SO anyway, this type of blogging, the interesting type of blogging as I like to think of it, opens little windows into the lives if the writers. Even if the writing is poor the spirit is strong, and that shows a certain enthusiasm for life, doesn’t it? Telling everyone how lousy (or fabulous) your sex life is, explaining in detail the process by which you drain your beloved chihuahua’s blocked anal gland, exposing the world to your immense poetic talent, all of these things take guts.

The truth of the matter is that we all have needs of various sorts, my needs tend towards a desperate craving for attention and, if ladies choose to send me pictures of their breasts, so much the better. I’m sure that drew a serious grue from my younger readers, but I am what I am and I have always been, take me or leave me. Actually, for the most part the choice is “leave me”.

Which leads me to the events of this year. Any of you who were at my birthday party (fabulous cake) will have heard me announce that this was going to be a BIG year, the biggest of my life. I was looking forward to it with a hunger and an enthusiasm that I hadn’t felt since I was 16 and in a park in Meikle Earnock for, let’s just say, lessons in life.

So here’s the list of BIG things I’ve encountered this year:

1. Amber isn’t sure if she wants to be married to me;
2. Friend chooses this exact time to pay me a “surprise” visit in Brussels and gets pissed off when I use the phrase “bunny boiler”;
3. I discover that my crushed vertebra (T10 for those of a medical persuasion) and broken back muscle are not fixable;
4. I discover I have osteoporosis and a “high risk” of further spinal fractures;
5. I become addicted to narcotics and develop an unhealthy fondness for Diazepam;
6. My three year contract extension is reduced to a sixty day contract extension;
7. Amber chooses to divorce me (I honestly can’t blame her, considering);
8. I discover this morning that my 60 day contract extension has now become a zero day contract extension, i.e. no job, AND I have already booked my flights;
9. I am fatter than I have ever been and therefore a an ugly portly curmudgeon (thank you Susan);
10. Friends are concerned for my mental well-being which, all things considered, is fair, because I have suffered from depression since I was seven but didn’t get treatment until a scary episode in 1988;
11. My house renovations are “almost” finished. Note, “almost”;
12. I will now have to sell the house, unfinished, and in the worst possible market conditions, and will probably lose money because I’m utterly desperate;
13. I am too much of a fucking nutter for anyone to remain friends with me for any length of time;
14. I am as stoney broke as I have ever been;
15. I’m barred from speaking to my closest friend.

On the upside, the head pain helps distract me from all this shit;

But there have to be good things too, right?

1. My kids are amazing and smart and beautiful and talented (that includes the informally adopted ones);
2. My eyes are still blue (though I do need glasses now);
3. I’m not bald;
4. I can write better than most people I know (including Marting fucking Amis);
5. I don’t actually have an anger problem;
6. Sex, in all it’s many guises, doesn’t seem quite so important any more;
7. Pasta is cheap;
8. I have lots of toys;
9. I have learned (the hard way) that I don’t need anyone;
10. I can still take most of you in a fight.

SO, big year it has certainly been. I still have a sense of humour, which when combined with despair just makes the poo jokes all the funnier… and I still care about you. All of you.

More will come, this is just an update, OK?

Love

it's not *my* plane, but you get the idea...

I’m on a plane.

Actually, by the time you read this I will no longer be on a plane, I will be in an office, at a desk, under fluorescent light and looking at a computer screen. However, let’s not allow reality to intrude. I’m on a plane and I am enjoying the ride, for a change.

Perhaps it was the weather as we took off but, something in the way the sky looked this morning, gave me the wonderful takeoff thrill that I used to get, all those years ago, when I started throwing myself about the planet.

There’s a definite chance that this could be my last trip for a while and I’m not completely  sure how I feel. Obviously it will be nice to be home more, to be able to help with the things Amber has had to manage on her own for the last few years. It will be great to be able to say goodnight to my children every night and it will be nice to be able to schedule a weekly class of some sort during the week. But what about my itchy feet? After all, I’ve been traveling, doing the rounds, in one way or another, since I was 16. That’s almost 20 years, people.

It isn’t so much that I don’t like being in the one place as that I feel a sort of hunger for change.

When I was growing up we only moved house once, but in those two houses my mother would change the furniture around, have us swap rooms, change the decor all the flamin’ time. It became almost a family ritual, my mum would decide a change was needed and the three of us (she, my sister and I) would set to for the day and see how we could lay out what we had in different, creative and exciting ways. Maybe that is where this hunger came from.

Or maybe it’s that, before I was born, my parents lived in East Africa. Moshi in Tanganyika, to be precise. I spent a large part of my gestation there and my mother only moved home when my father died. My uncle lived in East Africa too, he had farms in Tanganyika and Kenya and he lived there till he passed away, just a few years ago. I had relatives all over the world and a cousin who traveled to, and lived, in various exotic locations, Mauritius, Khartoum, Oman, all (to me) exciting sounding places, but the only person in my family who had never been anywhere was me (I was also the only person in my entire family who had never met my father, bat that’s a whoooole ‘nother set of issues).

I also wonder how my perpetual presence will affect Amber and the kids. Will they get fed up with me and wish I was off somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else? Will the dogs start to feel that I am a tiresome owner if they don’t get to greet me enthusiastically once a week, to practice their leaping and smiling?

There’s always the chance that this won’t be my last ever trip. We’ll see.

I’m not on a plane any more and I’ll soon be back in Kansas.

So, any thoughts, ideas, suggestions? You know me, I’ll listen to anybody… but I only pay attention to you, dear reader.

rhubarb

We have a new government in the UK that partly fills me with dread for the future, but concurrently gives me hope that things are really changing. Maybe even for the better. I think Cameron and Clegg may well be just what the UK needs at this point in time. Certainly conservative rule from London will stimulate the Scots to think about the Maggie Thatcher years and consider our future as part of a nation that has completely different needs and wants from its bigger sister, and so it should. We don’t think for ourselves nearly enough. Independence? I think it’s a viable option. I think it may incur temporary hardships for the citizens of our new nation, along with confusion and the pain of change, but I firmly believe it would ultimately help us to stand again with pride as Scotsmen and Scotswomen and reinvent the world in our own image, rather than the other way around. But that’s just what I think.

Twitter, what’s that all about, eh? At first I dismissed it as a fad but it really has taken over the world, hasn’t it? I am @zzzeno for anyone who wants to follow ‘my’ Twitter feed. I must say I have been sucked right in and have been exchanging tweets with all sorts of luminaries from Carrie Fisher to Rosanne Cash, Simon Mayo and millions more. I know that it’s all lighthearted nonsense, but it really does make me feel like I am hobnobbing with the luminaries. Restrain me someone, please.

In my absence from the blogging world I have been thinking loads, talking even more and having all sorts of crushing blows delivered. I turned fifty this year, in January, and since my announcement that “This is going to be the BIGGEST year so far”, I have discovered that I have a spine like a corkscrew thanks to a crushed T9 vertebra and osteoporosis (I’m an honorary old lady) and I just ran out of job, unexpectedly.

“How could that happen?”, I hear you ask,
“What, the osteoporosis?”, I answer,
“No, the job, you twat!”, you reply with genuine bonhommie.

Well, it’s a long and complicated story that involves several immense egos, a crushing political regime, more acronyms that you can shake a stick at and a disappointing lack of respect for human beings. Suffice to say that two weeks from now I shall be unemployed. Or I shall have a new job. Or something in between. Or maybe the old job, who the fyck knows?

Did you notice my new word up there… “fyck”? I rather like it, “fyck”, “fycking”, “fycker”, “fycked”, it has a sort of Norse elegance about it, doesn’t it?

I could go on, but I know your patience is limited and I know you now have other fish to fry. I’m not your “significant other blogger” any more. But I promise, dear reader, I promise I shall win your heart once more…

I’m not a mind reader; I just notice things, little items that other people gloss over and ignore. I notice small changes in posture, in vocal tautness, in skin colour. I notice changes in surface temperature and in smell. Really tiny changes.

Perhaps the ability to see like that is common, perhaps what is uncommon is being able to read the changes, to analyse and interpret. But I know what the changes mean. Always.

And I am always right. I know when you are angry or frustrated. I know when you don’t like me or when you want to get close to me; when you need to be held and when you need solitude. I know when poetry is touching your soul and I know when nothing short of physical assault will change your mind.

So never imagine I am anything less than intent. Don’t for a second believe I am not aware of your presence in the world, near or far. My senses are so attuned to yours that I would feel a sigh at ten thousand miles.

I know what you are thinking, believe me.

In my little corner of existence life seems pleasingly mellow, yet, when there are no ripples or sub-surface currents, my mind has developed two basic ways of responding to the various tomorrows that could appear.

Half the time I worry that something big and black and overwhelming is lurking around the corner and I worry that somehow the delivery notes got mixed up and I have someone else’s life, but they are going to want it back. Soon.

The other perpetual hum at the back of my unfashionably cluttered mind is a glorious, expectant excitement. An assurance that, as I take my next step, a huge bubble of wonderfulness is about to burst and shower me in joy and success and all things sparkly and golden.

I don’t always feel these things in a recognizable or describable way; only when I am not sufficiently distracted by the mechanics of actual living or the minutiae of the daily grind, but they underlie everything that is within me.

And so my responses are not always what people expect, suck it up.

But life does go on.

It’s been a couple of years since I was regularly posting but some of you will remember (fondly I hope) the days when fasteddiesbullet and the dubious institute kept abreast (fnar) of the times, the culture and the zeitgeist. Then I ran out of words.

Others who started around the same time just kept on going, producing better and better stuff, but I faded. Millions of new bloggers began to fill the webosphere with words and pictures, thoughts and opinions, smut and saintliness. Blogs specialised and focused, became commercial and attended to the neeeds of the most jaded of reading palates (yes, mixed metaphor, I know… but it’s what I do, right?).

Which leads me to here and now. Where do I go and what do I do on this little piece of internet real estate? Should I try and focus on more thoughtful pieces which drag on a bit but get to the heart of the matter (at least in my eyes) or should  I go back to my original recipe of a scattergun of brilliantly coloured, but ultimately shallow, notion-posts, interspersed with the occasional picture of my arse?

What do you think people, poetically purple prose or fnar jokes aplenty?

I leave it in your gentle and tastleful hands. Make your thoughts known, suggest a topic or two, send pictures of your own bahookie (mine is aging, after all), write me a poem.

Answers please.

I am, in fact, an Orthodox Christian, but that is an aside. I ended up there after a fairly lengthy and involved journey that doesn’t need explained in this post. It’s enough to say that I became a Christian (practicing as opposed to nominal) in my mid-twenties as a result of a decision. An intellectual, and emotional, decision.

The years since then have merely increased my comprehension that there are many, many things that we don’t know, and can’t know, about the universe and our place in it, and that my response and choice (if that’s what it was) is as valid as any. I am as convinced as ever that my choice was the right one for me, and I firmly believe that a choice, a considered choice, does have to be made by each of us.

Recently my reading has skimmed religion, evolution, creationism, physics, metaphysics, philosophy, theology and the human experience, in both fiction and non-fiction. It has made me think quite deeply, I like that.

A question that bubbled to the surface yesterday was “what is the purpose/point of evolution?”

However you cut this particular cake, there has to be a purpose or an aim to evolution. Otherwise, why evolve? Evolution implies continuous improvement or adaptation to better extend “life”. Either that or it suggests that change is merely serendipitous, in that an accidental change is only successful when there’s nothing around to destroy it. So, therefore, the “purpose” of evolution, intentionally, or as a by-product of accidental dynamic change, is the continuation and propagation of life. A battle for survival. Survival of the fittest, survival of the best adapted.

In any battle the winner only wins, and it’s the most effective fighting methods that bring victory; strength, ingenuity, adaptability, speed, weaponry. But, if the winner is only the one left standing at the end and the environment that remains no longer supports him, evolution scores a Pyrrhic victory.

Then along comes homo-sapiens and we find we are able to adapt to suit pretty much any environment (primarily by adapting our environment to suit us). It’s still a battle for survival though, and the hunger, not just protect ourselves but to defeat whatever threatens us, is why we are here; and asks another question “Is humanity the pinnacle of evolution?”

Are we currently wearing the evolutionary yellow jersey, or does that accolade go to insects… or bacteria… or perhaps algae?

It has been said that it is sentience that sets humanity apart from other life forms. It’s an evolutionary step that allows us to look forwards, and backwards, in time and to evaluate the consequences of our actions. Sentience, and all that goes along with it (conscience, emotion, abstract thought etc), benefits us enormously in evolutionary terms, “Look before you leap” is a very worthwhile motto, but does it benefit us more than any of the evolutionary advantages that viruses or insects have? Consequences are irrelevant to them, for the most part, because of their great numbers. Variety is their particular strength, sentience is ours.

Of all currently evolved life-forms humanity certainly has the capability to destroy life on our planet. We are the most dangerous life-form, if not the most evolved, so is sentience nature’s way of balancing the capability we have evolved? Are the two linked… conscience and destructive power?

From a purely evolutionary viewpoint, our much cherished humanity, or the things that we cherish about or humanity (aesthetics, passion, creativity, determination, love etc), is merely an evolutionary by-product and has no meaning beyond acting as a governor to our burgeoning destructive potential. Tears and laughter, pleasure and pain, are simply behavioural adjustors… even charm has its evolutionary use. As we are merely evolved, we are essentially no different to the virus or the insect or the fungus…

I don’t find that a pleasant thought. Not because I want to consider myself more important than, say, a flea but because that thought process concludes that a flea, or a jellyfish, or a rat all have just as much right to life as we do. Therefore human life is as disposable, or as important  as any other life. Perhaps you think that’s true. What would you do if you discovered you had tapeworm?

So we have evolved to the point where it feels important to reconcile why we are what we are, but frankly we don’t, and possibly can’t, know.

Religions are considered by some to be humanity’s ignorant response to the unknown. Possibly there is truth in that but, as there are so many unknowables, perhaps it’s wise that our responses should encompass the unknown.

Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Animism, Daoism, Jainism and a thousand others… each religion is an attempt to explain ourselves, and each probably touches at least part of the truth. The evolutionary value of religion is, possibly, that it prevents humanity going mad.

Humanism, from what I can see, is anti-religious (in the nicest possible way). A rejection of religion, yet by placing humanity firmly at the centre of the universe it also invokes religion. In essence humanism is a religion-free religion. In an evolutionary sense, it has she same value as religion, but without the faith.

Does meaning exist because humans make it exist, or does it exist anyway?

Science can’t actually explain things; or rather it can’t give reasons for things. Science can certainly describe the how and can make accurate predictions based on accurate observation, but any “whys” that science answers are pure opinion. Why evolution? Why speed of light? Why only three visible dimensions?

Science is limited by our comprehension and our comprehension is limited by evolutionary need.

Science does, however, have enormous evolutionary value because it allows humanity to innovate and adapt our universe. Yet science alone doesn’t feed that core essence of our humanity, the “sentience”, or at least not for most people, and so we’re back to religion again.

Finally… by virtue of its nature (pun intended), evolution surely must end in the total annihilation of life, otherwise evolution (as accident) is incorrect. That begs the question “what’s behind it?” and leaves us with the only other option… evolution by design of some sort?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…