The Beasts Speaks

Or one too many martini's.

Please stick with this to the end it brings tears of laughter to my eyes and it's me thats actually performing it.

One too many Martini's.

This is as much an experiment as anything to see if I can get it to work.

Also this was recorded previous to the proceeding piece.

Technorati Tag: Conversation, Humour, meekon5, MP3, Depression, Talking To Myself, Subculture, Martini .

Reflections On The Solstice.

I took the last three days off, one to get a pay meter fitted (which of course they couldn’t do unless I have some plumbing work done to the meter cupboard). The other two to cover the solstice.

OK I sit here again having performed the usual hotchpotch of ritual and farce that goes hand in hand with my attempts at some religious practice in line with my Pagan beliefs.

Farce as I attempt to light a candle, having read somewhere that previous (historical) Pagans would capture the last light of the setting sun using some polished crystal. Keeping the flame over night to be extinguished with the rising of the sun the next dawn. Using the light from that (the new dawn) to ignite the temple flame for the next six months. Farce As I stand in my back door attempting to light a candle with a magnifying glass and only succeeding in burning the wick away to nothing. I even attempt to light a lighter from the suns focused rays, which of course doesn’t work as well. I get more and more frustrated with myself and end up just lighting the candle in the rays of the setting sun. Farce again as I can’t help but fiddle with the burning candle and can’t leave it alone. Of course my intervention causes the flame to go out. So have I not only failed to light the alter flame (candle) from the sun but also managed to extinguish the same by pissing around with it. Well long ago I realised my only purpose in existence was to provide amusement for the gods, which I succeed at in all quarters.

Well forensic evidence, post three bottles of rather pleasant Rosé (alcohol for the reverence of Baccus), suggest that Eris made her presence known as well (Eris Discordia do look up the Principia Discordia). Even to the extent of some burnt offerings and the liberal anointment of the kitchen (It looks as if I cooked something and then tried to get the cooking oil back into the bottle, spilling it liberally over the washing, the kitchen surface, and anything that stood there on). Also the candle has burnt (slightly) some of the area around where I left it to stand (putting it out this morning with the first light of dawn). Though I must say that the oil has actually lubricated the cooker ignition switch that was sticking. This now fixed, I can leave the cooker actually turned on at the electric switch. Though completely failed to notice this evening that the oven was actually turned on, only noticing that the kitchen was warmer than usual, for an hour or two, before realising and turning the thing off.

My understanding of the solstice is as the reflection (and opposite) of the winter solstice. Here the Holly King regains the thrown by defeating the Oak King. The days become shorter and we begin to think of winter again.

Enough of the pantomime. So there you find me. Deep in my post alcoholic depression, having only nearly set fire to the house twice in the last two days, completely unable to find my suit trousers, finding most of the rest of my clothes infested with moths, or fungus, or both, deep in reflection as to what the last six to twelve months has brought. My life still the blueprint for some sitcom as at yet unwritten.

So where am I then?

Scared shitless that the job I’m doing at the moment is the final destination. The rest of my working life doing a job for half the money I was getting to do the exact same job (mostly databases and spreadsheet manipulation) for half the money, but generously allowed to work myself to death by doing twice the hours. At a creative low because I have no energy, or time (once I’ve finished my thirteen hour days), or inkling left to create anything. Feeling both used, and abused, and ignored.

My only options being much of the same with another company, merely changing location and employer not solving the problem. I spent many months going to interviews and just seemed to be going round in little circles (no one wishing to employ me until this firm. Circles, ever decreasing, ever reducing, the time I have to create and destroying the very impetus to create itself.

Frightened that this is “it” I will no longer do the things I enjoy. No one will let me play with computers the way I enjoy (and am so good at). Twenty years left to work. Twenty years finally to trudge through the work-a-day drudgery of soul destroying boredom.

Spent all the last few days trying not to watch daytime TV as it only depresses me even more. The continuous repetition of the same programs. Not meeting the demographic, continuously bombarded with debt management and loan adverts. Does ever one who watches daytime TV have money problems or do I just watch the same programmes as the needy.

Scared shitless that this is actually it. This is all. This is as far as I’m going to get, a bi-monthly rant on the web on some obscure blog. Left moaning about the fact I thought of certain concepts first but had neither the money nor opportunity to pursue the ideas and publish them.

I haven’t written any poetry for ages.

Has the joy really gone? Is this it finally? Too qualified to do most jobs, not qualified enough to the ones I want to do. Are my whites really that grey?

If only I could just slip back into academia and disappear into study and not have to face the real world on a day to day basis.

Technorati Tag: Conversation, Humour, meekon5, Discordia, Depression, Religion, Subculture.

Conversations I Should Have Had With My Godson.

Please don’t assume this is about “The Birds and the Bees”. To be honest at the age of twelve he probably knows more about that subject now than I did at his age (actually thinking about it my first instance of sex education was about that age, but in London, where things seemed to be explained earlier than they are in other parts of the country. Experienced from having to sit through the same rubbish a few times as we moved around the country as I got older).

As you will probably appreciate I spend a lot of time thinking about things. Possibly too much for some peoples liking.

One of my favourite pastimes is the dialectic, to my understanding conversation taking two opposing points of view discussed in an attempt to bring some understanding to the particular situation, philosophical point, what ever.

Dialectic in my case usually occurs most of the time internally, with idealised versions of individuals. Actually quiet shockingly occasionally when the conversation or imagined opponent takes their own point of view and begins arguing their point independently.

What I’m trying to say is I spend most of time wandering round Portsmouth deep in conversation with myself like some muttering loony. Listening to the voices in my head argue with myself or each other. It can be quiet amusing when I burst forth with a witty replay only to realise that I have spoken out loud, and I could actually be frightening the other people on the bus.

One of my favourite dialectics at the moment is the conversation I should have in whole with my twelve year old godson. I have managed to broach the subject with him already in part. But the real version of the conversation is so much more spectacular (in my head).

Life is all about compromise and negotiation!

All of life is about compromise and negotiation. Every relationship, love, marriage, friendship, sex, work, is about compromise and negotiation.

You live with your parents and the things that annoy them about you is the lack of compromise (hasn’t cleaned his room, never does the dishes, could make his own breakfast). It’s only later that you appreciate the work that was done for you because you have to do it yourself. Like pay the bills, mortgage etc.

I don’t share my life (on the whole) because I am essentially a very selfish individual. I don’t want to “negotiate” watching “eastenders” to be able to watch a Star Trek episode. I don’t want to negotiate the fact I’ll be home at seven to see her parents, just for a quiet life.

I have frequently compromised my circumstances. To allow for the fact that I worked in pubs I “lived in”. They paid my bills, fed me, paid my council tax and even gave me wages (pocket money), so I worked seventy hour weeks and only took a day and a half off a week and didn’t complain (no blog then).

In my older more cynical years (actually more cynical is not really achievable I’ve always been this bad) I have become more and more convinced that love and marriage are purely compromise and negotiation for regular sex. Or in some cases (my own included here), for any sex.

Work is purely compromise with your employer for what little you can get away with doing, for as little as they want to give you for doing it.

(It’s at this point that I descended into a darkness that could only see relationship, and marriage as just an excuse for each to try and get something off each other, so I left it at that.)

As a P.S. last night I dreamt that I had two axalotals and two newts. The newts where actually huge hairy versions of the axalotals. The two huge newts killed and ate the two axalotals. Now taking the biblical precedent (Josephs interpretation of the pharaohs dream of the cows), I’m taking this two mean I’ve had two years of shit and now my luck is going to change drastically.

Technorati Tag: Conversation, Humour, meekon5, Obsession, Depression, Dark, Axalotals.

Rainy Bank Holiday Monday.

As is traditional it rained Monday. It always rains bank holiday Monday (as far as I’m concerned). By some convoluted logic my company allows those of us with six months continuous service too be paid for “religious” bank holidays, but you need a years service to be paid for “non-religious” bank holidays. This particular bank holiday was not a “religious" bank holiday, I was on the rota to work. No amount of arguing on my part that, as a Pagan, all bank holidays are actually religious to me, would allow me the day off.

So I did the usual, up at seven out of the house by half past to be in work about eightish. These people are allowing me to work myself to death. Thirteen hour shifts four days a week and the odd eleven hours on the fifth day (actually Mondays). The little they pay me means I have to take what overtime they give me, and that’s overtime at basic rate, the gods forgive if the possibility of me working overtime on an occasion where I may earn more (say a bank holiday for instance) should occur. You see I can work as much overtime as I need, as long as it doesn’t give me the opportunity to actually benefit myself.

Much the same with the new position. We have to “prove” ourselves before they will consider even offering us more money. So they have four high class data analysts for half what it would cost them to actually employ them from the open market. Supply and demand will overcome this situation because I only need them as long as it takes me to get another job. The fact that they were the only people to offer me a job in a position of need, for that please read “back against the wall desperation”, is a small point.

I just feel as though I have fallen through some time warp and ended up twenty years ago (if it were not for the fact they all wear modern clothes I would think I had undergone a similar situation to the main character in “Life on Mars”).

I miss my bank holiday Mondays. I own most of the “Carry On” films on DVD. Actually from the point that during my deep days of depression I needed something light and inconsequential, as apposed to the not too surprisingly dark feast of angst and depressingly dark horrific fare that is the majority of my film collection. Nothing better than to sling on a “Carry On” and fall asleep to memories of mum cooking Sunday lunch and the rest of the family slowly drinking ourselves into a sherry addled stupor in front of the TV.

The flickering of the neon light in the gents reminds me of so many scenes from various film noir.

The down trodden hero’s profile starkly outlined against the intermittently flickering neon sign (either a bar sign from the seedy dive they live above, or the street light intruding through inadequately closed curtains). The hero (sipping at whisky from a shot glass, smoking a cigarette almost carelessly, blowing random shapes out of the window), sits on the windowsill watching the city flow past below. Sip on the whiskey, long drag on the cigarette. The sound of a police siren in the distance. Exhale, long and slow, smoke billowing towards the heavens. A drunken brawl, mostly shouting, threats of what they would do to so and so, if they caught them. The forlorn cry of an abandoned lover as she pleads in a painfully coarse, and common, voice for her mate to return, and that her impropriety meant nothing honestly. Sip of whiskey, draw on smoke.The smash of glass down some side street, heralding some other fight, or petty crime, thuggery, or vandalism. Exhale. The large old clock on the wall ticking too loudly in the quiet of the room. The drifting lilt of music from some bar down the street. The too merry karaoke style drunken revelry as some group of regulars attempt to join in. Sip of whiskey, draw in the smoke. The occasional car whizzing past with that ever present Doppler affect on the note of the engine, as it draws closer, then the shift in pitch as it passes and recedes to the distance. Clock tick, whisky sip, draw on the cigarette, nothing is going on this evening. Nothing at all. Cats fighting in the alley. Cars less and less frequent. Rise in the ever present drone of the by pass in the far distance, a road that never sleeps. Top up the whiskey from the dregs in the bottle, too little left, Have I really drunken all that? Probably.

Slowly turning to the room. Not stumbling too much. Slight chuckle to self at how difficult the simple things are. Place the bottle on the table. Remove my shoes and slump onto the mattress. Finally fall asleep.

Technorati Tag: Film Noir, Humour, meekon5, Obsession, Depression, Bank Holiday, Dark.