TO WHERE I AM NOW

It’s 2 AM and there’s a dog barking outside. It’s the same dog that always barks at night. I know its voice. It’s not so close, it’s somewhere there between the gardens, the backyards, the building sites and the row of buildings tapering off into the distance. It barks below the water tower and the famous EM apartment building, under the street lamps and below the trees. Our friend and record nerd Ricardo lives in the EM building and from his window he can see the Atlantic Ocean, glistening in the distance and spreading out, a vast expanse towards the horizon. One imagines Vasco da Gama sailing out towards the sun sinking into the sea, staring from the deck of his ship into an unknown future of adventure and discovery.

We never close the window at night, it’s Portugal and although it’s cooler at night in Porto, it’s not cold enough to want to have the windows closed when we go to bed and when you wake up late like we do, we are happy to have had the windows open for five or six hours of daylight. This afternoon a giant hornet flew in through the window, I had the fan going and it kept on being blown back towards where it came from. Finally, it began buzzing against the glass and although I suffer from spheksophobia, I approached it with some paper and guided it out of the open window. I watched it climb into the sky, a beast in flight. I have such a problem with stinging insects but not bees, bees don’t seem to be so aggressive or even as ugly, or even as cruel.

On the subject of insects, last night I was watching the latest BBC Dracula series which is really scary, really dark and brilliantly done but as I was watching the monster suck the blood out of the humans, I had a smaller monster buzzing around me and sucking the blood out of my arm and my leg. I looked down at my forearm and there was a huge bite. I can’t believe how invisible mosquitoes are. I think they have cloaking technology that they have picked up from the Klingons. I only heard it once and even then very faintly. I saw it once on the curtain but then it was gone as if it knew it had been seen.

I watched the Formula 1 qualifying today and there was a major accident with Lando Norris careering into the wall at high speed, his car spinning round and round in the rain. He walked away but it always seems odd to me that putting your life in danger to win a race is considered the work of brave gladiators, heroes risking their lives, thrilling themselves and the crowd, whereas any exploration into the mind can end you up in jail and have you condemned as a misfit.

I watched the Liverpool – Chelsea game (1-1), an obvious penalty for Liverpool, denying that it was a penalty would be like denying an election result, as if. I also think that anyone seen to be holding their face when nobody went anywhere near them should be made to walk through the streets of the city where the game was played, naked and wearing a jester’s hat, fined a week’s wages and be made to listen to Patrick Hernandez singing Born To Be Alive 50 times a day for a month…César Azpilicueta, take note.

Music today was the Space Summit – Listening Party where we all listened to the album twice and talked and played and discussed and thank you all for attending. The album will be released on CD on September 10th with limited blue vinyl from early next year, only 500 copies. We have one video released already for the first single I’m Electric and we have two more videos made for the second song Life This Way and the third Queen Elizabeth’s Keys. You will be able to see them exclusively on jammerzine.com very soon. We will let you know when they have their premiere.