Zhuangzi wrote about dreaming as a butterfly dreaming as a man. It would be a little macbre and untrue if I was to stay that I cut myself to make me realise that this isn't a dream. But sometimes the dusk moment between dreaming and waking up can be a frightening experience.
I once dreamt that I was shot in the head, I died in the dream, the lead up to it a mixture of crazy moments which I don't remember. I just remember the sight of someone pointing a gun at me and the bullet slicing apart the left side of my brain. A moment later, I was awake sitting in a room, I remember it being grimey with a cold light coming out of the drawn curtains to my right. I heard my mum calling to me to come downstairs for dinner.
Then I woke up for real. I could have pressed return carriage a few days after that to make the prose more dramatic but I don't think thats the point of the dream. This isn't an anecdote which the psychotic part of my mind created to re tell again and again as some philsophical game. The only point I can really believe is that this really was me waking up from dream in a dream and only that. My mind was unwinding for the night and through circumstance and the length of my own sleep, I really wasn't ready to wake.
Sometimes it feels like the life I'm living is a detatchment of reality to what I see with my own eyes. My hope is that for all the pain and unknown unfolding as well the amazing and happy things each and every day of my life, I never wake up from all of this.
Live your dreams my beautiful eggs.
The further away I get from you The harder it gets for everyone else, for everyone else
The happier I am when I'm with you The harder it gets when I am alone, when I am alone
Life in the UK for me (well for the tasters I've had, I dont really live there anymore), it's always been a life of duality. Chinese to my Western Friends, while British to my Eastern friends. After all the words fade away I realised those things didn't matter as much as I thought they did and since then I've been enjoying the life I've always wanted.
But the duality in the UK, television bombards us with the life of the gutter in the UK, they show images of the places I grew up, the places of low opportunity. I walk the streets and hear the ignorance of people, how they can't do these things because of these things. I've had long conversations with Mitu about American attitude where this would never happen. Although that's a separate conversation for another time, she has a point, if there was even an inch of that in peoples soul here, then where would the British people be?
On the other hand, I realise the change, I walk the streets without issue, without fear of the police being on my back for the colour of my skin. My fathers stories of racist fights wasn't long ago although I can't remember them. They talk as if people have all gone to trash, but that isn't completely true, people are polite and for their ignorance they do mean well. I've yet to meet anyone starving even if my socialist vigour has almost been devoured. We as a country aren't the gutter trash that most people would expect if you really believed the daily mail. But what's my point, it's as simple as saying things could be better, a lot better in fact, we as a people can over come as they Public Enemy might say. But then things aren't that bad here either, we just need to see the good things from all the ill reporting media.
On a different stroke, I started my blog more than two years ago, but this is just to say its been just over two years when I was sitting in one of the control rooms and I was writing a short article. At that moment I wondered a lot about what was going to happening in life, I could never have guessed. They keep saying that I would do a lot of maturing, a lot these things, a lot of those things. But the reality is something quite beautiful and stark. I thank my wonderful girlfriend for keeping me sober to see those things that happened and enjoying all the things we share.
Here's to another two years my beautiful eggs.
Threw my bad fortune Off the top of A tall building I'd rather have done it with you Your boy's smile Five in the morning Looked into your eyes And I was really in love
In Chinatown Hung over You showed me Just what I could do Talking about Time travel And the meaning Just what it was worth
And I feel like Some bird of paradise My bad fortune slipping away And I feel the Innocence of a child Everybody's got something good to say
Things I once thought Unbelievable In my life Have all taken place When we walked through Little Italy I saw my reflection Come right of your face
On some days while driving to work I imagine I let go of the wheel, placing my foot down as far as the accelerator pedal will go and see where life will take me. Sadly there are two outcomes of this; the first is the Bayrische Polizei peeling me off the side of the road smeared in a deep red. The second is as I start to swerve into uncontrollability, I snatch the wheel at the last moment before I hit another car and bring myself back out of it. My heart stopping for a few minutes while all the drivers around me shake their head.
If ever these thoughts creep into my mind, the rest of the day is filled with voyeuristic thoughts of Bob Dylan. Not voyeurism in the sense of stalking and wanting to know everything about him, it’s more wanting to understand why people obsess about him. These are just flights of fancy really, nothing coherent in a day where I shuffle from one moment to another without really thinking too hard. This is all a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.
Hope you are all well my beautiful eggs.
I want absolute beauty. I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody. I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work."
Imagine a song, that really reached out and touched kids, And not in a Daily Mail way, innocence corrupted, But in a way where criticism remained constructive, And wasn't too politicised and children weren't instructed, To behave in a way that was unrealistic, Or made out the way they live was somehow sick and twisted, But simply pointed out reasons to get it together, Not shouting "get a job", but just saying,
Two stories are swishing around in my head around, not really related but somewhere in my backward mind it seems to fit that this is something that would make sense. I thought about how lucky we are in this generation, we definitely are.
When I was about 21 my mother told me to look at my hands on one side, then turn it over and look at the other. I didn't notice anything apart from the dirt under my nails which I tried my best to hide. My mother showed me her hands, I mean she was only in her late forties, still looking quite youthful, actually both my parents still don't look their ages. But her hands were quite wrinkled, blotchy and looking of age, the years of working taking their toll. Since that day I started to notice the veins in my hand creeping around the back of my hands like some ivy left to over grow at an abandoned house, the blotches and the loss of elasticity of my skin.
'Enjoy the youth you have my son' she said, albeit in Chinese.
These are old words but I was recently rummaging around the house I find an old battered suitcase, it was torn at the side and wrapped in a wonderful reddish brown leather. Even from ten feet you can smell the mixture of mould and moisture of the years. For some reason I thought that because the suitcase looked liked something my parents had brought with them from the old world, I would be allowed to open it. I took a screwdriver to the lock and it pops open and out falls around a hundred photos. I see all the people in my family staring back at me, smiling knowingly as the camera snaps the pictures in black and white, sepia and faded colour. I see my father the same age as me young smartly dressed, boyish like I am now and handsome from the beginning. I see relatives who I have only ever known as old people looking back as happy as my father was in those days.
But what marks us out from our parents? For the senseless posting of random photos of our youth drinking and having a good time, for all the photos we have which we stare back smiling, there are hundreds if not thousands for each one of us and only in the last 5 or so years. We book mark our lives without realisation, without the thought of the future which could change or creep around the corner in the next few years. I wonder when I'm as old as my father, what my children will think when they open up a computer or a web-page with their parents staring back all beauty and youth.
Turn over your hands my beautiful eggs and enjoy the blemish free skin, it may not last but at least enjoy it long as possible.
You may tire of me as our December sun is setting 'Cause I'm not who I used to be No longer easy on the eyes These wrinkles masterfully disguise The youthful boy below who turned your way and saw Something he was not looking for Both a beginning and an end
musik
You've Got The Love- Florence and the Machine
Pow- Lethal Bizzle
Remote Part/Scottish Fiction- Idlewild
Holiday- Dizzee Rascal
Summer Skin- Death Cab For Cutie
Brothers On A Hotel Bed- Death Cab For Cutie
videospiele
Metal Gear Solid- Peace Walker
Every Extended Extra
buch
The Great American Detox Diet- Alex Jamieson
VMware vSphere 4- Scott Lowe
Invincible Iron Man- Worlds Most Wanted
verschiedenes
bbq sardines,
putting Italia 90 away for another 4 years,
my gf understanding it all and revenge her favourite player will get,
A holiday would be nice right now, but as I mature and the more serious I become about life, the more life entertains me into being about business or taking things even more seriously. But the reality right now is I'm stuck at Munich airport smelling like one of the worst things in the world, surrounded by my fellow country men who I have no compunction to chat or make conversation with. This is how it feels at times in China, a mass throng of people heading in a direction that only they know and we all congregate on a single place. I hate to imagine what the water closet facilities are like here. For the moment my flight is delayed which means it will be around midnight until I land in London, 2am before I get home and maybe a few days before I post this article.
This article would want to sound like I'm trying to drum up a complaint and in the some sort of Live Journal sympathy plea. But people know me well enough know the amount of hypocrisy I can live with, this is something I wouldn't do, not here in any case.
Instead to pass the time I write my blog and look around at all the different people surrounding me, they are all holiday makers except the guy to my right, he is sporting a pair of white Apple headphones and reading some book which change his life. I realise I'm staring at myself for a few minutes, except my headphones are a lot more expensive and I haven't succumbed to Apple products. This is my only revelations at that moment, for all the worst things in life, I realise that being stuck at an airport isn't one of them.
Well I suppose I can keep this up for at least another half hour or so, don't get delayed my beautiful eggs.
We stop in every passing place To watch the world move faster than we do Watch it pass with our eyes closed The way we usually choose to
So I'll wait 'till I find the remote part of your heart When nowhere else will let us choose a comfortable start
Some would grant it a paragraph, some would grant it a whole book for the whys and wherefores of it's existence. A seed in a game creators mind, spitting it in digital.
Pulling at the sides of your mind, you can see out of the window and Munich's raining, I open the window a little in the funny way that all German windows seem to open and I can smell the rain. For all the Ikea furniture in the flat, it makes you yearn for wood pine panels, oak breakfast table and the sweet smell of rosemary in the morning from the herbs sitting over the window sill. Some fall in love with it all, the romanticism of living in the country side wishing life was simple.
In truth the sides of my mind melted only for a few seconds, the leaf caught in the wind and all the other flowers blooming throwing more petals into the sky. It's all so beautiful and to juxtapose this against the rainy sites of a New York-esque city with the constant beats of the cityscape. To steal something Scroobius wrote 'it's New York like in old movies'. I would be blindingly lying comatose in this fantasy, but coming back down to earth, the only thing that I would really want is the smell of rain on tarmac. It's worth the experience, its worth the time and energy unlike most of the time sinks I have been 'enjoying' of late, that is a subject for another night. In fact it's worth buying a PS3 just to sample it.
It doesn't matter where you are of what media you are watching/listening/playing, just enjoy the things that mean the most to you my beautiful eggs. Don't forget art is hard. Second star to the right and straight on till morning.
videospiele
Flower
God Of War Anthology
Plants vs Zombies
buch
Catcher in the Rye- JD Salinger
kino
Ringu
Zombieland
Terminator
verschiedenes
olds visiting- nice
Next door neighbour Turkish guys stealing bikes
the single speed bike- 22min special to Grosshadern,
Ikea flowers special, nice to have a proper looking flat,
Electrons passing around at the speed of light, it doesn't matter who said the words or even wrote them down. A blinding animation passing by as if the science of the world had offered up all the answers and our brains were being cyber-hacked.
I wanted to write about all the bowler hats and suits that I had walked past every day to and from the training course, describe them as the snobby yuppie elite, but as I started writing I realised how old those kind of words sound. Instead the line of electrons passing around rattled around in my head, I thought about this while taking a long hot soaking bath. My flannel rinsed in hot steaming water and then placed onto my head the light opaque through the flannel.
I imagine the world would looking in on itself and see all the beautiful lines cris-crossing every day, tracing paths where people were treading across the pavements. The veins of the city, the country, the world. All being part of this and in a steaming hot bath gave me a clear satisfaction about it all. I could really believe that for a moment we all belonged here, less as cogs and wheels of society but more of the blood cells bringing oxygen to the world.
I breathed a bit harder when I was lying there in the bath and took the flannel off and stared into the ceiling, those are the sort of times where you either start taking life serious (or more serious) or run the cold razor down the wrists and forget it all. It was Nietzsche that said that 'The thought of suicide is a powerful solace.'
Don't believe in the system, but believe you are part of it all my beautiful eggs.
“Pressure? Pressure what? Pressure is millions of parents around the world with no money to feed their children.”
“Look, we’re not entertaining? I don’t care; we win.”
"It is omelettes and eggs. No eggs – no omelettes! It depends on the quality of the eggs. In the supermarket you have class one, two or class three eggs and some are more expensive than others and some give you better omelettes. So when the class one eggs are in Waitrose and you cannot go there, you have a problem”
musik
Special Needs- Placebo
Four Winds- Bright Eyes
Whatever Happened?- The Strokes
You Talk Way Too Much- The Strokes
Be Quiet and Drive- Deftones
Running for Life- Eliza Doolittle
Kidulthood to Adulthood- Bashy
Letter From God to Man- Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip
Love Steals Us From Loneliness- Idlewild
Readers and Writers- Idlewild
FOC- Rodrigo y Gabriela
kino
Memento
Iron Man 2
Harry Potter und der Orden des Phoenix
Cars
Monster INC
buch
Anasi Boys- Neil Gaiman
Googled- Ken Alluta
videospiele
Final Fantasy XIII
Hustle Kings
verschiedenes
the disconnection- enjoying the silence from the internet
It's been a while, the loss of a internet connection meant more trips to the MacDonalds than should be allowed, I keep my wallet in my pocket and my money in my wallet just to make an effort with it all. The general flavour is more of a cheeseburger than say a chicken burger.
The feeling or addiction of being connected, I know it well and like the worse kind of vices you can never really go clean by drip feeding yourself of it. Heroin or no heroin, cigarettes or no cigarettes, drink or no drink. It's rare to meet someone in between, able to check his/her facebook wall just the one time in the day or even better once a week. The thing is for all the interesting things to massage our retinas or to make our brains click ever harder, the rest is either garbage or a form of detrius that people seem to love more and more. The label 'junk' which is both a word for rubbish and also slang for heroin says it all. They say that religion is the opiate of the masses, but a modern update would be the internet is the coffee for the masses. People always accuse me of hypocrisy, some valid, some not valid at all. I would love to say that the words I've laid down here are beyond the facebook bullshit of drunken pictures, the sordid opinion of each and every fan boy or even the incessant pornography keeping lonely men up at night. But this is a slow burner so I can be content that it may take some time to decide where this stands.
But for now, read all the things you need to in the day and then switch off the computer, the router, the servers, the internet and go for a walk outside. It may be raining, but if the water droplets fall onto your forehead only to soak you through, be happy knowing that you can feel this. My words can only make you think about this.
Love you all my beautiful eggs, it's been a while.
Last year was me taking my time in understanding all the things that I wanted and slowly getting them. Not to objectify it all, it wasn’t like a list of things which I said today I will get this. It was more ensuring that when I met those targets it was to be satisfied in them. Reaching out and doing my best to make sure I was getting the best out of things. The best out of life. Luckily this never ends, if you defeat every enemy who is left to fight?
The year before last was really the last vestiges of the old me, the stress of work, the losing and gaining of friends but more importantly the move across the water. Last year I wrote a lot about letting go of those childish things, but the reality was for all the interesting words I put up last year, they were slowly slipping away the year before anyway.
So it brings me to this year, rather I couldn’t let New Years Day be the place holder for all changes, but since going back to Hong Kong for the umpteenth time and up to last weekend, to say my life was all over would be a lie. To say things cannot return to what once was would be closer to the truth. In the throng of writhing European Language students descending on a single house in North End, Dizzee Rascal peaks my interest and I see my best friend dancing to it all, like it was 5 maybe 10 years since I’ve known him. I’m enjoying the night but realise I have nothing to say to these kids all trying their hardest to have an amazing time. I don’t bother trying, just let it go, you don’t need to be accepted by these people and neither will you. Acting your age is one thing, acting the age of your peers and not realising that your skin is sagging and your passport picture no longer looks like you.
Neither am I jealous of all of this. I always wondered what the best way of maturing would be, I haven’t found the definitive answer but for me it goes along the lines of enjoy what you have done, what you have in your hands, remember the past, but never try to relive. Reminds me a little of that Orbital song where the son is asking his father question about regret.
It's like a dusting of icing sugar but when it hits my tongue the sweetness isn't there and I'm starting to get cold in the fingers. They begin to fall off at an alarming rate and there's nothing left of me to talk about. I'm just a pile of washed up blood and bones on the side of the road, not even vultures would pick at.
For all the melodrama it's just a little cold outside, but you still have to fight your way through the snow storms to get to work or home. I wasn't too sure if I would cope with it all before I moved here, but with any adventure you just have to stick it out. I think the thing that keeps me going or rather the thing that keeps life as interesting as it is (for keep on going suggests that I'm hating every second of it all) is that if you can stand up tall enough and look on the horizon, you can start to see the future unfolding. It may surprise a few of you that for all the words up to know have been laced in nostalgia, laced in the sort of things that only romantics linger on for a life time. But with anything in life it's all split off into a hundred different flavours or shades of blue, red and yellow.
The snow outside in the Munich wash keeps me indoors as much as possible, save the silly walk I take in-between lunch and before I leave for home. I walk out into the shattering cold with only a polo shirt and a pair of jeans. I can't remember who quoted it but it goes along the lines of 'we do most of the best thinking while walking', I won't bore you with my inspiration, but the sweet tones of the cherubs as they fall from the sky with the snow bring me much happiness.
The future is tangible and you believe that anything is achievable and everything is within your grasp. Most people would lose that naivety, but I say embrace it.
Lately I've been having strange dreams, moments where I wake up bolt up right as if I've heard something unusual in the house and then I settle back down forget the dream I was having and slip into another. But I'm lucky for the first time in my life since I was a little kid that the dreams aren't taking over my life, I remember times when I was dreaming of floating away from all of it, forgetting the words to all the songs and learning them all over again.
I'm neither a junkie or dreamer nowadays.
Stay beautiful my lovely eggs.
It's like forgetting the words to your favourite song. You can't believe it; you were always singing along. It was so easy and the words so sweet. You can't remember; you try to move your feet.
As one year burnt away into the ether we come into this year with all the usual lashings of hope and mostly sore heads from free form hangovers. I unsurprisingly drank very little this holiday season, the need and want flowing away from me like it was quick piss into the wind. It was the winter cold that bit me the hardest, my fingers turning black even in the mid day sun, my heart stopping for a moment and then I breathe in again a bit sharper.
It feels like I kept wanting to review last year even knowing that whatever words to spill out, these were always going to be pre written. I knew the feelings there were no surprises, it felt a bit scripted and so in the end when the year left us. It left without even a whisper in my ear. The clock clicked over and I turned over and got ready to close my eyes and dream of all the carbon monoxide it would take to ease all sleepless nights.
It all sounds a bit negative when a years beginning should be hopeful, but that's the point. I can see it every day in my office where people make big statements of life and living, where they know they can't achieve it and then it ends up a downward spiral into a hell which they never felt would afflict them. The truth is all I wanted to say was good tidings for the new year, but never let the optimism mug you and if it falls never let the pessimism get to you.
Pucker up and kiss the asphalt my beautiful eggs, Happy New Year.
