The Ballads Of Mister Rhodes

  “ Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.”   - Nikos Kazantzakis Do you think, at a few weeks shy of forty, one is qualified to talk about how much they’ve seen the world change? Is it old enough to have some authority on such a matter? Perhaps it is still a decade shy of the wisdom we associate with ageing. I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable, but I’d like to begin with “how much I’ve seen the world change.” It seems to be that, for the most part, these creatures calling themselves human beings have become increasingly less aware of how they cause ripples in a lake. It is a form of selfishness, but it is not deliberate, nor is it intentionally malicious. It is, as I said, a lack of awareness. The result of stupidity and pride fitting together so well. They hold each other at night, kissing one another's necks. Their fingers interlocked, dreaming the same dreams. I recall the time a man at a bar tried to borrow my attention to tell me how dreadful his life had ...

"They're lining up the prisoners And the guards are taking aim I struggle with some demons They were middle class and tame I didn't know I had permission To murder and to maim You want it darker."   - Leonard Cohen (You Want It Darker) Perhaps this is just a feeling and not something that can be written down. A moment of softness that one tries to move away from as quickly as possible for fear that it might be interpreted as fragility or vulnerability. Some sort of admission that the ground is shaky and the compass needle is having a momentary crisis. One of those, in which, if you allow yourself to think, you realise that it started before you were even here. There are things that we pull into today that we didn't even realise we were ever attached to. I am shown videos of a man I used to live with a decade ago. He is alive and happy. Playing with his grandkids. Walking his dog. Holding his wife. From what little I knew of this man, he was one of a rare breed. Ex...

I have to tackle this chronologically. It’s too easy for us to get lost in the notion that there is anything more than time that connects us, ultimately. So, to begin, I stretched out over the concrete block and stared up at the sky. That place, where, at times, I can neither see nor hear anything of the human world. The waves, birdsong, my dogs playing. That is the soundtrack. In that absence of the human world, there is a stillness that I often do not know what to do with. It brings on nausea and a little lightheadedness. I count my breaths and try not to get wrapped up in the idea that there is something to release, although I am sure there is. In a clear blue sky, I can see so many markings on the lenses of my eyes. I wonder for a moment if these will eventually lead to blindness. I also find a little peace in the fact that, at almost forty, I am beginning a physical decline, and that is something that I must find peace with. Whilst the dogs are playing my mind reminds me that the ...

“there isn't enough of anything as long as we live.  But at intervals  a sweetness appears  and, given a chance,  prevails.”   - Raymond Carver I unleashed the dogs and sauntered over to the usual concrete block -it makes do as a seat amidst the sand and dirt. Additionally, it’s large enough to lay back on and have a complete panorama of nothing but the sky. I think it’s a drain cover of some kind. Part of an abandoned development. There are unfinished foundations a few feet away. The architectural ghosts of COVID. The skeletons of over-frivolous excitement. Laying on my back, I escaped the twitch of anxiety, or perhaps it was a soft sort of existential dread, that I had been feeling earlier. The distance between the rolling thunder and I put me at ease. An ambulance and two police cars had driven past me earlier in the day. I messaged my wife to make sure she was okay. Many of the drivers here are reckless, and there seems to be little conscious thought for the...

“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being,  but by integration of the contraries.” - Carl Jung At the risk of sounding conceited, or perhaps even self-acquitting, I have been wondering around the idea that our hostility towards ourselves and the world around us might, in fact, be the very same thing that is essential for carrying ourselves in a way that has us setting examples worthy of following. I am exceptionally tired today, incapable of cooking the day's final meal. I have been waking up at 5am and running with the dogs, eating breakfast, then going to the gym. That is my morning. My afternoon consists of eating again, taking a nap, walking the dogs again, and by that time I'm a few hours shy of slumber. It is in these last few hours that I have been meaning to write something, but I am often too hungry or entirely uninspired. There is a stillness to the mornings that I regret not spending more time with, and there is a sense of solidarity and self...

 "The only thing that can ruin a good day  is people." - Hemmingway A little way down the beach you'll encounter something between a fold in time and a public exhibition of why things might go wrong. Like most things, the more crucial patterns of human behaviour are not to be found in freak incidents and news headlines. We don't need to bare witness to young men with machetes or remorseless rape gangs to see which way the slope is facing, although it is unlikely to be completely unrelated. What you need to be, is on the lookout for the small everywhere things. In the last five years of my life I've lived in Phu Quoc, Vietnam. A place where I have witnessed the gap between music and futuristic construction noise grow smaller, but louder, and wider spread. So don't be surprised as you head a little way down the beach if you start hearing such a noise. These events are called 'team building exercises,' and they are put on by larger organisations to inject...