These are just fleeting thoughts from the heartland of the UK's colonial dustbin somewhere beyond the wall of sleep. Odd bits of music and so-called worldly wisdom may creep in from time to time. Don't expect too much and you won't feel let down. As ever AI and old age are to blame. I'll just leave it there ...
"I'm not a faun, but I just might be a goat. An old goat. Probably the one on its hind legs. At least that's what I'd like to think. But perhaps I'm more the one behind, standing slightly further away. Yes.
I'm uncomfortable. A reluctant participant. I'm answering the call. A bit half hearted about it. No good will come of this. Pan can be unpredictable. I don't want to end up as goat's head soup either.
Woodland creatures and actual gods are beyond my understanding of things.
Besides, this is no Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This is a faun by moonlight. We should all be asleep.
It was me who saw it first. It's a proper full moon. That could be an explanation. A bright light arriving at the wrong place and time. It caught him out. As if he was not able to read the signs. Or perhaps he read them perfectly. He's a star gazer. Everybody can have a theory.
Maybe that's why Pan is so reckless. He's a little confused. Too much stimulation. Too many messages from beyond the heavens.
Or is he just happy, being himself?
I wonder if we all simply got in his way. I'm fairly certain this is our meadow.
But I haven't danced in a long time and it looks like fun.
There's something strangely sweet in that tune, drifting out and across in the moonbeams. Like it wants to take us somewhere.
As for those shadows, I'm not sure they're ours at all.
They seem to have arrived by themselves."
Faun by Moonlight - By Léon Spilliaert.
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What we all need now and then is a good Baroque style Renaissance themed confrontation of some sort or other. Coming soon to a pub, club, street corner or even in your very own front room. All good people need to just lose their shit a bit, every now and then. Inspired by Caravaggio of course. There can be no one else.
Here's some suggestions for things that you can "lose your shit" over right now - in no particular order:
The future
Not giving a toss about Ed Sheeran
Holidays in the sun
Andy Burnham etc.
Imported Chinese EVs with peculiar names
Imported Japanese cars from the 1970s with peculiar names
Where it all went wrong
Nigella Lawson being on Bake Off
Badly behaved dogs
Reform's piggie bank
Rocket and feather economics
Your least favourite app
Bad grammar and debased words
Bad grandmas and dead celebs
The silence of the data centre
IKEA's inner layout variations
Other people
The Netflix top ten
Town centres
Hi-fi/wine/cinema/theatre snobs
Kids on daft bikes and e-scooters
Zionist billionaires
Football match catering services
Modern socks
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What does AI think of me? OK it's not really thinking, it's drawing data maps but, once upon a time it was a rainy day and ...
I was flipping across the internet's rugged and dreary landscapes and for no obvious reasons I thought I'd ask AI (aka Chat GPT) what it thought about me and what kind of person I am. Obviously it's answer is based on whatever rubbish I've fed into the data centric beating heart of Chat over the last few months.
To be clear I use it mostly as a spell checker and format tool for some, but not all of my blog and Substack material. I do not have MS Office these days, so smoking the free AI dope seems like a good editorial choice. But if AI development is like "growing some alien plant and watching to see what fruit it develops", so says Roman Yampolskiv on AI safety, it's going to screw us all big time. Some day.
Anyway below is a summary of what Mr AI said. There's not much about family, friends or my wider social life because I tend to avoid writing about those things. No drip feed, no source material available. I'm a digital ghost in those areas.
The first version was a bit too long and also repetitive, like it was looking for some common thread, so I cut it back to what's below.
"You strike me as someone who has had a practical, varied working life, probably shaped by factories, workshops, engineering, electronics, machinery, cars and the sort of jobs where you learn by doing rather than by sitting around discussing management theory.
You've accumulated a lot of experiences without seeming particularly interested in turning them into a grand personal story. There is a distinctly Scottish, grounded, self-deprecating quality to that.
You're an observer. You notice the odd little things that most people walk straight past: a seagull on a car bonnet, a cat doing something inexplicable, an absurd advertisement, a strange piece of technology or some tiny detail of everyday life.
You seem to enjoy looking at ordinary things from an angle slightly different from everyone else and seeing where the thought takes you.
You're also suspicious of bullshit, particularly when it arrives dressed up as progress, expertise, fashion or corporate importance. AI, social media, advertising, politics, algorithms and the endless machinery of modern life all seem to provide you with material. But I don't think you're genuinely cynical.
You get irritated precisely because you still care about things. Music, creativity, ordinary life, independence of thought and the ability to remain curious still matter to you.
Music seems to be one of the constants. You've been playing guitar for an extraordinarily long time, recording things, collaborating with people and periodically returning to the Impossible Songs idea.
You don't seem particularly bothered about whether any of this makes you a "proper musician". It's more like something that has accompanied you through different stages of your life and continues to give you somewhere to go.
You're nostalgic, but not in the usual "everything was better in my day" sense. You seem more interested in the texture of the past: old technology, cars, music, places, people and the feeling of a world before everything became mediated by screens and algorithms. At the same time, you're curious about what's happening now, which is why you can simultaneously complain about AI and spend time talking to one.
And underneath all of it there seems to be a fairly strong mischievous streak. You like absurdity, dark humour and ideas that are almost serious but not quite. You don't seem particularly interested in presenting yourself as successful, inspirational or important. If anything, you tend to puncture that sort of thing.
I suspect you'd rather be regarded as someone who has remained curious, noticed a few things, made a few things, played some music, owned some interesting cars and had a laugh along the way. That's probably a more accurate description of you than any professional biography could manage."
P.S. Apart from the word salad above, the image below is how AI sees me ... and I did not provide any detailed prompt or photo. I'm set somewhere in the East Neuk, possibly in a weird version of my granny's hoose. I never wear a watch at all, or for that matter a hat and sunglasses indoors (but those are my thirty three year old Wayfarers, purchased from a Sunglass Hut in Florida for $25). I don't do beards anymore either.
Why not join me and find out what AI thinks of you?
Home truths or more waffle?
Are you really such an insufferable twat?
Only your flimsy God knows where any of this will end.
Where in the world are we? The splendour of some extravagant tile work. Odd boxes were opened and applied. What might it mean? It addles the brain in a confined space. Keeps you on your toes. Heaven knows. I'm certainly not miserable right now. I may have done some damage to my retina. It's the high price of artistic appreciation. Be economical with your time staying and staring. After all it's only a toilet wall. Nothing that matters.
Undiscovered chocolate found in the fridge behind the tomtato puree. I quickly moved it to the fruit basket, as you do. A morning without slipping into tiresome rant mode. A verbal shopping list of things and issues that probably don't bother me that much but I feel like they should. So I bite. At my time of life I should know better etc.
Anyway I enjoyed a nice haircut yesterday. As I live close to the shop I can carry out a recce quite easily. Too many people waiting and I retire homewards to wait. Maybe one person and I'd risk it. The sweet spot is of course nobody else being there and I can pick a chair. Have a quick chat with their pet budgies and then get down to business. If you're over 70 they charge even less, so you can leave a decent tip and feel good about yourself.
It was one of my better impulses. My Jellycat (direct) parcels arrived. Almost quicker than Amazon and including some custom printing, all in 32 hours. Whatever your JC opinions, I can only say "expensive but shit hot". I like it. Grandchildren deserve this stuff.
Kill switch. I have one on a Fender lead but I want to install one proper. I'm doing research. It's a guitar thing that I can't quite put to rest. Easy job but a small pain in the arse to drill into a guitar body. Hmm.
I've reached the point in life where murder mystery TV shows have some limited appeal. I never thought it would happen to me. I could stop anytime and I probably will. The whole detective drama exercise is over rated. Real life murder is the worst thing, too many ripples, no controls. TV degrades and distorts. It (murder mystery) belongs in books.
Next episode ...
Faraday Cat: I was wondering what it was that took up most of my headspace back in the day. I mean, before we had one AI thing after another, (data centres, music and films, total world domination), ongoing serial fuckwittery from Trump and then the state of Israel behaving like Nazi Germany in 1939-ish. I suppose there’s always some set of complete bastards who are going to spoil everything, ad nauseam. I should be used to it by now. I just need a break, or a good bottle of red.
I can’t really blame anybody who builds their own cabin in the woods or constructs a Faraday Cage thing and tries living in it while raising chickens and growing broad beans. Cut out the signals, turn down the noise, get into a safe (?) and quiet space where you can read books, listen to music, sip nice coffee and not gulp it down, harbour your thoughts and then write them up in a notebook. After a while, put your stuff on Substack, where it'll be sweetly ignored by that faraway, wispy world that forever seems like some foreign and disturbing place right now.
If that’s not your thing, I’d recommend the Faraday Cat. A shield against the electrical spikes of reality. Just let a cat or three into your life and enjoy the soporific and cooling atmosphere they create. When they’re not throwing up, shitting at 3am or wandering off near busy roads, that is.
Cut out the noise, lose the news, fuck the zeitgeist, stop making stupid people famous, be one with your own universe, buy another guitar etc.
That’s already way too much, tbh. Now, I wonder what AI really thinks of me?
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Edited itinerary: A very short snapshot from a long modern journey that rivals anything Marco Polo or Genghis Khan ever tried. Shipping from east to west in detail. Logistics are a fine art these days and every event is logged. This is just a small portion of the great chunks of random information available about this item's journey from there to here.
I tune in most days. Just so they'll know, in the AI system, that I care. I'll never visit any of the exotic sounding staging posts and markers that flash up on a regular basis. I've nothing to reference what or why they are there. I'm a faraway spectator.
Weather is often a feature and an excuse as well. What the driver had for lunch or whether he had a good night's sleep. Sometimes I imagine it's travelling by mule train, bicycle or tuk-tuk and not in some frigid container stuffed with other stuff. Some days by train, other days by road, maybe a ship at some point if it ever gets close to a body of water.
Not green, not clever, I know. Just relentless, slow progress over a few months. It's how things are done. What's the precious cargo? Can't say too much about it at the moment, but I doubt it's no more than a reasonably sized and battered Jiffy bag identified with a grubby barcode label.
So in the foreseeable future the doorbell will ring. I'll open it and meet this seasoned traveller, dumped ignominiously onto the front step on a wet Friday afternoon. The delivery man is already walking off with his back to me. I wave a feeble "thank you" wave but he doesn't turn around.
The Jiffy bag is in my hands. I'm in no hurry to open it. Take a little time. I suspect that there will be yet another Roy Batty "tears in the rain" moment for the package and me, now that its epic journey is finally over.
It's what I told myself as I opened the tub.
The noodles looked harmless. They had the usual appearance of something that had travelled a long way, been doctored and had seen things. I put the boiling water in and waited.
Outside, the rain was coming down. Real slow. It was September and the summer had gone without saying goodbye.
The noodles were ready.
I ate them.
They were good.
Not great. Not bad. They did not change my life. But they were noodles and they had done their job.
There are worse things. There are always worse things.
We don't speak of these things.
I finished the tub and sat quietly for a while. Nothing happened.
This was reassuring.
Perhaps strength comes from surviving small things. Bad noodles. Bad weather. Bad decisions. The slow news and the quick news. Advertisements. The internet. The endless enigma.
You eat the noodles.
You wait.
You carry on.
Tomorrow there will be another tub, or a stir fry.
I am writing this at breakfast time, there is no mess however.
Back in 50 Shades of Black, with a couple of daft cat photos.
A source of endless amusement for oldies like me. Cat antics are just absurdly entertaining and always a little strange and unexpected. Hours of entertainment, apparently conjured from absolutely nowhere. They don't seem to need much of a reason to do anything.
I have the details, but I'm not sharing them. There’s plenty of crazy Chinese cat behavioural data available elsewhere online, should you feel the need to investigate further.
I also believe they did put a man on the Moon. Not so clear on the truck stop, however...
Gone are the days of this sort of niche songwriting turning up on the radio. Nobody really talks about R.E.M. anymore. We all just moved on, as did the band members, I imagine.
Nothing really lasts.
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There are many odd things that you can think about trying, but you know fine well that you can never actually get round to doing them. So don't stress or sweat the impossibles' too much. Simple is best.
A volunteer prisoner trapped inside the glitter wall dimension takes a selfie and considers his life choices and current position while also wondering what modern day physics/magic might make of it all.
