Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness...

I had my first round of telesales training last night. I had an hour and a half of it before I went home. Now I accept it’s a part of my job that I need to conquer and I’m fully prepared to try. It’s just that it’s really hard. When I heard myself back on the recording I sounded awful: I spoke too fast, I sounded desperate and nervous and basically didn’t sound like me. It was hard. Give me a guitar and someone who wants to listen and I’ll change their world. Give me a telephone and someone who doesn’t want to listen and I’ll fail to do anything except f**k up. It ruined my day yesterday.

The drive home cheered me up a bit though. I was booting it round the back roads to work with a guy in a large, burgundy Nis**n behind me. He kept up and I was really enjoying the drive. He overtook me on a straight “Fair play” I thought to myself. I have no problem with people overtaking me. As we came into the village of Escrick though I took a left, which brings you out at a different bit of the A19. I sailed past where he was waiting to turn my way, so I rolled my window down and gave him a pleasant wave! I love having fun on the roads, it’s so much better than driving aggressively. He managed to get out only one car behind me, which he promptly overtook. As he caught up with me he flashed his lights, so I turned and gave him a little wave. He waved back! What fun.

This morning’s drive to work was beautiful. The shafts of sunlight beaming through the trees, a slight mist accentuating each separate shaft of light and the huge milky sea that was the sky. It helped that I had my minidisc of my mixing on. I’m not much of a beat mixer (not for a few years at least) but I know great music, and I also know how to put tracks together. I just can’t seem to find the time to practice. My decks are setup in the lounge so we’re usually watching TV. Which is the biggest waste of my life ever. As much as you can enjoy a TV programme, you can laugh, cry, be made to think (though not that often), it does not compare with experiences you have in your own life, communicating with others for example. It just sucks up your energy and thoughts, preventing you from doing anything. I think it was Hitchcock who said:

Television is known as a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.

I shall leave you with that thought as you sit down to stare at a screen.

Monday the 29th September

I love my friend James so much. He spent the last year telling me to watch a film called “Waking Life” by Richard Linklater. I have now seen most of it and enjoyed it more than my limited vocabulary can express. It is animation over film. It is about philosophy and life. It is stunning. The world is in constant motion, the backgrounds shift, the foreground merges into shapes, people fly. I tried watching it with one of my friends, but bless him he didn’t understand much of it – how arrogant does that sound? But it is true, he didn’t.

Whereas I spent three years at Uni studying many of the ideas and issues that the characters talk about, so I was halfway there. To anyone not interested in philosophy or life or the human spirit this film will be lost, they’ll call it boring and just talking – “not very exciting is it”. These people though could never understand the feeling of knowing that other people think the same way as them.