New Tricks

He looked down in astonishment at the coil of steam that rose from his hand. Extending his wrist to examine it, he blinked twice at the wisps of smoke rising from the place where his trigger finger used to be. The round had spun shrieking through the calm morning and neatly removed it at the first knuckle, the heat of ignition blazing still hot enough to cauterize the wound as neatly as a surgeon trained in the civil confines of an urban teaching hospital could.

Instead of looking down to where the separated digit might lie, perhaps flexing in the ochre dust, his minded folded in on itself like a decorative napkin, hiding the silver-plated thoughts he should have been thinking. He caught a glimpse of an ancient man, legs crooked by years of the saddle, hunched into his stool on a shady porch. By the old man’s side a glass glinted, droplets of condensation chasing each other down the sides to the hand-shaped oak boards beneath. The old man was squinting at a piece of wood, methodically shaping it with a pearl-handled blade. His eyes were rheumy and seemed to shed permanent tears; weeping for a life gone, or a limited future. Who knows.

And as he stared inward at this old vision-man, he felt… nothing. Not fear, not calm- but maybe the absence of calm. The absence of everything.

Even as time regained its usual haste around him, he knew the old man was himself, an ancient container holding the brittle memory-remnants of a life and lifestyle now as forgotten as the stars which slipped in to an orange pocket each day at sunrise. Stranger still, the old man would never exist, for as he looked at the space where his pointing finger, his beckoning finger, his gouger and router used to be, a second round cored his scalp behind his ear, whipping around the inside of his skull like a deranged baker riling cream, until it had thoroughly erased all thought, memory and future from him, and burst out of his eye-socket, to lodge in a sign across the road. The sign read WE WELCOME ALL VISITORS (AND THEIR CASH).

Breadcrumbs

Of course it never works the way you plan it. If life followed some predictable road map into the future, with all of the distractions neatly set apart from the road so you could cruise past without stopping, you’d just not bother with it.

If you could tell what was coming up, and make sure that you had everything you need with which to master it, tame it, or overcome it, you’d never actually know what you could be capable of.

Perhaps it’s more like this: a haphazard scattering of crumbs in a darkened wood, a tantalizing trail which misleads you into thinking that you have your bearings. Abruptly, the trail ends: a flock of misshapen and random birds are pecking. Looking at you. Mocking you. Their gleaming red eyes challenging you- where to now, mister- where to now?

You have no choice but to take a rag, wrap it around your eyes, and reel blindly through the undergrowth. The security in doing this comes from having the knowledge, deep down, that somewhere in the lightless overgrown mass is a clearing. A couple of trees, felled by a forgotten storm, or a pond, circled by the tiny footprint signatures of those who come to drink in the night.

You may not know where you’re heading, but from the clearing, you can see a mountain in the distance. It won’t be easy to get there, with your head to the forest floor, but you know where it is now. Even if it takes the most circuitous route possible to get there, and you emerge at its foot with your shins barked by rogue roots, your skin alive with the light scarring of thorns, you’ll end up where you need to be, at that time, for that reason. It’s inevitable.

Insufficient Funds

It’s kinda weird the way people tell you not to panic. I can say that, because I do it myself. Sure, I get told it a lot, so maybe I’m more prone to it than others, but I think that panic is under-rated. If you’re doing a balancing act: sitting on a dodgy bicycle on top of a razor blade wired to explosives, it’s time to panic.

If you’re watching the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho, then you don’t want to calmly encourage the woman to relax and meditate on her blessings, you want to scream at her. GET OUT! PANIC AND RUN!

If you happen, unluckily, to be tied down to a railroad sleeper with a runaway train heading for you, then it’s ok to feel more than slightly anxious.

I’m no stranger to the paralyzing effects of panic and anxiety, and of course you want your friends to keep dodging the bullets, but sometimes there just aren’t immediate options. You know you’re panicking when you are so muddled you can’t remember the words to the Serenity Prayer. Hmm. Serenity. I’m not sure I know what that is.

So today for me is a day to panic, a little like a startled furry creature in the headlights of an oncoming car. I’m hoping that some sensibility kicks in, and I dash to the freedom of the hedgerows lining the road, instead of running into the opposite.

I hear screaming can be therapeutic. Right?

Cusp

Sometimes it's actual nostalgia: a feeling that some ghosts from the past are still rattling chains in my head. Family times from childhood, places, songs, people. They sneak in with their compound memories, an echo of smells or photographs, of recordings or furniture. They are the husks of shed snakeskin, there and yet they exist only to show what has gone before. They are the moulds from which came the brass statuary of reality, and yet they are just plaster- broken. The shattered powdered mass cannot recreate the entirety. They are the abandoned burrows of earth-bound creatures, the shadows of objects in negative, removed from the sunlight.

Sometimes it's a feeling of nostalgia for that which may not happen, or just a daydream, slumbering in the possible or impossible future. Wistfulness is the warm outer-layer of hope, the maybe which keeps me placing one foot in front of the next.

Somewhere, between the past and the future, is where I hide- glaringly visible, and yet none of you here with me knows exactly where I've been or where I'm going. There are architects plans, the blueprints crackling in the breeze which lifts them aloft, sends them spinning crazily and unpredictably forward. The tumbleweeds left behind recede, rolling, bouncing into the ancient hills.

My Grandpa Was a Chocolate Bar

He was tall, wore glasses, and the photos of him for me are where the memories come from, rather than a sense that he was once flesh. I do remember snatches, perhaps even his voice, but he’s been dead for more than thirty years.

He was a successful businessman, running a family concern well and had great dignity. I’d say, based on the way his daughters reminisce, that he was a strict but doting father.

I think he’d only just retired to his hilltop home overlooking the River Tay in Dundee, Scotland, when he had a stroke that subtracted his reality from ours, and left him a series of fading memories. A favourite was the letters he’d write to his grandchildren at Easter- this three-piece suited gentleman- he’d write letters which had little drawings of rabbits to replace the word, and tiny sketches of zig-zagged eggs.

I remember my mum’s tears after the telephone call, and not knowing how to comfort her.

Oddly, now, the most powerful memory I have of him is the chocolate bar we found in the golf bag he left to my mum after he died. It was in one of the side pockets. Obviously there to satisfy a whim on the golf course- golf was an institution for him, being Scots. It represented, for me, the whimsical in his character- a man with a taste for the sweet, even when at his most focused.

It was a small chocolate bar. The brand name was Penguin- and it was a chocolate covered wafer supposed to fill the gaps during a tea break.

My mum kept it in a drawer next to her bed. Sometimes we’d rummage through the drawer, and look at it, smell it, trying to figure out what magic was contained in this- a snack created to be eaten but now containing mystical powers; a talisman.

That’s how life works. We work to create lives and lifestyles and memories, but in the end those memories belong to someone else, and we can’t control what they are. I’d like to stash things in a box which are important to me for my children to discover one day, but I think each of them will find their own talisman of mine to cherish.

Maybe you’re holding onto something special that reminds you most of someone not around anymore. I wonder what those things are…

(That's him, at the top, in the middle, in his Christening gown, around 1912)

Watching Paint Dry

It’s dull, matt, and often the worst possible colour in the spectrum- listless pastel yellow or peach, or the same shade as apricot milkshake sick, and it’s nothing but a chore to use. Trouble is, it’s not there for form, but for function- and if you invest the time and money into using it, you’ll have a smile on your face for much longer.

Undercoats are there to seal and protect, to wrap and nourish. They provide absolution for any physical sins the walls have committed, and help to armour against future temptations. You slap it on in back-breaking tedium, and then cover it up with the glamorous robes that obscure its usefulness.

There’s always something going on beneath the surface; sometimes it’s there to protect, sometimes it’s just hidden away…

Overcoats: the traditional outfit of hoboes, perverts and schoolboy mass murderers. They conceal racks of watches, parcels of white powder and filthy clothes. They are sodden with rain and smell of stale air, cigarette smoke and mothballs. Behind their dense drapery, the body’s form is lost to function, as legs become a solid silhouette, and hips and waist are merely imagined.

What horrors lurk inside this hellish garb, whose tweed foppery is lined with sinister and thinly-veiled threats? (Poe moment…)

What we choose to do beneath, or reveal above can be good or evil. Sometimes what we hide is the best of us, and sometimes what we reveal in order to intimidate reveals only our flaws rather than our strengths. Perhaps we should look at showing off our vulnerable parts more, and give up trying to posture ourselves as tougher than nails. If we are to represent ourselves as human, then how many more dimensions can we add, just by expressing what is already there?

So I’m not sure if I’m sorted out either way- I need to work on putting the proper energy into laying strong foundations, even if that’s thankless labour, but also make sure I’m getting rid of any layers getting in the way of being authentic, true to myself. I figure I’m not alone in this…

There’s so much to you and I we haven’t shown or seen. I look forward to being surprised.

Things Appear Bigger Through a Rifle's Sights

Waking up to a fresh start once a week/clean clothes after washday/early mornings when you get to see the sun rising/DJs on the radio trying to cheer you up/getting to prioritise the week/getting stuff done you didn’t manage to do last week/taking your professional life in a new direction/discovering that people like to advertise exciting things that day/coffee tasting so much better and seeming to be more necessary/restaurants having special prices because they need to compensate for quieter traffic/the unexpected evenings you have with your friends because it’s not predictable in the way a weekend is/Happy Hours/meetings that resolve issues/the sense that everything could change before the week is out/the way a favourite CD can feed your mood/knowing that no matter haw bad it is, it’s just a day and that it’ll be over in a few hours/happy memories from the weekend/seeing photos going up on Facebook/catching up on news with people who have been away as they update their statuses/the way people seem to publish blogs of accumulated thoughts and review their lives/leftover food from entertaining/a sense of camaraderie with others as people commiserate/coming home to a house and garden that you’ve tidied up/feeling alert at the end of the day/having the energy to watch a favourite movie or TV show/still having the rest of the week to do things, see things, feel things and learn things….

Some pretty good reasons to enjoy Mondays. Right?