Larry

On loafing, waking at dawn, the keto diet and healing the past. Oh, and my favourite character in literature.

Like Larry, I realised I just wanted to loaf.
Compulsory reading: “The Razor’s Edge”
I keep losing it.
And then buying it again.
Gifting Maugham a tickle in the afterlife.

I get upended easily by things.
Sometimes, it’s not too bad:
Just to follow your distractions.
The ginger bread trail of random stuff that leads your heart.

A song from “Rumours” comes on.
No, please don’t.
I don’t want to be pulled into the past today.
Old pains revisit sometimes,
Like restless butterflies
Or mad dogs.
I am no longer consumed by them.

I allow them their fluttering;
Or their pound of flesh.

That is the power of loafing.
To allow the psyche to dance.

Dawn rises.
Majestic, morphing, effervescent.
It draws out whatever is in you -
Like a sponge on a wound.

Yes Larry, I loaf too.
But I loaf by getting up to greet the dawn.
It’s where I hear the silence speak to me.
I linger awhile
Until whatever trance I fall into is broken by those unsung heroes:
The bin men.
I offer a prayer -
To the gods and to The Bin Men
Civilisation is as dependent on the one as the other.

Ah, the day is calling, coming to disturb my longing with its typing, its buzz and its exigencies.

I’d like to fetch a loaf of bread from “Königs Backerei”
But then remember I’m on the Keto diet.
It feels good to cut out sugar, carbohydrates and man made things.
Currently my energy derives from the Caves.
From fats and from thirsting.

Today I will comply with the abominable pledge;
To hunt an unformed Idea amongst the
Vast famine.
I will wander amongst the blood lust in the shadow of my ancestors,
And make sacrifices to my unbroken lineage.

I will stare into the fire and return its gaze,
Linger awhile in the vipers dream.

Dead eyes.

You who killed me is you who made me.

My rebirth has been forged out of tears.
Cried at the zero point of the abyss.

How could I know?
That they would flood the chasm,
That I would learn to swim
In the unspeakable Tsunami,
That it would bring me
At the last to the shore of my Self.

Yes.

Sometimes your life raft comes from accidental advice given by an un-intending friend.

His words impacted me at my lowest.
I wrote them down by the entrance to my house.
To remind me of something I could live for:

“Become Your Best Self”.

I didn’t know what it meant.
It just promised the idea of someone beyond me.
And then three years later;
I arrived in yesterday’s dreaming.

A thousand days of sacrificing to famished, un-compliant gods.
Every moment, clawing out of the “I” I no longer was.
Our progress is measured in painful increments.
It isn’t the pain that hurts.
It’s that you don’t notice the growth.

You convince yourself you’re static.
But nothing is more in motion than static.
Buzzing.
Pregnant.
Frenzied.

And so, yesterday came around.
Hit me like a “thunderbolt of clap”
Amongst my loafing.

I had become something other.
I had feasted upon my own pain.
That’s how wounds are healed.

Not by patching them up, but by cleansing them brutally.
Revival in the grimacing.

And so I gorged on my own suffering,
Banqueted on the nothing itself!

I am more “I” than I was before.
This is how we measure our victories in this life:

To recognise not our survival,
But our development.

It wasn’t through mania I grew.
It was within the loafing.
Not ignoring the hurt.
But leaning into the pain.

By remedying the microscopic,
One tick-tock at a time.

By complete commitment to loving that which I could love
Or which needed love.

In that I found a value,
Meaning within the echoing abyss.

I am partaking in life again.
Whole amongst its fragmentations,
Recomposed amongst its song,
Revitalised in surrender to its conditions.
Life cuts off old selves
With a scalpel
And asks you to stick around -
For reasons you simply can’t know yet.

So now, I will loaf awhile.
Loaf-less.