Counting

It seems a long time since my last post. Ten days is enough of a short break I think. Ten keeps popping up. Sometimes I catch myself counting numbers in my head. I used to do it occasionally but just recently I’ve been doing it a lot more and I don’t know why. I think it might be associated with a disorder like the way I hoard stuff, stuff I should get rid of. When I catch myself doing it it’s hard to stop. Sometimes I just keep counting on and on and into the hundreds and it’s usually when I’m out and about walking when the counter begins its climbing oratory. People develop ticks in the city in a multitude of ways, urban psychosis, twitching curtains at the windows of the self. 1..2..3..4..5..6..7..8..9..10..11..12..13..14..15..16..17..the Zebra crossing 18..19..20 the shop 21..22..23 “Alright mate!” 24..25..26..27 look at the little dog.

I read that J.Meister and Smooth Blue seem to be hitting it off and I’m pleased to read that. I thought I might send them a comment but I thought that maybe I shouldn’t be a freak, that’s to say that even though the net has doors ajar it’s good to respect peoples privacy. It was damn strange to read about the wrapped cat that Mr Meister found on the long boat, the little thing couldn’t be the same as the bundle found under my floor could it? The council had taken it away and I thought that they would burn it at least…although, of course those other items of mine, the bridge parts, they were confiscated too and ended up miles away. Those fragments ended up in the house that incarcerates Old Uncle Charles and his young matriarchs.

Boris returned from seeing his brother Ruth in Prague. He came back with this little box that opens out to become a little table. It’s a miniature curiosity, perhaps some kind of truth.

Yesterday two cars exploded outside. I asked a fireman who stood waiting his turn at the hose what he thought had caused it, he just shrugged and mumbled something about sparks, right then I started counting again.

Back at work the monotony of turning tables and sweeping floors, cleaning the toilets and catching myself in the bathroom mirror, looking at a stranger there, so much older than me and then I obliterate the image with glass cleaner, counting.

House Arrest can be more than just a geographical location. Is Aliss through the looking glass I wonder? The cartography of all our children, our layer cake evolution, myself, the crumbs I leave, the icing I loose, my decaying sweetness, all the memories that I am of this and that connection to all that I ripple against in the pond. I’ve forgotten the code I once adhered to, that of my sensitivity to symbols embedded within the exegesis of the day to day, to read my text carefully. I’ve been skipping too much, whole chapters and stumbling into narratives over which I have no knowledge. I feel as if I’m fighting an enemy of strangers because I have become a stranger to myself. I am disadvantaged, infiltrated and surrounded. I am going to be knocked down and when that happens I have to listen very carefully. I can only hope that there are enough cotton buds left on the shelf inside the cupboard. 1..2..3

Sublime

I’m taking this week away from work because Boris has gone to visit his brother Ruth in Prague. Ruth used to have bit parts in Hammer house films when he was younger.

I have this pile of books that I’ve started but not completed. Each book has a marker, their shaking pile like a switchboard of calls on hold. It’s a mindless way to read but I have a sniper of an attention span, my analog Internet. I’m going to read them this week.

The Young woman called Mandy that visited me with my friend Helium a week or so ago? I mentioned her URL in my last post regarding a Mr. J Meister. I’d posted it with the possibility in mind that she might by chance be the same girl whose phone number he’d lost. It turns out that One and another one somewhere else connected by a common factor makes Two. I checked out her blog and she sounded a bit pissed that I’d mentioned it. I think that the net makes us more vulnerable to nodes of indeterminacy in an acceleration of mans evolution. It’s like sticking our heads outside the eye and into the storm and these things happen more and more frequently in the wind. Sorry Mandy.

In her latest post she mentions a gift that she had gotten for her mother. She’d found this curious doll maker called The Softest Person. Naturally I checked out the dolls and had one sent to me. It arrived the next day. Newt Sublime is special and another kind of serendipity. The dolls are like balms for ailments, alchemical morphologies, signs for divination, texts for resolution. Newt Sublime is like a synaptic bridge. This effigy from The Softest Person has allowed me to find some kind of closure. When I was about fourteen a friend and I, Star Wars fans found two Newts in the garden pond. We called them Chewbacca and Yoda. We put them both into a shallow, water filled, orange plastic cat litter, with little rocks, weed from the pond and a little netting over the top to keep them in. Later, after a day digging holes in the garden I returned and found one dead, dehydrated and bound in fluff on the carpet of my attic bedroom. I had always thought that perhaps the cat had disturbed them, that he’d got one whilst the other had got away, at least I never found the other but it was a long way back to the pond through unfriendly territory. One thing that was certain was that I was responsible. It was an ill memory that pinched, a little past that swayed restless and ghosting. The doll is a mirror in to which I can slowly mouth resolve. Thank you TSP and god bless Meister and Mandy.

Breaks

I might by coincidence know someone who, by coincidence knows someone else and if you’re reading my feed Mr J. Meister then, hey fella, I can’t give out a phone number but I do have a blog address for you it’s: smooth-blue.blogspot.com (.) The world turns like a poker wheel so lets see if your number comes up, good luck and you have my friend Helium to thank for that tip.

As for my love life, well nothing at all right now. I actually feel that I can’t be bothered at the moment. This is because I’ve made so many of the same mistakes over and over that I just want to get off for a while. I want to sit with Popcorn and watch the dial carefully from outside of the ring. I don’t expect to ever get things right, my block’s been carved, shaped and hacked by raging, misplaced desires. I am a wretched, Pavlovion dog. I am every man. I’ve fallen off the bike and I haven’t managed to get my feet back on to the Peddles. I do however have at least a good grip on one of the handlebars if you know what I mean.

Changing the subject the Café has managed to be a little burdensome this week. The stove needs replacing and my good intentioned adjustments ended up with a damaged gas ring and a reprimand from Boris. To quote his well managed words “You’re a terrible, terrible bloody fiddler.”

Other news, Dink the Café cat went missing and then reappeared outside the newsagents yesterday asleep in an empty fruit basket. He had an Elastoplast on his head for no apparent reason and some chewing gum matted up on the end of his tail. I can only imagine foul play and not the winged variety. I doubt, with respect to our feathered friends that they’d have the imagination.

Back to the subject of gas the tower block at the end of the mainroad had to be evacuated last week because a tenant, a middle aged Lithuanian women, had decided to kill her husband. She had left the gas on whilst the man was sleeping, sealed the place with damp towels, came out, locked the front door and after an appropriate time put a match through the letterbox. The flat blew up as she’d intended although the reverse of intentions came to pass. She was killed instantly as the door blew out on to her whilst her bemused, most fortunate husband and bed were found intact, upturned and outside two storeys below. A little magma springs forth.

Every action has a reaction and unless we’re really careful it won’t be one that we can comfortably presume, not that I’m an advocate of flat-lining expectations, the indeterminate considered, but so much trouble can be avoided. Misplaced desires? The inevitable bite from the juicy fruit? We balance ourselves on ropes suspended many hundreds of feet above the earth and yet some of us (me) cannot traverse the most even terrain without pain. But and this is the rub, we are shaped by pain. If we lived for a thousand years, what then? It’s not that I’m not a gambling man, I’m just conservative with the odds. Ladies and gentleman, Brim has left the building.

inside me
thousands of summer songs
crammed
i open my mouth
& try to put them in some order.
I sing, badly.
but,
thanks to my song,
i am distinguished...

Cicada by Timothy Gallagher

Rise

An over-trod and painful west London Street, lusting after fire and destruction, desperate for death. A fifteen-year-old boy torched every bus in the Westbourne Park bus yard. Why? All things, it used to be thought, contained the element Phlogiston. “Phlogisticated” substances were those that, on being burned, were “dephlogisticated.” The ash of the burned material was held to be the true material. The stink of unreleased Phlogiston rises from the filth of London’s labored, street and avenued entrapments. Like ancient grasslands cities too need to be raised from time to time. Short of regulated, lung draining flares of necessity, intense, startling bursts of concentrated inferno will rise like tremors from the earth. Flames have shaped the city of London many times in the past and it feels as though the volcano is about to violently erupt once more, reducing again to its true material; materia-prima to feed the atrophied spirit of the lost.

Enter

Spineless rat spread out and wired for insight on the ground and beneath an averaged height outdoor clothesline. Rattus Anoono bathed in etiquette of mirth and dandelion. Pulled out and sung to from a distance. The small voice undulation that arises over and above any wind or direct breeze impact resonates the voided, spineless rat as hi-tone modulation. This in turn and of an occasion inspires black birds with a certain predilection to the attractive qualities of a certain timbre to grace the evening brighter. ‘Sqee ack ack ta wee wee Sqee nata nee nee sqee.’ The significance of the line is the magic quality of surrogate spine to which it has succumbed as Succubus to need.

It is always a gamble.

Anti-aging cream in easy jars. Destructible virtual environments to bite through from a static position like the nail to hammer into African sculptures for release of bad spirit. Effigies of pillow and string reach out to mimesis, hung from poles, waiting for lead. Sleepless nights tossed on the tide of times slow resolution. Poured turpentine on fresh oil on wood, decaying the inaudible stutter of a poorly rendered face. This instrument of bricks and mortar, this house, like a musical pipe for the breath of traffic.