Bring your own salt.

Over here, stone is packed on stone, and the wall of our city rises. We are proud. Another year dries against the Ages without end. Men and women pass rustling on into autumn. Forever. Whatever. It is a year like any other. Over here, peace. But over there, none. Listen. Mortar burst from seams, the walls are breached, they crumble. Swept across the dunes, listen, the soft suffering of all those caught in the claws of Chaos come again. Oh how they wail. How they choke on Fate and ashes. It is a year like any other. Ancient ocean of the possible ever ebbing into the single cave of the real. Into our actual. Here; peace and plenty, but There; there they have none. Girls and boys are born. Whatever. A thousand, thousand, tiny heartbeats in the dark. Forever. Two hearts. Beating their first at precisely the same time. They'll never know, because one is over here and one is over There. Lucky. He who has a home. So very, very, lucky. You see, we are here too, we just happen...

Travel teaches you more about you and how you work than you ever learn about them . You learn very little about them, really. Globalization. Everywhere's the same now. The internetting interknitting of our cultures and our cities and our stories. You can't get lost anymore  anywhere . You have GPS on your phone. Travel shows you how to get totally, utterly, wordlessly lost. If you're lucky you learn how people are the same everywhere you go. If you're lucky you learn how  people  couldn't  be more alien. You return home from your travels. Tired, content, ready for a new adventure. Perhaps then you finally see, I mean really see , where you came from. You see your home. Feel it, even. If you're lucky, and your eyes are open. You start to see people. You realize that actually you saw very little about where they live. Where they really live. You wake up in the middle of the night in your own bed and it hi...

Men like the immediacy of war. There are no maybes here, there is only the truth of steel and strength of arm. Those dry philosophers do not last a minute on the fields of flying rage, nor do their brains look any different from the stableboy's when dashed on iron and stone.  If there are or ever were any such things as morals, or gods, they are absent. Some men swear they see glimmers of the divine during the heat of battle; an act of heroism, an impossible archer's shot - but afterwards, afterwards the flash does not linger. In the aftermath of armed conflict there is no soft angel-song, nor the hiss of demons in the shadows. Good and evil have no meaning to the corpses, nor to those who afterwards walk the red ruin.  Good and evil do belong here. They  did not make this happen. Nothing belongs, not here where what it means to be mortal hangs from its own bones. Indifference. The survivors nursing spirits crushed. On their faces writ large and disbelieving the e...

Every day I walk past these three "Cash for Gold" employees. Poor souls whose job it is to stand in the middle of St. George's Mall Street with chest-sized billboards hung around their necks. Yesterday, just as I was pitying them, I looked down and I noticed as if for the first time how I was wearing a Nike t-shirt. I really saw it. And the message embedded itself deep, deep within my mind, much deeper than if someone had screamed it across the marketplace. We are creatures of vision after all. The message was this: "You're mobile advertising." I couldn't shake this insight, and on the train ride home I noticed all the eyes bouncing off my t-shirt. Drawn there by - just what, exactly? The cool? The bright red color? The brainwashing? And I realized then, sick to my stomach, how wearing branded t-shirts is like making yourself a walking billboard, no different from those Cash for Gold guys. The only difference being that they're getting...

A storyteller is the most ancient kind of spellcaster, insidious and omnipotent, you hear his words and they stick on the inside of your brain, and something of himself is planted there forever, not quite the speaker himself (never fully) but one of his creations, invisible and yet springing to life on the stage of inner image, emotion, and sound. Once the spell of his words has entered your mind it can never be undone – or unheard – or un lived . You can but hope his words are those of a soothsayer, and not those of a sorcerer. For with tongue and throat and mind he wields the imagined power of words: the power to soothe, to please – or enrage. And the means too by which we occult and enthrall and enslave. It's impossible not to think the thoughts they command, these symbols, and once we have thought a thought we've in some very real sense also  lived  it – the actuality of the experience is utterly irrelevant, for it  has   happened . Stuck now in...

 Benson, in the combi on the way to a midweek game: “ Ag man, don’t worry so much. They don’t get it. I mean, unless you’ve swung for the fences, how would you know?” I mean: you just won’t get it unless you’ve been there. Unless you’ve taken a pace delivery to the box, and your eyes watered as you walked it off, fighting to keep your face neutral, to give nothing away . Of course – of course – everyone will resonate with the writing in their own peculiar way, because how could I possibly know how these words will ring against your experiences, the way it feels in your head when you read them? But. The way it feels to hit a six. Now that’s quite something. The way it feels to be the opening batsman, who tells himself he’s one of the best in the team, but he’s scared to hit lofted shots. He always angles the bat down, settling for fours, avoiding the risk of being caught out. Tells himself his responsibility is to stay in as long as he can, that his job is to k...