so yesterday I woke at 1am as usual and according to all the health youtubes that means I have high cortisol or low consumer satisfaction or something and it means I will be dead in a week but it's meant the same thing for the last 40 years of me doing it so I'm not doing my bucket list yet. Instead at 5-20am I left home and walked to Salisbury, calling in on one of my cousins on the way. You remember the day - same as this one - frozen and cloudless and beautiful if you're swift and alive, which I stayed all the time I was outside.
I've not seen this cousin since before the pandemic. She didn't recognise me. Thought I was some farmhand - she lives in among farms, in that whole world. I did look a mess. How I loved her warm messy home - my own home is like a hotel room, it is the only way I can live for long, but I love other people's houses to be cluttered and full of broken exploded sofas.
Since we'd last met huge things had happened in our lives - hers more so than mine. But we stay the same. Or maybe we're just moving in sync. It's a cheap easy cliched phrase but it'd be silly to struggle to think of another way of saying it - we just have so much in common, see the world the same way.
It's when I hear my own thoughts coming out of someone else's mouth that I realise that I'm more of a hippy drop-out than I ever want to admit. I wanna be a punk and spit up into Joe Strummer's face. But really I'd rather sit with him after the show and listen to him telling me what it's like to be dead and how to live the days that I still have.
Like me, my cousin finds it difficult to cope with life even as basic/simple as we've got it - me with almost no gadgets or appliances or commitments or job or friends or family - just her and two others, just you and no one else, just music and nothing else whatsoever. Even this is too much. I rhapsodised about when I lived just in my tiny van and owned nothing and was happy even though it was months and months of winter days just like today and yesterday.
She beat me by telling me of her recent stint travelling with nothing but her bike and what she carried on it - Scotland and Ireland and Wales and having to go to Denmark to get to the Faroes cos there's no direct way to get there from the coast of Scotland, which is where she went first in her lazy happy delightful effort.
She's always been slim, I've been fat and now I am slim, so we talked about that stuff - how the people out there who are slim and healthy are the ones who know to ignore everything that conventional medicine tells us. Do ignore your doctor. She's a cunt. Sitting in a soft easy chair.
My cousin doesn't follow the news. I have newsy radio on at home almost all the time. Consequently she knows more about what's going on in the world than I do. I know about Megan and Harry. Like I say - nothing. Whenever old hippies get together we always eventually get wondering when the young are going to get together and overthrow us - we, the old, who have everything because we take it from them, they who have nothing except debt and will stay in slavery until the revolution.
Ha - the revolution. In Salisbury I'd just missed the 2-40 X7 to Southampton and didn't want to stand around for another hour till the next one. So I walked for 15 minutes to the station for a chance at catching a day-between-strike-days train - and just missed the five-to-three train to town, next one 3-56pm - the one that leaves from platform 6 and stops at every tiny stop and several in between.
So I bought the train ticket and then walked back to the centre of town and hated myself for going into Oxfam Books, knowing I'd come out with something I shall never read. Sure enough. John Cowper Powys, Weymouth Sands. Sitting in the train carriage waiting for 3-56, there were only two carriages and there soon were 8000000000 people trying to travel on it, me being a bit of a weirdo and the only one there reading my book and not looking at a phone. A beautiful young woman asked if it was okay to sit next to me. Like someone like her would need to ask for anything. She took out a book.
Maybe it was just chance. Again, like so often lately, here was a chance for a connection. But for someone like me, just knowing these things are still frequently available is enough - to go further and actually grasp one of them would be too much. Like my cousin, I find life too full and overblown already.
Back in town I crossed the road and went into the revamped Co-op. It's cleaner and less claustrophobic than it used to be. I paid for my weirdy modern healthy sausages at a self service thingy and then tried to leave, but the little barrier gates were resolutely not opening. I tried waving my arms in front of things that might be sensors, then tried bashing at bits of the frame that might be switches. Nothing shifted. I turned and asked the guys behind the till how we're supposed to get out the shop. They looked gormless - like I was being the idiot. Then a couple of other customers who'd paid tried to get out. They too had my own lack of luck. We kept asking the youngsters behind the till how we were supposed to get out. They just stared at us like we were asking them the square root of 2.
Only when one old bloke grabbed one of the two gateways roughly and pulled it almost out of the ground did the thing open up for us. That is the way. Don't ask them - they haven't got a clue - they're trapped in their jobs and it's us who've trapped them there and forced them to be moronic - we have to grab the shit that's blocking the way - one day we'll look back at these days when we were all so meek and apologetic and realise what dumb obedient cunts we all were.
recorded this morning, photo Michelmersh yesterday morning
Free-flowing, loosely structured songs that borrow lightly from jazz and ambient but expand in directions all their own. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 7, 2023
Hong Kong's Enor D reinterprets nursery rhymes as noise pieces with elements of musique concrete on this playful new album. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 5, 2022
Producer Yoyogi Koen takes inspiration from five demons from Japanese folklore, creating spooky, surreal soundscapes for them to inhabit. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 20, 2021
A glimmering ambient suite from Swedish composer Tomas Nordmark draws connections between the NYC avant-garde scene and classic film scores. Bandcamp New & Notable May 5, 2021
