Summertime Blues

The aircraft make a sound that hurts, a deep roar that cracks the top end of the hiss on my head. From left to right it flows, from the distant land of rigorous R&R to the North down across the deserts where we live and on over the strange apparatus that makes up the towns of the south. Just as the sound fades to nothing we see the black bombs drop from the wings to the ground where they explode in a flash of fire and black smoke, using the precious oil as fuel for month-long fires. The sound reverses, fading in from south to north as the computers return the planes to their bases resting tranquilly in the foothills of the greener European mountains. What style, pilot less, without windows - if only the targets could be the same. Let's agree on a planet out there and send out all our machines to fight for whoever wishes to and leave the rest of us to get on with things like living.

The history we used to be taught was about Kings and Queens, Politics and envy, wars, the big things. We forget that wars just facilitate a short life of thuggish dictatorship, which fades to a vacuum that is filled by the creeping historians who write it all up as they want. Real history is how we laid fires, what we did for food and shelter, things that seep into the fabric of existence, that gives us mannerisms and ways of doing things that we can trace back for thousands of years. There is behaviour that is a combination of evolution and instinct, of folk memories and day-to-day existence. Stuff Starkey and his pompous, snobbish attitude to living history. I imagine he has to shake the dust off himself after a heavy day of analysing the long dead we used to have in command. Centrism has won and real history is much more interesting.

White Sails

It rains! It rains again and the rivers flood and wash away all the hose-pipe inspectors. I love this weather even if it does flood the garden and mean we have to think about lifting the drain covers to let it flow away. Even in the winter a good shower makes me happy which might seem odd but just think about all the negative ions that go with it. They make the air fresh and keep the dust down. Think of the sound a raindrops staging their way down through the different levels of a thick summer wood. You can walk surrounded by spheres of sound from the crashing white noise of the indistinguishable multitude that hit the outer leaves to the chaotic bass of the conglomerated monsters that make it to the forest floor.

From the window here I have a view over green lawns towards trees that hide a few cars, not like the car park that surrounded the previous office. And right now the rains falls, straight down in the windless air. This sealed building steals all the sound, giving us just the muffled murmur of various conversations and a mid-range hum of blowers and air-conditioners. I look forward to the short walk to my car in the rain this evening; it makes the thought of the longer journey home more bearable. I think of all the unpopulated places around - the empty forests with their unheard rainstorms, the undulating grass of moorland taking the deluge unhindered by the protection of trees - the beaches with the sound of wave and tide. These places have been here all the time, long before there was any mind capable of remembering them. Like existence defined by the last memory of the last person you knew, they will fade from our notes and yet they will still go one until we have ceased to be either through destruction or our own evolution into something more worthy of the custodianship of this planet.

I'll make it into Pseuds' Corner one day.