Trip Mckenzie and the perfect gathering.

I have been trying to imagine the perfect social occasion.
Driving in my car, returning from a show that never happened, nostalgia for days of my youth hitting me in the face as I travel along the dark tree lined roads of those days. I recall an excitement and a spirit of adventure that accompanied every such drive, no matter what the occasion I would be filled with expectation of the grand and magnificent events that might just possibly occur that evening. Or the beautiful, intimate moments that I might experience.

Now my head is constantly overflowing with jumbled ideas of great artistic achievement, human evolution, purity of experience. I question whether there is any worthwhile reason to engage in anything which is not pure experience and so I find myself doubting that there is any worth to any art or act of creativity. But without it how does the human race progress, how does it evolve into something greater than the stagnant state of society now.

I imagine an answer to be found in a collision of these ideas. Acts of wild unbounded creativity enacted purely as experience pushing its participants with every manifestation to a new and better place. In my head this collision of ideas is only possible through the collision of people - evolution of an individual is not the same as evolution of the individual.

Yet every gathering of people around creative reasons always seems to devolve into two groups: performer and audience. The former forced into effectively shouting their ideas into space, no matter how much they simply want to share and interact. The latter demanding that they be entertained, that their laziness and cowardice, unwillingness to push themselves rather than claim to be enlightened through their appreciation of other people's efforts, all be satisfied by those who they believe they validate through their presence.

This is not what I yearn for.
I yearn for social experiences, a natural product of life lived well, in which every person engages and participates. They do this for no other reason than that it is the right way for it to be done at that time. A dancer dances for themselves, but in doing so inspires a writer to put pen to paper, whose words feedback into the music played by musicians, guiding the hand of the artist and sculptor, shapes created compelling the dancer to push themselves to new places. And so on, with the linebetween all ever blurred and erased until the group and each indivudal a part of it finds themselves in a new place, filled with new ideas, concepts, imaginations and understandings. A pure experience done for no reason but its own self-worth and the self-worth of the individuals involved.

I have no idea what I am talking about.
These thoughts just run through my head day after day, never taking concrete form or shape, never showing me anything apart from frustration and confusion.
Something is lacking, but it is only out there to be grasped and embraced.
But I have no clue what it is.

Let us take the mundane for fuel, burn gas-lights through the night to equal the stars in their multitudinous beauty.
Let us rage upon the catalyst of other's lack of ambition.
Fly screaming into the clouds, shifting weather patterns, cold-fronts and jetstreams with our defiance of the refusal to challenge.
Do the chancers and the activists have any idea how tiring they are with their torrents of blandness?
Does the half-informed skeptic recognise the affront to understanding in their hastily paraded knowledge?
Do the decent and ego-less feel as indecent as they seem to me?
What could be more offensive than compliance at all costs to inoffensiveness?


The shocking, the conformist, they are aspects of the same species.
The apologist plague, to live defined by everything and anything but the self.

Let us inoculate our selves and find our faith.
True worth is the same value as self.
Let us brave the charge of arrogance and wear our self-confidence upon our sleeves.
Let us rip self-belief from its hiding place in our hearts; to be thrust flaming, bright and blinding, into the world.

Blogged with Flock

I've done alot of driving lately.

Nowhere exotic, but largely for good purpose, some even exciting in its way.

That is neither here nor there though, the reasons behind these drives, not only less than enthralling for anyone but me are not the point here.

With driving comes time free from distractions with my own mind. (yeah you have to concentrate on the road, but that still leaves alot more free mind space than the bludgeoning forces of tv and the internet.) So long as the roads are not busy, it is dark enough to cut out the outside world (or you are driving somewhere exciting, but for that I refer to my second sentence) and you have great music, then the otherwise dull task of getting from A-B can be time well spent.

You can also be surprised by some of the things you do see; even when driving along the same dull roads time after time. Coming off a motorway junction at 6.30 in the morning, driving up the slip-road, for one moment everything in front of you is cast in emerald blue light, as if the traffic lights, roundabout, road and even the sky all lay at the bottom of the most beautiful azure clear lake. And...well that is the only one that comes to mind right now, but there have been countless moments over the years, glimpsing beauty in the same places that feel like a prison ninety percent of the time and feel like nothing most of the rest.

Thoughts run through my mind, some I go with, draw out, chase down paths of logic and reason, sometimes just chase down no particular path. Others come into mind, provide a moments amusement, even inspiration only to be left on the road behind me. These last ones are the most frustrating and also the greatest, fleeting inspiration from the most unlikely of sources or from the depths of the mind and heart only realised in the pseudo-medititive state of something as monotonous as driving along a motorway. It is these that I grasp at, try to recapture...

And this is where it pays to do more than a little driving in a short space of time, even more so when the driving is done for good reason and the thoughts are bouyed up by the purpose behind the actions. For sometimes, if you pass along a route enough times with the right state of mind you do encounter those moments of inspiration again, still on the road where you left them, waiting for your return. Then, passenger to your soul once again, you can follow these thoughts as was always intended for you and from the pit of banality that is life in your so-called home a new path, idea and direction, a renewed purpose can be found.

So thank you to whoever I may have been driving for; I think I might have a direction to head in again.