clinging to the wreckage

When I worked at the chemical factory in my youth, I’d sit in the car with Scotty at lunch times and listen to him comment on the radio program that he listened to each day. Scotty was a seventy-five year old man who had retired many years before but had run into financial trouble through illness and bad luck and had been given a job back at the company where he’d worked earlier in his life. He was the storeman and this position afforded him the luxury of a steady income with very little work. He passed most of his days singing Frank Sinatra songs to the factory staff. I worked in the laboratory at the bottom of the factory but always spent my lunches with Scotty. Everything about him was fascinating, from his brilliant white spikey hair to his stories. The radio host to whom he devotedly listened was a woman named Jenny Williams and she deliberately tried to be controversial, usually in a sexual way. Scotty would sit back in his car seat, almost lying down, with his arms crossed ...

The day begins with Bukowski… every day begins with Bukowski… and it is a great boost to head out into this carnivorous and barbaric world, this crumbling so-called civilisation, still warmed by his words and his world view. Sunday brought disappointment in that the trip I was hoping to take to Vancouver in April fell through and I am currently floating along in a listless state as if between jobs… as if between reasons to live. My job is no more and I am moving onto a new one but, for the next two weeks I remain in the one that I am no longer entitled to do… it is an odd feeling of displacement. For years we strive through fear in school; fear of failure and of being a disappointment or of being homeless and hopeless; we study and work and develop skills hoping to find a job and to build that job into a career in which we excel. And then comes a day, many years along, that we are told we are no longer wanted or needed or cared about and we must push on in search for alternative mea...

There are seven billion people on this planet, most of them struggling for survival. Those who are not struggling for survival are working unhealthy hours to try to support their families and themselves. You might be significant to your friends and family but you are one tiny atom in a sea of human beings all coexisting at the same time and to the planet as a natural entity you are not significant. Therefore, stop taking yourself so seriously. How many people out of the seven billion alive do you think get to pick and choose when and where they work and what they do and how many hours they spend following their own personal dreams? You ask for advice on how to do this? Ok... join the queue of seven billion people all waiting for a lucky break. Perhaps you can find a wealthy husband who will be happy for you to stay at home and pursue your dreams whilst he risks heart attacks on a daily basis to make sure you can live in luxury and not have to worry about anything other than your own...

If I thought, for even one millisecond, that you wanted to see me, I’d be there... anywhere... I’d break down doors to get to you. But, as it is, I don’t think that you have any interest whatsoever in where I am, what I do, or if I’m alive or not. And then you message me to ask me if I’ll be there and I am completely baffled. Why do you message and ask? You don’t say that you want me to be or don’t want me to be there. As usual, you leave me floundering in the empty space below and trying to scrape the walls of my mind for tiny shreds of evidence that you might be, in some quiet dark way that only you know, trying to reach out to me and say something. And yet so often when I reach out you tell me to fuck off.

I feel ill and I push it. And I wonder why I feel ill and I push it some more. And then I wake up and think ‘shit, I woke up again.’ Then I realise that my mother would be upset if I didn’t and feel I have a duty to try to continue until her and my father are gone. It’s not easy because everything becomes so pointless. Everything feels like a pushing towards something for the sake of someone else; someone who never cares… whether that be the owner of a company or the distant woman one loves. In moments of weakness I give in and shout out how I feel, yet all ends in naught. For we can dream and pine and hope and desire, we can offer our love and pour out the deepest secrets of our passionate affections… these only serve to push those for whom we long further away. Clouds of frustration set in and burst their pouring misery upon our unprotected hearts and minds and we cower to our quiet corners and weep for what we shall never have… never realising that the very thing that causes us...

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and at this time I am forever awake. It is 3 o'clock in the morning so I check the weather and I turn on the television and I turn it off again because it's too bright. I talk to the cats... I pay attention to the light falling upon the curtains and I listen to the water warming in the immersion heater and wonder why you never told us what was due to happen. And then there's you; your texts come through but they say nothing. A waste of time. You don't want to be mine or even take the time to communicate properly, so we may as well sever this. It's 3 o'clock in the morning and it’s just the cats and I, the way it always is. The cats don't lie to me and I don't have to try to make them like me. The ghosts of things said haunt me at this hour of the witch and I'm unable to understand what was said but more importantly I'm unable to understand what was not said.