Talk about meeting interesting people…last night I went out with the team I’m working with for a meal and a few drinks. After they all called it an evening, I started wandering back to the little hole in the wall of a hotel I was staying in, which apparently is in one the worst areas of Derby. I couldn’t face hanging out in the room waiting to fall asleep, so I rang one of the other consultants who is working on the project and I knew to be a bit of a gambler. Sure enough, he was in the casino. He told me to come on over and have him paged and he’d sign me in. So that’s what I did.

As we were sitting at the bar, An older guy, white hair, black suit, comes over. Pat (my consultant friend) starts chatting with this guy, you know, the usually stuff, “how this one, how’s that one.” I assumed it was a mate of Pat’s who lived in Derby and that they were catching up on things. Pat then introduces me to him. His name is Dez. We start talking. “Where are from in the States?” New Jersey. “I know New Jersey. I’ve spent a lot of time there.” Atlantic City. “Yeah, and other places.” We banter on like that for a while. We discovered that we’d both been to Boston and I tell him about the time me and some friends broke into someone’s house (someone we knew and knew they were away) to watch football and drink beer from the keg we’d “acquired”. We were kids, all under aged drinkers, and needed some place to drink this thing and not get caught.

Anyway, he tells me about his dad and the time they were in Boston how they drove where they weren’t suppose to be driving and had all these people pissed off at them. We chuckle at bit. Then Dez calls his dad over and introduces me to him. We exchange a few words and then his dad grabs a pint and heads to the end of the bar. a few feet away. Dez and I continue to talk. I tell him I like dog racing. He says he’ll arrange a night out for me at the Nottingham track, dinner and all. I tell him I’m into adventure racing and mountain biking. He disappears for a moment and comes back with, and introduces me to, an elite class downhill mountain biker. Dez says, “you have to have contacts, you never know what’ll happen.” I chat to the downhill mountain biker. He’s raced all over Europe and some in the States. It turns out we’ve both been to Morzine in France and we exchange stories about the mountains there. We chat for a little while longer and then mountain bike man nips off to go back to gambling.

Dez and I start talking again. I tell him I’m looking for a female team-mate to race with us in April. He disappears again and returns with a fit looking female. It turns out she’s a fitness freak and likes the idea of adventure racing and wouldn’t mind giving it a go. I tell Dez about Ascent. He says, “Call Richard Branson. He’s into those things.” It’s about this time that I start to think that Dez is my genie in a bottle. I ask. He conjures it up. Dez sees that I’m married. “How far are you from Wolverhampton?” 45 minutes. “Good. I own a fantastic Greek restaurant there. You bring your wife, have a meal, all on the house.”

The hours pass and Dez finally disappears back into the casino. Pat leans over and tells me who Dez is.

The last scene in my dream I remember is looking in a closet. The closet floor was covered with clothes, jackets, boxes, and a lot of other miscellaneous items. A green raincoat caught my eye because I thought it was my Gortex jacket. I pulled this green raincoat from underneath the pile of junk only to discover that it wasn’t my Gortex jacket. In fact when I looked up I saw my Gortex hanging up on a hanger. I found in the corner of the closet an old bad of crisp that had been left there opened and with crisp still inside. The crisps were molded so I decided to through the bag in the trash. Well on my way to the trash bin, the bag starts to move. Low and behold, there’s a mouse in the bag. He pokes his little head out to see what’s going on. Well I didn’t want him in the house for fear that more mice would come. I opened the back door and attempted to throw him out. Only he just fell out of the bag onto the porch, so I tried to kill him by throwing heavy items at him. I missed. The mouse, in a frantic attempt to escape my flying objects, fell into the little pond we had beside the porch and started to swim away. But he didn’t get far as one of the frogs in the pond saw him as meal and went straight for him. The mouse started climbing up the side wall out of the pond, but the frog was quick to zap him with his sticky tongue and yank the mouse back down onto a ledge. The frog jumped out of the water and onto the ledge to finish the job. He managed to swallow the mouse.

I must be undergoing phase change as I’m feeling a bit emotionally detached, unable to hold on to a concrete feeling. My rational mind, of course, has moved in to fill the void. Being more in tune with my emotions/intuition/spirit than my intellect, this is causing me some difficulty because my rational mind likes to analyze things and look for opportunities to say why this or that is not working. Whereas my feeling mind looks at the same situation and says no problem, there’s nothing that a little energy and enthusiasm can’t solve; let’s get to it.

I had an odd thought while washing the spaghetti stained dishes at midnight. I was thinking about the various ways folks in the business I’m in go about marketing themselves and I thought in a lot of cases, well in most cases, they/we parade ourselves around like cheap tarts on a red light street. We mangle the truth.

On the other hand, artists, poets and writers (creative) are committed to the truth and are willing to starve to death in order to maintain the truth and their commitment to telling the truth through their art. I’m reminded of one of Bono’s lyrics, “All I have is a red guitar, three cords, and the truth.”

I sold out a long time ago. I abandoned my search for the truth in order to consume the intoxications of adventure, treasure, and the fairer sex.

The end of a long work week has finally arrived. I decided to entertain the team today by eating a live worm for every piece of product they sold. I swear I can still feel the worms squirming around in my belly.

I’ve been away from my fictional world for a few days. I started redesigning my website and got caught up in the excitement of making some forward progress or should I say some visible forward progress. The fruits of my labor were immediately perceived. Whereas, my fiction seems to be a lot of agonizing over even the smallest of words and the smallest of choices and hours go by and all I have to show for it is a dubious 700 words which I probably won’t use. I suppose that’s the reality of writing fiction, especially long fiction where the end can seem an eternity away. Still I’m not disheartened by it. I can ride the wave of the emotional high I’m feeling from accomplishing some of my other tasks.

Slaying Dragons…I’ll have to work that into the title of one of my books. I like the metaphor of slaying dragons, where the dragon represents some obstacle or problem one has to face. I’ve been wearing my ST Michael’s pendant. It’s a special pendant, one forged specifically for airborne soldiers as ST Michael is the patron saint of paratroopers. On this particular pendant, he’s jumping from the sky, along with other paratroopers, to slay the dragon.

I’m touching places in the depths of my soul that i haven’t touched in a long long time…and it feels good, good to be alive, awake from an enchanted lumbering lifeless dream…

Nobody told me writing a novel was so slow, well slow for me anyway. Good news is I’m making forward progress. What I do find strange in the telling of the tale is that I’m finding myself living in two worlds, one real, one somewhere between the shadows of reality.

I miss the smell of your perfume
Lingering
Lingering with me
Reminding me
Reminding me that somewhere in this savage land
Someone loves me
Loves me

Have we forgotten
Forgotten how to be romantic?
Sick with puppy-love

I want to return
Return to the warmth of your embrace.
Are you waiting for my return?
I return,
We talk of things functional;
carpets;
school plays;
kitchen fittings.

Have we forgotten
Forgotten how to be romantic?
Sick with puppy-love

Maybe it’s my fault
My fault;
I spend too much time in my own head
I used to never leave the house
Without kissing you
Kissing you;
on the carpet;
in the back of the stands;
in the kitchen.

Have we forgotten
Forgotten how to be romantic?
Sick with puppy-love

Where did it all begin? Where will it end? What happened in the middle?

If all the world’s a stage, what part am I playing?
The puppet? The pirate? The poet? The pauper? The pawn or the king?

Or indeed the fool?

I want to be the knight in shining armor dashing forth from my castle keep to slay dragons.

What dragons shall I slay today?
My bills? My meals? My car? My contracts? My invoices? My Taxes?

I was Robin Williams in Deconstructing Harry today, out of focus man. It was just one of those days were I never quite seemed to get in gear. The highlight of my day was meeting Jenny for panini’s and coffee at the Border’s bookshop in Leicester.

I feel like I’ve been busy being present and by being present I haven’t thought about all the things I’ve been setting up to do in the future and now when I sit and reflect I feel like there’s so much I need to be doing that I haven’t done. How do you get around that? Because I must say it’s a wonderful feeling to live in the present,to be here now, but then things get scary when I stop to think about the destination and not the journey. There is a line of thought that says if you don’t have a destination you’ll never get there. But where is there? And what does it mean to be there as oppose to being here.

I’ve been…I don’t know where I’ve been. Where ever I’ve been, it hasn’t been on this keyboard like I should be. To be fair, I have been writing a character biography which is just over 5 pages long. I have two characters, but no story and I’m not sure which character is the main character. There’s a young lady and a history professor. They both want their stories told, but at the moment, it looks like the lady is winning. She seems like a very interesting character. One I would definitely like to get to know a lot better.

The C8 gathering on Friday nite was superb. We saw the Peter Pan Pantomime starring none other than former Eastenders bad boy Phil Mitchell as Captain Hook. Then it was off to some good grub and dirty dancing.

Today we frolicked about Kenliworth Castle.

I started French Lessons last night. I was a bit disappointed because only one other student turned up and the teacher or tutor was quite evidently not used to leading a class. I want to learn conversational French. This cat started off teaching us grammar which is absolutely boring, or rather, he made it very boring. I had to stop myself from sticking my pen in my eye. I think I’ll look for another class.

I have reached the point in my novel writing apprenticeship were I get frustrated and give up by getting involved with “other things” thereby given me an excuse not to write. Ah but this time I have bravely decided to face the chaos and fight through it even though I feel like jumping up and down and tearing my heart out. Embrace the chaos.

The project I’m working on in Derby is going extremely well. There is a lot of energy in the place and a lot of folks who are eager to improve their personal and professional performance. I’ve been working some crazy hours on the project, but as they say time flies when you’re having fun.

Tonight I’m supposed to be going to the theatre with a group of friends in Milton Keynes. The problem is the play starts at 19.00 and I don’t finish work until 18.30 and it’s at least a 2 hour drive on a good day from Derby to Milton Keynes and that’s not accounting for the Friday night traffic. Realistically, I’ll miss the play, but I’ll be able to catch the dinner, dancing and general hell-raising afterwards. (I would say good bye in French, but we didn’t even learn how to say hi.)

I start my new contract today. I have the pre-game jitters as I always do before a new project. I am feeling a bit time starved at the moment. Time seems to be speeding by faster than I get things done. I have to remind myself that all I can do is what I can do in a day.

The cacophony of my emotions has created a great buzz in my head. I am over excited, almost to the point of stunned confusion – like a white hot poker in my mind’s eye.

I secured a nice coaching contract that’ll take me through the next couple of months. I attended the Inland Revenue workshop on becoming self-employed and I actually left the workshop happy, knowing more than I did before I came. I saw Sam. Her belly is getting huge, a far cry from the stick figure of a lass I first met two years ago (I should add she’s more than a few months pregnant now). I spoke to a couple of mates whom I’ve not talked to for a few weeks and who, whenever we talk, always lift my spirit. I bought a PS2 so I can eat up the little spare time I have occasionally. And to top off the day, I finished John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction which I believe is one of the best, if not the best, book I have ever read on creating works of fiction. I would encourage anyone who is serious about writing fiction to read it. Oh and I also finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick. This was my second reading of this superb piece of fiction. It makes me wonder how simulated life will affect our humanity.

peace

The world is closing
i cannot see the sky.
Trapped like the wings of
a Cabbage White between
the thumbs and grubby paws
of the little blonde tyrants
kicking around in
the grass fields.

Gird up your loins
like a man,
things will work out fine

The Shadow
lingers over
watching…
waiting for me to falter,
like the panther, dark and sullen,
sinewy limbs stretched tight
ready to rip the bones from my flesh.

Who are you
to question me
with the darkness
of your counsel

I cannot hold a candle,
to Prufrock’s boots
let me drown by the Sea
oh they will not wake me.

Hear my speech,
suffer me a fool.
I do diligently speak,
a whisper
and a drool

I have found the Plains of Moab,
the River at my knee
I hear the trumpets of the Priest,
the people stand and stare
they will not shout for me

My soul’s too black
the River’s too wide
i hope they wake me
so I drown