Tag: journalling

The Daily Grind

Sorry, to myself, not to you the reader. I’m sorry that I don’t make enough time to journal about my daily experiences when I know it’s relaxing and therapeutic for me in particular to reflect on my experiences. Today wasn’t a particularly special day, except I didn’t have a lot on today. Life in the era of lockdowns is quite unpredictable. Some days I’m frantically going from appointment to appointment and others like today I have a couple of errands to run and the rest of the time to contemplate social media for far too long to be healthy. So I am going to write about a few musings from my day.

Firstly, today really wasn’t busy, I rode my bike for a bit since I don’t have to wear a mask if I am on a bike. The virus knows to leave fit people alone. I had a look around one of the housing commission areas. The attraction was the dystopian communist landscape that is public housing. I try to imagine it looking attractive in an alternative universe but I suspect there is something the size and uniformity of the structures that makes it almost impossible to imagine them as beautiful. My notable observations were an novel design of sewerage vent, evidence of a recent apartment fire, a drunk half naked man having a fight with an invisible assailant, a young woman drinking out of a 4L orange juice bottle that gave me a look as though she would knife me if I stared at her for a moment longer, and a skinny dirty old man reading a rotting paperback on his balcony seemingly enjoying the serenity. Mentally, I tried to figure out what was going through some of these people’s minds, and trying to imagine what public housing would look like if the people living in them owned the apartments instead.

Continue reading “The Daily Grind”

Thorns – Part 3

Elwin set down his pen. He looked over the ten or so pages he had just written about his time in the nursery. He took half a dozen slow deep breathes and rubbed his eyes. The room he was in looked different to him now. It was a small room. It wasn’t much more than a meter across and two metres deep. It had a single bookcase, a small writing desk, a small window, and a wooden chair slightly too low for Elwin to sit on comfortably. The bookcase had only about two dozen books on it, but the spare space was filled with various pieces of junk. The kinds of spare parts one might find in a mechanic’s workshop.

Elwin felt the thorn on his left cheek itch. It itched all the time. The itching of the thorns was like tinnitus: it never ceased but often one stopped noticing it was there. He continued reading over his account of living in the nursery when he reached the part about Agatha the thorn over his heart started to twitch and his hands started shivering slightly. He stopped and focused again on his breathing. Long slow deep breaths. It would pass soon, he told himself. Continue reading “Thorns – Part 3”