… apropos of nothing, i do adore that phrase! Howard Jones!! sure there are some fans of early 80’s soft electro synth pop out there (mbe 1)… with bonus mime artiste? i was picking up mum from heathrow very early this morning, popped to the loo and this song was billowing about the bogs there was a dubious haunting air to the tune, sounded like it was being played on a casio tone? which led me to suspect that actually it was live Howard Jones has been stuck in the khazi at the airport since mid 83? hence explaining his complete disappearance from the face of the planet
audio of bog text
commenting on my own comment… ancient anecdote… i am reminded of once upon a time hitch hiking through Deutschland, somewhere near Bayreuth, Wagner Götterdämmerung! i was stuck overnight at a motorway service station, zilch lifts, going nowhere… it was freezing cold, so i had to traipse inside, ended up trying to kip sitting on one of the toilets bland piped pop music all night long, bleaggh, woken from my semi slumbers, by the thunderous farts of germanic truck drivers in the cubicle next door, all accompanied by Wham cheerfully warbling ‘Wake me up before you go go go’
R.I.P Rest In Pieces. Macklemore the Sycamore I killed a tree this morning, not said with bravado and aplomb… and despite the obvious comedy (it’s Facebook)… a fair amount of remorse and guilt broadly it’s a small backyard, he would have grown far far too large, wrong tree/wrong place if i’d left it a few more weeks, the leaves would have come out and it would have been impossible I should imagine the time to chop a tree is autumn when the sap is falling? spring is a terrible season, but at least if you squint you can pretend its still a half dead stick stuck in the ground as penance i hand sawed him into small chunks, will season for a year or so then find a suitable wood burner. anyone need some lumber for a viking ship burial? Should imagine the stump will grow back, but, sigh, will deal with that then I had a good ponder before i began and gave him a fare thee well hug Not wishing to be too sentimental, I appreciate that my mere existence on the planet in this society will have decimated i don’t know… a small copse? an area of the Amazonian Rain Forest one thousandth of the size of Wales? (one Wales is the standard unit of measurement for amazonia, plus its St Davids day!) in younger days i also personally hacked many a wilderness in my folks garden but the point is, Macklemores decimation was all so unnecessary! as a good mawkish victorian moralist, i know the time to chop him was the first year uprooting a teensy sapling is nothing, chopping down a 5 or 6 year old tree, a much harsher deal but of course the first few years i took the Romantic Poetic approach, ‘look how can a tree grow there?’ the next couple of seasons it was sloth, depression and busy-ness… and the last 2 years its been ‘oh no i have to kill a tree’ basically, framed as a bellocian cautionary tale deal with your stuff before it gets too big… otherwise ‘James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree’ oh not him you know the the one who wandered into a lion cage and died from eating bits of string?? Carpe Diem… I can never remember does that mean ‘sieze the nettle’ or ‘snog a trout’? both. do it. now
gawd, yet another suspiciously glorious day, here at the usual dreg end of February, wishing ya all well on it! i’m bizarrely compelled to post yet more snaps! apols, not imagining they’re particularly fantastic, will return to 1000 stanza gobbledy gook poems, else slomach back into the bliss of silence soon, ha think i’ve taken more pics over the last few days than i did in my first 30 years… which is an utter shame like most peeps i’m profoundly ambivalent about technology, but having a camera on a smart phone, that’s fun and engrossing on with stuff!
pink man in pink larder… paints… green man in green larder everyday dalliance with dali… so easy surrealism! nary finished yet, but thinking so glorious the sunshine, i should go to the beach for a little bit
did make it down the beach for a swim, 4th of the year (5 inc christmas) not that often, but always a thrill the secret is to choose a day when theres little wind as its when you get out that it eats you the sun was astonishingly, almost worryingly, warm… i dried off in plein air, just a woolly bobble hat and unsoggy skimpies, sunbathing promptly fell asleep as for sorting the larder… i started off just looking for the fresh coffee, couldn’t find it… got carried away astonishing how much stubborn crap accumulates… found stuff buried deep deep i hadn’t seen in 8 years… had been wondering where the jewell encrusted mask of tutankhumun had gone too!
Celsius 233.77… Bonfire of the Vanities* A dowdy cloudy pleasant Devon day, birds tweetle twerping in the trees above, with anticipation of the spring, so i got on with the hugely satisfying task of burning ALL of my old Morning Pages Thats about 7 or 8 years worth, written in long hand, with an ink pen, usually florid but scratchy purple ink… I don’t do them every day, that’d be daft(!), i mean i have far too many healthy / time consuming morning practices, but still its usually about once or twice a week… burnt them all the way right up to todays squib. hurrah!! i was thinking have i only completed 12 volumes? but still at heart being a geek boy i did the maths: 80 pages each book is 160 sides x 12… 1920 sides, 3 a day so thats 640 days worth… 1 day takes me about 20 mins, so 213.333 hours of writing = 8.88888 F***ing days!! So if i started now and wrote for 8.88888 days non stop, well my ink splotted finger would ache…but THAT is how much deeply engrained almost etched effort i burnt, ha! and gosh it sounds like a hugely fortuitous number, presume it would be popular in china?… also think i might well apply to join the KLF? they done burn stuff good! Oh just to clarify Morning Pages aren’t anything exciting like sordid gossip strewn diaries, sadly not, they’re a practice from the Artists Way just write any old crap, splurge, get it out, get it out the way, loosen up, Art is process… let it flow! mine are usually a pastiche of Morissey and Alan Bennet, but, yeah, blander!… ‘Why does nobody love me, forlorn, forsooth, my tea cup rattleth, why do i love nobody, is that the postman delivering letters to next door?… but never to me’ … etc for 8.888 days Aw in truth away from the absurd lurid-o-delic falsehood world of facebook: better i burn them than leave them for the kids to do so one day… i did do a small serious ritual to the elements, let things go, eh, gotta be good x …………. hmm not often you get footnotes in a facebook post! bonus *fahrenheit 451 (obvs!) ** Savonarola! i’m thinking Apocalyptic Medici Florence … not Tom Wolfe… far too much of an intellectual snob, tho i did love Elctric Kool Aid Acid Test when a youthful hippy!
hey mr influencer… profound apols couldn’t resist creating this monstrosity… when alan partridge meets the kardashians x
them be all the notebooks i burnt, beautiful gaudiness… aw i don’t know how to change my profile pic x
oh and just from genuine curiosity, if anyone who does morning pages ever meanders past here… what do you do with your old volumes? burning would seem to be the most poetic response?
aww gotta love summer in the 90’s, with all its golden sea sepia nostalgia glow! the slightly unusual combo of me, Raymondo, Mum and baby Nick, on the walk to polperro hmm must be 94? gulp nearly a quarter of a century ago… Mel over from Miami, so i’m just back from Praha? or more likely the caves in Granada? just before South America any roads
as i sit here eating ‘dinner’, organic avocado, popcorn hot from the pan and some sweet chilli sauce (do what you want kids!), easy to stumble into the trope ‘where did it all go wrong?’, but, ha, actually it all went rather marvelously well, time just passed, not the same as saying, there aren’t so so many things i wish had gone differently, but actually such a blessed existence! x
interspersed with comments from mole!
ha! blooming hope not, but a man muddling thru his maudlin’ young molefred x
i’m currently perusing the internet for 900mm quadrant shower doors, so clearly the glory days are on their way! x
ooh thanks, aw you’ve set my heart tap dancing with your tip top tap top tips! whoops gone a bit dr zeuss x
we look like supergrass! kinda… and who could argue with: ‘we are young, we run free, we’ve got teeth nice and clean…’
dita: Baz! You’ve been exactly like that!!!! (You still are 😉 but it’s funny to see your 90´s face again! Pusa!
aw ditka (ditichku?!), i laughed when i saw this one, it is exactly my praha face and the clothes! ear shaped shell necklace, my favourite ever pink and purple jumper and such astonishing luxuriance of hair! bouffant goooood times… come visit me and the ocean this summer xx
what barks joy in my heart?…. let the chaos, revelry and clear out commence!… see you on t’other side
*** updated with some words… to ‘honour the process’ and all that malarkey ***
ding! end of round 1… facebook mucking about aside (and what else could the medium be for?) … blimey that was traumatic!! i know i’m supposed to say cathartic, but little evidence of that just yet. firstly massive a dust mite sneezing from this hayfever sufferer still i managed to liberate 5 stuffed bin bags from my own wardrobe, then a further 2 from the airing cupboard, straight away pronto recycling them down the tip in truth i didn’t even imagine i had 5 bags full worth of clobber? amazing what we can manage to squirrel away! the secret for me was to deal with the stuff with most emotional baggage first, whilst i still had some brio, after that all the rubbish you never really cared about and seldom wear was easy… the main downside being that barely/nary a single sock survived the cull, so if you see me skipping thru the snow in just a pair of sandals, you’ll know why!
oh and in no particular order the worst 3 emotional items this cancerian nostalgia hoarder managed to chuck:
… 2 t-shirts, one purple, one green that i’d meandered along the camino in, more holes than fabric! i pretty much refuse to wear clothes unless they’re battered beyond belief, and have better personality than practicality these had been around since the late 90’s, then gone travelling round asia… the camino, where you wring everything out by hand after each days amble, was sposed to be their swan song, cept, of course, i carried on wearing them
… the last of the beautiful coloured alpacca wool cardies from otavalo, moth eaten to a string vest, older than Finn, from the time when pam and i met in South America and loitered in a lurid hued nest of them
… my down feather trekking jacket, beautiful bottle green, a north face fake from kathmandu, in this i floated over the Thorung La pass (5400m!) the zip broke years ago, and then it developed a leak, everywhere i traipsed there was a cloud o’fevvers, used to infuriate dad, who’d follow me around the house brandishing a hoover, ha!
happy chinese new year!…. tho obv i know utterly nothing about it, apparently tis pig, which is prosperity and enjoyment of the many pleasures of life, sounds guzzle grand to me x
May: Tea and cake sooon? Xx
yaaas! no idea how its been so long, hope to make landfall (in my hot air balloon) in btown saturday… if you about then? or most welcome to swing by the coast way on your way home xxx
for that matter, why is a clanger trussed up in mexican wrestler bondage clobber? a perplexing world! xx
Mic: Hi BazComing to Australia anytime in the future 😀
Me: aww i wish! one day. haven’t been back since i was a skipping about 21 year old… we shall glug a few schooners, mongst the weirdly cosmic boulders of magnetic island? love to you and fambly xx
Mic: Mate, they do pints now as stardard or a pot which is 375mls, weather great, surrounded by mountains lakes , sea and Islands You would be most welcome anytime, we have a rambling colonial wooden house just shy of a century old with heaps of space. In Brisbane. Keep,well and travel safe and best wishes to family Cannot remember last time we met up , must be 15 years? Managed to track down Rebecca last year, married with family, still in California, although I doubt she will ever forgive you forgive you for the demise of the Peanut butter 30 years ago
Me: ooh sounds like an idyllic life out there! we hitched up to cape trib, reef and rainforest, when i was 21, spent a few days in brisbane, but all a blur my kids are alledgedly adults now, Finn probs almost the age we were when we met… you and your gangrene… so will deffo intend to get over soonish
ha! Rebecca the mountains and peanut butter! that made me guffaw out loud, wild, wild beautiful crazy days… as is now i’m sitting here with a huge vat of peanut butter spooning it into my mouth absent mindedly… because i can send her my love if you chat again aww and mirroring back 2 snaps you took back then, know you’ve got them, but pretty much the only fragments from my travels enjoy. om shanti xxx
Mic: Hi MR Baz Good memories, although maybe time to visit and make some more, not been in contact with Rebecca for a year, maybe I should send her some organic, sun ripened, locally grown and picked peanut butter, although getting anything healthy stateside may be difficult. Love the photos you post Love ya work Mick
