I feel this one has driven my ears mad and they can't tell me whether they're hearing a work of genius or an even more grotesque shambles than I usually create when I am very tired and very high like I am right now - both things are because I had one of my favourite walks today - my favourite for ages - Calshot to Lymington. On a map it doesn't look THAT far and if you could fly straight as a bird or even if you could walk on water and walk across the mouth of the Beaulieu River then it would only take about 4 hours. But my own route quite often involved walking in 180 degrees the wrong direction e.g. just so I could walk along the beach, and then uselessly up alongside Southampton Water - and later I didn't want to be anywhere near the quiet road when crossing the big Heathland area so that was a detour and a half.
One thing and another, I arrived at Lyndhurst Pier train station about seven hours after I'd started, which is my longest walk in five months - ie since I fell down stairs. No physical pain at all. But lordy the collective unconscious(ness) in that part of the world is very bad indeed. I'd say that about half the people I met today were really miserable. But that will not defeat me. Everything else about the walk was hugely uplifting. Examples are, say, that I heard my first cuckoo of the year, that the ground was suddenly much much dryer than it had any reason to be, that there's a beautiful tiny exhibition of paintings in a hut-thing at Bucklers Hard, that this is the first time I've ever caught a train from Lymington Pier and though it's nothing special, well, it was. Oh a million things. Really.
And nothing much. In a weird way, being this close to the end of life and having to think a bit more carefully how I'm spending it, I'm slightly delighted that I fucked up my life so much and when I am in the company of normal and in-any-way "successful" people I just evaporate, pfutt, there is nothing there (or here). To have done a lot of the things that those people have done - the memory of it now would depress me horribly. Whereas every disaster in my life, all the catastrophes that've led to me leading this inaudible life of the catastrophic musician, thinking about them all now, they cheer me up.
My favourite game when I am with other people is to keep track of just how far along the path of dementia everyone is - there is definitely a lot about. When they were young they'd've been called stupid. Now we can actually put them in a home and forget about them just as quickly as they've forgotten about us. I won't miss any of them, but I will miss walks like today's, along with quickly rattling off music like this, it plays on right now as I try to make up my mind about it - it's nothing like as brilliant as my previous one, but no one downloaded that one, but I just take that as yet another symptom that everyone has dementia except me.
recorded this evening, photo along the way today, it's by that very old falling-down stone barn near Gins Farm
it sounds like those early Selbstportrait albums that Roedelius did a million years ago that have been my favourite albums for all of my life katharine eastman
The latest from Grails is full of woozy, expansive music that draws on a host of sources to create immersive compositions. Bandcamp New & Notable Dec 5, 2016
