Without meaning? --I'm afraid not. @qdefinity-blog - Tumblr Blog

In death as in life, we are the pavement-strollers, the window-shoppers, the bored, bunion-hobbled boulevardieres. We're there waiting for something--anything--to happen. So we can be photographed, or filmed, or videoed, a blackcloth of hysterectomies, in front of which events can be played out again, yet never exhausted. History is never in the round--it's always on a stage; and while the curtain may be death, why is it then that so many scrutinising eyes stud the proscenium, peering into the dimness of the stalls? Are they tragic or comedic masks--or not masks at all?

How the Dead Live, Will Self

#how the dead live #will self

All that was once me has been dispersed through a flux of a thousand thousand experiences. The 'I' has been partitioned even remember what the original dados or mouldings were like. They say ninety percent of house dut is dead human skin--and that's me. Dust on a windowstill, in a converted apartment, in a foreign city.

How the Dead Live, Will Self

#how the dead live #will self

I can't be damned to listen to people's chatter any more. Everything they say bears upon a future that doesn't include me.

How the Dead Live, Will Self

#how the dead live #will self

Waking takes long enough for me to realise that these memories--undoctored and unedited--are a crude gloss on the badly painted present. More precisely--that the tank of tiredness is itself now empty; and I feel fatigued by this fact alone. I'd thought that at least I could always depend on this numbing languor, this painful drowsiness. That it would be the layette of my lifetime; and that sleep--for so long dispensed in famine rations--would now, at long last, be in plentiful supply.

How the Dead Live, Will Self

#how the dead live #will self

There's so much luv in their world--so little caring. Luv is to love as diesel is to petrol--a heavier, more viscous, less incendiary form of affection.

How the Dead Live, Will Self

#how the dead live #will self

People imagine that when junkies are loaded on smack, or alcoholics get drunk as lords, or coke-heads fly stratospherically high, they enter a fantastical realm of unlimited bounty, where they are possessed of great wealth, infinite allure and enormous talent. Not so. They may set out for an artificial paradise, but the real estate they all end up inhabiting is one and the same. In it they are all right. That's all. They're all right. Not alcoholics, not addicts--simply OK. Just like everyone else. Oh sure, they may have done dodgy things--lost a few jobs, broken a couple of marriages, had some kids taken into care, been deprived of the odd limb--but basically they're all right. And so this mighty traffic--bigger than the entire world's legitimate trade--goes, in large part, to service such a nugatory requirement. To supply deviants with the delusion of normalcy.

How the Dead Live, Will Self

#how the dead live #will self

I want a street life, because with it comes a well-exercised tendency for people to stick their big fucking noses right inside your business and have a damn good honk. Shit, I wouldn't even mind being in Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem. Anywhere but London, where people are still so fucking reserved, so polite, so hidden behind gauzy indifference. Their politeness is killing me.

How the Dead Live, Will Self

#how the dead live #will self

Very often the meaning was obscured. Very often it required some digging. The meaning of his life was an elusive seam of water hundreds of feet below the surface, and he would periodically drop a bucket down the well, fill it, bring it up and drink from it. But this did not sustain him for long.