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The corporate pathway.
I'm doing some temping and living the life of a normal office worker.
That's what i'm doing now.
I'm treating it with the same attitude as my Welfare Flavoured Sabatical of 2006. Let's call it a pod farm sabatical. Although that makes it sound Copelandesque and cooler than actually it is.
Its normal.
My numb flavoured insulation sabatical. That's better...i'll work on that...

So not much to say.

I've been shuffling perforated paper into administrative patterns.
I don't like feeling normal in a normal space, although there is something secure about it, something slightly reassuring about the repetitive tasks, the lack of pressure to be all singing and all dancing...
Its not unbearable, or even unpleasant and it will pay some of the bills, but I don't like it just on principle...its kinda beige and quiet in my head. A bit too grown up and sensible.
It takes away something or something is missing from inside. One way or the other, I feel distant in myself....ha! I actually feel comfortably numb. :)

I think I'm maybe working on a series of new images that will story board the experience. I've uploaded some (www.flickr.com/photos/epac_island) and I think I may even have a working title;
N/everchanging scene and/or DaysEmpty.
Its a start. A project to play with. See what happens.

As part of my refocusing, I have started to collate and build some previous projects too, The Meanwhile In Montreal/Attack of the Things That Were Not There stuff, The Coventry Tales and ±Momentography. Would like to put each together as a series of actual books.
Art is all about the narrative in presentation afterall.
You never know, depublishing and the monkey may yet actually publish something... That'd be fun.

Heh.

Ah now, yes, right. Here's a song that I found myself singing yesterday and today.

Song: Married With Children
Artist: Oasis
Album: Definitely Maybe

:)

The day my world shook.

07.38

I just heard on the radio that it was an actual genuine earthquake. I think that's My First Earthquake.
Magnitude 5.3 on the richter scale, whatever that means.
'Quite wobbly', I guess is what it means.

Well that was very exciting.

Right better get up and get ready for wednesday

A stage set further.

Tuesdays are for discovering that we've all been duped on the prescription "happy" pills all this time.
That's funny.

Depression. The mental disease of choice for most of us in the great and mighty Western First (not Third) World.

I've worn that t-shirt as pyjammas. I have a spare t-shirt in my wardrobe too if you want to borrow it.
It says "Modern Life Is Rubbish" across the chest.

Now that we all know the little prescription happy pills are just sugar and rice paper (i absolutely loved rice paper as a kid), the bubble of illusion, that they did so much more than give us a little bit of an energy buzz, will slowly deflate.

But fear not, the marketing people are no doubt waiting in the wings, cheerleaders and bands poised, ready to present us with a New & Improved Organic ProBiotic anti-oxideppressant remedy of some kind. Something to distract us from the fundamental feelings that none of us are good enough, the feeling that we don't really deserve this and/or that thing we wanted so badly just last saturday...

I read a book recently called, poignantly, "The McDonaldization of Society" by George Ritzer. More of a series of transcribed lectures rather than a novel, it doesn't really get into the individual shrink wrapping of a person's head, its more of a thesis of sociology and the effects of global branding/marketing (kinda), but it left me with a couple of enduring images, one of which was an all emcompassing rubber cage in which this 'modern' world exists. It's comfortable in here yes, but its a cage nonetheless. The classless liberal occupants, taking medication and staring into a light box for being Seasonally Adjusted and unhappy whilst the Third World...well...they have nore important things to worry about than depression.

I'm not trying to be self righteous here. I'm as guilty of being depressed as any one of the 14million people who take anti-depressants in the UK. That's one in four people (roughly speaking), unhappy enough with things to go to a GP to get a prescription.
I'm so depressed, I can spot a counsellor's rhetoric at 30 paces for example... :)
(actually i'm good at the moment, new job has numbed me inside slightly, wierdly in the same way that the anti-depressants used to...)
I just think that compared to the huge majority, maybe we're lucky to have the luxury of Depression. We have the time to explore it, we have the space to wallow in it... It is a condition of modern life.

Hmm. I dunno. Maybe i'm just tired and shouldn't have had that last special cigarette. Here is a link to the article that got me thinking...(thanks VT)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7263494.stm

Right so i'm attaching a pic that is relevant I think...if it doesn't upload, it can be found over on www.Flickr.com/photos/epac_island, along with some other bits n bobs.

00:57
Crikey! Chambers just shook! The whole building just shook! Twice!

Thought it was a strong wind buffeting at first, but..having just stuck my head out of the window I can see there is no wind at all right now...and the whole building shook! Properly shook, things wobbled on shelves n everything. I hope the building's not about to collapse. That would just ruin my day.

stay on target. almost there.

Sunday scene.

Hmm.
Silly phonecam thingymajig. It has stopped attaching pics to emails. That's why the previous post is just title. No idea why or what i've done to upset the phonecam thingymajig.
Its really quite frustrating. I've got a couple of pics I wanted to upload. More shots from bus journeys.

Non event weekend really. Moo had a sleep over/slumber party with a friend last night, they bounced around Chambers until quite late and then watched dvds, giggled and played til very late, so I had a late night too. We're all bit tired and grumpy this morning. The girls have just gone out for a playdate, Chambers is quiet...

My eyes are heavy and keep closing for long blinks as I lay here on my bed listening to the radio.
Think i'll have 40 winks.

N/Everchanging scenery again again and again.

N/Ever changing scenery. Again and again and again.

Beware the buses, they are think tanks with a variable view.

Inevitably I hate my new job.
I knew I would hate it when I took it as an option from the temp agency. But, needs must and it'll do me some good i'm sure. The people are pleasant enough though, I say people, what I mean to say is that I am the only male in an open plan office full of accountancy type females.

That doesn't excite me as much as it would some of my straight(er) mates.

The job itself is a no-brainer, repetitive administrative tasks and number crunching, I tried not to engage too much in random chat and nobody tried to engage me particularly. Which, for now suits me just fine. I won't bore you with the details, I nearly fell asleep doing the job, so it wouldn't interest you much more... The bus journey to and from, now that was interesting...whilst the dangerously squeeky bus with no suspension hurtled along the back roads between here and wetherby, I randomly I realised I am capable of forgiving, given the opportunity, but not forgetting. I remember almost everything regardless of how much time passes. In the same way a bus stop remembers to be where it is on a bus route I guess, but is only stopped at when it is needed.

Or something.

Ahem.

Off out tonight for a pint or two with The Minister, it is afterall Midweek Celebration Night. I'll be toasting my sister, whose birthday it is today, my ex (and mother of moo) whose birthday it is tomorrow and also jimmytofu who will be getting married in japan tomorrow (in real time) to the southern belle that is sarah. As if that wasn't exciting enough, Tofu's extended away mission to japan draws to a close in the next week or so...by jimmeny, it'll be good to have him and his zen(ness) back again...even if he does have a wife. ;)

Poor me. The only unmarried one left.
I can not imagine why.....lol!

Think i'll go listen to some Morrisey now. First of the gang to die I reckon...

After the gig it was back to DragonDrop centraal.

Stonkingly good and brilliant weekend.
So good to be in the company of such cool people, such very good friends. Eirene the birthday girl, shaved her head to raise money for a bus, The Optibus nonetheless, packed with experts to go fix kids eyes in Bangladesh. Marvellous thing. Marvellous fundraising event. Well done to all who did that. (details found www.dragondrop.org ).
There should be more of that. More please.

Like the heroic veterans we are, Matt and I stayed up for the Full Duration, passing on the option of sleep.
Bleary eyed, incapable of forming sentences of more than three words but smiling all the while, i took an away mission to Whitby with some friends.
Inevitably the batteries in the clever phonecam thingymajig died just as we arrived, the light was perfect, everywhere I looked I saw things I wanted to snap or doodle and for the first time in years I had left Chambers without my sketch book, so my only record is locked away in my head...
It was cold. Really cold. Whitby is a lovely place though and it was a clear still day. But by god it was cold.
Much prefer it to Scarborough.

Prior to the weekend, I did some sofa tramping at the First Life Couple's house, some dossing with Skip The Piano Man in a house that I once lived in long ago and caught up with JimmyTwoScoops.

I'm off for a job type thing tomorrow. Standby.

That is all for now.

N/Ever changing scenery. Or, We went to Whitby to come down...

The path remains the same. The scenery is what changes.

That cow and them fish.

i cant see the wood for the trees etc etc

i cant see the wood for the trees etc etc
Originally uploaded by paintMonkey

oh what the hell.

brace yourselves for more of my ranting internal dialogue.
i can't help myself.
i've been trapped in my own head space trying to work the crappy situations and losses of my real life out and dealing with a nasty man-cold whilst on cocodemol, which isn't a particularly good combination and only serves to make me feel more...well, trapped/self pitying/angry. Which is just silly.
Some kind words from Mrs Jones helped me see things with some perspective. It doesn't actually change anything of course, my life is still on the brink of cash crash calamity, but there is no point in spitting my dummy out...doodling etc is what i do. at the end of the day, i like making pictures, images and writing words in sequence. It is all i have to give so i may as well do it whilst i can.

so, anyway, just popped to the convinience store on kings road with a friend of mine and we examined the selection of sandwich pastes available.
did you know that beef paste contains more chicken (15%) than chicken paste? also, salmon paste contains no salmon and crab paste contains no crab, but does contain shell fish flavourings.
sandwich spread contains no sandwiches.
just thought you should know.

Annoyed by my own self destructive and compulsive nature...or... Not about, but for.

Completely man-flu'd out. Have been all weekend,
to the point where i've considered giving up smoking...

And as my previous post and half the title of this one implies, i'm slightly annoyed with myself and the patterns I seem to inhabit. I have reached a point where i've begun to question what my motivations are, what my reasons are. I've thought of giving up on doodles, writings and the rest...considering how long i've been doing it, it has never been a success and none of it seems to have done me any good, not particularly. I put way to much time and effort into it all (this blog included) at the expense of security and stability...and for what? Everyone is a damn artist these days, each of them thinking they are more special than they actually are. Each of them thinking they have something important to say. None of them do of course.
In my case my fixed desire to express has, one way or another, broken more things than it has fixed, ...so maybe I should follow everyone else's example and keep my feelings and thoughts to myself and stop trying to say whatever it is I keep trying to say. I certainly wouldn't feel so vulnerable.
Someone once said to me that you only get out what you put in. If only that were true, if only...
I want to close the window . The draught bugs me.

But then, on friday evening I uploaded the appropriately named above picture to flickr...and it turns out to be the most instantly successful image i've ever posted on flickr...it reached a high of #14 in the top 500 Flickr Explore pages, and has had nearly 900 hits in two days.
Oh the irony.
If only all that activity transferred into cash, i'd be a very content soul.

But it doesn't. And i'm not.

Either way, I need to break with my patterns and have a major refocus of my attentions onto other projects. Afterall its not who we are underneath that matters, its what we do that defines us...

So, this isn't a catagorical shutdown of this blog (although I was tempted to just delete it), but it is daren signing off from the blogging thing for now.
Can't really be bothered anymore with constantly justifying each word and entry to those that would pick it apart ;)

â prochain, tout le monde.

"And in the end,
The love you take,
Is equal to the love
You make."

Song: the end
Arist: Beatles
Album: anthology3 disc2

Window is now closed.

No thursday report this week. Obviously.
Too pissed off with it all to be bothered.
I would list the many reasons for my pissed offness, but, like I say I really can't be bothered.

"There's a monkey in the jungle watching a vapour trail, caught up in the conflict between his brain and his tail..."

Another night of broken sleep. This back/side strain is truly doing my head in. Woke up with a proper frown-on, my head buzzing with half dreamt dreams and prophetically A Someone's voice echoing through my mind.
I need a massage.

Glorious weather this morning, crocuses are up and opening, the daffs are just a week or two away and soon it'll be blossom o'clock. Cheers me up. Winter is such a drab time...
According to the telly box last night, the clever bods at kew gardens have said that spring is months early this year, as opposed to 'only' weeks early last year. The projections of steady warming over the next century or so are now being re-evaluated. The new thought is for sudden, dramatic warming almost overnight...the evidence is there in the change of plant behaviours literally year on year and the accelerated melting of the artic ice and glaciers. I'm still not entirely convinced it is our fault, as far as i've been told our planet goes through these climate changes at regular intervals (something about the cycle of warming and cooling our sun goes through) and there is substantial evidence for that. Most of the pandemonium about environmental disaster is churned up by journalists and campaigners looking for exciting news, and by blaming ourselves we feel we can control it. I'm pretty sure there is little we can do myself, its out of our hands. It has its benefits though, the trend and application for sutainable energy production can only be a good thing for our health. Either way this glorious land we call yorkshire could have the current climate of Southern France by as early as the middle of this century, leeds council are already making plans to import trees that will be able to deal with those conditions. Our indigenous, shallow rooting trees will not be able to handle it. Yorkshire will be relocated to Iceland or the Outer Hebrides. On those projections however every thing between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn will be unbearable and unihabitable. That's probably two thirds of the world's population...all looking for somewhere to live.
The expression "time and tide wait for no man" has never seemed so apt...

Ahem.

Met my Mrs Jones for coffee in harrogate and discussed the mostly pros of yesterday's date with Someone New. Then signed on, went window shopping and got bought a new pair of Ginch Gonch underpants by Mrs Jones. Another ten points to her! There are few things that excite me as much as new pants (except shoes). I've probably said that before. Its not a secret.
They are snug.

Today is Shrove Tuesday. In some parts of the world they celebrate this with parties, processions, fêtes and carnivals before Lent kicks in and we deprive ourselves of the things we love for forty days and nights.

Here in the uk, we eat pancakes.
Hurah.
Anyhoo moo has brought a friend home with her for said Pancake Day, so I should really do my flip/toss party trick before I begin a rant about the planned re-reclassification of cannabis to a classB drug.
The bullet points of that rant for you to take away with you would be:

? Silly sods.
? Decriminalise it.
? Control it.
? Tax it.
? Every one happy

Song: 19-2000
Artist: Gorillaz
Album: G Sides

Standby.

Mind The Gap.

Stat.

Bags under my eyes.

The pain in my side has got much worse.

Hardly slept at all last night or the night before. Every movement and deep breath is painful. Really does feel like i've bruised or broken a rib...but I haven't . Gonna hoik myself to the doctor's this afternoon. He will, no doubt tell me there is nothing wrong, and that i'm imagining it.
Should be up and about. There are some unpleasant smells coming from the sink and/or the bin in the kitchen, I need a shave and shower and I'm meeting a New Someone in little over an hour...

Don't close your eyes, don't fade away...don't fade away...

Song: Rule The World
Artist: Take That
Album: Stardust OST

I unshamedly love that song. My sister and I would listen to it in her car when we would go see our nana in hospital (my sister shares my naff pop taste in music), and so it was chosen as the closing song at the funeral on friday. I didn't know it was going to be played, so when it started I felt like I had been hit by a emotional shovel in the face. I had manged to hold it together (mostly) up until that point...
I won't dwell too much on the funeral, they are what they are, an opportunity to say goodbye and to pass the care of a loved one onto whatever god/afterlife system you or I happen to believe in. Nana was an aethiest, so if she is now with a supreme omnipresent being up/over there, then she'll be a bit annoyed and will no doubt have a bone or two to pick... Ha! They better have channel4 and Countdown or scrabble in the very least, that's all I can say. She was looking forward to an eternity of rest...
Was good to see some of the old family, and meant huge amounts to me and my mum that my ex (and Moo's mother) P was there.
My mother's cousins (although they are all much closer than that, they all grew up together in the same street and even the same house in some cases), some of which I hadn't seen since the early nineties were all on characteristic good form. My godfather was there too, haven't seen him for yonks...but within minutes it seemed like only yesterday. Was brilliant to see him. Was brilliant to see them all. I should make more of an effort to stay in touch with them.
What I thought very funny at the time was, surrounded by our london family, how my mother's, my sister's and my own accents slipped right back into our native London tongue after a few drinks... I even managed to get some to shout "Poawk!" at the top of their voices (it is 'pork' in a london accent if you didn't know) in the restaurant. I was worried it would be a sombre occasion, we were all very fond of Vi and she is effectively the last to go from that generation (she was the fourth eldest of twelve kids), but as it turned out it was a laugh, loud, light and fluffy...just like the old days. At one point I got goose pimples and felt like all the (now dead) oldies were sitting with us...silly I know, but the feeling was real enough.
My Moo (born and bred yorkshire lass) was quite confused by the accents at one point. My aunt, her great aunt, Mo was asking her all the regular questions that people ask kids, how old are you? How's school? Etc etc... But it turns out Moo was giving her all the default answers that kids normally give distant relations without actually understanding a word Mo was saying... Moo came and told me that she thought Mo was speaking in an another language, but knew she was asking questions so she had just said "yr 4.....8yrs old...thankyou". My auntie Mo and I had a laugh about it later. She does have an accent and voice that requires a certain experience I guess and is deaf enough to not have heard the answers anyway. Funny thing is Moo is in year 3 not 4, I don't think it was a fib, I think she just panicked. Moo, during the wake, also wrote and illustrated a story about a caterpillar, its cocoon and emergence as a butterfly, all on the back of a napkin. The poignancy of that made me catch my breath... I've framed it.

Emotionally drained by midnight I bade my fond farewells and went and crashed on Chris and Alayne's (First Life) sofa. We stayed up chatting and playing games til early o'clock. A good way to 'come down' from a day like that is with the comfortable distraction of good friends. I'm glad for that.

And now it is sunday. I have woken with back ache, an odd bruised feeling in my left side and I had dreams about the bailiffs coming to take all my stuff away last night. If that's not my body and sub conscious telling me straight that its 'game on' and time to get my shit together then I don't know what is...anyone wanna buy a painting? A print? A coloured-in doodle? I've got a whole 3 for 2 thing going on... :)

*Matt, put it back where you found it, you'll get mucky fingerprints all over it. There aint no gap between you and I for you to mind...

Now, to whomsoever it may or may not concern, please...
Mind The Gap.

a last supper

a last supper
Originally uploaded by paintMonkey

cousins, sister, aunties, uncles, mothers and nieces. oh my!

cousins, sister, aunties, uncles, mothers and nieces. oh my!
Originally uploaded by paintMonkey

a day in the life 2 The last day

a day in the life 2 The last day
Originally uploaded by paintMonkey

Another methodical composition.

Digital doodle using clever touch screen phone/camera thingymajig aka hermes.