Category: s05 may 24/25

socrates in shit

i read about his suicide on teletext in the 90s
a poet tortured, bill teller of the apple orchard
never socrates unsatisfied nor pig in shit:
we are socrates in pig shit, always and 4 real.

i was at the climbing gym the other day, i like to run over there, i put my climbing shoes in a wee run bag, it takes about 20 minutes if i go slow, sometimes i race back, anyway, this is all besides the point, so, i arrive at the gym, decide to go pee, in the disabled loo as it was closest, i’m there, nearly flowing, but the pan is full of unused female sanitary products, like a couple of pads and three inserts, all still in the plastic, so i’m like well i can’t pee on that, but i’m also like, if i leave now the next person is going to think i’m a mentalist who fills the toilet with sanitary products.

so i fished them out with my hands as a public service and put them in the bin and i hated it but i suppose this is just what its like to be an adult. and that reminded me a bit of the poetry above i suppose.

a common question asked by philosophers is, ‘how does one live a good life.’ which leads to the question: is it better to, like socrates, live an ‘examined life’ – and probably be constantly unsatisfied as a result. is it perhaps better to be a pig rolling in shit, just living?

but i find that often life forces us to be socrates in the toilet, actively disliking what you are doing, and thinking a lot about it.

and while i’m here, the first two lines were references to elliott smith and william burroughs, the death of the first by a somewhat suspicious suicide, and the killing of burroughs’s wife, joan vollmer, by burroughs, in a drunken ‘game of william tell’.

i have a theory that brexit is the sack of london, by hitler / different, but the same

i was reading the periodic table by primo levi recently. primo was a jewish italian chemist, and this book tells the story of his experiences during the second world war, living under fascism, and ultimately becoming part of the resistance and ending up in auschwitz.

we didn’t mind the british bombs, he said, they were allies against fascism. but while the italians believed that mussolini would fall, they thought that the germans and the japanese were invincible. and that the americans, too, would prove invincible. war would continue for twenty years perhaps more, bloody and interminable, remote stalemate, ‘back and forth on the steps to the ukraine… would never come to an end.’

and to some extent, this has indeed come to pass. not twenty or thirty years of war. eighty and counting.

have you tried the toblerone, feckless bairn? / it’s abysmally pricey, but so is everything else

it was a year ago that i wrote this. the inflation rate may be lower now, but the gap between what things cost and what we feel like they should cost seems to have been made permanent. its hard not to feel anxious about the state of the economy. so much uncertainty. war. tariffs. irrational, illogical people in positions of power.

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.