withdrawal by katharine eastman

Yes I admit I'm a little disappointed to be back here, doing this, the same as before, can it ever change? can I ever break free and live one of the full lives that everyone else is living ? - even though I'd find it exhausting.

When I and my most recent girlfriend split up one of our incompatibilities was that physically I could go on and on forever and she couldn't, but mentally she could go on forever and I'd eventually need silence and solitude. So days like today are still good. For the first time since before the start of the pandemic I have gone down with an illness - just a cold - definitely a cold, no Covid symptoms whatsoever - and it's given me an excuse to eat lots of Halls etc and get high on medicines that I've carried with me since before I moved here, wonderfully druggy sugary 1950s concoctions that my wife's mother knocked back easy-regularly as breathing.

So I've done something very safe and formulaic - a new formula, and I think I might be able to get another 200+ albums out of this one tiny idea like Rothko in love with brown or Monet and water lilies or Cezanne painting that mountain by his house. Yes it's illustrious company that I am trying to keep up with. Well - now that they're dead I seem to have left them behind. We've all left them behind. Everyone who's dead, all of the past, all history - that book my girlfriend gave me (The Courage To Be Disliked) wasn't what I expected, it was quite good, it was all about Alfred Adler and (very simplistically) his belief that there's no sense faffing about the past and childhood trauma and blaming your parents etc etc - instead, everything starts today, right now, the past is nowhere and nothing and not worth thinking about, so this is my first and only album - those others - they don't exist - today isn't The Start Of The Rest Of My Life, it's the end of a vanishing near-nothing.

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(recorded this morning, photo Hampshire last weekend)