clinging to the wreckage

  Christmas Eve used to be my favourite day and, even yesterday, I was thinking ‘tomorrow is my favourite day of the year.’ This was because it historically marked the beginning of a holiday that lasted into the beginning of January. It marked a time that most of humanity slowed down… together, for once, and enjoyed some peace and quiet and celebration. It was also historically a night that I was with my family, and we would all sleep under the same roof to awake to presents and feasts and parties. In later years, it became a night often spent with a lover or girlfriend, a night spent cooking and drinking, talking and laughing, kissing and being romantic. Today I rode my bicycle to a nearby restaurant for lunch, I sat at the bar and had a beer and a pizza. However, before the pizza arrived, a strange guy arrived and, even though the bar was empty, came to sit next to me. I eventually escaped, went home, then walked back and went to my regular bar. It was peaceful and pleasant. The ...

  At 04:30 I give up trying to sleep and make a cup of coffee. It’s the 15 th of November and the window is open because the weather is so pleasant. There’s an ever so slight movement of the air that pushes the smell of coffee to me. I’m so tired that it feels almost like a pleasant drug-induced state. Most of my friends are in the UK and Europe, so there are people to chat to. The American night is silent… most people have already arrived home from their late nights, and the early risers have not yet risen. Many people believe that if they wake up at 5am they will automatically become rich. It makes me smile. Most people either don’t have the discipline to wake up at 5am or, if they do, they wake up and doom scroll through Instagram or similar on their phones. Typically, when I am awake in the night, I am researching the stock market, reading a book, writing, having a conversation with Europe, or watching videos about life in Japan or Vietnam. I also spend a lot of time studying ...

  I found a postcard that I had written 8 years ago, but, of course, I had never sent or delivered it. It was to a girl I worked with in Madrid. She was from Romania but was, essentially, Spanish. She had lived there for many years. I was enamoured, desirous… she was an absolutely spectacular being. The postcard captured some of the beautiful moments that we had shared; breakfast in a tiny kitchen in a quiet corner of the office, sharing cake that her mother had baked, talking at the bus stop, a long romantic walk, arm in arm, a cocktail in the shade under the Madrid sun whilst I touched the skin that showed through a fashionable tear in her jeans. She was magnetic. Absolutely irresistible. Yet, she was also wonderfully helpful and friendly. She helped me to cross-reference and validate the bibliography of my Master’s thesis, a task that I dreaded, and I was eternally grateful for that. Then I left Spain and moved to the USA. I visited her twice after that, but she seemed elusive a...

Everyone simply rushes back to the office… and it is chaos. Everything is chaos. The roads are full, the elevators are full, the toilets are full. It’s a mess and no one is happy. It’s a tragedy that so many live a life of misery because they need money to pay for bills.                     The past dies. During the pandemic in 2020, we grasped for the past and longed to return to 2019. However, by 2021’s end we were forging a new life, a better life. We were returning, more grateful, and we were changing our way of life to match our own goals and desires. We were striving for a balance that would allow us to work and contribute whilst also traveling or spending time with family or doing household chores that would free up more time in the evenings and the weekends. Companies were just as productive, if not more so, and people were happier.           ...

You say ‘I miss you’ or ‘I love you’, but you don’t… you want to feel forgiven for the wrongs you have done. You claim to help people… you simply want to know about their lives, their salaries, their hopes and dreams, and, in the end, you want them to feel that they owe you something. You try to control everyone and everything. You pretend to be calm, charming, and funny, but inside you are burning with rage. It fills you with rage when someone lives differently to how you feel life should be lived. You think that everyone is lazy and immature and incapable of doing the work that you do. But what do you do? It seems your goal is only to control, to seek power, to break up friendships, to kill anything that motivates, inspires, and engages people. I understand now why you voted the way that you did. Selfish people vote for selfish people. Narcissists vote for people who remind them of themselves.                 ...

  03:33am and sleep is merely a vision, a wish, a dream. A day of work lies ahead and yet, here in bed, there is no rest. There was a reconnection, a revival of a love long lost, but it was brief and flickering and, as usual, something popped up suddenly to sever the connection as rapidly as it was regained. The ship sails on, silent and alone in the night. Who would have thought that a fuck in the French night could rekindle so many feelings… from love to despair. And a forgotten one: the feeling of becoming less significant when one’s lover finds someone more interesting via a chance encounter.  

A page, a palimpsest, a text written again and again over the previous text. The story is old and grows out of context as the author ages. It’s one of disappearance. Disappearance of youth and of love. I spend my minutes watching videos of how to configure a thermostat. The rest is all about the end… how every country is ending, the world is ending, how we will all die in chains in a dystopian nightmare. This is what they tell us.   In the meantime, old photos are like a haunting portrait from the Picture of Dorian Gray but, in real life, it is in reverse, of course, the portrait remains the same as we grow older, lose our youth and, if we ever had it, beauty.                     I took a bus out to the Natural History Museum at the foot of the mountains in Salt Lake City, Utah. I accidentally got off the bus too early and had a fair distance to walk in the heat and direct sun. Nevertheless, ...

  The ghost of love lingers in the halls. It was once a living, breathing thing that brought excitement, anticipation, company, and passion, but it is long since dead. Its emaciated ghost haunts me in the dead of night. I rise from my pit of insomnia and take a short walk outside to see if the cat is around, and I find it stretched out on top of a car the same colour as its fur. We stare at each other for a short while and then she stretches out once more as if declaring ‘I am bored now’ and attempts to go back to sleep. Back inside, wide awake, I begin to ruminate on the change of feelings over time and how, now, I don’t even feel the desire to make an effort to try to chat or date or get involved in any way. And yet, I still pine for certain people from the past.  

  10pm, Saturday night. I’m sitting outside with the cat. The cat dislikes people, and I fail to understand them. 10pm Saturday night… why are you driving? Shouldn’t you be having fun at a party? Shouldn’t you be too drunk to drive? If not, if you don’t drink, shouldn’t you be at home? Why is there an endless flow of cars pulling into our parking garage at 10pm on Saturday night? We are not a nightclub. We are not a disco. Why are you in your car? I simply cannot fathom it.                     Giving up on peace, I return to my apartment and hide inside. Saturday night and so many people are out there looking to fulfil their needs. Many looking for sex, many using it in the hope of finding more. Most simply there because they cannot bear to be alone, the way that I am every night. After a few hours out in the afternoon, I am satiated.           ...

Would you like to buy a book for $1.99 that captures the ramblings of loves long lost from my years spent living in Spain? if so, here it is:  Memoirs of the Damned: The Spanish Years  

  I have dined in hell… and it was wonderful. Alcohol, music, food, and beauty abound. This was the start of the second day of my self-proclaimed four days of debauchery that I referred to as the ‘Grind, Comedy, and Death in Dallas’ tour. I named it this due to the fact that I was watching two Grindcore bands in two nights, followed by a comedian on Friday night and a death metal band on Saturday.                     It all began on Wednesday, the 16 th of April. I was heading out to see the Grindcore gods, Carcass, from Liverpool, England, at the South Side Ballroom in Downtown Dallas, but I’d made it a mini vacation, so it was the first of three days off work to indulge in decadent debauchery. Thus, I took the DART train to the Southwest Medical District station and walked to The Grapevine Lounge/Bar. I was intrigued by the bar simply because someone from Washington DC had written a review ...

 During the pandemic our species was given an opportunity to evolve rapidly. We had a chance to assess all that had come before us and to change, dramatically, for the better. We were given the chance to eradicate commutes and uncomfortable lack of privacies. But then the doomers set in… ‘we had to suffer and so should you. I had to wake up at 4am, put a suit on, then walk 25 miles over a snowy mountain inhabited by dragons and vampires to get to the office at 8am.’ Yes, I am Generation X, I have suffered, too, and that is what makes me even more determined that younger generations should have flexibility and the best possible life. Give people a choice and ease their lives. Give them work/life balance. Retain and attract talent. Increase engagement across the board. Stop worrying about where work is done, focus on productivity and let’s work to build a better life for everyone. The Campion Trail, my backyard, Las Colinas, Texas, USA.

 Everything is mediocre and futile. The return to office madness, led by madmen and obeyed by the hopeless. The government’s endless persecution of immigrants and administrative workers… but, even worse, their pursuit of the destruction of science and education. The people on LinkedIn whose profiles read ‘founder of three companies’ (why would that be your headline?) and those on tiktok/youtube/etc claiming that they are always the hard working ones in a relationship but the relationship always fails due to the other person, just like they get fired from every job they ever have… but it is always the company’s fault. And then the companies who all seem to run with a tiny group of people trying to deliver while a massive group of people ask them when they will deliver and how and when… and all the people chasing don’t seem to be in contact with each other, so they all overlap and ask the same questions… but they never contribute to any solutions. ‘Is he there?’, he asks. But wh...

  What causes the disconnection between people? What is it that causes a colleague to praise the work and efforts of one but completely ignore another? Why does a team mate in a sports team congratulate a member of their team but say nothing to another who does equally well? I’d been contemplating this for a few days and then, today, my father told me a story about something that happened while he was bowling (lawn bowls). He hit the jack, pushed it back, and took his team from -2 points to +6 points… and none of the team said anything to him. No comment on the shot. He said to me ‘it makes one feel that one is not wanted.’ It made me sad to hear him say that, and it made me ponder, even deeper, why this occurs. My only thought is that is must be one of the following reasons:   -               People simply don’t like you and are not willing to comment -          ...

  At the moment, my life feels like that scene from The Empire Strikes Back in which Luke Skywalker is out exploring Planet Hoth on his Tauntaun and gets attacked by a Wampa. When he fails to return to the base, Han Solo is in a complete panic, realizing that Luke may freeze to death out in the cold. I am Han Solo. It is currently hovering around -10 Celsius with a ‘feels like’ much lower, and I keep staring out of the door looking for the feral cat that I feed and talk to every day. She has been around for years and has coped with a lot, but I fear for her in this temperature. She refuses to come inside or to lose her independence. So, the cat is out in the cold, my soccer team sucks, the president destroying my mental health, work is very high pressure at the moment, my friends are sick or sad or both, and there seems to be no reprieve.  

  What a terrifying time we live in, what a terrifying world. Not only are we led by greed, we actually voted for it. When I say ‘we’, I mean the majority. I have never been a part of the majority, so I don’t know what that feels like, but I see a lot of idiots looking very happy. Their focus? Not environment and climate. Not healthcare. Not peace and collaboration. They care about blocking rights for the LGBTQ community. They care about revenge on people who did their jobs in trying to protect us from election deniers. It’s a time when so many people are filled with jealousy, hatred, and insecurity. Parents look upon childless individuals with despair and envy. Boomers look at remote workers with utter hate and bitterness. Uneducated racists look at immigrants, and fear for their jobs… and they hate anything they don’t understand. All of them look at a changing society and long for a time long-gone to return… so they vote for the right wing, they fall for slogans like ‘make Americ...

  One sentence to replace all happiness: I miss the connection we had before you disappeared. We woke up that one Saturday morning and you said, ‘I feel like getting drunk.’ I suggested that you have a beer while I make breakfast. So, in that bright early morning Madrid sunshine, we had breakfast and got drunk. We laughed and joked, listened to music, kissed, had sex, watched BBC’s Sherlock Holmes.  It’s the crazy moments that I remember. The trip to Casablanca, the trip to London, the cocktail afternoons in Madrid during which we’d take hilarious selfies of ourselves with some character in the background… we’d try to create an optical illusion to make it look like it was a tiny person sitting between and we were putting a finger on their head. In the end, you said you wanted to party, not be in love.  I respected your honesty, and watched you walk away.  

Sometimes it is essential to get very drunk and suffer a terrible hangover so that you are able to appreciate it when you are sober again. There have been times that I have gone through many days with hangovers, and I envied those people who said they had given up drinking and felt great. Recently, I have been sober a lot and, yes, it often feels great, but, like anything, it becomes very boring at times.   A few times in my life I have decided to lose weight, too… I do this moderately, not by going on a diet for 6 months during which you eat no carbs, drink no alcohol, have no fun and no excitement. Instead, I eat small portions of food (any kind of food) during the week; I have fruit for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and any meal for dinner… but always small portions. I don’t eat crisps (chips) between meals, and I don’t have chocolate or ice cream… I don’t drink alcohol. When the weekend comes around, I drink and eat pretty much what I want. Of course, this does not mean that...

  I want to do good; to contribute to society as a whole, to do good work and bring value to my team and my company. I want to help my community, my country, the world, to become better places where people can thrive and not just survive… but there are heavy weights dragging down my hopes and optimisms. When I see a society in which people are being asked to commute in heavy traffic to go to an office just so that office space is filled to please real estate moguls and shareholders that all is well, and I see thousands of people around the world losing their jobs simply to try to bolster profits and stock prices, I struggle to withhold hope. I see a world that we can make better, where we can strive for happiness and make the lives of most people better… but, instead, we try to stick with everything that failed in the past simply because ‘that is the way it has always been.’ People have suffered and, for some reason, that does not make them want to help future generations to avoid ...

  Only two have been the one.   In 1999, in South Africa, I met the first… she departed and moved to California, where I later visited her. Unfortunately, we became so close that we destroyed everything.   In 2013, in Madrid, I met the second. She already had a child and a life partner… and later I moved to the USA.   I now know, those two were ‘the one’. I have no contact with, or knowledge of, the first, but I am still in touch with the second… even if communicating with her is like trying to extract water from a rock. She has two sons now and is married.   Just a fleeting thought to be recorded for posterity. Others have come very close and have been loved deeply… but those two were the one.