gain by katharine eastman
The photo is Hythe Pier from the Number 9 bus to Calshot a couple of days ago. I've almost become a commuter on that route - riding there, walking back, a day outside of near-happiness for just £2. For some of the walk I pass the new signs saying I'm following the England Coastal Footpath (or something like that), apparently some new path that goes round the entire coast. A part of me hates myself for being tempted, but yes I am tempted to do it, even though it's the sort of Raynor Wynn shite that gets articles in the fucking Guardian from posh property-portfolio'd hippies telling us how they did it and how it changed their lives blah blah.
So I probably won't do it. Decades ago I did things like the Pennine Way and Offa's Dyke and the Ridgeway and SW Coast Path etc, but not to "DO" them, but just because they were on the way or in the way and bits of them were handy for a while. I walked to Wales many times - it'd take about 5 days - and back then it was as much a part of my routine as my current one-day walks to Salisbury or Andover or Basingstoke etc.
But there is no doubt about it - I am getting totally bored of the empty feeling that comes with having everything that I want - a cosy home with lots of books and music and sofas. And now there's nothing left to do except enjoy them every damn day between now and death. And there is no danger at all, nothing to remind me I am alive. And I do only come alive on long walks. And would come completely alive if I had nothing except my whole life on my back, and nowhere (everywhere) to go/be.
Nothing I have is worth having. Here's a reminder - yesterday I did nothing and went nowhere and I downloaded a bit of music and tried to add it to one of my dozens of one-terabyte external storage thingies, except the thingy had bust. It was nearly full anyway and had maybe just got too fat and lazy and depressed and lost the point of living and decided to die. I get it.
I might be wrong, but here's how my maths works. That thingy was full of just music, no photos or videos etc. If the average album is 100 MB, so there's ten albums in a GB, and 1000x10 = 10,000 albums on a full 1 TB thingy. Indeed, because I download things at a very low bitrate, an average album is about 30 MB, so that trebles the number of albums on the thing - so I've just lost thirty thousand albums.
Christ - how would that have sounded fifty years ago - losing thirty thousand albums (LPs). It'd've been a life-changing disaster, like losing your home to a fire. But yesterday it felt like nothing at all - it's nothing at all to any of us - none of it means anything. I still have about half a million other albums stuck inside little placky boxes.
A while ago I wanted to paint a sea cliff. I have books of photos of that stuff. I tried to find them. In the meantime I found books about ancient Egyptians, about physics, about Latin, about Russian literature etc etc - how the hell had I got that stuff - I've had several destroy-everything scorched-earth destructions of ALL my books during my lifetime, the most recent one wasn't that long ago - so how had I managed to acquire so many books since then ? - and instantly to have forgotten that I'd got them.
I thought I was a Marie Kondo disciple, I really did. I'm not even on my deathbed yet and already I'm regretting owning all this stuff, having devoted so many hours to getting it, then worrying about storing it and keeping it safe. Early this morning I watched a documentary about Ranulph Fiennes. At one point there was footage of him and a couple of others stuck in the middle of the North or South Pole and realising that they were dragging along too much stuff, they were too weak to bring all that weight with them to wherever they were going, so they were arguing over what to jettison.
It turned out that they'd been dragging-along spare this and spare that and enough food for a century and blah blah and they ditched it, even the spare battery for the radio which they'd had "just in case", and you can understand why, and then looking at it in the snow as the three of them walked away from it, you couldn't understand why.
Later in the documentary, now an old man, very frail, with fingers missing due to frostbite years ago, he was climbing a Scottish mountain alone - no path, very steep, just rocks, the odd bits of grass, it's a mountain he climbs every year and his plan is to do it till he is 85, and you could see that that was the happiest day of every year - he was/is too old to hide his real feelings about things, and you could see that he loved that day more than he loved his wife or his daughter or anything else.
I don't have a lover or a child, and everything that I do have is just crap/stuff - when my wife died, nine years ago now, I carried her ashes up to the top of a Scottish mountain that we had once climbed together and I scattered her ashes there - no I don't need to say that most of the ashes blew back into my face and down the front of my t-shirt - I don't want to copy another person's route to happiness, but mine is similar, it is out there, outside, disconnected, with almost nothing.
recorded this morning, photo a couple of days ago
