Hera Be Dragons

Over the edge, Over again.

Darkness envelops physicality, while sentience wanders free and unhindered.

The curse of the left lifted.

These beautiful molecular genii…

A friend of mine is recording me singing on one of his tunes tonight.

AAArrrrggghh! I hate you.

I will give ’til it’s all gone and you’ll turn round and spit in my face.

Sold my phone to keep my job. Lost my job. Still got no phone.

Apostrophes dance in a good sentence.

Take a good look. You’re no big deal. You’re so petty. It’s a lie! Naaaaaaahhhhh…

They still feel justified in their use of “retaliatory” force. From the mother of “turn the other cheek.” From the father of GREED.

Get me another fucking Lattæ.

God, I still owe him money and when he reads this, I’m sorry! Speak to you tomorrow.

Various Fawlty Towers/Monty Python references.

I wish I’d gone to Henley College and studied Classics. I told a girl I did the other day. Turns out I’ve read enough to blag it!

Zeus’s thunderbolts shake the sky – John Hurt in I, Claudius. Now “Little Boots” was a free man. Branded “Tyrant” by the S.P.Q.R. Tyrannical Taranis, the same in Gaul. No Homer for the Gauls though. And the New Romans? A bumbling, fat, drunk, father of the year.

When you hear/read a real line of poetry that makes you feel alive – “Let my armies be the rocks, and the trees, and the birds in the sky.” – Sean Connery quotes Charlemagne.

I wish my father could read this and be proud.

Wonder if I should get a blonde streak? Or a silver one?

This is the result of 25 minutes of writing down things that came to my head. I think this disproves the myth that men think about sex every 7 seconds. I confess I thought about heroin three or four times but it so distracted me I neglected to write it down. No Kubla Khan’s were lost though. Tonight I shall sing out the frequencies of Pi. Bring back to me, Isis, what I need to make my life complete.

Perhaps my problem is very few women compare to Goddesses. I met only one. Lay and loved with only one. She was Calliope, Aphrodite, Persephone, Pandora. Now she’s just another scar on my heart.

No doubt the next one I fall in love with will be the same. Mortals outshine the Gods by virtue of their fleeting brevity. Ugh! I’ve been alive too long already!

Single minded

If single-mindedness were an art form, I’d be rich. But it isnt, and I’m not. Thinking I would write a new blog I discovered the only thing I could think of to write about was music. Having just spent three satisfying hours playing it, two hours walking back home thinking about the music I’d play next rehearsal, and the rest of the evening writing lyrics, one could be forgiven for thinking an alternate subject might present itself.
No dice!
Even the time spent writing this has yielded the absence of a pork cylinder. Could it be that I’m possessed? Oh, no, that’s the wrong word; incest? I remember… Obsessed.
Most likely.
It’s consuming though, you see. Lyrics for songs, arrangements for songs in development, melodies, harmonies, rhythms, riffs, constantly running round n round my head. It never stops. People wonder why I get so agitated by “shit” music (i.e. music I don’t like). Because I, and in my experience, any one else schooled in Musick can’t not listen to, analyse, and generally focus on music playing in a given situation. And while that may be just annoying to some, for me, it interrupts the flow of composition and creative fermentation. It touches a core of me, a place that shouldn’t be sullied. I feel as disgusted and ill when I hear such things as I do elated and alive when I hear the music I love, that sustains me through life. Melodramatic it may sound, but I think I would die without music, and my life would have very little meaning had I never discovered it or if it didn’t even exist.

Exchange

I’ve been here before, she said.

My tears tell a story, I said.

Perhaps they did.

 

I can’t stay, she said.

I’ve no reason, I said.

Watching her walk away.

 

The point is beneath, she said.

And I’m ever thankful, I said.

There in the smoke from the gun.

 

Don’t you hear in the radio? She said in my head.

You’re not here, I said.

And the guitars mourned.

 

We’re alone in the crowd, she said.

Nothing but us, I said.

And she kissed me again.

 

My mind is a garden, she said.

I would love to stay, I said.

It was, too.

 

The way eyes turn silver as seeing is strangled away.

 

Was that really me?

 

It was too…

Today I feel like a J-J-J-Junkie

That’s right. Things feel like a CD skipping sometimes. I have to check things more often than I’d like. I worked hard on a construction site the last couple of weeks and with the first whiff of a pay-cheque I went and bought me a sizeable amount of drugs. The weekend is a blur, needless to say.

I was doing well, I tell myself. And so do others. What the fuck do they know. They aren’t here; with me. They are far away, and they don’t know what it’s like. They don’t know the cupboard full of needles, blood and shattered dreams of self-esteem: the iron-maiden that I locked my spirit in long ago.

Some people can shove their darkest secrets down, down and forget them.

Mine manifest into the unsure, unstable dream of reality I share with the world. I mark the scars on my body. I pay the price in blood for every sin. Don’t worry, I have no messianic delusions. I was always more of a “Better to reign in Hell…” kinda guy.

I forgot why I did it for a while. I f-f-f-forget why I do a lot of things. But why the gear? Oh, yeah. It works. Every time, it works. Every time you shoot heroin, assuming your little-gangster-wannabee-dealer hasn’t burned you, you don’t need anything else. You are free of your responsibilities to your body:

Don’t eat, or excrete, and your heart barely beats.

Ah, yes, free from that hideous addiction thrust on us at birth – eating. It always pissed me off that with all this fucking technology they still haven’t come up with a pill that gives us all our nutritional needs in a daily tablet. Then surely the joy of eating is freed from need, obesity eliminated, and world hunger forgotten, no?

I’ll have to stick with gear for now.

It leaves you surprisingly free to do other things… Strange and dark things; dreamlike, wondrous things; underworld things, and nocturnal things; social and sexual things…

The downside, of course, is that those natural drives you’ve escaped from kind of lead you to a natural place in society.

Case study – Thom is not a Junkie.

“Hmmm, I feel like eating, shitting, sleeping in a warm house, and fucking my girlfriend today. I’d better go to work and earn some trust paper.”

Seb is a Junkie

“Fuck I need some gear before I start to feel ill. Then I might think about earning money, sleeping, fucking and having somewhere to live. Mind you, the price of this medication which alleviates my mental and physical symptoms of depression, introversion, and self-loathing, before we even think about withdrawals, is sky-high, and it isn’t available in a safe and reliable format, like, say, Insulin.

I have to wait for my dealer to be up.

I could be standing here waiting for hours; and I will wait. If I’m late for work, in my girlfriend’s car on route to pick her up, due anywhere in fact, I will put it off and put it off, waiting and waiting for the man with my fix to come.

I will hate and curse this dealer who may well have forgotten I’m standing waiting for him, may be rolling a joint, talking to a mate, or may be legitimately late for some reason. Dealers exist in the Junky’s mind in a kind of quantum duality: wave and particle, they are spat-upon and saviour. While waiting for the dealer, no insult, derogatory statement, not the harshest, bigoted generalisation will be expurgated, rolling easily off the lips of even the educated and enlightened. All the hate, frustration and bile in the world is poured upon this character, guilty of nothing more, really, than poor customer service.

Then, like the burning, sapphire chariot, vision of God that appears to Ezekiel, a car heaves into view or a man walks round the corner and, suddenly, all is forgiven. He is beautiful, radiant, the anointed one, sent to free you of your mortal sin, bringing with him the kingdom of Heaven, wrapped in tiny, Rizla paper packets. Stabbed with relief you murmur, “Alright mate, two yeah?”

“Yeah, bruv. What’s hap’nin’, you cool, yeah?”

This is not a genuine inquiry of your status; it is to convince anyone watching that it is an exchange of words and friendship being conducted, not a black-market one. No one really cares for anyone else in that world. Does anyone really care for anyone else? It’s a nasty question to consider because, often, the evidence “For” is gray, fuzzy, and rooted in mutable concepts like Faith, Morality, Ethics, Hope, Family, Love and Spirit. On the other side of the scale is placed a large, metal-looking, solid and opaque body-of-evidence, drawing on such solid-sounding concepts as Science, Empirical Study, Statistics, Genes, Survival, Instinct and YouTube. Watch as blind Justice leans, teeters, struggles, but ultimately topples headlong over the cliffs of Human Denial.

People ask me why I don’t clean up my surroundings: why I keep a huge pile of bloody needles and spoons, citric and heroin wrappers, smashed bottles of sterile water, in a storage cupboard which could very well be used to house the clothes that live on my floor. Junkies like to create a hierarchy; a pyramid of points on the drug user’s wall in his head with a little mark on it saying “There is the point I will not go beyond.” For instance, many party-going people of my generation will have Ecstasy, Speed, Ketamine, and Cocaine above Crack and Heroin. Many Crack users will look down on Heroin addicts thinking dirty fuckin’ Skag-head cunts while blazing away on their pipes, stalking their houses with loaded crossbows and assorted other weapons, peeking out the window, sure that their drug habit is so important to the CID and MI5 that, any moment, any tiny noise, is the cops coming to storm the place and arrest them. And when the last Rock has been smoked they will happily kneel on the floor with their nose to the carpet, arse in the air, searching for any tiny, white crumb, however dubious, however microscopic, however plastic, and try to smoke it. Still, if they want to think they’re somehow better than us that’s fine.

The Point is always arbitrary: given long enough, assuming one doesn’t address the issues causing the problem, one will always go past the Point. And let me point something else out: – if not getting the latest pair of Nike trainers, mobile phone, Gucci handbag etc. made you ill, you would lie, steal, cheat and whatever else to get it. In fact, I have seen the exact same behaviours in people addicted to shopping and people addicted to drugs; the same will to destroy one’s stability, bank-balance, relationships and self-esteem. The line is thin, I assure you. As the maxim states – Civilisation is only ever three meals away from collapse. Just as class and status are illusory, equally, no state of addiction and spiritual emptiness is any better than another. Perhaps, in some ways, I was lucky when I decided, at around 14 or 15, that I was gonna do Heroin at some point. Perhaps I saved myself an awful lot of posturing bullshit and weak denial. Straight for the jugular.

The hierarchy exists in sub-category as well. I’m pretty much at the bottom, being an injecting Heroin user, and being a user who can’t be fucked to clean up his dirty works, I theoretically only rank above the guys who are homeless, dirty, aggressively rude in their begging the public for money, and are generally ignorant and offensive. The fact that I’m employable, educated, cultured and creative counts for little; as I said, there is little difference between addicts. I have done things my middle-class family have been shocked at. Myself, I always just saw it as a voyage of experience. I guess there were things I was not proud of, and certainly things I felt guilty about, but I never really set myself a Point until I’d been past it and decided Hmm, don’t wanna go there again. Blake said it best when he said “You never know what is enough, unless you know what is more than enough…”

But why the cupboard of needles? It reflects how I feel. Sure, I only show it to my little room, my little piece of the world – and anyone friends with me unfortunate enough to stay in my room while I shoot – but I suppose it’s my way of not deluding myself, not forgetting that I’m one fucked-up Smackhead. And, maybe, a lot of people have a cupboard like mine, secreted away behind a dark door in their mind, and as long as they keep that door closed they appear to the rest of the world as a good, upstanding, waxwork pillar of the broken and fraudulent community in which they live. As I said, I wear my scars, and I’m not afraid of myself, and while I may be full of contradiction – narcissistically self loathing, ignorantly intelligent, cassandrionic and narrow-minded, and a truth-seeking liar – I can look in the mirror and see who I am…

One fucked-up Junk-junk-Ju-Ju–Ju—zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Bad Poetry written in Haste

Sorrrow,
Axiomatic
Sorrow,
Pure and relentless
Sorrow,
The underpinning of
Self,
Brutal and primitive
Self,
Failed to be more than
I,
The I that troubles the
Eye,
The eye that troubles the
Mind,
The mind that troubles the
Soul,
Beautiful, resonant
Soul,
All that will ever be
Source of Infinity
Soul of delight though its
Locked in duplicitous
Body,
Joyous and meaningless
Body,
That’s inherently born with a
Flaw,
That sows the idea of
Sorrow,
Tells you everything’s going to
End,
Everything that you hold
Dear,
Everything that you could
Make,
Everything that you could
Know,
Everything that you keep
Safe,
Everything that you will
Love,
Will die in cold reaches of
Space,
And there’s nothing to stop it,
No consciousness here,
The helix is twisted,
The answer’s not there,
And once you remember,
How could you forget,
And how can the world be the
Same?
The constant is
Sorrow.

The Fight – The Conflict Chakra

I used to have a strange relationship with an outwardly professional, very down-to-earth, to all intents and purposes “normal” girl.

Throughout the relationship she would “try” to get me to hit her. Sometimes she even hit me to try to provoke a violent response. I always thought it was something to do with her Radical Feminist tendencies conspiring to drive me to violence, thus justifying the idea that all men are bastards.

I will interject here and just state that I am aware that the principles of Feminism do not posit that all men are bastards. I am a Feminist. And she was also an enlightened woman, a true Feminist in many ways, and I have a lot of respect for her. She was however plagued by certain negative beliefs born in childhood of her neglect and abuse at the hands of certain prominent male figures in her past.

Aware of this, it seemed a reasonable conclusion to draw that someone who modeled a relatively positive male figure would need to be induced in any way possible to inflict violence upon her in order to fulfil the childhood belief that men are cruel, heartless, purveyors of violence. My conclusions came from observation of behaviours, the study of certain prominent thinkers in the field of psychology previous to these events, and a certain intuitive reasoning. But I am no authority and I could have it totally wrong.

And my thoughts this Winter evening may confirm that. After all, there are plenty of ways to get a man to fulfil the aforementioned criteria without trying to get him to hit you. Why, specifically, did she want me to hit her?

I’ll just interject again, for the sake of my reputation, to say that I never did hit her.

So, recently, as you can see from my previous entry, I have re-acquainted myself with the movie Fight Club (I’m kinda breaking the first two rules here if you take it to extremes!) A master stroke of film making in my humble opinion. That question of etiquette thing – the ass or the crutch dilemma – still sticks in my head to this day, along with certain other pearls of wisdom that rolled off the tongue of Tyler Durden in those couple of hours. It’s Tyler’s alter-ego, played by Christopher Norton in the film, who says, I think, “You never felt more alive than when you were fighting.” And that kinda rings true with what a lot of people say: when you take a big risk you feel alive, that exhilaration, like from bungee jumping, hunting, or whatever. It puts you in touch with something primal, something our button-down society, with its convenience food and ever so polite transactions, fails to deliver. So getting right in there with someone, fighting tooth and nail with nothing but the weapons Nature gave you touches that.

The principle is also advocated in the film Green Street. Elijah Woods’ character says something like “When you realize you’re not made of glass” you lose that fear about speaking your mind and worrying what other people think of you or what you’re doing.

And a fight is not generally mortal to one of the combatants. In the film Rocky IV the kid hits the bully for nicking his jacket, the fight’s finished, the guy gives the jacket back, the two go on about their lives. Countless other films have portrayed the same thing. So it’s obviously an important thing in our collective psyche. And the point, beautifully painted in Fight Club, is that you can even be closer to someone after a fight. Hell, you can even just fight for the feeling of being alive that it promises.

I remember the first time I hit someone. I spent plenty of my school career being termed as “a pussy” because I didn’t like to fight. I was also extremely slow to anger. Then one day a kid got right in my face and, completely unconsciously, I landed a perfect right hook on the side of the guys head and he hit the concrete like he’d been shot. I dropped to my knees, sobbing uncontrollably, shocked, appalled, terrified at what I’d done to another human being. Or so I tell myself. Was I actually feeling a huge in-rushing of “Life” that I’d never felt before and which was so completely overwhelming to my twelve-year-old self that I was reduced to tears?

I never got a chance to test this theory because a) I’ve only just come up with it, and b) after the other kids had seen that, I was afforded a level of respect which meant I didn’t need to prove myself again. And to this day I’ve never been in a situation that demanded physical intervention. Now that’s probably mostly due to my disposition – Watch the weather change… Sorry, I happen to be listening to Lateralus at this moment – and the fact that I’m not a fan of violence… and probably also because I’ve spent a good part of my adult life taking downers that suppress those instincts. But, to someone who doesn’t take drugs, could that in-rushing of life become addictive. I should think so!

So one wonders if my ex wasn’t seeking a “hit” of sorts that mirrored my need to anaesthetise; a release, an exorcism, an act that gave her the feeling that she was still alive. And who could blame her? If I didn’t take drugs I’d do something drastic to “feel” something.

One of the reasons I’m not prone to getting into fights is that you don’t know where they can end up. It’s no longer, as with some previous generations I’ve spoken to, that you have a disagreement with someone, get your fists out, slug a few to each other and when a guy goes down you pull him up and shake hands. Now there’s a pretty good chance that if you get into a fight, once you hit the deck the guys mates will pile in and break every bone you’ve got. Or someone decides to pull a knife or some other such weapon to bring an edge of fatality to their violence hit.

Is it any wonder? If you suppress urges they magnify, fester, grow ugly and perverted, and manifest ten times worse in spite of your best efforts to bottle them up.

We are so out of tune with ourselves and our surroundings and etiquette demands you keep a lid on all that shit you’re feeling and plaster on a smile for the sake of everyone else; no fucking wonder kids ever more frequently pull out GUNS on their fellow brothers and sisters. The Doublethink forced down our throats is vicious: video games and TV, tabloids and friday nights are exponentially more graphically, narcissistically, gratuitously violent than certainly I have ever seen; and yet they don’t embody the true expression one gets from being understood, rather they distract you from connecting with people around you; and then coming down from on high the politicians peddle wars while all the time calling for world peace! FUCK YOU!

A well armed populace is the best defense against tyranny…

I don’t believe in guns but I believe a populace should be taught to deal with these violent urges that manifest in each of us differently. I’m not sure how yet but I’ll figure it out at some point. I know it won’t be delivered by the people in charge: they thrive on us being divided and conflicted about tearing at each others’ throats while desperately trying to be tolerant of everyone!

Then again, maybe a militia is what we need. Peaceful protest doesn’t seem to achieve an awful lot in this day and age; they seem to keep fucking us no matter who’s in power.

At the very least the fight should be reclaimed as a reasonably safe method of solving differences. I’m sure it would weed out this nasty litigious virus we’ve got. The idea of beating someone to within an inch of their life is abhorrent, and, I’m pretty sure, is abhorrent to every man, woman, and child on the planet. Something in your bones just screams “No!” On the other hand, sometimes you just want to smack someone in their bigoted mouth when they are shooting it off about something… And my point is someone should be able to, and even supported in this act, without fear of being beaten to death.

“Third Rule of Fight Club: someone yells ‘Stop’, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful end to a film than when those credit card buildings (with no one in them, I stress) come crashing down as the culmination of Project Mayhem’s activities. And then the Pixies comes in. Happy Day…

Well, I’m off to my friend’s house to see if he’ll hit me as hard as he can.

In the world I see – you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.

Debt Collectors – The Clue Is In The Name, Douchebag

Dear Sir

We have recently taken on this account from such-and-such a company and would now like you to make payment of DOUBLE the amount that you owed such-and-such to us…

Well, DUH! Retard. If you’re stupid enough to BUY an account that hasn’t been settled then you have a really bad grasp of business.

If I didn’t pay those guys what makes you think I’m gonna pay you?

I don’t have any possessions of note (except my guitar, no pun intended, and you can try and pry that from my cold dead hands), I don’t have a house (because in the country of my birth property prices are far beyond the reach of many of my generation) so I don’t see how you can really do anything to me. Thankfully, under the Geneva Convention or some such document of Human Rights, YOU CAN’T TOUCH ME!

And let’s be honest, we both know that we’re dealing with fictitious money in this sense. I mean SKY are really no worse off because I don’t pay my bill: they were charging me for thin air really (interestingly, they grossly inflated my bill, hah, hence the lack of payment), ’cause if my subscription fee truly mattered they’d take all that nauseous, cancerous advertising off their service. And you just went and paid them for me anyway, in the vain hope that I might be coerced and threatened into paying you a) more than you paid SKY for my account and b) an extra hundred and fifty odd pounds for sending me a letter and, Oh, BooHoo, solicitor’s fees. You need a solicitor to advise you in this situation? I doubt it. I think we might consider that we’re dealing with fictitious money in this case as well.

Go talk to my so-called Government, who’ve managed to run up a bill higher than I could possibly hope to achieve in maybe a hundred lifetimes to the power of nuts, and tell them to clean house. When they’ve got that situation under control, which may well bring about a set of circumstances where their citizens – whom, I might remind you and them, they are supposed to serve and protect and who put them there and pay for them to stay there in the first place – a set of circumstances where their citizens can afford to buy a house IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY, then I’ll be glad to address this issue you have with me.

Until then, stop trying to make a quick buck on other people’s – that is, by the way, your genetic brothers and sisters – difficulties and start trying to be part of the solution rather than the problem. (No, South Park fans, I did not close my eyes when writing that last line, nor did I partake deeply of my own flatulence!)

If anyone reading this is facing debt problems, please remember they are bullshitting you at every turn; how dare they try and charge you when they chose to take on the debt! You never took out any agreement with them, you never forced them to take on the debt, and if they try to play hardball, tell them you can’t afford to pay them any more than a penny a month, or an amount you feel comfortable with. Your credit rating will even repair itself remarkably quickly if you do this (rather than just ignore them like I do) because THEY WANT YOU TO BORROW MONEY! They will have even bought your debt… WITH DEBT, so they’re not even spending real money!

The other thing to remember is that all OUR money that sits in banks all day and night is earning THEM money – millions, and billions, and trillions, and squillions, and godzillions of pounds, and they still want the 20-40% of your wages that go in taxes to pay the debt run up by the treasury when it borrowed the money to issue to the country, i.e. you and me, FROM THE FUCKING BANKS! So where the hell do they get off charging us money when we go a few pounds over our overdraft or we’re late with a payment? They have that cushy lifestyle because we give them our money to play with. They should be paying us!

Ideally though, my fellow beings of wave and particle energy, don’t borrow money from people (although I hesitate to call them that because I’m fairly sure people are born with intrinsic compassion and if you lose that you no longer deserve the name of human. Blake said “…Everything that lives is holy.” but I don’t think, prophetic as he was, he’d counted on the HellHounds sending out these bile-soaked debt collection requests) unless they’re not gonna charge you interest. If you really want that new thing, save for it; my parents’ generation (that is born during or just after the Second World War) did, for the most part, and they honestly seem no worse off for it. Sure, I know they got their own set of screw-ups but they generally bought things when they could afford them which, in turn, teaches one a sense of value, not just of the things one then owns but in the wider context of one’s self and environment! There is a definite link between the debt you have and the esteem you hold yourself in, and that’s fucking huge when you consider that anyone who wants to go to University now comes out with debts that can equal what my Dad paid for his house in 1969! 69, dudes! I really can’t understand why our “Great” nation could fall so far behind the rest of the civilised world in terms of educational standards… and then have the fucking nerve to charge for this abominable, lip-curling, gut-wrenching state of affairs.

My, what a can of worms you’ve opened Mr Debt Collector!

Finally, dearest siblings of love and light, even better than the aforementioned “Ideally”: realise you have everything you need to feel complete right there inside yourself, and no amount of spending fictitious money on polished turds can compare with the beauty that can exist within the free mind, body, and soul of every single human being; and if you haven’t got time to meditate or whatever, bosch a load of mushrooms! It ain’t hard and it’s certainly a great shortcut!

If we can take a few steps in the proposed direction then maybe we’ll get out of this larcenous, isolationist, hierarchical, sexually-brutalising, destiny-hijacking, disease-propagating, spirit-killing PIT OF LIES that we all seem to take for the natural state of democracy. Then maybe our culture will change from one of scarcity to one of plenty… FOR ALL!

I’m a dreamer… But I’m not the only one

It’s only after we’ve lost everything, that we’re free to do ANYTHING…

Thank You, Eve – Liberator of the Human Race

Smoke wisps from my cigarette enhancing my opium wash. As I’ve indulged in too much opiate consumption my guitar is unhappily in hock to provide me a few hours of endorphin high; judge me as you wish. However, it has led me to muse (being a musician it happens a lot :)) on something that happened in the days leading up to the Winter Solstice.

I went to a carol service over Christmas at my Dad’s old Oxford college. I have not been to a carol service for several years, being somewhat anti-religion. The choir was amazing. Truly, the human voice lifted in song is a sound most heavenly.

However, interspersed between the harmonic interference of male and female voices, we were forced to listen to readings from The Bible. I say The Bible, but perhaps I should say A Bible, most likely the King James version of the literal Word of God! Yes, there is a key word in there: version. I mean, there’s the original translation into Latin from Hebrew or Aramaic (which left out any bits Constantine didn’t want), then through, Olde and Middle English, to the King James Version taken as somewhat authoritative today. But still the literal Word of God… Honest!

Now, I’m something of a feminist and I couldn’t understand how if I, a somewhat modern and forward-thinking but still unmistakably – and unapologetically – male man, was offended by the brazen, derogatory sentiments being delivered with unashaméd, tranquil tones, then how on Gaia’s green earth could so many, one would assume educated (we are in a church on one of the most respected university campuses), contemporary women, no doubt with ambitions, aspirations, careers, and cares beyond being receptacles for sperm, rearing children and taking the blame for all that’s wrong with the world, sit calmly with bowed heads while such monstrous calumnies against their entire gender were dictated gently by various men and women of the church.

And how could these aforementioned dictators deliver these passages

A) with a straight face, and

B) without feeling hideously uncomfortable?!

I mean if someone asked you to stand up before a load of people and tell them that women were inferior, the reason for all the suffering of the world, and basically not worth pissing on if they were on fire, you’d tell them where to stick it, no? At the very least, if you did narrate the reading, wouldn’t you have the decency to avert your eyes and look a bit sheepish, rather than glaring meaningfully at members of the audience as if they shouldn’t have caused us all such woe by being born female?

Oh come on, man, it’s from the Bible; it’s part of Christmas; and you don’t have to take it seriously if you don’t want to.

Well, it fucking shouldn’t be part of Christmas. And, forgive me, but when I’m in a room and someone is reading something out with conviction I do take it seriously, because on some level, it’s trying to work its way in and poison my being with cruel, anti-human propaganda, and if that’s what it’s trying to do to me, then all the people who aren’t reacting are suffering that same poisoning without knowing it.

And don’t tell me I’m trying to ruin Christmas. I love Christmas, but I love it for what it is: a festival at the Winter Solstice, right in the middle of the harshest part of the year, when you get together with people you love, eat, drink, and be merry… and possibly sacrifice an animal or a virgin or something – or did I dream that one?

Anyway, who wouldn’t love that? And we had been doing that for centuries prior to Jesus even being born, so don’t tell me that it’s justified on the grounds that there wouldn’t be a festival if it weren’t for Christianity – FUCK RIGHT OFF with that one!

I mean – and I apologise for going off on one about this but it’s my blog so like it or bugger off – two thousand years and still people hear this shit without getting pissed off at the malignance being thrust on us by a fucking book! In fact, they tell me to chill out! It’s outdated. Either update it (like you’ve done for the last two thousand years) and join the rest of us in the 21st century or FUCK RIGHT OFF!

Just to show how outdated it is I’m going to attempt to look at this from another angle, just to see if I can’t speed things along…

There we were, the first man and woman, alone in the world, surrounded by the lush provision of Mother Nature. There was a tree – a metaphor for something else, of course, but let’s leave it as a tree for now – and there is a decree from The Gods (Elohim translates as Gods, plural): “You shall not eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil!”

Really?

Some might say that this was a foolish thing to say to a human. Immediately, one wants to eat those rosy apples!

But, whatever the reason – Jealously guarding the realm of the divine, suggested by the Tempter not more than a few pages later – we left the tree alone, for now. Hell, there were other things to be getting on with without having to worry about one tree. Shagging… that was lots of fun; passed a lot of time. Oh, and according to Milton, the seraph Raphael came and chatted to us for a while, informing us of a war in Heaven and of the casting out of Lucifer Morningstar, greatest and most glorious of all the angels from aforementioned Cloud City. Incidentally, Lucifer was the original angel of Music, and orchestrated the heavenly choirs.

Adam hears this story and takes it on face value. Let us imagine that Eve, being bright-minded and of equal but differently functioning intelligence, thinks a little beyond the face value and imagines that these Gods don’t like people standing up to them, people who get too big for their boots, and she files this little bit of information as a possibility somewhere in that little storage facility women seem to have for things like people you met once four years ago while drunk’s birthdays, and where you went to dinner that day when your father’s cousin came to visit your sister’s dog.

Now life goes on happily enough until this chap, Lucifer, – whom we could also call Inspiration or even Messiah, if we subscribed to Blake’s writings and were feeling charitable – comes into our idyllic sphere of existence and has a chat with Eve, supposedly with the intention of fucking up this little state of bliss.

But let’s look at that: bliss is a somewhat subjective term, no? One man’s joy is another’s grief and similar comparisons? I assume the same applies to women. And as there is no specific description of what this “bliss” entailed what are we to think? Also, there is the well-known phrase “Ignorance is bliss”. And I suppose it is, but I personally can’t see two intelligent people never beginning to question and philosophise, especially if there’s nothing to do but eat fruit and fuck! In fact, usually the only time I get any sort of deep conversation from a girl is after a good shag; y’know, lying there in the afterglow pondering things while passing a cigarette back and forth.

So could it be that Adam rolled over and went to sleep after five minutes, leaving Eve to seek out fulfilment elsewhere?

Enter Lucifer…

I’m digressing, and I’ve created too many threads and forgotten them again to create a coherent story out of this! In order to preserve spontanaeity I’m just gonna plough on to my point.

My point is I would be glad to have that knowledge from that tree. Even should the “blissful” state be lost, you can still fuck and eat fruit. To me the story shows a woman furthering the course of mankind, rather than ruining our happiness. Is it possible this parable on the power of the female has been twisted to suit the needs of Patriarchy?

I forgot! The worst bit I had to sit through: when God found out that Adam and Eve had eaten the apple he says to Adam “Didst thou eat of the tree?” or something similar and Adam points at Eve and says “She told me to!” I mean, really, how low can you get? And this Almighty, Omniscient God decides to be really petty and make the birth process long, arduous, and painful as a result! Yeah, ’cause two wrongs make a right, God.

In spite of all this, though, we are supposed to take away this message: He LOVES you…

Seriously? Straight face?

So what I want to say is “Thanks, Eve, for saving us from ourselves!”

Today I Fell Back In Love

It’s been four years.

All that time apart.

I thought I’d stopped being in love with her. I thought that the white-hot pain of separation and then the dull ache of yearning had matured into the love of memories: a friend, distant and precious; a lover remembered fondly; that one, true, soulmate, unique and perfect, but nonetheless a resident of the past.

A fire may look all burnt out but, even in the morning, embers glow, hot and passionate, desperate to be rekindled, to re-embrace the essence of their being… To blaze again.

I feel it as soon as I hear her voice over the phone disclosing her location not more than a hundred-and-twenty second walk from me: tension in my abdomen, irresistable pulling at the edges of my mouth, contractions in the back of my neck, a widening of the eyes, colours becoming vibrant, and a gallon of adrenalin coursing through my system.

I try not to run.

I think through the things to do to be cool: the line to say when first seeing her, exactly how I’m gonna hold her when we embrace. I pull my fingers through my long hair, desperate to tame it against the wild breath of the wind. I pull the sleeves of my jumper down to cover my hands, just like how she said she loved. My heart’s thumping so hard I’m sure it’s gonna snap my sternum.

I feel light. I feel joy. I feel like I’m so fucking glad to be alive this exact moment. Thank the gods that, against the infinite odds that our race defies by even existing and – on an individual level – the fair amount of near miss overdoses I’ve survived, we two nexuses of electrical impulses and carbon based molecules and great collections of remembrances and moments are coming together in this tiny little part of the world for the merest fraction of the blink of an eye of the universe!

Thank you!

I fling my arms out to the side and address the sky, uncaring of the slightly bemused looks from shoppers, and the giggling of a pack of teenage girls who I nearly totalled with my clothesline.

For me, for then, nothing else in the world existed. My years of misery, my fears of failure, my hopes and dreams, my isolation and my loneliness, my songs and lyrics, and even my memories of love and lust with her… Dissolved.

I was whole. And I was present. I was more here, on Terra, in my flesh than I have been for years, I don’t know how many.

And there, at Journey’s End, she appears, rising from the little round wooden coffee table outside the café, coming towards me, smiling, a perfect vision of radiance, scruffy just how I remember her.

She’s not changed a bit: she even wears that perfume that only she wears and, locked in her arms I’m transported back across a decade and over two-hundred miles to the coasts of Wales in 2005, walking hand-in-hand come rain or shine along those rocky beaches… Off our tits!! I will deign to put in a “lol” here to convey my feelings of mirth.

“Taste this,” she instructs after disentangling herself from me, handing me a staggeringly burnt excuse for an espresso in a paper takeaway cup.

“The years in France have spoiled you,” I quip, and she replies she’d rather have a proper drink anyway.

Off to the pub. I’m thrilled to discover she still smokes. We light up and talk on the way.

Over the next two hours and dry whites and pints, we talk, laugh, absolve each other of guilty regrets, catch up, reminisce, flirt and gaze, until it’s time to leave. One hug isn’t enough, and she comes back for another, risking missing her train.

I murmur in her ear, “Love ya.”

“Love ya, too,” she responds, before turning to get the train, our fingers lingering just slightly before letting go.

I walk away.

I don’t look back… But I’m smiling.

Elated, I fling my arms aside once more and give a “Hurrrh!” of satisfaction, again drawing slightly worried looks from hurrying commuters.

Sod ya!

Today, I fell in love again…

Happy 2014

The Shades of 4 a.m.

I’m inbetween.

A quotidian, Persephonic curse.

I inhabit the underworld – the land of the dead, though walking they still be. Though by some grace I’m still free to join society. Some people can’t tell; they can’t read the signs: tiny bruisings running along the path of veins, a certain paleness, a certain gait, the pupils, the irises; it’s all laid out for one who knows how to read. The fact that people don’t tend to look too closely means I can have been scoring, shooting-up, and enjoying a little death (not la petite mort, you understand, but it’s not dissimilar) of a morning, and be sitting in Fortnum and Mason’s with the family in the afternoon and no one’s any the wiser.

Now, perhaps, they choose to not see; my sister, certainly, finds my little anecdotes of life in prison and criminal rogue-ery (not sure if that’s a word but it suits) rather distasteful, wishing I wouldn’t bring up such taboo concepts up in polite conversation, whereas my father chuckles away and comments and questions, as though I’m one of his learned Oxford fellows, a scholar in criminal behaviour and the pschology of addiction. Yes, perhaps they choose not to see deeper; my sister not wanting to imagine her middle-class, picture-perfect fantasy of her family tainted by a heroin addict and convicted criminal to boot, and my father, so convinced he was a cruel, heartless father, is easily swayed by the part of me that is practised at putting on a facade in order to soothe and manipulate the hapless victim into handing over money, though I now use it to convince him that I’m recovering well and haven’t touched a needle in weeks. It pains me, but on the other hand, the idea of him thinking I’m a failure, and discovering that he really can’t help me is worse.

No one can help an addict. We are undead. Heroin addicts are like vampires. One even becomes addicted to the sight of blood in the syringe – the rush before the rush. We use the massive confidence boost tempered with care-free, laid-back cool like “glamour” to navigate social events and captivate the opposite sex, while, later in the addiction, we learn to sniff out targets, bleeding them dry of money, valuables, energy, and eventually, care, in order to feed our beast. And when the thirst is upon us nothing, and I mean NOTHING, will deter us from getting our next fix.

Similarity is uncanny, no?

You can see it with other substance abusers, as well…

Alcoholics resemble zombies mostly: lack of motor control, bad skin, terrible smell, and wandering around crying “Brains!” Well, obviously: alcohol destroys so many brain cells it’s no wonder they want new ones! They’re also prone to bouts of violence, against anyone and everyone who happens to be in range.

So, what does someone trapped between life and death do? It’s a form of cowardice: too disdainful of life, too despairing of death, I walk between. I would like to say that Love could break the spell, draw me out of the mire, but I just don’t know any more. One needs a reason, a fire in the heart, a voice urging you on to face any obstacle.

I have none.

Everything I touch, hope for, believe in, dissolves into dust. There’s only so many times you can rebuild… aren’t there?

What would I like this Solstice? A reason to live.