Futility man sat at desk, chewing his pen. He was sitting in front of his heater and it was on high, so his toes were all toasty. The word "toasty" made him think of food all of a sudden, but as he considered (as he often did) he realised that acquiring toast would involve going to the kitchen, thus removing his toes from their present position of toastiness in order to acquire toast and, really, it just wasn't worth it.
"This may be why I'm thin," he thought.
He had had a good day.
He mused on the day and it's general goodness.
He had even, at a point early in the day's proceedings, had toast. This made him feel even better still as he remembered.
"I have already had some toast today," he thought.
"I don't really need any more then," he decided, not that he thought he had been particularly likely to get up and get any anyway.
"I'm okay for toast," he mulled the words over and took a good suck at his pen, which was pretty soggy by now, let me tell you, "for now."
Not only had he had toast, he had also managed to squeeze a nap into the days frantic inactivity. He was PRET-TY excited about that having happened, as he wasn't normally organised enough to remember how much he liked napping, though he rarely forgot how much he liked toast.
He managed to prize a bit of the pen off and chewed it, nodding. That was some tasty pen. He had a momentary quandary, soon overcome, when he espied his cigarettes and had to choose between them and his pen. He tried both momentarily, but found he wasn't getting full enjoyment from either, and left his pen carefully at the top of his keyboard. For later chewing.
"I've really given that pen a chewing that it won't soon forget, " he reflected, though there was always the problem of the damned ink stains - to think of the shirts that he'd ruined. And that awful blue ink taste, though red wasn't too bad.
Either way, it was important to remember that when this happened it was not good to talk to girls you were interested in. They tended to look at you oddly and slowly back away. This happened also with police and any members of the judiciary.
Best done only in the privacy of the futility cave. Where such actions belonged, and were accepted, even engaged in as sporting activities on festive days.

Do you feel as I do?

My brothers and sisters?

Deviants and mutants and freaks and angels? - does it move you like this.

Like - THIS?

It swings and burns and riots inside me sometimes - sudden tastes uncertain and anomalous - each sense fitted up and mis-wired with invention.
Show me that synchronous similitude: Following Orpheus as he follows Eurydice into the dark. The dark that I have been sucking, gulping into me since I first lifted my wide wide gaze to the moon. Rising ancient and cold. Eating darkness and it tastes....

Human like you, yes!

Let me exist as you, I want to sear your mind show me where you hide your kindness so that I can rip it from you with my red real teeth.
Sad and soft sounds sticking in my throat, in the softness behind my words. Behind my panicked, violently blue eyes.
I once…

I made a man cry with my work –

Triggers in his own bruising mind clipping sore and real and true.
A strong man and brave. A man… my oldest friend; he whom I have not never seen shed tears. Not in twenty hard years of the hard corners of a brutal and difficult life. He has healed himself now. He is in love with his wife. He would kill and die for me…
Women and men have shed tears at my work.
They have I have seen them I was there I saw I saw and my memory is quick sometimes and it frightens me with clarity so sharp and real.

I trace the path of their tears in the air before me.

AND I ALMOST SOB.
Stop it. Stop it stop it. The emotion, unnameable, is colossal impossible.
Stop.
Deep breath, try. Shudder once more. My own tears hot on my cheek. Sip something cool, open a fucking window? Put the kettle on again forget put it on again forget and remember that I have done this twice and limp back to my work. I stand. I twist my strong, deft hands against each other.

I fail without simple answers, stuttering ambiguities sincere and desperate. A gasp of longing slips from my tongue flicking outwards from my undecided lips like a creaking leather whip.
Calloused and scared and still and always smeared (STILL YES! WHY I CAME IN HERE! REMEMBERED YAY!)with paint. It is so beautiful.

It frightens me.
I step numb to the bathroom twist taps in unfeeling slippery fingers paint. It makes things…hard to grasp. Hah! Puns rule…

Shock and cold and it tastes so sweet and I could drink such water as this, forever cool. False insectile legs pricking my skin even as I scrub it, prickling through my hair.
I pour clear cold water in a winding trail down my back and hold my head under the tap for as long as I can bear.
Oh, to find a baptism such as this - at the hands of one so replete with belief that what they may have been disintegrates before the throb of divine insistence. Baptised by a drowning.
For this act, to find faith in warm human hands… In some symbol ancient and quivering with the force of certainty. With fucking CERTAINTY (“doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one” – Voltaire, the wily old bastard). With faith.
Measured in millions of long dead believers embraced in the sweet surety of ritual - beneath the crying cup.
Dust strewn under hard, calloused hands. Angels? And dust? We must be both! Concentrate!
As the cool water runs over the yielding welcome of my eyelids.
The last and least peace that I can find.
My own faith… zealot of nothingness, disciple of CHANCE. Rhapsodist in ephemeral accident so pure its coldness burns.
I hear the hiss of the plumbing, the booming blood surging in my ears. I breathe some rushing strand of the water and cough hard. Enough.
I bang my head, on the tap, even as it vibrates to my sight in the tricking slight of hand of mild hallucination.
Only me. Shiver and shake. Force out each claw into a supple human finger, nails painted deep sapphire blue. They are calloused from my guitar, still stained with my paint and sore from the incessant scrape of life at their raw nerves searing just under the skin.
Squint and glare at my reflection. Snarls have always just looked completely silly on my face. I must smile. Smile smile. The shape of the bone, the skull, under the gums.
The sink is covered in paint. Faucets young but obsolescent. Plastic decay matching my own.
Flick my hair back just so and water sprays lightly. It seems to fall in jerky staccato accelerations and infinitesimal pauses. Some of the drops on my open palm. They roll and rattle into each other like flawless crystal marbles before dissolving into water once more.
This. Endless. Endless. Impossibility… this mammoth UNNAMED and Unnameable emotion. That my senses distort when I must see to work to breathe to work see to paint to live.
It is so heavy. I want it and hate it and crave a name for its crippling mass upon my heart.
For now…
Trick it with beauty. Paint. Be brave. Courage my friends, my siblings, my lovers.
Angels and dust.

Concentrate!





"Where I am I don’t know, I can’t know. In the silence, you won’t know, you’ll never know; I must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Beckett.

OK i know the title is a bit well overtly romantic...but you try coming up with 300 different names for paintings that fit the imnages they represent reasonably well. I suppose this can only get worse as I get older, and to be honest I resort to going through all the songs on my computer and trying to find something that is cool, then changing it a bit. I think this one comes from a Mazzy Star song. Um. Not sure.

More ranting... have been doing an awful lot of late. If you are really keen on the Catholic Church or are easily upset by profanity, I advise you NOT to read on.

More ranting... have been doing an awful lot of late. If you are really keen on the Catholic Church or are easily upset by profanity, I advise you NOT to read on.

2.00 am on a saturnsday morning. Saturn, of course, being the roman god of the hearth but more specifically Cronos, from whom he was adopted, chief of the titans before they were overthrown by the gods. It was foretold that one day his children would kill him, so naturally he ate them all whole, but his wife Rhea (the original earth goddess, prior to Gaia, also Greek) fed him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes and Zeus was raised by the centaur Chiron on far away Crete. Until he was fully grown, at which point he fed his father a potion to make him vomit up his brothers – Poseidon and Hades. There was a war between titans and gods… the gods won and the sea was given to Poseidon, the sky to Zeus, and the underworld to Hades. Then it gets complicated, but anyway that’s why we have Saturday. He was also considered a god specifically of corn so we should all eat our corn flakes on the weekend.
Though I think Cronosday would be better since the Greeks came up with it not the Romans.
Gentle light and soft chords in the night. I hereby celebrate Cronosday by eating a clonazepam. Also the feast of Saturnalia was held um lessee EXACTLY AT CHRISTMAS TIME. Which was settled on as Christ’s birth 450 years AD. I can’t imagine such a time. Such chaos and devotion, idea after idea held to the point of death, of torture, by so very, very many. The martyr’s courage does not lose its sadness nor power because I do not believe in its cause. It gains pathos, but it becomes something so exceptionally, harshly sad. From Christ’s first sacrifice. So sad. Peter crucified upside down as he felt unworthy to emulate Christ. Paul offering his neck to the sword. James the great beheaded at the same time as his recanting accuser, offering the cups of their blood and skulls to the lord.

I hate this I hate to make this comparison. It is NOT a comparison but it runs lines similar sleek with pain and luminous with symbology to the point of swelling my mind with twists and flinches at the thought of such violence. Remember 1984? The book; Orwell, not the year with the ra ra skirts and torn stonewash and mullets and the school beatings. No, Orwell, who had typed out the last words of the novel in a shack in the far Hebrides without power or hot water in the freezing winter while he slid and coughed and hacked and typed and died from pneumonia.
There was a scene. I shall never forget. I shall NEVER FORGET. After torture, true torture, absolute and requisite with blood and personalised horrors… Winston Smith is asked what two plus two is. He answers “four” and is tortured. He is asked again. He answers “five” and is tortured and tortured. He tries many combinations of numbers to escape his fear; his real pain. The torture continues, is intensified. Winston Smith is beginning to lose his mind.
Finally when asked what two plus two equals, he screams out “WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE”. And he is free.

Well certainly it affects us all in velvet lines and nails dug into palms and heights drawing us to their creeping, gorgeous edges. That final appointment trembling inside our fragile masques. This is where you are. This is what you have left.
Courage as plagued and futile as fear, dignity an un-credible, absurd end point.
The words as pale and as oxymoronic as a just war or a healthy wound. Asking and questing, snatching at our clothes, comfort me comfort me share this with me, oh you must feel what I feel. Here, I’ll take your hand and push with painful strength to the muscle and bone and webs of red red flesh stringy and old. My words are nothing to the swollen mass in my chest.
Dipped and silvered with simple kindness and past love. If only to hear the morning in the pliable, ductile moments full of the scent of sex. When we lay giggling like children and sounding sane and just like humans, just like anyone, like anyone, like everyone else.
We shall never say time on our hands again. Brittle and small like the singularity of your throbbing appetites. After the fall. Yes.
Time on our hands is time IN our hands. Remember this, swept up in the kleptomaniac present. Hear it ticking behind you, within you rehearsed and constant in any heat you can find.
Imagine the shocking thrill of your parents’ eyes locking for the first time. Entwine your consciousness with the first moment that you saw, breathless and startled, the beauty in your reflection.
I want to share with you so much, so much; my heart is boiling full of knowledge, in a river where blood is born, an ivory string, a floating spinning ball in an ocean of involution, seventeen syllables holding the world clenched in vehemently, intensely ALIVE wonder. Both faces of Janus for me, for you, a dark and hungry god. A broken white abacus furiously calculating, but such wonders oh such wonders to share. And these old wounds, deep and real and crusted with scars as they are, it is these that have created us, burned us out from the husks that we were. Phoenix mother, hands like clouds.

i wear a rojer ramjet tshirt and i like long walks on the beach setting beached whales on fire. i am fit as hell; i write i play guitar and i paint paint paint. i live vicariously through my shoes. i am VERY SHINY. home page is [link]. it won an award. most shiny webpage. something like that. go there it is cool. no no. don't fight it. i know you want to.
if you drive me home i can get my pants.