Quotable Not Me

I've always liked Pierce...good line from the dour hairdo..

"You just never know what life will throw at you, but you must always take it head on.

Surprise it before it surprises you"


Pierce Brosnan, 2013

The Future by a 13 yr old

Abide Without Me - 15 things I could really do without

1. Information about traffic anywhere I don't live
2. Television repeats featuring the sinister ghost formerly known as Leslie Crowther
3. Anyone who thinks pasta should be al dente (ever tried lasagna?)
4. Taxis that U-turn in front of me
5. Rod Stewart
6. People who can't spell lasagne
7. The words tote (I don't know what it means, I think it's either a bag, an umbrella or a bet) and ensemble (too excruciating to say)
8. Earrings on men - we've given it 30 years, it never really works
9. Ads on youTube
10. The voice of POD in Snog, Marry, Avoid
11. Everyone who stops on the double yellow lines outside my local newsagent
12. Beanie hats and everybody in them
13. Prime Minister Boris Johnson
14. Anyone alive claiming to ever have been "technically" or "clinically" dead
15. Hellos on Popmaster

The Blue Pill

Well if you went for either of my suggestions, you're close but you're not right. But then if you were paying attention, I told you that in paragraph four.

If you stick to your original matrix and ignore the vast scope of the universe, then that won't work.

You can live a lie but you can't keep living a lie.

You can plaster over a crack, but you can't keep plastering.

Subsidence will guarantee it reappears.

You can paint over the rot but, well.... you get the idea

There are problems that can't be solved with decorators caulk.

I am talking about concepts a little more global. We need to recognise kernels of truth in daily life when it presents but it is a disorientating exercise. Looking up at the universe makes your eyes hurt when the sun is shining.

We may choose to find it exciting. Or it may be painful. It may put you in your place. How much more comfortable to be the expert in an artificial wrongness! Better that, than to try to work out what matrices everyone else is jumping in and out of. Working out how they really see the world. Working out how to find... them.

People construct different matrices to get them through different tasks, different relationships. If they enter your life, you need to work out what their matrix looks like. It's work, at least it takes effort, but you can season the game with play. At least then we will all be joining in, taking a step or two closer to where the truth really is.

We'll be playing the same game.

We'll share the joy of taking part.

Half of us will win.

And if we put our win to good use, we can drag the other half up.

Or stick to your old ways.

Join the flat Earth Society, if you feel so inclined. But eventually something will happen that makes you slap the heel of your hand into your head repeatedly and scream "what was I thinking of?"  (Or if you've been brought up classically "of what was I thinking?")

We all live in a little healthy denial. Nothing wrong with that. (Or is there?) But too much and you need guarantees. Guarantees that things won't change. I'm not confident enough to follow you on that.

Dance in and out of your matrix. And dance in and out and on everybody else's.

If you dance into mine then 'Welcome'.

Come say hi.

Life Lube

As you become more experienced at doing life, you become a monkey in a tree who knows where all the vines are.
A lawyer who knows where all the loopholes are.
A doctor who knows what all the smart handles are.
Where experience has taught you the legitimate fast-lane to the martial art of your life, you inhabit.
Well done. You made it. Happy?

But you're also like a prisoner who knows where all the bars are.
A politician who knows where all the fiddles are.
A hospital manager who used to know where his soul was.
(I feel a poem coming on).

You are living a construct.
When you become a specialist - in anything. ..macrame, smoking, hula,  anything - you are a specialist only of that particular artifice.
Ask anybody who knows anything about 'evidence-based anything', and you should already have realised that your artifice is by definition... wrong.

Our realities, the ones we all select, are wrong.
If you need your delusions and want to be kinder to yourself, you can call your realities works in progress.  But unless you are actively working on it, I would just settle for plain wrong. It's a lot clearer position to start from when you are thinking about what you going to do about it.
You are thinking about this, right?

Your construct is something created by man for ease of understanding, ease of flow....life lube.
(It is poorly documented, but women occasionally dabble in this as well, usually related to washing-up techniques, protocol at the Clinique counter, or reading Hello).

As you become more skilled at your chosen game, you find that many of the bars of its cells are not needed to deny escape.
You are a monkey who only needs half the vines to get around perfectly well. In fact better than perfectly well. Better than most.
Many of the rules of your game can be dispensed with.
But of course this cannot be taught. It has to be felt. By persons with a reasonable IQ or emotional intelligence and good character. It cannot be rolled out to a group of whoever wants to turn up today.
Doubt this? Ask anybody who's ever run any business.
Ever.
And do me a favour, don't get back to me.

It's everywhere.
Watch an elderly person walk and you'll note the minimalist movements. The best balance of safety and speed for the cranial occupant.
Watch a 16-year-old girl walk, and you'll see uncertainty in the step. Even after 15 years of practice.
Watch her 10 years later (a high-definition camera from the bushes I often find gives good results), and her step can betray arrogance, or denote elegance. (That poem's getting a bit closer).

Do you still think we don't read minds? Our 6th to 10th senses are always working.
There is a lot of everything in people and you can tell a lot about people when you take a little look at a bit of their everything. (That's the advantage of high-definition).
Somebody gliding into your personal space can either appear intimidating or beautiful depending on the other ways in which they present themselves. Goths don't come over too well on these occasions, for example. Skinheads aren't much better.
This is the way life works.

The next thing that happens is somebody takes a few bars of your matrix away. It may take weeks, it may take decades. If it takes decades, you're screwed. You probably forgot how to learn years ago. Claim ageism. If you're black, racism. If you're female, sexism, if you have spots, spotism. And if you're scared of spiders, get a note from your doctor. Because you have just become redundant.

Maybe there's been a new law, a tightening of an old one, a making of a new one. Instantly your expertise became redundant. The bars are in different places. The vines were deciduous. You're a hunted animal, soon to be a scavenger. And you used to be so much more. You were the fella who knew what the matrix looked like, you knew where the bars were, where the lines were drawn.  You were it.
Well, you better get fluid, Poindexter, because they ain't there no more. And you never saw it coming, you clown. Maybe you could find a role in a part of the world that still has those nice old bars that you recognised so well. Or maybe you should just grow up.

When those bars of your oh-so-familiar matrix are taken away, you don't know how to swing home. Quickly nor slowly. You don't know the way.
You don't even know the damn way.
You see ghosts of the old way, shadows of the old bars covered in slime and shame. Maybe you persist in trying to make them real again. Paint the slime.
Or perhaps if you have any reason left and you can allow yourself, you just realise. The game's up.

But you have an alternative to all this inevitability ...... you can step outside your matrix and see it for what it is.

And the great thing is, you can do it from day one. You can still be its master. There is a difference between mastering 48 kB of Manic Miner on the ZX Spectrum, and 2 GB and 26 three-dimensional levels of Quake and Doom on the PlayStation 3. But human capacity did not change over this decade or two, just the challenges it gave itself. (Plus a little bit of evolution, as it seems to me there are an awful lot more zombies around than there were in the 80s).

Imagine a cube with bars of lead piping. Occasionally the bars you know so well shimmer and disappear. You might choose to visualise this in a provocative or entertaining way. Before you know it you might be enjoying change. (But don't tell the NLP gurus that I'm giving this away for free).
I'm sure it's great to play chess for a lifetime, but if someone introduces you to a new game, then come on, get with the program. Give it a crack. At least recognise it as an interesting challenge.
Because your matrix doesn't live in a wooden box at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it lives in an alien world in a minimum of four dimensions. That you thought it might only be three, at best was stupidity, at worst wishful thinking.

So what have you decided?
Are you going to stick to your original matrix?
Or move onto my ethereal matrix?

I'll give you 24 hours to answer.

Good luck.

The Final Countdown

I wrote to Hans Moretti last year.
It looks like I left it a little late into his dotage as he died a few days ago with Alzheimer's.
Wiedersehen Hans.

.

Sandwich Break

I was listening to Danny Baker yesterday and he asked the question 'how do cut your sandwich -  across the middle or diagonally?'

His assistant said she cut it down the middle and saved the top bit till last.

He queried this concept, but I know what she means. The top bit is the best bit. It's a sign of admirable self restraint to save that till the end. Some would eat it first, but leave themselves looking at crustily angular remainder.

A diagonally-cut sandwich of course yields that shop-bought feel. 

And eliminates two unsavourily dry points where crust meets crust.

Sure, it's an open invitation for the innards of the sarnie to drop onto your trousers, but Pret a Manger has made a perfectly good living out of exactly this sort of behaviour which is why they open all their franchises next to a dry cleaners.

Personally the oblique technique (which is what I have just decided I call it) is something I reserve for special occasions. I don't like to live beyond my means.

However there is a third way.

A little-known method. A darker route to satiety.

I'm willing to bet that many of my thousands of readers have never cut a sandwich in this way.

Some never will.

It is the longitudinal cut, through the top, and through the bottom.

It's not for the fainthearted. 

It's mix of symmetry and asymmetry will leave you uneasy. Queasy even.

If you've never done it before, for Gods sake, don't do it alone. 

That it makes the sign of the cross will not save you. 

You cut a sandwich this way at your own risk.

But know this....

It's how the devil gets in.

How to Speak

The first is the sort of thing you'd get from some amateurish speaker. Doing a class. Sharing their skills as a "qualified" speaker.

The second is what you hope to get from somebody who cares about what they're saying, somebody who might make a difference by yanking on the right tendrils of communication, connected deeply to supratentorial areas directly responsible for change.

The first is a Hallmark message from a greeting card. A message from a moron.

The second is the delivery of change. From love and experience, direct to the matrix.

WRONG

"I can only open the door for you. You have to go through it".

RIGHT

"I can only open the door for you. And standby and salute.

You have to raise yourself an inch into the air, steadily tilt yourself forward and fly through".

Subtle perhaps. (Not really).

But the difference between exhilarating success and grinding failure.

Spanish Unemployment Q

Err...So What!

I do so wish a few more people could start a few more sentences with the word 'so'. It's such a useful pointer to help me know when to listen to an erudite opinion.

But I admit that I do miss in verbalised conversational speech, the much maligned and much loved word 'errr'. 

'Errr' showed a certain sensitivity and self-doubt. It had a dash of humility and possibility. It showed engagement and interest, expressed concern, and thoughtfulness. It wondered at the differences between opinions and humanities. And it provided a low humming baseline to accompany a life in conversation.

'So' however, rips into that.

It cuts through the nonsense.

It present the conclusion to the debate. It ends. It pronounces. It judges. It labels. 

It links when there's nothing to link but it makes you think there is, that you missed something. 

It's a trick. A lie.

And now because you said 'so' and not 'no',  it's creeping into written speech.

Now we have two cancers of communication. 

It started with the arm-waving, propagated by BBC news reporters, going to far too many workshops and delivering their communications bimanually by manual. Now it has metastasised into our choice of words, starting sentences with an obnoxious "listen to me". It's hard to find a radio interview that 'so' does not dominate. 

It's like listening to a group of potty-training two-year-olds.

When I learnt Latin as a schoolboy 'so' and 'therefore' were synonyms, equally translated from the word 'ergo'.

So when I advise on this (ahem), usually I suggest intra-mental substitution of the word 'so' with 'therefore'. If it sounds wrong with the substitution in place, then it probably is.  

You're welcome.

Introducing a topic or even answering a question with the utterly redundant word 'so' is painful. It's become a curse of the last few years.  

You wouldn't find Frank, the new Pope, being so sloppy. (He is still heavily into ergo).

And he has his work cut out for him deciding whether he should persuade the rest of the Argies not to invade the Falklands again. Or tell them that they'll have God on their side this time.

Join the fight.  I will be running workshops from mid-June onwards.

Where will they be based?

So...Er-Google it.

Think of a Card

I started the last week with two pretty hard-core kind of work-related "official" things.

That took me to Wednesday. 

Since then I've been part of three fantastic things with potential to change a life, in this case mine and by extension potentially many others. In small ways, yes. But it's the little things isn't it? You don't need me to tell you that. 

I won't be too obscure. I'll tell you one of them is related to comedy and two of them relate to magic - one quite simply was the card magician Dani daOrtiz who physically stole my breath from my mouth on at least three occasions. I felt it go. 

If I can do this, with a week off work and would tend to have fewer of those experiences in a week dominated by work, surely the conclusion has to be... work less, do more.

Imagine what could be achieved.

Currently in the right corner of my eye is Limitless - a movie I had quite fancied except that it seems largely to concern pretty boy B-movie actor Bradley Cooper, doing a bit of a Lance Armstrong with his brain drug, so far resulting in him gaining a lot of money a lot and getting his end away quite a bit. Why anybody needs to see that, I'm not quite sure.

But the principle is sound. The limitless brain.

It will burn of course. (Bradley is already feeling the strain).

The protection that separates the two hemispheres (corpus callosum, in case you're interested) is the thing that keeps us sane. It is our limiting valve. I'd like to think that this will atrophy as we graduate into our next species. We will let the madness in and control it in our stride. The oneness of our creative and intellectual sides communicating with the universe with less facade, less workmanlike interface. Our biotech going wireless.

How far can we go?

How limitless is limitless?

Do you want to be a Joker - sandwiching the pack pressing at its face or pushing it up from the roots?

Or is it enough to go on being the 6 of clubs?

Red Nose Time

It's another Comic Relief.

Haven't they raised enough money for rhinophyma?

A Doc Called Horse

Follow me on this.

• The UK regulates the working practices of butchers.
• Butchers costs go up to ensure their product is to the world's highest standards.
• The supermarkets prioritise cost over quality.
• They outsource.
• Dodgy meat floods in from every unregulated source in Europe.
• (The low quality meat has illegal drugs in it. For good measure).
• Supermarkets get away with this for years, happily oblivious, 
• Then they suddenly panic and go cap in hand to the British butchers to rescue them.

Now substitute the words butchers/ meat with doctors/medical services, and supermarkets as GP commissioners.

Of course, you can omit the last line. They haven't returned to UK standards yet despite papers full of stories of NHS corrupt decision-makers, hospital  scandals and endlessly frequent Dispatches documentaries. 

After all where do you think Group 4, and 1000 other private tenders will be recruiting their next medics from? 

Prairies - wherever they are. That's where.

Death by Diddly-Dee

With some of the music choices people take as their Desert Island Discs, if it were me in the rescue boat, I'd be driving right past.
The fourteenth time of hearing an agonising baroque overture played on some medieval instrument would be all the evidence I need.
I'd send somebody with binoculars up the crow's nest to make sure the island's only resident had enough coconuts then I would turn up the 80s Hits Compilation and it would be full speed ahead.

The only thing I'd like to see played on those instruments of torture is the half wit choosing the records.