mumbling

As usual it's been hard to maintain this. I knew it would be when I started it.
Time, the most precious coin. I have this nagging feeling every day, like something
you know you've forgotten, something important, and no matter how hard you try to
remember what it was the further it seems to slip away. It's the feeling of wasted
time, sand falling through the hourglass that you can't touch, can't stop. Like in
the Anna Nalick song, it's glued to the table. Life traps you in the room where you
spend too many long days doing nothing, or worse doing something you hate. You can
only look out the window to a bigger world, or sit and anxiously stare at the falling
sand, the sibilant whisper amplified by the anxiety to a harsh shriek, individual grains
crash down the unstable slope of your miserable life.

I bought a couples of kilts. A sport kilt and a utilikilt. Got the sport kilt last week and the utilikilt this week. I love them. The sport kilt is more traditional in that it is a plaid tartan - I got the morrison tartan. But it's 'sporty' in that it fits lower with velcro and is a much lighter material than a fully traditional scottish worsted wool kilt.

The utilikilt is more contemporary in design. It requires a belt to wear and, in black, the snaps and big belt make it somewhat gothic looking. It not quite as comfortable as the sport kilt, mainly because of the required belt, which makes it ride just a bit higher that I'm used to with shorts. And the material is a poly /cotton blend that is a bit coarser than the sport kilt material. I wore it 'traditional', i.e., no underwear and the material kind of irritated things. I pinned a folded, soft cotton bandana in the front for the second wearing and that helped a lot.

I really like them - it has been another one of those things that result in me feeling more comfortable with myself - I tend to stand a bit straighter in it - good for the sense of self.

Waiting for the last update to download, shouldn't be more than
a couple minutes, so don't have much time.

Read a piece in the Financial Times on video monitoring in London.
I think it's a good idea. People are like kids - you really can't
trust them to do what they're supposed to do without watching over
them. Sometimes I think the vast majority are incapable of accepting
and fulfilling the basic responsibility of being a part of a society.

I do have a problem. Can't stay focused - seems impossible to fight. Get sidetracked and become
deeply focused on some, usually, somewhat twisted topic and have to fight my way out of it like a
man drowning in some heavy viscous syrup.

And I do have a preoccupation with the weird and twisted. Looking for dog/cabal/queen of hearts
associations ran across the site, "The illuminati Formula to Create an Undetectable Total Mind
Control Slave" - a very heavy treatise on torture and various, nazis-like ways to totally wrap a
person up tight -made me think of Tool, Bourne Identity, propaganda, govt. control conspiracy, dark
corners, horror fascination and the cracks and recesses of my mind. It wraps around to my own
twisted pleasure thoughts - 'gentle' torture is a sexual turnon... What is twisted anyway??

Running has something to do with this - and what Beth said awhile ago about something she read
about running. It's when I'm the 'happiest'. I'm not getting bounced around by my brain - there's
no discontent, no anxiety, no doubts, no depression, no scattering, no splintering, no jitters, none
of the weirdness I just live with otherwise - it's like meditation, just me the world and the
trail - like sleep where everything just goes away, but unlike sleep, I get to sense, get to
stimulate myself, immerse myself in the experience and let go of me.

You have a fairly large backlog of snippets of verse, ramblings, events, turmoil, and stress stretched cross several files, scraps of paper, and various note-pads. What are you going to do with them?

Christmas, that wonderful season of commercial giving and cheer, is over - and you're suffering from the affects of over-indulgence in baked goods, assorted sweets and earnestly offered heaping portions of family values. The first from a lack of self-control and discipline, the later from the ostensible good intentions and caring of various members of the extended family.

If we can get past the next day or two without being sick, we might survive the new year.

But you are a cynical, cold-hearted bastard though. There were two deaths in the family over the holidays. Big Jim died the day before the solstice and Aunt Pauline died Christmas morning.

Both PJ and Betty seemed to make a point of commenting on how Cindy couldn't be there to say goodbye - they got divorced way back when. What, may I ask, is the point of it though? Death's face is never nice, and makes no allowances for the feelings and thoughts of the dying, much less that of those left. Our guilt and regrets are what they are, and death, while adding poignancy, will not provide a Dickensian absolution and redeem our Scrooge within us. I'm an atheist, I see little point in basing life's decisions on what may lay with me on my death bed.

It was true that Uncle Bill and Pauline had a picture perfect marriage - Uncle Bill's despair that he would not be able to care for Pauline 'till death' did them part was the single thing keeping him in this life. Pauline is the epitome of the devoutly religious, doubly so, because she believed without preaching or judging. I'd be the last to say a single ill word about either of them. But again - Ah yes, you have no aspiration to sainthood do you. No I don't, and I think it lame to prod me with the goad of assumed values and morals based on religious and philosophical underpinnings that I simply don't share. An ecclesiastical whipping only satisfies the righteous need to punish, the slight sting I feel only pisses me off.

You are a sick fucker you know that? Yeah, I know.

Six o'clock winter solstice somewhere a little south of my mind.
2nd Street Brewery. A brewery on 2nd Street. Should have run
to see the sun, to see her.... What for I'm not sure, maybe for the
run, maybe for... Yes, please I'd like a beer.

Jazz in the bar, she's like the red-head in the mural on the wall.
The eyes painted, expression remote and a little unreal.

Copper bar-top dimpled reflections like my thoughts, blurred, pocked,
and unrecognizable. Is what I want what I need? Sittin' at a bar
drinking beer at six o'clock on the shortest day of the year.

Like last year this one is gone, fragments of memories - murked
experiences, another thanksgiving of thanks for what? I'm not sure.
Another xmas around the corner, on another unknown, unnamed
street, soon to be forgotten.

Came for - what - the idea of - someone to meet? But the people
are all like the ones painted on the wall. Bars are the graveyard
of the lonely and the dysfunctional.

sad rhymes; how to arrange the phrases, to capture the feel, the
angst, the uncertainty, the need, the want.

But the beer is good.

Happy Solstice.

Another year, gone in innumerable, fleeting moments; each,
in its brief passage, sharp, rich, full of sense and
immediacy. Then they're gone, some poignant and
brilliant, bigger and richer in experience and sensation -
and you know that you want to hang on to them, to put them
away on a shelf; others quietly slip by nearly unnoticed in our
preoccupation and lack of mindfulness and awareness. But
all of them gone, an echo of reality that fades so quickly
you wonder if they happened at all, making us doubt the
reality of existence itself. The ones you try to keep
merely tchotchke, tawdry in the bright ornamentation of our
mind's paint on them, remote on their dusty knickknack
shelf. Others faded to the sepia tones of those long ago
moments we connect together - rosary beads on the string
of time, that we tick through, trying to make real by the
litany of reminiscence. The seasons, the metronome of Sun
and Moon, provide proof of some permanence; of an order
and meaning to that something, that ineffable otherness
that we inexplicably insist on trying to find. By their
regularity, their apparently endless cycle alone, we place
such significance, milestones, that like the comfortable
repetition of tradition, mark and measure our passage
through what is often a surreal and frightening landscape.
But the comfort is tinged with a troubled unease, an
anxiety recognized but not acknowledged. For the cairns
lead inexorably to a finish line we don't really want to
cross. They mark moments, all too fleeting, in a
fantastic run we desperately don't want to end.

Happy Solstice:)

I keep thinking on committing to this thing.

It going to hurt many people; It's going to be very hard
for a while; I'm sure it's going affect my relationship
with the kids - but not necessarily for the worse...

But, as I get closer to the precipice, and more clearly
imagine the feeling of letting go, of clearly visualizing
taking that step off, out into nothingness

I get such a sense of relief; this feeling of release.
I can't call it joy; but I get this somehow full feeling
of happiness and contentment - well, not really - I'm maybe
using words that connote too immediate a feeling. Maybe of
lightness...

But it just feels good and somehow right - can I say that?
Can it be? Or is it still just the yearning for what I
can't and shouldn't have?

got to get a life or throw this one away.

Geez, moody, pissed off, and distracted.
A shitty day alround so far.