1. The end of the summer

Right. I’m sitting at a computer. I’ve got nothing else to do. I’ve got a cup of green tea. And I think I’ve got things to talk about: the blessed creature that resides within me and wants me to type everything single thing I ever thought and felt and did. That’s okay: like he say, he gives me joy in return for my effort. It’s a decent salary. It’s better pay than some.

Anyways...that’s the fingers just loosening up, the creature inside doing his stretches and pre-game exercises, plotting his course. A course which begins...at the beginning. Back in the summer. Back to July 15th and the last time I properly wrote. And not that I remember where I was but basically we can say, hoowee, we were in a bit of a mess, having relinquished the flat, having gone mad from trying to fly to Canada even though all signs were against it, and having then just about accepted being back in Leeds. I –

I rented a room with some guys in a house. But then a construction site opened up next door, big massive machines booming and digging and drilling and churning from seven in the a.m. and going all day just metres from my window and – wow, it made me want to cry and tear my hair and scream for all the woe of this woe-gotten noisy-ass world but –

Somewhere in there I was walking late one night by a road in Beeston having got dropped off in the wrong place by a fellow referee and then my friend Harry called, in answer to an SOS text about his sitting-empty student house and, God, it was so easy. “Can I rent your place?” I’d said, after finally overcome fears of asking, and thinking I should be offered, and not wanting to be no burden on my supposed amigos and –

“Sure,” he’d said, “I’ll sort out the keys and you can go there tomorrow.”

And typing that I’m reminded once more of how I sweated and clutched my brow way back when I was a wee lad feeling desperate to go on my first John Milton vision quest – and then how easy it was when Craig simply suggested, “well why don’t you ask him?” and I got up the balls and I did.

“Sure,” he’d said as well, and shrugged his shoulders and smiled, like it was absolutely nothing at all, after all my hours of inner torture.

Why do we hold these things back? Why not just ask? Is the fear of rejection (or whatever the hell it is) really that bad?

Harry’s said that kind of thing a few times too. You don’t ask, you don’t get. I see aloof people in the world and I try and encourage them the same. You’ve got to put the energy in. You’ve got to make the effort. You can’t expect people to always bring you what you want, to mind read you. Sometimes you’ve got to open your voice.

Wanting something is a sign for you to put it there. And all that kind of thing.

But I guess I still do it my self.

Anyway, that’s all just a long-winded way of saying, “I was in a miserable place. I wanted to be in a good place. I knew someone who had a place that I thought could be good. But I avoided moving towards it because of various fears and weird beliefs. And then when I finally plucked up the courage and stepped towards – nay, knocked upon – the door. Well, lo and behold, it opened to reveal a smile and a welcome in, and everything was shifted.”

Life may not always bring us what we want – but it sure as hell brings us what we need. What I wanted was a safe and relaxing place to lay my head, away from all the stresses I had caused myself by moving out of my flat. But what I needed was a reminder of how to go beyond my aloofness and swallow a bit of humble pie.

And in the end, I got them both.

Ah, Harry’s house! A four-bedroom paradise pretty much mostly to myself, with occasional roommates coming to-and-fro on their summer vacation wanderings. With a bathtub and a living room and chairs. And with a cellar full of junk and loads of weird cupboards full of decade’s worth of shit that somebody long ago should have taken the time to clean and sort out. Tasks! An opportunity to give! A chore so desperately needing doing, and me the man to do it, to make that place the fifty-quid-a-week palace it so obviously deserved to be.

Yes, I was happy there. Yes, I loved taking my baths, and miss them now I’m back in my shower-only pad. And, yes, I thought how nice it could be to live with others; to have others there to come how to; to have conversation and company and games-playing buddies on tap. Even as I know, at the same time, how often I loved it when they were all away, and how much pleasure I take in my own company – and how I even, sometimes, shy off and disappear into my room, and avoid all others, when given the choice. Balance, it is...

There was a moment back there somewhere – in a charity shop in Wakefield – buying books on a whim (I hardly ever buy books; don’t really believe in it) – that I came across Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy and, upon reading the chapter on Epicurus, fell in love with a like-minded, long ago soul. Everything he said – the simple life; finding joy in the little things; not being dependent on the outside world; pleasure being the goal of one’s existence – I wholeheartedly agreed with, and felt I lived. But one thing I knew I didn’t live – and that was Epicurus’s belief that friendship was also one of those key ingredients to a happy, peaceful life. I didn’t live it – but I believed it too. The problem is...

Sigh. I love people. I really do. But they do so often disappoint me. They could be so wonderful but I find they so rarely are. Too often saying the commonplace thing. The stupid thing. Too often engrossed in things that don’t matter, don’t even exist. Boring things. Or maybe just not capable of listening, of conversing, of living and displaying their truths. It’s hard being a human – and harder still being a twenty-first century British human, brought up to believe life is about one thing when it’s probably about something completely different, all obsessed with booze and the repression of one’s emotions and – curse this new fad – “banter” (ie, the being a bastard to others in the name of apparent fun, even when you’re the only one who’s laughing) and...

Well, in any case, I would love some friends but I find it hard to make them. To meet them. To get interested in them. To get anything from them. A week or two ago I was feeling very lonely and wanting to get away from here. Even those closest to me seemed as though they didn’t care, had shown in various ways that I didn’t mean vary much to them. Well, it’s true, I’m a sensitive soul, with high expectations – and it doesn’t take much for me to go “sigh” and take myself off in my own company, where things are mostly good.

Thinking: beautiful dear young Harry, who I think is about one of the most awesome people I ever met, and who has helped me in many ways, and who astounds me given his twenty-one years, and is joy and openness incarnate – and yet, wow, when I think of the hours I’ve given to listening to him, and then that moment the other day when after another burst of listening, and then my turn to want to say something – and in that immediate moment he picks up a book and flicks to a page and puts his eyes to the words...

Ouch! Whatever the truth of that – whether I’m right or wrong or overreacting or what – I feel hurt inside, and just think, what’s the point?

And then Nicky – my ex, who I see lots, who I help when she’s crying and confused and in need of a shoulder and an ear – and who one night when going to a party and even though I deny urges to child-like say, “huh! thanks for inviting me!” choosing instead the far more enlightened – it took several minutes to get to this – “can I come? I’m feeling sad and lonely” – and all I get is avoidance and indirectness but it’s obvious she doesn’t want me there, is pushing me away (fair enough) and –

Well, yes, that night I felt sad. Alone in my flat. Contemplating my wonderful yet alone life in Leeds and wondering that, for all this time and help I give to others, and the ears I lend, and the tears I’ve hugged and held – well, who is it that’s there for me in those few brief moments when I need someone? And the answer’s...

Well, is it no one? Or is it spiralling back to that earlier thread, of needing to put it out there if you want to get it back. Of making the effort. Of having the humility to bend down tearful on the one day in six months that I don’t feel strength and joy and –

And there’s another truth in there too: for though I do get these moments of lowness, the problem is that when I do finally get to share it all with someone, I feel such joy in the sharing of it and the expression – much as I do here in this writing – that they don’t take my so-called “existential torment” seriously. I bear my heart and still they say, “you never show your vulnerability. Even when you talk about feeling desperate and unhappy I don’t believe it, you’re even smiling when you say it.” And what can I do buy shrug my shoulders and admit it’s true? I may be in dire straits – but the joy is never far away. In fact, the joy is always there. Joy is pretty much ever present. I could be at the end of my tether and ready to sling the noose and have felt like that for days – but bring me a box of eggs and someone to share them with, and maybe a good old rasping fart, and I’ll forget it all in an instant.

Well this is all mainly from this one friend who goes mad with the way I am. Thinks I don’t reveal enough. Hates me for “always landing on my feet.” It’s envy drives her buttons. I would give her everything I have. But she’s happier staying in her own world, I guess, where things go wrong and it makes more sense to hate those who embody the aspects you so desperately desire.

I’m nothing special – but I am very cool. And by that I mean ‘awesome’. And in saying that, I feel good.

It’s okay to acknowledge and celebrate one’s awesomeness, right? If it’s not in an arrogant way, I mean.

Are we not all awesome? Or, at least, potentially so? My God! I marvel sometimes at the man I have become – singing joyful to myself in the supermarket just now – doing nice things for strangers – feeling no hatred or contempt for others, even when they’re abusing me on the pitch – and the purity of my mind...which hath been revealed to me on many occasions in the last year or so – the monastery, the iboga, and now the LSD. It’s fantastic how far I have come!

But, ‘tis the British way that, no matter how awesome you are, and no matter how much other people say it, you’d better not say it yourself. For some weird reason.

Luckily for me, I spent half my formative years in the United States. And also grew up with a dad cocksure and confident who always told me, “tha’s got to blow thee own trumpet son, no other bugger’s gonna do it for thee.”

Good old dad.

And all these weird things I just writ, to get the story started – to recap on the summer – to work my way to this week’s wondrous LSD experience –

It’s strange because, of course, all that negative feeling and boohoo loneliness and crossness with others is, by now, a thing of the past.

But, you know, storyteller’s got to tell his story, and the show must go on...

So I moved into Harry’s house, and there I did dwell from near the end of July to near the end of August, when I got my flat back. Sure, I made a mistake in moving out of there – what was the I Ching I got? Can’t remember the number but it was all, “stay where you are, it’s not the time to move” (ask before, you dolt, not after) – but in the end I guess it all worked out. Except, it probably didn’t. I lost my passport. I lost a few other things too. And I think I lost some time.

Friendship. Epicurus’s third (or fourth) leg. A thing I simultaneously long for and then push away. I loved to be back in my flat but, curiously enough, it wasn’t the same as when I first got it to myself, when Nicky first moved out. Then it was peace and happiness at being in my place. Lazy mornings in bed with my typing and the lack of washing up. The quietness of it all. But upon my return in August, once the early glee and sheen had worn off, there was a sense of...yes, loneliness. Or, rather than loneliness, the feeling that...someone else should be there. That – “man is a social creature.” And that that’s what I wanted.

I get songs stucks in my brain. One of those songs – and I’ve been singing this for years – is the theme tune to the 80s American sitcom ‘Cheers’:

“Sometime you want to go

Where everybody knows your name

And they’re always glad you came

You wanna be where you can see

Your troubles are all the same

You want to be where everybody knows your name.”

I was singing that last week. I was really struck by it. It’s so true and it makes me sad. Where is that place? Who are these people? Probably since I was a kid I’ve been wondering about them: a poem I wrote when I was like sixteen spoke of the need for “fellow visionaries...and voyagers” – and then when I got on my Beat-obsessions phase, not that I wanted to live like them – all that dirty hedonism (as opposed to the clean hedonism that I tend to favour) – but, wow, at least they had each other, and so many of each other too. Always there. Always with an open door and a bed and a floor. Food and ideas and a cultivated love. Interests and a heading in the same direction. I envied that. I’ve often felt that I was on the verge of it with certain other. But then it all falls flat and comes to nothing, people get taken over by their hang-ups.

The world is different now, I guess.

But, then again, it must be out there somewhere. Man! I know so many people who say they have that dream – of buying land – of living with like-minded souls – of creating a commune and...but they just don’t do it. They don’t sell their houses. They don’t get together. They –

Maybe I should get them together. Or at least give it a go. Call their bluff once and for all.

Do they want it? Or do they really want their front doors and their comfort and the illusion of an enemy – society, the government, finances – that keeps them from their dream?

In any case: friends. The wanting of them. The having of them but the not really seeing them. The thinking of having them but the not actually having them (the friends that aren’t really friends). And the friends of the past who were the best friends I ever had – I’m talking spirit buddies here – but who are so distant in time and space and, on the whole, in lands I’m not even allowed into (that is, America) and it’s all just so...

Yeah, sometimes I pine for it.

Except, of course: wow. Monday. And the wonder of that. And the joy it done bring me. And the way it’s rendered probably the majority of what I wrote above an absolute THING OF THE PAST.

Yes indeed. And that’s the end of Part One.