Category: rationale

aside, rationale

greetings from a #zagreb mixology bar

it’s white but not

dotted with hooks for coats in crazy ways

and photos of beautiful faces

and legs and bodies

stretching out to embrace something

as embodying a better time

with those eyes that try to meet

and gaze languidly

as the street outside walks past

casting a glance inside

and wondering what gin would best go

with a night’s slow movements

as the man holds on

and the woman smiles gently

as if expectantly too

and maybe it’s true

and maybe it’s not

but the vibe between them is kindly

and yet kinda hot

in a way that doesn’t threaten

but promises so much

because the art of life

lies not in the delving

nor in the delivery

but rather in showing you really do care

by ensuring like this

you’re never in the clear

in respect of how far

you might go or maybe not

in order to be like this

and so it’s like this again

and then again you’re doing

what you do best

as the rest attempt to get onboard

with your occasional lording over them all

and that’s when you realise

you’ve overstepped a line

that signals the sign that ain’t very right

and so you retreat

as in when you keep appearances up

and pretend the night ain’t hurting

and the loneliness ain’t biting

and all this writing ain’t a substitute

for living life itself

as all this time you’re sitting here

in the calm of the white

that is white as white

and white as not

and in this city you’d lost for twenty-two years

and now can hear so sharply around

as the sounds and voices

and the toying of choices

and then this is true too

as so finely once more

you are in what’s becoming home to you once more

and this you do feel now so firmly

whilst waiting to leave fiercely on the morrow

and when relieving this life

you wanted to regain

in ways that felt alike

and then exactly the same

as before all that terror which collapsed you so bad

and poleaxed you so madly

and broke your ability to cope at all at all

and so all that happened after

were the fires that they stoked

so you’d burn in the hell they’d made for you at home

meaning they’d be able

to tell the real bad you were

for the rest of the time

they cared to make others hear

as the signal that signs just as before

on terrifying dotted lines

and yet in truth

even where terrifying is the intention quite hard

it’s turning out differently now (i’ll suggest)

and it’s now much easier and how (i’ll suggest)

and much more like leisure is your lace

and much more like pleasure is your place

and much more like someone loves you

as earlier they couldn’t

or wouldn’t

or weren’t allowed to ever

and so that’s then what wraps it up

like a cup or goblet

of grandiose kingly measure

as we come to the end of yet another time

and as we choose to attempt to avoid the crime

which we wanted to embrace all this time

as we avoided the chase

of the deletions of hate

remembering that it’s never to late

and remembering there’s always time

to make into any life

the tidings of the seasons

that arch over our reasons

until we sense fundamentally

like a benchmark of tech

the (touch)stone of love’s deck

distributed like the cards

we tried desperately not to play

as we say let’s make hay

and then sometimes we did

but mostly we didn’t

and so i guess since we didn’t

now it’s full time we did

and that’s the end and beginning

of all our beings

because life is this

and love is all

and even when the funeral pall

surely someone will remember me well

and want to tell a story

where people saw

that this someone did love me true

and utterly

and actually

and doing and seeing

and saying and won

and when finally it’s all done

and dusted so deep

like our lives were chores

not treasures to keep

because if truth be told

i so wish that people loved me enough

to want me not

to take that trigger

and fire that shot

as my beloved ernest did

in the year i now live

out of the despair i now feel

and am obviously being dealt

whilst the final call

brings me close to seeing

that humans are anything but good

and even though all i’ve said is true

still we beat on mercilessly

and pitilessly

and gracefully

and fearfully

into the incandescence

as if we really should

because it really would it really would

be nice to feel i could have been good

copyright mil williams, 16th march 2024, zagreb croatia

in memoriam of #bloomsday2016

aside, definition, design philosophy, rationale

“Good to meet you … Miljenko Williams” | on dark figure, gaslighting, security and the future of Western democracy

A very brief video that an unknown person or persons posted about me in 2015, just as I began to move closer to the UK Guardian newspaper

The day our security agencies decided that neo-crime and dark figure did not need a law-enforcement response was the day we opened the doors to a future Ukraine; an organised criminality in the UK where we now have an army of embedded criminals in all levels of society which outnumbers the British armed forces; and a broad and widely shared sense of citizen, perhaps even political-party, hopelessness about everything that happens quite toxically to Western and related democracies. That is, none of us can reasonably believe in better any more.

Mil Williams, Chester UK, 18th January 2024
Screenshots of a very brief video which piggybacked on an article the UK Guardian newspaper had just published back in 2015 on my relationship with the newspaper, being this latter the final screenshot in the above series

What follows …

What follows is a series of observations on a real case of targeted gaslighting on a democratic citizen — myself, being one of many similarly affected over the years by a nexus, I guess, of tech-bros and outlier security interests in the UK, and maybe other states and actors, too: a longitudinal case which already led to my undue and improper incarceration for a month in a UK mental facility back in 2003, after an experience in a broken-backed open-source community the previous year of 2002 called OpenOffice.org.

• gb2earth.com/citizenx

https://gb2earth.com/citizenx

This open-source site was sponsored and paid for mainly by the then Sun Microsystems, but the dysfunctionality arose from both sides: corporate and independent developers in equal parts.

First, then, a poem about the impact this has had on me over the years.

“tech-bro”: a #poem by #milwilliams

in english a bro of the tech nature killed me

in swedish a bro is a bridge

*

if only i’d been able to make my life again

in a land like the latter where good people rule

*

but my pain and misery all came from the place

where i had the misfortune to be born

*

and whilst in swedish a tech-bro

would be a path to a better future

*

in english it’s better so much better

to be burned

*

but since i don’t believe in burning anyone

i reason the problem is myself

*

and so it’s myself

that mathematically must be removed

*

from any equation that includes

the future of humankind

*

this is why when the tech-bros

of english-speaking lands

*

burnt my person

in the manner of a most inflammatory form

*

of gaslighting imaginable

in its scorn

*

i never forgot

what they did to me

*

just as i began to fly

and just as i began to try

*

to lift my head higher

and fly to better skies

*

why now i burn those bros memories

even though arson is not my thing

*

but not as beautiful bridges of swedish ways

but as stupid men of patriarchal “hey!”

More on the video and how it continues to impact me

The video embedded at the top of this article was, as already alluded to, posted by an unknown person or persons, or an organisation, around the time the Guardian newspaper published a reader profile of me:

• https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2015/feb/13/good-to-meet-you-miljenko-williams

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2015/feb/13/good-to-meet-you-miljenko-williams

It was a clear example of self-interested gaslighting by those who didn’t want me to begin to build bridges to good and progressive discourses in British society such as the aforementioned newspaper, and therefore perhaps one day gain access to what for me would be a truly self-validating public platform.

Personally, I never forgot this video, and I believe as I write these words that if its creators were ever revealed, the two decades and more of neo-terrorism on the individual — by any other name, cognitive warfare on a specific and targeted individual such as myself — which I have been subjected to at today’s moment of writing this article would now have responsible parties, as well as a clear motive and notable set of explanations.

That is a world absolutely not fit-for-purpose. Absolutely not.

No?

So what do we do?

The day our security agencies decided that neo-crime and dark figure did not need a law-enforcement response was the day we opened the doors to a future Ukraine, an organised criminality in the UK where we now have an army of embedded criminals in all levels of society which outnumbers the British armed forces, and a broad and widely shared sense of citizen, perhaps even political-party, hopelessness about everything that happens quite toxically to Western and related democracies. That is, none of us can reasonably believe in better any more:

• gb2earth.com/hunch/neocrime | #darkfigure #neocrime

We need to believe in better, of course: but in order to begin to have a right to do so we must say enough is enough in the grey area of discretionary law enforcement and security where discretion is given a bad name in the interests of expediency. That is, in precisely that area of operational manoeuvres which utilises both dark figure and what I prefer to call neo-crime, whatever side of the law we find ourselves on.

We can only reacquire the authority Western democracy once had if we start to deliver on this: only this. And we shall not, until and if we do.

Ever again.

*

If you find what I have written today interesting and/or engaging, please do get in touch:

• mil.williams@gb2.earth

definition, design philosophy, rationale

On choosing to be a servant not an enforcer

I am minded to write this poem because of a small and discreet event I attended at Liverpool John Moores University, one evening some years ago.

The event was given by a chief constable of a nearby north of England police force.* The standout stat I remember he offered us was when he wanted to contextualise what differentiates the average experience of a police officer with the average experience of a democratic citizen — and perhaps, in so doing, making it easier for both sides to be less opposing and more conciliatory.

Most citizens, he said, experienced 10 to 11 “life events”: what he meant was serious incidents such as witnessing the horrible injuries of others, maybe their violent passing, one’s own experiences of near-death, and/or perhaps the death of a family member or close friend.

Then he asked the collected audience what they thought the stat was for the average police officer. Not even the attending officers themselves knew how to hazard a guess.

The figure was 400.

It sank in. He let it sink in slowly and quietly, too.

It will never be forgotten.

That is how much the average police officer suffers. And wherever they individually choose to remain servants of the citizenry, not enforcers of the same, is when we have the very best of our societies standing rightfully to attention in front of us.

Just this.

Have a safe day.

(And just that.)

* I also recall the fact that I was once very firmly informed by a community police officer in a suburb of Chester, UK, that whilst the public liked to see the British police as a service, the British police never see themselves as anything but a force.

“the 400: a poem about service”

i was told one evening

by a chief constable near where i lived

amongst an audience of people good and free

that 400 was the number

which for the rest of us was 10 or 11

being life events

that break our souls

and make us weep with heaps of tears

like babbling brooks

when nothing’s then right

and all is then took

and life is then no longer worth living at all

*

and this chief of big team

was the kindest of souls

and he knew how to roll with the times and the goals

but equally he was clear

what should be made more clear

and this was that police and citizenry both

needed to come closer

not as yoke of law

nor as harness of tough

but just as two parts which completed a whole

*

and so his view of policing

and of law enforcement proudly served

i’ve found in very few places since then

and how

but where i have seen this

is where i am now

which is sweden and stockholm

and where they really must take a bow

and here i have seen

that policing is a team

but where force doesn’t define

the many first few steps

and only kicks in when a blue line protects

the service which otherwise

inscribes the good deeds

*

of a law enforcement and policing philosophy

designed specifically

to deliver a broader humanity

via a society engineered and scoped

to improve what we do to each other

as human beings seen as such

rather than automatically

as monsters capable of horrendous touch

*

and so this is what really floats my boats

much much more than relationships

of a personal sort of love that deludes

because what i need

and what i want

is much much less than to quantify the affection

that baldly a person might feel for my person

and much much more to qualify the ways

we should be treating ourselves society-wide

hiding from nothing

and fearing absolutely no one

as we relearn to live

with the kindest heads and hearts

*

and so i say

and so i say i may

that love of people is a service not a force

and law enforcers who prefer to serve us fully

are worth their weight in gold all told

and so these are the places

where really i want to live and work

and have the deepest of friends and colleagues

never lovers or wife or anything more

because my focus from now on in

is the health of my civilisation

and the democracies i want us to repopulate

as every step we now must take

involves us just choosing … to do good

aside, definition, rationale

now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL

I’ve been thinking a lot this year about my life. I’m now 61: an age at which one of my two favourite writers one day took his own life. This being Hemingway.

I love Hemingway. He’s himself. Grace under pressure. Whatever the reasons. And grace under pressure was the way he wrote his prose. A pressured prose, and yet so graceful. Graceful despite the pressure, never because of it.

I’ve lived a life of similar pressures, though grace was rarely my discourse. Lately a tad more. And I’ve been wondering why this, too.

I spent many months, on and off, in Stockholm Sweden in 2023. I learnt a lot from a culture which my own — British — had never been able to accurately prepare me for. We have a lot to learn from the Swedish way. Really we do.

A tangible outcome was this site:

• sverige2.earth

I then went back to the UK for a longer period from August on, and so began to process all that learning.

More recently I created the following site as I looked to transfer Swedish ideas and concepts and ways of thinking into a British context:

• gb2earth.com

I took advantage of this impulse — and it took me a while to settle into it and feel safe enough to deliver on it — to also bring together a whole bunch of historical online whitepapers which audit my progress in the ideas I have had around intuition validation since at least 2016, but probably since my first university degree in the early 1980s when I had studied Film & Literature:

• gb2earth.com/truth/homepage

Part of the reason I began to feel the UK was starting to respect me — instead of wishing to do me harm — was because of a place called Storyhouse in the northwest English city of Chester: modelled I felt (and then had later confirmed) on the Stockholm Kulturhuset: one of my favourite places to be in the Swedish capital.

I felt safe enough in Storyhouse to be able to begin to want to reengage with my homeland really profoundly.

So.

All good thus far.

The final part of my life, and my thoughts around it this year, involves the increasing number of people in my close and wider family who are submitting to and getting successful assessments of differing kinds of neurodiverse ways of being.

In 2003 I was ridiculously diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. I had already begun to suffer from epilepsy at the age of ten; though whilst living in Spain, and between the ages of 30 to 40, I was completely — and successfully — unmedicated for the condition.

Meantime, in that same decade and after my misdiagnosis, a member of my family was diagnosed with autism, level 1 — then called Asperger’s. On my Croatian side, such cases were already apparent. Then another relative was diagnosed with bipolar within a few years of my misdiagnosis. Honestly, I think hers was also a misdiagnosis.

From the 1960s onwards, one parent had suffered from clinical depression, whilst the other had experienced severe migraines and clear traits of autism/ADHD during their whole lifetime. More recently, this year in fact, two close members of my family have been positively assessed and medicated for ADHD, and yet another case of autism, level 1 has been uncovered.

A couple of members of this tribe I belong to now feel I should request a reassessment for ADHD, too. I’m in two minds. My original psychiatrist clearly made a mistake. After three years (ie, 2006 in my case) it became impossible to argue clinical negligence. I’d still be up for bringing a case of criminal conspiracy to court, but maybe I now have better things to do with my time. Either way, it’s pretty self-evident my family are brainy.

That’s how I now prefer to see myself: neither schizophrenic nor ADHD, nor autism nor anything else. Just brains in abundance.

What I am looking for now, after all these years of strife and denial, is the opportunity to put my brains properly to work in terms of my ideas re intuition validation, complex thinking, and in respect of being able to work on tools to deliver secrecy-positive thinking-spaces where an absolutely free thought can begin to enjoy its flight.

From a deep love of Hemingway and grace under pressure to secrecy-positive thinking. And a chance to stop the Putins of this world … forever.

Yeah?

And so to the poem that follows: it’s a visceral review of some of life’s most insoluble problems.

How complex and fractured family groupings come about when people refuse to ask for help; refuse for their whole lifetime to not believe it’s someone else who’s the problem.

Just what happens when the concept of the scapegoat as a narrative figure becomes the easiest tool in order to structure a network of individuals.

Just this.

Have a really safe Christmas … and the happiest New Year possible.

And do take care.

now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL

i spent my life 
as eldest of my family
being the glue 
that meant i wasn't as i could've been

i had to be 
for every sibling and cousin i had
the very best sounding-board 
they ever could have EVER had 

understanding in all respects
accepting all their holes of dark 
seeing as absolutely and utterly fair 
the roles i was assigned so stark

like lairs and dens
of the dragons and monsters 
some of them have been to me 
and you really wouldn't ever believe 

what i have actually seen
and what i have actually witnessed 
and suffered to the extent 
they intentionally drove me mad 

and so all this time 
i found it hard to do more than rhyme
in order to survive 
the cruelty of my 61 years 

visited on me 
and imposed on me 
and painted on me as if into a corner around
my every boundary and residual sound 

as never could i set my limits
and find in time the core i needed 
and just be me for me at all
and avoid the funeral pall 

of man and son 
and father and brother and lover and done
nailed brutally and abusively 
to the cross of quite another 

and so after all that 
it came to 2015  
and all i could do 
was scream silently to myself 

and everyone thought 
again he's going mad 
or maybe he's just bad 
and maybe that was it

when really what it was 
this thing i began to do
was realise that their VACUOUS holes 
like gruyère cheese

had prevented my mentioned core 
of apple-like pleas
ever forming contentedly
so that all i knew how to do 

all this time 
for 53 years of foolishness too
was to impale myself like stake to a soul
in such a way

that their very real madnesses 
appeared mine all that time

and maybe to this day 
most would still find it easy to say 
that what they did to me in 2003
as my whole family stood aside 

and let me suppurate 
as incarcerated foully 
by a state of extreme and vicious cruelty 
and how it did so 

and how it was so
neither good for them nor good for me
as no one ever let me be
neither in 2003 nor EVER since then 

and as my monstrous lover of 2004
then took me to her web 
of evil spidery claw
and the horrible things she then did and said 

as she treated me badly 
and without remission 
and did all those things to me
with zero permissions

i am reminded also 
of the techie folk 
who in 2002 in virtual sense
and right to this day in quite parallel way 

attacked me and my reputation it's true 
as they played their games 
with my achilles capacity for foolhardy hesitation 
for it's only the clever who ever wonder why

and only the foolish 
who can't find it in themselves 
to ever care more than a minimum expression  
for the lessons of an otherwise historical compassion 

and so then it's a fast-forward right to today 
and christmas 2023 does approach in its way 
and so now my son is adhd 
and then a sibling that other thing they say

and my parents both undiagnosed but surely it was true 
and my younger relations both clearly that and good
and even two others  
who claim to be hyper-sensitive

when really all they acted out 
was a fearsome them of brutal cold fish 
for all their multiple decades and years ...
and so we do come finally to the VERY first 

being me two decades before the worst 
when getting a diagnosis unbidden and unasked for 
and one of utterly beastly yore
as i was assigned a violent assessment

of a ridiculously inexact psychosis 
when if all the above
had come fairly to light first of all
then first i wouldn't have been without my core

and second the family 
both sibling and parental
and so wider and much more 
wouldn't have fucked me about

as they allowed me to die struggling on my feet 
drugged to the eyeballs 
by a country caring only to treat 
a clever man like myself 

as if i were an elf to be tossed baldly aside 
like evil mischief 
far and wide 
because dear cousins 

and siblings 
and children 
and wife and my life 
that's what you did to the man i should've been

whilst once i defended you all 
as i tried desperately 
to be that thing you all needed me to be 
when in truth the problem wasn't EVER me 

but people JUST LIKE YOU
who needed far more support 
than i ever would 
being far more support than a crutch to a cripple 

and so as we come close to 2024
i realise with joy in no way a trickle 
that i need care for none of you any more at all
because what was broken 

and splintered 
and hurt
was not my job you see
to make complete in the end even then 

because i was far less damaged all that time 
than you and yours and those you claimed were mine 
and i was far LESS incomplete 
and far less unseated

and far less nailed 
to that cross i mentioned before 

when talking of awful loss 
and the cost of not talking 
to each other as we might've done
and the idiocy of hiding 

behind the unassessed
and never embracing 
what actually you all were 
in respect of something that could have been 

a completely beautiful diversity 
to treasure and measure 
against all other benchmarks 
where humans do hark to a GORGEOUS eternity 

and so this is where i now 
found myself at last
with no right at all 
to cast any stones 

yet equally no duty remaining 
to ever help out 
anyone insane enough 
to want to stay 

as a member of this sad sad tribe
incapable of realising any of you in time 
that the very reasons 
you refused to defend me

were precisely the reasons why
you should've protected me
and precisely why no longer 
there's any point in my trying 

to work with and for 
absolutely any of you
in health and sickness 
or any condition left to me

nor in any kind of frame   
where being together
could've been a worthy test 
of a humanity hugged close 

to a seafaring bosun
of chests of mysterious 
pieces of infinity 
where once upon a time 

it was me that was seen 
to be the really crazed guy 
when it truth 
it's me who finds himself now catapulted 

into a place of truthfully righteous change
because family for me 
now irreversibly wanes 
as we all become 

as diverse as each other
thus meaning right on 
i am finally released
from ever being again your necessary brother
aside, definition, design philosophy, rationale

on being a FEARless CITIZEN / the dreams of those who dream the unreal / all i want this christmas

https://gb2earth.com/love
when you teach 
and reach out 
and don't preach but do advocate 
these certain ways that are different 
from all the differences everyone else sees
and accepts 
and may reject or not  
then i am not you 
and you are not me 

because what i am looking to do 
is change the "you and me"
we have been so far 
in humanity's historical charter 
of what is good 
and what is not:
i'm not prepared to settle any more 
for a relativism of core 
that destroys our capacity 
to construct good and bad 
in the measure they had 
once upon a crime 
and in rhyming couplets
that mean something deeper 
than a ditty of shitty superficial resonances 

i aspire to much more you see
because i believe 
we humans are built out of cruelty 
and good
depending on where we are stood 
and the challenge for me now
(and how it is 
this challenge i see 
how it is for sure)
is to make it possible 
for not just an individual 
to progress mighty and fine 
across the timeline of their person
but for the generations too
that they make up and inhabit true ...
... well ... that finally 
they may not need to reset 
and just about almost always reboot
what we know from one to the next 

because if the driver of humanity's improvement 
really is only ever 
the nonconformism of intelligent individual
where corporate-style teamworks serve simply  
to only implement and make real 
the dreams of those who dream the unreal
we need far more dreamers of the unreal
than we currently have 
if we are to survive and thrive 
quite outwith ourselves one day 
when FEARful prayer would no longer be needed 
to deities sometimes just 
and in equal measure as cruel as gruel 
at least in the "sometimes"
that history has loosened upon us 

and so all i want for christmas 
is just the sense 
that together
you and me
me and cee
(out of a love of the most real
even where not expressed ever 
for whatever the circumstances 
which present themselves 
as a present that is current 
as well as wrapped up 
like no gift ever given) 
we might just soon enough 
be tough enough 
to bring enough truth 
and compassion and firm resilience 
to the science 
of building the FEARless CITIZEN

because me and you
that's what we are
and what we've been
all these years 
they knocked us back 
like into a sack where good guys are tumbled 
by the really really bad
and dumped into waterless wells
(like we were rocks that don't ever get to)
and some these guys and sometimes gals
do no good 
but only stuff the neighbourhoods 
with more and more legitimated mafias 
of nearby cities and then again 
way beyond 

so it's now time we put a stop to it all my love:
time we said enough is enough 
and then did in consequential act 
what was needed and always has been
and that the rough guys 
who were never tough
but just cowards
and only apparently hard 
when possessed of the full knowledge 
no one could properly stop them ever 
nor stop their awful cruelty 
born of power's abuse and total misuse 
as they winged our beautiful civilisations 
over and over again 
like icaruses 
of a sun which should only have embraced
and instead was laced with poisons galore
by the criminals of yore
but also the mafias of RIGHT NOW

time i say
to make love where we can 
and as women and men
and genders-all
we make these calls to love as practised 
where humans communicate 
with fabulous exes 
that become the kisses 
which seal the real human deal ...

... and then when we meet people
who care not at all for all this 
it's time we became as firm as hell
and gave them bottles of their own medications 
as we salvage the reputations 
of every civilisation of good good hood 
into a future-present 
of neighbour "should"
and "want"
and "wish" being the most at this time of year
anyone has the right
to see delivered and given and handed over 
and no longer feared
no longer feared 
no longer feared ... at all


a world where it suddenly becomes
possible and practical
to rebuild
once more
the FEARless CITIZEN
aside, definition, design philosophy, rationale

heaven isn’t a place / art of the heart / the soul redeemed

because when you love unconditionally 
is when you arrive not at bill gates 
but at real pearly gates 
where your place isn't a state 
of vatican embezzlement 
but of true affection and amusement
and of honest kindnesses 
expressed like the best espresso you ever sipped
being your lips that day on dublin river 
and so this christmas i hope to find you on stockholm isle
and maybe we spend a while together 
where everyone can see us holding our palms out 
not in surrender or white flag 
but in the glorious colours of blue and yellow 
one a sanctuary from all that is bad 
and one fighting on behalf of us daily
by the minute and to the second 
never seconded from anything that wasn't a deep belief 
in the fact that putin is not mad 
but just entirely and completely bad 
without redemption and without ascension 
and only awaiting 
if some day a justice of a natural kind 
may be delivered duly:
the descent to the darkest embers 
of unending fires 

and so all that's being left for me to say
is how much i love you
and always shall 
and if you cannot show yourself now
or cannot yet 
or may not any more  
then there will always be a time 
i will find time for you 
when you can finally hold my hand again 
and make me the happiest man who ever walked this rock
proud and tall and amongst it all 
because that's what this is all about dearest soulmate of forever 
where our shared and intrinsic souls 
our fabulously intertwined souls 
become arts of the heart 
and our work then finds itself never-ending  

and our life is always of utility now 
even as distances make the kiss on the lips
quite impractical for the moment 
still one day 
we may one day say 
it's time to hug each other 
in beautiful lacy embrace 
NOT of the poison-laced juliet or romeo
but being just the moments when utterly chilled together 
on common sofa 
we end our days in an uncommonly handsome conversation 
of a meeting of minds and body
night after day
and in all our joyous beams not of foundation or construction 
but actually just of sun 
where your eyes glisten and shine with happiness 
and mine weep and sob 
as finally i am accepted exactly for what i am 
by the only woman 
who knew what made me right again 

just that state out there (if you're ever so lucky 
and if fortune blesses you 
and if your life is one of fortunate outcomes 
and not of war nor conflicts horrific)
but that state 
that one which makes you unconditionally beloved 
without further recourse to the cruel
and without further imposition 
of those gruels of incarceration i suffered 
once upon a crime 
but just a hand again 
a hand outstretched 
never clasping or grasping 
but compassionate and warm 
and slender-fingered 
and SO elegantly yours after all

and so i do await that moment 
one day in the near future 
when maybe soon 
and if not then 
well ... then maybe later
you may grace my presence 
and give me the notion and opportunity 
to remind you 
of all that you have meant to me 
and mean verily still
not out of illness or infirmity 
but simply the veracity of knowing 
the soul IS where it all lies 
in truth:
a very human redemption ... for us all
definition, rationale

“Why are people in post-#brexitbritain so proud of things that don’t work?”

I’ve been following recently #elonmusk’s #tesla’s attempts to tell other countries with different approaches to #labourrelations how they must conduct their businesses.

I’ve been reporting on it, too. Sometimes gleefully, as you’ll have noticed I’m sure:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/07/tesla-loses-legal-action-sweden-nordic-unions-licence-plates-collective-bargaining

Today, at #manchesterairport I supported two people as they flew to foreign climes. I had booked a train ticket well in advance to make the return journey directly back to #chester on a #transportforwales train.

There’s a strike today by #aslef, the trades union, on #transpennineexpress trains. I wasn’t taking a #transpennineexpress train, but my beef today is nevertheless still with the people working at the airport’s railway station who work specifically for this company:

Not because of the fact of the strike, mind. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t know the details of this particular one, but train people are generally hugely responsible professionals: I’ve worked with them on station platforms and concourses in #liverpool for months in a #securitylight role. They combine #security with #customerservice roles, often immensely intuitively. And therefore, seamlessly.

I’m still not with#elonmusk on this one, as you can see.

🙂

So the problem wasn’t the strike at all. Not for me. What was it, then? And what is it?

The splintered nature of the #uk train network, which a long time ago used to be called #britishrail. Now it’s a mishmash of competing operators. It was broken up in the interests of introducing competitive dynamics into a system that did need a shakeup, it’s true. But the result these days is serious problems with information flow across operators, and accountability amongst them when there’s no desire to duly deliver on it.

The way it works is that each major station enables the arrival and departure of trains from all the operators which want to use it. But it’s not as simple as it could have been. Because each major station is not run by a common separate body across the country. No. It’s run by one of the operators on behalf of the rest. And where you are determines which one runs your station.

What happened today was how the system manifestly doesn’t work. The #tfw operator wasn’t affected by the strike, but it was. Because the #transpennineexpress personnel were only interested in getting bodies out of THEIR airport’s station: the one, that is, that they are responsible for overseeing and running.

The one who was controlling the flow of people onto the platform said to me at one point he worked for #transpennineexpress and couldn’t offer information on any other operator and the validity of tickets except those of #northerntrains.

Their interests as overseers of the station clearly didn’t coincide today with the interests of #tfw, and therefore its passengers too: people just like me.

For this reason, he wasn’t interested, either, in whether half the madly grouped passengers he finally let en masse onto the platform had tickets or not, and thus clearly didn’t care whether or not they were just taking a short hop improperly to get to #manchester centre on another operator’s trains, squeezing legitimate passengers off the rest of this journey.

To make things worse, the trams — usually #manchester’s most exemplary part of its #publictransport network — were also delayed by disruption at just about exactly this time. The only way out for a while was an hour-long bus journey or onto a platform not being marshalled correctly IMHO, by a station operator which had no intention of supporting travellers who legitimately were going with a competing operator.

In the end, I waited for the trams to be up and running again, went to #manchestervictoria station where I received exemplary #customerservice from a #northerntrains employee, and was then redirected by the same to #piccadilly where I got equally brilliant service from two #avanti employees. One wrote me the ticket you see below:

So even in a stupidly splintered service such as the #uk’s good #customerservice can be delivered, when the will and professionalism chooses to exist.

One final observation: the only person at the airport railway station prepared to offer a categorical assurance that I would be able to travel without cost on another train, whatever the operator in the end, was a #security professional I am very grateful to and whom I was sure to thank — even whilst myself unsure whether anything would turn out right.

It shouldn’t be like that: but that’s how it was.

In the end, #security was compassionate, the strikers’ cause was just, and the man who was there acted only out of self-interest, and not on behalf of all parties involved.

What really puzzles me, though, is why a power like the #uk, once I am sure world-beating in so many respects, now settles so often for being proud of a self that doesn’t work … or at least, maybe worse than not at all is, simply, not quite …

definition, rationale

“A question for everyone in love with #publishing …”

I’ve been considering how to move forwards with traditional #proofreading and a more complete #qualitycontrol of different channels of #contentdelivery.

• qcdocu.com (my new proposal, as it stands right now)

Background

I got into this in the first place for two reasons:

1. In the early 2000s I studied, whilst living in #spain, a #spanish University Master in #publishing. I’d always been interested in content of all kinds: when a child and adolescent, almost engulfing my local library’s bookshelves; and when older, blogging every day on a whole range of subjects in response to the imagination and occurrences of many known and many relatively unknown writers.

The Master then served to put me in touch with #editors of the very best: I even interned for three months or so in the University of Salamanca’s fabulous #publishing house. This only sharpened my interest in the role and activity of #editing #reality.

2. From about 2012-2013 onwards, I started working for a major #london-based #marketingagency. This was in the field of #bigtech, and involved ensuring that the #sales #documentation which ended up in front of the #csuite clients of my client’s clients was in the best condition possible — including grammar, flow and related, and even in some cases picking up on domain-related inaccuracies.

This second activity has been the mainstay of my working-life since then. Until this autumn, that is. The most recent relationship — volumes and so forth — which I had with my main client was settled for over a year or more, at levels which enabled me to deliver an exclusive dedication. Then staff changed, agreements were left by the wayside, #generativeai seemed to promise a world of automated #csuite-competent comms, and two things happened … or at least, my client tried really aggressively for two things to take place.

The new revenue stream and NDA

One, reduce substantially my income over a period of two months with minimal warning; and two, demand I signed a new #nda which not only required me not to work as #proofreader for my client’s clients — most of the #bigtech corporations and quite a few niche ones, too, being an absolutely reasonable and understandable condition — were I ever to leave the relationship, but also demanded I did not work in any #tech field which my #proofreading over the years might touch on … or, maybe even, have touched on. And remember, the only documentation I ever came into contact with — or would be coming into contact with, for sure — was sales & marketing documentation aimed at the #csuite. Never manuals, never secret sauces … none of this at all, in any way whatsoever.

I couldn’t sign, obviously; and so I didn’t.

And so I guess, because the #marketingagency is influential globally, that locks me out of future work of this nature elsewhere.

Yet I love the industry. Still.

Next steps …

So what next? Well. I’m considering moving into bigger-project publishing: I’m already editing the translation of a #croatian 20th century novel on behalf of a family member. We have obtained the rights to proceed with the translation’s publication, and now we’re working through final versions of the same.

But this, for the moment, is clearly a side hustle. ‘Keeps my brain ticking over, I guess. (Something I am grateful for, too.)

The question itself

A question then, to you all. Whilst #openai and #microsoft have wilfully upturned the world on the basis of presumption and unvalidated notions around the utility of their #generativeai escapades, people who have worked skilfully and with deep wisdom in the industry of #content and #publishing more widely have seen their livelihoods destroyed in less than six months.

I now hear of a case where a smaller agency which automated their content processes using #ai a year ago are not only continuing to pay out for the #tech, but are having to take on four more people to revert back to a manual and human delivery, as well as pay for lawyers to identify any injuries these obviously fairly unwise changes may already have incurred for clients over the past twelve months.

As someone has observed of the #openai/#microsoft nexus, a shit-show all round.

The question, then? Will common sense now ever return to high-level marketing & sales, and their related communication?

WDYT?

Yay or nay?

qcdocu.com
aside, rationale

on #cognitivebeauty, #thespywholovedme, and #ianfleming

one of my favourite writers of all time is the #prosepoet #raymondchandler. passages which describe dust-ridden orange groves intermingle with the blood of a dark and deep act.

you can’t imagine how i was transported to the best of such writing today, on beginning to read the below.

i’ve never read #ianfleming in my life. i stumbled across a #largeprint version of his book #thespywholovedme with a fabulous introduction by #nickstone earlier today in the quiet section of #storyhouse, #chester. i didn’t want to deprive someone who might really need it from the privilege if a standard-size version was available. it was. i wish now i had taken the large print. this #penguin edition is fab, of course. i don’t know if in every edition, but the page numbering in this particular one conserves the three digits of #jamesbond’s licence to kill. so page 1 is not page 1, but 001.

it’s a gentle and discreet touch and decision. it’s beautiful in its discretion.

meantime, the large-print version has much better artwork on the cover: really evocative of its time. this one here is nice, and reminds in its palette and visual tonality a lot of #chandler’s aforementioned orange groves (not wildly out of keeping with the locale, or at least the continent, tbh), but it’s much more prosaic.

and at least this #bond book is anything but prosaic. it’s riddled with a superhuman attention to details of all kinds. it’s a poetic prose at the highest of levels: #fscottfitzgerald wouldn’t have been ashamed of any of it. and so #chandler, neither …

but the most surprising thing about this book by #ianfleming is both twofold and interlinked: being precisely what #nickstone ensured we took away from his introduction to the large-print version. it’s not written in the third-person but the first, and it’s not written from the spy’s point of view but from the female hero’s gaze. cognitive about her prior life and surroundings to the max and metacognitive about what happens to her and how she reacts, it is an astonishing piece of writing.

you don’t feel this is a woman written by a man at all. and maybe this is because i am a man, and maybe a woman wouldn’t feel the same either. and maybe i am radically wrong. but to me this was the #fleming who took intuitive, calculated risks in wartime when they needed to be taken. and sometimes you hurt people. and sometimes you saved them. but always … intuitively calculating.

and as i delve further into the book and admire more honestly and deeply its achievements, i realise why writers — like #fleming and perhaps, to a much lesser degree, even myself — deserve to be actors on much broader stages. because a human being who writes daily, who writes well daily, who writes pleasingly daily, and who writes purposefully daily … well … we take a thousand or maybe more decisions rightfully daily … you really do, you know, when you put sentences and sentences together, one after the other; and if you’re a writer you’ll understand that when people say writing is not the same thing as doing, it’s only because no one who “prefers doing” ever duly sees the number of great decisions even just a good writer who writes every day is capable of taking because of their professional art and training: being transferable skills, all.

and #fleming is not only a good writer but actually one of the best. so when he sent humans to possible, sometimes certain, death on missions in world war ii, he did so with the very best of brains which might ever have been brought to bear on the challenges that nazi germany imposed at the time on us all.

and then after the war, with all those calculated risks done and taken and regretted or not, he proceeded to write an object of art such as this book i am reading now.

life is about doing things like this.

life is about calculating a #cognitivebeauty and completing it.

isn’t it, after all?

yes.

it is.

aside, rationale

On the City of Chester UK (and why I stay …)

Chester was a place that gave a lot to me and took a lot from me.

It allowed me to grow into adulthood, with an epilepsy that struck me at ten years old, and was medicated with barbiturates until a better solution was duly found six years or so later.

In the 1970s it was a place of little attraction for young people, at least people like me … though now it has vibrant sociocultural institutions, and a small-town vibe that works for very many people.

But small-town vibe cuts both ways. It can lead to the beauty of the gentle and the unsuspected: of people who reach out to you and want to be reached out to, equally. Or it can lead to the embracing of criminal and mafia-like behaviours. Where who you know is much more important than what you describe and experience, even when you communicate it with absolute accuracy.

Today I saw in this very same town of Chester its very best side and its very worst. In its remembrance of the sacrifices of two world wars, and more before and since, it was exemplary and compassionate.

In its defence of mindsets I myself recall from my childhood — for example, things that happened at school to me and my classmates, which today would lead to criminal prosecutions — it also showed such evil people are still alive and literally kicking.

Earlier today, I was walking into the Tesco in the centre of town and a woman cut closely into my path with a suitcase trailing behind her. I had to stop. I bided my time. I then headed away from her into the shop itself, and lo and behold, she drove her suitcase, now in front of her, into the back of my left leg.

I turned round and she asked me if I was all right, with a beaming smile. I answered I was, and asked her pointedly if she was.

She said nothing. We went our separate ways. But the mindset she had didn’t. It planes over this city of two curious parts. One part, beautiful and scenic, in the physical, emotional and intellectual, and with the cultural organisation it never had in my childhood and now, obviously deservedly, manifests to the max for all who wish to value it properly:

• storyhouse.com

But there’s another part, a quite different layer of society in Chester. It’s a layer which mainly chooses to defend its own very restricting, manipulative turf at the expense of the innovation and invention the first half not only treasures as it always attempted to, but is now capable of formulating wisely and assertively.

The layer which looks to defend its always-has-been looks to the past as a justification of all current behaviours: the woman with the suitcase and her mates videoing the scene are just a silly example of how the past can be (wrongly) used to justify a #gaslighting present.

The other layer, the one of cultural vision and fabulous statements where every human being has value, meantime, looks to Chester’s past not as a justification of the nowadays and the cruelties these others are continuing to deliver, but as a way of intelligently informing a collective future-present of the most wondrous: a world where all of us fit in, strive and eventually not just live but thrive.

This is Chester UK, then: the marvellously creative, wise, generous, gentle and compassionate on the one hand. And on the very beastly other, what I experienced in Tesco in the town centre not long ago: a group of people who have nothing better to do than track, using mobile phone tech and related, the simple movements of people, like myself, who will not stop telling inconvenient truths.

It’s Brexit Britain right down the line too, is the Chester I experienced today: so many good people who just want the best for the world, on the left of politics and in the decent centre both, whilst on the extreme right the monsters who, in truth, have become one-bit mobsters.

I spent most of my youth in Chester. I’m proud of the sociocultural environment its good people have managed to fight into being in the past few years from practically nothing previous.

Today’s incidents, on the back of other things I didn’t report on other days, because even sillier, have made up my mind, a mind that was unsure, for sure.

My decision after the Chester #gaslighters of this afternoon? I now intend to work here too, to join the better half.

Why?

After being unduly incarcerated back in 2003 by the outliers and institutions of this city, you’d maybe wonder why indeed. I’ll tell you, then. Now I shall. The good people who’ve stuck it out, and made this place so much better, deserve other good people to join the fight.

The bad, the one-bit mobsters I mean, don’t deserve anything any more. They certainly don’t deserve that the good abandon them to their victory.

In fact, they don’t even deserve our disapprobation.

Just to be ignored, is what they deserve. Just to be ignored.

I do join, then. The movement of the best. Not a city of #gaslighters. Not a city of beautiful #roman even.

No. Rather, a city which has begun to learn to fight a layered criminality with ALL the tools to hand. Something which in my childhood never seemed conceivable.

All the tools. Absolutely all. And even with the written word, I say.

My contribution.

The pen wins.

As does Chester.