Praying

Sometimes I think to pray but I don't know if I will ever be able to pray hard enough. Pray for all the people I love, for all the people I know.

Wrote the above a few days ago, haven't had much inclination to write much at the moment. Had some weird red swellings that have appeared on my body and don't know what they are. Got a patch above my right side ribs and one on my back which is difficult to see. They have been hot and itchy and at times painful. Thought it might be shingles but I am not too sure about that as they are supposed to cause great pain and although these swellings are uncomfortable at times they are not as bad as that. Also might have another patch developing beneath my right nipple but it is early days yet. Must some physical manifestation of mental stress or something like that. Left me feeling a bit knackered as well and I am always grateful of the opportunity these days to have a lie down for 1/2 hour or so. Wonder what they are? Wonder why they have appeared?

Wrote the stuff above, those two paras, over a month ago now. Time has moved on so what's been the buzz? Well I guess that is hard to say. The rash that I mentioned has long gone, don't know what the fuck that was all about. Bit worried about the fact that I am currently hooked on playing a cd of Tupac's Greatest Hits in the car at the moment. So many bas ass muthafuckers and bad ass niggas it is simply unbelievable. Will have to make damn sure my wife doesn't find out that I'm listening to it as I cruise along the streets of East London. There is something delightfully forbidden about it though, not that I would ever be able to say that I have a clue about Tupac's world...Only reason I bought it really was because I recently read Michael Connelly's book the Lincoln Lawyer where the main character - the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller - listens to Tupac a lot and speaks extremely highly of him. Since Michael Connelly is a writer I rate I took note and then lo and behold there I was the other day in HMV in Beckton when I came across his Greatest Hits on 2cds for a very reasonable £9.99. Well, since then it has been Tupac all the way as far as the sound system in the car - a Toyota Avensis - is concerned. This has come after a fairly long period during the main music of choice in the motor for me has been late period Steely Dan, namely "Two Against Nature", "Everything Must Go" and Donald Fagen's solo masterpiece "Morph the Cat". Shit hot stuff and it is interesting to compare the sound of Dan when it is Fagen and Walter Becker and the sound of Fagen solo. Somehow Dan are more West Coast, more illicit, more sunny. For me that is clearly down to Becker and the fact that he is a genius bassist, genius gutarist and overall master arranger. Steely Dan. Citizen Dan. Boy oh boy when I get into them I play them non-stop. Don't think that will be the case the Tupac however but all the same I am getting into it in a way I never thought I would. Tupac is dead now of course and there is a strong sense of premonition running through a lot of his material that he was going to end up getting shot.

Carrying on from yesterday. Must now be in a writing phase. Gone weeks without writing a thing and now, two days in a row, I am back on the Blog. Not that I really have that much to say. Guess I've been feeling the pressure of work a bit these last couple of days. Maybe writing is a bit of a distraction, a chance to escape thinking about it for a while. Unless that is I write about it. There ain't that much to write about however when all is said and done. Simple fact of the matter is that business could be better. Orders are slow but the bills keep piling up and bit by bit we are running out of money. What happens when we can't keep the whole thing afloat ? We sink. Simple as that. Curtains. Thanks and goodnight. 20 years of working in the East End of London all over and some may say... thank god for that.

And so it goes, this is now a continuation of what I wrote the day before which just happened to be the above paragraph. Writing this with "Modern Times" on the sound system. There ain't no doubt that it is right up there in top 2 or 3 Bob Dylan albums as far as I'm concerned. Mind you, contary to what has been written, the lyrics in "Rollin' and Tumbling" read "hurly doom" and not "early doom", likewise at the end it is "think I must be babblin' on" and not "think I must be travellin' on". Just little things I guess, these corrections, but to me they are in fact quite important as they change the direction in which the song has taken.

Weather still mild. Not as sunny recently as it has been, but still pretty good. Some people don't like it and think that it is another sign that it will soon be the end of the world. Well I think that is pretty unlikely. Man might disappear but the world? Not until the sun expands into a red giant and that is ages away in the future, approx 3 billion years. Still I know where it is that people are coming from. It makes me feel uneasy when it is mid-October and there are still people walking the streets in little more than t-shirt and shorts. It's gonna come down to simple evelotion in the end. The survival of the fittest in the sense that whoever adapts and just gets on with it are gonna be the ones who will do OK out of it. If you sit around freaking out that you can't walk out in the bracing winds of autumn you are falling into the trap of believing in the permanence of things, in this case elemental forces. But the world keeps spinning and rolling through space at a fair old lick. Tremendously quick in fact and it is only because we are goddam tiny that we don't realise how fast it is moving. Something like 130 km per second if I am not mistaken.

Friday now, getting to the end of the week. Quite a busy week, quite a stressful week as far as work is concerned. Not busy enough as far as orders coming in through the door, that has been the problem. What do I do ? Work for a small, very small, book distribution company, more like a wholesaler really. We have a mail order list and we have a website. We specialise in books on Buddhism. Went live with our newly designed website nearly a month ago and it has been a testing time since that. Testing in the sense of whether people like it or not, and testing in the sense of whether it works. Anyway, anyway. All we can do is try. And I guess that is what we have always done with varying shades of success as a result.

Writing this at work , a few days after the paragraph was wrote above. Ain't it funny, when I'm away from this thing I can think of thousands that I wanna write about, get off my chest, but when it comes down to sitting in front of it then it becomes difficult to come up with much to say. That seems to be the way. Maybe it simply requires more attention, the willingness to grind away for hours until I reach of state of fluency. Whatever it is, I ain't got it right now.

Gotta remember to write
Aint wrote nuthin' on the blog
For the last few weeks...
Dunno why 'coz it aint like I aint got nuthin' to say
Guess it just goes that way -
Speeding life

That's it, this blog entry has gotta live now, been too long hangin' round in draft lands...