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. 

chorus number nine

brazen child, pray share your toblerone with me

i know you pinched it but i’m no a grass

i have a theory that the criminal law system propagates violence in place of justice

different but the same

it’s funny that i find myself writing this blog on the day i was a victim of attempted violence (see tues 2 – i postulate a remedy). should i report the crime, and myself propagate violence (the criminal justice system) on my assailant? 

the punishment is often worse that the crime. i need to think this through. i believe we shouldn’t judge people by the worst thing they ever did. but i also realise that if crime is unpunished, criminals become our rulers.

degenerate cosmopolitan

i’m not jewish but i am a degenerate cosmopolitan

tagging my archive, overwhelmed by the burden of time, 

the library extends my being

to a new dimension, my mind fleeing

to the shelf. and when i see a single magpie i blurt, i say

there was a second one but i scared it away 

down glens and valleys,  down spirits and sedatives

my love is unambiguous

but the good souls may as well forgive us

i often reflect that if i lived in nazi germany, i would have been a victim, not a perpetrator. i’m left wing. i believe in individual freedom. i’m an artist. i’m disabled.

i am very scared about the turns being taken in many so called western liberal democracies.

the tempo of doms

to the sweetie shop why stop there’s no consequence 

i run and i come as close as i’ve came since whence,

rage rover through the stroll pastoral 

cape town to mugdock bog, 

wide spectrum gossip, conspiratorial 

prone to panic about other’s perceptions

a tendency revealed through a habit of projection 

concept album? i am living a concept life

into the tempo of doms i go, abandon strife

the internal rhyme rolls the rhythm, through indecision to precision

yes i am getting organised, on a mission

to rise up contra to mindless repetition

yet once again i combine olive oil, chilli and paprika in the kitchen

back in the mid life crisis phase, one thing that happened that partially led to my initial interactions with the medical industrial complex, was that i unexpectedly lost a load of weight for no particular reason. i’ve been fit and active for most of my life, but i’d never had visible abs. then suddenly, i couldn’t maintain my weight. it was a bit scary at first but by this stage i was more thinking well i may as well just eat sweeties whenever i want.

i do try and eat healthily but i’m still lazy and i require daily treats. and i think i have gained a bit of the weight back now. i stopped weighing myself and the problem became less stressful. it doesn’t make any sense, but i can’t waste my life looking for the answers to absolutely everything can i?

the crops blaze

a sunny eve with keith, watch the crops blaze

dump, no whiff of a gap, sewer works (the job pays)

i dispel return to indefinite limbo

doing surveys shirtless on the deckchair, a himbo

you know i cried every day for a year after i left

and 17 months on my life’s still a mess

weirdly, this same pun was in private eye the other week, but done much better. they had ‘water treatment works’ – with the punchline ‘well why aren’t they doing it?’

mortal again

in how many people’s memories do i still live?

what degree of blur, how precise an image?

there is nothing mere about mortality

there will be humdrum finalities like the last cup of tea

the last step in the sea. the last shag

the last time taking out taking out the bin bags

so i say memento mori at least every day

and when things get hard, i’ll try to be there

i genuinely do try and say memento mori every day. there are so many sad things about life. but life, as far we know, is the whole show. so you’ve got to try and make the most of it really. try not to spend all day reading the news. remain in denial about creeping authoritarianism and the collapse of the world order. who knows, maybe things will get better eventually.

i think i’m going to start watching star trek from the beginning. i think i’m ready.

smash and ooze

you smash the avocado, bring the force within you down

your zeitgeist, your energy and spirit

oozes, you infuse us in it

but our guests left us with an odd moment

mutually dysregulated, endlessly in torment

good souls do forgive all souls, but is every corpus soulful?

i was randomly flicking through my old emails from university and noted quite a few where i had emailed tutors chasing for essays. i hate uncertainty, hate waiting for the answer. i remembered logging into to websurf, the university’s online student platform, to check my exam results. just mindlessly refreshing the page. then eventually, my degree certification was there. it came through first, before the rest of my exams were uploaded, and i felt such relief. joy, general excitement, but essentially relief. a non-shameful result.

i had dropped out of uni after first year. had a difficult time after leaving school, suffering from autistic burnout. after a few years i was ready to try again. i didn’t really have any expectations, the best grade i had got in first year was a c i think. i just wanted to stop myself from drifting into a life of unrewarding cycle of repetitive work, burn out and unemployment. which felt like not just a real possibility, but probably the most likely outcome for me at 19 years old.

anyway, that relief and joy was tempered almost immediately when i realised i didn’t have a job, wasn’t especially suited to one, to be honest struggled with all the entry level positions i’d ever had, and was useless in job interviews.

i’m proud anyway.

plug stuck

am overwhelming day, a meltdown throws my phone away

the bath is full of soapy water, the plug stuck in its circlet

it’s thursday the 12th, what the fuck will tomorrow bring?

i start the drill and it’s enough 

to scare the plug from its crown 

when you find out you are probably autistic, there is a tendency to temporarily get more autistic. i have actually only had a few meltdowns. i am a quite person. i am prone to shutdowns. i don’t like to draw attention to myself.

the few meltdowns i have had have tended to get me in serious trouble. like, arrested, or hospitalised.

on this occasion, i merely smashed a phone that was already quite scratched up and to be honest i probably wanted an excuse to buy a new one.

oh and the plug got stuck in the bath. i have written about this before! it was annoying! check the archives!