Albums trigger strangeness

Couldn't work out a decent title.. but I came across something tonight.
Last year was my first of two years in the UK, a very strange time that had me up and down all over the place emotionally and 'culturally', and there are a few albums that are already strange enough but that I happened to listen to back then that don't sum up what I was going through but I just associate with a weird but well defined period of my life.
So far there are two, Ill Niño's One Nation Underground and System of a down's Hypnotize. I really don't know why I'm doing this blog, unless anyone else has an album or two they can't listen to anymore because of the memories..? I mean everyone's got several all-time fav albums but this is different..
bleh :X



Home, part 2

Quite a few people answered my last one from about two years ago now or something... Should any of those people see this or indeed anyone new, I could use a moment of your time to help me work out if there's an easy explanation to this.
To summarize, in the first part, explained story, lived in three different countries, no sensation of 'home' really, didn't know what to make of it (I think a lot of people thought I was really depressed but I was just pensive :))
Now this is my second year in the UK and France seems like home, only because it's the last place I lived, and I know that if I go there I won't feel at home because of this place. I am so different from everyone I've met so far here (sometimes getting similar confused reactions to part 1), and I don't want to wonder about this or think I'm going to let it get to me;
Basically wondering if anyone here has a simple theory to why someone like me doesn't know 'home' or feels 'away from home' or even 'lost' whereever he lives? Not a depressing subject just curious if any of you have studied say psychology there might be a really simple explanation that I haven't found yet!
Cheers guysx



Home

I'm sitting in an old armchair, two of my dogs sleeping, listening to Arvo Pärt... and I was just thinking once again about "Home"...
Home in the sense of "where I come from", my "home country", and so on... I left my home country, the UK, when I was three years old, to live in Saudi Arabia. People ask me if I speak Arabic, but I don't, my father worked for British Aerospace and we lived on a compound. (well at first some appartments in the capital, but really when moving to Jubail). A compound is like a village built for a company's employees, one side is for the families, and the other side is for the bachelors who share flats etc. The whole thing is surrounded by a big wall. All that to explain that we were pretty much seperated from the rest of the people, so I didn't get to know any of the culture and stuff even though I lived there for seven years.
I went to an English school, in this school of three sections (American, Dutch, and English), most of the kids were Arabic, most of them were from Pakistan. It was great. In that kind of environment, and at that age, it was a real mix of all kinds of people getting along, not caring about where we came from. I was there till I was 10, but it was a synthetic environment in a way.. and by that I mean living in an appartment, with a cleaner, growing up in a foreign country, it was all a little weird... Not "home"...
In June 1996 I arrived here, in France. The nearest village has about a thousand inhabitants (allegedly)... most of which are rather old, if not very old. Who am I kidding the average age is like 65.. The only kids who are left, that I know, have never moved out of this place, and frankly it shows, it's so freaky.. I was 10, and I arrived here and already found it weird to find kids playing with marbles and farm toys (like those Majorette cars but they were farm vehicles, bringing catalogues of them to school to show etc..) - now ok I'm just saying what it was like for me back then... Trying to explain what it can feel like. I was playing Doom and other games (dune 2!!) before coming over, I quickly got a pc and half-life, and they just didn't seem to see time go by...
Ok that's kinda off topic, what I really need to explain is that my house is about 3km away from this crummy village, in the forest, our nearest neighbours are 100m away, and that's a farm anyway... I've been growing up in this... place.. completely isolated, from everything, for 9 years now, 8 of which were spent exclusively here, quickly losing interest in TV, no one around here, the only people my age gasp at technology (ok the select few that I brought home back then did..)... so i get so insanely bored... and missed out on so much, missed out on life... I just stayed in, and this is where this gets back to the main topic, because I never really felt accepted here (being foreign, especially English, hardly surprising), and never really fitted in with the culture etc, so this is far from being my Home.
People talk of the UK, Germany, France, or some place else, as their home, but I left the uk very young, I was isolated in Saudi, i'm isolated here, I don't have a place I can call home, with all the background that goes with it, culture, heritage, I barely know any of the slang that's used these days in the UK!
I'm expecting most of you will find this silly... probably too long.. but I'm hoping someone will read this all the way through and if he or she's living or has lived this kind of weird feeling, of... I dunno being a nomad or something.. then please leave a comment on a question, I'd appreciate it, ty:)



Obscure letter

Copy of a letter from a Melbourne gentleman in reply to an income tax final demand.
Dear Sirs,
Your super-heated letter arrived this morning in an envelope with a penny stamp on it, and it would have given the boy and myself much pleasure had it not revived in us a melancholy reflection of what has gone before. You say you thought the account could have been settled long ago, and couldn't understand why it hadn't, well, here is the reason:
In 1954 I bought a sawmill on credit. In 1955 I bought a team of horses, a timber wagon, two ponies a double barrelled shotgun and two razor backed pigs, all on credit. In 1956 the bloody mill was burned to the ground leaving not a damn thing. One of the ponies died, and I loaned the other to a stupid bastard who starved the poor bugger to death. Then I joined the church.
In 1957 my father died, and my brother was hanged for raping a pensioner. A tramp seduced my daughter, and I had to pay the bastard £50 to stop him becoming one of the family.
In 1958 my boy got mumps which spread to his balls, and the poor lad had to be castrated to save his life. Later I went fishing and the rotten boat overturned drowning two of my lads, neither being the one which was castrated.
In 1959 my wife ran away with a sheep rearer and left me with twins as a souvenir. Then I had to have a house keeper, so I married to keep expenses down, but I had a hell of a job to make her pregnant. I went to the doctor's who in turn advised me that I should create some excitement at the crucial moment. That night I took my shotgun to bed with me, and at the time I thought was right I leaned out of the bed and fired the gun through the window. The wife shit the bed, I ruptured myself, and the next morning I found I had shot my best cow.
In 1960 someone cut the nuts off my prize bull. I was buggered and took to drink. I did not stop until I had nothing left but a pocket watch and a weak bladder. Winding the watch and running for a piss, kept me busy for a time. After a year I took heart again and bought on credit a manure spreader, a reaper, a binder and a car. Then the floods came and washed the bloody lot away. My wife got V.D. from a tavelling salesman, my boy died through wiping his arse on a rabbit skin that was infected. To cap it all, some bastard mated my cow with a broken down old bull.
It surprised me very much when you say you will cause trouble if I don't pay up. If you can think of anything I have missed, I should like to know about it.
Trying to get money out of me, is like trying to poke butter up a porcupine's arse with a red hot needle. I am praying for a shower of skunk shit to pass your way and I hope the very centre of it is over much of the bastards in your office who sent me this final demand.
Yours for more credit,
Isa Upyours



Nightlife in the country

Oh yes... It may say Toulouse on my profile but I'm really smack bang in the middle of nowhere, and tlse is the closest city - ok I'm not the only guy on the planet who lives in the countryside but I thought I might share the story of a night out in my area :p
The place, Lavercantière, population somewhere around 100 or something silly.. The occasion was the annual village fête, which means there are actually people in the streets... out to see the entertainment on offer, the rides, the games, etc, which in this case, was some concert by a musical group, some trash from the 50s for the kids, and the usual catch the duck game...
There must have been a good ... erm... ok 200 people there, which means that little square was packed at 11pm. The group on stage was made up of four dancing and singing girls (one was a lot older, some washed up wannabe no doubt, can't look more blasé than that), a sax player, well basically a band + some gay looking singers.
When we were walking up they were singing that Céline Dion song from Titanic, then after a while there was some intro to the "Action movie theme" part, mentioning things like James Bond, Mad Max and something else...O_o
Here it comes... the James Bond part, with two of the girls dressed in black leather coats and hats, with two plastic guns (yes with the red tip), pretending to aim at things, more or less prancing about the stage looking silly. If that wasn't bad enough then came the Rocky part (Eye of the tigerrrrrrrrrrrrrr) - and the girls suddenly changed into boxers, punching the air, as you do... Well you get the picture.
Before finally leaving, I couldn't help just checking out the crowd... mostly 40s-60s, all the men had their arms crossed, looked really pissed, and I came to assume that they were just out there because there's no way they could sleep with that trash going on anyway.. And no there weren't any girls older than 14. What a night huh?:D Doesn't get much better than that xD

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