Clarity is never looking back.

Back from the land of Barbecue.

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:43:48 +0100

It's been a while.

I came back from the United States at the end of September. Kansas City. The majority of which is actually in the state of Missouri rather than Kansas. The sort of fact you'd normally never know unless you actually spent some time there. You know now. I spent a month out there in the late summer heat, acquiring knowledge about a software platform for the firm that I work for. An interesting month. Didn't start well though!

I'd never been to the States before. They really have no idea how to welcome you to their country. There I was standing in a queue to get through Passport Control after a nine hour flight in Minneapolis Airport before getting my connection and this miserable looking Homeland Security chap wanders up and starts giving me the third degree! This guy, greying in his fifties, armed, he was really over the top.

Why was I there? Why couldn't I learn this stuff from home? As if any company is going to go to such expense to send you somewhere if they can just stick you on a series of conference calls or webcasts instead. What was on my laptop? Did I have videos on it? What if he was to boot it up? On and on. He was really aggressive, clearly deliberately trying to be intimidating. His partner I'm sure was doing all that NLP observation stuff the police do in interviews. I hope my keeping my eyes firmly on my aggressor firmly disappointed him. When they finally moved on to someone else the guy behind me, who they left alone, was really shocked - couldn't believe what he'd seen. Relieved I guess that it had been me and not him. He was there for a Rotary exchange - perhaps that's more acceptable then a business visit. In my case a mate of mine went out to Dallas a few years back and got the same so it was kind of half expecting it. Even so it left me feeling pretty empty and quite angry.

So, views? What the hell was that all about? Has anyone had that when going over as a tourist? Is this just a guy thing or have you women out there had to put up with something like that? You know, I've been to some unfriendly countries and never been treated like that on the way in. I still can't work out why treating someone on a business trip in such a manner is of any assistance to a country where the economy needs all the help it can get and where the state really needs all the friends it can muster...

Conclusion... must try harder Uncle Sam.

Fortunately the people of Kansas City were far more friendly...

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"Lost forever in a happy crowd..."

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 02:08:40 +0200

I was online very late with a workmate the other day, talking about music; about the bands and songs that floated our boats. It was weird because we don't actually know each other that well and yet, as so often happens online, you start to spiral deeply into yourself quite quickly. Conversation drifted from the songs themselves to the reasons why. I didn't paint those reasons, just sketched them briefly but when I finally logged off the brushes came out.

The fact is I've always felt rather disconnected; apart. The eternal observer. The one who sits quietly in the pub watching other people. That's not to say I don't get emotionally involved with situations or people. I do, profoundly. But I've always had this enormous difficulty expressing myself (with the exception of anger, which is all too easy an emotion to express) through any other medium than my own or other people's writing. I once asked a girl I was crazy about out by writing her a letter and then giving it to her when she came round. I just could not say the words that I'd written. Crazy isn't it? In fact it took a drunken confession of her love over the phone after many years of circling each other for me to finally reveal my feelings to the girl I'm now married to. Prior to that I'd sent her tapes and live recordings that made me feel the same intensity that she generated within me.

I always seem to be able to move people when I write. Particularly when I write letters. When I have the luxury of time for thought, to hone my blunt feelings into the shapes of the alphabet. With the spoken word though I am and always have been impotent when it comes to emotions. Spontaneity was never my thing. I am too busy analysing what the hell's going on inside me when I experience a feeling. Which appears, indeed is, like a form of detachment. It's difficult to build connections with the world when you're in the middle of internalising something. When you're "processing".

I think this marooned feeling I carry with me is reflected in some of those songs I talked about to my colleague. Reflected in the way that the Cure have always been a band I set apart from the rest of my musical tastes. Partly, although not entirely I think because they have this talent for voicing that alienated, adrift feeling perfectly. "Lost forever in a happy crowd". However, not just with words but with their sound. There is a guitar on a live recording of Faith that I have (the version from the Cure in Orange), which begins just after the main verses and continues for a few minutes before the final words that I sometimes really feel is the sound of my own voice. A banshee's wail of wordless, raw, uncontrollable loneliness. A lament that you can never truly know anyone. Even at my happiest moments, those times I have almost felt that togetherness most of us crave, when the analysis has been put to one side, that searing guitar has never stopped.

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"It's easier for me to get closer to heaven than ever feel whole again..."

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 02:20:19 +0100

Apologies to anyone reading this post. It's more than a little self-pitying which is never good when you are part-architect of the reasons. As I've said elsewhere, we're just grains of sand hoping that our words let us collide and rub ideas with others on the beach of life. Excuse the clumsy metaphor. I'm reaching.

I've been cheering myself up this evening by randomly pottering about reading blogs. Just seeing the crazy mosaic of what so many other people are thinking on here usually helps to lift me out of the gloom when I'm feeling drenched in it which is getting all too frequent lately. I posted a comment to that effect earlier for someone else who finds blogs cathartic (thanks Louisa).

Unfortunately, although its been lightened a little, today I have a weight in me that persists, that won't be quelled by anything. Not even sure why I am writing about it as that won't change the reason for it either. The lyrics from a Cure song seem resonant right now - I'm going to share them here in another purely selfish attempt at catharsis:

I never said I would stay to the end
I knew I would leave you with babies and everything
Screaming like this in the hole of sincerity
Screaming me over and over and over
I leave you with photographs
Pictures of trickery
Stains on the carpet and
Stains on the memory
Songs about happiness murmured in dreams
When we both of us knew
How the end always is

Strange how songs take on a poignancy years after you fell in love with the music.

Sweet dreams everyone... night.

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So why this nostalgia?

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:37:47 +0100

Is your childhood as warm and comforting a place for you as it is for me? Do you sometimes wish, really wish, that you were back there?

I'm sure plenty of us on here, particularly those in their late twenties or older, have been touched by one element or other of the industry of nostalgia. I know I certainly have. And what an industry it has become. Just one glance on Ebay at the toys and games of twenty or thirty years ago and the silly money they often sell for will clearly reveal its popularity. I sold a board game last year, an old Games Workshop affair called Talisman you may have heard of which had been gathering dust in a cupbaord. Some of the cards were damaged which I made very clear in the description - that didn't stop it selling for over £60! No surprise that the buyer, who I met to complete the deal as he was local, was a similar age to me. His mumbled excuse about the kids wanting it didn't wash! I'm not even sure why he felt the need to be embarassed. I wear my 70s/early 80s retrospection on my sleeve. Stormtroopers and Jedi are not an unfamiliar sight on my desk at work. And I don't mind getting the old photos out.

Why does my youth or childhood always seem like a better place though? Is this the same for most people - is this what drives us to buy mauled Star Wars figures, old books we remember from school and stop every time we hear a tune from those days, even though we may not even have liked it much back then. Christ I've even got an Abba CD downstairs and they are definitely not my scene - but I still listen to it.

Thing is I can't say my childhood was particularly spectacular - my sister and I were brought up by my Mum who struggled on her own till she remarried when I was about 11. We didn't have lots of things or have lots of days out and stuff like that. And yet it all seems now like one long adventure. Mostly eternal summer - action man wars with the neighbours and sneaking to my door to read books in the failing light after bed time - with the occasionally exciting winter, building igloos in the back garden, disappearing into snow drifts and Christmas stories of Peter Rabbit. Of course it wasn't all like that but that's how it seems now.

Is it just the sobering nature of responsibility that makes me want to turn the clock back? The cold truth that actually the world can be a harsh place and now love is so rarely unconditional? That there are people you could not hope to understand, that there is no Santa and maybe there is no-one who listens to your prayers? That, in the words of an early 80s song, one of those I've always loved:

The further we go
And older we grow
The more we know ...

How odd that this and more perhaps results in us reaching, like children for teddy bears, for these objects from our past.

It's kind of comforting to me now that maybe my children will look back on these years of their lives the same way I do mine. Although, at the same time, I kind of hope that they don't need to the way that I do.

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The Silence of the Turkeys

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 03:19:56 +0100

So, I guess the anxious amongst us should be worrying about bird flu now? For me the story stuck for a rather different reason.

The report in the Telegraph had this sad little picture of a fledging Turkey in the timeline it displayed of their short lives. It didn't sit well with what was clearly a factory production line approach to getting them from egg to supermarket freezer. And then we had the rather unpleasant description of their gassing in crates with argon. 50,000 of the poor buggers so far. Another hundred thousand to go. Sounds a bit horrendous doesn't it? A black day in Turkey history?

However, rather better I reckon than being dragged through an electric bath to stun them (OW!!! That would certainly stun me!) and then having their throats cut though which is apparently how they are slaughtered. How grim is that? Where do our agriculturalists dream this stuff up? May be the bird flu batch are the lucky ones.

You're probably wondering if I'm some PVC shoe-wearing vegetarian. Fact is I'm not. I enjoy my Christmas turkey as much as the next person. I did have a phase in veggie-ville in my early twenties thanks to an article on cow slaughter which similarly appalled me. However, any associated principles simpy failed to contend with the smell of a bacon sarnie in a girlfriend's kitchen a few years later. I just couldn't give it up now.

Still, think I'll pass on explaining how my kids food gets to the table for quite a while yet!!

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My muse has left the building.

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 02:29:57 +0100

Now it comes to it it's more difficult than I'd imagined. Not so much a 'Christ what do I say' thing, more a 'Whoa there, not so heavy'. I was going to explain that one-liner I came up with when I registered, my motivation for this thing, but I think that's going to have to wait. The moment's gone for now.

So instead, forgive the egocentric beginnings, but a little bit about me just to get this going. Put it in a context. Frame it all perhaps.

I still think of myself as a youngish chap despite being in that phase of life where I have a young family and a career of sorts. I would like to look back and say that until now I've always taken the 'path less travelled by' but, despite some of my better moments and my working existnce not being 9-5, I can't honestly say that I have. Still, plenty of time for all that perhaps. Recent history. I've upped sticks, changed job and moved south to be nearer my roots and my partner's, although her's aren't on these shores. A significant and unfortunate fact - there, I've gone and touched ever so lightly on that one liner.

I've got far too many interests than are healthy for my means and the time I have. I'll not bang on about all those just now - better to mention them when I've got something to say about them. I do get those "phases" though, you know. Where one interest tends to dominate for a while. Lately its an interest in the human side of the Second World War. Can't get enough of first hand accounts at the moment. It can be quite an emotional endeavour. I'll challenge anyone not to be moved by diary entries from soldiers from both sides on the Eastern front in Beevor's "Stalingrad" or Deborah Dwork's history of Jewish Children in the Holocaust, "Children With A Star". I'm beginning to get angry just thinking about the latter - a good thing - the more of us that do then the less currency these revisionists will have to play with as the last witnesses dwindle. Any time you feel the slightest shred of self pity stuff like that really brings you to your senses. Makes you look at your own children a little differently you know? You suddenly tend to value that the job you go to isn't a live life by the minute affair (those employed in Iraq and the like excepted!).

So, it seems that looking back can bring some clarity after all, at least to some of us. Perhaps another night I'll talk about that other sense where instead it most certainly doesn't. For now it's getting late and I'm full of sleep...

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