Grims-Reality the movie ... well, YouTube channel.

 Some of my friends (I have some), suggested that I create my own Youtube Channel. I did so years ago, but I never really followed it up (foolish in retrospect).

So here is an offering from this weekend, and over the next few weeks, I shall be releasing videos edited together from the archives that go all the way back to 2013 (I shan't put them all up it would take too long).

I aim in time to get a GoPro and start making stuff with better sound and picture quality. For me right now, I have little choice but to be productive in other ways. This will be one of those ways. 

Displaced.

1a: to remove from the usual or proper place. Specifically: to expel or force to flee from home or homeland. Displaced persons.

I am displaced, I am living in a camper van parked outside my son’s house in a village in the middle of nowhere relative to my usual home turf. Onboard I have a bed, a loo, cooking facilities and clothes space. Besides the facilities onboard the camper, I also have access to a very good games desk where I can set up my laptop and write or edit videos I shoot when I walk. I have access to Wi-Fi and a landline (in addition to all the usual facilities you would find in a one-bedroom ground floor flat).

 Relative to someone who has just fled Afghanistan, or a Syrian refugee living in a camp in Turkey I am enjoying the relative life of luxury. 

Perspective and counting your blessings are a good thing. 

There are buts. But I have a half share in a two-bedroom home some sixteen miles by road away. But I’m fifty-four and it’s not an ideal time to get to square ninety-nine on Snakes & Ladders board to then slide all the way back to number one, with a requirement to throw a six before you can move again.

I’m not sure I deserved the treatment I have received from my now ex-partner. Unless I have been having blackouts and don’t remember what passes or passed between us in the last few months since I stopped working. What my ex-partner has done feels entirely disproportionate. Again, I shan’t recount the details of thirteen years of a relationship, where each has supported the other at times of need, where each has made sacrifices of time, energy, money to support the whole (the partnership). I feel a sense of betrayal and hurt beyond words. I am stunned, my world is one of disbelief, incredulity and shock. The shock that someone you have spent so many years with through thick and thin, can, when you find your life wheels metaphorically spinning just discard you. Cut you off, lay you low, strip away your dignity and leave you questioning everything about yourself, and for what it’s worth everything about them. 

I am not easy to live with, I like things a certain way, but generally, that worked for Amanda and I because it meant that I kept house (even when I was working, I did the majority of the housework) I like tidy, I like to be able to open the door to anyone and not feel self-conscious that home may not be up-to-snuff. I/we created a beautiful home, with two very distinct gardens, and if you think of home as a machine for living in, then indeed the machine I created (I say I because that’s where most of my spare time and cash has gone over the last seven years) is a very efficient machine. And yet now, it has literally been ripped away from me arbitrarily by someone to who I gave my all. I gave up my independence, I gave up my own home, I put my fate in the hands of another and I have now paid a terrible price.

I find it difficult to comprehend. I find it quite troubling. I loop over the same thoughts time and time again. I slipped on ice in January, I was in a terrible job in an environment of idiocy, of shared information being a loss of power, of martyrdom to work for the sake of self-flagellation on the part of my boss (a very odd life lived for work, while around him people just took it for granted that he would pick up all the slack, while outside from what you were privy to, his children's life were starting to manifest the effects of an absent dad). Compounding the injury over six weeks as I was forced to sit on a chair broken by the previous incumbent in the role. This has resulted in an injury that has barely improved in eight months (though the first six to ten weeks were exceptional). I am now left with variously, sciatica, peripheral neuropathy, legs, abdomen. And from the neck, wear and tear it seems like more of the same in the face, arms, and chest. Bodily spasms are common once I lie down, and particularly when one straddles the border between wakefulness and sleep, resulting in not drifting off to the land of nod, and of course on occasion waking to a body spasm.

Trying to rationalise anything at the moment is a fraught business. I like order, I like a plan, a routine and structure. Not because I’m OCD, but because life is short, can be messy and uncomfortable. So, managing the little inconveniences means that you can have more `headspace’ for the upsets and travails. Until something like this happens and then, as Jordan Peterson points out in Twelve Rules for Life, you are thrust headlong into chaos.

I am there, I am on the very meniscus of chaos facing squarely into the unlit future second by second, day by day. That sounds dramatic. But it isn’t, in the knowing of it. However, it is a tough place. You can turn and look back, but that’s the past that can’t be undone. When facing forwards, it’s like a blank, and or sometimes a kaleidoscope of paths with no way to determine which if any is correct … or if the path you choose is just one you have travelled before, just in a different time frame (a path of repeated mistakes). To mitigate the effects of the unknown and to maintain a sense of self-worth, I have started to do things immediately and reactively, to write here, to make short videos when I take the dog out. I fill my days writing one or both of two novels I started years ago. I still swim three times a week, and thanks to my son having the first car I bought him, I can do that at a greatly reduced cost of driving my own car. I’m doing housework and cooking, and trying very hard not to sink into a sort of `How the fuck? Why the fuck? When the fuck?’ did my life path end up on the current trajectory?  While simultaneously spinning the plates of: How do I maintain body and soul into a more meaningful and fruitful future? 

I have been forced to simplify my life, pare back to absolute essentials, view everything through the lens of conservation of cash and energy, in the sure and certain knowledge that a few miles away across Bridgwater Bay are my houseplants, my small collection of art, my tools, clothes furniture and all the trappings of a normal life. I don’t want to abandon those things; I don’t want to think that I am never going to occupy four walls again. I don’t want to think that my now ex-partner is so impatient so intent that she is going to destroy my things … but … I must acknowledge that on the last eleven days performance I am concerned. 

Chaos. What I have learned by the serendipitous utterance of these words watching a film just a few days ago; You can let it destroy you, you can let it define you, or you can make it make you stronger. 

I found this little plaque on a chair along Burnham-on-Sea seafront on Friday morning as I sat waiting for traffic to die down, so I could have a clear run home and avoid the school-run and rush hour.



So here is Google translate version: 

... between This immensity my pensioner drowns And my shipwreck is sweet, in this sea.

Clearly, this is poor. Hey-Ho I wasn't expecting much. Below is a link to the Wikipedia article that contains three translations.

The Infinity by Giacomo Leopardi

And here is my favourite translation.

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
and this hedgerow, which cuts off the view
of so much of the last horizon.
But sitting here and gazing, I can see
beyond, in my mind’s eye, unending spaces,
and superhuman silences, and depthless calm,
till what I feel
is almost fear. And when I hear
the wind stir in these branches, I begin
comparing that endless stillness with this noise:
and the eternal comes to mind,
and the dead seasons, and the present
living one, and how it sounds.
So my mind sinks in this immensity:
and foundering is sweet in such a sea.

When I saw the plaque facing straight out to sea, the horizon, the hills of Wales to the north and the Quantock's and Exmoor to the south I knew it would reference life and death, and loss and the unknown and obviously the expanse of the sea. I knew it would be something I get and feel exactly as written.

Never underestimate or dismiss poetry, there is always something to discover. And the thing most often discovered, is that people have been feeling the same things, about places and events and the tides of life for centuries. We have a common thread running through time. That commonality down generations and spanning continents, and cultures allows you to empathise across time, and in that empathy comes a greater understanding of the human condition. 

You are not alone in your travails, and everything you can experience has been experienced by someone else, somewhen else, somewhere else.

The James Webb Telescope.

I am so excited about this it's giving me the jitters. What if it blows up on the launchpad? Or fails to open once deployed? Or goes off course and ends up falling into the sun?

It is incredibly odd to be so invested emotionally in a project I can only observe from behind a keyboard thousands of miles from the project itself. And if that's the case for me. How stressful must it be for all the people who have invested hundreds of thousands of man-hours and years of their lives bringing this machine into existence?

Youtube James Webb Telescope

jwst.nasa.gov

The End of Shine and Finch

This may be the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. Just these few words tear at my heartstrings, knowing what I have to say has happened, has happened. So, I will jump straight in and get it out the way.

After thirteen years and eleven months, Amanda and I have parted company. There will be no forensics or analysis, other than to say we have become different people over time. 

I am sad beyond belief, I thought we would rub along despite the changes because we had been together so long and know each other so well, but also in spite of the changes in each other’s personalities and outlook. But it wasn’t to be, and it was probably foolish if not naïve to think so.

This isn’t mine or Amanda’s first rodeo, and I fervently hope that we can be the friends in the parting that we were in the sharing years, but given my earlier naivety about rubbing along together, I think I should set my aspirations and hopes at a more sensible level … but as I say, I live in hope.

For me it’s a funny business. I have left our home as requested, and am now living back in the camper where our story on the ILTYT Blogspot began in January 2012 … though not in the camper we planned to adventure in. ILTYT Blogspot

It has to be said it doesn’t have quite the same adventure feel to it, as when you are travelling hundreds then thousands of miles on an adventure. Now it’s a matter personal survival, it tarnishes the joy, however, it is also a familiar space and like any home; once the door is locked and the blinds are drawn it is home sweet home.

I find it hard to comprehend or even see the future, but then it’s only been three days so far.

I didn’t want this fester, or to leave it unsaid and give a false impression. I am currently `homeless’ in the traditional sense of the word home, unemployed, injured and in a system that has been stymied if not paralyzed by the pandemic. It’s odd in some ways. I am as free as a bird at the moment, and it is utterly terrifying. 

This the low spot, the place where the snakes belly meets the wagon rut. However, the perspective that saying misses is that from the rut you can still see the stars, and you can still see where the rut runs to the horizon, and if you are heading in the direction the rut runs then quite simply following it will take you into the future.