Thoughts in my brain
I sit down to write
At nine pee-em
Because that blog of mine
Lives again
And for some strange reason –
So that Martian moon-men
Ten thousand years hence
Will have a better understanding
Of us modern day
Ancient humans
Than we have of
The Stonhengers
And the Egyptians
The Lemurians
And even our grandparents –
Who shagged and
Sucked cock
And said
“Come on my tits!” too –
I have to record
The little detritus bits
Of my day
Like:
Did you know, despite all this mad stuff I write, I generally dress like a sporty bloke and go about my business refereeing football several times a week, and organising this squash league I created – now containing 70 players – plus doing the refs’ appointment for the Intramural football and –
Boring!
Okay: how about this? I had a Halifax bank account. They tried to charge me a tenner for some bullshit thing and I said “NO WAY!” I took all my money out the account except a penny. Then I wrote on the letter that they sent me (asking for nine pound ninety-nine) “I’m not going to give you this money [for such and such a reason] and actually I just want you to close the account. But keep the penny. Also, if you send me any more letters they will be subject to a handling fee of £10 per letter. Physical contact with this piece of paper by one of your employees constitutes your agreement to this charge” (to paraphrase). Then I went in the bank and gave the teller the bit of paper and stood there as he read it. He went off to find someone else, tried to direct me to another person. I said – as nicely as I could – “tell you the truth I’ve lost interest in all of this, I’ll just leave it with you” and walked off without my bank card or the letter, and that, as far as I’m concerned, is that.
I wonder what they’ll do? Many companies have tried to get tenners out of me – Vodafone, Virgin, Carphone Warehouse – but none have yet succeeded.
Also I was thinking: hm, I think about my ex a lot.
Also: movies. Yup, I watched a lot of movies lately. Me who thought at one stage last year that I was pretty much done with them. So many films! And why’d they bother with half of them? Just a pointless way to fill some –
Ah: but I needed time filling also. So I watched:
The Watch – this was funny. Made me LAUGH quite literally OUT LOUD. And anything that does that can’t be bad. Bit of a plot hole with Ayoade’s ‘coming out’. But – dun’t ma’er.
The Master – a little bit interesting in places – reminded me at the beginning of a lame version of what I got into in Mexico back in ’99 – but ultimately BORING and, boy, did it drag on. I left that one thinking, why did they even make this? Couldn’t see the point in its existence.
Glorious 39 – possibly the stupidest film I’ve seen in a long time. Except it’s confusing ‘cos it’s beautifully made and the acting’s terrific. Just a shame the plot repeatedly belies credulity. What’s a movie without its plot?
Argo – another confusing one. As it stands, it’s a taut, exciting thriller. But most of what makes it exciting is the thought that it actually happened. Yet having read an account of one of the hostages I know that’s not really the case, and knowing that then makes it something of a distasteful exercise in American rewriting of history. Still, the hair looks good – and there was one big belly laugh right at the end when a voiceover says, “and we upheld the integrity of our country (America ) and we did it peacefully.” Excuse me? Wasn’t the whole mess caused by granting asylum to a genocidal maniac America had malevolently manipulated into power in order to get its hands on that ubiquitous troublemaker, oil? Never let the truth get in the way of a good story eh? A little bit later the credits state, “some scenes and dialogue in this film have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes.” No shit. And so is history written by the victors, and those with the biggest movie cameras, and Ben Affleck.
Gangs of New York
The Dictator – very funny! Laughed out loud A LOT. Amazing how many comedies don’t actually provoke that. But this got me. Better than I thought it was going to be having only seen the trailer. Didn’t even realise it was Anna Faris; previously one of my favourite hotties. Might have to rethink that.
Wreck It Ralph – lovely movie, flawlessly done. Made me close to tears a few times. Loved the chemistry between the little chap with the hammer and that smokin’ hot army bitch. Christ, what a woman! What I wouldn’t give to be manhandled by a dynamite gal like that. Vanellope was pretty cute too.
Jeff, Who Lives At Home – this was stupendously good. Watched it the night I couldn’t sleep all freaking out and mentally fraught. But the opening quote comes up – “Everything and everyone is interconnected in this universe. Stay pure of heart and you will see the signs. Follow the signs, and you will uncover your destiny.” – and I KNEW it was for me. I shake my head: let’s face it, I AM JEFF. Me and him are soul-buddies. Kindred spirits. Bum chums. I related absolutely unequivocally with everything this movie had to say. Found encouragement for my own life path and belief. Wanted to get more out there and do more things like that. Good old Jeff. Loved the bit, too, where he’s saying, yeah, it’s groovy, but it’s not easy. Made me realise I put so much stock in not only living that way but also trying to maintain happiness at all times, like that should be my public face. But why not acknowledge that it’s hard and confusing and I don’t have to be smiley happy chappy always as though to display the rewards of raving mad living to others in order for them to believe it’s worthwhile. Not that I do that here of course. And so Jeff begins by talking about Signs – and now I’m talking about Jeff. But it’s all true, isn’t it? Isn’t it? I mean, it is true, right?
Safety Not Guaranteed – and a few weeks before I watched this film, and adored it too, and it wasn’t until after I’d seen Jeff that I found out they were the product of the same people. Great film. Good message (follow your mad dreams even in the face of public scorn and laughter). And not a gunshot fired in sight. I dunno, I’m just sick of looking at people shooting guns. I don’t get it. Why so many films with guns in them? What’s the obsession? Nearly every single one of us will live our lives without firing or seeing a gun, without knowing someone who got shot or shot someone else. They’re such negative things. There’s no need to put that energy out into the world: doesn’t do anyone any good. And so it was lovely to thoroughly dig this movie and to have a respite from that. Even most nice films have a gun in them at some point. Bloody Americans.
The Other Guys – which brings me to this: a dumbass comedy which was mostly nice but had lots of guns in it. Oh well: I still kinda liked it. I guess when guns are being silly they’re not so bad. A bit hit and miss but, overall, a…not unpleasant filler of time. Lol! There’s praise for ya! Did seriously love the bit where the two hero-cops jump off the building though. And I’ve always had a soft spot for Marky Mark.
Ted – which kind of makes this a shame. If The Other Guys was a bit hit and miss then this was a lot – and definitely too miss to want to sit through a second time. I’m trying to think of a good bit – but I can’t.
Before Sunset – magic. Makes me want to run off and live my life for mad things, believing that love is the only thing that matters and the rest of it’s nowt but crud. Like when I watched Castaway back in 2001 and next thing I knew I was penniless in Canada following a woman all on the whim of a dream. But what else is there? What reason not to be mad?
The Truman Show – I talk about this a lot. I never get tired of watching this. I long so much to grow the balls that could leave every little thing behind – your whole known universe – and sail right on out to the very edge of the world.
Avatar – I cried when I first watched this and wondered what mad creatures we were to have so crippled the planet that sustains us. Also marvelling at the little bits of floating stuff. But on a laptop, when you’re not feeling so hot, it looks like a daft cartoon.
The Big Lebowski – another guy who’s probably me. Someone said that not too long ago and I was like, no way, man. But then I watched this one morning sitting in my pink dressing gown in bed and at some point I knocked my pot of green tea all over the place and hot water and soggy tea leaves went into the carpet and plug points. But all I did was instantly put the kettle on and go for a piss and then remake my tea. What the hell, those tea leaves weren’t going nowhere. And all that fuss about water around electricity is a real overstatement. And then I got back into bed in my homeless-smelling dressing gown and giggled back down on my movie and farted. Whatever.
The Majestic – I bought this from a charity shop for like two quid: probably the first DVD I’ve bought in more than half a decade. Who cares? It’s for charity, right? And I do love my Jim Carrey. It was harmlessly decent, this film – another encouragement about leaving everything behind and recreating oneself anew – but, wow, got a couple of major flaws. Like how come the main chick, right at the beginning, has this cute little lousily-acted hiccup thing going on but then loses it when the plot turns its eye elsewhere? Like, d’yall just forget about that? Sheesh. Plus the music was majorly schmaltzy, as Frank Darabont generally is. Anyway, I still dug the message and probably cried here and there, like I do in all cheesy Hollywood schmaltz fests.
The Breakfast Club – fun.
District 9 – thought it was really intense and groundbreaking the first time I saw this: pretty much blown away, really. But the second time I was more…well, all I can remember right now is how much the main bloke said the f-word and whether or not his accent was any good or did it keep slipping – much like Dicaprio’s and Diaz’s did in that crazy movie last night. Though Daniel Day Lewis was consistent, even if bizarre. But he’s got three Oscars, so there.
Anyways, out of all those – the new ones, at least – I’d say Safety Not Guaranteed and Jeff, Who Lives At Home were the best. Christ, I loved Jeff. I wanna be more like that! I wanna be more like how I used to be once upon a time, following the signs and –
Maybe a day or two later I saw a guy I know who, seeing my arms full of stuff, said, “you should buy a bag.” I had a bag but the zip’s been bust for like maybe a year and it looks like shit. So I thought, hm, a sign, I’ll go and buy one – and I did.
I was thinking about what I should do next. I went to campus and found myself walking behind a girl with a Canada flag sewn onto her rucksack – as they do. I thought: hm.
And then when I told the girl I work with in the sports department that I was thinking of going away and she immediately said, “Canada ?” But I’ve mentioned that to her before so maybe it doesn’t count.
All these movies about doing the mad thing, and Conversations With God, and my turning against the domesticity instructions of Mother Meera and – are they all signs too?
That dream/vision I had, of the name of that ancient city in Greece . But like I said, it was at the end of a sequence about my dad’s guitar shop. And then a few days later he calls me up and says he wants me to go in and help them move into the internet age, the business is failing and they don’t know what else to do.
A task to be completed first? Before I earn my freedom? And ancient K –
Well it’s also the name of a city in the States just south of what may be a fairly easy border crossing in from the north. So again we’re in a limbo land, between two worlds, both the signs and my heart pointing in each opposite direction.
I sometimes think about forming a little group, like Leo’s Journey To The East.
A poster at uni asks, “Why Don’t You Walk Instead?” (or something like that), an answer perhaps to my wondering about cycling or hitchhiking or even buying a ten-year-old Jaguar and driving it to the Czech Republic to sell.
I want the signs to speak clear. I want –
I bought some dates today. Said to the woman – they were sixty pee – “well I’ve either got fifty-nine pence in change or a ten pound note.”
She said, “change is fine.”
“I’ll bring you in the penny next time,” I said, a winking smile acknowledging both the worthlessness of a penny but the necessity of paying one’s debts, “I won’t forget.”
“Well don’t leave the country,” she says.
Don’t leave the country! Ay ay ay: that’s all I need when I’m once more jettisoning my flat and dreaming mad dreams of just walking out the front door and keeping on walking – or even Forrest Gump running, like some poor man’s Eddie Izzard – or flying off to Canada .
Don’t leave the country? What’s a man to make of that?
I Ching, of course: that would clear things up. But I’m not quite ready for that. Can’t do an I Ching when you don’t really need to – and aren’t in the mood to be thwarted. Dreaming of escape is about all that keeps me going these days. Except –
I was down at my dad’s guitar shop again today, ostensibly furthering my work on their eBay page and website. Mostly what I do is complain about the stench – my dad still smokes in the shop, despite it being illegal since 2007 – and the whole place reeks like a homeless man (no exaggeration). They wonder why they have no customers given they’ve got some decent stock in – and I really do believe the smell and general demeanour of the place has a lot to do with it. People don’t want to go in shops that smell like rough seventies boozers anymore; where gruff old men sit watching Chinese upskirt videos and swearing their asses off while guitars sit dusty and unworking on the wall, neglected and overpriced. It’s old skool and an antidote to the plastic places staffed by schoolboys who don’t know their Zentas from their Zemaitises – but much as we hate phoney McDonalds Americanizations round these parts a little customer service wouldn’t go amiss. It’s probably too much for the old man to embrace the credo “the customer is king” – but why not a happy medium between that and the current shop philosophy, which appears to be “the customer is a turd”?
I can’t remember now where I was going with this. Looking back…dreams of escape and…well, maybe just feeling a little bit of excitement about doing more with the place. They want me to work one day a week putting stuff online and I’m happy to do that – but, problem is, it smells so bad I seriously need a hardcore shower and to wash all my clothes after even half an hour in there – and that’s when they smoke outside – that I can’t actually do it there, I have to go in, quickly take pictures, and then escape to uni to do it somewhere a little less unsanitary. On leaving there today I started to think that maybe one solution would be for me to do my stuff there and kind of banish them – my dad and his equally smelly partner – and just do all the shop stuff at the same time too. Perhaps an odd solution – giving myself twice the work for the pittance pay they’ve offered me – but it kind of made sense.
And there I am formulating thoughts in direct opposition to how I spend the greater part of my time thinking. I have a real-life friend who also reads this blog and she says it’s all just a record of my ever-changing whims, one minute I feel this way, the next that. She says I’m always changing my mind about everything. Funny thing is, I’m not really aware of that, I feel like I’m pretty much constant. Pretty much constant in my change, anyway. It’s not so much a back and forth as a moving through, a journeying through the cycles. Isn’t that what life is?
Anyways, this brings me back to my dad – cos he’s like a total nutjob in this regard, and I wonder if we’re not actually quite similar (which is gonna bring me around to another thing I’ve been thinking about – which is handy). My dad – ah: this is the man who wanted to sell his shop and did actually sell his house and bought a villa in Bulgaria and moved out there all excited and full of plans only to come home less than six weeks later sans wife and saying he couldn’t stand the place. Back to a bedsit in Holbeck. Sitting smoking in front of the TV. After ten years of marriage.
This is the guy who every time I see him – at least once a week – tells me either he’s got no interest in guitars or women or that he’s putting a band together and feeling the itch and chasing some broad. Tells me he chatted to a woman for a few hours the other day and is thinking maybe in a year or two he can sell the shop and just go live with her in some distant city/country. This is no exaggeration: he’s said this several times over the years, felt it about women he barely even knew in Poland and Holland and Texas . Came back from Poland once having had a brief romance with the mother of a girl he knows and, though she couldn’t speak English, was thinking of retiring out there. Then knocked it on the head two weeks later and spoke of it no more.
Maybe that’s where I get it from.
The other day I walked in and he was saying he was sick of life, if he got cancer or something he wouldn’t want to bother with the treatments, he’d just want to die as quick as possible. With a smile on my face I said, “I know exactly what you mean, I’d do the same.” He says, “well then let’s just end it, make a suicide pact right here.” I laughed, said we should do it live on youtube – but go for a curry first; might as well – but also I shuddered. I was like, hm, he’s kind of serious, I don’t think I’ve quite got the balls.
Anyways, he’ll have changed his mind in a day or two, got excited about some short-lived project – like the music video he made last year, the signature guitars that are apparently winging their way; him talking about finding a ghostwriter to write his musical memoirs (“anyone in mind, pop?” I didn’t ask); some woman in a far off land he’s talked to for like three minutes, taken for a beer, charmed in the shop. He’ll probably live forever, that man.
“When Keith Richards goes, then I’ll be worried,” he says, “but until then – well who’s to say me and Keith aren’t immortal?”
He says that and then the next day he says he can’t wait to get out of here, it’s a world full of idiots and he hates the bloody lot of ‘em.
I’ve got my foibles but…
Well it made me think when I was in my January funk – though quite happy and giggling to myself a lot and generally in good spirits even though all alone and lonesome in this world – that, here I am in my bed and I can’t think of a damn thing to do, pretty much zero in this whole workaday world of the city and concrete and shops and people’s busynesses, and so I just lie here and do not much, watch movies and wait until sleep and – well, isn’t that just what my parents do, my brother? It’s like I’ve fought the tide of time (whatever that means) all these years, what with my travelling and adventuring and gadding and education and learning and tap-tap-tapping away at this lovely, lovely keyboard and – and yet we all end up in the same place anyway. Not the coffin, you silly – but the bed, all run out of ideas, and waiting for the end.
My dad sits at home smoking and watching war films. A few years back he went through a stage of making and painting model tanks. They were pretty good. He buys and sells guitars. But you can’t say he really has a friend, even though he knows and is known by loads of people. He’s a lonesome man. He’s not that into people and he probably doesn’t know how to be with them. He’s all blustery and temper-filled. Sometimes philosophical but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him have a genuinely vulnerable moment. Without guitars I don’t know what he would have done. He’s played them his whole life, made them his hobby, his business, his occupation, his way of meeting people and women, gigged in pubs the best part of forty years, got his reason to get out of bed. But even on his days off he comes down the shop before opening hours to get online and look at crap, like we all do, because there’s nothing else to do. Sixty years on the planet and it comes to that.
My mum, on the other hand – well she has her husband, I guess, and through him they’ve got into things like holidays and walks and interior decorating and gardening and I guess that fills her time. But I’ve never really thought of her as having a friend either. And when I was a lad she pretty much gave up on everything and went to bed for more or less four or five years. Couldn’t think of anything to do, I guess. Left me and my brother to it. And now my brother lives in her house and though he’s not really gone in for the bed-occupying stuff – must have left that for me, taken my dad’s slightly less horizontal manner of filling time – I can’t say he does much else, has never had a job, nor friends since school days, is merely killing time between now and the end of his life – which is a real shame, being as he started on it when he was about twenty-three.
So that’s something I thought of when I was in bed run out of things to do. And I guess in a way I can congratulate myself on at least having done a few interesting things with my life – and yet you can only escape the weight and the baggage of one’s family karma and inheritance for so long. And so try as I might the bed and the end of activity done catch up with me after all. Ah, to be like one of those normal people who can find things to do with their time, and believe in those things too!
Still, I plot. I say I’ll toss it all off and go on mad adventures. And then I’ll one day write about those mad adventures and that’ll be my life, my dream life. How many years have I been saying that? That if I could do anything it would be to “go on big adventures and then write about them – and then use the money I make writing about them to go on more big adventures, and on and on and on.”
But what do I do instead? I just moan. That’s something I’ve thought about too: the humour of it all. That I moan for life to bring me something groovy. That I moan for life that I’m not a successful writer. That I moan for all the time I have and nothing to do with it. That I have all these ideas and really want to write something – can’t not write something – and moan about that too. And yet…
Well it’s a simpler conundrum than one add one, isn’t it? So why don’t I do it?
Absence of external pressure. The deadline. Those things work well.
And a reason. A belief in the purpose. Yet I tried to kill that during my MA, deciding all published writing was pointless.
I try to leave it behind but I can’t. I want to go on more adventures and I think –
Well, if I’m going away maybe I should just get all these words out of my system before I do. A deadline. A reason to not postpone it till tomorrow. And the promise of moving on, creating a space for the new to come. Much as I did in 2008, wanting so badly to get back on the road, feeling the weight of my unborn book – and going off to Mexico once I got it out of me and onto paper – and, come to think of it, I feel its weight no more.
It’s been a while now that I’ve been thinking to get out of here on March 21st. That’s the date I’ve told my landlord I’ll be off. That’s when spring hits – “when spring comes around” – and spring feels like a good time for the new. It’s also about enough time to fast-write some book-length splurge of words, or something of the sort, and given all this time I’ve got, and the bemoaning of nothing to fill it with – what procrastination! what utter foolishness and folly, the squandering of such time and opportunity! how ruefully I shall shake my head when this dread life is over! – I figured –
A Creative Project.
I made a list of what I had in my head. I could either:
- Spend time putting all my old diaries into book form. Seems like a kind of dumb and vainglorious idea at first – but, in any case, it wasn’t my idea, it was Stevie’s, and I’m not really saying it has to come to anything, that there’s any merit in it. But might work well as a companion piece for when I’m dead and gone and a thousand years have passed. Or for someone who’s as loopy as I am and thinks it not an inconsiderable sum of money when it’s 69p on Kindle. Plus I’d love to have it all on paper, even as I mourn “the lost pages.” Anyways…
- The sequel to Discovering Beautiful. I’ve thought about this a lot, often composed stumbling and apologetic introductions about how none of what follows will make any sense, but then neither will my life. I ignored it for a long time cos I always thought I’d rather share only the goods that could help lead people to a happy place – as I imagined DB would also – but then…well maybe it’s like my good chum Harry said the other day, “sometimes you can learn more from other people’s mistakes than from their triumphs” (to paraphrase). In any case, it’s daunting but I’m kind of reconciled to doing it quick and slapdash and not really caring for the literary content, let the chips fall where they will. Who gives a fuck? No publishers or editors want me anyway.
- Man Woman Sex Love, the autobiographical sex and romance memoir I started just over a year ago – wrote twenty thousand words in four days – and haven’t added to since. I quite liked this – as did my tutors at university. Had the next sentence in my head all those months but never got round to writing it down. No reason to, I guess. Except probably a dozen very good ones. But without an external interest…well it’s easy for a boy like me to say, “what’s the point?” and just loll in bed watching rubbish movies instead, like a massive looser [sic].
- Hit up publishers and agents once again. For what it’s worth.
- Try and record my songs properly. I like my songs. I’ve thought for a long time that I would love to have maybe five or six of them done in the studio with drums and other musicians and the full band effect. My dad’s been saying for years that he’ll pay to take me in and do it with me – but then he always cries off and says business is bad and he ain’t got the cash. In his head, fifteen grand ain’t enough to shake off feelings of being poor.
- Blog. Resurrect the blog. Get stuck into it. Blog my ass off. Which I guess is what I’m doing right now. ‘Cept –
But I shall. Quality may not be my forte – but quantity-wise, I am perhaps without equal. All I was gonna do tonight was have a quick express and then go to bed with some other neighbour-provided mediocre flick (he hasn’t any dumbass comedies, just films with depth and guns) – but that’s another five thousand flippin’ words in two hours – t’other day was 2500wph too – and, well fuck it, if I could only take to heart the words of Elizabeth Gilbert:
“I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write.”
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