clinging to the wreckage

  On this day, one year ago, I was in Salt Lake City for the first time. The 2 nd of august was the day of the Bad Religion concert that I used as an excuse to travel. It was an interesting time because the city is beautiful, it is well connected to the airport with a clean, efficient, and cheap train, it has a beautiful natural history museum and great bars and restaurants… but I found the people to be a little bit strange. They seemed to be either hippies who appeared to have come down from the mountains or they were extremely conservative religious types. There was no in between. Nevertheless, it was a wonderful trip and I have fond memories of riding on the bus up into the hills to visit the Natural History Museum. I also recall riding Lime Scooters around and even riding one to a sushi restaurant close to the music venue before riding the scooter to the venue to watch Bad Religion. I rode the same scooter from the concert to my hotel later that night.     ...

  The tiki social… a beer after a bike ride in the deathly heat. Is a fascinating social study. I feel like I could earn a PhD in anthropology from sitting at this bar. There is not a single man wearing a shirt. The women are all on video calls at the bar. What a world. I pay and hop onto my bicycle to venture to the next bar. Familiar people and a beautiful manager dancing through the day. A frozen margarita washes away the day’s heat and a few hours are spent in blissful retreat.     Looking around it is more apparent than ever… some people are lost. Engulfed in a world wave of tradition and trying to keep up with the neighbours. A taste of freedom at the bar turns them into a wild storm. A grin the size of the sun appears as a beer is placed before them. For a few moments, they forget that they have a spouse and a child and debt and so many responsibilities.   The day has been a wild one. Alcohol has been flowing. A pub crawl by bicycle. Some things concern me, su...

  Friday morning is sadly clouded by nausea. Hoping that fresh air will revive the spirits and the body, I take a walk to feed the ducks. There are some large ones that live permanently at the lake, they are loved by the community. I laughed out loud as one of them ran towards me when I held out my hand. The way a duck runs is very unique.                         Walking back, I felt a sense of pleasure at the thought of solitude. An empty apartment in which I can simply sit back and do nothing… or listen to music, read a book, watch a film, sing, dance, sleep… all in the blissful silence of solitude. I did my banking and some investing. Keeping a budget file, I calculate my finances precisely and invest immediately when I get paid. This has been life changing. After this, I call my dad and help him with his banking.                ...

  Sleep is a distant daydream… only a daydream because I don’t sleep enough to dream of it. It’s 03:38am and the temperature is 29 degrees C (84F). The cat is hiding; I just walked out onto the roof to see if I could see her. However, there is a beautiful full moon and the Dallas skyline in the distance is showing off an array of colours. I have a meeting at 6am, which doesn’t help. Opening the fridge at 4am, I see a bottle of Aperol, and it looks like fruit juice, I almost take a swig. Sanity prevails and I reach for the milk to add to my coffee. I stare at a sentence for fifteen minutes, remove a comma, then I add it back and close the laptop.                     Walking to the office in the 5am darkness, I think that I am clever in wearing soccer shorts to remain as cool as possible, but as I step into the office, I discover that I have left my trousers at home in the bag I had placed them ...

  Photos of ghosts are everywhere… and yet they are not really ghosts, in most cases, they are the living who have ghosted the living. A hundred methods of high-speed communication and all of them lie dormant. The baby boomers boom like wailing babies across social media to all who exist and yet those from whom we want to hear disappear into a static like grey ether. Is it fear? Is it hate? Is it jealousy? Is it a lack of interest? Perhaps it is fear. After all, I look at photos from 2008 and still feel warm from the memory of them. 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016. Then again, 2018 into 2021. All periods of great romance and love… and in 2021, it all stopped. I am not sure if I just gave up, they gave up, I got too old, I moved to a place filled with people to whom I could not relate. I went from a famous university town, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a place filled with secular humanists, to a city filled with Christians and climate change deniers. I love it here, too, but even people who drin...

 For New Year’s Eve, 2025, I travelled to Boston to be with some friends and to enjoy the snow. I stayed in Cambridge, next to my old apartment, so I could re-live the walks, sights and sounds of my old neighbourhood, which was mostly a tiny nature reserve. I had to work a little while I was there and the snow was so intense that I spent quite a bit of time inside the hotel working in the communal area. One member of staff was so friendly and helpful that we ended up staying in contact through Instagram and have chatted from time to time throughout the year. This morning I woke up and thought of messaging her to see how she was doing. I couldn’t find her… then discovered she unfollowed me and removed me as a follower. It was a sad start to the day. I only hope she is okay.       As the day progresses, I contemplate, what is the balance between insanity and creativity? To create, I feel that it is almost essential to loosen the grips on sanity. Although, consider...

 Writing in a rage. Not now. Yesterday. I wonder if I can publish the things that I say. I should, but political posts tend to cause a nasty backlash. I am simply perplexed, astonished, amazed that we are in the situation we are in. I am grieving.  Slipping on flip flops, I step away and take a short walk in a loop to the lake and back up to the swimming pool. I attempt to swim the rage away. Another beautiful day, but another day that will get too hot and cause my worry for the cat to continue. The week will gradually get hotter with Friday being 39 degrees Celsius (102F). There appears to be no reprieve.  Work begins after the swim, 07:30am, and it’s a relatively calm morning. People are on vacation, maternity leave, paternity leave, sick leave… it seems that mankind as a whole, even if enjoying a job somewhat, is always trying to escape. I invest like a man possessed in the hope of retiring as early as humanly possible. Morning activities mostly done, a mimosa seem...