I went outside with John Coltrane, my portable speaker and a beer. Most of that good Irish cheese had gotten moldy but I ate around the bad parts. Mom sent an email photo of a tissue she blew blood into and it turned my stomach, I had to delete it. I was having a hard time focusing during the interviews we conducted at work. That challenge of being present with the responses and anticipating the next question, I kept slipping out. We ordered a pizza again because it was Friday night and that meant I could have a cocktail, my go-to Negroni. The grapefruit I used for garnish had spirals cut across it from the last three or four weeks, that spiraled pattern from the 1970s on a rubber ball or balloon. For hours I’d sit on the floor as a kid playing with one of our cats bouncing a ball against the door, and she’d reach out and snag it every time with her claws. I was an only child and that explains a lot, the self-absorption. We watched the movie As Good As It Gets and I wondered if that Jack Nicholson character was in my future. I knew where everything was in the garage with my eyes closed, repeated the same steps most days for the comfort of routine. And recalled the last time I watched that in 1998, the walk home afterwards. A dark path from a house in southern France to a condo on the beach, impossible. I built a fire and the kids sat by it for a time, baited by marshmallow and chocolate. They went inside and the fire grew lonesome and I went up to the horseshoe pit and played games with myself, a bit buzzed. I put the hose in the shrubs and set the tension on low and the music combined down with the hissing of the hose, the crackle of the fire and the peeping sounds all around. Everything settled in. I got bit but didn’t care. I felt alive for once.
Bill Pearse 
We oft forget we weren’t meant for lights, or questions, or memories or symbols. We’ve constructed a suckering palisade around us; expansion for the cost of itself. Our most intimate cousins sleep for twelve hours, scavenge about for a few and lie in quiescence for most of the waking moments.
I’ve always been somewhat pinned for a strange child, a strange adolescent, a strange adult, simply because I’m very still and very quiet. I’m not observing, I’m not a savant; I find that I’m often just overloaded with the vacuity of things; the politics, the buzz, the image and incessant tremulation of the productive human. I do not live in my thoughts, but in my senses, in the not-thinking, not-symbolising.
What I collect, I “poemise”.
Eliot wrote once in a poem, I believe it was called Note on War Poetry, but I’m citing this last stanza from memory:
“The enduring is not a substitute for the transient,
Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception
Of private experience at its greatest intensity
Becoming universal, which we call ‘poetry’,
May be affirmed in verse.”
I think you poemise too. Just, you know, prosaically. After all, poetry isn’t verse.
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Well darn it JM that’s one to frame, that comment there…poemise. Thanks for that and for the Aldous reco again, I listened to one of her albums back to back twice, one from 2016 I think, earlier this week. Couldn’t find the one you suggested on Spotify but glad nonetheless. Happy we’ve connected! I’ll have to go back and deconstruct this comment. You’ve got me with a book and a beer and the sound of the summer breeze on a Sunday. Wishing warm sensations for you too on this day and evening.
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The album I like most is from 2015 and is eponymous, called Aldous Harding. And then there’s Party from 2017 and Designer from 2019, both also very good, but much more experimental than the first, which is a strip-down terreous and highly folky acoustic guitar album.
The song I suggested, Swell Does the Skull, is from Party, though it sounds much more alike the first album.
I, too, wish you warm sensations, though the Sunday here is already shutting its jaw. And I’m glad to warn you regard you comments, now that I know you don’t do it purposefully.
In the Settings of your WordPress panel, if you’re using the Reader-type editor, there is a place called “Discussion”, and in it, a setting called “Allow people to post comments on new articles”. This setting is always overridden by the settings of each post, but if you enable it, the default will always be to allow comments, instead of the contrary.
If you’re on wp-admin, it’s the same, settings -> discussion, though it isn’t the last item, since wp-admin has more extensive controls.
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Yeah that album is the one I listened to, thanks…I’ll check the others too. And thanks for the note on the settings. I’ve been doing this for 11 years now and not sure why it sometimes overrides that setting but I’ll have another look, appreciate the guidance there. To Sunday shutting its jaws…
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Oh and wanted to thank you for letting me know about the disabled comments issue, appreciate that. Now I’ll have to make a practice of double checking every time. I post from my phone and maybe that’s the issue.
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