Posts Tagged 'Sleepthief'

Shadow Seasons: An Epilogue, 2011

Dedicated to the few who messaged on New Year’s Eve.

2011 was a story I don’t know how to tell. It’s a year that had so many structural positives, countered by surface negatives. Perhaps it’s best defined by what others have said.

Shadows

In the early summer, I was ‘strange’, ‘sick’ and ‘damaged goods’. Thanks. In the mid-summer, I was an expletive abomination. Consequently, in the late summer, I was branded a defeatist.

Victimisation does arise sometimes. Not because it is wanted – if there’s a brand of people who don’t want to be happy, this author is not one of them – but because it’s a way of dealing with the various angles of attack and the after-effects that cannot be disguised.

Continue reading ‘Shadow Seasons: An Epilogue, 2011′

Music: Between Minds, Between Friends

A difficult anniversary is approaching, which has made me think a lot about personal relationships. Thus, I turned, as many have seen recently, to the virtues of music: as a companion, as a friend, and as a saviour.

The Ambient Man

It’s not easy out there. I’m sure many people join me in feeling that we are always fighting battles: some of our own making and some that aren’t; some that we deserve and some that we don’t. And part of that, from my side, is the life I have set for myself, and what it has done to me. “Damaged goods”, as the expression came recently. I should feel ashamed for living. What’s a man to do?

I’ve witnessed friends working together this week in perfect synchronicity. I’ve witnessed so many personal relationships thriving. And yet, as usual, while I’m glad to be on the periphery of anything positive, I’m so used to solitude (and occasionally negativity) on a daily basis that I’ve always had to find other coping mechanisms.

Music has long been that foil. That is not to say, of course, that there aren’t the best of friends out there, but working in isolation so long requires something that is always there, always tolerant, and always constant.

Music, oddly, cannot know me, and yet knows me better than anyone. When it speaks to me, sometimes I listen, sometimes I more than listen, and sometimes I unwittingly ignore. It cannot judge me or fall out with me. It’s a relationship I need, and cannot do without.

[Mobile users: a lot of videos under the cut] Continue reading ‘Music: Between Minds, Between Friends’

Skimming Stones: An Epilogue, 2010

2010 has been, it seems, a sad year for many people. My own sad story has been punctuated with glimpses of light. End-of-year epilogues are so hard to write, but in the light of some illuminating and wistful hopes and dreams that have consumed me recently, I’d like to share some meaningful pieces.

I can be jealously protective of some of my favourite hidden treasures. It is part of what makes things appealing to me. But their allusions are telling, and stories can be built around them.

Continue reading ‘Skimming Stones: An Epilogue, 2010′

Public Hypocrites and Private Anger

Andrew Marvell Statue, Hull.

What grates so much about hypocrisy? Is it observing people changing their mind? Breaking promises? Breaking trust?

To speak in one way and act in another is something almost all of us do. We would be hypocrites ourselves to deny it. Often, it is a tool of diplomacy, of fitting in, even of subjugating oneself. Just like the well-meaning white lie…

Yet, distinct from the more innocent ‘forgetfulness’ or the more calculated and sinister ‘betrayal’, which often uses secrecy as its veil, hypocrisy often bites because it is flagrantly public; it is exuded through public channels, and knowledge reaches us that way. Inconsistencies and reversals are paraded in disregard of those with whom bonds were formed through the old values now abandoned. Worse still is when the hypocrisy seems fuelled precisely by this form of conquest and deliberately targets those left behind, the victims.

Continue reading ‘Public Hypocrites and Private Anger’


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