What's actually in a cup of tea.

Today was one of 'those days'. I think today was a peak Day. So many irritating things that could have been avoided, happened, and it totally sucked. Each event gave a little bit of my happiness away to self hatred. And I started to explain each event through a very personal explanation, not that "shit happens", but that it was my fault. That part of the problem was that Today I found myself floating around in space to such an extent that I probably graduated from space college, from space cadet to fully qualified astronaut. It was an off day, with shit things happening and my shadow using them to remind me that I was 'off.' And so as I sat looking at my spilt tea slowly spreading across the floor, and I was at such a loss. It was the last thing on top of a shit sequence of events in that day, not just because I wasn't paying attention because I didn't have the headspace, but also the pressure, and tiredness, and unhappiness. And I was really looking forward to that tea. I had a whole packet of Nice biscuits prepped and ready for maximum dippage. But I started thinking, maybe I'm actually cursed? Maybe witchcraft exists? Maybe it's the universe? Maybe there is a chaos theory and I am part of it? Or maybe it's just my spatial awareness? And my depth perception? and my short term memory? Maybe all of them together work at just the right level to create a halo of 'inconvenient' affect around me? Maybe there's an  increase in probability of formally static objects falling over around me that could be statistically significant when compared to other people? (which would be hilarious) Maybe I only actively experience my life when things actually start to go wrong? Maybe I only pay attention when things could go wrong? Maybe I'm prone to anxiety because it serves a social function and adaptation to my lack of awareness?.. Maybe social anxiety is a learnt strategy because of a need to be aware in social situations? Maybe I'll never fit in? It took me a while of complete despair and over analysis to realise, like the click of a kettle reaching its boil, that I could just make another cup of tea and stop fucking thinking so much; stop taking myself so seriously; that I can learn from each mistake and not feel so doomed to failure. And when I did I felt so fucking proud. Im happy I made that decision. It felt like restoring balance, like breathing out, like following a flow downstream instead of up it. It's the first time in a while I've been able to without obsessing over my thoughts. And that second cup was fucking excellent. And I remembered it when I ripped the wing mirror off my car on a pillar, later that night pulling out of a parking bay. That's progress, baby. 

The Best Reference

The solo in Wearing the Inside Out at 5:52 directly quotes the solo of Comfortably Numb at 5:30 (in this video above).

This is a hugely important and meaningful thing for Gilmour to do in this particular song and yet only lasts a couple of seconds.

Wearing the Inside Out is a song written by Rick Wright, and his first song that he sings solo, let alone writes lyrics for, since Time on DSOTM. It is absolutely his most personal song, showing a very seldom seen side to the quietest person in Pink Floyd. In this song he is speaking his inside emotions out; speaking of the past and the fact that by doing so he is regaining a voice he has lost. Because of this, the feelings in the song are intensely vulnerable and the song itself has a very tentative and fragile mood to it. As well as that, because the song is about the past, and only just coming out of silence after so long, it has a bitterness from anger, sadness, and almost self-righteousness to it. You aren’t quite sure if the song is about Rick, or it is about Roger Waters- who pushed him towards his silence; who the bitterness in the song blames for his silence.

Look at him now
He's paler somehow
But he's coming round
He's starting to choke
It's been so long since he spoke
Well he can have the words right from my mouth

The whole of the Wall is about Water’s anger; the bricks are his reasons, the Wall becomes a monstrous defense-mechanism structure that only goes to trap and disembody the protagonist from his self. Thus, when it came to putting this deeply personal struggle into music, Waters was obviously extremely vulnerable; bearing his heart on his sleeve. He was totalitarian over the recording process and extremely controlling. Thus, for many reasons, but mainly because of Waters’ anger, during the time of recording Comfortably Numb, Wright was at the absolute peak of his silence, not allowed a voice in the creative process let alone as a friend or a human being. And so he exiled himself from the band, refusing to speak to Waters and indeed anyone in the band. Wright’s voice was lost in the maelstrom of Roger’s hugely fragile ego. And Wright could not express himself in any way- apart from this taking himself out of the band, which is a very loud, but more passive expression of reactive anger. Wrights rage was bottled up and silenced:

"I murmured a vow of silence and now // I don't even hear when I think aloud"

Comfortably Numb itself is Roger’s perspective- it is his expression of disaffection, disembodiment, separation, and rage made impotent by the demands of having to perform constantly. It is about not having a voice, ironically, in the same way that Wright was not allowed expression. It is a song that Waters wrote after an experience where he was stricken with terrible stomach pain just before a gig, and a Doctor gave him painkillers so he could get on with the show. He used this experience between a doctor and himself as a metaphor for the similarly intense feeling of disaffection that he felt between aspects of himself, the audience and his fellow band mates. The song’s outlook of this pain, in contrast to the hindsight and remorse in Wearing the Inside Out, is one where this pain of separation and disaffection is a burden merely to be shouldered for a greater good, for the good of the audience, at the expense of Waters.

"Just a little pin prick

There'll be no more aaaaaaaah!

But you may feel a little sick

Can you stand up?

I do believe it's working, good

That'll keep you going through the show

Come on, it's time to go."

Significantly, the words “time to go” are repeated over and over again in “Bring the Boys Back Home”, the song preceding Comfortably Numb, as a relentless knocking; a Stage Manager’s call to the stage. As well as that, “The Show Must Go On” is the song directly after Comfortably Numb, further emphasising Waters’ inability to express his pain because of the pressure of being a producing artist.  Anger then forms from this bottled pressure, and anger turns to impotent rage because he must he must perform without a break. 

In both situations, anger and painful emotions are firmly kept locked inside. Being Comfortably Numb is a notion where one has to just get through it; the word Comfortable becomes tongue in cheek, because the numbness; the inability to express frustration, becomes the real pain.

This can be heard in the song itself, by switching from B minor to D major. The pure angst of being numb- the impotent rage itself- is only expressed in Gilmour’s screaming guitar solo. 

So when Gilmour, who was obviously part of this furious cold war, refers back to Comfortably Numb through his guitar, which is his way of expressing his voice in this song, Wright's narrative about finally becoming less numb, finally speaking out without fear, being heard, and being able to hear his true self, is reinforced by recalling all of the pain and lack of expression that Comfortably Numb is not only about, but brought about in its recording. The pain of Comfortably Numb is the reason that Wright had to bottle up his emotions inside in the first place, and Comfortably Numb itself perfectly describes the situation of impotent rage. Gilmour playing it in this song highlights the reasons that Wearing the Inside Out is thus a song so meaningful. The pure vulnerability of Wright speaking out for the first time is both righteous and jubilant in the fact that he is not numb anymore, but it is also a challenge towards Roger to do the same. And Gilmour, who sends out his own challenges to Roger in other songs in the album, refers back to the past with his solo in a way that highlights with deep remorse the fact that both Wright and Waters, were equally too numb and clouded by anger to reconcile with each other. Thus, the song is a hopeful, and even revolutionary song from a feeling of complete stagnation, towards a cathartic expression of fermented, painful feelings of remorse, loss and bitterness, that are all compounded by this hindsight that screams out not only in Gilmours solo, but the use of the farfisa organ that was so heavily used in Wish You Were Here. Overall, it is just a bloody great song and I love it.

Unlimited Breakfast: Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

The city is a place of murderers, prostitutes, businessmen, pidgeons, and other birds in fruit laden foliage, hanging unpicked, eventually falling, and melting back into to the ground. This is the circle of life. And all beings here hang in the noisy nether zone somewhere between life and death. When you live here you have to accept that your death is certain, life a dying process gone grey by way of lain down tarmac. You eke out a life somewhere halfway in purgatory, shuffling along a relentless conveyer belt you until you hand in your shopping; carried away in black plastic like the bottles of some nefarious drink you use to drown out the sound of sirens past your window at night.

And once in a while everyone crosses the road, across the line, into footfallen, rubberworn alleys where no one can save you- no gods, no mothers, no father figures, no Freudian slips to lighten the mood- the random fancies of copper coins that glint devilishly on the floor scream at you to flip them.  Coins you’ve already had spent as soon as you’re dragged out screaming into the cold uncaring world, eyes wide and bloodshot, your gumless screams stifled by scratchy blankets covering your new nude body, trailing umbilical all over the shop until the doctor finally comes and decides if you’re an innie or an outie- sealed- until the fat lady at the fruit machine sings with triple bananas.

And as time goes by you have to ferment. You dodge cars, and the people who flyer for causes, surprise and double take await you past every curved corner already cut by the almighty architects of the city.  And so you’re stuck here, tall brick and concrete monoliths stand bearing down on you, keeping your eyes low, and your spirits lower until you find the dark settles down on the ground. And that’s why I come and go. My name at the time was McFlanaghan. Detective Chief Inspector McFlanaghan. Chaos and I play a fickle game, we make our moves one after the other, never winning, both playing, forever.

I was born and raised in the city by my father, my mother died before I was born. Her name was Lilah, the softness of her name hung tenderly in my memory, I only knew her from my father’s pictures. His name was Benedict. Like the eggs. And we had a saying in our tiny two-man family: don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. We loved egg based phrases, we really did. But then my father died in an omelet fire. And the firefighters were baffled as to how the fire started in the first place. I can barely remember now if the coroner decided that the cause of death was house fire or lust for breakfast. But that was my dad through and through. He loved breakfast. And he loved making it. He always made a habit of encouraging me to go out and make my own. His words still ring in my ears, tempered words that shone through the grimace borne of the gentle searing splatter of bacon grease onto his hairy arms. “Make your own damn breakfast!” he used to say, whilst waving his shiny, melted plastic spatula up and down like a wizard’s wand, shoulders twitching minutely at every tiny jumping drop of grease. And I took those words to heart. Because it turns out that breakfast isn't just the most important meal of the day, breakfast is life. He used to make an omelet every single morning for fourty-four years since he could reach the hob. He taught me to twist and push until you hear the cracking fires emerge. Twist and push and tear the knob right off to keep the flames firing the frying pan of destiny. And then crack your eggs. There were times when it seemed like he was telling me old news- ideas I already knew- but as soon as he was gone it was because I never knew his story. I never realized the struggle that gave weight behind his words. I never realized why he was telling me these things. He was full of wisdom, laughter, and breakfast.  But I never cooked my own. I could never find it within me. And then I was the one with egg on my face, some kind of yolk I could never wipe off.

So I had to find my own purpose in life. It just so happened my purpose found me first. It was chaos itself. I found my way to see through the charred, steaming hulk of our little burnt eggbasket. When our dream burnt down, I caught a glimpse into the writhing underworld of hatred. And so I remembered the ethos my father gave me before his pancakes were flipped. It was for me an ethos unexplored, where the night could set it ablaze at any moment. And so I packed my bags full of determination, hate, fear, eggs, turned them into weapons, against those who ride on the coattails of chaos. Against those who set the night ablaze. And all in all, in the deepest, darkest nights of your life Fate rides a flaming chariot through the sky, careening his reined charges through the snow that drifts so calmly in the air, and he enters your quiet life like a master cat-burglar. He delicately lays down the law of the universe right next to your sleeping face until you bolt upright and realize you’re right in the shit. I always hated Christmas. And so I am but a ghost in the footsteps of dusk, trying finding my path. I often find myself looking up, trying to see past the sodium orange lamplight that eats into my soul like moths to a stained rug. To me the sky is forever a colander; the stars pitted gaps in a bowl of black, the night seeps in.

Looking back over my shoulder at the never ending line of streetlamps, my gloved hands flipped up the collar on my modest beige duster. Then I reached into its folds, my quarry the crumpled pack of French blues. I pulled one out, lit it, and inhaled deeply. I shuddered. A cloud of smoke fell up past my head. And it was a cold evening, no doubt Emerson, my partner, would be feeling it too, back in our wheels for this whole operation. Necessity had found us an old ice cream van. We called her Laquisha. She ran like a beaut, and we’d modified her original ice cream truck siren to be piercingly loud. We careened around in her, and as long as she continued to pump out 99’s, we would continue to pump out .44s, right out of her ample side window at whatever bastard needed one. One after another, in whatever form, we served righteous brainfreeze to this tangled cerebral mess of a town. I was glad Emerson was keeping her company. I had asked him to save me a couple of flakes to stick into a mighty vanilla swirl for when I got back. I smiled to myself as I walked down this dustily lit road. I paused. Why was I here? And then I remembered.

I carried on smoking, walking, thinking through the cold. I flicked my cigarette down a side alley, watching its orange arc fly through the air until it stopped, sizzling, in small pool of blood on the floor. I jolted and swore. Mild fear rippled through my body as I thought through my next moves, a mild fear only felt on Wednesdays, a day for planning. But it was a Tuesday. Tuesdays need no planning. And I began to follow the trail along the course concrete until I laid eyes on a body. It had fallen clumsily. I swore again and closed my eyes. Poor girl. As I opened them I was numb. She had a stamp on her forehead, chaotic milky eyes looking up into the night sky. Her limbs were strewn about, her left porcelain hand clutched an open packed of custard creams, she was missing a shoe. She was clearly dressed for a night out, long flowing black dress, torn in places, and a black velvet choker cruelly highlighting the damage sustained to her neck and face. And I noticed that the packet of biscuits was left full. Not a single one taken. Her lipstick, deep red lipstick, was smudged across her cheek like scar. And she was punctuated by an obscene smattering of beige crumbs, they were scattered like fallen stardust across the flowing black fabric that covered her empty body, a delicate, obscene galaxy all the way down to her midriff. She had light brown hair, curly, but lacking volume and lustre, as if unconditioned for weeks. The light failed to bounce off, any bounce long since gone. And as I stared with dull silence echoing in my ears I noticed the finer details. Suddenly, I heard the sharp slap of feet rushing up behind me. I snapped round, drawing my '44 as fast as i could. The footsteps stopped. I squinted past my dim shadow into the fog of the city night, my barrel hovering, pointed delicately, and unknowingly in the briskness.
"…Show yourself!"
And from the deep dark at the end of the alleyway emerged a small thin man in an apron smeared with fingerstreaks of chocolate. He wore a tall white chef’s hat with a heavily mustached man giving both thumbs up, his eyes screaming happiness. He took a few steps forward, finishing the end of a waffle cone.
"It's only me, boss!" he called as crumbs spewed from his mouth in no apparent direction.
I paused, sighed, holstered my piece and zipped up my fly.

"Goddammit Emerson. You really fucking scared me there."

His eyes were always lit with the sparkle of a man who lives life for the sheer hell of it. That’s why he was with me. I followed hell, he followed suit, depending on the formality of the occasion. He was the yin to my yang, the bread to my butter side down. And there was undoubtedly a fire in his warm soul that never went out. But as those green orbs looked past me, his smile fell, the sparkle faltered. A single drop of vanilla ice cream fell from his bottom lip and hit the ground with a wet tap.

“Its… her” he said.

“Yes.” I sighed. “I know that.” We both turned around. Emerson turned around again to look in the same direction. I understood his shock. No amount of death is ever right after a waffle cone. But the time for ice cream had been and come and passed away.

The Time In Between/Mindfulness/A Connectivist Ontology/Expressing Nietzschean Affirmation

Where does the time in between the second hand go? It seems to be forgotten under the gravity of the second hand hitting its mark. And when you’re stuck in a depressing rut it seems to me to be that one only focuses on something final. You live in the moment where the second hand has hit. When you’ve completed a task. When you’ve seen something and need to remember it. When there’s a finality to a process. And that need only goes to reinforce the importance of each second.

But a second is not a moment in time, it is a process. And forgetting this ignores, not actively, but subconsciously, the time that makes up everything in between. The ever powerful 'they' say that the journey is far more important than the end result, because you couldn’t get to where you are going without starting a single step towards it. 

And if this is the case, we appear to live our lives in a mode of going from result to result, from place to place, from being to being, person to person, only getting gratification from finality. 

But this is to willingly forget the importance of the factors leading up to those moments. And when we can’t make sense of a moment and it seems impossible, we try to rationalise it out place order over chaos. In other words, through our methods of understanding, we try to make sense of chaos. But chaos is infinite, and using our concepts of causality necessarily skews hindsight and foresight into an understandable mode. This is halfway to living in between the second hand.

Nietzsche was given strength and joy through this idea. The very weight of this idea gave him meaningful existence, and it is fostered on the idea that our lives may eternally recur forever. 

If it is a given that we constantly cycle through life and death, our lives recurring in multiple dimensions at once in the exact same way, like looking in an infinity mirror, or a webcam's feedback loop, then we can start to see everything we do, process and moment, as meaningful. And we need not even try to comprehend this, because if every moment contains the grain of sand and its fall in a sandglass, then we can understand each individual grain as a meaningful grain.  The same runs true for the time in between the second hand. 

To understand this, and to love this inevitability of fate, is to live life meaningfully. And even though there is a stream of the universe do not take this to mean that one has no free will, this would be a gross nihilist appropriation of something so small but blindingly bright. Because there may be a game constantly playing, with rules, and players, but this does not mean that one does not choose your moves. Thus, "If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed."

So, when we find ourselves lost in a process, mostly extremely common tasks, our minds elsewhere, such as driving a car, changing the binbags, making a cup of tea, making pasta for dinner for the 10^th fucking time in a row, we lose ourselves in them, because we deem them to be menial, allow our minds to drift away into the realms of imagination where mindfulness is lost, where we can track back or forward through memories that cause us anxiety and only go to keep us lost in mists of memory.

But these processes, exactly because they are so commonplace can allow us to remember the time in between the second hand. Because we can start to think that the result of all of our processes of being are as important as the end result. And this makes the ostensibly meaningless extremely meaningful as a connection to the end result of any process. And we can begin to appreciate the human race as a whole, such as the engineers who have constructed these material parts of the whole. Someone has built the shelf you use to store your food. Hilariously, the cheesegrater could not exist without the need to eat cheese. Someone has engineered that car to take you to your destination. The road that you drive on. The green light from red has to go through orange to get there. The beep of of the green man saying you can cross the road is a singular moment in existence but it is connected to the stream of the universe, of fate itself. Each process and moment can therefore open up to meaningfulness, rather than as a point to pass through to get to the next second in the day. We are all grains in an hourglass, but each grain can fall glittering afresh forever,