Using kids as hired guns, just to start another war, and singing God Bless America....unless they know, they know, what for.

Kris Dollimore's Requiem To Two Johns

This is Kris Dollimore playing a song John Fahey wrote when Mississippi John Hurt died in 1966.

Immediately there's a sense of fearful automation to the piece that sounds like Death got bored of the scythe and now chases people with a combine harvester. Part of the dread in there is something I sense in lot of Fahey's music- a mixture of stuffy front porch, heatwaves on cracked clay and vultures wheeling, and it comes from that resonance that flows in and out of your focus sounding either indispensable or unbearable. Something feeling either extremely regular or very wrong in the body.

Following the initial sense of being hunted there is a cascade of notes in the next section that reminds me of a couple of things- one is the idea of the recapitulation of life at the moment of death*, the other is an intense expression of gratitude. Something around hunting or homage or the parallel between the two.

A chain of hunters from Hurt to Fahey to Dollimore, who plays it so fucking beautifully.

Scratch

Great clip from a must-see film for anyone obsessed with breaks.

Mo Monet Mo Problems

Southern Nights

The Chokin' Kind

Heard a few versions after realising this isn't the original, but definitely the funkiest.

Creepin'

Swamp Dogg's music continues to be one of my favourite musical discoveries in a long time. Can't stop listening to him.

'The Universe Hates You'

Note- steps to an ecology of mind (Gregory Bateson):

"The principle of pride-in-risk is ultimately almost suicidal.

It is all very well to test once whether the universe is on your side,

but to do so again and again, with increasing stringency of proof,

is to set out on a project which can only prove that the universe hates you."

Brilliant lyrics. Found this on a documentary about John Fahey the other day.

Aren't words for this one.

Galician Interlude

"A slip-road is a road which cars use to drive on and off a motorway."/
"It is a great temptation to want to make the spirit explicit."*/
Talking about absolutely nothing

Accidental selfie. Captures the overarching theme.

There are a couple of words that trigger a surge of dopamine in my head. One is 'Patrick', a hangover from my formative years as diligent accomplice and hagiographer to my closest brother in age, whose ability to roam the house each night stealing food to order was one of the several things about him that filled me with a reverence that lingers. I can remember the long minutes waiting in fevered hope for him to come back to our bedroom with the peanut butter jar and some spoons. He'd reappear, tiptoeing through the door gingerly, neck stretched and ears straining so as not to fuck up the last few steps. As soon as he closed the door the cautious look changed into his trademark beam of victory...admittedly it was the victory of the axis of liquid modernity and corn syrup over our metabolism and our parent's sanity, but that beaming smile was like the sun returning anew. He's still mythic and continues to pollute reality with sparks, much to the confusion of most friends we introduce him to.

The second word is 'slip-road'. Dear god. A slip-road is such a beautiful thing.
Accessible, usually on the edge of a town. The bandwidth of a motorway without threat of arrest, close enough to civilisation that there's always a plan B. Basically a legitimated spot in an edge environment. All roads lead to Rome, but often there are barriers, tolls, police or no place for cars to pull over. A good slip-road with space for cars to stop makes it feels like mercy is alive and well in the world, hiding in planning oversights and maintenance access.

I was recently in Galicia on a four-day trip. I'm not going to go blow-by-blow because I think my approach to chronicling these trips is changing a bit. I don't want to write a directory of kind or helpful humans, but have another go at seeing what happens to my brain at the roadside.




On Saturday in Ferrol, Galicia, I was looking for a place to get a lift out in the direction of A Coruña to see the famous 2000 year-old lighthouse I learnt about whilst researching Roman Hispania for my history classes this year. I stood by a zebra crossing for twenty minutes or so until a local man with a great bristly walrus moustache and blues brothers shades came over and told me that despite my waiting in the right place for the motorway, nobody was in that much of a rush and I'd be better to wait on the other side of the city center where the national road headed east before going south. 
"Thank you, sir."
Cue discovery of a slip-road (!) heading out to the FE-14 and my next interaction some time later, a dog-walking man with hair like white seaweed draped over a rock raising his finger to tell me how I'd be there all day. Poor guy was interrupted by a car pulling over beside us and he waved bye as I ran up to it.
Me: "Hola! Dónde vas?" (Hi, where are you going?)
Bald, round faced sea-eyed man with cold expression: "I'm going to Vladivostok."
Shit, I thought I'd found the motherlode there. Hard to turn down a lift that long. He seemed Russian, but Jesús turned out to be a retired Galician shipping captain on his way to A Coruña. A man who loved his 45 years at sea and missed it dearly in his retirement. 'I used to travel the world. Now I just travel from Ferrol to A Coruña and back.' A conversation held together by reflections on the radio station M80 and its pop songs. Jesús told me about an interest in travelling around Russia in the 80s using his four months on, two months off schedule. To do so he had joined the communist party in Galicia, got a letter of recommendation and managed to travel from Galicia to Madrid to Paris to Moscow by train, followed by 16 days on the train to Vladivostok. He spent a week there and came back. This story was interrupted by Sheryl Crow's 'All I wanna do is have some fun'. As soon as it came on he fell silent and turned the volume up as far as it would go. 

The trip didn't go as (un)planned in the sense that I'd meant to be there longer but hadn't packed properly for the occasion. The heatwave fell apart and the rain returned. I'd brought a guitar for the first time, but hadn't realised how damaged my boots were. I think when I stepped on a nail two years ago the change in my gait introduced sore spots. Having walked in comfortable boots for so many years, it's hard to see the point of giving myself blisters when it's something I'm lucky enough to be able to change.

From A Coruña I had a great lift with two Dutch surfers/vagabonds in a van who came back from a roundabout to pick me up because one of them had spent time hitching in the Andes where you can wait 5 hours for a single car to reject you. And where a single lift could often last a day. That night I ended up in the campsite on the beach where they'd heard the surf was good.
 
I realised that night that it was probably the last trip I'd have using that tent. I wasn't prepared for how sad that made me.
I don't tend to think of myself as someone who gets that attached to objects, but that thing has kept me out of heavy rain and snow for five years. There have been so many nights where you wander around alone at stupid o'clock trying to find a place to sleep, or you get that last extra lift and suddenly you're deeper in the countryside and can pitch it where you like. You fall asleep genuinely laughing because you're so happy to be safe and dry for the night. There was a week in 2013 when I was able to share that nightly relief with a man I was travelling with on foot, but apart from that I've been alone, and I associate that sense of utter joy with the green walls of my tent.
What killed it is three cumulative months over three years of being absolutely hammered by UV, dust and storms when working at a festival in Aragón. The mosquito net is torn in places, all zips are broken and the hole in the fly is starting to spread. 
I'll move on and keep on finding that sense of joy in shelter in and out of other tents, and I suppose it's really just the ratio around body temperature, dryness and lack of foreign organisms in your personal space that ticks the 'you are saved' box. The tent is the skin around that experience but you can find it in other places.

My beloved on Yakushima back in 2012.

I think the last thing I want to mention about the trip is the last day. I said the heat wave fell apart and things got very rainy. I had a brilliant morning travelling through the Cantabrian mountains high up in the passenger seat of José's coal truck pointing out birches and talking about vegans and people who look unrelated to their other family members. I love the north for the thick vegetation and biodiversity. If water be the food of plants, rain on. Completely worth it when you're prepared.

Galician woods as I last left them.

By the afternoon I was back down the mountains and onto the yellow table of Spain, where I waited here for three and a half hours. Not my own photo but it's exactly how it was:

 
Dead road at 3pm. I'd tried hitching further up the road where all possible routes converge but had no luck, so went to the garage to escape sunburn. I met the station attendant, Gabriel and we had a protracted conversation backed by three hours of glacial clouds and tilting shadows, and interspersed with him filling up petrol for the odd car that rolled up.
He told me about the feeling of racing his lithe leaf-green Kawasaki, and proudly talked about his four American Staffordshire terriers. They have their own swimming pool and he spends €280 a month on dog food. I wish I had a photo of his face when he spoke about them. Pure sunshine.
He kept asking if I was bored, and seemed puzzled that I wasn't disappointed when people passed on.

What I was thinking about and couldn't express to him in my bad Spanish is that one of the odder modes alive and well in my head is where one treats everything in one's current plot of physical reality as a personalised metaphor or poem. In an effort to glean value out of the terrifying raw drone of time, you basically act as if you are inside an idiosyncratic world that you've created. 
As if your own thoughts had origami-ed themselves into matter.
I'm not solipsistic enough to actually believe I live in such a world, but I find that to entertain that model once in a while gives me a great sense of peace and allows time to pass. It is because it imparts any situation with a sense of curation. Anything can be looked at and examined and analysed for symbolism and comparison. Oil is a theme that often comes up, ever present in the circulatory systems of both roads and the network of Chinese manufacturing that beats its plastic blood throughout the world. The latter network is something I call Pulmonary Sinensis and I got it from standing at garages looking at cars and trash.

In reference to the second sub-title of this post, I feel I'm close to tacking directly into the wind so I'm going to stop. All I wanted to do was add a little bit more to the chronicles of how waiting at the side of the road expresses itself in my organism. I remain an addict of and prisoner of the sensation, so this is just another leaf of the jail diary.



*Ludwig Wittgenstein

Back from a hitch around Galicia- write-up to follow.

Meanwhile back on the Don Covay wagon. An embarassment of riches...

River run

Sudden recall.

This one goes out to anyone holding a nuclear code:

"There's a hole in Daddy's arm, where all the money goes. And Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose."

Sam Stone

There's a hole in daddy's arm, where all the money goes. And Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.



DH Lawrence

5 Days

Drums and backing vocals.

Hey there lonely boy

Flowers By The Sea- William Carlos Williams

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s

edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form—chicory and daisies

tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement—or the shape

perhaps—of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways

peacefully upon its plantlike stem

The Groundhog- Richard Eberhart

In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot  our naked frailty.

There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.

Inspecting close maggots' might
And seething cauldron of his being,   
Half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry stick.

The fever arose, became a flame
And Vigour circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the sun,                   
And through my frame a sunless trembling.

My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day
Watching the object, as before;
And kept my reverence for knowledge         

Trying for control, to be still,
To quell the passion of the blood;
Until I had bent down on my knees
Praying for joy in the sight of decay.

And so I left; and I returned                     
In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,
But the bony sodden hulk remained

But the year had lost its meaning,
And in intellectual chains                                                 
I lost both love and loathing,
Mured up in the wall of wisdom.

Another summer took the fields again
Massive and burning, full of life,
But when I chanced upon the spot             
There was only a little hair left,

And bones bleaching in the sunlight
Beautiful as architecture;
I watched them like a geometer,
And cut a walking stick from a birch.

It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,

And thought of China and of Greece,         
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

"For a Lamb" by Richard EberhartI saw on the slant hill a putrid lamb,Propped with daisies. The sleep looked deepThe face nudged in the green pillowBut the guts were out for crows to eat.
Where’s the lamb? whose tender plaintSaid all for the mute breezes.Say he’s in the wind somewhere,Say, there’s a lamb in the daisies.

Hurt Hawks

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

-Robinson Jeffers

The Beaks Of Eagles
An eagle's nest on the head of an old redwood on one of the
precipice-footed ridges
Above Ventana Creek, that jagged country which nothing but a
falling meteor will ever plow; no horseman
Will ever ride there, no hunter cross this ridge but the winged
ones, no one will steal the eggs from this fortress.
The she-eagle is old, her mate was shot long ago, she is now mated
with a son of hers.
When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same
tree, in the splinters of the thunderbolt.
The she-eagle is older than I; she was here when the fires of
eighty-five raged on these ridges,
She was lately fledged and dared not hunt ahead of them but ate
scorched meat. The world has changed in her time;
Humanity has multiplied, but not here; men's hopes and thoughts
and customs have changed, their powers are enlarged,
Their powers and their follies have become fantastic,
The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly. The
motor and the plane and the great war have gone over him,
And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle
Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry and
is never tired; dreams the same dreams,
And hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the throats
of these living mountains.
It is good for man
To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and
anguish, not to go down the dinosaur's way
Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him
To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact
in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.

-Robinson Jeffers

Victory In Sight

I'm in love. I never noticed this in the Prado before, but found it the other day when my aunt and uncle were visiting.

To Redeem The Day

[Writing] begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt. It begins with that kind of appetite.

-Leonard Cohen

"Into this furnace I ask you now to venture. You whom I cannot betray."

I was four years old the first time I heard Leonard Cohen's music.

One Saturday morning I came downstairs to 'So Long Marianne' playing from the speakers in the empty living room. 

I went over to the hearth of our long disused fireplace, and half-standing, half-hanging with my hands on the mantelpiece, I listened to the song with a furrowed brow and tried to work out just how destitute this man was.

If he wasn't homeless he was at least hungry, and possibly an alcoholic. 

Up to that time my understanding of homeless people had been that they were always sad and you could do nothing for them but frown until you felt similarly sad, give them some pennies to put towards the house they were going to buy, or ask your parents to buy them an ice cream if it was a really hot day. 

What struck me about this homeless singer though, was that he intended to laugh, cry and then laugh again.

Life wasn't simply a vale of tears and you could be happy and sad at the same time. There was something sphinx-like about it that stayed with me.

My parents played that album on loop for a few years, but aside from some brief exposure to 'I'm Your Man' during my dad's minidisc phase, I didn't hear any more of Cohen´s music until I was eighteen, when a friend of my brother played a few chords of One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong on the guitar one day. The memories came flooding back. I began to teach myself the guitar immediately.

Twenty-three years from that initial morning and Leonard feels like a fundamental part of me still. When I started to travel alone he was a great comfort.

  "Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control. It begins with your family but soon it comes round to your soul. I've been where you're heading, I think I can see how you're pinned. When you're not feeling holy/wholly, your loneliness says that you've sinned."

After the travel and into work, a brief university attempt and bouts of young-man's-depression he stuck around. 'Dress rehearsal rag' functioned as the litmus test for suicide at one point. Sitting here I'm now glad we both failed that one, and it took the edge of shame off to know someone else who was compelled to pull out of the nosedive...even if levelling out still just meant clipping the shrubs with one´s wing-tips.

His music has been a map for me that played strangely well into the territory I came to experience, and anything of his that gave some solace I've generally internalized without thinking about it. 

There is something elemental about the poetry in his work that I think allows it to be embodied so readily, specifically in his first three albums. I see him as something between a sculptor and a glacier, bearing upon his words gradually until they are few, and worn smooth. An ineluctable force working in hope of ineluctable language. The result for me is almost gnostic. The language gave me either permission or reassurance when wandering and experimenting. It made it feel alright to grow in hope of a light as yet unseen.

Right now I am processing his death from the perspective of someone who owes no small part of their thinking to the man. So much of his work offers itself to help in remembering, celebrating and mourning him, but what has struck out for me at the moment is 'The Old Revolution'. I'd overlooked this song until last week. It is difficult to comment on the significance of this song for me at the moment without giving it chapter and verse and pulling a few psychological threads to the point of unravelling, so I'll try to keep it short.

What I feel I took that first day, from the man who laughs and cries and intends to continue doing both, was that you can tolerate and, moreover, survive apparent ambiguities and contrasts. What seemed to be in very simple terms, something of a mission to remain happy in sad times.

Twenty three years and a lot of ambiguity and contrast later, and I can say that that the odd sense of continuity in my own life would affirm this, and that it probably helped to have had this model to work with from the start.

There is a reframing of this point in a staggering line from the first verse of 'The Old Revolution' that says what to me is the same message about tolerance of contrast, from an inverted angle that fits my own cycles of fevered searching and resignation:

"Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows."


The gyroscope of resignation rebalances from either side. When you are desperate to remain happy despite life´s sadness, you can do so. Some years later when depression and cynicism begin to show signs of leisurely use, it can be alarming to remember that moments of happiness are inevitable, whether you like it or not.Your new challenge might be to remain aloof and stoic whilst stepping around the puddles of joy.
This is almost like a permission slip to come back off pseudo-intellectual Heraclitic world-weary holy mountain and have a slice of cake with the other idiots, of whom you are of course one, in case you´d forgotten.

And then in the last verse I am hit by a line that contrasts this. After permission to put your picnic blanket down in the shit and enjoy the atmospheric phenomena of a life in gruel, there comes a line that gives me restlessness.

"The hand of your beggar is burdened down with money. The hand of your lover is clay."

Having spent perhaps enough time the last year foregoing intellectual perseverance for comfort, this makes me want to scoff my cake and get back on the search. Joy in sadness, yes. Sadness in joy, yes. Stopping at either one for too long? Not really possible. You may be figure of eighting between the two nuclei for the rest of your days, and that might be pointless, but so what? You can´t just stop here in the land of relative financial comfort and untold cynicism, enjoying your sandwich whilst batting the flies away. You have to take another shot at something meaningful to you, even if it just ends up being the return journey.

 I imagine life will continue to be a constant tacking between the two, and perhaps the searching-stopping cycle is the furnace he speaks of, in the last line of the song. In some way these words embody the golden breadcrumbs he left for me as I came through innocence to experience and grew up with him; acceptance and love of the human carnival in its glory and its weariness.
 I would like to echo his words back to him as he embarks on his voyage into the place where real ambiguity begins:

"Into this furnace I ask you now to venture,

 You whom I cannot betray."

Sleep

Really reminded of Mahler.

Borne by the autumn tide comes the return of mopey music.

Chin Up

Be happy Ürgüp, there is no smoke above you.

Fluvial prayers.

Rogers on Learning

Regarding Learning and Its Facilitation (1969)
How does a person learn? How can important learnings be facilitated? What basic theoretical assumptions are involved?
Here are a number of the principles which can, I believe, be abstracted from current experience and research related to this newer approach:
Learning

1) Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning.
2) Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.

3) Learning which involves a change in self organization - in the perception of oneself - is threatening and tends to be resisted.

4) Those learning which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.

5) When threats to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.

6) Much significant learning is acquired through doing.

7) Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process.

8) Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner - feelings as well as intellect - is the most lasting and pervasive.

9) Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance.

10) The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change.

Facilitation

1) The facilitator has much to do with setting the initial mood or climate of the group or class experience.
2) The facilitator helps to elicit and clarify the purposes of the individuals in the class as well as the more general purposes of the group.

3) He relies upon the desire of each student to implement those purposes which have meaning for him, as the motivational force behind significant learning.

4) He endeavours to organize and make easily available the widest possible range of resources for learning.

5) He regards himself as a flexible resource to be utilized by the group.

6) In responding to expressions in the classroom group, he accepts both the intellectual content and the emotionalized attitudes, endeavouring to give each aspect the approximate degree of emphasis which it has for the individual or the group.

7) As the acceptant classroom climate becomes established, the facilitator is able increasingly to become a participant learner, a member of the group, expressing his views as those of one individual only.

8) He takes the initiative in sharing himself with the group - his feelings as well as his thoughts - in ways which do not demand nor impose but represent simply a personal sharing which students may take or leave.

9) Throughout the classroom experience, he remains alert to the expression indicative of deep or strong feelings.

10) In his functioning as a facilitator of learning, the leader endeavours to recognize and accept his own limitations.

Boom!

Shimmering goodness.

"If you can remember the 60's, you weren't there!"

Barbara Dane

All this is coming off of MGMT's Late Night Tales comp. Absolute gem.

Here With Me

Hang in there two minutes and you'll feel it.

Gentle Thoughts, Soothing Notions

Showing mad love.

As the furnace draws away for another six months, can't say it wasn't golden.

Blessed are the brassholders.

Who taught this cat to sing? Real deal.

Lal

I got holes in my pockets baby, I got patches on my pants.

Aman; A part

An episode from the recent hitch from Madrid to London. Rest soon.

At 4 in the morning it started bucketing. Nervous engines pre-stoked by a few hours of light-infused half-sleep, my body reacted suddenly and I came to consciousness stood under a tree, sleeping bag and rucksack in hand. Small joy in being surprisingly dry, soon crushed under the recognition of how little sleep I'd actually had.
Initially bedding down had been fun- a skulking tour of the waysides and a trip through a hole in a fence into the inviting black fields adjacent– until it dawned all I'd done was catalogue every of the truckers' ideal piss perches then almost throw my sleeping bag down in a manured furrow.
The pitch I'd just leapt up from was the one innocuous place I'd found climbing back through that hole. Anyway, rain avoided,  I toddled off to a dry spot in the doorway of an abandoned restaurant in the service station. Threw down yesterday's signs to add a bit of padding to the roll mat and the half-hearted attempt at more sleep. It didn't work and I was soon browsing the garage for coffee and non-extortionate foodstuffs.
At that point I came across a card to give my dad for his Ph.D graduation (one of two reasons I was hitching to the UK.)

A bit of a nutty card but you have to know my Dad. Whole thing is summed up by the expression of the zoo-keeper, lip curled in an expression of considerable muscle strain and flagrant curiosity at how much confection can be dropped into such a maw in one go. To me it suggested the spirit of enquiry at the moment of its absolution.
Some time spent outside of the garage with my sign, watching what I guessed were two colleagues rambling away in French together. Guys in their 50's, both with spectacles, curly grey hair, smart shoes, tight jeans and shirts tucked in. Just quietly observing them. Six cigarettes and four coffees later they got into separate cars and disappeared. I padded off to the main entrance of the service station to meet the 'dawn', or the wan grey misty barometric car wash that passes for dawn at that time in that place. Spain has ruined me- the sun lives there and merely haunts the rest of Europe.
Playing the game of numbers, waiting there gave maximum advertising to the maximum number of people. I think an hour later the rain went up a gear again.
Coming back to throw myself on the bench inside I realised I'd been in that station for 13 hours.
"Hey!"
I looked up to see a teenage boy smiling at me from the bench across the way. Sat beside two women, whom I guessed were his sister and mother from the resemblance. Mother wore a headscarf, smiling politely, leaning forward with her hands folded. The two teenagers were sat up straight, beaming, eyes engaged with my bag and sign.
Boy: "Everything's going to be fine! You just have to have that mindset."
Me: "Thanks, I'm glad to hear someone else thinks the same."
He and his sister got up and came over to talk, and we spent about half an hour on life goals, the military, becoming a millionaire by the time you're thirty, curiosity, teaching, the road from Morocco to Amsterdam and school in Holland. I showed them the card I'd chosen and the boy fell on the floor in tears of laughter...twice actually.
When I arrived at sunset the evening before I wrote in my notebook that all I could hope for at that hour was a good conversation. Took half a day but it worked. If I was scientifically persistent enough I'd consider a study on the fatigue-eliminating aspect of positive acknowledgment at the roadside. Some days before in Burgos when I was at my wit's end (sleepless start to the day, endless marching, sore feet, rain and a dead national road) a garage owner came over, looked at my route, paused and opted for buoyant prescription over leaden/realistic prognosis:"Buena suerte!"(Good luck!) and a pat on the back.
That was an intense day for a number of reasons, but any small kindness during the wait acts as a pivot and the slate is wiped. You get on with it. In Burgos this meant a vampirical springing to the feet and the next car stopping immediately and whisking me to Irún.
In the same way, the thirteen hours in that station south of Lille was immediately redeemed by the positivity and openness of those two young people. The boy was somewhere between woeful and angry that both myself and his sister couldn't give him a firm answer in terms of a life goal, but we talked that over till he was sure we had them and they were just latent. His is to finish school in a year so that he can join the army and start making some serious money.
Their father came in from napping in the car to collect them for the drive back to Holland. We said our goodbyes and here again prescription was chosen over prognosis- they thought I'd get a lift but also that I'd be in France at least another day, and they just said good luck. I wished them the same and said farewell, and as the boy trailed the rest of his family out the door he stopped suddenly, came back, shook my hand and introduced himself as Aman.

Well Aman, if you end up here somehow, thanks to you and your sister for that chat. Ten minutes later I got a lift all the way to Brixton.

I Don't Know Why

Hitched to london safely.report to follow.

Ringing In The Dawn

Been listening to the whole album a lot recently. If you like this follow it up.

Colleen

First heard Colleen about ten years ago when snooping through my dad's CDs. Didn't know if she was still making music but she turned up for a rooftop gig around the corner from me this weekend. Enchanting would be the word, she played a 6 string viola* and sang like a siren.

*Treble Viola Da Gamba

Patrick Caulfield- Earthenware (1967)

Reading "The Anatomy Of Human Destructiveness" by Fromm as part of a drive to read the list of 15 books that Bill Coperthwaite 'would have saved if the world burned'. Reminded of other books of his, including this from The Art of Loving:

"Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton — well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature."

Hockney- Sun (1973)

Spinning gold from hay.

Tea

Midas Put His Mitts On This

Lu'ay Sami

Rimbauld-Illuminations clip

"As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided, a hare paused among the sainfoins and the swaying bellflowers, and said his prayer to the rainbow through the spider's web."

"From that time, the Moon heard jackals howling through the wildernesses of thyme - and eclogues in wooden shoes grumbling in the orchard. 
Then, in the forest, violet-hued, burgeoning, Eucharis told me that it was Spring."- Rimbauld, Illuminations

 

Blast from the past.

Message from Dad

"I have never seen this picture card vista except on a postcard. I guess we have to take it on trust like the moon landings."

"If I was a catfish, swimming in the deep blue sea..."

"You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you."- Robert Anton Wilson

Crackalackin'

Dying stuck inside a guitar.