Joining the Dots – A Short Story
It was sometime in his mid-fifties that it struck him. Sitting one night, bored behind his computer screen, he suddenly had an idea. Increasingly feeling isolated and alone, he had begun to feel as if, somehow, life wasn’t really real. Reality wasn’t real. The feeling had started in his thirties and intensified as he got older. Life seemed out of control, beyond his sphere of influence. It was as if the world had been created just to keep him afraid and controlled. Or was it occupied? Yes, occupied. The more wars, threats of war, strikes, accidents and so on, the more occupied humans become with fear. Then there was the rise of social media and its avalanche of idiots who suddenly thought they knew more than the experts. This manifested
Read More »Love, Music and Obsession
Great blog title. I’m obsessive and have put out another album of music. Actually, I even have two more songs lined up for release as well. The album I called The Anatomy of Love. Hence – Love, Music and obsession…. Strangely enough, I find that friends and relatives simply ignore all of my please to give my music a listen. I think I’ve written so many books and recorded so much music and stuff, people are just – well – sick of me. It’s disappointing that really as you kind of hope friends and relatives will share and help you build an audience. Maybe it’s me but I don’t see it happening. Then, just as you are thinking well, why do I bother if no one actually listens, I get
Read More »The Loss of a Friend to Social Media
While doing my PhD in Glasgow at the University of Strathclyde, I met a wonderful, loving and balanced guy who became a mentor and friend. After leaving college, we lost contact but later found one another on facebook. A gap of twenty years meant that much had changed of course but still, it was good to reconnect. But people change. The problem with Facebook is that you see people’s bad side. Their obsessions and worries. I know I show mine all of the time and I sometimes decide to change my approach to Facebook and not use it as a place to express my frustrations…… However, my friend began posting quite a lot on politics. His postings and comments got more and more, well, strange. He developed an absolute hatred
Read More »It’s a Black and White World
The world is changing and I find myself feeling old and hankering after the good old days….. and then, I don’t. Walking this morning I realized that sometimes I live in the past and I must make an effort to be in the present. I wrote a blog post once theorizing that perhaps aging is what happens when the volume of forward-looking thought is outweighed by the volume of backward-looking memories – I called it the tipping point. I still think there may be something to that idea but essentially, we have to live in the moment or we are not living at all rather we are dreaming our way through life. I struggle to explain some things and this idea that the world is increasingly black and white is one of
Read More »What Happens When You Try to Debate Climate Change
I worry for humanity given the younger generations inability to think critically I do. I guess I’ll be gone by the time they wreak their havoc on the world so maybe I should stop worrying… Anyway. When you try to have a debate with these younger people about climate change some strange behavior manifests. I have had several attempts at debating this issue with a young BBC reporter, A British MP (and a bunch of his followers who all piled in), some people on Facebook etc. Rather than engage with you on the topic, the response includes all of the following; You write badly and need to pay attention to your grammar (I actually use Grammarly, so I guess that is a waste of cash), You just used the word ‘crap’
Read More »Art for Art’s Sake?
For a while, I have been thinking that the walls of my rented place look a bit bare. I had a poke around IKEA and places like that but I’m not going to pay $50 for mass produced ‘art’. Then, my friend Walter Novak gave me a couple of his photographs – a beautiful shot of David Bowie, a ‘fan’ photo or two and a picture of my daughter he shot one evening recently. I framed them and hung them. But still – lot’s of white space. What to do? Over the Xmas holidays, my girlfriend and I were visiting Telc – a beautiful town here in the Czech Republic and we visited an art store. Suddenly, I realized you can actually buy real art for less than that mass-produced stuff
Read More »Happy New Year
It is a funny thing, but I hate New Year’s Eve. Always have done. I could never quite understand the need to celebrate what is essentially just another day by getting drunk and letting off fireworks? Now, starting a New Year hung over. However, Happy New Year to you all! I spent New Year’s Eve at home watching Netflix – it was perfect. At midnight, we stood on my back balcony and watched and listened to what seemed to be the break out of a war that went on pretty much all night. It reminded me of visiting the main square in Prague several years back on New Year’s Eve. Hundreds of people – many drunk – letting off rockets and bangers everywhere. Through the clouds of acrid smoke, it
Read More »Other Eyes
Sometimes I see things. Its been that way all of my life. Now, when I say ‘see’, I’m not sure this is an accurate description yet it is the only word I can use. I see and feel all at the same time and the two ‘senses’ are somehow merged as if one. As an example, a few months ago, as two friends and I stood within a stone circle close by the Scottish border, I ‘saw’ a lady step out from behind one of the stones and smile. Her hair was loose and flowing in the wind and she wore a flowing gown of sheer simplicity. As I mentioned to my friends “Oh, we have a visitor!” They both looked down the approach path expecting someone, well, physical. Then,
Read More »An Immigrant and His Life – Walter Novak
Last week, I met my friend Walter Novak for a beer and a chat. Walter is a Czech-American that found fame in the US as a photographer and rightly so – he has a unique ability to find the photo. The topic of the conversation drifted to his life story and what he told me I think is very apt given the times that we live in. He left the former Czechoslovakia two-years after the velvet revolution. When he arrived in the USA, he could barely speak a word of English and he had to gain a green card of course. For a couple of years, he had two jobs mopping floors and he got up and demonstrated the movement that he perfected so well as he mopped for maximum efficiency.
Read More »Someone is Listening
I got a report from Spotify this week. Apparently, my songs were listened to for a total of 14,000 minutes in 2018. OK – it’s only 9.72 days but, for an unknown guy in his late 50’s, I’m quite pleased. Spotify is only one place to hear my music – it’s available to and hopefully listened to on many other platforms like Deezer, iTunes, Amazon, Soundcloud, and Reverbnation to name a few. Someone is listening. In the run-up to Christmas, I treated myself to a couple of things to try to get my sound quality even better in 2019. I bought a pre-amp for the microphone to try to beef up vocal quality and a synth keyboard for better keyboard dexterity – I was using the QWERTY keyboard! Some of the
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