i had my butt in the air and i was getting a tattoo and it was pretty sore. and i had perineums on my mind generally. the bit betweeen the balls and the anus, if you weren’t sure. excellent word, and it’s up there as a body part too.
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.
i kept getting this feeling that when the legs were pedalling the bike, the body was being left behind and the mind was in the sky, distracted.
it’s gone away now. it’s hard even to explain. i was having an out of body month or something.
i was just making some toast and cheese and i thought i’ll make it a bit fancy since, let’s be honest, this is what i’m having for dinner.
so i mixed some seeds and tomato paste and olive oil and salt and cheese into a lumpy paste, spread it on wholemeal pitta bread and bunged it into the oven and make a sort of turbo-pizza snack. and i remembered cooking with my dad when i was a wee boy.
we would buy pre-made pizza bases from the supermarket. or even just a crispy morton’s roll. and then tomato paste and cheese. so my version is a wee bit fancier. but that’s just a generational shift. there’s more stuff in the supermarket now than there was when i was a kid. nobody cared about mixed seeds and whole grains then. the food my parents eat now is different from the food they are then.
that’s why nostalgia is so emotional, and can hit so hard. it’s that longing that you didn’t know you had for a thing that you cannot have, because it just doesn’t exist anymore.
there are only 12 notes on a keyboard. each generation’s challenge: to take them and create something unique and meaningful that binds them into a cultural unit.
it’s a tall order. luckily, its fun just to try.
it’s actually only sort of a lana del rey tattoo. i got the idea when the queen died, and there was a new king. there was stuff in the news about the king’s new cipher, c iii r, which replaced the queen’s e ii r (charles the third rex, lizzy the second regina.)
i thought, what would the american cypher be? so instead of the british crown it would be the one from the statue of liberty. and the monograph… l d r, for lana del rey, or, alternatively lana the 500th regina.
oh and also. i love lana del rey.
would you rather be socrates unsatisfied or a pig in shit? the life unexamined is not worth living… but the pig is actually happy isn’t it? at least, it is in this philosophical paradox.
but ultimately, even if you choose the socratic life, ultimately you will still need to clean your toilet and take the bins out.
i remember distinctly an evening of childhood. my mum had made pork. i was chewing the pig in my mouth. overcooked. dry. tough. i left the dining table and went to the kitchen and spat the mouth-full into the bin. i thought about mortality: this was a dead pig i had desecrated. what a waste. i too would die. and i was scared of that. but if this pig could do it, maybe it wasn’t such a big thing.
a few years later i became a vegetarian, and i have mostly been vegetarian for most of my adult life.
i was listening to a lot of elliott smith, who i just found out was neurodivergent. i would have guessed that, to be honest.
his music is so hauntingly beautiful. he has a unique style. melancholy and melodic.
his life was short and tragic. he actually died in 2003, but i am pretty certain i did read about it on teletext.
i used to read planet sound on channel 4 teletext every day, and even wrote in. presumably it would have been email by then, but i have a vague memory of at least once having to actually post a letter.
one time i posted a hoax to the streets message board under the name ‘john hoaks’ claiming to have worked in a studio where mike skinner was doing a collab with chris martin of coldplay, and felt sort of embarrassed and guilty when i saw it reported as news on teletext a day or two later.
people look down on the homeless. they smell. they are drunk. they are addicts.
but we are all only a calamity away from destitution. so i try and give gratitude every day that although i don’t live in a society or a world in which every person has the dignity and security or a safe place to sleep and sufficient food and comfort, at least, currently, i do have that luck.
remember that the reason for homelessness is societal. we could change our politics to eradicate poverty. as a society, we choose not to.
so when i wrote this line, i was just trying to empathise with a homeless man who i had encountered near my flat. he was drunk. and i reasoned, if i had to sleep on the pavement tonight, i would probably want to get a bit drunk.
as is common with autistic people, i have struggled to get to sleep all my life. even in my comfortable bed in my warm flat, i really on medication to help me sleep. i’d really need to up the dose to have any chance of sleeping on the pavement.
i like to try and keep my desert island discs up to date. you never know when lauren laverne might call.
right up there, maybe my favourite song of all time, is ‘why does your love hurt so much?’ by carly simon. and love does hurt.
falling in romantic love is a massive, multifaceted thing. it involves accepting vulnerability. it means taking on another’s pain, as well as sharing in their pleasure. you sign up for the highs, but the dips can be brutal.
and as you fall in love with someone, you change them, they change you, and you change yourself. and, if it is meant to be, after a while, you will have grown together and found a way to be together.
the love epochal. n.n. benn 