Dismount

Adapted from a Flickr description

In my first years I never knew mountains, hills, nor valleys. There were some hills in my home town, but they had been peeled, squashed, bored and worn down by hundreds of years of industry and necessity.

"Mound" might be a more appropriate word, if it wasn't the lairy and crude cousin of the upright, clinical, anatomical and xenogeographical "Mons". Milton Keynes was free of even these mere dimples.

The mountains I drew as a child were grey triangles capped with thick, fridge cold snow, the colour of paper. They were not obstacles, just ornaments, a they were in he backgrounds of Hanna & Barbera cartoons that Yogi bear ran past. Again and again and again.

My only valleys were the valleys Ivor passed through or Aslan created them from Nothingness population: 3 guinea pigs

Obviously Dwarves lived under mountains, beside Dragons sleeping on gold and hobbits that tricksed Gollums. and Sir Edmund Hillary conquered the biggest, tallest triangle of them all. Tin Tin saw Yeti’s on them and Asterix hit Romans on the chin in the forests below them.

I visited ‘downs’, but looked up, not down, because at that age, you always looked up, so much of the world seemed placed and arranged there, out of reach.

I saw another down mounted and conquered by rabbits, and listened to my teacher read stories about an owl called Plop who visited hillocks and their introverted sisters; hollows.

Then there was Snowdonia. Camping in its foothills. At an age when I could begin looking down I was forced to look up at the first time at real hills, youthful, round, soft, playful leering down at you, jiggling in valleys, pushing you, guiding you to the peak: Snowdonia.

Snowdonia was no grey triangle with jittery pencil strokes and internal angles adding up to 180º, it had infinite volume within finite space. It wasn’t capitated with sugar-paper white snow. Roads had the sweep around it, gorging on land until their flabby shapes no longer fit the line of best fit

Clouds, not present on children’s depictions; stroked ghostly fingers on old, fractal bedrock. There were triangles though, children get that right, but only in the same way there are grains on a beach or the grammatical treatment of ‘love’ as a single emotion. “Love are..”, it should be, not not “Love is..”

With puberty and dalliances with conspiracies part of that immature, ‘I know something you don’t’ phase, there came ‘Knoll’. If the word can hide a sneaky Dutch “K”, why couldn't it hide a second gunman?

School stressed 'mottes', 'summits', middens, and the reduction of rubbish dumps. It also offered river valleys, and flood plains, for consideration, but that’s a story for another photo.

And in Scotland those words I’d cherished, loved, stored in the woodenbox of my mind have to mix, meet and mingle with new words: Munoes and Bens.

Ahora tengo que usar y entender: ‘Sierra’, ‘Mesa’, y cumbres internacionales.

These words are old, daring to stake claims in meanings that offer little to modern world. Where as my grandparent’s generation would have needed such distinctions, today we need finely defined words for painted tarmac.

Come round my way, we’ll get in my car and pull out the cul-de-sacs of our loneliness. We'll head down the street, turn onto the wide boulevards and avenues that lead out of town. We’ll shunpike the ring-road, with its on and off ramps riveted to feeder lanes, and career down single carriageways until we’re in a secluded country lane. Perhaps we can lay down ourselves in a lay by off the thoroughfare, take the time to wander down each other’s memory lanes. Bypass nothing, take the scenic route.

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ElGuiri, photography, words, mountains, hills, El Guiri

Night Fever

The night is sticking to me in humid lumps. Every time I try to clear my mind and tempt the sticky hands of sleep to rise up, grab hold of me, pull me down under the surface of consciousness, a few stories pop into my head and run around frantically, urging me to write them, free them from the prison of my mind, set them free into your much bigger and complex mind.

Having spent too many nights recently replaying events and conversations into the early hours, I gave up and came to the computer to write them, only to find that the stories weren’t really stories, but were only the bones of stories. They didn’t even have tale bones or a skull, not even enough to call them the skeleton of a story. I can’t even begin to imagine how I can turn such small quantities of impure source and smelt them into the articles they so very much want to be, but I’m releasing them, setting them free in the hope that some day soon I’ll come back to them and do something with them. More importantly I might get some sleep:

The first is a recollection of going round charity shops with my grandparents. They’d buy clothes, while I’d look for comic books. I bought Peanuts collections, The Farside and even a Calvin and Hobbes book. Somehow I’ve got to link that to a much later memory I hav of my Grandmother enjoying a ‘Peanuts’ cartoon on television, finally understanding why my uncle, her son, used to spend his pocket money on Peanuts comics. My pocket money was a blob of gold an silver

The other story is recollections of all the hours of languages I studied at school, never once learning grammar in them, having never been taught any English grammar in my life. Utilising Overhead projectors and actions to accompany the learning,it was a bizarre learning process.

My grammar and spelling are wonky at the best of times, but at half past three in the morning they will be diabolical. Please forgive me!

A city

From the scribbles in my notebook

I get drunk on cities, but only if the flavour’s right

Its chemicals enter me, saturate me. Its chemicals enter my bloodstream and sit on my neurones and tinker with the sparks that jump between them, and as one might lift a glass to the sky and rotate it to watch the light reflect, and refract; the city revolves about me, its glass windows doing the same:

A warning: just don’t drink too much, it’ll numb the soles of your feet and effect your judgement. It’ll put tears just behind your eyes, daring to be used, occasionally seeping out and shattering your vision like a kaleidoscope:

If they’d touched me I’d have touched them back, my skin melting in seething ecstasy beneath their fingers.

Welcome anonominity. Let me slip into you, hidden in plain sight, I pass by invisibly, just another piece of someone else’s story. In the story of the city I play no part. I slip between the paragraphs of its history without touching the story line. Hidden in the glare of the city's protagonist's eyes I am not even a sentence. I am part of a single word, a faceless, nameless blob conjured by the reader’s mind by a well placed adjective. A brush stroke in a water colour sky. If I’m lucky I’ll be remembered by one of its characters:

and if they had kissed me I’d have kissed them back, the lenses of our senses focused on the tunnel between us:

Tell me what events led you to this moment, relax your jaw and open your mouth to tell me what life has done to you and you to it, for us to be sitting facing each other on this train right now. We're both scared to look into each other’s eyes. Promise to look at me and I promise to look at you. I’ll pretend to not be a stranger if you will too. I’ll show you my scars and you’ll show me yours and then our paths diverge, never to cross again. Please, never forget me and I swear I’ll never forget you:

If they had told me they loved me I’d have believed them for I would have loved them too:

Why do you sing blackbird? Would you still do it if you knew that only I was listening? I understand why you sing at the top of your voice at the passing, deaf world:

Why do we sing blackbird?

Time flies like an archer’s arrow

How do you measure the passing of time? It can pass between outstretched fingers at a rate of hours, days, weeks and years without you noticing.

What causes you to step back into yourself and take note, turn your head around to look at the steep, short path that lays behind you, your heavy footprints fading quickly as they fill with the sands of time?

A slightly higher number tickled by the thin, cheeky finger of your scales as you step on it?

Another wrinkle etched around your eyes, another instalment toward the face you deserve?

The passing of an anniversary marked on your calendar? More and more of it taken by anniversaries of death at the expense of birthdays?

Often, for me, it’s the ebb and flow of the seasons that sag and billow like sand in an estuary. The arrival of spring, the sun drawing shadows across the balcony, getting shorter and shorter like a piece of chalk as summer arrives. The arrival of swifts and swallows playing in the shifting colours of the sky like the liquorice-stained smiles of children. The colour of the sky is a measure too. Its colour as I walk to work, the town’s clocks puncturing it, each with their slightly different definitions of 8pm.

For some of the year I walk as amethyst skies peer through narrow streets, searching or me as I disappear under the orange glow of lampposts that stick out from houses like jig handles. Or as now, I walk in the hot throb of that day’s punch by the sun, A numb heat readying to blacken and cool with the bruise of the night.

Why do we love dates that end in a zero or five? Seeing them as important, these numbers arbitrarily nailed to reocurring patterns. Numbers agreed upon for our convieniance and imprisonment. “Ah really? It’s been five years?”,”For ten years you say? That’s a long time”,”No! twenty-five years? congratulations!”

It is a silly thing, now part of the human condition, or syndrome? I’m only 42% unsure that I’m pondering about time because as the swallows leave this month, it’s the last time I’ll see them before I’m 30.

Time flies like an archer’s arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.

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Time

Some like it hot

"Take me away from here"

This year, Spring was an long-distance lover who only occasionally called, making the heart grow fonder. Winter was allowed to out-stay her welcome only for the psychotic Summer to burst back into my life. She’d been away so long I’d dared to believe she’d forgotten about me, only for her to storm back in, forcing aside all who stood in her way. Loud, brash and abusive she leaves my nostrils raw, itchy and dripping, having chapping my lips she turns her back on me after blowing itching-powder into my eyes. Those new to her buxom charms warm to her, Chipper birds cheep and flighty flies fly; all in her strengthening glow.

After only a few days of her company, my mind, already a disappointing bag of tricks, begins to feel like a DVD collection where someone has meticulously replaced the discs with synopses written on post-it notes in a child’s handwriting, and not necessarily in the right case.

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weather, seasons

Word Tetris

What was that they said I should do? “Put up”,”Put down” or “Put on” the pig?

Only one of them will help me pass the veterinary exam I’ve studied so hard for.

That the impact of misunderstanding things in broad terms can be so disastrous, and not just for pigs, it is amazing just how well people can get on through life, by only understanding in broad terms.

I’m one of them and I can tell you it’s not unlike a dedication to a drug habit, or committing yourself to a debilitating, long term mental illness because you suddenly find yourself in situations ad places without any true understanding how you got there. You’ve no excuse though as you agreed to it in a fit of mistranslation or wallowing in that point of tiredness when the game of 'words of another language Tetris' is lost.

In a waking moment of lucidity I found myself at a celebration of ‘the erotic’. I was listening to Spanish poetry and monologues, all chosen with this theme in mind. I had plenty of time to think at this exhibition whenever the poetry became to difficult or bad to understand. Some readers were reading their own poetry like it was a infirm relative, pushing a pillow down, stifling the passionate expressions until they lay silent and lifeless. Not for the first time in my life I felt like an eunuch at an orgy as the words of lust and love, thrust and stroke passed through me like uncooked chicken, I got thinking hard about the emotional impact of words and how that is something you loose when borrowing the clothes of another language.

Words are like a campfire beneath cast iron pan, of the body, heating the consciousness until it boils; spilling out waves of love or hate or lust.

Words can can forge a single piece from many or drive a wedge until a whole is split, shattered and irreconcilable.

They can pierce the breast like a lance, either tearing out the heart or merely casting a glancing blow and wounding it. A wound that can fester and blacken and poison.

They can open legs, or slam doors shut, lubricate and soothe or leave creaking, dry and raw.

They can burn bridges or quench burning thirsts

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ElGuiri, English, Spanish, language

Sayonara baby

I wish, as some have done; I would start again. Delete this blog with its badly spelt beginnings and aggressive punctuation. To be rid of its ancient nonsensical articles that get more visits than all the others combined. But as there were other blogs I’ve started, maintained, left to lie fallow and then made private out of sheer embarrassment it seems so sad to do the same again.

I'm sorry, you weren't my first as I let you beleive, but you were the best and longest lasting

It might have been nice If I’d combined my older blog from before I came to Spain with this one, it would, in a few ways at least, be interesting thing to look at.

I suppose it’s in the nature of my approach to writing that this will happen.

Like the very worst mother; once I’ve given birth I forget about the offspring. Now its parasitic themes and words have been expelled from my body all that’s left is that paradoxical feeling of no longer feeling a constant sensation. Not unlike the emptiness you feel after taking a shit. As it has happened before and will happen again why would starting anew be the way for me?

So I say “no” to revolution, but I am currently trying to polish this chamber pot of shit. Then I’ll be back for good*.

And thanks to those who start again and offer encouragement.

Ever wondered how they translated "Hasta la vista Baby" from "The "Terminator" into says in Spanish?:

*”For good” means until the next time I’m bored, too tired, too ill, found a new toy etc.

_.::._

Can't seem to fit this place into my life. I think I'll let it slide for a while