h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Good morning world, springtime lovely world, and hullo Journal, I still love you. .

Notes on Hanging the Washing, Non Existent Guide Entries and Jujubes

Funny those moments of being that anyone can experience, which don't really have any words, you just feel mysteriously peaceful within, like you've been sitting in a stripy deckchair in a saltsea breeze, eating jujubes, and drinking a lovely elixir of wellspring loveliness, from a cracked china mug with blue spots on it.

I suppose its because I am over halfway through my life. One thinks about things like inner peace.

I'd say these moments, in fact, can occur anywhere, anytime. You can be hanging the washing or cutting your toenails, or waking up at 3 am with the TV still on, and getting involved in a late night drama about a peculiar hotel in a place of strangers, where even the mosquitos panic.

That last line was really stoopid. Mosquitos don't panic, they never panic.

Anyway, where was I. Ah yes, moments of being. Hmm, well I think I said it now. Even though there's no words for it.



Been taking loads of photos, ah lovely lovely camera moments, so thanks for the inspiration, Post photographers and all.

Great Post as always.

As for a Guide Entry, , well it's becoming a bit of legend. . Like, the Guide Entry that never happens. .

It is my friend though, this flawed non-entity. . I see it, the spirit of it, winking at me from behind the neon Cadbury's sign on the hot chocolate machine, or sitting in a stripy deckchair cutting its toenails and eating jujubes, grinning a funny grin, with the alphabet all written out in orange letters, completely in love with snowdrop smileys... writing poems in mirror writing about stage fright .....



It still has stage fright. Can't hurry these things.

Jujube anyone?

.

Hah!

Here's a thing now. I just made two Guide Entries. Still work in progress, but I faced the fear.

Not for review, just placed here for now, although I want to share them with mvp, so I will message her.

What a kid I am . I just want to show my treasures to all my friends, and people I don't know too, as long as they know that my levels are a little bit limited. hmm. .

You don't have to read them of course. heheh. Its just an exercise for me really, the crossing the threshold, again .... that all important action, against the odds.

I have decided to be almost naively honest about all this. Only way to create a breakthrough.

I think I've got the show n' tell bug! I guess that's what it comes down to in the end, for me. I don't want to climb to the high slopes. Happy girl I am. Perhaps I can work towards a site contribution after all.

Anyway, I am happy with these, they feel like my level, and working on the photos.

Not sure of site context for this kind of thing, the AWW feels a bit too steep a climb, but hey, journal is good!

When I first joined h2g2 in 05 I was always attracted to putting my work into the Flea Market. heheh. I love Flea Markets. But at that time you couldn't just go there. It was for entries that didn't fit anywhere else! Yay! My type of place.

Of course I have no idea how to add a photo to a Guide Entry, but that's for the future, if at all. For now, this is enough.

Will put the dreaded blue numbers in next post.

OK, this was written exactly as it unfolded. Very important to me.

A87732057

And this one sounds a bit like a primary one school project, but hey, I confess I kinda love it too.

A87722986

And both entries are as true as my heartbeat. hmm

cc

My sister was always good at the crafts projects. One day, she made 'fried marbles'. Really, they were a kind of bead, and you heated them, and it made a big flat circle the shape of the frying pan.

Hers was all red and yellow and orange, and we hung it up in my bedroom window so I could see it when I woke up in the morning.

It was the late 1960s. One Saturday, I slept in a bit, and when I woke up, the radio was playing in another room. It was some woman singing about a Chelsea morning. I vaguely knew that Chelsea was a place in London.

But I lay there listening to someone singing 'the rainbow on my wall', 'the light poured in like butterscotch', etc. And experiencing the same thing. The light from my sister's handiwork was making beautiful patterns on the wall. That gave me a curious sense of well-being, as if the day had achieved veridicality somehow.

Now I read that the singer was Joni Mitchell, that her Chelsea was in New York City, and that she, indeed, was watching the rainbow on her wall through coloured glass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP5L9_LdtKk

Thanks for the memory!

PS I also learn through the miracle of the internet that Chelsea Clinton was named for this song. How interconnected the world is.

PPS And those are lovely ways to share thoughts. Thank you.

Hi there Cactuscafé! See, now you've written two entries already! And they are ones people can relate to! Well done! One question ... Dmitri seeing as you're here ... *can* one add photos or pictures to one's own entries, somehow, now? You added the photo of the kingfisher that time ... but is there a way I (or Cactuscafé) could also do it for our own entries?

I'm afraid not, Willem. Not yet, anyway. (I think they're working on it. )

In the meantime, though, we can add pictures when we publish your writing in .

Hey bros

You two do inspire me, and thanks, as always, for meeting me round my various corners ...with first aid, water and sandwiches ... ... as I lurch precariously along the road of the spirit.



Ah! So its the Post where the Guide Entries can go all photographic. yay!.

I'm kinda glad I don't have to learn how to add my own photos, right now, bit technical for me I think. .

Like, for my next Guide Entry, about my plastic tree that I have in my room, there might be 543 piccies of my plastic tree in various hues, offering various clues to my internal mindscapes and ....

where you gone? ....

No, seriously, I'm really happy right now. Oh, and what a marvellous piece of writing there, Mister DG, and now I am transported to the world of fried marbles .. ... and the light through glass Joni Mitchell moment shared ah beauty beauty thankyou.

Great word that ...veridicality .. I've not heard that word before.

Interesting dimension .... the sound of light through glass. The soundtrack. The Sound of Light. Hah! The Sound of Light.

Now, if I can spell it ...synaesthesia ...I bet both of you could write like angels on this subject .. in one way or another .. with soundtrack please ..

Dear Journal,



There are many things in this life to know and tell, and this isn't one of them

A87746421

but I am going to tell you anyway.

Did the word knock on your door later?

9.20 am. I am eating my cheese and tomato sandwiches. Oooh, there's a knock on the door.... wonder who that is? Oh my word ... its ...

(wait for sequel)

Dear Journal

Notes about Mecki postcards

When I was a kid I collected postcards, and stuck them in a postcard album, and they were my world.

One time, in the early 60s, my Aunty, who worked in Canada, sent me a postcard which was a black and white photograph of a weird plastic hedgehog on skis.

I loved this postcard, even though I found it a bit spooky.

Somewhere, presumably from the back of the postcard, I learned that this aforementioned hedgehog was called Mecki.

Well, the years went by, the way they do, and my postcard albums got lost, the way things do, but from time to time throughout my young adult life I thought about Mecki, and wondered who and why and where.

Every now and then I would ask people if they had heard of a hedgehog on skis, called Mecki. No-one had.

Well, technology advances, the way it does, and computers appeared, and I was able to Google , and there are all sorts of sites about Mecki postcards. I could join forums, talk about it all again, forever and always..

It seems Mecki originated in Germany, so now I want to know if DG or Bel know about Mecki.

And Mecki did more than ski. He did gardening, and lots of things that hedgehogs don't really do.

People collect Mecki postcards.

I am grateful for this knowledge. The internet is so great for that.

What the internet can't give me, though, is the way to describe that original feeling I had when I first received my Mecki on skis postcard, and stuck it in my album.

That strange enchantment, that is-ness of Mecki.

To find words for that feeling is a creative expression that comes from within. I think.

End of Mecki notes

(although I am destined to write further Notes about postcards. In fact I could write postcards about postcards.)

I am amazed. I never heard of these postcards before.

I'm looking at a website that has reproductions of what appear to be Russian versions.

So, Mecki, the well-travelled, versatile, strange, spooky little hedgehog. .

Ah postcards.

Of course, one of my favourite books is Martin Parr's Boring Postcards, a Phaidon publication. The UK version. Lots of postcards of 50s/60s/70s carparks, conference centres, motorway service stations, and even the motorways themselves. . Not boring at all, of course, each postcard being a wonderful historical document of the time.



I am hoping soon to acquire the follow-up publicaton, Boring Postcards USA, with a lot of pictures of motel rooms and things. Marvellous! Again, not boring at all!

Dear Journal,

I am inspired. This is worrying, especially to those who have to live with me. . I am inspired by the random rhythmic prose poetry which runs through my head, which I think is my ultimate expression. I call it poetry, of course I would not presume .. more like Notes, but prose-notes doesn't sound so good.



So what about this strange rhythmic prose that runs forever through my head? Sometimes the need to write it down is as intense as a fever on a hot night, as if each day was my last, part fact, part fiction, part memory, part contradiction, with all its scars and glory and flawed absurdity.

On and on it goes, with no particular route or reason, just the heartbeat mystery of moment, haunting me like a torn black and white postcard of some seaside resort that I can never quite identify, or the wingflutter whirr of a startled flock of starlings.

And last night I dreamed of a creamy white moth, which settled on my forehead just for moment, then disappeared into a twilight landscape of reedy marshes and silhouette pylons, leaving me with a poetic ache I love this ache!

End of endless prose poetry, for the moment (with intense exclamation mark, ah the ache!!!, tease me at your peril!!!!!! hah!!!! ) .wink wink.

No teasing. Ah, the snapshot of time.

Here are some US motel postcards for you:

http://www.motelpostcards.com/mp_gallery_01.htm

Now, this was the kind of motel I thought was most fun when I was a kid:

http://www.postcardy.com/images/motels/wigwam4b.jpg

The separate units, each shaped like a wigwam...

Wow. Bliss. Thanks!



Is that for real, the wigwam units? Or a fantasy motel? I love those wigwam units. If I had grown up in the States, I would be obsessed with those, also.

I love those motel postcards with an unbearable poetic ache.

A poetic ache!!!!!!

I am going to print them out, if I can, and put them in my ... erm .. postcard and photo album.

.

Well, I remember one in Tennessee. It wasn't as grand as that - fewer units - but each one was shaped like a wigwam. Inside there was air conditioning and a black-and-white TV.

There were others. I can't recall, but different, separate units, like tiny cabins, with weird outside structures and a theme. It was a fad.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote about these, too, in his novel 'Lolita'. (And you thought I read it for the sex, bah. There isn't any.)

There isn't any? Not even in the wigwam units?? .

Dear Journal,

Dmitri said , in that post back there. I love that. The snapshot of time. Strange thing, my Dad's book of war poems that he wrote from the front line, was called Snapshots.

I must come from a very snapshot type family. .

I love the thought of snapshots. Notes could become Snapshots. Snapshots make me happy.

I made a blue number, just for practice, and yet led on by a weird vocation. I confess to being happy about it. . I might add abstract arty snapshots, to this written snapshot.

Does a galleon ship lurch through a foaming ocean, or over a foaming ocean? These things matter, unless they don't. .

A87749806

Thank you. That spoke to my condition.

hey, and you know what? in the room where we stayed recently, since writing this, there on the wall was a lurid oil painting of ... galleon ships, no kidding. True, cross my heart. . I photographed them, but the focus went funny, and they sailed out of my camera and made a new life for themselves somewhere South West of Geography.



Now, I must write some incredibly pretentious, yet hopeful and holy word painted postcards, because my heart is wounded yet singing, and I have to communicate with the spiders, and the midnight riders, and the ghostly gliders, and anything else that rhymes with spiders. yes! yes! goodbye world.



Dear Dream Ghost,

Funny how when my soul is all aching with beauty and hurt, all I can do is write to you in rhythm, even though the words come out strange and re-arranged.

And I say to myself keep writing through the derangement of D minor blue stripes, running all riverlike and snaky through that park where we met once. Where was that park, and who are you? Are you a ghost of an angel-concept I long ago tried to bury? And yet we were there, I know we were, all shaky and luminous with nervous light.

And this is the rhythm, this is the heartbeat in-breath moment, a moment-painting that exists for no reason other than to heal its own ache, with a kiss of musical absurdity.

exit! no! no!

Dear Dream Ghost,

Lily Pons! Lily Pons! She is the opera ghost, that other ghost who isn't you, she is that voice I first heard, maybe I was seven, when the world was a peculiar place of strange enchantment, (still is), Yes Lily Pons, opera ghost, all crackle and static and sonic shivers.

(My older brother played Lily Pons records in the attic, 78s of course.)

Lily Pons? now I have computer, I can track down and cure all these childhood shivers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Pons

hullo lovely Lily.

exit! (for now) yes yes!