puking pink petals

the season everyone calls cherry blossom season had finally come and gone and gone for good. my lasting memory of cherry blossom season is riding through the local park on my way to work. a bright cold spring day it was, where dew hangs on daffodils. except today i saw a pile of yellow sick splattered all over the path. and the thing which is worst that a cold pile of sick is when animals start eating the sick. they poke and scratch at it and it is vile.

you can't describe cherry blossoms. you can look at photos and listen to people wax on about them, but until you see them you will not understand why every waxes on and on about them and everyone takes loads of identical pictures of them. if you can, try to imagine pink trees with black branches. the pink is a light pink, like candy floss pink or new born baby pink. then multiply the trees by 10 and imagine they fill you whole field of vision so the ground is sparse with black sticks and above them is a pink cloud. then imagine above that is a van gogh blue sky that stretches to the end of the earth. got that? then multiply that by a thousand and then multiply that by a hundred thousand like all you can see in strands of black and huge masses of soft pink and solid blue sky. do you have that? now close your eyes and you have some idea of what it is like to see cherry blossoms in japan.

next imagine below the pink are hundreds of people that don't know when to stop drinking chugging down can after can of beer. and then imagine how the country that invented karaoke has bred generations of people that have no problem with about belting out tuneless drunken wailing songs. and then litter the ground with bits of paper, plastic boxes and cans, chicken bones and wrappers. and imagine the din and smell that follows you all the way home.


listening

listened to an audio tape of 1984 by george orwell read by timothy west. listening to a book is very different to reading it yourself. it's far more dramatic and affects your bowels more than your brain. i always thought, with incomprehensible manish pride that i would stand up well to torture. after listening to smith's time in the ministry of love i don't think i would. and as i think about it i realise that i have no reason what so ever to even justify my original thought.

still reading whitman. finished the first part of leaves of grass: songs of myself. he kind of reminds me of all american music from the past 50 years.


gone

saw gone with the wind the other day too. it was long. i loved the way the slaves are all portrayed as happy to work on cotton farms and digging ditches. they must have had such a laugh. rhett butler does have a great last line though.