Loose decades

Decades & random pics.

In the fifties I was born but I don’t remember much and there are few photographs and the world was monochrome. People without memories can only recount what didn’t happen and that can be so tiresome. All I ever wanted was a straight story but the Masonic Lodge had signed me up for a career I knew nothing of, still they stalk me with that all-seeing eye, a pyramid and a burning scroll in their clenched fist. Austere.

In the sixties I was too young to care but I was aware that something or nothing was taking place; I was still growing in a damaged way. I gave way to the bully boys who told me which way to go as I crossed their bleak landscape. Education was not all it’s cracked up to be and people generally spoke from the side of their mouths. I was confused about sex and music because of a criminal lack of raw material and up to date text books. My first period was a disaster and there was nobody to run home crying to, potatoes and margarine, every day. I blame Fife Education and my Irish upbringing. Scratch a Fifer’s skin and you’ll find the flesh of a potato. I think that the Flintstones are some kind of tractor. Hallucinogenic.

In the seventies I grasped at lost causes, championed failures, cults and premonitions, I chopped down trees and buried the bodies of people I didn’t kill and none of the drugs ever worked. I hurt my friends, my family and myself, I listened to the wrong voices, and they prevailed. Grave illness was all around and the coal fires burned late into cigarette and macrobiotic evenings, relatives are dying but if you’re wise you won’t ask why. The smell of hospital lingers in my nostrils and I am the subject of new and fresh abuse, always welcome in the modern lifestyle. Are punks something to do with Munchkins, DC Comics and Top Cat? Everyday I fall in love with someone else and go home and write them a whole book before I fall into peaceful and blissful sleep that only underpins my recent awakening with its wonderful dreams. I had the potential to be beautiful but some spoken sentences, uttered idly but picked up by my radar-like hearing tore into that magic and killed it. At the cremation I remained controlled and composed. I reasoned that some parallel universe would allow the play out of the correct script because God is always available for parties and brief encounters at numerous omnipresent places and appointments. A complete waste of time some said. Desperado. Shotgun.

In the eighties I still could swing an axe but most of the time I aimed it at my own head. I drowned in the shallow end and swam on an ocean a thousand miles deep peeking below the surface from time to time. I didn’t like what I couldn’t see. I discovered garlic and wine and talk and when not to talk, I was singing but out of tune. I am cold and running down an endless grey motorway running out of fuel. A crisis in the wider world would be welcome as a respite from the chase and being the quarry. I have the blackest fingernails because I drove them in so deep at the time, I suck the dirt out but it does not shift; there is no decay in this universe, only the hardening of the concrete. Deep inside I acknowledge that for me, time must pass. I am sitting on a stool, dressed in black. There are cartoons all around that blur reality just a little. Brittle.

In the nineties I was numb, dumb and drunk, I stopped caring, I fell through the mist and landed in more mist, the mist was likely to strangle me, or so I thought. There were bolts and rivets everywhere, pining me down and holding me down. Everybody meant well (they said), but to this day I don’t really know what they meant. If I travel I get no where, if I stay at home the bills mount up, I give money away because it is a nuisance and what difference does any of it make because you can’t buy friends. My good works are noted by various well-spoken Caucasian angels, the text book type of course. To add to no troubles at all my Grandmother’s house is looted and eventually burns. I don’t cherish these particular memories. For a brief moment the world made no sense at all, as I recall. Morning, noon and night. Reptile.

Now it’s the last seven years and the universe is still a torn place, it’s a Bob Dylan lyric writhing in the realm of all great and forged incorrectness, it’s neither political nor animal, it’s the burned out anger that takes no more and rolls itself up. It’s all about expression and no substance. I’m sniffing out and searching for the substance but where? I am reminded of my animal past and grudgingly I embrace it. I become aware of the power of deceit and multiplication and the weakness of ownership and jumping to conclusions. The world is as it always was whatever you make of it. People are something else however. In conclusion you must find love, but it is well buried and you need a deep spade with a long handle. Everything we do is old. Desperate.

Today I can say that I am older and I am aware of the things I can do, the things I cannot and the things that I used to do that I cannot do any more. So what.