Corn starch and water, resulting in fluid grain suspensions

What's that word, that thing, that happens before inspiration? That murkiness that lacks any specifics but is tinged with an outer coating of an emoting, like triumph, or a happiness that's guessed through sandblasted glass.

It's a visioning, perhaps? When your brain and heart skip ahead away from the tedium of what, when and how, and imagines how you'll feel if you accomplish this wonderful thing (the details of which and what needs to be done can be determined later) and for a basking blip in quantum you inhale the potentia of the pride, and success, and wonderfulness you feel for what you've done (details of which are not presently available).

That's what this scramble of words is. Custard¹. I can skim your finger over it distractedly, but as soon as I hit it to get through to some of the pieces underneath, nothing. And so, wrists droop listlessly from extended arms, as a quiet terror shepherds the smoky shapes and shadows out and away. Words, and pictures, and ideas hidden under the opaque film. And all I have is an abstracted (but real) sense of loss - that swoop and delight that was nearly tasted, that wasn't ever there. Elbows reel in the futures of words, of thoughts, of changes never realised. And a boy that very nearly almost began to be, now famous for fuck all, collapses like flan in a cupboard².



Notes:

1. i.e. Fluid grain suspensions
2. Similar to the Austro-Hungarian empire

lost in the midnight blue shadows of the moon

When I see something (or even someone) that's extraordinarily beautiful, my chest clenches. I fall in love, nearly instantly. And it makes me want to, with no hyperbole or exaggeration, want to die.

Because instinct works out that escaping the dusty tethers of this constrained and (relatively) unremarkable existing will fade into a being that's complete. And free from the inhibited appreciation that's governed by a sulking boy's perpetual temper, sour mood, and irrational pride.

But the overwhelming and swollen heart usually subsides into a darkened undertone of contrition that seeps from my bones. Because I know as much I fall in love with a sunrise, or a dark eyed girl, I don't deserve those things. And my brain furiously pencils out the parabola of things I deserve to have, and my shoe laces feel to big for my feet, and I stumble and graze an existential chin.

injurious

As a child¹, I cracked my skull twice, got thrashed to within a few feet of my life by teachers and parents more than a dozen times, lost a toenail, had hundreds of scratches and cuts², and got into a lot of fights.

Now, a decade and a half later, I don't really remember those things as painful. The scattered scars are curiously remembered, and the stories fondly told.

What does still hurt and sting, is the humiliation and abandonment by peers³ and friends³ as I tried to fit in as a too-clever, un-coordinated boy from a little too far away⁴. Bored, rejected, lost in strange cultures, and well into university, very afraid of people and not being liked.

I'm very reluctant to reflect on whether any of those things apply to me now, because of the dread of finding out that they do.

Footnotes:

1. Fat, awkward, and a little bit too clever
2. Though, weirdly, no broken bones
3. So-called
4. I was born on the east coast, grew up in a rural dorpie in the middle of the country, and moved to the west coast when I was 8.

This sentence can't exist really. It's too improbable.

Being able to read to the end of this sentence means the formation and billion-plus-person-adoption of a codified written language, the synthesis of plastic to create these keyboard keys, the n-thousandth iteration of  a non-toxic paint to demarcate those letters, the very clever spring system to allow the keys - adopted from the first 18th century typewriter - to fall and recompose themselves as they're attacked by flitting fingertips, the adoption of radio and anti-aircraft technology for the printed circuit board to conduct a tiny current (adhering to the science of metals, conductivity, densities, static electricity, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism) to a processor that's evolved the use of bell jar sized vacuums to store and process data (this in turn a tribute to the sewing loom and a punch card). The tiny current travels, is processed, transformed, and redirected to another processor which uses centuries of spatial mathematics to automatically and autonomously calculate how to draw the arcs and shape of the letters pressed, transforms this into a different current conducted between the descendants of carrot cholestrol whose composition of liquid crystals is held between two panes of superheated silica and scattered to create colourful lights, which is sharpened with hyper-density magnetic currents.

That's what it takes for me to see the letter I type on my screen. The fact that you can see it, and what's necessary to allow this to happen, is utterly improbable and stupendously impossible.

And still we can bear to wither our lives away on some fucking bullshit.

Stand still for a moment dear

The Earth spins around its axis at 4.7 kilometres per second. The Earth also revolves around the sun at about 12.5 kilometres per second.


That means for every moment you're standing still, the ground beneath you is spinning through space faster than you can spit; spinning at a speed of about 1,700 km/h, and swinging around the centre of our solar system at a speed of 4,500 km/h.


The solar system spins around a galactic core, a superset of the Earth's motions, and our dwarf sun is moving through the galaxy towards the constellation Virgo (the jokes you could make, eh), taking the Earth and 8 other lumps of rock along with it, the entire solar convoy spinning around the centre of the milky way at about 1900 kilometres per second, and hauling ass through to Virgo at about 194 kilometres every second.


So stand still for a moment. Feel the tranquil stillness of your breath. Anchor yourself in time, in this moment. If it took a second, you will have moved 12,000 kilometres - a quarter of the way around the Earth - as a passenger on board a machine with galactic mechanics.


(If you're interested, this is what it looks like - not accounting for galactic spin:)

Our solar system occupies a negligible amount of space and matter in the universe.

Which isn't really related to anything, except, the next time you stand to pray and you say the words 'God is Great', for the moment it took you to say those words, imagine what He has made happen through the heavens, and what he will continue to make happen until the end of time, and understand that our comprehension of the word great is miserable.


Which may be the point.

on little white dots in the sky

Every morning, as I trundle over the mountain and flit in a streak of headlights and red-lit bottom for some brief moments between hulking clumps of concrete and glass, I stare at Venus. How do you not, she's an utterly remarkable orb suspended in the velvet dawn of a polluted city sky.

And then I always try to do the processing: that the biggest of the little celestial dots, which only occasionally has the courage to be visible in a photograph glides gently through the morning with a size and (almost) mass of the Earth. That the white light is the pearly sheen of clouds of sulphur that are wrapped snugly around her. And that the closest I've ever been to Venus is 38,000,000 kilometres which, at a space shuttle speed of 28,000 pm/h would take me 2 months of travelling to reach.

And then, feeling overwhelmed and small and overly aware of my insignificance, my brain collapses like a harassed flan in a cupboard. So I blot her out with a well-placed fingertip and swear a lot.

I have a headache when I look at Jupiter.

on career ambition and being prepared to die

Apart from swearing, sarcasm, chronic procrastination, being follicley unpresentable¹, and having the fashion sense of a damp² rag, the only other major reason I get into trouble at work is around my prickly issue of ambition and goals, and my utter lack thereof. For two reasons:

1. I treat my job like a job³, and apart from having a comfortable and only mildly stressful environment, I don't really mind/am indifferent to what I'm being asked/told to do.
2. I don't have any career plans further than lunch.

Which doesn't go down well, because it looks lethargic and lacking grit and determination even though I'm an intelligent⁴ boy. Making "growth" and a "career path" only something which can happen retrospectively (if indeed at all) rather than looking ahead.

For a while, and still now to some extent I suppose, I feel a little embarrassed about it. Because people around me have lives to live, and things to work for and towards, and I simply plod⁵.

And while the plodding is instinctive, I think I'm working out why it feels right for me. Goals and goal-setting are remarkable exercises to undertake, and are very responsible for making extraordinary things happen. But ethos and ethos-setting can be, if not as easily to ceremonise⁶, also quite more-than-ordinary.

In the last 9 years of my life, switching degrees a handful of times, making career decisions more than that, and generally having a fluid time making and discovering lifes paths and the briar bushes of its decisions, I've learnt that it's okay not to know. And I really don't know, and it apart from social shyness, it doesn't worry me. While goals have shifted, and changed, and sometimes altogether disappeared, the ethos of being and doing hasn't. Getting stuck in, be kinder than you need to be, learn hard and try to teach and share as much as possible. All these things have been more important to me, than reaching the tenuous goal of being employed.

Life isn't meant to take you where you want to go, and you definitely you wont do or become the things you expect to (there are obvious exceptions to this, but lets pretend they don't exist). While I generally exist in a delusional bubble of distraction, and abstraction, I think that's okay.

Right?

Footnotes

1. My beard. Eish.
2. But practical
3. Revolutionary concept. Wait till you read the book.
4. Above average anyway
5. Like the policeman in Noddy
6. Throwing a party for, etc.

failure (not failing)

What's really difficult is failure.

Not failing, which is in and of itself¹ laudable, and tells of courage, bravery, and sexy kind of stupidity. Failure is difficult because without a good and sense of self, self-importance, and that necessary tinge of despised narcissism failure becomes relative².

And this applies doubly so to me, I suppose, because I've spent a not insignificant⁴ part of my late teenage and young adult life defining failure as an inability to impress/make happy/keep in favour with others. So that my ability to fail or not succeed⁵ was a function of other's⁶ tolerance of my action. Not being funny and entertaining company was a failure. Not being academically resourceful and logistically convenient was a failure. People in general are quite happy and eager to determine what the criteria for my failing is.

It is quite tumultuous⁷ to cycle through this as a realisation, because well apart from recognising my own failing⁸ to decide for myself what failing means, it's easy to want to wag a finger at the flavour of people I accepted failing criteria from before. And its an undeserved scorn, because I happily determine the criteria of the failure of others.

Maybe that's where those persons who have incredibly accepting and loving hearts come from; through their inability to decide how other people fail.

I'm not sure I've done it yet either. My vapid⁹ extra-curricular year and a half since graduating¹⁰ talks to two things:

1. I'm fortunate to work where a "performance culture" means my constructive corporate progress is passively taken care of, and my mental engineering fault means this will continue
2. Because my weekends and time away isn't seen or cared for by anyone else, these have descended into stagnant puddles of meh.

Deciding what constitutes my own failure feels ... awesome¹¹. Because re-wiring, or attempting to, at that level can only bring about washes of change and conflict. Importance changes. Things stop mattering. Things start to matter. Energy becomes a resource which needs to be strategically re-thought while the momentum of entertaining decisions already made needs to be (mostly) kept.

The flip-side of this flip-floppy chameleon like being, I guess, is Elon Musk. Now there's a personified instutionalisation of self-determined determination.

Footnotes

1. this is a ridiculously show-offy bundle of words. Doubly so because I'll be using the word vapid later on.
2. this would be a funnier footnote if I could come up with a joke about failures and cousins³
3. i.e. relative failures. Har har
4. i.e. significant
5. inverted commas
6. and here I exclude my family and my properly close friends
7. Excited, confused, or disorderly
8. this too, I feel is ripe for some kind of punny sidebar
9. told you so
10. where it's easy to attach myself to the failing criteria of lecturers and peers
11. in the way that space is awesome: vast, daunting, apprehensive, and fear-inducing

Vapid (Adjective): Offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging.

Vapid (Adjective): Offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging.

If you want a movie metaphor, it's the difference between the movie Snow White and the Huntsman and Mirror mirror. 

 

on fainting, not like a girl

I mostly¹ donated blood today.
I've decided to guinea pig myself later this evening and see if my iPod can induce lucid dreams that I pick
And I made you a 15 minute YouTube mixtape

1. Regina Spektor - Dance anthem of the 80's

2. The Pretty Reckless - Zombie

3. Miike Snow - A horse is not a home

4. Karmin - Take it away

5. Flash Republic - Devestation

Footnotes

1. Mostly in that my right arm was first impaled and drained a little, then due to knotting complications in the bloodbags they swapped over to my left arm, then due to some wussy² complications, fainted after surrendering half a pint³.
2. I'd like to point out that the first time (this was the second) I donated blood, I did it like a woman giving birth⁴.
3. Still counts.
4. Without any motherfucking⁵ drama (other than the appropriate amount necessary).
5. This is funny when you consider that it refers to women giving birth, i.e. mothers who have been ...⁶
6. I cannot apologise enough.

bet you never seen them do a list like this before

To do:

1. Build a Cape Town bucket list for Cape Town visitors (suggestions?)
2. Other stuff

This one time I ....

There's a wonderful thing I noticed that happens at live comedy shows. When the comedian makes a very subtle, very clever joke that doesn't have an obvious punch line, it usually goes:

• Comedian delivers subtle, clever line
• Immediate laughter from some people
• awkward pause as first laughers finish laughing
• secondary laughter from those who needed a little time to identify and process the humor
• secondary silence
• hushed whispering as the tertiary batch of none laughers are explained what the joke is
• awkward tertiary laughter consisting mainly of the primary laughers feeling sorry for the tertiary

Some comedians like a Dave Gorman (YouTube the Googlewhack adventure, it's phenomenal) and Eddie Izzard (YouTube the Death Star canteen) demand a smarter audience. Snobbish and exclusionary, true, but when it does happen the comedy is utterly remarkable.

on prefixing appreciatings

the ire and isappreciating of sign writers • the disappreciating
glare of tightening waistbands • and the reappreciating of
sleepy-sexy faces (apparently)

It disappoints me that the Hog's Head just has a sign painted "Hog's Head" rather than an actual (or even wooden) hog's head outside of it. Bad show Hogsmeade, bad show.
Frenetic day(s) are being made accomplishable¹, but not kindly endorsed by pants² which are getting more and more snug. But there's an absolute truth in the idea of busy people getting shit done, but functional, operational, tactical shit, not wide-eyed, wandering, slightly flirty-and-nappy shit³. Flirty-nappy, incidentally, is the best kind of mood to be in.

Footnotes:

1. Admittedly mostly by Peanut Butter M&M's. Booyah.
2. Meaning trousers, and not underpants as the British insist they mean.
   
3. Ah, shit. Not nappy shit, nap-like shit.

Dear all of you who’ve wronged me, I am, I am a zombie

Workaholics are not made, I don't think. They are crafted¹ by finding a worker who has found that ineffable³ sweet spot of having stuff to do that's not too dull, too stressful, or too loud, and gently ladling them with cupped handfuls of work that's been spiced with carefully encouraging words, and a sense of self importance⁴ that's not smug or inflated but carefully sold to be a part of a bigger purpose.

Well, that's the reason I'm camouflaging my recent endorsement of properly corporate being and participation. Hippie me⁵ would vomit in my ear. And not in a sexy way.

Footnotes:

1. In the way that a horcrux is crafted².
   
2. Pretty apt comparison, eh?
   
3. No matter how much you try to eff it
   
4. In much the same way you'd wash Daenerys Targaryen shoulders
   
5. Jun 2007 - Nov 2010. RIP.
   

everything, and everything

the skritch skritch skritch
of something complicated in the background
a sophisticated noise 
(which just means poorly justified static garble)
dzzt dzzzzt dzzztoh, and female vocals
lined with those submlinal head totting thingums
an infectious sound malady
(hardly a melody, and the furthest thing from a remarkable vocabulary)
dip, dipping, dippest
a seductive lull in the musi...
whoops, no, there it is, returning sans any respectable remorse
dzzt dzzzzt dzzzt dzzzzt dzzt
that infectious viral noise
slowly dehydrating a once promising cerebellum
but still
dzzt dzzzt dzzzzt dzzt dzt