the end

it's usually difficult to understand the cryptic nature of the world.

this blog is finished. it's been running over 19 months and that is a big achievement for any person. i'm going to struggle to find another outlet for my creative endeavours, but i'm sure when i do i will be back with a higher quality and greater substance to what it is i want to say. i've become complacent with this and convenience breeds ignorance.

This, what this was, was never about telling people what to do. This, what it was, was about the idea that if you knew what i knew, maybe your life could be easier. Maybe with another idea, a bit of my opinion about the way i see this world you could walk the walk of your life a little easier and maybe avoid some of the glaciers that i've climbed my way out of, to come back and say "don't fall down there!"

of course i'm no pariah and this is certainly and never will be any form of religious or dogmatic text. i've taken a great amount of care and spent a large amount of energy in creating these pages, of which there are 227 posts which averages out to more than 3 posts a week for over 84 weeks.

personally i feel that this is the only thing i've managed to create of any kind of quality that i am actually comfortable with and i'm finishing it because it's not good enough.

this is my stage. so,

i will leave by saying that you shouldn't worry. you shouldn't ever worry. that anything you ever want or could ever want for yourself is achievable. but that thinking about the end will cause you trouble. the ends, the things we see people happy with, the things that we want for ourselves many years down the line take time. the most important thing to do for anyone is to decide. to decide and realise. to really understand what it is you want for yourself what it is you want to achieve to be, or to understand in this life. then, to do it.

doing it is not a daunting thing when you understand that a little every day will not only accomplish those dreams but accomplish everything you ever dreamed of. Rome wasn't built in a day, neither was it all destroyed in one day.

when things are difficult, which they always will be in a realistic world, you should reassure yourself that if you accomplish what you aim to do today, then the future is assured. even if you don't, then tomorrow is another day. take tremendous peace in that fact.

i've just taken an intermission, two Jehovahs Witnesses pressed my doorbell and came into my room. i took the time to take apart their philosophy and softly put important things in their heads. they were two young men on their way preaching what they believe to be their personal philosophy and i'm sorry it's so submissive for them. i've no doubt that they will think and that i've have changed their course of life for the better. what greater triumph?

the end is important in all things, and there's no greater challenge to an artist than decision, no greater volition for mankind than making the right choice.

with the greatest wishes i wish that you all understand and accomplish your personal ambitions.

will

advice

if philosophy be the governance of collective thought, then conceptual euphemism is pointless. i do not know who i am to other people, only what i am to myself. in the grandest scheme other peoples' opinions are unimportant. i do not know how to better other people, only how to better myself. an that greater morals are foresaken for what it to be considered the personal good.

London

Have you got back after a few beers poured yourself a glass of tap water, drank some and thought
"ahhh i'll take the hangover, cos this water is worse"
Have you been on the underground with two different people standing on your feet with the sound of the train on the tracks so loud it feels like being the victim in a horror film?
Have i got anything less insightful to say about London that hasn't been said so many times by Northern English people that it misses the point more than a space hopper on a bouncy castle?
yes i do:
one thing travelling does do is broaden your context of thought. One thing that London is, is interesting, very very interesting. i am here for a reason other than passing through or as a tourist. while there are things i would love to dislike about this city it's the same issues that exist in many other large cities in varying degrees in some shape or form.
i think the important thing is to get over oneself and focus on what London has to offer. what it has are people, things, ideas and places that are truly unique and fascinating, set in a seemingly infinite diversity of ethnicity, culture and probability of possiblity.

i would disagree with the meaning in the proverb: "variety is the spice of life"
i believe:
"variety is as important to the mind as breathing is to the body"

Chocolate cake

I think i've discovered the mistake in Sainsburys price reduction logic. it came to me while staring at stale cakes reduced to £3. it seems the supermarket reduces the items based on their original price, rather than pricing them based on their actual worth (which in the case of a stale cake would be about 50p) the fact it used to be worth a lot more money is irrelevant.

i am opposed to this approach for two reasons: firstly i'm a tight Yorkshire man and here in Yorkshire i'm definitely not alone. i'm certainly not stupid enough to pay £3 for a stale cake, so the cakes that would be perfectly edible do not get eaten because they're priced far too high. this leads to the second reason that the cakes then get taken from the shelf and thrown in the bin. old food used to be given to the homeless but UK health and safety regulations put an end to that.

so the food gets wasted. wasting food really is a disgusting thing to do. the 'freegans' of the world (persons who liberate out of date food from food retail refuse bins) could then acquire this chocolate cake from the bin when it's thrown out at the close of the business day, except the bins are now padlocked because of health and safety reasons. it seems someone ate food out of a bin and successfully sued someone because they became ill. perhaps we should grill the lawyers and health and safety officers and then eat them. after that, if somebody gets sick precious little will happen.

in 2010 i think that some people have decided not to accept their inevitable death. they buy life insurance, wear 'anti-ageing' skin creams, they enforce rules and regulations to ensure that people won't get hurt through whatever obtuse or irrational reason. they pay for protection for their possessions, shopkeepers used to pay the mafias, now everyone pays the insurance companies. all these issues aside, none of this will avoid the unavoidable fact that when the time comes, that's it. it's all over. fully comprehensive gerbil insurance ain't guna keep your heart beating.

all this may come as a depressing thought that most would rather ignore. i can understand, death is a distressing concept to those that haven't done it many many times before. those that have might share my sentiment that meditating on the natural course of death is a genuinely magnificent way to appreciate life. because you don't know what you've got till you've gone.

Aldous

some things are better left unsaid. some things come flying out the mouth whether you believe them or not. i'm with Aldous "I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself."

What is not

The Importance of What is Not

We join thirty spokes
to the hub of a wheel,
yet it's the center hold
that drives the chariot

We shape clay
to birth a vessel,
yet it's the hollow within
that makes it useful.

We chisel doors and windows
to construct a room,
yet it's the inner space
that makes it livable.

Thus do we create what is
to use what is not.
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching)

nothingness is not a reference to the absence of content, but rather to the absence of aggression. Lao Tzu does not advocate not doing over doing (the popular Homer Simpson mis-conception) rather celebrates the maximal doing with the minimal effort. the yin element is essential in all things.

the shopkeeper says,
"what is happiness? happiness is a state of mind"
an answer difficult to argue with. we decide and are responsible for our own happiness.

Rant

I need to travel 220 miles. First i check the train prices my favourite (fastest and most environmentally friendly) means of travel anywhere and in any country: cheap advance fare £85. second i check the airplane prices just to get a little context: £75.20

aaaaaahhhh, i exhale the way a man does when he's so tired he forgets he's going to have to breath in again. the plane is 3 times quicker and costs £10 less but getting on a plane and flying 200miles on a non-essential journey over ground is a complete joke if you ask me. so, why is the plane £10 cheaper to travel 220 miles than it is to get on a train that costs a fraction of the running cost?

I'm walking along and a man walks past followed by the mysterious eyes of a woman wearing a burqa. is there anything more disgraceful to the human race than a woman hidden in a burqa? Nicolas Sarkozy said that burqas are "not welcome" in France, commenting that:
"In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity"
wearing a burqu has been banned in French schools since 2004. thank God someone can still call a spade a spade "touché, appeler un chat un chat". Home Secretary Alan Johnson raised the UK terror alert from "substantial" to "severe" despite no intelligence to suggest why, best make sure and put our soldiers in the airport to play it safe ay? ah, wait, they're in Afganistan shooting people....inconvenient

America has sent over a thousand marines armed to the teeth to Haiti, taken over the airport and turned it into a military base. now planes full of aid, medicine and water have been denied landing while Chinooks swarm in full of bullets for what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called a major effort to provide earthquake relief. i'd give you the link to the youtube video, but it's mysteriously disappeared.

i'm in a lot of pain, anger and irritation comes easily. my back has locked up again like it did in Australia, i can't really walk or lay down, my left shoulder can't take any weight or tension and my guts hurt from being burned and lasered by a surgeon on wednesday. to make things worse all i seem to hear from people left right and center is moaning and complaining about this, that and everything else. it's depressing, but i really do understand. i do my very best not to encourage or amplify negative sentiment as i walk along the high street in the town centre at midday in the dark, past empty bankrupt retail outlets while a well dressed student plays a funeral song on her amplified violin.

Jesus Christ what happened? did we lose a war i don't know about? sometimes i think that some people are happy being miserable, which of course is fine but it won't do for me. Another way to look at things is to look at the cause rather than the symptoms. where i live there is rubbish left everywhere, it really irritates me so i pick up rubbish and end up carrying it round for miles because there aren't any rubbish bins. transport is the same, taxation is extremely high to deter motorists, but the alternative is very infrequent, irregular and very expensive public transport. a poor alternative is no alternative at all. however, we should accept such things and have the attitude to either change them or live with them. life isn't easy but we're all in the same boat so lets get on with it. you won't get clean by rolling about in the mud.

Keep Calm

when things fall apart, the unexpected can help us back to our feet. the other night i was left stranded 10 miles from home after my bike fell apart. i left the bike for dead to head home on foot. several blocks later i'm under a railway bridge, i glance across to read a sign

"keep calm and carry on"

i immediately felt better. i did some research and found out that in 1939 the British Government's Ministry of Information commissioned a series of propaganda posters to be displayed throughout the country upon the outbreak of war, yet the sign i read was in Melbourne and this was 2009. this particular poster was never issued and was never seen by the general public.

its possible a person called Mark Coop is responsible for this posters revival and the message has found its way to the other side of the world. impressive.

to face adversity is nothing new. a sign, a helping hand, a smile, such little things can make a huge difference. i'm back in England now, it's raining and it's dark in the middle of the day, at home i look at my copy of the sign and i'm reminded of the people who came before me and how much of life is not about what we face each day, but about how we face those challenges. with the right attitude there's very little that can't be done.

Mark Coop is selling high quality screen prints of this sign from his site online.

click on the post title to visit the online shop or click here

Glyph

read the headlines
jump off a cliff
open your parachute
read some hieroglyphs
go out to tender
a nice piece of steak
get a track bike without a front break
learn about the world from the TV screen
learn about washing while in the machine
people i find like grains of sand on the beach
the same, but something different about each
got needles in your haystack?
get your money back
i have a chair near when i go to sleep
guardian spirits sit and guide my dreams
the nothingness i came from
to there i will return
ancestors wisdom borrowed for the earth

Basketball in the petrol station

The butterfly effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. While the butterfly does not "cause" the tornado in the sense of providing the energy for the tornado, it does "cause" it in the sense that the flap of its wings is an essential part of the initial conditions resulting in a tornado, and without that flap that particular tornado would not have existed.

it's not a naieve thing to try and save the world, but rather a waste not to try. maybe our different creeds, colours and ideas are ideally intended as different solutions to a global problem and we can exist as that solution. i'd like to think i favour inspiring ideas and techniques with which we can better ourselves and surroundings. many theories attest everything has it's opposite, ying to yang, hot to cold, destruction to creation. most problems, physical, emotional, spiritual, local, national, global ususally stem from an unbalance. too much of one thing without enough of the other. Sigmund Freud said "Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock."
If that's how or when it began, then i believe we as people can do more than that these days. Do it. Smile at someone, call your mum, be nice for 3 minutes, whatever.
"I destroy my enemies when i make them my friends"

Awake

"If we are open only to discoveries which will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut. This is why the marvellous achievements of science and technology are of so little real use to us. It is in vain that we can predict and control the course of events in the future, unless we know how to live in the present. It is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer. It is in vain that engineers devise faster and easier means of travel if the new sights that we see are merely sorted and understood in terms of old prejudices. It is in vain that we get the power of the atom if we are just to continue in the rut of blowing people up.
Tools such as these, as well as the tools of language and thought, are of real use to men only if they are awake-not lost in the dreamland of past and future, but in the closest touch with that point of experience where reality can alone be discovered: this moment."
(Alan W Watts, The wisdom of insecurity)

Credit Manuva

You may or not know about Rodney Smith, aka Roots Manuva. Speaking as a Yorkshire DJ, with the opinion that not only does this man know what he's talking about, but i feel he's a modern day hero. In a time and place where heros may be perceived to be in short supply you may listen to this music and be inspired whether you understand or not. Like Braintax, who is another hip hop hero, there's little ego and lots of substance. Music like art can be a compromise between the aesthetic and conceptual, i.e. sounding good/saying something important. Some people are heros because they can do both. Some people are also heros because they've fallen, been trodden into the floor, bloodied bruised, picked themselves back up, cleaned themselves off, pulled themselves together then shared their experience for the good of the world.
Experience from the experienced, isn't that what it's is all about?
As for me China has been hard, but because of things beyond my control, and often things unrelated to China. I spent 6 weeks in Beijing, a place with such high air pollution exercise was actually making me less healthy, i paid £900 for a TEFL course which taught me nothing, but a lesson in unethical business practice, and that a TEFL certificate is not necessary to teach English in China. Now i've spent 2 weeks in Changchun where it's so cold moisture and snot freezes to your face. These are both big cities, i don't care for big cities.
i want a holiday, i want a beach that looks like paradise on a postcard, close your eyes and you can see it, mine has a palm tree on the left diving down into the middle with white sand and clear blue sea. paradise is a state of mind, for me it's also a beach in Fiji:
"If the system ain't workin' you betta' think about desertin' or bringin' in some higher learnin'" (mc covert, track: 'are you on it?' album: skitz countryman)