Every Now Is Then Is Now…

The ups and downs of survival...foreign country, bad knee, fucked eyes, something is wrong with my back... need to apply for a new residence permit,  no healthcare... Brexit fucked that up…but it was fucked up prior to Von der Leaving.

No community to speak of, scattered friends in scattered places...all searching for their own way... for what, I have no idea and maybe that's the point.... the only conclusion I have at my ripe old age of…

By the way, how the fuck did that occur, arrive? ...creep up, ambush me unawares?

It's a truism that the older you get the quicker it goes.. still, the way it shapes up now is just a clearer understanding that the entire expedition is precarious, and despite delusions of progress, nothing budges...if anything, it merely crawls along with delusions of grandeur...grander things.

But on a basic level just to be free of the psychological burden of material survival must be a liberating feeling...a space in your head... body, that is free of worry and constraint....’the burden of staying afloat is a deliberate mechanism of control and distraction’. I tell myself in a smug and knowing tone. It can absorb all of your energy if you wilt for a moment...it flows into those gaps to squeeze you tight.

When you can hardly predict six months ahead are you free or fettered, does the fact that you know the score make you free somehow? I think we might soothe ourselves in those thoughts sometimes.

No country for old men, old women, young men, young women…..no security, no medical help, no social care, no ears that can hear you or eyes that can pierce the void you might easily fall into.

The first in my family to go to university. Meaning what exactly? A kind of tokenistic platitude, a pat on the back that converts into fuck all!

BA, M.A, Ph.D, PGCLHE lmnop. or whatever the fuck it's called.... hoops that I jumped through... often blindly...sometimes in hope...the paper means fuck all without the proper accent, the desired level of conformity...the CON...nections.
Paper, paper, paper, but worth less than an Origami butterfly: at least that gives the illusion that it might fly. I’m folded in a different way, a confusion of folds, and paper cuts that often bleed...tiny cuts that sting and fade.

All that travel, other places... yet it all leads back to me, the space of me. Still an imposter... no idea of what or where home is...is that just me? I feel like a freak in moments when I'm unsure, and am I the only one who has to take time to convince myself that I am sure? Not even sure of tomorrow...the horizon, the horizontal or the vertical...naughty schoolboy engineer actor, market trader, absent father,  capoeira teacher, workshop leader, artistic director, university lecturer, writer of books, music maker, piss taker, father, grandfather, dancer, movement director... all leading to....the same uncertainty that I began with...yet with far less stability.

Now that's a joke whose punchline is yet to be punctuated with the final snigger.