There is no denying I’m in a manic patch.

The amount I’ve written recently - here, there and elsewhere - both inane and sublime is evidence enough of that. Right right write. This flurry of thought currently comes so easily, and all so very quickly in one moment. Perhaps even too quickly. I was lucky perhaps that my time of the month coincided with my “audition” at the Soho Theatre. I don’t know how that went - I won’t know for some time. The exercises and some of the tools I learnt on Saturday were very insightful and time well spent, but I didn’t like what I ended up writing. I thought my protagonist was an insufferably dull man, and his antagonist intolerably juvenile for an old woman. The Canadian said that not liking what you’ve done at an audition is usually a good thing. Given my credit history with the Bank of Hubris, I’d like to agree.

I’m also doing very stupid things. I’ve started crossing the road intentionally without looking because at the time I think it’s “funny”, or spontaneously trying to kiss people I really, really really shouldn’t (prompting a long phone call to a no doubt quite bewildered friend yesterday that consisted of me saying nothing but “fuck fuck fuck. FUCK! Fhhhhhuck. Oh, oh fuck. FUCK.”) I’ve also barely slept in the past three days, despite feeling physically exhausted.

As ever, my entire mentality at present can be neatly packed into a pretty little nutshell of something that happened on Friday. Whenever I’m reading something (and I often am) and I come to a paragraph or perhaps even a sentence that touches me somehow, I’ll bookmark the page with whatever comes to hand (never, ever, dog-ear a page. There’s just no excuse for it). Usually this is a scrap of one of the many Marks and Spencers or off-license receipts that seem to breed in my pocket. This behaviour is not particularly unusual, I grant you. As I’ve been mostly reading my current choice in Tavistock Square recently (definitively and possessively MY square, along with Soho Square which we will come to later), I’ve on two occasions continued to use whatever came to hand - a leaf. One was, appropriately for the passage I marked, a maple leaf. Another I noticed only as I reached for it and, appropriately for the book I am reading, was deep red in colour. As you’ll see, it looks strikingly suggestive of a geisha - deep red lips on pale white skin.

Justly I had used it to mark a particularly beautiful passage (though anyone who’s read this book would probably agree that these are in no short supply - it is probably one of the most ornately written novels I’ve ever read. Though over 300 pages, I started it barely a week ago and am already close to finishing it - testament to either its quality or my present mental state). However, I was on a break at work on Friday and took it out on the balcony with a cup of foolishly strong black coffee and a cigarette. As I opened the book the leaf fluttered out, twirling towards the ground and lying in the dirt with the dried and crushed husks of its oakier cousins. I’d completely lost the passage I’d marked, with no idea what it might have been. I looked for an age, trying to jog my memory, but I couldn’t find anything that so profoundly spoke to me as it had when I’d been sitting in the square. I guess this says a lot about moments. In the end I just stuck it back in the book at random.

It occurred to me only this morning that mania is losing your place in the book. Flick through to try and find where you were and words will only whiz past your eyes faster than you can read them. In the end you just stick the bookmark back in anywhere, on impulse, because you know there’s no way you can find the order you were looking for.

The desire to put things into order is of course a human conceit. The universe is perfectly well ordered as it is. At present it seems to be using the songs of the dearly missed Kirsty as a reminder of what’s important and what isn’t, though this is perhaps simply because I’ve found myself in Soho Square a great deal recently, and always for entirely different reasons. Her song by the same title has also become my current favourite of hers, and I’ve suddenly started hearing it in the most unlikely of places.

An artist would call this charming. A bland person would consider it a coincidence, and perhaps invent an unnecessarily long word so they can better compartmentalise the artist into a box for filing with the other schizotypal or cyclothymic syndromes, temperaments and disorders. Everyone has different names for divinity. Being in love is an aspect of divinity - this raw incredible surge of ability that is often all too powerful for us to contain. You feel capable of anything when you are in love - you feel euphoric, inspired, alive and at one with everything; but you can also feel jealous, hateful, insecure and alone, half-dead from the heavy weight of the emotions you still carry round from you, long after they have served their purpose and their appropriateness and freshness have passed.

This aspect of my imagination - of the very neurology of my personality - is little different. In fact, it’s all too similar. I am not sick. I do not need your pills. I am madly, as ever, in love with my brain, and the two of us are at present very happy together. Human beings do like to dictate how people should live - what is normal and what is healthy - how they should love one another and what form that love should take. They seem to have trouble comprehending that what may be sauce for their goose is not for another’s gander.

All I ask is that you hold my hand when I’m crossing the road, and hold me back when I next lunge for someone I shouldn’t. A hand to hold and someone to lunge for generally would even be nice at times, but it’s important to accept our disabilities in life - the syndromes, temperaments and disorders that stop us from being normal and make us unique.

Again with the not being able to wear my favourite coat anymore by the time this airs…

When I was still a person who looked like me, while I was still human and before that life ended, there were these things that reminded me of that person I was. Things that brought me back, so strongly, to home. Things like warm showers on cold indigo mornings, or the sensation of cold coastal rain on my warm face. Or the cry of seagulls, mist or the touch and scent of salty black rock. Images of empty beaches on a hot day - abandoned lobster pots, cracked and rusted with age, entwined with coarse black netting and barnacles. Small freezers stuffed with food; magic or walking home at dawn and feeling myself being washed in its red and gold light. Night time memories swirl into thick happy clouds like a footprint in the shore at the scent of tobacco and beer soaked into wool, or the cloy of a certain aftershave, like the cosy hug of warm beer in plastic glasses or the feel of long coats and thick scarves. The empty smell of photocopiers that somehow echoes down emptier corridors with your footsteps, treading machine-polished lino to bars lit only by candlelight that smell of toasted fish and of roasted vegetables. The sight of a Nazi-grey Morris Minor, or the muggy scents and sounds whilst carrying cardboard boxes through heavy rain. Hole-in-the-wall sceney clubs and their tang of cheap alcohol, cheaper aftershave and fresh peroxide. Instant coffee, like mud, and cigarettes to the sound of TV drag queens, Star Trek till dawn and the mirror image of something Restless. This was, of course, all so long ago.

Because today I’m dying, again. So slowly I am dying, a little bit more every day. I want to go home before I die. I want to go backwards before it stops. I want to go backwards because it won’t stop. I want to go backwards because it all stopped.

…and thought of Who.

no no no i won’t take your nasty medicine. you sluiced it all. it meant nothing but still you put it in - took it out. so easy. can’t do can’t can’t do. stuttering like i was a child again. death. that was what i came here to say. death. i sat on the platform last night, on the bus. i thought about death. i held my breath and wondered how long it would take. i imagined my skin turning to leather and my eyes melting to white pulp. i haven’t thought about such things for years. another form of medication i guess. it’s insidious - if they can’t shove it into your mouth they put a stitch in your time. everyone’s so kind. everyone just wants to help. they want to help you to be just like them. people disappoint. friends can’t be there for ever and clumsy lovers always want too much or too little. love just never materialises. not anymore. but that’s okay. you have to accept the nature of the illness and move on. what is it you want of me? do you want anything of me? i can’t just be here, can i? i can’t just be existing? i cannot even feel. why can i not feel? how I can just be here to just exist but not even feel? where did my feelings go? drained in the blisters you lanced for my own good good good. because you thought they were ugly. those weren’t blisters, they were my eyes, brown like the moon isn’t and bumbling as it lies, silently, but sparkling blue from within. everyone has brown eyes you know, deep down. i am half dead already because you’re a thief. because you took it all from me. why? why did you do that to me? i don’t care. i care too much. i’m so tired all the time. nothing seems real anymore. everything seems pretend - arbitrary, meaningless, predictable. i was chasing something once. someone maybe. now i don’t remember. now i chase anything in case it might be the thing i lost. i’ve moved beyond it all. i’ve fallen so far far behind. a smiling carcass with dominant-gene-brown eyes. i’ve always hated my eyes, and the person who gawps moronically out at the beautiful hateful simple world from behind them.

I’ve fallen completely in love.

It may be only lust. In fact, that’s probably all it is. I’m hoping that’s all it is, believe me. Anyone who knows me knows of my quite epic and hamartic fondness for blue eyes and blond hair. It really doesn’t help when they’re accompanied by pretty little cherry red lips, smiling a smile that could topple any bird from its perch in dizziness. Which in this case they are. I’m completely infatuated with the most beautiful boy alive. And I only encountered him for the first time last night. But why is it far more reassuring for this to be only a physical attraction than a romantic one?

Well, for a start, he’s only eighteen. I know, repulsive isn’t it?

Secondly, his name’s Del. Yes, Del. Uh huh, I don’t know what I was thinking. Probably just looking into his eyes, or watching that cute little half-jig he wiggles absently whenever he gets excited suggests I wasn’t thinking at all.

Thirdly he still lives with his mum, though Marni is a lovely woman who only this morning I watched cook pancakes in her nightie. Marni’s great.

Fourthly, despite my best efforts to subtly encourage any inclination Del might have towards his own flock, he so far seems to mostly enjoy watching the girls who hang around the bus stop outside his house like hookers on a street corner.

Oh yeah, and fifthly, and perhaps most significantly if you’re inclined to pedantry or quibbling over semantics, he doesn’t exist.

You see, last night I arrived home quite late and quite drunk to find that those lovely people at MacGold (cheers Jane) provide just as good a service as ever. Propped up outside my door, as I wobbled about the place like a Merlot-jelly lollipop was my copy of The Sims 2. Goodbye Summer social life.

I stayed up tinkering for about an hour and created the most perfect boy alive (current existential thinking on the sentient status of computer game characters notwithstanding). The aforementioned Mr Barney. I’m now so obsessed with him that all I want to do is go home and watch him sleep, or dance that cute little half-jig of his or just make him try on different pairs of jeans all afternoon.

Before you think me completely tragic with just a little pinch of psycho, I should mention that I am someone whose first crush was on Esteban from The Mysterious Cities of Gold. I think he was also my first vaguely erotic dream - something half-remembered about Mendoza making us take our shorts off because we had to go swimming, and I said to Esteban I only would if he did first…

… What? Why are you frowning like that? I was only seven.

I started reading this earlier today which I’d found by chance. Immediately I thought “oh good, I’m not the only person in the world so emotionally suicidal that they fall in love with fictional characters.”

That was before I kept on reading however.

Suddenly I ceased seeing myself as someone foolishly infatuated with someone I’d never met (and unless dimensia sets in earlier than expected, most likely never will) and was instantly transformed into a sad old loner perving over a junior clump of fictional pixels taking his top off. Of course I’ve completely rethought my life, and am not remotely looking forward to going home and wasting the rest of this incredible weather indoors playing computer games that involve little strategy beyond finding a nice T shirt to match Del’s blond bob, or orchestrating him sharing a first kiss with the paperboy.

Not even slightly.

Human beings have no end of infuriating habits.

So many in fact that I’ve had to start writing them down to keep track.

It was close to midnight when I said I had to leave. I’d been watching you, but you either thought I didn’t know, or didn’t think what you’d been doing was important.

“I have to go,” I announced.
“Why?” you asked.
“Because,” I replied, looking at you with my most serious expression, “otherwise I may turn into a pumpkin.”

So I left. My lungs hurt from all those countless cigarettes, and the wine burnt my throat and two day empty stomach. As I stomped drunkenly back to the bus stop, already stinking of my own stale aftershave and anaemic efforts at conversation, I looked up at the stars and asked a question.

“Why?” I asked.

The answer came, as it only ever really does, by a series of coincidences. A man carrying an accoustic guitar walked past me with his friends - some band that had perhaps been playing in a pub somewhere. The guitar and the man carrying it stood out to me for no apparent reason. Then I saw another man with a guitar packing up his equipment in The Abbey. Then I saw another as I watched the world speed past on the bus.

What do guitars mean? Why is a man with a guitar an answer to my question? I remembered a song I’d heard, strummed by a man with a guitar as part of a recent performance that I’d been only loosely involved with.

“You’re no one till somebody loves you,” he sang.

This morning I sat alone on the bus, as usual, which trundled along on its usual route with the usual traffic jams, uncomfortable seats and people who step on your feet and stink of bad breath, listening to my iPod to drown out as much of the Wednesday morning world as I could. But there’s something new on my journey. Your flat is now on my bus route. It always was, of course. I’d passed it by every morning, never once knowing.

As I passed it this morning for both the first and the umpteenth time, the curtains still drawn, I realised that nearly every song I’d been listening to on shuffle had been sung by a man with a guitar.