Category: i] toblerone (a brexit poem)

we all rely on the good souls who forgive us

i don’t believe in having goals. not at this stage in my life. i want to live a life i enjoy every single day. it’s about the process. repeating the process. tweaking the process. getting better at living each day.

i exercise nearly every day. i cycle, run, lift weights, climb and hike. it took a while to get into the habit though. i think i was about 22 when i started to get on top of it. what really helped me was making it part of my identity. i identify as a cyclist. to maintain that identity, i need to ride my bike.

i also have a treat every day. a lot of treats actually. sweets. coffee. play melodica. write a blogpost. work on a poem.

what gets you through the day?

all that’s left is our dismal materiel

the first time i read the word materiel was in a christopher hitchens book, probably the one about kissenger, agent orange, the vietnam war and all that vile evil stuff. i thought it was a typo. it was only when i encountered it for a third time i actually looked it up and learned, for the billionth time, that there is much more that i do not know than there is that i know.

fun fact: in a million years, even if all my banal writings are somehow preserved, only very specialist historians would be able to understand any of it due to the shift in meaning of language over time. i may as well be writing in hieroglyphics. and even if language stayed the same, frames of reference change. in a million years, nobody will be living in a world inhabited by the characters of the 21st century. even liz truss will be forgotten! hopefully the good creatures of earth will still have lettuce though.

getting there—a tired prayer to monotony

i used to hate the phrase ‘getting there’. i have encountered many utterers of it. particularly when i was younger, in my first few, low paid, jobs. someone would say, ‘howzitgoin?’ and the response would come back, ‘aye, getting there.’

i suppose as an autistic person it struck two problems for me. the first, it is not well enough specified. how far along the road to where, are we? and, the second, much more significant, problem: it is unoriginal. everyone seems to say it.

then i was in the pub one time with my dad. i suppose he wasn’t long retired. and he say a guy, let’s call him jimmy, who he used to work in the yard with. ‘alright jimmmy,’ he said.

‘alright bill, howzitgoin?’

‘ah well, getting there,’ he said.

so that made me a bit more sympathetic. and then i lived another twenty years, and now i understand a bit better: ‘getting there,’ is the essence of the human condition. it’s a lazy protest against the monotony of existence. it is a blasphemous prayer. we ask god to release us from the drabness of life.

it is necessary that life weighs us down. that as a species we in a doom loop of futile repetition. it has to be good enough that we want to do it, but bad enough that we don’t really mind that we will be leaving one day.

regarding the snake eating its tail – that’s called an ouroboros. my friend i. has a tattoo of one thinking ‘i’ve had better’

in purgatory every pain and every pleasure you caused will be inflicted back / and you will judge yourself

i don’t know where this came from. frankly, i can only assume some deity or other was using my mind instrumentally to communicate a new policy of the afterlife.

this is my problem with religions, they aren’t selling the product hard enough. now, i’m a good candidate for salvation. i’m keen to cause no harm. i know that only the devil can offer in-life boosters and that the whole deal of belief is for the afterlife. so if they want my custom, they need to start banging on about what facilities etc are available in their afterlife plan.

i need the info on why proddie heaven is better than the hindu rebirth thing and why neither stack up to valhalla or whatever. i need to find the religion with the right afterlife for me.

i am a loaf of bread, origami, a process

we think that the world is full of things. but it isn’t. it’s full of processes. a building is a process. it goes through construction, then it enteres into a dialectical struggle between decomposition and maintenance. even the stone it’s cut from it degrading. atoms dislodge into the air.

the universe is unimaginable chaos. did you know that due to the solar system’s transit through the universe, the dinosaurs who lived millions of years ago also lived trillions of miles away? while it seems like the earth is a constant, actually it is moving very quickly through the unimaginable void of space.

this isn’t a cover up, the red rose, the guerilla’s fist

trigger warning: self harm

well it was a cover up really. i had a bit of a mental health crisis when i was younger, in my late teens. one result of that was self harm scars on my arms. i know realise i was going through a period of autistic burnout on the transition from high school to the new expectations of early adulthood. an experience a lot of austic people go through.

i don’t know why it took me so long to realise i could tattoo over the scars. maybe i just wasn’t ready to move on. but then suddenly i needed to. to make them a polished part of my story. i love my arms now. until very recently, i guess i preferred just not to think about them. and the message they sent out about me, and my mental health.

post-prandial down-dumpsy meek remainderman rain run

i was listening to a lot of podcasts about health. i’d had a couple of health scares. i ended up going down a few false paths. got misdiagnosed with various things. i wouldn’t recommend, it was all quite stressful. turned out i didn’t have copd or an inflamed prostate or whatever but i am autistic.

anyway. post-prandial means ‘after eating’. i kept hearing it in podcasts and i liked the way it felt to say it. i’m prone to echolalia. and i must have been feeling down in the dumps. must have went for a run. and meek remainderman is an ironic biblical reference.

friends, what we are dealing with here is melodrama.