning. I was the kid wandering on his own or standing in the group not saying anything and clearly daydreaming about something else. And that fed nicely into weird and extreme romantic landscapes streaming through my head…but being at school and stuff I never really spent much time fleshing those out into words. Or pictures I guess.
Since some harsh but enjoyable waking up to reality I’ve cut myself off from that place for a while, and now it feels like the right time to scavenge there for remnants, time to rebuild some clearer sense of romance again…I mean the passion’s bled right out of me. I need to rediscover the source from before and approach it again, with more care and self-knowledge this time, and use it for the poetry. For the sake of the poetry.
Yeah. So that’s what’s happening with that.
Also if I’ve not mentioned it before then have a look at this: https://hackhastings.home.blog/. It’s the other non-poetic project I’m working on at the moment and will occasionally show some of my writing that’s not turning up anywhere else. Also various other Hastings locals doing their thang. Check it out. Edit: things have moved on since 2019. hastings-examiner.uk.
Naive and Angry
I Don't Like PoliticsCaution: some very…erm…’casual’ thinking in this one…
Sometimes it feels like last generation were the cultural biproduct of the 60’s, and because so much seeming good happened (culturally) in the 60’s, but was then betrayed, the 60’s kids are a bunch of miserable sellout fucks. The kids they had, the culture they predicated and in some ways revelled in, is a culture of sadness and misery, of longing, of nostalgia. But, perhaps without consciously realising it, their doing this generates a great emotional capacity and even happiness in us. I kinda wanted to say emotional intelligence there but I hate that term. Emotional capacity will do if you understand it as not just a range of emotions, but the ability to control and understand those emotions to some extent.
60’s kids seem to have this tremendous naivety, even now. Maybe it’s from their parents not wanting to ‘wound’ them with tales of the war and rationing and whatever. Maybe it’s massive pop consumerism telling them they can have anything they want. Regardless, they generally exhibit a naivety that makes them do a shit job of bringing their children into the world…which is actually a pretty good job. I mean we mostly learn that the world is a harsh place and that we have to look out for ourselves…and we do that without a war going on, without the white males among us receiving much discrimination…I mean even those tremendously (socially) privileged persons still broadly learn the lessons of hardship. At least in the emotional sense. Our metaphorical hands are filthy from labour even if our real hands are freshly washed.
This doesn’t make us better. This isn’t me saying we beat our parents, our predecessors. It just seems to be an interesting facet of cultural reality. Nostalgia for me is 90’s and even 80’s bands being nostalgic about things I never knew. We grew up on the example of the post-60’s kids who were breaking out of the bubble, and suffering for it. We’re growing up cynical, critical, revelling in our misery and, in some cases, depravity. And there’s something strangely healthy about that. I mean as long as you combine all of them. Problems come when people only have one or two attributes off that list.
You hear all this talk about the snowflake generation, right, but have you met any of these snowflakes? They’re fucking monsters. They’re banning speakers from university campuses, creating their own thought police. They’re hard-hitters, they’re tough. They know nothing and they don’t care. They’ve got a broad range of emotions led by a cankerous anger at the world. The naïve post 60’s culture mocks the snowflakes in the hope they’ll go away. Just like they never knew how to raise the snowflakes when they were kids, the parents don’t know what to do with them now that they’re growing up, becoming political entities, asserting an economic influence and value, twisting culture to their increasingly powerful will. These are a version of the kind of fucks that caused a world war or two: yeah, the snowflakes!
I think maybe the greatest development in Western culture in the next few years will be the scales falling from the eyes moment when most of the last generation and its cultural pocket boys are dead or dying, and then we realise the new waves of toughies aren’t just scare stories and media scams. They’re real, they’re angry. They’re fucking up the stock market or blocking bridges with protests about environmental changes they’ve been told are damn important. They’re influential, easily influenced, desperate. They’re a catalyst for change in some kind of chemical mixing pot we don’t understand. We don’t know what the other ingredients in there are. Is it just water? Is it fucking mercury? Somehow we just can’t tell. But they’re jumping in anyway.
Frankly, I can’t wait ’til things get a little more honest around here. Even if it’s honesty about some stupid half-baked student bullshit of an idea, it’d be nice to meet someone passionate for once.
