Trailer Park Blues

Sometime back in the seventies, when every summer liquefied the roads and we lived in a perpetual round of trips out, visits to each other's houses and strange, fictitious adventures, I first had this dream. I dreamt of a rainy day, one of those days when the crackle of water on the windows acts like a lullaby, a gentle drumming to make you slip into afternoon sleep against the strange worlds inside your book. And I dreamt that the rain was wearing away the mud in the yard outside, making each tiny pit in the gravel bigger and bigger until they began to join up. And I still have this dream, only now the rain is harder and darker and more like the deluge you get from a cold storm in winter. There are no green-covered trees to shelter us from the icy north blasts, just the weathered clapboard of this rickety house. And in the yard, the rain has worn away pits about the size of a shoebox. I am full of regret in these dreams; I could have done so much between those early, sunny days and the now ehen I can begin to see a final count of how many Saturdays I have left. That rain is digging my grave. Of course they are not big enough now or for ages. I cannot actually smell the end but the trouble is, it is all beginning to come into focus. It is spring now and most of the time I am happy.

Today I read a message to some news website from the father of two soldiers out in Iraq. I saw this man in my own head, in his little world of sun and Sunday car-washing. And then some time further forward in this little vision, up comes a day when one of these two sons is killed and the sunny world is just the same except for this man and his family. My dad told me about the first air-raids he experienced in London during the blitz. A flattened street is something a ten year old boy would always find interesting but he regrets that clambering and inquisitiveness now, because from so far away he sees all the things that small boys miss - the Woman crying on the step of a demolished house, the venting gas, all the pitiful possessions spilled and smashed on the road, ripe for looting. Today there was a picture of a North Korean boy collecting door-knobs from the wreckage of the town around the station at Ryongchon. I saw my dad all those years ago in that picture. Nothing ever changes; we all just get older and find some new terror to unleash on each other.

Some of the people whose blogs I read seem to have this "I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong" attitude - stand firm - stand up against the evil that is around without ever wondering if there is a tiny piece of blame on their own side. They don't have any agonising over what they have done wrong in their own life or what their Governments might have done wrong. I like things to be elegant in my work. If something need a complex set of programming code to get it work, or has evolved over time and contains a mess of logic, then it always need cleaning up. My comfortable life is based on some people not having a comfortable life. You may argue but I can get to "I am right and you are wrong" as well. I am right - I know I am. I cannot live life accepting either that I have to operate in the face of the reat of the world or that I have to accept the pain and suffering of other. It can be made better; it will not be easy to achieve but it can be done. The answer is not globalisation but nor is it the uprising of the oppressed (or those that imagine they are oppressed). I do not know what the answer is. There is no person around who is the final output parameter of some giant, cosmic program who will tell us all the "answer". There are plenty of people who think they are the answer, but as I have said before, the world is far bigger than most people imagine when they think they have an answer. It is also more complex even in the level when you can say I understand everything. They do not understand everything. Our dear leaders do not understand everything - indeed sometimes I think that our dear leaders understand less than average. Maybe they think opinion is less complex than it actually is. Everything is reduced to figures, things that you can supposedly measure because people think that those are what defines the world. It is neurones and electrical impulses on a tiny scale, which define the human world. It is like trying to measure the width of a human hair with units no smaller than centimetres; even the basest approximation is not within the ballpark, not within a cosmic scale. We might as well all vegetate in front of the TV and wait for resurrection.

What can I do about this? Probably nothing. I am as much of a slacker as I was when I first heard the term from an American Penfriend in 1978. You get no answers here, just opinion. There is just too much entertainment in the world for most of us to bother making things better. Meanwhile, the rain in my dream keeps falling, driving itself into the ground. About 1500 left I suspect.