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 humumgous.

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.