actually existing capitalism

life under actually existing capitalism continues;
a unique combination of boring and stressful.
face it, i’m never going to be a hot porridge-man
i think trusts are somehow fundamentally immoral
for tax wheezes and to sneeze-on late diseases
build car washes and slag heaps on the green belt!
speed eden’s fall to it’s infernal conclusion

i don’t want to be too political, but i don’t like the world that much. i don’t claim to know how to fix it. but it’s just not that fun. work i mean. we spend years in training, like 13 years of school, then maybe college as well, you’d think we’d be like smart enough to make the world work without everyone spending most of their waking life just trying to keep on top of their emails.

an odd feature of actually existing capitalism, is that the essentials of life, you know, shelter, food, raising a family, entertainment… are priced as luxuries. lots of jobs just don’t pay enough to support such things. i don’t claim to understand economics. but that seems to me like an abject failure.

culinary weekend

gloriosa, parliament sauce,
crises on the high seas
a paddling pavarotti leaves
in degrees of blue cheese
graduates to a sextet roundtable gaff christening
make the dog wait late to get out in the rain
halved iced raw lobster twitching
piled up plates in the kitchen

was there a thing about the three tenors and high c’s? sometimes i read this poem back and i haven’t much of a clue what was going through my mind. i think this was about my girlfriend’s flat warming but honestly. it was a tough time. maybe we just leave it at that. need to get better about oversharing…

in my second novel, tentatively titled ‘sleaze in san estaben’, there is a character called pavolvia who is loosely based on pavorotti. except it turns out he isn’t really italian and has a gruff new york accent. and he’s a bit of a sex pest. man i need to spend more time working on my novels.

the elucidation

hey. imagine if everyone knew everything
not about the physics and philosophy and the universe,
god and the mystery of life;
but about every dirty thought you have ever had,
and all the gossip since the pharaoh and moses
smoked camel lights in negotiation
round behind the pyramid
not just who horsed who,
but every weird wet dream too
we would be more liberal and better behaved i should think
subterfuge stymied,
the obfuscated elucidated.

an idea i think about a lot is that of the book at the end of the universe. i like to think that, when this whole thing is over, all the players will be invited to inspect the logs and find out what the other characters were thinking, what actually went down, who thought they had got away with cheating, and so on. like, the ultimate compendium of gossip.

so for the purposes of this thought experiment, we accept that this book exists. the question then is: could it have existed before the universe started? does it already exist? but only the players who have already quit have access? or are there superplayers who have access to the book now? and would reading the book change the book?

ms. diagnosis

i only realised i had dimples
when i was 39
its fair to say i have a disconnected
state of mind
my health so misdiagnosed
i associate doctors with hurting mine
so let’s let this limerent love sing fine
aside regular meltdowns,
it’s still the honeymoon time
we bond beyond the boundaries of skin
and trust that good souls forgive everything.

when i was in my early twenties i had a girlfriend with facial dimples. how, how did it not occur to me that i also have dimples. even as i was researching the idea on google images i was doubtful. but ultimately accepting. diagnosed with dimples at thirty nine years old. with autism at 40. what next?

i learn slow

i shall need several weeks or months off work
in the early stage of a new religion,
i need time to make it up
pull an apex grin
888 my spectral sum
charm a devil at an intersection
and sell your soul for sin
best check the small print
because i learn slow
but at least i know

i had been down the autism rabbit hole for a while by this point but by now i was in a full blown identity crisis. who am i? am i someone else now? does the process of self discovery actually involve the construction of a new self? is this like the electron whose form is altered by observation?

i consider the parable of the bluesman who sells his soul to the devil to play rock n roll guitar. i’m tempted to seek out an autism super power for myself.

but on reflection, post diagnosis, the person i am most like is the young me, who blogged and wrote short stories and dreamed of being a novelist or a rock star, working passionately and amateurishly on artistic projects. the need to express myself on the page or cassette. the planned, edited, polished, dialogue. perhaps because i am not the best at expressing myself in the moment.

which is fine. i think. i’m sure i heard somewhere once that the irish say that a writer is a failed talker. i’ll take that.

baby-boomin’ woomin’

all my life, baby-boomer woman
have told me i’m good looking
and from hereon in such women
shall be my heroines

growing up, women of my parents’ generation were always telling me i was handsome. women of this generation remain the most likely to smile at me unprompted in the street, even when i’m not walking a dog.

but mainly, i am prone to echolalia, and the day i wrote this i just had the couplet stuck in my head all day and i felt like i was going insane. now, a year later, i’m quite comfortable making a conclusive diagnosis of insanity.

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.