Saltation —
Intermittent Creative Twitchings

[Freezing rain driving against windows. Knock at door. Opens to reveal Sal in distress.]

"My god, Sal! You look terrible, you're pale, you're shaking, your hands are freezing, come inside before you catch something."

"Too late, I've contracted genitalia."

Can anyone assure me that "puce" as a colour has not been mis-spelled?

It's a rhythm, It's a dance, It's linguistical romance. Poetry should scarify the air.

There's a moment, There's emotion, Sometimes rarest observation. Poems can help a culture keep a thought.

It comes rollicking, It comes peacefully, More often turgid self-indulgently. Poets are the poem's weakest link.

How strange How strange it is That our every little daily scene Is to each of us alone Peculiar

egnarts woH si ti egnarts woH enecs yliad elttil yreve ruo tahT enola su fo hcae ot sI railuceP

The miracle of dirt and dust Mankind's softest rain New cities with hubristic lust Soar from its greyling plain

Spraddled fat, and wide, and low Forest life is old The eldar roots a-mossy grow Nature's dust is mould.

And everywhere in every niche Old things find their rest Dust's nature is both life and lich New things' growth is bless'd

Lightly goes fluttering
Squeaking and muttering
Bats




(1983- on learning what dactylic was and discovering how much I liked it, this appeared in my brain. It's intermittently run through my head ever since.)

"God is a BJ?"
"No, god is a DJ."
"Oh.
  ...
  Still..."
"Yeah, I see what you mean."

I've been umm-ing and ahh-ing and don't-think-so-ing for months now. Re how to eat so you're healthy and happy. And how to exercise so you're healthy and happy.
Where happiness includes: your body's impact on the opposite sex.

And I just hit a site that's decided me.

Lots of lovely sounding food.
But if you ate like that, you'd balloon.
Despite eating bugger all.
And you'd get pissed off, and unhappy, and howl at the moon, and rage against life, and storm the citadels, and stockpile arms, and invade the infidel-de-jour/de-culture, and so on and so forth.

And as I sit here, in the midst of my 4-6 thousand calorie a day diet, 5foot10, 64kg and 5-10% fat, happily bloated right now with 2 persons' food and secure in the knowledge that it won't "stick" -- I've decided.
I WILL write down how to get a non-fat body.
You may not lose weight.
The average ballet dancer weighs perhaps half again what the average women her height does. She's heavy. Believe it or not, they are heavy for their height. Muscle weighs a LOT more than fat.

But you will LOOK like you're thin, and you will EAT bloody happily.

And you will become happier. Not from what what you look like, but from what the extra nutrients in your diet let you realise.


And something to consider is that people pay less attention to weight than they do to health, and fitness, and strength. Natassjia Kinski's not thin, Demi Moore's not thin, etc. etc. etc.

Stay tuned. Yer ole uncle Sal will get you uber-gorgeous with the minimum effort, plus you'll also find life a lot less stressful.
Serious athletes should also pay attention. This is where I came in. You'll basically do the same but rack the proteins and some of the aminos a bit higher. Plus I'll throw in some tips to save your joints and build your capacity sooner rather than later.

Catching bees in our hands so they buzzed round like flies. Mistake once as I clap and she's caught where the heels meet: with the flare of the pain I slash open my hands, the sting pulsing in one and the bee on the grass, and the tears in my eyes as I realise I've killed her.

Never again.

And I've cried dry-eyed for all of my life. Yet wept wet for the innocent's loss of life-left.

It's not so much a Capturing, as a Sharing in your hand of a moment in your Eyes.

Women definitely get the best deal out of sex. Over and above the utterly unfair ability to have sex while unconscious, there's the whole usefulness-of-horniness aspect. A scenario, a bar:

"Hi, I want sex."
"Fuck off, loser."

Now let's try that again as a woman:

"Hi, I want sex."
"Oh BAYbay, you sexy THANG you."

Another thing. Naked.
Say I run around naked. What happens? I get locked up. Usually.
A woman runs around naked. What happens? Applause. And a lift home. Somewhere.
Naked woman leaps into the middle of 3 men. What happens? Foursome.
Naked man leaps into the middle of 3 women. What happens? As above. Only more so.
Man, a naked woman can travel ANYwhere for free. If I'd been a woman (I s'pose there's still time), I'd have backpacked across Europe on my back. Anything to declare? I'm wet for you. Miss, I'm 92. I don't care, if you can get it up, you can get it up here. Hooorrrrrrnnnnnnnn. As a male, all I've accumulated so far is a series of black eyes and blue balls. All the same horn and yet it ACTIVELY negatively precludes me from converting that to sexual exercise-- as the tension mounts (heh) the eyes revolve, the hands start to shake, and the saliva gets in the way of free conversation.

Life is so unfair.

I'm off to oppress a disadvantaged minority until I feel bitter, err better.

"Uhhhnnn. Ow-owwwww"
[nnnnnn]
"What's the matter?"
"My head's stuck."
"What?"
"My head's stuck on the top of my neck. It won't come off."
"Oh come off it."
"No, really."
"Here, give me a go."
[nnnnnn]
"Crap, that's really stuck on there, isn't it?"
"It's been like that all morning."

If you have not read the preceding post (probably below), please do so before you read this one.

This is worth taking 10 seconds to consider-- the average American super-company is at MORE risk of non-economic behaviour than is the average European super-company.

This is precisely the opposite of what it seems as one first approaches both markets.
It is also precisely the opposite of what is taught in both cultures' business schools.
It is also precisely the opposite of what initially makes sense.

However, the apparent non-separation of ownership/control and executive authority in European companies means that the actual daily duties are performed by people who must report to people who control their behaviour directly and daily without further procedural issues, delays, forms, or modalities. Large American (and most American-influenced countries') companies, however, have their step-change between ownership and executive authority, not executive authority and daily performance/line-contribution. This lets executive authority operate semi-autonomously, and creates the scope for a peer layer or peer culture to be created, in an oligopolistic fashion, BY those executive non-daily-performing/non-line-contributing managers.
To put it another way:
by mingling ownership and executive control, you actually --counter-intuitively!-- reduce the (self-)creation of a further "aristocracy" in the long term.
To put it another way:
as an Australian thrown in at the top end of both America's and the UK's corporate ladders at various times, I noticed the UK's was ludicrously more egalitarian than America's. America's corporates' top layers and their accessibility/potential candidates' social background more closely resembled France's than the UK's.

Very few people realise just how non-rational big business is. The larger the corporation, particularly in the USA, the more INSULATED its decision makers are from the market, not the more responsive or the more intelligent. Notice there I used the words "decision makers," rather than "owners" or "executive management" which are quite different concepts. The yankee corporations in particular are quite surreal. You have an insane stickiness on Memes (contrasted with the European's Tradition or the Academics' and Employees' and Citizens' (Economic) Goal) and Orwell's groupthink takes on literally hysterical reality.

I have unusual experience here. But it's unusual only in the sense of how I arrived there and how suddenly I arrived there, without being one of the strivers. Every single other major American growth company I've come in contact with, has... been... identical. Read the various insider story books arising from workers inside Sun, GE, Apple, IBM, etc. They will all match the essence of what you will read here.

With one key difference.
Those books were written either by people who'd fought their way up from the inside, or by journalists who'd interviewed a lot of people, but never actually walked in their shoes.

I spent 3 years within 2 reports of the CEO/President of a Fortune 500, a several trillion dollar software firm, as managing director of an independent global business unit.
Any political animals reading this, currently licking their way up the corporate ladder, will be sitting bolt-upright about now, with their mouths wide open, their eyes all agog, and their parasitic antennae all a-bristle. To get within 4 or 5 reports within that time would be brilliant. To start there....?

It was a freak accident, and a freak time, and only a very few of the people I worked with knew a fraction of what was going on or at what level we were participating as a group. Initially because neither did I; latterly because a simple brain-dump would have so demoralised our small team as to have destroyed the group and because I didn't have the time nor (more accurately) the energy to bring them up to speed non-destructively.

At the very top level of these companies --and there is more communication between these companies' "senior" management than there is between each's management and either their clients or their market-- the HysteriaStrategy-du-Jour mentality was so irrational --literally irrational in the sense of being absolutely schizophrenically decoupled from what was observable day-to-day in the marketplace which people (for example: us and our clients and our competitors and the stock market analysts) assumed we were competing in/against-- that it took most people years to get even an inkling of what was actually going on.

In a way, I was lucky.
At least: extraordinarily unusual.

I had my nose rubbed in it.
Without having had the years of grubbing towards it immuring my sense of smell.

Remember the old 60s "fables" about people working within the system to overthrow it for so long that by the time they were in a position to do so, they'd become part of the system? "Heyy, he's sold out, man."
Happens in every aspect of life.
"He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself" -- Nietzsche

Due to a couple of historical accidents, I found myself, suddenly and without looking for it, on the inside of groups you normally could only get into via pure luck (oh, wait...) or brown-nosing at the right Ivy League "schools".

The hebephrenia was surreal, the surreality was insane, the insanity was terrifying.

What follows is an anonymised email volley sent between me and someone else who was on the inside of the inner circle but insulated, uninvolved, a drily amused outsider. The time lags are down to the time of year and the bizarro load we were under.
If none of the phrases "who moved my cheese," "get on the bus," or "fish!" means anything to you, then (a) you are a lucky swine, and (b) the following will be no more than silly.
For anyone who's brushed the CEO-class in America and came away either bewildered or troubled, this will start your thinking in the right direction.
For anyone who's been in my position of genuinely being able to, and trying to, achieve something Real in these circumstances, with both clients depending on you and friends depending on you, and with the knowledge of entire untapped markets briefly transiently temporarily there for the taking: my deepest sympathies.

Like so much humour, this is no more than a re-contexted condensation of many many discussions.

For those who recognise me from the above or the below, I ask that you respect my anonymity. From exposure: you can gain nothing, the company can gain nothing, and I can gain nothing. And in fact, we all stand to lose. The culprit is human nature, which when written large within a country's context becomes the corporate culture.
We CAN all gain if the lessons made ludicrous by the below, creep into regulation, and into the international business schools. And in this sense, the "all" is not just the corporations and their employees, I mean all society. Sounds like a wank. Think about it for a second. It's not. Society as a whole reaps all rewards, pays all costs.

Overflown sentiments; please just read the below in its original spirit of drained optimism turned to barely-credulous bitterness.


>----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
From   :       Eamonn Anous
To     :       I'm Just Watching

Subject:       god
Date   :       19th


i hate the corporate mindset
react, don't act, and for gods sake never NEVER NEVER think ahead about what you need to do NOW to get where you want to be in future



>----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
From   :       I'm Just Watching
To     :       Eamonn Anous

Subject:       Re: god
Date   :       3rd

Are you feeling better now:o)?



>----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
From   :       Eamonn Anous
To     :       I'm Just Watching

Subject:       Re: Re: god
Date   :       9th

no, they're still being daft, panicking after the event instead of ensuring the event didn't happen.

transcript:

Saltation:

"Corner coming up, better turn the steering wheel."

YankCorp:

"No, no, you don't understand, that will require effort. Besides, I don't see how you can say there's a corner, you can't know that."

S:

"A corner is a large bend in the road. Look out through the windscreen."

C:

"Our car has the best glovebox. The Market just doesn't respect gloveboxes enough, we need to change what the Market finds important in a car, how do we do this?"

S:

"We're nearly out of time, turn the wheel now."

C:

"Gosh, isn't there a lot of dust on the dashboard."

S:

"Corner!!"

C:

"We have lots of gasoline, that's a good thing."

S:

"Corner!!!!"

C:

"I wish you'd stop shouting, you're getting monotonous and it's obvious you just want to drive the car -- you can't, it's mine."

S:

"CORNERRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

C:

"Yes, yes, Sal, calm down, there's a good lad."
[crunch of car going thru fence and sailing off the cliff into empty space over the rolling waves below]

C:

"AAAARRRRGGGGGHGHHHHHH!!!!!!! We need to take emergency action!!!!"
[furious wrenching of steering wheel, braking, gear changing, etc.]

S:

"Well, we can't have much input into it now, we needed to do something while we still had tyres on the road. Or a road for that matter. You get a really nice view of the ocean from up here, don't you?"

C:

[steer, brake, scream, clutch, gearchange] "For christ's sake, Sal!! Stop looking out the window and contribute something!!"

S:

"We're a bit past the point of being able to have any effect on the outcome now, mate. Hey look at the surf crashing on the rocks."

C:

[steer, brake, scream, clutch, gearchange] "Are you insane?! More effort Sal! NOW is the time we need to ACT!! We need RESULTS dammit, and I want to see 110% EFFORT from you."

S:

"Good-oh. I'll show you about the only option we're left with at this point."
[opens door, spots gap in rocks, jumps]

Click thru for better image.

Click thru for the full picture.

I love the luxury of the post-workout steam. Stretch and warm-down, then change into the redoubtable DTs and splatsplat my slippery way past the pool and into the welcoming stinging enveloping fog. Then once the sweat's started good & proper, hop up and into the sauna for some chill-out scorch. And as the body melts and the soul unfolds, a girl walks in and parks her bathing suit bod on the bench next to mine. Saunas are such a great way to meet girls.
"Hi. What's your name?"
"Get away from me, loon."
"My name's Sal. Do you come here often?"
"I'll call the police."
"Haven't we met somewhere before?" I press 'Play' and Barry White's rolling honey rumble fills our dark wooden world, only slightly marred by occasional spits and sparks as the outraged little Walkman indignantly expresses its dislike of steam.
"Five"
"What are you doing afterwards?"
"Four"

Things went sharply downhill shortly after that, but all's well that ends well, and I could even be allowed back in the gym sometime later this month.

This afternoon I walked down to the river and spent some happy time in Borough Market, then strolled around a bit.

A text message from my Italian flatmate, A~, forced by her parents to move out and move in with her boyfriend:

Hi S..I just read your text now [from 2 days ago], my phone is..Shi..T..Dont worry im fine..I just tried to get my life back but is so difficult!See u soon.A~ bit depressed.

And I sent:

Hi A~. Don't be depressed, walk outside and look up. The sun is out and the world looks like a postcard. Get comfortable.

Snapshots as I strolled around the market. Just moments that I liked where I could/would spare the effort to pull the little camera out:
Click into each pic for the details and the colours.

You missed a bit:


G'day. I'm made of wood, you know:


Time to throw out those trainers:

I am starting to salivate each time I see this. Such glorious food. Exploding from its ground, happy effusive bubbling froth, just as we want it to explode in our mouths.

Above: