the edge

Being at the beach should be one of the simple pleasures in life. The best sort of beach has shelving sand dropping steeply into the sea, the waves rush up and tug at your ankles as you try to walk along. Standing still in the swirl of the sand and water results in your feet being buried up to your ankles, deeper each time the surf surges in. The icing on the cake is the rocky outcrops that make the perfect beach, so that the waves crash and send pearled and diamonded droplets into the sky. Spume. And over and over the waves come, in a rhythmn that never gets boring.

The joy of being on the edge, between the elements of earth and water, land and sea is what makes it more complex. I am most at home in the limbo between them, on the beach when the waves crash. Some people are happy at the centre of things, I am an edge person, happier looking in and observing.

The land is a mass where humans live, millions and millions of them, whom I will never know. The humans I meet, talk to, write to, watch on the telly or in films, they belong to this mass. I do not know them, in a Venn diagram of all that we have in common, the two circles barely kiss. I do not feel encompassed by them, I feel a thing apart, I prefer to watch them and carefully pick my interactions.

I feel drawn to the water and its vastness and energy and seeming emptiness (ignoring the scientist part of me that knows the biomass of the oceans is greater than that of the land). I feel drawn to it, I would like to wade into it's depths and swim out away from the shore, I would like to be that bold and adventurous, but I am not. If I stay here long enough, thinking, watching, reflecting, perhaps I will get the strength?

The beach is where land and sea come to interact, where sociability flirts with the empty wet horizon. An edge person needs the land, the mass, as well as the waters that move to their own tides. And so I come to the beach, not such a simple pleasure.



originally inspired by a T10 prompt 3rd June 2010, revised for >language>place blog carnival edition #6 on 21st May 2011 after the world did not end again.

Thinking Ten

Inspiration or Perspiration struck ;)  I actually wrote something to a prompt this morning!

http://www.thinkingten.com/profiles/blogs/be-careful-what-you-wish-for-1?xg_source=activity

an ordinary week...

The lady's body has fallen off the toilet door, she is only a round circle, a head.  Inside there is a new hand dryer, powerful but smelling of vacuum cleaners, call me a Luddite but I'm gonna stick with the paper towels.  My skin still smells of chlorine.  When I left at dawn for the swimming pool a right-angled green caterpillar was sitting on my windscreen wiper.  How did he get so lost?  Why would a caterpillar sit on my car in an underground garage when the grass is burgeoning, the rhododendrons are flowering.  What made him leave his caterpillar hatchlings, the happy brood Apple, Core, Skin, Pip, Husk and the others, to end up in this sterile place?  I mentioned this to the man I was drinking with, we were born in the same hospital, perhaps the same bed; he thought I was drunk and went back to talking about music.  My fingers typed, computer programming, e-mails, oh some fun e-mails, and now this, the bulletin of my week.  My head is not a round circle but a maelstrom, incoherent today.


Inspired by ThinkingTen Members Pick here

House of Escher

The wait was finally over. The shift was finally over. Another gruelling 8hrs , if not quite at the coalface then pretty fucking close. Back breaking work. Moving the products from A to B, from B to C, C to D, well, you get the picture. And yes you felt like you were moving in circles, but why the hell did it always seem to be uphill too? The sweat seeps down as you move and toil, like a nappy rash in an adult, how pleasant. Stubbed fingers, scraped knuckles. But now the wait was over, the reward in sight...



and if you're interested in the work/reward payoff, here's a link to the advert that came into my mind when I read the opening sentence!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb7y2VKfgHY

Posted at ThinkingTen in response to Take it Away challenge http://thinkingten.ning.com/profiles/blogs/house-of-escher

Tracks

The scene, tranquil on the face of it was subtly horrible. The tracks leading off into the forest, the trees louring over, darker as they drew my eye onward, until at last I was gazing into a black hole.
Stuff of childhood nightmares, I was never able before to bring the fear over into waking life. There was a picture of a woodland scene at Granny & Grandad's bungalow, above the fireplace. The colours were wrong too, oil paints in daubs of too bright yellows, olive splotches and the hint, but only that, of the darkness at the end of the track.
One day though, I opened a book, a classic, and read for a while until I got to a scene where four hobbits cower at the side of the track on the edge of the wood while unknown dark beings seek and sniff for them.
The memories then came flooding back, a nightmare where the monster lurks, I try crouching down in the wood, a tangle of roots I hope will hide me and prevent the monster spotting me. And the book has me hooked, there is nothing more evil than the nine black riders who search for you. Primal fear of being discovered. Being looked at. Freud would no doubt have a field day, as long as it is not walking tracks in the forest I don't give a damn.


Published at ThinkingTen in response to On Location Monday challenge
http://thinkingten.ning.com/profiles/blogs/tracks-1

A good day to bury bad news

The duvet lay straggled somewhere across the top of her thighs, one of them had made an attempt to cover up after the last bout of sex. He lay spooned behind her, his arm cradled under her breasts, hers resting over his. She felt cherished, again.

The first time it had stunned her, to lie with him in between the breathless explorations, to simply lie in his arms and be cared for. The heady rush of sex with someone she trusted, someone she wanted to please and oh, she was so thrilled that he seemed to be pleased by her. The cocktail of chatting all day about minutiae, of flirting and teasing, the feeling that she could say anything to him, and vice versa had opened her heart. The way to a mans heart may be through his stomach, but he had reached hers from between her legs.

Waking slowly, later in the morning, dazed with lack of sleep and still a bit drunk, there was a knock at the door. The maid, she supposed.

He yawned and stretched, "What time is it?"

"Nearly half ten," she said, reading it off her phone by the bed. One new message. No harm in looking at it, she supposed; as he got up to go to the bathroom she clicked into it, an anonymous number? The trickling noise as he pissed into the toilet seemed to go on forever as she read the message, when he came back into the room she was sitting up with the phone at arms length like she had never seen it before in her life.

"The message is for you," she said, and pulled the duvet up around her in a protective cocoon.

He read the message, "Tell that husband of mine I have news for him"


Posted at ThinkingTen in response to the Word inc Wednesday challenge:  news, spoon
http://thinkingten.ning.com/profiles/blogs/a-good-day-to-bury-bad-news

Where to though?

Time was running out. It was now 12 days since I had last mailed him; 8 days since he mailed me back. But the time was for sure ticking by. Perhaps I could look at it the other way round; time is running in... or up? It is getting richer and fuller and there are more things to do with time now that I am not waiting stupidly for him to contact me. That's the theory anyway. So why did I spend another 20 minutes today when I should have been working looking with aching eyes at the last mails? On my own in a quiet office, the sun on the windows soporific and sluggish like my thoughts. The sun runs through it's rutted arcs in the sky according to the seasons and perhaps so do I. Now is the season for looking around and realising time is running out. I wonder where to? Do I want to go there?


Posted at ThinkingTen in response to the Take it away Tuesday prompt:  Time was running out
http://thinkingten.ning.com/profiles/blogs/where-to-though