You left me at the gate..

The moment you saw the playground

the swings and slides, you left me behind

The maze

I came here to heal, and found a maze
Instead of confusion, I found comfort

I’ll stay here for a while..

Dark spaces

I’m walking in dark spaces
No longer sense, feel.. hear

Just one step at a time, feeling
my way, blindly I grope.
Another night, another day.

All the pain from the past,
becomes the comfort that I crave.

The sweetest Love

For a moment..

Saudi Woman..

Saudi woman to fight ruling.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071122/wl_afp/saudiwomenrightsjustice_071122011552

The ghost of wedding past.

My sister reminded me this morning that it is my brother-in law's wedding anniversary today. I wrote some time back about his wife who was thought to have commited suicide, but instead she had just passed away quietly in her sleep. She was 20 years his senior and they were very much in love. I know this will be a difficult time for him.

Float away..

B and blue (Writers club topic - Abuse against women)

One evening after an especially heated argument, I stood up and headed for the door. I needed to breath, and I needed to slow my pulse down.

It was at that moment that she stepped in front of me, defiant. Hands on her hips and mouth moving rapidly. I could no longer hear anything. My brain had gone into self-preservation mode. Everything slowed down and all I could see was my arms coming up. My hands flat forward, and I wanted to scream No!, but it was too late. I saw her fall away from me and out of my vision.

B fell down the steps to the lounge and made heavy contact with the chair.

It was the worst moment in my life. No matter how much I tried to console her. I new things can never be the same. The one time when I should have gripped her in my arms and hugged her till she calmed down, I chose to become a barbarian.

I trust she will never forgive me for that, and she shouldn't. I know I will never.

Exploring darkness (Writer's club topic: Voilence against women, or a child in this case)

I'm sorry guys, but this entry has been removed. I felt it was just a bit to Risque. I'll try something later

From London To Salem.. a journey of justice.

Courtesy of Christian Today

LONDON - A British-born woman, who liked to use the name the "Lyrical Terrorist", became the first woman to be convicted in Britain under new security laws after being found guilty of possessing terrorism-related documents.
Samina Malik, 23, wrote a series of poems calling for "Jihad" (holy war) and collected a library of material for terrorist purposes including the Al Qaeda manual and the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, the Old Bailey heard.
"Malik liked to be known to some people as the Lyrical Terrorist, or Stranger Awaiting Martyrdom," said prosecutor Jonathan Sharp.
"She had a library of material she had collected for terrorist purposes ... It may have been culled from the Internet but it has not just been idly viewed, it has been searched for, downloaded, saved and preserved," he added.
Malik, from Southall, west London, used to work at a newspaper shop at Heathrow airport until her arrest.
During the trial, the court heard one of Malik's militant poems "How to Behead," describing in detail how to slice off a hostage's head.
The prosecution also told the court that Malik wore a bracelet with the word "Jihad" inscribed on it and had Osama bin Laden's "Declaration of War" on her computer.
Other material on her computer referred to car bombs, her hatred of all non-Muslims and bomb-making.
Police said she had tried to join extremist subscription-only Web sites and had attempted to donate money to the Mujahideen.
"Malik held violent extremist views which she shared with other like-minded people over the Internet. She also tried to donate money to a terrorist group," said Peter Clarke, head of Britain's Counter Terrorism Command.
Malik was found guilty of possessing documents likely to be useful to a terrorist, an offence brought in under the Terrorism Act passed in 2000.
Judge Peter Beaumont however granted her strict conditional bail -- in effect house arrest -- until early December, after calling for more information into her family background.
He said Malik remained an "enigma" to him, and called for more information into "her family circumstances and in particular the influence her brother has had in the family".
Beaumont warned Malik, who sobbed in the dock, that "all sentencing options remain open".

Courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem Town on June 2, 1692, with William Stoughton, the new Lieutenant Governor, as Chief Magistrate, Thomas Newton as the Crown's Attorney prosecuting the cases, and Stephen Sewall as clerk. Bridget Bishop's case was the first brought to the grand jury, who endorsed all the indictments against her. She went to trial the same day and was found guilty. On June 3, the grand jury endorsed indictments against Rebecca Nurse and John Willard, but it is not clear why they did not go to trial immediately as well. Bridget Bishop was executed by hanging on June 10, 1692.
In June, more people were accused, arrested and examined, but now in Salem Town, by former local magistrates John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin and Bartholomew Gedney who had become judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Roger Toothaker died in prison on June 16, 1692.
At the end of June and beginning of July, grand juries endorsed indictments against Sarah Good, Elizabeth How, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Procter, John Procter, Martha Carrier, Sarah Wilds and Dorcas Hoar. Only Sarah Good, Elizabeth How, Susannah Martin and Sarah Wilds, along with Rebecca Nurse, went on to trial at this time, where they were found guilty, and executed on July 19, 1692. In mid-July as well, the primary source of accusations moved from Salem Village to Andover, when the constable there asked to have some of the afflicted girls in Salem Village visit with his wife to try to determine who caused her afflictions. Ann Foster, her daughter Mary Lacey Sr., and granddaughter Mary Lacey Jr. all confessed to being witches. Anthony Checkley was appointed by Governor Phips to replace Thomas Newton as the Crown's Attorney when Newton took an appointment in New Hampshire.
In the beginning of August, grand juries indicted George Burroughs, Mary Eastey, Martha Corey, and George Jacobs, Sr., and trial juries convicted Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard, Elizabeth Procter, and John Procter. Elizabeth Procter was given a temporary stay of execution because she was pregnant. Before being executed, George Burroughs recited the Lord's Prayer perfectly, supposedly something that was impossible for a witch, but Cotton Mather was present and reminded the crowd that the man had been convicted before a jury. On August 19, 1692, Martha Carrier, George Jacobs Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard and John Procter were hanged.

Petition for bail of 11 accused people from Ipswich, 1692
In September, grand juries indicted eighteen more people: Ann Pudeator, Alice Parker, Mary Bradbury, Giles Corey, Abigail Hobbs, Rebecca Jacobs, Ann Foster, Sarah Buckley. Margaret Jacobs, Mary Lacey Sr., Wilmot Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Rebecca Eames, Margaret Scott, Job Tookey, Mary Witheridge, Mary Parker, and Abigail Faulkner Sr. The grand jury failed to indict William Procter, who was re-arrested on new charges. On September 19, 1692, Giles Corey refused to plead at arraignment, and was subjected to peine forte et dure, a form of torture in which the subject is pressed beneath an increasingly heavy load of stones, in an attempt to make him enter a plea. Dorcas Hoar, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Martha Corey, Mary Bradbury, Mary Esty, Wilmot Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Margaret Scott and Abigail Faulkner Sr. were tried and found guilty. Abigail Hobbs, Ann Foster, Mary Lacey Sr., and Rebecca Eames pled guilty. On August 22, 1692, only eight of those convicted were hanged: Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Martha Corey, Mary Esty, Wilmot Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Margaret Scott, reported called by Salem minister Nicholas Noyes, "Eight firebrands of Hell." Dorcas Hoar was given a temporary reprieve, with the support of several ministers, to make her confession before God. Aged Mary Bradbury escaped. Abigail Faulkner Sr. was pregnant and given a temporary reprieve.
Mather was asked by Governor Phips in September to write about the trials, and obtained access to the official records of the Salem trials from his friend Stephen Sewall, clerk of the court, upon which his account of the affair, Wonders of the Invisible World, was based.
This court was dismissed in October by Governor Phips.

Room No 5

People live on the floor of this toilet in an old derelict building. The smell was so overpowering I just stuck the camera through the window to take this pic.

Room No 3

Route 103

Thirteen times in two weeks, I counted. That is how many times I awoke with a startle, almost rushing up to go check up on the sound that raised me from the dead. Only to find it was my cell phone’s alarm. Yes, that would also be thirteen times I slept through the night. The whole night. Not waking once, not to check why the dogs were barking, nor even to reach to my left and find B by my side; ready to reassure her that I’m ‘onto it’. Those nights I would walk from window to window and check to see that all was okay outside; get back into bed, and forget about getting to sleep until just 5 minutes or so before my alarm went off.

Only, it was Saturday, and I had forgotten to switch the alarm off. What am I to do with myself today? I lay my head back on the pillow and stare at the ceiling. An altogether wonderful feeling rises from somewhere near my toes, and slowly makes it’s way to the side of my brain that deals with the unfamiliar. Time is on my side. I have no one to answer to but myself. Two days to Monday. Two days of freedom.

A nice hot shower soon points the way, and road trip comes out right on top. Above morning coffee and people watching at the mall, washing the car (oh really?) and visiting mother. I dress hurriedly and shove camera, money, cell, and all into my one-by-one (small Student Prince backpack I’ve had for yonks), afraid some other stupid idea might pop into my mind, leaving me stranded. ‘Hurry now’, I urge myself on as I dig into an old box to find my ‘Weekend Getaways” booklet I normally have handy.
No luck! Stuff it; I’ll get on the road and figure something out.

The only clear direction I have is to go south. Well actually Southeast; towards the coast. Harrismith being the goal, and anything further depends on how big the itch becomes. Just after Heidelberg I turn onto the R103, a familiar route to me; having driven it to and from Durban for many years. Every time I took this route I had a different car, driving new model cars for an importer, and notching up almost 200 000 km’s a year. I know the route by heart, and not too surprised when I realise where I am.

Somewhere past Frankfort, next to the N3, I stop at a diner called Makietie, and while sipping on an ice cold beer, the itch wanes to nothing, and no matter how I try to conjure up the images of the road trips of yore; it does not return.

I think the wandering heart is still in me; it just needs to be dug up, a spade-full at a time.

Makietie

'Machismo isn't that easy to wear'

Norman Mailer

January 31 1923 - November 10 2007

The best way for me to do justice to the man that was Norman Mailer is offer you an interview done by Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian. Although I have only read one of his books; The Executioner's Song, as with Hemmingway, It was his life that interested me the most. I've read almost every interview and had alerts posted for any news that popped onto the net about the man.

'Fistfights, headbutts, drunken brawls, attacks on feminism: Norman Mailer's reputation as a bruiser has overshadowed his life - and fuelled his writing. Oliver Burkeman meets the hard man of American letters Tuesday February 5, 2002 courtesy of The Guardian'

"Would you like a drink?" asks Norman Mailer. There was a time when the way that you answered the question might have determined whether he would bother to carry on talking to you at all. Drinking - like writing, fighting and womanising - is a sport he has pursued with reckless force ever since he crashed on to the literary landscape at 25, and it has led to fistfights in the street, headbuttings of hostile reviewers, and a vicious clubbing from a policeman whose car he was trying to hail as a taxi.

Well into his 60s, he stumbled drunk on to stages and television shows, all the time railing against feminism, friends and fellow writers; he famously helped sink his 1969 run at the New York mayoralty with a speech to unpaid campaign aides telling them they were "nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs" who should go fuck themselves.

Now 2 days before his 79th birthday, in the sun-drenched living room of his redbrick house in Provincetown, Cape Cod, with its breathtaking view of sand dunes and the glistening Atlantic beyond, he hurriedly qualifies the question: "Coffee or tea?"

Mailer shares the house with his sixth wife, Norris, a painter and writer, though he has lived here with several of the others. Bright portraits decorate the walls and there are cut flowers everywhere, the remains of a birthday party they threw for a neighbour the night before. If you were to have a drunken brawl here, you would knock over tens of framed photographs of Mailer's nine children and countless grandchildren.


Norris brings tea and profiteroles and then vanishes. The profiteroles don't seem very Mailer, somehow, either. And Provincetown is the last place you might expect to find the leading proponent of machismo in American literature: the vast majority of its population is gay, and the colourful, laid-back cafes and restaurants of Commercial Street, the main seafront road where Mailer lives, are hardly the Brooklyn bars of his young adulthood. There was a time when Mailer was notorious for lunging at those who questioned his heterosexuality; once, his biographer Mary Dearborn records, he beat up a sailor in a Manhattan street because he thought he had questioned the heterosexuality of his dog. But he has lived in Provincetown, on and off, for three-quarters of a century; he writes well here. He is working on another book - two hours' writing in the morning, two in the evening before dinner - but only Norris knows what it's about. "I tell no one about it," he says. "One of the reasons for that is the joy of telling no one about it."
He walks painfully and arthritically, with the aid of two canes; he sits with his back to the sea view because he's had operations on his eyes, he explains, and the strong, pure, Provincetown light bothers him. The pockets of the blue denim shirt encasing his barrel chest are stuffed with several pairs of glasses. He is going deaf. To look at him you might think the fight had gone out of him, but you would be wrong.


Take the whining chorus in the media about Mike Tyson: "As long as I can remember, people have been hating boxing because something in the rational, corporate vision of existence doesn't like people hitting each other," he says, the gravel voice accelerating like an engine. "That's just too brutal. Destroy them spiritually, but don't beat 'em to a pulp."


Some of Mailer's most acclaimed writing captures the choreography of his idol Muhammad Ali in the ring, and he thinks of the sport as an artful safety-valve for male aggression. "The very people who are complaining about the brutality of boxing would be screaming when they got mugged on the street by some of these guys," he says.


Then there's the Enron scandal: "I'm sure those guys in the corporate high-rise said: 'Let's call it End Run, and we're gonna make an end run around that whole stupid fucking money business that's so backward, we're gonna really show them how to make money out of money!' And they did, for a while."


And then, of course, there is the war on terror. War is the subject that made Mailer; in 1945, aged 21, he was drafted to fight in the Philippines, and the novel he wrote on his return, The Naked and the Dead, catapulted him to disorienting celebrity. It is a pounding, unflinching study of men in war; of strength and sadism and masculine rivalry amid the colossal waste of conflict. It was also, according to the Sunday Times, a book that "no decent man could leave... lying about the house, or know without shame that his womenfolk were reading it." It was energetically obscene - even though, at the publisher's behest, it was full of "fugs" and "fugging" - and that was what made its heroes heroic, Mailer argued. "What none of the editorial writers ever mentioned," he later wrote, "is that the noble common man is as obscene as an old goat, and his obscenity was what saved him. The sanity... was in his humour; his humour was in his obscenity."
Manliness is what is missing from the current conflict, he says: America is behaving like a timorous giant. "What would we think of someone who was seven-foot tall, weighed 350 pounds, was all muscle, and had to be reassured all the time? We would say that fella's a mess!" The sentimental patriotism engulfing the country appals him. "My feeling is that you're patriotic about America if you're obsessed with America because it's a democracy, and its obligation is to improve all the time, not to stop and take bows and smell its armpits and say 'Ambrosia!'"
In the 30 books that followed The Naked and the Dead, machismo was never far from the centre of Mailer's preoccupations. That must lend a special poignancy to growing older and more frail? He laughs, a gritty chuckle. "I'm laughing because I'll be 79 in a coupla days - machismo is that faint zephyr I can still barely hear on the other side of the hill. But listen: machismo is not the easiest cloak to wear, the easiest role to assume in life. Machismo is a ladder, and there's always a guy who's more macho than you coming up that ladder. I've never had any illusion that I was high up that slope, and it's a desperate slope, because if you get to the top, you're dead. Macho means taking the dares that come your way, and if you take every dare that comes your way, sooner or later you're gonna be dead. So I'm quite happy to have machismo behind me now. There are pleasures in being macho, but there are great anxieties. It was a great load to carry. I was never macho enough to enjoy being macho. I don't know. I'd fight if it came to it, but people don't go looking for fights with men my age."


He races through the thoughts as they strike him, compelled to externalise, to confess. It is a compulsion that has been the motivating force behind his writing, generating works of genius and patchy disappointments alike. He has "this habit of exposing himself in all his weakness and all his anxiety", his old foe, the essayist Vivian Gornick, has written. "He freely, happily, repeatedly, confessed to envy, greed, insecurity, raging competitiveness. What is curious is how little affect this confessionalism achieves... the way those sentences are accumulating: that is Mailer's self on the page, and the aggression in them never lets up."


Off the page, his aggression has been just as inexhaustible. So: when did he last headbutt somebody? "It's been a while. A long time. I did - oh, my lord - maybe it was when [the New York/Newsday columnist] Jimmy Breslin wrote about it. That was the best headbutting. Breslin and I butted heads, and a couple of days later he wrote in his column that Norman immediately lost the next two chapters of his novel and he was no longer in possession of his name and address... But there were probably a couple of episodes after that."


The literary feuds are over, too, he says - "they're so very expensive. Novelists are an endangered species now, and when there's only 18 elk left in the world, they mustn't start trying to knock off each other's horns." When Tom Wolfe made a clumsy attempt to initiate a new battle a year ago by dismissing Mailer, John Updike and John Irving as "the three stooges" ("it must gall them a bit that everyone - even them - is talking about me") Wolfe told a TV interviewer - Mailer says he couldn't be bothered to respond. "I was laughing. I was thinking, God, he's vulnerable. And the mean side of me thought, if I'd realised how vulnerable he was, maybe I wouldn't have been so nice to him." Nor does he take an interest in the jostlings of younger generations of writers. He doesn't have any literary heirs, he says, and he doesn't care. "You get very selfish about writing as you get older," he says. "You've got only so much energy and you want to save it for your own work. I'm much more interested in being able to do my own work than bringing a wonderful new writer into existence. Because my feeling is that if he or she is truly a wonderful new writer, they're going to come into existence on their own."
For many, though, the writerly feuds - and even the writing - were a distraction from the matter for which Mailer has incurred more opprobrium than any other in his career as a literary celebrity: his battles with feminism. "In the 1970s," Gornick recalls, "women in their 20s and 30s knew what he meant, at whose permanent expense 'feeling alive' was to be had. And when we said so, out loud and in print, Mailer turned vicious. The anti-feminism was pathological, a thing we turned away from in fear as well as rage."


It was never entirely clear from Mailer's goading public pronouncements - most famously, that "all women should be locked in cages" - just how much he was in earnest, and whether they mattered less if he wasn't. Today, he pleads misquotation, misunderstanding, and the bandwagon-jumping of publicity-seeking feminists.
I was on a television show once with Orson Welles, and at a certain point he got very pious about women - Orson Welles, who was married to Rita Hayworth, of all people! And so I made a totally stupid remark. I said, 'Oh, come on, Orson, women are low sloppy beasts'. Now I was going to add, with a great twinkle, and they are also goddesses . But you make a remark like that and you don't get any further. Well, the feminists took over. They used that remark and ran with it. They enjoyed that remark... of course, part of your character is dictated by the nature of your foe, and a lot of those early feminists were just godawful people."


Altogether unexpectedly, he turns out to be a new convert to the works of John Gray: "People have been known to say that men and women come from different planets, and were landed here, and that to me is as reasonable a hypothesis as an other."


Mailer's rhetorical jousting made telegenic entertainment - but there was something else. In 1960, at 4am, drunk and stoned after an argumentative party, Mailer stabbed his second wife Adele, twice, in the back and chest with a pair of scissors. He only narrowly missed her heart. Adele did not press charges and Norman's literary friends rallied round; he spent 17 days in a psychiatric ward and got a probationary sentence. The couple did not separate for the best part of a year. Nobody in his circle seems quite to have addressed the incident at all, and the same seems to have happened when his fourth wife, Beverley Bentley Mailer, said he had physically attacked her, too. Uncomfortably, the episodes seems to have been swiftly filed away under Norman Being Norman, as if they were another spat with Gore or a barroom fistfight.
Forty-two years after the first incident, Mailer is certainly not going to let introspection disrupt the patrician calm which has settled over the Provincetown house. "It's a long time ago, and you really might say the worst elements of it have been digested over the years - by me, I mean. I can't speak for Adele. It's our children who suffered with it more than we did, when people whisper about it. All right, I deserved [condemnation], but it's them carrying the weight. Everyone alive carries the weight. It's a dull bruise. You don't go around fingering it."
What would the young Mailer, the 25-year-old bruiser, make of the 79-year-old patriarch, I ask. The explosive gritty laugh returns. "Hahaha! It's rank speculation. You think that's a good question? It's not a good question! Rank speculation is useless! It's like asking what would I do if I'd been a bathing beauty or a whale! A dolphin! A mountain climber! It's not a question I'd care to answer." But, of course, he has had an idea and he has to get it out. "At 25 I was terribly critical of my literary betters because they weren't doing enough. So I probably would be angry at me: why isn't Mailer doing this, why isn't Mailer doing that?



Dissatisfaction with the things I haven't done. Not with the things I have done."

The fool in the Rain

I met you at the gate
I touched your face
And my heart skipped
A beat

Your lips so soft and warm
And I prolong the touch
For as long as I could

How could I be
such a fool, to stand
alone in the rain

When I could be
Cosy and warm
in the arms of
the one I love.

When one lives together with a person for so long,
and the respect and love they deserve, dissolve into
fits of anger and despair. The only thought that
Crosses your mind is to get out as soon as is
Possible. If only for you to stop behaving like
A child and spare each other the endless tirades.

And now I find myself having left and gone my own way.
Can you imagine how much I miss her?

I’m just the fool in the rain..