A Bad Moment

When you are young, your potential is infinite. You might do anything, really. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age where what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren't Einstein. You weren't anything. That's a bad moment.

Chuck Barris

Children, Weeping

And on 18th May, after looking after her through a year of illness, after supporting her as she worked at launching her career, and after a brief spate of illnesses myself, after all my love, after helping her all day at a promotional event and driving her home at midnight in teeming rain...

...she dumps me because I'm not getting well quickly enough and I'm holding her back.

I have never felt so lost and sad and bereft in my life, and that's including the loss of my parents.

Her brother, a Consultant Psychiatrist, says that she is mentally very fragile and on the verge of falling apart, and projecting all her fears about herself onto me.

She was difficult, she was hard work, I love her and I miss her so much.

And I'm terribly afraid I'll not find anyone else nor get her back because my health and employment chances are now very poor.

"An only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never"

My neighbour M is moving out today and I've been calculating in my head how long she's been here: her daughter M was in a push-chair when she moved in, so was probably around 2 years old, and M will be 20 on her birthday next Autumn, so M has been here about 18 years, which is to say 1993/1994,

In my subjective memory of my own life 1994 seems just a year or two ago, but my subjective memory of M when she first moved in suggests she arrived far more than 18 years ago, perhaps 40 years ago, but anyway a very long time ago.

Perhaps this is because I have a sense of the markers and developments and growth in her life, the different boyfriends, the various stages of M's childhood and teens, M's marriage, the birth and childhood of her second child J, and so on.

With myself there seems to have been only a long undifferentiated period of depressing unemployment, followed by a long depressing period in a tedious job I didn't like, with the deaths of my parents and the trouble with the scrotes being the only emotionally striking events.

It's as if my life ground to a crawl on leaving college and went into stasis from 1990 to my mother's death, and I've only recently been released from the Stasis Pod and my life has resumed. I think I now have only the everyday psychological problems that everyone has, and the psychological problems I did have were - rather bizarrely - problems that mostly came from my being persuaded to believe untruths about myself by my dad and by some teachers.

I feel despite this that my life has resumed too late, and I'm arriving at the party when I'm worn out and everybody else is going home, the music and dancing has stopped, and there's only a few dreggy near-empty bottles and some dry curled-up sandwiches at the Buffet.

I read a comment article in the Times the other week while waiting for my partner C in a Nero's near Albert Square. It was about the level of poverty and deprivation in Salford, and said that as bad as things here used to be, they are now far worse. The journalist said that the area of Salford I grew up and live in has for many decades consistently had some of the worst levels of poverty and deprivation in Britain and is presently the 3rd worst in the country. It's a sort of bleak consolation that it wasn't all my fault, and that mediocrities from more fortunate backgrounds (this means you Cameron and Clegg) did much better due to the usual and long-standing tendency of the middle and upper classes to hoard resources and opportunity for themselves.

There was a quotation in the article that sums up the problem we faced: "an only life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never"

That said, I can't say but I contributed to my own undermining and ill health.

I hope my old friend J can either win his former girlfriend back or leave thoughts of her behind and find a nice 35 year old, because I think there's still time and health enough for him to have something of a satisfying life.

Children, singing

After 30 years of desert, a woman asks me for a date. Wonder of wonders. So sad because so late, so good because perhaps not too late.

Emerson

In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous impressions with good-humoured inflexibility most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinions from another.


Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Self-Reliance"
1841


Ralph Waldo Emerson "Brahma"

Ralph Waldo Emerson "Hematreya"

Byzantium Endures

After the Cossacks routed the Turkish Army in 1667, the Sultan wrote to the Zaporozhki Cossacks demanding their surrender:

"As the Sultan; son of Muhammad; brother of the Sun and Moon; grandson and viceroy of Allah; ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper and Lower Egypt; emperor of emperors; sovereign of sovereigns; extraordinary knight, never defeated; steadfast guardian of the tomb of Jesus Christ; trustee chosen by God himself; the hope and comfort of Muslims; confounder and great defender of Christians—I command you, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, to submit to me voluntarily and without any resistance, and to desist from troubling me with your attacks."


Zaporozhki Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!

O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil's kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are you, that can't slay a hedgehog with his naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. You will not, you son of a bitch, make subjects of Christian sons; we've no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck your mother.

You Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, Armenian pig, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig's snout, mare's arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, fuck your own mother!

So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won't even be herding Christian pigs. Now we'll conclude, for we don't know the date and don't own a calendar; the moon's in the sky, the year with the Lord, the day's the same over here as it is over there; For this, kiss our arse!

The England-Germany Magic Sunglasses

Having no interest whatsoever in football, I thought I would have the streets and shops almost entirely to myself this afternoon; myself, a handful of women, and the odd ageing queen.

God, how I misunderstood that situation - in Manchester the England-Germany game filtered out most of the humans and left the streets populated largely with the Robot-Slaves of the Death God in their beards and burkas, with their swarming grubs and no crowd to hide amongst.

It was like that moment in "THEY LIVE" when John Nada puts on the sunglasses he's found and can suddenly see how many alien invaders there are on the streets.


So as quickly as I could I walked to the bus stop, past Cafe Italia Halal, Chico's Mexican Halal, the Abergeldie Halal, Kebabish Halal, and Zorba's Greek Deli Halal and got out of the Hellmouth that was once central Manchester.

Should the Great Correction ever come it will have to be deep, thorough, and complete.