Mexico (Part Ten)

I dreamed this morning I had taken LSD. Very strange to be having hallucinations inside my dream, seeing weird things through dream eyes knowing that it wasn’t dream reality. I was in a room with Nicky and a film was playing – and then because of the acid the film kept playing and replaying over and over inside my mind, lightning fast. Then I started levitating, floating up to the ceiling, as I do so many times in dreams. I came back down and told Nicky to get her camera, to film it. She did, but I couldn’t get going again, because I was thinking about it. An awareness then of all the times I’ve dreamed of levitating thinking it was real life, and thinking – still inside the dream – that I really ought to learn how to do that for real, through some meditation or something. Then I woke up.

Before that, there was another dream, with some old school friends, playing football. Except every so often we’d stop playing and take out our willies and pee on the ball. All this was captured on film and we watched it later with family and friends. It was some sort of tactic to help us win the match, and it worked.

In the real world Nicky and I went to Pateley Bridge and Brimham Rocks yesterday. A circular hike up the valley, on the Nidderdale Way, and a picnic by the rocks. Beautiful and peaceful and sunny and warm too – and all within an hour of Leeds. North Yorkshire is stunning.

Nicky’s off on annual leave this week. She’s been wanting to go somewhere but hasn’t got it together to decide on anything, so we’ve just stayed here. I’ve been no help in any of that: I just feel so content in Leeds right now the idea of going anywhere else seems bizarre. More and more it dawns on me that the desire to get away so often springs from an internal discontent – a very strange realisation for one who has travelled as much as I have. But pretty much obviously true.

I did, however, dream also of Mexico and the hot springs again this morning, as I often do. And yet even thoughts of returning there seem odd during this current stage of contentment. Why leave? Why go far away to a place without football and squash and Morrison’s?

But, in any case, travel back there we must – if only in thought, for ‘tis time now to continue and perhaps even wrap up the story of my five-month visit to that most wonderful of countries back in 2009…

…wherein I’d made it over to Baja, and visited and gone through various things at Yandara, and had a pretty awesome epiphany at the Way of Nature in Todos Santos, which seemed the point of the whole trip. And then it was on finally to the hot springs, and my favourite place on Earth.

The hot springs, just west of Santiago. El Cañon. The canyon. My canyon. Paradise on Earth. Palm trees and waterfalls and swimming holes and glorious house-sized boulders. Holy cows and holy fires. Cliff jumps and rock balancing and little sandy beaches. Peace and sun and warmth. Bullfrogs and toe-nibbling fishes. All the things I’ve said over and over ever since I first went there at the arse-end of ’98, the whole magnificent place burned forever on my brain.

But how much had it been changed since I was last there nine years previous? Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo had grown massively, but Todos Santos was pretty much the same. Big beach houses had sprung up here and there but others had fallen into ruin. Which way had my hot springs gone? Discovered and developed and overrun by yahoo young Americans in baseball caps and bikinis tossing their beer cans everywhere? Or, even worse, bathhouses created and a ten dollar entrance fee and fat Arizonans sipping margaritas shuttled in on tourbuses and the nudity and freedom that I once knew a thing of the distant outlaw past?

Hard to imagine that someone wouldn’t have capitalised. And yet…

I rolled up there on a Saturday afternoon. At the end of the road, just before the entrance and the first little camping area where the camper vans used to pull in and make their fires and cook their beans there’s a pole across the road and an old Mexican sitting in a chair. An entrance fee! I knew it! Things have changed and –

It’s twenty pesos – just one pound. He’s chill and he’s happy to listen to me gab on about when I was last there. He sits in his chair under some half-assed shade and behind him the burned-out remains of an evidently more permanent structure. Some guy got angry and drunk, he tells me. So they’d even made a little entrance office.

I shudder a little but it still seems pretty ramshackle and relaxed and I’m hoping for the best. I walk on down the road and things are pretty much the same. But nobody’s camping there where the camper vans pull in. And then at the very end, where the other cars used to park…just one truck! That’s all there is. It’s a Saturday afternoon and there I am expecting hordes – and all there is is one solitary pick-up and the place is basically unchanged.

Eleven years on and my paradise – my favourite place on Earth – this dream spot that I’ve always held in my heart as the place that I could go were everything to fall to shit – it’s still the same.

Kiss the dirt and hug the sky and weep with grateful reunions at every little tree and shrub and rock and grain of sand. The canyon stretches out before me. The hot springs tubs are still there to my left – the naked knees of Dave and Jen and Sarah and myself still rubbing together on our first night there in December ’98. The dam. The river. The stones.

I once more go running excited up that canyon, alone in the blissful silence, marvelling at its unchanged beauty. The rocks I balanced and hopped over and loved. Looking for remembrances of self-same stones. Stones Shane and I stood in the river to appear as though standing on water, perhaps still there where they fell. That one? Was that one my young hands swivelled and turned and stood marvelling at once upright and even gently swaying in the quietly whispering canyon breeze? But so hard to recognise a stone after all these years apart.

Not that one though: not the sunbathing and diving rock that sits at the edge of the swimming hole in front of my little beach. The beach where I camped. The beach where Dave and Lindsay and Sarah and Jen and Italian Dave and I first made chapattis and ate our feasts and where The Lovely Boys sang and laughed and played. Diving in off that sunbathing rock. Swimming and peeing in and drinking that pool. The pool still there! The beach still there! And the sunbathing rock, where I lay and lay once left alone, and where I lay that time the whole host of elderly Californians came trooping up and took my picture stretched out naked on my back, and where are those pictures now?

Everything the same, oh tearful reunion.

Not that I cried, mind: just poetic license intended to express happiness and relief. All that trip towards that canyon I’d worried about what it might have become, and there it was: home, sweet home. The same, the same, the same…

I stayed there a total of two weeks, a week at a time, sandwiched around periods of being at Yandara. One of the times I was there I took nothing and fasted – such incredible freedom to roll up to Paradise carrying merely my sleeping bag and an empty plastic bottle and not much else. Seven days on the beach, hiking up past the falls, and sitting of course umpteen hours in the tubs soaking blissfully, the most peaceful place on Earth. No food, no desire for food, not even the sight of other people’s food. Just that bottle and when thirsty scoop up some river water and drink. Ultimate freedom. The lightest of travellers.

Seven days was my longest fast to date. I had planned on ten but seven seemed enough. Strangely easy. A little hunger here and there, and a little light-headedness, but no great challenge. And great clarity of thought, with regards to so many things in my life…

Women: I’d had so many questions about women. That whole trip over dear sweet Mexican and Guatemalan men had been looking at me confused and saying, what are you doing here walking strange and alone in a foreign land without family or wife, why don’t you go home and get yourself wed, settle down? And they’d said it so many times I’d started to think maybe it was a sign, the Universe telling me what to do, guiding me into what came next. As well as my own constant thoughts about women and love.

But what woman? That’s the next question, if one resolves to go ahead with it. For my head was filled with a multitude of women and I could make no sense in my mind. Sophie, my most serious ex, who I still felt a thousand things for, and considered “the one”, and rued the weird mess that had conspired to force us apart, which all seemed like mistakes, and mistakes which could possibly be fixed. I wept for her. I felt her in my heart. I wanted her in my life again.

But then what of the problems that we had? Problems unavoidable. Maybe someone else…

…like Perlilly, my most recent ex. Dear sweet young Perlilly who was fun and emotionally smart and grounded and real world. Good for me in many ways – and wrong for me in many more…

…and then Eve, from way back when, still pursuing me even nine years after we’d broken up, still sending emails declaring her love for me, that she’d decided I was her man, always wanting to know what I felt for her, wanting to marry me, so crazy and up in the sky but also capable of making me feel wanted and loved perhaps like no other person in my life, adoring and revering and…but bonkers, also, and always that terrible friction between us – but a friction, perhaps, that I had created by my refusal to give in to her, to let her touch me and kiss me and hold me and perhaps it could be fixed but –

Laura, from Yorkshire, lovers in 2001 and 2007 and an ease and a comfort while also deeply connected, not some glamorous foreigner or someone above my tree but a girl who understands fish and chips and farting and digs the spiritual life but is also partial to a bit of TV and a bit of finding excitement in a supermarket bargain, some bangers and mash. Lovely Laura who I sometimes wanted to marry, but always pulled away from, perhaps purely out of my own non-commitment issues, or perhaps something else. Laura who has in the meantime weirdly bought a house in the village I grew up in and now lives there alone hoping for a man to come into her life and perhaps make a family with and who was perfect for me in so many ways but –

And others. L and A and C and – all these others always floating around in my brain, attempting madly to find an answer to the question “but who?” and making mental lists of pros and cons so as to finally get down to the one to commit to yet forever the impossibility of it, one minute this one rising to the top, the next another. On and on, never resolved, impossible to resolve but resolution still ceaselessly sought nonetheless. It’s enough to drive a man insane.

But clarity arrives in the hot springs, in the middle of my fast. All my thoughts are crystal clear, and it instantly and painlessly dawns on me: you have to see them. You have to go to them, one by one, and experience what it feels like to be in their presence. You have to see how you work together. And then you’ll know. You’re trying to work all this out on paper, in lists of pros and cons, but it doesn’t work like that. This is real life.

It sounds so pedestrian and sophomoric and obvious when I type it now. It’s hard to imagine there was a time – and a time that stretched on for months and months – when I didn’t know that was what I had to do, that I truly believed that I could figure it all out in my head. But when I realised that I simply had to experience them and myself with them to find the answer, it felt like one of the most astounding breakthroughs of my life. So obvious. So good. So true.

Thank you fasting. Thank you hot springs. Thank you canyon.

I sat in those tubs and I soaked. And in that peacefulness many things became clear. My mind was calm, yet full of projects. Ideas about writing – books that seemed to be writing themselves as I lay. And thoughts about what I wanted out of life – and they weren’t thoughts that involved living in that canyon alone thinking about my navel, they were thoughts that pointed me back to England. All that way to finally get to the place where I could rest and relax – and what I found when I got there was a heart that wanted – even needed – to go home.

Women and writing and the life I wanted to lead: it was all back in England. How else to really know about those women but see them? And where were they all? England – or, at least, Europe.

And the writing? The connections? A computer and a place? For that I’d need to be back there too.

Likewise, livelihood, and the games of football and squash I’d come to long for so much, such a sacrifice of the travelling lifestyle, no squash courts or rackets to be found out there in Mexican mountain wilderness.

England. My brain burned for it. The answers to all my questions were there. The women. The work. But how? For I was a long way from home…

And what the hell would I do there when I landed? All ties severed when I’d departed for Mexico in July, nothing of the life I’d previously had there desired to be again…

The best way to get from Baja to England, I’d long thought, was to go via Canada. Canadian Affair do wicked priced flights from all over Canada to all over England, and you can buy them one-way too. If you’re lucky, a hundred-and-fifty quid max. One-way flights from Mexico City to London, I would imagine, would be at least triple that price, if you could get them – probably a lot more. The only other option – American being out of bounds – was heading all the way back down to the Yucatan and maybe picking up the return leg from a Cancun or Cozumel charter flight. But that would mean a long and pricey trip right across Mexico again. So Canada the best bet.

Plus, you get to go to Canada.

Anyways, there I am, in Mexico, with these thoughts of England. And what should happen but the following two things: 1. an hour after I dwell on the question, “but what would I do there?” I get this email from my dear friend Matt saying, “Rozzer! We’ve just bought a castle in Herne Bay, do you want to come and live with us?”; and 2. while I’m helping this Canadian woman who lives just outside the hot springs with some computer problems in return for checking my emails she remarks to me that Westjet are doing real cheap flights up to Vancouver and so I idly check it out and right there and then book one for something like $90 when they’re often $400+. Cheap plane tickets guide so much of my life. If it’s meant to be, the ticket will be there. No need to splash out exorbitant. Just like finding the initial flight to Cozumel, or the one across from Mexico City to Baja. Divine bargains, I like to think. S’been like that my whole life…

And that’s that: I’ve got women questions on my mind, and the answers are all in England – and pretty much instantaneously I’ve got half a ticket and a place to go to when I land. Voila: it all falls into place. That’s when you know you’re going with the flow. Synchronicities and such…

I’m rushing. I’m pretty much at the end. Sure, I stayed that other week in the hot springs and did groovy things like: meet the young guy Henry who glimpsed me out the corner of his eye and said in his mind, say, there’s something about this chap, he seems kinda content, I think I’ll go learn from him – and did; and the day when I created an awesome massive series of complicated dams and diverted the whole entire river so I could build up a set of four hot springs tubs from a newly uncovered 116°F jet of hot mineral water that sprayed out of the cliffside, and slaved away, and watched happy as the gringos and the Sunday Mexicans bathed and enjoyed, those various channels and dams one of the most fun things I ever did; and the interesting way I noticed that when I stayed on my beach and people said we should hang out only those that meant it came up the beach, and we generally had awesome connections, while the others stayed down at the dam and though inviting me and appearing interested if I ever went to them it never felt right, like I was playing their rules and their rules were rules which didn’t appeal to me – which is a sort of halfhearted attempt to explain something that felt like a realisation in the dynamics of letting people come to you/not going to people that you probably don’t gel with, and staying strong with that (which I’ll explain properly if anyone’s interested); and the whole weird thing about when people did actually show up – for a full moon drum thing, for example – and after realising that I could no longer make it with yogaheads also seeing how I couldn’t connect anymore with the pot smokers and the hippies either, and the sadness in that as I watched one by one all my potential social circles fall away from me like dead dropping flies even as they’d fallen away from me in London; and despite having said that, also repeated connections with young groovy people who sat enthralled by stories from my past as I of course did once upon a time with Lindsay and Shawn and Shane. Passing it on, passing it on…in the canyon…still my favouritest place on Earth.

The canyon. I love it. I played in there as a child and especially when I hiked past the falls, where the people rarely were, I felt like I was truly myself. I felt – this is what I told myself – that it was the one place where I could be absolutely free and exactly what I am. After London, after England, after all the bullshit hoops one has to jump through with people in nearly every single conversation whereby power games and second guessing and one-upmanship and “what should I say? this thing or that?” and not knowing the reality of anything anyway – but here I am myself. A boy running barefeet on rocks. A boy smiling happy at the sky and the patterns swirling in granite. A boy drinking straight out of the river. A boy whooping or silently contemplating. A boy listening to the voices that bubble up within.

That canyon. That place. Even then, plans to go back. Dreams, perhaps, of returning with a woman. Of spending six months. Maybe a year. And writing a book. And calling it “One Year in Paradise”. And maybe even a baby. Inspiring all the tired humdrum families back home who think you need endless piles of toys and roofs and mortgages and boring-ass schooling to live happily ever after.

Nice dream. But the woman question needs sorting first.

And woman…one more. Not so much on the list, but never out of mind. On a little sidetrip to Cabo Pulmo, catching a ride with an old ancient sweet and nice Colorado couple from Grand Junction who say they might actually know Grace, and wouldn’t that just be the maddest thing ever? But –

My canyon remains. Young dudes should go there, find themselves and experience magic and goodness and beauty. Maybe it’s time for me to pass it on, let it go. And yet so difficult, even now plotting to be there once Leeds MA and all responsibilities here are taken care of. The woman, perhaps, found. The woman…the woman…

The women, I might as well tell you, were looked at and ticked off. Sophie I bumped into in a coffee shop in Kew, and she was cold but the feelings didn’t die, and I eventually wrote her a long mad letter telling her everything and she got back to me harsh and final and made it clear that she didn’t like me one bit. So that was pretty much that – though it took the iboga to finally convince me and let those stupid foolish young man’s romantic Hollywood-fuelled dreams die. And now they’re dead.

And Perlilly was lovely, and we had fun, and slept together some once I’d moved to London in May 2010 – intermittently through until Christmas – but it was obvious there was never any more to it than that, just physical pleasures and joys in lips and embraces and carnality and jokes. We’re still occasional friends, the odd text and no doubt always there for one another in some small capacity – but big-time romance beyond that made obviously unfeasible by our incompatibilities.

Eve, I gave in to. Even back in Mexico I told her, okay, I’ve resisted your advances all these years, and I promise you I’ll have sex with you next time I see you, okay? She, of course, doesn’t want that, not just that – wants more than that – but, like most women, if you stick to your guns and say that’s all you can give them and no more – no commitment, no bigger thing – then they’ll take it just the same. And so we had a couple of five-day periods of sleeping together – one in Kent and one in London – and it was decent and sometimes close but, at the same time, patently clear that there could never be anything serious between us. I saw it as I’d almost always seen it – and I think she finally did too.

And Laura. Laura who was guarded after previous hurts I’d caused her. Laura who was keeping me at several arms’ lengths. Laura who when I did eventually see I felt once more the chemistry and the physical attraction. But Laura who was in a real bad and negative place in her head, and therefore not right then so appealing. But who still remains…

And L, who I finally kissed, after more than twenty years of wanting to. And who I love dearly, but again see so clearly the incompatibility of our personalities, which I came to learn is what it’s all about, if you’re talking wives and mothers of your children and all that everyday getting old and living together doing the shopping kind of shit. Glamorous though Hollywood and passion and romance is, it’s perhaps untrumpeted harmony that we should be focussing on. And in that…

…I met Nicky. In fact, she was the first girl I met, and the first girl I kissed and got with and fancied after I landed back in England, as though she was waiting there for me. Very compatible. Very bill-fitting. Interested in the same things and not mental and pretty saucy and not demanding nor materialistic and wants to travel and digs the idea of a year in the hot springs and…

…all those things combined and now we’ve been together properly a year. Is she the one that answered the question that burned in my brain in that hot springs tub? Or is it all just another step in a path to something else? I don’t know – non-commitment remains and openness to other things and the ever always changing of my mind, which when with woman wants not woman, and when presented with the opportunity for making babies, though long dwelled on, would rather have his balls bitten off than procreate. Running away. The something else. The unknown possibilities. And, as ever, always in the background, Grace, who…

…after much internet searching – thanks Leah – appears to have been more or less located and finally quite recently contacted (well, her sister) and yet – in the silence that I receive from that should be my answer: that no person who fails to respond to wonderful out of the blue enquiries from distant weird past souls is on my page or wavelength or tree. The point being, anyway, that foolish romantic Hollywood stupid little boy dreams should be dead, and are rationally understood to be dead, but in the head of this idiot right here don’t die easy. Maybe that’s why I dream of zombies so much. Haunted by the undead and only removing the brain’ll stop it – but I don’t, it appears, have the weapons to do it…

In any case, that Mexico hot spring list was fulfilled and ticked off – amongst other womanly adventures in what was perhaps the sluttiest year of my life, London 2010-11 – and now here I am living content with the first woman I met off the plane – who had first contacted me, incidentally, while I was travelling in Guatemala – and perhaps the question has been answered and I need to move on, let it go, all that jazz. But I do have a habit of complicating things. And away from Mexico we’ve crawled.

Mexico memories. Memories of when I first got to the Yucatan and all the phones beeped their text-receiving beep and my mind instantly reacted and then I remembered I had no phone. The days it took for that to die down. And the joy I felt at the freedom of being away from that, after all that stupid London over-communication and needing always to be in contact with a machine through email and text and facebook and –

I don’t think there are any more memories. I could talk about the strange and long-lasting and absolutely groovy and beneficial effect I think my encounter with Mariela has had on my lovelife, but I don’t think it would make much sense. I could talk about the mad hitch I had on the north road to the hot springs with the guy who drove his shitty little car at 90kph into 30kph curves – and 160kph into 90kph curves – or the hike up the canyon with cool Manchester Lee and the rattlesnake I nearly trod on again but what point? Ultimately, it came down to this: me knowing I’ve been completed and fulfilled by that Way of Nature epiphany and those Yandara rude awakenings and my canyon also epiphanies and even instructions as to what to do next. The canyon has been reunioned with and checked in on – but man can’t stay there forever when man has bigger callings to answer. Man buys plane ticket to Vancouver. Man checks in with two BC friends who will be happy to receive him. Man then flies up there, two days before Christmas, and is back once more on the Tsawassen ferry heading again to Christmas with Eric, just like Christmas 2001. Another long-awaited reunion. Another glorious and groovy time. Long talks and walks and good company with E, and then the same again with Shalene in Vancouver. Good friends. Good old friends. Nice times, but England calls.

Patti comes up and fills me in and she’s lovely and motherly as ever. I’ve found a plane ticket from Calgary to London, about a hundred and forty quid. Patti drives me part of the way, and in her car we skirt that American border just a wee hop and a skip and an infrared dodge away and I long for it and think about coming back in the summer and genuinely actually doing it. All that way through Guatemala and Mexico I’ve been meeting these guys who had succeeded in sneaking in and they’d given me hope. But tempting though it is I’ve other plans right now. Plus, it’s winter. Although, funnily enough, the truck driver who takes me over the Rockies and drops me off right at the airport in Calgary maybe six hours before my plane is due is a Canadian banned from the States and he says he’s snuck in loads of times, goes sometimes through the hills with a mountain bike on his shoulder. More dreams and plans for the future…

When I go to the check-in there’s no record of me on the passenger list, been a slip-up somewhere. No matter though – there’s a plane two hours later and even though I’m buying the ticket in cash at the airport – long-time dream fulfilled! – it’s even cheaper than the one I’d wanted to buy online. Ain’t life grand? And on we go, good old Thomas Cook, right back to London eating always satisfying airplane food and watching movies and the whole thing is complete. I land in England in deep snow and after a train exit the station and smile at everyone and want to say hello and share the enjoyment of the snow with them but they tramp and look at me miserable and I guess it’s unsurprising ‘cos to them it’s just 7a.m. on January the 16th and they’ve been tramping in this snow for weeks and who needs some semi-tanned man straight off the plane smiling at them like he thinks he’s in goddamn Mexico or even Canada for God’s sake? Weird-ass English: so grim and forgetful of their status as human beings all together. But even they can’t puncture my spirits this white January morn. Back home! Back to adventures new. Back to a life in a castle in Kent and book plans and marketing plans and launch party plans and new writing plans – none of which come to fruition – and, of course, the hunt for a wife plan, which perhaps did.

In any case, gee whiz, I’ve sure written the whole thing fastly and haphazardly and I’m sorry about that but I just don’t seem to be able to write properly anymore, the imperative being to get it out of me and down on screen rather than to be understood or neat or good, writing and publishing dreams dying easier than romantic dreams – they take effort – and in the middle now of a real strong drive to completely tell this entire life so I can move on to the next one. Compelled, I am, for reasons either good or mad, but compelled nonetheless and caring not a jot. What comes next? That’s the only real question – the question that drives all those movies and books and dies at the end of them too.

What comes next indeed? For I am home, and back in England, and briefly in Leeds, where I briefly make love with Nicola, and then move to Kent in a frivolously purchased Renault Clio (uninsured) via Oxford and Bristol, and where I live in the castle for a few months until the castle becomes too dissatisfying. Nothing happening in Herne Bay. No jobs to be found. And then I write a massively frustrated letter to Mother Meera – posted here? – and pretty soon events unfold and conspire and synchronicities (etcetera) take me once more to London, but to south London, and I actually find a life there I like. Much musing and learning on women. Almost falling for my friend Abi. Various dalliances and then moving over to East Dulwich and –

I guess that’s pretty much where the latest incarnation of this blog begins, in January 2011. Filling in the blanks. Bringing it up to date. Leaving the whole thing complete for the future biographers when I’ve finally metamorphosised into beautiful butterfly crystalline creature without time or interest in piddling little confusions of daft human boy Rory, shambolic but no doubt fascinating for intellectual brains to one day contort themselves over and try and slot into place unrealising that the whole thing’s just madness and bobbins.

But, like I say, compelled. Ahem! And that’s the end for today.

Questions? ;-)

Mexico (Part Nine)

The students are on holiday, a one month Easter break. Came as a bit of a surprise to me: term-time don’t mean much to a postgrad. We’ve not got any classes as such till mid-April, and the last one was in February. Pretty much forgotten that I’ve actually work to do. As far as writing goes, all I do is type my blog, though will no doubt get down to essay action mid-May sometime, when the deadline’ll be a-loomin’. Ain’t the student life grand?

Lack of students also means a decrease in playing and refereeing football, which is good. My body is exhausted, and in need of rebuilding. I played a game last Thursday evening and although the engine was still functioning – ie, I could run fast the whole game long – my touch had deserted me, which is a bit of a shock when it happens. The ball just pinging off my foot for no apparent reason. Brain and leg no longer working in harmony. Although weirdly enough I scored more goals than usual, deciding that since the touch had gone I might as well just swing the old leg and shoot. And they kept going in. But a bit of rest most welcome.

And the plan? The plan is to finish this Mexico malarkey and then to see what I feel like planning. So…

I’m done with my Yandara talk. I left there finally and once and for all I guess satisfied with having ridden it till the end. What began with high hopes of perhaps finding a place to settle for a while – remember, this was still an open-ended trip even at this late point (the beginning of December) – turned out to be nothing more than the revealing to myself that yogaheaded bliss ninny days were well and truly over. I didn’t want to be there or be around that vibe. It simply wasn’t me. And so on I went.

There were two more places to go to in Baja. One was, obviously, the hot springs canyon, which I had come to believe was the point and culmination of the whole trip all along, and the other was John Milton’s Way of Nature, now shockingly revealed to me as having burned down. And yet John was still due in late January to run a course down there and I had thoughts about connecting with him then. John who no longer returned my emails. John who had once been so close and now seemed so distant. John who still held such a fascination for me…

I went up to the Way of Nature one day while I was staying at Yandara. Todos Santos is a short easy hitch to the north. Things hadn’t changed much in the town – still the same old fish taco stand, the galleries and such. New shops had opened but as many old shops had closed. Again, remarkable that it had changed so little such a short distance from the burgeoning Cabo.

Todos Santos, so extraordinarily familiar to me. Two months there in ’99. Four months there in 2001. And that groovy narrow dirt track that winds down to the Way of Nature that I must have walked hundreds of times, the memory of the first time I walked it burned in my brain forever. The guava and the lemons. The purple flowers. The…

…farmers’ fields – good old Augustine and the dodgy knee I healed, his hand plough and his chillies and beans – gone now, replaced by big houses and walls. Tasteful, mind, but changed…

…and on down, winding along the path, noting the differences, noting the similarities, until, right at the end, there is the Way of Nature ex-bed and breakfast, where so much happened for me right back in my youth and…

…it’s charred. It’s burned. The palapa roof which looked down over some of the most momentous changes in my life is gone. Bamboo and cariso windows and walls I helped build are gone. Everything is black and wrecked. And yet…there’s more there than I’d been led to believe by Craig. The shell still stands. It’s somewhat inhabitable. Patti’s proud kitchen the scene of so many tortillas and lentil delights. Craig’s magic sauces. The happy young souls we once were still there standing and smiling and chatting and rapping, excited by life, still doing it all right now in front of my eyes, imprints of their ghosts. If all moments exist in the NOW then we are all doing forever more the things we did back then.

But the kitchen I see is gutted, no longer proud or neat or functional. The room I painted with Rob – the massage room – the room I slept in with Ashargin, which Craig built – the cariso mandala Shane made my first week there, still surviving – the once so neatly manicured tai-chi circle overgrown and –

Everything is destroyed. The sadness of something once so beautiful and lovely and cared for, where my young heart opened and dwelled in love and passion…wrecked and burned and graffitied and left to rot. And yet…

A Mexican family live there now. They take care of the place for John – to stop the looters and the graffitiers, I guess – and that’s their rent. There’s no electricity anymore, nor running water. The gardens and pathways are overgrown. The man drives John’s blue four-wheel-drive with the Colorado plates that he had even when I was first there. Keeps everything running for when John comes back. John’s room upstairs. The roof Canadian Dave who now lives in London used to sleep on. Everything burned. And then…

The table. The dining table. The big elliptical brown table we sat around every morning, every evening to eat and talk and laugh. The table I received John’s teachings at those first six days. The table at which I first listened to him talk, when I hated him. Me and Rob and Patti and Craig and Rani and Shane and David and Emily all gathered round and listening and smiling and laughing and eating and learning and –

A thousand, millions memories around that table. And the table still remains.

The table is off to side, forgotten and unused. No chairs. Black marks from the fire where things from the roof have fallen down onto it and burned. But it survives.

I walk over to it. I put my hand on it. And in an instant I see –

Everything. All my memories of being there with John. The laughter and the growth. The whole thing I went through in ’99 right there under that palapa roof.

It hits me like electricity. Rockets up my fingers and my arm as skin touches wood. Everything so vivid, as real as visions. The –

I have to get out. I have to leave these kind smiling Mexicans so open and welcoming. I…

…go stumbling through the grasses – past the overgrown Buddha fountain – along where Shane so carefully used to manage the dirt irrigation system of miniature dams with a hoe – where I would come and ask him questions and then leave him hoeing to contemplate the answers, so new to my young and seeking brain – and into the old overgrown camping area, where my tent once sat, where I…

…woke up that morning amazed after blissing out in oneness kissing dirt and gravel and Rani sat on the steps with me holding my hand and smiling and saying, your eyes, they’re full of stars and…

…where sad and hiding in my tent Craig gently cajoled me into asking John if I could go on the wilderness solo, and leaving my comfort zone and humbling myself before another, my whole life changed because of it.

My whole life changed. Everything changed. Right there.

I walk to the edge of the camping area. I face away from the palapa and the kitchen and the Mexicans. I fall into the grass on my knees. And everything begins to shudder, and tears stream from my eyes, and I don’t know why.

But what it feels like is this: that coming back to this place was the whole reason why I came back to Mexico, not the hot springs. And that I’m simultaneously dying to something while also rediscovering a little piece of my soul. That’s what it feels like – but the tears are beyond words, beyond understanding, and I don’t know why they’re there. Something…

A pilgrimage. A pilgrimage right across the great big body of Mexico to a charred forgotten table wherein a little piece of me dwelled. Where everything once happened. Something I’d never been able to let go of.

A pilgrimage I didn’t even know I was on, till I found myself sat shuddering in the sharp yellow grass where I once slept.

And that’s what it feels like. These tears. This outpouring. That something within me is dying. The something, perhaps, that has never been able to stop thinking of Mexico, of Baja, of my time there at the Way of Nature. The something that I’ve forever been looking back on, and wanting to get back to. That way of life. The discovery. The spirituality. The excitement and the newness. My youth. Always I’ve thought of Mexico – in jobs – throughout uni – with women – and now I return. And when I do, I die. Because, at the same time, I’m reclaiming something of my soul. That makes no sense, but that’s what it feels like: that I left a part of me there, in that place, and that I’m getting it back. Which part, I know not. But that’s what it feels like, and so I shudder and cry and let the emotions and the energy do what it will. Falling into the grass. Opening myself up to it. Lost to the tears and the sadness and the –

Whatever you want to call it. Feeling. That’s all it is. A feeling that cleanses and renews and leaves me…

…grateful in the yellow grass. Grateful for everything. Grateful for John, and for the mad life that led me to him, and for the mad trip that brought me back. For the table that was still miraculously there. For the visions from its touch. For the vividness of those memories. For the magic of those times. For…

…everything that had transpired since. For uni and grounding and for the fortune of my life: a life that still allowed me the freedom to give the energy and time for seeking these experiences. Five months across Mexico. All those thousands of miles. All the detours and the people along the way. Not even knowing whether to head for Baja or Peru. The signs that took me to Xela and Cuauhtémoc and Mexico City and even there at the Way of Nature, another Coco-like story/premonition wrapped around a girl called Holly that put everything into place…

The magic of life. Of wonders. Of…a goddamn table, fer christ’ssake! But oh how so powerful and beneficial and heartfelt and real. All that way to touch a table and cry in the grass. So absolutely worth it.

I return to the Mexicans fresh and new. We smile and chat and they’re lovely and tell me all about John and the place and hand me a bag full of avocados freshly dropped from the trees. I tell them what it was like back in the day, point out the various places no longer there or changed beyond recognition, and they give me free reign to wonder and explore. Up on the roof, to dangle legs over the side and think about Canadian Dave and all the other times I sat up there looking down on the circle where I first did tai-chi, and first watched John disappear, and the magic cactus. Then to go wondering down the overgrown paths past the cabañas Craig built in later years, in which I slept with Eve, beautiful beds with nets and romance, now collapsed and barely visible underneath the grasses. The trip began with ruins and ends with ruins. But ruins that mean so much more to me. The ruin, also, of the little church I built in 2001, a pentagonal palm frond structure built between the perfect space created by five trees. Craig gave me the materials and the freedom and the encouragement and it was one of the best things I ever did. But Patti told me it got washed away in a flood and a storm a year later. And yet…still the trees remain, and the magical space that first attracted me and whispered to me to build it there and – unbelievably, the screw holes from my cariso wall poles remain: ancient tiny lined-up holes in trees made there by my own young hands. So many memories, so much to find. But…

The catharsis has happened. A part of me has died and a part of me has been reclaimed. I’ve got what those thousands of miles have led me to. And once the place has been poured over, and the shuddering sadness accepted and integrated…the man is born anew. The door has been walked through. The door can never be walked through again. The place is…the table is…

The table is just a table. A beautiful table. A magical table. But what it had been holding for me, it has passed on, and it dwells within me now. Reclamation. Recapitulation. The pilgrimage complete.

It was never about the hot springs; I understand that now. That was the carrot that dangled so juicy and sweet. That was the picture of the beautiful girl that drove me on across the ocean and all that land. But really it was poor old burned out Way of Nature, and a table, and an epiphany in the grass that I could never have expected.

Even the first time, all those wonderful years back, magical though the hot springs were, they were but the precursor to what awaited me with there.

And yet…having completed the pilgrimage, and found what I so patently set off unknowingly to find, the hot springs remain. And it is to the hot springs I must go…

Mexico (Part Eight)

It’s eight-thirty and here I am again typing, despite not really being awake yet. Didn’t get in till three-thirty: was round at Simon and Harry’s for a midnight game of Balderdash and some long conversations about women, sex, ourselves, and spirituality. Simon wanted to know some of my actual experiences and I told him. Seemed like he got it. The substance in the words hitting him somewhere inside. Would be cool if that was true, and turned into something. Maybe all life not absent – extraordinary life – here in Leeds.

Staying out late and interacting, and enjoying the interacting more. The approach of official springtime perhaps having an effect. The long hibernation of winter at an end. It’s been a pretty good, mellow, simple one, here in my little cave. Though not so many sleep-ins as I would have liked, what with poor girlfriend having to rise around seven. I don’t go back to sleep.

I also met up with Laura, to share words about writing. She’s penning a children’s book; was cool to pass on tips and wisdoms. Even things about the “story arc” that I mostly ignore myself.

Spring and sun and passing things on.

But now it’s time to get back on the Mexico train. To rise and find my USB stick, open up the last chapter, and jog the memory; thoughts of it being something to do with Shane and my stay at his place, despite lots of words, still unfinished, further things I may or may not say.

To rise. To prepare the tea. To get down to it…

Where I was with…Shane. Shane and Craig. Craig and Allison. At Yandara. Down on the Baja beach. Dwelling there in paradise in a tent tiptoeing carefully around rattlesnakes and surrounded by – hands off! – yoga girls. Where I was helping Allison transform a yoga manual she had written into a publishable book. Feeling useful. Feeling like I was paying for my keep, which is something I wanted after Mexico City; after leaving there feeling ever so slightly dirty because…

…I never told you about Lucio. Lucio was my friends’ vet. He had a lovely top floor apartment that he’d decorated like some kind of interior jungle. Had branches and vines with plants growing from them, the walls painted in savannah scenes, everything shells and bamboo and then a whole roof terrace tropical greenhouse garden. Everybody fell in love with Lucio’s place. He invited me over to dinner, to chat and to hang out and also stay. He was Mexican but not a Jew. Spoke perfect English. Veterinarian to the upper-middle class and their billion pooches. Smart dresser and good lifestyle and…

…a friend of his comes over one night, a cool Mexican girl who’s lived in London and now speaks with a perfect English accent and no doubt has rich parents. She’s awesome. Good chats, etcetera. Somewhere in there she asks Lucio if he’s told me about his other friends and he says, no he...

…and Lucio so smartly dressed and sophisticated and…

…me there thinking that maybe…

…but then he’s always talking about women we should chase and…

…my feeling then…

…the one day when I’m on his computer – still editing my book – and I see some pictures of him posing smiling with a group of smart sophisticated (clothed) smiling posing well-dressed other Mexican guys and…

…the thought back to the massage he gave me the first night I went round to his, and the freedom with which he worked on my thighs – my upper-thighs – no hang-ups like you’d think Mexican guys might have about rubbing their oiled up hands over some guy’s thighs, maybe a hint of buttock, maybe…

The photos confirmed what I’d long suspected and felt – no one in the Jewish circle knew, I don’t think – and that left that goodwill massage feeling a little bit yucky, plus several other things besides. But worse than that, later when I was staying with Mariela she told me she’d heard he’d offered to let me stay at his longer if I chipped in with a bit of money for rent and I’d refused and left for hers. That caused friction between the two of us: she suspected she’d got a freeloader on her hands and lost her trust in me, and it made me paranoid, not knowing who else had heard this rumour, or who else believed it. Suddenly I was this alone foreign guy in La Condesa who wasn’t sure what to believe and double-thinking on all the goodwill I’d received afraid it wasn’t genuine and that it was maybe even resented. I longed to defend myself, get to the bottom of the source – no doubt Lucio, for some strange reason – and blurt out about his secret gay life and inappropriate massages, but I kept it in. No point rocking the boat of his life. No point creating a scene in a place I was about to leave.

But it soured my experience there, and I knew how I would be thought of when I left, even though I had chipped in and paid my way as far as groceries went, if not for rent and treats. The whole thing made me deep down sad – still does – and determined again to not go to a place where one is relying on others. The fine line between accepting the kindness of strangers and looking after oneself. And yet here I was again, staying at Yandara, being provided for as far as food and shelter went, and wanting to give something back…

…which I was able to do with the book preparation, and that felt good, although I wanted to do more. I did give Craig money for groceries – though he ended up paying me anyway for the work I’d done on the book. But what I really wanted was to be able to contribute to the place, share in some ways the things that I had learned over the years, perhaps in meditation or perhaps in the grounding experiences, which I felt I’d mastered the hard way and which they sorely needed. Allison wanted me to do something like that too – said she felt I should be there, wanted me to get involved – but the vibe from Shane was one of hypocritical platitudes of being grateful that I was around and for what I brought to the place but in making little effort to actually interact with me, and from Craig a sort of confusion of mixed-messages that again spoke of liking what I had to offer but also feeling that having an outside guy around all those girls was a bit untenable. They were going through stuff, he said. Having a guy around wasn’t good for them. Outside girls were fine. And inside guys. But an outside guy…

…although he did one day acquiesce to Allison’s request that I get to take part in a campfire on the beach one night with everyone, having done the job of gathering all the wood and hauling it down there. That was nice of him. And there I was, in the circle of the yoga girls, sort of tentative and on best behaviour, not wanting to say anything guffawing or rude from my dirty life – yet cajoled into playing the ‘My Girlfriend’s Nice Song’ and joyfully relieved when all the pure yogaheads dug it and laughed and didn’t wince at the sex references and…

…there was one girl there that I did have my eye on, I must confess. A Canadian called Brittney. She played guitar and sang beautiful songs. She also looked on the whole Shane and Craig thing with a refreshingly withering eye and was always getting told off for disappearing down the surfing beach with her guitar and maybe coming back late or skipping classes and she seemed about the only one who had her feet on the ground. We had a few fun talks but Craig warned me off, said she was going through some difficult stuff. I didn’t buy it but, man, his house, his rules. Anyway, she and I were the last ones by the fire and we talked and played right through the night and then when the fire went down I hit her with this idea I’d had of burying the coals under the sand and lying on top of them, which weirdly worked, and worked too well, the coals slowly heating up the sand and getting us sweating in the blanket we were wrapped in, too afraid to nod off in case the whole thing caught fire. Man, those coals were like three inches under sand! But you’d have sworn they were just exactly then scorching a hole in Allison’s lovely thick blanket. Not easy to relax. Of course, no hole was scorched but it was too hot and nervewracking for sleep. We giggled into the dawn. We spooned most innocently. I was ever-conscious of Craig’s admonitions, even though I fancied her like mad. But her fingers began to explore my hands, as they always do, when all you’re doing is innocently cuddling up – yeah right – but innocent we remained. I was chaste. I didn’t want to give Craig any reason to doubt his trust in me, gorgeous and lovely though she was. And naughty too.

She went back to her tent and slept, and I stayed on the beach till the sun rose. I’d been a good boy. I’d done the right thing. I’d missed out on beautiful times with a beautiful woman but…

And Allison. Allison who liked spending time with me. Allison who was nice and good but also a bit batty with the whole New Age spiritual thing. Who took some time out from the whole place and went and camped in a little trailer on her own down the beach a ways and invited me over to laze around and chat about all things under the sun, fielding calls from Craig unsure about the time we were spending together – he should be unsure, if he judges all men by his own standards – but nothing devious in it beyond my own intermittent thoughts of maybe screwing him over for all the shit he done cause Patti, my friend of ceaseless goodness.

But Rory has his standards and Rory’s standards try to keep him from doing things he’ll later regret or cause other people harm where women are involved. And so…

Strange days at Yandara. In paradise and surrounded by bliss and love but often skulking around and needing to avoid certain areas and getting into weird moments of wondering what the hell I was doing there, and wanting to leave, but then being persuaded to stay by the very people who didn’t seem to want me there, and getting even into playing internet chess – right there, a few hundred metres from the Pacific! – and the oddness of Allison-Craig-me – she wanting me around, involved, him always umming and ahing – and then mostly Shane, to have such a good close friend you’ve been through so much with, but at the same time to be at such loggerheads…

…his arrogance with regard to his role of spiritual teacher…

…the contrived and condescending way he would read quotes from books, slowly and carefully picking over the words, seeking to imbue them with meaning, making them out to be holy and about to any second blow our minds, breathing ‘em in putting on soulful gazes and then – for God’s sake! – repeating the whole paragraph even though it’s just me and one other girl – trying to impress? – and I’d rather talk about football, to be honest. Making his weird hand movements and spouting teachings he’d heard when he was in India – half-teachings; teachings not the whole picture – while at the same time still remarking – bragging – slipping it in there, as he was ten years ago – that he’d never read a book.

Come on, man, you’ve read books, I say. You were just reading out of one now. You’re always reading books.

But, ah, he’s never read a whole book – that’s the point. Some big spiritual triumphalism to separate him from the masses, to show that his wisdom is his and his alone – despite quoting teachers, reading paragraphs here and there – because it’s the whole book that counts. Same old bullshit statements of self-grandeur I once probably made myself.

I’ve never read a book. Sheesh.

The climax of it all came when I watched the first part of the movie Zeitgeist and I declared it the dumbest movie I’d ever seen, pure stupid. Shane didn’t take well to that. Said he couldn’t believe anyone he considered a friend would use a word like “stupid”. Defended it and got pretty aggro and we actually argued over the whole dumb thing. To me, it was clear – I’d studied certain things that the movie touched on – you know, the whole “this myth of Jesus has been told over and over again pretty much exactly the same, down to date of birth, etcetera, in cultures all over the world” – and I knew enough to know that plenty of what I’d seen wasn’t simply incorrect, but that it was bogus, fabricated, and made up. The rest I researched, and pretty quickly was able to dismiss that whole first part – I haven’t seen any of the rest of it – as laughable.

But Shane leapt to the defence.

Well how do you know what you believe is true?

Books, my man. Reading. Looking into things. Getting to the historical sources. The best possible evidence. Making an informed decision. Ninety percent of the stuff in that film was bunkum.

He whips out his iPhone. He rushes for evidence to challenge me. He’s bubbling with anger and I can’t help but think a lot of it’s because I’ve made my laughing criticisms of this “dumbest movie ever” in front of a girl that he likes and a girl that likes that film too.

Well, the debate gets heated. He hates that I’ve been so scathing of something he loves and used words like “dumb” and “stupid” – remember, to a New Ager, the greatest crime in the world is to be judgmental – far worse to judge a murderer, in fact, than to commit the murder in the first place – and I can’t believe that this otherwise intelligent, level-headed, thinking man would fall for such a piece of sensationalist homemade trash as that Zeitgeist fiasco. Imagine watching that and taking it for history! But whatever we do, we just can’t find no common ground, and for the first time in my life I’m seeing a side of Shane that doesn’t want to understand, doesn’t want to meet half-way, and doesn’t want to deal calmly with things and talk about our feelings and find out what’s going on.

Just being human, I guess. I suppose that should be refreshing. To finally see the man lose his rag and come down from his high horse. But I suppose I couldn’t let go of my expectations that he was better than someone who could be petty and lash out and say childish mad things patently designed to piss another person off.

It took said girl that I figured he fancied to sort things out. The next day things were still brewing and when another attempt to smooth them over failed she sat us down and whipped out her conflict resolution skills. She was good at it. Impressed me no end. Had us talk out what we wanted to say and we reached a place of understanding. Took a few hours but the outcome was of really hearing why the other person felt what they felt and learning to be okay with that. Was actually quite fascinating: for Shane, it didn’t matter whether something was historically true or not, it was the feeling that it gave him. It felt true, and that was enough for him. Weird as I found that – head-shakingly weird, in all honesty – it was what he believed and once I got that into my head I had no problem with accepting it. And having been able to explain myself – that whether something was true or not – ie, whether it actually historically happened – was of absolute importance to me – and being heard in that in full, I was satisfied. He heard me and accepted that that’s was what was important to me, and I had no need for him to feel the same way. Perhaps it was just the wanting to be heard that was the problem – and being opposed is, well, the opposite of that. We were doing it to each other, by trying to convince one another of our respective viewpoints, and maybe that’s where the friction came from. Afterwards, I felt great, and connected and close to him again.

Though naturally I still thought myself right. ;-)

Anyways, I guess that was about the end of it. There came a point where it was finally apparent that nothing was ever going to happen – that Shane wasn’t interested in spending quality time together – that Craig was forever going to um and ah about things that I could do while simultaneously pointing out the logistical impossibilities of the whole thing – that the yoga girls were going to come and go – that Allison wasn’t going to get her way – that whatever gifts I had to offer weren’t desired – and, beyond everything else, that it just wasn’t the place for me. All the getting high – all those weird-ass staring competitions and falling into each other’s arms and gazes – all the words of honey and puke, telling truths, expressing hearts…it wasn’t where I was at. I had little interest anymore. Grounding seemed more sensible. It all seemed a bit pie in the sky and up in the air. I was sad that I didn’t fit in there any longer – didn’t fit in there just as I didn’t fit in in London – but, hey ho, the road warrior must move on, such is his lot, ever evolving, ever changing, maybe tomorrow he’ll wanna settle down…but till tomorrow he’ll…

Kissing without sound

I just wrote a blog entry. I just abandoned it. I felt like I couldn’t say what I wanted to say and I guess I didn’t see any point in it either. I was trying to make cogent and intelligent observations about certain things I’ve been musing on of late – things about sex and myself and life – but it just wasn’t coming. That’s the problem with trying to be intelligent – it takes a bit of effort.

Sex blah blah: here’s what I wrote about ‘kissing’:

Mostly what I’ve been thinking about the last few days is new ideas about what the passing of time is doing to me. It started through musings on sex, deconstructing that. That started with musings and experiments on kissing, which yielded perhaps startling results. Perhaps you would like to try my experiments for yourself?

Kiss someone. Give them a good proper kiss. Tongues and lips and sloppy wet saliva juicening up the action. You stop. You break. You go back into it. You stop again.

What do you notice at that stop?

A noise. The sound of lips smacking. The sound of a kiss.

Now do exactly the self-same kiss but without making the noise.

What do you notice then?

What I notice is that the kiss no longer feels like a kiss, but something else. Like people slopping their mouths on each other. Like ‘chewing face’. Like some strange wet ritual of licking.

Kisses without the noise at the end sort of fall flat. Like, oh, what were we just doing? What was the point in that?

And yet, there’s no reason why it should be that way – because, for ninety percent of the kiss, they are identical. In fact, the kiss that you are enjoying so much is the exact same kiss as the noiseless one – it can hardly be defined by what it may or may not sound like in the future – not logically – and yet it appears to be.

The kiss is in the noise we make at the end. And it’s important to note that it is a noise we make: it doesn’t come naturally. We add it in. We really are some very strange creatures.

Not that I’m saying I don’t like kissing. ;-)

And then I tried to get onto sex, deconstructing that, saying something or other about how it’s mostly in the mind – though not entirely – and the older I get the more I seem to be realising this, like for real, and then I also wanted to say similar things about the experience of reading, of watching movies, things like that. Just the ideas of some musings I had that once upon a time I believed that movies and books would prove endlessly fascinating and would take me deeper and deeper into something – and that now they seem to have reached a plateau or even a peak and – yes, a peak I think it is, for there is nowhere else to go with it. It’s like I’ve come to a point where everything’s repeating and the repeating’s just no fun, becomes less about learning something and growing and experiencing something new, and more about filling time in a way that feels kinds of mundane.

Not that this in any way depresses me. I believe in the ever onward and upward progression of life – evolution, I believe it’s called – and that things are always getting better. The door closes, but it is a door that closes behind us, if we let it. If we are able to let go, of what we have been, and of what no longer appeals. If we relinquish our previous realities and move on with faith into the land of uncertainty, which bridges our present and our future.

I suddenly feel like I don’t know what I’m saying. Perhaps writing has reached this point too. Certainly, that’s the way it’s been going – and again, I rejoice to see it. Everything old and unappealing is expendable – even the things we love. Kill your darlings, right? If they cease to serve the story.

And the story is life.

What I really need to do is look up something about the stages of life. New Agers have this idea that things go in seven-year cycles and here I am, into my sixth one of those, and things are tangibly changing. Certainly, the ages 0, 7, 14, 21, and 28 are pretty pivotal – but what of 35? What does that represent?

Making an egg sandwich

PS Click here if you're interested in reading about a load of men moaning about not getting blowjobs. Though having snided them by typing "moaning" I must say that I fully get and support their point, having experienced that once myself.

Also, I just uploaded what I wrote two days ago. Be sure not to miss! It might just change your life!

vlog

right here there's supposed to be a video of me in bed musing about 

talking into a camera - but we're having some technical 

difficulties, folks

Not about Mexico

I woke up this morning thinking about what I wrote yesterday and thinking, hm, I wouldn’t be surprised if that generates some heat. And, sure enough, right there in my inbox there’s an email on the subject from a long time mutual friend of Shane’s and mine, though more his.

O-oh, I think, I’m gonna get a telling off, and face my own shortcomings, and probably take the whole thing down at first available opportunity, and regret it. Except…

Except, it’s not like that. It’s support and recognition that the things I felt have been felt by another, and another who knows him well. There’s relief in that. Not that it makes me feel good about it – no one wants to feel good denigrating another human being – but what it does do is negate the sense of craziness that comes when you feel something and it seems like no one in the world gets where you’re coming from. You know, like the cheated-on spouse who just knows in their bones that something’s not right, but all they get is denial. I don’t know what’s worse – the cheating, or the sense of craziness when your feelings and intuitions are painted as nuts. So…

I shall continue with my story. I’ve got two hours before a game of squash with young Simon. Simon who I called in on the other day and ended up spending three hours with – him and his roommate Harry, who I also play squash with – and an enjoyable three hours it was. They’d just had a drunken party. They’re twenty and talk lots about girls. But it’s interesting and real and there’s no pretending to be anything other than what they actually are. And they seem to sort of dig my company too, being as I’m older but also still kind of young, and different. Harry’s got spiritual inquisitions. They’re both into thinking about life. A lot of it revolves around relationships and sex – but that’s okay: a lot of my thinking revolves around relationships and sex too. And it’s interesting to see what the younger generation are like. Changed, I think. Looser. More free. They talk dirty and sleep around and the girls are as aggressive and promiscuous as the guys and I’ve got my theories as to why that is. Different generations grow up with different ideas. Ours was all AIDS terror and pregnancy fears and STDs and also the feminism glow of women wanting careers and lording it over men after all those centuries of oppression and even wanting to put guys down. Then things changed and the next generation realised that AIDS wasn’t the dead-cert thing people like me grew up thinking it to be, instant contraction after the merest sniff of unprotected sex. Porn and vibrators becoming the norm. And the rise of the ladette and girls going wild getting as pissed up and debauched as the guys. Plus, feminism dies down and integrates and the whole thing about the female being able to have whatever life she wants – as long as it isn’t the life of the housewife and mother – is forgotten and something more natural is settled into wherein they really can have whatever they want, including the traditional thing – which many younger girls, I think, now given total freedom seem to want by choice in any case.

Total freedom: I guess that’s the key. Not necessarily the free love of a pre-AIDS sixties – but probably something not far off. And mobile phones and text messages and drunken late night booty calls have probably all changed things too. One student girl I know told me she once got a late night text message from a guy asking if she was up for some action – and there you are, eleven p.m. and flicking around bored on facebook and how easy is it to just tap out “sure, come on over” on your mobile and much better than doing nothing, right? Only she checked his phone for some reason while he was off in the bathroom and saw that the message was a multiple-recipient one and she just happened to be the one that replied.

But what to think of that? Bad? Wrong? Or probably she just shrugged and thought, meh, I’d’a done the same thing in his shoes anyways.

Things are different, I feel. Unless it’s just me, who grew up pretty shy anyways, much more romantic and traditional than I ever gave my self credit for. Always monogamous. Not sleeping around. Only going for people that I genuinely liked. Maybe people have always been wild and free and I just never noticed it. Though it’s really only with the younger generation of guys that I’ve had frank and open sexual discussions. They just don’t seem to mind. There’s no boundaries when it comes to talking about what they get up to, dicks and arseholes and the whole shebang. I theorised a few years back that guys didn’t talk about sex with each other ‘cos it was too uncomfortably homoerotic – you know, some guy tells you what he was doing in bed with a girl, and to think of it you’ve got to visualise it, and next thing you know you’re thinking about your best mate’s naked cock and balls moving in and out of some woman, and to my mind that’s a bit gay. And realising that I’d never really talked with guys in intimate detail about sex that was the theory that I came up with to explain it. But I may be totally wrong. It may just be me, and that I don’t like talking about it because it would make me think of men in a way that I find uncomfortable. Same way the idea of having a threesome with two guys and one girl – even if the guys, in classic porno situation, were never to interact with one another – that just turns me off. I don’t want my erect penis near another man’s erect penis. I don’t know how they do it. Or those bukkake videos where they all stand around masturbating together. Really strange. Really kind of homo, in my eyes – which of course leaves me wide-open to accusations of repressed homosexual urges, which I’m fine with, it don’t make no difference. Bit high school-ish, that theory anyways. Though probably true…

Point is, we have a number of possibilities: 1. that the younger generation are different, and that the males of this generation are more free and less inhibited when talking with each other; 2. that things have always been the same and it’s just me who was never comfortable with sharing intimate sexual details with members of my own gender; 3. something else, which usually turns out to be the case.

And where did I start on all this? Oh yeah, musing about Simon and Harry and just trying to slide into this blog some indication that I do actually associate with people in the real world, beyond kicking balls, and that I’m not just some lonesome typer who sits in his apartment looking out disgruntled on shoppers and smokers and wondering where the fuck I belong. Only ninety percent of the time, I reckon. ;-)

We ended up going down to Popina’s on Brudenell Road for a fry-up. Lovely Popina’s; haven’t been there in years. We all got the Mega, which is £6.50 and stupidly enormous. They have a board there with the stats and something like two-thirds of guys and three-quarters of girls fail to finish it. The girls, I can understand – but the guys? I’m shocked at that. We three of course all finished ours (I had extra toast) and I’m even half-confident that I could have eaten it twice. But what sort of man fails to eat a ginormous fried breakfast? I literally just shook my head when thinking of it. Two-thirds of them fail! I’m disgusted and embarrassed by my own species.

And, yes, I do mean species, not gender.

In any case, we made it in style and we’re all now the proud owners of Popina “I ate the Mega!” key rings. I’ve wanted one of those for years.

I’m such a boy! lol

And talk, and women, and sex, and fun. A walk around the park out in the first true sunshine of spring and a bit of a play on the swings. Listening to the guys and getting some insights into what their lives are like, and feeling how mine is different now what with the passing of years, but still mostly the same. Thirty-six but not so out of place to feel it – just as it always was with the grooviest people I knew in my youth, good old Stevie Jay and Lindsay, still older then than I am now when they first inspired me in my own early-twenties – and still they go on living their groovy lives, having their fun, though now into their fifties and lighting the way for those of us who are to follow tem there, and who fear less at the spectre of getting old because of their good example. An example which I am perhaps passing on too, to poor indebted students who look all around them and see materialism and a world build on jobs – and yet here is this guy who doesn’t have much, yet seems happy, having a good time, enjoying the life, beating them on the squash court, running faster than them, getting taken for twenty-six, talking about all things young and yet also outlining the possibilities in experiences lived in his own outlandish youth, and with more experiences to come. Only when the talk comes to booze and to clubs – to the incomprehensibility of my getting involved with that – do I feel the passing of my years, our differences. I don’t even remember what that’s like. I ask Simon what goes on in them, is it still dark and noisy like it was when I was young? and he laughs and says I sound like his dad. I only see them in the day, when fresh-faced and sporty on the whole – but there’s a whole other life they’re living, which makes entertaining stories, but which I’m not sure I want to see with my own eyes. They did invite me to a party they just had and I almost thought to go and check it out, even if just for five or twenty minutes, but I’m glad I didn’t. Sounded awful: girls getting wasted and puking and having mad arguments with each other. Harry says he’d proposed to a friend of theirs that she should get with me if I turned up – but when I look at her picture on facebook later, pretty though she was, I swear she only looked about fifteen. The madness of getting older! These girls who are no doubt fine in the eyes of their peers – thought of as women – seen to be fully-grown – and yet the older I get, the more they look like the children they probably are. Hell, at twenty-three I was with an eighteen-year-old and I felt no wrong in that. And yet, now at thirty-six I’m thinking twenty-year-olds as mere adolescents, jailbait, out of bounds. The idea’s as ridiculous and seedy as when Kevin Spacey finally gets his mitts on Mena Suvari in American Beauty and he looms over her at least twice the size like some King Kong monster holding a pre-pubescent Faye Wray in his arms.

Some things stay the same as the years progress, and thankfully so – but others change in ways you can never imagine.

And it’s all good.

Oops. I’ve gone off on one. Well that’s okay, I’ve not really the time to get into more crazy mad Mexican recollections anyways. It was ten thousand words yesterday and if it’s going to be more of the same today I don’t want to have to stop halfway through. So…any other real world things to talk about?

Hm. I think I mentioned that Nicky and I seemed back on track, despite certain weirdnesses. Funny old relationship: easily the most functional and smooth and troubleless of my life, which is something I’ve always wanted – but also the one that seems most like it could disappear at a moment’s notice. Nicky's never really been here in Leeds – and what I mean by that is, she’s spent the last three and a half years overseas, with good weather, digging new things, and settling here, in one place, in the winter, has been a real chore for her. She’s dreamed much of getting away. Wants to go travelling in Morocco or South America again. Started talking a few months back about taking a three month bike trip down the Continental Divide in America. Or maybe just biking from here down through France and Spain. Basically, dreaming of places elsewhere. It’s kind of a weird thing, I guess, to live with someone who wants to be in other places – who longs for travel and to quit their job – who comes home talking of trips that I don’t really have any interest in taking – and who also occasionally bemoans the lack of a feeling of togetherness in our relationship, and puts the blame squarely on me. Which I don’t, of course, deny – accept fully, in fact. In general I don’t feel together with people that I’ve been with. I don’t know what it’s like to be part of one of those couples that are “joined at the hip” – and I’m not even sure it sounds appealing. I’m very much an individual. I’ve got my ways and I like them. I don’t follow the crowd – some people talk about the wisdom of the crowd and some people say where the crowd is, there you’ll find folly. I’m with the latter. Football crowds and crowds of protesters and Daily Mail readers lacking their own thoughts and opinions and groups of guys staggering drunk down the street barely making up a whole person between them, just arms and legs and little chunks of brain. But what Nicky means is the little things in life, like when you’re at a gathering of friends and how I don’t seem interested or want to participate in things, and there’s truth in that too. I say, but they’re your friends, and she doesn’t want that, doesn’t see the need for the separation into hers and mine. But they are her friends, and they’re her friends because they interest her, and she interests them, and if they interested me they’d be my friends too. But they don’t. We went to a dinner on Sunday night and, listen, I’m not gonna say they’re not nice and lovely people – and probably nicer and lovelier than me – but I can’t get beyond the sense that pretty much everything they say I’ve already heard a thousand times and I’ve got no interest in saying things I said a thousand times ten or twelve years ago in response. I know that makes me a bad social animal but there you are: I’m just me. And if you don’t like it…

I wonder why she likes it? I wonder what she sees in me? The sex and the fact that I’m easy-going and good-looking and don’t give her many hassles nor drink nor smoke nor immerse myself in bad habits? Is that all? I got this other theory…that in general, these days, relationships begin before we ever really get to know a person and we basically make our choices based on the fraction that we know of them and we fill in the blanks. The fraction that we know of them, we decide we like – and the rest we just take on unspoken trust that it’ll all be there. You know, like the daft promises and insinuations we make when we’re first getting to know someone, wanting to impress them and being interested in what they’re interested in and therefore giving the impression of, I don’t know, a life of cross-country skiing and book discussion together. Or walks in the country and growing herbs. Or taking salsa classes and weekend breaks. All the stuff you’ll never get to experience with a guy like me.

But, anyways, that’s not the theory: the theory is that that initial thing that gets two people together – the spark, the connection that births the idea that this one-day or one-week or one-month interaction could work in the long-term – is basically what comes to define the relationship as a whole. For instance, with Perlilly and I, it was basically a kind of lust-sex-chemical magnet kind of thing and a mutual interest in music – and we always had that, but really nothing more. And when the lust and the sex died down – and more specifically the music – it was really my turning my back on wanting to perform with her anymore that precipitated the end of that relationship – well there just wasn’t enough of the other stuff to sustain it.

With Nicky, our relationship began because we both saw that the other person liked travel, and was chilled out, and didn’t give hassles, and, more tangibly, because we watched a movie together in bed and then had some pretty wicked love-making. Now, two years later, the watching movies and the pretty wicked love-making remains – amazing how it’s been such a constant, right from day one – but problems have arisen because our actual personalities have entered the situation – things which we really had no prior awareness of, given that we didn’t really know each other at all – and I suppose they’ve taken us by surprise. She’d assumed, of course, that I’d be the type of guy who would want to have dinner with her friends and interact with them in the way that she interacts with them. Cosy foursomes and all that laughter and small-talk discussion over candles and wine, etc. But what she’s actually discovered is I’m more content hermitting and keeping everyone who doesn’t fascinate me at arm’s length. That I much prefer my own company. And that I find most other people kind of dull. It’s not her fault, of course, that I’ve entered this stage where I just feel like I’ve heard everything anyone says a million times before and I suddenly can’t take it anymore. But it is her fault – my fault – everybody’s fault – that we enter into relationships without even getting to know the other person and making all these assumptions about what our lives will be like.

Me, for my part, I’m a pain in the arse because I’m easily satisfied. My main criteria is that my woman doesn’t hassle me and gives me the minimum of troubles. I get my satisfaction in life through playing sports and typing – and whatever else I happen to be into that year – and I guess I’ve reached a stage where I wouldn’t look to another person to provide my satisfaction for me, even though I do like being with another. I’m not even that bothered about making sexual demands, having seemingly started to reach this age where the whole thing is falling away from me. I don’t even wank more than once every six months. I could go weeks sleeping next to a shapely, curvy, soft naked body – and knowing she’s up for it, and wants it – and not even get a hard-on. Interesting times in Rory’s sexual progression. Osho reckons sex desire, if properly fulfilled, really ought to be sated by about forty-two. My feeling is that Osho talks a lot of crap but also talks a lot of sense and, who knows? maybe he’s onto something here. In any case, one does what one feels is right – and at the moment not being very interested in sex feels pretty much right to me.

Of course, it don’t help when your girlfriend’s only twenty-six and is far from sated. Among the few troubles I do get – and there ain’t many, to be fair: she’s absolutely remarkable and head and shoulders above any woman I’ve ever known in that regard – a sometimes exasperated burst of “when was the last time we had sex?” is about the extent of it.

That, and the issue of “togetherness.” I don’t know what to say about that. Probably I’m just no good at it. I is what I is and it’s a shame that there’s no time in this world for people to find that out. I should be more honest next time – if there is a next time – and lay my cards on the table in full. Or better still, write up some sort of menu. Like, this is me. The main problem is, because of my colourful past, people tend to think that I’ll have an equally colourful future. Except being in a relationship makes me happy and settles me – and all ideas of mad adventures feel a little bit silly. Wanting to get away is what discontent people do, what I’ve always done when I’ve been discontent myself. But take now, for example: I live in Leeds and I feel perfectly content and even tell myself I’m happier than I have been in years. And yet all my life is is sitting in bed typing – as I’m doing now – and then playing a bit of squash and football, and refereeing a couple of games for my income, and eating meals and sharing a bed with a nice woman who doesn’t give me hassles. Sounds kind of boring. And yet I love it! And I wouldn’t change it for the world. And I certainly wouldn’t change it – not right now – for a life back on the dusty, lonely road not knowing where I was going.

Although, I may one day in the future, depending on what I feel. That’s the difficulty: I could just change my mind completely…

Another thing that perhaps brought Nicky and I together – this was after we’d slept together a few times, and decided we liked that, but before we became a couple – was that we connected over ideas of bringing up children. In fact, that was a big part of what got me to fall for her – expressing my ideas and seeing that hers mirrored those almost precisely. And rare ideas they were too. Though what I didn’t know at the time was that she kind of mirrors everyone’s ideas anyways, being a nice and polite and somewhat inhibited young woman when it comes to social interaction: a bit of a “yes girl” in my twisted opinion. And that’s me not getting to know her properly before throwing in my lot. Not that I doubt her on this subject – cool ideas, hippy ideas, non-materialistic ideas: the kind of ideas that allow for babies running free on Mexican beaches and who gives a fuck about the whole lame-ass English school system anyways? – which is how she genuinely is – but…well, I doubt myself, and she should doubt me too. Because I’ve changed my mind…

Kids. Two years ago I thought it was about time I got into that. I have these notions that I need to learn love and what better way to do that? That I want to be part of a unit. That I should stop fannying around with all this Peter Pan gallivanting and actually settle down to some kind of ‘adult life’. Six months ago I was back to investigating mortgages. One year ago, when Nicky and I got together proper, we were making love and saying, what if we get pregnant? and just laughing in our derangedness ‘cos it all seemed fine and groovy. And now…

Now I look at babies and hear them squawking and contemplate the work they take and I think, no fuckin’ way. Now I look at children and watch them misbehaving and throwing their tantrums and I think, not for me. Now I look at teenagers and think of the stereotypical ways in which they hate their parents and go off getting drunk and taking drugs and shagging around – my own dear sweet daughter! – and I think, I couldn’t handle that. Even friends with kids, when I get to spending time with them, and experience the noise and the chaos and the hassles and the tiredness first hand…well, you know what I think.

The closer it gets, the more I go off it. Thirty-six and I’m still flip-flopping over this. And yet, being thirty-six, and still feeling pretty strongly the old “no fuckin’ way” I should perhaps listen to that and honour it a bit more and…

A few days back I was saying to Nicky, maybe I should get a vasectomy. I mean, look at me, I’m thirty-six and I’m still not sure I want kids, mostly think I don’t, so perhaps I should just get it over with and stop all this fannying about with precaution and worries and pregnancy tests and ejaculating and then saying, o-oh, I don’t think I should have done that, when do you think you might be ovulating? Such a pain.

But was I serious? Am I serious about anything? Or was I just testing the water, giving her a get-out clause, seeing if I could push her away?

Your man don’t want kids and you do: whatcha gonna do about it? That sort of thing.

Kids. Pah! But then, is there ever a man who really wants kids? Why would he? What’s in it for him? Except hassles and work and a diminishment of freedom. It’s women who want children – and back when I was with Sophie I figured that given that I liked her so much, and could see myself being with her until we were old and in rocking chairs, kids were an inevitability and, not that I’d know when the time was, but that I knew that if the day ever came and she turned around and said, I wanna make one, I’d be like, sure, I’m down with that. Basically, I figured that when she was ready I’d go along with it. Funny thing is, when she decided she was ready and wanted to get on it, we broke up.

Anyways, blah blah blah and I don’t know what I’m saying now: I’s a been writing nearly ninety minutes – nearly four and a half thousand words – and I guess that’s enough given that it was just a filler and nothing to do with the subject I wanted to write about anyways. You might think I’m exaggerating when I say, I swear, you stick me in a room with a computer and I don’t think I’ll ever run out of things to type, but I really think it’s true. How many words? Must be well over a million by now – and we ain’t even got started.

The depths of the shite in this brain are endless.

Poor old Nicky having to live with a madman like me! lol

“Having to”?

Yes. Good point. No wonder she’s plotting round-the-world bike trips and in the meantime she’s got her own secret little agendas too: live with this guy in easy lifestyle and he’s okay and funny and makes her laugh with farts and though the sex ain’t as much as she’d like it’s good when she gets it and that just about compensates – and in the meantime live cheap and save up a whole massive fuckin’ stack of money and then one day – poof! She’s gone. She’s like the female version of me.

Well, we’ll see. In the meantime…it’s A-Okay and given that the I Ching says “proceed” and the I Ching’s never wrong, proceed we do. Evenings of food and pleasant chatter and cuddles in bed. Weekends of fry-ups and me being out reffing and her tending her garden and seeing friends. It ain’t a bad life. It’s a kind of adult, normal life. But is it a sustainable, relationship kind of life?

It might have to be, if I’m not a bit more careful in where and when I release my gunk.

How ridiculous that sex goes to making babies! How bizarre that a thing we do purely for pleasure should also be the thing that creates a life and changes your own more dramatically than anything else. Nothing else we do for pleasure has such drastic effects. Some squash games I’ve had of late I’d describe as “better than sex” – but there’s no lasting repercussions from them, no lifelong ties and responsibilities created and dreams and plans all of a sudden absolutely transformed or killed. Madness. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: God done right-royally screw up when She combined fucking and procreation. I mean, sure, it’s nice way to make babies – but I’m not sure it’s the most sensible one. At least there should be some kind of button you have to push – or even better some code to be entered – wherein fertility could be switched on and off. If I was God I’d make it so we were all sterile unless, I dunno, the man had eaten half a pound of grapes and the woman had been standing on her head for thirteen minutes. That would trigger the system and then we’d only have babies when they were wanted. No more drunken shags birthing poor innocent perfect-souled infants to incompatible and rubbishly unprepared parents doomed to load them with traumas and fuckedupnesses.

Man, I really think I hit on something there. Let’s do it! And even if girls decided they wanted to sneakily get impregnated and so were off in bathrooms pretending to powder their vaginas but were instead standing on their heads – it wouldn’t matter if the man hadn’t eaten his grapes. And what man would?

No, instead we’d have sensible, sober conferences where people sat down and said, okay, let’s do it, I’ll get started on the grapes, you go stand on your head, and in nine months time we’ll have a beautiful baby child and all because we want one, and we’re ready for it and – even better – we’ve also taken our courses and passed our tests and got our licenses and government approval.

What a totally different world it would be.

One, probably, whose population would dive into massive decline - for what man, even, beyond the rich man or the rare man, would eat those grapes when all he really wants is get his end away? Would I? Looking around my one-bedroom flat and contemplating the freedom of my life – of Mexico and America dreams to come – and then contemplating just at the end of the bed I now lie in some box or cot with a little squawking bawling crying human being in it?

That’s the problem: no man, surely, wants a baby: what he wants, if he wants anything, is a child. A being you can talk to. Teach things. Take hunting in the woods.

But a baby? No. Why would you? No appeal there.

I guess that’s why nature makes them attractive to women. You know, lots of women even think they’re cute and adorable. Whereas guys just think they look weird, alien, shrivelled.

Nature’s pretty clever.

But She ain’t yet outsmarted me…

Time for squash! Adios!