Love to Love

I've had a couple of conversations lately that have seeded a slight alteration in my perspective on life. In one I learned that someone, a person I thought I knew pretty well, had been responsible for breaking a young man's heart in her youth. When it came to the crunch she had just hadn't been in love with him and so she ended the relationship before it progressed into marriage. My first response to that revelation was surprising to me -- the more so because I do not usually consider myself particularly quick off the mark when it comes to especially apt ripostes. But later I was talking with someone else and the subject of my own love life, or lack thereof, came up .... "But you'll probably want another relationship, eventually," said Linda. "I am pretty sure I won't," I said. Linda regarded me doubtfully. "I think I am too selfish," I added by way of explanation. "After all, when push comes to shove, a 'relationship' is only really a licence for having sex." "Isn't that a bit cynical?" Linda said. "Maybe it is. But it doesn't really stop it being a true analysis of most people's actual situations ... as opposed to the fancied ones that they cling too in their daydreams." (Now I was being cynical!) That piece of conversation was ironic, not just in its cynical tone but also in its subject matter in the light of my previous conversation. The first individual, whom I will not name, had expressed herself in terms of love. Specifically that she did not love the man she rejected. I challenged her. I said surely love wasn't the real issue, wasn't it more to do with lust. The truth was that you didn't fancy the pants off of him! She thought this over for a few moments and then smiled and agreed. After kicking the idea around for a little longer we reached agreement that love comes out friendship and that neither actually requires lust as a precursor but in most cases (of lifetime sexual partners) a little fruity lust can go a long way. The crucial element in a marriage is the trust and sharing that arises out of friendship and (or) devotion. (Many a 'tradtional' marriage survived more on the devotion of the two parties to their vows than it ever did on friendship.) Anyway back to my conversation with Linda. I was very mindful of my prior foray into similar territory so recently and I therefore felt myself unfairly prepared to resist Linda's casual-seeming determination to marry me off, decently, at the earliest possible opportunity. "I'm too selfish for cohabitation," I said. "I have tried it twice and both times it failed, mostly because I hated to share. I have trouble being honest with myself so I can't possibly see how I can do it with another individual entirely. Cohabiting just brings out the control freak in me." "But you could have a relationship without actually living with someone," Linda said. Her eyes seemed to say that she had scored a winning point. "But that isn't a relationship, Linda. It is an acquaintanceship, or a friendship, or even a love affaire. Marriage it isn't. It needs no respect, it needs no sharing, it needs no committment." "So it's committment that you are afraid of, then?" Aaarrgghhh! "No," I said. "I can commit to friendships with people of either gender without fear that sex will become an issue. I can (and have) committed to love for people -- love that cannot be assuaged and that does not require the sticky elements of coition for its sustenance. And sex ... well anybody can have sex ... can't they?" Game set and match to me, I think.

Count der Feet

Last night I got to thinking about easy money. As an erstwhile writer one of my holy grails is the perfect crime. Perfect being defined as undetectable, victimless, and surviving long enough to savor the fruits. Sadly the victimless caveat is the real bear trap. What kinda master criminal bozo would consider such a stupidly counter-intuitive ethical stumbling block? Yeah, I know. One like yours truly. Anyway it doesn't stop me thinking. It takes most people a whole day to make between 50 and 150 pounds. Over that range? You are in the top echelon, mate. Above the 90th percentile. You have to work hard for the money ... I never believed all the crap and Mark Knopfler was definitely in danger of chewing off his own tongue when wrote Money For Nothing. So I was musing on the level of effort involved in making my own money. I overlooked the problem of the hypothetical victim because I wasn't gonna take the idea beyond the intellectual process. The first step, in the chaotic mish-mash that is what passes for mentation in my milieu, was to speculate on mass production. There being no good reason, that I could think of, for having to do a thing over and over if it could be safely be done in larger batches with more opportunity for R&R within the schedule. It was at this point that Her Royal Highness emerged, blinking in the unaccustomed harsh halogen glare of my desk lamp. Quickly and guiltily her slid her out of sight beneath the lid of a nearby handy device. The device had the letters HP emblazoned upon it. Boldly, I depressed a button. The button was marked with the word Color. The button had a neighbor mark Black and between them were the words Start Copy. You know, I was startled and amazed by the realistic quality of the "twenty pound note" that emerged a few moments later. Nervously I turned the real McCoy over and replaced the printed sheet in the paper feed tray. Press. Five minutes later, after some squint-eyed action with the kitchen scissors I held a newly minted twenty pound note in my greasy fingers ... (I had been forced to extract the scissors from the half-loaded dishwasher. The scissors has last seen action at breakfast cutting the rind from bacon.) The grease helped to distress the note. Distress is a technical word employed by we professionals of the forgery world. A new made reproduction must be distressed, whether it be a Louis XIV escritoire or a bearer bond for mineral rights in the Patagonian Steppes ... the patina must be consonant with the article's supposed age, history and purpose. I began to crease and crumple my new money. Soon it resembled something I would expect to find in a trouser pocket after laundering. I wondered what a cycle of crumpling followed by pressing with a hot steam iron would achieve. I am still wondering this morning. I looked at the fruit of my first foray into forgery and I realised that I could do a lot better. The color copy cycle on my HP printer scanner is, well ... slack. The scanner can make an image up to 1,728 dots per inch. That would be pretty darn near photo quality. I suspect that the cheap old 11" by 8" paper I get from Staples by the ream could easily be made to resemble the high rag content paper used in money by repeated crumpling and hot steam pressing. But there remains that victim caveat of mine. Oh if only I weren't so damned principled! Meanwhile, yesterday I had my first group therapy session in anxiety management. There were many things that occurred to me as worthy of a specific mention, but in the cold light of day only one remains fresh. The others are not forgotten, they just don't seem so vibrant and important. Naturally, throwing 10 chronically anxious people into the same room isn't going to be any kind of picnic. However, as mature adults, we all strove to at least try to appear interested, awake, and willing to consider the possibility of maybe entertaining the notion of soon (but perhaps later ... no sense rushing things) contemplating actually saying something. One or two of us did. Me? What do you think! It was a 90 minute session. Halfway through we were told that we would take a break for a coffee and (or) a smoke. If I still smoked I wouldn't have been there. Anyway I joined a small huddle at the coffee machine. Inevitably we talked, inescapably -- perhaps -- we fell to comparing neuroses. Why is it that we too often feel compelled to indulge in the "I've had that, only worse", syndrome? Soon the hot brown liquid had been consumed and we filed back to the meeting room with its Swedish warehouse furniture. Someone had opened a window (British public buildings are rarely air conditioned and yesterday afternoon was warm, too warm for the heating to be on ... but British public buildings have the heat on from September 21 through to April 30 and the good ole long-shuffering Joe's Public must either shiver or perspire and like both discomforts with the equal-minded fairness of a true Brit.) In spite of the shared confidences around the god of office refreshments we reassembled in silence and waited in patient contemplation of the floor for the group "facilitator" to return from her cigarette break ... I guess even psychotherapists have incurable hang-ups then. I wonder why I am bothering. Even I managed to quit tobacco! For two minutes, I counted feet. There were 20; two of those were mine. I also wondered what thhose two minutes might have been like if some eldritch wizard were to appear and with a wave of a spangled stick revert us all to the age of 4. We would not have been counting the feet, that's for sure.

The Art Of Swearing

A few months ago, while I was searching the net for some help with a web page style sheet problem I came across one of those glorious little factoids; those snippets of golden know how that can turn a mundane accessory into a niftily indispensable aid. I have been using the all purpose text editor, Notepad, ever since I got my first Windows PC. It is a rare day when I do not have a stack of notepad files open. I have a large folder of jottings named Notepad Bits. I suspect that as much as 90% of the files are utterly useless and redundant. Lately I have been using MS Outlook not only to manage my completely stupid number of email addresses, but also to manage my diary and to keep track of my private journal. However I continue to hold simple old Notepad in esteem for those eureka! thoughts and in particular there is a single file, tecnicolor dream (yes my typos are that appalling!), stored directly on my desktop. Its first line is:

.LOG

This first line in a text file, I learned, instructs the program to append a date and time to the end of every entry. So I not only have a record of those thoughts I considered significant, I also know the date and time I committed them to electronic memory. I took a look through it today after adding a new reminder and was pleasantly surprised to rediscover an old idea that has been patiently waiting for resurrection. It was only two words: swearing tolly. I have a son who is now all grown up and making a career but when he was tiny he was cute in both main senses. One day when he was still between first word and first recognizable sentence he overheard a conversation and added a new word to his rapidly growing vocabulary. It was a word that was to delight him and me for several years to come and he quickly made it his own by making subtle changes, both to the vowels sounds and to the consonants. The word was polyester but within weeks it had transmogrified into tollylister. It was a supremely ubiquitous word. It was used in high spirits uttered with a joy and the sort of unselfconscious chuckling giggle that toddlers too quickly forget how to do. It was also used petulantly and on at least one occasion I am certain that it stood at least one tour of duty as a profanity ... there can be no mistaking the tone even if the words used are risible or non-sensical. For me, though, Tolly Lister was always a real person. As the years rolled by I got to know him, even as his inventor outgrew the childish gibberish that spawned his name. Tolly was an exotic person. A true wild man of rock and roll. Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Axl Rose ... these were mere pretenders to the title. Tolly was also a musical prodigy; a Mozart for the twenty first century. He could make grown men cry by plucking an original melody from any handy guitar or keyboard; he could soothe restless babies to sleep with soft contralto improvisations of nursery rhyme standards; he could draw and capture for ever the hearts and minds of a one hundred thousand strong audience with the wildest and most original music since Buddy Holly reinvented rock and roll. Stephen King says that a writer doesn't just need ideas. Writers also need to be able to deliver. He sums it up as "Can you?" Ten years ago I asked myself that question. Tolly Lister had a presence in my mind and he just begged for a story to go around him. I had some ideas but most of all I needed a scenario to put a past into Tolly's life. To make the man rather than to leave him as just a shadow, a thin transparency set only in one moment, a cartoon gel. On a cool spring Saturday afternoon during 1993 I retired to the bathtub with a bottle of indifferent French merlot. I had the house to myself and I meant to find out if I could work up a yarn that made Tolly come to life. What emerged was both scary and heartbreakingly moving. I found that was looking into the not-too-distant future and although I felt inclined to shrink away from science fiction I felt drawn to the story that was growing in my head. I had it off pat within an hour; it was then that my second mate, Mark, chose to return from work and came to see if I wanted anything such as tea or a help soaping my back. I told him I'd like to borrow his ears, so he perched on the toilet and I told him the story of Tolly Lister. It took about 45 minutes and I didn't lose his attention for a moment. It was quite an ego boost. I began work on a full length novel a few days later. Time was always a problem and the project continued in fits and starts over the rest of the decade. Mark and I split up and it got shelved indefinitely. One day I refound it and I read a substantial portion of it to my mother; she wondered why I wasn't trying to finish it and I wasn't easily able to explain, not then. The truth was simple. I was stuck. It wasn't writers block. I was writing pretty good stuff but the plot was going around in circles ... by the time I stopped for breath and took a serious and honest look at what I had I saw that the plot had eaten its own tail. I was still trying to figure out how I could rescue the thing from slow death by inspiration starvation when 4 planes crashed on a September day in 2001 and huge chunks of my plot came too horribly true and at the same time other major plot devices were exposed as false and silly shams as events overtook them. I lost heart then in many more senses than one. My own loss was insignificant in the great scheme of things but loss is relative and mine hurt me as much as anyone else's hurt them. Time is of course a great healer and my muse is now slowly coming back to life. So I say tollylisters to everything and maybe one day I really will sit down and tell the story of how a nice middle class girl ran away with a fairground gypsy and gave birth to a baby boy whom she named Nutroast .... I tell, ya, it brought a tear to Mark's eye and he thought he was a tough guy; he also thought that Tolly Lister was modeled upon him and maybe that was a true, a little, but Tolly lived first in my own heart and he is, was, and always will be, my very own alter ego. My own little pitchfork equipped devil hovering o'er my left shoulder, belittling my successes and heralding my failures. But I am goona get that little expletive deleted Get thee behind me, imp. But, er ... not before I have you pinned down to this table flayed open and fully dissected and analysed.

Medicine Balls

It occurred to me, today, pretty much in the form of a bright light suddenly flicking into brilliance that the loss of a single notebook at the age of eleven has probably had a rather disproportionate series of consequences for the way my life has since developed. Bearing in mind that this was forty years ago it seems not just churlish even to mention it now, but actually a serious sign of delusional wishful-thinking ... and yes that is a deliberate tautologous expression. Not everyone is familiar with the 1960's British educational system. In the school year that one attained age eleven we joined a secondary school. When I joined mine in september 1964 the minimum leaving age was 15. This was raised to 16, where it remains a year or so after I passed my 15th birthday. In those days pupils were selected on the basis of an exam taken during the final year at junior school. I had done pretty good and so I got a place at the local state-run grammar school. This was a stuffy academic institution with a bevy of Ph.D doctors in the staff room and a published playwright of a headmaster. It had a long a distinguished record of sending students on to Oxford or Cambridge universities many with so-called open scholarships (those being the closest thing to a blank cheque, university expenses defrayment, for the use of, to which anyone of humble background might aspire). Within this hallowed institution of learning pupils were further segregated into an "a" stream and a "b" stream each of which was further subdivided thus A/alpha; B/beta. I started in 1A ... I have often been stupid, I have frequently been ignorant, I freely confess to being too gullible; dumb, I am not. Toward the end of year one a crucial series of end of year tests loomed. By this stage I had already formed a passion for blood and gore and most earnestly desired to widen my knowledge and ultimately I hoped to become a surgeon. I also liked to read a lot and also to write. Sometimes I dreamed of becoming a writer instead. Anyway we draw close to the fateful moment when one of the trucks in the van of my ambitions took an unexpected derailment. The one subject that I had struggled with during the year was Physics. The principle of Archimedes' was so much spilled bath water as far I was concerned. However I had a secret weapon. I had one of the best short term memories this side of Alpha Centauri. I would swot through the whole year's worth of semi-legible scrawlings that I had made in the county issued hard-backed notebook and upon whose green and faux-leather crinkly cover I had illumined, with ballpoint pen, the imaginative title: Fizzix. Tests for 11 year olds aren't especially challenging. Spew out a few facts and the marker is happy to award a few marks and the happiness is spread fairly and squarely all around. Imagine my childish horror when I discovered that book wasn't anywhere to be found! I remember quite clearly coming to the conclusion that it had been stolen by someone with a less than honest approach to keeping good scholarly records. Whatever ... the thing never did reappear in my life. The physics test was an excruciating embarrassment. I believe that I did well in remembering my name ... though I wasn't at all sure at the time. I actually got 15%. It is a rather ghastly blot on my academic record ... and I have all of my end of term reports for the whole of my school career. It was the nadir of my learning curve ... Hell, nadir? Curve? This was the Mariana Trench! I started year 2 in 2B. It could've been worse. If it had been 2-beta I would have been forced to find a way to type greek letters. Actually it was worse. The A/alpha stream got to do character forming subjects like Latin and English literature while we dumbos were gifted extra classes in the basics of life ... like breathing. Without even making an effort (and I cannot say this without it sounding conceited) I came out at the top of 2B 2 terms running ... not by a mark or two by a light year. I finished the year in 2alpha. But by then the damage was done. I was already taking the dumb-ass courses and Eng. Lit was off limits. I still won the Third Year Literature prize anyway. So there it is. For the want of a notebook a night's cramming was lost, and with it went the opportunity to be guided through some of the most significant landmarks of literature. Instead I have stumbled around, pretty much in the dark reading trash and high art, often simultaneously, both for contrast and for also for light relief, each from the other ... Oh, I know what I mean. In some way it is an advantage, I can rate Stephen King as highly as Steinbeck. I can look through an Ayn Rand and wonder: "why" and gives a shit who John Galt was. Dickens made me laugh and Homer impressed me as the kind of man who would have trouble finding his way home after a party ... but I wouldn't mind cos he told a good yarn. All the same ... an earlier grounding in the principles and mechanics of the science of literature might have cured me of my obsession with chopping pieces of formerly live tissue into minute chunks (the better to determine why it was once "alive") ... it might also have kept me from becoming the natural corollary of a dissectionist: a dentist. Which would have saved me from wasting the best part of two decades doing something I loathed, mostly to people that I detested. Still ... it is never too late. I am learning to wake, on demand, my recalcitrant muse, to tame it and to steer it. Now all I need to decide is which way to go ....

Blogged Up

Being a weird one I am prone to many silly and childlike faults. Alliteration is one. Of course being weird I am apt to conjure up complicated alliterative conjunctions that rely upon the reader having a similarly off-kilter view of life in order to appreciate them. One way to do this might be to use rhyming slang to mask the alliteration and -- in doing so -- changing the whole apparent meaning of the relevant sentence. I agree. It is not big and it most decidedly not clever. It is just childish nonsense. The nonsense of a precociously clever child possibly ... but still the work of a child's, mostly, febrile mind. And here I go .... Febrile mind? Whatever am I thinking! Are the minds of children febrile? Well it is true, I suspect, that for most of the time between birth and the age of 16 or 17 the average child is either about to become feverish, actually febrile, or else in recovery form a particularly nasty virus that was accompanied by a truly dreadful fever that was just barely within the powers of Calpol's® abilities to control. Some even go to the extreme of actually fitting; an event that is a truly frightening experience for any parent. A while ago I came across one of those witty pages that breed like lemmings in the dark corners of the virtual-reality of cyber space. I have wasted a good 30 seconds of my life today in trying to find it again via the auspices of Google but all I keep finding are websites for childhoods ailments. The page I found was a long and detailed examination of the pandemic affliction known as childhood which seemed to afflict a large portion of the human race. The disease's principal signs were dwarfism and ignorance. The paper noted, speculatively, that many cases of the disease seemed spontaneously to go into a remission that is characterized by sudden height gain and a growth in common sense.... Well, I guess you get the idea. Trouble is I cannot find it again and, frankly, I can't be bothered to look too hard. The only reason I mentioned it at all was because of my casual use of the epithet febrile mind in relation to a child. It is, one has to grant I feel sure, an apt usage. And so, by association we also readily accept the silly concept of childhood qua childhood being ipso facto a disease of humanity. It is rather comic. It is also sad. When we cease to like the behavior of a grown person we insult them by labeling them as childish when, maybe, what we really mean is mad. Why is being slightly crazy an affliction (to be ashamed of)? Where was I? Oh yes ... Being a weird one I am prone to many silly and childlike faults. Another one is a fondness for overuse of new-found tools, toys and gizmos ... like for example alliteration (and no ... don't bother I haven't hidden any here today, too tired, too lazy!) I was messing around with Windows movie maker for the first time the other day. Imagine my delight when I found that I had a simple, but complete set of video effects available to me ... and, more to the point, I had never suspected that were even there all the time! So I edited together a quick 3 minute movie and managed to use every single transition effect that was on offer. I also used almost all of the video effects on the various clips (scenes) mostly doubled and trebled-up, for example, blurring plus colorization plus slo-mo. When I had finished I was thrilled. It was a masterpiece. I was clearly bound for Hollywood and Oscar ceremonies. I would dine with Bushes or the Kerry's -- I'm not fussy, nor too proud (to hobnob with mere politicians). But, whatever else may be true of second childhoods and/or premature senile dementia, one is at the peak of one's powers of self-criticalness in those dreadful first hours after the daily miracle of raising oneself miraculously out of bed. It was during such a period, that for nonce I shall call "this morning", when I viewed my masterpiece with a more savagely critical eye than had hitherto been employed. How ironic that I had chosen to name the wretched opus: "Shattered Dream". There are many writers of great skill with the literary tool, irony who have chosen many and varied paths that all, essentially, seek either to prove or else to disprove the existence of God or of Fate by the expedient of finding a real life example of the deux ex machina at work in their own, or someone else's life. Well, I just found mine. The taste is bitter. Thank you Jaweh or whatever Your name is!

Getting Into A Two And Eight

OK, OK! I get the message already. I blog four entries in June and now I'm expected to make a habit of it? Someone posted a comment positing the theory that I was making some sort of exotic (non-? ) existential demonstration of the futility of work. That was so good, such a sharp and well-honed observation, witty and brief as well as having all the hallmarks of a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, that I felt goaded; I have to feel spurred or impelled before I decide to do anything. My problem , I now appreciate, has less to do with laziness per se than it has to do with emotional constipation. When I began this mess I was deep in the throes of a mild, but chronic, clinical depression. It wasn't a place I had ever been to before but it's a place that I am not ready to visit again. At the time I thought, hey! Why the hell not? I'll just begin a blog and open my soul and write down all my thoughts and maybe someone'll be able see where I went wrong ... Bad idea! I am emotionally constipated. Ask me how I am. Go on, then ... "I'm fine, thanks!" (And here's one of my big, cheesy patented sunny smiles) See what I mean? I've been going through these motions (oh help, please lord, if I need a three-legged thing for me to sit on please don't let it be a stool!) all of my life. I don't really say what I feel until, when I finally do I end up falling out with someone. Oops there goes another relationship. Yes my house is still the sort of place that attracts flies rather than good housekeeping awards. Most days I think I would choose to have teeth filled without anaesthetic rather than clean something. Cleaning is so pointless ... it only gets dirty again. Last week, for example I went all week without getting into the bath. Why? I was too lazy to evict the arachnid who had abseiled into the tub overnight. OK Too scared as well. Arachnophobia is another foible I have. The beast in question was a monster in UK terms (meaning that it was approximately the size of Wales) ... it also had a particularly malevolent glint in most of its eight eyes and whenever I looked, cautiously, over the edge in hopes of finding that it had turned turtle and died, decently, of -- presumably -- hunger or dehydration I was partly relieved (I'm not by nature a sadist) and partly disconcerted to see it still standing there, in enamel valley, trying to look like it was rolling up its shirt-sleeves prior to physical combat. For four days that fearsome sight was enough to send me scuttling away to do something as unstrenuous as possible. Sadly on the fifth morning I had an appointment with a therapy group (more of that another day) and although I tried my level best to convince myself otherwise I had to admit that I had acquired an aroma. I did not yet stink, but I was moving in that direction. Call it pride. Call it anything but I was darned sure I wasn't going to sit in a room with other people I hardly know if I wasn't utterly content with the olfactory signals I would be transmitting. What I found much more worrying was the realization that this piece of pridefulness was far too sane and sensible. Maybe I should just go out all stinky. I'd given her a name by now. Charlotte . (I know! Cheesey isn't it?) What I had figured was this. Spiders can't get a grip on the enamel which is why they get stuck; they cannot climb out because the sides of the tub are too slippery ... even in my filthy house where bathtubs hold archeological records in their fossilized scum rings (only joking ... even I like a clean bath tub!) Anyway, I figured that being large, Charlotte would also be smart and that, given enough time, she would work out that if she built herself a stairway with silk she would be out of the tub in a jiffy. (Ever noticed how much silk there is stuck to the sides of a tub that's had a spider in residence for a day or two?) Well. She hadn't. I needed the tub and she was still there and if looks could kill she would still be there. And if I had less pride she might still be there, too. OK. I admit it. I hate myself enough as it is. One more admission isn't gonna kill me. She went up the Dyson. I could see her all supine and toes-together amongst the assorted cat hairs and skin flakes that make up what passes for household dust in my residence. I felt a deep well of remorse yawn open before me like nightmare gateway into a hell-for-spider-killing-lazy-people and then I shrugged and turned on the hot water .... It was later, as I laid my head back against the steamed up tiles, that I remembered about the silk that spiders leave attached to the sides ....