Author: nofiltersnecessary

thoughts

~ Towards the Adventure ~

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~ Towards the Adventure ~

“Sorry, but I guess I’ll always be a bit of a runaway, a dreamer, a vagabond. This blood that runs inside me will not allow me to do anything else. I have stared into the eyes of those people on the street and decided I am not one of them. Their words have been heard and their perspectives considered, but ultimately the life they live is a strange foreign one to me. There is a priceless pleasure in following the heart fearlessly through life, and I guess I would rather do that all my years than allow myself to dwell in an existence that doesn’t bring me any real fulfilment. I am out on the quest, and yes, I know my road may end in wreck or ruin, but in my heart I only desire to be able to say that my life was one lived to total completion; that my soul at least knew what it was to run free through a great wilderness, rather than to stay stuck in a way of life which did not allow me to truly live.”

thoughts

~ What I Have ~

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~ What I Have ~

“No, I haven’t got that stable mind, that polished resume, those practical and pragmatic skills. I haven’t got many things that most people in this world have. But such is life and I have learnt how to survive my own way and by my own rules. Because I got those feet that march through the swamp, those eyes that lift to the horizon, that spirit that never quits. I got those values that never corrupt and a heart that can’t be tamed. And when the others lose their way, I have just enough madness left inside to pull myself up and continue on through the storm. These are the things I have, and although they may not be the things most people desire, I would not trade them for all the riches in the world.”

short stories

~ Trapped in Time ~

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Trapped in Time

It was a random weekend and I had come back to visit the parents in my hometown of Coventry. I was unemployed and waiting to do a medical trial in a couple of weeks’ time, so I thought I’d pop home to be bored there instead of where I was currently living (Nottingham). It was still national lockdown from the coronavirus and there wasn’t much to do, so I arranged to meet a friend and walk around the local park while venting our frustration at the situation. We were both approaching our 30th birthday as the closing years of our twenties were wasted by a hysterical overreaction of a virus outbreak. Both of us should have been out travelling the world, having romances, living life, but instead we were wandering around the drab suburbs of our childhood town, unable to even go to a bar or do anything of any real excitement. After a while he told me his younger brother had just bought a house and was having a house-warming gathering. Well, what the hell; it was something else to do other than wander around aimlessly, so we bought some drinks from a cornershop then headed over.

We made our way inside the house where his brother and a friend were setting up a TV on the wall. We helped them assemble some chairs and then got started with the drinking. His brother and his friend were 21-years old; they had crates of beer, wide eyes, high spirits and were ready for another Saturday on the booze. Soon enough another couple of his brother’s friends arrived to join the party. We were a good age distance apart from everyone there and it wasn’t long until the obvious subject of our age came up. “How old are you?” one of them asked. “29″ I said. “29?” he said. “That’s old man. I thought I’d be having kids and stuff at 29. Don’t you want to have kids?” I shrugged my shoulders and told him no. I then cracked open another beer before moving on to the drinking games. At first it was drink whenever someone with your name scored in a football game, then it was beer pong, then a load of other games as shots and drinks were consumed every few minutes. Vodka, Rum, Bucksfast – it all went down as my memory began to black out as it had so many times over the years.

The next day I awoke in my bedroom covered in cuts and scratches. There were bloodstains on the sheets and unhappy parents downstairs. It took me a while to figure out the ins and outs of the situation, but apparently I had been kicked out of the house-gathering by my friend’s younger brother. Having skipped dinner and downed copious amounts of alcohol, I had become intoxicated to the point I was spilling my drinks everywhere and falling over into thorn bushes. I had also lost my jacket and smashed a bottle of liquor I had bought my mum for mother’s day. Oh – and just to round things off – I had left the key in the front door along with blood on the handle (something my parents found slightly disconcerting). The thought hit me that I was about to leave my youth behind and I was still doing the same stupid shit I had always done. In fact, I was even worse than those 21-year-olds. It was a sobering realisation and I tried to avoid the judgment of my parents by hiding in my room all day. In that lair I dwelled in my hungover state until boredom and horniness caused me to get out my phone to go on Tinder. It was after a few minutes of mindless swiping that I came across the profile of a girl I used to see when I was twenty-two. Seven years had passed but I thought I’d start speaking to her again anyway. Suddenly I was feeling super nostalgic; probably I just wanted to feel like I was younger again, but I asked her to go for a walk over the local farmland near where we lived. She agreed.

We met on a street corner and started catching up. It had been a strange year since the pandemic began, but this was perhaps the strangest moment of all. We hadn’t spoken in five years yet somehow it felt like no time had passed at all. Tales of the past and present were discussed as we wandered around the farm fields under a grey and gloomy sky.

“So what are you doing with your life now?” she asked. “It must be weird now the pandemic caused you to be a stable UK citizen.”

“It has been weird,” I said. “I was about to jet off to South America when the pandemic hit but  instead I found myself moving back in with my parents and getting a job at Amazon. Then I quit and enjoyed the summer before moving back to Nottingham. But yeah, to be honest, I don’t really know what I’m doing right now. I always wanted to just travel throughout my twenties, but now that has been taken away from me by this pandemic. Right now I’m just living month to month, working here and there, doing medical trials and trying to get by. You know how it is…”

“I can imagine it’s been strange for you not being able to take some trips…” There was a pause. “So do you think you can finally see yourself settling down or are you planning to get away again after the crisis is over?“ I knew why she was asking this of course – it was to see if I was finally someone worth imagining a future with. That was what she wanted in the past and what I had disappointed her with once already. When I came back from an eighteen-month trip five years ago, she had hopes that I was finished with the life of being a wandering nomad. We saw each other a couple of times again but I quickly realised it was the wrong thing to do. She only ever wanted a normal life and back then even after that trip I knew there was no way I could give her what she wanted. Well, here I was five years on still feeling the exact same way. Time had changed nothing; I was still just a drifting bum with no direction or desire to join her in a settled existence. Well, if I wanted to get laid I’d have to give her hope, so I continued talking about how I was open to whatever life brought my way now travel wasn’t possible.

It must have worked as the next day she invited me around to her place for the evening. I walked over to hers from my parents, a fifty-minute walk through the streets of a sleepy suburb, filled with big houses and nice cars on the drives outside. I got to her house, knocked on the front door and entered. Inside I was jumped upon by her puppy – an eight-month-old cocker-spaniel. She had bought him during lockdown, presumably to have some company while living alone. I then made my way into the living room and sat down with her on the sofa. As we chatted about life, I looked around at the interior of the house. It was clean and well-decorated, but something about it saddened me. It was a new-build house and you could see it was a formulaic design –  a computer-generated building on a computer-generated street where everything looked the same (almost like it was taken from The Sims). I looked at all the Ikea furniture tidily laid out; I looked out at the garden which was a blank square of grass with a small shed at the bottom. Everything was neat, clean, featureless. Of course, I couldn’t knock her for buying her own home at the tender age of twenty-five, but to me it seemed that there was just no soul there at all. In that soulless house we sat discussing old times as I imagined the possibility of finally forming a relationship with this girl. I could live here with her in suburbia, come home to this sofa, walk the dog in the local park, make love with her at night. I could get my old job back at the Amazon warehouse that was right off her street. It was all there within my reach: a civilized and normal life. A chance to come in from the wilderness. A chance to ‘grow up’, as my parents kept pressuring me to do. No more getting drunk and hurting myself. No more floating idly with the breeze. Just a steady, sensible, neat, ordinary existence.

Eventually we started making out and I ended up staying the night. The next morning we made love again before I headed to leave her so she could get started with her job. Of course, I didn’t have such responsibility and I walked out into the rain to begin the long walk back to my parents place. “Do you want a lift?” she asked as I headed out the door. I remembered how she always gave me a lift home in the past from her old place. I still hadn’t got my driving license after all these years, but this time I couldn’t allow her to drop me home. “No, don’t worry about it, “ I said. I then left her with a kiss before walking off into the rain (without my rain jacket, of course, which had been lost at the house-warming party).

When I got back to my parents, I packed my bags and began the journey back to Nottingham. It had been a strange old weekend and I just wanted to be back far away from my hometown. The train journey would be two hours and I spent that time staring out the window, my old pastime, wondering what was next for me in this purgatory state of living I had been experiencing. It had now been one year of living in this existential blur. No direction, no desire, no possibility to do what I wanted to do anymore. All the years were coming and going. I saw the younger kids buying houses and settling down. I saw past love flames still living a stable existence. Elsewhere friends were getting married or engaged, climbing career ladders, having babies. All those things which I still had no desire to do. My way of life was dead for the time being and I saw myself as just plodding along, acting as stupid and reckless as I had always done. Getting drunk and hurting myself; losing my belongings and breaking things; leading girls on I had no intention of forming a relationship with. Not much had changed over the last decade. I was a man trapped in time, repeating the same reckless behaviours I had always done. A couple of lines across the forehead showed the passage of time aging me, but other than that just the same old fool I had always been. Where to go from here? Who the hell knew. The lockdown of the world had left my brain in a frozen state and all I could do was stare into space and wait for something to appear to me in the greyness.

thoughts

~ The Same Old Feeling ~

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lifee

Now I’m turning 30

I’m about to be an age where the average person is supposed to have it figured out. The career, the partner, the place of residence. In all honesty, things haven’t changed much since my 20th birthday. I look at the world I am supposed to be a part of and still feel nothing but total indifference with it. It’s all just so beyond me. The expectations, the traditions, the system of living. I still read the job descriptions and feel hopelessness in my soul. Is that what a man is supposed to become? A business analyst? A communications officer? A marketing manager? I could never bring myself to even engage in that world just cause the very sight of it filled me with despair. Even just writing a CV made me sad. The robotic nature of it; the notion that my intrinsic worth as a human-being came down to some bullet points on a piece of paper. The depressing thought of sitting in front of an employer with a fake smile and speaking insincere words just to get a job I didn’t even want. Then there was the idea of marriage; standing all-dressed up at a pompous ceremony, wasting money on that event while having to engage in small-talk with people you didn’t even like. Kids, well, I looked at how crazy the world was becoming and felt only the selfish wanted to bring more inmates into the asylum. Owning a property also had no appeal; I looked at houses and was disinterested with the idea of looking after them and paying council tax and being tied to one residence. No, all these things still confused and depressed the hell out of me. My mind disregarded it all and instead toyed with far-fetched ideas. Riding a bicycle to Asia. Hiking through the Himalayas. Working on a vineyard in France. Writing poetry under the stars. I imagined myself meeting a beautiful woman and residing in a quiet little village somewhere in Spain, sipping wine as the sun set across the fields every evening. I imagined hitch-hiking around Europe, working season to season while meeting strange and interesting people. My mind was a gateway to a better place and I imagined myself living a life of purity and beauty, far away from the suffocating reality of a society which had taken all the life out of living.

thoughts

~ A Beacon ~

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woman

~ A Beacon ~

“You’re not alone. Forget about it. There are many out there who feel like you out there. There are out there dwelling in the crowds, in the cities, in their chambers of solitude. They are returning home to a dark room everyday to stare at the walls. Like you do, they will enjoy their solitude and release from society. They will enjoy their peace and their quiet and their cats and dogs. But a part of them needs to know there are others out there somewhere. So write your words. Spill your soul onto a blank page. Graffiti the walls with your deepest secret. Send out a beacon of your own soul for others looking for some guidance through the wilderness. You never know who is out there needing to know they’re not the last of their kind in this world.”

thoughts

~ What Am I Going To Do Now? ~

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What Am I Going To Do Now?

Well, it seems I haven’t got much to say these days. I remember when I sat before this laptop, the words of passion loaded in my fingertips, waiting to explode onto the blank pages of the world. Now the ammunition is low, the gun is jarred, and the desire to pull the trigger not even there. I have my excuse: the collective madness of society losing its mind and collapsing over a virus with a 99.5% survival rate, leaving me locked up alone and unable to live life during my prime years. The coronavirus had inspired a new peak of human insanity: shutting down the world, locking children up, fining hikers for walking alone, not allowing anyone to live their lives to potentially prolong the lives of some elderly people who had already lived theirs. Ahh yes, it sounds harsh right? But just think about it for a second – many countries had crashed their entire society at the thought we could once again control a natural force (spoiler: we can’t). The countries who hadn’t locked down had shown had utterly stupid this whole thing was by having a death rate that was not too dissimilar from everyone else’s (and, in some cases, actually better – see Sweden, Nepal, and the state of Florida). Hysteria reigned supreme and I now lived in a country where McDonalds was open but gyms were closed; where smoking and drinking were legal but sitting on a bench in a park was deemed too dangerous for public health.

I knew the next ten years would slowly reveal how utterly insane and foolish these lockdowns were, and that people would lie about their support of them (just like people still lie about their support of the war in Iraq when figures show 80% of the public supported it at the time). The second-hand deaths from lockdown would far outweigh any potential elderly lives we managed to prolong (and these deaths would include younger people who still had their lives to live). Besides that, many people would have their life quality forever lessened by the poverty and mental health pandemic that was sure to follow. The youth were especially fucked and I essentially saw the whole situation as something similar to forcing young people to have kidney transplants to prolong the lives of some elderly people. This very notion sounds utterly insane and evil, but in reality that wasn’t far from what was happening. So many young people were having their insides tore out against their own will. Due to lockdown, I knew many who were depressed, stressed, anxious, lonely, jobless. Suicide rates were up and with a bleak looking future ahead of them, so many had nothing much to live for anymore. They had already lost an entire year of the best period of their lives due to the tyranny of a government and the docile nature of a public who swallowed whatever the media told them. And I was amongst those betrayed young people, hence my anger, and now the one thing in this stupid life that kept me going (travelling) was taken from me. At first, I had thought lockdown was the right thing to do, but now I had time to clear my head and actually think about it, I deplored it with every ounce of my being. I wanted to see heads roll over what had been taken from us. I wanted the people to awaken and go out and live their lives again with the knowledge of the fact that – shock, horror – they are mortal beings who will die and decay into cosmic dust. And that it’s okay – it’s okay to die; what is not okay is to not live in the first place when locked up living in irrational fear.

Okay, I can feel the virtue-signalling do-gooders sharpening their knives and shouting ‘granny-killer!’ The same people who never said a thing about the millions who die from starvation a year, the 500,000 who die from flu, the millions who die from smoking, from suicide, from obesity, from heart disease, from malaria, from road accidents, and not to mention who happily consume thousands of animals a year while turning a blind eye to the fact that all major disease/virus outbreaks of the last thirty years originated from the meat industry. The same people who go around supermarkets filling their trolleys with junk food that will cause them heart failure but feel outraged at the sight of someone not wearing a useless face covering. To be honest I was done with humanity to a degree, but this last year has cemented that. I always knew people were irrational and illogical, but I never knew it would be to this extent. I always knew people were willing to throw away freedom for illusions of security, but I never knew it would be to this extent. I always knew people were brainwashed by the media and public opinion, but I never knew it would be to this extent.

So yes, I have detached myself from the situation, but still, now in the prime of my life when I should be living life to the full – when I should be out meeting new people and experiencing things and dating women – I now have to reformulate and adjust to the tyranny imposed upon me. For a while I have been doing that: living the healthy life, getting my fitness up to new levels and meditating in my lair of solitude. I published a new book and even started learning how to drive before that was also made illegal. Now comes a time where no matter how much I meditate or masturbate or write, I can still feel the dissatisfaction brewing within me. Naturally it’s nice to believe that this will all be over soon, but it appears that society is only going more and more insane. Human rights are slowly being eroded and soon I will be forced to take a vaccine for a virus which poses no threat to me while also having to show a vaccine passport to go out to a bar or a concert or a cinema (despite the fact the people actually vulnerable to the virus had been vaccinated). We are on a slippery slope into the dystopian, totalitarian abyss and soon life will be something like Blade Runner or a Black Mirror episode. I always felt it would be that way, but I genuinely didn’t expect things to disintegrate into the realms of madness so quick. Well, silly me.

Anyway, I am twenty-nine and probably have another fifty or sixty years until I happily die of the coronavirus. That’s a lot of time, and with the world now changed forever, I have to sit back and stare at the ceiling and think: what the hell am I going to do now? Seriously. All that time ahead of me with a world that is taking away everything good about life. For the last decade I have based my life around travelling – around flying to new countries, meeting new people, exploring new cultures, dancing on beaches, kissing strangers, living wild and free and soaking in the sun and the sights. Now that world looks decimated at least for the foreseeable future, and probably even longer if this madness keeps unfolding. I mean, yes, writing is also my life passion; but my words came from that wilderness of travel and freedom, and I am not sure what exactly I will have to write about while living this new dystopian lifestyle which is insidiously being imposed upon me. I still have my running and cycling of course (they hadn’t taken that away from me yet), but I needed more of an adventure than riding my bike to the next town or jogging beside the river. I guess I could do what so many men do when they don’t know what to do with their lives: find a good woman, settle down, reproduce, and force myself into a steady and tracked existence for the next few decades. God, even just writing that sentence out makes me want to hang around unmasked on a covid ward. Maybe I could try and start a career finally? Ahh too bad – the economy is fucked, young people have no opportunities, and we are now about to enter an era of mass unemployment as small businesses crumble and psychopathic billionaire elites finally take full control of the world. 

Well yeah, things aren’t looking so good I guess. And yet I still need to go on – to keep breathing and feeding myself, to keep waking up in the morning and finding the strength to pull myself out of bed, to face the world, to talk to other human-beings and be a member of a society I can’t stand the sight of. Maybe there’s just no way around it anymore: I’ll have to become an alcoholic or drug user to make it through. A comfortably numb existence which so many have chosen to live just because the pain of being human in an unhuman system is all too much. God, now my sentences are crumbling apart. I used to write with such flow and fluidity, but look at these words now – plodding along, going nowhere, dissipating out. I can’t even be bothered to edit this shit anymore. This is what the lockdown has done to me. My one talent is now dying due to the suffocation of this tyranny as politicians and billionaires sit laughing, counting their profits, amusing themselves over the pitiful plight of the common man.

I won’t bore you with my jaded words and frustration any longer. I would normally finish a piece like this by trying to make some grand point, but there isn’t one; this is simply nothing more than a scream against the absurdity and insanity of the world. A howl in the wilderness from a wolf who has locked in a cage. A thrash of a shark who has been imprisoned in a tank. A tear of a soldier who has been deprived of his battle. I don’t know how it came to this, but one thing is for sure: no matter what society throws at me, I remain determined that this world will never take this fire from me without a fight. It may cage me and totally prevent me from living the life my soul cries out for, but I will not bend over and die like the rest. What am I going to do now? I don’t know exactly, but I will find a way to keep my soul alive, even when this world seems to want it dead and buried. Even when I can no longer distinguish society from a mental asylum, I will fight my fight and do whatever I can to keep something real and true inside of me.

thoughts

~ Unstoppable ~

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“For most human-beings there is no greater spiritual pain than a life devoid of substance and meaning, but if you are willing to do the inner work and have the courage to follow your heart, then one day you’re going to find that thing that sets your soul on fire; the thing that leaves you feeling like you can march against a million armies, and sail the stormiest seas, and climb the deadliest mountains. There is no gift greater than this, and a person who is deeply in touch with their own existential core is surely the person who gets the most out of this life. Unfortunately we are currently living in a society where many are made strangers to themselves – whose morning mirrors show them every day drifting ever further away from the shores of their own souls. This is the fate that befalls so many in the modern world and right now through television, consumerism, social media, drugs and alcohol, we are seeing so many people self-medicating on vices which help them escape from the existential emptiness of disconnected lives. It is an ever-growing reality and to be able to truly live in this day and age, one must be able to do the inner work; to light the torches of self-discovery, to venture wide-eyed into the unexplored areas within themselves, and find the thing that fills their veins with purpose and desire. On the path to a fulfilled and meaningful life, nothing is more important than this. A person who has enlightened every corner of their being, who has found their inner treasure and knows how to yield it while aligning themselves in with the totality of it all, becomes a person of incredible power in a society that seeks to suppress this very state of being. They become wild-eyed creatures of purpose and passion. They become healers of a lost generation. They become empowered, awakened, emboldened, alive. Sometimes they even become unstoppable.”

purpose

thoughts

~ The Blessing of Madness ~

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~ The Blessing of Madness ~

“As I got older and lived my life the way I did, I found that many people simply dismissed me as crazy. I didn’t take offence to this. In fact, I welcomed it. Once you were put in the ‘crazy box’, then you were free to just live life how you wanted, without having to answer or adhere to social norms. Ultimately people’s realities needed to be reinforced, and labelling people who saw things differently to them as ‘crazy’ was one way to do this. But those people didn’t understand just how fragile those realities were. Once the sane people believed the earth was flat; once the sane people burned women on the stake for being witches; once the sane people enslaved other humans thinking they were nothing more than their property. Sanity was just the dominant cultural viewpoint at the current moment – a collective hallucination that had about as much solid substance as the wind. Often I looked at the sane people of the world and felt sorry for them in a way. Did they not know how limited and constricted their reality was? Did they not know what wonders awaited them beyond the fences of conventional thinking? The sight of a completely sane person made me sad, and I hoped everyone was fortunate enough to lose their mind at least once in their life.”

short stories

~ Blocked ~

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~ Blocked ~

Locked away alone in my bedroom, in the middle of winter, with the wind and rain howling outside the window. I sat staring at the screen waiting for words to come. Nothing did. It had been this way for a while now – racking my brain and having nothing new to put down onto the page. It was frustrating, but what can a writer really do when their creative well-spring has run dry? You feel incomplete, almost sick in a way, but ultimately you know there simply is no way to force inspiration or emotion; it has to flow out of you naturally, like blood coming out from a wound. And the reason nothing was coming out was because everything had been drained dry. I had written down all my experience up until now, and I now needed to go out and experience life some more. However, the lockdowns of the country over the last year had made that somewhat difficult. I was now in a strange state of being: stuck in one place, unable to take a trip anywhere, unable to do anything of any real excitement. On the flip side to this, I had recently discovered something novel to me; a strange sort of peace and harmony. I was living undisturbed, eating and exercising well, as healthy as I’d ever been, but the confronting truth – as I had come to realise  – was that deep down I needed the chaos and the adventure. I needed to go get lost, to struggle and to suffer, to elevate and overcome. I needed new pains and pleasures to be felt in my heart. Such existential turbulence was what I was born for, and the fact that my words ran dry when I hadn’t done it for a while was confirmation to me of that. Listening to the rain outside, I began to imagine myself back out on a new adventure, living life on some precarious edge. I imagined getting my heart broken again and new truths being discovered. I imagined pouring all those new emotions into new stories and poems – the wisdom of the wilderness being further explored as I resumed my chaotic journey through life. But there was nothing I could do. I was powerless. Locked down. Blocked. Simply existing and no longer living…

I wasn’t alone in this feeling, of course, and I thought of everyone else out there in the storm, also just existing and waiting for the world to go back to how it was before so we could all carry on with our lives. Maybe the conspiracy theorists were right; this was the end of normality as we knew it and it was all a part of some grand plan to control us all under a new globalist agenda. Maybe the government was right and things would be back to normal by the summer once people had been vaccinated. In reality, it was hard to know what to believe; getting to the complete truth of things with your own short-sighted perspective of such a complicated, global issue was an almost impossible task, and a part of me had mentally withdrawn myself from the whole mess altogether. I didn’t follow the news anymore; I didn’t debate about it with friends and family. I simply waited and waited, practicing contentment, meditating on my bed as the last years of my twenties drifted by in static silence.

I took solace in the fact that I had taken advantage of the preceding years when a man could go online and book a flight to almost any country in the world for the next day. Such a lifestyle seemed like it was a relic of a bygone age, even though it hadn’t even been a year since the first lockdown started. Now the feeling is almost becoming normal, and that’s what worries me the most. To live a life that is constantly on hold, blocked, and you become accepting of and adjusted to this new reality. But how many people like this lived their whole lives this way? Waiting constantly for life to begin? Fuck, maybe I was just getting sucked into it like the others. Maybe I should have taken the gaps in lockdown to move to another country, or take up a new hobby, or at least try something. Maybe I’m just on the downward slope to having this spark inside my soul snuffed out, and I’ll attribute it to old age or the lockdown, but really I’ll just be another person made complacent and incompetent by the world, wasting out his one existence on the shores of security, rather than going out and braving that storm. No creativity or imagination left. Rotting away. Blocked forever. Spiritually locked down forever. 

Well at least I had some ideas about how I would get out living again, and some money in the bank to put those ideas into realisation once the travel bans were finally lifted. I was in contact with my French friend who had taken a risk to book a flight to Indonesia for April. He too was like me, itching to get out and do something, although he was being sent slightly more insane by the lockdowns than I was – drinking often, and losing his mind from being sex-starved. “Life is shit,” he said. “I need to go pub and to fuck some girl.” It was the type of pent-up sexual frustration that only a single man in a global pandemic could resonate with. He was urging me to book a flight too. It was tempting, although I felt April was most certainly too soon to escape this prison. I was also in communication with my Dutch friend who had gotten lucky to be in Australia during the pandemic, where things were currently running normally in most parts. He had been moving around the island of Tasmania, going on hikes, drinking in bars, meeting new people. The pictures arrived in my inbox. The other side of the world, in the summer sun, free to roam as he pleased as I stayed locked away in this small room with the winter winds howling against the window.

It’s a shit situation and there’s not a whole lot to do but write these words and carry on waiting for life to begin again. A part of me knows I’m gonna get back out there doing what I was born to do eventually, but I can’t for now; I am blocked, both physically and mentally. I’m just a man in a waiting room and seemingly out of words to say. But as the wind keeps howling outside, I can at least still feel that wilderness inside of me fighting to break out – out of this room, out of this winter, out of this insane situation society finds itself in. It will take me onto that first plane, travelling to some distant land, sharing drinks with strangers, embracing, hugging, kissing, dancing. It’s all out there beyond the rain clouds, beyond this crisis, and it’s going to come back to me, and I will soak in all those experiences and all those new truths and all those new words, and I will come back to you and share some stories and poems with you. Until then, I’ll be here, staring at these four walls, trapped, blocked, waiting for life to return. A prisoner of circumstance.

thoughts

~ The Wisdom of the Weirdo ~

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“To live free, to be free. It’s more than just putting flowers in your hair and quoting Eckhart Tolle. The free souls are the ones who live completely in tune with their inner nature – whatever that may be – and don’t allow the influences of culture and society to distort their unique shape. It’s about being thoroughly yourself in everything you do, and I believe it’s all on a scale on how much people maintain their individuality while fitting themselves into a societal system. I see some people free to a degree: perhaps 70% themselves while the other 30% acts out the social role. I see some people at 80% or 90%. But it’s only when I see someone being completely themselves that I smile and rejoice. Usually these people are known as madmen and outsiders, but what I see is something so beautiful that I can’t but see a great victory in their very existence. The sight of true authenticity brings joy to my heart, and I do not desire to live in a world of people who dilute down their essence to meet the crowd’s taste. No, I long to live in a world of free-spirits, all shining and setting this world alight with the contents of their hearts. I long to live in a world where people’s words come straight from the soul. So please, give me the ones whose tongues know the dance of their truth. Give me the ones whose eyes contain an untamed wilderness. Give me the ones who choose authenticity over acceptance; who choose integrity over integration. Give me the wisdom of the weirdo; the insight of the outcast. Please, just give me some straight-up, pure, unfiltered soul, and no matter how crazy you may seem to this world, you will always have my heart, my admiration and my respect.”