Life is nothing
But the creation of memories
And Inspiration for dreams,
Because that's the only time
When you'll truly understand it.

I can walk forever
In yesterday's dreamworld,
Reliving my own interpretation.

You can't stop me.
In fact,
Maybe you're there,
Kicking leaves,
Running in slow motion,
Smiling,
Laughing,
Falling in love with the dreamworld.
It's there that you are mine,
You are me,
You are the memory I have invented.

Falling into that strange place, that special place inside, where pleasure and pain combine into a 3rd state, some kind of dreamworld on the virge of comprehension, where meaning replaces all logic, and it's just memories and colours and intensity, pure intensity, like you only know fully in your sleeping dreams, but sometimes it slips through into daytime, and you wonder, all this real life stuff, is it REALLY real life, is it really what it's all about?

When I go to sleep at night, real life doesn't matter, what I look like doesn't matter, who I am doesn't matter; it's just some pure sense of being. What if that was real life?

When I see things in dreams, the most simple things are so intense, like a sunset with silhouettes of trees, a big blue lake, a field, or just the sky. Why can't real life be like this?

I used to want to not exist, with a passion. Not so much because I hated the idea of life, but because I LOVED the idea of nothingness, with a passion. That idea seamed like bliss to me, sometimes even more so than the idea of existing forever in a dreamworld.

It's only really at times like these, when you pull apart the very fabric of reality and existence, that you can laugh at the sheer absurdity of Life Itself.

The day that I start worrying about my pension, and there's no decent comedy on telly, remind me to jump off a bridge with a Superman costume on. One last big laugh. The joke'll be on you God, you complete f***wit, if you're listening.

Hahaha...

Pain
Without reason;
A beautiful sky
With a scar across it;
Laughter
About nothing at all;
Sadness
Not related to reality;
A rollercoaster of meaningless emotions;
This is what it's like
To be trapped in a brain which doesn't work properely.

The Blue Sky of Hope within the Black Void which is my Mind


The Yellow Sky of Meaning within the Purpleness of my Sense of Humour

Okay, so I got off to a funny start yesterday with my first day doing my van driving job. What's the funniest thing that could happen to a van driver on his first day on the job? Yes, that's right, I accidentally shut myself in the back of my van. Luckily the man I was delivering the shopping to came and rescued me.

Useless fact of the day: Today is the first day of Autumn, apparently.

Last night's dream: I was at some kind of fun fair with Paul and Michelle, and we went on this ride which was like, well, the only way I can describe it is like dodgem cars except that they were on water. It was great fun! You could go forwards or backwards.

The strange thing was, it seamed like a really highly emotionally charged situation, like both extremely fun and yet sad at the same time. I remember I was in a "car" by myself, whereas most other people seamed to be 2 to a "car". I remember really enjoying the fact that I had full control over it, yet at the same time I felt like the odd one out.

Do you ever have dreams which seam REALLY important and intense, and full of clues to your inner self if only you could remember them correctly and work it all out? Sometimes when I was younger, I used to wake up almost feeling like I was emotionally suffocating, trying to desperately hold onto fragments of insight from my dreamworld.

Sometimes I envy simpler animals. We're too concious of everything, always looking for meaning. If only I could live a simple life of eat, sleep, shit, lie in the sunshine, chase things, purr.
Maybe one day I'll get back to learning how to become concious in my dreams, and then I can understand, take control, live a different life, fly, eat trees.

I feel a bit overwhelmed today, because 3 major things have happened in the last 24 hours...

1) Last night I had dinner at my friend Michelle's house, along with my friend Paul too. They are people I have been friends with for 10 years ever since my first year at college. I hadn't seen them for over year. Now Paul is going back to Japan for 2 years. It's an intense experience, seeing somebody you haven't seen for over a year, having a great evening with them, and then knowing you won't see them again for a long while (added to that is the fact that the reason he was back in this country is because his mum died of Cancer recently). It's got to be done though, if that's his dream.

2) I had my 2nd appointment with my nutritionist today, to review my diet and to talk about treating my high histamine level. She's told me to still keep away from Wheat & Dairy for the time being while we sort out my other issues. She's designed a new supplement programme for me, which includes extra Calcium and Methionine to reduce the histamine (this is something that may become long term) along with a B complex without Folic Acid or B12 (because they increase histamine). She's said to stay on St John's Wort (herbal antidepressant) for a while, at least until my histamine is under control. She says I'm doing very well with my diet (especially with the elimination of wheat & dairy and eating more green veg), but to make absolutely sure I have fish at least 3 times a week and eggs most days.

3) I got offered a job today. After coming back from my nutrition appointment, I had a brief lunch and then went down to Co-op and spent several hours driving the van around, etc. Yes, that's right, I'm going to be delivering shopping to peoples houses. It'll be like being a postman again, except with MUCH better hours (10am start, compared to 5am start when I worked as a postman). I like driving round the Gloucestershire countryside anyway. Now I'm gonna get paid for it. Flick the stereo on, drive around, then drop bags of shopping off at old peoples' houses. Great!

I think we should organise a mental fun session where I find loads of people on the internet all called Rodney and then loads of us all e-mail them at the same time with the message "Alright Dave?"

E-mail me if you think this is a good idea, or even if you don't.

Days
Turn into weeks,
Turn into months,
Turn into years,
Turn
Into Memories,
Then into dispair.
Disrepair.

Days
Wasted on memories
Of things that don't even matter.

Holding on,
Slipping,
Slipping,
Sucking me down,
Drowning.

The sound of your voice blinds me to all this,
Just for a moment,
A sweet moment.

Then the darkness comes again,
Presses in,
And I feel like I'm dying all over again.

Time is increasing.

Today I played tennis with my friend James.

Us, ourselves, what's inside us, in our core being, transcends the flow of time, but is ultimately more unstable.

Say YES!

I got my blood test result back for my histamine test, and it says I do test positive for high histamine. Judging by what it said, normal range is 28 to 51, but mine is 62. This explains my lack of body hair, my sensitivity to heat (histamine increases body heat) and also my past of mood swings, amongst other things.

This combined with my food intolerance (most probably wheat and dairy, but it's still being investigated) and my blood sugar imbalance, means it's now official: I'm special!

My next appointment with my Nutrition Consultant is on the 17th. I'm carrying on as I have been doing until then, but eventually it may mean I need to go on a vegan diet and have special supplements (increasing calcium and methionine, but avoiding folic acid and b12).

I was already halfway there anyway since January when I started reading nutrition books and eating healthier. This is just all taking it a few steps further. We buy a lot of food from health food shops now, and I'm finding lots of new foods which I like which I'd never tried before.

But I'm really happy now I know for sure about the histamine. Now I know it wasn't all in my imagination. I have a real condition, and now I can get better.

The Thin Line Between Memories And Dreams

I Don't Understand

Imagine if all that was black was white and all that was white black, all that was red was grey and all that was yellow was an explosion on a beach, like sand and sea and cliffs and a man falling, deep down into the earth's core, like a big sausage in his mouth and a raped grapefruit digger, marshmallow in the sub-custard's elephant mask, enveloped in sandwhich toaster moo cottage cheese milk.

Cuthbert in the milky sausage, "Milk it!" he said. "Milk it like a mole potato!"

Umm, yes.

Tree 

I was driving northbound on the M5 motorway the other day (that's "freeway" to any Americans out there, and "autobahn" to any Germans), when something happened to me which has never happened to me before...

A police car came up in the center lane, it's lights flashing but no siren. Once the car had got in front a large bunch of cars, they started waving their arms up and down out of the side windows, which means slow down. We all slowed down, all 3 lanes, to about 30mph, with the police car a short distance ahead of us, the lights still flashing. My heart raced, I thought we were about to pass some mangled car wreckage or something.

Then after a few minutes, the police car's lights stopped flashing, and they waved us forwards, and we all went back up to full speed again. "Hmmm" I thought to myself, "what was all that about?"

Then, a few minutes later, just before the junction I was about to turn off, I looked over at the hard shoulder and this is what I saw: There was an unmarked black police car with its hidden blue lights flashing and a neon sign saying "Police Slow". In front of that was a black car with a bunch of goths getting out of it, with the other police car parked in front of it and the policeman leaning over and talking to the driver.

There must have been a high speed car chase going on between the two black cars (the goths and the unmarked police car) and they didn't want us lot to all get caught up in it in case it went horribly wrong.

Hopefully they had a camera on board and it will appear in one of those exciting police documentaries that they keep showing on BBC1. Far more exciting than staged car chases in films, because you know it's real.

Men in tights

Imagine if all animals walked on stilts. No, really, imagine it! Wouldn't that be so funny! Dogs on stilts! Cats on stilts! Horses on stilts! Sheep on pogo sticks. Boing boing boing boing...

Today was really quite hot! I think the months got muddled up. Somebody swapped August and September around. Actually, I don't know what August was, just a wet pile of poo mostly. But today felt like July or something! Did a walk with one of my walking groups. Sweaty!

On thursday, me and my dad took a day trip to the Gower Peninsula in south Wales. It was a lovely warm September day, perfect for such a wonderful place, as you'll see in my photos below...






The Gower is fantastic, because it feels so peaceful and remote if you go there away from the main holiday season. If you go there in the middle of the school summer holidays then it can be quite packed, and if you go there on any warm weekend then there can be lots of locals from the nearby Welsh city of Swansea. But if you manage to go there on a September weekday, as we did both this year and last year, then it can be the most peaceful place to be. Being a peninsula, it's not on the way to anywhere. Beautiful beaches, sea air, tranquility... Here's a map of the Gower.

I'm dying of a fatal disease called Life.

This is what would happen if Jean-Michel Jarre was to join Tangerine Dream and they tried to do a cover version of a Don Henley song.

Actually, no, it's just me messing around with a software synthesiser a few months back. This is one of the many pieces I intended to do more with but never did. Oh well, here it is anyway...

Boys Of Summer

Note: These MP3 files take up lots of space on my ISPs webspace, so they will be deleted pretty quickly. If you stumble across one which has been deleted and you're interested to hear it, email me and I'll see what I can do.

Here are some pieces of music from way back in 1998, when I first started making electronic music. These three pieces were made entirely using 80s technology - Kawai K4 Synth linked up to an Atari ST. And so began my fascination with the fact that computer make key changes really easy to do.

Dark Angel
This was originally part of a much longer piece of music called Fairytails From Heaven part 2. This bit was actually just the intro for it. I was really into making stupidly long pieces of music back then.

Echoes Inside 1
Echoes Inside 2
These pieces were built entirely around the use the K4's built-in effects processor. As you'll hear, I was using one of the delay effects to create the rhythm, and the effect was global all apart from the kick drum sound (that's just they way it was). I would have only been about 19 or 20 when I did this. Oh how different things were back then. I was just on the virge of leaving college. I was a complete lunatic back then! Yes, I know what you're thinking, I'm a lunatic now. Well, no, I create crazy things, but I act relatively normal.

I included these on a compilation CD which I sent to my uncle back in 2002, and apparantly my cousins really like the first one. I remember at the time my friend paul saying number 2 was the best piece of music I'd ever made. Sometimes there's nothing quite like raw creativity in its infancy. These tracks were actually the ones from the compilation CD I made, which are both slightly shorter than the original versions (I just faded them out a bit earlier). Pointless fact: originally they were parts 2 and 3, because the original Echoes Inside was a different track, but I decided I didn't like it very much.