Category: Everything

Everything, Rambling

Places to be

I’m sat at the desk in the kitchen and he’s behind me, leaning into a corner. I’ve been thinking for a while about how we do this.

When I started it was a dumb fly-on-the-wall style thing. Look:

She sits at the kitchen table with a typewriter. Outside the sun is bleaching. A half-drunk coffee cools on the side. Some crumbs next to her hand. She is looking out through the window, but not at anything.

In the light and in the coffee and the mid morning daze…

The doorbell rings.

I…

She stops typing. She opens the door and an alsatian pushes past her leg into the house. A man is standing in front of her. Hairy, with wraparound sunglasses. Hands in his pockets. He probably has a leather jacket on, made of plants rather than leather.

His face doesn’t move, his eyes are hidden behind the glasses. She steps aside and motions for him to come in.

He leans on the kitchen wall. The dog pads its way back into the kitchen and sniffs her. She tickles his head and scratches his belly, then sits down.

I’m working, she says, just so you know.

She pulls the paper out of the typewriter and inserts a clean page.

But that felt all twee and weird. More like a short story than this live-in arrangement we have now. And anyway, since he’s arrived I’ve been so busy. We’ve had a lot of discussions. Acted out many scenes. I like his dog a lot. I have a cat, but she does her own thing. She knows my moods and respects my blind devotion to these people I sometimes show up with. She has her own loves to love.

In one of the scenes we tried, a woman turns up in an ambulance. Driving the ambulance, that is. I leave the door open and she walks in, bringing another dog.

After we chat all together for a while, maybe a couple of days, they get knives from the kitchen and stab me many times. I don’t die, and they don’t care whether I’m dead or not when they leave. I just bleed and hurt and crawl into the shower, where I wash away too much blood. In the morning, he comes back and finds me in the kitchen, on the floor again, acts like he wasn’t one of the people who stabbed me. Acts like he cares about the red staining my top. I don’t know where the ambulance went, but he says he’ll call one. I say not to.

But anyway… haha. Enough about scenes. I reckon we’ll get to that stuff later.

Hey, I say to him. Hey, so I’ve realised we can’t start here. We can’t start at the end, we have to go back and show them the nice times, make them live through the good so they can see how fucked up the bad is.

He looks in my direction, arms folded.

“That’s not exactly fair on me though is it?”

His dog, a big, scary, infinitely caring and friendly thing, sniffs my hand. He’s probably looking for the tennis ball.

What do you mean not fair on you? You enjoyed the past as well. You said.

“You already know my decision. There’s no point digging up the past and making things feel worse for both of us.”

Yeah but it wasn’t my decision. And it wasn’t our decision, was it?

I pet the dog.

“You ended any sense of us when you did what you did.”

Would you please stop being so much like him, it’s actually hurting me.

“How am I supposed to act?”

Like a figment of my imagination I’ve hired to portray him. Obviously. Have you ever looked behind your glasses? His eyes didn’t look like that.

“What have you done to my eyes?”

Don’t pretend to be freaked out by this.

He slowly kneels down, relaxing or retreating, and starts to feel behind the glasses at his eyes. The dog leaves my hand and pads over to him, looks up, maybe concerned, maybe curious.

You’re not going to be able to feel them that way, silly. Stop making the readers think I’m doing weird stuff to you. It’s you who’s a big part of the problem here.

“If we go back to the nice times, do I get my eyes back?”

They’re not your eyes, they’re his. And no.

He stops fussing with his eyes. Pets the dog, who relaxes and lies next to him on the floor. Pensive.

“If I don’t have his eyes, I don’t have his mind either.”

Yeah.

“Whose mind do I have then?”

You’ve got everything I know and believe about him, even a bunch of contradictory, confused and unfinished stuff, crammed into your skull and body.

“Oh.”

I did say you’re literally a figment of my imagination.

“Why are you acting like this is normal?”

Why are you not? Stop stalling for time, we have places to be.

Everything, Rambling

Sunny, my life’s gone easy

I haven’t written here for a long time. I write, but it doesn’t go here. That’s maybe going to change.

But before that, I need a ramble. And I’m going to throw you in at the deep end.

I love him. You know the love I mean. The bad kind. Obsessive. I think a lot about how I was raised to think of this as ‘romance’, as love. My emotional self still seems to think it is, but whatever rational self-awareness I have is fucking tired, people. It’s like stop this. Girl, you are better than this.

I’m at the broken end of my latest obsession. I get one maybe every two years. It takes a year or more to get over the rejection, and then about six months of relative stability before I stumble, clear-eyed and purposeful in my awkwardness, into another one. This is the routine.

My men always have some redeeming traits, things I see as divine connection between us. They’re also always selfish, anxious, they usually drink a lot, they usually don’t want people like me. They have a personality that makes them – under certain circumstances – abusive. And they are almost always friends first. In many ways this is a typical male profile, for men who drink anyway.

I’m summarising them this way because it’s hard not to see them as the beautiful, maybe perfect individuals I still love. Some of whom have continued to be, or who have become, lifelong friends. But I’m not talking about that part right now, I’m not talking about the good part.

Because I love him – and he is the most perfect one so far, and he has done what no-one else has done – cut me out of his life and burned some of my very important friendships in the process. That’s nothing, I know. There are people losing life and limb in Gaza or Ukraine or anywhere I guess when you think hard enough, and there are people in long-term abusive partnerships, there are people dealing with mountains much bigger than I have to move here. Okay. But I’m not them. I’m me. And I have to actively deal with this. This thing is inside me, it’s not inside them. We don’t have to play the hand we’re dealt, but we do have to play our own hand. At least a little.

I want to say I loved him, past tense. The love has been dulled. More than that. The love is entombed now, like a vampire. Waiting for a drop of blood to grace its lips so it can swing back into fully-fledged demonry. It has been entombed for some time. He made sure of this. I tried so hard to stop him, but I couldn’t. You can’t make someone love you, and you can’t stop someone from nailing your love into a coffin and burying it 18feet below your feet.

There were times when he loved me back, but they don’t matter here. I either imagined them or he’s given them up – the result is the same.

So… what?

Well, I can still hear my love screaming down there, in its coffin. You know like in that recent Nosferatu movie – it can be asleep and very awake and alive in your dreams at the same time. In my dreams it’s also buried, but it’s wide awake. It’s thrashing and screaming.

And I needed an excuse to write.

This site was always supposed to be the stories of me, in my bungalow, in a dreamlike Hollywood or LA adjacent place that doesn’t really exist.

I was sitting in my bungalow, and he knocked on the door.

He wears sunglasses to protect himself from my love.

I opened the door and his dog padded into my home as I tried to find his eyes. The lines in his face and the fall of his hair told me things, but the eyes sat behind those laughing, sadistic glasses.

This is the version of him I imagine, when I’m in the bungalow, okay. He’s not ‘real’. Over a year ago, he was the first character I imagined in the bungalow – I think. Apart from the little visitors coming to drink coffee or buy potions and hear stories. He came in a fog, like a character from Silent Hill. He never really wants to talk to me.

And as I write, he’s standing here, looking over me, or maybe not looking. It used to make my heart race just to think that I might see him, walking along the street, getting a coffee, in a meeting. I remember once he was walking down the stairs into the room and the seconds he took started filling out into an infinity of bliss. It was like an angel walking down from heaven. And as he stands here now I can hear the throb of my love’s heart below our feet. Distant, but persistent.

I’m going to talk to him, maybe show him some rooms here. And I’m going to pretend that this is a remotely healthy way of dealing with either breakup or rejection.

About, Everything, Rambling

Birth of a Snarling Grin

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
– Dr Johnson

Magnificent light over the bay, a glorious sparkling in the water that’s too friendly to blind the eyes. Little dots of people down there moving around, ecstatic; too far away to know what they’re doing. Misty hills in the distance, glory sat up in the sky. It must be after noon.

A streak of seagull shit running down the window splits those worlds below: the aquatic; and the urban sprawling into a wet green that refuses further development.

I often look out there, it seems to mean something – that view. What it means I can’t say. In the past I’ve witnessed great expanses from a bedroom window: the bowl of London like a nuclear crater; the impossible optics of broad slow incline; the purity of undisturbed ocean. They all had their meanings much clearer, or so it seemed.

This view is not like them. This one tickles at the edges of consciousness. When you move your head to see it, it’s still far away on the edges.

Ill thoughts these past days, darkness welling up from inside the lungs and stomach and spewing from every orifice. Retching and lapping up the spewm. Sun be damned – it’s mocking me. Go on it says, you come out here and enjoy life, what’s stopping you. I hiss and claw at the curtains.

This is too important for sunlight and joy. Too essential. But what is it? Memory becomes more advanced by the day – picking and choosing how it recounts complex and vague concepts. A slippery eel, electric, finding any precise thought at all becomes nigh impossible.

To become someone else, someone new: is it dying or becoming a snake that sheds its skin?

Too many people have been lost to the need for change, change of self, change of core, change of essence. Fools! It’s not that they’re after. It’s just a change of personality. What does Jung call it? I can’t quite remember. The collection of complexes that make up what you think is your unified self. Heck, maybe it is unified, in a manner of speaking. I’m not a psychologist, I’m a priest – but that’s neither here nor there. You just need to tangle with your complexes. Re-order them. Squash some bad habits. It doesn’t have to delete the Core Balance. But it is oh so easy to become unbalanced, and stay there.

This is the black bile these past few days: boiling atrabilious blood coagulating in the shade, and now this vicious filth. I’m not crazy, I don’t think it’s possible to be perfectly balanced, not as a human anyway. There will always be margins of drift – not error, if it’s absolutely necessary it can’t be error. And those margins of drift allow error to develop. Miscalculate the quantity of black bile permissible in the system, fail to understand the rate at which flame in the blood is snuffed out, and suddenly you’re overwhelmed by the stuff. Choking and gagging as you swallow it back in.

So I need to restore the balance. That means changing the personality, meddling with the complexes. Am I making sense to anyone? Are these simply the loquacious ravings of a antiquated lunatic? Not important. Focus. That’s just the bile forming for another convulsion. We must come to the point, the bitter red pill: pride, arrogance, total perspective, raging hatred and burning anger, barely contained. It’s the only possible salve to this particular wound. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I was wrong.

A terrifying journey begins. Will I survive? Will I escape the all-encompassing narcissism spawned in someone who believes in themselves, against popular dismissal, against all odds, against reason? Reason… is it a tool or is it the truth? Who can say.

Yes. I will survive. The first dark steps on the path to the light. Better than death. Better than the end.

Soon it will be time to leave. For the air. The outside. Something in this place reeks like sweet vapours and corrupts the mind. These drugs – emotions – crawling across my eyes and ripping up my veins. Just to think seems impossible – I forget it and then remember halfway through another awful trip. We must stop swallowing the bile. It is not good. But if we stop then it’s sealed – we mean something then. We are saying we have a right to exist as ourselves. The fucking arrogance of that. The self-indulgent, egotistical, sociopathic cruelty of stating that we have meaning, ourselves, as an individual.

Writing this, as though I mean something, as though my experiences would be worth reading. How fucking dare you? Wait a moment is this bile or coffee? Have I already stopped? Worse: have I already started? Oh god save us Jesus! Quick! I’m dying! Somebody help immediately! Send help! Send the army! Send the navy! Send the household cavalry! Bring the glistening swords! Sturdy truncheons! Well-oiled diamond bullets!

It’s no good. It’s happened. I know I’d be talking about atom bombs otherwise. Mutually assured destruction. God! It’s true! The balance! I’d been fooling myself all along: lies about enriching others’ lives by my own destruction, when really I was just scheming the downfall of all things, all along. We’re safe. Don’t worry. The plot is over. The king is safe. King? Well, whatever that slimy creature is. Some kind of tentacle monster I should imagine. Don’t approach it! And don’t kill it either. Not yet. It’ll end itself one of these days, in its own time.




Book, Everything

The Philosophy Bit

It has to start with this. And I’m sorry for using the word “philosophy”. I can’t escape it. It’s like my fucking shadow – it only goes away when I’m surrounded by it. Well, by shadow-like darkness. Or philosophy-like…stuff. Master wordsmith right here.

So this isn’t one of those annoying new philosophies like you haven’t heard of, this is basically a summary of everything that we already know. Frankly we don’t spend enough time on Prime Mover style self-contemplation as a society, but I do so I’m going to talk about it. Partially related, my granddad became a satsangi years ago, and apart from the joy of mumbo-jumbo like “don’t worry, granddad’s made it so you’ll evolve quicker up the spiral of reincarnation”, I remember one thing in particular about that philosophy: that, according to him anyway, it was a philosophy. You could be a Christian satsangi. A Muslim satsangi. A Hindu satsangi. It didn’t have to alienate you from any erstwhile comrades you might have. I’ve never really looked much into the satsangis (or what is it, the Swaminarayan teachings?) because there was always this character granddad would talk about called “the Master” and pretty much from day one I was like fuck that.

But! It’s a great idea to have a way of thinking that doesn’t exclude anyone, so that’s what I try to cultivate. I don’t have a cool name for it, and generally I say I’m a pagan (because my IRL name is pagan and heck why not?) until people start asking more questions. Actually, I’m a bit of a chameleon. Talking to those of the Abrahamic persuasion I reel off the teachings of Christian theologians like I’m one of them (albeit a very cynical one of them) and among atheists I’m as happy to smash god as the next deranged humanist. What matters to me is that I get past the first bit and start having a proper conversation with someone. So far it seems that you can’t do that if you have a named philosophy you’re trying to preach. Also, this philosophy genuinely doesn’t need a name – it’s already sitting there in every named philosophy to exist, so you really can just say you’re whatever you want. Whatever has the best fragrance in the communal hall, the best songs, the best weird robes or…you know. Pick the culture that suits you best for daily practice. I’m actually drifting from pagan to “scientist”, or I was until I crapped out my latest attempt at a degree. The covid lockdown really didn’t help there – I’m both desperately insecure and massively social, so it kinda hit me at both ends, and not in a good way.

Yeah yeah Rosa, what is this philosophy then, go on, tell us. Alright! I’m getting to that.

It’s so simple that it’s actually really hard to draw your attention to it. Like it’s covered by a Hitchhiker’s Guide “somebody else’s problem field”. You have to catch it off guard, by talking about all kinds of other crap. And if me saying that has just made you stop reading, well, fuck. I guess it’s not for everyone.

Something concrete. I started this journey just trying to work out what the fuck is going on here. My Religious Studies teacher, back at school, did these casual extra classes for people who wanted to know more about philosophy rather than religion. We had two atheists, me (at the time a devout pagan) and a Muslim. I still don’t know what my teacher practised, though now I reckon he had a line on The Philosophy. At one of the early ones he tried to explain to us – we were about 15 – that all of our perceptions are unreliable. That idea, combined with the Matrix/Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, sent my brain off on one. Like woah woah woah man, you mean I don’t know anything?? And he was all like basically yeah.

The first task then was to check that information. Do I know anything? And that took a while. First, you see, you have to define your terms. What is “I”? (Yeah, it’s that bad.) And what is “knowing”? And, don’t forget to ask while you’re answering those first two questions, what is “is”? Oh hell yeah this is/was some serious stuff.

I have some pretty good answers to these questions now, but I also realise that in a profound sense there are no “answers”, not like the facts you want, not like the knowledge you used to think you have. Nah man the answers lie in the spaces between things, or – more accurately – the flow of things. Which again is the Hitchhiker’s Guide bit, the somebody else’s problem field, or learning to fly – just fall at the ground and miss. But it’s also much simpler and more normal than that glorious sci-fi satire.

Knowing – you can’t. Know anything that is. But that’s the short answer. The long answer is that there is only one thing.

Also, while we’re on the topic, language is a real shit. It’s so hard to explain anything properly, in English at least. I don’t know any other languages well enough to investigate whether they’re better, and to some extent using language at all is the problem.

Alright, so I imagine if you speak multiple languages, you’ll find that a word from one describes something that doesn’t exist in the other. My multi-lingual friends and the multi-lingual people I read about tend to use whatever word fits best for the thing they’re talking about, even if that means they occasionally speak the ‘wrong’ language to someone, and have to explain themselves.

This suggests (maybe) we should spend a lot more time combining languages in everyday life, and less time focussing on one or the other. Right? I would then say, philosophically, to get proper understanding, we need to work across all means of communication and notation. Not just words. Music, pictures, abstract, realist, even feelings and taste and touch and intuition. You need it all working together if you’re going to ‘see’ what’s really going on. But let’s get back on track.

Self or “I” – there isn’t. Sorry, folks. Science is right, your sense of self is basically a fiction designed to help you survive. You are however part of the one thing, so it’s not that “you” don’t exist…it’s more like “you” is actually “we”.

Is – yeah. I’m looking pretty silly right now, but “is” is the key word in all of this, it’s where the revelation comes from, it’s how you can make a semi-serious argument in favour of you knowing at least something.

Let me try and put it in less pugnacious terms. So I was trying to work out if anything could be known, while also trying to avoid “I”. Famously Descartes or someone said cogito ergo sum, which roughly translates as I think therefore I am. No. But it does kind of work. Simplify that thought, boil it down to its bare minimum and you have: something is existing, which kinda just means “existence”, which kind just “is”. And even if you array all of your ability against that idea, against the idea that something is existing, I don’t think you or I can win, because it’s a truth. Possibly the only truth. Now you might be saying to me, but Rosa, that information is worse than useless, it’s actually just really depressing. If you are saying that, don’t worry – so did I! But try hanging out with it for a while, you know. Go out to your local, buy it a few drinks, make it a party, have a few laughs. It grows on you. You start to notice that actually having a basis for some kind of knowledge is…pretty cool.

I’m not gonna lie to you, I spent a long time just cycling that idea around in my mind, trying to make it mean something more. And heck, I basically got somewhere with that. I don’t think it’s me adding on shit that isn’t there. So, something exists. There can be nothing that doesn’t exist. Things that exist all share the attribute “exists”. There…you can get a bit lost. I needed to add some science to illuminate matters.

Let’s throw out a trite science statement “matter is neither created nor destroyed”. See – it agrees with me, this science stuff. But when you look at the implications of that, which all branches of science do plenty of, you see that everything is massively interconnected at basically every level. I’d really recommend looking at some theories of the origin of life for this – in fact I did an essay on that very topic, which I thought was pretty decent. I’ll try and clean it up, cut out the academic bullshit (in so far as it makes the essay harder to understand) and put it on here. You want to look at that because what we call “life” definitely came out of stuff we call “dead” and definitely still contains and depends on equivalents of all that “dead” stuff.

The links and relations between the minutiae of matter is fucking amazing. It’s like looking at the anatomy of god, and I’m not just talking about their huge futa genetalia. If you don’t know what futa is probably don’t look it up. Basically god would have all the genetalia, so penis and vagina, balls and womb, breasts and too much testosterone (technically). God looks either really weird, or really sexy, or both. Also god isn’t real (or, if you want to take it seriously and do a broad interpretation of the Cartesian attributes, god is just a crap – but ultimately serviceable – metaphor for existence itself).

I’ve definitely lost you now, right? I mean even if you’re still on board, you’re looking up futa and trans porn, you’re distracted, your mind and body are elsewhere. No I won’t recommend any decent sites: the imagination is my website! (But also, shame and social embarrassment are things).

Let’s go back to the point of this universal interconnectedness – that, as long as you’re willing to forego “hard” knowledge, like definitive “this is absolutely right under all circumstances” knowledge, you can still understand the world very effectively. It’s changing sets of interconnected and more or less predictable systems. The biggest next revelation here actually is that sense of movement. Like we’re, or I was anyway, educated to think that knowledge is solid and still. And it really really isn’t. When you think about it, it becomes pretty obvious too – because no-one agrees on anything, except actually everyone agrees on quite a lot of stuff. You can’t encapsulate that kind of non-contradictory contradiction in a traditional theory of knowledge.

You have to understand that when you’re observing something, it won’t stay that way forever, and it might not have even been that way when you saw it. So, like all those predicting outfits out there, marketers, gamblers, scientists, you actually function by making loads of (in our case possibly infinite) small observations and building an average out of them. Do I need to keep breathing? It appears so. But those anaerobic respirators over there, they don’t need to breathe. Well, actually they kind of do, I mean they need to respirate or whatever. Alright – rocks. Yes, rocks seem to function without breathing, although their “functioning” is probably mostly at the atomic level. Up at this level they don’t seem to do much. So not all things need to breathe? It seems so. But I do? Well, you’re breathing right now, and when you stop, you really don’t like it, and other people who’ve stopped too long have died. Well…guess I better keep breathing then. Yeah, it’s a pretty safe bet.

And that’s it! The vast majority of what we do, is what we consider a safe bet. Umm, but the main point I want to walk away with there is the flexibility, the interconnectedness, the fluid nature of existence. I say fluid, I mean maybe there are gaseous bits. I dunno. I’m only really at initiate level here. Science will have to take it further.

The other thing to consider is that time is probably bullshit. Like, an illusion to facilitate some of what we do. I’m early days on that one. It’s real fiddly. All this stuff is.

Anyhow, the reason I’m mentioning philosophy so early on is that even this amount of information can completely change the way you interact with society and the world around you in general. There’s a tantalising amount of further info out there that we can quest for and discover, but at the broader social level, we’re still acting like something is true if the Bible says so. By the way, don’t get me wrong Christians who I already offended, the Bible may contain god-tier information, but you have to admit, since humans wrote it, rewrote it, translated it, re-translated it…I mean…there’s room for abuse. Be reasonable. But yeah, human societies, even “the best ones”, are still acting like science is a hobby, which mostly relegates it, and the search for meaning, and evolution itself, to the minor leagues. Meanwhile, who’s got the shinest car takes the major league title once again, even though we’re in a climate crisis. I mean what the fuck.

[so yeah, as I said in the intro…pretty loose-cannon material right now, crashing and thrashing all about the decks. It’ll improve though. I actually have loads of casual and professional material on this already, most of which I’ve never used…so there is more basis to it than me randomly deciding to type this out today. Oh, and if you’re reading – thank you and I love you! And I’m sorry for being so aggressive in this – massive caffeine high. Massive.]

Book

Intro

I’m trying to organise all my favourite things into a book. For various reasons, this is not an easy task. Here you’ll find the work-in-progress stubs, drafts and shitposts I need to display to the public in order to feel validated and purposeful enough to keep writing. I’m not tagging them though, so you’re probably only seeing this/them if you’re a follower. Hi! It’s completely amazing that you’re here. Comment at me! Email me! I looove chatting.

The book is a mix of stories and, well, philosophy, with a style and composition loosely inspired by Dr Hunter S Thompson. It does have a working title, but no that title doesn’t seem relevant just yet. Additions will probably be pretty random, badly structured and unfinished. I will edit them and change them around. I welcome any amount of involvement you want to have.

You’re all wonderful.