The Boy Who Could But Didn't

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Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Tunnel visions
2007-04-26 11:54:00
You have to think in a tunnel, in any kind of tunnel. Your legs are moving, blood is pumping through your body, through your brain. You have to think. I took the long route home from Little One's via my first flat and Crouch End. I passed the road He used to live down, three years ago now, and duly kept my eyes to the ground. Then I bought some hair dye from Boots, waiting patiently in the queue and smiling serenely as an irate mother with a bad perm screamed at her loose change next to her screaming child. Through Parkland Walk my mind began to hop from one thought to another - half considered couplets and memories. I thought of Toby, my beloved little black miaowing monster who broke my heart at 17 when he died. I thought of little three legged Hector who broke my sister's heart when he died several years later. I remembered the voices and dimples of old flames and considered how congenitally incapable I am of maintaining a normal relationship with someone. I wondered which ...
More About: Sion , Visi , Tunnel , Vision , Visio

Coda
2007-04-24 22:43:00
Today on an ultimately insignificant little black-red website, far out in the uncharted backwaters of an unfashionable corner of the internet, the ugly face of humanity again puffed up its lungs to speak. The self-appointed literati once again opened their mouths, and by doing so only strengthened the case for the defense. On the pertinent thread of conversation, this wasn't about whether a musician decides to keep performing or not. On the fatuous, this wasn't even about whether Mika is worth listening to, though, perhaps much to the surprise of my usual tastes, I think he is. I even, much more to my surprise, really like a recent Take That song. When I first went to university, I was amazed by how everyone there just listened to whatever they wanted without being judged for it. There was suddenly no longer any schoolyard notion of what was cool and what was sad. There was no pack mentality for once. It was crazy being an individual for four years. No. This wasn't about any o...
More About: Coda

Scraps
2007-04-24 11:30:00
Someone downstairs is drilling into the wall. I lie back on the mattress and try not to imagine it's my head being bored into, the shrill scream of metal on plaster resonating through bone and wood alike. This is a Tuesday. Who am I today? I have a become Tuesday. Remember, not all calls will be successful but every call will be charged. Uncertainty flares again upon my belly and I tear off another few layers of skin without a second thought. Suddenly, with the call of an unseen bird commander from the other side of the window, the drill ceases, and the burning stops. The world inside the prison falls entirely silent, and even the leaves beyond the glass cease their slow bobbing dance out of respect for everything that remains trapped within - clawed at, bored at, but never breaking the thinnest of barriers.
More About: Craps , Scraps

6am, no breeze outside in the trees
2007-04-20 07:42:00
Sometimes in life you have cause to stop and look back and wonder why your load is so much lighter, and why you never noticed it lessening. Sometimes you're so painfully aware of having been abandoned by the sky and the grass, yet you don't know why. It's part of growing up perhaps, just something about getting older. Just one of those many things no one tells you about. You grow less important - to others, to the universe, to yourself. You turn from a creature possessed with imagination, insight and charisma to someone who just exists. I make a very poor human I think, but I never asked for the dubious privilege.
More About: Trees , Breeze , Outside , Tree , Side

A masterful decision
2007-04-11 17:38:00
Nice touch. Go to the above and scroll down until you can see the comments from one of my latest MySpace buddies. Looks like a trustworthy sort of bloke, don't you think? Certainly no pratt, and his career looks like it's worth traken. Sorry.
More About: Decision , Master , Sion , Mast , Aster

The grass is always greener - it's everywhere you turn
2007-04-11 17:05:00
As usual, I rarely take the time to appreciate what's on my doorstep. At university, I walked to and from my first year lectures down a quiet little country path flanking a sprawling rapeseed field of swaying yellows and greens, barely pausing to even look and think "oh, that's nice." In second year I lived right beside the links of the spectacularly bleak West Sands beyond the famous R&A golf course. I can count on one hand the amount of times I went there. In my last two years I lived in the perfectly decrepit Gatty next to East Sands. At the end of every year this became the most popular place in St Andrews for families with their screaming kids, barking dogs, and not very clever but painfully pretty young students who liked to take their tops off a lot. I visited this place more often, mostly in Summer. Late at night I would stand on the end of the old pier and stare into nothingness just listening to the sound of the sea. Sometimes at around 4am I would walk out amongst the ...
More About: Green , Everywhere , Here , Ever , Grass

Anonymous, silent
2007-04-06 04:57:00
My bedroom is bathed in timid pale moonlight. I lie in its silence and watch a star beyond my window, solitary and bright. I cannot tell if it is rising, or be sure it's not a planet or clumsy manmade satellite. I stare at it, consider it, try and work out what it is, denying myself unearned sleep and rooted uselessly to this ever-spinning rock. I can do nothing but lie and watch it and the man-made birds able to soar so easily between myself and that light.
More About: Silent , Anonymous , Lent , Anon

Etch A Sketch
2007-04-05 16:42:00
He's a butterfly, wrapped up in his silky nest of not yet spread patterns and unbeaten wings. His colour has changed again, though it's starting to fade in the darkness. He caught the true scent of life in the care he didn't expect his environment to yield, and the gentle footsteps of strangers as they pass by. He's wondering if he can have it all - live peacefully amongst the humans whilst revelling in the colours of his quite non-human nature. He doesn't perch upon the flowers but wants to. He wants to create but still lacks the most basic instruments. He cradles ideas on how to stay in the cocoon and instead become a god, but doesn't feel he has the right. He must do as his nature dictates. He's a butterfly, not yet unfolded, trapped beneath the pitifully thin skin of his own claustrophobic prison - soaking up the world outside, growing evermore towards taking flight, towards beauty and perfection, waiting until he's ready to break through and rediscover the sun.
More About: Sketch , Etch , Etch A Sketch

Tradition denies convention a title
2007-03-25 23:07:00
Starve yourself. Eat words. Chasing cattle invites just faith to be misplaced.
More About: Tradition , Convention , Title , Vent

A day for LaVern Baker
2007-03-21 11:37:00
Regina Spektor's on loop. The sun is shining outside and the cold is all gone. I'm facing the day. I feel confident, capable and excited about what's to come. Finally.
More About: Baker

The snow still falls in fits and starts
2007-03-20 17:34:00
The whole flat is freezing, gripped tight in a chill that surpasses skin and goes straight to the bone. I feel white and brittle. Why do I still find it so hard to make a decent start on this - my new life? Why do I insist that I cannot writer, cannot even pick an address out of the book and send them a prebound manuscript - a simple synopsis, CV or letter? Instead I spend money I do not have on food I do not want, watch TV I've already seen, and not respond to texts and phone calls from a man I gave my number to but already don't want to meet. It's my second day in my new diary - still on the first page, and I've already noticed I started the book, this new life, back to front. I'm doing everything the wrong way round.
More About: Start , Star , Snow , Stil , Tarts

Remember What Did
2007-03-19 16:19:00
One day out of Paris and it keeps snowing in fits and starts. Sometimes it is only a few tumbling flecks falling from the sky - others it's a torrent of tiny white snowflakes. They fall but do not settle. The light outside is muted - pale yet sharp, somehow like a television where the contrast is set all wrong. It reminds me of the way the world looks after an eclipse, or a thunderstorm somewhere by the sea, as the sunlight first begins to peep back out through the soggy clouds as it indeed is doing now. The world is bright, raw and anaemic. I have started a new diary, and I choose to write in it at a time of newness in my own life. I put next to no thought into its selection. It was simply the first book that came to hand.
More About: What , Hat

Post Regenerative Amnesia
2007-03-10 14:14:00
The big plans for la vita nuova had to go on hold, briefly. After I left work I had to fast for three days. I don't remember ever having been so hungry. I get very tetchy when I'm hungry, very tetchy indeed. I've never eaten at set times, just when I'm hungry - always have done. So ignoring the screaming in every cell for nutrition was almost as bad as having to ignore the obligatory screaming child on any Great Western train journey. The result of this preoccupation meant that instead of focusing my new found freedom on spinning out masterpieces or pestering agents, I was unable to do anything other than sit around the house working my way through an entire season of Battlestar Galactica whilst drinking water and more soup than I ever want to see again. This fasting was not self enforced, though it was a choice, of sorts. I had a hospital appointment on Thursday that I'd been stressing over since late last year, quietly lingering in the background, permeating the anxiety behi...
More About: Post , Genera , Regen , Gene

Hoppipolla
2007-03-06 22:36:00
was not playing. Nor Bittersweet Symphony or any other other happy-clappy ditty I'd always imagined hearing on walking out of the office for the last time. If anything, the only song I heard was Land's End, imagined all tube journey home, with the clatter of the northern line making a clumsy percussion to the unheard plucking of strings. Life's now all about having nothing but a green tent and a violin at the moment, or whatever metaphor you want to use. And don't it seem like too long a time Since you were sweating in the streetlight? The office raised a glass to the disappearing administrator, and he made a brief but grateful speech. It may surprise most people to hear that I actually hate being the centre of attention. It makes me overwhelmingly self-conscious and I spout utter rubbish in a whiny sort of voice that sounds not only incredibly gay, but also a little like Willow in Buffy as she delivers an insufferably cute line. There was wine but I can't drink. I was off...
More About: Poll , Polla

Moods are strange
2007-03-04 04:23:00
In the past few weeks I have surely felt everything there is to feel. And in its rawest state. I've felt the mind-numbing boredom of forcing myself through another day at work, the crushing terror of the prospect of never leaving, and then the sudden unexpected euphoria and yes!-this-is-right!-ness when I handed in my notice. I've felt alone, and I've felt lonely. I've had my heart bruised when it grew fond of someone but left feeling reassured that it's still possible for me to meet someone whom I could like, even after so long. I've felt estranged from the people who know me best and had a night of sheer and shameless fun with a group of people I had never once met before. And I've tried to end my life, yet again, and was revived not only by the endless and unquestioning support and love of some much undeserved friends, but in one moment a week later experienced something that made it near impossible I will ever make such an attempt ever again. In essence, I did what I tol...
More About: Strange , Moods , Stra , Range , Mood

I didn't expect to be so British
2007-03-03 17:22:00
Things you don't imagine yourself saying to the mother of all bees, that's trapped itself in your bedroom: "Hello. I have no intention of hurting you. Please don't sting me when I put this large plastic cup over you. And please don't do any sudden buzzing or fly at me because that really scares me." "Oh no, oh goodness no, please don't do that." "You're doing that throbby thing with your abdomen, aren't you? I'm annoying you aren't I? Please don't sting me." "[Frantic buzzing] I can see you're becoming agitated. [Even more frantic buzzing] Let's just calm down and talk about this..?" This thing was enormous. I've only seen bigger closer to the equator. It had droned on in through the smallest of gaps in the open window and was contentedly strolling around my kamidana, until it ultimately decided that my oil burner was a nice spot for a picnic. The significance of where it landed (and where it proceeded to stay for the next three nail-biting hours until my fear grew...
More About: British , Expect

I can't stand naysayers
2007-03-01 12:25:00
I get intensely irritated by people who just dismiss something out of hand, before they've even given it a chance. I'm infuriated in particular by fussy eaters, but particularly ones who decide they don't like something without having ever even tried it - "Ooh, sushi! Yuk! Don't like the idea of that! Horrible stuff!" "The idea? So you haven't tried it? Then how do you know it's horrible?" "Well, it's raw fish isn't it?" That said however, this looks like the biggest pile of shit since Nellie the Elephant went out on the town with the girls and ended up at the Light of Raj curry house on vindaloo night. Please leave this poorly beloved and tired corpse to rest in peace. Stop digging it up and screwing every last gold tooth out of it. The idea is about as original as anything with Matt Le Blanc in it and, if certain rumours prove true, won't even be as well "acted".
More About: Stand

Of hats and things
2007-02-26 14:30:00
Boy George just looked at my Gaydar profile. Not that I have one of course. Veteran readers of Popbitch might remember the broohaha when they included a link to his profile in one of their bulletins. I was going to message him to say that we had the same birthday, but it seemed only a marginally less fatuous thing to say than "OMG!!!! I LUVVED KARMER KARMELLION!!!!1"
More About: Hat , Things , Hats , Thing

Ash Wednesday
2007-02-25 10:39:00
This was taken at approximately 6:30pm in my office on Wednesday 21st February 2007. I don't know why I took it. At the time I found it beautiful somehow, but it's also a sea of little metaphors for what was going on in my head at the time, perhaps even literally. This could also have been one of the last things I saw. It wasn't.
More About: Ash Wednesday

Failure
2007-02-22 00:57:00
2 glasses Rioja + 2 Marlboro Lights on 1st day = Bad Christian
More About: Failure , Lure

This cheered me up
2007-02-21 16:17:00
on an otherwise miserable day. It's also probably the best response to a public statement of homophobia that I've seen.
More About: Cheer , This