31/10/12

“Each one of us has a designed and set place and purpose in the universe and it is up to us to decide whether we accept this as undisputed fact, or rebel against and decide our own duty, our ultimate our personal duty.” I sat speechless staring at him, loving him and watching his lips move to form each marvellous and angelic syllable. He smirked that little wild smirk that every person has down inside of themselves and said “Ah, shit man, don’t be leaving me hangin’, c’mon, what d’ya say about that?” “It’s brilliant” I said and I knew that I loved him and I knew that he could also love me and he knew that too and we loved each other momentarily. So we stayed up all night staring at each other on his bed with our backs up straight and hands folded on our laps and breathed deep and slow and talked about everything and everyone, childhood, lovers, the people I loved and admired like my Grandfather and for him that one teacher and all the music I love and films and books and writers, and he did the same and he confessed (when I asked) that he’d never really read until he had had me and realised all the wonders reading could do to a man and his soul. I really was touched and he said that on the day we met he went straight to a bookstore and bought a copy of Ulysses and The Sea-Wolf. “Gawd, I read one page of Ulysses and went back and exchanged it for the first book I saw East of Eden.” I told him that both of these books had been favourites of mine when I was a kid and still were. “How did you like them?” “Well, I read them cover to cover to cover no problamo and I did not care for them, not one little bit.” “But the Timshel in Steinbeck and the Nietzsche in London are perfect for you! You went on about them near enough just then!” “I know I know and I appreciate their help to the depths of my soul I do, but they were just straight reads. I didn’t need to reread anything. I need a challenge, to be stimulated, ya know?” I told him to try Ulysses again – “Not that stimulated!” So I gave him my copy of Naked Lunch and The Wasteland, he thanked me and I kissed him on the cheek and wished him good morning and left him and went for the door quick. 

11/12/12

The chalet was up high in the Alps and was the highest in the village. We had a small flat there for the week and the view was glorious as a great expanse of empty space and forest and snow and river and mountain rose up high above you and swallowed up the sky. There are moments when you look at something grand and tall and broad and it doesn't look real to you, it’s far too big to comprehend, me at least. The church down the road from my house at home doesn't look real some days. The Shard in London when I saw it, the Duomo in Florence, I expect the Empire State Building, and these mountains. Blue and cavernous and cold. I've seen many mountains, the French Alps, the Italian Alps, Scotland, but the Austrian Alps were the only ones that kept their sense of enormous proportion and power for long enough to really understand it. The flat had a wooden balcony that looked down the valley and up at the mountains with their sharp peaks, and when it rained it was cool and sheltered  and you felt that the thunder and lightning bolts were far away and nothing could touch you because you were protected by a wall of mountains. I felt sorry for the people stuck in the cable cars when lightning struck as they would stop and bounce and sway in the wind and even watching them gave me the fear of God. The landlady would say that “You have to experience the cable cars when they stop! It comes with the price of living here! Fun!” The only time we sampled the cable cars they stopped during our descent and myself and my brother were alone in car with an Austrian family who laughed and screamed with joy and pointed, but I sat there with my eyes closed and looked down to the ground fifty feet below and prayed silently. When we got to the bottom I looked back up the cable car lines at the mountain and thought about how long it would take to climb to the top from the dead bottom, and how long it taken for the mountain to get that high, and whether it was really there because it didn't look it and the locals acted as if it were no different to anything else in the world and I appreciated the mountain. It may have been one of the oldest things in the world, but nobody appreciated that it was. It had seen wars and wars and deforestation and death and simply looked down with omniscience and content and grew ever taller and more unreal. It had been there before I was born and would be there after I had died and it was safe and separate and it would still grow even taller and look down on everything below it, and that made me feel safe and I understood the mountain from within and appreciated it.   

26/11/12

The pizza takeaway used to be a fire station when the town was alive and important. Since then, some sixty seventy years it has been a bakery and a restaurant and now a takeaway with the grease half an inch thick next to the fryer and the side walls panelled with horizontal boards of wood. The oven burned wood straight, ash and willow mainly, and unless the door was wide open and the fan on the room soon filled up with smoke and it clung to your clothes and the whole building smelt of wood smoke and sweat. Opposite was a bank and a paper shop where I bought my first pack of cigarettes the day after my eighteenth birthday but I wasn’t ID’d. When it rained heavily in the winter the drains would overflow and we would get brown water sloshing up onto our doorstep which would make mopping the place at the end of the day hell and all of the customers would be miserable and short.

                It was owned by a Vietnamese man called Scott Lee who also owned the local Chinese restaurant and the separate Chinese takeaway and chip shop. He was short and stocky with fat fingers and small eyes and black thin hair that pointed straight up in the widows peak. He was smarter than he knew and knew a lot about a lot of things but man did he bullshit about a lot of things such as knowing a whole list of celebrities. He had been in Britain since he was eight when he, his sisters and his parents emigrated to Birmingham but he left there in the nineties ‘cause he got sick of the triad. He was active and loved cycling but was also a bit of a wimp and got really cold in the winter and so would sit around doing nothing in a coat and fleece and fingerless gloves that made him look like a Chinese scholar who should own a antiques store. When this happened he got the deputy chef to do all the work.

                The deputy chef was called Adam and he was a year older than me. He was both a pot smoker and dealer and would often take hour long breaks to run to his car to tend to a client. He was good with numbers and was able to pick up tasks quite quickly but was not very bright otherwise, for example he thought that the Queen was still the head of the government. I try not to judge him too badly. He was my height with a very square head and thick black stubbly hair and bad acne and constantly washed his hands. He had also worked in the chip shop next door where, like here, he did little other than sit around on his phone and eating what he made.

                There were often very few customers so I would usually just take a book and pass the time that way, reading roughly around fifty to sixty pages during my five hour shift. Consequently around a third of my books smell of smoke and many have little stains from tomato sauce of pizza grease. My favourite times were when people recognised the book I was reading and start a conversation about the book or the author and they would look at me all impressed because I know such trivial facts about the book or the author such as that Jack Kerouac was reported to have written On The Road while taking loads of Benzedrine but actually relied mostly on coffee, the Benny thing was just an urban myth. It impressed a lot of people.    

4/8/12

Not 20 minutes from our hotel is the Rhine, and here the river is wide and fast and not ten minutes pass without an industrial barge being seen hauling its load downstream, sand, cement mix, coke, coal and construction equipment. The eastern slopes are green, wild and dry due to the early August weather and I'm told that over there in the woods wild boar and dear roam. The western slopes are taken up with steep olive groves and vineyards with herds of goats grazing in them. Either side of the river there is a railway and every quart hour a train passes by and the silence is replaced with noise and dust.

                The town was called Bacharach and is built in that quaint and whimsical German fashion that brings to the mind thoughts of gingerbread houses, Christmas markets and Hansel and Gretel, the houses with coloured wooden support beams showing through the white plaster walls and the roofs scaled with lead tiles. The Olympics are still on in London and from where I am sat I can spot three German flags static in the warm air.

                We've sat at an outside table of a small restaurant and are reading over the menus, to the south is a steep slope atop of which is an old castle (now a youth hostel). For the height of the tourist season there are very few foreigners about in the town, in the shops, restaurants and in the streets I can only make out the locals going about their evening business. We've been served by a middle-aged German lady with dirty blonde hair pulled back tight into a pony tail and she wore too much make-up and a white top that gave the illusion that her breasts were far larger and firmer than they really were.

                At the table next to us is an American lady, early thirties with short black hair that is patchy in some places and dressed rather dykish. She sits alone, only moving to sip her Diet Coke or dip a piece of rye bread into her red and lumpy soup. "She an anorexic," my Mother whispers to me, "she has the furry arms of an anorexic."

                She really did. Her wide pale forearms were covered in fine blonde hair that was so thick that it looked as if it were almost mould. "Why does an anorexic have hairy arms" I asked and my Mother said "Because their hair usually falls out on their head and so they have to keep themselves warm somehow and so the body grows excess body hair."

                She stayed not longer than us and slowly finished her soup. We made eye contact a couple of times and I noticed she got embarrassed as she put on her sunglasses and a small panama hat that matched her masculine outfit and felt sorry for her and her shame. We saw her again later that evening when we walked up to the castle and she was leaning over the wall on the edge of the cliff on the east of the hill, her head looking straight down and when she pushed herself back up she looked at me and smiled. I did the same and looked over and felt dizzy from the surprising height of the cliff and the ragged rocks at the bottom and it made me feel even more sorry for her and ashamed at myself.

Cosmic Thought

I lie back, hands behind head
and stare up at the nights sky.
I try to count the infinite patchwork of stars,
trace the constellations with my fingers
and look at the moon framed with my hands.
It seems so strange that I, here, am bigger than these things.
For each star I see there is a hair on my head,
each constellation I could name and recognise a vein or artery, 
and my hands could frame a thousand moons.
For the endless darkness, the undiscovered and black empty lightless space 
there was the recess of my mind and the infinite possibilities of my 
imagination.
But up there, where all is theoretical and forces and where it really
matters I am nothing but half a flake of dust, a quarter grain of sand.
For each of the insignificant hairs of my body has a billion stars to it,
each unnoticeable vein and artery a thousand undiscovered constellations,
and my hands are but tiny shreds of meat on the Moons surface.
But the space of the universe and my mind are the same,
endless.
They are both infinite, eternal and never ending.
In both everything is possible, forces and theory can be made and unmade.
So I found solace in the darkness where I was the Universes equal 
and I ignored the rest.
I will forever stay in this darkness.

11/11/12

The village and its church lay at the bottom of the hill, which was steep, and so the parade must go slowly or else the elderly could not keep up. Everything was wet from the rain of the night before, the grass was soggy and the stone damp and mist hung in the air which made our sheet music in the band go soggy and limp. It was far warmer than people had expected from early November. The normal uniform of heavy coasts and two scarves, gloves and four layers proved impractical for the day. You could see the warmth from the marchers faces when the parade had finished, the British Legion looked pale and faint and wheezing, the various cadets had sweat on their brow and the kiddies in the St. Johns Ambulance were red faced and panting with wide open mouths like tired little dogs.

                The vicar was a woman and was short and stocky. She wore a dark hooded cloak over her shoulders, but this was removed when the service moved into the church and she wore her usual white robe. The church was small and so the many people who had attended the service were crammed onto the pews, including my weak and frail grandparents and many had to stand. We in the band had to sit to the side usually appointed for children to read books and play with quiet toys and puzzles during services and for the twenty-two of us it was far too cramped and our playing showed our dislike of the position.

                The vicar, ten minutes into the service, took to the pulpit and began her sermon for Remembrance Sunday. She fiddled with the microphone, somewhat confused with the instrument, and cleared her throat:

                “We are gathered here today to mourn the tragedy of war. Our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers and grandparents have all suffered from war, as have many among us here today. They sacrificed their youth and often their lives for their nation, out of courage, out of loyalty and patriotism, and, most importantly, out of love of God.”

                Half of the band sighed and I smirked, only to be scowled at by the conductor. It amused me how many of the band were like me and saw no link between respect for the dead of war and the Church. The assumption that the vicar had made was ridiculous, even my grandparents were wide eyed with shaking heads.

                “As many of the sins we fall for come from materialism, consumption and greed, so does war. Possibly the greatest of sins, war is a beast. It takes what does belong to it and gives nothing back but more sin, more greed and death, misery and grief. War is exactly what our Lord God stands against; the mistakes that we, as mortal beings, make must atoned for before the Lord so as he can forgive us. For, without His forgiveness, what else can we take from war?”

                Ten minutes of similar drivel was spoken, condemning humanity for brutality and acting wrongly before she left us to mull the whole philosophy over. When I left the church I saw two of the British Legion members talking to current serving soldiers. They smiled and laughed, shook hands and patted each others shoulders, the old and the new. I overheard a bit of the conversation –

                “Sometimes I worry about my soul. But in Helmand you don’t really have enough time to think about it too deeply, you just get over it and deal with it later.”

                “Yes, indeed, when I was in France during The War I killed a man, a German obviously. But I didn’t worry about my soul and still don’t now because I didn’t actually kill a man, I killed the enemy and that was my job and that was that.”  

15/11/12

Hello, I'm Jack.

Basically, one day I hope to be a published author and possible features journalist and I need to practice. I have a tumblr, which I hoped would help me vent and be creative, however all that has happened is that I reblog purty pictures of James Dean and Florence Welch. So, now I have this. I will write creative pieces which will be titled with the date they were written and possibly general articles on general things and questions. If anyone does read this, I really hope you enjoy.