There Is Nowt So Queer

as making war for making citizenship homophobic,
and negative or forgetful of so many other minorities
and communities too. Learn from nature-there even as life
is maintained by limited aggression, diversity comes first-
without diversity there is less to be aggressive against....

Twenty 'Rules' For Better Living

1 - Live beneath your means.
2 - Return what you borrow.
3 - Accept gifts according to the thoughtful generosity in them.
4 - Give clothes with wear in them to charities you trust.

5 - Be kind to unkind people.
6 - Admit it when you have made a mistake.
7 - Seek excellence whilst abandoning perfection.

8 - Listen more, talk less.
9 - Do good deeds without seeking credit for them.
10 - Acknowledge that life is uneven and unfair.
11 - Selectively let others ahead of you in queues.

12 - Be on time. Don't hide behind excuses.
13 - Be organised. Use arguments to help organise yourself.
14 - Know when to keep quiet with other people.
15 - Cultivate good manners, 'please' and 'thanks' work.
16 - Gift yourself plenty of time to be alone.
17 - Every day take a thirty minute walk.

18 - Be humble, be highly selective in your criticism of others. 
19 - Let small matters pass when bigger matters are more immediate.
20 - Use the past, however appalling it is, to live well with others in the present and plan the future.

These rules will improve how we deal with other people every day as individuals.

Apart from no 20 the guidance they can give us is every day and limited. But they will make each day the advice is followed better. The limits of the advice shows up most when we need help and advice because our foe is some faceless government, private corporation or any other legal but non-corporeal human body which does does not care about the inconsistencies it shows to others, but concerns itself with applying rules it did not write, and does not care about, to individuals it/they care about even less. 

How To Cancel The Future; A Simple Guide

Dystopias are are often described as 'nightmares'
for those that recognise such suffering in others
but who like to think that their pointing at dystopias
leaves them outside of what they see elsewhere.

For those who struggle to live
for being too close to merely existing
the lack of light is not a metaphor.

Darkness is key to the nature of Dystopia.

And in the deepest Dystopian states
there is no sense of time, no night no day,
it is a life beyond all light or darkness.

The people who live there live as if....

Man and his political choices
have reversed the clock of life
returning the sequence of Creation
to the The First Day where it is stuck,
we are all water, without form and void.

Time and light might once have been known,
and may still exist, but only in an unknown future
with no means for us who know nothing other
than what and where we are to get there.
.

There is No Such Thing As A Civil War

All wars are uncivil,
if not completely barbarous
-on wildlife, landscapes,
and last and least of all,
the humans for whom 'heroism'
is their Almighty excuse. 

The Royal Perogative

I often think of King Canute
when I go from room to room
tidying all before me in my home
until there is no more to be done.

If I do not learn how to reverse my untidiness
it will come back at me like the tide and control me.

The New Sociable Brutality

There is a new tribalism about,
less the old binaries of  class vs class,
but multiples of groups of otherness,
each of which gets more critical
of what it is not, the more of them they are.

The height of criticism is brusquely
describing other people as 'sensitive'
whilst thinking of your own group as tough,
whilst denying that your toughness causes damage
is the oldest cliche, and adds to the cliches
of the accompanying media anger.

Defensiveness is like the tide,
it will not be denied;
it will cover everything.

I can't stop it, but I will resist the lies.



  

Signs of Greater Age (46)

(1) Seeing handsome young men and women online
and knowing that you should know who they are
-they are famous. But feeling infinitely damned
for by being unable to recall what they were famous for.
The media generates far too much material
for even a small fraction of it to be memorable.

(2) To understand the modern life
you refer back to what you read earliest and most,
such that at the time felt like 'your guide'.
What you find that the book still holds true
-but not in the way you expected it to.