Informed / deformed

Dis­reg­ard everything you might have read in the pre­vi­ous entry, pub­lished just over a month ago. That’s an order. If you didn’t read it, don’t start now. Avoid, avoid, avoid. This site is still as good (bad) as dormant. Go and watch some­thing on You­tube instead.

These days and nights, dusks and late morn­ings and every other point inbetween, I find myself hear­ing a lot of echoes. I see them, too. I don’t think I’ve acquired sound-colour syn­aes­thesia on my non-travels — though any­thing is pos­sible on internal path­ways — because I’m not sure the sounds them­selves, the echoes, exist. I could be ima­gin­ing them. I am very prob­ably ima­gin­ing them. Any­thing is pos­sible, though (x2).

Internal path­ways. Ring roads. Coun­try lanes. Bridges. Cul-de-sacs. Lines in the sand. Under­scores. Mapped and folded.

I lack some­thing. I’m not sure what it is. If you have it, whatever it might be, I’d appre­ci­ate its swift and safe return. I need it more than I real­ised. You’ll recog­nise it, I’m sure. Whatever it was. Give it back and we’ll say no more about it.

I play sounds to make my eardrums hurt. My meatus acus­ti­cus externus fills with sludge. It’s life-affirming. Louder, louder, still louder. Life-reminding. Stop. Silence. This beha­viour could explain the echoes.

I’ve star­ted sleep­ing on my left side again. I haven’t done that for about ten years, since the win­dow with the view over a West Lon­don garden, a broken bench, an over­grown rock­ery and a cat on a cold tin roof. I am not sure this is sig­ni­fic­ant, but I’m going to claim that it is because I am cur­rently lack­ing in signifiers.

I recently asked a one-time fel­low blog­ger (as in: he still blogs but I don’t, des­pite the evid­ence of this lacklustre update) to remove a guest post I wrote on his site some seven years ago. 2005 is almost pre­his­toric in inter­net terms, and ask­ing for such a dele­tion is near point­less because if any­one really wanted to read the navel-gazing ram­blings of that thirty-four year-old, they could do so eas­ily enough thanks to the thor­ough but dis­or­gan­ised archives that the web keeps hid­den away in its col­lect­ive memory. Nev­er­the­less, I wanted it gone. I spent a long time explain­ing to this cur­rent blog­ger, via email, that there was no dra­matic reason for my request. No inter­net stalker. No wor­ries about pri­vacy. No con­cerns about poten­tial employ­ers see­ing what I’d writ­ten. Not even any embar­rass­ment. No, just my own unease at the pres­ci­ence of the words I’d writ­ten; how they had her­al­ded changes that occurred the next year and have con­tin­ued to exert their effect upon my life. The post fre­quently appeared on the second, some­times even the first page of Google res­ults against my name. I couldn’t for­get it was there, even if I was also per­fectly well aware that no one else knew or cared about its existence.

It’s gone now. Just a few hun­dred other online ref­er­ences to my exist­ence to bleach from the whitespace and scrub from the source code.

No com­ments this time. I’m being unfriendly. Stand-offish and aloof. I don’t want to read about beauty because, whatever this might be, it cer­tainly isn’t beau­ti­ful or inspir­ing or deep or missed or words or poet­i­cism. Or any­thing. None of those. At best, it’s thoughts sluiced out to empty a cesspit in my cereb­ral cor­tex; at worst, it’s chok­ing on fumes and ram­ming fin­gers down my throat so I spew my guts. If I read any reac­tions, I’d surely need to go and tear my face from the sur­face of the mirror.