We walked under neon skies, you know it made me wonder why, why all the frequencies combine, for the cleaner brighter light.

British Sea Power - Lights Out For Darker Skies

I want to wrap the town in daisy chains and paint everything with a morning dew. I want to live among fireflies and drink mead in the dusky light, with the evening leaves turned teal. As the sun goes down I want to breathe the flowers and the damp beads forming atop the grass, and I want to collapse onto blankets on mossy pillows, my face vaguely illuminated by the single flames of waxen candles.

Sq.

Sunday.

It seems to me like it all changed on Saturday night. It was the end of a week of sun and happiness; of times that I'll never forget simply because they were bathed in warm light. Then it was time for work, back to the daily grind.

"We need to rage through this life. "

As soon as Saturday was over, it was clear that things were final, as the clouds closed, heavy on the endless blue that had extended above us before.

So it's time to close it and wait for the next portal to happiness.

I'm trying to stop associating songs, films, books, pictures, ideas, memories and words with things I don't like to remember, and I'm attempting to educate myself out of this habit simply by listening to/looking at (etc...) these things until their original neutrality is regained.

As Coleridge basically said in The Nightingale, we shouldn't transpose our own (melancholy) meanings onto the things that nature (and, i suppose, general life) has given us in good faith. No nightingale comes into the world believing its song is infinitely sad, just as no song comes with a pre-packaged memory you should attach to it. Nick Hornby, a more modern voice on the subject asks:

"What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" (Well, John Cusack said it, but Nick Hornby thought it)

Just because I listened to it then doesn't mean I can't love it again, now. Having said that, I'm not sure that I will ever completely lose this flaw in my personality. I take things and make them apply to me, and that's the way it is. (It's like that...)

"If there's one thing I can never confess, it's that I can't dance a single step. It's you. It's me. And it's dancing."

New songs make it all the better.

Sq.

A glutton for punishment?

It seems I am.
Okay, these two things are exactly the same:


1) Becoming good friends with someone knowing they are about to leave for six months.

2) Getting into Pete Doherty when it looks like he might drop dead at any second.


I chose to do both. There are many other times that I have known that things would end less than preferably and have still dived in head first - those stories populate former posts; feel free to trawl through the archives as I always say.


Pete Doherty's new material seems far better than anything I've ever heard from him before. I keep finding new tracks, thinking 'I really won't like this' and being proved wrong. I am not jumping on any bandwagons as far as I know, I don't think anyone's particularly more enamoured with his new stuff than his old. My saddening disenchantment with the NME has led me to care not what they say any longer, so I don't know about them.



As far as my good friend goes... I hope he has a wonderful time.
You have to go and find your life, don't you. It's never just there.
Not for most people. Oh, and I have no regrets.

Hope it's all going well for whoever reads this.

Sq.

What's the Word?

Ever tried spelling things out in alphabet magnets? Do, it's the best fun. For about 99p you can go mental with words and phrases that make no sense, or communicate your feelings to those around you in an awesome way. Sort of like facebook updates or Twitter for children (and me).

So, I'm planning on uploading a photo of my magnetic 'Titanic' board every time I blog, so that you can see how I'm feeling, all visual like. Today, I'm feeling 'Dafodilz New Era'; although the first word is spelled wrong with a creatively used Q for a D, I think it fully sums up the sunny afternoon.

I picked daffodils on the way home, feeling all Wordsworth-esque and pretty happy.

Isn't life acceptable when you have alphabet magnets and the sun is shining.

Sq.

(By the way, I took these photos. These are the very daffodils I picked)

Weekends and Bleak Days

The finer things in life. Not products, moments; sat on a shitty little beach towel, sand blowing in your sausage rolls and self deprecation, deprecation in general. These things happen and everything's pretty much alright. You find an afternoon, a day go by without thinking of the crap that isn't in front of you. Weekends can be the best days of my life.

Then it's back to the bleak days and it's all back. I need the weekend to redeem my soul, and the daily grind just takes me back to where I started. What's the point in all this redemption if it's gone when I get back to the day-to-day? There isn't a point. None of it is particulalry pointful. Sometimes sat on a beach, or being with friends and laughing can make it all clear for a moment, but the majority of time is spent wondering why those times are the exception.

The quality of the sand... The firmness of the ground... Imported sand and deported ground... From beneath my feet.

Sq.

These five gears and wheels could drive to her/But this carriageway can't take me there

As some of you may know, I have recently become obsessed with two documentaries on BBC4 on Thursday nights. I think it's just a general fault of my personality that I become obsessed with things. Both of them concern travel, especially in cars. This week, 'Touring Britain' used 1930s and 1960s Shell driving guides to explore Cornwall and Dorset, and it was a lovely way of seeing how people embraced the changing face of the landscape to include motors, depsite their (well-founded) fears of change.

Secondly, 'Michael Smith's Drivetime' took a look at people who live on the road; funfair families, lorry drivers. He grows more angry at roads and cars with every episode, making me question why he decided to do the program in the first place, but his lyrical style and surprisingly fluid conceptions of how roads changed Britain make it a worhtwhile watch.

It's a fact that driving changes your life; I recently passed my test and see the changes in my life all the time. I even listen to music and wonder whether it would be good to drive to - for example the glorious 'Tonight' by Franz Ferdinand. I bought the two disc edition, which comes with the dub version of the album; almost a 'Hyde' to disc one's 'Jekyll'. I highly recommend doing so, as the second disc, entitled 'Blood' is almost another album, so it's great value- and the dub versions are fantastically weird and moody.

However, as far as driving to music goes, I did what everyone should, and made a playlist on my iPod consisting of 'Cars' by Gary Numan and several other care related tunes; 'Backseat Love' by NERD, 'On The Motorway' and subsequently 'Back on The Motorway' by Metronomy were in there too. Since my little car has a tape deck, I tend to waver between using the tape/iPod adapter and using 50p tapes I pick up from oxfam. There is also something to be said for the mixtape, the lost art of romance in music. I'm loving the tape, to be honest, and all of its bohemian, 90's excellence. Plus, it stops me being tempted to change tracks while driving, a proper safety plus.

Beep. Sq.

The Beauty of Betjeman

Lies in the simplicity of his words.

With a poet like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hardy or Blake, there is sometimes a certain masking of meaning with the words, which simply isn't present with Betjeman. In the introduction to the edition I have of collected Betjeman poetry, Hugo Williams writes:

"He lays out his wares for us to judge my his own standards, not his. Instead of a manifesto we get the whole man."

This is an idea I am wholly on board with, and while it has prompted criticism, from snobs and purists, it doesn't, and couldn't stop the ultimate end of poetry being fulfilled; people read it, and enjoy it. In fact, Betjeman's popularity seems fuelled by this accessible style, allowing people without the patience (perhaps) or trained eye of a metaphor specialist to enjoy poetry, and delight in the true purpose of this (to some degree) lost art; to feel like there are others out there who feel your feelings.

I urge you to read some Betjeman.
Sq.

I'm starting the year again.

1st January 2009.

So, it's the beginning of the new year.
Watch/listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NzECTWzvYc

It's going to be a good one! This will be a better year. So far, what have I done? Well...

Got up, had a shower, thought about starting again, decided to do it, and got on my blog. Harlem Shakes make things easier. I like it when music makes a decision for you, there's something of the religious about it. I don't follow the bible, I follow my iTunes library, or elbo.ws, or youtube.

Today, I plan to do lots of work. I was going to go outside and do something, but as soon as I got up, the sun went in. I hate that.

And cleaning; a new start, demanding the removal of lots of old things. Lovely.

Happy 2009!

Delusional Sq.

Don't let the silence get you down, though you've been sitting here for hours.

I recently questioned a loss of something I held dear.

In the end, I saw that it made room for all the other things I could hold dearer.

I keep managing to do this, and I feel like I'm finally learning from my mistakes. Friend to more than friends is like one of those chemical reactions which is irreversible. Or so I've found in my life to date, I'm ready to be proven wrong.

Anyway, I'm getting fed up of talking like this.

Have you ever thought about the difference between a dustmite and a mountain? I have. I do all the time. I'm sure you do too. It's so vast, it seems impossible. You look at a mountain, manage to comprehend it, then get the confusing image of a tiny, microscopic dustmite in your brain. It throws it all out of proportion, yet obviously completely into proportion.

And then there's you, stood between the mountain and the dustmite; you, the mountain to the dustmite, the mountain looking at you as if a dustmite. You feel oddly included and at the same time excluded in the huge scale of everything.

In early modern times, they had a concept of the 'Great Chain of Being'; everything and everyone had its place in the ranking. Kind of like a TMF top 100 one-hit-wonders, but instead of 100, everything, and instead of one-hit-wonders... everything.
I wonder sometimes where I'd be, stood under the mountain, next to that dustmite.

Sq.

Too many times we've been postally pipped.

Haha, what a l-o-l-able lyric from my new beau, Elbow.

Anyway, it's all good. I hope you're good. I am good. I keep having these terrible moments of literary inspiration, where I think of some phrase, idea, sentence of even word which I think of using later, but never write down. I can't remember any of them. Anyway, onwards and upwards. I'll have to keep a pen and notebook on me at all times, and not be lazy when they come to me at night.

Those times of infinite struggle between being nearly asleep and being epically inspired are a nightmare.

Speaking of nightmares, I've had a few. I don't know whether this is normal, but since 'the change' in my marital status, I have been suffering from taunting dreams of the way it was before. Dreams where I end up pleading, and being accepted and things going back to normal. They were sickening, worrying dreams and they stopped me getting on with things for about half an hour every morning. However, the night before last I had a dream where I, in the latter stages of the 'reconciliation' within the dream, said that I didn't want to, mainly because of people's opinion of me being lowered; being perceived as a weakling.

It's important to make clear that fact that I never would do any of the things my earlier dreams depicted.

And so, I thought that perhaps if I continued to dream the dreams until they became dreams of my strength and refusal to return to the previous relationship, I would know that the book was well and truly closed within me.

Last night I dreamt that we were just friends. Straightforward friends, and it led to a half happy, half sad (but prevalently happy) feeling when I woke up. I hope that this means I can progress both in my dreams and in real life; I used to quote Gabrielle's "Dreams can come true", but here it was a case of my own mental state (dreams) cathing up with reality. I feel like they have.

And it's good.
And it's great.

(Euphoria)

Sq.