My Life Right Now (things I shouldn’t be saying).

This is the stuff that happens when you’re not looking.

Alone on a limb of the idiot tree trying to keep all the leaves facing the sunlight, while it’s blazing rays do nothing but antagonise my eyes, producing a tension headache and a will to drop off the tree into the ambiguity of the dark void below. 

I appear to have woken up into somebody else’s life, this is what happens: I leave the house, go to some predetermined destination, stand around a bit and on occasion take part in a trivial conversation, where I, rather than pierce it with a pointy finger popping it into a splay of exploding latex, stand there and nod and add a few uttered clichés to the ever flowing stream of hackneyed diatribe.   

I’m a bottle twisting and turning in the tumult of tepid waves of ego. I’ve somehow been given/given myself the task of keeping all those fragile plates of ‘self’ spinning, while I dash between them, sweating and drowning in disgust, becoming a seasoned entertainer, but an increasingly infuriated one.

Cumbersome and unwieldy metaphors aside, basically and clearly put this is what I’m trying to say: I’ve become innocuous, dull and dreary merely to maintain and reinforce those egos placed in my general vicinity; I find myself agreeing with all kinds of passionless mediocre collections of words dribbling out of lazy lips. Not because I actually agree, but just to keep everything in place and their dewy eyes from falling. I’ve become trapped between these words, censoring myself ‘just in case’ it upsets someone’s cart and their oranges spill out and roll around and about the place.

How did this happen?

Jeeeez I don’t know, but once you’re sat on your weeping stool and that little realisation comes down your face like the water from a burst pipe and you suddenly become aware of the rug you’re wrapped in, it’s hard not to look back on the last 6 months like the constant digging of the hole in which you’re about to be dumped.  Every spade-load of memories becomes evidence for how you became so splattered with mental lethargy and the heavy eye lids of a hooked-postured myrmidon.  

It’s like I’ve been slowly deafened by an ad nauseum hum, the sound of the machine drilling further inside – there is no will, no stepping into the unknown, I just feel the cold boot of the apathy pushing against my cheek. Melancholy is my master signifier, my ore to forge that ridiculous and wonderful creativity that spews from me; I was the weirdo, that person in between who could be simultaneously offensive and hilarious, but where is it now? Hidden, secreted out of sight with embarrassment, a cudgel to beat myself with rather than a sword sent from the gods with magical truth-telling powers.

Am I finally ‘normal’, suckered into that cul de sac of inspiration? Am I a participant in a slave morality, do I exist in bad conscience, and have I always?

I’m trying to upkeep this image of myself that has come to the fore in the last year of being someone ‘everyone likes and gets along with’. This is one of the downfalls of a sensitive person going out into the world and dealing with all the small others unaware of their fragile teetering and their participation in the game of egos, we empathise with them all, see value in them all; I’ve become so immersed in keeping up this transcendental image of me, the saviour, that I’ve become part of the game myself – locked-in syndrome. 

I’m looking in on myself as if on the cover of a gaudy magazine, looking so perfect. I’ trying to maintain this image, live up to the thing I think is me, misrecognising myself in this shiny paper mirror. I am a role, a facet of ‘The spectacle’ the Situationists talked about; it suddenly all makes sense again as it always did. I’m trying to construct myself into this prefect image at every second of the day, lying in bed my head whirrs with the way I should be lying, why I should be inspired and creative but I’m not, how I am a wily discerning sophisticated person as if trying to prove it to someone – that thing, the big Other, I’m at its feet whimpering with all the rest.

Caught in the clamour of egos, soothing their illusions, I have lost my own and flounder confused looking for one ill fated fantasy after another, not joyfully but apathetically, but none of them are mine, they are the detritus from all the personalities I have placated haunting me as I try to latch on to something, anything in the hullaballoo.

Now I sit abruptly aware of the rubble of my-self in my hands and I can immediately see the line, that slight border to be crossed; there are things you shouldn’t say and all that is wonderful and unknown is over that line, unpredictability is over that line, but I hold back, I can feel it even now; those thoughts of others that remain in flux, frowning and belittling, my imagination has been tainted by their imagination, a monstrous hybrid that leaves a weak inoffensive sallow face unmarked by tears. For now I am stuck in this lull waiting for the things I shouldn’t say to bubble to the surface.

Why I like listening to records. Pt.1 A Comedy.

A normal house party scene: groups of bodies coagulated into corners and narrow hallways, scattered glass bottles and aluminium cans, the shift, the sway and the rumble punctuated by the occasional shouty cretin.  Then there’s me, drink in hand, staring at a familiar unrecognisable contortion on the face of the person I have found myself talking to. After exhausting all the rigorous and deft questions, that are destined to be posed by 2 drunken objects looking for a potential connection in the fug of bodies, it happens without fail when these words are spoken: I listen to records.

‘Yep, the vinyl ones, the big black disk things.’

...

‘No, I’m not a’ wronged up DJ who pops beats in a phat style’ and what is that odd hand gesture you’re doing?’

Once they realise I simply play these ‘things’ just to myself, for no exterior gain, for no promise of bitches or bling, I’m always treated to a raised eyebrow and a tone of voice that manages the synthesis of both suspicion and wonder; a bewildering moment which I think neither of us know how to deal with in an increasingly inebriated social interaction.

There is something incomprehensible about refusing what is seen as the best and as the apex of cultural capital. Society has progressed, eliminated the need for flawed technologies already perfected by our new form of speed; who wouldn’t agree, no one wants to be a Luddite? Yet, there is a certain attraction to refusing to accept what is most readily believed and records still have an ideology of cool; there is always a glut of renegades queuing in East London on Record Store Day to get their hands on a piece of the cool; a retro injection of the intangible past excitement of something with substance between their grubby consumer fingers.

So where do I stand?  Am I a badass maverick or a tragic wanker clinging to a set of slowly dying ideals? I like to think I’m a bit of both.

I’ve had a record player for about 2 years; it was one of the first things I bought after something terrible happened to me, basically I slipped between that crack on the plane of instinct. I tripped and disappeared into that dreadful aperture commonly known as a full-time job, responsibility and a disposable income – I know, I know but I was naive and incredibly stupid and I gave to all those voices that were telling me that’s where I belonged – this is relevant by the way. 

So I tried to fit in and become fully at one with my ‘final destination’ and to create a distraction from that dull ache in the belly, that comes from the unknowing participation in a system of futile accumulation, by starting to buy stuff; fantastic misrecognised, ideologically soaked stuff; I needed it to tell me who I was, in the absence of a soul, I needed stuff.  I entered into the role slightly askance but I pushed on my magic cloak of pretence and hoped no one would notice. My record player is a relic of that time.

Therefore, it came to pass that I defied all can be gained instantaneously through the internet at a quality much greater than the crackle, hiss and skip of a turntable system and this is why: I had a very clear image in my mind of a warmly lit room with a singular desk in the corner upon which was a small lamp. Its glow produced a beacon and a halo to my head, which was visible as a silhouette arched over a laptop (or typewriter), while I was tapping away on a piece of sublime prose or poetry; there was a glass of whisky by my hand, from which I would sporadically take a gulp then shake my head and gaze at the ceiling. In addition, for some elusive reason, there was a layer of cigarette smoke floating through the scene, even though I don’t smoke and would probably be choking, but anyway it was there. The record player sat on a cabinet to one side producing the sweet sound of a 1930’s music hall, leaving me a fibre shaking between its intangibility, and thus completing the scene. 

It’s a vaguely hackneyed picture, which I find obviously aberrant and must question what it was doing in my head – looking back now I can see that it was one of them, a solidified form of my alienated desire, an abstract idea foisted upon a solid object; an ideology, a commodity. Not one I had created, not a glorious convulsion of the absurd, not a collection of parts seeped with personal meanings, but a prewired template taken wholesale from some Unconscious Cultural newsagent.

This is what its evil little voices said: hey, hey, MG, guess what? You’re tired, you lack inspiration and all you can think about is the ever flowing ructions that ooze from that suit strewn abyss [the evil voices are known to be particularly obscure]. Here, look here, some things, ooooohhh yeah; you see this thing here [points to record player#], you need this, you need this because of this [gestures towards an ethereal image of the aforementioned whisky scene floating before my face, shimmering]. Oooooohhhh yeessss, this thing will make you a better writer and a more romantic, deep and profound person with all the time you need, look, look at this image of the future, this is what you will become; yeeesss [pats me on back and takes money from my back pocket – I put my hand out to the image and it immediately turns to sand].

Of course, now that I have stopped rowing on that infernal boat, I realise that all those cacophonous voices were ever saying was simply: ‘We can make the absences you feel, the qualities you lack, into the glorious presence of fulfilment’. A futile wish; they get you when you're down. What they* never mention is that they are the ones that have stolen the enjoyment you don’t have in the first place; it’s basically a blackmail which lasts FOREVER where you must pay in order to get back a bit of what they stole, and what you do get back is now useless. Oh the irony.

So I fell for it and I found myself with this thing in my room, an object consumed, and another failed ideology kicked to death by its diversion past the boot of capital, it faded and disappeared into the banality of the room, a forgotten potential. There it stayed, ensconced within its dust blanket, until something wonderful and unexpected happened. A rediscovery.

TBC...

# Yes, the voices have arms.

 *As a quick side note, I do realise I have displaced that inherent lack, that we all must accept and take on our back in order to enter into the Symbolic realm (society) and therefore not slip into the bliss of psychosis, onto work and capital, but that’s my particular want you may choose your own object, you decide who 'they' are.

To the lady who spoke to me at work.

You were crazy there is no doubt, you accosted me, with my unknowing mind, and relayed your story, with no need to do so, or any motivation for it to be heard. You spoke of torture and scarlet being the colour of your abuse, the evil people that stole the products of your mind and your intention to sue them. To you it was so banal and you relayed it as such, and I listened fascinated at the whole structure of rebellion and willingness to take it to the end; with all those unhampered creations you had within. I was a mere monotony in the spectre of your world that was a reality and an angle of experience that most of us will not achieve. We are trapped in the dream of some nonexistent system called normality, but you broke free, and the terror in your eyes told me it was worth it, and that you walked on the apex between the valleys that the rest of us never dare to look up at because ‘the sun will blind’. 

There was something we shared that revealed you the most and sticks to my consciousness even now. You finished your words, there was nothing left to say and then there was a moment, a short pause in the laborious flow of what everyone else would call time. You looked down, away from me, like a self consciousness, a silence; I guess you weren’t used to people listening to you, responding to the truth you found such a burden and a wonder.  In my role, as the vapid protector of the collective reality maintained by all the peons of the world, all I could say was: ‘thank you’. This is not an appropriate response, but I wasn’t really me and then you were gone as if a wisp of dust through my perception; you did exist and I failed you.

My colleagues responded with the tedious stares and laughing expressions that kept them in the realm of sponsored ‘sanity’, and I laughed with them too because I wasn’t sure, and maybe I didn’t have words for the minds of organisms without a conception of the void quivering just behind their eyes. So I pretended, like I always do, that I was one of them and that you were just another crazy customer that existed beneath ‘our’ grand illusion, propping up the ever wily ego of our reality. I know that's not true and that you knew things that would crack the craniums of those mere mortals.

I experienced something in your being that none of them could comprehend.

I hope we never meet again, but know you are a meaning that has never been revealed to me before and never will again.   

Completely Normal

Walking home, nearly there.  Two men, neighbours talking to each other over the fence, ordinary, but not. One was a large black man, huge shoulders, baseball cap with tag still attached, shiny trainers and a deep baritone sinking, sinking, The other a grey haired OAP, stick in hand, hunched as if he’s playing the role, voice juddery but very much alive. They converse, a connection; laughter, laughter, they laugh together, harmonising their distinctive melodies and all of a sudden neither of them exist as things, but as air filled with mirth.  My head is split but touched, somehow something collapses in my expectations, which I suddenly realise didn’t belong to me anyway, but had been slipped into my pocket.  And there is the Real in front of me, the crack between laughing lips, where everything flows towards, disappearing inside.  Connecting the neighbours a pamphlet, the object of their amusement, they point, rear back with pleasure; a political statement by the labour party, elections may 6. The men in red never saw this coming. Next thing I know I’m on my doorstep, a warm swirl in my belly and, despite my own inclinations, the world seems like a much better place.

MG