Brutalism and the auld maw.

We're in her bedroom, across a wee table. She says:
Don't volunteer for anything.
People who are saft get shat on.
You all end up jist like your faither. Saft.
As soon as I can't get up and dress myself, I'm going into a home. Why are all these peoples lives getting disrupted by these old people? You've got to know when you are done.

So I was heartened by this. Grasping onto life, and the desire for it, is one of the factors which are supposed to end up with you getting reborn countless times among the flatheids.

Since her hearing aid started working, the auld maw is a different wummin. You couldn't make her up. Some old ladies aren't so sweet.

Batman!

Monday 10:10 p.m.
                             I was wearing the care in the community ensemble: track bottoms with soapbar holes; the scruffy cardigan for old people; the awful plasticy jacket for the distressed but still aspiring bourgeois; when I walked into the shop in Princes Street to look for a leather jacket. It's Monday so there's nobody there but me and Antonio Banderas and Andy Garcia. The jacket costs £375, but the joes lets it go for £200 cash. I never buy myself anything but underwear and socks.
                            It'll last me twenty years, until I am dead. That's ten pounds a year or under a pound a month, maybe three or four pence a day. Once I've got a face transplant and a new set of zoobies, I'll be able to go out and chase girls.

Travelling ...

Wednesday 11:05 p.m.
                                   I spent six hours scraping the walls of the bathroom yesterday. I have much better things to do, but I did not get annoyed. I did get very tired. So this week I had tasks and I hate having tasks or appointments to attend to. Like last week. However, I am looking forward to being in the mother-in-law's kitchen all tomorrow because there I can just be. Maybe wash a few dishes. As soon as a carer shows up, I can go upstairs and keep on meditating. Hurrah!
                                  On Saturday I will probably be going to a sixtieth birthday party in the wilds of Ayrshire where the evil bourgeois do not go! It will be great to socialise in a place where there are some young people. My contemporaries are so depressing. As far as socialising is concerned, give me a drink, a smoke, some pharmaceuticals and surround me with nice young women tottering around on high heels and half falling out of their dresses! Just every once in a while mind you, but that's the way to do it!!
                                 Once more into the breach, dear friends!

Home Sweet Home!

Saturday 12:30 p.m.
                              Wakening up in my own bed on a Saturday morning! Oh, yes, yes, yes!
                               The visit this week to sit with the mother in law was most successful. This is partly because I knew I'd be home on Friday afternoon. So when you're sitting at the kitchen table this is most reassuring as you try to surf  through the time.
                                I get up in to give the mother in law a pill for her osteoporosis before nine. You have to drink a glass of water and wait half an hour and neither lie down nor eat anything. Then I go upstairs, read the paper, and have a smoke. Meditate. I go back down to the kitchen when the carers have been and got the old dear up and given her breakfast.
                                After that, the mother in law sits in her seat by the fire, but she's not so good today and not feeling too great and more confused maybe, but this varies. She's falling in very heavy sleeps. I meditate until the carer comes to do lunch and then I go upstairs to smoke, read, meditate.
                                Apart from these breaks, I sit at the kitchen table and meditate there. The meditations on this Thursday are fabulous, really fabulous, but every time I hear a noise I stop and check out the mother in law. She goes to the bog about three times during the day, but every visit takes twenty miles.
                                Old age is one long trek to the toilet and one long trek back, and ..
                                When the carer shows up around half four, I get a break and go outside where I skip for fifteen minutes and then run up and down the path for fifteen minutes. Then I lie in the bath for a bit.
                                 The mother in law is not having the best day. She's concerned with her confusion and knows that things are not going as she'd like. However, around this time of the day we can have a chat. I record it. It's about horses and buggies and bringing in the turf back in Ireland in the 1920s and 30s.
                                 At one time during the day there was something different about the kind of sleep the mother in law was having and I wondered if she was passing away. I've discovered the wee strokes she was having when she fell are ongoing. Didn't realise that.
                                 When she went to bed about nine at night, I got drunk and stoned. It had been a bright autumn day, but I was only out three times; twice to the Coop across the road, (morning paper, evening drink) and the time I ran up and down the path.
                                  It really was a very good day. If I didn't meditate, I couldn't do it.

Since Saturday Morning

Wednesday 1 p.m.
                            On Saturday I scraped; dug on Sunday; scraped on Monday; rested on Tuesday. No running or shadowboxing or anything much like that which I would have wanted to do.
                             Had a drink on Sunday. Otherwise, sober.
                             I'm glad to be doing more investigating into mahamudra meditations by studying this book. This is partly due to the power in the rest of it. The after effects of vase breathing and such that ... hold on! Just take it easy here. Power and force and accumulations. I'm a bit wary of taking lots of vase breaths in succesion.
                             On the other hand, that's where I want to go, where is says on the map: Obscured by Clouds, or There be Dragons.
                             I'm going to be back here on Friday evening this week. This means I won't see the Domestic Bliss till Saturday, but on Saturday we have an appointment to socialise with some of our old friends, so I'm let off staying on Friday. Time seems so precious.
                             If I believed in rebirth, I'd hope that all my old friends would die soon. Going into your old age with your head jammed up your backside is a disgrace really. All they're going to do is get old, get sick, get dead. I just hope they get on with it.
                             I managed to do three hours editing Cyclists yesterday. I've spent a lot of my adult life trying to get time away from people so I could do things. You'd think once you got rid of the jobbie .... Oh well, once more into the breach, dear friends!

Mr Pastry!

Monday 9:50 p.m.
                           So I'm perched on the third top step of the stepladder and I'm going to turn round to point the other way.
                           I have to say here that I have a fantastic sense of balance due to years of standing on my head. And I wan't drunk and I hadn't had any cannybliss for at least an hour and a half.
                           I realised once I'd got round that I was falling off balance. I can see the top of the set of drawers I'm about to plunge into and took a two footed jump, landing on the top of it. Then I must have ricocheted off the wall because I was then falling backwards and landed on top of the double bed. There was a metal thing there to keep the plastic sheeting on and my head knocked against that a wee bit. Apart from that ...Jackie Chan eat your heart out!
                           You could have done yourself a nasty there, Hotboy. I know, Jack. I think I'll have to hand in my notice.

Sunday night!

9:30 p.m.
             Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I offered to put up the wallpaper on a wall in here. It was cheap white wallpaper, the kind you paint over. There was a subtle pattern in relief on the paper. I knew you would not see this pattern or notice it, especially once the wallpaper had dried properly and was painted. And so it is. Or was. You never see a pattern.
             I showed the wall of new wallpaper to the Domestic Bliss and she took it all down and put it all back up again. Then it was painted and you could not see the pattern, or if there ever was a pattern. So that was the end of DIY for me.
             Until last night. There is a crack on a bedroom ceiling. The plasterer is coming to look it over. He said he will re-assess once the paper was off and he could properly see the crack and surrounds. When I was in Newmains this week, the other people did a fabulous job of getting this impossible to get off stuff off, and I was up for getting the rest of it off before the man came today to have a look again.
             You have to stand on the third rung from the top of the stepladder and hold this steamer thing up above your head, squeezing it onto the ceiling for a while and then scrapping the paper off with the other hand. But it doesn't come off. Sometimes you need to hold the steamer thing up against the ceiling five or six times before you can get this stuff off. This is about twenty, thirty seconds at a time. After three hours of this, I was completely funged.
             There were about four hours of steaming and scraping to go today, but I postponed the steaming and scraping until I'd meditated for a couple of hours. This is always the best way to proceed. The plasterer came and, having seen the crack in the ceiling, etc., said it was unnecessary to scrape any more of that impossible to get off stuff off as he was going to do something to cover the whole ceiling anyway.
             What a let off! Then I was able to go to the allotment and dig the last onion bit from this year so that the council man won't send us a nasty letter .
              It's probably fifteen spades wide and twenty spade intervals down. It is not a big space. It is not much compared to the whole earth. There is nothing as humbling as digging. I started digging and I dug and dug and dug at this little patch of the earth for twenty five minutes and I was covered in sweat. My teeshirt was soaking. The sweat on my glasses made it difficult to see where the spade was going. Legs unsteady. Maybe a bit stalled at the end.
             The book I'm reading is wonderful. The joe says you should be creative in your practice of the juju. Digging is my prostrating. Unfortunately, I'll have to do the prostrating as well, but not tonight.

Home again!

Saturday 2:20 p.m.
                             I could have been sitting on my backside doing the bliss six hours a day no bother if it wasn't for the three nights I've been spending in Newmains. It's dislocating. But sometimes I feel very strongly that I am on a "path". This is partly due to the way things develop within the meditations and maybe partly due to wishful thinking. But it's sometimes what I do think.
                             Obviously, I should be going to Newmains and doing stuff for the mother-in-law. You've got to want to do it and be a willing volunteer or it won't work. But I think I'm getting my head round it, at least much better than last week. I reckon the Newmains intervention can be seen as a sign that I'm not ready for the stuff I want to do. I've got to deal with it and make it part of my practice. I think everyone is doing their best.
                              I've been absolutely loving reading The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra by the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin. I've had it for years and usually find it really hard going. But somehow not this time. This is something else that makes me feel like I'm on a "path," the way I seem to get hold of books that seem totally appropriate.
                              Am I on a path then, Jack? Everybody is, Hotboy. It's just that you're on a much better one than anyone else..... feeling,  craving, grasping, becoming, birth, old age and death ... grief, sorrow, lamentations ... disillusionment, disappointment and despair... suffering in this life. To hell with that for a game of soldiers!

What's the scary thing coming over the set of drawers?

Sleepy Sunday!

Sunday 5:00 p.m.
                          It's hard to keep up with the bloggage and all when I'm not here half the time, but I'm getting a dongle for a netbook tomorrow, and I might then be able to do the computery stuff in Newmains. Sometimes I've thought that I should keep the place computer free, but life's tough enough.
                          The two top photies were taken in Newmains and all the rest were taken while I was up at the allotment this afternoon, or afterwards. There is my dinner. Apart from the three eggs, it's all from the allotment.