ZZ Top Shop

Why did ZZ Top stop?

Did they drop?

Did they get crocked?

Did their engine develop a nasty knock?

Did they run out of ZZ Steam or are the ok? Anyway.

Find

Find the cost of freedom

Buried in the ground

Mother Earth will swallow you

Lay your body down.

(Image by MotherEarthThunderbird - Words by various old hippies who are fatter and richer and still interesting even now. How can that be?)

five easy pieces and...

Apple, banana, grape, strawberry, melon. The first five.

Pear, kiwi, orange, plum, peach. The next five.

Thereafter you can try any combination - but not in a pie or in anything with sugar or pastry.

Or cream or custard or milky substances. This shall be the whole of the law.

This all sounds easy but in practice it is hard. As hard as unseasonal fruit. A particular dislike of mine. Keep it real and avoid the unexpected. Think hard about the benefits and digest your own answers.

Tricks of light

The sky is black tonight of all nights.

The path of the aircraft has changed to no path at all.

And when that happens.

Drinks are no longer available from the bar.

The best way not to sink is to avoid the water.

Swimming is the next best.

But your clothes may drag you down.

Live life as close to naked as is legal (and warm).

Ask a few questions of yourself.

But avoid using the marks.

Don't change the pitch of your speach.

And don't go looking for answers.

Soon your questions will be gone.

And you'll know everything.

Chemical wisdom and chatter in the margins.

Chemical wisdom and more types of well worn chatter in the margins.

People who tell you about themselves and all that they are doing, their family and so on for half an hour without asking you a single thing about your own life will try your patience. Who really has the problem here, you or them?

Sometimes in life you learn hard lessons, often unexpectedly and without warning, the lesson creeps up on you, you react, you hurt and you learn. Look upon this experience positively and take on what you gained from your mistake and use it.

Don’t get hung up on money and it’s perceived meaning, the cost, the price, the value, losses or gains. You will never pay all you owe and you will never spend all you have. Money is only numbers on a page, a screen or a statement, it can be power, and it can be ruin. See it for what it is in context.

Learn contentment despite yourself. If you choose to believe in Karma then practice it, if you do not it is of no matter as all acts have their consequences.

Creative restlessness is a gift that fuels the mind but uncontrolled will corrupt the soul, that is if you believe you own a soul or that a soul owns you. Some say that nothing is truly owned by anybody and it is true that all possession ends in death.

A soft landing in sleep

Falling flat on the softest of pavements
Cushions and pillows to elbow the statements
Made by the late and the great and the fragrant
Escaping the timepiece and switching the mechanism
Piling on pressure and avoiding the cataclysm
That is the perfect reality
Realized by someone else
Who hardly cares a jot
For the things we haven’t got
Or the humor we turned off
Quite in order or set with precise borders
Yet
It is so easy to dream and fantasize and forget
The essentials that other consider extraneous
The ideas that burn but at first seemed spontaneous
And now comes the gift of sleep
And my soul lays down but cannot keep
Silent
And then drifting away
The sense of drifting
Just drifting away.

A body cries

Why does a body cry out for milk (or salt)?
The cancer of laziness threatens my sanity.
Amicable and fair divorce: She got the house and all inside it, you got everything outside it.
When asked to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, do it. You’ll be a mile away and you’ll have some shoes.
Who was it that beat up the beaten track?
A black hole in the sky not visible from the earth but only via radio signal (eh?).
The driver now has a tracker unit in his van and so cannot tell a lie.
There is no victimless crime, or is there?

A cry in the dark heard only by the deaf.

These spaces are too large for their relative size.

Dangerous levels of you

Dangerous levels of you
A recipe is coming through and through
Intensity is reading past the blue
Contaminated cannot stay immune
Dangerous levels of you.

Intoxicate and breathe again
A crawling pain, seals in my skin
The fingers curl, the end begin
The love tugs more, a voodoo pin
My level best, I’m breathing in.

Dangerous levels of you
Dangerous levels of you
The course of nature on course, rest assured
Dangerous levels of you

Box of sleep

Box of sleep

Join me in this box of sleep

Heaven’s just outside

And we’re in deep.

Join me in this box of sleep

Take the long step down

Build the complete.


Build the complete, box of sleep. Build the complete, box of sleep.

Build the complete, box of sleep. Build the complete, box of sleep.

Facts, artefacts and things to retract.

I pick up the oddest items on my singular travels and triangular journeys, do you?

A metallic green Nissan Primera that once belonged to Eric Clapton.
A pair of New Zealand moccasins that once stood next to Princess Margaret at a grand opening ceremony.
The dried up red rose that Bothwell placed (romantically) in the bum crack of Mary Queen of Scots one warm night.
A short break.
A Mars Bar wrapper from the waist coat pocket of Mark Twain.
A box of sky collected at lowest cloud level on the Island of Skye.
A bag of frozen chicken and onion rings stolen from Dobbies in Dunfermline.
A lucky black cat bingo pen that allegedly belonged to Leon Trotsky.
An American Express card dropped in a Detroit Seven Eleven by Gore Vidal by the pizza counter.
Mozart’s special rag for wiping down his keyboards after a gig.
Edible chalk mined in the Andes.
A tearful denial from a guilty man with the gift of duplicity.
The swear box from a Royal and Ancient Golf Club and debating society in Dubai.
Tall tales told by medium sized dwarves in the Catacombs of Rome.
The deeds to a house not ever owned by Chic Murray.
Loose talk from the crush hall outside the main chamber of the Spanish Senate.
The notion that love will come around.
Coca-Cola bottles held prisoner by the Japanese for sixty five years.
Fossils picked up and then discarded by a tired Angelica Houston whilst doing the West Highland Way.
Distinctive farmyard smells captured and held in a golden phial.
Used crossword puzzles retrieved from a bonfire (just).
Sneeze clouds from the whispering gallery in St Paul’s Cathedral.
A snatch of clothes pegs sold in Falkirk by a young and inexperienced Sammy Davis Junior.

Please note that the final shape of your journey will make a significant difference to the items you collect both in number and quality. Plan carefully and make the best use of the time, angles and the relative bits of posturing you have left. Love will come around.

Oreo Worship

Why is there no monument to Oreos in this land?

If they’re good enough to eat, then they’re good enough to stand.

In every town and dull estate, in every street and thoroughfare,

A shrine should rise for Oreos, all round and never square.

Apologies (again) to Spike Milligan.

Black

Now that it is night, the dark can cover.
Now that I am in the night, I pass with the eyes of a cat.
Dark and it’s namesake darkness are my friends.
Like Simon and Garfunkel or Rodgers and Hammerstein
But not like Mussolini and Hitler or Brown and Blair.
The wear black cloaks and read from black books,
They avoid my gaze but return black looks.
At seven I watched the six o’clock news, by eight I had read all the movie reviews
At ten I saw the nine o’clock episode of “It’ll all end in tears”
And on Gold I saw something I’d not seen for years.
(I must have missed it then).
Time and a word and a day and a week, the pouring of time flows and the numbers repeat.
Everyday the numbers repeat.
With every number the days repeat.

Not to be confused

No obvious idols here.

Apart from the big stone heads on Easter Island there are no idols worth worshiping. I have to admit that following the Easter Island heads and whatever their significance or path to glory might be, isn’t so easy either. So make it simple and have no idols, models, heroes, gurus or anything like it. Respect, enjoy, appreciate, admire and support your fellows but don’t idolize, it gets you nowhere and never has a beneficial effect on civilisation or society anyway.

Not angry or to be confused with the Marx Brothers.

Growing older is at the same time a great cure for latent anger and frustration but also a source of whole new areas of life to become angry about. You can get angry about young people, stupidity where ever it materialises (because you are older and wiser) and most importantly with yourself as you forget, muddle about and become increasingly hypocritical in all you say and do. Why in a few short moments I can veer from super soft libertine and hippy seer to absolute fascist and despotic governor of the police state of West Lothian and the barren lands and cultural vacuum that surrounds it. Who would have thought that various extremists, Greens, Muslims, and Americans, the FT, cartoon characters and Socialist politicians could all say such wise things about the same things all at different times? I’ve also been told that only a Sith deals in absolutes and mental upholstery repair work.

Mona Lisa look

Now the she’s got a decent alarm clock, no hangover and fired the strange boy from Brechin that used to warm the bed, Mona Lisa has enough time in the morning to put on a little slap, because as any icon will tell you "I'm worth it”. All in all it could be a picture perfect day down at the big studio and Leo can just have all the temper tantrums he likes.

The helpline is live

One idea.

It’s good to save up post until you are in exactly the right mood to open it. Why not collect it, take a pile to work and dump it in your office bin unopened? This advice is not really recommended if you are planning to lead a normal or responsible life but it may just be the liberating experience you need to push you over the edge and into a great and wonderful adventure that you can easily fictionalise and turn into a successful novel.

Another idea.

Find the source of fluff and snuff it out. If you can prevent fluff then there is no need for noisy and irritating vacuum cleaners, for the activity of vacuuming and for getting tangled up in the vacuum cleaner’s power cable whilst trying to clean a twisting staircase. This may not result in much directly earned money for you and may result in bankruptcy for a number of electrical companies but it will provide you with deep satisfaction and more useful spare time which you can squander by simply looking out of the window.

Medical advice.

Starve a cold. Feed a fever. Strangle a pixie. Don’t cut your toe nails with a razor blade. Don’t use the shared changing when at the swimming baths. Don’t forget about essential oils. Speed up your metabolism with a portion of Wheatabix coated in peanut butter. Warts go away eventually so don’t try rubbing them with a dead toad. Shaving any part of the body requires some lubrication. A warm cup of tea soothes a headache (press cup against head vigorously). Coca Cola does cure a hangover as does a trip to the loo with a Sunday Supplement. Baldness is a result of irritability. Don’t eat a raw Beecham’s Powder, dilute to taste. Bloating in the lower intestine is not eased by the rubbing on of yoghurt. Staring at the sun makes you sneeze.

Wooden insects

Wooden insects try hard to confuse their real brothers – those not made in China.

Writing anything requires staying focused. Any tiny drift when writing, to the right or to the left can result in immediate blockage and closure of the creative doors, like a portcullis dropping on an invading army. You can also flop from your chair or even worse bruise your forehead on the brittle plastic keys of your keyboard. As Aldous Huxley might have said if he was ever remotely concerned about it “This is where the white rain comes on, but don’t believe me and you had better not ask him he’s an Epsilon, O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beautious mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in it!".

I didn’t really over hear this at a bus stop nor was I told it by a taxi cab driver.

“It’s not that I can’t read properly. It’s more to do with the way that I tend to skip words, assuming that I already know what the draft is saying and thereby, quite accidently obtaining an altogether incorrect meaning from the actual text. Then when my version of events and what I believe that I have gleaned from reading is shared with a fellow reader and non-conspiritor, sparks fly and general confusion follows. Drawing the wrong conclusions is a recipe for disaster, most of the time”.

This is the end, fairweather friend so turn the music down and check the spellchecker.

White Towels

Preaching what you practice

White towels are fine in your own house but in a holiday home they present the owner with significant laundry problems.
People on Myspace playing their own tracks to up their play count.
The National Health Service is a marvellous theoretical concept.
Recording television programmes onto a hard disk with one touch is the best thing ever (sadly few if any of these recorded masterpieces will ever be viewed).
Running out of coffee forces a man into drinking Southern Comfort.
If you seriously want to me a millionaire then don’t just give up at the fifty first obstacle.
Closing your eyes when playing the guitar (in effect letting go) produces the best playing.
Robert Plant told Alison Kraus just to moan when she couldn’t sing the parts, has there ever been better advice given?
We’re going to Portugal to do very little, but not quite yet.
Christmas will be routinely chaotic this year but the weather will be bearable and firework friendly.
I’m fed up with 180 spam emails a day.

Random is as random does

I was thinking of breaking out, I was think of breaking down. I was thinking other random thoughts and reciting the words to Bruce Springsteen songs, over and over with tap on the elbow to accentuate those other drum beats. After a while I decided that all these things were pretty pointless so I sat at a bus stop and decided to get the first bus that came along. Eleven minutes later a bus drew up, I disliked the number so I ignored it and noticed no protestations from the driver driving, begging me or otherwise to get on. As it moved off into the night I stood up and walked the long walk home via a handy short cut in the space time continuum, always a better way to travel in my humble opinion. Once home I relaxed with a good strong drink, a nasty not so strong one and a flourish of battle hardened digestive biscuits. I could live like a king on this kind of diet if I could be bothered. The remote is now lost down the couch so I’m stuck on ITV4 until the hoover comes along. Typical you may say but that’ just how life is. At about 6.30 I finally fell asleep.

Five day detox

Five days of five fruits

Something is undecided about its nature, a mixture of pulp and seeds, flesh and inner marrow, unsure whether it should hang or drop, or to stop it being whatever it can. Good for the digestion and eyesight, ask a question about intestines and dynamite. Fruit flavours the worried part and you must believe it makes it right. The subtle shifting of the diet, the mash that moves and heals in quiet determination, inside and out, the easy meal and wrapped delight. The drug that calms you in the night. So once the detox is complete you can relax and soothe the memory of the headaches, suck and orange dry, scoop and hollow the avocado, squeeze a lemon into drip dry glass and watch the sparkle as the goodness comes to pass, through you.

On the fifth day...

All was well in theory but I craved a rush, a rush that fruit and perseverance cannot give. The rush I need to live. A life long poison, poison is for me in any form that comes with sugar. Why isn’t sugar a fruit? Why does it grow in a rich climate next to melons, coconuts and palms, pineapples, grapefruit and yams? Sugar is so discredited; from out of all the recipes it’s edited. Replaced and relaxed, cut out and waxed. On the fifth day I gave up on the brilliant but glum fruit all trees and supermarkets offer. The ugly pills I’ve discovered are the best, they pass the sweetest test. You can rest and try out any current mixture, smoothies concocted from and kiwis and grapes and for a short time you feel a little richer.

On the sixth day...

I gave up and had a coffee and a chocolate muffin.

White Angel

The white angel.

Well, it’s obvious to me that the cat mentioned below is indeed the Angel of Death, the chosen angel who often visits this world in the form of a cat, a blonde woman (a nurse), a doctor (usually Asian), a family member (the closer the better), a truck driver or an alligator. He has also been known to assume the shape of a hoodie, a policeman, a fireman or till assistant in Tesco. Of all creatures cats are best placed and qualified to attend to the near dead in an “angels in an animal / angelic form”. I’m trying to remember how it is you summon up the Angel of Death (not a routine party trick), I recall learning the incantation as a teenager, (I had some odd friends). It involved the number three and a repetitive piece that, thankfully escapes me. The exact form that the angel would take when summoned up this way I don’t know. We didn’t specify animal type at the time. Like many things in life, your ongoing relationship with the angel of Death rests in a somewhat uneasy balance, how could it be anything else?

Some where in New York: He is a two-year-old cat and looks innocent enough. But at the nursing home where he lives in the US state of Rhode Island, Oscar has developed a reputation as an angel of death.

Since being adopted as a kitten by staff at the advanced dementia unit of Providence's Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre, Oscar has revealed a rather morbid tendency to pick which patient is going to die next.

According to David Dosa, a geriatrician at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, Oscar makes regular rounds, looking in on patients and giving them a quick sniff, before either moving on or settling down for a cuddle.
So accurate have his predictions been, that as soon as the white and tabby harbinger of death curls up with one of the patients, staff immediately start summoning family and clergy to the soon-to-be deathbed.

"No one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays awhile," Dosa wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families," he added.

"Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents."

Dosa did not offer any explanation for Oscar's uncanny powers of prognostication, which patients were not yet believed to have spotted.