Private August journallings #5

And so he finally sits down to write again. A relaxing empty day up early doing not much and playing some Mariokart Wii and then cycling to and from Otley with a women’s football match in between (that was nice: the banter and the sunshine and the being involved in the reffing, and makes me think positively of Yorkshire life). Then back to Yeadon for more pretty much nothing ‘cept watching the rest of When Harry Met Sally and trying to delete viruses off the family’s computer…

I’m still here in the family house in Yeadon, feeling strangely at home – but in a kind of strange way. I guess two and a bit weeks having it to myself I got well accustomed and then when they returned and said I should stay and the whole thing’s fine and…

Well, I don’t know. I’m just here. Pottering around. Not melancholy or wanting away. But I am going away anyway…

Tuesday seems like the day for a decision. I find a bunch of flights and eventually, with Ian and Jenny’s help, book one late into the evening. I write five down on slips of paper – one round-trip, four one-way – plus a slip that says, “figure it out yourself” – and then I get Ian to pick one and it’s the one I probably thought it would be all along. Not Edinburgh on the 16th or Kefalonia on the 18th but Leeds-Bradford to Corfuon the 22nd. That’s good. Ian’s mum’s dying and the five extra days should give him a bit of breathing space at work to sort all that out. So I’ll fulfil Leeds commitments and then be off. Not sure whether to buy a return before I go or not; will probably have a think. I’m a little bit excited and a little bit nervous too.

But let’s backtrack then to last Wednesday, and to the mad day of –

No, what I’ll do is write an email I can send to Brittney or Eric or somebody and just cut and paste it here:

So! Just as I’m trying to figure everything out and ‘get normal’ there I go again having such a very typical ‘Rory day’; for example, here was last Wednesday: I have work in the morning; then I tell my dad I’ll do the last hour or so in the shop for him; then I have an appointment with the counsellor 6 till 7 (thinking most likely to fire her off); then I’ve got to go ref a football match about a twenty-minute bike ride away 7.30 till say 9.15; then I’ve got to zoom back into town, swap bags, and make a train to Scarborough at 9.42 to rock up there at eleven in the dark and find somewhere to sleep for an interview the next day. Dad says guesthouses won’t be taking people in at that time. Boss says you don’t want to be camping and turning up to your interview with leaves in your hair. But of course that’s what I figure I’ll have to do so I stick a tent and sleeping bag in my bag – tent cost a tenner from Argos and leaks – and the plan’s all set. Except my bike gets a puncture on my way to my dad’s shop – like fifth in a month! – and I can’t find my repair kit. At five thirty I’m still looking at shit online and wondering whether to cancel the counsellor and make the football early and see if I can take buses where I need to go. But the bus/walk obviously takes twice as long as cycling – of course it does – and the whole thing seems impossible. Solution? Fire off counsellor early into the session and skedaddle outta there and hopefully kick off the match earlier. It’s 5.35 now. This is all so typical of me. If I need to be at work at 11am and it takes 7 minutes and forty seconds to get there – of course I’ve timed it – then I’ll still be sat in my sarong at 10.51 not even knowing where my shoes are. And if there’s a puncture needs fixing I figure still at least 10.40 before I need to get moving and maybe even time for a fried egg sandwich so…

At 5.55 still being no clearer I take one last look for the puncture repair kit and find it. The tyre has a hole in it. I tape some card in there and hope it stops the tube popping out while I wait for the glue to dry and then stick the patch on and wham it all back together and pump it up. It seems to be holding. I zoom on down to the counsellor’s and I’m only three minutes late. Pretty soon we get into loggerheads and I confess that I don’t trust her and don’t think she’s as smart as me and laugh about lots of things and by half past say, I know what I’m going to do, I’m going to call this a day and get on my way. We shake on it. She’s no doubt glad to see the back of me. Poor thing. She’s started bristling and defending and proving herself. But I got one or two good things out of it. Then I zoom on up to the football and hope the tyre holds. It holds.

Get the teams kicked off early. Ref the game. Two yellows and some meaty sliding challenges in the rain and typical amount of testerone bullshit flying about the pitch. It’s all water off the duck’s back to me by now. Who cares? The ball goes one way or the other and the ref makes a few errors here and there – who doesn’t? – and it’s all so silly to get so nasty about.

Game over. Someone wins 2-1. Some people are happy with me and the other fifty percent go home grumbling. Then I’m on my bike at a nice leisurely 9.11 and I’ve over half an hour to make that train. Back to dad’s shop. Get changed. Quickly run wet clothes and unneeded refereeing gear upstairs. Swap bags for pre-prepared one with tent in it. Cycle to station. Take a bit too much time and end up running for train – but then, when was the last time I didn’t run for a train and have to, you know, wedge my foot in the door and jump on huffing and puffing? I just don’t seem to do it any other way. Everything always at the last minute. Everything always crammed in and disorganised.

I’m making this sound like fun – but it weren’t no fun at the time…

Train. One hour twenty to Scarborough. Fairly mellow. Leaving town for first time in a long time. Something a bit open-ended. Nothing to get back for till Sunday. The interview and Scarboroughand…

I get there. It’s quiet and dark. I walk for an hour, right up to the castle on the headland, and search for a spot. Try to climb into the castle and scale a fifteen foot wall and then realise it’s all lit and locked up and guarded and get scared on the way down not able to see where my feet need to go. Use a tree instead. Then find a place and set up tent and muse. It’s mad to be 37 and out there like this just like it was when I was 23. I seem to have learned nothing. I seem incapable or making rational and sensible decisions. I’m supposed to be a grown man! But still I’m just turning up places with no plans and sleeping in crazy English patches of trees which only the bums do round here. I wonder what’s wrong with my brain…

And in the night, it rains. And the patter of the rain keeps me awake and I maybe sleep an hour, maybe two, in total. And the tent leaks and the water creeps in and pools in the corners and the sleeping bag gets a bit wet and all my clothes do too (I’ve just the one set, plus a pair of shorts that are already wet) yet in the morning it doesn’t seem to matter and once I’ve pulled on my damp jeans and realised everything’s okay it all just seems kind of funny. Not desperately tired. And twenty-five quid saved on a B&B. Who cares? Incapable is as incapable does.

I walk through town and am amazed at how ugly and base everyone appears. It’s like some horrible redneck nightmare; like the remnants of a failed nuclear experiment from the sixties. So much for Scarborough and the beautiful tranquil North Yorkshire coastline: I can see the sea and I haven’t seen the sea in nearly two years but I’m really not that bothered. Ho hum: a bunch of water. Mainly it’s MacDonald’s wrappers and pound shops and I know that’s a bit glum but, anyways, for some weird reason I decide to go eat breakfast in a pub and men are already ordering and sipping pints – it’s before 10a.m. – and it’s all I need since already feeling weird. I buy a book from the Oxfam about molecular biology and get stuck in: the cover says something about the link between genes and behaviour. I’ve been thinking lately maybe I’ve just got some very dodgy commitment or reliable or normal-making genes. Something that makes me incapable of making a sensible decision. Maybe something frontal lobe that’s gone awol or something inherited from one of my dodgy, disappearing dads and I’m, alas, just the same despite best intentions. This is one of the things that I’ve maybe stumbled on in the counselling sessions – the one I dominated and talked the whole way through figuring that was the best way to get my money’s worth, the poor counsellor’s interjections just annoying – that even though I may be able to improve on what they gave me I’m still in no ways actually in possession of the psyche and the ability to do that ideal thing and make it all the way to being stick-around middle-class dad. I guess I never realised that you could just be yourself even when yourself was imperfect and unable. Something like that. In any case, I’ve read the book – most of it was about research conducted on fruit fly – and I’m kind of thinking, hm, yes, I probably do have some mutant gene that compels me to illogically sleep in the rain in leaky tents and self-sabotage all pathways to middle-class money-security blisshood and the only difference between me and those scientifically screwed-up flies who run in the opposite direction to their cousins or do mating dances for the wrong sex or wake up way too early/too late is that I question my behaviour and somewhere know it’s wrong and they don’t. What gene causes a man to forever want to go off to a foreign country and go on unknown missions when he’s got a perfectly good life at home? What gene shuns good women for fantasy women, and then shun them too? What gene forever seeking answers and plans and then changing plans and then not knowing what to do but having to think of something anyway and probably choosing something mad? What gene drives me to this?

And, yes, not even important: important thing, perhaps, to just learn the lesson of the fly and instead of crippling oneself ‘cos observing one’s own particular mutation sending you oscillating away from the pack and trying to force oneself to join them/be like them just go gloriously and madly giving it and dance and whirl and spin away into the night because that’s what you were programmed to do. The fly can’t help it, has no choice in the matter, and doesn’t question. He’ll never know the pain of knowing one is flawed, and seeing so clearly what one should be, and even the steps that could bring one to it, but simply being unable.

I read of Neal Cassady and say, Neal, Neal, why didn’t you just stick working on the railroad and be a normal good husband for your wife and three kids with your swimming pool and neat little house instead of forever going off on mad journeys and loading yourself crazy with speed and flitting about all over the place for women who were no good for you – but how? How could he when that was the very way he was made. I’ve missed a trick there – not understood something very basic about the way human beings work – and maybe caused myself some stress and tension in the process. It’s all getting back to just doing and being whatever the fuck I want and marching to the beat of the weird fucked-up drummer within. How can I help it? How can I any longer pretend? Poor old Laura will just become another Carolyn Cassady always thinking that I can change into a ‘normal person’ and that change is just around the corner and, as she so truthfully predicts, really she’ll just get left “holding the baby” and much as I’ve tried to deny it all these years I’m starting to think, yes, that’s probably exactly what I’d do and maybe that’s something to therefore avoid or maybe it’s just my karma and there’s nothing I can do about it. Certainly, counsellor was right when she suggested that my unwillingness to even get into such a situation “until I was sure I would stick around” was partly based on a mistaken projection of possible future pain to some unborn, daddy-abandoned child (mine; me the daddy) because of what I myself experienced when, now I think of it, it wasn’t the single-parent thing that screwed me up but perhaps the quality of the parent I was left with. NC’s children grew up and became adults and, for better or for worse, exist in the world today. Maybe they took what he had and improved on it somewhat and are just those one or two steps closer to being “nice normal mom n pop n Buddy n sis” people that I kept thinking I wanted to be and could be but probably, reality accepting, just can’t. Maybe wrong of me too to stop the evolutionary chain thinking it’s got to be perfect or nothing – when perhaps it won’t be till great-grandson that one of my male line finally stops being mental and runaway and travelbug and responsibility-fearing. Biodad is off before I’ve even got feet and replacement dad is gone by six. Just maybe I could do better than that. But maybe not. Maybe best not to get into it at all. Point is: you’s got to be what you is, no?

I do something like that interview for the 4-year – four year! – course in psychotherapy and it’s a bit like being backed into a corner. Life diverges at that point and it’s a real moment of choice. No longer able to drift along or let the current take you where it will. No more deadend jobs that don’t need thinking about or living day-by-day. This is Big Decision Time: the decision that’ll take you into your forties and maybe define the whole rest of your life. On the one hand there’s financial commitment and commitment to a place and to the people that are in that place and also to a career – and the promise of money-security and not having to think about those things constantly and then the whole wife and family and home and not being skint thing once it’s all done and dusted and one is a swanky well-established shiny couch therapist – and on the other hand it’s like, well, is this really what you want to do and, if not, what’s the thing that you really want to do instead? It’s like when Tyler Durden’s got his gun to your head saying, what the fuck are you doing working in the Chucky Cheese if you spent your whole life dreaming of being a rodeo clown? I get backed into these corners and I always come out thinking about writing. Thinking about really knuckling down to it. Thinking about all the projects I have backed up in my brain; all the started but unfinished ones; all the times I’ve made that resolve and then forgot about it ‘cos it was mad or silly or nobody wanted it or I needed money or I just got lazy. Thinking how envious I am of those that just do it. Thinking I wish it was me. What is this lure of psychotherapy anyway? A path born out of fear and panic and weird ideas of some future me that probably isn’t me at all? But then what of the writing thing? Isn’t that just unrealistic and childish and never really going to put the roof over my head or provide any sort of true (child-raising) satisfaction? And yet it is what I dream of. Where does one go in this life? With dreams or with responsibilities? For not all dreamers and artists make their way. But then even some of those are eventually vindicated. Such madness! And it’s little wonder that life seems so unreal and pointless and confusing. Like I read the other day, you’d be hard-pressed to find twenty people that would sit and watch Van Gogh paint a picture – but you’d fill Wembley Stadium with paying punters to see him cut his ear off. It’s such a crazy-ass world. And now his paintings sell for tens of millions. Oh, for Van Gogh luxury of asylum-dwelling away from worlds of rent and food-shopping! I’m not even capable of feeding myself greens these days. And I’m not sure I could even learn. Everything is in my genes, my being – my dreaming, my inability, my laziness, my indecision and vacillating – and probably there’s nothing I can do about it. Oh, to be a clueless fly, bonkers but to have no idea that I should be anything else! To just run with program and live it out till the bitter end. To have no notion of any other way to be, just ‘cos the mass of society – the non-mutant flies all sitting at the light end of the bottle – have long since figured it out and sit content supping their sugary snacks in also blissful ignorance of their own programs and gears.

What me? To give in to this stupid fucking madness? Or to just marry the girl and live in Wakefield and grow old and –

Hm. There’s no way I can send that to Brittney or Eric now. Gone off on one. Lost all ability to write anything sensical. Which is generally the way. So much for writing dreams. When did I go loony? Or…

The other thing is that, give it six months and I generally look back on whatever I’ve typed with astonishment and glee and –

Let’s get back to the story. To Thursday after the interview – did I mention I got accepted? – and to napping a little on Scarborough beach amongst a truly horrifying selection of people – I really am a crazed and terrible snob and humanity-loather – and then doing the next crazy thing and instead of going back to Leeds or taking a train or a bus somewhere just instead walking and walking till I was out of Scarborough right along the main road for maybe five miles while the traffic roared by ceaselessly and I really can’t believe how many cars there are in this country and how often people use them. I thought there was supposed to be a recession and petrol prices were prohibitive? But everywhere you go the cars are speeding past at one per second, even on little village country roads, even on a Sunday. Today near Pool it was backed up from a crossroads. Where the fuck is everybody going? We’ve all gone insane and I know it wasn’t like this twenty or thirty years ago. When will it –

Seamer. I walked to Seamer and I spied a Morrison’s and I cried with delight. Supermarkets save my soul. Something you can rely on. A bag of dates and a bit of bread and maybe a bottle of fizzy water or even a couple of smoothies, if they’re on offer.

I hitch-hiked next and got picked up within three seconds, the first car that came past me. He took me down to Ganton – about eight miles down the road – and from there I walked up into the hills to get away from the road and saw dozens of (what I think were) peahens and also some cows and then put up my tent and read my book till dark. Again, it rained and my tent leaked, but I was a little more used to it now, got a bit more sleep. And in the morning a landowner came by and fulfilled my idea of what an Englishman discovering a camper would be like – in contrast to Mikey’s Germans – and told me it was private land, blah blah blah. Ah well: I was just off anyway. And tromp tromp tromp another three or four miles before thumbing another ride and getting taken all the way to Ferrybridge.

Walk to Cas. Train to Wakefield. Arrive just before Laura and meet her at the station and get taken up to hers and then have sex with her in her garden; what the hell. And then again that night.

This was Friday. I left Leeds Wednesday evening. I don’t know where the hell I am.

Saturday, Laura's to work and I’m back to Yeadon. Time to do nothing. Finish off the fruit flies and see if I can find any more clues about my state of being. Research that ’74 strat and find out it’s actually a ’73 and that two of the pickups are original and therefore maybe add a couple of hundred quid to the price or at least make it a damn sight more saleable. That was good and fun news.

And then it’s Sunday morning, and the Wii and the refereeing and the –

And now we’re here.

The thing is, this computer screen looks massive, like how it used to be when I was tired as a boy and the walls would start spinning and everything was up close. I’m definitely typing mad right now, not really thinking and just spurting it out whatever words come into my fingers so I can get it out and done before calling the whole thing a night. Poor Eric! One day they will edit this but, alas, not today and whoever has to read it like this has an unenviable job on their hands. Must learn how to type properly, however, if I’m to actually tackle that writer problem.

More crossroads coming up. Decisions to be made. Big and important ones. Laura and normality on the one hand and craziness and uncertainty on the other. Fuck! Glad I don’t have to decide now. Just off to Greeceand whatever crazy thing awaits me there. Gee whizz! I really must be off now. Four days till I fly. Hopefully everything gets sorted then. Something’s gotta give.

Plus: this is nothing like what I wanted to talk about, is it? But –

I’m knackered. Maybe shouldn’t even be bothering.

Tschus.