I’ve never been to New Orleans. I always thought I would. But now it’s gone. Just gone. Thousands of bodies are floating down the flooded streets. When the bombs went off in London, and over 50 people lost their lives, I was exasperated by how little the everyday world seemed to even acknowledge it. Yet here’s me, sitting in parks and prattling on about lacking focus or direction, and over one thousand people have died. Our lives are so vulnerable to Fate. It is absolute, immediate and indomitable. How long do we have left? And what is yet to come?
Slowly it returns. Someone tied a knot in me once, stemming everything, stopping the fresh salt-scented air meaning more than just the sea. Was it me? But now, slowly, it returns, much darker than before. And I know I must put it all towards a good cause. Shepherd the sheep to still bleat and baa and call. Someone made the sacrifices for me, putting everything in place. This person, this cause – neither are here. This spinning wheel and this comfy cage, this is not the rolling wilderness of before. I cannot smell the universe from here. My will must out.
Another day on Hampstead Heath spent picnicking and looking at boys. Drinking in the afternoon makes me dozy, and once I got home fell straight asleep. I then had a brief but revelatory dream that in one image defined why I am so unhappy. Everything comes down to money. Work hard at something that isn’t you, earn a good wage, buy a big house, breed, die. We have developed a society where salaries and mortgages consume so much of our lives. The modern age is so vulgar. Once again I am reminded that I was born way after my time.
Whilst my body lay dozing, my mind took a walk down memory lane. It thought of a time when life seemed endless, endlessly happy, like the blue upon blue of the sky above. Crickets in the dry surrounding grass became hypnotic as the sun heated pollens, baking the earth. Man and his wife took it in turns to play their guitar. Their singing and the sound of children making pleasant background noise - neither too loud to be intrusive. I asked my friend if I had died and he said no, but I remembered that this was what heaven was.
This is what it should be like. The sincerity, the warmth, concentrated into just one evening. There was no guilt when I woke up, none of the dirt or shame which had become as familiar as the scars you left me with. It doesn’t have to be that way. There can be both truth and beauty in the same room. What was ripped from me is now slowly coming back, tiny green vines twisting over coarse dead roots. I am not what I once was, but I can be again. But then there’s you, who can only tear and steal.
I love the smell of Soho in Summer. Sometimes droplets of water escape the clouds’ sweltering grasp and spatter across the toasted pavement, somehow almost sizzling by the scent that fresh moisture makes. Barbecues and Chinese mingle with cheap aftershave in the heavy air, blanketing the Square’s dry scrawny grass. The place has an almost carnival atmosphere, and what would any carnival be without its freaks – each of them cut from exactly the same mould. Amidst the clones, we sat and discussed the past. We were kids when we first came here. We looked just like them. We’re getting old.
Some people don’t bloom until fifty, their hair grey and thinning. I bloomed at twenty. My social life thereafter fizzled to a peg – a once marble pillar left in acid for decades. Today a woman stopped me on the street, her preamble evident of wanting money. I didn’t believe her story, and her look back said she knew I knew it was lies. I gave her money all the same. Madness. I might go mad again. Of course it’s difficult to do it properly without it looking contrived. There are so many fakers these days making genuine insanity look vulgar.
The rain falls like it should upon forests. Sat at my desk thinking of water sluicing mud upon moss, or the sweet smelling rot of leaves in a pine forest, I heard an odd noise. It sounded like wolves howling in the distance. I went and stood by the open door, watching the rain and inhaling the scent of wet wood and concrete. I heard nothing. The wolves had gone from the world, though their distant unreal howling still echoed about my head. And yet, as I write, I hear them again. An urgent reminder, but for what? From where?
God is coming. I must tidy for his visit. I read that a true chaotic artist lives Underground, beyond humanity’s enforced soulless routine. This struck a chord. Being so pompous and judgemental, I resent materialism, stupidity, those trapped in their fatuous meaningless cycles who can’t even see it. This isn’t The Age of the Artist. This is The Age of the Idiot. A crass, vulgar epoch where any moron with money can ‘write’ or take photographs and declare “art!” Humanity has sold its soul to its own end, and shoveled it onto the cart, retailed at three times its worth.
Not a good day. One where you’re always wrong; where previous achievements are stripped away, revealing only stupidity, laziness, incompetence and incapability. Days like this, where I can’t even be human, I truly miss you. I miss your voice that made those in my head disappear. I miss feeling like a person because I knew I mattered to you. And yet it was all nothing, all a lie. The still empty space beside me is somehow emptier than before; the silence at the end of the phone so much louder than what you could have said when you said nothing.
