under his eye iii

then i was home for the
first year of high school
alienated, scared,
quietly unusual
with no idea
what was wrong with me
needing people,
passions and a method of being
a year later,
on a coach to france,
i met k and c
and then p and s and g
(most of whom i fell in love with,
one of whom i am still in touch with)
who accepted me
when i rang their doorbells
every day

i am not sure how normal or otherwise it is to simply ring someone’s doorbell in the modern day. i suspect that most people now are like me now, and get the fright of a lifetime if someone unexpectedly rings the doorbell. but from age who knows eight, maybe, to at some point in midteenage, i would just go to the pal’s door and ring the doorbell and see if they were in if i wanted to hang out. even if nobody was in at least i got a walk.

also, remember to vote.

my pre-millennial childhood

o index finger
like a long toe
my pinky also
unusually small
little wonder
my handwriting’s unclear.
correction fluid
another go, please
i subtract seven letters
and get left with rect o fud
register my domain
with the nineties web dial up
to bravenet guestbooks
and fansites and bandsites
try and capitalise
on the dot com boom
all you need is a brand
profits will come soon
the scars of hubris
are born by us
inferior designers
and i wear them fine

i’m not sure if my little pinky actually has any impact on my handwriting. but if you remove enough letters from the ‘correction fluid’ we had in lieu of tip-ex in school, you could make it say rectofud. so they nearly all said this. pass me the rectofud, one might say, after an egregious spelling error.

as a 13 year old boy, i thought, i will set up a record label called rectofud. i made the website. it was the dot com boom. i figured that was all i needed to do to make my millions. it was fun anyway. the web was new and exciting and fun and i had my own little place on it, before myspace and bebo came along and gave everyone their own little webpage and none of my school friends had any need to post on the rectofud guestbook any more.

the universe is comprised of information thoughts are but ephemeral forms / deleted from the records for eternity, locked within an evanescent system

i try and fit the world into schemes of universal truth. the simpler the principle, the more beautiful, and hence better. but as soon as you take philosophy into the world, it is battered by complication and complexity. the universe is chaotic.

for this reason, i have a general fear of the future. planning makes me overwhelmed. there is too much of everything. too many books to read. songs to write. sunny days to bathe under. routes to cycle. dinners to eat. so many millions of choices, so many infinities of experience that i necessarily will miss out on.

and that’s before we come to thoughts. for we live in two worlds – the external world, which exists perfectly well without us and of which we know almost nothing – and the internal world – of which ONLY we know, and yet we still can’t remember everything. we can’t remember our every action in the external world. but we can’t even remember the events of the internal world: the ideas that drifted away before we could commit them to paper. the emotions we felt. the dreams we had. all gone. as if they never even existed.