fame

Dig this! Computer and Video Games Magazine, January 1991. Page 39, first column, about two thirds of the way down (where it says "Double Dragon").

It's me! 21 years in the past. :-)

whacked

I’ve gone a little weird the last week or so. I keep thinking about starting my assignment but the juice is not yet here. I’ve six days: six days in which I’m quite otherwise busy (football coaching course, refereeing most evenings). But nothing comes; I can’t be arsed. In the meantime, I’m finding it very difficult to think of a reason to get out of bed. Not so much that classic depressed moping about and lying into the pillow kind of thing – just that…well, we live in a two-room flat and everything I do requires sitting – reading, being on the computer, drinking tea, and writing, if there were any – and the bed’s the best place to sit. The couch is only six feet away and it’s not as comfy. And so I stay in bed, with my laptop and my teapot and my dressing gown, and eat and drink and watch movies and read books and –

Oh yeah, there’s always outside – but there’s nothing about outside that appeals to me – not in this rain and cold and grey – save the occasional shop for dates and Burgen’s and cheese: that’s about an hour a week. What else is there? Besides my football and squash? So instead I stay in bed and play old school computer games from my youth and, you know what? I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing. And that’s what I mean by having gone a little weird. But, thing is, everything else I contemplate – all the things the rest of the world is up to, like working their little office jobs or sitting at a cash register or making babies or filling out paperwork – it all seems much of a muchness, all the same as what I’m doing here. Play a game, sit in a field, write a book, think about poetry – who cares what we do with our time? I’m having a laugh! Everything’s gone strange and glorious.

I keep thinking this process of living that I’m doing – that I call life – is really just a semi-desperate scramble to try and find things to divert from something meaningful and scary, like finding God. And so I play with women and drugs and hobbies and sports and jobs and different kinds of jobs and get bored of everything and then say, wait! this new thing – that’s where it’s at! and then get bored of that too. All the things I’ve been through – all the dreams and discoveries and new wantings. Fixing on something and working my way towards it and believing that’ll be the thing. And then finding it’s not. And the last six months or so it really feels like I’m running out of things to pick up on – and even the things that thrill me, that hook me for their timebeing, there’s a sense of knowledge that they too are just passing temporary excitements. Once they also pass…what will be left for me?

I was thinking this yesterday and then I had an urge to skip right to the end of Richard Linklater’s movie ‘Waking Life’ and to the one thought in the whole thing that I found provoking when I first watched it a year or so back. And not that I could remember the thought but there it was: Linklater’s animated form saying something about how the whole thing is just a process of God saying, “so, do you want the infinite?” and we’re kind of saying, “yeah but…not right now, I’ve got a few other things I want to try in the meantime.” Weird how I should feel drawn to re-watching that one moment in the midst of thinking about my current stage and how well it gelled with what I’d been reflecting on. Of course, one gets excited by the possibilities that throws up – what genuinely running out of things to do and distract with would mean – but then I have to wonder if that’s not just fantasy talk and me slipping back into some old weird way of being which, when I think about it, far-fetched though it sometimes seems was actually pretty awesome and difficult to discount as anything other than genuine. Once there was a time when magic filled my life and all my needs were provided for out of thin air; when strangers channelled the answers to my every question; when angels and healings were an everyday part of life; and when miraculous, life-changing meetings happened in gas stations and supermarkets on a regular basis and it really was a groovy, groovy time. But now…well, all those things happened in America – and another thing I’ve been musing on is the difference between here and there: of how us Brits are so sane and balanced and samey – and how maybe over there the veil between consensus, humdrum reality and the world of magic is perhaps drawn a little thinner. Concrete and heaviness and secularity have their purposes – such as for helping lost floaty souls get back to Earth – but it wears a little thin after a while. As if work and homes and pensions and worrying are what life is about. But, oh, the wonders of California and Colorado are long gone for me…

Running out of things to try. Or maybe just falling down a deep dark hole. It’s weird to feel so happy and content and excited by life when taking such a small interest in it, beyond myself, this bed, and a squash court. But, really, what need to get dressed? To go among others? To see the world? To do anything other than what I’m doing right now? If there’s something better out there I’d like to hear about it. Answers on a postcard please…

Dizzy. Treasure Island Dizzy. Chuckie Egg. Wonderboy III…

Another thing I came to the end of was The Beats. Man, I read much on them dudes for some weird reason, and for a long time thought that’s what I would write my assignment on. Question: where have all the flowers gone? Answer: they grew up; they integrated; they realised booze and drugs was lame; they cleaned up their act; there was nothing left to rebel against; everyone got into surrealism and weirdism and hedonism and funky tunes; The Mighty Boosh is mainstream TV; our parents dress in trainers and ripped jeans; and the quieter pursuits, as favoured by Richard Alpert, for example, of yoga and meditation and the whole California Rainbow Family thing – it’s less newsworthy, less noisy and flamboyant and antisocial – and when it comes to reporting movements, that’s what we want to read about. In a nutshell: sure the hippy revolution succeeded: but only in the way that orange cordial succeeds in transforming a glass of water. One is diluted, the other is sweetened. What did you think? That you’d be drinking that juice neat? No sir, that’s not how the flavouring works…

Anyway, that’s not the point I wanted to make – the point that I came to – the point that I realised when I realised I wanted nothing more to do with those damn Beats – not even in my assignment – because ultimately it came down to this: they were all a bunch of lunatics and losers and I don’t even want to spend another second giving my energy to their works ‘cos that would be like saying their minds had something to offer when their minds were dirt. Kerouac the alky and Cassady the speed-freak sado-rapist and Ginsberg the dirty old smoking homo perv. Drugs and booze and mad words just spilling out and meaning nothing ‘cept every so often hitting on a line of beautiful poetry or rhythm – though if truth be told it was only ever really On The Road that did it for me in that whole grand thing – and maybe Corso’s poem Marriage – but the rest of it you can shove. Ever listen to Ginsberg actually reading Howl? Christ, what a voice! Sort of like a sorrowful, dribbling turd. And Cassady’s speed-fuelled madnesses as captured in Magic Trip. And all their children as screwed up as they were, Kerouac’s daughter dead from booze and Burroughs’ son a junky like his dad: Burroughs whose every third word was “cock” – and some young boy’s cock at that – and I’ve no idea why anyone digs any of his stuff except to say most of the world is dumb and mad too. Everyone’s insane.

My university professors: insane. Daniel Sussman with his little mad eyes, his skin all crusted up, his mind like some biting dog, nothing but repressed anger and spitting vitriol, all dressed up and hidden under theories and the words of long dead Frenchmen who were all mad too. A young man fleshes out his proposed project on Derrida and deconstructionism – but all I hear are reams of words and no more sense in them than in the nonsense shit I write – except at least some rhythm and perhaps hidden meanings in that, not just strings of academic speak masquerading as intelligence. He finishes his talk and looks as confused as everyone else, as though a part of him – his subconscious, as expressed through his face – knows full well he’s talking empty bullshit – but still he ploughs on. How to admit that all your cherished theories and intellectual games are flimsy as balloons, empty and bubble-like and prone to floating away? But maybe that’s just me: and not so much the boy pointing out the Emperor’s nudity as the boy lost and confused adrift in a world that refuses to conform to his little man’s ego desires and –

Everything’s me. Enter Academia and have a listen and look deep into these lunatic professor’s eyes and smell the nicotine on their breath and see the dishevelment of their minds and then say, wait! but stop! all the things you’re talking are mad and you’re going all wrong and you’re leading others wrong and you must desist! And of course no one listens – and can’t – and you get frustrated and angry and want to cry your hair out and spit – but that’s not the point, you’ve got to leave them well alone. They’ve got their games and you’ve got yours. Why worry about changing the minds of others when you’ve enough trying to work with your own? It’s all just a sign on you.

The drunks argue in the street. The mothers smoke on their babies and think it fine. The politicians obsess on money and chop down trees. The young run mental in fancy dress and puke. The shopkeepers keep importing from China for things we don’t need. Bananas travel ten thousand miles. Smart men pickle their livers in wine and tell us God is dead. The most popular books and television shows and movies are banal. Democracy is the least worst system because people are stupid. And there’s nothing you can do ‘cept scream or focus on your self.

I have gone wrong in wrangling with professors and their world. I simply shouldn’t be in it. Or, at least, I should turn my eye blind when I am. Play the game. The best minds always drop out. Get my letters after maybe two weeks’ worth of work and, for whatever reason, move on. Is it about being able to say, “I’m Rory Miller, MA” or is it about the sport, which I love? This refereeing, this coaching scholarship? Or just ticking boxes – boxes I didn’t even know existed? “I should have done a Writing MA” was what I was saying a year ago – and after this I will have done it and dwell on it no more. “I’ve been thinking of getting into coaching,” I said last autumn – and now I’m getting into it and I’ll see what it tastes like for real. Want it in truth? Or just another fleeting fancy? How many fancies to go? How much more before giving in to this supposed invitation, the last grand “yes”? Must all desires be fulfilled or let go of? It’s sort of getting tiring knowing they’re all just empty anyways. This is what it feels like: that all the threads of life are resting in my hand and an unseen force is slowly pulling them from me while I watch them go. I hold them so loose you could never call it a grip. The whole thing’s happening automatically...

Last Friday Nicky and I accepted an invitation to go to this weird avant-garde sort of thing down at The Templeworks in Holbeck. Ho hum: we got there and it was just probably talented musicians making some awful discordant racket – the sort of thing I sometimes do on my guitar when I want to go mad; fun to play, but bloody horrible to listen to – and then some contrived arsehole dude with a pretentious moustache putting a silly paper mask on his head and dropping a piano from a hook as though it meant something and was art. And other people had paid money for this thing. Well, it was a friend that I like who had put us on the guest list and I figured we’d at least honour that by staying twenty minutes. But then he said we were scheduled for some other thing – to go “upstairs” – and so we ended up hanging around another twenty minutes which was only slightly torturous and made easier by a woman pole-dancing in a mouse costume. Pretty sexy moves – and all the sexier for the giant mouse head, I thought – but ultimately disappointing in that she only got down to her mouseskin and we didn’t get to see her human bits. Anyways, then we went upstairs.

Upstairs was kind of weird. Some girl gave us to another girl and this other girl took us through a big door and then through all these old rooms and then gave us to a guy who said to sit down and wait for some other guy in a room that had been pretentiously decorated with weird, random, out there objects – the wacky artsters! – and so we waited. I had this feeling like…oh wow, everything I’ve ever done has led to this moment and now here we are in the unknown, totally surrounded by mental cases and I wouldn’t be surprised if…if the gates of reality finally dropped off. If someone walked in and said, welcome Rory, we’ve been expecting you, we weren’t sure you were going to make it for a while there. If they were actually aliens and I was too. Like a real life unveiling of ‘This Is Your Life’. And Nicky and my friend and everyone I’ve ever met and known – right back to Australian Simon and my teachers from when I was a kid – comes walking in and shakes my hand and reveals the great grand put-on that was my whole existence. Or some kind of dimension-hopping enlightenment. Or someone to take my hand and say, everything you’ve lived till now, you’re leaving behind – Leeds and uni and football and the material world – we’ve heard your prayers, we’ve seen your intent, we’re taking you somewhere new. Or maybe just a knife in the back and mad, cackling clowns. None of that would have surprised me. I was expecting it. It was kind of exciting.

In the event, though, what it was was some guy putting a pair of video goggles on my head, and some headphones, and then being put in a chair and wheeled through some rooms – quite thrilling – and then watching a movie with some nonsense-talking clowns which was kind of grating and pretentious though I still wouldn’t have been surprised if reality came crashing down. It didn’t – but it’s kind of revealing of the state of my mind when that’s what I thought from their little interactive art piece (I suppose it was). Is that what other people thought? Or was it supposed to be more scary than that? Reality is hanging by a thread. It reminded me of when I read Steppenwolf and I immediately thought I was the guy: the book that had landed mysteriously into my hand: the answers to so many questions even as they occurred. Maybe I should read that again. Herman Hesse: now there was a writer who knew how to write something interesting.

But has he just scrambled my eggs and led me deeper into some delusional fantasy? Or is there truth at the end of all these tunnels? Is it real, I want to know, or are we all just whacked? Amma whacked? Buddha whacked? John Milton whacked? Myself just whacked? I really just don’t know.

I’ll take myself away one day and have a real go at finding out. If I went alone into the mountains and ate nothing and wanted nothing and just sat there and said, fuck it, I’m here, show me something true or let me dessicate and die, would it come then? Is that saying “yes” to infinity or is it just being whacked? Does anybody know? Does anybody I know know? Only JM, perhaps – and he’s probably a little bit whacked too.

Eve is whacked, that’s for sure. Didn’t she serve as a warning to what would happen if one didn’t sort themselves out and ground? But still, I can hardly be anything other than the thing I so blatantly am. It seems, for example, impossible to imagine that I would one day take seriously work and mortgages and life. Fuck! I don’t even know if any of this is real! Seriously: that’s how whacked I am. I hide it well but…well, I’ve glimpsed enough beyond reality to know that reality’s not as solid as it seems. Nothing makes sense. Very hard to get into other people when one’s not even convinced they exist.

If only those clowns had taken me away. Sort of disappointing to realise it was just a show by studenty avant-garde ‘artists’ and not some supernatural beam-me-up from another galaxy and race. Would have been much better, I feel. But instead, for now, I remain.

A poem

Yes! The

frantic muscle

whistle hassle

trestle bustle

bashful washing

sandal scandal

passion passive

fruitful flowering

handsome Campbell

camel camper

swansong lightning

hoover quicken

grateful combine

garrulous meanwhile

turgid lonesome

craven custom

haberdash vagabond

futile forgone

organ Morgan

western-facing

lovelorn ghost-upon

jostle-berry spoon-juice

camembert how’s-about-it

dingle-bear

elasticated

marvellous-o

bean-producing

gadabout-lord

skin-arriving

latex onion

hasp rasp pasp grasp

effervescent

goon-dog servant

mastication unit

Garfield-entering

Quantock-serving

have a biscuit

waitress-lifting

cow.

pros and cons

Today, I will do something productive. Yes: today, I may even get out of bed, which is something I didn’t manage till about 4 o’clock yesterday. Extremely tired, after a weekend of early mornings and late nights and much sport. Also, couldn’t see any reason: all the things I wanted to do – watch a movie, write, edit, play Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, relax – were just as easily and comfortably undertaken there. That’s the thing with living in a one-room flat: the bed makes perfect sense. The bed, in reality, is the ultimate chair.

Unfortunately, the deadline for my project has been extended by three days: so I get a little bit looser with that.

I’m so loose sometimes I wonder if I’ll make the finish line.

Meanwhile, life is odd. My girlfriend buzzes around and I wonder about her. Maybe make a list of pros and cons. Sometimes I really like her and sometimes I don’t. Pros: she tolerates me and doesn’t give me hassles and laughs at all my stupid japes and enjoys sex and isn’t demanding and is good at cooking and has a fit body and does her own thing and when we talk seriously we talk really well and easily and on the whole we’ve a ton of harmony and she’s a pretty happy soul. Cons: I find her boring and we don’t have much to talk about and certain things annoy me, like she’s always playing with her hair or saying “sorry?” even when she’s heard perfectly well what I’ve said. Sometimes she gets in a funk and I don’t find myself much bothered about helping her out of it and I guess I don’t care about her that much. Not sure I love her or am in love and actually I know I’m not. I get no joy from looking at her face and the sex isn’t that great for me (nothing she’s doing wrong, I just don’t feel it).

Pros: she doesn’t drink or take drugs and believes in loads of the hippy things that I live myself by.

Cons: she believes in it too much. She goes on about carbon – while meanwhile driving seventy miles a day – and loads about permaculture too, which as far as I can tell is just gardening, like old blokes on allotments have been doing for eons.

Pros: when she’s away, I miss her, so I guess I like having her around.

Cons: when she’s here, I kind of wish I was on my own.

Pros: she doesn’t get too naggerty when I’m out playing all my sport.

Cons: she gets a bit naggerty when I’m out playing all my sport. She wants me around more but when I am around we can’t think of much to do besides eat a quick meal and watch a movie. We don’t do very much together. Probably that’s my fault: I don’t do very much when I’m on my own either. Doing stuff, other than playing sport, seems to have lost its appeal. Like going to town, for example: why? I can’t imagine a reason to do it. Or going to watch music: it gets me dull. Pubs and friends and chatter I can’t find the energy for. Boardgames and other kinds of games, though: yes.

Julia called me up the other night. Was emotional and drunk and just finishing off yet another destructive relationship that she once thought promised so much. She’s had a lot of those. And now she was saying that she’s realised she wants to be with me. That kiss we had last year. Something changing for her, after all those years I was after her (14-26). What to say about that? Julia, who I feel strongly for – some weird emotional connection always present, even after all these years. And a great kiss. And maybe it’s just sex I want from her. But I also feel caring and love. But –

Cons: her life is so chaotic, so full of drama and craziness and so different from how I live. Drinking nearly every night. Dogs and cats running everywhere. Tears and excitement and children and television. All of it, I suppose, an outward expression of her inner psychology, twisted out of shape practically her whole life. Even at sixteen I knew it was more than I could handle: and now, even more so…

Pros: the feelings, the connection, the wanting, the…dare I say it? Love. That thing it’s supposed to be all about. That thing I’ve tried to dismiss as make-believe. That thing I’ve said over and over that I don’t know what it is and picked apart with the analyst’s dissective coldness and held up in my hands a bloody mess, attractive to no one. Ay, love. Feeling. Emotion. Caring. Compassion. Tears. But –

Cons: she’s a mess. She talks endlessly. There’s not much room for me to be myself. I would get washed away. And our lifestyles – the noise! – are so different it’s hard to imagine how they would fit together. Money. Space. All that kind of thing.

Main thing is – wow! how weird! all these years and now suddenly out of the blue I’m getting drunken midnight calls saying I’m wanted a hundred miles away and I’m the one – like Eve sometimes does – and I guess it’s a bit of a thrill in this bedridden life.

And nothing any clearer in my search for a woman. Nicky perfect in tons of ways but my feeling quite absent. Laura always hovering on the scene, and much feeling and perfection there too. And always then the thought of Grace and what if I do actually see her in Colorado this summer? Plus adulterous desires to test out the devious waters of Andrea and Monica down in London and see how it feels, whether I could live with it and keep it secret.

Nothing clearer at all.

Meantime, I used to want to be a writer and I get worse and worse at it all the time. Now all I want to be is…

A tree. A football referee. A primitive man Mexican canyon dweller. A meditating monk. A disappearing act. A football coach and manager. A buy who grows old in a bed playing computer games. A young again inspiration around campus living the dream life of sports and free time. An admin worker in the sports office organising teams and tournaments. A crazy mad adventurer who writes his life story and leaves it to the world, warts and all.

Husband and father? Not really. That was last year. Every reality and dream passes and fades. You pick them up and look at them: they fall through your fingers like sand.

Every reality passes and fades. Is this what life is? Merely the desiring and trying on of different ways of being, and then letting them go? All the things I’ve thought I wanted to be…and everything fades. Now it’s what I’ve said above – but tomorrow? But the day after I’ve done all those things? More sand arises to present itself, masquerading in the form of castles. But the tide is ceaseless: the castles will fall – and you couldn’t live in them anyway. They’re not suited to our form.

Once upon a time there was none of this – jobs and mortgages and technology and hobbies – but a man was still a man and he could still live a fulfilled life and achieve his purpose, if the purpose had something to do with his body and his mind and his soul. And it does, doesn’t it?

speed run

And so what I’m supposed to be doing is writing this assignment which is due in on the 21st – which is what I’ve been supposed to be doing for the past several months now – and I’m sure I’ll start it soon – but what I’ve actually been doing – apart from organising this squash tournament in preparation for the Varsity match against the Met – which we played on Wednesday; kicked right royal ass; my first taste of university sports at the age of thirty-six! – is playing Head Over Heels and reading about the beats and wondering about the world and life and stuff. The thing is –

Head Over Heels! Wow: what a game! And though it was three or four weeks back that I completed it, which generally signifies being over something like that, I then got it in my head that what I really needed to do was speed run it from beginning to end – via the shortest route – and without losing a life. Ie, play the perfect game. And then record it. And then upload it so the world can stand gape-mouthed and awed praising Jah and glorifying my name to the highest forever and ever amen. Who wouldn’t be impressed? And so I –

The perfect game. Easier said than done. It took hours. Days. Hours each day. What with that and the squash there wasn’t time for anything else. I guess I got obsessed. But in a good way. No longer the sad loser man lying in bed playing some gormless eighties computer game but – yes! – the hero on a quest and joyfully giggling revelation at the knowledge that EVERYTHING we do with our time is basically the same: has the same value: none of it matters. So what? Some people work in offices; some people go shopping; some people stand at cash registers; and some people write books. It’s all the same. Everything. Just time and the filling of it. I pilot a small cartoon pussycat around a screen and try not to let him fall onto spikes. Isn’t the world wonderful?

But I got more than that too…

The thing is, I learned greatly much and loads too. I started out trepidacious. I tiptoed into rooms when no need. I charged in and died. I didn’t know what was coming next. So then I started to tell myself, ok, ok, it’s the dalek room after this one; then the corridor; then after that the fish room; and go left here; and got to hit that one sooner. I noticed markings on the backgrounds that I could use to judge my jumps and runs. I figured out the patterns of the robots that had bamboozled me since I was thirteen. I found shortcut after shortcut till I reckoned I’d found them all. And everything started to come together: no longer being surprised by rooms, and no longer even needing to tell myself what was coming next: I simply KNEW. All on automatic. Conscious brain strived and repeated and soon enough it became unconscious, habitual behaviour that leaked into the fingers and the fingers knew what to do without thought. Like learning to walk, I guess. And I marvelled at the smoothness and the speed of the cat, the way I raced through puzzles. The way I went from stumbling like a baby to becoming the master of the universe.

Useful. You say it was just a silly game, that there are better things I could be doing with my time. I say, what things? And, even if you’re right, I still have time anyway. And, more than that, what I got to see and experience and realise was this: that my mind can be trained: that I can take on difficult tasks and with perseverance and repetition and determination and focus make them with conscious effort, and then make them effortlessly. Not only this, but anything. It’s obvious, I suppose, but now I know it in my experience. Never give up. I was lame in the beginning and it seemed impossible – but I made it, and I made it good. Squash, football, writing – and even something useful like meditation. I think I will always remember the days I spent conquering Head Over Heels – forcing my mind to become expert – whenever I try something new and see myself struggle yet know the possibility of at some point getting it, and seeing it sink into my bones, and grow as natural as putting one step in front of the other and journeying this body through space.

Did I ever tell you, by the way, that I’m a time traveller? Yes! I travel through time at exactly sixty minutes per hour. Yesterday I travelled from nine-fifteen to nine-twenty-two with the minimum of effort. Though so far I can only do it one direction – at least physically: if I want to go back in time I have to do it absent of the body. And I can go forward that way too: which is what I may have to do sometime soon if I’m to complete this assignment. It’s not cheating, right, if you plagiarise your future self and copy the words you haven’t yet written?

So that is me: referee; squash nut; computer game geek; madman. My girlfriend, I think, is the most tolerant woman in the world. How could a man not love her? When she comes home tired from work and all I’ve done is play games of one sort or another – and then I fart, and it really stinks, and all I can do is giggle and she giggles too? I shake my head: I have no idea how lucky I am. It’s a one-in-a-million that could put up with me.

yabyum

And after – what? – a couple of weeks absence one person says, why you no write no blog? and I suppose that leads me to write some blog. What I been up to? Well, I been organising a squash tournament. I been refereeing. I been playing squash. And I been embroiled in awesome eighties computer game ‘Head Over Heels’ to perhaps a fiendish degree. Sure, I wanted to complete it again – and that I did, and thought I was done with it. But then I got it in my head I needed to record a perfect game, speed-running straight to the finish line and share it with the waiting world and, wow, that becomes some sort of obsession, right? Like losing a life or fucking up in some room and you gotta do the whole thing all over again – and then it’s like two hours of the morning done and time to drag one’s arse out of bed and make it to the squash just in time – and by the time the squash gets done the day is over and, hohum, it’s another day, another dollar. Another day nearer to death. Another day of youthful prime spent maybe not so wisely.

Also I been hanging perhaps a little too much with my young student squash chums. Well they’re full of beans and piss and vinegar and crisps and so much more interesting than people my own age. And they like boardgames too. Articulate, Balderdash – I’m down with that. We went the other night to watch the world’s number one squash player play an exhibition match at the Met and, wow, he was crazy good. He did a q&a afterwards but all I could think to ask was what his favourite sandwich was.

And I watch my libido trickle away to nothing. I don’t even get hard-ons anymore. Masturbate like twice a year. It’s been a steady downward progression really the last five or ten years: you could chart it on a graph. It’s sort of nice and liberating and peaceful, not feeling desire in that area of life. Osho says you should be done by about 42 anyways so I guess I’m right on schedule. It makes me wonder about these old guys who ramp themselves up on pills or go see doctors bemoaning their impotence and the like. Why not just let it go? Sex ain’t all that, ain’t that big a provider of pleasure. But – ah – that’s not what we’ve been taught: it’s supposed to be like one of the best, right? And maybe it is, if your life has been base. But, for me, it won’t be no great loss. Freedom! Freedom from all desires. And especially those that just leave you sticky and wishing you’d never bothered.

And then…and then there’s the degree, which is rapidly baffling my brain. Can’t think of a thing to write. Can’t think of any reason to write it. I wrap my head around theories of beats and writing in general – and the more I get into it, the more it unravels. I think I have it cracked – this idea of one seamless movement from mid-nineteenth century transcendentalists and bohemians right up to the beats and the hippies – an American movement, this is – and then it all gets blown apart when I read in a 1968 Rolling Stone article that the whole beat thing was barely remembered even then. They didn’t know who they were. They didn’t even relate it to the hippy thing at the time. It’s only later when we look back through history and want to pluck some fish out the pond and say that represents the whole sea that these movements become crystallised and made sense of. Oh yes, this flowed to this flowed to this flowed to this and everything’s ordered and understood. But it’s not! It’s a lie! And the more I see – of Ginsberg, of Dylan, of drunken lame-ass Kerouac – the more I think, but wow, they really were a massive bunch of losers, gnarled nicotine fingers and egos and sex hunger. Fuck! I wouldn’t last ten minutes in a room with weird bald-headed Ginsberg – imagine his speccy Jewish lips trying to slurp all spittle beard down on your clean young man’s armoury and sucking on cigarette butts and spouting mad ‘poetry’. Fuckin’ lunatics. Nutters. The written word is –

Is bobbins!

Yes, Frank Sidebottom said it best. And we’re all just losers and weirdoes and I don’t know why we do half the things we do. I can’t wait for this to be over – and then I can go proper mad.

What to grasp? What to pretend make sense of? Oh, if only to be one of those egghead academics who think everything can be explained in this infinitely complex and ungraspable world of ours – as though twenty people out of two hundred million define what was happening at some given time and forget the rest. Ah, it must be nice to live in make-believe – but my head rings.

And, of course, this is all melodrama ‘cos I enjoy the typing when really what I’m thinking about is my pot of tea and my game of funny little cat-head and dog-head and this lovely bed and the ongoing question of the girlfriend and everything else besides.

An ex emails me and tells me she had Tantric sex for 64-hours and I’m not sure I really believe it, or at least can’t imagine it – or when I do try to imagine it just imagine getting bored or sleepy or wanting some other stimulation – and then another part of me when I look at my life thinks, hm, that’s the kind of thing I should be doing, perhaps there really is a universe within that’d be pretty cool and awesome to explore (like I always used to say) – but then I don’t suppose I could be bothered with that. Man! It’d take some mindblowing shit to get me back on that weird old track given my life as a run-around ball-chasing referee type fellow and how normal and happy that feels and maybe this really is all there is.

Yeah, sure, I’ll write something normal soon. I’ll write about investigating ‘Breaking into America’ and express a few things about Lightning Source and Sports Direct and maybe get googled and provide something useful to the world instead of just strange words expression. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

That’s all.

But – PS – this is me: yup, I started this. I don’t know if it makes any sense. I feel very much the lone voice maybe not even crying in the wilderness – maybe just sitting mad in man-diapers and eating his own shit – but the lone voice nonetheless.

Anything else? Sharing my Towels script at script club down at the Playhouse and even making old people laugh. Dreaming once more and really must send it to someone ‘cos unlikely it’ll get bought if I keep it in a drawer. Thinking once more about writing [TITLE WITHHELD] and just to hell and damnation with everything else, the chips fall where they may and, sure, you can sue my ass if you want, take it all, I don’t care – but will I ever do it? And, yes, if my face wasn’t so handsome and my wit and intellect more-than-functional and…all the rest of it, where would I be? Me and my brother got more in common than I like to admit. Hope I don’t regret spending so much time in bed when I finally wake from this dream and find my knees all full of troubles and even small stone walls an obstacle insurmountable. All grow old and bent, eh?