Living Vicariously Through Older Men I live in shadows and I, Cant hardly breathe cos, That weight of history is, Killing me I've been living my #life, Vicariously through older men. I live in echos and I, Can't hardly see cos, The light of yesterday is, Blinding me I've been living my #life, Vicariously through older men. I know that there's nothing left to be, I know that theres nothing left to do, I know that there's nothing left to feel, I know that there's nothing left to steal. And I know that there's nothing left before me, And I know that there's nothing left behind, I've been living my #life vicariously, I know that there's nothing left to find I've been living my #life vicariously, I know that there's nothing left to find I know that there's nothing left to think, I know that there's nothing left to see, I know that there's nothing but the stink, The carcass of what should and could have been. I know that it's lost and gone, departed, Nothing but the sting of memory, Now that I have lost what I have started, Now I know what could and should have been.

Too Old To Die Young So maybe you have wasted, The time that you have done? So baby you just fake it So whoah I guess that we're too old to die young? So maybe we should do some growing up So honey you can't take it, The feeling in your bones, Just go ahead and break it Go whoah I guess that we're too old to play dumb, So maybe we should do some growing up? When the streets, when the streets, when the streets are calling, calling out your name And I keep and I keep and I keep on falling, Calling out your name Oh Honey don’t you hate it? Just look what we become, No sugar I can’t take it Nooh oh oh oh I guess that we’re too old to waste months, So maybe we should do some growing up? When the streets, when the streets, when the streets are calling, calling out your name And I keep and I keep and I keep on falling, Calling out your name I never felt so tired so old so numb, So maybe we should do some growing up?

La Folie à deux - Part One Chapter Two Chapter 2. The Good Times Are Killing Me The day wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He was tired but not in an overly unpleasant way. The kind of tired that made you think less, so that the passage of time through banal activity seemed to go faster. He hadn’t sold anything but then none of the other battery chickens had either so at least there was safety in numbers. He’d allowed himself to be suckered into the usual spiel when he’d applied for his current job. The small, professional sales team description that suggested it might at least be semi-tolerable and a City centre location that meant at least he could be surrounded by the welcome bustle of civilisation during his brief lunch hour. Of course it had become all too clear very quickly that this job was exactly the same as the countless others he’d found excuses to walk out on in the past. The numbers game approach to sales, get a thousand monkeys with typewriters and hope that they write Shakespeare excepting of course in this case they had headsets. It wasn’t just the facts of his day to day job that disgusted him so much, the constant little lies and little manipulations, the false humility and deference, the pretence that you were acting in a strangers best interest, no, it was the people places like this attracted. The smell of failure clinging to the older ones, the undeserved arrogance dripping of the youngest, the wannabe yuppies who lived with their mothers, the casual misogynists, the chatter about whatever bullshit, soul-dead piece of televisual shit the newspapers had told them they should be obsessing over. These weren’t people; they were just nasty little cogs in some horrible machine built as a mockery of what people could be. He never told them this, he felt detached enough and to be fair he even liked some of them on a casual, personal level. He was quite happy to kill time chatting nonsense and subtly and not quite so subtly winding them up. But it still added up to some kind of slow inescapable poisoning of the soul. The trouble was he didn’t know what else he could do. He always felt he was smart enough to see the gaudy bars of his cage for what they were but he was too dumb to do anything about it. Maybe that was a cop out as well though. It wasn’t that he was too dumb, maybe he was too scared and besides maybe they were better off anyway? Was it better to think you could see the truth of a sickeningly wasteful situation but then be paralysed into inactivity by the revelation or was it better to try and make a #life within the lie. Were the sales-monkeys he was surrounded by better off in the fantasy than he was outside it? Did they think these same thoughts or variations on them? Was his detachment even his elitism, if you could call it that, entirely misplaced? Maybe everyone thought like this they just kept their mouths shut. That would be even worse, self imposed solitary confinement through cowardice and a withering of the soul. It was 11.00 by the time he started to feel vaguely awake and normal and he’d already smoked eight cigarettes. He picked up his phone with his right hand and casually tossed it into his left, an effortless manoeuvre born of a #life wasted in call centres. He was supposed to wear a headset but he hated the thought of being indistinguishable from the rest even in that small detail. He also suspected on a fundamental level that no one who really mattered spent the day with a headset on, so he refused. He bashed out the numbers for “Sunshine Florist”, the next prospect in his CRM. It rang out and then cut to a stock answer phone message. The dusky feminine voice, the same voice that tried to sell him car insurance, toilet tissue and he was certain after a trip to London, had told him over the carriage tannoy what the next tube stop was, informed him that they were not available. He dropped the phone back down. “Why the fuck do they bother having an answer phone and then not have their own message? It’s fucking lazy and it makes em look like dicks.” He wasn’t really speaking to anyone in particular. Nicki was flirting with a client and barely registered him, Ollie creased up and started laughing. Ollie was a chubby Ghanaian, bald with a wide genuine smile and a twinkle in his eye. John had asked him if he was Black Buddha once and got the expected stock response of spasmodic laughter and shiny white teeth. He liked Ollie, he laughed at pretty much anything he said. He spent a sunny Friday afternoon testing this to its limit once. He quickly established he would laugh at even a meaningless look and shrug of the shoulders. He’d obviously decided that he was a “funny guy” on first impressions and so now just assumed everything he said or did was a joke without necessarily needing to check the facts. This didn’t bother John. Frankly any escape from the monotony of his job suited him fine. He liked Ollie’s attitude as well, he had a kid from a failed relationship in his early twenties and because of this worked harder than most. He wasn’t a great salesman, he was pretty mediocre, but he worked harder than the rest because he had something he was working for. John respected that, and he was also envious of it. He was aware that all the most meaningful accomplishments he’d ever achieved were for something bigger than himself and he longed to have something like that in his #life again. Something real, something important, something true. Plenty of the others seemed to be working hard enough to afford shit watered down coke at the weekends and the occasional sly lunchtime session. He couldn’t get his head round the appeal of doing a line in the office toilet. To him drugs had always been about context, surrounded by people you had a bond with, shared music, shared experience, above all an escape from the shitty nine-five. It just seemed to him pointless posturing to do it at work and anyway it’s not like you could fully cut loose and make the most of the experience anyway. Like an erection in a strip club. Pretty expensive way to get hard and then not be able to anything about it, what was the point? “Don’t you dare use that language in front of me.” Nicki was off the phone. She was very good at her job, John suspected because she was too dumb to fail. The fact she mostly sold to men in garages helped. She was from somewhere in the north east and was certain that she was very glamorous. John couldn’t help winding her up at every opportunity but somehow that had developed into a strange camaraderie. She didn’t have a clue what John was, she didn’t meet men like him in the circles she moved in. She associated with bouncers, petty drug dealers and wannabe rappers. She didn’t have a clue how to file john. “Fuck off Nicki. You coming for cig Ollie?” I can’t do this anymore he thought to himself as he stood up and sighed. ** Before he knew it, it was lunchtime. He made his excuses for the usual pub invitation; he rarely savoured being lightly drunk at the office it just made him tired and want to be there even less. He wandered the back streets of the old light industrial parts of town that skirted the centre. They were quickly becoming largely empty flats for young professionals. Any character and history ground down and homogenised in some desperate naive assumption that this was “The London Of The North”. No it fucking isn’t he thought to himself every time he heard the phrase. Or if it is it’s the shit, soulless bits most Londoners couldn’t give a toss about anyway. They were remaking the world in someone’s image and that someone was clearly a cunt. All glass and what he assumed were supposed to be exciting angles. He was pretty sure that the tower blocs that blighted the skyline, which went up in the 60’s and 70’s, were thought at the time, by a similar breed to whoever spawned their current analogues, to be modern and chic. There was probably some bitter loser much like himself, decades before him, who saw them for what they were. Cathedrals to mediocrity and despair, the chrysalises for slums in the sky yet to be born. He probably had bigger side-burns though. There must have been some tipping point in the not too distant past. A peak whereby change had stopped being something good and stopped being something that showed forward momentum for mankind and just became a way for things to get slowly, inevitably worse. He knew this to be true, it seemed obvious to him. Things were getting worse, people were getting worse, he was getting worse. He used to be fiercely proud of where he was from, but that was when he felt he had a stake in it. The people he cared about had mostly gone, the places he remembered fondly had been changed beyond all recognition. The faces he was surrounded by seemed to get younger and younger and more “Hollyoaks” everyday. He couldn’t decide if this alienation was because he was genuinely detached from the world due to some suspected but unconfirmed superiority or just because he was turning into a sad, miserable old fucker. Probably a bit of both. Even before he’d run out of women he had any interest in fucking he’d started to feel like the oldest swinger in town. In his early twenties he had to admit to himself he hadn’t been that choosy when picking partners but the parameters for holding his attention or even his interest seemed to get narrower and narrower by the day. He tried being his old self, but it just made him feel paper-thin. Maybe he was, maybe all this introspection was just vanity to cover the fact he was a creature of no substance. He had gone for a drink with an old friend from a previous job not long ago and had admitted to him after his most recent dalliance with a girl he neither wanted or needed, that what he really truly longed for was a punk, supermodel, genius. He didn’t think his prospects for finding such a woman were that great here, they probably weren’t great anywhere and he also suspected that such a creature would be unlikely to be interested in him anyway. Why did he think so highly of himself but at the same time hold so much contempt for himself in so many ways? And love, whatever that meant, he’d never felt further from it. Not the love you think you have when you’re a kid. Anyone could pretend that they had that and he suspected most people did. What he meant was that glorious soul lifting kind. The kind that makes you think there’s beauty in the world, the kind that makes you want to be a better man. The tragedy of that love which he thought he’d known maybe twice, the horror of it, was that the loss of it, the failure of it, made the world an uglier place, made you retreat back to being a lesser man. The peaks of its highest elevations never quite reaching the depths of its lowest valleys. That kind of love, so rare and so shocking in the quickness of its absolute dominion over him, took so long to recover from he suspected maybe you never did. If it doesn’t kill you it covers you in scars. Sears the metaphorical flesh. He longed and feared for it in equal measure and knew that there was always a chance the next time might finish him in some fundamental way. He’d reached the city centre now, it was late autumn, the sky was a serious steely grey and there was a crispness to the air that hinted at another hard winter. He reached into his pockets for the articles needed to roll a cigarette. Just as it was lit and he took that first drag like a drowning man desperate for air his phone alerted him that he had a text. Hello love can you get us some snouts on the way home? Xx It was his housemate. She must be skiving again or have a day off. He’d never really got his head round her calendar. This was one of the occasions where their usually shared poverty was out of sync so he didn’t mind the responsibility of feeding her nicotine habit, they had spent enough desperate Sundays scrabbling together rollies from the butts, overflowing from ashtrays from the last time they had any money. That had cemented their friendship really, that shared experience, that strange community. When he’d first moved in they hadn’t really spoken and then when he had his heart broken the last time, what felt like years but only months before, Sadie and John had started hitting the town together. They had overlapping friendship groups and similar tastes in music so bonded pretty quickly after that. Neither of them was unaccustomed to the late night comfort of strangers but they’d never slept together. That would have broken the bond somehow and the relationship was more like siblings than anything else. The roles changed sometimes he was the big brother sometimes she was the big sister but they looked out for each other in their own way. It wasn’t long until she referred to John as “The Wife”. If it had just been the good times that they shared though he didn’t think there would be that same depth of connection. He never spoke to her about it but he always felt that he and she both had a hole in them in some way and that the parameters were similar. He could tell or at least he thought he could that there was a deep and keen sadness they both had. They were both lost in their own ways and the fact that they had each other made it easier to bare. He was also glad he had someone he could care about that wasn’t the cat. He took out a pen from his record bag and wrote on his hand cigs sades. He almost always had something written on his hand, it was the only guaranteed way he could rely on himself to remember important information. He sometimes wrote notes in his phone that he hoped he could later use for writing, that of course he never got round to actually doing, these were usually composed late at night and depressingly made little sense in the cold light of day I never thought I’d survive the good times That was the only one that was obvious and direct in its meaning. It was true and he knew it. He hadn’t planned for a future and now well you couldn’t call this one, this was, well Limbo. He realised he’d nearly run out of lunch hour so he quickly ate the cheapest sandwich he could find and a Belgian bun whilst worrying about his flabby stomach. Fuck it he thought as he saw himself reflected in a shop window, you’re still pretty easy on the eye. He’d gone for a red-tie and the standard black shirt today and thought he looked pretty good in his crombie and red doc martins. He’d obeyed the letter of the dress code if not the spirit. He realised he hadn’t replied to Sadie. Reeto la. Let’s get hammered and go for a boogie on Friday. I’ve got some dollar so it’s all good. Xx It was Wednesday, half way through to be precise, which meant he was half-way through the week. The thought made him feel a bit better. ** “And when your all alone don’t forget me. And when I’m all alone I won’t forget you, cos I’m on the wrong side of the tracks and I did not know until you turned your back, I’m living the blackest years of my #life and I did not know until you said goodbye. Goodbye!” He turned the music off and slipped of his headphones as he arrived back at the office. He barely registered the afternoon meeting. The usual pats on the back and gentle reminders that people needed to improve their call-times and the quality of their pitches and that extra training was available if people wanted. Could you train me to give a fuck he thought to himself? He wished he had a trade, he wished he could do something real. He was pretty sure plumbers didn’t feel like this. He just wanted something he could touch, something that didn’t rely on what amounted to skill at manipulation. Even on good days he felt like a snake-oil salesman. He probably shouldn’t have fucked up university but he didn’t feel that would have given him that many options anyway. The realities of university had disavowed any dreams of academia he may have held as an adolescent so he guessed a degree might have just meant this but in a slightly nicer office and living in a slightly nicer house. He wasn’t sure if that would make him happier or he suspected even more miserable. He guessed he’d drunk deep enough from the well of poverty but felt uncomfortable with the idea of wealth. He couldn’t shake the feeling it would make him a traitor in some way. Maybe he should just make the most. Maybe if he faked enthusiasm for his #life it would somehow work out, he realised though even as this crossed his mind that he didn’t know who he’d be faking the enthusiasm to? He decided you can probably only lie to yourself if you don’t realise you’re doing it. Fuck maybe he was already doing that? How could he tell? He stopped this train of thought when he realised all he was doing was adding another layer to his introspection. I’ve got to get out of my own head for a bit he decided. I need a break from myself, some distraction, some peace. Just for a little while. How the fuck do I do that? Hopefully getting wasted on Friday would do the trick. It then dawned on him that Sade’s may suggest they get cocaine when he’d be drunk and vulnerable to suggestion on Friday. Oftentimes he was glad to be but he really didn’t want the stuff now, not when he felt like this. To be honest it had been a long time since he’d got any enjoyment out of it, there was a time when it had given him a clarity of thought that he welcomed, he’d say it switched on his reptile brain, old primal circuits, all id without the whiny ego to kill his buzz. These days it just made him more aware of the blackness in him, it just made him crawl home alone and curl up into a ball. The tears these little episodes inevitably brought weren’t even cathartic, they just came on in horrible, unstoppable bouts he’d choke down to hide the sound from Sades. Like the vomit of his despair. He didn’t want her to see him like that. He didn’t want anyone to see him like that. “Fuck yeah! Lets dance like prats and try and get you laid. Xx” Maybe he should try and get laid, sex was important. He might meet someone amazing and he hated the thought of getting really into someone and then finding out they were shit at sex. The woman he thought at one point he’d spend the rest of his #life with had been a one night stand that escalated. He wondered how she was. He no longer loved her but he didn’t like the inescapable truth that she hated him. He tried to reconnect and get some kind of absolution but she’d refused. He’d stopped trying now. He then began to think of all the embarrassing, shameful, sad little encounters he’d had to get through to meet her. The ratio wasn’t great. Maybe he shouldn’t try and get laid. “John, you are so lazy. Do you not care about your call times?” It was Nicki, she smirked after she said it so it was clear she just wanted some attention. “Not feeling it today old son.” A remark chosen to confuse and annoy. “Old son?” Mock indignation and a shrug of the shoulders. “Alright “Mum”, Jesus!” He picked up his phone and idly scrolled through his list of calls, “Sunshine Florist”. Yeah that’ll do, their probably not there and at least it’ll make it look like I’m trying, he thought. In his more professional moments he’d come to the realisation that it actually took more effort to not do much work than it did to put even a superficial amount of effort in, and that it made the days drag on even more. This epiphany in no way helped his motivation however. Something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He looked away from the BBC news website he was idly viewing and nearly laughed in shock. “I’m sorry but the person you’re trying to call.....” It couldn’t have been more than an inch and a half tall, almost the shape of a man but cruder, not misshapen but fundamentally basic, like a child’s drawing. “Is not available.......” It walked with a head bobbing arm swinging gate, almost nonchalantly from behind his monitor, he noticed or at least he thought he did through the thought stopping intrusion of it into his #life that it looked like it faded somewhat at the edges, like it was disappearing from the outside in. It was completely black. A completely black stick man was walking across his desk and had now disappeared behind his telephone. “Please leave a message after the tone.” His thoughts lurched back and forth between curiosity and fear. Finally curiosity hesitantly took over and he grabbed for his phone pulling it back and up. He felt the fear run down the back of his hand in that rushed movement. Not knowing if something was going to grab him and he instantly recalled the feeling at the strange sound that frequently disturbed his sleep. There was nothing there. “Your mental!” He couldn’t tell if she was genuinely annoyed and she certainly couldn’t read his expression. She cracked a smile and threw her head back and laughed, her long black extensions falling off her shoulders. “Your proper cracked. Hahaha, I don’t even.....Oh hello my names Nicki could I speak to the owner of the business please?” And like that she totally forgot what had been so funny and got back to her rote fashion pitch. He looked around, Ollie wasn’t at his desk and none of the others seemed to have noticed. What the fuck was going on? He didn’t feel that tired but he guessed it could be the bad night’s sleep he’d got. But then he’d had worse and not, well hallucinated, that’s the only word for it. He didn’t feel that stressed, well he did but it was just the usual background level he’d almost become accustomed to. Fuck maybe it was years of not looking after himself properly catching up to him? Maybe it was a flashback, but then he didn’t think he’d done much stuff that could prompt one. He Googled; Can ketamine give you flashbacks? The girl’s health website at the top of the list didn’t seem to confirm or deny. Although it did say that, the next entry LSD, could and didn’t mention it for ketamine so he reckoned probably not. He’d hardly ever had LSD and only then in weak doses so he reckoned that couldn’t be it. Calm down, he thought to himself. It’s just one of those things, you’re bored and tired and it was probably only a matter of time before your head played tricks with you like that. It’s just #lifestyle catching up with you. This voice was the one that sometimes came into his head, the part of him that acted as the friendly policemen of his mind. It would sometimes appear in desperate moments but usually only for minor crises, truly awful bleak times it left him to his own devices. Devices that invariably in those situations he’d turned against himself. He performed a mental inventory of other occasions where there was obviously something very wrong with his head. These were times when he’d been doing a lot of drugs and mixing and matching and cutting and pasting and staying up for days on end. There was the funny, déjà vu, he guessed you could call it. He’d been afflicted with it for a period of about two years just as long ago. It wasn’t déjà vu but that seemed the only appropriate word. He’d all at once be overcome by a song he could only remember during an attack, a feeling of nausea and of sensory overload and he’d have to sit and breathe deeply till it passed. He’d wondered if it was some minor form of epilepsy or was in some way related to the thankfully rare migraines that sometimes paralysed him with agony. It definitely felt like bad wiring. Like the horrible counterpart to when he’d felt once, on a ketamine high, that his blood had turned to luminal copper wiring heated and lit with an electric current that filled him with a vibratory revelry. And then there were the occasions, generally after very strong pills, where during the long comedown he’d be holding a perfectly normal conversation and his talking companions eyes would briefly melt down there face. That had happened so often at one point he’d stopped reacting to it and it was always over so fast and so obviously related to the crash after the weekends highs it didn’t bother him as much as it might. But the thing was, neither of those maladies felt like this. They were both obviously products of his head, they were clearly sensory but at the same time they were obviously miss-firings of normal brain activity temporarily hijacked by some possibly deserved and certainly self inflicted gremlin of the mind. This felt externally real. But then it couldn’t be, how could it be? There was no context or explanation for this. He was prepared to believe in ghosts, he even thought he’d had brushes with them a couple of times. That didn’t mean he thought they were necessarily sprits of the dead though. But even the broadest explanation might struggle with tiny black stickmen. No it was just one of those stupid things it didn’t mean anything. Yeah he’d forget it soon enough, even now he was starting to question what had actually happened, as the freshness of the memory faded. He reached into his coat pocket which hung off his chair and rolled a cigarette. He was half way down the stairs before he remembered the man with the bowler hat at the foot of his bed. ** By the time it came to the hour long walk home, it was getting dark and chilly. He didn’t listen to any music, there was none that suited his mood. The commuter traffic provided a reassuring background susurration, as he walked much slower than usual past the crowds of office workers heading home and students heading out. He wanted to drink very badly, to lose himself in stupor. He checked his balance by the university through a graffiti strewn, kebab stained cash machine. Not enough for anything decent but he could get cheap cider and black current. It meant he’d feel like shit guaranteed tomorrow but it was a shitness he could handle. He was no stranger to post-drunk #depression, although he found the obviously artificial come downs from ecstasy strangely easier to deal with. He didn’t like this, this feeling that things were unravelling around him. Every time he passed a hidden bush obscured pathway he couldn’t escape the thought some great black dog would leap out at his side and tear his face off. He rolled and smoked through fingerless gloved fingers in quick succession, feeling his chest tighten at the abuse mixed with the cold air. Get drunk with Sade. Get really drunk with Sade. Get so drunk they both passed out on opposite sofas. Yeah that’s the plan. It’s a good plan he thought. He didn’t need this. He didn’t directly think of the possibility of what it meant. Some thoughts were to terrible. They terrified him. His mind no longer happy with petty torments turned fully against him, losing himself, become something else, something that would be totally rejected by normal healthy people. No don’t think that. That can’t be happening. People that happens to probably don’t realise or question it. Yeah it was ok to think it now. Mad. He couldn’t be going mad. The truly mad don’t realise they are, do they? He thought about it. He wasn’t sure but he thought there was some logic to the idea and it made him feel a little better a little more himself. If he had any mental health problems it was probably #depression, but then he’d read somewhere that the clinically depressed thought they were to blame for all their problems and he didn’t truly feel like that, not fully. The semi-comfort of his internal reassurance almost carried him home. Then he saw the girl with the face made out of wicker. somewhere that the clinically depressed thought they were to blame for all their problems and he didn’t truly feel like that, not fully. The semi-comfort of his internal reassurance almost carried him home. Then he saw the girl with the face made out of wicker.

La Folie à deux - Part One Chapter One Chapter 1. Waltzin’ Black He couldn’t sleep. He lay there wondering if there was a golden hour in which this simplest and hardest of acts could be accomplished with some ease. Either way he’d missed it. The tiredness had once again translated into an uneasy laziness, packaged up with guilt at another wasted evening. Remorse at all the little beginnings he could have made, all the opportunities to become something better than this, wasted. Escape velocity that was the name of the game. The dull, crushing pieces of his #life made that harder and harder to reach. As he lay thinking how he must have missed the boat again, he listened to the frantic scratching noises of the cat as she dashed about the room after enemies and prey both real and imagined. He knew in a moment she would sit by the side of the bed and watch him blankly and he’d fall deeper into the non-sleep, non-wakefulness fugue. The sheets smelt stale. He wondered if there was a reason why he was so bad at the basic acts of #life maintenance. If there was some deep, underlying flaw in his character that was the reason he was terrible at paying bills, even opening the letters containing the bills, doing the washing up at a respectable interval, making appointments with dentists, he tongued the little gulf where his temporary filling had fallen out months before as he thought this. Was it to do with some impractical filling system in his head that he had little to no control over? Some things, which he was sure other people regarded as of primary importance, just couldn’t be relied on to remain in his focus for any length of time. Often once they had fallen off the radar, so to speak, even ‘red’ letters failed to reignite his interest. What did his filling system regard as important then? Probably endless cycles of mundane introspection destined to repeat but not to prompt any action. The best of us lack all conviction. He vaguely remembered something he’d read about false enlightenment or some other existential concept. Something about the self endlessly analysing itself for all eternity upon reaching the barrier between Me and Not Me. A fractal of the mind, a thought exercise in futility. He wished he could remember more details and as he did so began to worry that the bulk of his thoughts went something like this, half remembered, semi-truths, giving him a false sense of wisdom that lacked any solid quality. He realised he was once again living through one of those chapters of his #life where most experience was internal. A broad malaise with no discernable centre, no core issue to be fought and overcome, had once again settled over him. He supposed it could be his job, the kind of profession he’d fallen into as a younger man as it had allowed him a certain flexibility. The ability to just get up and leave had always appealed, although to be fair he would often find excuses to stay in increasingly intolerable circumstances. He’d been raised a devout Socialist. Although raised suggested a certain lack of personal responsibility he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He had been lucky enough to have parents that had given him the intellectual tools to make his own moral and personal judgements and so he supposed his personal beliefs, his framework of understanding the world, was as much his fault as theirs. What he knew in his heart of hearts was right and noble and true had begun to feel increasingly distant though. It wasn’t that he’d begun to question or turn his back on those things, not at all, it was more a growing sensation that he was drifting away from them, as though he was moving further and further from the light, sinking into some murky depth to what end and for what purpose he did not know. He’d always felt that the way he made his money was a betrayal. He never even made that much money which in a way made the betrayal deeper. He’d sold out for pennies. He’d worked as a salesman before even going to university. It was easy enough for him to fall into a cycle of such jobs, the decor might be different but they all boiled down to the same thing. Making imaginary wheels turn imaginary wheels. A prospect had said to him once “If something needs to be sold it can’t be any good. Anything good sells itself.” He was right. Was that why they sold the world to you so damn hard every damn day? The self made man. Consumer paradise. Just one more item, just one more purchase and you will be happy, just one more product and you’ll be content. The clockwork agony of bliss. But then, he thought, he wasn’t much better at the simple things when he was out of work. He’d spent a sizeable chunk of his earlier twenties on the dole. He’d tell women he’d meet he was an out of work actor, there was a dirty kind of glamour to that kind of poverty. The truth was he’d always felt he’d been raised to fight in battles already lost and so he’d struggled to find a point in it all. Idealism always leaves the door open for Nihilism. Drugs had helped for a while, he’d quite by chance fallen in with a clique of like minded, dilettantes he supposed, the drugs had been the common thread that held them together. When inevitably the group had scattered in the wind he’d gradually realised that the drugs weren’t really the same without his comrades and so he lost them also. He realised as the familiar train of thought went through his head that he was probably in the shallow end of sleep now. Melancholy reflection would inevitably be followed by flashes of petty little guilts and petty little shames, the memories themselves insignificant and not even that shocking except for their vividness. Lies he’d told, people he’d treated badly, things left unsaid. Thankfully these little sucker punches from his subconscious where getting fewer and further between as he got older. On reflection he wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing. Did this happen to everyone? Was part of getting comfortable in your own skin letting go, without even really thinking about it, of the nasty bits of baggage you’d accumulated. Or did he just care less and less as time went on? Was that why he never fell for anyone anymore? Not like he had as a younger man, but then even that always tended to accumulate yet more dross anyway. Maybe it was just a survival mechanism. Maybe you could only endure so much hurt before it stopped mattering. He realised this was the same theory he had about Pills. He’d decided that everyone had their own secret limit to the number you could take before they just stopped working like they had. You burned out on joy just as easy as you burned out on misery, maybe easier. What did that leave though? He opened his eyes. There she was. Staring at him as predicted. Soon she’d come and sit on top of the duvet on his feet unless she was sulking about something again in which case she would spend the night at the top of the stairs. Sometimes when unusual difficult to place noises woke him she’d be at the top of the stairs above his bed looking startled at things only she could see. He didn’t like that, the embarrassing fear of the unknown. He realised he’d better turn the lamp off and get serious about the sleep that may or may not come. If you don’t know honey, honey then you don’t. The words drifted through his head as he got comfortable. He was thinking about her now. Better not dwell, he thought, some wounds heal best in the dark. He tried to convince himself that he could stomach another day of drudgery, tried to tell himself that tomorrow would be better and brighter, that he would accomplish more in the scattered hours of freedom he had than he had in the evening just past. What did he do with all his time? Where did it go? If he parcelled up all the separate elements what would it look like? How would you even begin to express it in an abstract but understandable form. A pie chart of experiences? A graph of emotional states, how would you define the X and the Y? He realised as these vague and half formed ideas swam through his head that he was picturing the street he’d lived on four years ago in a half remembered town far away. Why had his thoughts taken him there? He was somewhere else now anyway, somewhere ethereal, a garden wall in the backstreet of a childhood so far away as to seem alien. You’d need more than an X and a Y axis anyway, sometimes when you were happy you were sad, sometimes there was a certain comfortableness in sadness. What would you do with the information anyway? It would probably just be another string to the bow of neurosis and self doubt. He’d decided about a decade ago that you could only really be truly and deeply, depressed if you actually truly and deeply loved yourself. You had no other frame of reference. It was only the disparity between the happiness you felt you were owed and what you had that caused any kind of ongoing bleakness. He’d decided once you ‘got over yourself’ you could get on with being basically ok. It was this kind of glib logic which had at one time given him a grim sort of comfort that if he thought about too closely he realised was running out of steam. He felt the solid and reliable weight of the cat as she hopped onto the bed and made her way to her usual place on his feet. Casual grace mixed with an earthy ungainliness. He was glad she hadn’t decided to bite his toes. Friends were often alarmed at the sudden and unpredictable switch between tenderness and violence she often demonstrated. He worried that maybe he hadn’t raised her properly. He hoped she was ok. Then he felt foolish for thinking like that at all. There was a dull far of drone outside, probably a plane. He always hoped that the familiar noise would resolve itself into something more exciting, something to violently rip him out of the mundane, a dramatic crash, a planet killing meteorite, the end of the world. It was the same excitement he felt at news of the sabre rattling of World Powers. A submarine sunk of the coast of South Korea, a mysterious rocket launch from the Pacific near California. He was always half hoping for World War Three. He’d once been in a tumultuous relationship with a girl who had frequent nightmares about the end. He never told her that he had similar dreams but regarded them as a rare treat, a blessed release from normalcy. Would it be worth it? If the Seas boiled and the sky fell in, just to be free of council tax, weary commutes and mind numbing soap opera. He thought it probably would. He never told her. Why the need to be similar to the ones we feel close to? Did that need mean all supposed closeness was to be distrusted? Was it always partly an act. He decided he probably didn’t care. He’d stopped trying to be anything but himself a long time ago anyway so the blame would always be elsewhere. He probably didn’t care. He wasn’t comfortable facing this way, he would have to turn onto his other side and risk upsetting the cat. He occasionally promised himself he would sleep on his back so that she could lie on his front. It was with some sadness that he realised he never remembered to do this. How many other little acts of kindness did he forget to do? He realised that he was starting to worry about whether he was a good man or not. Long dark nights of the soul rarely resulted in anything but tiredness the next day. He longed for some kind of hard earned revelation but it never came, just the usual inane chatter and self doubt, he wondered if the world was set up deliberately to thwart people like him, then decided this wasn’t only paranoid but insanely vain. He thought about sex instead. He thought briefly about masturbating but then decided he was too tired and remembered he needed to turn onto his other side. The cat fidgeted and resettled once he was facing the opposite side of the bed, unexplored and cool areas of the pillow secured firmly under his cheek. “Goodnight Kidda” he half whispered as he reached up for the lamp above. He sensed, rather than heard her yawn in reply. The unidentifiable clicking noise started up in the next room. That meant it was close to midnight. Why did he only notice the noise when he was trying to sleep? The familiar dread crept over him. He knew it was probably just the boiler, fuck knows it was unreliable enough, but there was something out of place about it that made him uneasy all the same. The house could be creepy sometimes. Things had happened there that he preferred not to think about at times like this but on occasion unavoidable, traitorous thoughts crept in, the uncomfortable sensation that you were alone and not at the same time. He gladly admitted to himself that the presence of the cat was a comfort to him at times like this. In fact he’d reassure her knowing full well he was reassuring himself. When she would suddenly become startled at some invisible presence he would put one hand softly on her back and say “Don’t worry, nothing bad’s going to happen to you, cos I’m here.” Once he’d paused and added “Bad stuff’ll happen to me because your here, but there you go.” She could be a terror at times, numerous little scratches attested to this. It had got quieter now, winding down to almost a chirrup. At its loudest thoughts of something turning a key in a creaking lock in a dark corner flooded his head or a horrible, crooked thing turning a crank. Were these irrational thoughts the twin sibling to his excitement at the thought of apocalypse? Part and parcel of the same morbid wish for violent change, any change at any cost, just for something different. Freedom and fear at the same address. He thought they most likely were. It was little comfort and it still didn’t spare him sleepless nights or annoyance at his own foolishness in the cold, weary light of day. Crrrrrr-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik-ik. A shudder went through him, distinct and primal. He tried to visualise a simple dial turning and not the all too easy to imagine finger, stripped to the bone methodically running down an exposed spine. He thought about reaching up and turning the lamp on. No, don’t give in to an overactive imagination, at least not just yet. Mundane thoughts, usually regarded as the enemy, now desperate allies. Shopping lists, laundry to be done, should he go back to having a skin-head, what should he have for lunch tomorrow? Silence. The kind that suddenly invades a room. He realised even his thoughts were quiet. He felt an unpleasant anticipation now, would he now drift off or would the alarming sounds begin again? The cat stirred, stretched and settled. It was a sweet distraction. The room began to feel oppressive now, too many corners out of sight, the little light bleeding through the below ground level windows spilling onto crumpled clothes and scattered papers and distorting them into unfamiliar shapes. A coat on the back of a chair became an elongated man on his knees, light glinting off a corkscrew became eyes in the dark, wires hanging from a bookshelf a mournful mouth. The darkness itself, more than just an absence of light, seemed to have taken on a character and spirit of its own. It clung about the room like some parasitic plant clinging to a ruin. His normal, plain everyday cell transformed into some faded, baroque monstrosity. That damned clicking sound. It lurched into #life again. It wasn’t just the timbre and resonance of it, unpleasant though they were, the rhythm was playing its part also. Spurring his quietly beating chest on into a spiralling ecstasy of anxious dread. Stop being an idiot. He thought desperately to himself. I can’t face another day of nervous exhaustion and then a wasted evening, his rational self pleaded. Stop being an idiot. Alone in the dark his rational voice was very quiet indeed. Silence. He wondered how long this cycle would go on. Fear of that horrible mechanism followed by the tense penetrating emptiness it left. More than likely long enough he would wake up miserable. He’d wake and take slow long drags on a cigarette rolled half asleep, try to work up the willpower to go upstairs, to shower, to feed the cat, put on his shirt and tie, arrange his hair, walking the same old route to the same old city to the same old office with the same old desk, make the same old pleasantries, feel the same old alienation, scream the same old scream all the day through at the indignity, the pointlessness and waste of a human #life of it all, silently, hollowly, inside the same old head where no one would ever hear it. He started to feel angry now. Not the hot instant anger that rose up uncontrollably when in danger or when deeply hurt or insulted, the slow warm anger, like metal twisted too far. The kind that never really went away, the kind you built up over a #life time. He tried not to analyse it too closely in case he lost the sensation, he found it preferable to the shameful fear of the dark. He understood anger better than that invasive and unwelcome condition that he’d allowed to overcome him. It was a familiar, desperate friend. They’d been thrown together often enough. The sound of drunken people making their way home outside suddenly brought the real world back into the room. It was almost as effective as turning the light on. He couldn’t make out the words. The conversation, such as it was, was somewhere between revelry and an argument. Suddenly he thought of her again, the latest ‘one that got away’. The way she would sometimes turn on him unexpectedly after a night out. He never could understand where that came from. The betrayal of the unexpected animosity had always angered him in a way that filled him with shame in the days after. The sounds of the couple outside drifted away into the background hum of the city. He suddenly noticed a texture to the silence that he desperately hoped would not, but knew undoubtedly would, mean the return of his invisible tormentor. Kh kk kkk kki ki ki ki ki ki The air felt cloying on the part of his arm, between two pillows, exposed to it. He wanted to kick his right leg free of the duvet and let it rest outside, hoping the cooler air would let him relax. He didn’t dare. His thoughts found themselves uncomfortably contemplating the times he would wake up paralysed and unable to move in the middle of the night. The excruciating paranoia of being trapped in a body turned against you, much like his mind had now, the pure giddy terror. He would struggle in silent agony until through sheer will some spastic motion would break the spell. Please don’t let that happen tonight. He wondered what the time was and then kicked himself for thinking the thought so clearly. That would never do any good. By knowing the time he would know the borders and boundaries of his failure to sleep. He hoped it wasn’t approaching three. Three was a bad time. The city would be quieter then, it’s reassuring presence distant somehow. Three was a bad time. He wasn’t sure when he’d first identified 3.00 AM as an unpleasant hour, even in a house full of occupied rooms you could still feel terribly alone at that hour, isolated in the dark. For someone so continually frustrated at other people he thought it a cruel twist of design that solitude could at times be so unbearable. Just another unpleasant paradox he supposed. He hadn’t been at all surprised to learn that Three was the so called witching hour, it seemed palpably obvious to him. Where did this flirtation with mysticism come from he wondered? He was a rational materialist, he knew it was ingrained in him, he would gleefully attack, verbally, anyone with any kind of Religious conviction that he met. He got a stubborn trill of pride at the reactions of superficial Christians when he explained to them the cruelty and horror of their Holy book, which they invariably hadn’t read. “Your God is a cunt.” He would say with a shocking certainty. That would be the bombshell he would drop only after making absolutely sure that the victim knew he wasn’t just saying it for effect, that this was a position born of reasoning and logic, solid and real and deeper than some childish belief in an imaginary friend. And yet. Why this fear of dark corners and unnerving sounds in the night? Was this all the product of an unhealthy mind? Was he sick in some way? Or was this all some throwback to an ancestral past where fear of an unknown and fundamentally unknowable world was a sensible survival strategy. When huddling together against a night full of fangs and claws and poison and death was the only answer? He wondered if this was how everyone else felt at times like this but just got on with things when the dawn came. He realised he could never know. The mind is private, all you have is your own thoughts rattling round and interpreting the signals received from the outside. The fangs, the claws, the poison, the shame, the hurt, the betrayal it was all you. The dark you were alone in was the dark of your mind. That indefinable thing that was you, that dialogue with and against itself, clinging to and railing against, in the cave of the soul. Anything but solitude an illusion, always and forever alone in the night. Fucking great he thought. He realised the sound had stopped. A light rain began to pitter-pat against his window. He sighed. He was probably taking everything too seriously. Things would work out. He had a knack for landing on his feet. He must have hit rock bottom now so he could begin his dreamy ascent back up, the inevitable fall that would follow far off and unreal. Yes everything would be ok. There was solace in rain, so much easier to drift off to the sound of its gentle beating, tiny little liquid hammers knocking out the ugly, sharp angles of his #life and weathering his thoughts down to a pleasing gentle landscape. There would be no shallow dreams tonight as his mind wandered into sleep, just a slow calm unwinding of his thoughts, processes slowing down, tense muscles relaxing, like a waterlogged sand castle losing its shape and slumping down into the beach, a barely perceptible waltz into blessed, rejuvenating oblivion. When he was in a deep slumber the cat lifted her head, stretched out her feet and quietly hopped off the bed, she carefully plodded into the little room adjacent and lapped at the cool water of her bowl. She looked back once at John, as she jumped upstairs one step at a time, his crooked sleeping limbs limp with unconsciousness. ** He was awake. It wasn’t the sudden wakefulness in the response to some stimulus, but it wasn’t the slow walk back to the world either. He had simply blossomed into near full awareness. He had turned back over again in his sleep. He knew he wasn’t fully awake but he was far from asleep, his focus wasn’t entirely on his thoughts as it would be if that were the case. What had woken him? He opened one eye, his other obscured by pillow remained shut. He realised his head was at a strange angle, not turned in towards the mattress as was usually the case but leaning back slightly, the unfamiliar geometry of this confused him, it was quite dark but he could make out the corner of the ceiling, the top of the bookshelf. He was calm as he almost dispassionately reviewed his perceptions. What had woken him? There was no sound in the room. He slowly looked to his left to bring in more of the room, the wardrobe at a steep angle from his position. Movement. His thoughts stopped instantly. His thought process entirely derailed by what he saw. A void in cognition. A tiny sliver of abyss. Unclear but there all the same, a figure, ridiculously, cartoonishly thin, no discernable head to speak of, side on at the foot of his bed. Short, maybe four and half feet, for all the world a ghostly oblong, the only distinction between head and torso the barest suggestion of shoulders, facing his mirror. An arm so thin as to be almost transparent, like ones own hand at the start of a Ketamine trip, was reaching out and touching what may have been a bottle of his aftershave. The whole spectre almost an after image, the room too dark to discern colour or detail. Except, Was it now wearing a bowler hat? He tried to shake off the grogginess and turn to see it more clearly, the awkward angle of his body meant he had to lean in the opposite direction away from the form back into his mattress. When he turned back it was gone, the barest suggestion that it had turned towards him as he turned to it. He fell back into his bed, reaching for the lamp almost out of reflex. Staring at the suddenly illuminated spot where, whatever the fuck it was, had been. There wasn’t any fear, no not fear, just shock at the absurdity of it. He had seen it, he wasn’t asleep, he couldn’t have been. But then, he must have been, he briefly thought of rolling a cigarette and then exhaustion landed on him like a heavy wet quilt. His last thoughts as he quickly fell back down into sleep were that it must just be because he was tired and his head was a mess. ** The alarm brought him round slowly, hit and run by love, the first words he heard that day. Morning cigarette, realisation that he was only at the beginning of another long unwelcome day, thoughts of whether he could get away with ringing in sick, numb headed, dry throat, sticky crusted mouth and leathery tongue, he could stay in bed for another half an hour and skip breakfast, check phone for messages and emails, enjoying the warmth of the bed, the cruelty of having to leave it. He didn’t finish the cigarette; unexpected reserves of willpower got him into the shower. Once he was in the shower it was ok, he could pretend to be a normal productive human being then, feed the cat, fresh water in her bowl, give her a fuss at the top of the stairs outside the bathroom, cold kitchen floor, look for keys. By the time he was suited and booted and out the door, he was almost awake. It was cold but not unpleasantly so, almost refreshing, he’d only gone a few steps when he realised his socks had begun to slip into the end of his shoe. He should buy better socks. Happy people probably bought better socks. In fact it was probably a collection of little things like decent sock elastic that made people happy in the first place. No grand complete units of happiness just little mundane things that made #life easier, less of a struggle. Actually he thought happy people probably didn’t give a fuck if their socks slip down into their shoes. He hadn’t thought about the night before. He wasn’t avoiding it, it just hadn’t come to his mind, when he realised this he thought that probably meant it was a dream. If it could be forgotten as easily as one then it must have been. It wasn’t fair that you forgot some dreams. There was one he had desperately tried to cling to as a very young boy. All he could remember of it now was the sorrow of its loss. He took a long pull on his cigarette as he passed the first window of many he would examine himself in casually as he walked to work. He was looking pretty good today. There was always comfort in that. He’d decided a long, long time ago that however shit you felt on the inside you had to make sure you looked as good as you could on the outside. He flicked through his iPod as his cigarette hung from his mouth. Ian Curtis solemnly intoned “Don’t walk away, in silence.” Music was best used as a mood enhancer he thought. If you had to feel something you should feel it as keenly as possible. Live it as deeply as you could with no fear or shame. He marched down the hill as the sun rose weakly above the tree tops. Post-Industrial-Soul-Death here I come. something you should feel it as keenly as possible. Live it as deeply as you could with no fear or shame. He marched down the hill as the sun rose weakly above the tree tops. Post-Industrial-Soul-Death here I come.

Untitled First Novel Chapter 1. Waltzin’ Black He couldn’t sleep. He lay there wondering if there was a golden hour in which this simplest and hardest of acts could be accomplished with some ease. Either way he’d missed it. The tiredness had once again translated into an uneasy laziness, packaged up with guilt at another wasted evening. Remorse at all the little beginnings he could have made, all the opportunities to become something better than this, wasted. Escape velocity that was the name of the game. The dull, crushing pieces of his #life made that harder and harder to reach. As he lay thinking how he must have missed the boat again, he listened to the frantic scratching noises of the cat as she dashed about the room after enemies and prey both real and imagined. He knew in a moment she would sit by the side of the bed and watch him blankly and he’d fall deeper into the non-sleep, non-wakefulness fugue. The sheets smelt stale. He wondered if there was a reason why he was so bad at the basic acts of #life maintenance. If there was some deep, underlying flaw in his character that was the reason he was terrible at paying bills, even opening the letters containing the bills, doing the washing up at a respectable interval, making appointments with dentists, he tongued the little gulf where his temporary filling had fallen out months before as he thought this. Was it to do with some impractical filling system in his head that he had little to no control over? Some things, which he was sure other people regarded as of primary importance, just couldn’t be relied on to remain in his focus for any length of time. Often once they had fallen off the radar, so to speak, even ‘red’ letters failed to reignite his interest. What did his filling system regard as important then? Probably endless cycles of mundane introspection destined to repeat but not to prompt any action. The best of us lack all conviction. He vaguely remembered something he’d read about false enlightenment or some other existential concept. Something about the self endlessly analysing itself for all eternity upon reaching the barrier between Me and Not Me. A fractal of the mind, a thought exercise in futility. He wished he could remember more details and as he did so began to worry that the bulk of his thoughts went something like this, half remembered, semi-truths, giving him a false sense of wisdom that lacked any solid quality. He realised he was once again living through one of those chapters of his #life where most experience was internal. A broad malaise with no discernable centre, no core issue to be fought and overcome, had once again settled over him.