Bang! You're Dead

When one tells a Doctor or a Mental Health Professional that one has practically considered suicide, which is to say one has a plan by which to end one's life, they give one a list of contact phone numbers and instructions on how and to whom to present oneself at the A&E Department of a Hospital should one reach that extremity again in future.

The list and instructions are a futile gesture - one does not plan suicide in order to cry for help, then one merely plans a failed suicide. One plans suicide to put a subjective end to the World, to from an unbearable and inescapable source of pain by ceasing to be, because when the self ends, the pain ends, and subjectively the World has never existed because the Self and its memories are gone utterly and irretrievable.

That time comes anyway, so better to make it a friend and a servant than await it through more sad and empty years as a feared enemy.

The Damage Done

"Every junky is a setting sun, I've seen the needle and the damage done"
Neil Young "The Needle and the Damage Done"

There are worse and more destructive addictions than Smack as this poor bastard discovered.

Graphic Erotica - Sashimi Girls

I've no idea who made these drawings but I love them:

Hoarding Opportunities

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life - educated men who live in the East End - coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Oscar Wilde "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"

More than any other social group I despise the middle and upper class Left. Why? For a very straight-forward reason. They hoard opportunity as fiercely as any rich Tory, while paying lip-service to equality. They oppose selective education, condemning poor children to no-hope comprehensives, while using their own class privilege, be it money or insider information, to buy themselves into the catchment areas of good comprehensives and pay for private tuition for their children.

They complain endlessly of environmental degradation and carbon footprints while driving petrol-hungry luxury cars and flying to numerous luxury international holidays every year.

They support mass immigration and generally are the first to accuse the poor of being ignorant racists and islamophobes, despite its being the indigenous Poor who have their streets transformed and made alien by mass immigration and the children of the Poor who have to attend schools where most of the children don’t speak English as a first language. It’s the middle class Left who defend Islamic supremacism despite many muslims holding the beliefs and practices of the Left, from feminism to secularism in deep contempt along with despising this country, its laws, history. society, and achievements.

Yet go to a poor area and you will see many mixed race children, half North European, half Asian or half-black or whatver. The indigenous poor mix far more with immigrants, to the degree of taking them as partners, than the privileged Left do. My own close friend has a sister married to an Indian Hindu, and a brother married to a Bangladeshi ex-muslim. The only time the average bourgeois Leftist lives near an immigrant is if an Indian doctor or Turkish accountant moves into their secluded little close.

And these middle-class Leftists infest academia, deforming the teaching of everything from history to English Literature, deforming and denigrating our culture to fit in with a Marxist or sub-Marxist world view, this latter often disguised under the name of Post-modernism.

Having been of Left-wing inclination in my youth I’m aware of what underlies the damage the middle-class Left do, particularly the dimmer members of it – which is most of them: they are engaged knowingly or unknowingly in the Gramscian project to overthrow western hegemony from within by entryism and the destruction of canons of history and culture. This was an openly acknowleged project on the Left in the late 70s and early 80s, and it contiues to this day, even if many of the middle-class Left don’t realise they serve it.

Usefully to the interests of the middle-class Left, the destruction of western hegemony serves to exclude the Poor even further. The existence of the canosn makes it possible for the Poor to work their way through it by their own efforts if they wish – the destruction of the canons leaves just an seething lava of competing isms that one can only find ones way through with the guidance of the hierophants of post-modernism.

I would rather have greedy aristocratic Tories and openly selfish business people than the middle-class Left. They’re more capable of having fun and njoying themselves, and they don’t hide the fact that they manipulate the system to their own advantage. There’s no difference between buying your son a place at Eton, and sending your son to a comprehensive in a wealthy dormitory town and paying for extra tuition for him, while insisting that comprehensive education is fairer than the selective Grammar School system that at least lifted some very poor girls and boys out of poverty and ignorance.

Except there is a difference. One is honest and open hoarding of opportunity and the other is deeply dishonest. But then deep dishonesty is the nature of the middle-class Leftists, because the equality they affect to seek would – if achieved – strip them of their sedulously acquired and assiduously disguised privileges.

Morales' Morale Moral: Ask Your Friends What They Like About You

I sent:

I've just been to my second Mental Health meeting - the woman I see, Leena M0rales (pure visigoth if you ask me, blonde, gray-blue eyes) told me that I automatically discount my good qualities when they're told me and can't see them myself, and she has encouraged me to ask my friends to list what they think are my good qualities (NOT my bad), and what they like about me. 
 
 
I feel embarrassed to do so but I said I would ask.

From Ian:

Am suitably half-cut and ready to maybe tell you what a cunt you are - I mean how wonderful you are. First I'm off to the fridge for some more ale...it's nearly midnight an i have work in the morning...

not to mention am in the fucking throes of a nervous breakdown..

OK, so you want me to tell you what is good about you...

You're incredibly intelligent.
you're the perfect sounding board, because you're very honest with your opinions on things people do.
you're forever young - your eyes, your voice, your soul.
you also have a timeless quality, which complements the forever youngishness.
You are post-everything. You're ahead of the curve and waiting for the rest to catch up.
As such you are very bored.
and confused, but your confusion translates into an open-hearted quest for happiness and satisfaction.
You're very funny.
you're witty enough to virtually always cite a source for something you say that is funny/witty, and even sometimes cite sources of things you derived from such sources. That's rare and could get you shagged often, if you could but see.
you're versatile and adaptable (from fine art to maths to libraries)
you have a vast scope of reference and you can go into detail on it, unlike 99.99% of people.
you have a cheerful face. not in a "fat" sense but in a kindly wise sense.
you're capable of insightful and logical thought on a par with so-called brilliant writers and philosophers.

i'll do more tomorrow - it's 1:00 am and i'm pissed and have to get up for work in the morning.



From Bernadette:

How spooky
 
I've said a few things to you before rob when you've tried to convince me you're autistic

lol Harry asked why i was laughing and when i told him he didn't get it.
 

ok here we go not sure lists are the way to go
 

in no particular order
 

good friend - what more can a person ask for but think that you make a good friend do i need to quote any more qualities
 
so what makes a good friend the qualities that you share with the good friend stereotype
 
you listen -  a quality that shouldn't be underrated
 
you try to help - again another quality that shouldn't be underrated
 
you are thoughtful about your friends and act on it
 
you are interesting and have lots of topics of conversation to draw on
 
you're good at sharing in that in a group you won't hog the limelight 
 
you don't get involved in gossip which is good  (sub text to that is at the moment the new people in the office seem to be a bit on the malicious side you would never criticise someone without good reason

 
The way you looked after your mother tells a lot about your character and your father.
 
I hope now you realise you can't be autistic at least because  i'm not the only one who thinks you are a good friend.
 
More to the point what did Heather put?
I'm working on the friendship bit especially with one of my friends whose mother died a year ago and at the time i think i could have been more supportive.  
 
Just by the by i ended up enjoying the Rossetti biog but now want a Holman Hunt biog as he's the religious one.  
 
will think about the rest  
 
but like i say can't think of a better compliment than to say you are a good friend tell that to the spooky shrink but let me know how it goes as i can't help being curious about the process



From Melanie

Hi Bob

Good qualities as follows


Intelligent

Loyal friend

Very caring son

Well read

Politically astute - usually ahead of the rest of us !

Good at finding out about stuff


Few bad habits , no drinking or smoking or drug taking

Very independent - doesn't ask for help.


That will have to suffice for now Bob - if I think of anything else -
will email you !

Lots of love

Mel

PS I heard you had a driving lesson - how did it go ?!


From Heather:

honesty
a good listener
interested in other people
caring
kind
no affectations
excellent facility with language and writing
tallented and able artist
can spontaniously see humour and laugh without self conciousness
can see the humerous side to things because you have the ability to look at things askance
you take my ideas and views seriously
intelligent and reflective
know a lot about many things, an auto didact
you keep trying, you keep persevering dispite depression and ill health
you get up and do something every day dispite feeling shit


H
x

The Glare

I have done what you suggested
and the world has paid attention to my belief
but I am still alone

So millions think I'm ugly now
but it's the same old story
until I sing the song

and I sense you close

I believe you are watching
when I act foolishly
I believe that you are smiling
that knowing smile at me

that's what I believe

I believe when I am shining
in the spotlight's rarity
I believe that you are standing
silently applauding me

that's what I believe

I have done what you suggested
and the world has paid attention to my belief
but I am still alone


Words 2009 David McAlmont

From "The Glare" by David McAlmont & Michael Nyman

Er ist der Geist, der stets verneint

Angra Mainyu

Rex Mundi

Chernobog

The Lie

Nobodaddy

Father

Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint! Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht; Drum besser wär's, daß nichts entstünde. So ist denn alles, was ihr Sünde, Zerstörung, kurz, das Böse nennt, Mein eigentliches Element.   I am the Spirit that always negates! And rightly too; for all that  begins Should rightly to run to destruction; 'Twere better then that nothing were begun. Thus  Sin, Destruction - in a word, Evil- That is my own true element.

Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war Ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar Das stolze Licht, das nun der Mutter Nacht Den alten Rang, den Raum ihr streitig macht, Und doch gelingt's ihm nicht, da es, so viel es strebt, Verhaftet an den Körpern klebt. I'm part of the Part which at the beginning was everything, Part of the Darkness that gave birth to Light, The proud Light that now with Mother Night Disputes her ancient rank and space, And yet 'twill not succeed, since, strive thought it may, Light will remain fettered to bodies.

Roter Sand und Liebe Liese

Liebe Liese, lass die Gänse,
Ich will von deiner Haut probieren
Vom Blute rostig ist die Sense
Bist Du freundlich nicht zu mir?

Roter Sand und weisse Tauben
Laben sich an meinem Blut
Am Ende gibt es doch ein Ende
Bin ich doch zu etwas gut

Boner

I became very sleepy around 4pm yesterday and began to fall asleep. Before I fell asleep but was feeling very dozy and relaxed I had a hard-on.

 

How come I sometimes get hard-ons when I'm on the edge of sleep or wake up in the night with them, but can't when I need them, managing a rare semi-on at best?

Unsporting Behaviour on Oil Drum Lane

When I was a child, from about the age of six, I regularly received inappropriate Christmas or Birthday Presents from my dad - from my parents actually, but my dad was the one with the income, so I expect in his usual domineering way he took little notice of my mother's suggestions.

My friend Heather had told me she was expected to contribute half the cost of her own gifts herself; the gifts I received were fully bought for me, they were just gifts my father wanted me to have rather than gifts I asked for. Having to contribute to my own gifts might have made me more independent and resentful, and eventually propelled me out of home.

I was utterly uninterested in sport. So, on successive birthdays & Christmases my father gave me: boxing gloves and punch-ball; a fishing rod; a Manchester United kit; a tennis racket and ball; a cricket bat, ball (not a corky), wicket and bales.

I did - at 7 - once get a transistor radio which I was pleased with but I've only just now realised that though it was given to me it was actually a present for himself and my mother as it spent the rest of its life in the kitchen and living room being used by them.

My mother once told me that when I was three or four my father spent Christmas Eve scouring the Shops to find me the Cowboy outfit I'd asked for, but I can't remember.

I can remember only ever getting a present I'd actually asked for, which was a Johnny Seven One Man Army gun.



I asked for an Action Man when they first came out and got some british knock-off called Tommy Gunn (which I now think was actually better). I asked for a little telescope and never got it, I asked for a chemistry set and never got it, and I asked for a bike and never got it.

Looking back the telescope and bike were probably too expensive for my skint parents, but there was no moment when I was taken aside and told "we can't afford it, but we'll help you save up the half-crown your gran gives you every week and we'll put something toward it" , or when I was a bit older "we'll help you get a paper-round and you can save up for it", or even "we can't afford a telescope but we'll get you a big book on astronomy and take you to an observatory". It wasn't if I was passively sitting by, I saved money for a little book on astronomy, and borrowed books on the subject from the children's library.

So I got gifts from my Dad, but they were gifts for the boy he wanted me to be rather than the boy I was.

The boy I was was Frasier Crane, my father was a particularly unresponsive and unsupportive version of Marty Crane.

Or more accurately and british, particularly later, he was the cantankerous, manipulative, and negative Albert Steptoe and I was the aspirational and trapped Harold.

My uncle, my dad's brother, had more of an idea of who I was - when an acquaintance of his died, my uncle made sure that he secured the man's amateur artist equipment - oil paints, brushes, a portable easel, some cheap textured board - and he gave them all to me. He had his own child, but she was only seven or so at the time so they were age-inappropriate for her, but he could have saved them for her for a few years to see if she became interested. Instead, knowing that at the turn of my teens I was already interested in drawing and painting, he gave them to me.

My dad was an armchair sportsman who didn't even try to convey his interest in sport to me by sitting me down with him and watching football on TV together, but he expected me to become suddenly sporty because I had a cricket bat. My uncle was a fanatical Man City supporter and an amateur league referee, yet he could see I was a different type of boy and supported that boy.

I don't blame my dad for being disappointed that I wasn't a typical sporty boy, but he could have supported the boy I actually was. It wasn't as if I was a namby-pamby softy-Walter, I got into fights with other boys, I enjoyed rough-and-tumble, I likes boy's toys like guns and games such as playing Japs and Commandos, I just wasn't interested in any sport beyond having a kick-about in the street with my little mates now and then.

I don't know whether he didn't realise that I wasn't interested in sport, or whether he was ham-fistedly trying to make me be, but, whichever, it went on for many years and was if anything counter-productive..

It was such a shame - stuck out on a council overspill estate in the middle of nowhere there was next to nothing for a boy like me and a bit of parental involvement or support in my interests might have made a big difference. Even actively trying to enthuse me about - say - football might have made a difference.

It wasn't as if I was lost in a big family, I was an only child so my parents' attention should have been undivided and largely undistracted.

This was probably when I first started feeling isolated and ignored and a misfit.

Birthday Treat

As a belated birthday treat for myself, this lunchtime I bought on spec Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near". I love the idea of the Singularity, estimated to happen around about a third of the way into the 21st century, when the graph curves of the rate of technological and scientific advance become hyperbolic and all bets are off as to what the future will be like beyond the Singularity.

I hope it's right and I live long enough and have enough wealth to experience the transhuman condition.

The Burqa in their Limbic System

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.


Sylvia Plath

Some Years After

Here we are now, some years after
You and me and funny laughter
Don`t be scared, It's only dark
Soon you'll hear a meadowlark

Don't give up, just one more try
Rainbows soon will fill the sky.

See us in our upper limbos
Peeking through the blinds on windows
Down below and far as wide is
Slick is kissing old King Midas
Silly birds, you should know better
Tell each hero "go and get her"

Lady Luck`s the one we're after
Now and also ever after
Gosh, we caught her - gee, she's crying
Fortune teller, are you lying?

Do you see the noses growing
And wonder where the truth is going?


"Desolation Theme" - Ken Nordine

Pulham Down, or Ambushed by Suggestion

Max0n Crumb - fascinating story. Illustration by his more famous brother R0bert Crumb. Watching the famous Robert Crumb documentary by Terry Zwigoff put a sexual fantasy in my head I've returned to ever since

The Narrowed Limits

I've had a new insight for the first time in weeks - months maybe, given how much I came to repeat myself on these blogs.

I woke up early again at around 5am - better than 2am as of late, there are plenty of people who get up for work at 5am - and a thought so very obvious occurred to me that I can't believe I've not realised it before.

It's very simple - I've realised how narrow my social boundaries were and how little I stepped beyond them. I deliberately used the passive voice there because I don't think I knowingly drew those boundaries.

The specific realisation was this: it occurred to me that when I was at college I remained within that tight little group of Heather, the two Johns, Melanie, Lorraine and Lynn. I think everybody else mostly did the same. I considered for much of the time that the only women available for asking out were Heather, Lorraine, and Lynn. I didn't feel Melanie worthy of consideration, which was mean and shallow of me.

John had put dibs on Lorraine, John S had put dibs on Heather and for some of the time she was going out with Geoff, and I was so reticent with Lynn that I said nothing and she took up with Duncan W, despite her once having told me directly to "show some initiative" towards her.

It was ridiculous for me to have drawn my boundaries so narrowly. I think part of the problem was that art schools are so incestuous, one spends so much time in the company of a small group of people of one's own age in a way that is very unusual after infant school.

Most students aren't big mates with most of the people on their course, they see them only for a couple of lectures a week, instead they make friends with the people they share houses with, people they meet in social societies, political societies, and what have you. For instance, Heather would probably never have met Geoff if he hadn't been John S's housemate for a while. As I remember she lived at home for two terms until her parents moved out of the area, John lived at home for all but two terms, I lived at home, and Lynn lived at home for a good part of the course until her parents divorced and she and her sister moved into a council flat.

Such staying with one's parents is very unusual for students and - in my case at least - limited the motivation to find a social outlet, and also reduced the pressure. But I was particularly inert. John G lived in a bedsit in Whalley Range for a while, found on his own initiative, and everybody else sooner or later moved out too. The only move out I made was one term in Halls, and I only applied for that because I was drunk at the time and had found that everyone had moved in to Halls and I felt I was missing out.

My life being as limited as it was between the ages of 11 and 37, those four years at college were a time of particular opportunity I failed to recognise. I can see that I'd been primed to think very poorly of myself and my chances, but I should have perceived the situation as one of opportunity, I should have considered people on other parts of the course as potential friends and girlfriends, if no one else. It isn't as though I didn't have connections with other people on it, I used to be friends with Janet W, I knew Jean Y and Carmel McC quite well, and had slept overnight on their floor, and there were others too.

But I never picked up on these connections, I never struck out on my own.

After college, apart from getting very fat I was unemployed for most of 15 years, which pretty much put me out of the running for everything at a very important time in my life. Never the less, I'm startling to realize how little I ventured out of that little group at college, how narrowly I drew those boundaries.

When I did get a job, my confidence and situation were so deeply troubled that I made no use of my opportunities, I stayed fat, I stayed at home, I merely longed for women from a distance (and they were mostly Doctors, which didn't help). My social boundaries were drawn in so tightly to just me and my parents, despite working in an institution with nearly 2000 employees, the greater part of whom were women.

At college and at work I was potentially in clover, all unawares.

The funny thing is that out of the two Johns and me, I was the only one who actually approached women I didn't know at parties. The Johns usually did nothing, they would drift around chatting to other men or end up in the kitchen, but I would at least sometimes approach women - I at least pulled a couple of times.

On one of thesse blogs I used a line from a John Cooper Clarke poem *Midnight Shift" - "was there ever a thing so fair that smashed itself to bits". That was about a prostitute, but you could say something very similar about me. I was OK back then, and more fool the women I knew if they couldn't see it.

I sense a strange inertness and deep sexual passivity within a lot of women, so many women seem to need some kind of permission to find a man attractive, even if it's only the permission implicit in other women finding him attractive. I think it's the reason that women tend to be more interested in married men and divorced men than men are in married and divorced women - there's an aspect of "oh, he must be quite attractive, because another woman has found him attractive".

Women criticise men for being attracted to younger women, but women are so very often attracted merely to male status, rather than men as people, and put up with men they don't especially like, as in the old Mrs Merton joke "Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to the Millionaire Paul Daniels?"

Indeed, most women seem not particularly to like their male partners . For men, and their attractiveness to women, it's a case of "more gets more", As as sex women seem to want to be loved and desired by men more than they actively love and desire men. The only women I've known who exhibited anything I would call passionate love and desire are Melanie and Beverly M, a girl I knew at 6th Form. I could cite many examples but I'll pick the one closest to home: my dad always addressed cards and notes to my mam as to "my sweetheart" i.e. he actively saw her as someone he loved, whereas she always wrote "your Eva" i.e. she saw herself as someone who was loved by him. I've pushed female friends to voice their love for the men they are with, and find they wont, although they will say variations on "he loves me". or "I need his love"

I look back and see now how fine I really was and didn't realise it, and I think I must have read this female inertness as something that was directed at me, not something quite general in most women, to be overcome, or melted by men.

I don't and didn't have problems talking to women. I've never found it difficult being with women, never ever. I have a limited social life but I've always had female friends. I prefer the company of women, the conversation isn't limited to sport and boasting and getting pissed or high as it is with many men, and women are more comfortable talking about emotions.

If I'd had confidence, most of the rotten things that have happened to me, and that I've done to myself, would probably never have happened.

But I drew those limited and limiting social boundaries, or failed to see there were no boundaries there, and thus reduced my opportunities to none..

What I am trying to draw from this is that I'm not unloveable, not unwantable, not unable, not a social cripple, but someone who could have had a normal happy life, and perhaps still can have if I can get past this leaden crushing sense of worthlessness, and see and make and grasp what opportunities are still there, to get beyond the sense of shame at my perceived worthlessness that I've felt since late childhood.

Exemplars

Awake at 5am – I was immediately very conscious that it is almost exactly 12 years since I got the job at the medical library, over 10 years since the trouble with the threatening yobs began, and 10 years since my dad became so ill that he couldn't really cope from day to day anymore.

I remember thinking once it became obvious that the trouble with the yobs was going to continue, that this would probably take about 10 years to go away, by which time I'd be 50, my life would be past the time of promise and development, and would be more or less over, and my parents would probably be dead. In fact it took 7 years, but in the meantime my parents did die and my health failed.

Given the seven years after 1991, the summer I realised I didn't want to be an illustrator, when I was mostly unemployed, that's the last 18 years of my life, from 32 to 50, wasted – the years of children, of career, of career consolidation. The ten years before were hard themselves, but they didn't feel hopeless.

This is all something I already knew, but for some reason it hit me with great weight this morning, and I became very anxious – how or why I can be anxious about something that is passed, I don't understand. Sad, depressed, yes, but not anxious.

Separately I've realised how normal, how everyday the sexual and romantic part of life is in most people's lives. Because I was on my own so much I didn't notice, but it's utterly normal – it's why there are children playing in the street, young women walking with pushchairs. It seemed something extremely difficult to achieve to me, but almost every damn fool achieves it. It's not necessarily easy and straightforward but it is common and everyday. I think part of the reason that I didn't notice this is because it wasn't happening in front of my eyes, I didn't have a group of friends I saw pairing off, and obviously people don't commonly have sex in public. Even passionate kissing and clinching in public makes other people uncomfortable, the comic response to the sight being "get a room".

So for me at least the evidence of other people's romantic and sexual relationships was implicit not explicit, and I either didn't notice it, or I blanked it out to avoid the pain of acknowledging it.

It's only now, since my mother died and I've connected to some degree with people of my own age again, that I've realised how life works and how late it is.

Martin van Maele

I know very little about Martin Van Maele except that he worked around the start of the 20th Century, but I liked his surreal and violent erotic illustrations from the first time I saw them in a Taschen anthology of erotic art.

There is more available at All-Art








I know very little about Martin Van Maele except that he worked around the start of the 20th Century, but I liked his surreal and violent erotic illustrations from the first time I saw them in a Taschen anthology of erotic art.

There is more available at All-Art

On the Other Hand

On the other hand I might as well carry on...

A Day

Even the porn and erotica don't hold my interest now. this is the third blog I've tried and it's just more restatements of my old, old problems.

I don't even feel sexual excitement any more, just numb or painfully sad.

So this is my last post

Bellmer

Regret

To H

I dreamt about you this morning, just before waking, probably because I was on co-codamol for my extraction and sleeping quite soundly for once - we  met by accident attending for interviews for an MA course sometime in the mid 80s. I was conscious in the dream of somehow being aware that it was 2009 and 1984-ish at the same time.

It doesn't need much interpretation - I'd been thinking yesterday about how well-matched you and P are in life experience and status, and in the dream my mind was imagining the last time you and I might have been more or less equals.

_____________

Almost immediately after waking I remembered how I started playing truant at secondary school. On the afternoon we were supposed to register for Games (I hated Games and PE) I was sent instead to accompany another lad to hospital who had broken his arm. I never registered and was able to skip Games every Wednesday afternoon. From then on I realised I could skip any lesson I disliked or in which there were problems, and I truanted from many classes for the next two years, until I failed all but two of my O Levels and had to re-take them all at 6th form along with "A" Levels.

Up to that point my life was going relatively normally. If I had to name a point when I took the wrong track, that afternoon was it, or more accurately the next games day, when I should have registered myself rather than truanting, was it.

It's not that I'd forgotten this event, more that I realised today what a pivotal point it was in my life. It was the moment when I chose to retreat rather than deal with things. I could have changed the path many times over the following decades, but I didn't, and a time comes in every life when things have gone too far wrong to be put right. I probably reached that point 5 years ago when I began to feel like I do now.
_____________

Another useless insight because it doesn't change my life now and can't bring back all the lost time, experience, and opportunity.

But then again, my deep sense now is that nothing can put my life right or onto any track I would want it to be on.

Which, if I'm open, is an acceptance that my life is over.


B
x

Poverty of Poverties or "Oi! Chavvie!"

For some reason I can't identify I've just realised that the defining problem of my life and my family wasn't anything I've mentioned here, it was poverty. And by poverty I don't mean not having much money, I mean growing up in a family where there was often none, nothing to buy food or pay the rent with, where my parents had to go cap in hand to relatives for loans and hand-outs, where I grew up on overspill estates in the middle of nowhere hearing people on TV and in the street disparaging "council estate types", where my dad struggled to find even low-paid work at anti-social hours, where my parents never had holidays or even socialised because they couldn't afford to. Where hard work and effort went unrewarded. I got to college but after I left college I returned to that poverty myself.

We didn't have a car - my parents know they couldn't afford to run one -  and I feel the same myself to this day.


I sometimes call myself "3rd Generation Underclass Shite", is more or less true, it's just that I don't come over as such because I'm bright, so can I probably pass for middle class on the surface.

But the exclusion and alienation and sense of worthlessness that goes with knowing that one is powerless and looked down on is grinding and dispiriting, and one is looked down on.

So much of what I feel, so much of my sense of inadequacy and inevitable failure comes back to this strong sense of powerlessness and worthlessness and enforced lack of opportunity and experience and expectation, a sense that I've lost before I even enter the race. I used to have a friend, Shirley, who was black, from Jamaican parentage (she got married, moved to the States, and we lost touch) and we once discussed how hard it is to attempt anything when you feel every hand is turned against you  I remember saying that poor whites get a similar bad deal to black people, it just isn't so obvious, and the similarity goes far deeper than most might realised, in that the rural poor in this country were effectively enslaved during and after the enclosures, when they were driven off the land and forced to sell themselves into indenture just to survive.

But that's a digression.

I'm just noting that a lot of my problems came from being born into and having grown up in actual poverty, like and amongst the people who now get called Chavs, and the diminished ways of thinking and looking at the world and myself remain with me.

Little Brother, if only I had known

I bought the Fall's "Little Brother" 25 years ago when it was first released. How come I've only just now registered the closing words of the song?

There's always someone beside you
And there's always someone in your arms
Oh little brother
If only I had known
Then I might not be alone

"Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels"

Vocations can destroy the lives of those who have them. The cliché is "many are called but few are chosen" and the cliché - like most clichés - is true.

They destroy lives because they only rarely lead to wealth, success, and hence status.

They destroy men's lives far more thoroughly than they destroy women's. In modern society women can be a mother or a career woman or even both, they can seek career success and they can seek marriage and motherhood. For a woman there is no shame in being a mother and a mother alone, she will not be judged a failure in life by others even if she feels herself unfulfilled in the wider society of work. Men still find it easier to have successful careers, but a man must have some success and status  if he is to win a woman and have a family. For most men fulfilment and acceptance is founded on having the status enough to win a woman.

For a heterosexual man the important thing is status, not because he wants it - most men couldn't care less about the status of their male friends as long as they can have a laugh, talk about the match, have a kick-about, neck some beers with them, share a bit of advice or experience - but because women want men with status.

Women's hunger for dominant high-status men is so powerful that female sexual perversions are usually tied up with  it. Just as some men  are so charged with a need for feminine smallness, fine clear skin and powerlessness that they are attracted to children, some women are so attracted to dominance and status (in the form of notoriety at least) that they strike up relationships with men in jail who have murdered women, and even marry them. Watch the True Crime section at your local bookshop and see who buys the books about serial killers. Hint: it's not usually men.

Women are not generally passionate creatures - they love, but they don't often fall in love.  Every man I've known has fallen in love, but I can think of only three women I have met who have fallen in love. This isn't to say that women don't love and desire the men they are with, just that the passionate obsessional burning drive seems not to be there - that it comes later, from getting to know the man, to becoming companionate with him. And that motivation to be companionate emerges from a woman's choosing of a man who can provide for her, even if she is wealthy enough to provide for herself. An she will knowingly ignore huge incompatibilities and unhappiness to keep the sense of security that his status brings.

Men in the end are nicer than women - they are attracted to appearance, admittedly, but they are also attracted to loving, caring women, not women who are necessarily rich or powerful. Most men are attracted to the qualities of the woman as a person, not just to her ability to dominate and overcome others, not to the sort of moral vacuum whose one basic motivation is to be King of the Castle and hoard all the goodies and - if possible - all the women.

As the generation of children is dependent on the winning of women, in most societies where such careers exist, most families want their sons to have high status careers as doctors and allied medical professionals, as lawyers and similar. These careers don't lead to the greatest wealth, but they ensure that those who pursue them have the highest and most assured median income of any professional group, and they come with automatic status and respect.

Outside of being a surgeon these jobs don't need talent, they reward moderately intelligent mediocrities who are prepared to put in the study, and so are open to anyone with the good sense or good luck to know they are available.

In  the West  we delude ourselves about the importance of self-expression and self-fulfilment. This importance is illusory - fulfilment comes from family, from love, from work well done. Self-expression is best done in the interstices of a normal life - making it the whole of the point of a life usually destroys that life, and is a nonsense left over from the disastrous Romantic revolution of the late 18th Century.

To some this knowledge comes as a given, instilled by their families, but my family were the lowest of the low, from the biggest and worst slum  in Europe as Engels once called it., and they were unlikely to know the way out for themselves or me.

Nevertheless I had realised this by the age of 30 and did nothing about it. Or more precisely, I was paralysed because I knew what I must do, but not how to do it.

I have spent the subsequent twenty years in a bewilderment of anxiety and dread.

Now it's too late.

And all the women I know turn to men with the highest status they can find, even if on this council estate he's only a kitchen fitter or a dealer.

I have no status having been unable to parley cleverness into success, and will die as I have always lived.

Isolated without woman's touch and woman's love, and alone.

Batteries Not Included

I've woken feeling as low as I felt yesterday and my thoughts have turned again to why most other people's lives seem to work and mine doesn't.

Almost everyone I know isn't given that much to thought - by this I don't mean worrying or longing, but actual systematic thought. They pursue interests, relationships, friendships, careers without much analysis or self-reflection. They hold opinions without deep understanding, express those opinions without self-awareness.

They believe in absurd, even fatuous things such as astrology, or God, or that they have a fate mapped out for them.

And all of these people have lives that work - they have difficulties, but the difficulties mostly resolve and on goes normal fulfilling life.

I'm intelligent and thoughtful. I struggle to make friends, I've struggled to find even menial employment, I've never known how to initiate a loving relationship.

It strikes me that thought and intelligence aren't worth much. Animals don't have much in the way of them, and they live and mate and raise young before they return to the nothing-at-all that we all come from.

Early humans must have had thought and intellect, but beyond knowing what berries and nuts to pick, and how to hunt and bring down an aurochs or a mammoth, everything they believed must have been wrong. And they lived and mated and raised their children before they returned to the earth we are all made from.

I know enough successful people to know they don't do much in the way of thinking, even when they're bright.

Intelligence and thought mustn't be worth much in life, they must be like sharp teeth or sharp claws - natural built-in tools, but no more than that. Obviously emotion and instinct are more important, a will to dominance, a will to action, a will to connect.

I have the tools but in me the important instincts and emotions are faulty, and so the tools are useless to me, and I am useless to myself and others.

And so I fail.

And so I am lonely.

And so I am sad.

A Hard Day

Today - Saturday 3rd October -  has been a bad day. Overwhelmed yesterday by happening on a disliked "schoolfriend", ugly, rude, fat, short, self-regarding - and finding that at the age of 48 he had found a woman and got married, I felt ever more low-spirited, at the thought that even this arsehole now has a wife and I still haven't the first idea what to do or where to start at 50.

How sweet it would be to spend a boring weekend with a woman I loved, just sitting around and watching the TV, going to the shops with her, just sitting next to her on the Sofa. This normal life that nearly every man and woman lives, that I have never even been able to take the first step towards.

I'm so weary and so lonely. If I'd known this was to be my life I would have killed myself decades ago. It's very hard not to do it now - I think about it more and more.

I felt so bad I cried in the street and cried uncontrollably when I got in my flat. Just typing this I'm crying again from thinking about it

Borderline Aspy

For many years I've thought I might have a disorder on the autistic spectrum, probably mild Asperger's syndrome. Last week a male friend described both myself and a female friend as autistic - which despite having thought it about myself at least - upset me, for my own sake and for hers.

I've taken the test for Aspergers traits designed by Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, a recognised world expert on autistic spectrum disorders - it's not an diagnostic test, merely indicative.

I scored 28 out of 50. Neurotypical men (ie normal people) usually score up to 17, neurotypical women up to 15, and 80% of people with Asperger's and other autistic spectrum disorders score 32 or above. I scored 28 which places me in the borderland of Asperger's.

It's not a surprise and it's not upsetting for me. It makes sense of a lot of my problems. My favourite TV comedy at the moment is "the Big Bang Theory" in which one of the funniest characters, Dr Sheldon Cooper, is clearly a superbright Asperger's personality with OCD, itself related to Aspergers. He's a character in whom I recognise an extreme version of myself.

The test is available here

I was surprised to hear that Prof Baron-Cohen has discovered that a greater proportion of women have Asperger's than used to be believed.

Graphic: Lions and Tigers and Bare Ass - Oh My!

Some more erotic illustrations by Tosh10 Saek1 (my previous Saek1 post is here) - this time from my own collection, accumulated over the years, most from the late 70s through to the early 90s.


I'll start with my favourite - I found this in an annual of Japanese illustration sometime in the mid 80s but it was already a few years old then. I adapted the theme myself for a westernised version in which Dorothy Gale was similarly attacked by the Tin Man, who had already dismembered the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and had impaled Toto. I have quite an obsession with the Wizard of Oz despite not being gay -I find it a very erotically charged film. So thanks to Tosh1o Saek1 for providing me with inspiration from this fantasy of Japanese demons and girls in sailor suits.



Unusual for Saek1, an illustration in which the man is the sexual victim of the woman. I love the strange mix of sadism, sexuality, surrealism, traditional Japanese illustration, and pop art styling in his work.

A strong sense of sadistic dread, the elderly couple with their hands already chopped off, the girl struggling against the man with the axe. I'd love to know whether these scenarios refer to specific Japanese cultural icons and situations, whether they appear less surreal to someone steeped in Japanese culture.

I find this picture very erotic, despite being baffled as to what it's about: a doll of Emperor Hirohito lowers a bound naked young woman onto the spiked head of a giant Kewpie Doll, watched by a smirking M1ckey Mouse Doll and Jack-in-the-Box. The only sense I can make of it is a revenge of the toys, in which a baby doll is the agent of hurting a young woman in the place where babies come from.

A young woman uses the sharp horn of a theatrical mask either as a dildo, or perhaps as a means to kill herself via her womb. Another picture I fing baffling yet exciting.

An old woman wanks an elderly man while they listen to the torture games of the couple in the next room (is one of them their daughter or son?) I love the little kitten crossing the threshold between the rooms, between youth and age, and becoming the only party that knows what is really going on. The Japanese have a strong history of depicting as erotic the impostion on women of restraint and pain on women.

A perverse rendition of a scene from the "Journey to the West" Monkey King legend - I'm not sure of the identity of the persons being molested by the two demons, but I suspect the monk is Tripitaka, who is traditionally played in drama by a young woman. The monk definitely has tits and a nicely rounded female bum.

A remarkably restrained and normal scenario for Saek1, but still quite sadistic.

A man and boy light fireworks, the boy watching with interest while the man lights the fuse of a firework lodged in the bound woman's vagina or anus. Another image I find a great turn-on.

That exhausts my collection of illustrations by this artist. If I can find the Wizard of Oz drawing I made I may post that later.

Emulation

Here are a couple of my own attempts to depict a Tosh1o Saek1 subject but in my own editorial style. I can't put a date to this piece, but I'd guess I made it about 15 years ago.

I provide both the black and white rough and the finished piece insofar as it was finished before I become bored with it.

Graphic

Tosh1o Saek1, one of the few artists whose work gave me a hard-on, back in the day when I could get hard-ons. I like the surreal sadism and perversity.

Here is a small collection harvested from the Web. I'll add more from my own collection in a later post.

The descriptions are what I see, not the original scenarios, as I cannot read the Japanese in the books from which I copied the pictures.



Often it's not immediately obvious what's happening - here, if you look close, the girl in the school clothes lying prone on the grass has taken her knickers off so that a snake can burrow up her cunt, or perhaps the snake is just crawling over her bum and its head appears to be one of the leaves.



More obviously this girl, again in school clothes, is being fucked by a procession of wind-up automatons



The woman sitting on the stairs is penetrated by her lover's head, which has turned into a cock, while a young girl spies on the couple.



A traditionally dressed woman, watched by her husband squats baring her crotch to a man held captive in the water - is she taunting and tempting him with the sight of her genitals, or is she about to piss or shit on him?



A captive woman in traditional dress has her blood sucked from her left breast by a vampiric man (who looks remarkably like Bryan Ferry) while vampire bats gorge themselves on the menstrual blood dripping from her womb.



One of my favourite images - a girl in uniform goes for a night-time bike ride, her bicycle seat transformed into a man's face, his open mouth and tongue ready to probe her cunt and arse if she sits down.



Saeki is fond of portraying bound young women lowered onto sharp objects. Here a young woman is threatened with death by impalement via her vagina while her horrified male companion watches.



A subtle but extremely perverse image I'll let speak for itself.



Having caught and bound a lovely mermaid, the man prepares her for fucking by making his own hole with a sturdy twig. Myself I always imagined that Mermaids and Mermen are dolphin-like below the waist and so have mammalian genitalia. Still, an image I find very sexy.



A woman is exorcised of a fox demon, which emerges from her cunt.



A murderous demon creeps up on a goddess while she masturbates using a living human man as a dildo.

Blowing a Wad

The contents of a shopping bag of porn I'm about to throw out. The pile is about an inch thick even spread out like this. What a sickening waste of money, what a heartbreaking waste of a life, over 35 years of life wanked away over this.

Even if there was no woman who would love me, who would make love with me, this was a ridiculous and wasteful substitute.

I'd have been better even spending on some whore, at least if I never knew love, I'd at least had the animal pleasure of poking my cock up some slapper's guts a few times.

Fairyland

Looking on Overchan and Overbooru for pron and win to fap over, I found a thread of artwork by Ben Newm@n on a new chan board. His anatomy is a bit off as is his finish, but the actual themes of his artwork are close to what I was producing myself before I abandoned art.

The first illustration I saw was the one below "D0r0thy's Itch", which is technically the weakest but very similar to a scenario I once attempted myself. I'd have placed them in an Oz scene, on the Yellow Brick Road or in the Emerald City, I'd have made Dorothy look like the 16 year old Judy GarIand or Fa1ruza BaIk, I'd have given the Cowardly Lion a barely visible hard-on, I'd have made Toto smaller, and Dorothy would have slightly dirty knickers round her ankles, but otherwise I'd keep close to Nwm@n's composition.

I'm glad to have discovered this illustrator.

All credits for artwork is his.

Cut and paste to visit:
http://ben.isfj.org.uk/index.html
http://bennewmanart.blogspot.com/
http://www.bennewman.co.uk/