The variablility of skills

Gareth writes such beautiful poetry.

I like admiring the skills he has that i don't possess. I admire the skills he has immeasurably more than the skills of my friends. He is my partner, my 'other half', the future father of our children; therefore the skills of manipulating language, musical ability and quiet patience are all things which will be passed onto our children.

I find it puzzling that some things come so natuarally to some and not to others, how the world can be viewed in completely different ways by different people. Puzzled even though i can try to explain the reasons why with science.

I suppose our brains are complicated, that the positions of the billions of neurons are really important, that as soon as they are out of place we are essentially a different person. But there are lots of really complicated things that man has created, can't they just figure the brain out, it can't be that difficult?
I've seen programmes that look into how the chemicals, the hormaones, which your brain sits in can also affect how you think and feel, this can explain how man and women tend to think in different ways, and also why i don't seem to be in control of my thoughts for a few days every month. So it's not just the position of neurons, its the chemical composition of the soup they swim in.

Too many variables, too complicated.

This is why i admire Gareth, he has a mix of variables which i don't, and i like this fact.

By Losing Thee Awhile

Without attempting to justify the hell within him, for within him hell he brings, I nevertheless have to ask myself 'are you any better?' Only on two or three occasions in my life have I come face-to-face with such bare truths, and on each I've swallowed, accepted, denied and ignored. Principle increasingly seems an absurd notion: an assumption upon which I appear to base everything; and yet when called upon, my so-called morals cower behind convenience, shudder beneath shame. Thee father first they sung omnipotent, immutable, immortal, infinite, now your tawdry mortality reveals itself in the sweatstale certainty of blokish secrecy. And again I ask 'are you any better?' I am now discovering that reason, unable in the first place to prevent our misfortunes, is even less equal to consoling us for them.

Milton - Paradise Lost
Laclos - Les Liaisons Dangereuses

The Ceremony goes as usual

'History always emphasises terminal events' Speer said to his Yank interrogators. History always written by the victors, of course. Your body is a machine. I lie on my back, fully clothed except for the cotton white underdrawers. Dirty words strolling on a Sunday to find a fightfightfight with lunchtime drinkers in beer gardens. Defending the nakedAryan bathers in the Tiergarten. Defending from nuance and difference. Serena Joy grips my hands as if it is she, not I, who's being fucked, as if she finds it either pleasurable or painful. This is not recreation, even for the Commander. This is serious business. the Commander, too is doing his duty.

Leyton Buzzard
Atwood - Handmaid's Tale
Beevor - Berlin

Etherised Upon a Table

In what may be the most self-indulgent act of all time... I've been inspired to return to blogging by the coursework moderation I'm currently doing in order to pay off my overdrafts and bolster the old CV. A few of the projects I've moderated have examined modernism and the 'stream of consciousness' style of James Joyce and the similarly fragmentary approach of TS Eliot. This got me thinking, as I stare longingly at my collection of novels, plays and poems, that I'd love to plunge into my collection, steal, borrow and adapt some of my favourite lines and use them as a way of re-connecting both with blogging and with my book collection. Also, 6Music and Xfm have been providing the soundtrack to my moderation, so it's quite possible that the odd song lyric makes its way in too. I'll try to attribute where possible. This will be self-indulgent and messy. You have been warned:

Back to life, back to reality. Let us go then, you and I.
'Satan, King Satan - What the hell?' she said.
The train had derailed but the pun wasn't dead.
'Quiet you bloody wolf. Boil your guts in your own anger.'
'That's easy for you to say. Down in THAT London, of course.'
I don't wanna know if you're lonely. It's too easy to assume everything's fine and it isn't of course, but who's going to feel comfortable if you ride in on your bloody high horse. Exactly halfway through my trek in life, but it's more a roundabout than a crossroads. The days of Ibiza Uncovered are dead and gone but those days were never yours anyway. Welcome to Hell. A man on a mission to the sinners who sowed division, the sinners in Manumission.


Eliot - Prufrock
Dante - Inferno
Husker Du