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Again, the wheel stops. There is no input, mental or otherwise. Although you are surrounded with information, buoyed by various drugs, diverting yourself with strange inner life, it suddenly seems the same message, the one you have heard so many times and know is useless in the end. The high is now a kind of low. Next week I will be back at work. On the weekend I fly to Amsterdam. In May I am likely to work on the election. In the summer I am likely to work at WOMAD.
An entire two years without Glastonbury. 544 days and counting. What a desolation.
Next year I will be 40. A 40-year-old gimp. At least I survived this far - I can't gripe. Life has been easy. Low points?
Leaving my Dad when I was a kid. Three years in a shit school being bullied and arguments at home.
Then another four years at a shit drama school in London which ended in expulsion.
Seeing my Father for the last time on the bridge by the station looking ill and bumming a cigarette off of me and dying some weeks later from another heart attack. My Mum told me tearfully in the kitchen as we entertained guests.
"So what?" I said.
I never knew about the first heart attack - or did I? I had used it as an inspired, improvised excuse to take a day off from the library. My colleagues expressed their regret. Within two weeks it really happened.
Then the anger at the funeral.
Then Royal Holloway and failure. Sweating with tension and nerves. Taking the ticket. Opening up. Being kicked out after six months and hanging on desperately to this other life without, it seemed, love or tenderness, or understanding and sympathy.
Maybe I was just a cunt and deserved what I got.
Then the madness and the fear. The shattering sense of mental invasion. All the usual fun and games.
And 20 years of drudge jobs and living in one room. 20 years of never knowing what it was to be with someone. 20 years of being a wanker.
It could be worse - truly. There have been high points too; storms and shrooms, camaraderie, soul mates, sleep, soaring highs, laughter, praise, books, music, movies, even television. Cornwall in '96. Glastonbury. Royal Holloway again - the flip side with summer days and nights and Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell and The Happy Man. It's enough, as they say, to be getting on with. Maybe one day I'll fall in love and not understand how I endured this - but as this is all I know I cannot gauge how much I have lost - though that's a problem too, I guess.
Plans for the rest of the week? I fly to 'Dam on Saturday. Tonight I wish for snow. Tomorrow I wish for good light. My SLR is fixed, I think, and I'll take it for a spin in the morning. Maybe I'll write again.
I feel shattered now, in the worst way. There is an empty hole - a vague sense of discomfort and not much hope. I'll see no stars tonight, despite finding that face again, which was lost to me.
I wish you well lady. I hope you don't mind. I am pleased to know you exist and that you have been let loose on the world. I'll never have you for sure - even in my mind (you are too strong for that), but I am so far from you I can stand the pain - though seeing you again in this way has shaken me up and shattered the Billy Liar life. The wheel stops, as I say, and the facile dreams turn to dust. Welcome back to reality. What do you make of it?
Boxing day. 2005. The day Google spews up the albums. George Jesus - there she is in all her glory. My God, what a face. Look how strong she is. Even a bikini shot to boot. Sick bastard that I am, I added a folder of everything I could find to my scummy Windows desktop. There were many of them.
The Ultimate Bird.
I am alone this Christmas for the first time. Yesterday was fine though. One of my Cousins picked me up and drove me to my Aunts, who had laid on dinner for ten. I limbered up on frothy lager and hit the wine and port. The meal was excellent and everyone was on fine form. It was good seeing Nan again. She was intelligent and charming. I especially liked the way she modestly apologised with a wry smile when she took her teeth out to eat. It was good chow, as I say; turkey, beef, stuffing, roast potatos, roasted vegetables, parsnips, Brussel Sprouts, Yorkshire Puddings and Christmas Pudding with cream. Cheese to round it off. Four generations and no arguments. The women running the show as usual. Especially the conversation.
Then a lift home and rest.
The last post was a bad one. No doubt about it. I was grinding the gears. I realise that, for me, to achieve here, to create something, I must order my life and also live. It's true, that while many people are bastards there is again great hope and feeling. A woman with cancer tending to her children and expressing love for them. A young girl who lost both parents to drugs wishing peace for her lost mother. Love letters and women who adore their partners. Beautiful writing that throws me a curve. The moon looks down on us with our own face and there is time yet. Spiritual beings on a human journey. That's right. Much has gone wrong but we are strong.
Silence. For a moment I felt like an old man - sitting here - and the sight of Roald Dahl came to mind - writing, as he did, with pen and ink in a comfortable chair. He was banged up badly during the war and was in pain thereafter. Just the old man and the pen in his hand and perhaps a blanket over his legs.
Sorry, losing the plot again. Keep it short and sweet. I'll be back when I have something to say.
"Riding the subways of New York, I see the new generation which has sprung up during my absence, the young who have come to manhood and are already reproducing their own kind. I look at them as I would at so many guinea pigs. Still performing the same old tricks. In their faces is written - hopelessness. They were doomed from birth. Sad to reflect, the better the conditions the worse their lot. One may teach them how to breed bigger, healthier looking youngsters, but they and their progeny are marked as sacrificial pawns in a meaningless experiment. From generation to generation it will continue, until one lone creature escapes the hands of the vivisectionist and starts a world of his own. It will take a very, very cunning creature to make the escape. The chances are a thousand to one against it. The chances are that the guinea pigs and their vivisectionists will be wiped out long before. The chances are that some strange, unheard of creature, some forgotten homo naturalis, will take over. One, let us say, for whom all our progress and invention mean absolutely nothing. One who will make his abode in trees or caves - and cultivate such a fucking lazy streak that maybe he will be swallowed up in his own shit.
Bravo! I say, speaking strictly for myself. Let him prove to be the filthiest bastard that ever stalked this continent, not a murmur from me!"
Henry Miller - The World of Sex
I was watching Robert Winston on television last night. It seems that 45% of
Americans profess to believe in Creationism. This makes America the most dangerous
and psychotic country on the planet, considering the associated factors.
Country, that is. Or is it? Just another conglomeration now. Another mass of souls and bodies organised in singular systems of politics, economics, law, religion, media and ideology. Not so much ideology these days. We are fragmented, including The Movement. "The Balkanisation of epistemology," as McKenna said. There is no consensus. Most of the sane people are in a trance. The wheel trance of money and sex. Me to. We care not for these religious nutters. They are usually far away and we will never deal with them. Good news. Maybe we can take them down in oblique ways. Maybe they will fuck off. Maybe I'll just go to sleep.
There's that old thing about the best idea prevailing. Wow. What would qualify? The most expedient idea for the majority - including sleep, delusion and ignorance?
Is it the message then - as itself? Yes, obviously - even though I am numb to it.
Into the moonlight...
That's right. We all fly away into the ether.
Only 18:03. I had a day off work today. An engineer came round to look at the washing machine. It seems it wasn't rinsing because I had it switched on to 'Rinse/Hold.' He was super efficient - as were people that fielded my calls and sent me an email update on Friday afternoon. I bunged him a fiver and told him to get a drink. OK, I blew a days leave, and the insurance company may not pay for the call, but I tidied the kitchen and bathroom and hoovered my room. I wrote and posted my Christmas cards this morning and stocked up with about fifty quids worth of booze and food. I am holding fort.
OK, it's 02:12 now on Tuesday morning. I figure I can sit here for another two hours. Work at eight and another office do from midday. Four new crowns giving me gyp but a pleasant routine scheduled for the next 24 hours. Why worry?
And maybe your dreams will be more interesting. Probably.
So should my papers yellow'd with their age
Be scorn'd like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage
And stretched metre of an antique song
- Sonnet XVII
Knowledge is Relation
- Aliester Crowley
Saturation point in the silence. Sitting here I find the thought of a long haul
frightening. Let's look on the bright side. It was another difficult week at
work; network downtime, psychotic firewalls, missing databases, patches, upgrades,
switching virtual machines, weird error messages, crashes and RSI. It was the
French Market yesterday and presumably today (I've been in the flat for the
last 26 hours). I have no idea if there was a rugby match. Harlequins may have
played at least, but they only cover the premiership on Radio 4 sport and the
club was relegated last season.
It was the Varsity match on Tuesday of course. Of all the fixtures the one with the worst reputation - mainly, I suspect, because it falls on a weekday.
I need to clean the sensor on my SLR. I've been building up to it for weeks.
There is a chance I may get to exhibit some prints of photos at Orleans Gallery. They are staging an event called 'Hidden Talents' and are asking the 4,000 or so council staff to submit any work they may have. I know a couple of photographers and graphic designers/artists who may put stuff in.
[pause]
Why does this seem so difficult?
Who knows? Not me for sure. Round and round we play the game - the dream of money and a life and surreal gratification. I am a clerk in an office, although my medium is now the Internet. I see myself in the old sepia pictures of the area. Those lower middle class fellows in brown suits and bowler hats, nameless, faceless, eking out their lives and disappearing into local history. Old Uncle Lighty (perhaps), he lived in Twickenham by the river. Well, he kept a diary. It seems he was writing for years - and taking photographs.
Not a bad fate, I suppose.
It is warm in here; cold, foggy and still outside. I have lost all sense of focus.
[pause]
Woken at 6 this morning (now Sunday) by a boom. There was a massive explosion (the biggest in Europe) in Hemel Hempstead - about 50 miles away. An oil depot. In an ideal world it would be deliberate - planned and executed by a Machiavellian genius with a free mind and a liking for expensive wine. It would be a post-modern installation of some kind; a necessary diversion; existentialist. No such luck though. The world carries on like a lurking horror; all expediency and chance; a kind of spiritual mud. There's trouble coming every day - but think of the crippled and destitute. Think how lucky you are to have a roof over your head and a body that works. So far so good; let's hope the walls hold and the levee don't break. Spare me from the fuckover lord and keep me from the medicos and Social Services.
That's right: I see no magic and Goddess forgive me. I'm chewing up the minutes like some ravenous cyborg. I need to live on this page - but for me that means retrieving something from myself - a memory or feeling, a hope or a vision, a dream.
You see my predicament.
[pause]
What to deal with, that is the question. So many of us in the shit these days that you have to go sideways or underground; that benthic region again and the primary considerations. Most fiction isn't mundane - why are our lives? Sit and listen to the singer. Ignore the humming and the news and the Santa and magician outside MacDonalds. Buy your groceries and take a bash at the sensor. No work tomorrow or Tuesday. No. No. Remember what the man said: You don't have to do anything. That was one of the final messages from the astral temple back in the eighties. That and If you want to prove that someone has no grace you do it by being graceful.
Poor bastard. It seemed enough for me then. You look back, don't you, and wonder if in some way you saw the writing on the wall, could see the pain coming all those years stretched out before you and a fear of the cynic you'll become. You sensed it with your soul. Christ, it felt good though. You had found the main nerve. You acted in a dream - the Bohemian dream. Knowledge came through via the soul.
Somehow it turned to lies, or bigger or worse lies. Strip away all the buildings and you are left with a lump of earth. Many layers existed then: The physical structure, the other people, the various cultures and forms of social contract. Concepts like money, institutions like banks, music, literature, history and politics. Many of these entities and their forms are semi-real. They lend a feeling of familiarity and order to our perception. We take what we want from them and align ourselves. Now you suddenly have new forms of bullshit - focused right onto you. They come in the night and play with you; scenes from Beowulf, 2001, The Exorcist and Deep Throat. Roll up to see the world change. Hold on tight. It will fall apart right before your eyes.
After the madness the slow return. One day you find that you cannot leave the house without event, but then the fitness and recovery. You highball boredom as the routine unfolds and then hide under the blanket of booze and wanking. Me? No, no, you must be mistaken my friend, I'm just sitting here having a quiet drink before I go home. I'll be no trouble. Thank you very much and goodbye.
There's a lasagne in the oven and I'll just grab another beer. The flat is secure and I have everything I need. Need an indication of pace? I'll just get another beer. I have plenty. As I say, I have everything I need.
I had the lasagne and a glass of Casillero Del Diablo.
So: Four days off and this is all I could manage. Two more days to go before I go back to work. Two more days in this struggle. I hope I come down soon.
What do you hope to find?
When you're down in the pig mine
- Animals - Pink Floyd
How easily could all this go wrong? Quite easily, trust me. The very act of
kicking this off in this state is dangerous - and I'm beginning to get a sense
of flogging a dead horse; coming over my own footprints in the sand. To deal
with facts:
Last week, as expected, was difficult. It was all tits-up by Thursday - at around 3am. This weekend has been good though. My temporary crowns have held and I got blasted at home on Friday night on beer and Shiraz whilst cooking an enormous bolognese. It's the first decent meal I've had in weeks.
That's that.
My mind during the week was a harsh and sterile place. Easy to fall asleep and let the lizard instinct come to the fore. You think of nothing, just what is in front of you - and that means work. There is no Dragonfly or Butterfly, there is no fog or snow, and though it gets dark the sun never sets. Interior locations in a plot: The flat, the office, the shops, the pub. Move from scene to scene abruptly; there is no in-between, no spaceship, no castle, no woman, no other world. I'm alone now and often I think that this page is all I have. What can I make of it?
Head out the window for a cigarette. St. Mary's bells call the faithful. It's 17:51.
I should be grateful, I guess. I am alive and apparently well. It is quiet here and nice. I have money and a comfortable bed - and privacy. There is food in my belly and more in the kitchen. The air force, presumably, is patrolling the skies, the fleet the seas, and agencies and forces of all kinds are ready to leap into action at the first sign of trouble. We have the get out clause - just a phone call away - and the television to keep us informed or entertain us. It's an amazing organisation that's evolved over hundreds or thousands of years.
"Archaeology indicates that ancestors of modern humans such as Homo erectus seem to have been using controlled fire as early as some 790,000 years ago. The Cradle of Humankind site has evidence for controlled fire 1 million years ago."
- Fire - Wikipedia
A simple thing. Primal.
And what do you see in the flames?
They told stories and sang songs with the words and sounds in their heads. It was heavy shit, whether they got loaded or not. Heavier though, you have to admit, if stoned on those saucers in the cow-pats that gave you the sight and the drop on the next first-timer. There was no Jesus then, or Mohammed. A mass of us lived in those million years before Christ. We have probably murdered a larger number of people since then - if you trouble to consider the crucifixion a Rubicon of some kind, which I don't.
Then maybe we were murdering the Neanderthals and the other species from the start - as well as each other. One long bloodbath and agony.
Fire, words and learning to kill instead of foraging. Man became the hunter and moved over the women because he became the killer too. Was it ever thus?
There's always room for variation though. The Golden Rule.
Time to reach for the moon, obviously. Sing your song of magic and weave the spell.
[pause]
No ...definitely nothing there. There's no story to tell, as yet. An errant gnat made it into the room and hovered about the screen. I flicked at it with my duster then killed it.
Every sleepy light
Must say goodbye
To the day before it dies
Kate Bush - Sunset - Aerial
Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,
That old and antique song we heard last night:
Methought it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs and recollected terms
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times
- Orsino - Twelfth Night Act 2, Scene 4
17:15
Dust on the sensor, dental work, Photoshop and Adobe; statistics and weblogs; Sufism and Qawwali. Big emails and showing off; farewells; yellow envelopes every 10 minutes and an hour not long enough for lunch. Draw and Stelazine; Cappuccino and bacon rolls; Pub grub, takeaways and the microwave; Cigarette breaks and Budweiser; Peroni; Pellegrino and Diet Coke. Every meal I had last week taking a maximum of ten minutes to make from scratch and my life at work going weirdly sideways into the bushes...and Bluebells. I can give an amazing performance at seeming to work now - so realistic that I actually do work quite hard. Total Method Acting; which is the purest and most original form of acting.
Here is Big Bill's signature. From the will, if you forgive the pun...
Shakey hand, yes? Probably on his last knockings. Or was he pissed? There are rumours that he spent the last years on the sauce. I find the thought appealing. And touching. And inspirational. He died young of course.
Now whence?
The source. How about some sauce? Cover up this funk of mine.
Maybe not.
Sip of cold coffee and a cigarette. Wrapped in night. Absorbed in fantasy. Hastening the end.
In the future there is only really Glastonbury in about 570 days. In the past...?
The past is a long time ago now. The present has been going on for fifteen years - with no sign of stopping until a disaster occurs. The tiger died years ago. I used his skin for the funeral drum I beat every waking moment. I am a fat man in a fat country. A trencherman, a beer drinker and worse. A native. This is what I have to process and re-process. This is all there is and for all I know all that there will ever be.
So the prediction for the week ahead is not good. Time for a break to find the darkness again. Have something happen.
[pause]
Not much of a answer there.
I have forgotten all my recent dreams. That is to say, they merge into one, one mass of random surreal images and situations. Pick one and consider: On the ground at night outside Edwin Stray House on the estate as a boy, with a blanket bedded down next to a white car van and hoping I am hidden in the dark. Were there gangs? Yes and no. When you lived with them you could make them go away - literally. We were never bothered in the old flat - even though the lock on the door was so banjaxed you could push it open. The dual carriageway, the Chertsey, dominated the estate - cutting it in half. I lived on the top floor - the third floor. From my window the road and the traffic - then over to Crane Park and the Gunpowder tower. I lived the life of a hermit - from the age of Fourteen. When I got out of Whitton School and got into the Tertiary college it was like a miracle. 16 and my own flat. A good Saturday job too. I smoked Silk Cut and Gitanes and Gauloise Blues and drank only Carlsberg. I was as thin as a fucking rake but still felt fat. I observed the world through the blinds on my window. It seemed so very real. I began to be obsessed with realism - in a deep and unknowing way.
That was one mental situation kicking off another. I come back to myself and the paralysis is on. I am melded to this seat, almost afraid to move, leaving the flat only once this weekend. When I reach out there is nothing, not even the cold now, or fog. The night is neutral, grey and still. Rats and foxes prowl the grounds. I see parts of people walking the embankment in the distance through the boscage and the rickety fence. It's only 7.30 and I can pretty much guarantee that no good will come of this evening.
Go to bed then and assume the position: The Hanging Man or the Yogi. Watch nothing come from nothing.
"One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities
required to explain anything."
- Occam's Razor
19:06 - Saturday
A heavy mist rose off the river about three hours ago. The sky was on fire briefly, then became occluded and dark so fast I couldn't mobilise myself in time to take a photo.
Night-time now and cold. The town is full of Rugby fans. More fireworks went off. Dreams have dominated the last few days.
I find that I cannot come here with enthusiasm: It must be with something akin to regret or sorrow. This is dark. You try to go to the depths - the benthic region of ancient life - the living ancient life, not the dead kind. I try to fight for the feeling and the meaning follows. Too bad to be sick then. Not so bad to be stoned, frankly.
I'm moving to a new job, working on the web full-time, maybe training people on the CMS system. I hit the ground running hard on Monday with a day off and someone's leaving do that evening. I posted some more photos, repaired a Wikipedia article, wrote many long emails, went to lunch with my ex-boss and had some rough and mad dreams. I need four new crowns, which is going to cost around £1500; and that got me thinking about my finances. I couldn't remember whether I had paid off a particular card when I got the top-up loan. It didn't matter for the teeth, I have another card which was cleared of debt, but the possible non-existence of £5,000 of extra debt was strangely intriguing. As it happened I still owe the money.
Enough.
Is that it, on this Saturday night in the mist?
Administration.
[pause]
"Let us leave
The temple now, and gather in some cave
Where glooms the cool sea ripple."
- The Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides
Why not? The cave is neutral: The temple is run by psychos and pure cynics.
The food and the trinkets and even the sex peddled there is pap and everyone
is in cahoots with the machine which is butchering people on all the borders
and you had better not fuck with them yourself. Get the hell out of there. Get
somewhere safe and consider the propositions.
What propositions would they be Chris?
[pause]
Then say it's all feeling, all emotion.
Sunday night now and all I have to offer is myself. I'm no philosopher. I lean out the window to smoke, my head in the fog, the night wrapped around me. The country prepares for the evening; entertainment, work or prayer. Down at The Clubhouse the regulars will begin to show and drink and talk turkey. Henry's ghost lives on in dreams and somewhere in this city Minerva will try to sleep.
Christ, it's only five o'clock and the fog is thickening. I went out earlier. The Draw Off is on and there is nothing left of the river - you can walk right to the island.
Red wine now and Coq au Vin with sausages and fried mash and spring vegetables. Willow...
"Hey ho, who is there...?"
No-one, not even if I look for them, not even if I pray for them or cast a spell. There is nothing on this Sunday night other than the high to come.
I wish you well Minerva. I wish I could be with you in some way. I wanted to say something when I saw your beautiful writing - but it was all wrong, as this is.
I'll try to go into the night later - after the dinner settles. I'll try to make the most of it.
More bloody photos.
15:50
The war in Iraq - cost. Jesus crucified. What Jesus means to me and why I think that way. The mushroom witch. Was it ever any different? How do we change? Torture. 1984. The lack of revolutionary spirit. Fascism. Honour killings. Misogyny. Racism. Homophobia. World in reality is in chaos. Battle of cultures. In the battle of culture the most vicious idea wins. Hatred and fear. Art. Rights and responsibility. World War II.
"Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and
another cause of dishonour to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied
with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and
the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish
through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand
down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral
heritage."
"My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance."
- Petrarch
I see that the war in Iraq has cost
over two hundred billion dollars so far. It seems like a lot of money.
There are some that would have us show no mercy. You do it the Roman way: Kill all the men, rape and enslave the women and children, raze the city and sow the ground with salt. This is the honest approach, as it were.
Once the Romans committed to a siege everyone knew they would pursue it to the end. From Masada to Mai Dun they did a thorough job.
But nevertheless they lost the plot. The idea of Rome receded into the past. Most of the citizens were foreigners - including the emperors. Christianity came - after they nailed Jesus to the cross; the empire split; the West collapsed. Nearly everyone went back to living in huts lined with mud and shit. Unless you knew the mushroom witch you spent your short life in fear, misery and ignorance.
Even the religions go sideways - fanatical. Torture. Dogma. Fascism. Honour killings. Misogyny. Racism. Homophobia. Insolence. Corruption. Psychosis of the worst kind. Jesus crucified a second time - as an idea. The message of love, pity and self sacrifice perverted...used to drive people into the ground. Women were weak idiots, or some kind of animal...so were Jews for that matter, and the Moors. Most people didn't fit the ticket. And when the Puckle Gun came they had round bullets for the Christians and square ones for the Turks. Anyone who stepped out of line was crushed.
[pause]
It's only 18:31. It has been a dark and dreary day. The perfect day for this time of year - as we go through Samhain, Halloween, Diwali, Guy Fawks Night, All Souls Day. I feel as though I am living deep underground in some vast vault. All the buildings Victorian Gothic and brown brick. Ripples of explosions now. I am getting a grip, drinking Pellegrino in a tidy, hoovered room with fresh fruit (one banana) and a fridge full of soft drinks and Peroni.
But I just coughed up a bad lump of phlegm. Can that be good? Well, things could be worse.
Time for some music. First, the cards.
[pause]
And now the music and focus. Aerial loud on the Sennheisers. Here we go again. King of the Mountain? I'm still alive.
Who would call a song Mrs Bartolozzi?
Washing Machine.
Oh and the waves are coming in...
Oh and the waves are going out...
They did once. I had my moments. I've been flat lining for at least 7 years. Where to from here?
Situation summary report: The general outlook is grim. A major overhaul of the overmind is needed to avoid total disaster, which may be inevitable.
But the discovery of mushrooms growing outside the window has been seen as propitious. Mushrooms are at the bottom of the food chain; primary decomposers - and their mycelia structures can cover whole fields - in North America there are some vast networks. Are they capable of neural processing, these delicate webs? I hope so. I would be immensely fucking relieved, especially if it could communicate telepathically or pheromonally. The mushroom is your friend. Yes indeed. He is here to help. Please bring me another bottle nurse.
A couple of people linked to me recently. The first linkage in years. This lady in particular puts me in esteemed company. She writes very well I find.
There come moments when the chattering stops. You find yourself alone and a heavy silence falls upon you. It's 18:20 now. It hit me about an hour ago.
I saw, for the first time in weeks, the madness of the noise. I took two Nurofen - vaguely aware of a sense of pain. I moved around my room very slowly and deliberately, collecting cutlery, dusting the desk, picking up receipts from the floor, looking at them, tearing them and throwing them away. Small bits of litter. The ends of cigarettes. Crushed cans of Diet Coke. Bottle tops. I found the phone bill.
The last week, certainly, has been insane. I have existed almost entirely with no connection - no faith - in reality. I have neglected myself and, quite co-incidentally perhaps, many things have gone wrong. Trivial things - of no great consequence... Technical problems, another office move, a rotten tooth, the tail-end of a Cold, colleagues leaving work, the realisation of errors of judgement, putting on weight, too much television, thinking of what could be and not at all of what is. The lack of any event, a sense of failure, hopelessness, fear - and the need for human company.
Even imaginary human company.
Powerful dreams every night calling out to me when I sleep.
Time for some music. Can't handle Peter Namlook. Must have something reliable.
I must get a fucking grip.
I smiled there, and for a moment felt good. I have the Namlook on now. I have lost track.
The way through is to stop. Stop and look at everything carefully. Avoid talking to people - just observe them. Ignore them observing you. You are far away in the quiet place. What they see is not you. Don't worry yourself with counting the minutes on those moments you feel safe. Every moment is an eternity - the culmination of your life. Get back in touch with your memories. Remember what you were. All those years.
[pause]
I just went to the window to finish the roach. I stood there for a while, in silence, and opened it very carefully and quietly. Immediately I hear a young man on the embankment shout "I did it!" - and then silence again.
I need to stop now too, as my mind races.
"Tell me is something eluding you sunshine?"
- Pink Floyd - The Wall
"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to
be a slave."
- Roy Batty - Blade Runner
How I got here Goddess knows. I'm fighting on several fronts: The secular, the
emotional, the mental, the sexual, the chemical and the biological. Problems
abound - and I feel so ill I have barely been able to make it out of the house
over the last few days. That hasn't necessarily slowed the pace - and I believe
I can project an air of seediness effortlessly on the rare occasions I've walked
the town and stocked up on supplies. Overweight, unshaven, dark jeans, black
jumper and lived-in sports jacket. Not to mention the Brashers.
"I've got a pair of Gohills boots..."
And a little black book with my poems in.
All the time trying to exude the aura of a Public School boy on the bum. I knew those bastards well during the eighties. This is my homage to them. It is a statement, of some kind, or a defence, a delusion, a decoy. A psychological vignette.
Well, fuck a duck, it's a miracle I made it this far. 20:18 at the moment and I must collect my thoughts. Remember the thing I needed to say. The thing about Syd and The Wall and the newspaper clipping. Tell the whole story.
[pause]
It's a grim business - the way the logic unfolds - and I am not sure that I can face it at the moment. I must strike out to the left or right. I must find something honourable.
21:31. How's that for pace?
It is the time of H5N1. The virus is on the move, so it seems, and the government, to my mild suprise, appear eager to prepare us for the worst: Maybe 750,000 dead in this country. Upwards of 150,000,000 around the world. It's possible, they say.
There would be a reality bomb for me. How could I go on - with people dropping around me like flies? It would be the invasion of the mundane - besides the fact that it may take the web down - or me.
A tiny creature could take over a whole culture - a whole social, intellectual, political, artistic history.
An organism - without a brain.
Well, a lump of rock can do the same thing, or one guy in the wrong place with the wrong idea. My manor has had a good run for 50 years. Before that it was war or depression or the pandemic of 1918 or the Normans or the Witchfinder General or the Black Death. Shit happens - and when it does no-one gives a fuck about conceptual art, poetry or film noir. Not as we approach death and all the incumbent suffering. In situations like that you need rousing leaders and religion and good sex and rum. The artists either tow the line or disappear.
I see the weakness in my own argument though - as ever. If I am an artist then there are many of us. You too - you see? We are all at it, one way or another. It's a big lump of weird expression and hope on the information matrix. Too many of us now, maybe, to blot us out - even with a major fuckover. The artist in us is resilient too. She is like the fifth kind of spy; the surviving spy...
"...of keen intellect, though in outward appearance a fool; of shabby exterior, but with a will of iron...active, robust, endowed with physical strength and courage: thoroughly accustomed to all sorts of dirty work, able to endure hunger and cold, and put up with shame and ignominy."
The bitch has been running strong for millennia - often against all the odds.
And I guess that brings me to Syd.
In yesterday's stats I get four referrals from search engines:
writing is like giving oneself narcotic
session lost freeparking.co.uk
blade runner esper edition
syd barrett is left handed
The last one interested me, and I cut and pasted it into Google out of curiosity - and saw that I came in on page three. I looked at some of the other links too, and came across something that changed the way I think about Barrett and my interpretation of what may be the greatest work of art known to me - The Wall, by Pink Floyd. It was a press cutting from 2001 and the picture of Syd.
There was a lot of Syd in The Wall - so said Roger Waters in a recent documentary. Yes, I can see that. The Wall has always symbolised the process of breakdown, mentalism, coming soft or being blue-balled. That's my personal opinion. The hope the album inspires in me is from the methodology - from the words if you like - rather than from the narrative - which climaxes terribly and peters out into some listless mental death elegy. The inspiration from the off is the irony - the sarcasm. Nothing is what it seems. We are having you on sunshine.
It's what kept me going when things were really bad. It fills me with hope. No-one understands it.
"Why are you so happy?" One of the Germans asked when I sat down
at their table in the Kingswood canteen 10 years ago.
"I've just been listening to The Wall."
"But I don't understand. That album is so depressing."
No-one gets it. My version, that is.
I never really got to grips with the narrative, as such. And one of the most inexplicable things is the fascism manifested by the Waters character on the second disc. In the film Bob Geldof shaves all the hair from his head, eyebrows, chest with a broken razor, cutting his nipples in the process (I saw one guy faint at that point). What the fuck has this whole ensuing polemic got to do with anything? Waters once said that a turning point for him came when he spat on a fan climbing onto the stage at a Swiss stadium. Waters said that he felt that he had become a fascist - hence the introduction of that theme (and maybe the skins around at the time and the death of the 60's movement).
Then I looked at Syd. There seemed to be something wrong with the picture.
Here is a man going about his business. He is dressed for efficiency - making no statement. He seems to be carrying a fresh copy of the Daily Mail in his hand, neatly folded. And a document wallet of some kind, containing papers. There is no hair on his head.
The wincing scowl? Well, maybe he was pissed at having someone take photographs of him. I would be. But the rest? It made me feel uncomfortable seeing him like this. It even may me wonder, for about 5 or 6 hours, whether that fascist trope was some reference to Barrett - even if only an oblique one - even if only a transitory one.
That was my speculation. It's probably bullshit. Just another crazy way of listening to that album.
In one of the other photos he looks sad.
I wish him peace and strength.
"A language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathic language.
If you've thought much about telepathy you might have naively assumed that telepathy
is you hearing me think - that isn't what it is, I think. Telepathy
is you seeing what I mean. And it is not something that happens dramatically:
It is a function of eloquence."
- Terence McKenna - Tree of Knowledge (tape
2)
"Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black
words on a white page are the soul laid bare."
- Guy de Maupassant
Are they indeed? But much can go wrong. For example: You have an idea about
yourself - and perhaps it is an unpleasant one. Perhaps you try a variant that
fits the medium better. We do that anyway - the expressions we paint, the personas,
the public and private faces. Who knows what soul lays here, if any? 'Know thyself,'
the Greeks said, heavy as they were into the hard-core. And do I really know
myself? Well, not as others know me, that's for sure.
Bad cold at the moment. Just had two days off work. Hit me the day before my 'flu jab. Friday night and the only thing I've had to drink is some Whisky in a coffee at about 6 this morning. I have taken two Nurofen and some generic Trifluoperazine and had a smoke. I tidied my room, sorted out some paperwork.
Things have been quite boring. I look at the stats routinely. Traffic seems to be picking up. Web site statistics are notoriously difficult to interpret. I have anything between 6 and 50 regular readers, maybe. Some things are inexplicable - like the 24 hits every day from a BT server - always the same IP address. Spiders account for about half the traffic.
Work: Not much has been happening there. Two days off was nice though, despite the cold. I think the site is looking pretty good at the moment, not that I've had anything to do with the layout or design, or much else.
Silence.
[long pause]
Saturday night now and no end for this in sight. To write, I meditate, must involve disassociation of some kind. I am finding that difficult at the moment...
The media are wasting time over David Cameron's alleged drug use. Here and there some hacks seem to be saying they are bored with the spectacle.
David Davis, on the other hand, has just been on television saying that the whole issue of drugs (that will be illegal drugs) 'makes him nervous.' Nervous in the sense that he has never used them and would reclassify cannabis if he had the chance. Apparently 80% of young people admitted to bug houses have toked their way there - something to ruminate on as you ride the high. David wouldn't bullshit you. He was trained to kill in the reserve SAS. If the Leaf makes him nervous you know it must be serious.
Well, what is there left to talk about - stone-cold sober on this Saturday night in Twickenham? What indeed...
[pause]
Just had a chat with my Mum. She seems bored and lonely. She asked me what I was doing. I told her I was reading (and not writing this).
"What are you reading?" She asked, in her mock child-like voice.
I told her I was reading about David Cameron and David Davis. She said that she likes David Cameron...
"I read about him before this - when he was just an MP. How he looked after that child and campaigned for that hospital to stay open - when he was no-one. He used to stay with that child in the hospital all night. Who cares what he did when he was 18? That David Davis is a pig. It's him and his team that are making a big thing out of this drugs thing.."
We talked for a while longer and in the end she let me go - as I maintained my usual aura of mild annoyance and preoccupation. As I left I caught a last glimpse of her looking openly, playfully sorrowful. I felt sad for her. She probably felt sad for me.
I came back to my room and leaned out of the window to have a cigarette. The Moon is bright and vivid tonight. As I studied the face for meaning I thought I could discern a tear running from the left eye. So: The face of creation weeping as it watches its children fuck everything up. Is there any hope for us?
"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming.
67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am
always bitchy. No Fun - for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old
age. Relax - This won't hurt."
- Hunter S. Thompson's suicide note
"We are in some kind of engine of narrative."
- Terence McKenna - Dream Awake
And take your baby by the ears
And play upon her darkest fears
- Wang Chung - Dance Hall Days
All of this came to me at the window, as I was finishing the last of the first
doobie. I shuddered as I opened TextPad...
I was listening to George Monbiot on Radio 4 sometime within the last 48 hours, I think. I remember George from a while ago - back in the 90's - when he appeared on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's original series of Cook on the Wild Side on Channel Four.
George was saying, on the radio, that we needed legislation to control energy use. We needed, for example, television manufacturers to abandon the idea of 'stand-by' in the design of TVs. Much energy is used in the mode - a profligate waste. I switch the TV off now (I'll just do that).
George said that there was no way to convince millions of people to switch off their sets out of habit. We had to build televisions that made stand-by impossible.
He is right - and millions of people don't care. Why is that?
Well, your guess is as good as mine, unless you're a complete idiot.
But if you even half understand the idea, implicitly derided in George's argument, the mind concept of influencing people, then you will understand where I am coming from. You try to affect a change. You make some kind of mark: On the fabric of reality. At the risk of sounding nuts; you create Art. That is; you begin to chip away at the collective soul. In the best way there is.
Now then, I know that I am an arsehole, and the bad waffling over the most recent 1500 words I have written has seemed to me, at times, to be both pretentious and ridiculous. The last 250 hours or so have been confusing. More to the point, there has been nothing to say for weeks, obviously bad for a gig like this when you're weirded out anyway: Let's fuck everything up. Get out the tin. Play the fool. Follow thy leader. Indeed...
There is a certain air of pomposity don't you think?
I can barely stand the sound of my own voice.
[pause]
But we go on regardless. Catch you out there? Maybe, if I'm lucky.
Entirely predictable. Stage Two. This is the stage where the narrative becomes self-reflexive - overriding the confessional reportage style. The subject now has his head up his own arse, along with his suppository, and cannot escape. He suffers from a belief that his obsessive behaviour is a form of progression. The subject has delusions of grandeur - and retreats from reality. There is no known remediation. The condition must be allowed to run it's course.
Which reminds me...
So, it's Friday night, actually Saturday morning, 01:57. Another week at work and looking down the barrel of another weekend. Absolutely nothing has happened, as far as I can tell. I'm at the bottom end of the next series of photos. I need at least another 3 or 4 sessions to get another publish together. There has been the odd dream but no wind in the sails. Every day is the same. I really need to write a story.
"It was all feeling, don't you know."
Henry Miller on the writing of Blaise Cendrars (Frédéric Louis
Sauser) in Dinner with Henry
I felt a need earlier to somehow order reality. As I recover from oblivion at
the screen, listening to Burn by The Cure for the 478th time in 6 days,
with blind determination or expectation, I find that by picking up the threads
of that initial despairing high the list of alleged facts is all that I am left
with.
I know I've been thinking about words recently - at first the spoken word - but on to thoughts about the written one too.
I read a while ago that Syd (Syd Barrett) is believed to have a form of Aspergers. I tried to think what that would mean.
I may be working with something like that internally. I still sometimes hear the faltering voice, mainly when I'm wrecked - but it is distant, ghostly, inchoate and prosaic.
I still get the odd spasm, twitch, whatever.
But it's the chaostrophe of thought, the occasional need to interfere with my flow of thought, the inability to compose a sustainable pattern of thinking, catching myself going too far with a fantasy or a delusion and the pièce de résistance; the lack of any belief or conviction in my mental process... The problem is compounded and complicated, of course, by my involvement with the immediate environment - Twickenham.
I find that I am talking to a lot of people these days. Sometimes I'll just dip into a conversation with a stranger.
At the same time, I enjoy talking to nut cases, as I happen to enjoy interesting conversations. Like the old geezer who accosted me at the bread counter a couple of weeks ago and told me he thought all the bread was too hard - for his teeth. I agreed of course - it's true.
But this is not the way we normally behave. If you are even tempted to say something like that it's best to both expect the worst and constantly over-compensate (by avoiding conversation altogether). Happily my own problem is under control, despite being augmented by the giddy momentum of a drinker and the hope of a space cadet. "The shortage of eccentrics is acute these days," remarked Jeffrey Bernard. That was many years ago. Things are much worse now. Watch your back. There are no excuses.
Then the Walter Wolfgang incident.
Thick-headed pricks went in on poor Walter mob-handed when he said the word 'nonsense' in the wrong context - as Jack Straw peddled some lie or half-truth about Iraq. Walter was escorted from the Labour Party conference centre. When he tried to get back in he was detained by police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The press went ape-shit.
I don't believe the coverage, as such. Walter exists - I know that much. But I know also that what we have seen of the story is likely to be 10% of the truth. Walter's biggest trauma, I suspect, was that he had to tackle the media - scum to a man. Maybe this supposedly noble, scholarly gentleman became dimly aware of what was happening: The lack of empathy, the baleful, superficial, disassociated look in their eyes, the disingenuous catch in their voices, the impetus to override his story with their own - one that fits the pattern of the shit they are used to feeding us. There must be no complications in a situation like this. As Wolfie told them his version of the truth perhaps he got a sense of it slipping away from him.
In any case, one way or another, it all stemmed from a single utterance.
[pause]
What does all this mean? Well, it's daytime now. And looking over what I have written so far I am not sure I care to know the answer. I went out earlier to take some pictures - mostly of trees and flowers. Nature lives on, even here. How eminent the trees seemed. Nature is ruthless though - that is what they say, isn't it? Winning is everything. There is no morality. However, it helps me face death, seeing all this life. It looms large now - the big one. What the fuck else can I expect?
So we segue into Sunday night. What's Syd doing now? Is he happy? I think of him as I ride this rip-tide, The Cure loud on the Sennheisers. I just had one off the wrist, to settle down as it were. Hang on - I can't say that, can I? Danger there. Must keep up appearances.
Now The Big Sky from Hounds of Love. Had to think of the eighties. Then of Glastonbury. Strange thoughts, fantasies and recollections. Too much. Now Echoes from Meddle. Odds-on favourite to make me dig in.
Now a steady neutral hum. The music paused. I just turned the television off. The sound was down, but the picture was bothering me, even though I couldn't see it. Now I am sitting here with no input, apart from the sound of the fan and this screen.
How about...
...a memory.
What would make sense though, out of the selection that spring to mind? Do we remember feelings - as well as we remember our five senses? I remember the first words I believe I ever formed in my mind - at least I used to. It was Holywell Bay in 1976, wading up that stream with Richard and saying 'this is beautiful,' or some such, in my head. A snapshot in time.
Better go now and seek deliverance. Too much thinking going on, and this was supposed to be my animal scream. A left-handed tale indeed.
Now I think of it, that was right...
This is beautiful.
There's your animal scream.
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
(King Lear Act V Scene 3)
No se puede vivir sin amar.
19:36. Saturday. Here we go again; against all the odds, Goddess help me.
Just had another commotion outside. I guess one was due. This was quite singular: I heard a young man begin to freak about an hour ago. He started to smash something up - maybe a car. The old nutter who sits out there on the wino bench tried to calm him down. The mad old bastard's voice sounded strangely hollow, distant and emotional all at the same time. A new side of his character was revealed to me.
The young man ranted: "I've been in prison! I've just spent two days in a cell! You want me to go back?!" And more.
All the time the old man saying, calmly: "Calm down. Stop it. Don't." And so on.
I carried on playing patience. The same game I have been playing 20-so years. I had bought two new decks of Waddingtons earlier. I have no idea what this variant is called and I have never met anyone who was familiar with it. I play for fantasy women in my head.
Then, outside, a change in tone. Another voice - authoritative. The young man shouting again: "Hit me! Hit me!" and a scuffle perhaps - and then the young man sobbing. He sounded broken.
After some time passed I came to the machine - which is where you find me. Absolutely at a loss.
[pause]
There seems to be a crisis developing, but perhaps we are all to busy to notice or care. The Muslim world now hates the West, so the story goes, and we probably hate them. Even the liberals balk at the religious madness - not to mention the primitive homophobia and misogyny. We, on the other hand, carry a long and glorious tradition of inflicting organised military violence on most of the world.
The British armed forces, I understand, have fought in more bona fide conflicts than any other country's since World War II. How many wars over the last 60 years? Sixty maybe.
But we've been busy for 700 years - killing people all over the world: Africa, Asia, South America, Europe, the Pacific - everywhere, when you come to think of it, except the North and South Poles - where there are no people and the cold makes it difficult to use a gun.
Why did we do that? Because we could I suppose. It made Jesus happy, and it made us rich. It was good for business, and no-one could touch us.
Now some people say that the West is running out of oil. Hurricanes have hit America and an entire city has been destroyed. Our ghettos are full of maniacs who want to kill us. We are losing the war in Iraq. The economy looks vulnerable. Voodoo witch-doctors are cutting off children's heads and throwing the bodies into the Thames. Our youth are going schizophrenic from smoking pot. There are champagne vineyards in Kent. Pretty soon there may be olive groves. Your job can be done better by someone in Navi Mumbai for 70% less money. Sperm counts are down everywhere.
The government is getting jittery. They have redrafted a thing called the Terrorism Bill - hoping to make it illegal to even say you agree with the 'terrorists.' They may increase the penalties for possessing or selling cannabis. A lobby wants to ban all edged weapons apart from kitchen knives.
All this is happening and nearly everyone wants to let it happen - in the same way a broken and evicted psychotic, wrecked on dope and Ketamine and loneliness and madness, might let his anus dilate on a freezing squat floor at 5am. Nothing can be done. We are too weak and stupid. We are alone - and we are guilty.
What is the answer? Should we even look for one? How about a few ideas...
Enough. The world is mad my friend. Most people believe in nonsense. You are one of them - yes? And maybe me too. And if it makes no difference what you believe as truth, then surely it must be the style of your endeavour - not the underlying 'facts' - that makes all the difference. But I'm missing the point: Why not believe in nothing? - and I mean nothing. Live hour by hour - step by step, with your mind wide open. Try new experiences. Try to escape the mundane and the fear and pain that haunts you. Take the consequences if you have to - as I am doing, out of interest.
Well - I'll end this now. Things have not been too good recently. The new job is better but I have felt out of sorts. Lonely. I live in a black hole.
Outside seems a metallic blue grey, deepening into twilight. It's sapping the colour from everything, making the bushes silhouetted against the sky seem transparent and unreal. A cool breeze swirls the leaves. This is Sunday night in London, the last few hours of freedom this week for many of us. We are all mad for all I know.
Things I need to do...
I have one 5mg Stelazine caplet left and 27 10mg Aripiprazole tabs - which I have no intention of touching. I tried one Aripiprazole about a month ago and it knocked me sideways.
I'm getting into American beer at the moment: Samuel Adams from Boston, Anchor Steam Beer from San Francisco. I've just opened another bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale - my favourite. It's dry and fruity. It's from my new refrigerator - which is chilling everything down nicely. I may have to have another.
There is a lot that's gone wrong with the site over the last couple of months. Much bullshit has been talked. Hopefully that is going to end. There are some good people out there doing good work. I mentioned some of them a while ago, but but she's a girl and Brecher really stand out so far this month. I either need to up the ante or get back on track - a matter of opinion I suppose.
Well, take care. Here's to the week ahead.
"The nymphs are departed."
- T.S. Elliot
I have the Esper edition of the Blade Runner soundtrack playing. I am in stasis, free fall. Intoxicated from at least 6 sides. There seems little point in going on. I know something must happen to shake me awake. I'm waiting for my lucky break - if it comes that way. A moment of pure truth would suffice. I need a steadying hand. I need to be led out of the cave into the light. I need to stop staring at this fucking screen.
And so on.
If I could somehow condense this last few weeks, what has happened and how I have been, what I have dreamt, asleep and awake, and how I have felt, if I could somehow get to grips with it...well, maybe I could learn something. Learn how to move forward. Find out what to do. I need to be completely objective...
There has been work and the new, better, office. There has been the new camera and a new set of photographs. There's been a walk in the country, my birthday, the discovery that Athalone rooms are no longer available, England doing well at cricket, getting wasted and 4 days off over this bank holiday. I have learnt a few things. Mostly by meeting and talking to people. And I've picked up a few tricks with regard to Photoshop, HTML, CSS and WAI Accessibility standards.
Although I am aware that the general feeling in me has been one of misery. Even worse, a kind of preoccupied misery. The shit never ends. Carry on up the nightmare. Coat my eyes with butter.
'The bigger you build the bonfire the greater the area of darkness you reveal.' I yearn for the darkness. What I see is a sea of faces and buildings and cars and computer screens and everyone wants something from you - be it background noise companionship or work or money.
I dream of someone stepping out of the blur and leading me away. A Morpheus-like character, if you will. Take the tablet. Press the button. All change.
I have the feeling that I cannot do it myself. It's a low curve I am on, and the end of the graph is near. I am at a fucking loss. I am pissing in the wind.
"Com on wanre niht
scriðan sceadugenga."
- Beowulf
"My beauty is gone for very trouble:
and worn away because of all mine enemies."
- Psalm 6
Night-time again - and like the monster in the old story I come gliding through the dark to this brightly lit place - looking for something.
It was my birthday yesterday. I got railroaded into having a party - of sorts. About 16 of us went to Joya for cocktails then on to Zizzis for a meal. There was the usual drunken chatter rounded off with a late night argument.
It either went well or went very badly. Trying to decide is too tiring. It's better to forget the whole evening. Be still. Find some silence. The quiet place.
There.
Hits so far for this month...
Me at home - 919
Me at work - 756
Feedster - 733
ntli.net - 284
googlebot - 225
btcentralplus.com - 222
btcentralplus.com (different range) - 207
mci.com - 99
ntli.net (different server) - 77
googlebot.com (again) - 56
informa.com - 51
msnbot.msn.com - 39
sprint-hsd.net - 38
plus.com - 36
looksmart.com - 34
Chubb Security - 33
King's College London - 33
C & S Informationsteknik AB - 33
swipnet.se - 25
japo.fi - 23
Asia Pacific Network Information Centre - 22
[not listed: 252 hosts]
[total hits: 4,886]
Every landing on the home page will register as 9 hits. Eight for the graphics and one for the page itself. Every time I view the stats page I clock up about 15 hits.
There have been roughly 70 referrals from search engines. The robots.txt file has been requested 223 times and there have been 160 attempts to retrieve a favicon.
Well, let's face it; maybe you're better off cracking one off.
And so much for that.
"People have become slaves to probability," said Lemmy Caution in Alphaville. And that certainly seems true.
And maybe the "cosmic giggle" is real, and maybe the carrier is love, as McKenna said, and "You can launch your story."
Now I find that my life consists of a series of fragmented events. The day at work; fake conversations; a walk in the country; meeting an old acquaintance; a session in the pub. This is a game you play and hope your nerve holds. Maybe something snaps and you decide to take up smoking, or Bolivian Marching Powder. You drink every day. You feel your body declining, you cough up strange lumps of phlegm, you cannot focus your eyes very well. This is the march to oblivion and as far as you are concerned it's the only game in town. It's the only game you can win, because it's the only game you can control. How's it going, and goodbye my friend, I'm off now to die in a haze. Fuck you, I'm sick. Comprendez vous?
Memories.
Impasse.
Checkmate.
"...to be born a writer one must learn to like privation, suffering, humiliation.
Above all, one must learn to live apart. Like the sloth, the writer clings to
his limb while beneath him life surges by steady, persistent, tumultuous. When
ready plop! he falls into the stream and battles for life. Is is not something
like that?"
- Henry Miller - Nexus
Wandering and dreaming
The words have different meaning
Yes they did
- Syd Barrett - Matilda Mother
I was just sitting on the bed, playing my favourite game of patience, listening to Fantasia on a Theme by Tomas Tallis by Leonard Slatkin, when I sensed there was an ominous barrier between me and this page. The thought of actually sitting up here and typing something was shockingly unbearable. So unbearable that I realised that, within the scope of what I am capable of, it seemed like the ultimate challenge.
Now I find myself here: And fuck knows what I can make of it.
Careful decisions.
I sense gathering strength, but every feeling is transitory now. I must remember that. The feelings are strong and easily recognisable. That may be bad. Might be better to allow myself to drift; get away from reality. Reality is shit: That is the reality. Selah and hallelujah.
Biding my time. Massive pauses.
How about a plan of action? Where to start though... Try to hit the sack before midnight and stay in bed for at least eight hours. Hope for a change. Maybe try to initiate one. So difficult to do that now. Once I traversed the Astral Plane regularly. Now my wings are crippled and I scratch around in the ground. What hope is there - lying there? What can my mind possibly achieve?
I dream of a bolthole. In the bolthole there is permanancy and peace. Slow Time. Perhaps it is a prison. Even if it is, I find that I can travel further there and in better ways. Forgiveness. Redemption. Empathy. Bliss. Whatever. Either that or the knock-out blow - the big movement; I hope I come down soon; goodbye Eric, etc ad nauseum. But the chaos goes on. I'm a broken automaton in the midst of it - in a lock step.
So. Where to begin. What to think, and how to live.
Predictable.
23:59
I was at work by 8.15am. After a few opening shots I settled into a sham. I sent my first email at 10.37, following a friendly communication from a colleague asking after my well being...
"Hello ****** ********
I apologise in advance for the length of this email.
I do hope you are well and in a good position to face the day ahead.
There must be some strategy for not getting tense. That’s my problem. I can feel the tension in my face as I type this. I can feel myself clamming up.
Bad start to the day.
Possible plan for dealing with the situation:
Work myself into a shamanic funk. Move my mind through the layers of the Astral Plane to another realm. Discover an old and richly decorated Ger in a golden bough populated with nymphs and mead and sweet berries and smoking bowls of hashish and opium. I will be here and not here at the same time. Away somewhere in a happy place - a world of my own making. Ignore this terrible humming and the chatter of the idiot women around me. Perhaps if I think hard enough I can actually make it happen. Literally attain satori. Literally change reality. This is the mental solution - the only viable type of solution.
Apologies again for bothering you with this. I have absolutely no work to do whatsoever. Seems safe sitting here writing long and boring emails. At least it looks like I’m doing something.
Yours with respect and warm regard..."
Not sure how the recipient felt about that - but she told me to leave her alone. I didn't believe her, and an hour later I sent another email...
"Scenario number two:
The alarms go off and the building is evacuated due to a 'bomb scare.' As I exit the building with my rucksack I hear a voice behind me...
"Chris. Remember me?"
I turn around and see *****, the chick I met (and fell in lust with) at **********.
"Chris. You’ve got to come with me. Come this way. I want to show you something."
She takes my hand and walks with me down to the river.
"This is my wagon. I want you to meet the other girls."
Parked up near Marble Hill is an old converted coach. ***** opens the door and we step on board. There are eight other women on the bus, all of them obviously crusties. There is the instantly recognisable smell of Sinsemilla. The interior looks lived-in. Ethnic hangings drape the sides of the comfortable lounge area. Large cushions are scattered around a small hand-carved wooden table that sits low on the floor. There are bottles of strange-looking liquid on the surface.
"We want to take you away from here. We all love you." ***** says. "All you have to do is agree."
"But how will we live?"
"Don’t worry, we have taken care of everything." One of the women hands me a huge joint.
"Here, light this up. You know it makes sense."
The women, or course, have rigged the bomb scare just to get me out of the building. The engine starts as I take the third toke of the reefer. My legs feel week. ***** and another women - a blonde in her early twenties with long dreads - lead me to the back of the bus to a curtained-off area. She pulls back a hanging and reveals a king size bed that covers the whole back of the bus. Pink Floyd's Echoes is playing on floor-standing speakers in the cabin. I literally collapse on the bed. ***** stands over me like a colossus.
"We had better get his clothes off.""
...
Later in the day I cut and pasted 60 HTML tables into Excel, cleaned up the formatting and did some reconcilliation. Went to the Clubhouse after work. Had three pints of budweiser and looked at this web site on the laptop. Thought it was shit.
"He nolde his wordes for no man forbere,
But tolde his cherles tale in his manere."
- Geoffrey Chaucer - The Miller's Prologue
I'm shaken up. About 30 minutes ago I heard really bad screaming outside and
called the police - an interesting move for me at this time of the week and
evening, as I was in mid-flow, checking for a translation for the quote above
at this web site.
I picked up a copy of The Riverside Chaucer last week; looking for inspiration
from a radically different source. I first read the Miller's Tale very nearly
10 years ago. I was in my room on the ground floor of C block in Kingswood at
Royal Holloway - frequently howling with laughter as I pored over the text and
the thicket of annotations in my borrowed Riverside edition. We never got to
study The Miller's Tale, thank fuck. I can enjoy it now with a clear conscience.
So what is my 'cherles tale?' There isn't one really, as such. I spent quite a lot of money today, roughly a months salary, on clothes and a new camera. I posted some more photos on the other site last week.
That's where I've been living. In the real world.
I think.
Just leaned out the window for a cigarette. Only low-level conversations going on now. I cannot see the embankment. The view from my window, on the ground floor, is blocked by boscage-covered, weed-infested ground leading up to a brick wall topped with a fence and the whole area rampant with Ivy and two Elders.
As I stood there, head outside, smoking, I watched a rat trot along the wall - where the wooden fence meets the bricks. It looked like the same slinky bastard I saw a few days ago, and a few days before that.
I wonder, sometimes, if the rats eat the cigarette butts I throw out the window after I've dipped them in cold coffee.
What can we make of that?
And what is this world I find myself in?
I have been ignoring my dreams recently, with or without much conscious effort - I cannot say. I find it difficult to plan anything, even in the short term. I know I must 'go to bed' tonight and get up in the morning. Then I go to work. What I will do when I get there I have no idea. In many respects it doesn't bear thinking about.
I live hour by hour, pouring down to the sea of oblivion in many tributaries. That is, I have several lives: Several streams of existence. In my mind, even more. But the journey is frustrating and bleak - in every stream it seems - sometimes.
What can I leave you with? Something...
"Each way I turn, I know I'll always try
To break this circle that's been placed around me
From time to time, I find I've lost some need
And what's emerging to myself, I do believe"
- New Order - Temptation
There is a bit of a design situation here - due to some copied and jury-rigged CSS. The page still prints for me, but I really need a style sheet that you can switch off etc...hang on, you can do that can't you? Anyway, this my latest attempt at a drunk dialing design style redesign. I just padded the content and changed the colours. As a corollary there seems to be plenty of serious shit all over the blogs at the moment: bsag, sammie, kev, chris lightfoot, and especially darian.
So what's happening? I'm off to new job after next week (with the same outfit). A much better one. There is hope on the finances side and I have a room full of fine comestibles and every means of ingress locked, blocked and covered. I have Monday off, and nearly enough pictures to whack on the other site. I have three different types of beer, organic perry, vintage port, wine, whiskey, vodka and gin - even a bottle of Christkindl glühwein.
And, as the song goes, I've lost the need...
...to be here.
Must find another way.
"Everything has been figured out, except how to live."
- Jean-Paul Sartre
"I live in an aura of hope; because I live in a twilit world of my own
self-generated, cannabinated fantasy."
- Terence McKenna
Holloway dream last night. Familiar story: I am a student there and at a critical point I realise that I have barely done any work and failed to attend most of the classes. Prof. John Creaser featured large. It wasn't a bad dream. It was good to see the old fellow again. Not that I knew him well.
Quiet day at work, though tiring. I felt a little wasted. The sun blazed yesterday afternoon in a clear and sterile sky like a 10,000 watt halogen lamp in a small, bare room. This valley city became nauseous. The oily heat blasted off the asphalt back into our faces. It was a uncomfortable night, in the muggy London air, and sleep was difficult. It was cooler today. I wore my blue linen shirt and dark blue jeans. I wore shoes today. The first time in seven months I didn't put my Brashers on to go out.
I saw my doctor this afternoon. It went better than expected. Seems that there are problems with the supply of Stelazine; the indications are that it is not being taken off the market. Good news, because the range of alternatives sounds a little bizarre and includes one drug that is administered by injection. The doctor was cool, and seemed committed to the idea of sorting things out without any major stress for me.
(Before I forget - apologies that no Glastonbury photos have appeared. The digital copies are unusable and the prints will have to be scanned. It's a big job. One for the weekend).
22:19 at the moment, by the system clock.
Now 22:21. Losing track.
Let me share something with you. It isn't much; a moment of madness. A hallucination, if you like...
This was the view from my tent at Glastonbury, looking over the road at the bottom of Tom's Field, where the 1400 Oxfam Stewards (and a few others) were camped. Come Sunday afternoon I was pretty tired. My last shift had finished (effectively) at about seven that morning, and I found sleep, in the heat, was impossible. Early evening though, I retired to the tent, flaps open, and had a smoke. Lying on my airbed, looking out of my tent, I observed a constant flow of people moving up and down the road (much busier than it looks in the photograph). I pretended to read the program, in case one of the passers-by eyeballed me, but I had my mirror shades on so no-one could be really sure what I was doing. I carried on with this for some considerable time. Some people, I found, were beautiful, some funny, some scary. They all interested me. I became conscious, also, of two other things. Firstly it was quite apparent that many people were already leaving. This is the beginning of the Monday come-down. The early exodus of the weary, the sated, the disappointed, the ones too afraid to face the chaos of the morning and too tired to stay until the following evening. It shits you up, seeing these people leave, and there is a little tinge of contempt - mixed in with pity and soon, I found, despair. I got a sense, rightly or wrongly, that the culture around me was being stripped away and I came to 'realise' the second feature of this narrow vista and demographic delusion: Some of the people were changing. What I mean by this is that there seemed to be many more of a specific type of person. I got the impression that, as the Stewards left, the construction people, the drivers, the labourers (and their wives) were taking over - the people that clean up the site - take the rigs down perhaps and ship it all away - these people were moving in, taking over our field.
Then, in the distance, I heard a voice - ranting...
"Have you ever seen such a fucking rabble? Look at the fucking state of them! Yer fucking wankers..."
And so on - for about an hour. A Scottish accent.
I got a little freaked - with half an idea that the environment was turning hostile. But I fought against it, and to my relief I saw many cool people go up and down that road. I was not alone. And big up yourselves, I thought, for making it this far, and helping to make it what it was. I was proud for them.
I saw him the following morning - the Scot. He was a premiership piss head, absolutely at the top of his game...ragged, raving mad, and covered in mud. He was fucked out of his head. A middle-aged woman had a word with him - a Scot herself - as he loped around the marquee...
"I heard you last night. Have you no respect for the workers?"
He flipped, spouted some gibberish, and staggered off through the marquee, slipping and narrowly avoiding another mud bath.
...
23:30 by the system clock. Time to go. Into the night...
A Piss Artist consolidation loan on the phone to one of the banks after a half an hour and a chat with a guy whose name I cannot remember, but he was, I feel, a toker like me and he had a sense of humour, poor bastard. It was a day without managers and I fucked it away in style following a night on my main drug, Stelazine, and this afternoon I hit the bar for two Carling Extra Colds. Some people turned up and we had two jugs of Pimms. An hour earlier I landed a cheque for £170 and this morning I sent off a cheque for three hundred for New Year in Amsterdam, specifically two nights in The Americana, judging from last year, a fine hotel. We hit the conservatory bar there New Year's Eve last year and caned some booze and watched the fireworks. I just got home and had two or three bottles of Budweiser, I can't remember.
A run of bad luck. Bombs in London. Blair Ascendant. Belle de Jour thinks I'm a prick (which is true). Another office move. Massive debts which I cannot repay and hardly anyone looks at this web site. Bad nightmares last night. Little sleep. Spent at least the last week off medication. Faxed repeat prescription off to the surgery this morning and managed to get things sorted by this afternoon.
Work today was not good. Constantly afraid of falling over (etc). Picked up new prescription at surgery and took it to pharmacy. They tell me they can only give me 28 tablets. The drug, Stelazine (Trifluoperazine), is being discontinued. Seems likely no more stock will be available. This, effectively, is the last batch of the drug I have been taking for 15 years.
Doctors appointment for Monday. I'll be referred to a psychiatric hospital for some kind of assessment. Put on another kind of medication. Something a little more advanced, maybe less dangerous. I'll be back in the process after many years. It is likely to be a nightmare, as I remember. Important thing is to tell them nothing. Act like an idiot. Agree with everything they say. Never ask any questions. Remember the first rule of psychiatry: The patient is always to blame for their condition. Just get some new tablets.
Dark spaces and no comfort in sight. Just took three tablets and on my fourth bottle of Bud. Better get my shit together - hadn't I?
Last night, at about 10 o'clock...
In a state of silence. A kind of exhaustion has settled over me - despite drinking too much coffee earlier. I am finding the bed uncomfortable: I cannot rest. My face is impassive, like an old Red Indian's. I stare into space.
Try to step back and see the life from further away. Look through another's eyes; a different perspective; another mood; different memories.
What do you feel - and what is the prospect?
I feel as though I have reached zero tolerance level. From now on it's all out war. I'll move silently and quickly, by hidden ways. Light engagements now and then to keep myself on my toes and to show some semblance of life. Daytime Chris: On an even keel. Friendly, responsive - if a little too polite. Out of the way to everybody, in the background - just like everyone else.
And here with have a different life. A life, admittedly, of smokes, booze and lounging around with no clothes on. But there is also music and some harmony (tinged with relief that I am not at work). Not to mention this white space and the thought of you, reading this.
Whoever you are.
Sunday now. Another grey day and I am wide awake. I have a tape of the Live8 concert on in the background - specifically Pink Floyd. Gilmour is doing well. Idly caught The Who beforehand and I thought I saw her in the crowd - the Glastonbury chick. Memories of her face flashed before me. For a moment I thought I might have it pinned. In any case, it was a step forward. The tide mark remains a little higher.
This is how lonely men spend their time. Clutching at straws.
I concede the point that, statistically speaking, this is almost certainly a form of madness. The odds are heavily stacked against me. The likelihood is that she has gone back to her life, her boyfriend probably, and doesn't give me a second thought. Why should she? What have I got to offer anyone? Less than nothing, for all I know. But I can be harder: She lives in the real world - a mature woman: I live in the shadows - a child.
Again, statistically speaking, I have to accept the possibility that I have never left an impression on any woman - in my entire life. This is my predicament really, and it's a humdinger. I've been through all the permutations of reasons, over the last twenty years or so. A long time ago I put it down to plain ugliness. It was a simple theory but didn't withstand careful examination - and was unworkable in the long term.
Then I came up with the idea that it was something deeper, either my fate or some kind of weirdness.
Well, whatever. Rest assured, I've had the shit kicked out of me, so my natural instinct now is to retreat, cut my losses. If captured you'll get nothing from me apart from my name, rank and serial number. I know nothing. I say nothing. Thank you for your time and have a nice life.
When I was in my early twenties, just as I started to go mad perhaps, the following notion occurred to me: How can you have a serious conversation with anyone without ever having been with someone?
I forgot about that for a long time. Then it came back to me about seven years ago.
The world turns on its axis, and I move through the people around me like a ghost. Like a waiter at a ball, I am there to do a job. We engage on one level and here it stays. You see the white suit and the tray of glasses. The man, the role and the context are one, inseparable. The white suit and the tray are my excuse - my cover, if you like. It seems right that I should be there, close to you. It seems reasonable.
I'm going now. This is as much as I can handle. In any case, words don't do it justice. She blew me away.
"By your patience, Aunchient Pistol. Fortune is painted blind, with a
muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that fortune is blind: and she is
painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that
she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation: and her foot,
look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls:
in good truth, the poet makes an excellent description of it: Fortune is an
excellent moral."
- Fluellen, in Henry V, Act III Scene VI (c1599)
I am dust
I am Earth I am
Yet I feel like
a stranger in my own land.
Walking blind
Ever trying to find something sacred
naked and true.
- Shannon Smy - Seize The Day - I Am Dust
...
I am obviously back from the festival. I arrived there on Monday 20 in madcap style at Castle Cary with only one available cab - a transit van with 7 seats in the back and no-one to share with. I got a quote (£15.00) from 'Des' at the wheel and pondered my options. I chatted with a guy holding a mobile who had just ordered a local service. He told me he was a massage therapist and suggested we go back to his house first. I went straight to Des, told him the fifteen was a goer and jumped in.
We pulled into the drop-off point near Ped Gate A and the first person I laid eyes on was the Geordie security guard I had worked with last year on Vehicle Gate 5. He gave me directions to Vehicle Gate 6 - which was fine by me: The stewards on duty would have certainly told me to go to Ped Gate D - a long hike. Now I had a blagging card and a heady sense I could get myself through Gate 6 - three minutes walk up the road and on a direct route to Tom's Field - where I would be camping.
When I arrived there was the usual collection of people around the gate, including 3 or 4 Oxfam people with orange tabards and at least one security guard, with the customary black outfit and blue tabard. I told the first steward to approach me that I was Chris Light, that I was an Oxfam supervisor, and I showed her my site pass with my name and serial number. After the initial polite argument she told me that she would get her supervisor.
"He's exactly like you and also called Chris."
A squat pug-faced man came over with her. He looked like a Philosophy professor who had fallen on hard times but was still able to live high on the hog. He had clearly seen a lot of life. I instantly thought of Albert Finney. We stood facing one another.
The girl steward stood next to us and by way of introduction said: "You see, you even look like each other."
I was immediately horrified and involuntarily said "Oh no", and then quickly added, in a loud voice, "I feel sorry for the guy now!"
The steward looked at me, held out her hand towards the Finney look-a-like and said,
'And his name is Chris Wright.' She seemed profoundly amused at this. She was obviously a fast filly.
Chris understood my position perfectly, and agreed to let me through if I could blag a lift through the gate in a vehicle. That's how it works on a vehicle gate. Only people wearing a uniform - Security, Police, Paramedics and Stewards, clearly on duty, could make it through on foot, and there is CCTV on every gate to enforce the rule. Practically all of us gathered around the first vehicle to arrive - a 4x4 Pickup - to negotiate and monitor the deal. The Fast Filly did most of the talking and I threw my rucksack in the back. Then the security guard flipped and started shouting that no-one could be allowed through without a wristband. She was about 19, blonde, stocky, inexperienced.
"I get my wristband in Tom's Field!" I shouted as I jumped through the passenger door. I waved to Chris as we drove through. Maybe we bonded. He impressed me, at least.
The driver at the wheel of the 4x4 was a Grade A strapping country lad. A very big and fit looking guy in his mid-to-late twenties. He seemed incredibly happy and at peace, worryingly so, and I knew at once that he would either take me all the way to Tom's Field, no questions asked, and with joy in his heart, or he would finally crack and beat me to death. I held the electrical components that had been lying on the seat in my cupped hands, uncertain how possessive he was of them and afraid to put them down.
Sure enough, he took me right up to the field. I checked in, pitched my tent, registered, smoked some of my working man's hash and had a cold shower. I was overheated and covered in sweat. It was a new experience.
...
And so ends the beginning.
It was a magical time for me. I met more people and on better terms than every other time put together. There was edge work, hash funks, sunshine and rain, high energy salads, valuable lessons and all the women were awesome. It was hard and I cried after my last shift, in my tent, on my own, and I cried again when Shannon Smy sang that song in the Avalon Field a few hours later. I won't forget any of it. It burned its way into me - easily enough to last another 2 years. Frankly, I have changed.
Shot off about 85 stills. Will get them on the site by the end of next week.
I have trouble remembering her face. Crying again. A good sign.
"A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he
has to say something."
- Plato
I'll be the fool then. This is my last shot before the 10.10 tomorrow to Reading then the 11.32 to Castle Cary and the festival. The Festival. Stewarding again. Supervisor. This will be the sixth time there. Must be ruthless about staying calm. I have no fear though: My mind is hardwired now - condition green.
I'll be in another world for seven days; away from this place. Maybe I'll say something about it when I get back.
19:31 Sunday
I am writing this longhand in the back room of The Clubhouse. It was the only sensible option, as I found myself climbing the walls earlier this afternoon.
I am on my second pint of budweiser and I have three notebooks in front of me. Only the first page of each notebook contains writing...
#1.
Dream
- Handjob
- Crisps with glass and pin.
#2.
A DEDICATED TEAM OF RATS
#3.
The Dream.
Physical objects and DMT
Film and USA & The Day After Tomorrow
Grey skies & Glasto
Climate change
American president everything OK
French director & stamped with the American flag
...
I slept well last night and woke up at 5 in the morning. I dreamt, and this was how my dream ended...
I am in an American town. It is a balmy night and I face a woman who is about to kill me. I have a shovel in my hands and poke at her. She tells me to always go for the midriff - taunting me. I aim for her chest and belly but she is big and absorbs the blows, which have no effect whatsoever. As I back away from her in fear the shovel becomes longer, but even so she is eventually out of my range. She taunts me again and takes off her long coat. Underneath she has a holster, on her back, containing a small and elegant gun - a modern Derringer of some sort. I get a close-up of the gun. Outgunned now I run...and she pursues me. I run over a road to a queue of women milling around outside a building. Now I see the town. Definitely American. Clean. Middle class. As I say; it is a balmy night - like something out of American Graffiti.
I hide behind the ladies (one brunette stands out from the others) but the killer woman comes after me. She has a pump-action shotgun now (where did that come from?). She aims the gun at me but I duck behind one of the women in the queue. Crucially the killer woman is seen now. This is her undoing. Her cover is blown. On the side of the building, in a portico, there are cartoon-like posters of photographers - two dimensional images, but each image in sequence becomes animated and each photographer takes a picture of the killer woman. One by one the flashes pop. As I say, her cover is blown, her life is over, she is undone.
She sits at a counter in the portico/reception area, defeated. The building, I realise, is a cinema. She looks through a book of celebrities and film stars - something like the old Spotlight. Now I hear the words...
"No more ickle-bickle girl..." She seems, now, to resemble Sigourney Weaver.
In the book I notice that there are pictures of Virginia Bell. I hear the words..."You think you have seen pictures of Virginia Bell - you should see these!"
[Pause]
I woke up and opened my bedroom window to smoke a cigarette. My mind was reeling. Several things occurred to me in rapid succession. Firstly, I thought of DMT and the facility the purported 'self-transforming machine-elves' have of conjuring up pseudo-material forms (and devices) from some metaphysical language - from nowhere. Similarly with dreams; I find that objects have a habit of appearing from nothing. The assassin woman materialising a shotgun, for example.
(It occurs to me too, now, the similarity in the 'tone' of dreams to reports of the nature of DMT trips. Specifically the 'zaniness' of the content. I rarely have dreams that have a creeping, calming or sedate ambiance. Events tend to unfold at a pace - made all the more frantic by bizarre and sudden twists and turns of plot and setting).
Leaning out the window to smoke, I noticed it was one of those typically British, oppressive grey days. A heavy mass of ash-coloured cloud spanned the sky. Here and there a pale, insipid luminance broke through: A harsh and painful light that did nothing to assuage the general misery of the situation. I felt as though I was being crushed.
The previous day I happened to switch on the television (a rare event) and idly caught an episode of Talking Movies on the BBC. During the program Tom Brook interviewed the French director François Ozon. Brook had quizzed Ozon on his contention that all American films were 'draped in the American flag' - or some such. He was fairly aggressive, by his quaint English standards.
Looking at this grey sky my thoughts turned at first to Glastonbury, next week, and then to climate change, which is becoming a cultural obsession and a kind of mass subliminal nightmare. I thought about that piece of shit, The Day After Tomorrow, and I realised where Ozon was coming from.
Here is a film that is like every other Hollywood disaster movie, where the only deaths are token ones, where there is no enduring suffering and where the hero is always a White American - usually a middle-class professional. The President always appears at some stage and gives a keynote speech. He is a dignified man of impeccable morals, no hint of scandal or compromise, but strangely neutered and unconvincing. Strong family ties are emphasised in the plot. Usually there is some kind of homage or thanks to Jehovah.
At the denouement of the disaster, or the impending disaster, we find that no real damage has been done or rather; nothing has been lost that cannot be recovered - quickly. Some brown or yellow people have died and some buildings have been wrecked in scenes of amazing explosions or the like - something like a fireworks show, only on a larger scale. We are dazzled by the splendour but unmoved at the stagy suffering. The pain is in the realm of the unreal; expressly in the realm of special effects. Nothing is poignant or pathetic. You never see a child or a pregnant woman die. At the close you are supposed to be grateful to the American military, to science, to college educations, to the President; calm in the knowledge that the whole issue of doom, or change, or revolution, is nothing but an illusion. Something like these things might occur, but they will happen far away, in the reality of blanket media coverage perhaps. At the end, as I say, nothing has changed. If anything we feel better about ourselves and go back to the business of making crap with a renewed sense of gratitude. As I toked on my cigarette I found the thought of the predicted upheaval in 2012 (the end of the Mayan Calendar and the moment of McKenna's Concrescence) exhilarating, and hoped I could stay alive until then to watch the real show.
Off to the festival in less than six days. Not sure how I feel about it.
"Sailing the ocean of the self; every wave cut by my prow is myself."
Uncomfortable words for me to entertain at the moment, overdosed, as I am, on reality. I have my Graham's 1998 late bottled vintage Port by my side and it's working its way into my bloodstream as I type this. I have just switched from the Rotel and the Missions to the Sennheisers. Silent running.
I just paused there to skip through some tracks. Finally settled on Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, by Leonard Slatkin. So hard to get the music to work for me now, and my back is aching.
Well, I must find the vibe then, mustn't I? How do I do that - swap a state of mind; move into a different realm of consciousness? Work on this until there is something here - something substantial? I'll never make it surely, not like this.
Sleep, dreams, thought, tension at work, a flood of information coming to me from this screen and others. No time to stop. Gotta compete with the wily Japanese and where's the fucking bar John.
Time for another Port and a break for a cigarette. Help is on the way in various forms. 320 hours to go till Glastonbury. I'll be back soon.
[Pause]
Have you noticed that the busier we are the closer we become to living in a state of death? The world becomes a pell-mell of sanctioned paranoia, last-ditch decisions made with poker-faced hysteria and a gamut of two-dimensional, transitory images that you would find in a zoetrope made by a sadistic psychopath. We are in something like a cross between Plato's cave and the torture chamber in the Ipcress File. Ruminating on real death, in this context, is a luxury and a comfort. At least I find it so. What if to die is to forget the world ever existed? Not a notion given much prominence in Religion - the idea that what comes after, one way or another, is dazzling different from anything we have experienced or can imagine - even if is nothing, and if it is nothing, then fuck you.
The more I piss into the wind the more it blows back on me. I wouldn't mind so much if I was pissed or stoned, but keeping up the performance stone cold sober, with half a thought that you are doing the Right Thing is as close to suicide of the soul that you can get before you become a concentration camp guard.
So: Dark thoughts on this Sunday night, as I prepare for another charade at work for another week and no end in sight. Happy trails my friend. Godspeed.
"I've been to Amsterdam."
Fatalistic, doomed and pointless words on a summery evening, Friday night, in my Boony hat and prescription mirror shades and a drunken and stoned funk by the White Swan on the crowded terrace where we had all been trapped an hour earlier by the high tide. I'd had three cans of Budweiser and was on my third or fourth large Chardonnay when the joint came round. A drugs debate started - with one of the tokers arguing that dope should be illegal. I wanted to disagree and I waded in with what I could muster, which was next to nothing.
"You've been to Amsterdam?"
That's right - a thin line of nothing. No support, no depth, paralysed at the first sign of fire.
I left when the weed and the booze really gripped me and did the Twickenham variant of the Long Walk. Back home I hyperventilated in the dark for a while and then slept. I woke up at about 3, whacked. I have only just come to terms with my stupidity and naivety. When I drink I become a bore, which is best done in private. In any case it was too much - too much.
Here we go again.
I am generally tired and bored. No plans. Nothing will work. I'm going to lie down now and try to find the solution - in my head. The flight of the alone to the alone, as Plotinus said.
More photos on the other site.
Have a good weekend.
"I hear a fellow speak; with him I will not mell.
This Earth, with my spade, I shall assay to delve.
To eschew idleness, I do it mine own self."
- Mankind, lines 328-331 (c1470)
"I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might
be everything, and their intent everywhere, for that's it that always makes
a good voyage of nothing."
- Twelfth Night, Act II Scene IV (c1602)
I am still recovering from the election job - 'Presiding Officer' at a polling station. I was up at 3.30 in the morning, was at the station by 5.45 and got home at 11.00pm. Roughly 18 hours. The money helps to pay for a new crown for another broken tooth.
There was one fairly serious incident during the day - when a disaffected woman ripped down all the signs outside the hall. I went down the road after her (and her partner) and she stopped to scream at me for half a minute. I called 999 and two squad cars turned up within minutes. The cops take this shit very seriously - Representation of the People Act and all that.
Curiously, I felt no fear whatsoever. Later in the day I had to tell the party 'tellers' outside the hall that they were stepping out of line. They acquiesced immediately and two of them disappeared, but I had the shakes for a solid five minutes afterwards. I can take screaming and ranting in my stride. I cannot cope with any kind of reasonable argument or debate. Interesting.
My mind is flat lining at the moment. Terminal boredom. Nothing to engage me, no end in sight and the music isn't working anymore. Moreover, there is nothing to say.
There is nothing and no-one, it seems. Another dead day tomorrow then back to the grind on Monday. At least I am not one of the poor bastards working on the building site on the Embankment. I should feel better than this then.
Try this if you want.
Five dried grams.
"In Madagascar there are no hallucinogens."
And that is bad news for the Madagascans.
6pm. A lazy summer's evening. A light breeze ripples the dapples on the Ivy and the Elder outside my window. The birds twitter and caw. My metal desk fan blows coolly on me, and the 12-volt fans whine in the Cooler Master case by my side. In the distance, unseen, the Neds and the Wankers squawk angrily like soulless, psychopathic pricks. A car horn toots. The inevitable agro commences, then moves further away - as it always does.
Now the sound of sirens - getting closer.
Silence. The soundtrack of my afternoon. It will all be over by the time I finish this, or even really begin it, because I plan to be here for some time, perhaps seven or ten hours (goddess help me). Here on the evening of Mayday, when we celebrate the birth of the sun god - or whatever it is we are supposed to do.
I dined earlier in the day with some friends at the huge London Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant near the airport. The food was expensive but of a high standard. The decor was Immaculate International and the service was quite impeccable. Many Chinese were in evidence. One of them had parked their Aston Martin Vantage outside the entrance. Good job I polished my Brasher's this morning.
I dreamt intensely last night, of a naked supine woman spreading her legs for me, drugs, relationships with talking dogs and some strange psychological perspective shifts. There was a profound issue with two men, which I cannot recollect, and a typically well-defined ambient locus (run-down apartments again this time). My pineal gland must have cooked up something special, with maybe a double shot of DMT. I woke up at five in mild shock. A good night's sleep by my standards.
[Pause]
Two things have concerned me recently; the Ego, and whether it exists, and human suffering, including my own.
Fuck knows, I have entertained some mad thoughts of success with writing recently - Billy Liar type fantasies - and I wonder how Just and Noble any thought of having any noticeable effect can be. This, to me, (if I can phrase it in such a way) is The Miller Challenge; the notion that we (as writers), at the root of our endeavours, pursue a low denominator - and a pointless one at that. This is the notion that we seek to create an impact obliquely, insidiously, impotently, "in the fictive world of symbols" rather than directly, and that we choose this course because serves our own ends, our grandiose designs. We do this not just because we are fools, or some kind of scum, but because we are too proud, too ambitious, too self-serving, too immature. (Hence the fact that so many more men have 'heard the calling' than women). We do not create art to escape; we create art to enslave. What else could it be? Or in other words; is what I am doing wrong?
(Henry, what is your secret? How could you write millions of words and yet feel uncomfortable with writing? Why did you eulogise about Hamsun, Cendrars, Dostoyevsky and thousands of others and yet write these 1500 words tearing the whole thing down? You put a weed up my arse, and I have barely got to first base).
I would say that I try to write because I am...
...perhaps I am ashamed of my life and want to change it, or perhaps I want to live out life as a character - and not a carbon-based organism following a predetermined set of chemical, biological, social, political and psychological rules.
Perhaps the world is "made of language and can therefore be hacked."
Perhaps I have given up the ghost. Perhaps this is all I can hope to do.
And perhaps one day I can create, in this fictive world of symbols, some sense of hope, inspiration, peace, excitement or, most powerful of all, confusion (and reorganising) for others - just like you did with me, Henry. Remember?
Or to simply move someone - somewhere.
Maybe what I do here is a good thing then.
Enough. I'll try to talk about human suffering some other time. Real suffering as well, not the kind I endure. As for the Ego - fuck Freud.
"If the world is made of Language then why isn't it the way I want it
to be?"
- Terence McKenna, DreamAwake
I turn to this in desperation, tired and unhappy; typing in TextPad, too afraid to put it straight on the page, in case I have second thoughts, or the whole show dies on me. If I can string something together here...well, that would be something.
I am so tired of the constant moaning at work - the backbiting and backstabbing. All I want to do is get out of the office. There is no question now - I would happily take a monkey job; sorting the post again, logging back review forms, even doing the daily Fraud beat. There are maybe two or three people (out of a hundred) whose company I feel comfortable in, who I can share some nice moments with, who I have some rapport with.
Interestingly, I barely know those people.
I am so fucking sorry to bore you with this again. But what can I do?
Elvis is reputed to have said: "To be famous is to be misunderstood."
Then how about this one...
"To know people is to be despised," or rather: "To be known is to be despised."
That is what it means my friend.
So the last thing at night (say 5am) I dream of locking myself in my heavily modified Fuchs Transportpanzer - itself buried in some hidden bunker - perhaps disguised as part of an electrical sub-station on a wind farm in the Welsh hills. I am wired into the grid and the interweb and hacked into the comms and the cctv. Filtered air and water. I have all the drugs, porn and food I will ever need. No-one knows I am there of course. No-one is even aware that I am alive. I live and die on my own terms.
The thought of it gives me a tingle down my spine. You cannot reach me now, as Roger Waters sang.
Gee - isn't that just Jake?
I've come a long way. Once I built Bodium castle in my mind in time-lapse fast forward. When I was nuts I saw myself as a lone hooded figure on a bridge facing an army of cunts. My sword was called Lucifer - lightgiver - and I wiped them out.
I tried to make a tactical move back on to the booze about two weeks ago. It's not been going too well, although I have been trying hard. I have put on some weight and become more accident prone - culminating in a superbly controlled tumble on the pavement outside The Clubhouse yesterday afternoon after work. I landed expertly, to my surprise, and didn't injure myself. Then I drank three pints of Budweiser and a litre of Westons organic cider. Dinner was a Chicken Tikka Pura, Chilli Chicken, Saffron Rice, two Chapatis and four Popadoms. I am hitting the Diet Coke at a rate of about one every two hours - 24 hours a day. Smoking about 30 filter-tips a day.
Getting a lot of hits from work - 10 or 15 sessions on Monday. Too many to be just me, I think. Maybe Audit are watching me. No-one says anything. Good. Best way.
Tired of Twickenham - signing off.
"Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative
background, which never emerges explicitly into its chains of reasoning."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1967, p. 7).
"You see...well this came to me a few months ago when I had my yearly physical - and as I was buttoning up my doctor said to me, he said, "You know, in the Nineteenth Century most people your age were dead," and I realised that this was true, and one of the...among all the revolutions we are enduring...one of them is that we live nearly twice as long as people lived very recently in the past. Well, culture is a kind of neotony...
...But now technology throws a curve - and the curve is that we live so long
that we figure out what a scam this is. We figure out that what you're supposed
to work for isn't worth having; we figure out that our politicians are buffoons;
we figure out that professional scientists are reputation-building, grab-tailing
weasels; we discover that all organisations are corrupted by ambition - you
know - you get the picture? We figure it out."
- Terence McKenna, DreamAwake
...
Silence. White space. What do I have to say - especially after that?
Recurring dreams recently - mostly featuring bizarre modes of transport. The other night I found myself fighting for Al Qaeda, or the Arab Cause, from the back of a giant motorised baguette driven by a Rastafarian. We ran into an American armoured convoy and surrendered immediately. I got a good grilling from one of the cuntish troopers and looked forward to 20 years in Guantanamo Bay - for riding on an unarmed baguette. Last night I was stewarding for Oxfam at Glastonbury, manning a gigantic balloon. I love my Glastonbury dreams. They are never tinged with bad feeling.
I am pretty much recovered from the virus. The cough isn't so bad, and I have the whole of next week off work to do my own thing. It was also payday on Thursday. And there are interesting deals going down at work. And with luck I will be working on the election at one of the polling stations. It's good coin.
As I approach 40 I find I am becoming more aware, if less alive. My life, assuredly, has its fair share of failures, but when I think how far I have come over the last ten years - well, it's a source of some comfort and hope. The more McKenna, Miller and Thompson I indulge myself in the more skeptical I become. The never ending sea of media bullshit has had its effect too. I reached saturation point a long time ago. I literally cannot stand to have the volume turned up on the TV. The sound of those squawking moronic pricks sends me wiggy. Fuck them. Fuck them all.
It occurs to me that the shit being peddled now by our culture is as every bit out of whack as this was. There is no fucking difference: The war in Iraq, the War Against Terror, the wars everywhere, The Terrorism Bill, Identity Cards, the move for the reclassification of Cannabis, the materialism, infantilism and sterility of the culture, the daily office politics - it all puts me out of the frame. My involvement is a best a joke, at worst a waste of my life, and somewhere around the middle: simply a bad call - or a bad dream.
One day I may be out of debt. One day I may have my own place. One day I may be with someone. Roll on then - like the Mississippi - and get me the fuck out of here.
Well, I'm curious to know how this will pan out. To re-cap and summarise: I came down with the virus last Saturday. The first 48 hours were a slow build-up. I felt well enough, or was deranged enough, to make it into work on Monday morning. By ten it was apparent that George - the guy I was supposed to shadow for two days (he is leaving tomorrow) also had the virus and had called in sick. By lunchtime I discovered that the office opposite ours had also been hit and only one person, out of about four or five, had been able to make it in. Classic cold symptoms broke by the early afternoon and I was encouraged by a friend to go home. I made it back by 2.30. Later the sneezing and the running nose stopped. This was Monday, as I say.
The situation nose-dived from then. My sleep pattern was shot - virtually nonexistent. My head lit up like a 400 watt halogen lamp. The cough was getting nastier - but still manageable. My thought processes became more fragmented and I grew more paranoid. It was impossible to concentrate on anything. I had rampant diarrhoea. (I've lost about seven pounds already).
By Tuesday afternoon I was shitting myself. I rang George at this stage and we discussed the symptoms. To my great relief he was in pretty much the same predicament.
"Georgie, I think I'll be lucky if I can make it in by the end of the
week."
"Chrissie, you'll be lucky if you live through it."
And that was that.
Yesterday the halogen lamp blew its fuse, to my great relief, and I managed a couple of hours of relatively peaceful sleep. I grew more active, listened to music, wept with relief.
Now I realise that the current has merely moved to my body. I've had some minor sweats. Sleep seems impossible - I've just tried. My brain is on fire. My eyes are bloodshot. I eagerly await the denouement. The die is cast.
On a side note: I may need to configure an htaccess file for this site.
That's enough for now - as much as I can handle. I'll transfer this from the laptop to the live site in the next ten minutes then try to find some equilibrium, and put myself to sleep. Somehow.
Bad at t
