Today's photies!

Saturday 11.20p.m.

                               Except when I take a photie of my foot by mistake..  well, what you see if what's happened. It's unedited since I wouldn't know how to edit it anyway, but it is great that the technology allows joes like to me just to point and clicky. 

                                         The bottom photie is from the window in the kiddo's room. Once a long time ago I imagined that I could write in that room and look out the window when I'd nothing to say, and that's the kind of thing I could see. And so it is. I'm hidden up at the back of the flat instead and I haven't moved around in the kiddo's old room for ages. The place was decorated. The workmen left. I stayed huddled in my wee room at the back, and the bathroom still looks half chewed, and the living room is unlivable in, but the kiddo's old room is soft on your feet and no one is in there and there is no feeling of anyone either, and I could creep in there unobserved and sit quietly doing nothing, just sit and wait then turn round and face the other way. The name of the game is being happy in an empty room. Donkeys, stunned and fixed as they are, sometimes change the direction they point in.

Went Oot!

Friday 10.30 p.m.
                          The wummin who'd done the long time for doing her husband, the same wummin whose son is doing serious time for knifing her nine times, was sitting in the auld maw's kitchen when I arrived this afternoon. What a nice woman! Roll with the punches, eh?
                          I put on my leather jacket for the second or third time and went out tonight to this Neu Reekie thing that's held down the Royal Mile once a month. I haven't been for a couple of months since my visits there ... well, here comes another open grave. Tonight I went on my own and really enjoyed myself, but kind of still being on my own. I bought one bottle of beer and didn't drink it, just sat it there. I was sitting in my usual position, but nobody notices. I'm reading the Times in the dimmish light. The cannybliss yogurt is maybe coming on about now.
                         Then the animations started and then two students from the Edinburgh Art School showed up and showed animations they'd done in a day. That was great! Then the two poets. They keep putting on performance poets and they are all brilliant. I love these poetry readings. I think I'll just go there on my own in future, sit in the half lotus up the back with the broadsheet covering my legs in the dimmish light, and wait for the cannybliss yogurt to come on.
                         The forces that I will not be able to control were running around my torso by the time I left the Neu Reekie thing. I like the forces out of my control. The creepy crawly stuff in your torso is interesting, like getting another leg. Your attention keeps turning to it because it's kind of funny and comforting when you're out there on your ownio.
                         What I had been thinking was that you could go on a solitary retreat in the big city, just by being alone and doing everything by yourself. Like in a crowd. I don't think in a crowd an excuse me, and thank you, don't really count at not being on your own. It's making your way by manners, not ....
                          Loved being out in the beautiful, wonderful city.
                         

Another nice day!!

Wednesday 10.28 p.m.
                                   The first photie is of the tree outside the bog window.
                                    Another very good day. In the afternoon I got a bus uptown to get some vitamin supplements. I thought I remembered that I needed vitamin B12 for something. I was pretty sure it was for the leprosy, but I couldn't really remember. Anyway, I started taking vitamin B complex supplements, which have 40% of your recommended daily amount of B12, a wee while ago when I started getting cracks at the side of my lips sometimes. Anyway, the pills I bought have 4,000% of your recommended daily allowance.
                                   The wummin in the shop said that the pills were quite big and asked if I'd have any problem swallowing them. I wanted to say that due to my misspent youth there would be no bother swallowing the pills, but I demurred.
                                   I looked up the vitamin on the computery thing and it says that if you're a vegan (i.e. don't eat meat, fish or dairy, like moi, a kind of accidental vegan) then there is no satisfactory way for you to get any B12, and them  that died of the leprosy would be the lucky ones.
                                   Anyway, at fourteen pence a pill what can you say? Take two!
                                   I have dug all of one side of the allotment apart from a wee bit where there are strawberries needing to come out. I reckon there's about nine hours of digging left. Then there's the planting. Then perfect peace of a few weeks as the ground stays brown. Cue the jungle!

Trying to get a lumber!

22.17 p.m.

                The Story of Mathematics went east to have a look at what was going on there. Mathematical progressions. So the Emperor has to sleep with 120 women in the course of ... about seven or eight days. The mathematicians worked this out in accordance with how much yang he had what with the full moon and all. So on the first night he slept with his wife. Night two and he slept with his three other consorts depending on their status. Then he slept with nine lesser status women and then he slept with twenty seven slaves, and so on. I assume this went on, and on, and on, through the months. When he was humping the twenty seven slaves,  well on that part, he got them in rotas of nine at a time. Nobody can hump like that. I assume being a Taoist, he was just poking most of them, like with the full moon waning and all.

               No wonder the foreigners think we are a lot of merchant bankers!

              Bizarre weather. We had the high ground, Brian Wilson and I. Between us we have probably slept with at least eight other people, but we had the high ground in Princes Street Gardens today as the weird July weather in March caused the gorgeous babes to reveal their fantastically flexible, healthy, young bodies. Brian Wilson needs a new liver so he was sober. I had two pints and he didn't want any of the joints. These two gorgeous babes were looking up the slope at moi, sitting there with my dad and smoking this rather obvious joint.

              'I wish I could crawl up this grassy slope to get closer to the groovy guy with the joint,' said she, giggling at her pal. Her pal swept her head back and pulled up her top, just a little.

              'Well, I'm not going anywhere near that old guy.'

              I think it would make a difference if he wore a wig, I really do. It seems he's off to China, or the Tibetan bit of China, looking for more liver from poor folk. He does not mind if the liver is a wee bit scorched. 

              I have made a pretty pattern in the earth with the diggings. It's an earth sculpture. Then the growth begins, or will begin. 

              The bliss was so up today. Tomorrow I will stay away from temptation and hope for equally, weird weather. Allotment, here I come!

             

Summertime again!

Monday 10.10 p.m.
                               The first and last photie is from spots where I was meditating today whilst out. It was a lovely summer's day somehow at the end of March. A wonderful day! Wonderful meditations. Wonderful everything.

In the summertime!

Sunday 9.58 p.m.
                           It is unusual to see the bare trees in the first photie and lots of folk sitting sunbathing. Also, when you pointed the camera at the red sunset, it did not show you this when you looked at the photie you'd taken. There was less red. There is more red in the photies as they show up on the computery thing. I am totally unsuited to being a photographer. I just imagined the photie would be of what you were looking at. Didn't the cameras they had before all yon digital development do that?
                           I have to go and watch the tims getting put to the sword. Lost 3-2 at Ibrox today. Got to hand it to the huns. When the going got tough, you'd want the wee psycho prod basturns in the trenches with you, so you would. Bitter they are.

First smoke in five months!

Friday 11.23 p.m.
                           Whilst boozing. As well!
                            Just been watching The Story of Mathematics on BBC 4. I could do maths at school, but I didn't see the point of it. Then I read Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. Loved it. Great book! Also, his autobiography in three volumes, dictated or written in his 90s. Maybe I'll start reading again.  Anyway, The Story of Mathematics is how the subject should be introduced. Loved it. I'll watch the second part after this.
                           Bumped into my brother Popeye today at the auld maw's. He's my wee brother. I love him. I don't see him so much these days, but that's the way it is when you get older. Babies grow towards independence and then everyone scatters and it's like the universe getting bigger and bigger and colder and colder, but somehow when you cross paths again it's like there was no time in between.
                           The auld maw wants the case with my stuff in it taken out of the attic. It's a bug in her heid. So me and Popeye goes up and gets the case down from the attic. Always a weird one going up there. The deid brother fell out of the attic towards his grave injuries. So we got the case down, us old, fat brothers.
                            The auld maw says it's just auld paper with writing on them, and why don't I chuck it out. I says that I'm supposed to be a writer (I'd just been talking to Popeye about Kindle) and that I used to write stuff on bits of paper .... I found the first copy of Alma Mater with a carbon copy. A carbon copy. Remember them?
                             Fung huge! I then found .... the case is now in the auld maw's hut. This is a much better hut than mine and I could live in that hut, but maybe somehow I am now.
                             Skinny McDuck arrived. Skinny might end up being the best of us all. Once I thought it would be good to be like Sammy Davis Junior. Like a black jew. Once I wanted to be a black, catholic jew. This is maybe what happens when you have been given some confidence. Celtic won the European Cup when I was about sixteen. I thought it was the result of the oppression. Excellence through stress. Anyway, the Skinny had a much worse time than me, but he is a very nice person indeed. We were upwardly mobile working class, given an even break by the Butler Education Act, but with Skinny we'd sunk back into the drink and who gives a fung. Froggy McDuck once told me that you had to overcome your background. I'd told him I was worried about the male centred world he'd lived in without a mammy. He's right. If you can survive Bellshill these days ....
                             I stayed sober for four or five days this week. The meditations have progressed. The wonderful Thrangu Rinpoche (I do hope he's getting better!) says that the boons - the bliss, non-thought, etc - are like a husk, and sometimes they will fall away and leave the seed. Things were happening in the meditations at the start of the week ... you are such a fool for not meditating that I can't really go into this, but I couldn't describe it anyway ... and I shouldn't have started drinking last night in Newmains. But sometimes you just have to admit that it's happening. It's happening. I don't know what it is and I don't know where it's going, but it is working. Falling down, stumblebumming, it doesn't matter. I have been blessed. When things progress like that, what else could you feel? It's bugger all to do with me!
                             
                           
   

Warm days!

Wednesday 8:20 p.m.

                                 Had quite a normal day today. I meditated all morning and then went out to the Botanics since the weather was nice again. Then I went to the allotment for more meditating and another wee bit of digging and planting. 

                                The black lines you can see on the bottom photie are compost; lines of compost where I stuck the wee onions. From the photies yesterday, you can see that I've planted the bit I dug yesterday and the bit I dug today. Today I prepared the ground about six lines of digging deep. That's probably about seventy spade lifts. God alone knows why that tires me so much!! But it does!.

                                 As I was walking to the allotment - for the first time without a jumper under my jacket this year - through Inverleith Park I felt very pleased that I'd never left Edinburgh to get a jobbie or work anywhere else. There's always the temptation or you have to move anyway because you want to make more money, or even just get any kind of job. I just stayed relatively poor and stayed here in the beautiful, wonderful city. There's no where else I'd rather be. Where I live is a great place to live!!!

                                 There's a pigeon in the second tree photie. Can you spot it?