Home off the range

I have been taking stock and realise that I must apoogise up front for my lack of blogging. Okay so I said right off the bat that the blog is an irregular or perhaps more frequent account but six posts in a month is pretty poo. That said I have been pretty busy but now that I am back in UK I really should knuckle down for a few weeks at least before Rose and I enjoy our next physical reconnect.

On the plane back I got to thinking of the notion of going home and more particularly what home means and/or what is meant by home, by others and for me...you too. So what do you reckon? Is home more than a useful key on your QWERTY or more to the point is this home the only tangibly, physically real notion thereof? Let's consider things from a definitive perspective courtesy of my old friend dictionary.com;

home ( P ) (hm) n.
1. A place where one lives; a residence.
2. The physical structure within which one lives, such as a house or apartment.
Okay so no argument with the above; there is no scope for any and jetlag and downright lack of sleep prevents me from the will to create any.

3. A dwelling place together with the family or social unit that occupies it; a household. Notwithstanding the tendentiousness of the notions of both family and social unit the above is fairly secure as a definition insofar as, in common with nos.1 and 2., fairly well describes a place, a setting, a context.

4. An environment offering security and happiness.
5. A valued place regarded as a refuge or place of origin.
Think about it, unless you are an unremembering infant home is a bad place (and even then sufficiently good and lengthy therapy can unsubmerge that which infancy represses); as a kid it is the place you get grounded to; as a teen it is the place you do all you can to avoid, as a homeowner it is a financial strain, and as a parent it is the place where you are conscious of the physical dangers your home presents to infants, that your kid(s) will remember it with mostly sadness, regret and fear, and that your teen(s) will be tangibly ashamed of it and avoid it all costs. Ultimately you'll die there, be taken from there to die in hospital or worst of all be referred to no.12.

6. The place, such as a country or town, where one was born or has lived for a long period.
7. The native habitat, as of a plant or animal.
I am a native of Liverpool it is resoundingly not my home. I have lived in Manchester in excess of ten years it is not my home. I spend most of my time flitting between both of these cities and Texas the latter of which is not my home either as I am constantly continually reminded of my Englishness of speech, manner, dress, manners, attitude, politics and irreligiousness.

8. The place where something is discovered, founded, developed, or promoted, a source.
Home is more often than not a place where what is discovered, founded, developed, or promoted is unhappiness in all its forms and therefore home can be considered a source of misery, right? See nos.4 and 5.

9. A headquarters; a home base.
Nonsense. This is yet another example of lazy grammar.

10. Baseball. Home plate.
11. Games. Home base.
Whatever

12. An institution where people are cared for: a home for the elderly.
See St. Rita's Nursing Home in Chalmette and see if this type of home is a place in which it follows that people are cared for.

13. Computer Science.
14. The starting position of the cursor on a text-based computer display, usually in the upper left corner of the screen.
15. A starting position within a computer application, such as the beginning of a line, file, or screen or the top of a chart or list.
See above as I rather think I covered these points ahead of time.


So you see that it is not as unslippery as you might have at first thought, this notion of home so how and in what way one can come home is purely esoteric and/or physically impossible, at least in my case. Isn't it?

In my case right now it is impossible to escape the overriding sense that it is both dulce and decorum to feel and believe that my home right now is not the place where I was born or have lived for a long period nor is it my headquarters nor my home base but it is a place where something is discovered, founded, developed, or promoted; a source and that thing is, An environment offering security and happiness; A valued place regarded as a refuge or place of origin and its source is the space occupied by Rose, in Texas. This will change in geographical terms but I am more resolved and convinced of right now than ever before that this will forever remain. I have found home and she is about to come home to me.

Wow!

American Idiot

Well it has been a while...again.

I am Stateside and it has been a busy couple of weeks since I landed at DFW what with reacquianting with not-so-old nearly-friends only partly known and all through Rose but a couple of them no less sincere for all that but for the most part I am tolerated and humoured as an extension of Rose, a part of her and her life or rather her life-to-be, the other half of both of our lives, the unseen and overplanned part, our tomorrows, beginning again together.

What have I been up to? Damn good question.

Well, there have been the not insignificant matters of a bunch of new shows and a gallery opening, and the hosting of an award-winning artist arrived for six days fresh from LGW and replete with that drainingly British dirge in his heart before gradually lightening up as I fed him more margs day after near-interminably entertainment-filled day. For the most part it was do-able and occasionally flashed with enjoyment.

Plus I've done the Labour Day BBQ thing with a bunch of art-dykes (c'mon you've gotta laugh I mean at least one of them would...I think) of varying degrees of interest and/or misandry

...or should that be typo-ed to misnadry - a hatred and distrust of all things with nads?

and just generally tossed about, fucked around, done lengths of both hotel pools and around hotel rooms, before settling down Chez Rose for the daily drag. She is back at the grindstone I am variously checking email, making plans, eating, growing compassion fatigued with the saturation coverage (ha ha!) of Katrina, thinking about writing, avoiding it, wanking, arguing, sitting on the step only to grow immediately too hot. You know the kind of thing; think of a typical day off when you plan to get a load of 'stuff' done but achieve little more than Olympic standard clock-watching and general guilt.

So here I sit, a working class boy from a no horse town via the once horse drawn city of Manchester, in a very bourgois two university town with a shitload of art stuff behind me and some pretty poncy dinners to look forward to this week before much more of the gallery thang in Dallas for most of Saturday. The scary thing is that I'll be back on that non horse this time next week, still talking to you, still writing the novel, still striding forward with the master plan, but all the nearly-friends, the new people, the contacts made, the chats with artists, curators and collectors, the invitations, the private viewings, the dinners payed for and bought, the heat, humidity, light, the life, will be behind me, as will the dull open flatness of northern TX, as will mi corazon. I'll be facing that over-busy, chintzfest wall typing like a demon, avoiding mother smoke and father shite and so the loop will begin again; recover, regroup, wank, reconnect, refocus, wank, review, rethink, wank, wank, replan, reset, repay, wank, replay, rehope, reprospect, drink-think-wank, reknow.

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes.

Until when?