Ni-Frith

There was an evil light in the sky this morning. The sun was streaming through very dark grey rain clouds and it looked like blood on water. Sometimes this is enough to put me in a bad mood during the whole day and though I might have got away without being too bad, events here have annoyed me beyond normal boundaries. Never mind. I don't have to walk 12 miles for water that I then have to boil. Having said that, there is a particularly bad smell coming from one of the cup disposal receptacles - butyric acid I think - which could be the source of a nasty problem for environmental health departments for miles around.

I do not want to write down music today. I am not actually listening to anything, as I have brought no CDs with me. Some things just make me so depressed, things that I do not need to write down. Before I was married and especially before I was a father, I could read most things in the paper without being really bothered by it. Now for certain things, it is a struggle to get through an article without feeling angry, sad, frightened or all three. If it is like this for me, then what is it like for children? I still think it is important for children to see the news but then there are articles like this which make me review that thought. Of course we have to know what goes on in the world but it is difficult to do anything about it. We are generally helpless against the tide of bad things. You can argue both ways, that things are better now or that they are worse and of course that all depends on your viewpoint. I may have ranted about the comparison of the seriousness of various events int he world but all this debate about the relativism seems to make any of them simply a point for argument rather than human tragedy.

Something (I forget what) in an entry by Salam Pax made me think about all the people who are living in situations which are precarious. Those living in Iraq both before and after the invasion, those who live with a never ending struggle for food and water - think of your own entries in the list - they all seem to settle down into a routine which includes the elements of their situation which could kill them at any moment. Sounds like a sort of worldwide Catch-22 doesn't it? I wanted to add in a Micawberish line here - that they have to keep thinking that something will turn up and solve their on-going problem or otherwise they will go mad. For millions of people it won't unless some outside force helps them. Do not expect any solutions here because I do not have any. My life is far better than 95% of the world's population and even that is a low estimate. I cannot be bothered to complete my thoughts for this paragraph as I was going to start with "most of us with our comfortable lives..." and that sounds so sixth form that I would be sick. Apply that to the whole thing. Yesterday I wrote a title "Naff Heading deleted" - you can replace this paragraph with "Naff paragraph deleted". I would do it but it is an entry and I should stand by it.

I stand up and look out of the window. The grey cloud has gone and the autumn day which threatened so early on has been swept away by late Summer returned to fight. I close my eyes and try to hear the city below but we are in the middle of industrial land and there is no movement here, even at lunchtime. No children playing, no dogs searching the dustbins, only silence created by the empty ground and the height. There is a fan nearby which fills one ear with white noise and makes me slightly giddy as if I had drunk a short. The few lunchtime conversations are dulled into unintelligibility by distance and the general air of lethargy. Now nearby, someone is reading out a list of numbers as someone dictates it to them over the phone. Everything is neutral - no conflict and no teamwork. We are ants or bees, creating a buzz but only noise. No idea stays with me for long. I think of one thing to interest me and before I have recorded it, the idea has gone to be replaced by the next chained thought. Chained thought! No thoughts are unchained - free. They are coloured by our entire life. At no point have I had one thought that does not flow from another. They go back to the moment the first synapse in my brain fired into life and started creating my mind. Even as I sleep, the tenuous links go on, connecting me now to me always. The salts I need to think are the most important things in my diet. They buzz around, making the journey from my gut to my brain in seconds until they are used in a fantastic idea that I then forget forever. The chemicals are wasted. I want a minute when not one atom of those chemicals is not used to create an idea which I will always remember. I stumble over a portal to another universe, a perfectly reflecting sphere and in it I see the whole of this new place - every person in it - every tree and every planet. I have a world in this sphere and the sphere is inside me - every idea is mine and the lives of all the inhabitants are mine. A bubble off this universe, brought into being by science and split off from us is creation begun again. There can be no connection between universes, no wormholes or space warps created by spinning black holes. Now is now and always is not now. We live always in our own little spaceship travelling unseeing and unknowing between the infinite other-universes and other people and other things. There are only people and things - mind and not-mind. Life is ours and mind is ours and all else is not ours.