Worn Out – now please now

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.”

Sylvia Plath

Thursday

Another week down.

The visit by the Sheikh was unremarkable. The students enjoyed it, some of the girls cried claiming it was the best thing that had ever happened to them.

For me, the biggest incident of the week was my shoe blowing out.

I have had these shoes for over ten years and wear them every day to work. They have been repaired four times.

Nothing lasts forever.

“The sadness will last forever”

Vincent van Gough

I hurt my back doing cleans at the gym on Monday.

It is getting better, slowly, but on top of the hysterics of the Sheikh visit and my cold, I was not my best self this week.

I didn’t miss a gym session and my morning meditation routine got me through with only a handful of heartfelt apologies for irritable behaviour.

“If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

Aldous Huxley

Friday

‘Happy,’ I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception–especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong.

Hunter S. Thompson

Gym.

I am not a very good listener. Every emotion needs to be rationalised, every problem needs a solution. Sometimes, you need to listen and let someone be heard. Voicing a problem resolves it, in the simple act of someone hearing it. Emotions make sense if you speak them to a listener.

“Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted”

Charles Bukowski

I am determined to finish Political Dissent in Democratic Athens this weekend.

The wine drinking rules have been suspended. I am cooking a ragu and I need wine for the recipe. Only half a bottle.

It would be criminal not to put it to use.

We open a second bottle.

“Any fool can make a rule
And any fool will mind it.”

Henry David Thoreau

Dinner is delicious and the wine is adequate.

The company is exceptional.

Bed.

Saturday

“I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”

Charles Bukowski

Gym. A reminder of why it is better not to drink arrives in the rancid taste of last night’s wine as I push through the session.

A day of reading and job applications.

I get a haircut. Shell insists my nose needs attention. Unsatisfied with the first three waxing attempts the fourth seems to get the job done. I feel like my brain, along with hair has been torn through my nostrils.

We decide to watch a movie. Shell chooses Revolutionary Road with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

A bleak look at the way society traps people into the monotony of existence. The slow grinding away of hopes and dreams. When one partner tries to escape, the other sabotages everything from their sanity to the ability to parent rather than face the reality of their fear of change.

A spirit trapped with brutal psychological control.

The feeble tale people spin to themselves is that their lives are special, they are different from everyone else on society’s treadmill.

“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than too late”

Charles Bukowski

We watch another movie. It is rare for Shell to find the patience to watch one, so it is a surprise.

The key seems to let her do the choosing.

Ammonite is the story of two women falling in love. Set in the coastal town of Lyme, England in the 1840s and is loosely based on the life of the British paleontologist Mary Anning.

It is as much a work of cinematography as storytelling. Beautifully drawn scenes in paused patient moments. The coastal scenery of Lyme is stunning.

Winslet is well cast as Anning.

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

Herman Melville

Sunday

“because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

Sylvia Plath

Writing job applications makes me restless. It speaks of movement and excitement. Change.

The not knowing where is part of the thrill. Knowing the when, and how far away that seems, is sobering.

Preparing for the work week ahead is a constant on Sundays. It only takes an hour to prepare lunches, but it soils the day when the week ahead is utterly unstimulating.

Knowing the work week starts tomorrow pollutes today.

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

Eugene Debs

Greek Politics is hard work.

I have spent more time reading the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Charles Bukowski.

I have finished the chapter on Plato and Socrates in Political Dissent in Democratic Athens.

It’s breakdown of the trial of Socrates and the corruption of democracy is excellent. The text of Plato’s Apology illustrates the injustice of ill-conceived public opinion. Plato’s distaste for democracy arises from the trial and death sentence of his mentor, Socrates.

Chapter 6 shifts its focus to Aristotle. I have never read his work and it is next on my reading list.

I will pause on Political Dissent and move to Why Plato Wrote by Danielle S. Allen. This is the last book on the Plato reading list.

Probably just an excuse to stop reading Political Dissent, but I think it might be worthwhile to tackle some of Aristotle’s work before I head into the breakdown of how he influenced political discourse in Athens.