One Saturday evening after a most distasteful day of work I attended a rooftop BBQ to celebrate my Asian friend's house mate's birthday. I never really got into the mood of the thing, the brethren was compiled mainly of chavs and gays, not that that is a bad thing, but frequent attempts at conversation flaked away like tissue in water and left eyes floating to spy on the ever more dark but lucid sky. I was left with a deft certainty, as I took a step back and watched the flickering colours of socialisation exploding around me, that the only emotion I could feel for these people was disgust; I didn't care what they thought of me, and didn't believe they had anything to offer me, they had the pompous aura of certainty in their hearts, somehow untouched by horror,they were paper images, a conspiracy against that sublime darkness hovering above and descending in ever increasing quantities. They wanted to be loved, that much was obvious, but they wore it with arrogance, denying their own fragility; through my eyes their fragility was the only thing I could see as they spewed words and laughed into each others faces. I couldn't work out whether I was alone in a crowd of idiots, or the only idiot in a crowd of well adjusted, stable, happy individuals.
Anyway, my remedy to this was to take two rather large tokes on a joint handed to me by a friend (let's call him D-gong), D-gong only turned up for five minutes with two rather unenthusiastic friends before leaving, but before he did I was able to suckle at his herbaceous teet (yuck). This joint was expertly assembled and, after the second puff, I realised very very strong, after that I was out, there is pictorial evidence.
Below is a document of my evening through text messages sent to my girlfriend (let's call her Piekna). It starts just after a phone call from Piekna to Melancholic Georges (MG) where she informed him she would not be coming to the party; see if you can see where the joint hit.
[MG] is sad you are not coming and that he won't get to hear the slender sparkle of your laugh as well as the wah wah wah when he tells a crap joke :-(. He will have to comfort himself with 'Lucozade' and sitting in the corner all night scratching his own chest and muttering compliments to himself , such as 'I really like those shoes' (whilst chewing on sheep's head obviously). Have a nice evening sweets. [MG]
-
So I'm at the party right n there's loads of people here, mostly chavs and gays. All shouting and spilling their dribbling ego's into my face. Where is your lovely face? Boredom a smooth, long feeling like a white corridor, or the anticipation of the needle touching your flesh before a blood test. I bet you are warm and snug, I'm cold on the roof, I think there is a dog staring at me from a dark corner. Why are clouds? There is a particularly fluffy one that reminds me of you (in a good way) :-). XxXx [MG]
-
Running = Woooooooooooooooooooo. There's a hole in my pocket. [MG]
-
I just asked a brain scientist what would happen if I poked out his eye and came on his brain, he said he would feel nothing because the brain has no nerves. Should I put his theory into practice? [MG]
-
Stoned in the wired forest of the night, barking dogs whistling into the smiling void of their stupidity, why there is curling infinity, quivers on thigh high coloured material. laughter like holes, cracks in wood, slithers of craggy darkness. Eyes dragged by dripping weights, falling touching, smiling, [Piekna], sublime :-). [MG]
-
I don't think understanding is within me either, I don't believe it was a friend of comprehension. U are a lovely lovey. XxX. Goodnight sweets, [MG]
Finis
MG
Thursday, 30 April 2009
Monday, 30 March 2009
Never Forget
Dear [Georges] -
We come to the city
To follow our art and
Open up doors.
Those doors open onto
A lot of shit
And we forget that that
shit is the vital
Ingredient.
Embrace the shit
F. xxx
We come to the city
To follow our art and
Open up doors.
Those doors open onto
A lot of shit
And we forget that that
shit is the vital
Ingredient.
Embrace the shit
F. xxx
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
I'm a positive and happy person?
Prepare yourself for more lengthy self indulgence.
The thing that has been bothering me over the last few months is the prevalence of people telling me that I’m always very happy and positive, it’s been happening all the time. For reasons of my past and the person I believe myself to be I always feel a hint of disgust when people say this to me and snap back with a disdainful comment or I just let loose with my distinctive maniacal laugh that drowns out everything in the near vicinity and leaves people clutching their ears and crumpling their faces.
I don’t know how this transition has come about, it seems I’m suddenly outgoing and sociable, fun and open; yuck. It appears to have happened over the last year since my split from J. I have somehow adapted to life as a singleton by learning to play the disgusting games of confidence, social interaction and the pretence of stability; although, I am still conscious that the whole time I’m playing these games part of me is laughing at how ridiculous I sound. An ironic participation?
When I tell people I’m shy and suffer from depression, they smirk and chuckle like I’ve just told some mediocre joke; ‘but you get on with everybody’, they say, ‘everybody likes you’. You might find this a bit arrogant, and possibly a little hard to understand, but this is the last thing I want.
Let me explain. When I was younger, people scared me, threatened me, infected me; at playgroup I didn’t join in with the other kids jumping around, shouting and playing with the many toys, but sat alone and isolated on a plastic chair by a radiator. My mind was populated by two sensations: fear that at any moment someone would try and speak to me or try and get me to do something and the sublime feeling of solitary rapture as I created new worlds out of precious little from the safety of my head. People were a threat to this vulnerable child sat alone on his chair and it is this image that has stuck with me all my life, I just couldn’t leave that chair, physically or metaphorically. The thing is this: I still feel like that child, aint nothing changed in my head, people are just as scary, stupid and unwanted as they always were.
Poor baby right? Get over it, right?
No, NO, NO. It hurts.
And this misses the point, it’s the equivalent of asking a paraplegic to join you on the dance floor, ‘for a bit of a jig’. This Thing is not something you ‘get over’, it’s a hard kernel buried deep in my deepest recesses, affecting every thought I have, it is not a consciousness but a ghost, a haunting, invisible, ungraspable, but there in every instant, exploding from my unconscious in my weaker moments, the reminder of my impotence. There is no ‘getting over’ this silence at the apex of my being, you may construct any number of cunning imaginary blankets to cover over that hole, but suddenly, bam, it’s right back there in your face.
Well I say this to that sly darkness: haunt me, provoke me, eat my thoughts out with your inky silence; I love that kid, that poor defenceless, insecure little brat, that crawls into a ball on his chair and dwells in that silence, faces it and becomes it. He is an image, a metaphor, the imaginary cause of my glorious torment. He is the sickness, infesting my ideas, words, actions; my life. I say to him come in, take a seat, have some tea, insult my hospitality then kick me in the head; more, more, more.
My happiness comes not from being told I’m a positive happy person; nothing brings more of a rush of euphoria to me than telling myself or others that I’m a useless, whining, antisocial, pathetic slab of flesh who is scared of everything and everyone and fears that if people saw this sensitive, needy, crying centre, they would laugh and crush me under their boot. Like a rush of mania, I am inhabited by laughter, like I’ve touched beyond, seen a insane truth; is this not the basis of all human personalities? I’m just more self obsessed and tragically addicted to the pleasure of prising open that wound, I consider it an honour to be able to live with this ability.
Positivity, in its present meaning, is a lie, the imaginary tale to hide the horrible truth, the self help books that tell you to look in the other direction, rather than make a friend of your horror. But this terrible Thing isn’t a negativity, it’s not a question of positive/negative, negativity is impotent too, I’m not privileging either side of the binary; this is my problem the two sides cannot contain me, it took me a long time to realise this.
The myth of positive thought is a laboured, overstated, vapid hag of a cultural phenomenon. It’s so prevalent it’s disappeared. I work in a book shop and spend extensive periods of time looking at pictures of twatty gormless men and moronic smiling harridans claiming their book can help you ‘harness the power of positive thought’. Unconsciously what the cover of these books are saying is:
Heal your wound yeah, it’s gonna be great, you can have everything you ever wanted, you’ll finally be happy; all you have to do is believe.
Don’t get me wrong I want to believe this is true, but it’s not and ultimately all they make me want to do is expend bile into their crooked, money stuffed mouths. Now where’s that paraplegic? I feel like dancing.
I spent years trying to train my brain to be positive, ‘if you think positive things about yourself, you will become a positive person’. I read all the books and I would beat myself up more for failing:
‘you’re an idiot, no you’re not you’re a cool guy, it just takes time, How much, god, I’ll never do it, yes you will come on, shut up you’re boring me, no I’m not I’m encouraging you, you can do it, bam, well don’t punch yourself, I’m not I’m punching you, I am you, no you’re not you’re some foreign voice that speaks inside me, bam, bam, get out, bam………………………………............’
Something like that.
Then I realised, with a crystal purity, shot straight into the softest part of my inner sanctum: don’t fight the negativity, it is your savoir. My situation is this, when I’m negative, it makes me happy, when I’m kicked I smile, when I scratch that wound I laugh.
My laugh plays a big role in my life and perception by others, when I was in counselling it caused me a huge problem, it’s also a family trait. Maniacal as it is, it is not a laugh of joy, but a laugh of tragedy, there is evil in its resonance.
For me its’ not as simple as positive/negative, because the latter pushed to the extreme becomes the former and therefore the former the latter, which all makes just about as much sense as this sentence. So for me to be negative means to laugh, to experience joy as much as pain and torment, it all swirls round in a big cauldron never settling into singular constituent parts. That boy on his chair is beyond tangibility, he is mere intensities, multiplicities, morphing in every moment into something new. I can feel his indifference, the truth is indifferent, silent, horrible, but something you must make a friend of.
Kurtz in Apocalypse Now? Mad? Unsound?
The indifference is inside, encapsulated for me in the image of the child on his chair, unsymbolisable, threatening, loved. In the vein of Camus’ concept of the Absurd, or Nietzsche’s Amour Fati, love your/our fate in all it‘s awful genius. And I guaran-damn-tee that you will never see me on the front of a self help book looking like a tosser and encouraging you to ‘harness the power of indifferent thought’
You may however see me on posters advertising my expensive monthly seminars, you’ll know it’s me because I’ll be the one dancing with a paraplegic.
So you see, this is why I take issue when people call me a positive happy person; The main point of all this is this: it’s not that I’m not a ‘positive happy person’, but that I have to believe myself not to be in order to be, obvious right?
MG
The thing that has been bothering me over the last few months is the prevalence of people telling me that I’m always very happy and positive, it’s been happening all the time. For reasons of my past and the person I believe myself to be I always feel a hint of disgust when people say this to me and snap back with a disdainful comment or I just let loose with my distinctive maniacal laugh that drowns out everything in the near vicinity and leaves people clutching their ears and crumpling their faces.
I don’t know how this transition has come about, it seems I’m suddenly outgoing and sociable, fun and open; yuck. It appears to have happened over the last year since my split from J. I have somehow adapted to life as a singleton by learning to play the disgusting games of confidence, social interaction and the pretence of stability; although, I am still conscious that the whole time I’m playing these games part of me is laughing at how ridiculous I sound. An ironic participation?
When I tell people I’m shy and suffer from depression, they smirk and chuckle like I’ve just told some mediocre joke; ‘but you get on with everybody’, they say, ‘everybody likes you’. You might find this a bit arrogant, and possibly a little hard to understand, but this is the last thing I want.
Let me explain. When I was younger, people scared me, threatened me, infected me; at playgroup I didn’t join in with the other kids jumping around, shouting and playing with the many toys, but sat alone and isolated on a plastic chair by a radiator. My mind was populated by two sensations: fear that at any moment someone would try and speak to me or try and get me to do something and the sublime feeling of solitary rapture as I created new worlds out of precious little from the safety of my head. People were a threat to this vulnerable child sat alone on his chair and it is this image that has stuck with me all my life, I just couldn’t leave that chair, physically or metaphorically. The thing is this: I still feel like that child, aint nothing changed in my head, people are just as scary, stupid and unwanted as they always were.
Poor baby right? Get over it, right?
No, NO, NO. It hurts.
And this misses the point, it’s the equivalent of asking a paraplegic to join you on the dance floor, ‘for a bit of a jig’. This Thing is not something you ‘get over’, it’s a hard kernel buried deep in my deepest recesses, affecting every thought I have, it is not a consciousness but a ghost, a haunting, invisible, ungraspable, but there in every instant, exploding from my unconscious in my weaker moments, the reminder of my impotence. There is no ‘getting over’ this silence at the apex of my being, you may construct any number of cunning imaginary blankets to cover over that hole, but suddenly, bam, it’s right back there in your face.
Well I say this to that sly darkness: haunt me, provoke me, eat my thoughts out with your inky silence; I love that kid, that poor defenceless, insecure little brat, that crawls into a ball on his chair and dwells in that silence, faces it and becomes it. He is an image, a metaphor, the imaginary cause of my glorious torment. He is the sickness, infesting my ideas, words, actions; my life. I say to him come in, take a seat, have some tea, insult my hospitality then kick me in the head; more, more, more.
My happiness comes not from being told I’m a positive happy person; nothing brings more of a rush of euphoria to me than telling myself or others that I’m a useless, whining, antisocial, pathetic slab of flesh who is scared of everything and everyone and fears that if people saw this sensitive, needy, crying centre, they would laugh and crush me under their boot. Like a rush of mania, I am inhabited by laughter, like I’ve touched beyond, seen a insane truth; is this not the basis of all human personalities? I’m just more self obsessed and tragically addicted to the pleasure of prising open that wound, I consider it an honour to be able to live with this ability.
Positivity, in its present meaning, is a lie, the imaginary tale to hide the horrible truth, the self help books that tell you to look in the other direction, rather than make a friend of your horror. But this terrible Thing isn’t a negativity, it’s not a question of positive/negative, negativity is impotent too, I’m not privileging either side of the binary; this is my problem the two sides cannot contain me, it took me a long time to realise this.
The myth of positive thought is a laboured, overstated, vapid hag of a cultural phenomenon. It’s so prevalent it’s disappeared. I work in a book shop and spend extensive periods of time looking at pictures of twatty gormless men and moronic smiling harridans claiming their book can help you ‘harness the power of positive thought’. Unconsciously what the cover of these books are saying is:
Heal your wound yeah, it’s gonna be great, you can have everything you ever wanted, you’ll finally be happy; all you have to do is believe.
Don’t get me wrong I want to believe this is true, but it’s not and ultimately all they make me want to do is expend bile into their crooked, money stuffed mouths. Now where’s that paraplegic? I feel like dancing.
I spent years trying to train my brain to be positive, ‘if you think positive things about yourself, you will become a positive person’. I read all the books and I would beat myself up more for failing:
‘you’re an idiot, no you’re not you’re a cool guy, it just takes time, How much, god, I’ll never do it, yes you will come on, shut up you’re boring me, no I’m not I’m encouraging you, you can do it, bam, well don’t punch yourself, I’m not I’m punching you, I am you, no you’re not you’re some foreign voice that speaks inside me, bam, bam, get out, bam………………………………............’
Something like that.
Then I realised, with a crystal purity, shot straight into the softest part of my inner sanctum: don’t fight the negativity, it is your savoir. My situation is this, when I’m negative, it makes me happy, when I’m kicked I smile, when I scratch that wound I laugh.
My laugh plays a big role in my life and perception by others, when I was in counselling it caused me a huge problem, it’s also a family trait. Maniacal as it is, it is not a laugh of joy, but a laugh of tragedy, there is evil in its resonance.
For me its’ not as simple as positive/negative, because the latter pushed to the extreme becomes the former and therefore the former the latter, which all makes just about as much sense as this sentence. So for me to be negative means to laugh, to experience joy as much as pain and torment, it all swirls round in a big cauldron never settling into singular constituent parts. That boy on his chair is beyond tangibility, he is mere intensities, multiplicities, morphing in every moment into something new. I can feel his indifference, the truth is indifferent, silent, horrible, but something you must make a friend of.
Kurtz in Apocalypse Now? Mad? Unsound?
The indifference is inside, encapsulated for me in the image of the child on his chair, unsymbolisable, threatening, loved. In the vein of Camus’ concept of the Absurd, or Nietzsche’s Amour Fati, love your/our fate in all it‘s awful genius. And I guaran-damn-tee that you will never see me on the front of a self help book looking like a tosser and encouraging you to ‘harness the power of indifferent thought’
You may however see me on posters advertising my expensive monthly seminars, you’ll know it’s me because I’ll be the one dancing with a paraplegic.
So you see, this is why I take issue when people call me a positive happy person; The main point of all this is this: it’s not that I’m not a ‘positive happy person’, but that I have to believe myself not to be in order to be, obvious right?
MG
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Tender Fists
The other
night
I had a
fight
With a
small Asian girl
She is my
friend
We were at
another friend's house
After the
works Christmas party
The dogma
of Rum was running
Through my
system with a cult like determination
The mad
prophet Captain Morgan at the helm
Driving me
head first into the abyss
Where pain
and joy whispered with one voice.
The
official party had come to a halt at 11:30
The
oppression of the corporate hierarchy
Was
dispensed with as vapid balding managers
And
vacuous babbling drone colleagues
Were left
in the wake of the lively few
We flew to
Putney, weaving through the lights of the city
Fuelled by
the mere ecstasy of Dionysus
Suspended
by each others garbled, but infinite wisdom
I put on
someone’s hat, people said I looked good
They were
wrong, I saw the pictures
We stumbled
down pathways,
Looked up
at many eyed buildings
Down at
foreign feet, and scuffed pavements
Until a
door opened
And in we
fell
When we got
into the flat
I remember
thinking it was good to be inside
We drank more
and laughed
Some
smoked, some shouted
There was
music playing
A lot of it
I can’t remember
Someone
kicked over a drink
The night
dissolved
Fizzing and
bubbling
Smudging
Sound
undulated beneath
The swaying
hum of our heads
About 3am,
filled with a hollow need for destruction,
I singled
out my Asian friend
And said to
her, ‘hit me’
I knew only
she would do it
She had a
glint in her eye
And a
clench in her fist
She
forcefully thumped my left arm
Purposefully
and aggressively
Then it
began
Others present
later referred to events
As the
‘brawl’
Fists flew,
we didn’t hold back
And that
was our genius
True
friendship
Our hands
passed through
Tenderness
and came out the other side of love
Our
knuckles bounced off each other
Leaving a
satisfying dent on the night
And a
cavity in the restraint of the audience
Between us
wasn’t a disparity between size
And
strength
But a
radical loss of self
A beyond,
we both experienced as one being
Bang, bang,
the fists came down
We tangled
Twisted
Cavorted
She hit me
hard in the face
I went down
She fell on
top of me
I clamped
my legs around her
We both
lay, looking into each other’s eyes
An
unbearable intensity
Buzzing in
the hollowness of our addled heads
‘I love
you’
‘I love you’
I stroked
her face
We talked
of our potential
The thrill
of total release
The fear
The ecstasy
of violence
The danger
The want to
melt into oblivion
Then we got
up
And went to
talk
To other
people
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