A moment not to lose

I thought I would suspend this moment, as I feel somehow it is important, though not for any conceivable reason (I NOT before E, hmm). Currently it is Saturday, before Christmas and I am at my computer, not surprisingly. I'm just sitting here waiting. Waiting for someone who, relatively speaking, isn't far away at all. Waiting for a call. Just waiting. Waiting has it's good points, you can think about things, you can read, you can listen to music. Waiting is crap. Everyone thinks I'm busy, and I suppose I should be, but you know, I'm not.

Perhaps this is important because when you aren't waiting you forget how long it takes, no matter the length of time. I'm not intelligent enough to be entertained by my own thoughts...

Why computer why?

Just some questions...

1. What is an 'error report'? No Mr Microbrain what I want to send is a kick in your face for losing my work, not a bloody error report, where are you going? what are you doing?

2. why is it a fragment? What is a fragment? they never taught me about this grammatical concept in primary school? I dont want to revise it goddamit!

3. What the hell is 'virtual memory'??? How can it be running out when its virtual! Leave me alone you retched thing!!!

...and on a similar note

Por Una Cabeza

Ive always wanted to do this, not with a blind Al Pacino particularly, although in his heyday well ... hes a good actor. It has bugged me for a little while because along with the white wedding, couple of kids, nice house, full-time job as a consultant here and in every other country, ability to speak multiple languages, content, good mother, good wife, good doctor, somethings not happening. I recently was asked 'what do you expect your life to be like in twenty years?', and worse than having no clue I had EVERY clue, I wanted all of it, and thats just not clever. In the mean time, maybe someone will learn to tango with me, I expect he'll be pretty good at it if he did.

What do you expect your life will be like in twenty years?

x

On On the Origin of the Species

More accurate this should probably be entitled On On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life but it just doesn't fit you see, and I'm sure you'll agree it really doesn't matter, does it?

After the mild fury that had arising from the ambers of a particularly brief conversation, I did go on and do some reading. I read about something I thought I already knew about, about which I think most people have at least a concept of - Darwin's theory of Evolution. Except that it wasn't Darwin's, it was Anaximander's, Hutton's, Monboddo's, Lamarck and a Darwin a whole two generations before young Charlie. Darwin's original presentation of his findings was done alongside a fellow 'transmutationalist' Alfred Wallace.

See it wasn't evolution, on account of the latin origin of this phrase referring to the 'unrolling of a scroll', with its rather heavy religious connotations, no it was infact referred to as transmutations.

And my dearest pedant was at pains to remind me that On the Origin of Species (or The Origin of the Species as it was referred to in its 6th Edition), did not refer only to those characteristics which were passed on through mating. Indeed that is true, Darwin even suggested that the forces of inheritence are in exact opposition to those of adaptation. Perhaps we should take into account, however, that Mendel's Experiments on Plany Hybridisation was first published in 1865, a good four years after On the Origin of Species. Darwin held the Lamarkian view that if you use your right arm more, your son will have a larger right arm. Makes sense to me.

Touted as the funkiest new atheist in town, he did infact hold some rather divine thoughts, the final line of On the Origin reading, 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginnig endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.'

Though Darwin was by now to ill to partake, no-one noticed too much and the debate regarding the holy monkey race went on, and somehow eventually everyone just knew. You just know don't you? When are we going to learn that knowledge is not assumption? When are we going to learn that even when we think we do know we are infact just offering explanations of the patterns? We don't know.

Oh and incidently. Urgh

When you are too tired to say a thousand words ...

The things they say

I got an email from a friend today, it was brilliant and included the line ...

'I'm sick in the lest couple of days i think i have influenze'

I wish I could speak more languages. Oh well, better start the lessons then.

x

A little poem

Here's a poem that a little boy wrote a while ago and I recently found once again.

Danger, darkness.
Water on both sides.
Blue Dragonfly.
Be careful,
Doggy.

Apparently its an interpretation Ted Hughes' The Lake

orkw rkwo kwor work

I went back to the house I moved out of at the beginning of the year tonight. This was in celebration of a friend who lived there, whos birthday it was. I drove there after picking up a gift and got the house. After a couple of hours or so I was back on my way. I stood on the step a little longer than necessary, feeling heavy with thoughts. I remembered standing there looking closely at someone, I remembered my bike being stolen and sitting on the pavement (or possibly sidewalk), I remembered it being cold and hot and all the temperatures in between. It was at this time I wanted to go back to work. I realised thats why I work. Its nothing to do with anything more noble. I just cant stand the rest of it. I hate feeling like the one on the side, I hate knowing that I will always say the wrong thing on the phone no matter what we are talking about, I hate not being bothered to do the exercise I know is a good idea, I hate feeling ugly and knowing the news. The only time when I'm somewhere else is when I'm working. So I'm in the hospital now, learning about infertility.

Milk and car accidents

A man is run down on a busy street. The driver said that the man simply walked out infront of him. When the ambulance gets there he is already dead and found to have milky secretions coming from both nipples. What was wrong with him?

hello there

I want you to know that although i am able to put words here i can do nothing more. The NHS does not wish for me to read comments or view this page. Please go ahead though, scribble something down for later.

Where the lost things go.

I lost my wallet recently. Which was a bit crap. It was a bit crap because I'd just put £30 in it. It was a bit crap because it had my driving licence, my yellow fever certificate, my NI card, my student card, my credit card and by blood donation card in it. It also had a ring that my grandma gave me. It had a badge that a soldier gave me. It had a ticket from some old place in poland. It had a ticket to newcastle. There are probably more things gone that I cant remember. This all got me thinking as to where all these things now were, perhaps if only to remove downhearted feelings. I wonder if those things will begin to mean new things to new people. After all, we are all losing and gaining things all the time, I guess mostly no noticing. It would be interesting if we tied a string to each thing we called our own and watched it all spread out all over the place, into corners and cracks.

A good word

Flummery.

Hey there stranger

I have hardly anything of any use today, but I've been so desperate to write here the last few weeks I'm pleased to be putting down any sort of non-sense. One might even argue thats the point, but I'm sure thats a whole other matter.
Hmm, things that have happened. I've moved to another hospital. I think at one point I'll be surprised to actually be ill in a hospital. This one is a children's hospital. It has walls which look as though they once had colour but have become sick and old. There are paintings on most walls and a lot of small beds. Children are pretty amazing really, the potential is overwhelming at times.

I've been getting hideously lost almost everyday, mostly in relation to the M60 which, just when I thought I had it mastered, fooled me again today, allowing me to go 5 junctions before realising I was going the wrong way around the clock, in many senses of the word.

I spend a lot of time with dave, my 'clinical partner' (in crime). He's definitely interesting. Warm and giddy, overbearing, irritating in the extreme, admirable and surprisingly young and old simultaneously. I hope that he knows I consider him a good friend, even though Im most often blunt and off-hand. Ive had the opportunity to regret that in the past, and hope that I have changed a little, enough to make it obvious that is.

I miss Neil a lot. I miss feeling comfortable and having to defend the way I am. I miss knowing that I make someone else feel better (you really get that so much as a medical student.) We talk, but its still hard.

I've been listening to Pulp quite a bit and my mind has been drifting back to places, perhaps its the children. I've thought about my grandparents, walsden, old primary school friends, playing with my brother.

Today I thought whilst driving home that the motorway looks awfully pretty at night-time, like electric vessels, and the cars seem to direct themselves so smoothly. You'd hardly believe there were human hands controlling each one, in turn controlled by busy minds, busy with singing along old hits or talking or thinking about that annoying colleague. Funny really.

Sad really.

I have known sadness for it’s own sake and wallowed in a feeling which has no fact to cling to. It exists for itself, penetrating, insistent and conceited in it’s dominance. I could blame you, myself, an inanimate object, but this would be a fruitless exercise. Everything is grey, even the things I know are brightly coloured. No information is absorbed because everything is blank and passes me by whilst I cower within myself. Sorry I’m no fun. Sorry I don’t remember you as much as I should. Sorry.

She sings

Find this lady; she sings like an angel.

As I look back.

Why is it that looking back we always seem like we were so much better before? Do you feel that?
I have come to this conclusion on multiple occasions and each time I can't imagine what has gone wrong. Looking back on my own words they seem laden which such heavy thought that I can't imagine from where they escaped. Perhaps our products are greater than the processes we have to sense our way through and only looking back they can seem remarkable.
Today someone I admire greatly said to me, "to be a good scientist you must be me standing here, seeing you". Sometimes it feels like the things that are real that we haven't realised are so close that I almost realise, but then it's gone and I'm standing looking back at myself as I was, not as I am now, reading my own words in disbelief.

There's been a lot of rain recently. Then again, there's been a lot of rainbows too.

In other news...







It definitely runs in the family. This is my little brother, yes he is very cool, and yes he doesn't know how good he has got it. He doesn't even know he doesn't know. Actually, come to think of it he doesn't know he doesn't know he doesn't know.


I love it when these things just happen...


And as I'm on a role, here's a little taster of Israel ...

All in all.

All in all it was a big day today. Not one of those days you feel should be a big day, like birthdays and weddings (so I’m told). Just woke up and felt like I wanted to stay in bed, and didn’t. I presented a paper at a Journal club and my consultant, Mr Soltan, a inspiring man indeed, told me ‘I think you are going to be a good academic doctor’. It meant a lot, I don’t really know why, but it did. May it’s one of the things I want to be. I’d like to a be a good academic doctor. I’d like to be able to blow glass. I spoke to a lady who had had breast cancer, she was warm and I felt like we held something between us, not a thing which was of any particular use but it was there, and it felt good to be half of what was keeping it there. I tagged along with one of the registrars on call and watched whilst she put her entire arm inside a woman to remove what was left of the placenta after she had had a miscarriage. As blood turned red to black as it hit the blue drapes I felt a little weak. I felt the guilt of the joy I get from doing this. I felt like this might all be for nothing. As I was driving I listened to Ed Harcourt - til tomorrow then, it was nice. I don’t really understand things so much, sometimes you realise it more than others.

Preservative??

Who ever ever ever thought of putting vinegar inside a vagina in the hope of identifying cervical cancer? Why? Just Why?

Love: right conclusion, wrong disease

I was right after all (and not just filling a poster full of pseudo-insightful crap to put in the museum). The unpredictability of symptoms are (infact) as debilitating as the symptoms themselves.

And some more pictures from Ghana ...


An ant-house, as big as a person house (interrobang)






Charity is just like normal life.


Just because I think it needs to be said, has anyone heard David Bowies The Laughing Gnome ??

The scariest thing about Blackpool...

This, you put inside a woman.

This, you don't.

Someone once said...

i'd like to hear some of those other thoughts, all the same. why should you get to decide, all on your own, what's worth hearing?

Who missed the plane?

Scouts can lose anything.


Funny you should mention the flight. On the way to catch the plane the whole team and I (only 7 of us this time) we nice and early. We had all our extra bags of books and balls and needles (that took some explaining) checked in and went to look at the gate on the big flashing screen which makes everyone squint. We saw that there was no gate so we thought 'yes, its wandering time'. We all bumped back into each other approximately five minutes later and squinted back at the board which now said 'gate closed'. After a good minute of 'Shi..sugar', 'wheres my bag', 'where is moni...there she is' most of us started looking stupid running through Heathrow airport. The only one at the back moseying her way slowly was Naomi, the only Ghanaian at that point. We arrived five minutes later a little pink and a little more sweaty to find everyone sitting all leisurely-like at the gate. We bundled everything to the man at the gate and. 'Have you finished boarding? Is it too late for us too...'. 'Ah no' the decidedly Northern man said. 'We just do that because we were sick of the planes always waiting for someone on these flights'. Naomi got there a few moments later smiling to herself. I swear Ghana International is the only airline that has to trick it's customers into getting there on time.
Incidently, we had to wait for a passenger who was late.
It did get me wondering about all the people that are 'supposed' to be in all the places we find ourselves. Most of the time I assume that everyone who is infront of me is supposed to be there and no-one is missing. Sometimes, on the other hand, people are decidedly missing. This is one of those times.
x

My natural tendency would be to do things in reverse order, but at request Ghana first. There really are few words, which I know is a cop out, but here are a couple of pictures, because words, at least the few that I know, can sometimes fall flat. There will be more I promise.



There are many more images, memories, feelings about this place. They will spill over with time. The things echo in my mind are the colours, the cloth that dances brightly over dark skin. The fact that people there live without a burning desire for more which simultaneously evokes a warmth in me and a sadness. Without the will there is no change, but it is that same will that repulses me when I walk through the perfume department on harvey nicholls. Sometimes it feels like the only alternative to poverty that is allowed is a shopping centre and a cleaner cleaning a floor which is alreadly clean.

I was given much in Ghana: Food, interest in my beliefs, friendship, gratitude, knowledge, and I really wouldn't see it that I gave more than I received. Perhaps people should think a little differently about 'doing the right thing.' It really never felt like a chore, I never had to go hungry to feed another, it was never difficult at all. The only bad taste left in my mouth is that the change is so small, there are so many things which should already have been done.

A small number of facts which I learnt in Ghana follows : -
1. Ghanaians eat squidgy food in many many forms. Fufu, Kenke etc etc.
2. It's the only place I've seen where a series of million dollar houses can be built on a street with potholes big enough to house an entire car within their depths
3. Saying 'Ey' can mean approximately 25,421 different things
4. Every kiosk/shop/garage has to have something to do with God. 'God's will salon', 'Hallelujah tire repair'
5. I am an Obroni
6. A 12 year old boy in southern Ghana knows what Gonorrhoea is
7. Eating a coconut from a street seller couldnt be more fun
8. People are willing to get run over to sell you washing-up liquid off a basket on their heads
9. People sing and dance for no particular reason
10. Children are still children and I'm not sure that presenting them a starving little dolls to raise a pound or ten or a million will help their cause.

Watch it

I have, for a number of months, had a little black watch, which has travelled with me and my wrist at almost all times (minus showering). It has, amongst other things been taken along to Ghana (more on that later). It is fair to say too that it has taken a fair battering on the way, and during these few months it has had to be put to rest and resurrected with the (sometimes not completely voluntary) help of my local Argos. The first time it the strap broke I took it back to the shop accompanied by my fellow, who was pleasantly surprised by the ease with which it was exchanged, without a receipt, for a shiny new one. The second time it broke (I'm was beginning to think cheap watches are not necessarily the best investment) I took it back again. I had (again) lost the receipt, which I was rather annoyed at myself for. My fellow had a facial expression of vague scepticism at the thought of my being able to exchange the watch AGAIN without a proof of purchase. He was right that it was a little more of a struggle. The woman at the desk briskly informed me that I could not have an exchange because I had no proof of purchased. Initially I dejectedly stepped away from the desk. But then, something inside me said no, I was going to push it, and I was going to get an exchange. And that is exactly what I did. The woman firstly protest and then I asked to see the manager and somewhere along the manager overruled the decision in favour of an easy life. I got what I wanted and the woman at the desk just looked down and gave me the watch (and no receipt). I was left with a shiny new watch and another little mark on my morality. I couldn't help wondering where the line is between getting what you want and just being nice.

It's not the first time ive given thought to watches mind. I've always thought that analogue has something that digital will always lack. I realise that the likely audience will disagree in majority. It's just that you can see half a day, wrapped around you wrist. You don't just see 3:19, you see close to half past, you see that appointment at 4. Perhaps it's just my sense of numbers which is lacking.

There is also the moment I realised that stopping my watch does not stop time and that a watch doesnt really measure time at all. I really have my watch to thank for many of my most taxing questions. Read.

Before expectant silence

I wanted to leave a little note before I shoot off. I’m going to Ghana for a while, I’ll be back soon with pictures. I don’t really have anything of worth to say but it seems these things come along at their own pace (apparently I should consider revising my use of a reflexive pronoun, feel free to offer suggestions). So what’s happened? Erm, I passed my egghams, always a good thing. I’ve finished learning about lungs and hearts and guts and soon it will be on to babies and women and nutty people and such. I’ve done a project which I’m told was excellent but I’m not so sure, it’s probably a relative measure. I’m in the process of moving out of my house and moving in to Nowhere in Particular. People are moving away, I will miss them. I’m not much better at playing the guitar than I was many months ago but I have written some songs and had a play around. I’ve been here for nearly three years now, I would say Manchester is my home. I do, however, hold the view that we collect homes along the way, we never lose them, and only need reminding in the right way and it all comes flooding back.

It feels like I’ve reached a little bit of a ledge in life, when lots of things change all at once and you feel like you are about to drop into someone else’s life. I don’t know where I will be in a few months; come to think of it I don’t really know where I will be tomorrow. I can try and imagine, but it’d just be an ersatz reality.

As a complete aside Word is playing with me (again). I typed the word visage and then searched for a synonym, one of which it gave me was phizog, a word which quite frankly baffled me. It then told me wasn’t a word! Apparently it is ‘British slang for face’, who knew! Microsoft works my arse.

Have your cake and eat it

I don’t want to buy cake; I don’t deserve it, I’ve had it before and it’s not fair. I don’t want to go out drinking, I don’t want Birthday presents, I don’t want you to love me, I don’t want new shoes. I have to be missing at least one thing.

The world should be fair, right? I realise it isn’t, but that it’s most people want I think. It isn’t fair though. If it was fair something bad would have happened by now. I do enough bad things to deserve something. Some of those bad things are to test this point precisely and they never seem to work. I leave things around that I would steal and they don’t get stolen. I’m cruel to people and new people come and tell me they love me. How can you make someone feel as though there life is not even worth living and be made to feel that you are everything to another. I don’t get it. I’m more than tempting fate, I’m demanding fate, I want some karma. Otherwise this world is unpredictable, anything could happen at any time and that is what most people avoid thinking of for most of the time. Why do they drive to work everyday through rush-hour traffic at nine? Because then they know what tomorrow will be like.

I don’t want cake, so I don’t buy it. It’s not the guilt of being fat, because I’m not, and even if I was I’m hardly going to be prosecuted. No it’s a deeper guilt, a guilt of fortune. Why am I so fortunate? So I set these false limits, and that is what they are, entirely false. If I want cake I can have it, as Jarvis Cocker pointed out. I’m just a little rich girl, at medical schools who has decided she doesn’t want everything she can get. So what happens? I decide I don’t want the cake. A pretty thing arrives and says he’ll get the cake, then apologises for not letting me eat it immediately. Gets upset because he’s eating cake and I’m not. I eat cake. The battle is already lost and I’ve already won a thousand times over.

Please, tell me what the answer is.

Asking for trouble

The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run


You can’t ask a question without making an infinite number of statements. Take the question ‘Do you love me?’ Now this is not one of the best-out-of-five format that I am used to, and I must say it’s lucky that I haven’t be asked, or don’t remember at least. But there seems to be example after example of these questions and it’s taken much practice to even begin to consider the number of things that are being said when a question is asked.
At work I have learnt to hesitate a little and allow the chance for an answer before I’ve asked.
However, on one of the other hands there is the issue of not asking, and I can also see the side that says that you if you don’t ever ask you might never get. Of course if you do then get whatever it is that took your fancy, you have to live with having had to ask. For some this is less important, because other things get said anyway, and those can, apparently, be just as good for them. Don’t forget though there are other comments being made and you’d be a fool to miss them.
But what if you do ask directly and you still don’t get? Then you have to live with having asked and also having gotten nothing at all, except maybe a vague excuse for a reference.
Perhaps you get what you are given regardless of what you ask and you just end up frustrating yourself and others in the process.

Penny for your troubles?

I was walking today when I saw a little penny sitting on the road. Naturally I picked it up and began looking for someone to give it to when I began to wonder. Why is it that people need an adage to persuade them to pick up pennies? Isn’t ‘pick up a penny and you will have a penny’ enough? Why do we also need luck? Perhaps it’s a strange form of greed. I have, as it happens, seen a lot of people say ‘nah, its just a penny’ or even ‘nah its just five pence’, it seems that they are ashamed to become up anything that would be below their own threshold of worthiness. There is also the matter of the gain if passing the penny on to a friend. What about ‘see a penny pass it on because you don’t need it for now and you’ve got a friend who has £1.99 and wants to buy an over-priced coffee’? Perhaps before inflation eroded our pennies to dust people needed more persuading to share their pennies. Incidentally, anyone feel like a bad person?

This is NOT about Thursday

Let’s talk about Friday, because we all know about Thursday. Besides spending all this time talking about Thursday, you could miss Friday altogether, and that is a very dangerous thing. So I woke up Friday. Well waking up from being awake is probably not possible but I got up at least. Went to see doctors about the business of forensic medicine, booked appointments, sold cakes for the charity. Then it all got a bit strange. As I paced down Oxford Road a good friend bumped out of Oxfam and straight into me. Certainly a surprise and certainly a nice one. We went for a coffee and chatted, about roman emperors, friends, giving blood. The usual. We talked about qualities and shortcomings. He said that he couldn’t understand/stand the people who seem to cherish their inadequacies, the people who refuse to better themselves by refusing to let go of them. And I made the point that quite often our failures are also our strengths dependent on the surrounding situation. I’ll give you an example, a man who will work until he is sick will get the job done, and as well as it can be, at least by him. He is also the man who will neglect his girlfriend/wife/children/health. I suppose the trick is to position yourself in the situations which allow your weaknesses to become your strengths.

After the pleasure of coffee I tootled back to Occupation Health to be vaccinated against various horrible diseases which kill people daily. Drinking and needles in various limbs and I could soon feel myself drifting into the nether regions of my consciousness. Cant remember what I was thinking about but it was something wonky. Next thing I remember theres a nurses voice in my head muttering ‘open your eyes now’. All a bit strange. Then some more meetings, more cakes, and to top it off I drove to Leeds.

In other news, I can’t sleep (I don’t suppose its any blood wonder.)

An inspired title

My thoughts are wandering, I wrote this poem, its a bit rubbish but I might as well put it here for safekeeping.

A breath.
A kiss.
A mindless list.
A wish.
A way.
A wasted day.
A blur.
A haze.
A greenish daze.
A bond.
A bind.
A listless mind.

These things never have a plan, but im really trying my best. A few things are happening at the moment, exams are coming close, which always makes me incidiously lose tract of reality and enter some sort of horrible nightmare state. Today I learnt about Gurkas probably for the reason that knowing things is a treasure, and also they seem to have been in the news a lot recently. Is it me or is the idea of Martial Race completely bizarre? Which is the all-seeing-all-knowing race who chooses which is which? Oh yes, the British, I forgot. And yesterday about Lady Godiva, like I said the exams are coming up. Hello to any peeping Toms, if there are any around here.

Minging thing

A certain somebody said not long ago ‘you live in ming’. Simple statement, and eminently true, and I know said in jest, but nevertheless never a true word and all. Don’t get me wrong I’m not insulted, rather scared to death. It’s just that feeling that you might not be the thing that they thought you were, despite the repeated warnings. You know those things, the things about you that you wish weren’t true and that you pray to something celestial (if you are that way inclined) nobody will ever find out. I suppose it’s a balance between wanting to be understood and not wanting to be heard farting, seen picking your nose or caught growing something horrible in your dustbin. And if you think about it it goes a little further, because as honest as we think we are we are still different when alone. I will never truly know everything about you, and to an extent I can never not be trapped in my little skinbox (that’s demands a strange mental image.)

As an aside, isn't this painting lovely?

Strange conversation

A conversation I have subsequently thought about ...

Manfriend of a friend: Hi.
Me: I like your ring.
Manfriend of a friend: It doesn't mean anything.
Me: Oh.

What the hell does that mean?!

Someone put a fridge ontop of my car today.

I don't really have anything more to add. An opportunist would have taken a picture i suppose, but I think I'll forgive myself.

Black spot.

Heres a little story I wrote a little while ago. Perhaps you might be interested in reading it ...



Cold hard mother. She is laid, prostrated matter. The bed is anisotropic oak, a dark and strong and aligned box, filled with vessels. Within the cavity the technology of springs and foam creating a mechanical softness, a new uterus. Enclosed within is a Mother. She lays now, metamorphosed into solid, from the fragments which she was. The sediment, all bits and pieces of flesh, of warmth and cold, changing and becoming and not becoming now seems solid, finally permanent. An illusion, as all ways are. But still, there seems to be permanence about her, as Strazza had constructed and the hands of Alexandros of Antioch had assembled. Beauty; a permanent matter.

The room was the coldest I had known it. Her warmth no longer exuded into it’s corners. It was the coldest I felt. The pale box was no longer blue. The origin; shine, blonde, blush, fulminate, phlegm. All lost now save bleak. A bleak box and a contained loss. The sun did penetrate, it would be untrue to say that it was not present, but it failed to blaze, failed to bleach; only the presence was known of it through hard glass.

I stand to the right. My physical state? I am vertical. I am straight. See the top of my head. I am lost. I fall to my knees. Upon the floor I creak and joints abrade roughly. I am in pain. My mother is lost. I will stay here for maybe two hours, bent and wilting with grief.

After a little time has been given I am dragged up, pulled to elevation. I move into my study and sit. There at my desk I make only the slightest and most necessary movements. You can barely see me alive. All the pieces of me do not wish to be given away. This room too is cold and quiet, not silent, but so quiet.
Why do you do this? You. What a cruel thing. I have spent all that you have given me on you. My moments, mine, I gave them to you. My mother’s love, it was always received through me and in to you. Do you not think that I knew? That I know? That I did not think this so right, and so unfair?
All my joys, because of you. As a child, playing upon a swing, the air kissing over my skin was your breath. As a young boy, all my achievements; gifts from your hand. The knowledge learnt during schools; all your rules. Searing passions of me, a man with youth (yours too), all fragmented offerings from the Everything. The world that I have, it is constructed, the worlds that I use to make it ordered, they too are decided. Why is it that there is no such word as ‘sensical’ if there can be a ‘nonsensical’?
And to give gifts. To be capable of everything and to give as you do, when nothing is asked. And then to take it away, at your will. So cruel. So unjust. I asked for nothing, and to be made to exist, to have something of Everything enforced. And all this, only so that you may have the final pleasurable, powerful withdrawal. So cruel. Why are you so cruel?

I am at my desk still, letting thoughts ravish me, sweeping and swinging, as a child in a fantasy. I sit in the early afternoon. The thin veil of my curtains frame a gentle light that brings no warmth and casts grey shadows across the walls and floor and ceiling, not creating shapes but simply adding weight to the objects which shield boxes of light. I have been here perhaps an hour, perhaps a day or a week. The time has struck me, carrying significance because I do not know from where this moment has come.

The cruelty of your control, your decision to withdraw is still raw on my flesh. Perhaps you do have the will to explain, but you wish to be asked. Others have asked you. And I believe that you told them, that they knew because of you. The First and the New; I believe them. I trust you, you cruel thing. I’ve been told, I cannot understand, and I believe. Now I ask you why. I don’t ask with malice and doubt. You have given me hunger that I have not eaten for forty one days. And now I ask for food. Is it not your due? You cannot be surprised. Please. I am your child, whom you can punish. But does it not make more powerful the one who can and chooses not to? Oh why do I bother persuading you of your own power. Whatever I say will make you sick with the sweetness of creation. However I phrase my torture, all that will be heard will be ‘look at that little miracle of mine’. A boastful parent. Please.

I give in and go to eat. I need to absorb and I must continue. I rise from my seat and make my steps toward the door. It is dark that I barely see. Down the stairs I creep, the marionette. My crimson dried to a thoughtful brown and lemon, now sallow. I can scarcely make the boards of the steps scream underfoot, I am of such little matter. The knots which I feel under each step are not seen in this darkness. Each could once have been a branch, could have extended. But growth has been cut in order that my practical eyes may not see that there was once life. Cruel nature deciding which branches are to be and which are to be knotted and cramped as the invalid’s limb. And for what end? No, I’m not asking for an answer this time so be quiet. For what end? I have my answer to what I ask in this instance. For what end? For some overall form? So that a tree can be a tree and not any other shape? But what I ask is not this, I know this. But why must it be so? Why must a tree be a tree and of no other shape with its branches growing from all manner of places, some being prevented whilst others allowed? Purpose upon purpose upon purpose? Now I am asking you.

I have reached the kitchen. How long did it take? Don’t ask me. The warmth of this place has not yet been completely lost. I try my best to remain there but I am slipping, recalling stealing biscuits whilst my mother baked. The milk-warm Sundays. Having to reach up to half her height and over the counter, and touch tentatively amongst the knives and heated implements to find warm, sweet, golden viands with my fingertips. I am just a child.
Back in the carcass of my recollections as they slide cinnamon to sepia to grey. And I feel hungry again. Opening boxes, cupboard doors, glancing, draws, examining, sliding them, pulling at the sides, opening, shutting, looking. I find a pear and some stale bread.
No temptress. No sneak brought this, a pear, for the eye to widen with desire. No Pome, no delectable floral exterior, its ovarian remains dangling. I bite into the pear and fall slowly to my chair placed a little distance from the pinewood table.
I don’t remember eating the bread, though I know it is inside me for the pains of hunger have dulled. It could have tasted of whatever I wished it to be. I don’t remember ascending the stairs. If you told me that I had flown. If you had kindness to tell me so that I may know, I would believe you. I am back at my chair, at the desk, in a house.

Are you there? How foolish. I’ve begged of you and asked you please. Often I’ve thought that it isn’t an answer that is really sought, only a little longer to keep asking, more time to be confused. More time. But not now. I want an answer. I am not asking for the questions. So there you have it. Do not ask me the time, I don’t know it, all I could tell you is the light looks as morning and it looks as autumn has looked.

I will shut my eye, yes? I shut off my view. My head falls back, heavy with layers of copper, cobalt, vanadium, zinc. It swings back on the elastic of ligament, back and forth before momentum is lost and it settles at a point secure behind my torso. Taut, taught, tort. My skin pushed into the slats of the chair. I am lax and simultaneously strained by inescapable forces.

I know what is there behind the blanket of my flesh. I know what would be seen were my eyes freed from their enclosure. The point at which the ceiling and wall and wall reach to touch one another. That is what is there. Their angles conveying some variation of colour, which is an illusion. They are all the same, but not to me, even if I know them to be so. I am ready for your response. No more Pleas. More please.

I open my eyes abruptly, quickly, so as to trick the little nymph of opportunity, just about to develop wings and gather flight and leave me. God. You are there. Just there. Completely visible. All manner of things of passing through me. Don’t leave. Remain there. Answer me. You are answering me. I see it all. Just a little spot, black as all that has been. This spot, it penetrates my ceiling, through the roof it cuts, tears a slice the circumscribing atmosphere, smudging out into nothingness. A point, a ray which disperses, scattering twinkles of black, which disperse themselves, filling everything with their nothing.

Oh god. You are everything in there. A point, a place, no dimensions, no measurements. A circle cannot be the multiple points equidistant from you. Oh god. All that I understand reduced to nothingness. The only way I can know it is as a slice of something more full, a cut form of fuller whole, and that too is a spot. You are huge. Had I the impertinence to talk of cruelty? I’m sorry for simple morality. Oh God. You can cast an answer with a dot of yourself. Light soon recedes and the day is finally shut out. The weakness of my possessions fails me, I can no longer see.

Answer given. I sleep.

When I wake I am sure that I have slept for almost forever and been woken just at the very last moment. Hello dirty God on my ceiling. I will be on with my business today if you will please.

I pass from my bedroom across the narrow hallway to the bathroom. When was my mother taken away? I told you that I will be on with my business, quiet please. I am grey with lack of warmth, dry and sterile of movement. I stare through the mirror for a little while. It would seem that everything has been painted grey. What time is it? Why would God need this. Please be quiet with your existence. I run the water over my hands and face and neck. It is warm and then very very cold as the energy is being stolen from my skin.

I make plans for trips. I will buy things, I will see people, I will be in different places. But I fail to move, my intentions are a pretence to fool my limbs.
Alright. I submit. All the intricacies of life, they can no longer be done today. All my movements seem tiny. I let myself sit down. The study seems an empty box on the edge of then and what is to be. The dark floor a rectangle eclipsed by a thin red rug. The walls bathed in paint and tiny wriggling particles of dust. The ceiling will keep you out.

My hand is upon a pen. It is twisted from where it lay with my solid fingers. A take a sheet of blank paper from the draw and begin scraping shapes and circles and lines. There is nothing of any reason that I could give you, though I would if I had the capacity. I just keep on. Round and up and down a little then to the left then up then round then down to the point I began.

You are a mass of all. Everything has been done and all the negatives too. It seems that you result in nothing at all. I look down. I see my attempt, my action, and my blank page, now with the writhing of a pen marked into it. I don’t suppose that you are capable of this? No that is wrong. You are. You have done this in all ways, and not done this too. That is worse. How pathetic, how I give you my sadness. It is yours? No it has been lost by you, only made something by my tiny shell. Me; a vessel.
All that you can do is send out your little specks from up there and watch as they are no longer you anymore. Paralysed as you observe what you create as becoming so much more than you are.
You slime. You extend, spread, infinitely thin over everything. Into all your dimensions. Our gifts. Our measurements. Our ordering of your faceless mass. All you can do is everything. That is why I am able to wander. That is why the appalling can happen. Because you are fixing and dismantling.

All this time I have worried and wonder about my own pointlessness. Here is a point. I stab at the paper with the pen grasped in my hand. Ha. God. You. The paper rips a little; a tiny triangle is scraped almost from its centre. Big you. Giant You. Massive. Pointless. Ineffectual.

I do terrible things. I do wondrous things. Other things. Actions are taken. Changes are made. I say yes. Then no. Yes. No. No. Yes. Yes. No. None has replaced the other, they have all been said. You are erasing yourself as you begin. In all ways. We do the appalling. Yes and you do nothing. Little specks dancing around.

You see him sweating. You see him very pale now. His skin suffers to surround him. Wherever he is. You see him dart from one place to the next. Swinging and throwing papers. He does not attempt to leave the painted box.

Why do you look at me with the black eye. Absorbing all perfectly. I am one of your specks. Yes? I am an example, one of your actions? Yes I am your action. Have you not erased all that you have done by not doing? I am created I am uncreated.

You see that he stops. As still as he has been made to be. The world is dancing around him, all shadows and colours and ugly things. It takes a little time for the train to fully run through him. This thought is heavy. It stops him. He settles gradually down onto the floor.

Now let me think. Be quiet you, just stay there and be quiet. The only way that I may be real, complete, not to have a purpose but to fully exist, is to be bounded. I must have gentle points as the fronds of a fern does. I must possess the frontiers at which the wave is bent. Then I will be and you will have nothing else to say on the matter. Yes I must complete my boundaries.

He tears down the staircase, the fragments of his outer strata flying wildly from his outer surface. Banging and smashing into things to reach the point he sees. You barely have chance to see the tiny garden, growth over growth, following him.

In the dark cellar he pushed boxes, knocking metal against metal, things crawling quickly into cracks. He is unconscious to them, to what he is moving.

I have it. Yes. Paint. I have it. A brush. See?

He pushes out of the darkness, covering himself with heavy light. The door is heavy with water contained in its cellular boxes. Let him run on up the stairs. It is worth listening for a moment to the gentle screams of the door as it is left dancing too and fro in the wake of his unguarded displacements.

Painting the room black
You see that there are already splashes of deep black dragged into the wall by the time you have travelled to him.

No you are wrong. This is not the black of heraldry. No doubt cast. No danger. No you are wrong. No mistake. This is not immoral night. A blur of right. My right. Because I can. You can’t. I will not be erased. No. Erase your edges. Run away then. You have run. You are still. Here and there and not there and never here and always here. Bye Bye. Hello. Never gone. Always never.

Markets and males. You seem him. He is taking you away. Yes it is true that you can do nothing and that really nothing is being done, save the fact that a room is being made to night. You are a terrified little god, reduced to everything. What a shame. Don’t cry. Oh you already did? Yes and you didn’t bother. You did everything but cry? And Cried with it as well? What a shame.

And now what do you see? In the gloomiest of boxes. Yes you see a man, that is true. Shh. All of you be quiet. I am here, I am the important one. Me in my box. And now I will create myself. You little scum of a god, gave me my beginning, my slippery, grovelling emergence. But I will give myself a clear ending. So rarefied and pure.

He raised the knife in his left and drove in into his right. Deep red flowed down the creases of life, tracing that which was still contained inside his tributaries. And awful rumbles and screeches escaped from him. Out it is wrenched and into his thigh. Minuscule fragments of tissue spatter, wet onto wet, and are completely invisible. The room is already as black as it can be. Though layer after layer was made, scraped off himself and smeared onto the walls, not a thing more can be seen.

Are you sad now? No. You wretched faceless thing. Nothing can be done. You couldn’t even manage to be sad for yourself. Stay forever more and watch your little speck now that he is reduced to a mass of bits and pieces ripped up carelessly but with so much thought. And even then he will escape you with your time. He will be reduced further and disperse into many beautiful fragments. And still and still and more still you will have nothing of everything.

A word about…

There are times when you think before you speak: wedding speeches, thank yous and goodbyes. And then there is the rest of the time, when it seems like most of what comes out is an indiscriminate blob of poorly thought out rubbish. And it sometimes feels as though that is a long time of talking crap. When you’re with two friends, carelessly wandering through conversation you, well I, don’t think about it. And then you get onto rough terrain, perhaps what the other did last night, perhaps what you did, perhaps someone doesn’t want to talk about it. Well I’ve always thought it was because I was being honest, I wasn’t trying to say the right thing but just what was in my mouth. Increasingly though, I think its just plain laziness. It’s easy not to think. It’s also easy not to say anything at all, and I don’t agree it’s the best way to get around the issue. So next time I won’t be any quieter, but I will have thought about it, or at least I will have made the effort.

No pretty pictures

I hope the people who are likely to be most disappointed have lost interest in reading here by now, and im sure it is in part the result of the sporadic nature of the posts and not entirely the result of the particular lack of imagination or interest within the ones that have been made. Hmm, a rather long sentence. I have a few questions so I might as well make them here. Firstly is it common to feel as though all your thoughts are unfinished, sort of blurry and never quite formed? Where do memories spring from? Why exactly does gravity have to exist? Why do things stay stuck together at all? Who exactly doesnt hate Adam Smith?

Careering off the edge

Well today I spent another collection of hours standing around, getting in people’s way, doing jobs less well than other people could do them and generally making an obvious hassle of myself. Life is fun when you don’t have a job. So I thought I’d spend a few minutes thinking about some useless jobs people have, in a feeble attempt to raise the spirits.
The first job (or probably part of a job) was adding the little message which appears if you leave the cursor on an image for a while on the more advanced websites (you’ll note that doesn’t include this page). The Manchester university library website has a particularly bizarre message if you lurk around their images. ‘The library, always there.’ Presumably they aren’t expecting the impending nuclear war, along with most of the rest of the world.
Then it always falls down to pointless office jobs, the kind that rubbish T.V. sets out to represent (another pointless job you could argue.)
This was all turning out a little less cheery than I had hoped, so in a more noble attempts I worked on jobs that I had come across that are little known probably of importance. Of these many and varied occupations there includes Fluffers (with regards to the underground, in its more accurate usage of the term) and Verminculturists. As yet I am still undecided as to whether jobs need the people more than people need the jobs or vice versa.