Merrily merrily merrily. Life is indeed but a dream.

A dream I think I dreamt and/or Merrily merrily merrily.

A blur, a haze and a jumble of noise. But a face, a name came through and something about force feeding a someone anti-freeze... I think I didn't care. For a while after I awoke I was convinced it was real, that it was all going to happen. Turned out to be nothing though. A drunken sleep of confusion and restlessness soon washed away with a cuppa tea.

Its thursday morning again. It seems to be a regular thing now to be hung over on a thursday morning. Mid-week celebrations...The train was 6 minutes late. No one complained. No one ever does.

My life is an open book, dropped to the floor. Pages bustled by the breeze of hurrying passers by.
Chapters. Just chapters and paragraphs of what has happened. What is happening. Illustrated pages populated by various characters and faces, various someones I know now and some I used to know.
Bumped into one i've known for 20 years last night, had completely forgotten that we were engaged once... was nice...apparently niether of us had changed.
Drunk and a bit stoned, it got me thinking....
I've been told that a few times recently. At 36 years old I haven't changed. Ha! Certainly not for a lack of trying. God only knows i've had enough life changing experiences and/or pulled back and revealed enough layers of my glass onion over the years in attempts to reinvent myself. To rescue myself from ...I dunno anymore. But, I guess there's something reassuring about that lack of change, the consistency of being me. Through all my searching, expressing and documenting, my goals have never been big houses and £100k a year. How shallow and mercenary that would be? If I was to earn that kind of money as a consequence of doing what I love doing and have always done habitually, fine, good and dandy. But to make it the aim, the ambition, la raison d'etre at the cost of being something i'm not? No. Especially now, when I am finally comfortable with my own space, my own company, with who and what I am.....Nah. I wouldn't recognise myself in the mirror, and niether would my friends.

If someone wanted to me give a hundred thousand pounds, I wouldn't object though. I'm not an idealistically principled idiot....
;)

Life is but a dream. A thin sliver of light between two eternities of darkness. And this paintMonkey has many more blank pages to fill yet.

Now, where did I put that thingymajig ?

Another 48 hours in firstLife as a sofa tramp on a Wii-athon.

Subject: Another 48 hours in firstLife as a sofa tramp on a Wii-athon.

Said I would pop round to see a mate after work on friday. Its now 1716 on sunday. I just got home.
A great hanging out weekend. Slobbing on my mates' new sofa cushions in the living room. Watching tv, playing the "i'd do him/her" game with my mate's wife and generally dorking out. The remainder of the new M&S sofa incidentally, and majority bulk is casually up on end in the hallway. Lesson to us all I think. The lesson is: when buying a sofa, measure it, your hall way and any relevant doorways between the shop and its intended resting place.
For some of the time we test drove Rock Guitar Hero II (Or whatever its called) on the Wii. It comes with a guitar thing that the wii-remote slots into and is then effectively played like a guitar with buttons. The game is great. Does exactlly what it says on the tin. If you like that sort of thing... But for my part, other than getting to kareoke air guitar along to Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby b' kiaser chiefs, the most interesting thing was the side-affects on my vision from staring at the scrolling screeen during gameplay. I looked away from the screen and happen to catch my mate's oyster chair, which is covered with a Tiger print throw, 'breathing'. I say breathing, but it was more like the pattern itself was tightening, rising in areas of m vision. Not much, but enough to give it a sense of being a slightly shifting fluid. I kept quiet at first. Haven't seen that sort of visual since my early 90's (ahem) experimentation with certain funghi and chemically flavoured blotting paper, my first thought was that I was having one of those 'flashbacks' we were all promised. As it turned out my mate was seeing it too in the wall paper and curtains. Ah. Just like the old days :)
A further three other games test driven in our 48 hour wiiathon, but without any obvious halucinagenic side affect were;
The new Complete Saga Lego Star Wars, the same games as before with some polishing here and there, still brilliant and huge fun with the wiimote and nunchuk.
Thirdly the phenomenonal Mario Galaxy. People either love Mario or they haven't really spent anytime in his company. 'Nuff said.
And lastly, Cook Mama. Japanese Candy coloured neon flavoured sillyness with a scary 'mama' whose eyes turn to demon fire if she is disappointed with your timing and cooking skills. I'm sure she kept telling me "you're not mine"...

My daughter was asking for the DS version a couple of weeks back.
I think it would do my head in.

So that's that then.

FLICKR feedback

firstLife. Most every other fridays

firstLife. Most every other fridays
Originally uploaded by paintMonkey

auto stitched 3 set photo taken on camera phone.

repeated 6 times with slight angle adjustment.

6 images attached to email on phone, sent to flickr.

viewed and then downloaded images to mate's computer.

built bug eye composite montage in photoshop and saved to mate's computer.

uploaded to flickr.

deleted original 6 autostiched from flickr photostream.

blogged new construction process.

went downstairs and carried on slobbing with mate.

:)

landscape

landscape
Originally uploaded by paintMonkey

ahh. ashville college. when i was a lad, this was all nothing but fields.

Being single and the science behind ±MOMENTOLOGY.

I have made five failed attempts at leaving a comment on a friend's photo on flickr through the wonder of this new (and borrowed) pda phone/camera thingymajig. The genius behind its clever bits, buttons and touch-screen-yness... has all made for various fat thumb/small buttons mistakes and, after multiple errors and mistouched buttons, I have taken the hint from whatever all powerful supreme being who kept forcing the mistakes, that I wasn't perhaps supposed to leave that particular comment. It was going to be a slightly drunken, stoned and mildly profound reference to a conversation we kinda had years ago about events in life and our relationship to those events. My profound/obscure references will have to wait for another time I guess.
Being the confirmed batchelor that I am I don't have a significant other to share these thoughts with in these moments at home. Well, there is my goldfish; Billy, Bobby, BerthaSky and Bonzotrooper, but mindless philosophical, theoretical and abstracted chatter isn't really their thing. Swimming and eating. That's their thing.
±Momentology: unrecorded, undocumented moments between this and that, now and then. I suppose it would be like walking unexpectedly into the atmosphere surrounding/between a close couple that may or may not have had 'words'. The experience is very real, awkward and uncomfortable. Transient, momentarily passing scenery on the ever same path... But not something i'd want to document even though, if we were all honest, that is what fills most of our space and time and is reflective of our actual existence. That's ±Momentology.

Today's blog is borrowed but true.

Woke up, got out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head.
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, i noticed i was late.
Found my coat and grabbed my hat,
Made the bus in seconds flat.
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and i went into a dream..
Ah.

i draw what i see.

i draw what i see.
Originally uploaded by paintMonkey

And through to wednesday...

0825 thursday.
The air is crisp, clear and bright. The cold nips at my exposed fingers and seeps through the cloth of my trousers. The commuters wait patiently and without complaint for the ever late 0821 train, it eventually arrives at 0828. That aint so bad. It is normally much later than that.

Here, on the train, seats are scarce and the aisle is full of over confident and sneeringly sulky teenager students. I take a seat next to a book reading stranger, I am aware that I have the presence of the hung over. Stale pubs and a late night bearly hidden by my deoderant and Paul Smith aftershave.

The motion and rocking of the train sends me back to the drunken blur of last night. I mull over comments and conversations spoken through lost time and over indulgience. Those Man-Mushy moments long over due with long lost friends now found...

There were words and doodles in my diary this morning. Evidence of open wounds still weeping. Reflections of how the sun has gone down on the day I call a some 'friend'. Damn it. The subject is closed. Well it certainly should be by now.
The train arrives at my destination and I make my way with the milling crowd, swept along in a mass of iPod isolated individuals... My day job, my three spankingly cool computers and my mp3 playlist call me on.

I need coffee and pastry.

Slacking on a wednesday

Slacking on a wednesday
Originally uploaded by paintMonkey

the previously mentioned new phone/pda/camera thingymajig donated to me (on long term loan) by matt, will, if instructed to do so stitch three photos together to create panoramic pics... bloody marvellous! some basic examples can be found on my flickr page.

This is incredible. It really is.
If someone had said to me in 1992, when I was but a stoned 21 yr old, that in some hypothetical future I could find myself laying in bed, 1 o'clock in the morning, typing my journal using MicrosoftWord on a computer and/or camera and/or phone and/or music player unit thingymajig... a thingymajig more powerful than anything available at the time and no bigger than an audio cassette... a hand held machine that could instantly publish my words, my drawings and my photos to a world wide space or connect to a vast network of computers that spanned the globe, that theoretically could retrieve any information on just about any subject anywhere... in a world where 1 in 2 people have the same...At best i'd have assumed they were talking of an old and grey future of mine way downstream. At worst my younger, slightly too obnoxious self would've thought them a wee bit fantastical and a deluded Star Trek Geek.
But here I am fifteen short years later, right in the middle of my very own "the future is now!" moment. The very object in my hands, my thumbs tapping out the text on a qwerty keyboard the size of a book of matches...actually smaller.

The reality is, of course, that through all the wonder and genius of this small and perfectly formed thingymajig toy, a toy I would have struggled to believe in only a decade and a half ago, the information available wirelessly on the internet is, let's be honest, mostly pornography, price comparison sites, wikipedia and various sci-fi things. None of which I can view, read or enjoy at this moment because, for reasons I can't begin to understand, the thingymajig won't connect to anything. Hurumph.

The future is now, it looks brilliant and it don't work.

Although by the time you read this...it`ll have worked again obviously.

Attempt# 12 to remotely publish to blog

This'll mean nothing to you, i'm sure, but until I can publish through my mobile I won't be truly happy. Have been trying all weekend...but so far only managed to get something saved to draft.

In the news... I got the job I went for last week. Yay! Which is very exciting... I start monday. I bought some leather(ette) curtains to celebrate.

.. Now lets see if this'll publish from my phone....