no evil star

Or maybe I should call this My Secret Internet Life, but I’ll get to that later. If I can get rid of my dead leg and hold the most utmostest concentration, that is. Ow.

I typed that about 10 minutes ago and then lost complete concentration. As I am wont to do. But in my dithering I did (re) find this:

… I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you’ll root
and the real green thing will come

which is from this.

And I also found some other stuff. Plus I remembered the sleep game I played last night with myself at about 2 in the morning.

It went something like this (and I think you’ll see the pattern forming if you squint at the sequence very closely and cross your fingers and toes all at once):

Alvar Aalto, Basil Brush, Coco Chanel, Danny de Vito, ee cummings, Fred Flintstone, Greta Garbo, Harry Houdini, … , James Joyce, Ku Klux Clan, Lucy Liu, Marilyn Monroe, … , … , Peter Piper, … , Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek……

Okay and I’m bored with that now. It didn’t actually help me get to sleep, anyway, because I kept getting stuck. And when I got stuck I got agitated. And I also sort of overheated (in that cloying itchy-wool way you get when your mother tries to pull a tight jumper down hard over your head and it won’t go and you see stars and your skin flashes and prickles… and really you were warm enough already without the jumper).

I have a frustrating head. Sometimes I don’t know what to do about it. But night time head is the worst. Night time head can be a bad, bad thing to be lugging around (and so firmly attached) in the dark.

Today I noticed the daphne in my garden for the first time. I walked into town and saw girls with bare legs. It just seemed so audacious and wanton. And strangely summery. Bare legs! I cancelled appointments and felt good about it. I wore jeans to work and felt a bit scrappy.

This evening I accidentally discovered a blog I had set up and completely forgotten about, called NO EVIL STAR. I was trying to bluff forgotten passwords and hack my way into another blog (not this one). I thought I’d finally cracked the pesky code, set about my business, only to discover I was in an entirely alien blog (but also one of my own making, apparently, which was vaguely worrying to me but also perfectly harmless).

I still haven’t worked out the code to the blog I really need the code for. But I think I might do some resuscitation work on NO EVIL STAR anyway. God knows why and what rambling paths I will take it down. But why not.

(And what we have here, with NO EVIL STAR, by the way, is not an enterprising digital spirit creating yet another floaty ego in the digisphere. Oh, well, it might be a bit of that, minus the enterprising. But really it’s just old fashioned procrastination wearing very modern clothes. And on that note, back to some shit about symmetrical communication or something. Bye.)

night excursions

This is a picture I took on my phone this evening in Martinborough. It’s a little wooden church with the lights on inside, at the very end of sunset.

I just went through my camera photos and discovered a lot of wobbly photos I have taken recently on night excursions. Some of which I will share here, some I will relegate to the recycle bin where they belong. Actually, many of the ones I will share most likely belong in the recycle bin too, but there is something charming about their wobbliness, or I want to keep them as a mental note of the evening.

I like night a lot. I am a night person. Night is weird, though. Everything changes. Perspective changes. In the dead of night things mushroom or snowball or balloon – whatever the word is. Things take on eerie shapes, quite divorced from their innocent daytime form.

Things look nice at night. Lights are nice. Candlelight is nice. Dim rooms are nice. Light against dark is nice. I think partly I take night excursion photos because I like the way things look when I cannot see them properly, and really for no other reason than that. I like things lit up. I like walking when it’s nearly night time and seeing people’s lights come on.  [On that, Ali Smith wrote a really good story about that – the feeling you get when you see the lights in other people’s houses. I did try and find the story, but it’s buried somewhere three-deep and I gave up. I think the story is in the collection called Hotel World.]

I have an old favourite book called Night, by A. Alvarez. It’s really just a study of what night – and darkness – is. I might read it again, now that I have pulled it out, right after I finish reading my field study of melancholy.

I like this quote, from Don DeLillo’s Americana: I began in the dark and would no doubt end the same way. But somewhere between the beginning and the end there would have to be an attempt to explain the darkness, if only to myself, no matter how strange a form the explanation would take, and regardless of consequence.

Dark is a bit of a clusterfuck, when you think about it. Maybe it pays not to, most of the time [see earlier post on overthinking].

I didn’t take the No Exit photo. It is a (bad) photo of a photo by Leigh Mitchell Anyon from his Night Series. I had to get the camera on an angle where the light wouldn’t reflect in the glass, so there are a few foreign objects (namely circular black object above right hand barrel) that aren’t in the original.

This is Oriental Parade on a still night.

This is a pretty lightshow at a concert.

This is some kind of fairground attraction.

These are fireworks that look like jellyfish.

This is a full moon.

And these are apartment lights that nearly look like cats’ eyes.