Music For Your Tape Recorder

Here we are, another orbit around the Sun...

I got three CDs in the last six weeks of the year. It's a bit difficult to explain everything between March 2006 and then.

We Love The Winter, It Brings Us Closer Together

The Hearth, Aaron Gustafson, 2006

Between 1986 and 1990, there was me, my cousin, and my brother. For the best part of the decade it was just us three. The Padre's brothers hadn't had any kids yet.

Around 1992 my cousin moved to Florida via Big Blue and later settled in North Carolina. Roughly every second year my aunt, uncle and cousin would come over for Christmas - and occasionally Easter. When we were still kids, it was easy to maintain a relationship, but by the start of this decade it just became too awkward. One year we could all be on a train to Glasgow having a laugh, and the next time it would all be undone. Ironic considering the ways to stay in touch are much better than 15 years ago.

The 'best' Christmases are still the ones when they come over, though. Christmas doesn't feel like an event unless they're over. Isn't it all about seeing people again in the deep of winter? Something has disappeared from the experience. Perhaps it is the excitement that comes with being a kid receiving all the toys you want. In its place the simple joy of being in a family.

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Beyond The Infinite

Screenshot from Space Odyssey, BBC, 2004

By now anyone reading this blog will have composed an eschewed psychological profile of me. Perhaps the most interesting things are happening inside, not out. A reflection of existence once we'd been to the moon and bought the tat.

Among the small assortment of recurring dreams I have, is a particularly adaptive one. The core elements remain static but the circumstances which frame it are always different. In the 'Astronomic' dream some ridiculously large and visible heavenly object rises/sets/appears in the sky. By this point most of the framing has dropped away and I'm concerned with relentlessly photographing it and staring straight at it as my mind melts.

Sometimes it's a spectacular pumpkin Moonrise/set, a gigantic Jupiter hanging on the horizon, or most recently Comet Holmes (which I have yet to see in reality, despite much effort). In the most strange version I was equipped with large binoculars and witnessed the true structure of the universe - which I can reveal is a lattice of red and green pipes not unlike that old screensaver.

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When You Think Your Toys Have Gone Berserk

When I was a toddler, one of my uncles bought me a particular stuffed toy as a birthday or Christmas present. This toy was the eponymous character of a mid-late 80s tv show. I was very fond of this toy and the show.

Vessels

Public domain

Before people worked in offices in the city, all of humanity was tied to the land. Once the beasts of burden were harnessed, humanity started to escape the limits of their own frailty. Across four millennia; the horse pulled the cart, the ox ploughed the field, and the donkey carried a messiah or two. The cereal crops harvested by these agricultural humans could both sustain the farmers and their animals. The humans ate the grain and the animals (both the working ones, and the unemployed ones bred for meat) ate the stalk.

Celebrate

Ah, two years of blogging. Unlike last year's frantic pace, I've slowed down quite a bit this year. Maybe I've cleared a backlog of thoughts or maybe being unemployed just wasn't much to write about. As I said earlier:

Ëçë wëb-sögnäh eþ satewai jaami to alirazdlis.
This blog is as much for me as for whoever reads it.

There's plenty of stories about being a postman, I just haven't got round to writing about it all. Who doesn't want to hear about psychotic dogs, urine-soaked stairwells, and the passionate hate for people and their mail that develops within no time at all?

Pruitt Igoe

Kim Noble (Patricia) - Golden Stretch, 2005

Marching ants scurry to work. Blind ants drowned by rising water and squashed by falling rocks.

Too fragile. Drop it and feel relief. Wound tighter, moving faster, the tension unbearable. Hand-held. Quivering and losing balance. Oh, the fall. I say, you sir, would you please catch us? Pogo till your neck snaps. Cause when the sun goes down...