sheeps lay many eggs

It’s five thirty in the morning and I’m awake. I woke up at four twenty-two in the middle of a dream about my book – I was somehow erasing pages and rewriting them right on the paper – and then I lay there for a bit thinking about it, and thinking about rewriting it, and thinking about how yesterday I’d look again at the webpage of some girl (‘The Fearful Traveller’) who had self-published a travel book and then immediately had it snapped up by publishing firms and sold the movie rights and when asked how she’d done it she’d said it was all about the edit: about editing the arse out of it until you couldn’t stand to edit it for another second – and then keep on going. I believe in that, I truly do – but I haven’t yet done it. Well, I have edited the arse out of it – but it’s still a long way off complete.

I deleted the prologue recently and took the two good sentences out of it and stuck them in Chapter One. I deleted, also, the two diary sections – Parts Three and Five – and started rewriting them as further chapters in the preceding parts. It’s better like that – it might knock another fifteen thousand words off the word count – but, boy, it’s still a long book. People like it as it is – sure, they’ve always liked it, even when it was the horrible YouWriteOn first edition with its million mistakes and child’s design cover and enormous seventies indentations – but I guess one shouldn’t necessarily go with what people think. Perhaps I need an editor. Perhaps I should stop being such a tight arse and pay for one. Perhaps that’s something I’ll do today when the sun comes up.

Will these things ever get done?

I’ve had some responses to my crazy New Years emails: Lindsay says, woah man, we have all been bonkers – which makes me smile a lot – and tells me he’s working as a clown in Japan again (last I heard he was working as a clown in San Francisco). The guy must be getting on for forty-eight and he’s still out there doing it. Inspirational. He says to remember it’s a wonderful life and to share that with people. But then he always was much more of a people person that me.

Adrian’s still into Vipassana and I guess he’s something of an organiser in that now. Says it’s been good for him, that my problem was always that I was practising other things. True dat: I never really could let go of mantras and divine bliss and listening to amazing wisdom and doing healing stuff. Only time will tell, I suppose, which one of us was right.

Then Eric writes back and tells me I’m a loon but fortunately an interesting one. He also mentions my ‘interminable blogging’ – Eric’s as far as I know my number one reader – which I think is fantastic. Calling me a loon I think fantastic too – just thank God I’m an interesting one: s’all I ever wanted to be – one of Kerouac’s “very amazing maniacs”. Eric didn’t get a letter ‘cos I met him after ‘99/2000 – and also because I knew he’d read all that stuff anyway. Good old Eric.

Rory the interesting loon. Rory the interminable bonkers blogger. And here we are with another forty thousand words clogging up the brain. Well, you is what you is. Only question is: is writing the cause of my madness or my way out of it?

Not, of course, that I’m genuinely mad: in fact, I’m pretty much always happy and calm and optimistic and good, content in my own company and absolutely free from all vices save, perhaps, that I maybe eat too many dates (usually between one and two kilos per week). But it’s even been coming on for ten months since I last ate chocolate or a refined sugar product – and of course six or seven months since the iboga cured me of my internet chess habit and the facebook.

Now all I do is type. S’what I was ever best at. Perhaps one day the Martians or the future Earthlings will look back on all these millions of words and say, wow, thank God at least one man decided to take the time to write every single little stupid thing he ever thought and felt and did, so we could see what I was like. You laugh – but I bet you wish someone had done that every fifty years or so since humankind began.

I don’t know what else I was thinking; maybe I should go back to bed. It’s only ten to six and another couple of hours might do me good.

Sure, let’s give that a try. Night! (again)

<(O_o)>

But instead of sleep fingers tweak a lazy nipple and when lady hips suddenly start to unexpectedly push back and forth there’s only one way that’s gonna go: sticky belly time. Then it’s past seven and sleep is impossible so leap up and fry four eggs for two egg sandwiches and put on salt and pepper and ketchup and boil the first of the day’s kettles for lovely juicy pot of jasmine green tea and eat the eggs but then feel queasy ‘cos they’re the battery eggs that I accidentally bought in a mad excited rush ‘cos they were reduced to 17p a box but now I’m lumbered with eighteen eggs that I don’t want to eat ‘cos not only can I taste the sadness I can also feel it even just by looking at those three stacked boxes and that big lousy word: CAGED. Poor hens.

Then to suddenly start saying, don’t say sheeps don’t lay eggs, sheeps lay many eggs! over and over in style of big chief what sits spookily and ghostly on pretty much everyone’s shoulder, according to lame spiritualist mystics – which in turn then of course reminds me of the time when I was maybe eighteen and standing alone one night in the attic of my dad’s guitar shop where I was then living and I started saying, there’s more wasps in here than in a Chinese restaurant! and it amused me so greatly I said it maybe seven hundred times and I thought I’d discovered the greatest thing ever. But then later when I told it my friend Tim he said, stop saying that, you nutter, it’s annoying. In any case, sheeps do lay many eggs so please don’t forget it.

It also reminds me of, I’ll fix your tap! The point being, sometimes I type nonsense even sometimes making out that it really happened but obviously didn’t and perhaps you think this is one of those times but actually this is not, this is a true recollection of the morning so far which is now at twenty past eight and here I am back in bed in my pink dressing gown with of course a pot of jasmine tea and the burps of sad caged eggs in my belly.

<(O_o)>

So last night I continued on with my latest quest stroke grand procrastination to polish up my ever-loving blog by quickly reminiscing on all the years before 2002 to give it some sort of sense of completion. I worked backwards – as the keen-eyed will tell – and I soon realised that, wow, it’s been a really random and mad life full of strange twists and turns and mostly the body I inhabit rocketing about from place to place for, as Gus once put it, “no apparent reason” – though I don’t believe that – and that made me think that amongst all these recollections and lookings-back I tend to focus on how I felt about what I was doing but not so much about what I was doing and so then I thought maybe I’d lay it all out here in one big stretch so as to look at my life in pure doings and goings and see what shape it took. So:

1. Born in Pontefract, West Yorkshire. Grew up in nearby South Elmsall. Went to school there, then had eighteen months at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, then dropped out. Went to high school, got a girlfriend, did a year of A-Levels, and then dropped out. Moved to Leeds and lived above my dad’s guitar shop (no shower or bath) and worked for him there. Got fired and then worked for another guitar shop. Got fired by them too and went on the dole. Meanwhile, I lived with a girl six years older than me (eighteen to twenty-four) and her baby daughter. Aged twenty, I flew to America.

2. Lived in New York for four months as an illegal alien and squatted in empty apartment buildings. Worked doing furniture removals and was also a bike courier. Bought a car and crashed it in Ohio. Bought another car and drove it across to California where I spent two months in San Diego. Drove back to New York via New Orleans – covered the first eighteen hundred miles in one long twenty-eight hour stretch – and then flew back to England for a bit. Holidayed in Spain. Flew back to America.

3. Moved to Charlottesville, Virginia and found work as a waiter. Got rohypnoled in a gay nightclub my first week there. Went mad and drunk and kept crashing my car, which landed me in jail on felony charges. Lived in my car for about six weeks, depressed and alone, and then I skipped bail and hitch-hiked across to Arizona where I found work on a ranch learning how to be a stunt cowboy. Stayed there two months and then hitch-hiked around Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, until I was arrested riding a freight train and deported back to England. Holidayed in the Dominican Republic and then flew back to America.

4. Hitch-hiked down the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego. Bumped into a guy I’d met four months previous in Montana and joined him on a trip to Mexico. What I thought would be a week or two turned into a four month stay. Camped six weeks in a hot springs canyon then lived two months at a kind of spiritual retreat place learning tai-chi and meditation and doing my first six-day vision quest. Met a shaman, John Milton, and began studies with him. After Mexico, I hitched back up to Charlottesville, thinking I’d head back to England, but then I stayed there another two months learning Kundalini Yoga. After that, my yoga teacher flew me out to New Mexico and I went to a Sikh Yoga festival with Yogi Bhajan, had my first meeting with Ammachi, the hugging saint, and then spent two months in Crestone, Colorado with the shaman from Mexico. Did another twenty-eight-day vision quest there, then lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for a month with a very attractive girl, then hitched on out to California. Spent some time with my angel-channelling friend Shawn and his Christian faith healer teacher Momma Lucas and then had a life-altering experience at Mount Shasta before another ten days with Amma. Did my first Vipassana meditation course. After that I hitched to Arizona to see John, stayed a few weeks in a homeless shelter, then hitched back to California and flew down to the hot springs canyon in Baja California for millennium before hitching once more to Charlottesville via Albuquerque for a miraculously-manifested plane back to England. All that was pretty much in the space of twelve months.

5. Back in Europe, I lived three or four months in the Vipassana centre near Hereford and also a month or so in Amsterdam. I also travelled out to India for three weeks and then went to Germany a couple of times to see a reputed Avatar, Mother Meera. I flew to America for a day, being denied entry. I travelled a lot in the UK, too – went to Scotland a few times, and had several trips to Glastonbury – and then I went around Europe with Amma, during which time I was picked up by three French people who insisted that I stayed with them. I became the lover of one of them and one of the guys – her ex – paid for everything. We lived in his apartment in Paris for a month or so – also visiting Mother Meera once more in Germany together – and then he paid for us all to go to Mexico to see John Milton, where I stayed another four months and did my third and final vision quest. Back in the apartment in Paris we lasted another month before I found out that the girl had cheated on me (with the third member of our party) and I scuttled off back to Yorkshire to cry.

6. This is now April 2001. I lived in Wakefield though did a lot hitching – mainly up and down from Yorkshire to Glastonbury and Bradford-on-Avon – and then in October I took off once more on the Amma tour, winding up in Germany at Mother Meera’s a month or so later. A couple of weeks after that I flew to Vancouver and stayed a month on Vancouver Island with my good friend Eric. Then I flew over to Toronto to see a girl I was in love with (Sophie) and then back to England before quickly hopping over to Dublin where I lived for two months with a lovely Vipassana friend, John. After going mad in Dublin I flew to France, took a ferry back to Ireland, and then hitched to Wales where I worked for a short time on an organic farm. I hitched to Yorkshire, hitched to Norfolk to visit an old school friend, and then got a job there as a postman. Through a postman’s mum I started volunteering at a school and through that, having decided I wanted to be a teacher, I applied to the University of Kent at Canterbury. I hitched down to Kent, did my interview, flew over to Germany to see Mother Meera, and then started uni (this is now September 2002). I lived in a caravan in the woods paying five pounds per week rent, carrying my water in, and cooking on an open fire. One day in January I exited an evening class with a sudden urge to fly to Canada and the next morning I went. I went to see the girl Sophie and finally wooed her, and we were together.

7. In May 2003 Sophie came over for three months and we hitched to Devon and Cornwall (two separate trips) and also hitched around Ireland. I went back to uni and flew out to Canada for Christmas and New Year. At the end of my second year I deferred my studies and spent two months in Beijing with Sophie – also visiting Tibet – before moving to Canada to live with her in Guelph, Ontario for a year, where I worked for the government. In August 2005 we returned to Canterbury together so that I could finish my studies – included trips to Yorkshire, Scotland, Belgium and France – after which I got a job as a high school teacher in Folkestone. I quit that at Christmas, after six months, and we flew out to Ontario and British Columbia for the holidays, then came back to Europe, had a holiday in Morocco, and broke up after four years together. I moved to Wakefield and got a job in Leeds as an Oxfam shop manager; after a time I started living in the shop. Then, just as Sophie and I were about to get back together – we were in Venice, which was just after a little trip to Ireland – I fell for a girl nearly ten years my junior and started an on-off relationship with her. In June 2008 she asked me to go and live with her and her mum in Oxford and I went. We worked together as a musical duo playing in bars and restaurants and on the street. We also went to Spain (twice) and Morocco again.

8. Just after Christmas 2008 I was penniless again and I decided to leave Oxford and hitched to London, ending up sleeping the night at Gatwick airport. The next day I wound up on a friend’s farm in Sussex helping his dad fell trees and chop up a deer. Then I moved to London, got a job with a company that made money betting on football matches, and found a flat in Stoke Newington with my girlfriend. After a couple of months we broke up, and I got fired, went a little bit mad, watched a lot of zombie films, and flew to Mexico on a one-way ticket. I spent two months hitching from Playa del Carmen, on the Caribbean, to Mexico City, via Belize and Guatemala, where I stayed for one month in Quetzaltenango. Although I had only gone to Mexico City for one or two nights I ended up staying two months, staying with many wonderful Mexican Jews. Then I flew to Baja California and the hot springs canyon, where I stayed about a month. Then I flew to Vancouver, to visit with Eric and another old friend, before hitching across to Calgary to catch a flight back to England.

9. I moved in then with some good friends in a gothic mansion house in Kent for a couple of months before moving once more to London, where I worked as a landscape gardener. I stayed in London for nine months – also working as a waiter – before taking off for Israel and then three months of travel around the UK, which included a week in a monastery near Gloucester and repeated hitch-hiking trips to and from Sussex, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Kent, and London. Then I had three more months in London, which included a trip to Germany and France, before I moved back up to Yorkshire to begin an MA at Leeds. With my new girlfriend I lived in Huddersfield and South Elmsall, before finding a flat four months ago near the uni. And that’s where I’ve been ever since. And that’s where I am now.

Hm. I thought I’d be saying “phew” after that but instead I’m saying “hm” – by point seven I’d started to get a little bit bored. Obviously I’ve replayed this whole thing over and over but…well, I think what turned me on about it – about my story, about the looking back at what I’ve done – was all the movement and the variety – and then there comes a point, probably around when I started uni, that the movement and the variety stops – or at least slows down. There, I suppose, my focus shifted – I was on to women, to some ill-defined ‘career path’ (that led to nothing) – and movement wasn’t where I was at. In truth, movement and variety had started to get real old by then and staying in one place did me good, as far as peace of mind goes – but when I look back, it’s all that gadding that gets me smiling’…

Anyways, that’s all by the by: I’m not even sure what the point of all that was, if there ever was a point, other than to prove to myself that I really am stuck in the past and to display some more interminability. It is interesting that it’s the thought of movement that gets my juju flowing, that I marvel at – for I know that movement too has taken me to the brink of madness before but – well, yes, I suppose it’s what I’d like to see in my future too. Certainly, it ain’t been no humdrum life – and I don’t aim for it to become one anytime soon. S’a wonderful thing, this plethora of opportunity, and I’d be a mad man not to take advantage of it.

In the meantime, however, I’m a student in Leeds.

I’m totally bored of everything I’ve just writ.

```---(|*~’|)---o-

The point was, I guess, that I’ve been thinking about regret and I’ve been realising that, my God, I’ve done about ninety-nine percent of everything I ever wanted to do and it’s been a damn full and eventful and fun life so far – and it’s only about half-way done. Sure, I dwell on the handful of things I missed out on, opportunities blown and ignored, the time that I’ve wasted – but really, all that should merely serve as a reminder to make the most of what comes to me from today. I didn’t grasp the things I missed in the past because I didn’t know any better – but now, apparently, I’m saying that I do know better and so I shouldn’t miss them this time around. All that regret and looking back is really just the teaching that says, you know what to do if you don’t want to feel like this again, right? So it’s all about keeping one’s eyes open, walking through the doors that appear, ignoring doubts and money hang-ups and fears, and just going for it. After this MA no doubt there’ll be some beckoning doors – it is, for me, very much the end of a road – and so it’s all priming and preparation for then. Eyes’ve gotta be motherfuckin’ peeled!

And also: sheeps lay many eggs; know what I mean?

- (o-.)]-- -o

Did I ever tell you how I once thought I was the reincarnation of Neal Cassady? No news there, of course: I’ve thought I was the reincarnation of just about everybody at one time or another. But reason I mention it is to sort of – well, yes, mention it – and then segue into a thought I had when watching Magic Trip a couple of weeks back, some woman on there saying, you know, the thing with Cassady was he was brilliant and all these people told he could be a great writer and he really tried to be that but, in truth, it was never in him to be that – and there he was, stuck in between two worlds, not good enough for the one he wanted and too good for the one he came from. And so he turned into a loon! And there was me hearing that and feeling sort of hit by it – I’ve felt this before – for what I am but a stupid mining town boy who somehow escaped what he was born to be and, in so many ways made good, but in so many ways am still handicapped by the brain I was born with. I’ve worked my way up to associate with rich folk and Cambridge graduates and smart and enlightened souls, and what I always realise is that even though there are some superficial realities, deep down we can never be the same. Likewise, because I had my barnstorming youth and people said, boy, this lad can sure write a half-decent blog they assumed I’d be able to turn it into a book and pushed me in that direction. And yet, what book? What connections? What wine glasses and cocktail parties and contacts through daddy’s tailor? No, that world is beyond me – and the world from whence I came, of factories and pubs and grim faces and TV? Well that’s not possible either. And so like Icarus, the only thing to do is burn up. Or listen to your dad and not, I suppose.

Point is: two worlds. A certain amount of greatness but just not enough where it matters most. And swayed and buoyed by promise so much that reality is forever left behind even when promise is realised as unfulfillable. Two worlds. No going back. Only the next lifetime, and the next.

I think I blame, also, Magic Trip for my madness and mania of the last few weeks – for all these crazy words and weird times alone at home with a head full of thoughts. That and my strange obsession with a group of dead beats who I neither aspire to emulate, nor really enjoy to read – On The Road aside – yet don’t seem to be able to ignore, for some weird reason.

Although I suppose I could just let it go – he types, knowing full well he’s thinking of focussing on them for one of this semester’s classes.

Ah well.