A month of great change.

As predicted, the flat move went through finally, and I am very happy to be here. Other aspects of my life, in terms of moving (recent and potential) brought with them less good news, therefore the predicted career change looks more enticing than ever, especially given some of the experiences encountered through University-arranged talks and workshops: more of which later.

This month I had a great time at a christening, the first I had been invited to since such an event was predicted by the seaside seven. There I heard of the subjects’ mother’s recent visit to a medium, and what she had been told about the children… which came only a couple of days after a riveting story I heard about a young boy who sees ghosts. And, I discovered that where we now live was once a social club one of my best friends used to drink in before regularly scaring himself on the way home by staring at the building’s ‘ghost brick’. Perhaps it will turn out to be haunted though by characters from its time as a fire station, when the chief fire man shared the name of another of my best friends and my god son. All this being a flat where an old tutor, who once told me I reminded him of himself when he was younger, lives on the next street, I found out this month.

The warnings regarding ‘a bottle or glass’ were also painfully resonant this month when, after months of anticipation, I went to see one of my heroes (Morrissey) as part of my birthday present. As many of you will know, the concert lasted about five minutes before the singer sulked off stage after being hit by… a bottle or glass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tLUI7IGb38&NR=1

Once again, a birth and a death took place on the same day in November, though this time they affected a colleague, and the very creator of this site. And, as many of those ladies told me, I came into money unexpectedly this month, ok so they were a couple of months out, but there is not much  that I was initially told that is left to come true now.  This financial gain was also predicted by a horoscope in our now local paper, and a fortune cookie which said ‘if you had your life to live over again, you’d need more money’ the very day that one of the cheques arrived.

Plans to cross the water are continuing apace, and the year does seem to be “going out much brighter than it came in”. Coincidences, quirks of fate, are happening more frequently now – maybe I am looking out for them – but how else can you explain those above, or the time a couple of weeks back when I returned to the old place to cheekily check the mail box and arrive at exactly the same time a couple who looked remarkably like me and Lise, entered the building accompanied by an estate agent who said he was about to show them around my old flat?

However, perhaps the strangest coincidence this month was passed on to me by a course mate, who, during a visit to his friends, noticed a fortune cookie message pinned to her notice board.

“HELP! IM LOCKED IN A FORTUNE COOKIE FACTORY” said it.

Now, I have a decision to make. Clearly, Brigitta’s desperate pleas were bound to end up in other people’s post banquet entertainment, but I never expected such convergence at this stage.

Therefore, do I dismiss months of research and pondering? Accept that it was not my destiny to intercept her s.o.s.? Or at least, not just mine.

Or, do I investigate this event further, exploring the notion that this is all just another intricate layer of the elaborate game I am mixed up in?

You see, my lines of enquiry are already shifting, and this is where I need your help…

I spoke at the start of this post that I had been lucky enough to attend several fascinating glimpses of the worlds of curation and collaboration. One of these introduced me to the seminal article by Roland Barthes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes) which I will now (rather ludicrously) reduce to snippets of still-hard-to-read soundbites, but you get the idea:

“writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost… the explanation of the work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it… the author ‘confiding’ in us… the novel ends when the writing becomes possible… the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture… the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings… when the author has been found, the text is ‘explained’… but there is one place where this multiplicity focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author… the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

Subsequently, over the coming months I will be asking you to play a more active role in my narrative. The exact details are yet to be revealed, and many of you already play major roles in my life story so I don’t want you to feel that you have to intervene any more than you already do, by acting differently the natural order might be upset…

But in the mean time, please can you look out for any lookalikes of me that you think are particularly good. Celebrities, colleagues, anyone who might be mistaken for me – now, in the past or even the future. You can send me links or pictures, comment on the forum or email theartist@jonathangreenbank.com and your input would be greatly appreciated. Apparently, my godson thinks there’s an Uncle Jon lookalike living next door here – unless that was a ghost too.

http://www.123people.co.uk/ext/frm?ti=person%20finder&search_term=jonathan%20greenbank&search_country=GB&st=person%20finder&target_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.clubwebsite.co.uk%2Fglanconwyfc%2Fcommittee_members.pl%3Fpage%3Dprint&section=weblink&wrt_id=216

I will leave you with two horoscopes that I read on the last weekend of November. One  mentioned that “problems with education make for a stressful time” whilst the other said “we all have our negative moments, but they pass… fotunately, the stars are giving you a deeper insight and a sense of how something is shaping up.”

‘Til next time – Happy advent.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under I A Y T E W B OK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.