Christmas 2021

This may be the last blog of the year. Who knows. I will try get in one more next week. I got some lofi Christmas beats playing, the weather is suitably gloomy and tomorrow I fly out to see my brother, his family and my sister. I have not seen my brother in nearly 10 years. 

I fucking love Christmas. I've had quite a few memorable ones in my life. Summer time beach side braais in South Africa, or drum accompanied rum and cola street drinking in Uruguay, or Christmas markets, snow and skiing in Austria as a child. My more recent Christmases have been cosy affairs with my ex, my dogs and mountains of food.

This year will a bit different. This year it will be with family I haven't seen in a decade and family I have never even met.

And no dogs.

At least there are the lofi Christmas beats for familiarity. And hopefully Die Hard. There better fucking be Die Hard, or my brother will be seeing the business end of the most profound motherfucker of a hissy fit.

2021 has been a turd and it can go suck a fuck. Seriously, what an absolutely scraped scrotum seasoned with lemon juice and salt of a year.

But it is Christmas in a few days so let us conclude this short post with some positives:

Work

I am enjoying my new job. It is challenging and provides me with a new opportunity to grow as a teacher. There is also the added benefit of actually getting paid more and working less hours. How the fuck does that work? Yes, that is counter balanced by increased living expenditure in the form of having to pay both rent and a mortgage. But you know what, I worked my nuts off and I've managed to survive, save and actually enjoy myself upon occasion.

Then there is the online thing. The income from this has allowed me to live somewhat comfortably. However, the real benefit is the people. In 2021 I have met 1287 different humans from 73 different countries. Each of them wonderfully weird and unique. That has been quite an experience.

Work Out

I have been pretty damned disciplined in terms of working on my physical and mental health. This year of collapse has provided me with the opportunity to grow. And I have certainly grown. These life challenges have been immense and I feel as if I am doing a medium to acceptable job facing up to them. Despite working 7 days a week since September, I have hardly missed any opportunity to work out. Yes, that will not be the case for the rest of this year, but you know what, fuck you 2021.

Write

I am no closer to being published. That does suck. But, I have been writing a lot so, fuck it. That is all there is. I have been most productive with my poetry but I have started on my next novel / short story and it is suitable for self publishing. I will also continue to put together a collection of all the poems I have written over the course of this shit bucket of a year.

The weather is suitably miserable. My tea is getting cold and I need to start packing. The jazzy piano lofi beats a getting me heart warm. I am seeing my family tomorrow and it is so wonderfully bittersweet. 2021 has been a maggot infested and festering wound in the form of 365 days. I am so fucking over it already. When next I write, it will be on the other side of a reunion.

Merry Christmas, and don't forget, Radiate Positivity Motherfucker!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rnx08JFs6nQ

Twenty Years

 I cannot decide

if I gave you my world

or if you stole it.

Right now, in this forever temporary now,

as ink meets paper

I still cannot put you down.

Twenty years were yours

no giving and taking

only sharing.

Twenty years spent together

intertwining shared and co dependent roots

each into the other.

At some unidentified point

complacency began to form and grow

now fungus and mould thrived.

Somewhere down this line

each took the other for granted

a false assumption that this was a forever after.

But it wasn't,

the roots constricted

and squeezed the heart.

Until it died

and you moved on, and with you

went my world.

Kick him when he's down

My mother was hospitalised this weekend. It has been weighing somewhat heavily upon me. Firstly, she is getting on a bit in the old age department. Secondly she is all the way in South Africa with there being little to no chance of me getting there due to travel restriction because of that fuck face Omicron. Fuck you Omicron. You should have been a strain of cannabis not a strain of covid. You fucking prick.

Finally, if she were to pass, she would pass with me in the worst place of my life. Failure in your early years is easy enough to overcome. Just work. Failure at the age of 40 gives you quite bit less time to correct.

The thing is, my mother always believed in me. 90% of my over inflated sense of self worth is due to my mother's unwavering belief in me. She always told me I was special and I foolishly believed her. For some fucked up reason I still do. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I firmly believe that my surviving the bad drug years was down to her. Most other members of my family had had enough and were far beyond being ready to sever all ties. She believed in me and that belief helped my to overcome the bone deep tendrils of addiction.

But I did it. I stopped everything but the green and the booze.

All that accomplished was denial of the ultimate collapse of my marriage as I statically watched my world crumble around me, too stoned to care or even to do anything to halt the collapse.

In no uncertain terms, I am a complete mess. And although this may be true, I am not going to quit, despite thinking about it, I will not give up. I am far too Jozies to ever drop fists. Fuck that shit. Life is for fighting.

However, I am starting to run out of steam.  

It has been one long motherfuck of a year and it still isn't done kicking a prick when he's on the floor.

Time to hold on more tightly than ever to the 3 Ws.

Working out

Today I trained for the first time in 3 weeks. For the first two weeks, I skipped working out because I was sick. Not training at first was shit. But then I got used to sleeping, which was nice. Then last week Monday and Wednesday were holidays. Monday I trained, Tuesday I trained. Wednesday I got high, Thursday lazy and Friday stoned. Then today I woke up in the bleak. All of it was weighing me down. So I trained to pull middle finger and tell life to go fuck itself.

It was great. Muscle burning fantasticness. The yoga at the end was perhaps the best. I really got to wrestle with myself, deep dive my thoughts and unstitch the bleak. Training really does release the best kind of brain drugs.

Work

Work is work. It is the bar you set yourself. I want to be awesome at all things, so I set the bar high for myself. In my one class this has really challenged me. That is because I have an autistic student in my one group. I do not have any experience or qualification when it comes to teaching special needs students. In fact, I have to shamefully admit my frequent use of the r word. I would go so far as to say that my generation grew up with almost zero sensitivity towards those with special needs.

That said, I have struggled with this group of students and have frequently second, third and forth guessed my work in this regard. Then came exam day today. I was concerned. Having worked with this child for 3 months I had serious misgivings regarding his ability to sit an exam for 90 minutes. 

I am worse than the worst for doubting this student. He rocked the shit motherfucker. Kid got 75% on the paper. Fuck fucking yes.

You have to hold on to whatever ws you can.

Writing

I am making headway with my new novel. I have put my last WIP on the backburner. It needs to be overhauled from top to bottom or entirely revisited. It has such a fantastic premise and a wealth of source material in terms of my online teaching experience. However, the entire idea needs to shift focus completely.

My new WIP is a turd, a steaming pile of tinsel tainted turd. I fucking love it. No more to be said for now in this regard. I am enjoying writing it is the most important thing and I am happy to own it.

There you are. I am sorry for being such a downer king. I am quite bored with circling the drain already. Swings and round abouts motherfucker, I guess. The important thing is to never take your eyes off the prize, and for now it is to relentlessly and unquitingly strive forward on the path away from being shit towards the unreachable goal of being awesome instead.

Here I am, trudging forward, still stuck in the muddy beginning bits, the bits most likely to make you give up and quit. But don't give up. I can't promise that it gets better. Maybe it doesn't. But that shouldn't be the motivation. The motivation is to be as awesome as possible. If reward comes in the form of acknowledgement, recognition, fame, fortune, satisfaction, love, anything, if reward comes, so be it. But let not reward be motivation. Let the struggle towards awesomeness be the reward. Whether it is awesomeness in work, in body, in mind, in writing, in music or in art, let all of these facets of awesomeness be the destination.

The sound of today was Mazzy Star Fade into You, mainly because I like to dwell and it reminds me of her. I guess I need to let her go before I can move on. And I guess by saying that, I haven't let go yet.

The Perma Baked Plateau

I have slipped back into old habits. Bad habits, if I'm completely honest. Towards the end of November I joined the local cannabis club in Sevilla. It started off well enough, I had the green at arms length and was very disciplined about it all, one smoke after dinner to accompany a whisky. That was alright, I guess.

But then, this weekend I had Monday and Wednesday off. I slipped bad. A smoke before morning lessons and a day lost to the haze of smoke. It felt good if I am honest. Real good. Like getting back into a warm bed in winter on a day on which you do not have to work. And that in and of itself is good, I guess.

The problem is comfort. I find comfort to be a distraction from all that needs doing. I am not ready to be comfortable yet. I don't think I deserve to be comfortable. I am not even sure if anyone ever deserves anything. We just get what we get and have to do the best with it. Or the worst. Or nothing even. There are no obligations to life. Apart from the obligations we make and the obligations we agree to. 

Winter is a slow crawl here. The trees still cling on to their last few leaves. Those leaves are now a late autumn array of orange and brown, gradually they are falling to reveal bare finger tip branches. I walked across the river to my morning lesson. That 15 minute walk always gives me time to think. And my thoughts often end up going to the same destinations: loneliness and loss.

I am feeling very alone. I am used to being alone. I am quite comfortable with it. But right now I am torn between loneliness, the desire for companionship and the need to heal. I want a warm body to share my bed with, and an intellectual mind to challenge me. However, I also know that it would be a bad idea to have that, as it would just be reactionary. 

So as I walk over the bridge from one side to the other, I let my thoughts wander freely. I let them wander into the fields of memory, where my dogs run and play, where the good times lie, luxuriating in golden shaded memories of an inaccurate past, that never really existed. 

Memories are problematic once you've reached the Perma Baked Plateau. I've been mayor of the Plateau for 25 years. The Perma Bake was a good escape from the properly dangerous substances, but it too is a danger. Comfort without effort is incredibly dangerous. Free rewards absent effort. Green became North, South, East and West.

And then everything changed. With the collapse of my marriage, I could no longer justify comfort without effort. It was exactly that problem that caused me to take everything in my life for granted. I just assumed she would always be there and we would always be together, with our dogs and our home in the village. 

Those are all yesterday's memories and they need to be processed. And so I joined the club. That wonderfully familiar green wall of atmosphere and tingle edged pixelated reality baked. I smoked in the club. The music was rock. There honestly should be a law prohibiting generic rock from a cannabis club. Should be dub or no dice motherfucker! For the last week or two (lost track, lol) I have been walking in a haze and glaze eyed dream through winter's descending grip over Seville. It's been OK. Not great. Underneath the haze, conscious thought questions: is this helping?

I don't know if it is or not, what I do know is that I forgot, for all of a week (or two). I forgot where I am and what I am doing. I forgot what has happened. I forgot how much I miss my dogs. I even forgot how much I still love her. 

And it felt good to forget. It felt so damn fucking good to finally put all of that down.

So started Thursday, still dark morning walk to the other side, where the bridge takes me. The cold water separating here from there. Thoughts resurfaced from the depths to remind me of the brutal fact of reality: while I might have forgotten, it doesn't change the reality of the here and now.

That dark depth chest constricting emotion is back, squeezing my centre in a death grip, biting back the back of throat tear trigger. There is no bottling it in, there is no escaping it. It has become a part of me, that hopefully one day will take a different path and will fade to just another gold tinged memory of self constructed mythology.

From here, I have no future direction. Rather, life will continue as life has been: head down, work, write, workout. 

To conclude, in amidst the haze and smoke, I sparked the seed of my next novel. A human story freed from bells and whistles of fantasy and scifi. So, if I write bit less regularly here, it is because I am focusing more on that. So there's that, which is not completely nothing, I guess.

That's me for now, the music for today has been Nick Drake, a place to be.

That final remaining piece of joy

That final remaining piece of joy,

that thin and fragile strand that at one time

connected me

grounded me,

that kept me hanging on to youth and childhood

has been cut.

It is over now.

Cold hard and bleak,

laughterless reality

beyond feelings

has cold hand gripped my heart

and squeezed reality in my fantasy dreaming

idiocy.

There is no going back

to pastures of green and idyllic memory

those pastures have been flame thrower torch

obliterated.

There is nothing to go back to.

And that is OK. Because going back there

was preventing me

from going forward.

And that is the only direction left.

So thanks to setting fire to hopes.

I can move on to other places now.