Cupboard love and sideboard hate

Do you want to hear some­thing amus­ing? (Qual­i­fier: I think it’s amus­ing — well, blackly amus­ing; your mileage may vary.)

Recently, I’ve felt as if I’m being watched.

Pat­ently ridicu­lous, of course. I live in a fifth floor flat at the top of the tallest build­ing in the area. The desk at which I spend most of my day work­ing is at the oppos­ite end of the room from the win­dow. There’s no way any­one could see me.

And yet.

Of course, there’s the pos­sib­il­ity of vir­tual voyeurs. I sup­pose, oddly, I feel as if I’m being vir­tu­ally watched at the moment as well. More than usual. More than I have in thir­teen years of liv­ing almost the entirety of my life online. Per­haps because I’ve been fig­ur­at­ively spill­ing my guts on these pristine pages, rather than scrawl­ing through the pre­vi­ously employed impen­et­rable lay­ers of mean­ing. Such verisimil­it­ude leaves me nervous. I find myself irrit­ably exclaim­ing “Stop that! Do some­thing else!” when I find that I’m writ­ing here again. I’m say­ing it to myself at this very moment, in fact. I’m telling myself to stop writ­ing about how I tell myself to stop writ­ing. Very meta.

So, yes, I’m being watched. Maybe there really is someone hid­ing in the ward­robe. My worry, if that’s the case, is how utterly, mind-numbingly bored they must be as they endure their daily obser­va­tions of my dreary exist­ence. Any moment now I expect to hear an exas­per­ated scream of rage and a demand that I do some­thing inter­est­ing before my voyeur is forced to start pulling out their eyes with rusty forks.

*

Second thought: I need more hatred in my psyche.

People — I would call them friends, but though they may have been at one time they’re now firmly of the vir­tual vari­ety — who wit­ness my com­ment­ary online, on social net­works, could eas­ily be con­vinced that I’m already brim­ful of hatred and the last thing I need is any more ran­cid blood cours­ing through my veins. They’re wrong. That’s not hatred I dis­play online; it’s exas­per­a­tion, even dis­ap­point­ment. Dis­ap­point­ment with the world I see around me and — just in case you think I’m absolv­ing myself of all respons­ib­il­ity — dis­ap­point­ment and exas­per­a­tion with myself.

Fur­ther­more, all the while that I’m com­ment­ing, that same voice telling me to stop writ­ing this post is urging me to stop com­ment­ing, to stop feel­ing the need to take part, to close down the social net­work and step away. No one’s inter­ested. My stream of bile is the last thing that any­one needs pol­lut­ing their timeline. “Made you feel bet­ter, did it? Did writ­ing those two bit­ter, twis­ted lines provide the neces­sary relief you were seek­ing? No? Do you still want to wash your mouth out with bleach? What a surprise.”

My response to my internal voice is to shrug, look sheep­ish, plead some­thing vague about the need for com­mu­nic­a­tion, then skulk off to hide in the ward­robe with the voyeur — telling them to get out and take over my life for a while, because it’s now my turn to watch.

I need more hatred in my psyche in order to wipe out the other parts of my essen­tial nature that offer any­thing but hate.

That’s enough. I’m shrug­ging. I look sheep­ish. But, well…com­mu­nic­a­tion, you know? Com­mu­nic­a­tion, just that. That’s me done for tonight. I’m going to go and hide in the ward­robe. I want to find out what the voyeur thinks is so very inter­est­ing about me, because I’m damned if I know.

This time of night

Even the never-ending swish and rumble of the road out­side is at least dulled.

My mind is sud­denly awake with the ques­tions I haven’t asked myself for a fort­night or so.

(Not) sleep­ing on my right side, because I don’t want to look to my left.

And I’m big enough, old enough and ugly enough to admit that there’s no song, no poem, no novel, no film, no well-crafted words, no vir­tual web pres­ence, no well-meaning thought — in short, none of the sub­sti­tutes to which I often return at times like this — that can replace the indefin­able com­plete­ness and neces­sity of genu­ine human warmth, both tan­gible and psychological.

My skin has gathered under my fin­ger­nails again.

Message #251

Don’t be shy. You know you don’t want to be. Come for­ward. Say what you’re think­ing. Feel what you’re say­ing. Think who you’re touch­ing. Be inside and out. Listen. I’m listen­ing. It makes a change.

Silence the noise of the silence

It’s nearly 2.00am. There is too much noise and too much silence. I always have too much noise and too much silence. I crave silence. Yet I crave noise. Crave silence. Crave noise. Silence. Noise. Silence. Noise. Silent noise. Noisy silence. Whichever and whatever. I am try­ing to lie in the middle of the bed to fill the space, even though the bed makes me nervous, some­times ter­ri­fied. I touch my arms, stroke my arms. The skin is awful, peel­ing, flak­ing, dried out. Yet I still stroke my arms. For com­fort and for reas­sur­ance. Com­fort. Reas­sur­ance. For an embrace, bet­ter than none. I look through my con­tacts list on my phone. Men­tally tick­ing off. Men­tally cross­ing out. Men­tally eras­ing. Men­tally regret­ting. Men­tally rewrit­ing. Do I know you? Do I know you? I wait for the phone to respond. I wait and I wait. It’s now a little closer to 2.00am. I have to be up in six hours. Six hours. Two phone con­fer­ences. Must be coher­ent, logical, say the right words, spew out the neces­sary jar­gon. But I just want to shout. I’ve opened the win­dow. I want to shout. HELLO. I AM HERE. I EXIST. LOOK UP. LOOK UP. LOOK UP. I EXIST. I STILL EXIST. I AM STILL HERE. I stroke my arms again and pull some dry skin away from the fleshy remains. I remem­ber. I for­get. I for­get to remem­ber. I hope I can remem­ber before I for­get. I trust you’ll be in touch, though. If you remem­ber. But don’t worry if you for­get. BECAUSE I STILL EXIST. I AM ALIVE. I AM BREATHING OUT. I AM NOT SURE IF I’M BREATHING IN. CAN YOU GIVE ME SOME BREATH? SOME OF YOUR BREATH? Put your mouth over mine and breathe. Mouth over mine and breathe. Mouth over mine and breathe. I am in the centre of this bed. I am lost in the centre of this bed. Lost in this bed. I have my skin under my fin­ger­nails. MY FLAKED SKIN PROVES THAT I EXIST. SKIN CANNOT BE VIRTUAL. THEREFORE I EXIST. I want to travel and stay. I want to touch and breathe. I want to talk and hush. I want noise and silence. I want beat­ing hearts and act­ive minds. I want to exist. I need to exist. I must exist. Because it says here that I have to exist. I have to exist. I have no choice. So I exist. It’s now after 2.00am and I exist. I will still exist at 3.00am. At four? Not sure. But for now? For now I exist. I EXIST. I EXIST. I EXIST. I EXIST. I EXIST.

If you asked

My reply would be “Always am and always will be”. Because my reply has always been “Always am and always will be”. Always.

Meaningless exhalation

I know who you are. No, of course I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your name. This puzzles me. That puzzles me. I’m tired of puzz­ling myself. You puzzle me. That’s good. I need men­tal stim­u­la­tion. Crave it. Men­tal input. Avoid pre­ma­ture brain death. I need touch stim­u­la­tion. Crave it. Touch input. Avoid pre­ma­ture touch death. I need stim­u­lants. Crave them. Imbibe. Avoid. I bet I can stare at this wall longer than you can. Count. Here are some egg­shells. Tread. Tread. Tread. I don’t care about softly. You should bite the side of my face. You should. Really. Bite. Scratch. I don’t mind being watched. It’s another reminder. That I exist. Do I exist? I think I exist. Think. Cer­tainty is not my strong point. Remind me. Remind me that I’m human. Not ima­gin­ary. Will you? You will? Will you? What? Why?

“Whoah this blog is great, love studying your articles”

Let me tell you about my new habit. My new dis­turb­ing habit. Except it’s not that new. It’s been going on for a few months. But it’s still quite dis­turb­ing. Even by my stand­ards. Which are, as you’ll have real­ised, fairly broad.

So. My still dis­turb­ing but now almost famil­iar habit. Swear­ing at myself, out loud. Telling myself off, out loud. Not for drop­ping some­thing. Or for bump­ing into some­thing. Or for gen­er­ally being idi­otic. No, none of those. Those might be under­stand­able. Sens­ible. An exclam­a­tion of minor irrit­a­tion. No, not that logical. This is telling myself off for stay­ing up too late. For not going to bed at a sens­ible time. Which I do almost every evening.

Not just mildly telling myself off, either. No, telling myself off in the most vile, most foul-mouthed, most abus­ive terms I can wrench from my lex­icon. Each and every despic­able, ghastly word spoken out loud.

This can go on for half an hour or more. Berat­ing myself ever more dis­par­agingly. Whilst also chal­len­ging myself to stay awake a little longer so I can tell myself off some more. Don’t let me off so eas­ily, you. Ham­mer the nails home. Do your worst. Give him both barrels.

“Go to bed, you fool. Look at the time. Go to bed, you sad and pathetic excuse for a human being. Why are you still up? Why are you still awake? What earthly reason do you have to be awake at this time, you worth­less heap of naus­eat­ing excre­ment? Nothing’s going to hap­pen. You’re not going to miss any­thing. Go to bed, you fuck­ing miser­able, fuck­ing ugly, fuck­ing imbe­cilic cunt. Go to bed and sleep, or else you’ll just wake up tomor­row and spend the whole day being an irrit­able, short-tempered, fuck-faced bas­tard. Just go. Cunt.”

That’s just the start. The first salvo. Over the fol­low­ing twenty-five to thirty minutes, the lan­guage gets much worse. Bru­tal. The insults become harsher and harsher. Sprinkled with viol­ence and down­right depraved verbal abuse. Not the kind of speech that I, even in my most open-minded moments, want to put down in black and white for all to see. Espe­cially not you — you who all rate me so highly. (That’s a joke, by the way.)

There you are. Tonight’s con­fes­sion. I’m going to bed now. Finally. Because I’m a fuck­ing worth­less piece of shit. And a cunt. Also, because I’m tired. Which I’ll admit is a far bet­ter reason.

Sums

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In the space of seven days, give or take a few hours:

  • Six people, of whom
  • three were in person.
  • Three were face to face = approx­im­ately ten minutes.
  • Of those three: 1 post­man, 1 care­taker, 1 deliveryman.
  • Three on the tele­phone = approx­im­ately fif­teen minutes.
  • Of those three, all were work-related.
  • Total words spoken aloud = dif­fi­cult to estim­ate, but very few.

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Poison and vacuity in equal measure

Where has my ima­gin­a­tion gone?

As ques­tions go, this is up there with the likes of “how long is a piece of string?” or “who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?” I’m not expect­ing you to offer an answer, unless you par­tic­u­larly rel­ish a chal­lenge, because there most likely isn’t one.

Yet I’d still like to know.

I used to pos­sess a vivid ima­gin­a­tion. It’s dis­ap­peared and reappeared through­out my life, of course — present through­out my child­hood and teen­age years, dur­ing which, to the con­sterna­tion of par­ents and teach­ers, I was the ste­reo­typ­ical child liv­ing too much inside my own head; mostly absent through­out my twen­ties, when uni­ver­sity, enter­ing the world of gain­ful employ­ment and achiev­ing inde­pend­ence inter­vened; then sta­ging a comeback in my thirties thanks mostly, it has to be said, to writ­ing online.

For the past two or three years, how­ever, my ima­gin­a­tion has been drain­ing away. What remains is little more than a small puddle of stag­nant water seep­ing slowly through the hair­line cracks at the base of my brain.

Though I’m obvi­ously no longer that inward-looking boy, I’m cer­tainly the adult equi­val­ent. Con­sid­er­ing how much time I spend, often unwill­ingly, inhab­it­ing my own mind, the logical part of my brain tells me that my ima­gin­a­tion should really be fir­ing on all cyl­in­ders, releas­ing ever cra­zier thoughts to pro­voke my brain cells into sizz­ling and spark­ing with cre­at­ive ideas. (Yes, yes, I am try­ing to under­stand the vicis­situdes of the ima­gin­a­tion via an entirely logical pro­cess — you got a prob­lem with that?)

It also doesn’t help my lack of ima­gin­a­tion to be con­stantly reminded of the archive of writ­ing on this very site, stretch­ing back nearly seven years. Even though my com­plaint against my past words was that they too often focused on me, my life and my thoughts rather than cre­at­ing a fic­tional scen­ario or story, they did at least dis­play some sense of ima­gin­a­tion in doing so. An Unre­li­able Wit­ness, in its defence, was never a stand­ard diary. Indeed, the con­scious desire to step away from ‘here is what I did, what I saw and what I thought today’ blog posts was what ori­gin­ally drove me to close down my old site and start this one. In recent months, how­ever — and as I men­tioned at the start of the pre­vi­ous entry — a diary seems to be exactly what this place has become on the rare occa­sions I’ve man­aged to eke out an infre­quent, leth­ar­gic update.

The inside of my head now appears to be about as lack­ing in inspir­a­tion and interest as a wet week­end spent in a card­board box. My ima­gin­a­tion takes one for­lorn look at what’s on offer, shrugs, then under­stand­ably asks: “Well, what am I sup­posed to do with that?”

P.S. Don’t worry, even I’m tir­ing of these des­per­ately unin­spir­ing, navel-gazing posts. There’s another part of my brain that is run­ning a tape loop of a voice inton­ing the phrase “snap out of it” twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It’ll wear me down eventually.

Space for breath, for seeing, for skin hunger

This place is almost becom­ing a diary. That’ll have to stop, because I abhor diar­ies. Very few people are so inter­est­ing that any­one in their right mind would want to know all the details of their day to day exist­ence. Frankly, even I don’t want to know all the details of my day to day exist­ence, since it’s tedi­ous enough liv­ing them.

First, how­ever, before I try to put a halt to the dull con­fes­sional thread I seem to be pur­su­ing of late, I need to roughly scratch the fol­low­ing into this vir­tual wooden post, primar­ily for my own bene­fit. (This is part of the ‘Try to Remind Myself That I Exist’ pro­ject that seems to have occu­pied much of 2012/13.)

As I sug­ges­ted in the pre­vi­ous entry, yes­ter­day I did some­thing that, for me, is all too rare: I got out from between these four walls and escaped the cease­less noise of this city for a short time. Little more than a day, but a change of scenery is so unusual that it imme­di­ately takes on the feel of an epic adven­ture. In those few hours, I found that I still have the abil­ity to pass time rel­at­ively nor­mally — sit­ting in a café on a rainy after­noon, chat­ting aim­lessly, drink­ing vast quant­it­ies of tea and find­ing the entire exper­i­ence truly relax­ing. I dis­covered that I can stand up (albeit with pre­dict­able unstead­i­ness) in front of a room­ful of strangers and read aloud. I real­ised that I am genu­inely ter­ri­fied, sick­en­ingly so, of walk­ing along unfa­mil­iar pave­ments and streets, because even the slight­est cam­ber fills me with dread and my senses reach over­load due to con­cen­trat­ing so hard on every incline, every dip. I spent a brief time in the com­pany of people with whom I felt imme­di­ately at home, if not entirely relaxed (because that state takes me a lot longer to achieve), and who most of all didn’t make me feel like an oddity. And I was unpleas­antly con­fron­ted with the fact that there are some people who regard the most vile and dis­gust­ing acts of [there are no words] as suit­able mater­ial for gen­er­at­ing shock value and boost­ing their notori­ety as a per­former, without think­ing through the all too real harm they cause in the process.

Dur­ing the last of those moments, my reac­tions — I hes­it­ate to call them emo­tions, because I’m try­ing (though fail­ing) to become the kind of per­son who doesn’t exper­i­ence any­thing I can’t ration­al­ise — were all too clear on my face and in the anger and nausea I exper­i­enced. Other reactions/emotions, how­ever — the ones I want to reveal — I appar­ently keep hid­den far too effect­ively, des­pite the fact that I think I’m alarm­ingly obvi­ous in the way I com­mu­nic­ate them. Maybe I should look in the mir­ror to see what I tell myself, to see if my face is closed down even to me?

So I did. I looked. My ana­lysis? I seem all too much of an open book. I know this expres­sion. I know it well and I des­pise it. It speaks of imprac­tical emo­tions, unreal­istic desires and, above all, an over­whelm­ingly bad case of skin hunger.

Passing at various speeds

From clos­ing my anonym­ous door to reopen­ing it again, I’ll be away for little more than twenty-four hours. Yet it’s aston­ish­ing how much of a break it seems to one who is so fre­quently caught by cir­cum­stance and bound by dull routine. I want to fever­ishly gulp in all the air around me, hold it in my lungs for future remem­brance, use it when needed as an emer­gency escape route from those over­fa­mil­iar four walls and that single pre­oc­cu­pied mind. At this moment in time, I could almost believe I’m vaguely normal.

The private tangle

It’s extremely rare that I come across a piece of writ­ing to which my instant, entirely genu­ine response is: “The defin­it­ive art­icle on this sub­ject has finally been writ­ten. I can for­get everything I’ve ever clum­sily tried — either expli­citly or impli­citly — to put into words on the topic, tying myself in lin­guistic and psy­cho­lo­gical knots in the pro­cess. Moreover, this art­icle is so clear and insight­ful that it should be dis­trib­uted far and wide, par­tic­u­larly so it can replace all the woe­fully mis­guided journ­al­istic ‘think pieces’ on the issue. Here’s a writer who ‘gets it’ com­pletely, because she under­stands what she’s writ­ing about”.

Today, that happened. You should all go and read this post at Diary of a Gold­fish. Now.

Exhibitionism is for fools, self-confident or otherwise

One of the odd and some­what unset­tling aspects of this most likely tem­por­ary return to reg­u­lar writ­ing online — no, nearly thir­teen years after start­ing ‘blog­ging’, that word still causes an irrit­at­ing tic and I refuse to use it — is won­der­ing who might be reading.

If you’ll per­mit me a moment of loath­some immod­esty, back in the days when I had many more read­ers (as did most blogs), save for a couple of excep­tions I didn’t par­tic­u­larly care who was per­us­ing the site. Just as long as each and every entry was being read, appre­ci­ated and com­men­ted upon at length, of course. Ah, the naiv­ety, bravado and stu­pid­ity of online youth. I sus­pect that feel­ing — for me and for many oth­ers — has trans­ferred itself to social net­work­ing where, unless one is par­tic­u­larly scru­pu­lous about bat­ten­ing down all the hatches and push­ing every pri­vacy set­ting to ‘max­imum’, one accepts that tweets and status updates are going to be seen by many people, a sig­ni­fic­ant pro­por­tion of whom aren’t known to us except in the vir­tual world, and shared to even more. It’s become the accept­able risk of social media, just as it was pre­vi­ously the accept­able risk of writ­ing navel-gazing posts on your own site.

Surely, then, if I’m that con­cerned about it, I should stop? Very prob­ably, yes. But then I rarely fol­low my own sens­ible advice. Plus, for bet­ter or worse (and I sus­pect it’s worse), as explained in an earlier entry, I rather need this out­let at the moment — pathetic and needy though that undoubtedly sounds. It’s some­where to put my thoughts in a des­per­ate attempt to expunge them from my cluttered, unkempt head — a place that I’m so tired of inhab­it­ing that I’m ser­i­ously con­sid­er­ing decap­it­a­tion — but which neces­sit­ates some degree of cen­sor­ship in order to make each scratched and scrawled gib­ber vaguely under­stand­able, even palatable.

Why am I indul­ging in all this philo­soph­ical claptrap about trivial mat­ters, while fail­ing to adequately explain myself in the pro­cess? Because this wasn’t the post I planned to write. I wanted to share a link — just that, a simple link (remem­ber when we used to share links on our per­sonal sites?) — to a pro­gramme broad­cast a few days ago on BBC Radio 4: a pro­gramme that pro­foundly affected me, made me think, made me put aside my nat­ural cyn­icism and accept that there is some genu­ine under­stand­ing out there amongst the gen­eral pub­lic, rather than just the narrow-minded view­points I’m so weary of hear­ing repeated. But then I recon­sidered. My recently faulty, indeed reck­less, internal cen­sor kicked in and warned me that post­ing such a link might prove too reveal­ing, might give too much away. Espe­cially when I can’t be sure who’s reading.

If you’re inquis­it­ive, if you’ve even half-read what I’ve writ­ten here recently, I’m sure that it’ll take very little detect­ive work to track down this par­tic­u­lar pro­gramme. Des­pite rais­ing my guard and not shar­ing the details with you dir­ectly, it’s cer­tainly well worth a listen.

Delete event

Shortly after mid­night, a reminder tone erupts into life, pulled from my phone’s extens­ive rep­er­toire of syn­thetic sounds for all occa­sions. It doesn’t wake me: I’m not asleep yet. As I get older I feel the need to eke out every day to an inad­vis­able extent, des­pite the tired­ness that so often res­ults. I’ve fallen out of love with my bed and sleep isn’t the refuge it once was.

“xxxxxx’s birth­day”

First, I have to wrack my brains to remem­ber who ‘xxxxxx’ was. Is. ‘Is’ for them (pre­sum­ably). ‘Was’ for me. That’s my unne­ces­sary touch of cruelty, right there, because I don’t need to think twice. Of course I remem­ber who ‘xxxxxx’ is. Was. But the spite­ful child within me likes to spit out: well, you’re no longer a part of my life, so I’m not going to remem­ber who you were. Who you are. Or even if you still are. How do you like them apples, eh? I poke my tongue out at the per­son. Or at least at their name on the small glow­ing tab­let cradled in my left hand

Second, I try to recall how old ‘xxxxxx’ has become. That’s when I genu­inely have to rifle through the cluttered card­board boxes of my mind’s fail­ing fil­ing sys­tem. I think this is their 38th birth­day. Or their 39th. Just for a laugh, I won­der if I should call them to offer many happy returns, but also to impudently ask their age, before whil­ing away an hour or two catch­ing up on their old times (though not mine, never mine). That’s when I real­ise that each index card is woe­fully incom­plete, because although I have a name, a birth­day and a clutch of scattered recol­lec­tions — some heart­warm­ing, oth­ers upset­ting, a few plain infuri­at­ing — I don’t have a clue how to con­tact them other than by hunt­ing them down on a social net­work, which I’m not com­fort­able doing now that my detect­ing days have come to an end.

This hap­pens each year with an ever increas­ing num­ber of anniversar­ies. I tell myself that these names and dates are no longer rel­ev­ant to my life in the here and now, that I should erase them from my port­able elec­tronic memory to leave space for more import­ant events: meet­ings, con­fer­ence calls, remind­ers to com­plete tedi­ous tasks.

I let my thumb hover over the red but­ton, taunt­ing me to ‘delete event’ with such nuc­lear final­ity. I never press.

Errata

I think these are prob­ably the reas­ons why I am writ­ing here again all of a sud­den, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure of any­thing right now, to be hon­est, apart from the fact that I seem to have a ball of bile and hatred screwed up inside me, which I’m unable to expel via any con­ven­tional means. Vomit, shit, choke, bleed. All tried. But no, it doesn’t shift.

None of this makes sense, and someone will need to remind me to delete this post before too long.

  • I am a mind of mess. My mind is a mess. I’m ter­ri­fied. Ter­ri­fied of everything.
  • “Oh, he’s okay. Yes, he can be a little odd at times, but he always copes. He’ll always listen. He’ll always do that for you, or this for you. Reli­able. Depend­able. Always there.”
  • (Day)dreams of leav­ing. Almost con­stant now.
  • In an effort to regain my long lost cre­ativ­ity, I put myself for­ward — yes, delib­er­ately and con­sciously, like someone with an iota of self-confidence — to read some of my words next week at a poetry/performance night. Not new words, of which there are none and haven’t been for well over a year or more. No, these are old words taken from this very site, dat­ing back years. The people who attend these even­ings are young, tal­en­ted, beau­ti­ful, lit­er­ary, musical, indus­tri­ous, soci­able and well-connected — they think of a pro­ject or idea and they do it. To my mind, I am the oppos­ite of all they are. I don’t know why I volun­teered. Maybe I thought it would shift me out of this cre­at­ive tor­por. I must be mad. I feel sick just think­ing about it. I worry that I’ll simply stand up in front of the micro­phone and “‘throw up.
  • I’m really not sure what’s hap­pen­ing to me. Anyone?
  • Every day, I feel more thoughts die. My brain is emptying.
  • I don’t remem­ber the last night I had without nightmares.
  • When I can, I take 3.00am night­bus jour­neys from out­side my home, into cent­ral Lon­don, where I cross over the road to the oppos­ite bus stop and almost imme­di­ately take the return jour­ney. Months ago, as I waited for the bus — a dis­abled per­son out at that time of night, an easy tar­get, I know — I was mugged. I never saw their face, just felt some­thing hard, pos­sibly poin­ted, pressed into the centre of my back, as I was told to hand over my money. I’m not scared of it hap­pen­ing again. On the con­trary, I want it to hap­pen again.
  • I can’t read. I want to get lost in a book, to dis­ap­pear into its pages, but the words just dance them­selves into a jumble in front of my eyes. Even the most fant­ast­ical scen­arios seem too real. I don’t want reality.
  • Act­ing on a sud­den and ridicu­lous whim, two days ago I placed a pro­file on a pop­u­lar, well-known dat­ing site. You’ll know it. It’s the one that people have told me for years I should try because it car­ries the name of the left-leaning news­pa­per that I pre­dict­ably read. So I did. I signed up and cre­ated a pro­file — in ten minutes flat. What I said was noth­ing if not truth­ful. Bru­tally, hor­ribly so. It was writ­ten as a screed of loath­ing, dir­ec­ted both towards myself and towards any­body who might read it (just in case they were deranged enough to con­sider con­tact­ing me). Fur­ther­more, the hor­rendous irony of such a site is that faces, looks, appear­ances, bod­ies mean noth­ing to me. That’s not just a state­ment of fash­ion­able polit­ical cor­rect­ness, of me try­ing to be some kind of ‘new man’. They mean noth­ing. I scrolled down one page of female faces and couldn’t man­age even a flicker of a reac­tion in response — which also meant that I had no inclin­a­tion to click on anyone’s photo to read more. I still don’t under­stand why I went there, why I joined. The pro­file has now been hidden.
  • In a repeat of the incid­ent I wrote about the other day, I once again spent a con­sid­er­able amount of time in a one-way online con­ver­sa­tion on a par­tic­u­lar mes­saging plat­form, seek­ing emo­tional advice from someone who blocked me years ago.
  • I don’t know what any­thing means. I think everything has rel­ev­ance, a deep mean­ing, a sig­ni­fic­ance. Yet I think noth­ing has any rel­ev­ance, that all is mean­ing­less, all is insignificant.
  • I like someone. A dear friend. I like them too much. Far, far too much. No, it’s not…well, it’s not that word, the word that I can sense you’re all des­per­ately try­ing to place into my mouth, to have me say in order to sat­isfy the human race’s con­stant need for hearts, flowers and romance. I don’t under­stand that par­tic­u­lar over­whelm­ing and fre­quently dis­cussed emo­tion, and I have des­troyed people before by say­ing the oft-cherished three-word phrase to them. This is not such a case. This is ‘like’, I assure you. But it’s too much like, yes. I like this per­son too much. I feel emo­tion­ally and men­tally stun­ted because I don’t know what to say or do, and I feel that whatever action I take will des­troy a won­der­ful friendship.
  • In recent months, I’ve found it almost impossible to sleep in my own bed. I sleep on the sofa at least three nights a week, then when exhaus­tion takes over I reluct­antly return to the bed, but almost cling­ing to the edge of it to avoid slip­ping too far under its covers.
  • I yearn for nor­mal­ity and reas­sur­ing, every­day tedium. Instead of the suf­foc­at­ing tedium that I’m exper­i­en­cing. I desire a ste­reo­typ­ical fam­ily, a secure mort­gage, vis­its to DIY/furniture stores on Sat­urday morn­ings, pub lunches on Sundays. Simplicity.

I’m scar­ing myself wit­less. I don’t know what this is. What any­thing is. Now. Any­more. Tonight. Tomor­row. Best not think. Best sleep. Sleep. Wake. Sleep. Wake. Sleep.