My Love For My Sweet Grey Fluff

More of my drawings here…

When you hear the bell strike twelve,

You know but for this teddy, you’re by yourself,

In eight hours or less,

You’ll wish to feel only this amount of stress.,

The nurse will come,

Her aim to tease and antagonise your tum.

This time tomorrow,

You’ll be full of pain and sorrow,

In ten hours or so you’ll crash through the theatre door,

You will fight, struggly and renounce your sight,

This is all before the main show.

This warm, soft thing,

Gives you the stength,

Not only to quietly sing,

But to know you’re going to be fine when your hear the lift bell ping.

Through it all,

These fibres woven tight,

Never reject you even when you bite,

In and out of this hospital,

Not so any longer as my softy has gone.

Ward rule number one,

Mess with another kids snuggle,

Expect a scrap or a struggle,

We all know it’s just not to be done.

The people that placed me here,

Are the ones who stole me from your soft ear,

You went to a better cause,

Or that’s how they justified it after a short pause.

When by eye was cut,

They bandaged you up too,

I loved you so much but I’m not sure you knew,

The tears you absolrbed,

The words that you spoke,

The fears you way-laid,

Nobody as much as me, happy could you of made.

The sun is rising,

I can no longer sing,

I’m exhausted,

You are dead,

Hears the nurse,

My breakfast I am fed.

To another child you don’t belong,

Knowing you’ve been assaulted and damaged feels wrong,

Once more as an adult I wish I had you to hear my missery song.

Through thick and thin,

Sight and none,

Until adolecence from cot,

I miss you so and everyday,

I’m full of woe,

I only know I can say,

I love you my little snuggly grey.

Weather you were a bear or a cat,

You were warm, soft, absorbant and fat.

Beyond & Below

Click here for more of my drawings.

The obvious is by design,

It stands out to distract,

Deception can’t be accidental,

What it may hide needn’t always be mentioned,

With each exposure,

Less the viewer can believe,

The truth is always there,

Written faintly over,

Never genuinely wanting to deceive,

Once the interior has its’ confidence,

The inferior unveils its’ composure

You can’t dislodge a limpet before it’s ready,

True to is this of the obvious,

Tug, pull and wrench at your own risk,

The fragile sculpted will smash,

You will stand with dust and mud,

The owner will be hurt,

If you deceive,

Only to chor eggs from the nest,

You’re nout better than a rich thief,

Trust can shatters,

With the vibrations of a distant clatter,

On to your hands will the gore splatter,

50 Shades of Identity Crisis

I can’t be a snow flake - snow is white and my identity covers most of the colour wheel. This makes me a wonderful butterfly of diversity and understanding… No, it makes me confused, very confused, very confused^x50,. 

I can’t embrace all of the colours because their values are in conflict. I can’t reject all of them because then that leaves me with nothing. I could take the existentialist view and say, I’m first and foremost a thing at least in my own perception. This then leaves me wondering, how to connect to my perceived surroundings and what’s the point if they only exist in my mind. Well, I use my ‘physical’ body to move around and communicate and what’s the point? There isn’t one but why does the lack of a purpose matter if everything is real only to me, because I want to and I find it satisfying is enough. Now this is where the problems start. If I make the rules for myself then I can only be limited by my own internal limitations, which explains why there are lots of investment bankers walking free - after all, nobody is going to jail themselves. Of course, not everyone is detected breaking laws so perhaps I’ve/they’ve not got the same subconscious’s internal limitations as those who put themselves in prison.

The flip side of this is that, our ‘entity’ is our core with our identity encapsulating it. We are changeable and these experiences stay with us and change us. This is sort of sensible since we know if we have a bad experience, unless we are intent on repeating it we approach a similar situation differently the next time we come across it. These changes and bits of knowledge make up our identity. However, what happens when we approach a familiar problem with two or more tools to deal with it?

• Grab one and see if it works. Anyone who’s ever done flat pack knows this is a good way of stripping a screw and finding the problem getting more complicated.
• Consider the situation and which is best. This too can make a problem worse since you’ve decided you know the whole situation and only need one method to solve it. Since you’ve given it consideration before hand you might think you’ve solved the problem but in fact it’s temporary and the situation is worse in the future.
• Methodically consider all your tools and all your possible steps and the potential outcomes. The problem is in life we can’t predict everything always. Even if we can accurately estimate an outcome there is probably going to be a short fall between our estimation and the actuality. So, we over compensate knowing this. We expect to come home from a days hill climbing but we also know that might not happen so we take kit to keep us going just in case. This is fine on one hand but where is too far? Wearing a crash helmet on the bus; taking a spare set of clothing just in case; wearing a seat belt?

It’s this last point that brings anxiety. When these tools are parts of your outward persona, if you’re self aware, you might be conscious of being misread as two faced or hypocritical. Here in this dichotomy lies the anxiety/crisis/conflict/dissonance.

I love being queer but I know other people would kill me for it. I love being neuroqueer but I know this is something other people consider it weirdness. I love being an army brat but hate having no ability to keep friendships or not having an answer to where are you from. I love being blind but hate being excluded because people don’t consider difference. I love being ‘British’ because it’s a beautiful country and it’s rich in history; I hate the history that means queer people were tortured, murdered and excluded moreover, the class system that denotes difference but doesn’t allow for difference. 

I’ve wrote about these different aspects in several posts before. This is one of an unintended series, as I’ve just realised. Now, I’ve been able to see that my problems exist in the space between:

• My wants/desires/needs and reality.
• My image of self and who I want to be/am seen as.
• My ambitions and those of others for me.

I can’t erase my differences and I honestly don’t think I’d want to if I could. It might make life easier for that person but that person wouldn’t be me. I could also say screw it and ignore the space, this has been tried before and I was angry and deluded which wasn’t good for anyone in retrospect. If being me is good and I should embrace it, that solves part of my problems but how do I reject others while still caring. You can’t subtract and add the same amount and expect to keep 0? Red -5 (others’ perceived reality); Blue = 5 (measurable reality); Purple = 0 (my perceived reality). If I can only slide either way to within 0.01 of either end there will still be 0.01 of the other left. Of course I could revert to an existentialist belief and the problems vanish and are replaced with only purple but we know we don’t have absolute control because that’s 1 not how science works and 2 that’s not how society works.. Sugar wont cure death even if we declare it to. It takes more time than what any of us have in life to affect change that has no flaws, actually - is there one? There isn’t by the way, there’s no such thing as absolute certainty of that I’m absolutely certain. :D

Control+Aliminate+Daesh

This morning I woke up to the fantastic news that the British state wishes to kill some of its' citizens. This news is always warmly welcomed and why wouldn't it be? After all, they're trying to protect us from some incredibly dangerous people.

In some respects I do agree, if you are on a battle field fighting for a side that is causing global terror and death then yes, you do deserve to die. However, the words used by the most recent Secretary of State for Defence, Gavin Williamson, are scary. I felt like he was suggesting more than just battle field killings as part of air strikes. "hunted down" suggsests assassinations, suicides in the countryside or 'gang crime related' deaths,  this is a different kettle of fish. Obviously, I don't have and never will have evidence that this kind of thing has happend before. The state would cover it up with more than just a false tash and glasses with rubber nose attached.

It's also impossible to legally make the returning daesh fighters stateless since that would be a breach of the internation convention on statelessness. Moreover, setting somebody loose would only make them somebody else's problem or executioner.

What could be done instead then? Well, this Danish town might have the answer. Rather than using such profiling that leads to a bad experience from Prevent, that's been oh so successful in the UK. In summary, this town has strengthen connections with the local muslim population and uses the intel from them to intervene and tries to fix some of the problems that the young people are having that lured them to daesh's propaganda. It's a practical solution, it's also flawed but so too will any program trying to break idealism and brain washing. Nothing will be 100% successful 100% of the time. We can't have both complete autonomy of self and still have a guaranty of safety from the state. Even with 0 autonomy we'd probably be victims of horrific personal violations but from the state, like those in fiction from George Orwell and Margaret Atwood.

At risk of slipping into a philosophical criticism of most people's dilution of safety, let's get back to what the Defence Sec said.

In the grand scheme of things killing people while there is potential for them to kill far more people than their combined number isn't such a bad thing. They signed up to die. People going about their lives didn't. My concern is, where does it stop? Not only that but how do we prevent terrible tragedies such as the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 from happening. It was all down to bad intel but it was still a murdered sanctioned by the state of a foreign national who didn't pose any known threat. I would also say it's evidence that assassinations have been planned before now.

If the state can convince us of the real risk of death from these people, why would we then not give them the nod to do what it takes to keep us safe from 'them'. We could quite easily creap to having our very own wall to be reminded of the greatness of the state.

I really do wish I could say we've come so far since public executions and that this was just an insight from a deranged person's mind. However, I can't. The rise or maybe uncovering of hatreds in modern society makes me wonder quite how far things could go. Not just with state control to prevent unwanted behaviour but from people that are full of misinformation and fear.

First it's a legitimate target like daesh. Correction, secondly daesh - let's not forget the victims from 300ish years of witch hunting. Then what? People who protest with violence such as those seen in Brixton, Toxteth and English 'riots'? Nope the British state have done that before, in 1819 at the Peterloo Massacre, slightly more recently Fuadaichean nan Gàidheal (The Highland Clearnaces) - oh and once more, let's not forget the most recent atrocity by the British state upon "its" people via Dúchrónaigh (The Black and Tan) in the 1920 war of independance.

I'd hope that the international community would intervene but the UN doesn't seem to be able to do very much. Trade embargoes screw the little people not those doing the harm, if citizens can't resist and fight the state with food in their bodies doing it hungry will make it so much more possible. Weapons embargoes do work incredably well, the DPRK (N.Korea) has been stopped in its' tracks with the embargoes against it. Travel bans would stop those trying to find safety from leaving, presuming the embarkation state doesn't stop them. NATO hasn't intervened to stop the death and ill treatment of indigenous people or those hit by austerity.

Who can we rely on to protect us from our protectors? Why would the entity that protects us from the state be any less dangerous?

Let's hope that we can maintain our ignorance of state sanctioned murder and violance, in an overt mordern way, othered and out of our internal feeds of fear for a bit longer. As long as it's only indiginous people, the poor and people of colour its fine.

It's a bad situation when the government openly suggests murder of one group of citizens and the media doesn't seem to highlight the genuine need for fear and alarm. Or, when the media makes a decision to not reference times before when the state has done such terrible things but push one group out to show us that, this group are the worse of any. We got here from the past, much like getting fat, it didn't just happen. it's beyond naïve to ignore history and not see pattens and to not try and stop them from continuing. Why yoyo diet, to carry on the analogy, we need to make real sustainable changes, what they could be, I'm not sure.