Swamp

           TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

 And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

          And looked down one as far as I could,

    To where it bent in the undergrowth;

"The Road Not Taken" (first stanza): Robert Frost.

Ahh, there's nothing like a good snippet of poetry to add resonance to an image, eh?

Sorry I did not type much today.

I was going to tell you how the "Swamp' was an extended metaphor for life, and that the geese were in fact you and I, and that the creek was the not a creek at all but the River Styx (Charon has nicked under the bridge for a comfort stop and discovered that it is true about trolls) and that I have tried to make it all child friendly by bumping up the saturation...

But I knew you would have already guessed that ;)  

Thanks for looking. Again :) Please feel free to click for big.....

Shades: A Horror Vacui

Have you ever lain on a sandy beach staring up at the beautiful cloudless blue sky, feeling the sun light warm on your face - and thought about what it would be like if suddenly gravity vanished? How the earth's rotation would fling you into the heavens so fast that your eyeballs would sink into the back of your head, and as you sped into the universe your body would be suddenly surrounded by a never ending 'blueness'.

You know, the wonderful thing is, that if you   lay there on the beach and let the blueness of the sky surround you (like standing in front of a Field Painting) and concentrate hard enough it really does happen. And when it really does happen you don't exactly achieve nirvana. In fact all you get is a horrible spinning inertia driven queasiness as the sandy beach spins around you like a .... like a revolving sandy beach.

I guess, in a way, it's the epiphany of what it would be like to not have gravity.

You remember epiphanies? When a sudden realisation of a particular truth comes whistling out of the air and whacks you in the back of the  skull like a pea  sized comet? And afterwards you are left with a zinging clear brained  head and a realization that the universe is not quite the same as it was two seconds ago. 

To be honest, as I've grown older I don't have ephiphanies any more - I have, what I call, gradiphanies. 

Gradiphanies are kind of like slothful epiphanies that sneak up when you least expect it - like when you are flossing your grandmother's dentures, or measuring the length of your big toes to make sure they are the same size on either foot (they aren't). Or just hanging out outside the lolly shop waiting to be arrested.

Quite often these gradiphanies are epiphanies that you have had before - and have forgotten.

I have a particular one quite regularly - and I had it while I was jogging on the beach yesterday. (see pic at end of post).

Yesterday, as I came closer to the northern headland and it filled my vision, I had the particular peculiar feeling that, despite the sound of the waves and the feel of the wet wind on my shoulders that everything surrounding me wasn't quite real.

Well, to be perfectly specific, that it was myself who wasn't quite real. And that if I wasn't there, then it would make no difference to anything at all. I know it's cliched, that's it's a kind  of tree-falling-in-the-forest-not-making-a-noise moment, but in fifty years time the rocks and the cliffs and the dunes and the ocean would still be there - but it was myself who would be gone. Really truly gone.

But that wasn't yesterday's gradiphany. Yesterday's gradiphany was that, in truth, that it was my presence that made the landscape real, that, in fact, when I was no longer there, when I was no longer observing it, all the light falling from the sky would vanish, the sounds of the breaking waves and the rustling sand dune vegetation would stop, and, finally, the wind would drop away to leave an awful and still one dimensional horror vacui.

Strange isn't it?

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a huge piece of rock lying at the base of one of those cliffs, watching  each generation of beach goers growing old and feeble and becoming nothing but dust.

Still, it's better to have lived and died, than never have lived at all.

At least I think it is.

And to be perfectly honest, we don't get a choice really, do we?

Oh, this is the beach I jog at. :)

And if I can blame someone for this post I would like to blame my outrageously talented (both writer and visual artist) friend Linda Hensley who recently was kind enough to give enough to give me the Genuine Blogger Award for modesty, intelligence, good looks, charm and all round good old fashioned 'niceness' - not to mention brilliance and a penchant for telling lies about myself.

But seriously, thank you Linda :) 

You can find Linda's blog exceptionale here. If you haven't seen her work or read her words then, when you pop in for a visit, you are in for a stupendous treat.

Yield

Hay! Thanks so much for all your kind welcoming comments on my last post. :) They made me feel all warm and fuzzy (could be hot flushes actually  - apparently you start to get them at about the age of 41, especially if you eat a lot of chicken)

Recently I have been reading the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it's an interesting book because, (spoiler alert) the girl with Dragon Tattoo (Lisbeth Salander) is a wild kind of Goth, who in the course of the first two books , beats up a bunch of Hells Angels Bikies, tortures a sexual molestor by tying him to the bed and tattooing his crimes on his tummy, jumps in and out of bed with whoever she wants, all the while escaping a nationwide 'man' hunt, simultaneously tapping into the computers of the famous and infamous alike, transferring millions of Kronor into her own offshore accounts, and living the high life of your average Asperger's Syndrome person, while surviving a hurricane and having breast implants, and, at the same time, high-society-chameleon-like, being able to charm the suit and tie off any man (note: must be father like figure) she comes into contact with..

After a while you kind of start to like her. If you are un homme d'un certain age (and not a Hell's Angel Bikie) you think "gee, why aren't there more girls' like this in my neighbourhood?'.

And if you are a woman I think you are supposed to think: "Yeah, go GIRL!" Power to the Sisterhood!"

But I'm not really sure if that's what women think. After all, the book is written by a male (sadly deceased) who seems to have cast his alter ego as the main male character (totally irresistible to women etc) and let his own corporal fantasies build the framework for the novels.

Mind you the books went viral last year and became the world's second best sellers. So, dead or not, he must be doing something right.

So the 'nice parts' of The Girl with Dragon Tattoo (and there are some wholesome parts on page 37 right down the bottom in the second last paragraph) are the genesis of this image. 

Even Lisbeth Salandar was a child once.

thank you, once again, for looking :) please feel free to click for big - I won't be offended in the  least.

Heart of Darkness

The Hand Of .... err.....  "Death"

Do you know that scene in The Heart of Darkness (Apocolypse Now) where Martin Sheen's head slowly arises out of the dark waters of a Vietnamese river, his face covered in greesepaint so it won't pick up the light as he sneaks up the river bank and assassinates Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando)?

Well, apart from the fact that there is a yellow rubber ducky in this image, this post has nothing to do with that Heart of Darkness scene at all. 

Well that's what my therapist said I should tell you...... She insisted I head you off at the pass, so to speak, before you jumped to any mixed metaphors.

So, to get to the quick of things I'd like to say I am sorry exponentially. I am so sorry to have been away so long. I do have an excuse though and it's a long story, so pull up a chair, pour yourself a nice glass of orange juice, crank up the air conditioner and send me the electricity bill care of Jack's Foster's blog. (billing address at end of post).

Well you see it goes like this.

On Thursday the 22nd of December last year at approximately 5.41 in the afternoon I was riding a mountain bike home from work. It had been raining, there were puddles everywhere, and unfortunately the front wheel hit a huge crack in the road and I went over the handle bars and landed on my face hands and shoulder. 

But hold on. That's not my excuse. I am only telling you that so I get a bit of sympathy.  

 Mind you, to be perfectly honest it bl&#@dy fr&^5gen damn well hurt!

Of course it wouldn't have hurt so much if I hadn't done it  in front of 33 cars stopped at a set of traffic lights in peak hour traffic. 

And it would have hurt even less if I hadn't been wearing the pooncey pooncey bright purple helmet that I'd given to my wife the previous Christmas - a helmet that unfortunately had fitted her like a German WWI helmet might have fitted someone with microcepahly.

 Not that, I hasten to say, my wife has a small head - it's just that mine, being jammed packed full of brains, sand and salt water is abnormally large - and consequently just the right size for the XXXXX helmet I'd bought my wife.

Why am I telling you this...... hmm?
Oh yes, shoulder,sore, concrete, cry sympathy, excuse.
That's it: I am making an excuse!

So, unable to surf and laid up in my imaginary hospital bed surrounded by a bevy of beautiful, curvaceous Teddy Bears of all shapes and sizes, I have been working  on a few books. That's my real excuse (well that's what my therapist told me to say)

How cool is that?

But seriously, my therapist has also been teaching me to be more child friendly. The images here are the result of my first week of sessions. She tells me I need more work but I am not convinced.
:)

 Thank you for looking - again. They get big if you click on them. 

Which kind of freaks me out a little. :)

see you!

PS this one for If's 'Intention.'  At least I think it is.