I cylced to and from work today. It’s about 10 miles there and then a little more back (I have to take a different route because of a large hill which is very fun to go down and much less fun to go up). Cycling is odd because when you’re going downhill you’re hit with the crushing inevitablitly of the fact that at some point, probably even before you make the return journey, you’re going to be faced with the grueling task of pushing yourself back uphill again. So, no matter how exhillerating or fun it is to fly down a steep hill, the only “good” parts of cycling – the bits where you don’t really have to do anything at all – are tainted by their cost. When you’re feeling good you know it’s only because in a couple of minutes you’re about to feel really really bad; if you’re cycling for health, as I am, it becomes even more complicated. Soaring downhill doesn’t provide you with any health benefit whatsoever. It’s a cheap thrill and cheap things are usually bad – or so I’ve been told. In the end, it’s just wasted time. It is only when cycling uphill that you know you are really doing yourself some good. You know this because you’re in horrendous agonising pain and sweaty discomfort. One day, a couple weeks or months in the future, you’re gonna look healther and be in marginally less pain next time you are accosted by the same hill but thats never any consolation at the time nor is it the next time you tackle the hill – hills are always a bitch.
In actuality, the “best bit” of riding a bike somewhere is when you can glide across a long flat strech where you don’t really have to think about anything at all. Even then you are bound to be surprised by a sharp decline or a merciless hill which, as it turns out, are actually exactly the same thing – it’s just a matter of perspective. On top of all that, you have to wear a stupid-looking dorky hat the whole time which is just the worst.
Best case scenario: you’re hit (while blissfully enjoying a downill slide) by a 10 ton wall going 6 billion mph – the kind of thing that civilised people roll around in – and end up spilling onto the road as a pink-grey jelly mercifully detached from the broken and twisted thing that people once used to look at and say, “Hey man, you’re looking better. You been working out or something?” all becuase you forgot to wear the stupid dorky hat that would have at least allowed you to live out the next 60 years as an immobile vegetable in tremendous and unyeilding pain. But, that doesn’t look to great either. I know because I’ve seen videos.
If I was a naive fool I would try to draw all of that into some overarching, grand and poetic metaphore for life – I am a naive fool but I know that life is actually much much worse.
Anyways, the fruit shop. I work in a fruit shop. It sells fruit. Sometimes, it also sells vegetables but they are much less interesting to look at and require much more effort to get tasting nice. Also, I like saying “fruit shop” way more than “greengrocer’s”. It’s a neat place. There aren’t very many places like that left anymore – they’ve all been replaced by aisles in big white buildings with silly names. As such, most of the customers I tend to there are very old which means a third of them are nice, a third are horrible and a third are very interesting. All of them seem to think they know something I don’t which is probably true. One of the interesting fellows is called Ernesto. Claire says he's a “legend” which seems to be entirely true. He speaks with a wonderful cuban accent. I think it’s cuban, at least, he looks and sounds a bit like Yoel Romero (which is very cool). He must have stuck around there for about an hour chatting with the more tenured employees. From what I gathered by eaves dropping while picking mouldy chillies out of the chilli crate: he likes to bring the women who work there food, he loves classic literature and he is – to his core – a ladies man. He made a joke or two about having dementia (often the same joke) and got Claire to help him with his iphone. The staff there played along with his jokes and made a couple of their own. I laughed because the jokes were very funny but they also made me sad. He is convinced that a woman working in Tesco likes him “because of his colour”. That also made me laugh, I’m sure that she really does like him but I think it’s because he brings her gifts – books that he likes and stuff. I think he mentioned King Lear. Ernesto is very frail and has a sort of glased look in his eye. I wish I could have talked to him when he was a younger old man. I doubt he’ll remember me, now. Lots of old people talk about how they find it hard to think of themselves as a day over thirty. I wonder if Ernesto is like that?
In the end, I don’t think he even bought anything. He just gave Claire a big tub of ricepudding. I bet it’s great. I love Ernesto. I hope he gets the girl.
I guess I lied about updating the blog yesterday. No bother, though, I come with great tidings of new additions and ideas. I finally got my gallery up and running – it’s pretty rudimentary, right now. I was looking into using modals to display the paintings full screen but that would mean I would have had to re-write the html that I’d already written and then figure out how to use javascript and all that crazy insane stuff. I’ll get around to it at somepoint but right now I just want as much of this site to be [[[functional]]] before I start polishing stuff to the nth degree. One of my main reasons for starting this little project was to get myself motivated to write and paint again since I’ve been kind of out of it for a while. Maybe I’ll go into why that is – but probably not.
In other site news, you may have noticed that I’ve decided to start these post off with a song! I thought it would be cool to give people something to listen to while they read so I spent an hour trying to figure out how to set up yt-dlp on my new Linux install (I use arch btw) just for you! Getting the feeling that it’s gonna be another pretty short post today. Hopefully I can get myself into some trouble soon so I’ll have something more interesting to write about. I would kill myself if this shit turns into a webdevelopment blog lol – but thats really all I’ve been doing for the last couple of days :[. Anyways, cool stuff a’ comin’! See you then.
Woah!! I’ve finally got my website working to a point where I can start adding [[[content]]] to it. CSS is the worst thing ever but I would be lying if I said that setting all of this up hasn’t been kinda fun. Now that I’ve got a handle on things, the freedom you get from doing it all yourself really is worth the learning curve. If you have somehow stumbled across my neocities without having one of your own, I highly recommend that you look into setting one up.
I have a feeling that this first post is going to come across as glorified sampletext but, in all honesty, I’m not really expecting anyone to be reading this so if you are – hi! Theres is still a lot of stuff I have to do (90% of the links on my navbar don’t even go anywhere) and my layout kinda looks like shit so sorry if you’re on this website early. Maybe, you’ll comeback later and marvel at how far this place has come. As of now, it is very much a WiP. I think that next up is going to be the gallery so I can showcase some of the painting’s I have been doing and then I might try to get a cool little guest book up and running for when there’s actually a reason for people to look at and talk about this site. After that, I’ll probably work on a couple of “articles” so there’s something interesting to read on here – a photo gallery would be cool too. Lot’s and lots of ideas swirling around my head, right now. The potential of this stuff is all so exciting. It’s such a shame that most of society has left this kind of “social media” in the past. Anyway, thats about all I have to say right now. Hopefully, tommorow I’ll have something more interesting to post about. I think I want to write something here daily but I’ll probably just end up writing here whenever the mood takes me.