Sanctuary

The work week, the work life, is spent in people's houses trying to turn flat boring whitewashed walls into the gateways to some exotic other realm using colour and my meagre imagination. Part of the job becomes about blending unobtrusively into their environment, their intimate life spaces, their homes.

It's a kind of involuntary voyeurism...outside, looking in through the plastic wrap of professional distance. Like second nature I read their lives from the encrypted code of their possessions and professions; their habits and their humours.

Amazing. like fingerprints and faces, no two are the same...each room coloured by the distinct aura of it's inhabitants.

The happily married, the hopelessly single, the bitter divorced.

The tiny rented apartments and the sprawling manor homes.

Homes warm and frenetic with light and laughter and love and homes barren and screaming with the trapped silence of mausoleums.

Catalog perfect homes and spiraling mess homes.

Homes that let you borrow their sunsoaked peace and homes that feed you hollow disquiet.

Homes rich and pungent with the smells of cooking and homes rank with the odour of wealth.

Homes with pictures of friends and lovers and pets and mothers taped to walls and refrigerator doors and homes spartan as monasteries.


And in the homes, the people...
The sweet apologetic ones that can't quite make up their minds.
The exuberant ones that talk a mile a minute.
The narrow fault finding ones.
The sneaky ones you know are going to try and work you over.
The quiet ones with the guarded eyes that you want to please the most because when you do their wonder is the purest.
The terminally design challenged ones who couldn't possibly trust you or their own sense of style...not without a signed affidavit from their mighty interior designers.
The arrogant patronizing ones who think they could do your job in their sleep.
The adventurous ones who let you go the distance...and come along for the ride.
The bewildered ones who don't understand any of it, but know you'll somehow magically figure out what they like.
They all let you in...and you stay a while...a tourist in a borrowed sanctuary.

Shared space is a shared life; it's inevitable that they'll talk to you and tell you things...sometimes just because you're there. Sometimes because no one else is.
And you'll see them as they are...in the inner sanctum...ceos and society heiresses, accountants and movie stars, mothers and lovers and newlyweds, rich men's wives and single working girls.

And you'll learn a lot...about style and wealth. And grace.
And you'll see that sometimes a blessing may be a curse...
and maybe a curse isn't necessarily so.

it's not the storms that rage that will whittle you away...
it's this endless everyday.

wonder what it's all about....nausea i think.

Gettin' wiggy wit it...

Ok, things that will forever confound me by their very existence #3847 - Bad toupees.

Got to thinking about this when I saw a man in a store the other day - regular old guy but he had, nestled atop his head, the mankiest rug to ever have existed in the HISTORY of hair!!
The wig itself was your garden variety cheap,noxious, vile,bad bad bad hairpiece. However, what made it's dead-rodent creepiness so in-your-face offensive was the fact that it looked like some one had tried tossing it, frisbee-like, onto this poor sod's shiny pink pate...without having quite managed the perfect throw.
So the wig just sat there, three clicks due east of it's ideal final destination, leaving a furrow of bald skin to cleanly demarcate the scraggly remaining natural hairline from the jagged edges of a toupee made by satan's milliners, while what could only have been a dark supernatural power at work prevented the whole mess from oozing down his ear and sliding off his head.

Now maybe this is just me, but I'd imagine that if you put yourself through the indignity of owning a hat made of fake hair or worse, dead hair that once belonged to another human being (or horse...or ape...or gerbil?) just so you could salvage the derelict vessel of your vanity, then what you really need to complete the illusion ( or delusion, depending on how you see it) is an assiduous and unshakable belief in, and acceptance of, said hairpiece.

I mean, give the rug it's due!! Lavish it. Pamper it. Treat it like a gorgeous but demanding mistress; one with magic secrets and a weakness for protein rinse. Get that flash new haircut. Go all out on the conditioning pomade. Hell! do the routine with the hot rollers if that's what it takes!!(oh, and for god's sake, get yourself some of that extra strong hair adhesive while you're at it!!)
Don't just slap it on and forget about it like it's the bastard child you wish you'd never had!!! Because the only way you'll get the world and me to suspend our disbelief for the moment and pretend that your head is actually full of your own hair is if you seem at least half-way convinced of it yourself first! Because if you're not, well then you may as well lay a dead cat on your head for all the difference it would make...it's might even be an improvement!

real deep shit

Alternate reality. Consensual reality. Personal reality. Multiple reality...
Why do we not admit to there being more than one absolute legitimate reality? When you think about it, how can there not be?
It's kind of like the Earth, isn't it? One integral, solid whole... But divided and subdivided of necessity till it's in fragments: continent/ country/ city/ district/ yours/ mine/ ours/ theirs...Splintered into separate wholes by this need to hold as our own, individually.

Wouldn't it be ok to think of it as being so much bigger than me that I could climb in and wander around in it's hazy labyrinths, trying to find the perfect fit for the jagged edges of my individuality stained logic and know that I'll find a mirror for my perspective here under the all embracing awning of ultimate truth.
who's to say. Whose to say...

when you're happy and you know it...shut up, it won't last long

Refreshing… This might be a place in this huge unconcerned cosmos where I may offload the stuttering mangled garbage in my head without being told to shut the fuck up. If so halleluiah!

Ok so I sound like some sad Goth-obsessed, manic-depressive who listens to portishead and occasionally takes a razor to my wrists...(haha yeah...that’s gonna happen...NOT!!) But hey everyone hits a downswing every once in a while...so I’m pissed. Sue me!

Anyway, so I’ve been chewing on this one for a while. I mean, is it just me or are seemingly content, successful, urban individuals getting the blues with almost menstrual precision of late? And for no apparent reason it would seem? I mean look at me. I'm down. I'm out. And I have NO clue why!
I mean, it's not like I’ve lost my livelihood or the love of my life, my best friend, all my money, my favourite pair of furry bunny slippers...right? So all's well, right? WRONG! I mean what is this feeling? This horrible heavy stomach-clenching, gut-wrenching cannot-hold-my-head-up-feeling? Where did it come from? And WHY!!!? By all rights, it shouldn't be there...shouldn't even apply to me. I mean, my life is GOOD, DAMN IT!!! Ok so I’m not bouncing off the walls with glee every second of everyday but hell, I can't complain. And yet I do...

I think I'll blame this ‘Myth of Happiness’ i have in my head. Yes...happiness! Apparently, it’s a must have! And apparently happiness, not unlike homemade detergent and cherry preserve, can be created at will in required quantities and stored in airproof Tupperware for indefinite periods of time (ok the Tupperware bit only works for the soap and cherries). But the point is - you're supposed to make your own happiness, right?

So how? How are you supposed to do this? I mean shouldn’t happiness-making at least come with a manual? I mean what are we supposed to do...look about our world and watch films like Simon Birch, and a few sappy phone company commercials and read books by people like Henry James Waller or Richard Bach (horror of all horrors) and collate the sum of their syrup'n'scotch soaked wisdom to read that the easiest way most of us make ourselves happy is by ‘having’.

Yes, yes I know; that brings us straight to the ridiculously malformed yet unquestionably popular idiotism i.e. ‘money can't buy happiness'. Well, let’s state for the record and for all eternity that over here i.e. in this corner of cyberspace that is dedicated to the voices in my head, we will have no truck with the trite, the trifling, the over-simplistic; the downright stupid.
So in keeping with this policy of responsible extrapolative cogitation, we shall abstain from acknowledging the sheer ‘A is for apple’ naiveté of that statement let alone bother to tackle it.

So, no what I mean by the ‘having’ principle is that we are supposed to have a certain number of non material things that are supposed to then add value to our lives - things like a fulfilling job, love, intellect, intimate friends, great familial relationships, a productive day, impeccable taste and a few other things you can’t really pick up at the checkout counter at the supermarket. Now, say for a fleeting moment you have managed to amass all these things, together; or at least in aesthetically pleasant combinations. Yay, halleluiah, break out the bubbly! You’re happy!

Yeah, but for how long? See, that’s where it all starts to fall apart. You can manage a few moments of sheer gut-bursting joy given the right circumstances, but then you throw the balance somewhere by squabbling with a friend, a lover, a mother; or outgrowing your job, your friend, your lover, your mother or whatever and the happiness starts to leak right out of the bag making an unsightly puddle right at your feet.

Here’s the thing...say you were programmed to accept that things like this are bound to happen and that we must expect to be ‘happy’ 4.36% of the time, ‘content’ 73.65% of the time, ecstatic 0.87% of the time and, plain miserable for the rest of the 21.12%, then we’d have a realistically devised psychometric pie chart and we’d see that things are as they should be and we’d spare ourselves the further agony of soul-wracking self-analysis and just carry on being content.

Unfortunately we’re programmed to constantly and persistently search for this elusive and extremely capricious state of being i.e. happiness. We’re programmed to be relentless and unceasing in our quest for it...never allowing ourselves to settle naturally into the furry-bunny-slipper comfort of a more placid and attainable ‘mere contentedness’. So, not unlike small hormone-induced rodents, trying to navigate a bizarre maze in some mad scientific experiment, we tend to keep butting our furry little heads against the countless imaginary yet not insubstantial walls built with the brick and mortar of our insecurities, our limitations, our fear and guilt and shame and compounded sense of failure.
Result? YOU’RE FUCKIN’ MISERABLE!!! So what is wrong with this picture? Well, we’re all trying too hard aren’t we? And for who? for what? WELL, HELL!! I DON’T KNOW, DO I? I mean if I did, this whole tirade would be a little redundant don’t ya think? Ok so what’s my point? My point, maybe, is we need to relax...and debrief ourselves...and stop watching sappy films and commercials...or at least believing in them...and we need to make up our definitions and our yardsticks for happiness and truth and beauty and the rest of the important stuff by ourselves, as we go along. The way we make our lives up. We need to go back to thinking and feeling for ourselves...cause I for one am sick of having to compare my life to an image on a flickering screen to see if I’m doing it right!
Ok over and out. I’ve run out of steam.

Apparently we must share...

Welcome to the pre-event blow-out bash of the collapse of civilization as we know it. Apparently, a prerequisite to being here is an overwhelming need to share.

No,don't worry. We don't want your wealth, or your wisdom or even that last Mars bar you've been hoarding in your pocket since 7th grade.

We want your dirty laundry.

It would seem that here in the first quarter of the 21st century, it is imperative that we (as a species) disseminate...and of course, it logically follows that by disseminate...we mean broadcast electronically.

So any guesses as to what follows next...

Yes, Logic would point to either Door#1- A Reality T.V. Show or Door#2- A Weblog (AKA Blog, Online Journal, Rant Register, Universal Online Repository of Noxious,Vile, BAD BAD BAD Writing)

No Points for guessing which one this is.

Brace yourself...here comes the Vogon Poetry.