An Unfortunate Mishearing.

A girl of about 10 approaches the till; she has a girlish freckled face and is wearing a baggy light blue hoody:

‘Excuse me; have you seen my mum leave the shop?’

As someone who works in a busy train station shop this does seem like an absurd question, considering the constant flow of bodies in and out of the two big doors, let’s just say it was like looking for a long metal pricky thing in a pile of yellow poky sticky things; it would have been wholly unlikely. However, anyone that has ever worked in a shop, or with the general public, will know absurdity, idiocy or even insanity becomes so frequent and tedious that it no longer has the same meaning; it’s merely banal, so I didn’t dismiss her with the flip of a hand but said:

 ‘Erm, well I’m not sure, what does she look like?’

‘Oh, she has long curly hair...’, she mimes the long curly hair, wiggling her fingers and lowering them down beside her face, ‘...and she’s blacked up’.

OK... now, yes she did just say ‘...and she’s blacked up’ and I have to admit my previous statement on my inability to be shocked by the public somewhat melted along with my jaw to congregate on the shop-soiled floor. The image in my head at this point rather defies explanation and certainly starts to attack that staunch bourgeois myrmidon that is stuck somewhere in my being like a stubborn stain. I guess it did make her initial question seem slightly less bizarre, I mean who wouldn’t notice ‘that sort of thing’. 

‘What!...she’s blacked up?’ I found myself doing a weird mime of someone rubbing boot polish on their face, performing a circular hand motion just above my cheeks. In all fairness to me, technically, this awkward and vaguely inappropriate gesture was her fault for starting the whole physical byplay thing with the curly hair.

There was a beat where her eyes looked off to the right and her facial expression initiated a subtle change and twisted a little.

‘Errr yeah, she’s wearing a black top’.

Right, so now I felt a little silly, I’m pretty sure she had no concept of what blacking up was, anyone who has freckles is universally sweet and innocent and unable to tolerate such vulgar, racist notions. I may well have said ‘there’s a goat on the toilet’ and wow who knows what was going on in my unconscious to hear/mishear such a thing?

 ‘Oooooh’, I rear back and subject her to my overly maniacal laugh. ‘Err no sorry I haven’t seen her’.

She thanks me and leaves the shop still looking back and forth for her lost mother as she goes. I stand and watch her exist simultaneously contemplating a situation where the elusive Mother is found and the girl asks her ‘Mummy, what is blacking up’. She replies, ‘Where did you hear that?’ ‘The man in the bookshop said it’. 

An unfortunate statement inevitably leading to a scene where the mother comes back in the shop for a confrontation ending either with us all laughing as the credits roll or with me homeless and depressed begging on the street contemplating the big D as we fade to black.

Keep on Lying Baby!

There’s a lot to be said for lying down or indeed reclining, especially in bed; and this is what I have been doing for the last 2 – 3 weeks. Guess what? I feel great, authentic, a full blooded inhuman spirit (oxymoron intended mofo); ready to rage, oh yeah.

My job has gone, my girlfriend has gone*, and only now do I feel real (by real I include all the usual dispensations, ie real in terms of my experience through the Imaginary and Symbolic realms of my perception etc etc). The less I have, the more I feel at home within my offbeat, melancholic cranium; madness feels comforting somehow, rather than a threat.

Anyway, the normal set of circumstances is that a person goes somewhere to either sit or stand all day and stare at something (let’s call it work), and I can see how sitting or standing for short periods of time could be ok, but in terms of hierarchy I guess we could suggest something like this:

1.       Lying (supine/prone)

2.       Reclining/semi supine

3.       Sitting

4.       Standing

Unless you’re a vampire – there seem to be so many around at the moment – I presume that everyone sleeps lying down and what I want to propose is that instead of getting up then sitting or standing all day before coming back and lying down again, why not just stay either lying down or reclining, it cuts out the middle man, cheaper too.

Now I am being jocular of course as there are 2 rather large considerations that will somewhat thwart this utopian ideal I recommend:

1.       Your brain

2.       Money

One thing I have found about lying down and indeed any degree of doing nothing is that it is not that easy and not everyone can do it. Luckily for myself I am trained and so can withstand/enjoy it for extended periods of time.

You see the action of doing nothing/lying down is in fact hard work if you don’t know how. Your brain starts to think, invent inadequacy and guilt; to survive you must travel into the depths of your pointlessness, hold your head under its soapy surface, and say yes.

There is a fairly prevalent cliché, especially in the west that everyone would like to win the lottery and somehow be free from work or oppression; I would suggest that this is the last thing they want to happen; with no oppression there is no enemy and with no enemy you only have yourself to fight. Those demanding voices never go away, they are inside you, better you pretend they come from somewhere else (that twat of a boss, the stupid government, the ignorant lover). To truly be able to lie down you must be able to punch yourself and laugh, and be cleansed by its horror.

Don’t invent enemies, protests, petty injustices, simply start lying down, once you learn to breathe beyond the other side of your brain, there is far more to see.

All I will say about money is if you are worried about it you are too far into the system to be helped, you have a lack of imagination and too much stuff to upkeep (‘yes but I’ve got a mortgage to pay for and kids and...’ please leave me alone).

Basically I have been and will continue to lie down until my madness is all of my reality and the real world has shrunk into a loveable but clumsy puppy that chases its own tail (how cute).

Urg, yes, urg, yes, urh, yes (sorry that’s just me punching myself).

Lie don't lie.

MG

*Piekna is very much still around and in close proximity.

Freedom

There's a freedom somewhere that needs an invitation to my soul, because at present there is nothing, an empty bowl, a room bereft of guests; even silence stays away. Tonight I'm not drunk, but the words are stuck regardless; there's no one to tell you how to live but that voice inside which belongs to someone else and laughs at your actions when your back is turned. So it carries on, I carry on, sleep, wake, boredom, lethargy, sleep, wake, boredom, lethargy, sleep... Yes folks, I've learnt an important lesson, I'm now one of you and I know why you're scared, I know why you do it, why you showed such awe when I used to announce my bohemian status at parties before the change occurred. I know, but I still feel the disgust, for you fear losing something, letting go to the thing that you will never get back. 'I would but, but, but...money, money, money', the joke is that thing you are so scared of losing or leaving behind, is something you don't have anyway, you cling to nothing; pleasure awaits and that scares you more than the trudge through your lonely days, your moaning, your petty annoyances are the stilts that hold your world in place, so live on my friends, keep balancing on those struts because I'm there with you for now.  Will I be there for long? who knows, but there is a scream within me that says not much longer, but maybe you are the same.

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother..."

How to escape, this is my question? I feel the fear, but I know, above all else, I must break out.

 

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