clinging to the wreckage

Through the smoky room I see your silhouette sat seductively behind the typewriter. You flick your hair to the side and roll your eyes with that way you have of looking so disgusted with a world in which convention is the overriding force. Slowly sliding your head towards the desk you raise a cigarette to your full lips and suck on it as if hoping to derive the last puffs of freedom from life itself. You’d rather live self destructively and taste life than live a clean and orderly life of family and home and children… and this I find irresistible. Chaos is your art. You part your legs as if to tempt and promise… a promise unfulfilled as you fold one leg over the other. You utter a few words and your French accent croaks from a smoky throat sending vibrations of pleasure through my body. I want to reach out and touch and kiss as you raise a glass to your lips and sip whiskey. I long to be that glass. I long to be the whiskey and the glass, to simultaneously touch your lips and be ins...

After seven beers he decided to leave the remaining six untouched and go to bed. It was just after 11pm. At 7am he awoke and decided to go to the post office to collect the parcels that were accumulating… he was a master of ordering things online for which he had no need. Upon the drive to the post office, feeling slightly hungover, he was amazed by the number of cyclists on the road. What the hell were they all doing up so early and why were they so damned active? Didn’t any of them ever awake with a hangover? No, they spent their evenings preparing, hydrating, for the cycle ahead of them. He hated every single one of them and contemplated running them over one by one. Arriving at the post office he was greeted by an angry postal worker… there was no greeting, no smile, just a slamming of items and an aggressive manner of searching for parcels. ‘Yeah, I’d be angry too if I had to start working at 7am in the post office,’ he thought to himself. With parcels in hand he left and drove ba...

The darkness of January strikes and so many speak of depression. The short days spread out and the temperature increasingly decreases... there seems to be no end. The sensation is one of drowning in a whirling dark pool, grasping for air in desperation occasionally when the face feels air... but, to be honest, most of the year feels this way to me and not just the winter. There are those cruel summer days upon which the heat seeps through the walls and beats against the body and the head whilst happy families and couples run and play in joy outside. The reminder that life is a struggle against expectations. At least in the cold of winter we are not expected to be out and making the most of the sun or the long days or any of that nonsense. In the harsh darkness of these freezing and wet days we can at least hide inside and pretend that the external world doesn’t exist... until we are forced out into it once more.

I’m often disturbed by the words and efforts of many people. The ones that I would prefer to not hear from are the ones forever in contact. Never the less, I feel slightly better in the knowledge that I have made some important decisions in the last week or so. They may not be the correct decisions, but they are decisions. As people constantly remind me, it is a new year... but what difference does that make? Life goes on. If you desire change, then change. Why wait for New Year? It is just another excuse to cling to a lack of willpower. Life will continue here in mostly the same way; there will be literature both read and written, the same punk rock beats will sound from my speakers, alcohol will continue to flow, and many a film will be viewed on my television. My lack of ownership will continue and I will refuse to be defeated by the pressures of society to ‘achieve’ certain things dependent on my age/colour/sex/geography. 

All efforts are currently being poured into NaNoWriMo, see you soon with more miserable laments.

Once the war begins there is no turning back. A war against time, a war on the mind, a war against one’s self...   raging within. It’s war all the time. The guilt that we feel (or should feel... or possibly shouldn’t feel, depending on which way one looks at it) from suffering from issues that are merely bourgeois luxuries such as writer’s block or pining for the love of a lost lover. People in different walks of life do not have such concerns, they are concerned with finding enough food to survive or with the health of a terribly sick child or the loss of a family member. Our capitalist culture dictates that we consume and consume and consume so we are forever left feeling that something is missing from our lives. You’ll notice that those who have millions and millions in the bank, cars in the driveway of their paid for mansions are all out trying to do something for the starving... this too is simply a personal need. They are told by society that they should care for those les...

An oppressive heat consumes the land at the end of September and, I must confess, we celebrate it somewhat as we have had very little summer warmth this year. For me it is one of those days of great emptiness of the heart... a day upon which the memories of the past infest the mind and heart and begin to devour their way back through to the skin like carrion in a corpse.  Corpselike I venture into Guildford in the hope of buying one or two items of clothing but also with a thinly disguised desire to see some human life on the planet whilst enjoying possibly the last day of sunshine and heat. Drifting along beside the river I see nothing but couples, they swarm like locusts upon the grass beside this sad river and gaze at me amazed that I am alone on a Sunday in such weather and in such a place. I escape their glare by drifting back towards the theatre and into a department store... but this offers much of the same; wives helping their husbands to choose clothing for work, husbands ...