Let's keep this between us

life can be brutal

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

Depressing day consisting of the looming death of little birds, and a general gloom over the past. As much as I shake my head it won’t clear. So I’m adding tracks to my funeral playlist instead - don’t get me wrong, I’m not suicidal, I’ve just been to too many funerals where no one has a clue what to play so that I’m planning well in advance. It’s a work of many years. Still, it is a gloomy business.

What’s on the playlist you’re going to make all your friends sit through?

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

I had a dream I was in a New York of the future, I’ve never been to New York by the way, and I was in a sandwich shop with a terrifyingly violent man I was somehow forced to do something with. 

The walls are full of freshly made sandwiches in baskets, floor to ceiling, all about $1.20. There’s no staff, just an honesty basket. ‘That’s cheap,’ I point out, then look about, thinking, ‘don’t people steal sandwiches?’ ‘It’s a social concern,’ says the violent man, ‘if some people can’t afford a sandwich and steal some, then we just absorb it.’ I wonder what to choose, I’m looking at one called ‘Oh ho ojo!’ and wonder if it’ll be too garlicky.

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

I eat a croissant for breakfast and am immediately gloomy. She introduced me to croissants. She took such joy in them that I found it delightful, I would copy the way she pulled them apart with her fingers and spooned jam onto the pieces. My g/f now doesn’t care for jam so when I buy the occasional croissant now we eat them with cheese and other savoury things, I cut them in half and present them like a gutted animal on the plate, there’s nothing of the original in this any more. When she is away though, sometimes, I buy one and eat it like we used to, and feel wretched and gloomy whilst I do so.

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

I used to have another anonymous blog, full of terrible stuff, and I kind of drifted away from it for a year. When I tried to find it again I realised I couldn’t remember what it was called, like not even an inkling. Blank. And the email was anonymous set up with the same name. I didn’t write any of it down to not leave any trace. Now it’s gone. Just gone. Weird.

It was full of longing for (somewhat) unrequited love for someone who went off and quited her love with someone wholly unexpected and not a little depressing. I never felt such emotion in my life, honestly, until that moment I used to say that emotions were for the weak, or that I didn’t have emotions, or experienced them differently from other people, as I couldn’t for the life of me work out why the hell everyone acted so crazy all the time about stupid emotions. Then that. And I got it. And it took me perhaps a year or two to get over it, until it faded, so that now it’s not there, even when I look at photos. But the thing is, I’ve never experienced them since, the feels that is. Just back to numb every day. I wonder if, for me at least, they’re just like a one-time-burn process, where they plunder and ravage their way through my brain and scorch all the pathways so much that they are never accessed again. Maybe. It feels like that.

So the old blog, it had all this writing, about this emotion, that now seems again so weird and remote and unbelievable, so I wanted it back, to read it and see.

Ah well. Back to the red wine then.

(I should say here that I’m like 50 years old, not a youngling, so it’s not just a youth thing, sadly...)

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

So, one and a half years after my dad died, I’ve finally run out of wearable socks. It only just dawned on me that there will never again be Christmas or birthday socks from him. 

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

I don’t like Mondays. Work, the end of what seems like actually living life: the weekend - free time, eating and drinking well, travel, hanging with friends, hobbies, riding bikes, nature. Then Monday, and work and healthy, dull food and no wine and by the time working is over you’re just so exhausted and so don’t do anything except sit in your apartment and wait until bed time. Okay, I don’t like Tuesdays much either. 

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

Grey day, stare out of the window, it’s slightly chilly but the heating is controlled by higher forces, so I put woolly socks on. Outside the winter grit has been bulldozed into a huge pile in the courtyard, a mountain of black stones, rubbish and dogshit. I contemplate the pile and feel a deep hollow, anxious feeling in my stomach, the inverse space of the gravel inside me. I drink too much coffee even though it makes me jittery and paranoid, and sit at the table. There’s no tablecloth, covered in food accidents and wine it is in the wash; I am too lazy to get a new one out, it seems pointless here and now. A wash of background horrors flow over me briefly, taxes and work and cars and debts and taxes and work and... I breathe and drink more coffee.

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

Woke up gripped with the idea I’d made a terrible life mistake six years ago and was repeating my previous life again. Today everything feels pointless and I’m adrift in life with no goal. Not drinking alcohol for a week makes the desperation of not doing what I want to do in life very large. Sadly, what I want to do in life is travel around tropical lands, and drink wine with my friends. Nothing else will quite do. 

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

Aragorn sped on up the hill.

I remember reading this first line as a kid and just stopping and looking up. Something about it, talk about hitting the ground running. I was so excited at this point, breathless with anticipation. The words have magically stayed with me as an adult - I find them going through my mind whenever I start the walk up a hill or mountain, when I walk up a street briskly in the rain, they have become words of power. Oh! To write such a line, and to have such an effect.

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

Been reading The Tempest (the annotated Arden edition) (as I never got round to much Shakespeare), and also finishing off Riddley Walker by Hoban, and it has plunged me into deep despair that my writing is superficial nonsense by comparison. Every sentence has meaning, a purpose, there’s nothing that shouldn’t be there. There’s a depth of meaning running from the sentence to the page to whole story to the meta story. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to construct such a symphony.

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

Wake up to the sound of an animal being turned inside-out, heart racing. Ah, it’s just the cat being sick somewhere. Twice. Three times. Back to sleep.

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

My ex, from fifteen years ago, is an architect, and has been very successful. I follow her Instagram and myself staring at her in a fancy hotel overlooking Mt Fuji, now on a Thai beach, now high in a treetop rain-forest hotel in Bali. I eat my toast, and that is all.

[letskeepthisbetweenus]

I ate all the butter-fried croutons from last night, for breakfast. I couldn’t help it.