Month: Mar 2020

A Few Lines for the Ancient Dead

I’ve been returning to the park I described my visit to in this entry a few months ago, I’ve been going there almost every day that I’m not working or doing something else. And I very rarely am doing something else, so I’ve returned quite a few times now. Possibly as many as half a hundred already, at least I’m probably getting close to that number. I really have found somewhere special, and it’s close by as well so I can get there whenever I want. I’ve never had an experience quite as powerful as that first visit, although I did have a slightly similar one that I mentioned in the follow up I wrote, but I still feel like there’s some magic about this place that hasn’t faded. I remember being very concerned that would happen, that after a few visits the power would be lost completely.

It’s impossibly pretty, whatever the weather. I’ve been caught in heavy rain on more than one occasion and still been happy to watch the little pools of water form in the areas where the ground dips. The water takes on a sort of purplish tinge, maybe some optical effect caused by the interaction of the rust coloured autumn leaves and the mud below. I tried to get a photograph but I couldn’t really capture it. It just looked like a muddy puddle, with some dried leaves floating on top. Yet in person those muddy puddles are truly beautiful to me, I could stare into them for hours. The day after it rains might be when the place is most beautiful, the way the grass so verdant and fresh stretches out all around inspires a yearning within for true unbound grassland.

 

What you just read were the only two paragraphs I actually wrote for a post that I intended to write many months ago, shortly after the two more it links to, but totally forgot about. I started it during a time when I was visiting the local park in question several times a week, every day I wasn’t working and even on a couple of occasions after work when it was dark. I would go every day, and every day I would simply wander around for an hour or two in a half daze taking in the atmosphere and beauty of it. I gradually began to fear less and less that the connection I had to the place would fade, and of course it was when I completely lost that fear and my visits became another dull habit that the magic finally did leave.

From late summer, through Autumn, and into the first days of winter I did have a good thing going though; and during my many visits I frequently would find myself fantasising about creating some kind of great work of art to mark my time in this park. Lines of poetry would pop into my head, from everywhere I stood I felt like I was viewing the perfect photograph, and from my favourite area of the park – because I explored it thoroughly in my many visits, and didn’t just stick to the small area I had seen that first time going – which was that first found field, I would form stories of the grandest scope in my mind.

I remember one particular visit, towards the end of this period (during November) where a storm was heading towards me, I could see the dark clouds filled with rain looming in the distance when I looked backwards as I arrived at the park entrance nearest to where I live. I was listening to an album by this band called Taake, the second in a trilogy of concept albums about “death, Norway, and the devil in man” apparently. I walked up and along the path which is on your right as you enter and noticed it was beginning to get dark. It was early evening, and I turned around to look at the sky and saw the clouds much closer now and the feeling of rain about to hit. A wall of rain was rushing towards me along the tree lined path.

I began heading down a slope into this more wooded area, which I had avoided that first trip but now been down several times, and the fourth track on the album was playing. I put my hood up, and almost right after that I began to feel the first drops of rain hitting it. In my head, a grand narrative was playing out. I saw in my mind a man of antediluvian appearance, rags and bones tied to his waist. Some kind of Neolithic hunter-gatherer, his brown matted hair soaking as he stood in a wide expanse ringed by mountains. He had also been attempting to outrun the storm, and then as I walked along I felt his story forming in my mind. Then this particular track that was playing comes to an incredible crescendo and I realised the storm that followed him was in fact a wrathful god. I saw lighting cracks in the darkening sky of this alternative world I was glimpsing, and the man once again took off at a run.

It was a whole film that played out in my head, and I began to see it as something that could be seen on a screen. A full feature length film with not a single line of dialogue, just music and visuals. Almost like an incredibly long music video, perhaps all from one coherent album, but the music existing to serve the visual experience rather than the other way around. A film which lays on various grand and age old themes of heroism, man’s contention with nature/ the elements, and so on. I’ve always had these kinds of experiences, walking to school or stuck in my bedroom as a kid I’d dream up ideas of what seemed to me at the time to be amazing artistic visions. I’ve always had a creative impulse; but neither the talent, skill or resources required to manifest anything worthwhile from it.

An artist is a composite of all those things. We have a surfeit of self described “Creatives” in the modern day, but few artists. I’m not an artist, and one of the few positive qualities I have (my self awareness) prevents me from even seeing myself as merely a creative type. Yet I have always had this impulse, which is one of those necessary characteristics that an artist is made up of. This park was for a time able to draw it out of me much more consistently, you could almost say that it functioned as my muse. I would go there and often listen to music but sometimes just walk around and listen to the sound of the birds in the trees or dogs barking and so on, and enter a state that I would describe as mildly hypnagogic.

If normal hypnagogia can be described as having one foot in the world of dreams and the other fully in reality, then you could say when on these visits I was merely dipping a finger into dream. Everything I was reading and watching and contemplating during those months would stew in my mind and I would be struck by these many potential expressions of their fusion. It might seem strange but at the time I was fascinated by the imagery of the Eurasian Steppe, of this great and once eternal seeming grassland from where the Yamnaya and their descendants came down to conquer the known world at the beginning of history. Followed in turn later by the Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Huns, the Magyars, the Mongols and even the Turks.

The romance of it, the beauty of that unbelievably harsh and cruel environment, I really did find myself thinking about it constantly. I would walk through the field of the park with my arms stretched out to either side and imagine myself there. I’ve always been drawn to wide open spaces, only in totally open places does my soul feel completely free to assert itself, to fill out fully. There’s this wide road I used to walk along during the last year of school (I still go past that way from time to time) in the morning and I really enjoyed walking right up and along the middle of the road when it wasn’t too busy with cars. I’d love to see true open land one day, in Mongolia or Southern Russia or wherever, though it’s neither cheap nor especially safe.

This kind of imagery was a major feature of these artistic potentials that would float into my mind that I was talking about earlier, that very example I gave certainly had it. On one other walk a little earlier than the one in November I just mentioned, instead of a work of visual and audial art I began to feel a few lines of poetry forming from that same creative source. I didn’t write them down at the time, because while in that zone I really liked how they sounded to me, I know I’m no poet. I’ve talked before about my failure to understand or appreciate poetry, and so for those reasons I abandoned the idea as I did with all the others when leaving the park. The lines never left my mind though, I couldn’t get rid of them.

From Éire to Indus and every inbetween

There lived Gods and many kings

Riding down from the great grass sea

They weren’t even the first lines of a potential poem, and there were more that I did forget, they were just lines that felt poetic to me that I could see being somehow worked into something coherent one day. Grandiose ideas never last long though, especially those that are conjured up in this park I noticed after a time. So I kind of forgot about it, the idea of the poem was what I’d been fantasising about on that day just as the idea of other kinds of art were on my other strolls, rather than the pure expression of the lines themselves. So I let the lines remain somewhere in my mind, but had effectively let them go.

Then my visits to the park stopped, it didn’t snow this year and so the park in the dead of winter really lost a lot of that beauty I saw in it during Autumn without evolving to express a new kind as I had hoped for. I actually found a different park, also quite nearby, which I began visiting instead. The last few months though, since coming home from my trip to Rome, I’ve not really been visiting any of the parks. I’ve been working a lot, and I just haven’t been enjoying the walks as I once did, so on my days off I’ve been doing what I used to do and just staying indoors all day. The weather is warming though, and I’m going to have a lot more time on my hands going forward, so I do intend to start going again in the coming months.

As you may have heard, there’s a bit of a bug going around at the moment. My boss wanted to stay open despite it, and so I was working last week, but this weekend he announced to the team that we will be closing temporarily. Probably for the next 12 weeks, but it’s open to change. The government has instituted a temporary kind of UBI, so I’m still getting paid 80% of what I was, but I am effectively a NEET again. On the one hand it is an opportunity to read a lot, and write a lot more, but tedium does have a dulling effect on my spirit so I am a little concerned about this. I was an actual NEET for about half a year before getting this job and that really started to get to me, but I didn’t have an outlet like this back then.

Are we living in the end times? No, I don’t believe so. I was reading the Wikipedia article on the smug french imp known as Voltaire the other day and somewhere in there (or maybe in one of the linked articles about a particular work of his, clearly I was just ‘pedia surfing that day) it is mentioned that there was a smallpox outbreak in Paris during his lifetime that killed 20,000 people. I found myself stumbling across this information to be rather timely, given the major news story of the day, and it made me think. Corona-Chan – Gaia’s latest vengeful aspect – has actually been rendered rather impotent by the selfsame superstructure which roused her in the first place.

The initial outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan began before I left for my trip to Italy in early February, and there were cases in the north of the country while I was there if I remember correctly. Given how badly the country is affected, it has the most declared deaths I believe, I was pretty lucky. Always one step ahead of the game. I remember talking about it with my co-workers the night we went out a week before I left, joking about it actually. It has been about three months since the first cases appeared, and the death count worldwide is at about half of that 20,000 in Paris alone that died in the 1700s. Yet all around me people are acting as if the world is burning, you can definitely smell the fear in the air. That or acting as if nothing has changed at all, I’ve noticed.

I noticed customers last week shaking while paying for things, showing an unsual consideration for how I’m doing, or just a nervousness in their voice. I’m not saying there’s not cause for concern, but the way people are acting is just pathetic. Fighting over dried food that will be restocked the next day, stealing from shopping carts, hoarding. I am not saying that this couldn’t potentially kill a lot of people, but it hasn’t yet unless the conspiracy theories about the CCP lying about the numbers of dead in China are true. I saw a pretty interesting thread on /pol/ the other day about a very sudden and drastic increase in cancelled SIM cards in China that coincides with the timeline of this outbreak. I remain sceptical though, it does seem like this thing will blow over without having done too much damage.

Think about how incredibly unlikely it is that 20,000 people in a single city, as didn’t just happen in Paris but became nothing more than a historical footnote. It’s not even mentioned in this article documenting the history of the city in the 18th century, In fact given how much smaller the population of an average city, even a European capital, was during that period of time, an equivalent percentage of people dying now would be far higher than 20,000, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. I just think it’s beneficial to take a step back and get some perspective. Though of course also take the sensible and necessary precautions, or don’t whatever. Maybe the reason I’m really so unaffected by this is because I don’t really care if hundreds of thousands of people die from this anyway.

It might sound cold of me, but I don’t have too much sympathy for normalfags. The only people I hope (or even simply care) remain safe through this thing are the people who care about me, and my care is proportionate to theirs. It is purely reciprocal. My co-workers seem to care slightly, so I in turn wish them the best even the girl who I was calling oneitis a few months ago. I’m actually quite surprised how little I care that I’m not going to see her for possibly three months, given how upset I was about not seeing her for only one this last winter. I guess she’s not my oneitis anymore, I’m not sure why but my feelings have just faded. I’ve just been wanting to get away from people lately, good timing I suppose.

So a few weeks ago I was still at work, I was working until late last week actually the quarantine officially began on Monday, and stuck there all afternoon and evening with nothing to do but away from my laptop at home so unable to write. For most days of the week as well which is why I’ve been uploading rather infrequently lately. One day there I was sitting down and I was reminded of those few lines from months before. So I took out a notebook from my bag, and began to write.

From Éire to Indus                                                                                                                          And every inbetween                                                                                                                  There lived gods                                                                                                                              And many kings

Rolling down from                                                                                                                           The great grass sea                                                                                                                        Long haired heroes                                                                                                                   Bronze clad steeds

Now only the high                                                                                                                        Walls of once cities

I stopped there, it wasn’t good at all. There’s no structure to this mess, it is rooted in nothing. Nowadays everyone can be a poet, an instapoet if you want. You can string a few sentimental sentences together, cut them to pieces arbitrarily and if you pair your product with a picture of a pretty girl’s face then you’ll receive all the adulation you could desire as a “Creative”. Yet is there any value to it, it’s all a sham. Compliments are a sham, a lot of the time. I showed the written above section to someone, and she told me it was “great, you should try and get published!!”. What a joke, it is structureless and soulless. I scribbled it up in a few minutes, it flowed from my pen like prose.

Poetry is structure, it is rigidity that gives it it’s freedom, even I know this and I find little pleasure in reading poetry. It’s greatness comes from construction, the greatest poets of history didn’t just shit out fully formed works they laboured to produce their works. Even those iconoclastic avant-gardists of the modernist period like Ezra Pound who threw out strict meter did so not to open poetry to the world, to allow any fool’s ink to be held in as high regard as that of a master craftsman’s. They had their reasons I suppose, you’d have to ask someone who knows a thing about literature to explain precisely what, but they came from a place of knowledge. Think of the phrase “you need to learn the rules in order to break them”.

A few weeks ago I finally found the courage to fall for the online dating meme. I know how those sites work, Chad Thundercock uses it like an in-store catalogue, everyone else shouldn’t bother, but I’m lonely and my pride hurts for having remained so this long and so I did. The whole process is humiliating, taking a photo of yourself because you haven’t got any candid ones because you’re a fucking loser with no friends is humiliating, having to advertise yourself like a disposable product is humiliating, answering the asinine questions that no one ever looks at your answers for anyway because they “swipe” after seeing your first photo is humiliating. Taking a “selfie” for the first time felt like a nu-male rite of passage, I have become a bugman.

Somehow, I did manage to match with two qt3.14s. I think because when you make a new account they promote your profile to as many people as possible, then after a few days they bury it unless you’re Chad so you’re incentivised to pay for exposure. Or something like that, there are definitely some shady practices going on. You’re getting taken for a ride boys. I chose an app called Bumble, rather than Tinder because it has this gimmick where women always have to message first which allowed me to avoid the final humiliation of coming up with a funny enough opening line to snatch her attention away from the ten Chads she’s chatting with briefly.

It was one of these two girls who complimented my “””poem””” as relayed above, that’s why I’m mentioning this. It just rang so hollow to me that I couldn’t help but resent her deeply for it, all her false enthusiasm. She was really enthusiastic at first, though it felt so fake to me. I remember waking up, she must have matched with me during the night, and there was a message from her. She wanted to text back and forth the whole day and after a while I was really starting to feel like I’d made a terrible mistake. I tried replying with shorter and shorter messages to get her to back off a bit but that had the opposite effect, so that evening (the day after I first downloaded the app) I just asked her if she wanted to meet. My thinking was maybe after that she’d be satisfied and leave me alone a bit.

Which she was very happy about it seemed, asking me why I hadn’t just asked her earlier that day. Maybe if you hadn’t been constantly making it impossible to broach the subject roastie! She did back off a bit after that though, and the next day I decided to stop being such a bitter fag and embrace the situation. This is what I wanted right, to find a pretty girl who seemed to be interested in me? So I decided to reciprocate her enthusiasm when we picked the conversation back up. She wanted to know what I do for fun, I said I write quite a lot, before realising that there’s no way in hell I could share this blog with her. So when asked for examples I shared that stupid non-poem which this blog entry is meant to really be about.

Throughout the day, I noticed her interest seemed to lessen inversely with mine which actually increased as the day went on and I began to enjoy the text conversation. We made proper plans for meeting a couple days after that, I’ve never been on a “date” before so I let her decide and plan what to do. The day after she replied far less, and then the day before we were meant to meet she sent me one message very early then didn’t reply to my reply until that evening. I woke up the day we were meant to meet, and she had “unmatched” me. And while I was offended by the rudeness of it, wouldn’t it have been better to just tell me she’d lost interest, I found that I was also very pleased.

There was this dread about the meeting that was immediately lifted. Not just because there was that resentment I couldn’t get rid of even though she was quite nice, maybe just something I’d have with any female after years of being alone and bitter. Because I was just expecting an incredibly awkward experience and I knew I’d hate it. It’s funny though isn’t it, when I was slightly disinterested and also talking to another girl (who both matched with me and then stopped bothering to reply the same first day) she was very interested, and then the more I made an effort the faster she lost that interest. Maybe the PUA’s are actually onto something, what a crazy world. So after finding out what happened I noticed myself going back to swiping almost unthinkingly.

I stopped myself though, and in a moment of disgust at how quickly this thing had hooked me into it’s consumer cycle I deleted the app. Half a week after first downloading it. I remember thinking in that moment how sickened my ancient ancestors; barbarians, warriors, even any priestly or learned men if there were any; would be to see me there. I saw myself; pathetic, soft, modern creature in my pyjamas. And I saw these ancient men who those very lines from my failed poem brought to mind, the kind of men who put their enemies to the sword and razed cities to the ground. How would they see modern “man”, who prostrates himself so on these apps, who puts himself up for auction, who lives only for validation from women. I deleted the app, and in that moment vowed – I’m serious – that as penance I would take those lines and produce something that I could at least call a poem.

The immediate problem of course, was I didn’t know anything about poetry. I still don’t really. I remember what little I learned in school, English poetry is about stress. Feet, that is groupings of syllables which are repeated in a line a set number of times, in English (and I think most other languages throughout the world) are differentiated by which syllables within are stressed or unstressed. You’ll notice when you speak, at least in English but again many other languages as well, that you emphasise some syllables in a sentence very strongly but others you’ll just naturally glide across more softly. The same syllable in a word might be unstressed or stressed depending on the words surrounding it the particular sentence as well, it’s not always the same from what I understand.

A particular kind of poetic line then, is named based on the foot that is repeated and the number of said feet. I remember being taught that iambic pentameter is the standard poetic form in English, it’s what Shakespeare wrote in they told us. An iamb is a two syllable foot, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, it is supposed to sound like the beat of the human heart. da DUM, da DUM, da DUM. Repeated twice would be bimeter, thrice trimeter, four times tetrameter, and so on. You can find a list for the many different feet and all their names online, but it’s not going to help you if like me you just have a terrible ear for this sort of thing.

Maybe it’s a result of being such a thoroughly modern city dweller, maybe being so detached from the country and the earth has also alienated me from my body’s own natural rhythms. I remember the first day at work where I decided to really work on this thing, I decided I’d stick with the longer version of the starting line and analyse that. I then planned to use that as a model to repeat for the rest of the them, which at this point I had very little material for in preparation. I wrote down the line, and repeated it out loud to myself.

From Éire to Indus and every inbetween

Now it actually by chance seems to have a good natural rhythm to it, the muse must have been speaking through me when that line first came to me. It seems to very easily break up into four feet of three syllables each, so a kind of tetrameter. Yet despite reading it over and over to myself, in my head and out loud, and I just couldn’t quite figure out where the stressed syllables were in each foot. At first I thought the middle syllable on each one sounded best, but something about it sounded stilted and unnatural to me.

The last foot in the sequence just sounded completely wrong even to my untrained ear, and so I had to accept that that one would end with the stressed syllable rather than having it in the middle. This is fine though, one slightly different kind of foot (a substitutive) is generally acceptable even by older more rigid standards. In fact if done well, for example if used to break up the flow for deliberate effect, it improves the poem. Of course in my case it wasn’t for effect, although I did like that it gave the line a masculine ending. A line which ends on an unstressed syllable is referred to as feminine, and of course a stressed final syllable makes for a so called masculine ending.

From Éire / to Indus / and every (pronounced ev’ry) / inbetween

Given the subject of my poem, the harsh land of the steppe and the men and cultures it produced which have all been very strictly patriarchal I thought that was actually rather appropriate. I was now beginning to develop a real vision for the structure and layout of this thing, it was actually coming together. So at this point my thinking was that I’d try to end every line with one of those feet which has the stressed syllable on the end, an anapaest it’s called, and the first three feet would follow the unstressed – stressed – unstressed pattern referred to as an amphibrach.

An amphibrach is, according to wikipedia, mostly used in children’s poetry and more jovial or humorous kinds of poems. It is a kind often found in limericks, Dr Seuss wrote a lot with them I read somewhere, you get the idea. Given the tone of the poem I was trying to write that wasn’t ideal, my goal wasn’t a funny nursery rhyme clearly, but by this point I really liked the three syllable idea and that was where I felt the stresses were so I didn’t have much choice. It sounded right, and so I decided to just keep it. Not only did that first line just break into feet of three very naturally, but there was a rather appropriate symbolism to it as well.

The number three had a lot of significance to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, their social hierarchy was structured in a rigid three caste system. You can still see the echoes of it later in history; from the priest, knight, peasant social order of feudal Europe to the Hindu caste system which has it’s origin in the Vedic period though of course has evolved into something more complex. There is also more religious significance to it if you look into the subject further. There seems to have been some kind of division of the soul into a tripartite structure which their society must have seemed to mirror. With this in mind, I decided to work on developing the second line with what I already had.

It took me a lot longer than I’m proud to admit honestly, more than a couple hours, but after a few hours of fiddling around with what else I had I managed to produce two more lines which I thought conformed to that same amphibrachic tetrameter structure. To give myself some credit I was being interrupted by customers that whole time.

Old gods did / dwell, living / , and many / noble kings.

They came roll / ing down from / the once great / grass sea, on

As you can tell the third line there leads right into a fourth line, it’s enjambed. Perhaps because I’m just a brainlet, or perhaps because I’m good at sniffing out a fraud, most of the time I see enjambment used (particularly in contemporary free verse poetry from amateurs, instapoetry, most of the stuff that gets posted in critique threads on /lit/, etc.) it just seems arbitrary as I’ve said before. I’m never able to discern any kind of purpose or reason behind it, and there’s no strict metrical structure that makes it necessary, it just seems superficial. I was constricted by meter however, and so my hand was forced. I did plan at first to have all the lines end stopped, almost as a statement of protest towards the poseurs.

I had the general idea for the fourth line already in my mind at this point of course, just not the final product, it was going to be a variation on the “long haired heroes” line from before. I knew I had to keep that particular phrasing because I liked how it serves as an unintentional reference to Homer’s famous phrasing “long-haired Achaeans”; and also a structure for the overall poem was beginning to form in my mind which had eight lines which were paired. Eight lines, paired together in twos, kind of like a certain highly important Indo-European symbol which has an unfortunate reputation due to recent historical events…

See, in writing that second pair of lines – it would have been more impressive if I could’ve made them rhyme but unfortunately that was too difficult a task for me – which are obviously describing a kind of warrior aristocracy, it once again reminded me of the tripartite hierarchy of the Indo-Europeans I was mentioning a moment ago. The first two lines served as an introduction to this ancient world, the second clearly referenced a group of Kshatriya/ Knightly types, so now I knew what to write about for the rest of the poem. So the next quiet work shift I had, I got to work, and the writing the rest of the poem actually only took a couple more hours.

Their chari / ots, clad in / bronze, those long / haired heroes.

The many / , the most, both / their own and / those foreign

Did stand in / true awe be / fore their sub / limity;

Yet contact / with such a / thing as di / vinity

Could only / by souls ranked / most highly / be achieved.

So there it is, I’ll post it all together at the bottom of this post if you’re interested in reading it in it’s final form. I know it’s still not very good, I feel like the second half doesn’t have the same natural flow that the first few lines do. I worry that it sounds contrived at a few points in the second half trying to stick to the specific stress pattern from the start. It works “ok”, when reciting the poem you quite easily fit every line into the pattern set by the first, but when I look at some of the later lines on their own I’m not sure if that is the most natural way to speak them. I can’t think of a good title, so I’m leaving it without one for now. Thanks for reading.

 

From Éire to Indus and every inbetween                                                                                   Old gods did dwell, living, and many noble kings

They came rolling down from the once great grass sea, on                                                 Their chariots, clad in bronze, those long-haired heroes.

The many, the most, both their own and those foreign                                                            Did stand in true awe before their sublimity;

Yet contact with such a thing as divinity                                                                                 Could only by souls ranked most highly be achieved.

Dreaming in Prose: Slumberous Soup

Life is lots of tiny cuts, and we dream.

I saw that building again, the glass tower standing above the shop filled with sweets of all sorts. Old boiled sweets, hard sunset pink and lime in clear wrap, little bows. Timber framed finger pointing to the sky, a chair inside. I didn’t venture inside this time however, we went next door and I heard the same comment about the empty wall. We’ve done this routine before. It wasn’t even empty this time, made of marble it had things hanging.

Later I was at the station, it was half sunken and to get around one had to swing around on heavy cables, monkeys in the jungle canopy. The trains entered from the trees, and returned to them, we must have been in some kind of clearing. Looking down at the tracks I could see the water went deep. Stone and steel and little fishes who would scatter before the train came into view. A few of the guys who work there were around, the orange coats, but no shop. So, I was without purpose, cut loose. No fun allowed!

Now later my mother appeared, back from wherever she’s been all this time. We had to sell the flat and go some place where it would be sunny all year round. At once I was again fourteen, and though still naïve at twenty taken back to a kind that even to me seems now to be extreme. I walked past palm trees and felt again to be the shortest person in the room. The beach, an open room. It wasn’t to be though, just another false or fading memory.

I did return to one more concrete however. On the same night I forged a memory of particular regret and resignation, I was sent back. This time with added smiles, and warmer goodbyes, and a department store, of course. I didn’t return to the restaurant of goodbye but the streets after, instead of a glum plod the sounds of mirth filled the air and the streets seemed to twist and turn forever. I was glad, I really thought I was back there to do it again. Farewell, again, fool am I who truly thought I had gone back in time.

Duty calls though, for there was a city to save. Against the backdrop of pitch black sky pierced by bright and colourful lights we brought the terror down. Gliding up and along it’s cold metal body, and inside the thing. The destruction it caused was great, wandering through that broken city I realised this. Upon a toppled temple tower I stood, feeling sorry for myself. I think I was in some sense aware of the fantasy.

Handing out crisps, a bag bigger than any I’d ever seen before, to everyone in the room. The faces I knew and the ones I had forgotten.

Different city, smooth and shining bright with the sky open above. I searched for you, a platinum bob forever out of reach. Then you were a wolf, all white and vicious, and you hunted me. All these memories I have, of leaving you behind on that football field plateau, driving away in the shop. Or that old European city we set up in under the main level, and not one customer came. While I have you around in this world can I better access these fragments of our exploits in others?

I’ve met someone new in a different world, a sleepy seaside town by a forest. Tommy Caruso is her name, investigative journalism is her game. A walking caricature, a cartoon made flesh, golden hair, cork hat, shorts and boots, and a big smile to follow up after your first encounter with that accent. An exiled scientist from her home country of Australia who she was sent to get the story on had released a new breed of highly intelligent talking wombat dogs. They look more like black poodles with three rows of teeth. To hear them speak in their strange strained voices unnerved me. I found myself dragged into a series of events I felt unqualified for. Raised stilt houses on a cliff on one side of town, I went to them and delivered a letter. A chat with one of those odd and slightly frightening creatures. Finally a trip into the forest, cutting through vines with a lent machete. I don’t recall the laboratory, perhaps I woke up.

A cold concrete car park that was also a school, plastic red/ yellow signs by the railing over the stairs. I had to explain the purpose of my poem. “The thing is, women above all want to be pretty, rather than beautiful. This is why they wear make-up, sacrificing the latter for the former.” It wasn’t received well by Flo, but Molly didn’t seem to care. Tacit agreement, in my opinion. There were also stone streets, a tiny wooden bridge (enclosed) crossing over the narrow street above me.

Getting on an unfamiliar bus to go back home, a passenger who was equally unfamiliar expressed clear interest in getting to know me. So I responded in kind, only to be shunned. I get off the bus and see you, you’re crossing the road and I assume you’ll not even see me and keep my head down. That’s not what happens, you turn and smile just before a car blocks my view. So I walk some more towards home but now you’re walking towards me. You have this smile, and I kind of can’t believe you really want to talk to me. I then notice you’re talking to a friend. As we pass by one another there is a very quick moment of eye contact.

You look away almost like you feel guilty of something and I try to pretend to myself this never happened. I got a reply in my dreams, closure. Not all of them nice, in some instances you mocked me and another I was shaken awake by an imagined embrace. At the glass doors to the stairs you waved and I had to say something then from the lift you turned and we fell.

A, I didn’t realise this was your last week here or I would have said goodbye properly earlier. Anyway I’m glad to have met you and it’s a shame there wasn’t time to get to know you better. Goodbye, and good luck at your new job. / Goodbye, good luck, have a nice life!

It’ll feel strange here with you gone.

A, I wish you all the best in your new job and wherever else life takes you, I’m glad to have known you.

A, I’m really glad to have met you, I wish you all the nest in your new job and wherever else life takes you

A, I’m really glad to have met you, I wish you all the best in your new job and wherever else life takes you.

Name, I know I already left a goodbye message in the card but it was difficult to fit everything there is to say in just a sentence. Also I prefer to say goodbye to people in writing because I’m not very good at talking, maybe you / you might / maybe you noticed.

Name, It’s a shame there [page torn out]

Name, It’s a shame there wasn’t time to get to know you better, but I’m glad I got to meet you. Goodbye, and good luck at the new job.

I can’t just wallow for a month straight. I cried, I never cry, and spent a week of time miserable. I can’t sleep, my appetite is gone, and after you actually leave it’ll be ten times worse. For the next couple weeks I need some stability or I’ll go mad.

The same bright white head of hair again, only when I sleep now.

Name, It’s a shame there wasn’t time to get to know you better

Name, I’m really glad to have met you, it’s a shame there wasn’t time to get to know you better. Goodbye, and good luck at the new job.

Name, I’m really glad to have met you, it’s a shame there wasn’t time to get to know you better. Goodbye and good luck at the new job.

Name, I’m really glad to have met you, it’s a shame there wasn’t time to get to know you better. Goodbye, and good luck with the new job.

Name, I’m really glad to have met you, it’s a shame there wasn’t time to get to know you better. Goodbye and good luck with you new job.

I just wanted to say that I

Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you

____________________________________________________________

Ok, now you’ve made it through all that faggotry here’s an explanation. I did write an introduction intended to go before all of what you just read, but I’ve decided that maybe it’ll be a more interesting read if at first you don’t quite know what you’re reading. The introduction I originally wrote is below. I hope you found this post interesting, a little change of pace compared to what I usually write.

I’ve had some trouble writing this week. I did have an idea planned, another “describing my day” style entry, but I found it too close to the walk around Rome one from a few weeks ago. I went to a museum on my own, I went to some old places I used to visit when I was young a lot, I listened to some music, the usual. I had a lot of thoughts to share, and perhaps some will come through in later posts, but I’ve decided to scrap that entry. I had started on it though, and written quite a lot, so now it’s Saturday and I’ve got nothing at all and I’m working the next couple of days. I need to upload something or it’ll start to bother me.

Now today I was looking through an old notebook from a couple of years ago, which I was using as a sort of “dream journal” among other things. I have quite a few of these old notebooks, before I had this blog I’d write to myself just to get my thoughts out. Think of my more erratic posts, but far shorter, if you want to have an idea of what I would write in these things. A paragraph or two or any one subject at most, sometimes nothing more than a single sentence. I’d just write down ideas I would have, lines I thought sounded cool, and other similar kinds of things. I still keep a notebook, actually I was gifted three small ones when I went to Rome, but now most of what I write down in them relates to this blog.

Anyway as well as this I was also trying to keep a record of some of my dreams, as I’ve said. And reading back through that section today, not that there was too much because I kept forgetting to do it most mornings, I actually found myself enjoying reading it. Every morning it seems instead of starting a new section for another dream, I would just add to what I had written the last time I woke up and actually remembered to write. When we wake up we simply pick back up where we left things the day before, maybe instead of viewing dreams as distinct, we should see them as connected in some way like this. Sure, any two dreams will usually seem wildly different from one another – there isn’t that experience when you fall asleep as there is with waking, where you begin to refamiliarize – but often so can any one dream’s beginning when compared with it’s end.

I’m not too fixated on the idea, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about a little today after reading through these old notes. The technique works I think, for recording dream if you are someone who does so, it has a flow to it that mimics the feeling of the dream experience. And that’s what I think I was trying to do, and still am in some of what I write these days. To capture not just the content of dreams but the essence of dream in writing is something I’m interested in trying to pursue. I am also drawn to the writings of others which I think also attempt this in some way, as I’ve written about before a few times.

So today, or maybe tomorrow morning if I can’t finish tonight, I’m going to transfer those pages from the notebook to this blog. I’m going to fix any spelling mistakes and maybe I’ll edit it slightly, but I’m going to mostly leave it as is. The changing tense (I seemed to alternate between past and present freely), any other grammar issues or weirdness, I’m going to leave in. I think it adds to the effect I was going for in fact. There’s a little note I wrote at the start which I’ll leave in too, and the ending begins to take on a slightly different tone as it bleeds into more real events. I don’t know how far back I started, possibly around the time I first started working which is about two and a half years ago, but the descriptions towards the second half begin to concern events which would define the early days of this blog.

It ends where this blog begins, the line between the two worlds which had begun to blur being fully crossed by the end. I wasn’t really writing about dreams much by the end, but for some reason I don’t remember I decided to write it as a continuation of the earlier stuff, and so I’ve kept it in here as well. A lot of what ended up being that first post was written alongside some of what I’ll present today in fact, before I was sure I would start this thing. So, I hope this is a nice insight into what came before this blog, and a good way to show how far I’ve come in my writing since starting to really take it seriously again.

I’m Also Going to Use Proper Titles Going Forward

And here I am once again wondering to myself, and those of you reading, why I do this little thing that I do. I’ve always come at this topic from the position of trying to define intent, what I should do. I think I understand now that this was a silly way of going about it, that instead of obsessing about plans, the best laid of which often go awry, I should just let the thing live. All these vain declarations of design, of what outmoded model I follow or wish to, all this arrogant self explanation of what tone or message I imagine others could take from what I leave, it’s tiresome. You’ll note the irony in this statement I’m sure, but from here on out I intend to stop this.

I don’t know why I write exactly, I just feel compelled to keep doing it. Even though sometimes it’s as if I’ve been whisked back to my school days, particularly those long weekends spent staring at a blank sheet of paper – or playing vidya, trying to pretend the paper doesn’t exist – with an assignment hanging over my head. I keep writing, week after week, and I savour the moment when I press the “publish” button because it’s often the high point of that day. Through words I can explore my thoughts on anything and everything, and more than that I have the eyes of a small group of people so I know I’m not entirely screaming into the void. I like being heard, however faintly.

I don’t know if most of you are regulars, because none of you actually responded to the poll I made a couple weeks before I went away. I’ll be honest I was disappointed at first, but with the other things on my mind I was quickly distracted. Then of course I was away, and now I’m not that upset or disappointed anymore – well I am a tiny bit, over ten hours in MS Paint on that header image desu – I understand that I’m not owed anything from any of you. The only issue is that I still don’t know what it is that I was hoping to find out from that very poll, which is whether all this new traffic is from return visitors or not. Things have died down a little, I’ve had a few days here and there with few or no visitors, but I’m still getting a lot more than I was before the bump that inspired the poll.

Days with no one are very rare, rather than normal as they were. I should mention that one person did respond, so I can say with a certainty that I have at least one return visitor. I appreciate that, guy, but on reflection maybe it’d have been better for me to truly have had no response at all to that poll. Because it would strengthen my resolve when it comes to what I realise I need to do. Circling back somewhat to how I started this post, I need to stop worrying about what kind of writing I should be doing, what ideas and themes I think people should read into what I write, who I should be writing for, and instead just get on with the bloody thing. Like I’m not doing right now…

The results of the poll, that is the lack of results, seem to suggest that most readers are one time visitors. That for some reason I will never understand, and that could change at any time, these posts I write are showing up more in search engines than they were for the first year and a half of me having this blog. So while these posts that I write now receive more attention than what I was uploading even half a year ago, there’s no reason to assume they’re making any impact on any of the people who do. In fact, if I am being consistently stumbled across by people and am staying at the same average page views roughly then it must mean most of these new people don’t find what I write compelling enough to stick around or I would see consistent growth.

The poll result (or non result) has still taught me something, even if not one of the two things I expected to learn. I understand now that even if I have a reliable following, which I might/ but I very well might not, it’s a ghost following. It will never be anything more than numbers on a page, which represent people and show that I am heard, but tell me nothing about what impact my words have. Do I make people think, or feel? Do I inspire? Do I make people feel less alone? Do I provide comfort for people down on their luck, for the fact that they have found someone even more unlucky? Some mix of those and plenty more I would guess.

I’ve mentioned it already in a few posts, but I’m reading The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa at the moment (or Bernardo Soares perhaps) and I think I might see something of what people see in this blog. The book is much more poetic, and an entirely different beast, but similar in a few key ways. It’s a posthumous collection of notes and scraps of paper which were found in a huge chest nearly lost forever and put together in a way that Pessoa himself never would have wanted. I’m reading just one of several orderings, the one I chose seemingly the most comprehensive as it includes almost everything, and this is only of the translations in English. In the original Portuguese there could be thousands of potential arrangements of these short snippets of inked reflections.

He talks about so much, and I’ll save my specific thoughts on the book’s contents because I think I’ll probably write a whole entry here about the book, but it does remind me a little bit of this blog. I’m really loving the book, I was reading it for almost two hours straight last night. I’m trying to savour it though, I’m mostly reading it for around half an hour a day at most. I’ve been reading other stuff alongside it, I recently finished Dubliners by James Joyce. I really want to read a lot more in 2020 than I did the last few years. Every year since about 2014 actually, the last decade was a lost decade for me. That’s how I see it, not just in regard to reading but in every sense actually. I ruined my education, and I retreated away from the world only to waste that time in petty self pity.

When I came back from my trip to Rome recently, for the first time since dropping out of school during my A-levels, I considered higher education. My conversation with a man who I only know as “Bournemouth” which I talked about in my last post, prompted it I suppose. Though it was more than that, my uncle has been pestering me about when I’ll give uni another chance from the day I renounced that path, it was as much spending time with people who were just like me that are studying. Sure I have a friend who is in uni in England, but I spend very little time with him. The last time I spent as much time with him as I spent with the people I visited while in Rome was back when we were both 15.

I realised that I don’t want to be stuck in this box by the station until I’m old, honestly I’m terrified I’ll still be doing the same job I do now when I’m 30. There’s a guy I work with, he’s in his early 30s (about the same age as my dad when I was born) and he has two children. If I want a stable, lower middle class job, then it’s going to be very difficult without a degree. The traditional career, that of the boomer, is dead. The idea of working your way to a position through experience alone. At least, the barrier for entry has been raised significantly, you need a degree, and so I briefly considered trying to go back to take a year course to qualify and then go to university. I’d probably study English, certainly a humanities subject because it’s the only thing I could stomach, and then after looking into it for a couple weeks I decided I would rather not.

See, the barrier for entry may have been raised in one sense, if you want to be another office worker/ cubicle cuck then you’ll need a degree, but on the other hand the barrier for entry has been lowered in some respect. We as a society have achieved a level of consumerism never before thought possible, and unless Corona-Chan or some other catastrophe arrives to kick off the long awaited boogaloo then the trend will only increase. We are living through the slow bourgeois-fication of the human species, honestly look at the most well developed countries on the planet. Whether it be Norway or Japan, you could categorise them as middle class nations. Where I live, in England, we’re not far off. Even the homeless have smartphones, the other day a gypsy woman showed me a photo of her daughter with hers after I gave her some spare change.

I paid for my plane ticket to Rome (a return ticket, though as I mentioned there were complications) with the money earned in two seven hour shifts at work. I would like a more stable job with reliable hours and slightly more money so I can perhaps one day afford to own a home. Although on other days I wish I was dead, but assuming I “make it” and find someone I love and find a reason to continue with it all and all the usual normalfag faggotry. If I could earn what I earn right now (if averaged, because I do shift work of course) working as a teacher, or a librarian; or I could earn the salary of one of those more reputable professions doing what I do right now; I’d probably go with less money for the more respectable salaried job. More importantly, I think most people would be even more likely to do so. Especially people from a similar background to me.

I’ve never really cared about being wealthy, I have no real ambition in that regard, but I’ve always craved respect. Not that I’ve done anything to earn it. As we near the point where even the poorest among us live better than the kings of old, the idea of the job gradually becomes nothing more than fashion. It’s all posturing, it’s the expansion of the blue collar (trade) vs white collar dichotomy. You might very well be able to earn more as a tradesman of some kind than at a low tier “white collar” profession like middle management, but yet you will always be looked down on by that same white collar worker. You will always be a red faced prole, gammon. Now I see it though, I can’t find it in myself to take part at all. It’s so sickening to see the charade play out.

It’s a crazy world, clownish. This blog is the only real solace I have from it, that and good books. I’d say I should write as if I have no audience, because it would lead to the most pure kind of expression of whatever it is I wish to express, but I’d be trying to maintain a fiction. There are people here reading, and I intend to keep giving you more to read. I am however, going to try my absolute best not to be influenced in any way by what I think said audience may want from me. I recently uploaded something quite unlike anything else I’ve ever posted on here before, a work of prose poetry inspired by the creature Tiktaalik who has been making waves recently on 4channel.org.

I’m pretty sure the first thread was made on /his/, that’s where I saw it first anyway, but either way I really just took the inspiration to talk about determinism in a way that I thought would be more interesting than if I just made a more standard entry on the subject. I mentioned ages ago now, over a year I think, that I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that free will is anything other than a mirage and that I would need to write about it in some depth, but I never could find a way to intelligently share my view. Anything I wrote seemed juvenile, easily dismissible, and useless given there are so many very clear and well reasoned writings out there for you to read on the subject already from people far more educated and knowledgeable than I.

Whatever this new gradually forming worldview of mine ends up looking like, it’ll almost be certainly be determinist/ fatalist, because that’s how I see the world. It’s gradually become a crucial way of seeing the world for me, at this point a day doesn’t go by where I don’t find myself reminded at least once of the fact that we have no real control over anything. I’ve been meaning to write more generally about the idea of constraint as well, the very idea of it, and of course this subject also always leads one to the most oppressive kind of constraint of all. That being the idea, the fact, that we have no kind of freedom of choice in any sense when you really think about it.

There are no choices, whenever you follow through with a process that in your mind you would consider a choice, know that this “choice” was the only outcome that there could have been. You were always going to do what you actually did do, which is why you did it. It’s not something to be upset about though, for a long time I was quite negatively affected by this new understanding, for as I said it’s the truest realisation of constraint imaginable. Now though, I’ve kind of made peace with the idea. I said I didn’t want to push people towards a particular interpretation of my writing, so I won’t labour the point, but that post was kind of about that.

I really find the philosophy of Heraclitus helped with this process, which I wrote about a fair bit in this post. I do intend to get back into that by the way, I have been distracted lately and also reading other things, but I will finish that book and the post responding to it. I’ve also been working a lot lately, I did six days of work one week. It’s an easy job for the most part, and I’m getting paid, so I don’t mean to sound as if I’m complaining, but I’ve had very little time to write. I’m surprised I’ve managed to get a new post out every week since getting home from Rome. Well actually it’s not too surprising, this one I’m writing right now is completely mad and stream of consciousness. It’s easy to just vomit my thoughts out like this. The prose “poem” I was talking about a moment ago was half finished before I left and still ended up being pretty short, less than 1000 words. Last week’s post was substantial though, I hope you liked it.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, I feel like everything is slowly deteriorating around me and I’m very concerned. I don’t even have time for “tfw no gf” anymore… those were the days. I know that I don’t want to study, I would hate the environment, I’d be stuck doing a course for four years at least and I’d probably have to continue living with my dad for that time because I wouldn’t be able to work full time and study. I don’t know what to do, but I know I need to do something or I’ll be in that exact position I fear so much. I can coast through life, barely alive of course but present, and modernity will do it’s best to keep me comfortable while doing it, but in my heart I will grow more and more to hate every waking moment.

I know it’s odd that I was just writing about how free will and choice are an illusion and now I seem to be obsessing over “choices”, but knowing an illusion for what it is doesn’t make it feel any less real. Another example of constraint would be the languages we use, as far as I’m aware all languages are predicated on the idea that we are agents with the power of choice. So it’s impossible to talk or write about doing anything without reinforcing the illusion, every time you say or even simply think about doing something you further strengthen the false idea of choice. If you throw a ball at the ground and it bounces back, you wouldn’t say it chose to do so, but imagine if you were raised in a language that did. You would start to think it did, and of course the presumption probably comes before the language and I understand that our innate belief in free will might be genetic and not cultural.

I’m very tired, I’m going to stop writing now and go to sleep.