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 Nidderdale Way 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
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
The hot springs , just west of Santiago 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
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
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
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
Women and writing and the life I wanted to lead: it was all back in England 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.
And what the hell would I do there when I landed? All ties severed when I’d departed for Mexico
The best way to get from Baja to England , I’d long thought, was to go via Canada Canada to all over England Mexico City to London 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 Canada
Plus, you get to go to Canada
Anyways, there I am, in Mexico , with these thoughts of England Herne Bay Mexico City
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
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
…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
…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
…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
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 Vancouver England
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 Guatemala and Mexico
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 Kent
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 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? ;-)
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