Fine place to be at the closing of the year- Haunchaco in Northern Peru. Spanish ballads aching from a beach bar stereo, beer bottle perspiring in the sunshine, the Pacific rolling on in. I’m levitating. Maybe its the bubbles on a empty stomach, maybe its not being on a twenty four hour bus, corn bites crammed between white bread for sustenance or freezing and soaked to the bone out on in the Andes.

The familiarity of a sea front, golden torsos, strutting chicas, tatty umbrellas. The delighted shrieks of bathers when toes first reach water. While I consider myself a proud son of the Indian (and to her will always owe allegiance) for now the Pacific and her frosty reception, will just have to do. I shall sit here and watch the sun sink on an old year, sit with my sea view, drink beer till my belly grows and I can call it hereditary. I shall make a toast, take a sip for each of those I love-I will be parralletic in no time.

I shall smoke cigarettes under the pretense I wont tomorrow. Make a resolution or two ,for the guilty pleasure of breaking them. Mull over moments that resurfaced on a four day trek in the Andes. Where so alone and stuck with old thoughts was I, that I was forced to excavate new ones. Something to take the mind off cumbersome back pack and blistering heels. Pain a sure way to pop creative boils. Considering that 90 percent of writing is the thinking of it, I have had ample time to re-wire, re-work, re think characters and stories. Characters previously destined to fill the mass grave of my aborted imaginings.

They must break free, live their own god damn lives. That or stay trapped (to taunt and torture) in this the limited cell of my corpus coliseum (whatever part of the brain it is that houses such maniacs). It seems that every one is in the habit of having babies at the moment. Hell, in 2008 I might just consider popping some puppies of my own. I am grateful for this time, this sea side sunset to offer up my final meditation /masturbation for 2007.

I had a surf earlier, took a step for the first time off the edge off the edge of this continent. Funny that- for this sensation- I call myself a surfer but must confess, for the moment I am more bobber, content to let the element free feet from rock, concrete, carpet or slipper.I’m drunk now, writing this in the final hours of 2007 . This letter, idea, essay will be ill formed, poorly put. Forgive me for ending the year with poor piece of writing, for this i can find no excuse except the beer.

I have rediscovered solitude and am beginning to learn that it is more of a distant relation then close companion to that which we know as loneliness.I have experienced both and more often then not confused the two (one need not go to the expense of purchasing a ticket to South America to enable such discovery) .It has been a book by Marquez ,not 100 Years Of Solitude but a journalistic account titled The Tale of a Shipwrecked Sailor which has assisted me in exploring this little revelation/tangent.

In the account (a true story) a Colombian Sailor is tossed over board from his vessel into the Caribbean sea . Here he spends ten days adrift on a sinking raft, to fend of sharks, hunger and thirst until eventually washing up on shore to find himself declared a national hero. The similarities I have with this Sailor and his predicament are of course none. My cast away status being entirely self inflicted and savoured, my daily tribulation, incomparable to the horrors and struggles he faced drifting out over that indifferent expanse ( I have gone hungry but not yet had to feed off seagulls) Yet however desultory, adrift, lost I might have felt there is always a shore in sight, and if not in sight then just over the horizon.

Solitude then is a voluntary state, life with ones anchor optionally raised- bobbing, drifting call it what you will but loneliness, that is akin to days without water. A thirst with no end , a thirst that causes the sailor of Marquez’s story to sate and further exacerbate his need with salt water. There is wisdom in solitude (And yes self absorption, the danger of crawling entirely up ones own arse,as i might be doing now) but emptiness in loneliness. The sailor says he never feels lonely as long as he can remember there are people who refuse to bury him, refuse to think him dead until proven so. The minute he forgets this, these beacons- he hopes for a quick death.

Hope I have bundles of, solitude with an end in sight. A southern tip, sea side village on the East Coast (and west). Inhabited by people who I love, aspire to. A welcome end to wondering. I need not travel to escape then (like so many I meet) rather travel to return. And its not the cushy suburb, my six nippled staffie (who i miss terribly) that I long for. The generous space, who my folks- despite my ripe age- have housed me in and thus afford such a time away. Its not that, for quite content am I with cold shower, rusty springed bed, room enough to stack my books and tuna fish. Luxury for the moment is distance and draft enough to hang hiking socks without causing neighbours (or self for that matter) offense. It is the people, their quality, my tribe that populate such hope. People capable of solitude in their own spaces, capable of self criticism, who know how much to there is to know and fear knowledge for that very reason. People who see the world for the miraculous, tyrannical,mystical, mechanical, magical place it is. People like you.

I’m losing time, as I write the light is low , the waves all rolling and misty in the bay, dusk the brief respite before night, before morning, then boom a new day, year ,when we (some) rise with throbbing heads and wonder where it all went. So for brevity (and lights) sake, I shall be brief. May each day be a resolution.Know thyself , said (was it?) Thiresieus to Oedipus. I have only just started to re acquaint with my twin and it has been agreed, on this eve, that we might be able to work toward a common future (and even possibly grow to like one another)

There she goes, gathering up the last of her golden trail. Going… Going… Gone

Here’s to a year of other halves- in self and others

It is dark and can no longer see the page.

To solitude and never Loneliness

Now is Yesterday

Happy New year

much love

A shipwerecked sailor

bobbing an loving it

You might dread the endless scroll the meets your eyes when you open these entries. Why you might say, Get outside see the continent and stop trying to write about it. My reasons in this case are vaild (see below) also im downloading some travel pics (protection) and this takes most of a day with the donkey power of these archaic machines.

The trek I was hoping to take has been impossible to book due to festivities (annoyingly) halting the everyday clockwork of a functioning globe. My one day stop over in Hauraz has extended now to its fourth ,as I wait (in interminable limbo) for the gringos (im yet to see one) to recover from hangovers, crawl out the woodwork and book a spot to warrant the cost of porter and pack donkey.

Hauraz is not a pretty town, bar the imposing snow encrusted alps that encircles it. Strange then how I find myself with an intimate knowledge of its grim plan, uneventful alleys, ugly brown brick work. Only time can offer up an affinity for such a place. I trod its paths daily, mostly with little delight. This delay has furthermore meant I have succumbed (not all together reluctantly) to a spot of the old and all to familliar forms of daily routine.

In the mornings on my way to my preferred Desayundo (breakfast) haunt, to sip insipid coffee (still incentive enough to get me out of bed) and leaf through a novel or tinker on some half baked tale of my own, I greet the local street loon who now Ola Chico´s me like a long lost pal (and disturbingly resembles a Peruvian variation of Peter Machen). Then (in accordance with Santa Rosalind’s wishes) tip the toothless, down and out old duck, whose palm need no longer beg to recieve my morning tax. Time permitting (which there always is) I peruse the gaudy stained glass progress on a concrete cathedral (eye sore) being erected on the Plaza.

On to my acquaintance, the waitress, who no longer need squint blankly at my pronunciation of huevos de reveulots ( which comes out sounding more like and here I offer an English translation) the revolt of the eggs or revolting eggs- when they should be just plain scrambled).

A regular you see, whose nod and grin proves sufficient to send her on her way-. familiarity, allowing us to eschew further form of miscommunication and on my part - humiliation. The day drifts by in reading , then rummaging, sifting, excavating a head filed with tenacious but mostly loose fitting ideas. Ideas who always have the annoying little habit of turning out to be someone else’s. Reading Nobokov, is a depressing exercise and one that makes me want to give it all up-toss in the pen, towel or whatever object best signals the most brutal of defeats. What I might give (more then my front teeth) to come up with one, just one of that mans sentences. Would even be satisfied with the closing line -The End.

I walk the soggy alleys to water inspiration, pass the (by now) standard Peruvian street spectacles- shielded police bungling misfit kids into vans, copulating dogs and dilapidated rose gardens.I try to write in the evenings. Seeking out a local dive where meals are cheap and take ample time to arrive . A gringos solitude, no matter which restaurant, always drawing furtive and sympathetic glances from fellow diners.

Onto the lubricant of beer or wine, handy in liberating an reluctant wrist ( A wrist now hindered by what I might deem Nobokovian stage fright) .Always cigarettes. Ah cigarettes, nasty little comforts, companions,critters along the way, who which for the moment (and I assure you I have mediated, laboured long and hard over this) I cant seem to do without. What other beacon of a possible end might blaze through the night, reward me at the completion of those infernal bus trips-Trusty (pernicious) little soldiers tucked smug and patient in their silver foil.

In the evenings, when I cant seem to sleep and my spirit niggles with a mild ache(but never emptiness) I turn to the marching bands, for they play at all hours. Last night( bottle of wine in hand) rat to the rowdy pipers- I scuttled. Discovering them blithe to a persistent drizzle-clashing cymbals, pounding drums, honking horns .A music so discordant, unruly, rousing and repetitive- that it never fails to up lift. Sadly the turn out ammounted to a few funeral couples moping and shuffling over wet concrete. I joined them. A tall gangly white boy (who no matter where on this continent he travel-is his skull ever safe from connecting with low lying doorways) . As co- ordless and indifferent to his feet as the boy in the band with clumsy hands and out of synch cymbals .

Longing for these mountains, only they might rescue me now, salvage head from arse- a condition that has arisen with spending to much time with my self.

Buses I have seen many the last few days, climbing from Cusco ( Memories of Mrs Piccua -unreal- swathed in her ancient mists) toward Lima. Buses, a mutual tomb from where drivers may ply (at full volume) his sadistic froms of Bony M torture .Feliz Navidad it is no more. In Peru its either Carols, aching Spanish Ballads or worse- the traditional pan pipe music, which reminds one of being stuck (as we once were) in an eternal elevator.

I have plenty time to sit and ponder and mostly read. Sit through the stink of road side lunches lingering in collective 28 hour farts. Sweaty socks stewing in stagnant boots .Films, at full volume and all through the night. Rot of the B´st grade. Rippling 80´s Van Damme fok em ups and worse still (poorly dubbed) Lindsay Lonhan movies. Often trips without a break (and when the bus loo is broken the bladder too must wait). Blood, lung, patience screaming for a tobacco fix. Navigating my retarted knowledge of Spanish with fellow passengers over delays wrought by land slides. To Lima- oh Lima. The horror they warned. (Just a big stinky city in many ways like our own) The Lonely Planet recommends a gay friendly hostel. Having trodden the heteronormative road, my ear providing the sounding board to one to many yobo tales of pussy and Bangkok brothels (The couples generally sweet but mostly of the hen pecked husband, winging totalitarian wife variety - living their precious independence before stretch marks, cribs and car pools claim their days) I check in. Gay friendly I discover simply means a gratis bar of soap, towel and toilet paper (very welcome for someone who has been drying himself with a ripped sheet and reaching for the nearest strip of newspaper). A spacious renovated old mansion with an ample supply of excellent literature to peruse in the book exchange and a Vanity Fair in the bog. hahahahha. God bless the homos! Lima is in full festive swing. Black and White Bing Crosby movies on the telly. Spin doors swallowing late night shoppers and forget full lovers. Stations crammed with families heading home for the holidays. Families that gather beneath a single roof to do what it is that festive folk of the world do- drink, fight, love, forget, gossip, reminisce. Southern continents similar in their nostalgia for a white that will never fall. Celebrating a child that ( Tracy Chapmans words) might never come, if he came at all. I see it (Lima) in passing, another bus this time, nine hours to Hauraz. Here I sit at the front of the bus on the top story. Inches away from a panovision windscreen. Sweeping through the city, like a low flying pigeon, high enough to note the fire juggling, flik flakking street kids. The slums and villas. A desolate desert coast subsiding into a cormorant infested pacific.

Christmas I am ambivalent (though i wouldn't say cynical) toward. I light a candle, hang a dusty string of tinsel in my room. I remember the quantity of wondrous people at home whose company I shall not enjoy on this particular day. As for New year - I dread it more. A memorial, notch of my failings, rapid age, wasted hours. This I intend to resolve (or rather forget) by spending it out in the Cordelia Blanca Mountain range . A series of Andean glaciers-no doubt a wonder beneath this mighty moon of ours. Better I think then meeting a bastard headache in the morning.

Of course there are more appealing stories to tell then of Busses, but I lack imagination and strength beyond this ,my immediate.

Christmas I am ambivalent (though i wouldn’t say cynical) toward. I light a candle, hang a dusty string of tinsel in my room. I remember the quantity of wondrous people at home whose company I shall not enjoy on this particular day. As for New year - I dread it more. A memorial, notch of my failings, rapid age, wasted hours. This I intend to resolve (or rather forget) by spending it out in the Cordelia Blanca Mountain range . A series of Andean glaciers-no doubt a wonder beneath this mighty moon of ours. Better I think then meeting a bastard headache in the morning. Of course there are more appealing stories, observations to tell then of South American Busses, but for now I lack imagination and strength beyond the immediate.

Funny morning, stepped out of my hostel room only to be nearly trampled by two deranged llamas bolting down the cobbled streets, one frisky for a little Sunday loving I’m sure. They are peculiar, tragic looking creatures, cross breads between the oddest star wars creature and cutesy early morning toddlers TV show host.

It is pouring where I am, everytime I try to take a stroll to view some of the famed outlying ruins, down it comes. There is an advantage in that rain supposedly means less tourists, hence off season ( though there are still enough here in Cuzco to fill Disneyland ten times over). I understand why the rain might perturb the masses for it is hardly little drizzle but rather torrential walloping, balls to the wall bucketing, which makes me a little unprepared for the four day trek ahead to the heights of Machu Picchu. I am eschewing the trampled but legendary Inca trail, for its exorbitant costs and muchos populous of gringo, and taking a trail, cheaper and quieter (though apparently as beautiful.)

To be honest the whole Machu Picchu thing has given me a knot in my stomach and cramp in my wallet. Of course its majestic and of such fame for a reason but it also means the yobos and touts, the whinging poms, dope pests (mi amigo, mi amigo), hiked prices and petty thefts. The Gringo trail I have mostly treaded since Chile is often like this- all sights of importance, of wonder but a hustle and bustle nevertheless. Familiar faces as hard as one tries to escape seem to revisit along the way (Americans, their current state of nationalist insecurity -the worst) . Thus it can feel like travelling in a big unintentional pack. They are nice people but not the type I would relinquish my solitude for, forge friendships with a significant future in mind (that is excluding my French brother Marc- who I hitch hiked with for some time around the mountains of Northern Argentina.) On saying this I do not make an extended effort to meet people (there are of course gems out there)- I am here for an essence and theirs remains too similar to my own- spoilt first world fodder hungry for third world wonder.

After I finish with Cuzco and the ruins, I will be stepping off the trail, heading through the North of Peru, to where it all gets a little grittier, I am contemplating spending a few hallucagenic filled nights with the IncanBuenos Aries, reinvented my understanding and perception of the city. How exciting to think what Marquez might do in his home town. healers in some distant mountain range, figure it might be a fitting way to see, or distort? the new year in. You know take a peep into the extended yawn of my suburban sub conscious. Three months makes things tight, especially considering my hearts desire is with Columbia and thus far there has been a entire continent between us. I long for nothing more then to seek out some one horse town, with rocking chair, preferably wobbly fan stirring a thick stew of equatorial heat. To drink beer in the sun and read the ten Marquez novels (that I lug about in my Alexandria Library of a back pack). Literature of the region so much more valuable then paint by numbers, bray like sheep guide books- bibles we tend to abide all too slavishly by. The Argentine writer Borges, in the small amount I read in

I’m reading voraciously, Theroux´s -Mosquito Coast to which I have only come to now, is a cracking read, great for passing hours on arduous buses. Dante’s Inferno- delicious, timeless, torturous and pretty god damn terrifying. Dickens ´Hard Times´ universal to any city one might visit in the world. Jonathan Swifts ´Tale of the Tub´- affirming himself as the funniest, bleakest and most brilliant satirist there is- again the bulls eye to his barb-Religion (which seems to be the recurring thread to my education here). It is easy to feel lonely, but then I remember my purpose, the wisdom held in these novels, the people of importance, back home, the road ahead

I was really low the other night, lurking the shady streets of Puno, thinking those Gringos were right when they warned me of it being a non event of a town. Then a firework, a rocket exploded inches from my face, then another and another. Kerouac says pop and the world goes AWWWWWWW - and so it did, before a 60 piece marching bad struck up their triumphant tune. At the front came the Virgin Mary born on the shoulders of panting worshippers then the town mayor pursued by troupe of sycophants. A pack of blue Incan looking demons with protruding tongues, a gang of Boys in oversized Gorilla Suits, Behind them, girls and women in brightly coloured skirts, twisting from one side to the next, whirling like sequenced spinning tops. Then another marching band, more dancers, confetti and fireworks. So it went on and on, blazing up the night and I grew tearful at its sight, its sound,this pageant of the bizarre.

Nothing unites the world, elates the spirit quite like a parade. Pity the gutters, beggars and cripples submerged beneath that tide of euphoria. All reality, momentarily buoyed away and streets where minutes ago were hurried and harrowed are at once swept with jubilation.

I felt elated, levitating, I danced with the crowds, to that insistent beat. A delirious fool, desperate for it to never end, following the spectacle from one Plaza to the next until I could no more. Till I had to bid it farewell, let it pass, round its final corner and die as a distant summer storm might out over the Durban sea.

The rain has subsided, Outside the cobbled streets of Cusco have been washed clean . Ruins i should think fit for a little exploration

To my unborn nephew/niece- but an inkling in your apache mammas belly.

Whatever being you be- for at this point biology has not yet markated you a loin or groin (dangly irrelevant pieces of flesh they are)

Child of the Sun I grow impatient for your arrival,which is why I find myself writing you- a somewhat premature letter. A letter whose words you might only grasp many years from now. I write to you from the Island of the Sun in Bolivia (La Isla de Sol) for this morning I watched the sun wake over that vast expanse that is Lake Titicaca. Deep from slumber it yawned, setting world and imagination ablaze. More impressive was it for the fact that years ago your parents stood at this same place, beheld this same majesty. Your mother back then a dread locked lioness, your father-benign beanied gnome.

It is a sight ,that if ever love seemed tentative, uncertain (not that your parents ever did) after witnessing such a awakening- would prove no more. For those who have shared in the most ancient and basic of wonders, the birth of the sun, might never look back. Might then and there conspire to stike the flint, start a little fire of their own.

And so it was that watching this that I thought of you back home, growing so tenaciously in your mothers tum. I thought of you, who were yet to open your eyes, take gulp of this glorious air. Partake in a world both horrific and terrific. I thought of you child of North and South,of colliding continents. Gender less, nameless Gemini, constellation and confusion of my own. Com padre to my stars , I assure you- a cosmos worth thriving, striving, surviving beneath.

But I digress, for but a minute ago I was talking of the Island of the Sun which according to Incan Myth (after seeing such a sight, I would not hesitate in calling it pure unadulterated fact) is said to be the place where the sun -prince Hellios to some, was born. Here that the first rays of light were said to have swept over a gloomy globe, waking a world that had previously only ever known perpetual night. Let there be light, it is reported the almighty said, and so there was. Illumination beyond our comprehension. Now who in fact the Almighty was and is (or if he exists at all) I will leave to you and your abundant curiosities to grapple with, this may take some time. Be patient
Again being the bumbling spring of an Uncle I am, I have wondered from my source, the very point and purpose of this letter. So back we go to standing on that chilly 6 o ‘clock slope. With a myth in mind, miracle in eyes, I meditated on you. Orb still hidden from us, as the sun was when I first woke to meet it. I don’t doubt for a second that your entrance shall be as wondrous, moving and mythical as this. This that has occurred for centuries and shall continue to do so. I am more then fond of your conceivers, your gods or padres. They are in short two of an exemplary kind. Listen to them, love them for they know better (at least at first.) And when you are grown enough, take this journey, stand on this same hill, this place where those of mutual blood have gaped in simillar awe. Witness and be humbled by a birth that proceeded your own. Think of us, those who have shone before and those who shall shine long after.Write a letter to the next, as I have to you.

Until then burn, burn,burn. From me, here in the present, writing to you in the future, soon to be past (how fast it all flew). I long for the day, I get to shake your diminutive palm, behold your shining face and say- Welcome Child of the Sun- too long we have been expecting you.

light everlasting

Neil

PS… Happy birthday to your Father- for I post this letter on his Birthday- Him a Sun of a different kind- but beautiful one at that.

Sunday morning and I sit on a bench in La-Paz , watch a Plaza market rising. Ignoring the persistence of shoe shine boys ( and this takes some dedication) I set about enjoying a welcome splash of Andean sun. The traders are arriving, setting up their stores: strange looking local women in Pippi long stocking braids, bowler hats and bright Bolivian shawls. As they unpack their wares, a blind man tick, tick ticks his walking stick to the centre of the Plaza, puts down a tin and starts up on his Accordian. Fingers buckling, face feeling every inch of the lament. A sound of impossible loss. As he plays, an elderly Gentleman, decked in impeccable Sunday best, sits down beside me. The man is not perplexed when he notices my tears, rather sympathetically,even casually, extends his handkerchief. As if he understands all to well what wells of yearning such sounds are capable of inciting . Tears I shed for a sound so familiar. Makes one miss home, miss Rich most of all. Miss his midnight dirges, consoling a sea side city at odd and secret hours. There is an Accordion man for every town I visit. An omen if I may see them as such. Usually an elderly man, crumpled hat, a plastic flower protruding from top pocket. Each plays a song as tragic and beautiful as the last. They are of the same ilk, the same solitary brother hood. Watched over by Saint Ricardo- the omniscient melancholic. Contributing a few coins to their cause is an honour and sadly all I can do.

I’m sitting in the stuffy heated room of a cottage somewhere in Joburgh, Fourways. The corporation has drained most, they wonder around supermarkets with cigarette pinched lips. Backs bent from office chairs.Drunk on a bottle of red. My thatched cottage is sparse, one or two grubby couches, a TV that doesn’t work all that well. Stubbing cigarettes in empty wine glasses and eating dinner out of cans (cause the fridge is fucked). If only I were a better writer then at least I would have a cause to endure. If not for my art –then what? but I have no art, am artless. Expend energy cursing a premature winter, contemplating smearing myself in deep heat to fully inhabit this Withnail existence. Each morning I pass the stables, the property I’m staying on is a farm, a farm in suburbia, funny that, funny how electric fences fend off the city, keep ones pseudo paradises intact (so to hear the lovely coo coo of the high veld doves) At night the braying of horses mingles with police sirens, in the morning, coffee with horse piss. The property people eye it like hawks, I see them arriving every second day, knocking with a higher bid, waving blue prints for more Tuscan villas, one every three meters. White squatter camps- Charm less, ubiquitous. All cities possess a sadness a dirtiness. But without an ocean nothing cleanses .Footprints remain pressed on the back of this ugly insatiable beast.

There was an uprising on the mountain side yesterday, just over the decrepit old fence with its rusted barbs and rotten wood poles, on the slope beneath the black shadow of the cloud.The field of fierce yellow flowers curled into my palms with the seduction of a kitten. They coyly brushed their petals against my cheek and coaxed me into lying amongst their long green stems.

Then with all the petulance its petals could muster one stared me deep in the eyes and spat at me, at my kind. I took it by the throat, between my two fingers and threatened to snap it at the veiny top of its stem. It wept drops of dewy sap before I let it free, and it shook hard the remains of my fingerprints.

We are fighting she whispered, her yellow companions nodded emphatically in the wind. The war against mankind, against your kind. We have mustered up our defenses of barbed acacia and prickly pear, we have spoken to the rivers and babbled with the brooks. We have conversed with the messengers of the skies and signaled to the insects to prepare their defenses. Such a pretty flower had seen one to many a companion, picked and fondled, plucked and fingered, stroked and straightened to brighten up the vase of dull living room.

I pulled the burnt scabs of old bark off dead tree stumps, the limbless trunks, the mutilated black licked wood , gray and soulless. Waiting to burn in the stone cottage fire place.I felt the dying warmth of daylight on the rocks blunt ugly faces, I kissed their gnarled lips and wondered why my head was not as a peculiar shape as theirs.I exchanged my pain on that mountain beneath the black cloud shadow, I listened and they listened, crouched in their density, peering over my ridiculous web of stupidity

My discovery lies in a sort of indifference to the world -at least my previous notions of it

Nothing really matters
Nothing matters at all
The needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before

My heart is breaking.So? The world it seems is paved with broken hearts-paths we tread daily upon with little regard for the crunching sound beneath the souls of our shoes. I suffer-but know nothing of suffering and knowing nothing frees me the very idea of it. Suffering -pain -joy -happiness are ultimately the same thing-deceptions-further little illusions in the greater one- life

I’m in love! I’m mad ! limbless ! poor ! rich! miserable! ecstatic!

Wading now in the collective morning spit of taxi drivers
black lungs, cigarette stumps
collected at my feet
Tripping on the sidewalk of the world

a filthy deli street

and words, words, words
weigh my shoulders down
make my back ache
prize open my grit stung eyes
make my spirit wake

Tibetan ways to live and die
Kipling and his Colonial spy
Rushdie and his Midnight chums
Kerouac and dem Dharma bums

All you can do- as I understand it- is DO! with good intentions and curiosity and the knowledge that it all amounts to nothing in the end and that very thought ultimately makes the whole process a lot less painful but admittedly I battle to surrender to these philosophies myself because that would be to sacrifice all previous forms of Neilness- self importance, aspiration ,ego (my guardians along the paths to success!)

But I know now I’m not missed or loved or needed and the world has not stopped for me nor waits for me and that in truth I’m as alone and bald -as the day I was born. Where I escaped my mothers womb, crawled out my sacred belly tomb only to discover that I was….born into nothing
create into nothing

and will die into nothing

And so making mistakes and cursing gods for making me feel like a leper -for making me feel lost and isolated and strange and for not making me a film star or famous or extraordinary or great or a saint- is the bullshit , I deep down , always presumed it to be (though often distorted by my theatricality) .Cause it doesn’t matter! It’s all the same.We all return to the same plain dust, irrespective of what we’ve done or become. The wars that we fought- lost or won! and whatever’s been said before-matters fuck all, cause our tongues sleep too along with their secrets, our senses no longer open to their (sense)-itive and often (sense) -less ways and those that took offense or heart or joy at our words will someday die too and take with them all that unnecessary baggage . Having carried their burdens all their living days may be heard to utter (as dirt fills their nostrils)’Oh what a sweet waste of my precious emptiness!”

So I will not be ‘harbor’ like - and let other people anchor their shit (Or my own) in these waters anymore. Empty of expectation, fear and worry dependence or need, desire to have or be things. Easier said then done I suppose. Surely this endangers my creative pursuits? My purpose? This new found emptiness of mine?

I would not stop creating at the fear of it been, the pointless human indulgence it so often is but now begin to create, free from the limits and hopes of it making me immortal or respected or praised .Surely that means that my creativity will find a whole new purity. The simple and noble need to reflect and find a voice. Words to reveal the awesome inner workings of the great human wheel and words to celebrate the brave revolutionaries that have escaped its relentless cycle.

But then these are all just words, words , words and India turns some to madness. I’ve been on trains for three days flat. Running on no sleep and to much circular contemplation ,so humor me.

Neil

At an antique store I plunged my hand into a fish bowl of broken wrist watches. Pulling out a hand full I examined them, each in a different state of neglect. Faces cracked, straps worn pale of their leather. Their hands marking different times, different days, years, centuries. Some mere mille seconds apart. It was unsettling, holding the stagnant seconds of someone’s life in my palm. Whose life? What were they doing when it stopped? How long did it take for them to notice? Did they miss the bus, the tram, the carriage, over boil eggs, because of it? Was it a gift, accessory, necessity? How many attempts did they make to repair it before discarding it all together?

Did Durban’s salt air rust its intricate workings, Or water prove the ‘water resistant’ guarantee worthless? Did the battery die or technology render it redundant? Did the previous owner (in the clutches of Alzheimer’s) forget to wind it and live the rest of his life wedged in that same interminable hour?

How easy it would be to forget that these seconds, these minutes, hours had ever existed, were it not for my fistful of watches, forfeiting their pursuit of punctuality to record and remember them. Their deaths seemed noble now, a selfless contribution to ‘times’ archives, times expansive memory. I wondered if whether somewhere out in the world a watch or clock (in a desperate bid of remembrance) is dying at every mille second of the day , in the same way they say babies are been born. Are there enough watches in the world to sustain this theory? Is all that time ultimately has to show for itself, a fish bowl of faulty watches?

I clenched my handful of broken time. For a second felt that the world had stopped. Time had ceased and I were god.