Random Days Doing Nothing Don't Mean the Same Anymore

They just don't.  It's pretty much undoubtedly to do with the sense that there will be fewer of them.  When you're young, or even young-ish, days stretch ahead and boredom seems full of endless possibilities that slowly emerge like sailing ships through fog, adrift upon a mind-smothering and smothered-by-mind miasma which has been formed by doing nothing but sitting for hours in your pyjamas staring at a grey, flat stillness through the window, drinking too many cups of tea, and poking at shapes formed by biscuit crumbs at the bottom of the empty packet, and if you fail to choose one, which invariably you do because it doesn't matter, everything simply slides back into the timeless grey to emerge just the same on another dull day.
It's something to do with infinity and when you're older you know that infinity doesn't exist.  You've lost the courage to imagine it.  You can almost smell encroaching old age it's so close and you fear it.  You fear not managing.  You fear stumbling round the kitchen in a baggy acrylic cardigan and trousers that smell of urine, groping for the kettle with your arthritic fingers and barely seeing where the teabags are through your rheumy eyes and also because you've forgotten and there's nobody there to remind you except the underpaid under-trained nineteen year old care worker who pops in to change your leg bag at lunch-time - at least you hope it's going to be her and not the sixty-three year old care worker who steals from your wallet because she's angry and bitter about the dreadful state of her life and she's got no pension till she's seventy-one and her partner left her for a bloke and her daughter's an internet escort and she's lost all her money buying scratchcards and tattoos and paying off Wonga loans.  During those flat grey hours in your cold and empty house you look back on your cold and empty life and forwards to a cold and empty death.   You look up at the night sky as you struggle up the icy path to put the bin out and you don't wonder as you did when you were young, you don't see wonder, you can't, you only see that the stars are cold and distant and most of them don't even exist any more anyway. they're dead.  You're living on a planet spinning in a hopeless void and you've hardly any time left and it's all been for nothing and you don't know why.

Enjoy your day!

Steve Hillage - Hurdy Gurdy Man

Not as good as the Butthole Surfers' interpretation, for my taste.  However, always good to revisit the Canterbury school of prog.

David Lynch The Art Life - Clip 1: A Strangest Dream

11: Ladies Dancing

T.S. Eliot Reads: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Unique Sound of the Cricket

'All the happiness the earth possesses in not being broken down into matter and spirit was contained in the unique sound of the cricket.'



The Unique Sound of the Cricket: Édouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876.Stéphane Mallarmé died 118 years ago today. He wrote the letter below to his friend Eugène Lefébure, in May 1867, at age twenty-five, when he was working as a teacher in the provinces. It was, apparently, stressful, and Mallarmé came to feel that he’d entered “the Void”—a liberating (albeit terrifying) abyss of... Read More »

BBC Archival Footage-In Their Own Words British Authors J.R.R. Tolkien P...

Winter (1923) | BFI National Archive

When you knew where you were with the seasons.

Will there be an Apocalypse, and if so, after, will we be able to buy and enjoy cheese?

Of course not!  To both!  Although wait a minute - how can I say that with such dismissive certainty?  Nobody knows if there will be an apocalypse, or indeed what form it might take should one occur.
Say, for example, there was an apocalypse booked in for next Tuesday.  Would it wipe out the entire globe, or just half of Kilmarnock (not the good half, obviously)?  We simply do not know.  Would cheese be available, in either respect?  I think it is quite likely that some foodstuffs might survive, and that cheese might very well be among them.
Especially the hard kind,  such as Parmesan.
Would we be able to buy it?  Only if money and a trading environment survived.  Money and buying might be consigned to the dustbins of history, post-apocalypse.  We might have to stoop to 'looting' it.
As for 'enjoying' it - well, stolen fruits and all that.  And it would all depend on a decent cheddar being available. And on not impairing one's enjoyment of said cheddar by worrying about skyrocketing cholesterol.
I'm bored thinking about it now, and am moving on to 'what if the whole world went underwater due to apocalyptic flooding and to escape Kevin Costner - how quickly would we develop gills?'

Are We Turning into Machines?

Surely this isn't likely.  At least, not terribly.  I mean,  I accept that as organic beings - if you take a teleological perspective - we are wending our way along a Hegelian-style continuum of evolution - that is, probably.  Perhaps.  Then again,  perhaps not.  And whereabouts we are on that continuum, should such a thing exist, or be occurring, is a matter of pure conjecture.
Where does that leave us?  Sort of where we always were I suppose.
I don't think we're that far from the 'fish crawling out of swamp' stage really.  Well, so it seems if you look at social media.
We certainly use a lot of technology - our lives revolve around it now - and technology is increasingly involved in health care and in food production, so that we even ingest technology without knowing it.  The virtual web surrounds us and numbs us like the poisonous silvery threads of an enormous, crushing, stifling spider's web.  The harder you struggle, the more you kick, the harder it is to escape.  (Is that true?  I'm not sure.  Perhaps it just feels like that.)
One of the things that worries me most is that already there are no letters, no diaries with which secrets are shared, no accounts of daily life written in the watches of the night and hidden under pillows. Will there ever be political diaries again?  A Chris Mullin, a Tony Benn?  What about Byron and his Letters?  Nowadays he'd have an Instagram account and probably a leaked sex tape.  Everything's ephemeral - close your account and it's gone,  all gone, all bar that embarrassing photo you were tagged in on Facebook that just will never go away.
Perhaps as we age we will have failing parts of us replaced so that eventually we are completely mechanical, and just require to be 'maintained' and 'serviced'.  Hips, knees, kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. Teeth.  Faces.  They do all this already, in some form or other.  So, semi-mechanical humanoids, yes, that I can envisage.   What about brains?  Will they be next?  And what about souls?  I think we all have those, and I'm quite sure you cannot manufacture a soul.  A machine may be able to 'think', but it cannot have a soul.
No, I don't think we''re 'turning into' into machines.  I'm not convinced that we're turning into anything, we're not evolving at all.  If we're doing anything, anything at all, we're spiralling downwards, the trajectory is downwards, earthwards, drilling into the dirt and knocking ourselves senseless on rocks.  We don't understand time never mind the infinite, and our place within it.  Our view of existence is limited,  we see only a fraction, like navigating through life via that steamed-up triangular window in the Apollo 13 space capsule.
What gives me hope is the organic world.
Nature doesn't like nasty machines.

Next post - Will there be an Apocalypse, and if so, after, will we still be able to buy cheese?

To Love Somebody-Gram Parsons/Flying Burrito Brothers

Beach Boys-In My Room

BONZO DOG (DOO-DAH) BAND - 'The Intro And The Outro' - 45rpm 1967

'Adolf Hitler on vibes.  Nice.'

Splintered World

The world has changed a lot during my lifetime and especially so over the last ten or fifteen years.
Obvious,  I know.  I'm just trying to get my head around it in order to make sense of the world as it is now, and my place therein.  If indeed I have one.
When I was young, and if you were of the working class, there were unions to represent you and steady, reliable jobs that paid proper wages and at the end of your working life you got a pension.  You knew that, you were sure of it.  You saw your parents' generation doing that.  They'd fought in the War, most of them, and if they were old enough to have done that they were also old enough to remember what life was like before the NHS and the Welfare State and they valued these things.
There was plenty of work.  You applied for jobs on paper, or if it was a temporary job you might just phone or go along and speak to whoever was in charge.  In summer, there were generally plenty of seasonal jobs in hotels or on farms.  And if you couldn't work, there was social security instead of 'welfare'.  You could go to the Job Centre and look at the job cards and if there was something you could go for you took the card to the desk and spoke to someone who would assist you.
Now what do you do?  You fill in some crappy online form and send it to some anonymous agency which takes all your personal details and stores them who-knows-where, and you never hear from them again.
Or perhaps that's just me.  Is it just me?  I don't know.
Property was affordable.  They talk of affordable homes now but they aren't really affordable, not for the majority of people in the way that homes used to be.
People generally did better than their parents, educationally and financially.  If you didn't do well at school there were other chances, if you wanted them. People went to libraries and evening classes and learned new skills to help them 'get on'.  There was no such thing as 'student debt'.
That's all in the past now, by and large, and of course, there's no going back.  Even if you wanted to go back, you couldn't. You never can because things never gel together in exactly the way things used to be.  Some might say that's just as well and perhaps in many respects they're right.
A lot of people were like me and didn't want to 'get on'.  In fact. they spat in the face of 'getting on'. The old certainties were taken for granted.  Looking back from where I am now, I can see that that was quite the luxury - at least, if you so chose, you could 'get on'. At least, for most of us, there was the option of so doing.  Now?  Not so much.  Not at all, for many.  For many. there is nothing but bare survival and little if any

chance of escape.
To me it seems that the world has splintered into layers.  At the bottom, there are those who live among the shards of life,  living among shattered pieces of the old and the new.  Grubbing around in the best way they can.  There is no sense, anywhere, any more, not really any sort of a workable consensus anyway in the way that there used to be, that 'these people' (or 'the poor') have a right to a decent life and dignity and that we should all help each other to achieve that because by helping one we help us all.  Lives are uncertain at best, precariously desperate for many.  The old certainties of job security and having a sense of how one's life would, or should, evolve aren't there any more.  The new certainties are fear and chaos. Patterns have shifted or vanished, like unused paths to an abandoned coal mine.  At the top, are people who seem to have everything, and who seem to control everything, materially.  And there are just enough people in the middle to stop the world imploding. People who can afford mortgages and these big white cars you see all over the place and even second homes.  People with buy to let mortgages, for heaven's sake.  People who have retired on public sector pensions and who can afford to eat out a lot.
But there are far too many people at the bottom.  And the bottom seems far, far grottier and far, far harder to escape than ever it used to be.
Where will this end?  I fear for us all.

Algernon Blackwood reading Pistol Against a Ghost (7/5/1948)