clinging to the wreckage

  A blood red sun rises over the lake as the earth once more starts to shake in fear of the heat that will bake into it again, relentlessly for the innumerable day in a row. The scorched ground is cracked in desert fashion, all is parched. The only thing more parched than the soil is my love life… but that is a story for another day. It’s calm and pleasant in the office, there is some humour and companionship. However, having arrived at 06:30, I left at midday and walked home to work for a couple of hours in peace and quiet. I logged a ticket to ask maintenance not to remove the cat’s bowls… then discovered they had not removed them.                     An eerie sense of positivity has crept in. Actually, that is more dramatic than it sounds, since turning 40, almost thirteen years ago, I have been mostly positive throughout that time. This is simply the result of learning to simplify my life ...

 The acronym becomes a synonym for ‘I am important and know what I am doing.’ How many times is it the case that we simply don’t know what we are doing? It is often. This is why a team is essential. A leader’s job is not to try to guide everything in the direction that they want, it is to listen to their team and then to support and help in any way possible to progress in the direction that the team has chosen based on the input of various experts. When someone pays no heed to their team of experts, and beyond, you can rest assured that there is a power hungry, secretive, leader at the helm… and it never leads to any good. This is my thought for the day.  It seems that the summit of the mountain of heat has been reached and now we slowly begin to descend into Autumn and winter. Of course, temperatures in Texas are not like those in other places. A heat warning in San Diego for 31 degrees Celsius seems somewhat humorous when considering that the same temperature is the low in...

He hates the mail in ballot as much as any baby boomer hates remote work, the death of the fax machine, the cloud, LGBTQ+, anything remotely progressive. He, like most late Gen X and Baby Boomers, can’t understand these things because he simply lacks the ability to see life from the perspective of anyone else. Like all narcissists. If remote work does not work for them (because they can’t act like a dominant boss in front of their family) then remote work doesn’t work for anyone. If cloud technologies mean that their local team don’t have to be on 24/7 stand by, then it means life may become better for people and that upsets them because they ‘had to suffer’ when they were younger and therefore want everyone else to suffer for the rest of time. He is a weak and pathetic man with many weak and pathetic supporters. Dominance, control, hierarchy, that is what they crave. Control is their main desire… they want to control because they feel they are superior in every way and, therefore, the...

  Stepping outside for a moment, hoping for a quiet view of downtown Dallas… there is a person standing on the roof, looking down at me, a car darts past me on its way down, then another car… but there is a car coming in, too. Oh, the entering car sees the space close to the door is open and immediately turns to dive into it. Headlights in my face, I simply give up and close the door. 9pm Sunday night, car park Armageddon. I have never seen a car park so active in all of my life. It is the 5 th floor of the building, it takes 10 minutes to get up here, but I have never been outside when there is not a car coming in or going out. I go back inside, lie down on my bed, start sending some text messages, but nobody replies… perhaps they are driving in and out of a car park somewhere, too.                     Monday midday in the pool with a book. It’s the kind of break that you can’t take when you...

  A jog, a swim, a trip to the supermarket… sushi and mimosas for brunch. Soccer is a disaster, but the day is beautiful, the solitude is beautiful. The lady at the super market prepared fresh sushi for me and it was incredible. In an hour or so I will walk to the Ginger Man Pub for a beer or two and to see my neighbours before returning home to laze the afternoon away and attempt to avoid existential dread and despair. It is easier to fight that off when the night is peaceful and calm.                     I set myself the goal of writing and publishing every day, and I have done so for two months or so now… but there are days like today that I think I may not make it haha. I also fear the pain and boredom that people may feel when they read these entries. They serve as a ‘poetic’ nod to posterity. You see, The Ginger Man turned out to be quite social and a great discussion about music, litera...

  In my final year of high school, we took great risks… in our final exams we passed around notes. However, these notes had nothing to do with the exams, my closest friends and I had formed a band and we were sharing lyrics. We were trying to form a humorous metal band, we called ourselves Grandfathers of Destruction (GOD). This particular day, I received the note and opened it… I read the opening lines and could not contain my laughter… ‘I pull out my sword and Satan crawls in fear.’ We risked expulsion from the final moment of high school graduation and all for the desire to share lyrics that were beyond absurd.                     Our peers were experimenting with drugs and alcohol, we were travelling out into the darkest downtown and going to extreme concerts and raves and nightclubs. The next day we’d show up to school in a daze of exhaustion and lack of sleep. I was by no means a party p...

  On the couch with an ancient copy of To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. The copy was given to me by a gentleman I met in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2010 when I was visiting from England to see friends. He gave it to me the day before my birthday sixteen years ago, 7 September 2010, and he wrote a note on the inner sleeve, ‘To my friend across the pond.’ I cherish it. I say ‘ancient’, but this copy was printed in 1966, the same year that England last won the World Cup.   Literature is the archaeology of human suffering. We can excavate the traces of this suffering from within the pages of global works throughout millennia of literature. From cruelty, enslavement, war, racism, infidelity, ennui, family relationships, it is all there to see. The keys to happy living could be mapped out from these findings and yet we tend to repeat the same mistakes in endless cycles because we struggle to break away from tradition and ‘how it has always been.’ One of the saddest things in literature...