Blather like you mean to say what you’re saying…

 

Not long ago – days ago even – my imagination had me many leagues below an ancient ocean.

 

I dreamt I had returned to my long estranged hometown and, to recover long ignored memories, had ventured onto the sandstone hill I had played on as a child. I knew, as I had not then, that I was walking on stone that had once been a seabed. So, walking this same stone – this one-time seabed now turned sun-heated baking tray for every unlucky mollusc that lost its way. So walking this same stone that trilobites would have scuttled over – and now lie buried within – I wished wholeheartedly to take my time and engage with this feeling and the easy sustenance I found from it. This effortless meal of fantasy and immensity stretching out before me, that made me at once feel small and insignificant and then, in the same moment, made me feel integral to the world.

 

All this felt as if I were bringing all this life back, what had once been teeming and had laid for so long, that it might perhaps crawl up and out of the rock and start again the toil of existing.

 

Whilst standing there it became clear that, though I longed to join in with this aqua sutra – though I wanted to move back in time and occupy the same space as now, feel the cool water around me. Though I wanted a fantasy, for the pressure would have crushed me and I could not bring myself to accept that. Though I wanted so desperately to be a part of that world I know that if I were transported back I would not join, as a drop of water would, that ocean. Instead I would join it as a slick of oil.

 

Always wholly separate, that is how I am. That I would not fit in with prehistoric creatures is little surprise, that I could never fit in back in my hometown had the same ring of sadness to it – even now.

 

It is at this point that I find myself outside my childhood home, a shed on that same hill. The rusting roof, the doormat, the seats and that table made from a tire and a stop sign. I walk in and everything is upended. I walk out and find my old tools, a spade and some sheers, broken and rusting.

 

The day carried on, the sun pressed down on my skin, filling each pore with a rock pool of its own and glittering on the stone as its rays met the occasional polished grain – just as it glistened when the rays hit my moist skin. It had been like this all day, hardly a breeze to stir the stale air. Up in the endlessly blue sky unknown birds circled; too small to be vultures, not to mention unlikely for England, but still my imagination ran away with itself and I prayed swift deliverance from their greedy gaze. The song of crickets in the dry grasses sounded like the sizzling of eggs in a frying pan. The only other noise was the far off sound of engines on the duel carriageway, about two miles off in the distance, their survival ensured by our reliance on them.

 

Coming back to my hometown is like looking at fossils. There is no way to resurrect those old memories, or travel back to meet them. I must clarify that I wish to rewrite, rather than repeat those memories. They are now just fossilized, unearthed with careful thought. I can remember quite a bit about that old world I used to be a part of. Can see myself, undeveloped, like our ancient ancestors that would then have simply been curious looking fish.

 

Purpose seems to be the theme of these thoughts. That I have no purpose is an ever-present concern. My tools, rusting, are no longer able to do what they were meant. I have my wishes, aspirations, and targets. The trouble is that there is no impression in the stone for these things. I cannot trace the outline of a body. Cannot work out how they will move and come about. The ancestor cannot trace the family tree forward.

 

Realising that I have been standing on this almost lifeless mound for the last few hours breaks the spell. I walk down, first through brush – shoulder high and thorny – then down through greener ferns. Eventually I reach pavement as I leave the hillside and venture down through the winding streets and some time after that I arrive at the train station to board a train for my home, some 300 miles from this world.

 

As I look out of the carriage window there is a great rumbling – straining to see further down along the train – my face is pressed flat against the glass as I see uncountable tons of seawater fall onto that hill and rush down to greet me.

Filed under: Reality, childhood, hopes, mount, nightmare, sleep , baking, carriage, escape, fantasy, glass, greet, heated, hill, meal, miles, rumbling, scuttled, seabed, sheers, spade, station, sustenance, tray, trilobites

The rowdy lives of poison arrow frogs.

 

 

Talking to Fritz, I couldn’t help but swing my face to the sky. Almost completely smoothed over in black smudges – there was only the clicking of the pennies in my pocket to distract me from the depression seizing my chest – It’s always made me upend a smile when I see a good sky turn ugly. Much like it has always weighed my heart to find people who wish to remain forever unremarkable. Fritz and I are not those types of people. We are boundless in energy and ambition and likewise, for the moment, in struggles. Then again, ‘suffering has its benefit – to those who can read the brail of higher significance’, as Fritz himself once said.

 

So to lead you into a tale I will explain that Fritz joined me on a weekend away. It was a training weekend for a new job I had lined up working for The Cellphone Distribution Hive. The C.D.H. sent me on this trip to learn how best to distribute said devices and I needed a means of transport, hence the appearance of Fritz.

 

So both of us, sent forward by our buxom rarity, jittered our way to Stafford, myself in the back of Fritz’s steed ‘Bike’ (and yes we are aware it is an irregular name for a car). For Fritz any day is another chance to score some saccharine slut, the trip to Stafford meant that he’d be rid of those he’d already tried to pull. In his mind this was only adding to the likelihood of a lay. To myself, thinking more deeply on the scenario, I imagined carving a great path forward by mimicking the local slang – I figure anywhere away from home is a chance to be someone you aren’t.

 

High-tailing it to the second stop on a five stop journey – Fritz pulls into a road named after some long dead factory manager, one of them own-the-homes-of-the-poor-bastards-that-work-for-you-type roads – we take ourselves out of our car and I say ‘our’s knowing full well it was entirely his, except for the CD in the stereo.

 

Did I mention God’s hungers for our words? I don’t think I did but it matters so little anyway I don’t think I will carry on with that. When it is a duly considered fact, that most Gods are jealous of our brief intensity.

Anyway, Fritz and I made it to a bar quick enough to escape sobering to aching heads and dry tongues. We walked into a local joint with a pinch of talent in one corner – the rest populated by 30-somethings in tracksuits. There was a fully staffed bar, but most of them were standing like citrus fruit in the light of a lack of orders, so we offered our services as patrons and sat on the stools.

 

While we knocked back some sauce – increasing our devil-may-care attitude toward the notion of wandering over to said talent in the corner – we chatted about the heavy anchors in our chests. Always pulling us down. Always bringing down the mood to stringence and then to restlessness – or else, always tearing at the seabed of our sanity, while we used a gust of drink or drugs to fill our sails and push us onwards regardless. It was Fritz who hauled anchor for us, pitching the keel suddenly to shake me awake. It was Fritz who turned our eyes back to the shore; return to conquest.

 

 Interminable in courage – or foolishness – we made our way over to the flock of skirts with a view to pealing them free of what little they had on. Further and further became nearer and nearer and then we were upon them. Well I never saw – before that moment – a collection of shinier women. Hair was slick to their scalps and pulled back – amateur face-lifts – to ponytails. Their skin shimmered and looked to melt at their foreheads. In a flash we were greeted with glossed lips – parted periodically to partake in greedy gulps of beer. We could see their navels; pushed forward by their paunch little beer bellies, a little stud in each. There was, from each, a clicking noise, which we later learned was their tongue piercings flicking against the backs of their teeth. Each girl was as slimy as a newborn lamb. There is something to do about such things and that is to take each to your room, run a bath and chuck them in; like unwanted puppies. Its all fun and games to them, water is a novelty, so while you introduce them to soap and shampoo, you are also bringing a degree of hygiene to the proceedings. First you had to resolve to desire them. So while I looked on in horror and questioned whether my eyesight had somehow been tampered with, Fritz simply licked his lips and put forward a salutation.

 

We learned that their names were Rach, Tina, Chlo, Law and Sammi and that each had a laugh that shuddered your vertebrae. Why fuck them? The only answer is that ‘it is in our nature’. We taught them by example and the only homework was revision – oh yes, they would replay this night in their minds for a long time to come! Ours was a diploma in satisfaction and you got honours for demonstrating give as well as take.

 

Now you can – from the get go – write off Rach and Tina as both were none too kind on the optics, even after a sousing. As for Sammi, well she was so far gone she’d never remember consenting. Chlo and Law were nightclub get-up angels with halos of cigarette smoke and right for worldly education.

 

We chatted wasteful hours away, in-between gulps and tokes – you noticed frank want and need in their eyes – and time came for retirement to bedrooms and sofas, by this time Fritz was beside himself with the libido quivers. Thighs pulsing, faces flushed – like a kid on Christmas Eve, dreaming dreams of unwrapping new toys.

 

So two parts of Bath’s Literary Barbershop are slipping knickers off two saccharine sluts – when there is a knock at the door.

Fritz lies on the sofa with Law – well into intimacy with no regard for the caller, or for me – while I greeted a smile with more gaps than teeth. The stranger – dressed in a suit and slick smirk – just uttered two words, ‘Too Loud’, before walking away back down the hallway. Fritz can’t help but shout at me as I stood there – in disbelief with door wide – in my boxers. ‘Cunt, you should have told him he was a Twat!!’

 

At that moment a sticky soberness came over me and I felt sick and sweaty. A grim reality hit me. Chloe, well she is a Virgo. This in itself mean very little to me. It wasn’t fair to say that I trusted in superstition. Failure appeared to me in a vision and then sped off into my future – so I watched the path of it with my mind’s eye – until it flickered its last embers and faded out as it went beyond range. Virgo or not, she was a ready and willing catastrophe.

 

I left the girls at his mercy and wove a path down the hallway – palms assisting me – before I turned the corner, took the elevator and dropped to ground level to the sound of crap music. In my life only two things hold any real certainty; death and the occasional re-emergence of a soul-crushing feeling of listlessness. Utterly – achingly – awful. In my life, also, two things can pull my head above the surface tension of misery. One involves primal urge, the other… a large measure of any given liquor to lighten the spirit. There is nothing more wholly satisfying than a one-gulp start and a second to finish. Back in my room the mini-bar screams for me. That night I tried to calculate my future, the equation was simple – the outcome fell on the sword of Jensen’s Inequality Formula.

Filed under: Depression, Fritz, Girls, Sad, Training, burslem, job, sermon, writing