Kevin’s corner of the internet

I decided to restart my blog with a fresh install and a new directory path on my website.

I will try and keep this blog updated at least once a week with my thoughts.

Otherwise you will find me on cultureforall (see links panel).

Walking down twisted lanes of memories that have a magnetic pull on you.
Smells flood your senses, reality shimmers in front of you.
And there you are seeing one of the twisted lanes of memory before you.
Every detail is clear in your mind, from the time of day to the weather.
Caught up in a moment from the past. Feeling all the old hurts and emotions.
Being in a place you thought you’d forget.
But as always the twisting paths and lanes of memories hold those moments, distilled in time.
Waiting for something to trigger that memory and for it to pour it
You face things you do not wish to.
And then as soon as it has begun, the memory starts to fade and the reality slowly starts to focus. Sometimes you may find yourself in bed or just about to walk out in front of a bus.
But the trace of the memory is there for days on end. You become caught up in the past. But then like all memories it goes back into it’s bottle along with all the other memories.
And you once again set out on those difficult lanes of memory, that twist and turn before you. Unsure you take a few steps in what you hope is the right direction. Always the shadow follows hoping to snare you with memories.
Kevin Paul Taphouse.

You walk down a lane, the sun is shining. The people are happy. The birds are singing.
Then the storm clouds come. People dive for cover.
The birds scatter into the trees. Which start to creak in the wind, which is building up.
The first tiny drops of rain patter down, then come in volleys. Like arrows on a battlefield.
The trees are bending in the wind, becoming sinister with each creaky movement.
Then you are alone, surrounded by the music of the wind and rain.
Lost to the modern world. And you see before you a windy lane of such force you want to run and hide from it.
Then as soon as the storm has come it is gone.
The sun comes out and all those feelings go away.
And light fills the lane, and at that point life seems worth living. At least until the next storm hits you on the lane that is life.

If you were to ask me the question “what is you’re state of mind, Kevin”, I’d probably say a lot of gibberish about my latest toy or obsessions.
When in fact that is just one of the shield’s I use to hide myself away from people.
It’s irritating for some people. It is second nature for me to do this.
Not any longer though. I’ve been thinking long and hard about my future and I came to the obvious conclusion that I don’t have a future.
In the sense that I’m doing nothing of any worth. Ok I may occasionally listen to friends problems and try and help the best I can.
But I’ve wasted my life so far, on stupid obsessions and reasons for not getting anything done.
Oh I can wax lyrical about radiohead and doctor who, but it is a façade of my real state of mind.
It is one of confusion, highs and lows, strong urges to do something worthwhile.
So what is my state of mind right now ?
To be honest it is one of confusion over my problems, but it has a determined edge to it, one which wants to push all those confusions out of the way, so I can grab hold of my life.
Otherwise I will stand still, while other people move on, and will most likely die alone, with nothing to show for my time on this tiny little rock.
To change that I have to become brave and face the world, from which I’ve been hiding from for so long. Meeting Racquel was a turning point in how I’ve been thinking lately. Debating which subject to study (history or psychology), she helped me realise that I need to stop debating and go for psychology.
So instead of typing empty words, I will have to prove to myself that I am a worthwhile human being and that I do not need to hide behind the mask of my obsessions and fears.
If ignore this conclusion then I risk falling into the very life I’m most afraid of. Separated from others and dying alone. When I say I don’t fear death, I mean I don’t fear what comes after death. I fear dying alone and always have done.
But I have my life ahead of me to prevent that fear from becoming a reality.
By dying alone I mean having no family or friends around to see me till that moment when we part from those loved ones and go on a journey into the unknown.

I do realise I have what some people could call a morbid fascination with death.
Not because I have some great death wish (maybe at one point in the past I did), but I’ve have been around it for a number of years. Since early childhood in fact.
Is death normal? How do you deal with death?
The questions are endless. But if you think too often about death, you sometimes find life to be a nightmare in many different ways. I suppose it depends upon each person.
I do talk about death in an open manner. Some people probably find the entire subject as a taboo. Perhaps because they do not want to think about their own death.
Or because it’s not a subject to talk about in polite circles of conversation.
That’s probably a British thing going on there.
So I shall now describe in some detail my experiences with death of loved ones.
So I had a cousin called Sharon, who was the life and soul of a party. Very much that cool relative we all seem to have. I have faint recollections of Sharon. From her perm to her outright joy of life. She was around 20 years old when she died.

On the verge of getting married and having her life ahead of her. However one night for whatever reason, she was travelling in her boyfriend’s car and she didn’t wear a seat belt. The Boyfriend from what I learned was perhaps a little too tired to be driving, and lost control of the car (if a tyre blew out I don’t know). Sharon ended up going through the windscreen and maybe hit a tree. I’ve asked my dad for the details but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Though I shall probably come to my dad’s views or lack of them a bit later. She was in coma for a few days, and died. My crazy Grandmother didn’t like it because she couldn’t see Sharon, due to a host of reasons I really don’t need to go into. Because what I know is extremely sketchy at best.
Suffice to say any pictures of Sharon were destroyed by my grandmother. Who has no capacity to deal with death in any shape or form? Indeed she believes her dead mother speaks to her sometimes (though I think it’s old age and years of being wrapped in cotton wool i.e. she’s gets away with her temper tantrums for the most part).
All I remember is that I saw Sharon a few weeks before she died and then I was told that she had died. My other grandmother was cool about it all. She looked after us while my parents went to Sharon’s funeral. She may have imparted some of her pearls of wisdom, but I really don’t remember. I have a block on most of my childhood memories. I can remember snap shots of my childhood in full Technicolor on occasions.
So I guess from that point on my innocence if I had any was shattered. An Uncle also died around the same period in the 80’s, he was 34 and full of life. Though he was not the first child my cool Grandmother had lost (one child died from cot death).

She was a good person, with her flaws. A posh telephone voice, a penchant for scrubbing people clean if she thought they weren’t clean enough and her love of swearing and then telling us not to say those words it’s rude with one of her classic stern looks (she reduced many people to tears in the village, from what I remember).
So we fast forward to 1992, I’m a quiet child though extremely inquisitive with a good thirst for learning. Over the course of the past year my grandmother had been getting steadily worse. She told my mum at one point she had cancer, then changed her mind about it.
In any case I saw her a few days before she died. She looked terrible, ducking into the bathroom every now and then. And you’d hear her coughing quite violently. She was of course bleeding from a clot in the lung. It was eerie saying goodbye to her, she looked a bit sad when she said goodbye. I think she probably knew her time was nearly up. But being the tough woman that she was, she got on with life. Partly to protect some of her children and us grandchildren. And also to protect my granddad from the truth of the dilatation. He may have been a violent git towards her in the past, but I guess he loved her in his own way.
So there I was walking home from school, about to go into a department store to play on an NES, when my dad popped up from out of a phone box and told me in no uncertain terms to go home without arguments.
I arrive home, my mum is in a flood of tears. I can’t remember who told me she died, it might have been my dad or my mum. But my world was thrown off course right there.
I don’t blame that moment in time on my mental health problems entirely a lot of other things contributed to it.
So we get into the car and go back to the village. It was quite surreal at my grandmother’s cottage. Even though she was died, there were still signs of her presence. I even sat on the sofa on which she died. I was numb with shock; I really couldn’t grasp the reality that the grandparent that I adored the most was gone. That I would never speak to her again or have one of her extremely unhealthy birthday cakes (they were usually covered in butter cream).
My dad as usual took it in his stride, helped where he could. My Grandmother and dad got on pretty well over the years. As did my Uncle John, who with my cousin David found her dead on the sofa. She’d apparently called the emergency services but died while having one last cigarette. So very typical of her. She made me promise her about year before her death that I wouldn’t smoke. And I have kept that promise to this day. It is the reason for my rabid desire to ban smoking entirely. I don’t give a flying shit about smokers saying they can smoke if they want to. To me Smoking is one of the worst habits mankind has ever taken up.
But I digress onto the funeral. My mum went in the cars that followed the coffin. Most people in the village watched the funeral possession go by from what I can remember.
The Church in the next village was packed out. I was just so alone that day. Everyone else was crying, but in my disbelief I just couldn’t cry. It is for that reason I hardly ever cry.
It takes a great emotional event for me to leak tears.
It’s not because I don’t feel emotions (in fact my emotions rage under a mask of coldness). It’s just that I cannot express them all that well.
A cousin had a go at me for not crying. I just stood there looking at the coffin, trying to take in the reality. We then went to the graveyard back in my grandmothers village (Oxford Uni brought the church after it closed, they store books there). I threw dirt onto her coffin, and then the wake which I barely remember. And weeks turned into months which turned into years.
I just couldn’t deal with it. Not even now, 10 years or so on from that day.
I think I shall leave things there for now, and write a bit more about this subject. I feel quite emotional right now. Memories are flooding into my mind.

I’ve been wondering about that gleam of triumph for quite sometime.
First of all lets consider what Harry’s blood contains, traces of his mother’s sacrifice, which protected Harry from Voldemort’s killing curse and which made it backfire on the Dark Lord.
I have read many different theories over the years on the various Harry Potter fan sites and editorials on mugglenet, some of which went along the lines of Dumbledore being evil.

Now armed with the knowledge of the prophecy and what the power the dark lord knows not, I have formulated a rather bizarre cheese cauldron worthy theory, in which Dumbledore is not evil, but in which the gleam of triumph was yet another piece to the puzzle of how Harry may cause Voldemort’s final downfall.

We learn from Dumbledore in the Horcruxes chapter of the half blood prince, many interesting facts about Harry. That he is just as pure of heart as he was when he was 11 and looked into the mirror of erised and saw not immortality and riches, but the only way to thwart Lord Voldemort.
Canon evidence quote 1:
‘You are protected, in short, by your ability to love. Said
Dumbledore loudly. ‘The only protection that can possibly
work against the lure of power like Voldemorts! In spite of all
the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you
remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of
eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your
heart’s desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord
Voldemort, and not immortality and riches. Harry, have you
any idea how few wizards could have seen what you saw in
that mirror? Voldemort should have known then what he was
dealing with, but he did not!’
Pages 477-478, chapter 23, the half blood prince, UK edition

Dumbledore goes on to say that because Harry’s soul is untarnished and whole it has incomparable power over what is left of Lord Voldemort’s mutilated soul.
Canon evidence quote 2:
‘But he knows it now. You have flitted into Lord Voldemort’s
mind without damage to yourself, but he cannot possess
you without enduring mortal agony, as he discovered in the
Ministry. I do not think he understands why, Harry, but he
was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused
to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is
untarnished and whole.’
page 478, chapter 23, The half blood prince, UK edition

We also learn that Harry’s power over Voldemort is just love (see quote 1). Perhaps one of the uniquely deadly weapons Voldemort handed Harry when the curse backfired.

Now if we take a look at Harry’s soul and his power to love where can it lead us?
Back to the end of the order of the phoenix and Voldemort’s failed possession attempt on Harry.
Canon evidence quote 3:
‘If death is nothing, Dumbledore, kill the boy…’
Let the pain stop, thought Harry … let him kill us … end it,
Dumbledore … death is nothing compared to this …
And I’ll see Sirius again …
And as Harry’s heart filled with emotion, the creature’s coils
loosened, the pain was gone;
Page 720, chapter 36, The Order of the phoenix - UK edition

We learn from Dumbledore in the lost prophecy chapter that Harry was saved from possession not because he could not close his mind, but because he opened up his heart about Sirius Black.
canon evidence quote 4:
‘In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.’
Page 743, Chapter 37, Order of the Phoenix - UK edition

Fast forward to the Horcruxes chapter in the half blood prince and we learn from Dumbledore that Voldemort cannot possess Harry without enduring mortal agony, whereas Harry can flit in and out of Voldemort’s mind with little damage to himself.
The question i ask myself is why does Voldemort feel this mortal agony and Harry is undamaged?
Part of the answer is that Harry’s soul has incomparable power over what is left of Voldemort’s soul which is beyond repair, so perhaps that causes Voldemort’s soul to weaken.

The other part of the answer i think is to do with Harry’s ability to love.
Voldemort does not understand love and he could not touch Harry at the end of the first book, because he was protected by his mother’s sacrifice which was borne out of love for Harry.
This is the blood that Voldemort used to regenerate his body and come back from whatever he was after his first fall from power. He is able to touch Harry without feeling any pain. But now i think when Voldemort possessed Harry at the end of the order of the phoenix, his assumption that using Harry’s blood would make him invincible is in reality yet another one of Voldemort’s miscalculations.
When Harry opened up his heart about Sirius i believe that not only did Harry’s soul cause Voldemort to feel mortal agony, the blood he shares with Harry, was influenced by that surge of love Harry had. Which activated the latent protection Lilly Potter provided to protect Harry from Voldemort.
So in essence Harry can influence the blood that is circulating in Voldemort’s body to an extent that could possibly kill Lord Voldemort.

So the gleam of triumph might have been Dumbledore seeing another piece of the puzzle of how to finish Lord Voldemort off falling into place. Nothing sinister, just another weapon in Harry’s deadly arsenal of talents and gifts that will help him bring about Voldemort’s final downfall.

Now this method of loving Voldemort to death would only work under a few conditions:
1. Voldemort’s Horcruxes would first have to be destroyed
2. Harry would have to allow himself to be possessed by Voldemort or force his way into Voldemort’s mind.
3. Harry would have to hold Harry in this deadly embrace until one of them dies.

As to the question of Harry being a horcrux, i think this theory would most likely still work. In essence Harry would have to use his connection via the scar to enter Voldemort’s mind, and then with his ability to love kill the last two remaining pieces of Voldemort’s soul. Without killing himself in the process. But it could work.
However i did say this is probably a cheese cauldron worthy theory.
I’m probably not even barking up the right tree. But it all seems to fit into the grand scheme of things in relations to Dumbledore’s Gleam of triumph being the hinge on which the series is balanced on.

One of those rare bands you often stumble across entirely by accident.
So I go all the way back to 2002 and remember discovering this girl called Mary on ateaseweb.com (radiohead fansite). We talked a few times, I heard some of her bedroom demos and I liked them.
Now I lost touch with Mary due to a range of factors, mainly because I’m absent minded.
So we fast forward to around the end of 2004 and I remember Mary, take a spin over to littlerowboat and then discover boxfive’s website.
I thought to myself, might as well give them a listen (remembering Mary’s vocals from 2002 or so, they did catch my ears at the time). So I download some of the demo’s like media darling, I got hooked from that moment.
Boxfive then release Exercises in modern pop. Which was the best non commercialised EP I’d heard in quite some time (even the artwork was a bit different).
Now I thought Mary did lack some experience in song writing and arrangements back last year. But she has shown a marked improvement. Songs like Exanimi show a new maturity in Mary’s vocals and her song writing ability, though she has changed the lyrics for exanimi due to reasons only known to Mary.
Then the tin angel live mp3’s were released and they really hit that certain part of my brain that is affected by music. Doctrines actually brought me close to tears (I hardly ever cry, for my own stupid reasons), it was nicely arranged and Mary’s vocals were spot on (like they were on exanimi).
What next for Box Five (which is Mary and a band of like minded musicians that swap and change depending on what Mary needs or wants) ?
Fen is the answer. I’ve heard most of the new songs and they are a good progression from exercises in modern pop. Mary goes over the 5 minute barrier for the first time, and still manages to hold your attention with that style I cannot as yet define properly. If Mary can keep progressing at the rate she’s going she will get extremely good indeed, not that she isn’t good already.

Mary has come along way since those bedroom demo’s i’d heard all those years ago. She’s matured as a song writer and a performer. She is now starting to get into her stride. Lucky for me that Mary gave me the link for Aqua Toffana, before she yanked it off her site (it clashes with another groups EP release, the writing birds which she appears on in as a backing singer). She is probably going to release it on april 6th. Mary’s vocals are spine chilling on Doctrines, Aqua Toffana itself is a pretty neat song about Mozart i think. Ceasefire is a lovely 5 minute piano based song (hey i used the same description for a radiohead song last year). I can barely remember what Mary said last night due to hearing her new material.

Here is the lovely Mary in one of the pictures she had taken for Aqua Toffana:

She has yet to get a record deal, as she wants to make it on her own terms. Not entering something like Pop idol and then be restricted by a big record label that wants generic pop music.

How do they relate to a person’s personal truths?

fact
noun 1 a thing that is indisputably the case. 2 (facts) information used as evidence or as part of a report.
— PHRASES before (or after) the fact Law before (or after) the committing of a crime. a fact of life something that must be accepted, even if unpalatable. the facts of life information about sexual matters. in (point of) fact in reality.
— ORIGIN originally meaning an act, later a crime: from Latin factum, from facere ‘do’.
www.askoxford.com

Can you relate the facts about a person with the persons own personal truths?
By personal truths I mean, what lies beneath the veneer of the mask most people wear.

I have a background in dealing with scientific fact. You must experiment to prove a theory, once that has been accomplished then it passes into fact after peer reviews.

But where people are concerned, that approach is perhaps not the right one.

Take me for example, the following facts that I like to spread around:

Has no ability to feel emotions of any kind
Never cries
Has no sense of empathy towards people he seemingly hates.
Likes being alone

Personal truths:

Emotions rage behind the mask of fact 24/7.
I cry when nobody is looking, and more often than people would think.
I push people into taking positive action if possible. It does not always work. I understand that I can be a bit of a bastard sometimes and that alienates people.
I do sometimes like being alone, but I see people walking around Oxford laughing and joking and feeling like I am an alien visiting an alien world. Of which I cannot speak the language.

Those are a few simple facts and personal truths.

I may sound arrogant or insecure with those statements. Perhaps a mixture of the two.

So do the facts define a person or the personal truths blur the lines of definition.
Personally I think not. Facts are the human need to sound like you know better.
It is the personal truth of a person that are the real facts. The secret desires we all have and sometimes share.

So to understand a person you must first disregard the facts in so much that:

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” ~Nietzsche

It is the interpretation of the so called facts that can often lead one to finding the personal truths of a friend or indeed yourself.

We live in a world where we are bombarded with images of how you should look and behave. So the personal truth’s become blurred and even forgotten.
This leads to problems in understanding yourself and others.

This is however as far as I can venture on this subject.

The truth is often worse than the lies people use to hide the truth.

This is me swanking off to hide my personal truths.

Kevin Paul Taphouse.

How many thoughts can my mind contain before it cracks?

The simple answer would be that not much can tip the balance between my sanity and going a bit mental. Even the smallest little piece of information will kick start a flashback to a memory I have long pressed to suppress into oblivion.
But if I could erase my memory I would lose my rationality of learning from my experiences.
That which does not kill you, can only make you stronger as the phrase goes.

Now let’s take my fierce need/desire/compulsion to consume information of all sorts.
I find comfort in reading books, fiction or non fiction.
My mind can usually connect the dots between different pieces of information. I can almost taste the information if you will. But then something will throw a spanner into the works and my mind will start to crack. My carefully built barriers to keep my inner demons in check start to crumble.

And then the madness takes over. Flashbacks to certain memories flood into my mind.
Then the dark shadow that lurks in my mind starts to take bites at my self esteem.
Depression the paradoxical beast in my nature.

I don’t think I’d be as intelligent as I appear to be, without it.
But the price to be paid is a high one. Some days I just wish I never had to go through the pain of depression. It is somewhat elusive to explain to people who haven’t suffered from depression or the very worst kind which I and countless other people suffer from. Who have a much better grip on the problem?

Thoughts feed into my emotions and vice versa. I take great pride in the fact I am in touch with my emotions most of the time. It’s just that when my barriers break down, I lose my carefully controlled balance over thought and emotion. Both are linked, but need to be balanced, to maintain some form of harmony.

At the moment I have hundreds of thoughts running through my head. So many in fact I think those carefully crafted barriers are breaking down once again.

So enter chaos my greatest enemy. There are no external enemies in reality.
My perception of the world is reality. Which I process using my brain.
Therefore the enemies reside inside the mind. Chipping away at the person who wants to break free from the bonds that have been placed upon him. That person is the light that always manages to gain some control only to be between back down again.

I am not my depression; I can see the light even during the worst periods of my life. Even when I have contemplated suicide a voice stirs inside me and says “Take control of the thoughts, you control them, not the other way around”.

But I am very weary of the battle that I have fought over the last decade. But not ready to throw the towel in just yet. As long as I see that light that is me, then I won’t give up.
I shall keep on picking myself up. Even if I don’t get better, than I will be damned if I’m going to take the cowards way out. I shall fight the hold the thoughts have on me, until the day I breathe my last.
Perhaps death will bring peace or perhaps it is a state of being unaware of what you once were.
But that is a day a long way off, I hope.

I lost the train of my thoughts, but that is what happens when you have the amount of thoughts running through my head.