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.