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Tomato Throwing at it's Best

If you are the kind of person who clicks on things such as the picture above hoping that it takes you somewhere interesting,  then I salute you.

Many thanks.

A Useful Word Awaits You

No Law Redux

If any of this looks vaugely familiar then well done you dear reader. If not it'll be fine. Click to read it / watch it on Substack. No tricks.

I Dare You ...

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Nutella Dog Biscuits

This is exactly what the story is all about. Except that it's not. Click to read.

The Truth is a Simple Tool

I was thinking the other day, as most men do when they have lived long enough to look back without flinching, that I have been playing the guitar for over fifty five years. That is a long time to stay with anything. Long enough to have worn grooves in the wood and in myself. Long enough to know the truth of it.

The truth is simple. I am not that good a player.

That is not modesty. It is not fishing in a bucket for comfort or a “there, there”. It is just the measure of things. There are young players, half a lifetime behind me, who can outplay me without breaking sweat. I do not resent them. I only wonder how I have travelled so far and arrived here. I never saw it as a race.

I play by position. By shape. By the memory of where things sit beneath my fingers. My ear is serviceable but not sharp. Like the rest of me it was never trained. Sometimes I think it is made of wood. Guitar players talk about tone woods as if they were sacred texts. They argue over types and grains and ageing. It keeps the shops busy and the prices high. All bullshit but understandable. People like to find reasons for things. My problem is not the wood of the guitar. It is the wood of my hearing.

So I work with what I have. Geometry. Patterns. Scale systems. I let the fingers move and the mind follow. The sound comes after. It happens quickly now, in small flashes. Microseconds v milliseconds. If the sound that comes back is what I meant to say, or close enough, I accept it. That is a good day. I suppose I see what I’m playing rather than hear it first. This was probably not the model of creativity used by Mozart, Vivaldi or Miles Davis. But it kind of works.

I know chords and scales. I know a few moves. I can copy a line if I must. I work it out. These are tools. I use them to cover what I do not know. Over time the tools become familiar. Familiarity becomes a kind of map. I can move across the fretboard without falling through it. It is not scholarship. It is navigation. You need the right path to get home. Stick with it. When you find a method that works for you, don’t try to change it.

I have written songs, though I prefer to say I have made them up. Written sounds grand. Like you really knew what was to come. I have built them up the way a man might fix the plumbing in his house. Careful. Within limits. Never straying too far from what I know will hold. I avoid certain moves. I lean on others. I see the shapes before I hear them. It is not how the masters might do it. It is how I do it. Dave Brubeck, Jackson Pollock and Eric Clapton may agree up to a point. Caravaggio, Tchaikovsky and Da Vinci maybe not so.

Art is full of shortcuts. Some are honest. Some are accidents. Some are called modern so they can be explained. People mock what they do not understand. They say “my child could have done that”. Perhaps a child could have begun it. Beginning is not the same as finishing. The path from idea to ending is rarely straight. Sticking with the principle helps. It can also choke the life out of a thing. Mistakes take you to the edge of something.

In an artistic context, knowledge is power, if you allow it to be and that’s just how it is. Accept it. Discipline is good, you’ll be tight, you may be all over that King Crimson material or shining on in the Viennese string quartet. Ignorance may be seen by some as inferior but in it’s raw form it just might test or stretch the system. Enthusiasm and energy knock down walls. But you have to judge for yourself.

The tools you use make a difference. A guitar that fights back. A synth you don’t quite understand but you squeeze new sounds from. A voice that’s close to tuneless but full of soul or emotion and expression, or is just plain seductive. Software that mixes or bends and throws out unexpected tones. Tape speed mistakes, hiss, bleeding across tracks, mics in the wrong place, misheard or misread lyrics, accidents that happen in the moment. Keeping on playing where the others have stopped. Use the things that move you.

I do not know if I am a free spirit, stubborn or just undisciplined. I no longer care. I have been at it too long to worry about labels. What matters is smaller than that. A phrase landing clean. A note bending just enough. Staying in time. Serving the song. Finding something that sounds like me. Feeling good about how I arrived at that moment.

That is the point now. Not brilliance. Not speed. Not applause.

Just the few seconds when the guitar answers back faithfully.

After fifty five years I am still at it. Still feeling for the right note in the dark. Still building with blunt tools. Connecting the sparks. Still trusting instinct over theory.

It is not pretty but I’m getting used to it.

And that will be enough.

People may say. “In the end AI tunes will drown everything else out.”

Then we’ll have AiTunes.

Not sure about that.

Lost Jotters II

I am not the kind of person who'd waste a decent enough graphic. I don't want it to languish somewhere. Out of sight, lost or forgotten. I put it here and it leads on to a short story that's stuck on Substack. That's as stuck as a story can get.

It's Squint but also a Gateway

It's not just a long dry list. There are opinions, experiences and things like that. A lot it really happened, as far as I can tell. Click the immaculate, if slightly off-kilter piece of design to enter the into the hot mess of debate.

Villains & Heroes

Civilisation, Power and the Stories We Tell Ourselves.

Why not use a Beach Boy’s title and image as a jumping off point for a few random observations and opinions? If there are rules here, then I’m happy to bend them. Sometimes the mind needs to empty itself. Thoughts are set down in loose piles, as if they might later be arranged into something meaningful. Like jigsaw pieces or Lego bricks, there is a hope they might connect. Often they do not. The material resists order. The result is not clarity, but exposure. Maybe a release of steam will occur, good for the plumbing and pressure levels of the inner sanctum.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” The final words of Roy Batty in Blade Runner, everybody knows this.

That speech lingers because it captures something uncomfortable. Experience is vast, fleeting and ultimately uncontained. Human beings try to impose order on it anyway. Nowhere is that more apparent than in how we construct and understand power in human systems.

Today’s leaders; King Charles III, Donald Trump, Vladimer Putin, Benjamin Netnyahu, Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping, Cyril Ramaphosa, King Felipe VI, Keir Starmer … and so on. Are any of them actually “great” in any positive sense? Capable or even steady? Some seem ineffective and useless. Some are plainly bullish, ignorant, cruel and stupid. Some cautious, clever, playing a long game maybe. These things don’t make them great. Their “thrones” are always shaky. They may suffer from hidden disorders, mental illness, poor personal hygiene, bad habits, blind spots or simply not care about others.

Kings, queens, rulers, leaders and politicians are human beings. They are not abstractions or inevitabilities. They are complex but recognisable, made of the same contradictions as everyone else. They act with mixtures of intention, error, self interest and, occasionally, principle. Some do harm, some do good, most do both. Many do very little at all beyond maintaining position until replaced. We all know that Donald Trump just wants his face and name plastered onto a Dollar bill or any significant building - and the odd “prize”. Putin wants Russia to swallow up much of Europe so he might be remembered as a “Great”. The clay that makes up their feet is clear to see.

Yet we persist in treating them as something more than human. Through birth, opportunity, talent, manipulation or force, they arrive in positions that most people will never hold. From a distance, they become symbols. We project comforting features onto them, imagining control, strategy and purpose where there may be none.

This tendency is not accidental. It is rooted in something deeper. There is a strain of madness in human beings, a drive to construct meaning even where none exists. The collective madness that builds temples, great walls, cathedrals, palaces and systems of belief. It simplifies the incomprehensible into fairy stories that can be repeated and accepted. Actions are carried out “In the name of God” or for the “Benefit of the State”. Flags, crests and banners are the cheap tricks waved on by power brokers. Historical references and dreamed of ideals. Costume and ceremony.

These stories do not need to be true. They need only to be convincing, and people have the need to hold onto them.

Once established, they become tools. They justify authority, shape behaviour and create the illusion of order. Complexity is reduced to slogans. Responsibility is displaced onto others. Blame is showered onto minorities, the weak and the stateless. The larger and more imposing the structure, physical or ideological, the more effectively it can intimidate and control. Ignorance does not disappear. It is organised. It speaks. It swears.

At the same time, human existence remains brief and uncertain. Three score and ten years, if you’re lucky. We measure time as though it belongs to us, yet it does not. We exist within it, not the other way around. Beyond that narrow span, the universe proceeds without reference to human concerns. We fumble in the dark. Building a local railway system that can run tightly, according it’s timetable, is useful but insignificant for the rest of the world and meaningless within the universe.

Against that scale, the idea of enduring political greatness becomes difficult to sustain.

Consider our modern leaders. They differ in style, in rhetoric, in competence. Some appear forceful but crude, others cautious but calculating. Some seem ineffective, others dangerously certain. None escape the patterns of history. They inherit systems they did not design and repeat behaviours that are well established. Mistakes recur. Responsibility is deflected. Loyalty is prioritised over principle. Cruelty is tolerated in the search for justice and stability. States degenerate into rogue forms where arms, brute force and shouting wins arguements.

This is not necessarily the result of individual failure. It may instead reflect the limits of the systems themselves. Power does not exist in isolation. It is shaped by incentives, pressures and narratives that constrain what can be done. Even those who intend to act well operate within structures that reward continuity more than change.

From a distance, it is difficult to judge any of this with confidence. Most people experience events indirectly, through mediated accounts, commentary and fragments of information. What is presented is filtered, rearranged or withheld. The full picture is never visible. You can’t trust media. You never could.

Reality, as it is lived on the ground, is constantly erased and replaced.

A gathering or market place becomes student accommodation. A refugee camp becomes a resort. An oasis becomes wasteland. A natural landscape becomes an opencast mine. Agricultural land becomes a waste storage facility. Rivers die a slow death and forests burn. Each transformation is explained, justified and absorbed into a new narrative. What came before is forgotten or rewritten. The earth is scorched, then concreted over.

This is how civilisation presents itself. Not as a stable achievement, but as a continuous process of revision.

The question then is not whether power can be trusted. History suggests that it cannot be trusted for long. Even when used responsibly, corruption and distortion remain close. Systems degrade. Intentions shift. Outcomes diverge from promises.

The more difficult question is why this pattern persists.

Part of the answer lies in the gap between reality and the stories we tell about it. Civilisation is often defined as progress, as the advancement of knowledge, culture and organisation. It is associated with writing, institutions and shared structures. These definitions describe what is built, but not necessarily what is sustained.

A civilisation may be technically advanced and still profoundly unstable. It may produce extraordinary achievements while simultaneously creating conditions that undermine them. It may celebrate knowledge while encouraging simplification and distortion.

In that sense, civilisation is not a fixed state. It is an ongoing negotiation between competing forces. Between understanding and ignorance. Between cooperation and self interest. Between truth and the narratives that replace it.

This is where the unease arises. The world contains remarkable things, and remarkable people. There is no shortage of creativity, intelligence or care. Yet alongside this, there are persistent efforts to construct systems that produce unnecessary harm, confusion and inequality.

We recognise this in the good ideas that are launched with hope but quickly turn sour:

• Much of the connectivity potential of the internet is ruined by almost unrestricted social media, gambling, porn, toxic news reporting and AI fakery.

• Health care, medical and welfare systems that began as “for the people” services now becoming unaffordable and exploitative.

• Retail goods made on an industrial scale to inferior standards but sold at higher prices.

• Utilities owned by faceless corporations who outsource services to the lowest or unsuitable bidders at the expense of reasonable standards.

• Basic foodstuffs, supply chains and products tainted and corrupted by dangerous, often unsustainable methodology, forever chemicals and additives.

And so on. No one ever seems accountable for these cycles of degradation.

The contradictions are difficult to resolve. They resist any simple explanation. Perhaps the most honest conclusion is also the least satisfying. Human beings are capable of building meaning, but not of stabilising it. Power amplifies this instability rather than resolving it. Civilisation, for all its achievements, remains only a thing buffeted within a shifting set of values and standards .

Like the moments described by Roy Batty (ironically a fictional and non-human character), much of what is built and experienced will disappear. Not because it lacked value, but because it was never as solid as it appeared.

What is civilisation? What does it even look like?

1. An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of record-keeping, including writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions.

2. The type of culture and society developed by a particular nation or region or in a particular epoch.

   “Mayan civilization; the civilization of ancient Rome.”

3. The act or process of civilizing or reaching a civilized state.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

Then there’s the small matter of art, science, philosophy and invention’s place in the progression of civilisation and our collective history. Kenneth Clark’s 1969 TV series Civilisation is widely seen as high point in documentary content, styling and as a personal historical testimony. A good place to start any knowledge gathering. It’s available here and there online, via DVD or in book form.

Whatever or wherever human civilisation is right now remains arguable, but we are close to the centre of it. It persists whether or not we are willing to face up to it’s bumpy reality and somehow, we must find our own peace within it.

LinkedIn Speak etc.

"I try not to judge a fellow based on the standard of his footwear but sometimes it's difficult not to pass a constructive comment if standards slip."

Now reads:

"In the dynamic world of professional growth, I always strive to embrace individuals beyond surface metrics, recognizing the value of potential over appearances.

However, in the pursuit of excellence and high standards, it’s essential to offer constructive feedback when standards waver.

This is not just about footwear, it’s about commitment to excellence and continuous improvement.

Together, let’s champion resilience and elevate every detail that fuels our collective success." 🚀

#Leadership #ContinuousImprovement #ProfessionalGrowth #ConstructiveFeedback #ExcellenceMindset

Source Material

Summer in some city. The bar was open to the street and the heat came in along with the flies. The table needed a wipe but nobody bothered. The beer was good and cold and the men were already talking things up before the sun had properly gone down. I’m just a number these days. An aged and greyed out form. I’m across the room. They talked loudly and with certainty about things they had most likely never done. Maybe just a game. An illusion. A power play. Words filling the gaps in time. A few beers make the stories flow easy. I can tell what’s going down.

There are many such men in the world. They are brave in the telling. They have fought with boxers that were never in the ring and caught fish that were never in the river. They have written books that no one has read and fought in battles that were fought by other men. They have loved and lost, but not lost much. They are not bad men, mostly. They are only foolish but they do not know it. You can see them and hear them every day. The first sentence from their lips usually gives them away. A humble sounding brag.

They won’t ask you any questions. They’re afraid that you might just top them with you’re easily located truth. You’re too quitely spoken. You possess a stillness. They can’t quite read your eyes because they refuse to meet them. Missing out on the people skills. No desire or ability to read the room. So they throw in every little thing that they can. It’s over your way like a stray missile. The game of the low man. Not everyone is equipped to be a master of the human condition.

They speak about the things they say happened to them. Wonderful and odd.
But none of them have done very much so you stay entertained by you’re own quiet bluff. You listen to them and you let them talk. It is good practice for a listener. Material might come your way. They need to hold the floor. Sit back but lean forward. As if you’re a believer.

One man says he once sailed through a storm that would have broken a battleship in half. He says the mast was gone and the sail torn like some T-shirt in a dog fight. The coastguard talked him home. He made it. Yet the boat sits tied up at the harbour and it has never been farther than the two bridges. He couldn’t follow the instructions on a pizza box.

Another man says he understands war and conflict because he has read many books about them. He’s watched movies and documentaries too. He speaks of courage and of fear and of command. Spur of the moment decision making. He’s excited by the danger. He’s an “expert”. But he has never heard that first volley come in overhead or seen the way a man looks when he knows he will not get up again.

They speak well and they speak often. They tell you how they “really told” people or called them out. They could be lawyers in another life. They say they welcome debate. They think that minds can be changed, but they can’t change their own. The bar room grows full of their voices and the truth grows thin in the air. They might have a fully formed theory but it never quite arrives. Everyone is entertained but then they go home gnawing on their thumbs.

I listen to these men because they are useful. They puff out their chests. They fake authority and depth. They are the raw material of stories. You take the way they boast and the way they sit and remember. That queer way they look at a woman when they think she is watching. How they high five and back slap. The things they pretend to like. I judge but I don’t condemn. I capture. You take their vanity and their foolishness and you put it on the page. Down there on the page. In the early morning ink.

Then they become real. A reality that throws a bucket of ice water over them.

That is the strange part of it. In life they are shadows made of talk. On paper they can become something else. Pencil thin but characters. Blind men looking for the light switch. Fictitious idiots that might carry a story for you. Concentrate and they’ll give you the next line.

The trick is to listen long enough to know the value of those stray conversations, set within the moments of accidental literary inspiration, that are just floating out there.

Pizza Night

It can be done. How to survive, with or without pizza in your life. Click on the image.

AI & Fulfilment

Follow the yellow box road, right along here - click.

Nebraska

Click here to open this up in Substack. It's a quick read if you're strapped for time.

Various Bits

Various bits to display - click here to read.

Magpie

Oh, the magpie brings us tidings
Of news both fair and foul
She's more cunning than the raven
More wise than any owl
For she brings us news of the harvest
Of the barley, wheat, and corn
And she knows when we'll go to our graves
And how we shall be born

Chorus:

One's for sorrow, two's for joy
Three's for a girl and four's for a boy
Five's for silver, six for gold
Seven's for a secret never told
Devil, devil, I defy thee
Devil, devil, I defy thee
Devil, devil, I defy thee

She brings us joy when from the right
Grief when from the left
Of all the news that's in the air
We know to trust her best
For she sees us at our labour
And she mocks us at our work
And she steals the eggs from out of the nest
And she can mob the hawk

Chorus:

The priest, he says we're wicked
For to worship the devil's bird
Ah, but we respect the old ways
And we disregard his word
For we know they rest uneasy
As we slumber in the night
And we'll always leave out a little bit of meat
For the bird that's black and white

One's for sorrow, two's for joy
Three's for a girl and four's for a boy
Five's for silver, six for gold
Seven's for a secret never told



Written by: Davey Dodds

Album: Mount the Air

Easter is Weeks Away

Easter is weeks away but Christmas is my nightmare.

I have long desired to testify against the holy weight of things,

to lay my worked on hands upon the altar

and whisper that it is lighter than it looks.

But I have testified to nothing.

The evidence dissolves in my mouth.

Proof abandons me in dim corridors

like a disgraced envoy,

like monkeys in a back room

tapping faithfully at their bright little machines.

The feasts arrive in their robes of weather.

They bow and withdraw.

No one keeps vigil

except the shopkeeper polishing his till

and the devout who kneel before a calendar

printed in red.

But the hot cross buns,

ah, they are another gospel.

They appear beside the Easter eggs

like rival messiahs sharing a shelf,

and I make no complaint.

I am not a difficult believer.

I have entered the order of the bun.

Two a day.

I have been faithful for one entire day

and already I feel the discipline

settling on my shoulders

like a modest shroud.

There are no revelations yet,

no troubling visions.

Sometimes a face emerges

from the flour and the glaze,

a human arrangement of sorrow and heat.

On the upper bun

there is a grimace, unmistakable,

angry perhaps,

or merely puzzled

by what has become of His dominion.

The cross rests there

like a question He did not mean to ask.

A comedian once murmured

that God is out of His depth now,

and I think of Him

wading into the darkened bakery

after hours,

robes damp with doubt,

searching the cooling racks

for an explanation.

And somewhere in a mythical Yorkshire village

two rival bakeries sharpen their knives of pride.

The ovens glow like minor suns.

They will call the story Top Bun,

and it will be spoken of as a comedy,

though everyone will understand

it is about hunger,

and the small, sweet wars

we wage

in the name of bread.

Anonymous.

Nixon's The One!

I know the actual post is posted below but I liked the way this graphic came how and I was eager to use it. So I did. Click it and you can read it again, possibly in a clearer layout with a better font etc. etc.

Economics

I live as though a midnight nurse might appear anytime and ask for my symptoms. Of course they vary hour by hour. Dawn cracks open like a soft-boiled egg and pretends everything’s fine. I no longer step in puddles. I detour. I strategize. A relaxed stroll in cheap shoes can apparently lead to pleurisy or some Victorian inconvenience. First you get the sweats. After that you’re on your own.

The Knitpic café doesn’t make money. It just washes it's face when a white tour bus coughs up some retirees. Lochs, Castles and Bridges road trips. Then it shuts on weekends, because logic is optional. The toilets are closed too. They will be fine. You can probably guess my financial future.

I have a feeling of not knowing. It stays with me. I stand outside of things and watch them move. I do not always understand how they move or why.

I think about the men and women who design birthday cards. The ones who draw flowers and bright balloons and write small jokes in some careful script. They open Esty shops. I think about the people who shape up plates and cups, or print patterns on tablecloths no one will really remember a year from now because they’re not Ikea. They must earn their keep somehow. Most of it is made far away, in China, where the provinces are all different from one another and the work is hard and constant. So I imagine. I’ve yet to visit. There is talk of energy there. Of a work ethic that does not stall or complain. Brutal or just kind in a knowing, human way?

Here it feels slower. As if a man must be nudged out of bed. As if he must be promised money before he will bend to lift. And even then he gives no more than he must. But why should he give more, when the men above him take more than their share? When managers talk of discipline, tight lines and teams but reward themselves first. Who has more “rights”? Shareholders; they’ll let you drink the poisoned water for a profit.

Finance is a dark room to me. Investment and industry are words spoken with confidence by men in good suits that fit their bad mood. We are told the markets will correct themselves. That traders will be fair. That prices will find their proper level. It is like handing the keys for the till to a man who has already shown you his dirty money stained hands. He still calls on you to trust his speculations. I smell phoenix schemes.

There is a faint ringing in my ear. It comes and goes. It sounds like a signal carried on under the noise of the day. As if something unseen adjusts the dials. Turn down what is good. Turn up what is bad. You will have what we decide. They say it plainly. We will have what we can take. Easy money. Avert your eyes and don’t trust your senses.

The ringing stays.

Toothpaste costs seven Pounds a tube. Oral-B. Instant coffee costs seven Pounds a jar. Nescafe. A pint of beer costs seven Pounds in a clean city bar with polished taps and a quiet floor. Seven British Pounds - might be Bucks or Euros where you are. The numbers increase and repeat themselves like a joke told too often. Don’t believe a man who laughts loudly at his own joke. He’s not really laughing. Neither are you.

People shake their heads. They are angry. They are tired. But they get on with it.

The ringing goes on.

Now I blame Richard Nixon. I found the root. A lot of things grew up from that. Nests of snakes. Still putting their eggs out and about. There, that’s your economics.

Great Grids of Substack

Simply click your mousy wee thing anywhere upon this collage of wonderfulness and you'll be transported to the www. world of my substantial Substack offerings. It's that simple.

True Fiction

He told himself it was only a story.

Not one of the children. Not a favourite pet. Not a prized object or a tool. It was just missing.

A simple, small and architecturally sweet set of ideas that had been scaffolding itself up into life. Quietly working up behind his eyes for days. He had felt it’s beams slot into place while he washed dishes, when he heard his partner’s voice, while he waited at traffic lights, as he lay awake at night listening to the house breathe and the cats pad across the floor. It had weight. It had weather systems. It had a particular shade of day light. Mostly monotone but the colour splashes would come. There was a feeling. He could feel the feeling. He thought it might be a good piece of work. There was potential.

And then one morning he woke up and it was gone.

Not faded or pale, greyed out, but gone. As if someone had come along during the night and with careful, surgical hands, had lifted it cleanly out of him. The blue sanitised gloves had carried it away. Like a specimen. Out of sight, somewhere else.

He lay still, eyes open, scanning his mind the way you pat your pockets for a misplaced wallet. Characters? Nothing. Setting? Blank. A single line of dialogue? Not even a syllable remained. No tones or filler. Inside his head was a white expanse, naked paper, featureless and almost luminous. He had the unsettling sense that something had been removed by some precise pickpocket.

“This isn’t writer’s block,” he said quietly to the ceiling. Writer’s block suggested obstruction, a clot forming in the artery of imagination. You feel like you need to punch a hole in it. Free the pressure. This felt more like embezzlement. The funds had been siphoned away for a sports car or an exotic holiday. The account showed zero balance. It was an internal crime scene. Black and yellow tape sealed off further investigation.

Where does a lost story go?

He tried to reason it out while making a coffee. Perhaps it hadn’t been much of a story after all and had died quietly of plot starvation. Thin and threadbare as an old cotton shirt. Chewed by rodents or faded by the sun’s rays. Perhaps it had been too ambitious, too sprawling for the area available in his mind and it had slipped through it’s fences, bolting into the wild territories where ragged, unedited stories roamed feral and unfinished, over the hills and further away into some subconscious hidden valley never to be seen again. Or maybe it had been a hungry, weedy thing, embarrassed by its own smallness and lack of development, and had gone somewhere dark and private to wither in peace, for the greater good of everyone.

He closed his eyes and searched for clues or suggestions. Story style footprints in the mind’s muddy paths. A fragment of landscape. The contour of a face. Shapes in shadows. He found nothing. Only that white interior sheet, unmarked and waiting. He wanted to throw a can of red paint at it.

It was true, the waiting angered him.

He was angry that he’d not kept notes.

An own goal.

No reliable back up. No laptop memory storing the nuggets.

He spent the day interrogating himself. What had it been about? There had been a journey, surely. Or was that just because most stories have journeys? He pictured a coastline. That felt plausible. But when he tried to approach it, the sea evaporated like a mirage. Were there details? Hanging a jacket on a hook but the hook’s not really there and the jacket falls at your feet, crumpled. Yesterday was now an imagined thing that was not explainable.

He began to suspect that the story had not simply vanished, it had hidden.

“If you’re in there,” he muttered, tapping his forehead, “you might as well come out.”

Silence. The mind is good at silence. When it wants to be.

Nobody had ever said that before.

The day was finally spent. All knots and dead ends. All tangles of nothingness.

The log burner flames had risen and roared earlier in the evening. A burning fire god, it stood in the centre of the room. Once alight it seemed to have an awareness about it, as if it knew all the answers but revealed none of them. So the answers burned. He’d stared into those wise flames but could see no clearer. No clues or direction. Now they were dying back. Dead wood burned to ash. Light and energy gave way to a dark, inconsistent slow smoulder. Sleep would be welcome.

Later that night he dreamed.

He stood in a vast library with no shelves. Books drifted in the air like idle birds, covers fluttering open and closed. Some were thick and leather bound, paperbacks were more aerodynamic and hovered easily; others were stapled pamphlets and notebooks, embarrassed by their own brevity. They circled him warily.

“Mine,” he said, though he wasn’t sure how he knew. “One of you must be mine. Come back.”

A few books snapped shut defensively. One darted upward toward a ceiling he couldn’t see. Another hovered near his shoulder, then veered away when he reached for it.

At the far end of the room, if it was a room, he saw something smaller than the rest. Not quite a book. More like a stack of loose pages, wind tossed, edges uneven. A4. It did not flee. It did not approach. It simply hung there, as if undecided about gravity.

He walked toward it, and the other books parted slightly, not in deference but with the good manners of helpful, mild curiosity.

When he was close enough, he saw that the pages were blank.

A pulse of disappointment ran through him. “Empty,” he said.

The pages rustled. Not blank, he realised, faint impressions dented their surface, as if words had been pressed in hard and then erased. The grooves remained. He reached out and ran a finger lightly across the top sheet. The indentations formed no legible sentence, but they were not random. They curved and dipped with intention.

“You left,” he accused it.

Or perhaps it had never fully arrived.

The loose stack shifted, and for a moment he had the strange impression that it was studying him. Weighing him up.

“You weren’t ready,” he heard, not as sound, but as a pressure behind his eyes. Like hearing a long dead parent calling out your name through a fog.

“For what?”

No answer. Just that hovering patience.

He woke with his hand outstretched toward the bedside table, fingers brushing an empty notepad.

“Flying books, talking pages; Now Harry Potter and Mr Morris Lessmore’s tales have invaded my head.”

Morning light slid between the curtains. The white space inside his head was still there, but it no longer felt sterile. It felt noticed and expectant. Like ground after a fire, charred and darkened, but also cleared.

He sat up and tried again to remember the lost architecture. Nothing returned. No stupid coastlines, no travelling, no coming together of a plot. Only the faint sensation of grooves where something had once pressed hard.

He picked up a pen.

Instead of chasing what had fled, he began tracing the indentations he could not see. A man wakes to find his story missing. He suspects theft. He imagines it starving, or running wild, or choosing solitude, perhaps kidnapped. He dreams of a library without shelves.

The sentences came slowly at first, as if feeling for purchase. He did not know where they were going. He did not know whether this was the lost story wearing a convenient disguise, or merely the outline left behind by its departure. Like an unmade bed once a guest has left the house.

Halfway down the page, he paused.

There was a curious sensation, not of recovery, but of companionship. As though something just out of sight had settled nearby, watching without interference. Not hiding now. Not quite returning either. Did it have the eyes and patience of a cat?

He understood then, dimly, that perhaps stories do not belong to writers in the way phones or keys do. Perhaps they pass through, testing the shape of a mind, leaving when cramped, returning when there is space. Perhaps what he had lost was not the story itself but his certainty about it.

He wrote until the page was full.

When he looked up, the white expanse inside him had softened. It was no longer blank paper. It was foggy still but dense, and alive with the possibility of forms moving within it.

The original story did not come back that day. It did not snap neatly into place with a triumphant click like the correct Lego brick. No, but something else had begun, something that might, in time, grow branches and blossom and move in the breeze, on and around a particular shade of afternoon light.

And somewhere, whether in the wilder margins of imagination or in a dark, unreachable corner of his own consciousness, the missing story remained unaccounted for.

Not dead. Not dead at all.

Just uncommitted.

Linked Out

Click to read.

impossible songs: Linked Up - Screwed Down

impossible songs: Linked Up - Screwed Down: You can read this on Substack with a simple click on the pic. I can't be arsed publishing it here because there's just too much clut...

Pink's Floyds

This is a little piece of whimsy in which I skate around some ideas I've formed about the music of a band that once was, but kind of still is; that band being Pink Floyd. Click the pic above to go to Substack where I've buried it in self doubt and inner conflict.

By the way the piece below is a different piece also about Pink Floyd.

Wish You Were ...

Click image to read on Substack.

impossible songs: I Might Redo This

impossible songs: I Might Redo This: Everyone struggles with Captain Beefheart because they expect music to behave. They also expect other people to behave at funerals, to back ...

From Here to There

Having considered a number of different things this is really all I have to say on the matter right now.

Back Home to Highway 61

Has anybody out there on the corner of some virtual Tin Pan Alley ever written a song with the title “Back home on Highway 61?” If not then why not? Just another passing thought that I’ve recorded here and will likely forget as quickly as it came to me. So ... which in the name of heaven, earth and sourdough is the better album; “Bringing it all back home” or “Highway 61 Revisited”? Never mind the rest of his output, because I’m writing this, and a simple comparison of two albums is way is easier than any other evaluation piece that’s looking across Dylan’s whole career. Also, on which album sleeve does he sport the better haircut? It was the 60s after all.

Bringing It All Back Home is transitional by design; half acoustic, half electric, Dylan testing the voltage. Highway 61 Revisited on the other hand is the album where Dylan’s zappy electric upgrade stops being a provocation and becomes a fully realised world. Highway 61 is him saying that he’s found a new language. That kind of artistic confidence matters. Blah blah.

Also the songs themselves are more expansive and mythic. “Like a Rolling Stone” alone proves that, it doesn’t just redefine Dylan, it redefines what a pop single can become; length, structure, attitude, psychological depth. But then you get “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which turns alienation into a gothic horror story, “Desolation Row,” which feels like a surrealist epic poem smuggled into a cranked up folk festival and “Tombstone Blues,” which is basically Beat poetry strapped to a freight train, (I’ve a nagging doubt that it’s an example of a song that’s not aged as well as the others) but all of these aren’t simply powerful songs. No. At the time, in some NYC/Greenwich Village kind of “La Belle Époque” they reprogramed the world of popular music.

On 61 the backing band are sharp and mean. Rowdy with a chance of screwballs. Mike Bloomfield’s guitar isn’t just accompaniment; it’s gritty and antagonistic, pushing back against Dylan’s vocals in a way that heightens the tension. The album feels like it’s constantly on the verge of flying apart, something that suits Dylan’s sneering and doomed yet still prophetic delivery perfectly.

Bringing It All Back Home is playfully brilliant, witty, and an absolutely essential listen. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” kind of invents urban rap, “Mr. Tambourine Man” is pure, floating transcendence and the acoustic side might be Dylan’s sharpest folky style writing ever. “It’s Alright Ma” a scary car crash of images and pain woven into the tortured lyrics. Structurally, it’s split in two, and you feel that split, well an LP record had two distinct sides back in the day - still does. BIABH is the sound of an artist in an early state of metamorphosis, Highway 61 Revisited is the sound of that metamorphosis thundering towards completion. Until the next album ...

Bringing It All Back Home Dylan is kicking down the door, Highway 61 Revisited is him walking into the room, setting all the old school rules of song writing on fire, and grinning broadly as they burn. That said if you value intimacy, slick wordplay, and the last gasp of the folk hero Mr Dylan, choose Bringing It All Back Home. (Big) but if it’s all about an album where Dylan becomes an icon rather than an artist, it’s Highway 61 Revisited. Och aye. It all took place a long time ago, many good people were lost on the way, so not much of this opinion matters now. Get on with your life. Work on Maggie's Farm.

LIFE + One

Life is brutal*. Man is a wonderful but brutal creation. What we create is often brutal. How we act is often brutal. Thankfully not always. There are many sides to the shapes of the things that make us who we are. 

People may find beauty in brutalism as a design statement. But nobody wants to live within a brutal regime - unless you're the ruler or have some powerful role in the regime. Then you're a brute. It's a strange world and brutal remains a strange word. 

Brutal.

Adjective -

Extremely ruthless or cruel.

Crude or unfeeling in manner or speach.

Harsh; unrelenting.

Like life.

*Photo by TB, Kraków, Poland.