This seagull is warning this other off his my lunch.

You can rattle my soul
find sugar and salt,
the two contradicting
but neither my fault.

I’ve slept for short hours
long minutes and more
I’ve no reason to be trusted
given what hides in the core.

Did I mention
the light in the past?
Did I mention the screams
the memories that replay too fast?

I can’t catch hold of all
the problems I hide,
can’t keep your secrets
or remember all the times I’ve lied.

I sleep in the shadows
shake and shiver
my soul full of more
than just salt and sugar.

r.l.w

I don’t often write rhymes in a structure like this. it’s often too much work and you can feel how forced it is. But on occasion, it feels okay. Good enough to share at least.

My nephew is six and very cute, and I love him dearly, but the questions are relentless. He never stops talking, unless he’s asleep, and if he continues to become even more like his mum, he’ll start talking in his sleep soon.

I don’t mind answering the questions, it’s just I don’t always have the answer (or google) and sometimes I’m not sure how to answer in a way a six year old would understand, or that doesn’t create more questions.

This weekend we watched all three original Indiana Jones films. I figured he’d like them as he is addicted to Lego Indiana Jones on the Wii. The first film went fine, except he keeps asking why certain characters are scared of rats, or mice, or spiders. Because I know why Indy is scared of snakes, cause it’s in the third film. But I don’t know why Willie is scared of everything and the fact that she is, and that some people are, is not acceptable. So he keeps asking. The fact that she’s a wimp wasn’t enough either.

That’s relativly easy to deal with, the problem I had was with the second and third film. Cause I could say that Indy had to save the children in the first film, and that he understood, as long as I told him why they’d been captured. The second film involves the search for the Ark the the Covenant.

How do you explain that to a six year old?

God’s magic box.

I did go the route of trying to explain what the Ark was, what was inside, all the stuff about the ten commandments. It went in, I know it went in cause everything does with this kid, and it’ll pop out randomly later. But it didn’t really help explain much so in the end it became God’s magic box, with his rules in it, and they don’t know what’s going to happen when they open it. Then the spirits came out of the box and only killed the bad guys because God knew Indy and Marion didn’t want open the box he let them live and they all lived happily ever after.

I didn’t even try to explain the Nazis to him. They were just bad guys.

In the Last Crusade, I had to explain the Holy Grail to him. Cause calling it treasure only lasted for about half the film. Which then led to explaining immortality and a discussion about Jesus and God.

Cause as far as he knows, Jesus didn’t die, and I don’t know when he died, I’m just sure he’s not walking round Morrisons right now picking out the right wine to go with his fish.  My nephew doesn’t believe in God, and neither do I, and he wanted to know why I talked about him if I didn’t believe in him. We had a whole conversation too about whether the Ark or the Holy Grail are real, and what myths were and then my brain imploded.

I’m not sure if any of this is better or worse than last time he came to stay when we were talking about the end of the world. He wanted to know what happened, and I was telling him about the Sun dying and all that, and the solar system and he wanted to know what would go first Aberystwyth (where I live) or Aberaeron (where he lives) and I was trying to explain that the fact that they are all of 20 miles apart doesn’t really make a difference if the world ends.

The end of the world didn’t scare him, oh no, he wanted to blow the world up with a big gun.

The kid’s mental. I love it.

I don’t wear brands.

Okay, that’s a lie, cause I have some Converse trainers that I got for Christmas, but they’re the first decent pair of trainers I’ve had in years, because I’ve been buying cheap pairs from Primark and New Look for years. But in a way, during the winter especially, it’s a bit pointless even having the Converse, because I wear my jeans so long that you can only really see my toes and you certainly can’t see any logos.

Jeans, that are usually bought from Dorothy Perkins, or something like that. No Levis, of Lee Cooper, no Bench all the way up the side of one leg. No Addidas tracksuit with their distinctive stripes. Just jeans, always jeans, of various shades and usually flared or boot cut. Which isn’t really anything to do with being fond or one style, or avoiding the fashion of skinny jeans, but more about the fact I have an issue with having a certain amount of my feet seen. It has to be a small amount, or just the toes, or I can’t wear them. Buying jeans is hard work, but not for the usual reasons I suppose.

On the top half I wear vest tops, or t-shirts. No logos. No Nike hoodies. I just bought a hoodie and it’s as plain as water. I love it. My vest tops have nothing on them, I’ve just branched out a little in buying t-shirts with pictures/patterns for the first time in years. I bought some from Woot and one from Threadless, mostly cause they made me laugh, and I will enjoy wearing them.

I’m not entirely sure where this has come from. I hate being questioned over what I’m wearing if it’s a certain brand, cause mostly I’m just wearing it cause it’s warm/matches/clean, I shouldn’t have to explain my clothing choices. It’s not that I don’t care what I look like, cause I make the effort (usually) to be clean, and match (ish).

I was wondering if it was because I don’t want to be affiliated with anything. I just want to be affiliated with myself and my own brain. I hate fashion as a rule too, it confuses me. This whole thing with leggings I find ridiculous. My sister is completely different and wears leggings all the time, not seen her out of a pair since they came into fashion, and it’s stupid. We wore leggings in the nineties, that’s all I wore in the from the age of eight to eleven and I looked stupid. But that’s okay, kids are supposed to look stupid. Maybe I’m old, but I’m twenty-seven, and my sister is twenty-four. Do three years make that much a difference? She keeps telling me the nineties is back, and this horrifies me, cause pretty much everything from 1990-2000 was shit. The entire decade was awful, my dad, school, puberty, moving schools (twice), awful the lot of it.

This really goes of the point of the fact that my wardrobe is filled with plain clothes.

The clothes maketh the man? Maybe, but the people who live by that code are usually the twats. Clothes maketh the man a wanker.

I guess it comes down to how people perceive me. If people look at me, see no brands and think I am something less than what I am, or not worth knowing, these are not people I want in my life. I can’t stand that shallowness.

Okay, I’m shutting up now.

The snow can bring out the worst in people. Or the best, depending on how you look at it I suppose.

I have a lot of notebooks. That’s actually an understatement. I have shit loads of notebooks. Some empty, more filled. I don’t keep a hand-written diary or journal. I have this blog and a personal livejournal, I’ve never been able to keep up with a diary on a daily basis and I usually forget about it entirely before April. Having just moved, I’ve had a chance to look at my old notebooks, just flip through them mostly, to see if there is anything interesting that I can use, edit, whatever.

I have discovered that it is exactly like going through old diaries, not in some cases not particularly pleasant. In some I’ve written entries that I obviously intended to either type up for a blog, or into livejournal at a later date, because the entry needed to be written, but I wasn’t able to get to my computer. it happens and sometimes I need to write down the genius thoughts or desperate ramblings that rattle around in my skull.

Lot of space, what with keeping my brain in the freezer and all.

There are notes that I’ve written because I’m prone to forget, films or song titles randomly appearing at the top of the page because I’ve suddenly remembered or discovered the song I’ve been trying to get hold of for heavens knows how long. At one point I did have a notebook for such things like this, but that involved carrying around two separate notebooks and a diary (for appointments and such) and it was getting a bit much. It worked for a little while, because at least I had the information to hand at al times, instead of wondering what that film was and flipping through half a dozen notebooks to try and find the title of it.

There’s old poetry and the beginnings of a lot of things, little scenes I’ve wanted to use later and needed out of my head now, before I forgot it completely.

There’s a lot of dreams, nightmares. I don’t write down every single one, I tried that once too, had a notebook I kept upstairs for such an event, but that didn’t last either. I am a serial quitter of many things, not just academic pursuits. But sometimes are weirder than usual and they need writing down. To keep them forever, to scare people when they want to know exactly goes on in my brain during the night (if the waking hours aren’t bad enough), to get them out of my head. Whatever the reason at the time, the dreams are scattered through the books.

The worst bits are where I’m obviously distressed in my depression and all I can really do (aside from cutting- at the time at least) was to scribble down my distress in massive almost illegible letters. It looks drunk, and some of it was probably done drunk, cause I drank more in the days of these older notebooks. It’ makes me sad to read these pages, and the old poetry that is so obviously about cutting that it never left the books for fear of being another cliché.  Which I am, I’m sure, but I try and avoid it none the less.

Lastly, there are bits of other people in some of the notebooks. Not by way of my writing about them, but that they’ve written in the notebooks. There are a few pages of me and my sister insulting each other (by saying the other smells) and a few pages of my ex boyfriend and I communicating to each other while one or the other is one the phone to someone. Usually me, and usually to my dad. I know this because quite a few of the pages state the fact that he’s telling me the same story again, which is just like my dad.

Anyway, enough of the past. I managed to resist buying a new notebook today, mostly because over the weekend I put away all my books and notebooks and saw how many empty ones I actually have. More than I realised, so I’m trying (trying) to restrain myself.

It won’t last.