10/01/2025

My heroes, such as they were - the people I thought had it all figured out - were calm, cool and collected. Monkish artists, going in to go out, going out to go in. They were at ease, free of demons, so it seemed, although on closer inspection, a look at life not the art, things were often very different. Alcoholism, poverty, sexual misconduct, self-loathing, selfishness, timidity, jealousy, madness and in many cases early death having followed a trail of tears and suffering, with more left in their wake. Not a way of being or series of events one would wish upon a child.

There was consensual reality, then whatever happened within my skin and skull, and I was in thrall to the latter.

08/01/2025

I drink less alcohol, more herbal tea, to calm my nerves and not fuck up, not waste time, not become even more of a wreck.

Above all I cling to the belief there’s another story to be told, and perhaps I’ll live to tell it.


06/01/2025

I practiced nothing, so mastered nothing beyond being myself.

03/01/2025

I’ll be forgotten well before I’m dead.

01/01/2025

I’m not sure what I expected by rejecting the world, other than to have the world reject me.

As a teenager reality was mediated by books and music, film and TV, with the latter rare distractions, the former something I fell into with headphones and a library card. Easy ways of escape, and modeling, for the most part, emotions, not lifestyles. And then the lives I did experience on the page were mostly poor, or so it seemed, and mainly bohemian or wretched, but certainly, and above all, self-obsessed. This was the model I molded myself on, or the one that fit best my nature. To explore the world inside to untangle the knot of the being one was born and bullied into. To escape. To live in an eternal spring and summer. To feel free. To be happy.

Now for me this meant going inward and outward, away from home and convention, but also from society, from hope, from ambition, from connections, from the world. And so I found myself at a certain age with nothing - no friends, no acquaintances, no coworkers, no achievements, no abilities, no money, no past, no present and no future, but still inescapably me, having lived a life of indulgence, sloth and lucky escapes, or flash memories, strange pleasures and madness away from the crowd.

A life both real and unreal, lived fully and barely even started.


30/12/2024

Of course I’m utterly ordinary, leading an uneventful life in a quiet town in a European backwater, with nothing interesting to say, nothing interesting to do, just biding my time until there’s none left, almost none, when then I’ll look back at what I did and didn’t do, the hours spent unproductively, when none of it will matter.

27/12/2024

Over time all that promise faded, but not before it shamed you.

25/12/2024

A youth spent living young dreams, and now the dreams of middle age. A safe home. A pension. Teeth and legs that work. A mind and life that haven't been wasted.

Outside, the seasons continue.

23/12/2024

My life is falling apart, and so is my home, but inside I make the best of things.

20/12/2024

When I first found out about Daoism / Zen I wanted that emptiness and clarity, the ability to live both in the moment and out of time, a feeling I chased forever after. And with the decades I succeeded, perhaps, in that I find great joy, great presence of mind, when I’m doing the dishes, or laundry, or some other mundane task.

Which is great, a real boon to mental health and all that, but not exactly a life of great note when seen from outside.