Some Days …

You know the song There’ll be days like this, I like the Van Morrison version.

Of course, some days… it anything but that.

You get up and the sky is criss-crossed by chemtrails by the soulless, unloved, disgusting sacks of shit pretending to be humans, and I mean the pilots along with their puppet masters.

And you don’t have a crate of cheap stinger missiles from the “war” in Ukraine to take the fuckers out in a blaze of glory throughout the early morning hours.

And you wake up with the same bastard headache you had when you went to bed, despite the 800mg of ibuprofen last night. The chemtrails are probably doing it.

Or the mould. Because there is mould in the bathroom.

And the bedroom.

And one of the other rooms.

So you steel yourself for a messy day of sandpapering and vacuuming and fucking dust everywhere and then the stench of mould-killer stuff after.

And the sander is out of sand-paper. And the hardware store is closed until 4pm

And the bastard gasifier is still not doing what it should because you need to re-adapt the blower and probably the filter and maybe do a couple other things, and you wonder, why did no one from WW2 leave detailed notes on how to build these things?

And THEN you find out a major clusterfuck thanks to trusting someone in IT. And you KNOW you should know better. But you did it anyway, so 2 years of contacts from interested parties just weren’t forwarded at all. Nor their messages saved. Only their emails in the logs.

But murder is not the answer they say…

And the kid’s trampoline has a piece that broke and you need to fix it cause they love that thing.

And it’s only lunchtime.

And you try to pray.

And you remember that song… there’ll be days like this.

Yeah. but it wasn’t mama telling me about the days.

It was dad. And he had more days of this sort than most. And the one thing I either learnt, or got from DNA or figured out somehow is that when there are damned dog days like this…

You keep punching.

You reload and keep firing.

You pick up the hammer or the screw-driver, or the drill, or the grinder, or whatever, and you keep going.

And focus. Cause nothing spills blood more easily than a pissed off attitude and a tired or sloppy attention span working with power tools.

So, yeah, there are days like this.

And the correct attitude is that described in various stanzas of the poem IF.

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

And my mama never told me about the other days, the Van Morrison song days either. In fact, I like that song because I figured out on my own that they existed a little before it came out in 1995.

And it’s important to remember that. Especially when you have days like the one I’m having today.

You know what grinds us down?

Hope.

People forget that in the badly mangled version of the Myth of Pandora, which is the most popular —because people are idiots— they say it is hope that leaves her jar of miseries last.

In truth, in the actual myth, it is first of all Pandora herself that is the plague on mankind, representing woman in general, and later, her jar, filled with all sorts ills for humanity as punishment for the stealing of fire by Prometheus. And in that version, hope never leaves the jar.

But, at any rate, if we lived more in accordance with Catholic faith, we would go about our days, Van Morrison version or shitty life version, with Nec Spe, Nec Metu.

No Hope, No Fear.

You see it is when our hopes get dashed that we suffer. Because our hopes are usually an avoiding of pain, which is, of course, motivated by Fear. And if you live trying to avoid your fears by hoping to do so, somehow, well… you’re definitely going to suffer.

But if you have no hopes to be dashed, and no fear to terrorise you into having “hopes”, well, then you are free. And while shitty days and Van Morrison days are not the same, if you have no hope and no fear, they are not quite as far apart as if you do.

So.

Off I go to walk the rest of this day, however it turns out.

May your days be more Van Morrison days than not.

Tags: hope, the kurgan, Van Morrison

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