The Apple

For Craig Cass...a most ardent hater of apples. 

Apple…the big apple…how do you like those apples? You know, you really are the apple of my eye. Does anyone object to this glorification of possibly the least exciting of fruits? Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Pink Lady’s, they’re all just red and green sphere’s right? I mean, it was fairly abstract that of all things, an apple fell on Newton’s head. And whoever wrote the Bible and Snow White was clearly apple-deprived during their upbringing. It would be the same if someone was deprived of climbing trees; for we all know that’s how Tarzan happened. And if a child wanted to really impress a teacher, I think it would be more suitable to present them with an excerpt from Hamlet, or spell onomatopoeia, or shut the hell up and do work in class, than to present them with an apple. Surely, a pineapple is more exciting than an apple? It still includes the word apple, and though it’s a little harder to sink your teeth into, the citric euphoria is worth the struggle. It’s the quintessential object for the metaphor “don’t judge a book by its cover”, and other things. Yeah you could say the same for an apple, but my point is: it’s an apple. The creative genius Steve Jobs made an apple the symbol of his entire life’s work. Why? Because after working for some time in an apple orchard and indulging in a fruitarian diet, Jobs decided that it was worthy. And there was some truth to his justification. He said “An apple is not intimidating”, until you make it the metaphor for places like New York; “An apple is fun”, much like the red and green traffic lights battling against each other. And “apples are…spirited”, much like I’m sure, the object of your affection is. And is it a coincidence that one of the greatest bands of all time founded Apple Records? I don’t know. People just love apples. And as I’m writing this, it’s becoming more and more obvious why they do. Apples are simple, surprising – particularly when worms worm their way into them – and they remind us of the importance of simplicity. They represent the first letter in the alphabet, and if you think about it, that’s the first thing that children usually learn. Simplicity. The foundations. The basics. And you look at the apple long enough; it begins to resemble the world.

 

Some kind of diary-shaped thing.

So, I've had a revelation today and clearly, that is more worthy and contented than a blank-post might be. That's not necessarily true, but here are some words and stuff about some stuff I've been thinking. I have always been obsessed with music, strums, beats, whistles, noise - real sounds have always succeeded in arousing the hairs on my neck to the extent that they almost pull my skin off. But it is only recently that I have thought, "Hey, maybe I could do this". Stupid really, to be completely absorbed by something but never partake in it. But as it is always the present, I tend not to look at the previous present and resign in a sigh because I didn't use that present for this purpose. And I'll pretend I'm not worried about lost present's because the present is never invalid, never late and never negated. So...in this present, I am calling guitar Teachers in the local area to see if they will be able to interpret the sounds formed by my scarred larynx (after screaming along to Californiacation last night, positively dying as Flea walked across the stage on his hands) and will my musical education. Those I have spoken to thus far clearly assume correctly that I have been to a concert and am thus instantly determined to achieve rock-star status; that fame and talent is merely a guitar lesson away. "Naive twat", screamed all of their thoughts in unison. This is regrettably a little accurate, save for the rock-star status desires. I don't want to be musical to be famous (though last night I did think, "Fuck I want to make music"), I want to play and sing for the sake of playing and singing. Over the past few years I have written songs, but songs without music are a tricky one, and usually an unlikely victory. The concern is that you may be singing your words to fit the instrumental of an existing artist's song. But I couldn't do nothing. And since I need to write more than anything and didn't have ten years worth of instrument-perfecting on my side, it was my only option. So I have words but no music. But I'm hoping that is going to rapidly change. Hoping, hoping and more importantly, dreaming that I'm better than say if you asked a hyena to play the cello. I'm being discriminatory there and not taking into consideration their possible potential with a cello. How the hell would I know if a hyena could play a cello or not? Maybe it's a hypothesis that should be tested. But yeah, next stop, guitar. And I sincerely hope it's the last stop I make.

Sun Days

I’ve always understood the judgement call of a snow day, particularly when I was benefitting from such an indulgence. In circumstances where it is close to impossible for children to surmount the sea of snow obstructing both their escape from their houses (except for sledging marathons) and the entrance to school, I completely understand the decision to call it off. But today, I appear to have stumbled across a new convention, some invigorating secret that I was not made privy to during my school years. I discovered the manifestation of a Sun Day. Like me prior to today, you might be a little perplexed as to what a Sun Day is, excluding the latter day of a weekend. A Sun Day, entitled due to its nature, is apparently an occasion when the sun is just that bit too alluring and deterring for children to withdraw their sungasming eyes from it and carry themselves to school. And as a vital alternative, they gather and dissipate on the beach. The difference is obvious between these two scenarios - one involves obstruction, the other, distraction. But in Whitby, both qualify as reasons to avert a day of schooling.

Of the two, I must say if one had to go, I would vote for snow days to go. I mean consider the Sun Day, particularly today and particularly in Whitby. I would have been incredulously pissed if I was within range of viewing the sea, but restricted by an opaque glass barrier and teacher-shaped dictator who prevented me running into it, in that way we all humanly have the impulse to do. You know it, I know it, and we all pretend that what’s going to happen is not going to happen. We walk along the beach, we remove our substance-less flip-flops which we all know are excessive for the sporadic flicker of sunlight that grazes the North. We proceed in walking swiftly towards the breakers and we begin to run. We run faster, running to something larger than our miserably insignificant bodies, running straight into what makes up most of the world, something unconquerable and untameable. And when we get there, when we are just on the verge of the end of the beach, our feet carrying part of it with them, we encounter something entirely familiar, yet entirely surprising. Waves, crashing into us, salting and reviving our bodies. And electrically, we throw ourselves backwards and giddily run away from the toppling crystal waters. And then we turn and repeat the running motion, yearning for the icy collision, and unfailingly gasp in astonishment when the waves repeat the same ritual as we repeat ours. We love it. We cannot help it. And we want more of it. But there is never enough of it. And we do it for as long as we can, always absorbing this fresh taste of nostalgia, this sea-salted gesture that allays every scattered thought and revitalises every dream we hold. And we long to stay there, expecting the waves to one day surprise us and shy away. But they won’t, and we love them for never disappointing. Imagine attending a school that stood opposite such an enrapturing landscape, gazing on such a human simplicity that we cannot help but adore, with no ability to indulge in it.

So, my postulation is that upon unanimous request, they invented Sun Days. Either that or all the teachers in the Whitby area couldn’t be arsed showing up today. If so, they were probably wave chasing too. 

Just.

It was dark and she was light…much lighter than the dark air pressing on his shoulders. He had always spoken with such conviction, until he heard her voice. Hers shattered his. His words broke before they fled his mouth. But she caught them in her ears and they rested there a while, before swimming through to her mind. It wasn’t the sounds of the words that made them particularly all-consuming. She had heard the words before, spoken them, but it was the look that delivered the words…that irresistible thought-stilling look.

It almost didn’t happen. It was like juggling, only with words. What he was supposed to say, and what would have been conventionally appropriate to say was “Congratulations” or “Kudos” or any other token of praise. He didn’t need to say anything at all. And yet he was compelled to say something, and for reasons unknown to him, it had to be the right something. He had to have the right words. And what he did say...he almost need not have said.

“Though I am not…somehow…in your presence…I am.”

Puzzling words - extensively ambiguous words, words completely absent of, and yet completely electrified with meaning. And she held his stare for some time, more out of paralysis than anything else. He had heard her singing, that alchemy that dazzled and enraptured him. So…what else could there be? He had listened and she had sung straight from her soul, so what was he looking for? Did he need a visual? Could her eyes ever convey it?

And suddenly, for less than a nanosecond, less than was possible to qualify as time…he saw it. And as he saw it, she felt his, their whole lives in motion though they were standing perfectly still. The magic he had longed for…the impossible she believed did not exist. They had it…

…But that’s the tragedy - the life-breaking reality. It was over before it had begun, for that was it, that one moment, the break in the circuit. That was that moment you have all been warned about and conditioned to avoid. That was the moment when two people of our human breed felt too much.

They felt so much…that they both burst into flames. 

If I had a pet alpaca...

I want a pet alpaca. I would call it Meeko and Meeko and I would be buddies. We would compare stories and lives, my loves and her conquests. Meeko would be irresistibly funny; a humour that need not upset the feelings of others to shake my whole being and separate continents as an earthquake would. Meeko would say "mmm" and I would instantly realise that she was saying "I had a pet human once, but then humans developed brains. And my human pet beat me in an enunciation contest, saying ‘mmmmm’ - wait a minute, ‘mmm’, just one moment.” She would clear her throat at this moment. “It was simply the letter ‘mmm’, you see, this is how she won". 

Meeko and I would meander until the dark gathered up all the light and put it in his pocket. Darkness is usually the most fearsome thing, but it wouldn't be if Meeko was by my side. I would tell Meeko what her name means: that she has great strength and is very wise, according to Babynology website. To which she would respond “mm mm m mm?” which would mean “what is a website?” which would have been more convincing if she didn’t  then collapse on the floor, emitting a series of hysterical “mmm’s” asserting that EVERYBODY - even alpaca’s - know about the internet. That would be Meeko. I would tell her about prime ministers and that she is 1000% smarter and better looking than them. She would “mm mm mm, mm mm mm”, meaning “you’re too much, really too much”. I would then tell her that they are more pompous than the word pompous intended, but if that weren’t the case, then I might watch the news, because then at least the news would be news. If it is only ever what you expect (excluding exceptional, unfathomably possible events) then by definition, Meeko, it is not called news.  

I would then point out the stars and tell her that every single one of them was burning for her, because she was smiling so kindly. I would then explain that if she were to stop, the stars would die away and there would be nothing to separate me from the darkness. She wouldn’t like that idea, so she would promise that she would always smile as long as I was smiling. We would wander, and drink the finest eye-wrenching tequila, and hum along to the ukulele. We would seek out climbable trees and I would climb them and throw a rope down for her so that I could pull her up to the tallest branch. And we would see all of nature communicating, complimenting each other. We would follow the ivy with our eyes as it made its way up trees. We would watch daisies being altruistic, shedding their hair to enable the happiness of children. “He loves me, he loves me not – ohhhhhhh”, and just in that moment, the daisy would grab the spare hair they had been concealing in their stem, while the child wasn’t watching of course. Then the daisy would clear their throat. “What’s that? Wait a second…Oh! He DOES love me!” We would sit there and I would offer Meeko the hay I had brought along for her. This would be the hay I usually filled my rabbit hutch with, but Bernie wouldn’t mind sharing, especially with Meeko. He would love Meeko more than he loved hay. 

And Meeko and I would have adventures that were true, and full of feeling and life. And if I fell down, or lost my way, Meeko would protect me, because Meeko would be strong…and Meeko would be wise. I wish I were like Meeko, the entirely hypothetical, imaginary wonder. 

Shadows and Quadrilaterals

Creative Writing Workshop Exercise: To walk around the room impossibly slowly and write what we saw, our thoughts and triggered memories. 

Everything. It’s staggered. A ticking clock. It is every rooms dictator. When the room is fruitful of life. The stadium sits open in the distance. The green drowning in drizzle. A light smothers my face. An air vent is nestled in the wall. So small, that no human breed could crawl through. Not if under attack. His shadow paints the board. But shadows change. Shadows are replaced by the shadows of others. Even replaced by shadows of inanimate things. Imagine that. Locomotion enabled shadow theft.

A plug hangs directly below a vacant plug socket. Teamwork is rejected I guess. Or maybe electricity has told them where to go.

                                                                                                                        

I’ve borrowed the sky to clothe my legs today. Only, I didn’t say please. That could be the reason it is raining. Someone has abandoned their phone. The Mayan Apocalypse must be imminent. Pieces of paper rustle as they are indented by caffeinated pens. Changing them. Possibly forever.

The desire to be comfortable. Maybe seated. With a cherry-flavoured slush puppy. All of those disconnected buildings. All alone, mocked by the taller ones. Isn’t it odd how taller buildings become egotistical? There’s paper supporting a table. It doesn’t make sense. My eyes are drawn to trust. Open bags exposing money bound in leather and expensive music-playing technology.

It has stopped raining.

There are but two bottles of water in the room. The rest are caffeinated and E-numbered. I really like the colour of burgundy. But it really doesn’t suit that house. The camera is watching us, wondering about us. What are we doing?

Is the clock dictating us now? Or is it not?

The screen is now blue. It also must have borrowed from the sky. That would explain why it is now raining again.

Everything is a quadrilateral. Tables. Chairs. Wall panels. Window panes. Blinds. We exist within a cube. It’s how we trap space. We make cubes. Triangles lack the capability of space-stealing.

A man crosses the road on his mobile phone. He does not look left and right. Police sat in their quadrilateral van are doing nothing but enjoying their space.

Smoke is diffused defacing building upon arrogant building. Excretions from Corus are forming new clouds, or rather, transforming existing clouds. Giving them new faces. I am thrown back into childhood, into Fern Gully. The monster whose name I momentarily forget. I watched Fern Gully on a quadrilateral screen.

We’re still staggering, barely moving, but barely still. A body that yearns to move forward, to move faster, to change shape and angle, is denied. A body that’s prohibited. Right now anyway. At least we are protected, in our cube. The mediator between me and the sky who I didn’t give an I.O.U. to. Poor sky. But come on. There’s too much sky and too little time to dress to worry about manners.  

Nostalgia

Sometimes it feels like more than it is - an all-pervasive sweeping breeze of nostalgia that refuses to alter its course. Sometimes it’s a song, often and surprisingly one you haven’t heard before, or even associated with anything enough for it to be imprinted on your mind. It’s this human thing, something we all cannot shake, a surge of liquid ecstasy drifting around in our bodies. Nostalgia, everywhere, always, a feeling of “Was it better then?” or “Did I even exist then?”

I’m frequently engaged in nostalgia, for it shadows me like a cloud shadows the sun. Maybe it’s innate, maybe it has a hypersensitive sensor that simply cannot withstand an entire 3 minutes of John Denver’s senses being filled up without making my eyes secrete water like a flooded sponge. It’s "Run around Sue", and "Walk of Life", and every Jimi Hendrix song that I didn’t see live. It’s a whole collection of jigsawed words that when strung together and strummed inspire every cell of my being to make music.