the pb

race day nerves, alert,
waiting for the call to stool
and then a heady wait for armistice
two centuries less a decade,
my heart rate for eighty-six minutes
wobbly, aching legs, perplexing personality test
pleasant materteral assessors suggest i am for def. autistic

i ran a pb in the half marathon this time last year. this time this year i ran a pb in the 10k. 38 mins. it was a windy day. my legs are still aching from it now. as they were from the half last year.

then i went for my autism assessment, which was actually very stressful. like custom designed to really stress an autistic person out. which is the sort of person i am.

locker 91 revisited

i make a faith deposit in locker 91
b808 beats along
through the state of glasgow
lucy breenges to the counter
by the great-posture pub monster
pistil shoots and buds later
i have a callus from daily hooving
(with the hoover)
everyone you love and you will die one day
so i give thanks while we share the same air

the 808 is of course a drum machine as well as a road that runs past my flat in the west end of glasgow. i cross it on my way to the gym, where i used locker 91 if its available.

breenge is a scots word for pushing through. in the doublet, there was a great big dog in that night, all curly and humungous.

i have long believed that if you use a hoover you must hoove with it.

basically this was all a fun night in the pub with people i love.

is this the up dog?

it’s a genuine question
if life is just the things you do
the sensations and the stories that you tell yourself about them
maybe i better redo the utilitarian calculation
buying a guitar and quitting might suit the situation
but this isn’t the down-dog, this is the up-dog
dawn’s copper crown high on my morning jog

what does it mean to live a good life? this is a question as old as philosophy. aristotle was worrying about this in the 4th century bce when he wrote the nicomachean ethics.

sometimes, i take a while to understand things. sometimes, i’m blown away by the simplicity of an idea, assume there must be something more complicated going on, and completely misunderstand the thing.

this happened to me with aristotle. all our scholar is telling us is that virtue is found in the mean. everything in moderation. the goal is to live a balanced, happy, or eudaimon, life.

i somehow managed to get a d. i talked a whole lot about metaethics in that exam. which is interesting. but not what aristotle was talking about. this directly cost me a first in my degree.

did it cause me not to have a happy, eudaimon life though? no. i think it still might work out for me in the end, this life. i’m getting there.

save for what?

my good friend steev had a job when teenaged
saved up, quit, bought a guitar with his wages
said to me once: what are you saving up for?
lately i think about that a more and more
and the other recurring dream
loading the trolley with all the treats
and waking up before i eat them

i have mentioned my friend steev before. i went climbing with him early in the morning before work for a year or so, until he moved away last winter. we were both going through transitions of one sort or another.

we were in a band together when we were much younger, and it must have been around that time that we had the conversation about saving up.

when does one find contentedness? i was thinking about that a lot. and the autism diagnosis was forcing me to look at my life in a different way.

i decided to work less. spend more time on art. poetry, music, this blog. and i am working on redrafting some long form prose for publication. i wish i could work more on this stuff and less on employment still though.

chorus number nine

brazen child, pray share your toblerone with me
i know you pinched it but i’m no a grass
i have a theory that the criminal law system propagates violence in place of justice
different but the same

it’s funny that i find myself writing this blog on the day i was a victim of attempted violence (see tues 2 — i postulate a remedy). should i report the crime, and myself propagate violence (the criminal justice system) on my assailant?

the punishment is often worse that the crime. i need to think this through. i believe we shouldn’t judge people by the worst thing they ever did. but i also realise that if crime is unpunished, criminals become our rulers.

degenerate cosmopolitan

i’m not jewish but i am a degenerate cosmopolitan
tagging my archive, overwhelmed by the burden of time,
the library extends my being
to a new dimension, my mind fleeing
to the shelf. and when i see a single magpie i blurt, i say
there was a second one but i scared it away
down glens and valleys, down spirits and sedatives
my love is unambiguous
but the good souls may as well forgive us

i often reflect that if i lived in nazi germany, i would have been a victim, not a perpetrator. i’m left wing. i believe in individual freedom. i’m an artist. i’m disabled.

i am very scared about the turns being taken in many so called western liberal democracies.

the tempo of doms

to the sweetie shop why stop there’s no consequence
i run and i come as close as i’ve came since whence,
rage rover through the stroll pastoral
cape town to mugdock bog,
wide spectrum gossip, conspiratorial
prone to panic about other’s perceptions
a tendency revealed through a habit of projection
concept album? i am living a concept life
into the tempo of doms i go, abandon strife
the internal rhyme rolls the rhythm, through indecision to precision
yes i am getting organised, on a mission
to rise up contra to mindless repetition
yet once again i combine olive oil, chilli and paprika in the kitchen

back in the mid life crisis phase, one thing that happened that partially led to my initial interactions with the medical industrial complex, was that i unexpectedly lost a load of weight for no particular reason. i’ve been fit and active for most of my life, but i’d never had visible abs. then suddenly, i couldn’t maintain my weight. it was a bit scary at first but by this stage i was more thinking well i may as well just eat sweeties whenever i want.

i do try and eat healthily but i’m still lazy and i require daily treats. and i think i have gained a bit of the weight back now. i stopped weighing myself and the problem became less stressful. it doesn’t make any sense, but i can’t waste my life looking for the answers to absolutely everything can i?

the crops blaze

a sunny eve with keith, watch the crops blaze
dump, no whiff of a gap, sewer works (the job pays)
i dispel return to indefinite limbo
doing surveys shirtless on the deckchair, a himbo
you know i cried every day for a year after i left
and 17 months on my life’s still a mess

weirdly, this same pun was in private eye the other week, but done much better. they had ‘water treatment works’ — with the punchline ‘well why aren’t they doing it?’

mortal again

in how many people’s memories do i still live?
what degree of blur, how precise an image?
there is nothing mere about mortality
there will be humdrum finalities like the last cup of tea
the last step in the sea. the last shag
the last time taking out taking out the bin bags
so i say memento mori at least every day
and when things get hard, i’ll try to be there

i genuinely do try and say memento mori every day. there are so many sad things about life. but life, as far we know, is the whole show. so you’ve got to try and make the most of it really. try not to spend all day reading the news. remain in denial about creeping authoritarianism and the collapse of the world order. who knows, maybe things will get better eventually.

i think i’m going to start watching star trek from the beginning. i think i’m ready.

smash and ooze

you smash the avocado, bring the force within you down
your zeitgeist, your energy and spirit
oozes, you infuse us in it
but our guests left us with an odd moment
mutually dysregulated, endlessly in torment
good souls do forgive all souls, but is every corpus soulful?

i was randomly flicking through my old emails from university and noted quite a few where i had emailed tutors chasing for essays. i hate uncertainty, hate waiting for the answer. i remembered logging into to websurf, the university’s online student platform, to check my exam results. just mindlessly refreshing the page. then eventually, my degree certification was there. it came through first, before the rest of my exams were uploaded, and i felt such relief. joy, general excitement, but essentially relief. a non-shameful result.

i had dropped out of uni after first year. had a difficult time after leaving school, suffering from autistic burnout. after a few years i was ready to try again. i didn’t really have any expectations, the best grade i had got in first year was a c i think. i just wanted to stop myself from drifting into a life of unrewarding cycle of repetitive work, burn out and unemployment. which felt like not just a real possibility, but probably the most likely outcome for me at 19 years old.

anyway, that relief and joy was tempered almost immediately when i realised i didn’t have a job, wasn’t especially suited to one, to be honest struggled with all the entry level positions i’d ever had, and was useless in job interviews.

i’m proud anyway.