songs about me

So I’m still not feeling fulfilled.

I have a great life. No need to work. No deadlines. No stress. But I still don’t feel like I actually can be bothered breathing.

That isn’t anyone’s fault. I’m very happy at a lot of things in my life. Great relationships with people, great deal of success already with my projects.

I’ve taken to making jewellery and that is going really well.

I can now juggle. I can make my funky art. I can write (i’m really producing some amazing work). I can make clothes. Upholster chairs. Sail the family boat. Travel when i like.

I have a 32inch hd tv in my room. Surround sound. Dvd player. Laptop. Camera. Camcorder. Guitar. Typewriter. Sewing Machine. Mountains of books and dvds. I have material things to make one tear your own material to pieces in lamentation.

I’ve taken up photography and that is going really really well – as i’ve been offered a fair few opportunities of late to take photos of all sorts of events etc.

Just to touch on writing again. I’ve written the most exciting pieces of fiction ever recently!

I’ve not gotten drunk in weeks and weeks and weeks. So i know i’m not an alcoholic. I’m just a bit of twat when it comes to knowing my limit. So i learnt that lesson! lol – (On the flip side, due to not drinking i’ve picked up on inherent social anxiety, so i think that is why i drank a lot – to lubricate the old personality and push away the fact i get scared in big groups. I draw a lot of energy from people, but crowds really upset me and get me timid. Hence many times leaving parties and street festivals and declining to go on trips off to outdoor festivals too..  when i then lied and came up with some lame excuse. Least now i’m honest enough to admit i’m just a pussy when it comes to large groups.)

But it all amounts to a hill of beans when even on these bloody pills I still can’t seem the conjure up a will to live.

I had a song written about me a while back and the idea of it was – that Much came “to realise that it is life that you (I) despise.“

I’m sure that isn’t true, as much as it is too strong a thing for me to feel toward life. I’m not crying out for help, nor even really making much of an assertion past the simple honest truth.

I don’t care.

I really couldn’t care less.

With that is freedom and oblivion – but i really have no opinion on the matter of life and its vice and virtue.

The last relationship fell on a sword of my uncaring. I’d given up hiding behind a mask made of smiles. Showed a little too much of what it means to live near me. That there is very little that can stir up a case of genuine joy.

Maybe pills are making me apathetic and i’m looking back on life through these eyes, but i think i’ve pretty much always had this outlook.

She goes on to ask why I “must be so blue.” – It used to be up on last.fm, but it has been taken off now – but it is still a damn good song, despite the personal nature of it.

I really don’t try to be. I’m the life and soul. I’m happy and moving like a blur and i still can’t seem to shake this apathy.

Perhaps it is to give me a little wall between my mind and the worry of death? I used to worry about that a lot as a kid. Death became a sort of monster to me, stalking the land, killing indiscriminately, no proof of hereafter, of continuation. I feared a lack of a thereafter more than anything else. Here i am, several years later – not caring.

Perhaps i got bored of the question.

Unsolved questions will drive you mad – unless you temper it with some disinterest.

I’m quite able to hold myself out of the top floor window in my house and not fear the fall. Is that scary? Should i have vertigo to prove i mean to continue?

I’m not sure. I just get the sense that all these wonderful opportunities and skills and talents etc… are just wasted on me. I’m too ambivalent about them all.

Or maybe that isn’t true, maybe what i mean to say is that i can’t hold on to the joy of it for long? I have short bursts of intense happiness and then bam, nothing.

I don’t know, fuck it. At the end of the day it isn’t important. Except i do ache for a little purpose. I’m considering making up a god and just following that blindly. I’ve already taken up Buddhist meditation. That is too much the absence of God, but it meets with the fact i don’t care a stitch for all this junk in my room.

p.s. I’m still pretty lonely and need to meet more people to keep me entertained and motivated.

Filed under: Bath, Depression, Drinking, Existence, Friends, Future, Girls, Happy, Lonely, Travel, Women, Youth, about me, anxiety, childhood, cracks, hopes, much, prose, the novel, undervalued, vacuum, work, writing, writing the novel

Wide Sargasso Sadness

“Very soon she’ll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they’ve got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it’s a long, long line. She’s one of them. I too can wait – for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie…”

Last page of Part Two. Wide Sargasso Sea. – Jean Rhys

What wakes in me is the knowledge that I am very similar to Antoinette in this novel. (Perhaps we all are and that is the glorious moot point to this whole journey. Each of us have our own yearning for a place to be comfortable. Each of us, the need to escape persecution from a life we have not chosen.) I dread to go on, as I do, about Bath – except that it is still at the core of my subject. The centre of my recent sadness. So I must re-conjure it, yet only in the explorative sense – no hint of the nostalgic.

Bath is a picture to me, a movie, a reel of film. Non, it remains as a negative for me to hold against the light. Raised as a sample. A solution, contained within a petri dish, which I will match against a depression I cannot hope to master. Trying to determine if it would make for a good culture of inoculation. A vaccination against future bouts of restlessness. I know I cannot change who I am, though I can choose a lesser pain and use it to vaccinate myself against further heartache. Allow myself to learn; teach my immune system a way of fighting off every sign of sadness.

I get restless when I am not fulfilled – as we all do – I begin to fear a lack of feeling. Then a fear of feeling too much. I rush around and try to re-ignite my own passion for life. Distract myself from what is undoubtedly on its way. I start to sit and contemplate how I have reached this point in my life. Then I am overwhelmed.

In Bath – after I realized my lack of romantic love for Much – it became clear that I was rushing around and burying myself in other people – so that I wouldn’t lose my good mood. In January things took a nose-dive out of that revelation. So that I wouldn’t dip any lower than I was I buried myself in drink and social things. Invited myself along with American students that I met randomly. Got numbers from them. Planed on sleeping with one. Except even that didn’t save me, it was too late to raise myself.

It didn’t work because, when I reached the understanding that I’d only been treading water – that eventually I’d be drowned, I couldn’t help but reel back and lose control.

So home I went. But I packed away that understanding of myself. Took it with me to pull it out when I was strong enough to look at it. I only need to refine it now. Learn from it. Move forward.

I know what helps me.

Nightingale helps me, she understands my weakness because she has already begun the journey I am now starting. I’ve learnt from her, or rather… her voice is allowing me to hear my own.

Exercise helps me. Just a little a day helps keep those blues away.

Chemistry helps me – understanding that to help myself I need to believe I am simply a mess of chemicals – that there is an equation behind and yet controlling my emotions and I can curtail any lowering of it by simply adding more seasoning. A hint more distraction. A pinch of passion. A sprinkling of spontaneous energetic activity.

As clear as it is that I am preoccupied with Bath and the last few months. As mad as it makes me appear. As obsessive and compulsive and nostalgic as I might come across. I can’t help thinking that actually, it isn’t a negative thing to examine a sadness that could save me. If I didn’t – if I just buried it – then I’d only make the same mistakes.

Much like I did many years ago, leaving the Wirral for university (leaving my first girlfriend), I buried the pain and ignored it. I became a new person like a snake shedding its skin. I’m good at it; I’ve done it many, many times since. It was the wrong thing to do. I should have been smart enough to work out that there was something to gain from understanding ‘why’ I was unhappy with things the way they were.

Maybe it is maturity. Another plateau reached on the struggle to the peak of wisdom. You know, before I lose all logical cognitive function and fall off the other side into senility.

Antoinette moved from her island home – into marriage – and back to her island again. A honeymoon in a hell that she loved. It was her, as she was it. What I read from that decision is the old idea of returning to the scene of the crime.

As she, I have come back to the place of my childhood – a place that has forced such unnumbered pains upon me. As she, I have managed to find a renewed admiration for such a wonderful place. As she, I will face my hardships head-on.

Unlike she, I will overcome the forces met out against me. Unlike she, I will bow to the unconquerable, retreat and repair, so that I may return with redoubled vigor. Unlike she, I  will win a real victory – rather than surrendering to a fact that is unreconcilable.

Antoinette had a childishness about her that never fully lifted. Antoinette retreated into herself – rather than healing, for her, came the notion of hiding. I mean to break the spell of madness.

The book held a lot of goodness in it. I will write more on it.

“Do not be sad. Or think Adieu. Adieu. Never Adieu.”

Filed under: Bath, Depression, Drinking, Existence, Friends, Future, Girls, Home, Lonely, Nightingale, Sad, Strangers, Women, about me, anxiety, books, childhood, hopes, novel, writing

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 , rumbling, carriage, greet, glass, miles, hill, spade, sheers, station, escape, trilobites, sustenance, meal, fantasy, scuttled, baking, tray, heated, seabed

better off in bed

 

‘Then again’ has got nothing on me. My every waking moment is a sermon on any mount you can count.

 

 

I’m not sure where to start today, tonight, this morning… it has been, and is, all these things.

 

 

I’m lying in bed with two towering bookshelves to my left. Scores of books, some read – most just flipped through. All those words, all that information and, though I hunger for it, I can never seem to find the energy to begin any real campaign – no winning this war of attrition, there will always be backup coming from somewhere; always a cavalry of classics lined against the lip of the sky.

 

 

Nest Chick is out with her Cuckoo Tweeter and so I’m a pidgin shy of all alone. Beak-to-beaking-it together and I don’t get a look in – she and she got no me, no me at all – one wonders how they cope; yet cope they do.

 

 

No one else is awake these days, I seem to find them sleepwalking through life and I quickly get sucked into that mentality. Follow suit in the very outfit myself. Tonight I found myself stupefied and so had to evacuate the house party before my brain oozed out of my ears and my heart sank like a shipwreck. Compass set to sheets and a shower, I got home in quick pace – then all I needed was a spot of sleep… or the spiders to leave… whatever. I made a cup of tea and waited up for Nest Chick. Snuggled down under downy sheets.

 

 

Tie-dyed was the style of my first bed-sheets, second hand at the point where they reached me, and I loved them. For all the non-dye stains, for missing buttons and its cheesecloth hem – all raggedy ends – for all those things I loved it. I knew early on that it mirrored my view of myself, that even now I want someone simply to love me as foolishly as I loved those bed-sheets. For all faults can be found endearing. Most blemishes the results of a life lived, rather than a life kept in an airing cupboard.

 

 

Now I wish I had those damned sheets, but mostly I miss the pillow. The was worn in the middle and the fabric had bobbled slightly. It wasn’t rough on the face, but soothing when it warmed to my temperature. I’d get to sleep with my head nodding. Rubbing my cheek against the soft-rough surface. It was heaven. It was comfort. Now I wish I had that damned pillow because I need some easy comfort. Hard to find nowadays, where most things flash and blink but are none-too-good against the cheek.

 

 

I liked things the way they were a good few hours back, when we were easy in each other’s presence. Perhaps I should have stayed, simply sat there in silence?

 

No, I think I’m better off in bed, with or without the pillow.

 

 

Filed under: Sad, about me, bed, books, childhood, compass, mount, nights out, pillow, sermon, sleep, solitary

Perspective

As a kid I used to run away a lot. The most common place I would have been found, had anyone tried to look, would have been the park. I had a tree there that I’d sometimes spend the day in. In that way that boys do, I’d pee from the top of it and jump down and scare little kids from time-to-time. No I never peed on any of them.
I’d often spend hours just laying there in the tallest branches thinking about life. Soon my thoughts would drift to all the happy kids below and how unhappy I was. The thoughts used to make me cry, so I was glad no one could see me.
Later on my thoughts turned to the kid’s mums and how from that vantage you could look right down their tops. I’d watch their ample boobs wobble about in their low cut tops.
Its strange how your perspective can change with age, and how much difference puberty makes. More than anything it gave me something to distract myself with, and boy was I distracted!

Filed under: Children, Family, Home, Lonely, Women, Youth, childhood

Behind

My ex-girlfriend had a rather large bum, which I fell in love with almost instantly. We used to walk from school to her house and I’d sometimes walk slower to get a better view of her rear. Sometimes she’d look back and I’d grin at her and raise my eyebrows cheekily. Most of the time however she just kept looking forward while I took my fill of bottom-gazing, until I’d catch up to her side again and we continued hand-in-hand to her home.
After some time however it became clear that we couldn’t stay together. I had to go to university and so I chose to leave her behind.

Filed under: Amy, Home, Women, Youth, childhood

Pavlova

On the evening of the dinner party my Father was always demoted to little more than a fixture. He was reduced to a useless mass that took up space in the living room with the rest of the inefficient males. It would be a good few years until I joined their ranks, till then my games took on a new dimension. I used to play at being a spy. I’d hide in the same places, but report my observations into the freckle on the wrist of my right arm.
I’d be forgotten about while my Sister and Brothers were sent to bed. I’d be left to observe the drunken stumbling of the adults around me. After a few close calls I’d realise that it no longer mattered if they saw me or not. If my Father saw me walking about he’d mention bed, take another sip of red wine and then carry on talking to his friends.
If I went into the dining room to grab a bite to eat, my Mother would put down her glass of white wine and call me to her. She’d place a hand below my chin and lift my head, then use the other to crush me to her waist. She held me in a way that with one swift twist she could have easily have broken my neck. She’d then turn to her friends and carry on talking. Her grip would loosen. Eventually I’d be allowed to wander off with a large piece of homemade Pavlova.

Filed under: Drinking, Family, Food, Home, Youth, childhood

Demijohns

Whilst my Mother cooked I used to hide below the stairs next to the dusty wine racks; below the hem of winter coats. I used to write my name on the tops of the empty demijohns at the very back. Used to suck on a mint cream that I’d stolen from the jar on the counter. Used to listen to the CD player that my Mother kept in the kitchen as it blasted out Enya at full volume. It was either Enya or Crowded House, or some other CD that was increased to such a level that one could hear it above the extractor fan.
My mother had found the fan a delightful novelty when she had first ordered the fitted kitchen, but quite soon its usefulness was outweighed and it became simply bothersome. The problem was that it lacked a switch and was mercilessly attached to the lighting in the room.
I used to hide myself under the dining table too. Listen to the noise of my parents as they argued about the theme for the party. I used to scoot out from under the table, enjoy the brief intimacy of a tablecloth as it brushed over the back of my neck.
I used to surface as my Father laid his heavy, awkward hands on my Mother’s shoulders from behind. Watched as he attempted to massage her too forcefully, digging his fat fingers into her shoulder blades. He’d always mask his mistake. Pretend that he was being cruel on purpose, but inside I knew that he wanted to be gentler. It was in his eyes, there was sadness. He wanted to relax her, rather than put her on edge. My Father has a hard time being gentle, he was a slim man but his hands always seemed to defy the fact.

Filed under: Family, Food, Youth, childhood

Aspirations

Piya and Conner were the beginning of caring for me.
We didn’t have aspirations. We didn’t care if we were compensating for families that didn’t care for us. We were just three kids looking for something to belong to. Closer than friends. Closer than siblings, because for all we knew we had stronger loyalties. Our brothers stabbed us in the backs as soon as they could reach. Our sisters clawed our faces at a crossed-word. Home was a battleground that we avoided, daily, for as long as we could. Ours was a world of distraction. We didn’t care for anything but each other. We were more than a family. We were part of one another.

Filed under: Conner, Friends, Home, Love, Piya, childhood