It seems like a tremendously long time since I’ve made an entry, and gaps like those always discourage making further entries, because there’s an onus on you to make up for all of the lost time. The other problem is that I seem to have gotten into the habit of writing blogs, not uploading them, and later reading over them, thoroughly unsatisfied, before deleting them. It’s hardly an ideal state, so I thought I’d just recount this dream I had, and then upload it immediately.
Yesterday evening, I went to bed a little later than usual. It being a cold day, I’d decided it would probably be for the best if I just crammed in as much sleep as possible, but when I got to bed I just sat there and browsed the old internet for a while.
Anyway, I’m not sure if any of this was the cause, I’m just setting the scene, you understand. My dream went roughly along these lines.
I “awoke” in a doctor’s surgery, lying on what appears to be a dentist’s chair. The whole thing was very grim, a kind of 1930s view of what a future-gone-wrong might look like. The whole room was in shadow, and the only light source was a far-too-bright ER style lamp hung low over my face, so that the doctor/dentist can see what he’s doing. Thanks to the severity of the lamp, he’s just a shadow, backlit with an intense white light. I remember thinking that it was like sunlight, only colder.
Arrayed on a tray attached to the chair were a collection of various un-doctorly tools. From left to right; a scalpel, a scissors (black), a drill (Black & Decker), a hammer (claw) and a screwdriver (Philips head). All caked in a combination of blood, dust and flies. Just as I heard the sound of the drill whining to life, I woke up with a kind of relieved shiver. I’m not sure if anyone ever wakes up with a jolt, but I never do.
Relieved to have woken up from such a strange dream, and admittedly a little curious as to what kind of operation could possibly have involved such bizarre accoutrements, I rolled over onto my back ( I sleep on my side, not sure why, just how I am I guess).
As soon as I rolled over I noticed that some industrious spider had spent the night constructing a fairly large and twisted web around eight inches above my face. I looked at the web distractedly for a while, before noticing the sunlight from my window (which is broken in such a way that it’s always just a little open) picking out flecks of moisture from my breath as it condensed on the web. At this point it came to me that whatever spider had assembled the web must have been freakishly big.
Each strand, hung heavy with my breath and drooping towards my face, seemed as wide as thread. Having lived with insects for twenty-odd years, I resolved not to be bothered by it, and gently detached the web from the wall and the opposite side of my bed with my left hand, feeling the strength of its construction as I did so.
I got up and got dressed, realising how cold it was despite the sun shining through the window, I smacked on a too-big, bright orange hat and went downstairs to see what there was to be had for breakfast. It’s often the case that I “check what’s to be had for breakfast”, look at it for a while, and then decide I’ll just have tea. This was one of those mornings.
As I flicked on the kettle I noticed that there are two tiny snails crawling along the outside of it, their shells perfect beige-on-brown spirals, each the reverse of the other. The red button on the kettle lit up and, for a second I wondered to myself what will happen to those two snails, but the thought was cut short by the need to get a mug and a teabag.
I read whatever article happens to be left on the page on which my father left the newspaper open before heading to work. It was something about the economic slump and Iceland, though I’d be hard pressed to remember anything more than that. The came to the boil and clicked off twice (it’s developed a strange pre-click that always throws me), and as I picked it up I saw that the two snails had vanished, without a trace. For some reason, the thought that they’d just left cheered me up. I like snails, I don’t like the idea of boiling them; that’s probably the size of it.
Having dropped a tea bag into my mug (it has a polar bear on it), I went to grab some milk from the fridge. On opening it, I was greeted by its usual acrid tang… no matter what we do, that fridge smells dreadful. I stretched my hand in (better not to maintain any more contact than absolutely necessary) and noticed as I picked up the milk that it’s surrounded by a cloudy whitish liquid, to a depth of around half an inch.
As I extricated the milk, I realised that whatever the gak was that had surrounded it, it was all over the innards of the fridge. Furthermore, the stuff proved to be so viscous that when I did pull the milk from its cloying grasp, tendrils seemed to be dragged with the carton. The stuff left on the floor of the fridge made no effort to close the perfect square left by the milk. When I returned the milk to the fridge, it slotted right back into the hole it had left before… disconcertingly easily, as though being welcomed back.
As I finished making my tea (a half turn anti-clockwise to make sure the milk and tea combine properly), I caught sight of my backlit reflection/silhouette in its surface, and turned to check if the father had left the kitchen light on. Apparently not.
I walked into the front room (where the downstairs mirror lives) to see what was up. My previously day-glo orange hat had acquired something far closer to an ordinary glow. I pulled it from my head, shocked and a little afraid of why a hat would be so illuminated. Looking at myself in the mirror, my head was limned with blazing, holy light. Ringed by an old-school Christian halo, just as you might see in stained glass on church windows wherever you might go.
[Edit: At this point, I remember my sister(s) (a strange combination of the two) walking by the door, pausing long enough to say, "You do know you have a complex, don't you?" Dream criticism is the worst, I feel.
I groped around the back of my head, looking for anything that might make sense of what was going on, and felt something achingly strange and vaguely familiar. I’m not sure if anyone else has every felt a deer’s antler before; they’re a strange combination of incredibly tough and very smooth, and at the same time, porous where they join the skull. That weird combination of textures was embedded at the junction of my neck and spine.
Immediately, and in a manner that never quite happens outside dreams, I knew that some mad doctor had nailed (or otherwise grafted, I wasn’t able to fully investigate) a halo to my neck…
It was alright though, because at just that moment I woke up.
I wonder if I can persuade Adam and Ross to let us do a song about it…
Monday, October 27, 2008
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
I seem to have had a great many dogs...
It seems to me, in the manner of so many things remembered from when I was young, that myself and my siblings spent a great deal of time asking the father if he would appropriate a dog.
It didn’t have to be a particular kind of dog; as with all small children, we weren’t picky. The most scabrous and mangy of dogs would have been welcomed with open arms, but alas, ours was a house surrounded by “cat people” – just the kind of environment that would have little or no effect on a dog, but which would deliver noticeable recoil to a dog owner.
Not willing to draw the ire of our neighbours, my father was good enough to acquire from our Aunt (Waa, as previously mentioned) a cat that any would-be dog owner should have been happy to own. He lacked a cat’s natural skittishness, being possessed instead of a very canine will to scavenge and beg for attention. In truth though, he was an odd-eyed (one green, one blue) and scatter-brained thing, and when his death eventually found him, it would prove to be kidney failure, caused by a rat bite.
His wasn’t a death we felt keenly, by then bored with his essentially feline nature, we had paid him little enough attention that, when he eventually died, we noticed not because he hadn’t been home in some time, but because a neighbour informed us he had (kindly) dealt with the remains.
My father, in a fit we would later come to recognise as the pattern reasserted itself, named him Basil, with just a little less deliberation than he would later employ in the naming of his iPod (it’s Angela). We would remain petless then for some years before the siblings found a border-collie pup while on holiday and managed to wrangle enough sentiment from the father that he let us keep it. Again the father’s will to name things leapt to the fore and we were gifted with a dog named Raptor. He was named, not after a dinosaur or jet, but after a firewall in the father’s workplace.
Raptor was well loved though, and while his incessant and shrill barking had seemed initially to mark him a potentially short-lived addition to the family, our love for him overcame a series of potentially fatal flaws. He took a destructive dislike to strangers, children, furniture, deer and other dogs. At this point, worried that our dog might be bored, and thrilled with ourselves over the success of raising a puppy which had yet to destroy anything but furniture, we introduced a second collie, who was promptly named Wendy. She came to us through my sister Jane, who then worked in a pound.
It would however soon come to light that Wendy was addled by some strange malaise. She had spent some time as a stray dog, and, while picking the ticks from her fur (at great length), the brother would find large black lumps, each the size of half a golf ball, all along her abdomen. Within two months of adopting her, a vet would confirm that somehow, miraculously, she had cancer of pretty much every organ a dog needs to live. As an act of mercy, we had her put to sleep.
Soon afterward, Jane found another puppy, a soft brown and with darker lines around her eyes that gave her a perpetually disappointed look, we named her Fran. At this point though, Raptor’s slow boil aggression had turned him from a relatively hospitable animal into one that would eventually snap at one of the sisters on her return from a trip, and so he too would be put to sleep.
While the brother was the one to walk him to the pound, it would be Jane who had the last two interactions with him. Working in the pound often necessitated actions it would prove a little hard to justify allowing a sixteen year old girl to carry out. In this line were the two last times Jane saw our dog. The first was when a vet asked if she would help shave and restrain a dog that was to be put down, which would turn out to be Raptor – a task to which Jane was uniquely suited.
Stranger still, there were times, in the height of summer, when collections for “organic waste” were so few and far between that it became necessary to store the corpses of disposed-of dogs in a shed designed to act as a meat locker. I’d been told that on the hottest of days, blood would trickle from beneath the walls of the shed, as the mass of collected dogs within began to defrost. While decanting dogs from out-building to shed, Jane chanced to come across Raptor’s chilled and stiff self – an experience I find singularly unsettling.
And now, sadly, we find ourselves entering the same phase with Fran. Fran has been, by and large, the best of our dogs. She’s lacked Wendy’s general cancer-patient status and neatly avoided Raptor’s steadily growing aggression, but she’s just as neatly avoided any semblance of house training. Indeed, years after her adoption she’s still prone to just plain peeing all over the place for attention.
Part of the problem this time though, is that in as many ways as we managed to train Raptor and Wendy (indeed, in as many ways as I failed to train Fran) Fran has managed to train me. For every command she doesn’t quite understand, there’s a behaviour in me that’s become second nature, without any apparent effort on her part.
The problem is that I know now that when my house is no longer occupied by the sound of her scrabbling against the walls, chasing whatever it is dogs chase when they’re alone, I will still spend time making sure every door in the house is closed and sealed before I leave, for fear she’ll sleep in someone else’s bed. I know I’ll still leave the thick crust from the end of a loaf of bread behind. I know I’ll set aside the crisps from a bag that fall just short of edible, and saddest of all I know that I’ll keep doing these things long after it sinks in that she won’t be around.
I’ve been trained so well by this dog that, even when I don’t expect her to be there, I tense my stomach on entering a room, wary of exuberant introductions. I may, in every meaningful way, have failed spectacularly to train her to do, or not to do, anything and simultaneously, she’s trained me to behave in ways most conducive to her. In many ways, it’s like a bad marriage. Every time she decides to go a bit “rock star” and turn the room upside down for attention, I sit there and take it… like an abused spouse, I love the poor girl despite her little episodes.
Of course, what all of this boils down to is, I’m not sure I make the best of dog owners. I’ve yet to had a dog last more than three years before overwhelming evidence has presented itself that the dog really would be better off far away from me (at the very least), and while I can’t take sole responsibility, it’s hard to deny the mounting evidence that there’s a very good case for me not to be given sole dominion over anything’s life.
I suppose the saddest part of all of this is that soon there will be another collar nailed to the wall beside Raptor’s, bearing mute testament to the fact that, for some reason, even the dog I’ve loved the most has ended up so irrevocably broken by the experience of being my dog that she too is now gone.
I either need to get some kind of dog-caring lessons, or I need to think about keeping fish.
It didn’t have to be a particular kind of dog; as with all small children, we weren’t picky. The most scabrous and mangy of dogs would have been welcomed with open arms, but alas, ours was a house surrounded by “cat people” – just the kind of environment that would have little or no effect on a dog, but which would deliver noticeable recoil to a dog owner.
Not willing to draw the ire of our neighbours, my father was good enough to acquire from our Aunt (Waa, as previously mentioned) a cat that any would-be dog owner should have been happy to own. He lacked a cat’s natural skittishness, being possessed instead of a very canine will to scavenge and beg for attention. In truth though, he was an odd-eyed (one green, one blue) and scatter-brained thing, and when his death eventually found him, it would prove to be kidney failure, caused by a rat bite.
His wasn’t a death we felt keenly, by then bored with his essentially feline nature, we had paid him little enough attention that, when he eventually died, we noticed not because he hadn’t been home in some time, but because a neighbour informed us he had (kindly) dealt with the remains.
My father, in a fit we would later come to recognise as the pattern reasserted itself, named him Basil, with just a little less deliberation than he would later employ in the naming of his iPod (it’s Angela). We would remain petless then for some years before the siblings found a border-collie pup while on holiday and managed to wrangle enough sentiment from the father that he let us keep it. Again the father’s will to name things leapt to the fore and we were gifted with a dog named Raptor. He was named, not after a dinosaur or jet, but after a firewall in the father’s workplace.
Raptor was well loved though, and while his incessant and shrill barking had seemed initially to mark him a potentially short-lived addition to the family, our love for him overcame a series of potentially fatal flaws. He took a destructive dislike to strangers, children, furniture, deer and other dogs. At this point, worried that our dog might be bored, and thrilled with ourselves over the success of raising a puppy which had yet to destroy anything but furniture, we introduced a second collie, who was promptly named Wendy. She came to us through my sister Jane, who then worked in a pound.
It would however soon come to light that Wendy was addled by some strange malaise. She had spent some time as a stray dog, and, while picking the ticks from her fur (at great length), the brother would find large black lumps, each the size of half a golf ball, all along her abdomen. Within two months of adopting her, a vet would confirm that somehow, miraculously, she had cancer of pretty much every organ a dog needs to live. As an act of mercy, we had her put to sleep.
Soon afterward, Jane found another puppy, a soft brown and with darker lines around her eyes that gave her a perpetually disappointed look, we named her Fran. At this point though, Raptor’s slow boil aggression had turned him from a relatively hospitable animal into one that would eventually snap at one of the sisters on her return from a trip, and so he too would be put to sleep.
While the brother was the one to walk him to the pound, it would be Jane who had the last two interactions with him. Working in the pound often necessitated actions it would prove a little hard to justify allowing a sixteen year old girl to carry out. In this line were the two last times Jane saw our dog. The first was when a vet asked if she would help shave and restrain a dog that was to be put down, which would turn out to be Raptor – a task to which Jane was uniquely suited.
Stranger still, there were times, in the height of summer, when collections for “organic waste” were so few and far between that it became necessary to store the corpses of disposed-of dogs in a shed designed to act as a meat locker. I’d been told that on the hottest of days, blood would trickle from beneath the walls of the shed, as the mass of collected dogs within began to defrost. While decanting dogs from out-building to shed, Jane chanced to come across Raptor’s chilled and stiff self – an experience I find singularly unsettling.
And now, sadly, we find ourselves entering the same phase with Fran. Fran has been, by and large, the best of our dogs. She’s lacked Wendy’s general cancer-patient status and neatly avoided Raptor’s steadily growing aggression, but she’s just as neatly avoided any semblance of house training. Indeed, years after her adoption she’s still prone to just plain peeing all over the place for attention.
Part of the problem this time though, is that in as many ways as we managed to train Raptor and Wendy (indeed, in as many ways as I failed to train Fran) Fran has managed to train me. For every command she doesn’t quite understand, there’s a behaviour in me that’s become second nature, without any apparent effort on her part.
The problem is that I know now that when my house is no longer occupied by the sound of her scrabbling against the walls, chasing whatever it is dogs chase when they’re alone, I will still spend time making sure every door in the house is closed and sealed before I leave, for fear she’ll sleep in someone else’s bed. I know I’ll still leave the thick crust from the end of a loaf of bread behind. I know I’ll set aside the crisps from a bag that fall just short of edible, and saddest of all I know that I’ll keep doing these things long after it sinks in that she won’t be around.
I’ve been trained so well by this dog that, even when I don’t expect her to be there, I tense my stomach on entering a room, wary of exuberant introductions. I may, in every meaningful way, have failed spectacularly to train her to do, or not to do, anything and simultaneously, she’s trained me to behave in ways most conducive to her. In many ways, it’s like a bad marriage. Every time she decides to go a bit “rock star” and turn the room upside down for attention, I sit there and take it… like an abused spouse, I love the poor girl despite her little episodes.
Of course, what all of this boils down to is, I’m not sure I make the best of dog owners. I’ve yet to had a dog last more than three years before overwhelming evidence has presented itself that the dog really would be better off far away from me (at the very least), and while I can’t take sole responsibility, it’s hard to deny the mounting evidence that there’s a very good case for me not to be given sole dominion over anything’s life.
I suppose the saddest part of all of this is that soon there will be another collar nailed to the wall beside Raptor’s, bearing mute testament to the fact that, for some reason, even the dog I’ve loved the most has ended up so irrevocably broken by the experience of being my dog that she too is now gone.
I either need to get some kind of dog-caring lessons, or I need to think about keeping fish.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Strange Associations
Earlier on this week, my younger sister, Jane, had cause to rouse a house full of students at around half seven in the morning. I can’t say if she did derive any pleasure from it, but if I were in her position (having a job and living in a house full of students) I’d be pretty hard pressed not to have revelled in the experience.
Either way, the reason Jane felt obliged to wake up everyone in her house was that, over the course of the evening, someone engaged in what might best be described as a “criminal enterprise” had taken it upon themselves to hammer, punch or otherwise perforate a hole in her kitchen wall. This hole is large enough for Jane to confidently peek her head through and glance around her neighbour’s kitchen. This tells us a significant amount more than a simple measure of diameter might – this is not just a sizeable hole, this is a hole big enough to be a source of entertainment. Naturally enough, Ross managed to sleep through the whole night, despite being separated from events forceful enough to smash through a house by just one inter-room wall.
That aside, the point of this blog wasn’t to discuss damage done to their house, nor Ross’s various shortcomings as a human being (manifold though they might be). It’d be wrong to say the whole event seemed unusually familiar to me, but the image I was left with, of plaster, broken into chunks and flecking a smooth surface, did remind me of something. This was despite my never having been in a house that had had walls similarly broken, to my memory at least. Somehow, the image of a broken wall resonated with something somewhere in the leaky archive of my brain, and it took a couple of days for my mind to reclaim it.
I’ve talked before about the fact that myself and my siblings were, in the mother’s absence, raised by a series of (sometimes only in the loosest sense of the word) maternal figures. One of the most accurate embodiments of this was the mother’s sister, who we referred to simply enough as “Waa”, a name introduced to curb the difficulty a child’s tongue has in negotiating the kind of consonant slush that constitutes her Christian name.
We spent some time in Waa’s house, and while there it had occurred to all of us that there were a number of doors in the house that just sort of “led to nowhere”. They didn’t open, and where some of them did, there were bricks instead of rooms. The whole week seems very strange because of it, but for around a week, having things around hat “led to nowhere” seemed not to warrant any explanation. Being a child only slightly more shy than curious, and more than a little fearful of a bearish uncle (and it must be said, an only slightly less bearish aunt), it was easier just not to ask about things. In situations like this, it’s best to have a brother.
When asked about the “mad doors that go to nowhere” Waa was relatively forthcoming. She explained that she’d bought two houses, side by side, with the aim of reclaiming one that had (by means I’ve never fully understood for reasons possibly related to bearishness) been pretty much completely gutted – that is to say, the architectural equivalent of eviscerated. There were still the lines where walls had once been, and I seem to remember various props supporting the whole affair, but this wasn’t a house so much as a kind of dusty, indoor version of outdoors. Sure, it had walls, but they weren’t enough to make it an inside, this was just a piece of outside someone had built things around. They’re very different.
Why she felt the need to show us this house from the vantage point of a first floor doorway, one which literally opened out onto nothingness, I’ll probably never be able to figure out. What seemed most jarring about the whole experience to me at the time was that it was the moment I took to come to terms with the difference between indoor doors and outdoor doors. The door that now separated a wayward child from falling to their rubbly possible-death was (even to my maybe-twelve-year-old hands) disturbingly thin.
It seems now, through the miracle of reason, as though we only stayed with Waa for about two weeks, if even that, but in my memory that two weeks stretches out for months, distorted as it is by the lens of childhood and the number of disturbing details crammed into so short a space. There is something decidedly discomforting about seeing a woman tell someone to turn a lamp off in case it causes a fire, something she made seem not only possible, but very likely indeed.
What was then only marginally less disturbing (for the fact that I understood so little of it) was when someone questioned whether or not a lamp could really start a fire, to which the response was, and I remember this quite vividly, “Well- stranger things have happened, but, knock on wood.” A short knock accompanies the statement, followed by very slight furrowing of the brow, “-or in this case… asbestos.” I’ve always liked to think that was a joke, but I’m not sure if that makes it any less menacing, considering the deadpan tone in which it was delivered and the various other potentially life threatening features of the house.
There were other things that happened there that struck me as particularly mad, but I’m getting tired and want to upload this before sleep catches me.
Either way, the reason Jane felt obliged to wake up everyone in her house was that, over the course of the evening, someone engaged in what might best be described as a “criminal enterprise” had taken it upon themselves to hammer, punch or otherwise perforate a hole in her kitchen wall. This hole is large enough for Jane to confidently peek her head through and glance around her neighbour’s kitchen. This tells us a significant amount more than a simple measure of diameter might – this is not just a sizeable hole, this is a hole big enough to be a source of entertainment. Naturally enough, Ross managed to sleep through the whole night, despite being separated from events forceful enough to smash through a house by just one inter-room wall.
That aside, the point of this blog wasn’t to discuss damage done to their house, nor Ross’s various shortcomings as a human being (manifold though they might be). It’d be wrong to say the whole event seemed unusually familiar to me, but the image I was left with, of plaster, broken into chunks and flecking a smooth surface, did remind me of something. This was despite my never having been in a house that had had walls similarly broken, to my memory at least. Somehow, the image of a broken wall resonated with something somewhere in the leaky archive of my brain, and it took a couple of days for my mind to reclaim it.
I’ve talked before about the fact that myself and my siblings were, in the mother’s absence, raised by a series of (sometimes only in the loosest sense of the word) maternal figures. One of the most accurate embodiments of this was the mother’s sister, who we referred to simply enough as “Waa”, a name introduced to curb the difficulty a child’s tongue has in negotiating the kind of consonant slush that constitutes her Christian name.
We spent some time in Waa’s house, and while there it had occurred to all of us that there were a number of doors in the house that just sort of “led to nowhere”. They didn’t open, and where some of them did, there were bricks instead of rooms. The whole week seems very strange because of it, but for around a week, having things around hat “led to nowhere” seemed not to warrant any explanation. Being a child only slightly more shy than curious, and more than a little fearful of a bearish uncle (and it must be said, an only slightly less bearish aunt), it was easier just not to ask about things. In situations like this, it’s best to have a brother.
When asked about the “mad doors that go to nowhere” Waa was relatively forthcoming. She explained that she’d bought two houses, side by side, with the aim of reclaiming one that had (by means I’ve never fully understood for reasons possibly related to bearishness) been pretty much completely gutted – that is to say, the architectural equivalent of eviscerated. There were still the lines where walls had once been, and I seem to remember various props supporting the whole affair, but this wasn’t a house so much as a kind of dusty, indoor version of outdoors. Sure, it had walls, but they weren’t enough to make it an inside, this was just a piece of outside someone had built things around. They’re very different.
Why she felt the need to show us this house from the vantage point of a first floor doorway, one which literally opened out onto nothingness, I’ll probably never be able to figure out. What seemed most jarring about the whole experience to me at the time was that it was the moment I took to come to terms with the difference between indoor doors and outdoor doors. The door that now separated a wayward child from falling to their rubbly possible-death was (even to my maybe-twelve-year-old hands) disturbingly thin.
It seems now, through the miracle of reason, as though we only stayed with Waa for about two weeks, if even that, but in my memory that two weeks stretches out for months, distorted as it is by the lens of childhood and the number of disturbing details crammed into so short a space. There is something decidedly discomforting about seeing a woman tell someone to turn a lamp off in case it causes a fire, something she made seem not only possible, but very likely indeed.
What was then only marginally less disturbing (for the fact that I understood so little of it) was when someone questioned whether or not a lamp could really start a fire, to which the response was, and I remember this quite vividly, “Well- stranger things have happened, but, knock on wood.” A short knock accompanies the statement, followed by very slight furrowing of the brow, “-or in this case… asbestos.” I’ve always liked to think that was a joke, but I’m not sure if that makes it any less menacing, considering the deadpan tone in which it was delivered and the various other potentially life threatening features of the house.
There were other things that happened there that struck me as particularly mad, but I’m getting tired and want to upload this before sleep catches me.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
And Then There Were Two
Whenever there’s a monumental change to the way my life works, or the way I consider it to work, I worry about my teeth. I’m not sure where the association comes from, but there’s certainly a deep seated connection somewhere in my mind between the big, inevitable changes in the way I live as I grow older, and the gradual decay of my teeth.
I’m not even sure if it’s the degradation of my teeth that worries me so much… I don’t feel very consoled by the knowledge that they’re alright, I just keenly feel the need to make sure that they are, or even that they aren’t. As long as I’m aware, I’ll figure things out.
With that in mind, I should explain that I’m writing this blog having come from the bathroom, where, with the aid of a hand mirror, I established that my teeth are in fine working order. The reason I felt the need to check that my teeth were intact is because my brother leaves for foreign climes tomorrow and we’re not sure when (and indeed, if) he’ll be coming back.
With the brother’s departure so imminent, the father was kind enough to organise a family dinner, something we haven’t had in this house in quite some years. Present were the father, brother, myself, two sisters and close family friend Mary. Having left when we were all still young enough not to hold it against her, the mother phoned in from overseas, spoke briefly to the brother and promptly broke contact. No greetings passed on to the rest of us, but that’s life.
This seemed a strange state of affairs to Mary, but it’s entirely in line with my working theory of our relationship with the mother. Effectively, our mother was a wonderful, maternal figure for the first few years of my life (though slightly fewer for the siblings). Unfortunately, to borrow from physics, she had a relatively short half-life; while she was our mother she burned bright and beautiful, and accordingly, those years are incandescent in my memory.
I remember them now as warm, sunny times, times spent collecting blackberries to be made into a jammy preserve, which would later be spread on some kind of pastry I’ll never know the name of, but seem to remember enjoying tremendously. In subsequent years we would still gather berries in the field behind our house, but I remember the making of jam being as a once-off. I wonder now if that was the point, that the fun was in the collecting; my mother, the brother and I plucking berries from bushes, learning to avoid the ones that looked unripe while the sun beat down on the knee high grass around us.
Afterwards, I remember the buckets of blackberries standing, monumental on the drainer and, to borrow a phrase, sitting there until the growth of (to borrow a phrase) a rat grey fungus, glutting on our cache. In my child’s mind, they had sat there forever, huge buckets of fruit and pulp, sweet and warm, just waiting for someone to take the care to make it into a sugary food. It seems more likely that they’d just been there days, but that’s speculation – I don’t know how long picked berries last.
Unfortunately, as is the way with such things, the happy state was destined to be short lived, and slowly the relationship grew dimmer, eventually degrading into a kind of a “dirty bomb” of a relationship, with fallout effecting all sides. She later left the father under terms that have never quite been made clear to me, though I’m happier in my ignorance.
In the years that followed, we were raised by a kind of compilation of maternal figures who were kind enough to lend their efforts to our upbringing. Together they formed a kind of quantum mother, and it would be their collective influence that guided our development, alongside that of the father.
A solid 70% of this involvement came from Mary (a neighbour, close friend of the mother and mother to Ross, who I still consider my second brother). That should go some way towards explaining why, when the (biological) mother expressed so little interest in 75% of her progeny, I felt no deep desire to investigate my current dental status.
The fact is, I now associate the making of jam with Mary, rather than the mother. This is despite the fact that I can’t honestly say I remember Mary ever making jam. Moreover, those memories I do have of picking berries with the mother seem interchangeable with those of picking blackberries with Mary; again, I can’t honestly say this ever happened, but that’s the way childhood memories are I guess. The smells and tastes are so very vivid, but the people seem interchangeable as long as the feeling is about right.
What’s interesting is that, despite my having understood it to be the case for most of my life, I’m quite sure Mary hadn’t considered herself a mother figure to us and I’d worried that saying it might cause offense… I’m not entirely sure why, but I imagine being accused of being a kind of consummate (if accidental) mother might not be the perfect end to a day.
All that aside, we had a pleasant dinner and reasonably cheerful conversation and picture-taking, though all with a vaguely uncomfortable undertone. The fact is, I don’t see my brother nearly as much as I should, and the reminder so close to his leaving that we get on well while we are together seemed a little unusual.
What really summed up the evening though, and the reason I decided to write this blog before we drop out to the airport tomorrow morning, was the game of backgammon that my father and brother started while waiting for a taxi to arrive and take him away. Naturally, the wait for the taxi wasn’t quite long enough to allow for a full game of backgammon, and their game was interrupted.
I happened to walk back into the kitchen before anyone else had had a chance to clean up and saw the backgammon board open on the table, dice and pieces lying strewn across the board as they had been in play. I thought there was something very sad about that board and its father-son game, sitting open and unfinished, abandoned just as it really got started.
I imagine there’s a very shrewd observation to be made about the fact that backgammon is a game fundamentally about getting all of your pieces home, coupled with my brother leaving home and their game being interrupted, but that kind of observation is a little too visceral for me to really get at elegantly, Jane would do better, and I’ve always been clumsy with sentiment.
I guess the other reason I’m writing this now is because I’m not sure how I feel. I know there should be some amazing depth of feeling, and indeed I do feel loss, but at the moment I’m more disappointed that I didn’t get to see them finish their game than anything else.
At times like these I always wonder how I should feel, and I imagine that’s how everyone feels, which should probably make it alright. For now I’ll have to satisfy myself the same way I always do. My teeth are big, white and mostly okay. There are a couple of fillings and some wisdom teeth coming in, but overall they’re alright. Some staining, but that’s to be expected.
I’m not even sure if it’s the degradation of my teeth that worries me so much… I don’t feel very consoled by the knowledge that they’re alright, I just keenly feel the need to make sure that they are, or even that they aren’t. As long as I’m aware, I’ll figure things out.
With that in mind, I should explain that I’m writing this blog having come from the bathroom, where, with the aid of a hand mirror, I established that my teeth are in fine working order. The reason I felt the need to check that my teeth were intact is because my brother leaves for foreign climes tomorrow and we’re not sure when (and indeed, if) he’ll be coming back.
With the brother’s departure so imminent, the father was kind enough to organise a family dinner, something we haven’t had in this house in quite some years. Present were the father, brother, myself, two sisters and close family friend Mary. Having left when we were all still young enough not to hold it against her, the mother phoned in from overseas, spoke briefly to the brother and promptly broke contact. No greetings passed on to the rest of us, but that’s life.
This seemed a strange state of affairs to Mary, but it’s entirely in line with my working theory of our relationship with the mother. Effectively, our mother was a wonderful, maternal figure for the first few years of my life (though slightly fewer for the siblings). Unfortunately, to borrow from physics, she had a relatively short half-life; while she was our mother she burned bright and beautiful, and accordingly, those years are incandescent in my memory.
I remember them now as warm, sunny times, times spent collecting blackberries to be made into a jammy preserve, which would later be spread on some kind of pastry I’ll never know the name of, but seem to remember enjoying tremendously. In subsequent years we would still gather berries in the field behind our house, but I remember the making of jam being as a once-off. I wonder now if that was the point, that the fun was in the collecting; my mother, the brother and I plucking berries from bushes, learning to avoid the ones that looked unripe while the sun beat down on the knee high grass around us.
Afterwards, I remember the buckets of blackberries standing, monumental on the drainer and, to borrow a phrase, sitting there until the growth of (to borrow a phrase) a rat grey fungus, glutting on our cache. In my child’s mind, they had sat there forever, huge buckets of fruit and pulp, sweet and warm, just waiting for someone to take the care to make it into a sugary food. It seems more likely that they’d just been there days, but that’s speculation – I don’t know how long picked berries last.
Unfortunately, as is the way with such things, the happy state was destined to be short lived, and slowly the relationship grew dimmer, eventually degrading into a kind of a “dirty bomb” of a relationship, with fallout effecting all sides. She later left the father under terms that have never quite been made clear to me, though I’m happier in my ignorance.
In the years that followed, we were raised by a kind of compilation of maternal figures who were kind enough to lend their efforts to our upbringing. Together they formed a kind of quantum mother, and it would be their collective influence that guided our development, alongside that of the father.
A solid 70% of this involvement came from Mary (a neighbour, close friend of the mother and mother to Ross, who I still consider my second brother). That should go some way towards explaining why, when the (biological) mother expressed so little interest in 75% of her progeny, I felt no deep desire to investigate my current dental status.
The fact is, I now associate the making of jam with Mary, rather than the mother. This is despite the fact that I can’t honestly say I remember Mary ever making jam. Moreover, those memories I do have of picking berries with the mother seem interchangeable with those of picking blackberries with Mary; again, I can’t honestly say this ever happened, but that’s the way childhood memories are I guess. The smells and tastes are so very vivid, but the people seem interchangeable as long as the feeling is about right.
What’s interesting is that, despite my having understood it to be the case for most of my life, I’m quite sure Mary hadn’t considered herself a mother figure to us and I’d worried that saying it might cause offense… I’m not entirely sure why, but I imagine being accused of being a kind of consummate (if accidental) mother might not be the perfect end to a day.
All that aside, we had a pleasant dinner and reasonably cheerful conversation and picture-taking, though all with a vaguely uncomfortable undertone. The fact is, I don’t see my brother nearly as much as I should, and the reminder so close to his leaving that we get on well while we are together seemed a little unusual.
What really summed up the evening though, and the reason I decided to write this blog before we drop out to the airport tomorrow morning, was the game of backgammon that my father and brother started while waiting for a taxi to arrive and take him away. Naturally, the wait for the taxi wasn’t quite long enough to allow for a full game of backgammon, and their game was interrupted.
I happened to walk back into the kitchen before anyone else had had a chance to clean up and saw the backgammon board open on the table, dice and pieces lying strewn across the board as they had been in play. I thought there was something very sad about that board and its father-son game, sitting open and unfinished, abandoned just as it really got started.
I imagine there’s a very shrewd observation to be made about the fact that backgammon is a game fundamentally about getting all of your pieces home, coupled with my brother leaving home and their game being interrupted, but that kind of observation is a little too visceral for me to really get at elegantly, Jane would do better, and I’ve always been clumsy with sentiment.
I guess the other reason I’m writing this now is because I’m not sure how I feel. I know there should be some amazing depth of feeling, and indeed I do feel loss, but at the moment I’m more disappointed that I didn’t get to see them finish their game than anything else.
At times like these I always wonder how I should feel, and I imagine that’s how everyone feels, which should probably make it alright. For now I’ll have to satisfy myself the same way I always do. My teeth are big, white and mostly okay. There are a couple of fillings and some wisdom teeth coming in, but overall they’re alright. Some staining, but that’s to be expected.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Last Night I Walked Home
Last night, after what proved to be a particularly productive band practice (for me at least, less so for Adam), I walked home from Ross’s house at around three. While it was admittedly a fairly late time to walk home, I’m not entirely unfamiliar with walking home late, and so hadn’t any reservations when I set out.
I left with a half consumed bag of M&Ms and was making good progress on the rest when I reached the main road leading back towards the Park (in which I live, for anyone who isn’t up on all the details of my life).
I’ve recently installed a playlisting app for my iPod that measures the pace of my footsteps and plays tracks deliberately such that the two are in sync. I’d been enjoying this as I walked home at a pace that could be best described as “sedate”. The rain of the previous day had cleared to leave the night air balmy and soporific.
In a sleepy daze I meandered back towards the house, the sodium-orange of street lamps providing that unwonderful monochrome light that seems universally to provide just enough vision for whatever surrounds you to be boring.
Suddenly, I found myself swept up by a tide of grey-orange children, mouths open with the exertion of running as quickly as possible, eyes wide enough to see the orange light reflected all around the irises. They flooded onto the road from housing estates on both sides, from alleyways between houses, and over walls all sprinting in the same direction, numbers swelled by the surprise of seeing so many at once and the low light, shadows and children being roughly indistinguishable when moving at speed.
All at once I experienced two things. The first was that the crisp-sugar shell of an M&M compliments the coppery taste of adrenaline in roughly the same way as apple juice does toothpaste. The second was that music chosen in an attempt to mimic a slow paced walk is near enough to the perfect tempo to slowly incite panic. It being so very late at night, the seemingly vast number of ten-to-fourteen year olds so determined to make haste in one direction gave me what can best be described as “an uncomfortableness”. I ran; I ran as fast I altogether can.
I remember a few details with unusual clarity, I remember the low pulse in my headphones as my walkman informed me it had judged that I’d changed pace dramatically enough to warrant a revision of what track was playing (it changed from Massive Attack’s Teardrop to The Faint’s Mirror Error for anyone inclined to look it up).
I remember too the sound of my own footsteps as I ran, high on the balls of my feet and leaned far forward, made somehow sharper by the thin layer of liquid still covering the paths from the rain earlier that day, reflecting, with equal vagueness, my feet as I ran and the glow of the streetlights above me.
And suddenly as they had appeared, the crowd of children with whom I’d been running were gone, left behind or hiding, and still it seemed tremendously early to stop running from anything that had so scared a group so big. I continued running until I reached the gate to the Park itself.
Still fearing pursuit (in the manner of accomplished cowards everywhere) as I passed through the gate, I let my feet drift out in front of me and slid, right foot forward and the left only slightly behind it. The ground was slick and wet, I slid so low and easily I planted the fingertips of my left hand on the ground to remain stable and, as I did so, turned my body so that I could plant my right hand on the ground and look behind me.
Sure enough there was a shadow, tall and thin, limned by the dull orange glow, running (though without the energy terror had lent me) some distance behind me. In my sudden and brief stillness I could hear that run. Where my footsteps had been a rapid tapping, light and sharp, these were thudding, loping strides. Fortunately enough, my slide had left me in the same position as a sprinter’s, ready to start a race.
Despite the speed and sense of urgency, the park struck me as being unexpectedly bright, the throbbing, artificial orange light having seeped in from the surrounding roads. Given the comparative lack of darkness, I ran for the concealment of the woods, rather than the narrow path that leads towards the house.
However bright the park might be, there are few ambient lights that will illuminate any decent woodland, and so it was that, with a disturbingly simian motion, I vaulted the wrought iron fence surrounding the woods and felt my feet bury themselves in the soft humus of the woodland.
Anyone who’s spent any significant amount of time in woodland as they grow up will tell you that running changes entirely on entering. The number of sticks and small plants waiting to claw a sprinter down is disconcerting during the daytime, but during the near absolute darkness of night you’d do best to run in long, high strides, keeping your feet as high from the ground as possible from the beginning of each step to the end. It adds the effort of having to extricate each foot from soft soil with every step, but it’s always worth it.
To cut this short enough that I leave out the uninteresting bits, I’m not sure if I was ever chased, but the combination of dreariness, music and a late night lent me just the right kind of effervescent paranoia to lead to a good sprint home.
Marc “Craven” Mac
P.S. I finished the M&Ms as I wrote this blog, they were more delectable for the warmth and comfort in which I relished them.
I left with a half consumed bag of M&Ms and was making good progress on the rest when I reached the main road leading back towards the Park (in which I live, for anyone who isn’t up on all the details of my life).
I’ve recently installed a playlisting app for my iPod that measures the pace of my footsteps and plays tracks deliberately such that the two are in sync. I’d been enjoying this as I walked home at a pace that could be best described as “sedate”. The rain of the previous day had cleared to leave the night air balmy and soporific.
In a sleepy daze I meandered back towards the house, the sodium-orange of street lamps providing that unwonderful monochrome light that seems universally to provide just enough vision for whatever surrounds you to be boring.
Suddenly, I found myself swept up by a tide of grey-orange children, mouths open with the exertion of running as quickly as possible, eyes wide enough to see the orange light reflected all around the irises. They flooded onto the road from housing estates on both sides, from alleyways between houses, and over walls all sprinting in the same direction, numbers swelled by the surprise of seeing so many at once and the low light, shadows and children being roughly indistinguishable when moving at speed.
All at once I experienced two things. The first was that the crisp-sugar shell of an M&M compliments the coppery taste of adrenaline in roughly the same way as apple juice does toothpaste. The second was that music chosen in an attempt to mimic a slow paced walk is near enough to the perfect tempo to slowly incite panic. It being so very late at night, the seemingly vast number of ten-to-fourteen year olds so determined to make haste in one direction gave me what can best be described as “an uncomfortableness”. I ran; I ran as fast I altogether can.
I remember a few details with unusual clarity, I remember the low pulse in my headphones as my walkman informed me it had judged that I’d changed pace dramatically enough to warrant a revision of what track was playing (it changed from Massive Attack’s Teardrop to The Faint’s Mirror Error for anyone inclined to look it up).
I remember too the sound of my own footsteps as I ran, high on the balls of my feet and leaned far forward, made somehow sharper by the thin layer of liquid still covering the paths from the rain earlier that day, reflecting, with equal vagueness, my feet as I ran and the glow of the streetlights above me.
And suddenly as they had appeared, the crowd of children with whom I’d been running were gone, left behind or hiding, and still it seemed tremendously early to stop running from anything that had so scared a group so big. I continued running until I reached the gate to the Park itself.
Still fearing pursuit (in the manner of accomplished cowards everywhere) as I passed through the gate, I let my feet drift out in front of me and slid, right foot forward and the left only slightly behind it. The ground was slick and wet, I slid so low and easily I planted the fingertips of my left hand on the ground to remain stable and, as I did so, turned my body so that I could plant my right hand on the ground and look behind me.
Sure enough there was a shadow, tall and thin, limned by the dull orange glow, running (though without the energy terror had lent me) some distance behind me. In my sudden and brief stillness I could hear that run. Where my footsteps had been a rapid tapping, light and sharp, these were thudding, loping strides. Fortunately enough, my slide had left me in the same position as a sprinter’s, ready to start a race.
Despite the speed and sense of urgency, the park struck me as being unexpectedly bright, the throbbing, artificial orange light having seeped in from the surrounding roads. Given the comparative lack of darkness, I ran for the concealment of the woods, rather than the narrow path that leads towards the house.
However bright the park might be, there are few ambient lights that will illuminate any decent woodland, and so it was that, with a disturbingly simian motion, I vaulted the wrought iron fence surrounding the woods and felt my feet bury themselves in the soft humus of the woodland.
Anyone who’s spent any significant amount of time in woodland as they grow up will tell you that running changes entirely on entering. The number of sticks and small plants waiting to claw a sprinter down is disconcerting during the daytime, but during the near absolute darkness of night you’d do best to run in long, high strides, keeping your feet as high from the ground as possible from the beginning of each step to the end. It adds the effort of having to extricate each foot from soft soil with every step, but it’s always worth it.
To cut this short enough that I leave out the uninteresting bits, I’m not sure if I was ever chased, but the combination of dreariness, music and a late night lent me just the right kind of effervescent paranoia to lead to a good sprint home.
Marc “Craven” Mac
P.S. I finished the M&Ms as I wrote this blog, they were more delectable for the warmth and comfort in which I relished them.
Monday, August 4, 2008
There is a Piano in my House
In the sitting room of the house in which I grew up there is an old, brown piano. It’s an intimidating instrument, big as any piano is without being a grand, with a rich, robust sound. I’ve never known enough about music to be able to confidently say that it’s a particularly good piano, but it sounds enough like a good piano that I’ve never had any reason to believe it’s not.
There is a series of stories surrounding the piano that seem to accompany our family as we grew up. I’ve only recently heard the first of them (of how the piano came to live in our house) from my father; it’s the story of how the piano was acquired.
My godfather is man who, by various means, tends to end up with a tremendous number of things he neither needs nor (I suspect) really wants more than a little bit. His name is John. Once upon a time, he called my brother’s godfather and asked him to meet a truck in town. His name is Eanna. I remember, as a child, imagining Eanna to be a little unhealthy; he seemed to be just a little bit fat. It would later turn out that he was in relatively good condition, swimming the channel twice without his physical appearance noticeably changing.
So, after whatever minor conversation the two had, Eanna then proceeded to meet a truck in town, which will take him from there to a house, where he is to inform those present that he’d “come for the piano”. For a man built as he was, this probably seemed like a relatively minor task.
On his arrival at the door he was greeted by a young eastern European girl, who he immediately informed, “I’ve come for the piano.” In response, the girl burst into floods of tears. Her mother, doubtless querying the source of the girl’s upset, asked something (I’m not clear on this, but it seemed when I was told that the mother didn’t speak very much English). The girl replied with, “He’s come for the piano.” At this, the mother too broke down.
During this commotion, Eanna, in his infinite wisdom, managed to retrieve the piano. Despite the drama, I would come to suspect that John never really wanted a piano, at least, no more so than you or I might want a bowl of Rice Krispies. He had fancied learning to play, but ultimately his want for it was a transient thing.
The fact that best illustrates this point is that John would later ask my dad if he had space to store a piano for a few weeks. It’s still here, more than fifteen years later.
Essentially, that Piano has been in our house for as much of my life as I remember. The stories that surround it, as I said above, pretty much chart the family’s growth, or development, or whatever you want to call it.
I’m going to write a short series of stories/blog entries about the piano and the family, as they roughly relate to one another.
Marc “I don’t play the Piano” Mac
There is a series of stories surrounding the piano that seem to accompany our family as we grew up. I’ve only recently heard the first of them (of how the piano came to live in our house) from my father; it’s the story of how the piano was acquired.
My godfather is man who, by various means, tends to end up with a tremendous number of things he neither needs nor (I suspect) really wants more than a little bit. His name is John. Once upon a time, he called my brother’s godfather and asked him to meet a truck in town. His name is Eanna. I remember, as a child, imagining Eanna to be a little unhealthy; he seemed to be just a little bit fat. It would later turn out that he was in relatively good condition, swimming the channel twice without his physical appearance noticeably changing.
So, after whatever minor conversation the two had, Eanna then proceeded to meet a truck in town, which will take him from there to a house, where he is to inform those present that he’d “come for the piano”. For a man built as he was, this probably seemed like a relatively minor task.
On his arrival at the door he was greeted by a young eastern European girl, who he immediately informed, “I’ve come for the piano.” In response, the girl burst into floods of tears. Her mother, doubtless querying the source of the girl’s upset, asked something (I’m not clear on this, but it seemed when I was told that the mother didn’t speak very much English). The girl replied with, “He’s come for the piano.” At this, the mother too broke down.
During this commotion, Eanna, in his infinite wisdom, managed to retrieve the piano. Despite the drama, I would come to suspect that John never really wanted a piano, at least, no more so than you or I might want a bowl of Rice Krispies. He had fancied learning to play, but ultimately his want for it was a transient thing.
The fact that best illustrates this point is that John would later ask my dad if he had space to store a piano for a few weeks. It’s still here, more than fifteen years later.
Essentially, that Piano has been in our house for as much of my life as I remember. The stories that surround it, as I said above, pretty much chart the family’s growth, or development, or whatever you want to call it.
I’m going to write a short series of stories/blog entries about the piano and the family, as they roughly relate to one another.
Marc “I don’t play the Piano” Mac
Sunday, August 3, 2008
The Dreamtime
In the summertime there are often nights where I’m too warm to sleep. I suppose that’s true of everyone, but for a very long time it would frustrate me that, where clearly other people can snatch enough sleep to operate, I would lie awake worry that I’m missing out on something.
I used often to lie awake, staring at the slightly rusted springs of the bed above mine, and wonder how other people deal with the same situation. By some awkward confluence of books, the vaguest readings of yoga and an abundance of video games I came to construct the beginnings of a dream that would relax me into sleep.
Where guided meditation recommends a slow staircase approach (counting down from ten, slowly into a trancelike state and other such half-sense I’m not entirely sure I believe in), I’ve always found it doesn’t quite suit the maddening rush of colours that fills my subconscious. As I lay in bed, clammy with sweat and feverish with the balmy heat of a fetid midsummer’s night, I unwittingly pioneered what I would later term "turbo-meditation".
Beginning with the realisation that, if lying still for long enough the human body begins to feel like it’s in motion, I began to construct various dreamscapes with which that feeling of motion wouldn’t interfere.
Despite a vague feeling of uneasiness I tend to get around any body of water deep enough that I might be entirely immersed, I’ve begun more and more to imagine myself lying in a small open canoe (as opposed to a kayak, which I believe implies a canopy or covering). This canoe drifts lazily downstream on a broad river, the banks of which are lined with an assortment of unspecified greenery; trees forming a canopy that roofs the lapping river below just thinly enough that the occasional glints of sunlight that do filter through are soft highlights on the crests of the water’s wavelets, rather than a blinding glare.
The river itself is deep, clear, and with the slightest hint of blue, entirely artificial, running over a bed of small brown-grey rocks, each softened and rounded by the flow around it. I’ve often wondered if, in my half-dreaming state I might swim in it and breathe comfortably… sadly though, I’ve never tried.
I’d imagine there’s no sadder place to asphyxiate than in your own dreams.
That’s too sad a note to end a blog about so happy a place on though. I truly love that calm place where I end up so often before I find sleep.
Marc “Silly sentimental blog” Mac
Today there are coffee beans in my pockets. I stole them from a display in a chocolatier’s; I’d hoped they might make the change in my pockets smell less sour, but I guess there was only so much my meagre stolen goods could manage. My change smells as though someone spilled coffee on it once, but still powerfully of metal.
I used often to lie awake, staring at the slightly rusted springs of the bed above mine, and wonder how other people deal with the same situation. By some awkward confluence of books, the vaguest readings of yoga and an abundance of video games I came to construct the beginnings of a dream that would relax me into sleep.
Where guided meditation recommends a slow staircase approach (counting down from ten, slowly into a trancelike state and other such half-sense I’m not entirely sure I believe in), I’ve always found it doesn’t quite suit the maddening rush of colours that fills my subconscious. As I lay in bed, clammy with sweat and feverish with the balmy heat of a fetid midsummer’s night, I unwittingly pioneered what I would later term "turbo-meditation".
Beginning with the realisation that, if lying still for long enough the human body begins to feel like it’s in motion, I began to construct various dreamscapes with which that feeling of motion wouldn’t interfere.
Despite a vague feeling of uneasiness I tend to get around any body of water deep enough that I might be entirely immersed, I’ve begun more and more to imagine myself lying in a small open canoe (as opposed to a kayak, which I believe implies a canopy or covering). This canoe drifts lazily downstream on a broad river, the banks of which are lined with an assortment of unspecified greenery; trees forming a canopy that roofs the lapping river below just thinly enough that the occasional glints of sunlight that do filter through are soft highlights on the crests of the water’s wavelets, rather than a blinding glare.
The river itself is deep, clear, and with the slightest hint of blue, entirely artificial, running over a bed of small brown-grey rocks, each softened and rounded by the flow around it. I’ve often wondered if, in my half-dreaming state I might swim in it and breathe comfortably… sadly though, I’ve never tried.
I’d imagine there’s no sadder place to asphyxiate than in your own dreams.
That’s too sad a note to end a blog about so happy a place on though. I truly love that calm place where I end up so often before I find sleep.
Marc “Silly sentimental blog” Mac
Today there are coffee beans in my pockets. I stole them from a display in a chocolatier’s; I’d hoped they might make the change in my pockets smell less sour, but I guess there was only so much my meagre stolen goods could manage. My change smells as though someone spilled coffee on it once, but still powerfully of metal.
Friday, July 25, 2008
I won't eat a startling number of things...
There are times when my pickiness with regard what I will and won’t eat leads to discomfort or even outright awkwardness. This tends to lead to progressively more awkward situations when I find myself in circumstances where the opportunity doesn’t present itself for me to simply ferret out some sweet food to stave off hunger until I can feed on something bland enough that it doesn’t offend my admittedly childish palette.
There was a time, shortly before the visit to the old folk’s home I described some weeks ago, when I was placed practically in my girlfriend’s care. During a trip to France (a country in which, it turns out, I am particularly poorly equipped for survival) she was forced to effectively make sure I had enough food that I wouldn’t, for one reason or another, die. Scurvy was an unnervingly real threat.
As it turns out, I lack the aptitude in foreign languages to do very much more than to understand the kinds of conversations that young children might carry with confidence. Worse still, this means that I spend an uncomfortable majority of my time frustrated and, embarrassingly, jealous that they can understand their elders, who tend to speak with their words rammed together, intimately intertwined as are the carriages of a train crash.
I find the most difficult aspect of learning any foreign language to overcome is the doubt evoked whenever someone raises a subject that seems in any way unusual or misunderstandable.
When confronted with the possibility of spending the guts of a month in France, I had meticulously prepared a survival kit. It was constructed in the same manner as I imagine the SAS might construct a survival kit – light on clothes, heavy on familiar food and drink. It was this preparation that prompted me to bring more tea than could be reasonably consumed by two men in a month, against the chance that I might simply sit in and read for the duration of our stay – a process which seems to involve the consumption of a copious amounts of tea.
On arrival at Gaelle’s cousin’s apartment, in which we would spend the vast majority of our stay, I sprang for the kitchen and (much like a guided missile finds a target from low orbit) secured the necessary accoutrements for the construction of a cup of tea. The first hurdle was the want of a teaspoon, which proved somewhat difficult to satisfy...
I leaned from the kitchen and called Gaelle’s cousin, “Ou est le... spoon,” For reasons of dexterity, I won’t be on any French bomb squads in the near future, but I can mime “spoon” passably. Julien returned a barrage of French, impossibly fast, hammering words into one another with a kind-hearted warmth that suggested:
A) that he knew exactly what I was talking about
B) that I am a simpleton for not understanding what is clearly a very simple exposition of the philosophy underlying his lack of spoons
C) that I need to consult Gaelle before asking simple questions
As it turned out, Julien’s philosophy with regard the spoon dilemma is relatively simple, and what follows is a rough description:
If you own multiple spoons, you are wasting time. Surely the day is far better spent using spoons as needed, and then simply throwing them away when they’ve been sullied by whatever corrupted filth you’ve decided to eat or drink. The point is that once you’ve committed to actually washing spoons, you might as well just own one spoon, and wash that as many times as you need. If you think about it, you’ll end up washing multiple spoons anyway. In a sense, it’s simple, beautiful even.
You can’t imagine the effect this has on a person with a staple diet principally composed of tea. I don’t wash spoons; I use the same one over and over and throw it in the sink at the end of the day. This seemed to be a concept with which Julien had never been faced before- but he being a man of action, was able to secure (by means I can only imagine involving theft) from the café above which we lived a small crate of spoons.
When a man’s first interaction with you in his home country culminates in the mass theft of cutlery, it’s hard not to view them as fantastically sanguine (in the sense of “hopelessly optimistic” not “bloody”). On this foundation we built a passably bilingual routine; we would play chess most mornings, and his English would gradually improve as my French far less gradually deteriorated. Having taught someone to speak to you on your terms, it becomes very difficult to revert to a position where the primary method of communication is charades...
I would later learn through my distinctly one sided French, thanks to what can only be described as an acute academic disinterest, he is considered to be a little less than the sharpest knife the drawer. This is a distressing thought to introduce to someone incapable of reply, particularly coupled with the idea that, despite the appearance that I had been teaching the man to play chess, he had begun to beat me under conditions that were increasingly less favourable.
Initially he would lose while I was reading a comic or watching a film, playing offhand. Later we would play over breakfast, and if I were sufficiently tired, he would gain an advantage. Within two weeks though, we would play early in the morning, with him having slept for less than four hours (often not at all), still drunk from the night before, in the clothes he wore the previous day, reeking of smoke and wine and somehow seeing through every effort I might muster, however carefully guarded. At the same time he learned to speak English passably, with little or no prior education, to an extent that laughed in the face of my six years of French.
In many ways he reminds me of Ross. I’m not sure why, though I suspect a large part of it is his startling aptitude with Cubase, the program from which the name CLED Error was unexpectedly supplied. Within an evening he learned to use a copy of Cubase entirely in English to an extent I have yet to see anyone else manage. There’s something distinctly depressing about that.
Marc "Hopelessly Outclassed" Mac
It's only worse because every time we played chess he'd use tricks I'd used on him in the previous game... it's depressing to see how poorly I play against someone who can use my own duplicity against me.
There was a time, shortly before the visit to the old folk’s home I described some weeks ago, when I was placed practically in my girlfriend’s care. During a trip to France (a country in which, it turns out, I am particularly poorly equipped for survival) she was forced to effectively make sure I had enough food that I wouldn’t, for one reason or another, die. Scurvy was an unnervingly real threat.
As it turns out, I lack the aptitude in foreign languages to do very much more than to understand the kinds of conversations that young children might carry with confidence. Worse still, this means that I spend an uncomfortable majority of my time frustrated and, embarrassingly, jealous that they can understand their elders, who tend to speak with their words rammed together, intimately intertwined as are the carriages of a train crash.
I find the most difficult aspect of learning any foreign language to overcome is the doubt evoked whenever someone raises a subject that seems in any way unusual or misunderstandable.
When confronted with the possibility of spending the guts of a month in France, I had meticulously prepared a survival kit. It was constructed in the same manner as I imagine the SAS might construct a survival kit – light on clothes, heavy on familiar food and drink. It was this preparation that prompted me to bring more tea than could be reasonably consumed by two men in a month, against the chance that I might simply sit in and read for the duration of our stay – a process which seems to involve the consumption of a copious amounts of tea.
On arrival at Gaelle’s cousin’s apartment, in which we would spend the vast majority of our stay, I sprang for the kitchen and (much like a guided missile finds a target from low orbit) secured the necessary accoutrements for the construction of a cup of tea. The first hurdle was the want of a teaspoon, which proved somewhat difficult to satisfy...
I leaned from the kitchen and called Gaelle’s cousin, “Ou est le... spoon,” For reasons of dexterity, I won’t be on any French bomb squads in the near future, but I can mime “spoon” passably. Julien returned a barrage of French, impossibly fast, hammering words into one another with a kind-hearted warmth that suggested:
A) that he knew exactly what I was talking about
B) that I am a simpleton for not understanding what is clearly a very simple exposition of the philosophy underlying his lack of spoons
C) that I need to consult Gaelle before asking simple questions
As it turned out, Julien’s philosophy with regard the spoon dilemma is relatively simple, and what follows is a rough description:
If you own multiple spoons, you are wasting time. Surely the day is far better spent using spoons as needed, and then simply throwing them away when they’ve been sullied by whatever corrupted filth you’ve decided to eat or drink. The point is that once you’ve committed to actually washing spoons, you might as well just own one spoon, and wash that as many times as you need. If you think about it, you’ll end up washing multiple spoons anyway. In a sense, it’s simple, beautiful even.
You can’t imagine the effect this has on a person with a staple diet principally composed of tea. I don’t wash spoons; I use the same one over and over and throw it in the sink at the end of the day. This seemed to be a concept with which Julien had never been faced before- but he being a man of action, was able to secure (by means I can only imagine involving theft) from the café above which we lived a small crate of spoons.
When a man’s first interaction with you in his home country culminates in the mass theft of cutlery, it’s hard not to view them as fantastically sanguine (in the sense of “hopelessly optimistic” not “bloody”). On this foundation we built a passably bilingual routine; we would play chess most mornings, and his English would gradually improve as my French far less gradually deteriorated. Having taught someone to speak to you on your terms, it becomes very difficult to revert to a position where the primary method of communication is charades...
I would later learn through my distinctly one sided French, thanks to what can only be described as an acute academic disinterest, he is considered to be a little less than the sharpest knife the drawer. This is a distressing thought to introduce to someone incapable of reply, particularly coupled with the idea that, despite the appearance that I had been teaching the man to play chess, he had begun to beat me under conditions that were increasingly less favourable.
Initially he would lose while I was reading a comic or watching a film, playing offhand. Later we would play over breakfast, and if I were sufficiently tired, he would gain an advantage. Within two weeks though, we would play early in the morning, with him having slept for less than four hours (often not at all), still drunk from the night before, in the clothes he wore the previous day, reeking of smoke and wine and somehow seeing through every effort I might muster, however carefully guarded. At the same time he learned to speak English passably, with little or no prior education, to an extent that laughed in the face of my six years of French.
In many ways he reminds me of Ross. I’m not sure why, though I suspect a large part of it is his startling aptitude with Cubase, the program from which the name CLED Error was unexpectedly supplied. Within an evening he learned to use a copy of Cubase entirely in English to an extent I have yet to see anyone else manage. There’s something distinctly depressing about that.
Marc "Hopelessly Outclassed" Mac
It's only worse because every time we played chess he'd use tricks I'd used on him in the previous game... it's depressing to see how poorly I play against someone who can use my own duplicity against me.
Canary Row
I happened to spend around an hour sitting in place in town earlier in the week, for reasons that are both too secretive and altogether too boring for me to relate before a particular project bears fruit.
While sitting on a stone bench, listening to a book (as is my way), I watched as a tiny yellow bird, I can only assume a canary, flitted directly out the window of a particularly shady looking bar. It being only about 7 o’clock, and the street being relatively uncluttered by buildings, if ever the bird crested a height of about seven feet the setting sun would gleam red across the edges of its wings, streaking after-images across the eyes of anyone near enough to appreciate it.
I’d have been happy enough for this to have been the end of the story, but I had plenty of time left to sit around and enjoy the ambiance. I had the abundant pleasure of watching four bouncers, each stocky and broadly built, cross the road, having been told (quietly) to recapture the escaped avian.
The four strode, Reservoir Dogs style, across the road towards the canary, the whole time trying to look like angry, muscular men who had far more important places to be, while simultaneously trying very hard not to look threatening to what seemed to be an increasingly tiny and ill-equipped bird. The combined effect built into a kind of bullish tiptoeing, which proved effective only in communicating (both to the lone onlooker and one particularly savvy canary) that these men were not routine or efficient poultry hunters.
This scene quickly led to the establishment of an awkward three man tableau, which would last only until the gleaming yellow bird flitted closer to another of the four than the one currently investigating it, at which point the new closest man would begin to close on it, while the others tried to remain frozen.
The look of anguish in their eyes as they stood immobile in the wind and cackling laughter of a passing hen party communicated more than just frustration. These were men who, even if they didn’t enjoy their jobs, were a lot happier dealing with people than with birds… their employer seemed to think that, they being capable of dealing with mammals, a bird should prove little difficulty. Some fifteen minutes later, one was pecked in the hand as he finally reacquired the feathered escapee…
Sadly, this sudden retaliation caused him to let the startled canary go, and as it soared away, at a near right angle to the ground, the look on the faces of all present, myself included, communicated accurately using a line from The Shawshank Redemption – “I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. But still, that place you live in is that much more grey.”
I guess that’s a pretty big inference though. If I’m honest, I was almost definitely the only one thinking that. The bouncers were almost certainly just glad the thing had fucked off… it was beautiful though, to me if to no one else.
Marc “Read some Stephen King I guess” Mac
In my pocket there is a token for a carousel. I don’t know where it came from, but I treasure it. It has become a talisman.
While sitting on a stone bench, listening to a book (as is my way), I watched as a tiny yellow bird, I can only assume a canary, flitted directly out the window of a particularly shady looking bar. It being only about 7 o’clock, and the street being relatively uncluttered by buildings, if ever the bird crested a height of about seven feet the setting sun would gleam red across the edges of its wings, streaking after-images across the eyes of anyone near enough to appreciate it.
I’d have been happy enough for this to have been the end of the story, but I had plenty of time left to sit around and enjoy the ambiance. I had the abundant pleasure of watching four bouncers, each stocky and broadly built, cross the road, having been told (quietly) to recapture the escaped avian.
The four strode, Reservoir Dogs style, across the road towards the canary, the whole time trying to look like angry, muscular men who had far more important places to be, while simultaneously trying very hard not to look threatening to what seemed to be an increasingly tiny and ill-equipped bird. The combined effect built into a kind of bullish tiptoeing, which proved effective only in communicating (both to the lone onlooker and one particularly savvy canary) that these men were not routine or efficient poultry hunters.
This scene quickly led to the establishment of an awkward three man tableau, which would last only until the gleaming yellow bird flitted closer to another of the four than the one currently investigating it, at which point the new closest man would begin to close on it, while the others tried to remain frozen.
The look of anguish in their eyes as they stood immobile in the wind and cackling laughter of a passing hen party communicated more than just frustration. These were men who, even if they didn’t enjoy their jobs, were a lot happier dealing with people than with birds… their employer seemed to think that, they being capable of dealing with mammals, a bird should prove little difficulty. Some fifteen minutes later, one was pecked in the hand as he finally reacquired the feathered escapee…
Sadly, this sudden retaliation caused him to let the startled canary go, and as it soared away, at a near right angle to the ground, the look on the faces of all present, myself included, communicated accurately using a line from The Shawshank Redemption – “I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. But still, that place you live in is that much more grey.”
I guess that’s a pretty big inference though. If I’m honest, I was almost definitely the only one thinking that. The bouncers were almost certainly just glad the thing had fucked off… it was beautiful though, to me if to no one else.
Marc “Read some Stephen King I guess” Mac
In my pocket there is a token for a carousel. I don’t know where it came from, but I treasure it. It has become a talisman.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
We Made a Cake
Myself and Adam (Ross being in work) ended up playing Starcraft today, an experience I relish, but after that, things got a little slow, so we decided to make a cake. We’d seen a recipe for a “Five minute cake” earlier in the week, and figured it’d be worth a go.
The recipe includes “Cake Flour” but we didn’t have any of that, so we subbed in self-raising flour, and it worked out alright. We just used half a tablespoon less.
The recipe calls for the cake to be made in a mug and, given the number of comments involving mug related injuries, we figured an expendable mug would be best.
It’s hard to find anything very much more expendable than Goofy… that fucker.
We added all of the ingredients in the right order (which is basically, all the powders first, then an egg, then oil, then milk and mix). We’d been worried until now that it wouldn’t emulsify, or might take significantly more space than we had to give it, but in the end it all fit in alright.
No shell, motherfuckers!
The smell of cocoa permeates everything, it’s surprisingly strong, and smells somehow caffeinated. Adam is literally still coughing ten minutes after the event… that said, we did inhale more cocoa than most over the course of our arguing whether or not certain things would work. Among those things, can you efficiently measure milk in tablespoons? Can you still do so with a tablespoon covered in cake batter?
“How many are even in there? Is that three spoons?”
“Three… ish. I guess. Look, it’s fine”
Adam looks far less frustrated in sepia, so it makes us look like better people if we include this shot. It’s so homey and 1950s. I wonder can we get a spot in good housekeeping…
He’s like a cross between the joyous mother, helping a retarded child to bake a cake, and a palsied child trying to bake a cake.
After that, all we had to do was learn to use the new microwave, which was far more difficult than it needed to be. We spent at least twenty minutes trying to use the microwave this morning, so it had yielded most of its secrets to us, with the exception of how to make it work for a certain amount of time.
To operate this effectively you need to be a safecracker… :(
Fortunately enough, the microwave kind of did its own thing… I think it might have been set to “Beverage”, though whether or not this was because it could somehow tell there was a mug or not is pretty up in the air. I wonder could it ever have told if there was a cake mug within…
In the end, the cake kind of escaped the mug, but that was an eventuality for which we were entirely prepared.
Just below there’s a shot of the actual cake itself; we broke it into chunks and dropped it in a bowl. It tasted like a Swiss roll, but it was still warm and since we’d constructed it with our bare hands – yeah, and some spoons and stuff, but you know what I mean – it tasted all the sweeter.
It tastes better than it looks. next time though, we’ll add some toppings.
The temptation to build a second cake was almost overwhelming, but instead I took this shot of our assembled ingredients… it pretty much sums up the whole process.
The total cooking time, including preparation and finding ingredients, was five minutes and thirty seconds.
The recipe includes “Cake Flour” but we didn’t have any of that, so we subbed in self-raising flour, and it worked out alright. We just used half a tablespoon less.
The recipe calls for the cake to be made in a mug and, given the number of comments involving mug related injuries, we figured an expendable mug would be best.
It’s hard to find anything very much more expendable than Goofy… that fucker.
We added all of the ingredients in the right order (which is basically, all the powders first, then an egg, then oil, then milk and mix). We’d been worried until now that it wouldn’t emulsify, or might take significantly more space than we had to give it, but in the end it all fit in alright.
No shell, motherfuckers!
The smell of cocoa permeates everything, it’s surprisingly strong, and smells somehow caffeinated. Adam is literally still coughing ten minutes after the event… that said, we did inhale more cocoa than most over the course of our arguing whether or not certain things would work. Among those things, can you efficiently measure milk in tablespoons? Can you still do so with a tablespoon covered in cake batter?
“How many are even in there? Is that three spoons?”
“Three… ish. I guess. Look, it’s fine”
Adam looks far less frustrated in sepia, so it makes us look like better people if we include this shot. It’s so homey and 1950s. I wonder can we get a spot in good housekeeping…
He’s like a cross between the joyous mother, helping a retarded child to bake a cake, and a palsied child trying to bake a cake.
After that, all we had to do was learn to use the new microwave, which was far more difficult than it needed to be. We spent at least twenty minutes trying to use the microwave this morning, so it had yielded most of its secrets to us, with the exception of how to make it work for a certain amount of time.
To operate this effectively you need to be a safecracker… :(
Fortunately enough, the microwave kind of did its own thing… I think it might have been set to “Beverage”, though whether or not this was because it could somehow tell there was a mug or not is pretty up in the air. I wonder could it ever have told if there was a cake mug within…
In the end, the cake kind of escaped the mug, but that was an eventuality for which we were entirely prepared.
Just below there’s a shot of the actual cake itself; we broke it into chunks and dropped it in a bowl. It tasted like a Swiss roll, but it was still warm and since we’d constructed it with our bare hands – yeah, and some spoons and stuff, but you know what I mean – it tasted all the sweeter.
It tastes better than it looks. next time though, we’ll add some toppings.
The temptation to build a second cake was almost overwhelming, but instead I took this shot of our assembled ingredients… it pretty much sums up the whole process.
The total cooking time, including preparation and finding ingredients, was five minutes and thirty seconds.
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