Doomsday. He’s not on the beach - but who cares anymore. The engines roar and I find myself alone, not even myself, the maple-leafed sign beside me revealing this is Dårlig Ulv Stranden. I got it all wrong. London and the hollow chimes of an unirradiated Big Ben already feel light years away, gongs for a future already written and long since lived. There’s no sunshine anywhere. Chasing Cars. If I just lay here. Close eyes, arms out - back to the Reichenbach mattress as I push with my heel - down, down, down into cold and roaring hell, silent and unnoticed like a stone. I push my neck out so my head hits first. Nothing, just silence. I open my eyes and see only magnolia ceiling - put my hand to my head to find a still intact skull, but my fingers come away bloody all the same. I’m the only one who can see it. I’m the only one. I’m alone.

fingers tense against the gnarled oak chest, clutching at drawers, scrambling, fumbling inside. i am blind, my vision having died in darkened rooms, blindfolded by dirty sheets and smothered by anything without an edge. paper cuts my skin as i claw within the dark for clues, for something soft and warm, familiar, breaking my knuckles against the splintered wood as i search. there. something there. as fingertips tickle the tip of its outline a light fires from somewhere unseen - a spark far away that flashes an image, a distant star to find myself by. i dig deeper, clutching onto nothing and everything, anything with both hands, sweaty palms grasping only empty air and dust. is that all there is to find here? i lay them flat and take a breath of dark and unwashed air. another burst of light, and i see the image once more - older, no wiser - a face that forgot to stop. its curiosity peers at me from a place beyond. i stare back at it, forcing my hands from the empty familiar chest. slowly i move forward as it dims, my footsteps marked by brief memories of quickly fading flashes.

a st andrews breakfast - two cups of coffee and two marlboro lights, looking at 9am as it trails warm pools in its cloak across the valley opposite. brecon has never looked so pretty as regina sings, and sings and sings, daffs dancing all around me like teenagers at a concert waving unsteady lighter flames. i am in hiding, on holiday from life as we know it - making shows of trading blows, just hoping no one knows. wave to postman - a ludicrous parochial pleasantville truman show wave. i’ve died and gone to cliché. this is the antithesis to mr bergamot strange and mister beasley toast jr. this is the place where time comes before its next posting. no rainbows in the sky - no rain - so let’s have another cup of coffee, and let’s have another marlboro light. duty free, don’t you know. i see my life in a grey non-polyester hoodie - all grainy in sepia like a sunday morning duvet, snuggling caricatures of everything once ridiculous, trading absurdities for the trite. even johnny rockefeller is looking for a silver lining.

read. just read. sit back with your feet up on white sheets and listen to owen. don’t fear the reaper. read, as you turn the pages of a tobacco-yellowed 1960s paperback just to feel them between your fingers. pretend you’re rich. pretend this is all just a novel and you’re holding your breath because you’re three pages before the end - you know there’s a huge golden sunset peering between tiny holes in the net curtains as you read. you wait for that first breath as you turn that last page. there! that moment. that’s it. that moment where you don’t…

make breakfast. take your time. watch granules swirl and pool within a dark oily universe, primed in that perfect soup to catch the tiniest moment of light. take your time stirring the lightstruck shadows as they splash against white china bones. grill the bacon. keep it simple. just take your time. you’re not putting anything away. you’re spending money - spending money on silly little things just because they make you giggle for a moment or wiggle for a minute. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about money. money’s more ephemeral than flesh. you can’t keep money, and money by itself brings nothing. but money buys…

you don’t know when the plumber’s coming, if the plumber’s coming. it doesn’t matter. this is the point. you don’t know what’s going to happen apart from the simple things. the simple things that money can buy. that you can control. the only things you can control are the simple things. they’re pieces of an orchestra, you are components of a counterpoint. you are in harmony. you’re even typing in harmony with the music you’re listening to, the music you just bought. you fit. you fit because you don’t know what’s going on. music of the waves, the spheres - nothing is grinding, merely turning, resonating, spinning slowly on and on and on and on.

This is the book where the precious things go. This is where I put love to grow mouldy, where I put lies told to loved ones to be forgotten about - to fade with time, blanched to inedible like asparagus left in dark cupboards for the rest of lives. This is where I put my dreams and fears, stapling their excitement and power to bored pages like hunting trophies, waiting for their blood to seep out and soak until they become just words on a page. This is where I put myself, where I tried to paint the childhood portrait that would age instead of me. This is where I lost myself, in a half finished game of hide-and-seek. This will be the only place left where anyone who looked could find me. Sometimes I hear their footsteps. Sometimes I hear their breath as they pause, hand reached out, taut with intent, pink with pulsing blood. But I, being only words upon a page, cannot call them in, cannot call for help. Cannot call. I listen instead to their footsteps as they turn and walk away, each sounding so like one another’s but peppered with the hint of something new. The scent lingers stronger than any portrait, long after they have gone. You can smell newness like an aphrodisiac in here, because this is the place where the trophies are stored - the lost pennies, the shed ungreyed hairs, the priceless precious dust. This is what happens to the things we call precious.

Sit in space and stare into terror. Is this it? Is this as good as it gets? Blank lifeless faces stare back at me from the order that surrounds, wordless mouths pulled into self-conscious smiles. What is it they’re saying that I am not? What is it I’m saying that they are not? I used to have a brain. Now I just have grey sludge leached out by sweetness into grey dishwater, grey bathwater. Grey, grey, grey and they see it as colours. Come splash around in my grey colour, I’m just like you. You’re nothing like me. No, I’m nothing like you, so I’ll cut you - let’s take another colour, bright red this time. It’s another grey day and the cold is creeping under the door, through the window, clutching my knuckles that clutch my knees and grasping my elbows in its firm icy clasp. Winter is coming, and what have you saved? Air. So clutch your precious nothing and sit tight. Sit in space and stare into terror. Into terror. Into terror. This is it. This is all it is. There is nothing else. Nothing. But still I don’t give up. I really should give up. It never stops, any of it. Things change and stay the same in equal disappointment. What choice do you have but to live through it. Survive, again.

Voices mutter empty promises from the world beyond - the one that keeps turning beyond the window with everyone doing their little bit to keep pushing with palms and feet on wheels, keys and mice. The world is spun from promises. The music of the spheres recites dates, statistics and payments. The cog turns another notch. Black coffeemud and chained cigarettes oil the machine, otherwise grinding and whining at full steam as soon as I’m awake - earlier than I intended, like Wellington saying ‘hallo’ to a red fizzing dawn. London burns with low calorie chatter while the Luddites hide in daytime TV caves like chaos magicians playing with nylon and Oyster cards just enough to make it all work for them, nothing more. I am not a mouse in a wheel. I am not a God turning the lever. I am a man in a world that spins, regardless of my promises, regardless of whether I push it or not - my own music on loop bidding “get it done, get it done”. The world spins, on and on, regardless. Everything is spinning around me, shrieking with the sounds of promises and torture alike. The inferno sounds like a message. “Get it done,” it screams. “Get it done.”

I came back in the room, food in hand and I see a black cat. Black cat, watching the bed. Watching where I sleep. I blink. The cat becomes a chair, but I still see it as a cat, for a moment in my mind. An imprint, then it’s gone. Bast. Bast. Like Wadjet, like someone else, but this is not Tybi. Tybi! - just now, like Toby, my black cat’s name who died 9 years ago. But this is not Tybi. This is Pachon. This is not the 17th. This is the third. This is the third of the 9th. This is a pattern. This is a pattern where there isn’t a pattern there. There is just me here. Me, the chair and these unwritten things.

Breathe. Pace. Pace. Breathe. Tea. Make some tea. Green tea. Brewing. Big Brother on in background. People. People. Humans. Breathe. Breathe. Calm. Centred. Breath. The universe. The universe. Centred. Gravity. Attracts. Planets. Planets are selfish. The Earth is not the centre of the universe. Planets think they are suns. Suns think they are galaxies. The universe. Breathe. God does not think he is anything. God looks neither down on or up to anything. God is not human. God is not a planet. God is just God. God is breath. Breathe. Breathe.

Fuck breathing.

I’m going out to buy cigarettes. It’s two days and I’m allowed.

And green tea just reminds me of Vancouver and the road to it, untravelled.

i didnt go to sleep when i should. i stayed up to watch the fabulous baker boys - it was quite good. i liked tthe ending. never trust a happy ending,. it’s not real, not part of life. you’re just wathcing someone else’s sully dream. abandoned. ugh. broken. there is no purpose to this. i’m just giving my fingrs something to do while their arms just lie here in the dark, staling banquets to be bitten by my mystery assassin in the night. alone. i shjudder to think what all this is doing to my grammatical reputation. write though me . write fast. there is pasta on the hob, old tobacco down the drain, and i sit here curdling thoughts to a thick that when the milk’s drunk quick go insane