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 ...
Life is just wandering across the world in clothes without an occasional experiment to stimulate and spice things up. Experience a fresh taste or take a hit. I'm looking forward to cracking this open for a nip, maybe I'll just sit back and learn something in that golden glow of the amber nectar and a small set of revelations will emerge through the murky darkness of my mind. Could it be that we're just another of God's experiments stuck on a dusty shelf in a forgotten petri dish in the corner of the lab? - but we can still create good whisky.
Part of our cat facilities management duties or cat janitorial work as it is often described, are of course carrying out regular sweeps of the garden to collect and remove clumps of cat poo from wherever they may be buried. Naturally not everything is buried nor does it always stay buried. Activity is unpredictable. So it's sort of like an archaeological dig involving research and chance but in the end there's no real treasure to discover, just the mild sense of smugness that comes with having done some bit of insignificant environmental cleansing.
Today's impromptu rummage yielded about half of an asda bag of material, so that's not too bad though we've not developed actual KPIs yet. What's left will slowly rot away over time, so I tell myself, but with three active cats out in the garden and surrounding areas everyday, growing herbs and vegetables has become a thing of the past. It's just too complicated to police and the thought of actually eating the produce isn't a pleasant one for me. So ends another dream, silently but with, as you'd expect, an earthy and pungent odour.
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I see that Lego have started making Lego cameras that look very much like cameras but don't actually work. You'll fund them and numerous other things on the Technical Shelf. Lego also make other models of things, some that work up to point and some that don't other than acting as inanimate facsimiles of the original item. Some models are just toys really, others are complex machines or maybe, if taken too far beyond any of these terms, might be seen as just a bit pretentious.
Speaking of tech it's quite good that, at a certain stage of life, you send off a poo sample to a lab in Dundee and shortly thereafter they send you a letter back saying that you don't have bum cancer. I know that there are the other kind of letters that some people must get that are not so good but I've managed to avoid them so far. Don't knock the NHS (well not for this sort of thing).
1) The Marx Brothers.
2) Marks & Spencer
3) Karl Marx.
So despite various scandals and poor lifestyle choices I'd give top marks (groan!) to the actual Marx Brothers. The absurd (had to get that word in), surreal but often strangely conventional comedy family that still remain highly influential, copied and referenced within art and entertainment to this day. I was introduced to them fairly early on when their films were still regularly broadcast on TV in 425 blurry lines. Those films would have been almost thirty years old at the time but I didn't really realize their age because my own wee out of time world was completely monochrome just like theirs. I just liked them because they were stupidly funny and so different from the Billy Cotton Band Show, Come Dancing or whatever the two available TV channels coughed up at the time. I even enjoyed the ridiculous and hammy musical bits they added in.
Marks & Spencer - Mainly about the food but also for their trouser selection which for some reason seem to be made in sizes that can fit somebody like me. *I also know that this Marx was actually Michael Marks but who cares?
Karl Marx - Grizzled, misunderstood, often misquoted and a byword for a theoretical political radicalism that is a better model than many others. I can't completely disagree with someone who said "Keep people from their history and they can be easily controlled" (unless that's another misquote). The thing is we all know that Marxism will never work because amongst other things ... people are involved and human life is way too complicated.
"This egg tastes like nothing".
He shifted the white around with his fork, explored the smooth white surface that rested on the plate, casually probing it like a specimen. He added more salt, a little more pepper and moved the salad portion from side to side, as if exploring it for signs of life.
"Nope, it's bland. Like a black hole on my tongue, just nothing. I wonder whatever happened?"
I didn't bother answering. It wasn't even meant as a question. Yes there were eggs to eat but there were no chickens, they were long gone. They'd crossed over to the other side but found only a void. Now we had simulated eggs made up from some concoction of things that were not eggs. They had egg like colour texture but little flavour. It was a poor start and an unsatisfactory finish. Modern life eh?
"Time passes and you get used to things but memory plays tricks. We're old enough to remember an ancient world that doesn't exist anymore, it's far away and fading. Still I just can't escape the man traps my own mind lays out for me."
It had become a common experience for our generation.
Conversations about unsatisfactory food were embedded in everyday banter and the fodder of jokes. Complaints were voiced but just kind of floated and faded over onto some futile level of faceless authority before they were erased. The complaints became observations and then settled into something more to do with "at least we have ...". The slow acceptance, the lack of resistance, the carry on and keep drinking your prune juice attitude though no one under forty knows what a prune was or how you ever came by it. That part of history hasn't survived. I wondered what kind of history should survive; unending documentaries about real estate business from when it was "real", alien hoaxes, unsolved crime and extinct animals that we still think are OK and scratching about out in the wild somewhere.
I was brought up on the Lomond Books of Education, an austere set of school textbooks covering numerous subjects. It was a Fife thing, a Scottish thing in the mid 20th century. The Lomond Books on Scottish history were sparse on facts and speculation wasn't really allowed. Thin black and white illustrations of Wallace and Bruce, Mary Queen of Scots and James VI that told you nothing. Coloured print must have been too expensive so our historical viewpoint was like a brass rubbing extrapolated into an action figure but without the action or any drama in the narrative. Flat and grim, faceless people in armour and gowns who were long dead.
The historical text was the same, the human touch conveniently missing, just in case you thought these people might actually have been really flesh and blood. Births, deaths, castles, conquests and battle dates. Nobody ever said anything out loud unless they were a Shakespearean character traveling from A to B to C. Those "lines to take" had survived but no teacher ever explained what that complex dialogue might mean. We only had our uneducated guesswork to go by but were too bored to fully investigate it. The delete key had not been invented but they still knew how to use it.
So where did the chickens go? Like everything else they were replaced. They'd had a good run, however many thousand years of clucking and pecking but then along came a better, more cost effective, fully industrial and environmentally cleaner way of a) producing chicken meat and b) eggs, so they said. A few people spoke up for the chickens; chicken farmers probably and foodies and activists but "they" got rid of them. Quickly, quietly. The system works. Now we have a synthetic alternative but without any real alternatives.
I used to complain about having too much choice out in the world of modern retail. Too many varieties, too many products, all competing for space and attention, all getting in the way, all needing HGV transportation and temperature control and shelf life monitoring, crowded out with adverts and shelves and pop ups and fridges. Click and collect, delivery in minutes, everything there when you need it, food, drinks, clothes, anything. Well that way of being passed away. Things are still "available" but via ration, allocation, status and location. Not too much choice but it's all "good for you" and "good for society" now. Now a lot of the boxes to tick or click are greyed out.
The delays can be annoying but you get used them. We all keep emergency noodle pots in the bottom of our cupboards but I don't really know how we'll boil the water when the power is cut. Did I mention that I'm turning one hundred and four on my next birthday? I think they might have put something in the eggs.
There once was a time when we all were less removed from the food that we ate but there's a hazy fog coming down. I know it's true but I struggle to recall how that time was ...
"He spoke often of carrots and greens, of beets boiled firm and eaten with salt and he said a man who ate well from the rich earth would live long and die with his boots on. He believed it, or said he did and there was truth in his voice when he said it. It was the kind of inner truth that needs no volume. But sometimes, alone at night with the seabirds calling into the empty darkness and the moon low and dull, he thought of cheeseburgers wrapped in paper, fries and mayo and the snap of cold cola. His hands would tremble a little. He never said anything about it. Everything remained tight. He only chewed his kale slower and told himself that he liked the bitterness."
The Scattered Spider Boys came quiet, like a wind through the dry grass, invisible until the damage was done. They weren’t dusty farm hands or seasonal fruit pickers but the children of energy drinks, slim devices and code flickering screens. They were nimble-fingered and mean-eyed, coaxing secrets out of machines like a man might coax water from a dry well. They talked their way into systems with the same smooth patience a gambler might use at a crooked card table. Social engineers and scavenger hunters they called themselves, though there was little in the way of art or plain old hunger in what they did. Big firms with big gates and taller walls still found their vaults clean and empty and their names blackened. Their managers stood clueless. No code was too neat, no password too long for them to whisper their way past and steal the bread from the Co-op's shelves and the children's mouths.
To stop them, you can't just build walls higher or install tougher locks. No, it takes vigilance, the kind that doesn’t sleep. Teach the men and women who tend the systems not to trust voices on the wire, not to click the glinting lure of a message too sweet to be true. Multi-factor it like a farmer double bolts his barn. Monitor like the man who knows a storm’s always out there, just beyond the hills. And patch, by God, patch sweetly, like you're mending a fence before the cattle find the gap. It’s a hard kind of labour, the kind that doesn’t yield easy thanks, but it’s the only way to keep the systems safe from those who come like ghosts into the circuitry. Then again if you're old school like me you might try just switching it off and on and taking a fifteen minute smoke break.
These were the times before Ray-Ban was a proper designer thing and the name was embossed on everything and owning a set was still kinda cool. "Those days are gone forever, I should just let them go but ..." I'll admit now that Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" was probably playing on a loop in my head at the time but I'd yet to get into the Grateful Dead. I still think that the term "Dead Head" is more of an Easy Rider reference (Billy, a simple martyr for the hippie dream, being killed off at the end) but "Touch of Grey" eventually lit the fuse and then Jerry Garcia died a bit too soon.
I splashed out on a copy of the reworked Pompeii the other day having missed out on the full I-Max experience. I did see the quarrelsome foursome do much of this material live a number of months after this was filmed but I've to still to catch up and watch this hyped up super duper version. I imagine I'll be slowly wallowing in a further bout of nostalgia and possible disappointment but that's life. Somethings change, some stay the same.
Ivy was never a girl. No, Ivy is a plant. You can't tame her. A wild plant. Crazy, maybe. She grows where she wants, climbs where she shouldn’t, clings to brick and bone and doesn’t let go. (Try ditching the "she" for "it", don't encourage the metaphor; a much better idea.) You cut it back and it comes again. You burn it and the roots wait out the fire. It has a kind of green hunger I don’t understand but almost admire.
There is something in that stubbornness. Something in the way it never quits, but I can only watch so long. I can only let it grow so far. Enough is enough. I took the knife. I cut it down. The sweat of my brow and the cuts on my hands, the infernal dust it generates but yes, still in those moments I knew it would come back. Things like that always do.
Then the darker day dawns when you realize that the Russian Vine is gingerly making a comeback now. When you cut the dense ivy down, all that fresh sunlight hit onto the sleeping vine ... all of life is emptiness and chasing the wind.
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Wow! That was all I thought, there he was, hunched over a plastic table outside a Waffle House just off I-40, smoking Marlboros, staring into a coffee mug and wearing a t-shirt that read "Jesus would be alive if he'd had a gun." The kind of thing that makes your brain stutter. My early morning buzz hadn’t even peaked yet and already the universe was unraveling. One numerical string of reality at a time.
He had the look of a man who’d stared too long into a gas station microwave and found some meaning there. A greasy truth. Worn out eyes, cracked lips, a .45 bulge on his hip, this wasn’t a man playing dress-up. This was the real disease, the terminal velocity of American lunacy. God, make us great somehow.
I asked him where he got the shirt. He mumbled about an online store someplace. $20 worth of makeshift theology. “It’s a statement,” he told me, eyes twitching. “A spiritual one.” And then he laughed, all sharp, dry, like gravel in a blender. I didn’t argue. You don’t argue with a man like that in a place like this, not with that shirt and not in this heat. No sir. The line between prophecy and psychosis is thin, and I was in no mood to find out which side he was preaching from.
The topic that jars me back to life is about what way to go regards capitalization in the title bar: should all words be fully in capitals, should all words begin with a capital, should it just be keywords - nouns, adjectives and pronouns, should there be none, should I even bother? It's a dilemma of sorts without an easy end as a) I forget and b) who cares? I'm going to have to move on. This (semi capitalized in the title) post was brought to you by using the latent energy of a Katsu Curry pot noodle thingy.
Still don't know what I was waiting for and my time was running wild, a million dead-end streets and every time I thought I'd got it made it seemed the taste was not so sweet. So I turned myself to face me but I've never caught a glimpse of minimalist shoes until a few days ago. Now I own a pair. I've no idea what I'm doing anymore.
It seems that in the 2018 paper for the Journal of Sports Sciences, Devon R. Coetzee defined minimalist footwear as having a sole and upper that weighed 200-gram (7.1 oz) or less and were highly flexible, a heel height of 20 mm (0.79 in) or shorter, and a "heel-toe differential" of 7 mm (0.28 in) or less. They're supposed to be good for the feet and the foot area's general health and well being. So the trial begins. I've always seen myself as a complicated minimalist.
