OK my dears, because you are my blogee friends and do me the honour of wriggling through my petites ramblings where you have probably surmised that I am a weed flowering out of a piece of neglected land by a once-brightly painted wall (of a Victorian house) in sauff-eest London, I’m going to let you all into a little secret: I am a compulsive geek, a compulsive geek-weed flower. In my solipcistic search for a bit of point amidst all the ground … I count everything. I’m not particularly proud of it, it doesn’t really add up to much and I am starting to sit in order to make all the counting so transparent that I’ll see right through it to the purpose I was looking for all along anyway. But on the way I have collected (almost arthritically) a bunch of data about all sorts of things which have shaped me into the paricular flowered weed that I have become (mauve-thin thorns with white tips, deepdark green leaves at the top of the stem, and small but long petals with deep lemon edges, white middle and the thinnest blood-orange corrola and spine). I have whole lifetimes of top 10s/20s – and more? – of word and picture and tone and image, my whole culture wrapped, bagged, ticketed and stacked into a comfy armchair in a spacious and double-faceted sitting room by a standard lamp and a ticking clock somewhere, doors open, net curtains billowing. Slighty. Occasionally.
So. At the end of the day (litralee – I’m not even jokinngg-ugh) I audit my day and assign MY MEASURE of how much I got out of everything I did or how well I did it. Or not. The measure will only make sense to me, but they are A measure of how much I have got out of them, so I will include the numbers for your comparification (if you get that far). Not geeky enough for you? OK, try this on for size: I started doing this counting in 1998 and still do it? Not even bothered yet? I audit household work, career work, what I do for my kids, what I do for my wider family, what I do for my wife, what I do in my spiritual practice and what I do for myself at the end of every day. Yawn? I put all my numbers onto a spreadsheet (once I figured out what spreadsheets were) and have now got ongoing averages and charts for everything I do, hear, think and eat! Whp-p! I saw your eyes twitch then, I’m getting to you, aren’t I (I’m sorry, but I’m on a roll now). How about, once I settled my spreadsheet: I inserted enough rows above March 1998 all the way back to 2nd November 1959. Yes, YES: the day I was born! Do you see; do you see what happens when you start to listen to a geek; do you see my awful power …? And then I retroactively filled in all the data!. Oh, whoh; phew, sheesh – what a load off my mind; if I smoked I’d be taking a long draw at the moment – hot air through the teeth, down the throat – and holding it wondering what adjective would do justice to what just happened.
Actually, I think this confession is doing far more for me than it will ever do for anyone else. Nevertheless I will be sharing with you some of the countings I have like a toddler sharing the stickiest boiled sweet that I’d saved in my hand just for you even though I’d scoffed the rest myself. It’s sharing, I suppose, and it’s as sincere as a 54 year old child can be. I’ll call them “mlewisredford’s top ten _______ !” and provide my own commentary. I’ll store them under ‘poeviews’. So you’d better have a wet handkerchief handy, you never know when I might proffer a little fat arm upwards with large ‘lashed eyes sincerely unwavering.
Look out, now!
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
breeze & orange wormhole: wha’
doors wormhole: tired
green & London wormhole: still there // above the / Dallin Road / allotments / looking high over the river and the city
identity wormhole: I don’t think I could do it any more
leon wormhole: the library, / you know …
life & mauve wormhole: in verse / question / m a r k ?
meaning wormhole: adversely / mistaking the finger for the moon / again
net curtains wormhole: 3:30 am
openness wormhole: practising
sitting room wormhole: across the room / through the patio doors / through the conservatory windows / at the bottom of the garden / the still bifurcated trunk of / the oak / before the let-grown hair and fringes / of the fir tree / blown every lifetime in a while by the winter sun // actually
speech wormhole: inverse superhero
Victorian houses wormhole: Victorian bays / right angles and eaves
white wormhole: let
