on reviewing the recent and the far-reaching

“I am disheartened again. It’s busted I think. My heart, that small seed was the start of my unhappiness. It is my heart’s doing. It sulks. It languishes in the pit of my chest. Fallen from a branch of bone. I ache for comfort, for encircling arms to close around me, to hold me. I want to be secure with a warm someone. A hug. An embrace. To hold on for dear life. For how dear that person is to me. For not wanting to let go. For wanting everything to melt into the atoms they consist of and leave us, untouched, as we are. For wanting alone. For the wanting. The passion. Lust. I want for everything that comes of wanting deeply. Of wanting so deeply that there seems to be no part left of me that does not exist for that other body. That there is no stitch, no essence, no section that is not saturated with the flavor of them.

Taste is something I think I am currently obsessed with. I’ve learnt the value of herbs and spices. I’ve started to take care of myself again. So by that, I mean I’m eating but doing nothing more to prolong myself. Sorry if you thought this was me turning around and grabbing hold of life or something equally benign. But have no fear, I’ll not starve. You all understand why I neglected myself; too many other people to save and “When you over analyze, you tend to neglect your own well-being? as I have said. So really, it was spending time and money on people, rather than on food; and doing so because people are more interesting to write about than pasta.

Due to my months of eating next to nothing, I am now down to nine and a half stone, which I am secretly proud of, because it was that weight I was before I got with The Smile Reverser when I was fifteen-years-old. The first reason I became The Raining Man. I can do the same trick with a scarf; wrap it around my waist to show how skinny I am. To show how clothing alludes to me being in them and really I am only half there.

Bad points? I am starting to see signs of muscle wastage. My sheer skinniness puts me at a disadvantage when confronted by anyone on nights out. I have very little strength at all, to the point where I have to move chairs one at a time, rather the trademark, grab two and go. When I went to buy food this week I could hardly lift the bags.

Good? I do have more of a regard for the workings of the human body. It seems that bone and muscle does indeed move us, as I am now lifting and flexing my arm to see the motion actualised.

So yes, taste does tie in quite well with the need for someone. The fact that, that someone would have the grace to look after me. To feed me, or at least make sure I feed myself. It isn’t that I can’t do it, rather that I will not, I’ll neglect to, it’ll slip my mind while I am writing about how sun warms the stems of dry grass, how the wind makes music from them. Or something equally picturesque.”

I wrote this some 3 years ago – I wrote that I was depressed and wanted someone to love and look after me. It happened and it didn’t save me to have it happen. I still had the same cycles, I just had someone there with ‘the grace to look after me.’ At least, for a short time.

I maintain, and always will, that I don’t need someone who will be a carer for me – just someone to care. I’m worth keeping around, I shouldn’t wonder. If only for the amusing tales I can tell about the time this girl did this, that girl did that, or another girl almost didn’t but did.

Life has gone back to a worrying simplicity. I wake up, I read, I write, I go for a walk, I flirt, I drink, I come home, I flirt via text/IM, I sleep. Scatter in some screnzy madness in there and that is existence and I’m pretty bored of it. The sex is good, but its not really making me want to stay alive and active. I guess only apathy is the force that is keeping me breathing now.

Filed under: Amy, Coffee, Day-to-day, Depression, Drinking, Existence, Food, Friends, Future, Girls, Happy, Reality, Sad, about me, books, burslem, hopes, nightmare , cult characters, desire for change, escape, fiction novella story writing author guardian article J, meal, men, minx, polartropic, sustenance

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

The Burslem Sextet

  

Molly Leigh (born 1685) was a woman who was accused of witchcraft, died before being tried, and had her grave altered foloowing claims she still haunted the town.

Molly was born in 1685 in a cottage on the edge of the moors at Burslem. She was a solitary character who made a living selling milk from her herd of cows to travelers and passers-by. She was an eccentric person who kept a pet blackbird. The bird often sat on her shoulder when she brought milk into Burslem to sell to the dairy. She was known for her quick temper, and the people of Burslem were suspicious of her. This was not uncommon, throughout the country women, particularly elderly women, who lived on their own in remote places, were labeled as witches.

In Molly’s case it was the local parson, Rev. Spencer, who made the accusation. It was claimed that Molly sent her blackbird to sit on the sign of the Turk’s Head pub that the parson frequently visited, turning the beer sour. She was also blamed for other ailments suffered by the townsfolk. Leigh died in 1746 and was buried in Burslem churchyard but there were claims her ghost haunted the town. Spencer, along with clerics from Stoke, Wolstanton and Newcastle had her body exhumed, opened the coffin and threw in the still live blackbird that had been her companion. They then re-buried Molly in a north to south direction, at a right angle to all the other graves in the churchyard.

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The point of that?

Well, that all things are connected, you need not know how or why.

Filed under: Sad, accusation, blackbird, burslem, connection, molly leigh, other people's lives, sextet, solitary, witchcraft