my nurse, put me to bed.

because i made a promise to blog, but my mind is a little scattered, this blog will be a blog based on random, seemingly separate, thoughts. a mind sneeze.

 

i have re-connected with a friend who i never really knew when we were in the same physical location, but thanks to the power of the internet we are now good friends.

 

i can’t believe that only one month (or longer) (or shorter) ago I was singing britney spears in a packed pub. it wasn’t even karaoke.

 

i will feel sad when i have to take my art down from the walls in my bedroom. i am no longer moving out, but i think i still need to take them down to motivate me to leave.

 

i want to make a home movie tomorrow.

 

i need to remember to finish doing the photograph for the aforementioned friend.

 

there are riots in liverpool and i really don’t care. i mean, i care that it is all pointless, but a lot of what we do is pointless. most of it is just walking around. i do that all the time; I, therefore, identify. or perhaps I really don’t care at all. I’m not sure and I don’t want to think about riots.

 

i would like to try my luck at moving away for a little while this year. perhaps i will move to a different country. then i can come back and start university somewhere.

 

i used to cry at night, when i was a kid – because i was convinced that i would never find someone just like me.

 

the dogs that i live with are howling. we are their pack, they are trying to locate us. we know where we are. they would know if they stopped howling and thought about it.

 

i regret not being able to be friends with The Grin, she was funny. i miss her story-telling voice. i don’t even think she knows that she does that.

 

i might just lock myself away from the world in a little room somewhere in silent contemplation.

 

my sense of ‘fair’ came from a kids tv show where the boys get £10 (between the two of them) for saving a man’s life. ever since i’ve found it hard to believe fairness exists in the world. if even fiction can’t be fair, who will believe the world could be better?

 

i am really tired.

 

i talked honestly with someone about The Smile Reverser tonight. i actually talked more openly than i do in this.

 

my home movie idea is me drinking something and then reversing the film. i hope it looks as cliché and pretentious as possible.

 

i am going to sleep.

one and other anyone?

I’m going up on The Fourth Plinth for One and Other (oneandother.co.uk)

This is my official coming out.

I’m going to get the train down on the Morning of October 3rd and go up at 7pm till 8pm. It will be night time and I’ll be lit up.

I’ll be couchsurfing whilst I’m down there.

I’m yet to get confirmed officially by the charity that I want to go and support, but that looks set.

Once it is done, I have a tent and a bit of stuff ready for my walk back.

Yes, my ‘walk’ back from London. To survive by my wits.

I have decided to walk along from London to Oxford and then up the Welsh border back to The Wirral and then finish in Liverpool.

I can’t wait.

Other than that.

I get my new glasses on Thursday. I can’t wait because they are going to make me look sexy. I need the confidence boost.

I’m loving the fact that I’m meeting more people in Liverpool at the moment.

Grab your Côte you’ve pulled

Sailing

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There is hardly a feeling like that of steering the tiller as you lead a wayfarer on its way through the water. Sails are filled lungs, as they drag the blade of the keel and send us clipping along. Ropes are released, grasped tightly and then tied off with what I must describe as ‘passion’ rather than ‘precision’. Likewise the effort of ducking the boom during tacking is one of increasingly comedic value.

Me: “Ready about?”

Father: “Ready.”

Me: “Lee-Ho!”

*THUMP*

We’d lashed the sheets on land, pulled the sail to a snare-drum tightness, checked and rechecked the brace for the rudder and tiller. Dad ran around the vessel, mentally collating the tools needed for a successful launch. Finally connected to the back of the Land Rover, we were away.

We reversed down a heavily crowded slipway and halted the car as the back trolley wheels dipped themselves into the water. Unfixing it was completed after the winch had been secured. We then lowered the boat backwards, click by click into the water.

Once in, there was nothing to stop the stern from drifting and it took a swift mind to wet the feet in time and brace it against the impending calamity. Removing the trolley we negotiated the boat round the slipway wall to the docking area and each climbed in.

The Kingfisher was away, but not quite sailing, as we pushed off from the shore. We hugged the coast unable to catch the wind. Drifting with the current we made our way through fishing wires, cast out by leather-skinned men with angry faces. The lines freed themselves without piercing the sail and we soon caught breeze enough to put some distance between us and the sea wall.

Entering the wider sea we lined up and started sailing beautifully. That is that really. My first self-reliant voyage in a boat. What a blissful afternoon.

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In other news.

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My mind is still reeling (excuse the pun). I can’t get it to stop. I’m reading books and books and books. Which isn’t a bad thing! However the ideas they are stirring up are beyond my ability to pace.

In Glyph by Percival Everett there is a quote that runs to explain my current condition.

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“I cannot even say that I am smart, only that my brain is engaged in constant frantic activity.”

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It is a euphoric state you can enter after a while. It is a state that I’m trying to steer away from. Heck, I’d even anchor myself on the idea of brain-numbing medication to avoid the level that theses ups can lead me to.

See, having a brain that is running quickly is a wonderful feeling. Except that after a while you lose yourself slightly at the back of your own mind. Ideas that raced, now flood your brain – which itself is less of a buoy floating on top of this deluge, but rather it is a shipping container dropped overboard – straining against the pressure as it sinks to the seabed.

It will hold out. It will perceiver against the enormous forces met out against its sides. Except there will come a moment when its integrity fails. The surrender is made between the atmosphere inside and the tons of sea-water that seek to replace it. At this point, it is fair to say, I lose touch with reality.

It is a very temporary thing. It might only last a few hours, but I become drunk and irresponsible. I’ll most likely be alone, but if I am with someone then the connections start being verbally translated.

I can remember a very good example of this and it was while on a car journey to Falmouth. I was in the back of the car and talking to the two people beside me. After a few moments of talking about poetry I was flung onto a circuit. I looped over many subjects and began making connections (mostly coincidental) about the people involved. Subjects and dates and ideas flung at them as they came to me. After 20mins I came back to my senses. The rest of the journey I tried to stay as quiet as I could.

It’s a balancing act this. Making sure I can harness the energy that is generated by the reeling (sorry, I love the word) of my mind and also that I don’t fall into the realm of possession. That I’m not abstracted from the capability to see how useful my observations are. That I don’t lose sight of the fact that sometimes a coincidence is exactly that. That sometimes people don’t mean to be distance, they just have their own things to deal with. That there is no logical reason why a person should be privy to the same knowledge that I am. That they are not less valuable for not understanding what I am talking about, because what I am talking about in this state is mostly just irreverent crap.

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I am reading.

(click books for descriptions).

The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

Glyph by Percival Everett

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.

been away a day or two

so where do i begin? after near on a month how have i done?

okay. really!

got loads of great photography done. made loads of new friends.

been working on taking apart a Furby and other electronic related geekery.

read and written a lot of really great stuff.

currently working on 101 things to do before i die. also 101 things to do in the next few years.

i find that i’ve got so many opportunities opening up for me. my parents have bought a boat that i can sail away on. loads more things. things, things, things. (even the option of following my dad on his business trips to European cities – he’ll work, i’ll take photos and drink coffee)

i’m really really happy, even without working (because i’m not spending a lot)

just being positive that there is life after a life lost. been a bit regretful – but then, when aren’t i?

anyway.

more will follow as i detail more about my movings.

as ever. follow me on twitter. @jensenwilder

Universe

In the song Around The Universe, by The Beatles there is a section at the beginning that speaks to me. One of them says “You all right richie?”. Every time I hear it, it makes me smile.
A lot of the time I think about what it means to be content. To have that mantra of enlightenment run through me. A lot of the time I need that smile it gives me.
Contentment is being ok with yourself and everything. Utterly unchanging. Nothing is going to change my world. Except me.

House

When I got here, when I off the train, walked the long walk to the front door, when I turned the key and stepped in, my heart faltered and the beast wriggled in delight. I felt like I was opening the box of the world’s ills. If I had a choice I’d shut the lid and leave it here forever. Home is so sad, is what Larkin said ‘shaped to the comfort of the last to go’ well in this case, it isn’t. Its shifted furniture; moved in new televisions and hi-fi’s; the doors open differently; some doors are locked; my room is nothing more than a music studio. I feel like weeping for that now disbanded ‘joyful shot at how things ought to be’. Gone is the home, this is the house.
I’ve tried to think of where home is. Where my heart is, or longs for. I love Bath, but it isn’t a home. This is a world of sorrows and I’m a wandering kid without the wanderlust to enjoy it. How do they know how I feel? These people who tell me that it’ll be ok. If they did; they wouldn’t lie to me, they’d understand that the longer I stay here, the less ‘here’ I am, the more ‘elsewhere’ the more ‘anywhere’ I become. There is only so much absence you can handle, before you start to fade physically.

Starting

We first learn of love when we call it a name, someone’s. That is true enough, but we also first learn of pain because grief strikes where love struck first. We walk with open wounds. Love has never been easy for me. It’s like faith. I could never believe in a god because I couldn’t fathom his intentions, his designs. It’s the same for a girl who likes me.
Lord knows what she wants, why she wants me.
Yet nowadays I’m catching a glimpse of splendour when I just close my eyes slightly. That way that on long car rides, you squint until streetlights burst into stars. I’ve just stopped thinking and I’m starting to live. With life comes love, which means it is a natural thing, nothing to be feared. I still get stuck on how like death it is, but I don’t want to dwell on that.

Clara

I met a girl today called Clara. She is the same height as me and has short blonde hair that is feathered and light, so that the faintest movement sends it rustling.
I met her in the library while we queued up. She had taken out a load of travel guides and I told her that I’d go with her to Prague. She had no idea I was deadly serious.
She waited at the exit until I was done, to say goodbye. I think she wanted me to ask for her number, but I’m not really looking at the moment.