clinging to the wreckage

Sleep eludes me these days. I lie awake at 3am and think of ridiculous little meaningless things like the password to a portal that is completely insignificant. However, I also think of very relevant things such as my parents growing older and living alone in a country still torn by political unrest, culture clashes, racism, corruption beyond sustainability and, as a result, a constantly declining economy. I think of people with no homes, no warmth, no food. I think of people who are abused by their partners or their parents and I lie awake in a fit of exhaustion. Sometimes it seems that we get caught up in these social media and social circles in which the demographic is identical, causing us to forget that there are people in desperate need. As the temperature in Boston last night dropped to -8 degrees Celsius I could not help but feel pain at the thought of those sleeping on the streets or those with no heating and food. I read an article that socks are one of the most ...

I’d hoped to sleep-in before taking the 11:30am flight to Orange County via Denver but, as usual, I awoke around 03:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I started doing some work, as all of my colleagues in Europe were online and working and I had the usual plethora of emails bombarding my mailbox. The excitement that I felt made it easy to work. I was excited because I was traveling to a punk rock and beer festival on Huntington Beach and had the added adventure of a stop over in Denver along the way. I’d hoped to take the T from my house in Cambridge to South Station in Boston, where I’d get a bus to the airport, but it seemed there were severe delays and so I wrote off the idea, resigning myself to getting an Uber instead. Shortly before I ordered the uber, however, my friend messaged to say the delay had cleared and so I rushed straight out and onto the T. $2.25 and I was there in less than one hour. An Uber would have cost me $40 and would have spent a long time in traffic. I ha...

It makes me laugh now when I think of people saying to me, a guy from Wigan in the North West of England, before I moved, that I’d need to prepare myself for the cold winters of Boston. Boston, compared to England’s north west is like some form of Hollywood dream. I was lying next to the swimming pool in shorts, wearing sunglasses, reaching for the sunblock, as I was watching a football match from Wigan where people were wearing thick winter coats to keep warm. It’s like Halloween… the most terrifying costume I have ever seen is the one that businessmen and politicians wear every day. I see many people dressing up and I am happy for them but I can’t help but wonder if that is them showing their true colours and this makes me ask ‘why don’t you just dress the way you want to every single day instead of just Halloween?’ You’re hiding behind a mask, taking fun seriously. Dead Kennedys, Halloween

There was a brief flicker, here and there, where I thought I had found love… or something close to it. However, they all turned out to be false alarms and the moment passed. The spare wheel remains exactly that. At my age, the spare wheel metaphor is more appropriate than ever before simply because everyone else has a boyfriend or a girlfriend. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t sit around longing for that. I am happy alone and I love to flirt with drama. I love the words that pour from pain. Even if it is not always really pain. After all, true pain is being in a relationship that is void of love. Feeling lonely and lost in love and wondering how to escape. I get to travel and do many things without complication and for that I am truly grateful.             I began to think of this tonight as I logged into my blog and discovered that my profile picture was that of me being clutched in tight embrace by a young lady ...

I think that pain came from the woman I was in love with fucking someone else as I was walking alone through the park in the rain on a grey day and yet I never even thought about it. It never even occurred to me that she was fucking her ex at that very moment in a faraway place and thinking about someone else with whom she lived (also not me) whilst she was doing so. Repetition. Cliché. Emotional masturbation. I take a sleeping pill and wash it down with wine… it’s not abnormal, I checked with my pharmacist. It’s not romantic. But what is in these modern times? People go to a fucking tower worshiped by Tom Cruise and get engaged. You might as well go on honeymoon to McDonald’s. Books are the only true beauty. Creativity. But even that… so much of it is fake, superficial, duplicated, obvious. And so we sit in a darkened room and sip this wine of Argentinian origin and contemplate the past, the present, and the future. We throw in an Oxford comma because it is so be...

The sad man stares at a blank page and is afraid to mark it with more words that sound the same as everything that came before. Rhetorical nonsense borne of a broken heart. Borne of longing. Borne of loneliness. Last night in an open field, beneath the moon, the sad man watched Rancid, a band he has loved for more than twenty years, and came to realise that he was the only one in the field who stood alone and watched. He thought of some of the people he’d once known who were in different and far away countries and contemplated how much they would have loved the event… but how they would prefer to be at the event with other people these days and no longer with him. It doesn’t detract from the enjoyment derived from the concert as he sang along to songs old and new that served to alleviate a sense of being blue.

A distant crack, a roll of thunder, a flash, the clouds tear open and unleash what seems not like rain but rather solid streams of water. The clothes, the rain coat, do nothing to protect the body from becoming instantly soaked and so we run down the street smiling and laughing. A flip flop floats away in a new formed stream in the street and a chase is required to regain this gifted relic. Arriving home it is essential to remove all clothing and the rest, as they say, is history. A Saturday morning run in the Boston heat… an attempt to wash away the sins of Miami. Trying to regain the somewhat healthy routine that was starting to develop before the trip. It follows a flight, a thunderstorm, a tin can trap on melting tar mac as the sun sinks behind heavy grey cloud and a flashing sky. The airline senses the financial loss and prefers to risk the flight – a pilot can dodge lightning it seems, or so they hope – and so we bump and shake into the afternoon sky and climb the east coast of...