Twice daily I am drinking a foul liquid as black and thick as swamp mud but worse tasting

  • Tuesday, May 27, 2014
  • 0
"As Dorothy and the Scarecrow walked through the forest, they discovered something shining in a ray of sunshine that fell between the trees. Dorothy and Toto, ran quickly up to the place and then stopped short, with a little cry of surprise. One of the big trees had been partly chopped through, and standing beside it, with an uplifted axe in his hands, was a man made entirely of tin. His head and arms and legs were jointed upon his body, but he stood perfectly motionless, as if he could not stir at all! "
The Wonderful World Of Oz (1900)


































These days I am running but it is anaemic and two dimensional. I push out my front door past the dead hanging basket on the crumbling wall that the nazis blew down with their flying bomb in 1945. Bastards. Last summers blooms are now brittle and decomposing and the only green bit is a weed. I lack energy in all things, even my thoughts skate across the surface of my mind like a flat stone skipping over the surface of a dark pond. It is impossible to get traction, depth and meaning have become refugees replaced with superficiality and banality. It bothers me, this is the time of the year when I should be a Rambo for running, I have persevered through the winter with it's adhesive mud, the woods have achieved the rich odour of fermenting foliage and wildflower I love and I become a frightener of birds. This is the time for my reward and I should be exhibiting vibrancy and rhythmic grace. I should be killing it.
I am frustrated. I am not depressed, rather I have become the Tinman, an unenchanted life chopping off more and more of me, I am worn down into a heartless shell that rattles and clanks, so tired that I have inherited the soul of a 90 year old crackhead. It is not good for my disposition or my ambitions as a friend or as a viable human being and I feel that I have to walk out into the abyss. This dysfunction extends beyond running, my job that I love with passion has become a rote, I merely function and hope nobody notices. At home I am a silhouette, I flicker across the faces of my children before I slip off to bed. At heart I have become an island, I have isolated myself and am shrinking into myself. Everything is wrong. The dust is wrong here and so is the light. I need the sky song. I miss the soul of Kwela and Marabi and I need jive. I need umbilical songs.
It could though, all be physical rather than emotive. There is irony given the allusion to the Tinman, that I have embarked on a course of Iron supplement, acting on a hunch that I am lacking something in my body which is causing such a drain on my energies. I am not normally this dull. Twice daily I am drinking a foul liquid as black and thick as swamp mud but worse tasting in the hopes that it will reinvigorate me. It must, there have been too many of these types of post from me lately.
I'm going to stop being anti clockwise and turn this bad boy around.


Come with me down paradise road
This way please, I'll carry your load
This you won't believe.
Come with me to paradise skies
Look outside and open your eyes
This you must believe.
There are better days before us
And a burning bridge behind us, fire smokin', the sky is blazing

(Joy)