Angkor Days

Charles Bukowski. You will probably get sick of me talking about him; fine with me.   There is a raw beauty to his work—a brutal honesty. There are too many favourites.   Get your hands on two of his collected works, The Last Night on Earth Poems and Love is a Dog From Hell.   We are sitting in our local coffee shop. I am supposed to be doing a Uni assignment. Shell shows me this. It is from the 2009 book of poems, The Continual Condition.   No one seems to know when it was written. Charles died in 1994, so it is at least 30 years old.   Bukowski was a prophet.

The social media algorithm believes I need to see body transformations. I am bombarded with images of men losing weight and getting shredded. These miraculous diets and training programs not only build muscle and drop weight but also provide a tan, strip body hair, and allow for a manly beard.   Impressive program.   When I gained weight, I hated my body. It disgusted me. My solution? Pretend not to care and just keep eating.   It might have been the Cherokee or the Lenape people, but the war of two wolves in everybody rings true. The one you feed is the one that grows. I wonder if I have three wolves. My third wolf is hunger. It ate the other two wolves, which is all I have left to feed.   It is always hungry.   I worked hard to lose weight. The damage was done. Something in my brain changed. I can't turn it around.   I am still dissatisfied with my body. All I see is inadequacy. Shortcomings. I feel small, no matter how big I am.   "When we don't know who to hate, we hat

I love a good rant. “We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.” – Chuck Palahniuk   Every generation believes the next generation is less. We spent a few hundred thousand years on the improvement, only for older people to criticize young people. It holds some weight in the past. Boomers never went to war, maybe in Vietnam. I guess there was generational trauma. They received free University, literally free. You might argue that the Silent Generation did it tougher, during World War II and the great depression. They can judge. Maybe.   I have no idea how Boomers get away with judging kids these days. No generation had it as easy as the Boomers. Affordable houses, low unemployment, and free Uni. I am not saying they didn't work hard; they did. But their work yielded results. Financially speaking, the kids these days will never get near the Boomers' wealth these days.   The average house price in 1980 was ar

“Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer. Put your principles into practice–now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! […] Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do–now.” – Epictetus We don’t socialise. We go to bed at 7.30 pm. Asleep by 8.00 pm. The alarm is set for 4.45 am. We are time poor and our wellbeing sits in a fragile balance.   I have made charts to explain. Sometimes you get bored with Uni, and charts matter.   Forget Maslo. The Griffin Hierarchy of Wellbeing ™.   We discuss these things on the balcony watching the storms roll in. Serious business. There are four essential requirements for our wellbeing.   1. Love 2. Proper nutrition 3. Sleep 4. Gym. Not ‘exercise.’ Gym.   A planet called Wellbeing with four moons in perfect orbit. The Griffin Galaxy. Well, planet, but alliteration matters.   The entire galaxy