Notes from Saturdays

  Screenshots of The lost Jockey by René Magritte It's been aaaaages since I signed up for a class other than sports. Even sports take months of self-talk. But then, blaming one for physical disorientation is like blaming them for having a big nose; Easy to maneuver around. This one's painting & obviously I'm not handling it well. You think you know what your favorite paintings are? Wait until someone asks you to send them your top 5 so they can tailor their class to it. If your answer is right away without a pause 5 paintings, well fuck off! You're not the audience of this writing. I'm talking to those judgmental troubled souls who when asked by a stranger to define themselves in 2 words, 5 paintings or a freaking Kahoot quiz, simply dissolve into an unnecessary state of crisis; Who am I? What if I send the wrong image? What was the name of the guy who painted men with bird heads?... I've realized despite my best hopes that I am very ordinary - unspecial. N...

I always knew the type of music one chooses says a lot about one's character and mood. But I think the most expressive & accurate reveal of one's deepest truest desires is the type of ambient music one chooses. The background sound that one plays in the hope that the present mood will be transformed. It's a sunny late Spring morning. Outside birds are chirping furiously on the trees. I am in a vicious mood after a long night of being woken up a hundred time by the sounds of the person next to me in their fucking deep sleep, sore from head to toe from running & being generally an unfit shit. I sit down to work & I choose this as my ambient sound: Oldies playing in another room and it's raining. It makes me laugh inside, a bitter sad although not-giving-a-single-fuck kind of laugh when I realize in a world that couldn't possibly be more connected, modern, intertwined & accessible, someone makes a 3 hour playlist to imagine they are in a house on a rain...

I woke up to the sticky dampness of rainy spring mornings; Not a soaked up greyish blue one or a wild & aggressive storm. I woke up to a soft greyish white air that sits all over you like a second skin and spreads a hazy mist on the distant trees. I spent almost all of my life in a humid strip of land near the sea. I sometimes think my body can't rest at night unless it's heavily saturated by 95% humidity. Maybe that's why I'm restless & flaky.  Sticky rainy morning also means no lunatics out there with their jack hammers & hedge trimmers & tree saws & lawn mowers from hell drilling their way into my brain. Only the dripping sound of water on the timber deck, a distant bird, the humming of the fridge, the creaking floor boards upstairs where M is walking between shower & wardrobe.  I remember in the hous e where I spent my teens & 20s, when it rained in late spring & summer, I would drag the outdoor chair under the eaves and sit with my l...

Dear Arthur, I hope you know how much it tears me into pieces every time I tell you I'll be spending the rest of the day working on your job and then hang up and get pushed and pulled into 100 other jobs. Or it might be Adele singing her heart out in the background making everything sound like a heartache. But I do sincerely feel bad about letting your job down day after day. I hope you know that. And I'm sorry I don't know all the things you thought I knew how to do. I think you've figured it out by now and I feel bad about it. & I'm sorry I get confused by bureaucracy, this game of passing the paper tray on, with all so many booby traps, I feel bad about not loving my job, and about hating the politicians, and hating the neighbor with the chain saw, and wanting to scream at everyone every hour of the day to leave me the fuck alone & not leave me alone!  Sometimes the anger is so consuming I get confused by what I've said & what's been only in m...

I've started suspecting that living miserably is considerably easier that living happily or fulfilled. Because aren't most of us just mainstream whiny cowards? But then I get out of bed & make the same black tea & the same grainy toast and sit at my desk for an hour & stare at the emails & folders & jobs I don't really care about, like deep down, if it was my last day on earth I would drop all these jobs in a blink & run the opposite direction, not sure where, because I don't know what I really care about yet but I'm sure I would drop & run.  I write, I take photos, this is me trying to live these days. Maybe it's cowardly to be this unmotivated. Maybe it's not. I can't tell anymore, can't remember the last time I was delighted to know if I'm not, so this is pretty normal right now. Except... if it was my last day on earth, I'd be soooo pissed. Wouldn't you?

Labour weekend. Spring clean in progress. An occasion pregnant with emotional parcels of various sizes and familiarity. I found my old digital camera in a decaying bag; my first: A silver PowerShot Canon I received as a birthday present from my ex. Half the size of my current iPhone. I loaded new batteries and flicked through the photos bracing myself for projectile emotional trauma: A few shots from December 2016 when I was selling all my cheap second hand furniture to move up north; a lamp & bedside table, a single bed & its broken mattress, and my beloved clunky black mountain bike. The one I rode everywhere because I didn't have a car or a license. The one I pedaled through southerly headwind, cursing my life. The oldest photos were from back home 9 or 10 years ago, just some test shots from a damaged shutter and the very last, a blurry badly lit portrait of dad in the living room. There were more memories, more life, more of a person in that tiny forgotten camera than ...

 I think about taking up volunteer teaching sometimes. For completely selfish reasons of course: to feel better about myself. To feel the amazing sense of power and greatness when you demystify and disillusion, when you know and they don’t and when they ask and you generously give! But then I think, like all the best laid out plans that turn into big disasters I will probably end up with a bunch of asshole teenagers that have no interest in learning and drive me to suicide. Or worse, adults with their colorful array of complexes and insecurities. That’s the end of the philanthropic dream there.