#auto-biographical

The Alpaca “Shag.” #RDP

In what is sounding like a peaceful, ambient track in my head, I’m remembering my day in upstate New York at the Lazy Acres alpaca farm. The tour is one hour and starts with loads of facts about the raising of these lovely animals as well as a tour of the shearing areas and barns on the property. One such fact is the shearing of the alpacas once a year, to control their wooly shag, as it is much…

Teaser Tuesday #13: Secrets for the Mad: Obsessions, Confessions and Life Lessons

Hello fangirls and boys,

I’m finally back guys, yayayayayayayay!

Credit: Giphy

This week’s Teaser Tuesday is unusually a Non-Fiction purchase, very uncommon for me! Secrets of the Mad: Obsessions, Confessions and Life Lessons by lovely Musician/Youtuber Dodie Clark. AND I LOVE IT so far 😀

  Welcome back to my TEASER TUESDAYS Challenge. You know the rules by now but in case you’re new to my blog…

Date Completed: 3/29/16 Rating: 9/10 WOW. What a satire. Baratunde Thurston hit the nail on the head with this book. Comedic relief for talking about race, Thurston tackles the bigger issues at play in race politics in this book with seeming ease. He’s not judgmental and expresses genuine interest in everybody getting to a place of comfort with race, but where the conversation is at currently in…

I should have kissed her by now.  It's our first date, and we've spent nearly 12 hours wandering the city and staring into each other's eyes, biting our lips and trying to build the courage to even hold hands. It's coy and sweet and I thought I was too old to feel this.

But I really should have kissed her by now.

I checked my watch as the bar tender mixed our drinks - Two Old Fashioned Whiskeys that he has been labouring over for the best part of 15 minutes.  My last train is in no time at all and I'm worried his effort will be wasted.  That the day will have been wasted.  If I don't kiss her my rib cage is in danger of cracking, the  pounding is so great behind it.

I could have kissed her as I got off the train, even a peck on the cheek might have carried me through the day but I was giddy just to be hugged.  We might have kissed an hour later in the gallery, on a balcony overlooking the trio of musicians rehearsing in the hall below, we held each other's gaze for so long and the moment passed us by.  Or after lunch in the park where we huddled close - but not quite touching - in the cool air.  After dinner and all together too much wine which took us so long to eat, after nine hours in her company we still had so much to say that my chicken went cold.  The wine had gone to our heads then and walking the streets in the dark of the night her hand finally found mine.  I could have kissed her then.  My heart ached for it and I denied it again.

"I don't have long to drink this.  My last train is in twenty minutes." I said as we sat down in a corner.

"Stay?"

We talked it over.  I thought out loud. Weighing the pros and cons.  But of course, I was staying as soon as she asked.  I'd sleep on the floor, I decided.  You'll do no such thing, she protested.

And so we walked home to her flat, bouncing off a few more bars, buying liquid courage at affordable prices.

Beneath a footbridge at a point I'll never forget, she stopped me.

"Listen, I'm sort of stealing a line here but... Let's kiss now or I'll not sleep"

The Annie Hall reference makes me smile.  Or would have but we're already locking lips.  She kisses with her whole body with the same release of a day's tension that I'm feeling across my body, in a way that still makes me weak to think of now.  There's a growing lightness, a weight has been shed that has been building up.  Like a veil has been lifted, we can see each other clearly now and the relief is that we're both in the same place.

I continue to argue my case for the floor, but she's not having it.  We're sharing the tiny bed.  But she looks me dead in the eye "Nothing is going to happen here."

"That's okay." I tell her "It's not what I came here for."

And she's right.  Nothing happens.  But so am I.  And we're still awake when the dawn breaks, talking and kissing.

....there it was again, that indescribable sensation. It was like his stomach was made of a thousand wafer-thin steel strings and an iron cat was running its claws up and down them. The feeling leapt up into his throat and tried to turn his Adam’s apple into an impassable dam of bile-soaked cotton wool and tar-stained paper. He needed to vomit but couldn’t bring himself to do it – and so he was forced to push the sensation back down into his belly with a series of painful dry gulps.

Tea was a temporary solution but it was also now the only one. Food, more specifically, hot food was the only real cure for this hell but, unfortunately, the window for the administration of that holy medication had long since passed. He made and drank his tea – Imperial Ceylon with semi-skimmed milk and a tablespoon of granulated white sugar – knowing full well that the respite from the torture would be extremely brief and that soon the cats would be sharpening their claws once more.

I don’t live in the present or the past, I live in the future.

When I’m playing golf on the Xbox, I’m thinking about what I’ll be writing later and when I’m writing, I'm thinking about playing golf.

At work, I think about getting home. I think about watching The X-files with my girlfriend or playing Aladdin on my Sega Megadrive emulator. At home, I worry about the day of work ahead.

Before lunch, I think about eating my lunch and while I’m eating my lunch, I think about having to get back to work.

And I lie awake at night, when my girlfriend is asleep, and think about not only the near future but the distant. I think about having my own house and about raising children and about the day on which Molly will die.

And every idea I ever have fades away halfway through as the next scheme jockeys for position at the front of my mind.

And I wonder how many other people think this way, their mind ahead of their body? And I wonder if there’s a way to break this trend, to focus on the here and now?

Ooh, I think I’ve got an idea for the next nothing...

And... err...

When I was a child, no higher than the other children, my mother used to drag me along on her frequent visits to her friends’ houses and force me to interact with their awful children. As such, for a spell in the nineties, I was forced to spend a large amount of my free time in the company of the most dreadful family on the face of the planet.

The mother of this family, a slack-jawed luddite of a woman who was as orange as Orangina, as intelligent as a grapefruit and had all the grace and charm of the music video for Kelly Chen’s “Grace & Charm”, was blindingly stupid and, as such, so were her offspring. They were the type of people to whom “pull-my-finger” humour was considered the height of comedy.

Their house, which would later become the location of my first assisted hand-job, was always caked in gaudy trash and it smelled like a cross between an old people’s home and a chip-shop employee’s hair. Their back garden, which had no fence nor wall surrounding it, resembled a sort of sad, dystopian junkyard were children’s play equipment went to die.

To reiterate to you just how much fun it was to spend time there, I once spent an entire afternoon trekking up and down a massive pile of dirt located behind the house, pretending that I was one of the Grand Old Duke Of York’s men, rather than having to go inside and interact with the semi-evolved, yellowing family not two hundred yards away from me. Hell, even the fact that they had a SNES wouldn’t bring me in out of the rain*.

Regardless of my imagined superiority over this family, I was always jealous of them. I mean, not only did they have a SNES but they also went on holiday to Lyme Regis a lot.

You see, when I was young, I was under the delusion that Lyme Regis was some exotic, fancy island, somewhere hot and sunny and exciting and roughly the same distance from my house as the moon. I imagined that when the hideous chud family went to Lyme Regis they did so in a fancy aeroplane and that their vacation there was so exciting that they were just unable to convert their excitement into words upon their return to their shitty, stinking council house. I imagined that Lyme Regis had jungles and rollercoasters and dinosaurs and waterfalls and sharks swimming in its surrounding  ocean and sun-kissed beaches littered with beautiful tanned models playing volleyball with David Hasselhoff. 

And there was me, going to fucking Cornwall.

Of course, now I know that there really isn’t much difference between Cornwall and Lyme Regis. In fact, Penzance, which is a common holiday destination in Cornwall,  is a further 130 miles from my house than the town of Lyme Regis is.

At the time, however, I took the fact that this cave-family went to Lyme Regis every summer, whilst I was forced to endure sitting in a penny-arcade in Cornwall, as a massive injustice. I couldn’t understand how a family with two extra children, who lived in the filthiest slum my young eyes had  seen, could afford to jet-set off to the wonderful, exotic island of Lyme Regis every year whilst I was forced to settle for a cramped four hour car ride to the coast followed by a weeklong imprisonment in a  crappy caravan.

And that’s probably why, in the summer of ’98, I allowed my sister to stamp on the hands of the youngest member of that family as he dangled helplessly from the top of a stack of hay bales, twenty feet above the ground.

I wasn’t going to actively participate in his demise, I wasn’t as crazy as my little sister, but I did want to see that smug, Lyme Regis visiting sleestak fall to his untimely death.

Children, eh?

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