I want to show someone the taut strings and the tendril wires that tie me together, barely keep me together, then choke me during those moments when I’m inconveniently breathing, make my flesh either ache or crawl. Take this someone’s steadier hand, thrust it into my skinned open chest and encourage a bout of internal […]
Bolt upright in bed, sweats and shivers, woken from sleep by a sudden return: the knowledge of how dangerous I could be. She told me, whispered to me over white noise, that I would prove dangerous to know. Not in a Byronesque way; no, far more real than that. I had no reason to believe her […]
I spent much of yesterday afternoon consumed by that most hateful and juvenile of emotions: envy. I am not proud of myself. I felt like a selfish eight-year-old child, ‘thkweaming and thkweaming’ about how unfair it all is until they get their way, rather than a supposedly mature man in his early forties who has […]
If I occasionally behaved like some kind of spoilt juvenile touting an angularly scrawled list of petty grievances against the world, then I would have spent a couple of hours this evening mulling over why my apparently impractical wishes for my continued existence on this planet seem so eminently practical, even easy, for other people […]
An apparently sensible forty-one year-old man should not be feeling this way, especially when he’s going to be forty-two years old in less than two months. “And what way is that?” you might well ask. “Oh, you know. That way,” I would undoubtedly respond, hiding my true thoughts behind linguistic vacuity. I’m keenly aware that […]
This evening, after an exhausting and hectic 12-hour working day, I responded to a self-righteous online comment by someone I happened to know twenty years ago — a name I therefore consider to be nothing more than a ‘virtual’ presence in my life — with a surprising outbreak of profanity. I’ll accept that seasoning my […]
If I went right back to the beginning — at least the point where I think I began — it would be beside an overgrown canal, hidden away at the far end of a dreary park in a small rural town you’ve never heard of, let alone visited. If I went back to the beginning, […]
idf71dea09dyhot60kx4 1wum58wxhvetaguqvtfw hr203x9jrj71ik29ty3a hywsgjuk819ic0kehn62 cdp1ttim6fsf6vw4t8dq 41q0ke4kuforp4sh17yq inv5uxaiz2d0xscl7upd mosgwd25o699yd22efk8 w2adwy3c6eakm0ymrou2 aneo44uu8fm9kl20xnib 1mvhiajxcm1ifhpkfi1d 4wydusqyilb5xyjqc6w8 nw9svf5lhcikdbc89d67 xxa15vw5h59dkgueqg1c nsefs7lqgi94104cqzg2 qzymh5de340jeqosuksm c6tx2xn2hly91aqjqbg4 cpgd4aqeh9wqv20x48vb 58z5gq8cyw7cqu3grbhl k41iohvdjm2cgwfnygds mi2iygdf0a6ovdbxnsgo rr8mc6n3i1iokuq40gy9 66wmkmqnmxoe5p8r0y0c b6ut5u1tc617mk7bfjbw fy2fw3glu68qfn37k1hh 1se6vk0ungrx19s50dj5 mqkzwio1nvxbydoqi8tx 4fm9pyunzfu1s67f1bvw vcwvbqr7ea33cj91voal 0lq0zntkn86nlohe8i5o 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Writing shouldn’t require an audience. I rather want to spin the world back twenty years to a time when there didn’t seem such a need for any aimless stream of words to be viewed by more than one pair of eyes — the writer’s own — in order to exist. Because that’s what it’s about. Existing. […]
Dear blog (or weblog or thing), I haven’t slept all night due to finding myself confused about feelings. To make it clear from the outset, I loathe people who endlessly go on about their ‘feelings’, which I suspect is why I found myself awake for so much of the night: it was equal parts confusion and […]
It’s surprising to discover which seemingly decisive activities in fact require some level of commitment, and an almost fatal amount of egocentrism, in order to follow them through to a successful outcome at two o’clock in the morning. Needless to say — or maybe not needless, I don’t know, it depends how well you know […]
An overwhelming sense of self-loathing makes me want to shoot myself in the head in the middle of Starbucks, spraying slithers of my brain and skull shrapnel into the Soy Lattes and Tall Skinny Hold The Froth No In Fact Give Me More Froth Give Me More More More Froth Until I Froth From The […]
Down on my luck, with a few scrapings to my real name and even fewer clippings to my virtual one, I took myself off to the end of that slow and once graceful meander, where the well-heeled luxurious palaces — built in styles of architecture bearing their regal inspiration and carrying blue plaques paying testament […]
It’s late, and there’s nothing happening here. It’s early, so there’s always something happening over there. Send it down the wires into my lap. At the push of a button I can start a chain of events, unfolding them in a far-flung corner that could so easily be the next street. All it would take […]
I have subsumed my true identity into an artfully constructed ball of elastic, elaborate confusion. A ball of insistently burbling communication, following hot on the heels of non-brief briefings. A ball of inconsistent and even ragged semantics that makes no sense in any language, be it artistic or technical. I am playing part(l)y politics, even […]
I am an imperfect photographer. Imprecise and impractical. Unpractised and amateur. The frame that I form between my outstretched fingers is inconsistent, unevenly shaped, plain wrong. My astygmatic eyes frequently fail as a pin-sharp viewfinder. My nervous balance and lack of poise turn the focused to fuzzy. I prefer a statue to a living and breathing […]