clinging to the wreckage

  In 1999, during my first ever trip to the USA, I stayed with a couple that employed me for a few months at their small company. I spent hours searching for that address today and couldn’t find it in any old journals or notes. Then, like magic, I found an email from them from 2009 saying the house had been demolished in 2008. I went to google maps and was looking for familiar road shapes in the street and as I was sliding along a few yards at a time, the Google Maps photos suddenly jumped from 2026 to 2011 and, there it was, a house disappeared (the new one) showing the empty space where the old one used to be. Just one frame, a time lapse, showing the gap and allowing me to put the pieces of the puzzle together.   It is incredible that, at the time, I was desperate to move to the US, but it seemed absolutely impossible. Seventeen years later, I moved to the US through work and, twenty-seven years later, I now live just over four hours south of where I lived in Tulsa. Sadly, ...

  Sitting at Bird’s Fort Trail Park and reading a book, and it’s really an odd experience because, although surrounded by trees, a river, nature, there is a shooting range somewhere in the vicinity and the sound of guns being fired is constant. Not exactly harmonious with the otherwise beautiful surroundings.                     Finishing there I drive to the record store and buy the new Menzingers album, Everything I Ever Saw . It has been a lengthy period of time since I last went there and I have been meaning to visit for quite some time, so this album was the perfect excuse to visit… and I had time to kill before going for lunch at Ojos Locos. Now I am sitting at The Ginger Man, surrounded by magnificent beauty.                     A Saturday of debauchery… because I am really tired of society. I am t...

  I did something that I have not done before… I threw a book to the floor in horror and could read no more. On and off I have been reading Eileen Chang’s Half a lifelong romance , I have been reading other books at the same time. I love Eileen Chang… and was enjoying this book. However, I felt that it started to become a bit frivolous in the sense that it was like a teenage romance… Chang, I now believe, was doing this deliberately because, unexpectedly, the book punched me in the face with its depiction of cruelty and violence and pain. It opened my eyes even more to mankind’s capacity for cruelty and selfishness. How people will even collaborate against their own family, causing pain and destruction, to achieve their own selfish goals.                     Deciding that I probably could not continue to read the book… at least not in the short term, I immediately asked Copilot to outline the ...

  ‘How old are you?’ she asked.   ‘45’ I answered.   I could see the sudden flash of shock on her face.   ‘How old are you?’ I returned the question. ‘I am 31. I thought you were 38.’ I didn’t tell her that I thought she was 35 or 36. It was a few days after this exchange that she told me I was not the one. It was the first time I truly understood that I was too old for the person I was seeing. In terms of relationships, I had gone from six years older, to eleven years older, to thirteen years older and now I was fourteen years older. At this point, I realised that the previous relationship, with a gap of thirteen years, had also most likely ended due to age. That girlfriend had told me that she simply wanted to travel, go to parties, have fun, be free… and two months later she was with a younger guy with whom she now has two children.                     Today it is all just a ...

  Wonder Woman lived in Somerville, so the perfect place to meet, half-way between her apartment and mine, was Davis Square on the border of Cambridge and Somerville. We met at a casual bar for a beer, then walked along the street to go to an Italian restaurant for dinner. WW was born in Vietnam and moved to Canada with her parents at the age of two. She was Canadian but had moved to Boston that year after graduation from the University of Toronto with a PhD to work in the Biotech industry which was booming. We got along extremely well and, shortly after leaving the restaurant, found ourselves kissing passionately in the doorway of a closed coffee shop. WW invited me to go to her apartment for a glass of wine and so we stopped at the liquor store a few steps from where we embraced, picked up some wine, and walked back to her apartment. I remember thinking it was incredible that she invited me to watch a film but had no TV. She proceeded to pull a projector out of the cupboard, plac...

  When I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I lived close to Alewife Station, a major train and bus hub. This worked perfectly for me because I lived alongside the Alewife Nature Reservation but had walkable access to the station from which I used to take a bus to my office in Waltham each day of the week and The T Metro through Harvard, MIT, into Downtown Boston on evenings and weekends. The bus was subsidised and cost $100 per month, and I spent on average about $30 a month of The T. I had no need for a car.                     The bus to Waltham was not always the easiest to ride, especially when one particular driver, we called him Gargamel (after the character in The Smurfs), was at the wheel. He was heavy on acceleration and braking, so the first thirty minutes of each day upon arrival at the office was spent dealing with motion sickness. Our office was in an office park surrounded by te...

  I love books in which people stand up to the heavy pressure of tradition… books in which people are constantly being told to marry, constantly being ‘setup’ to meet someone to marry. Everyone is getting married and having children around them and they defiantly cry out ‘no, I will not marry, I want to remain single and create. I want to paint and I want to write and I want to travel.’ Inevitably, this speaks to me. From an early age, I never wanted to marry, I never wanted to buy a house, I never wanted to have children in spite of everyone that I knew either telling me that I should do all of those things or themselves doing all of those things. I remember, at the age of 25, having a girlfriend who was 26… she owned her own home and got angry with me when I told her that I didn’t want to buy one. She argued that there was ‘no point to life’ and ‘no ambition’ if one did not seek to get married, buy a home, and start a family. That was not the last time I would hear such words thr...