sometimes the self-defeating selfishness of humans really depresses me. the waste, and the mad rush to create waste everything else. i think every privately owned car is a policy failure, never mind every billionaire.

even more stressful now as artificial intelligence promises to press every ounce of precious metal onto silicon chips, burn every drop of oil and gas, and chain-react every uranium atom.

but organisms have always changed the earth’s atmosphere. when the first life formed on the planet, the atmosphere was bountiful… for microbes which lived in scorching acidic springs. we are not the first (and we won’t be the last) species to expand into all the space available to us, using all the resources we can pillage, resulting in our planet becoming inhospitable for our species.

despite being individually conscious, on a species level we are not smarter than trees.

it is good to be woke. i am in favour of recognising people’s struggles, but sometimes it seems in society that the only political agency we have to back up this wokeness is to consume x type of product rather than y.

i do try and research brands that are ethical. but i am no saint. not at all. i am selectively blind to the suffering i (indirectly?) endorse by buying products from producers unknown, in circumstances i choose to be ignorant over.

and even if i do manage to only buy ethical products, what does that say of the many people who can’t afford to do this? a few well meaning middle class people buying organic soya milk doesn’t stop the amazon being deforested for palm oil.

so sometimes it feels like our options are to try and be good, achieve nothing, and live with cognitive dissonance. or to choose ignorance and have a shot of being happy.

for some reason that completely made sense, i stopped about a kilometre from the end of my run for long enough that it seemed to make sense to have a shower before finishing the run. it wasn’t nice putting my running gear back on.

i used to be in a band when i was in high school. mostly fell out of touch with the guys after we all embarked on our journeys into adulthood. but over the last year, i got into a good routine with my old pal, our former bassist, bouldering most weeks at 7ish am. we were both having transitional years. making plans for the future. navigating new relationships. he has now gone up north to be a rugged mountainman. i miss him and i’m looking forward to visiting in the spring.

i was having a sociable week after getting over the norovirus. bike rides and hillwalks all weekend, then i got into a run of dinner and drinks out that lasted the whole week. january is dark, bleak and cold. but there is meaning and warmth in whiling away the hours on the little things of life with the people you love.

epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge – rather than “what is true” we ask “ what does it mean to say something is true” – a metaquestion. i often check my old diaries, and i often find that important events went by completely unremarked on, or are described in ways that contradict my erstwhile memory.

i seemed to have a big thing for m-dashes in the poem’s early days. this line is super literal. i was walking with a few friends on a trail near kelburn castle and came to a point blocked by great big tree. so we got our shoes all muddy and carried on our way. a fun day enjoyed by all. i went to john lewis to look at mattresses later that day, then watched sport on tv. one of the all time great days.

this is more bike poetry. i remember cycling weakly towards a busy a-road with a parallel path. stopped before the mini-roundabout at the motorway ramp. feasted on sugar and hula hoops. relieved myself in an abondoned doorway. and then on with my journey.