Here it goes again…

where not being able to sleep becomes less of a bother and more of a problem.

Yesterday, as mentioned, was my final day of relaxation before plunging headfirst into slides and notes of a class that I probably should’ve really turned up to. But ah well.

I had made it my goal of today to have as much fun as possible. This included lying on the grass and reading a good book or listening to good music, chilling out with friends and baking slowly in the sun. However, as the fates conspire against me, it rained and was cloudy and boohoo. However, I decided that should no put a dampener on my day and set out with overly curly hair and a pocket full of wonderful wonderful money. Met everyone in the bar in the cinema and started off with a kick of good old fashioned alcohol to set me up for the suffering of the really really shit film we watched. It was so shit that it was funny and good, but then it turned shit again.

Afterwards, in the toilet, I was flanked on both sides of the urinal by elderly, obese men. They both unzipped at the same time, and they both shook their farewells at the same time, so, to be honest, I had no idea which one of them stank of sex. There was this waft of it constantly bombarding me, and for a moment I thought it was me smelling of sex, but then I realised that I haven’t had any for about a week now so that was totally out of the question. So it must’ve been one of them.

Headed to a bar afterwards and got fairly away with it. Decided to stop over at Pizza Hut for food and ended up on the receiving end of more than a few looks after our loud discussion of giving handjobs to old, blind men.

We (all eight of my followers) were knocked back from another bar for being too drunk so we migrated to Jame’s flat where we watched soft porn and laughed ourselves breathless as I tried to dissuade everyone not to continue my new nickname of “Mini Mercer”.

And now I’m home, staying up because I can’t sleep and wondering to myself what I find more fun; lying in the sun with a book, chilling out with friends in a bar, or wandering the night-lit streets of my city with a flask of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes. They’re all fun, but different kinds. I realise suddenly that I experience these separate events with very different people. Or maybe that’s not right. They’re the same people, but different circumstances. No, that doesn’t make sense.

I get in these moods. I have these feelings. Sometimes I want to write and write these feelings away, but at the same time I just want to live them. There’s so many beautiful moments out there, you know? I feel as though I’m missing them.

Isn’t it strange when I switch styles mid blog?

Oh, and I smoked twenty cigarettes today. Go me.

There’s lots of things that get me depressed. Not depressed. Down. Lots of things get me down. Sometimes it’s only a little bit, but a little bit down is still down.

Like, for example, there’s this one person (person A) who used to know another person (person B). Now, A knew B before I knew B, and I knew A before I knew B too. And A seemed like a perfectly nice person (until I learned different) while B seemed like a perfectly fantastic person (and I still think the same). However, A had some nasty nasty things to say about B, really truly nasty things whose home should be in schoolyards, but I wasn’t deterred. B was awesome. So I stuck with B and soon lost A (a great move on my part), but now A is good friends with B, and they get along so magically that I find the hypocrisy hard to bear. So, as a result, I stay away from A and B. Which is a shame, because I really like B.

Another example would be another person (lets call this one C) who, many many moons ago, read a private and confidential notebook that was under my bed. Now, this wasn’t an accident mind you. C was in my room, all by herself, and C decided to search around for it. And when she found it she read it cover to cover (which didn’t take long, seeing how I had just started it) and claimed it was ‘bedtime reading’ which cracked me up something awful when she decided to tell everyone the horrible acts I had partaken in. Of course, C never really told anyone how she came across this information, she just told it and let everyone feel sorry for her and evils against me. Of course, I didn’t say anything. I rolled with the punches and stayed smug enough to shake it off, knowing what I know.

A fourth person (D) about a year ago tried to seduce me before exclaiming to the world what a bastard I was - a side effect of ‘just saying no’.

E thought she knew me and tried to use that information against me. But she didn’t know me, so I found myself wounded and lonely.

F used to tell me secrets that were for me and me alone, but he told everyone else them too.

G keeps me at an arms length (as does B, for that matter).

H and I are stale to me.

J is never there although she pretends to be.

K, I never see anymore.

L is losing herself in the worst possible way. Ah well.

M asked me every time I saw her if I was ok because once when I saw her I wasn’t smiling. I had good reason not to smile mind you, but she asked me why and I said it was nothing. And nothing continued until she stopped, and now I feel bad for not telling her.

I’ve said in a previous entry that I sound depressed because there was nothing good happening in my life worth reporting about. All the good things were too little to report, so nothing sounded good. But now I have many good things. Last night I wrote so much on my novel that I thought I was going to explode with happiness. In the morning of the afternoon I received a wake up call that has frankly made the rest of my day. Yesterday I saw a film that has made me change my definition of ‘noise’ into ’sound’. There are all these little happy things shining their way through, but at the same time there’s this half-alphabet, and then some, of things that are getting me down. And the result is a feeling of neutral emotions where happy and sad have combined to give nothing nothing at all and all you can do is sit and get by without any strong feelings until something really really good or really really bad comes along and skews your emotions enough for a happy drink or a sad drink and then soon things are right back where they were and the song and dance starts all over again.

Though, it occurs to me now that I could save so much grief and so much money if I just stuck to my life of solitude that I enjoy oh so much. But then there would be less happy to mingle with less sad.

It is indeed a horrible conundrum

The blind vagrant calls and screams but no one hears. Those higher up only in their minds take no heed and on this day the cold steel of betrayal sinks into their exposed and fleshy red backs. There’s no anger, no hate - not yet - only the most devastating feeling of surprise. And the last flutter of thought behind those royally wronged eyelids is one of foreshadowing, one of someone told you so. Some poor guy knew this would happen, and it has.

Beware the Ides of March, the vagrant yelled. Beware the mother fucking Ides of March.

Today is Monday. It is two days after Saturday and one day before Tuesday. On Mondays I have approximately three hours to kill between doing things. On Tuesdays I also have three. Wednesdays are mine until four in the afternoon. Thursdays I have five, Fridays I have another three (if I can care). Saturdays and Sundays are open ended horizons. Each day consists of roughly two hours traveling, of which I read books in, and thirty minutes eating, in which I also read books in. I work for five hours a day on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at a job where I would write if it weren’t for the obsessively lonely girl sitting next to me.

All this accumulates to roughly fifty hours worth of free time per week in which I must;
write essays
read books
continue social activity
play videogames
write
do the washing up
clean my clothes
buy food
manage budget
phone people
keep up to date with the world
listen to music (and I mean really listen)
think

If I allocate roughly four hours to each task (fifty-two hours) per week then I can equally manage each task, with each task falling short of its required amount I will have about five hours per week to myself. This can be spent in any which way I want.

I want to learn to play saxophone, but that has the added expenditure of money which also is the case with learning to drive. Each of these tasks would be perfectly suited to fit my five free hours a week, but unfortunately my financial status is nothing to brag about.

Two days ago I watched Mike solve a rubix cube within ten minutes. Two months ago I saw him pick up a keyboard and play it. A day ago I watched two guitarists jam to the Alton Towers theme and then become scared shitless by a videogame. Tomorrow I will watch a girl craft a story out of thin air then slide her feet on a polished dance floor. Twenty-one years ago a man was on board a naval ship in far and hostile waters. Five years later he married his mistress. Between now and then he learned to juggle, to excel in accounting, and to make the world his enemy. Two years ago a boy learned to juggle in two days. Four years ago I learned to see the world; two years ago I learned to see it differently.

I want to run in my five hours. Not to make myself fit or to increase my stamina, but just to have the sensation of running. There are locked doors that I want to kick open; there are strangers I want to talk to. Six months ago there was a stranger sitting on some steps crying her eyes out, and I talked to her. It was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life, watching her cry and putting a friendly arm round her shoulder as she bubbled incoherently into her chipped fingernails. Five months later I did the same thing, but this time there was no trail of mascara etching its way into their cheek.

In my five hours I want to make a difference. Not a save the world difference. I want to make someone see something. The world is human, I will tell them, you are not alone in your solitude. I want them to stop and take stock of everything they’ve ever known, or if I can’t do that then I just want to jar their thinking for ten minutes. Ten singular minutes in my five hours per week I want to stop someone in their tracks and show them.

I have all this free time to free the world. If I wasn’t such an arrogant son-of-a-bitch I might just do that.

Maybe I’ll just learn to play the saxophone instead.

My heart sinks with my eyes as I spy a glimpse of white on a thing that should be nothing but black. Confusion, shock, horror, desolation. Emotions ran wildly through my face, manipulating the muscles to convey the car wreck of thoughts I was experiencing. Wool sprouted from the tear in my leather jacket and I fingered it gently to see how bad the damage was. I wish I could say i got it by defending some poor old lady from a gang of knife wielding youths, or even grabbing someone out of the way of a speeding car and pulling them away in the process, but no; i just fell down. And so I held my leather jacket, prized possession of a year and a half, and wept.

On the bright side of things, I have now found a new use for electrical tape.

Sharkey and George crime busters of the sea do doo do do doo doo dooo, whirls round and round in the demented merry-go-round of memories that sing soprano purrs and lick with velcro tongues. Cancer runs in their family, winning first place with her as it hit the heart that thundered every time my fingers touched the electric skin of her nubile body. There was rasping and breathing and starving as I stood far away holding a roll of selotape and laughing they’re over his eyes, he can’t see hearing i’m going to kill you when you get this off me replying then i won’t help you take it off then will i? and she was falling on a needle with eyes fluttering with the beginnings of a dream suddenly silenced. Her sister went many years ago and I sat on the couch and cried my sorry little heart out but this time I put my feet up on the balcony and toast silently to the night before downing the whisky in one. She was the one who liked Felix cat food i hear a friend say I used to lift her up and spin her around when I was a kid I replied and all the while my brother is stumbling around with his hands selotaped over his eyes yelling over our laughter as we held each other up straight. She used to run behind the washing machine and once fell into the bin, the swing top spinning comically as a gentle mewing erupted from the base. And now she’s asleep in ashes and cooling away in the wind.

And that’s how it goes.

I just typed many many things and for once I felt proud enough to post them up here, but then I pressed the wrong button and it all went away. Lets start with something new then.

I’m ill, and I’m not sure if it’s due to the hunger or exhaustion. My stomach has the feeling of having one to many coffees, which is strange since the last cup I had was over three hours ago. It was wasted on me anyway; my tiredness had progressed to the point where even the blackest, sugariest coffee I could make would only fill my lapses into sleep with dreams of vampires and flowers being raised against me like rifles. Made work a hell of a lot more interesting though.

Met up with Catherine today to have a nice long chat about the chapters of my novel that I gave her. She was under the strict instructions to analyse every word with her little red pen, and she really gouged away. Ink as black as blood has scratched its way onto the paper and cut deeply into something that is more me than I am. Notes have been scrawled into margins and sentences weave between paragraphs in mathematical curves. They’re full of interesting notes and points to develop on, my favourite of them being; “It’s like her stomach is a trampoline! A love trampoline. Boing.”

It made quite an impression on my to say the least. Not the trampoline remark (although it did make me chuckle to the extent that people on the bus watched me with cautious terror), but more the comments themselves. It links in nicely to what Emma mentioned earlier on in the week about sensationalist writing and how things are always so melodramatic in my stories. It made me think back on the days when I’d focus on character rather than plot, how I wrote four thousand words revolving around a phone conversation instead of churning out a story of roll-ups with human tobacco just for the shock factor. Still, there are many aspects of my bizarrely twisted stories that I actually like. Lets see if we can’t just mix the two? It’d be a nice break from my novel, since I now need to completely rewrite everything because it just doesn’t look right anymore.

Also, on a side note, Mario Galaxy is the nicest game ever. It’s so colourful and friendly that you can’t help but hug it, even if it is ridiculously easy (which is more due to my old school gaming talent than anything).

Oh look at that. I’ve created a new page thing. Aren’t I special?

Still can’t figure out how to write on it though. I’ll give it a gander later, too tired right now.

I’ve stuck that brilliant-idea-of-a-novel on the shelf for now while I continue working on the one that’s been on the end of my fingertips for almost a year now. It’s going well, if I don’t say so myself. And, I know I’m biased and all, but it is one shit hot piece of writing. I can’t wait until I finish it so I can have a few good friends tear it to shreds with their little red pens.

Not much else to talk about these days. Excluding one incident in recent memory where my head was a permanent feature of my toilet bowl after one too many, my life seems oddly absent of events. Apart from a ton of writing.

My healthy exercise regime is beginning a week today too. It’s going to follow on nicely after my week of abstinence from smoking and alcohol. I don’t know why I’m doing it though. I tell myself that it’s some form of detox while secretly wondering if I just enjoy torturing myself for the fun of it. I mean, come on, a week without cigarettes? I’ll probably die.

I’ve discovered, just now, that writing solidly for five hours on a novel doesn’t make for good blogging afterwards no sir. I need to stop writing for a while so all my built up writing goodness can leak out onto this page. But, then again, I received two beautiful notebooks for Christmas and birthday (a moleskin, and one that’s too pretty for words), and I know I won’t be able to resist writing in them. My plan is doomed to fail from the beginning.

My room’s clean though. So that’s a start.

When will I begin to make sense!?

I can’t sleep. No. Not true. I can sleep, I’m just not letting myself. I find it disturbing that every time I tell myself that I’m going to get an early night I find myself up at three in the morning opening another beer and laughing at a joke someone has said in the next room. Yet there are other times where I tell myself that I’m going to stay up late and watch horror movies before I drop off five minutes into the beginning of Se7en. Woe is me and all that.

Other than lack of slumber, I’ve not much else to update about. Had a good old bash around with my friends the other day where a quite word turned into a drunken shouting match where fingers were waved and I felt like hitting something. It wasn’t the subject matter that annoyed me the most though. It was the segregation deal. The whole “us versus you” idea that knocked me off my balance and made me flail with panicked accuracy. But hey, we weren’t all meant to have friends.

The old birthday is coming up again. Luckily enough I’ve convinced enough people to forget about it and therefore there will be no celebrations! I’ll be happier than ever. My birthday’s always so depressing as I open up yet another HMV voucher as my relatives and/or friends have no idea what to purchase for me so decide to let me choose my own stuff from a mediocre music store.

But alas, I am not nearly as depressed as this post is making me out to be. I’m just stressed. Well, not really stressed. I don’t get stressed like normal people. I have once, and I didn’t like it. It felt like that there were so many things needed to be doing that I was being beaten up by every thought and my eyes burned with exhaustion. No, I don’t feel stress like that anymore. What I feel is like a passive drowning. It’s not like water is enveloping me and I’m sinking or anything, it’s more like the water is a muscle and I’m sliding down into it as the top closes over me. So yeah, I’m stressed. And I have nicotine cravings like you wouldn’t believe, which just doesn’t help.

I’m genuinely trying to think of something good to put in here. Honestly. My life isn’t crap or anything, I’m not miserable or depressed or suicidal, it’s just full of little nice things that wouldn’t get mentioned because their so little but make me happy. Like how at work I’m banned from telling jokes because they’re terrible (”there are two muffins sitting in an oven right?…”) or how Jules insults me because we know people think it’s strange or how I drew a doodle of something today that actually looked like what I wanted to doodle or even Elisabeth’s hat. Just little things.

Could be the time of day. Night. The lack of light and the oppressing time could be putting a blockage on my happy happy thoughts and just be letting all the nasty things through. I’ll blame the night then, for this neverending rant about nothing at all really.

A good thing! I know now! My need for writing has suddenly and thankfully returned, spurning me on to continue writing not only my novel, but two - yes two - short stories. You may even see them up here at some point. Who knows!

There we go. I’ve found a good thing. Now I can sleep.

The countdown was five minutes late at least, with the scent of gunpowder lingering on our lips and mixing with rain to infuse our hairs with chalky smoke. The drunken clamour swayed and danced as we counted back from ten (steadily speeding up as we descended into a new year) and broke out into a toneless Auld Lang Syne after we made certain that it was, in fact, the new year. I hugged Charlotte tighter against my chest and breathed smokey words into her ear.

A week previous had been spent amongst family; well, retreating from family. Hiding out in the kitchen, smoking with the cousin who’s slowly sweet talking her way into my Mother’s will and drinking steadily from a bottle of Jack Daniels meant only for me. Gifts had long since been unwrapped and forgotten about, so now was time for social merriment and watching of Hairspray (which is actually, you’ll forgive me, not that bad) and listening to my cousin fan herself and become breathless when a certain actor pops on screen.

The next day I suffered a five hour long bus trip to Manchester. The buses are designed the exact proportions to make you as uncomfortable as possible to fall asleep. There were many times where I was on the very tip of dropping off only to find myself with a face full of knee. Not all bad though, there was a South African sitting next to me - this huge burly black guy - who had won an all expense paid trip around Scotland and England. He was spending a few days in each of the major cities before going to Edinburgh for Hogmanay and then flying back to South Africa. He was so amazed at how kind and friendly everyone in Scotland was.

I smiled and listened to his every word. I didn’t want to disillusion the poor bastard.

And here I am, lying back in Charlotte’s room with rum sitting snugly at the bottom of my stomach. She’s in bed, her dark hair spread over the pure white pillow and her milky white shoulders and perfume that leaks from her fingers. It was a month since I saw her last, and goddamn right it was too long. Any length of extended time void of her technicolour eyes is too damn long indeed.

And so I think I shall join her, if you’ll excuse me, which I think you may.

Happy New Year folks.