i Am driven to write. Part 2.

Let’s put the record straight. It could be said my being placed in the bottom klass on switch from Junior to secondary school, which I had mentioned as a positive because it had made me the rebel without a clause, imagine, if the system had embraced me I might have become an accountant, like Trevor did. In fact I wish I had never mentioned it, it was a real Pandora’s box. But learning from mentioning it:

• Don’t go back you might find a bee in yer bonnet.
• We make our own ‘views’. It was dead and buried it was me that brought it up, dredged from a lost memory or at least something I had shoved under the magic carpet of ‘life guz on’.
• But also, REJOICE in the fact I was top boy! It never happened again. (Oops there I go again, telling lies being negative. You know what floats to the top?… oooh stop it, the lotus stays on top.) 
• we are the result of Self & Circumstance!

Only 14/20 fer ‘mental’, everyone says i’m good at being mental, that’s obviuosly a mitsake.Miss Howker, by the way, was an old battlaxe, not big on positive praise, once it is alleged she whacked three boys at one swatch with a Loooong stick, everyone wer scared of her. She told me be top before you leave or it’s broken bones, so, not one to tempt providence, I needed my legs for football, I made sure I wer top,, cost me lotsa pennies in bribes. 12 years later she visited my big exhibition in the town library and said as she walked out, ‘Very Satisfactory’. Actually there’s some pork pies in that sentinces. Forgive me Shanta.

My perceived self-mis-placement was probably more down to me than the system. I had obviously hung back on making my assault on the summit! This, sadly, was a lifetime skill I never lost, meaning that so often by the time I had gotten into top gear they’d moved the goalposts and altho my aim was true the goals had moved on. That only made me more angry, so I spent my life being frustrated, I never learned, until now of course, to get in early, do the job and get out before all else had woken up to the fact there was a job to be done. Am I blartin on? OK, job done, move on. Like the Buddhists say, let go. So, Am lerrin gu of all the angst, am cumin thru, a new me tha Happy Man. Learning from my perceived mistakes, happy wid my lot tot. Worra lot I got too. After only 50 years am letting go, am forgiving whoever was responsible and even, in particular, even the most culpable one, myself, for being too late at the gate! Now I am going to be ‘normal’. Well not really normal just normal normal. Not an accountant. But I do need to look to ways of making ends meet.

Success is not just to do with learning from failure it’s to do with how you deal with adversity. Learning the lessons of life and applying your learning to what comes up; failure, adversity or even triumph because believe it or not, Success is just as difficult to cope with and move on from as Failure.

Believe me.

So where was I? I was blarting about writers wat wer ‘driven’, like Dickens, he blathered on endlessly on the page, behind the lectern, had he been alive today he would have been on TV, on the Net, Bloggin, tweeting and all. Willy Shakespeare too he went on a bit altho I’ve read none of it (you littul liar) well the bard didn’t even spell words consistently, see the original manuscrips, spellin hadn’t bin formalised back then, has it ever? The Pilgrim Father’s descendants don’t even have an ‘o’ in honour! At least Charlie D. wrote a Christlemas story, one that touches the heart.

But there I go again rambling on like Hank Williams, ‘When the Lord made me she made a rambling man’, Oh squawking abart Kissedmass that reminds me of Alexandra Elene Maclean “Sandy” Denny and her beautiful song about a painter, I think I Am that painter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU9lmPy2uh4

Why don’t you have your brushes any more, I used to like your style?

I see no paintings anywhere and there’s no smell of turpentine.

Did it really have no meaning?

Well I never thought I’d hear those words from you.

(The painter said)

I couldn’t even tell you all the changes since I saw you last.

My dreams were like the autumn leaves, they faded and they fell so fast.

In fact as you say the snows are here and how the time it slips away.

And I’m glad that you did pass by, I’ll have another try. It’s another day.

I knew Sandy’s auntie, well not very well, she worked in the office at St. Luke’s College Exeter in 1973 when I was looking for someone to type my dissertation (that rambled on too) and she told me Sandy wer her niece. I now recall she put me on to a young typist who, having typed my essay up about J W Dunne’s ‘Experiment With Time’ and some links I saw between ancient Vedic ideas and Modern Science, said she had never suspected such intelligence in me. Well I had to disguise that, what with my image as a jack-the-lad. I mean, I had to exist in the weel woild; playing soccer, drinking beer , chasing birds, none of which I (can) do now. I’m just intelligent. But I’ve learned that maybe the most intelligent keep mum about it, they don’t blather on, they meditate, sing mantras and sing to the silence of the Void. Ommmmm…merry Crissmouse.

I cannot stay stum about my habit for the last many years of playing Van’s track with the line in it, “23^rd of December covered in snow,” which I try to remember to listen to each 23rd of December.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEty27_8XBY

It reminds me of the back in the day Van was so ‘up there’ that I used to go out and buy every album he released as near the day it came out as I could. Most of the Tupelo Honey album is even better than that track.

I’m taking a break now for a few days no mare blabbery woo, til nex yeer when you’ll be able to sing the beatles song to me when I’m sixty four, but only if you still love me by then. You godda luv me when you see this picture. Have a nice break from mi Blart.

(c) p d kennedy 2013 too