Documented lack of imagination, and feckless days chewing the inside of my mouth; bored on baked buses, eyeing the pampered, booth-tanned flesh of reality television stars on weekly gossip rags. Near work there are immaculate girls who I feel work for Glamour (they carry Glamour tote bags and have cut-out detail dresses). It feels bad to complain about things being not great, but where else. If Life Writing has become my un researched euphemism for putting whatever I like on here, here. I am engaged with social media I write, but what, when and how does that mean? I get off the phone with my mother and breathe in the garden. My neighbour has his door open, always. I get paranoid he can hear me exhaling in the open air. I am avid, antisocial. He is some sort of telecommunications whiz kid, and that is all I know. Read this story today and it moved me and made me feel awful, in the shit context. Contexts can shrug and stop being shit now, not just for me but for everyone else.
We sat by the Thames and around evening watched the bloated corpse of a large fish go past. It made us feel sad and thoughtful. It was a warm evening and the buildings were too close to the sky; the colour of overtime, photocopier neon. A couple of IT programmers started talking to us and they were nice but a little bit boring. They were more keen on talking to my friend; I must have looked sad and boring, hair all out of shape, face all out of shape, neither drunk nor tired, holding on to a perspiring glass and everywhere the girls in floral dresses and bare legs sipped wine and chuckled about social complexities and plans for the summer. Winter and sleet had come and gone. recalling the day I shut the doors tight as tiny pellets of polluted ice flung themselves into the garden and into the pond gaining density and disappearing in minutes. Earlier even I sat with P in the candy-coloured chairs and watched my cat lick her paws.
Tonight I make a pilgrimage to Crapham for a social engagement. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a chronic fear of Clapham; I have avoided the place since April 2010. Z and I left in a hurry, bundling my things off in a rented van, escaping into the sunlight with a house plant in one hand and a bag of sweaters in the other. Entering the next apartment; curtained windows, relief, blank, stupid hope. Even the thought of the railway arches and the winding, leafy back roads leading to the desolate newsagents and the fluorescent McDonald’s fills me with dread and fear. Chronic queasiness, like how it would feel standing in an hourglass. The weird, sacred power we ascribe to places, when in many ways they are innocent- what did buildings, and shuttered train stations, and rusty pharmacies ever do? Every room merely a container of its inhabitants, all the late night conversations and sleeping disorders, and the muttering of keyboards, errant mice, pasta sieves and faulty reception, messy clothing piled in corners, black textbooks. Time and gray and guilt. Pour it out and a room is a room, an area of the city merely a practical demarcation. Names as gibberish. Maybe it all means nothing.
A story I wrote for Crispin Best’s fiction project.
Lately when I have been feeling nervous or full of dread (99.98% of the time now) I have discovered a new physical sensation of the entire soles of my feet feeling ice-cold and these sparks of real cold travelling upward and stopping at my ankle bones. This is a new manifestation and for that reason I must wear more socks. Yesterday we took a boat out to near the Isle of Wight and at some points it tipped almost over to the side. I could sit here trying to remember the sensation of everything tipped to the side, but all these lines of my room are too obstinately horizontal.
I tried steering but then I realised I was making the boat go off course and into a pocket of the sea where it was a wind pocket so that was the end of my steering adventure. We had marble cake on the boat a layer of sickly sweet chocolate and I fell asleep briefly in the sun with my head on a windbreaker and my face on the deck and for some minutes it was possible to forget I was four limbs and the weight of a being, all slow thoughts and bad habits, none of that, could just have been a fish or an algae, drowsing on deck. The cliched introspection you get from being confronted with an expanse of water, unless you always lived right by the sea. Melancholy ramblings on the Internet. Two months ago there are streets in Madrid where all the blue and red doors are shuttered and a flyer for some classical concert gets trampled on and blown down the tunnel in the crumpled and inarticulate tunnels of the Metro. The sense of finality you get sometimes in a foreign place, wondering and almost knowing you might never be there again, with the same person, or the same contexts. Two months before that and the year is young and still draped in Christmas lights, dappled and hungover, not mid-sized and confused. May is a great month, I tell you that looking forward in 2 months it is July 20, and in another 2 months it is September 20. By which time people would have won prizes and died, snored after dinner and woke up from dreams populated with clown-faced variations of daily life, there might be some horrid war erupted, a tax man might be on the run, lots of petrol would be used up, my friends would still be my friends, and I will be happier, yes, happier
E.M. Forster: Howard’s End
Reader Submission: Title by Angela Lucera.
(Source: klobbaklanks)
Time stretches. I feel like the distance between this week and last week is fairly infinite. it has been a long, long week. it is the end of a foot-long week.
have I become one of those Paul Giammatti (sp??) types? I believe I have.