Tube packed to bursting as ever this morning. No immediate explanation why. Humans cram in off the chaotic platform, pushing, pushing, endlessly. The doors close. Someone jabs an elbow in your kidney and a handbag in your crotch and the train lurches forward. Suddenly you find yourself thinking thoughts that are, in themselves, slightly peculiar things to feel, such as sympathy for liver sausage paté.

I wish they’d sort this out. 7 million people. A crowded train every 5 minutes. Platform packed with impatient lifeforms. £100 for the monthly privilege. Logic? Health and safety? 2012 Olympics? I passed a man on the escalator as the bored voice of Big Brother on the Tannoy announced this morning’s casualties in the war against Eastasia - “there are delays on the Central Line due to too many people using it; there is no service on the Victoria line due to station closures as a result of staff absences. There is a good service on all other lines.” “Yeah, right,” the man jeered, and looked away at a poster of Dave Willetts in disgust. No one believes the propaganda anymore. It’s late, it’s unreliable, it’s expensive and it’s uncivilised. It makes each of us a silent Orpheus, Virgil or Dante, every morning.

But!

This morning there was a man there. Not a remarkable man, but a pretty man. He was in his late twenties, shorter than me and with better hair. He wore a nice pinstripe suit, navy - with a navy jumper and a navy shirt. No tie. Where are you going, Pretty Man? We stood directly opposite each other in the crowded carriage, our faces barely a few centimetres apart. I could smell his hair, his skin. Since I stopped smoking again my already acute sense of smell has become all the more so, and I could smell his aftershave. I didn’t know the brand, but it smelt of lemons and something musky, almost like burnt lilies, not that lilies would smell like that if they were burnt. There was the sweet simple scent of Head & Shoulders from his fingers, clutching the yellow pole between us. What do you do, Pretty Man? I looked at his hand and his thumb was slightly wet from where it had nudged his lip against his teeth, perhaps to nibble absently. I liked his slim shoulders. His jacket fitted very well. Are you lonely too, Pretty Man?

Suddenly my heart began to quicken. I was aware of the painfully minuscule distance between us, the scores of people shrouding us all around, the scent of his skin and hair working its way around me inside - into my lungs, into my brain. I looked at his shoulders again - the back of his neck, at his lips. It must be an impulse of mania, a giftycurse of last night’s recurring absence of self, but I really had to fight the urge to put my arm around him. It was such a strange thought, whispered quietly into my consciousness still preoccupied with coming to terms with Thursday: “you could kiss him,” it said. “You could just lean forward and kiss him. You can do anything you want.”

And you know what?

I really should have done. All I’d have got at the very worst would be a punch in the face and there wasn’t even room for that.

I got off at Euston, losing myself in the madness of yet another brief crowd. He didn’t.

Signal failure, apparently.

Not allowed. This is just something that happens. But where is it? I don’t know what to do with myself. Cheese. Fields. sunflowers with blue horizons that stretch on and on over the golden corn - rainclouds mustering breath at their apex and a moisture that you can only taste and not smell. world, spinning and breathing. breath, everywhere, but not here. this is a still room, this is a living tomb that is a tomb for the living, this is the place where dreams come to rest, and oversleep and not bother waking up when they find they’ve missed their place in the text. turn to dust. i don’t like the polished floors and the walls are too bland - give me colour, something garish, something blue, something red. give me dirt and darkness. give me a fucking mcdonalds oozing clots and fatjuice and staining these very important sheets of paper. give me that cow tortured till death and buried stuffed in a dry bun and i’ll eat it without the sqeamishness in my right big toe. i can feel the rain, can taste that moisture. it’s torture. can feel the unclenching grip of my fist on my sword that isn’t there as i don’t swing it round and round above my head as i don’t slice the air. what does one do with these fragments that come out - this exercise, this sweating? can you knit a sweater out of them? can you eat them, regurgitated so? hunger. oh yes. hunger. i haven’t felt like eating in days.

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loneliness is a physical pain that hurts all over. loneliness is a physical pain that hurts all over. brain heavy with nothing. these moments come less often than before, but they still come. you can keep something in a cage you know. but it has to get out and does sometimes. these are the moments when i’m at my most honest, my most deceptive, my most profound and my most trite. and when i fit most with the world man made for himself, because i am at my most meaningless. meaningless. without meaning or purpose. we find our own purpose. this is a blessing and a curse i think. there’s too much space in the universe, and yet not enough on earth, so we end up doing nothing. drifting. drifting. sometimes i think i have no soul because it always starts with the absence to feel. why is it the happiness doesn’t seem real and the pain does? i used to have an answer for this once but i think i’ve forgotten it. i find it very hard to connect with people you know. really connect. i have to stop doing things like smoking and sleeping with people i’ll never see again because they say its bad for the physical aspect of my frame - bad for what everyone else insists is my temple, but i think should just be a car. isn’t it strange how there are so many ways to die, and yet so few ways to suffer? what does this mean? i don’t know. what does any of this mean? what does anything mean? this is me sitting in the universe - big universe, head either exploding with the weight of it all as it spins, or having the endless void and nothingness poured into it until it doesn’t swell. i feel really tired. bad joke - that isn’t funny. it’s gone on too long. you need to keep stuff like that short and to the point for it to work. i do feel really tired but going to sleep will give me guilt. i think my head is spinning and that’s why i’m tired. i’m hungry, but the last thing i feel like doing is eating. or drinking. or doing anything really. it’s as if anything there is to do isn’t worth doing. there must be something worth doing. there must be something worth. there must be something. there must be. time to collapse and close my eyes. if you think this is tedious you should see it all from where i’m standing. but i’m lying. if you think this is madness then you should see the awful stagnant sanity of the world and tell me that that’s what really makes sense. [INSERT LAUGH HERE - UPROARIOUS CANNED LAUGHTER THAT LASTS FOR TWENTY SIX YEARS. DOT DOT DOT]

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Worse things happen at sea you know. Just sit back and watch it - watch its currents, clashing against each other, making waves.

There. Doesn’t that feel better?

You Are 100% Bipolar

You have some serious ups and downs, maybe to the point of endangering your own life. Consult a doctor to see if you may truly have bipolar disorder.

But 100% Bipolar? Is that really all I am? Surely 56% of me is geek with at least 13% a Patrick Wolf obsession? And what about the writingness and my ability to cook?

Oh no, I’m nothing more than a neurological condition. And my oven’s not electric anymore.

A few random songs played back to back on iTunes made me think someone was trying to tell me something. Namely stop pissing about and get to it. A quick flick through my playlist and I have assembled the soundtrack to my own rubbish-at-writingness:

It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career - Belle and Sebastian
Not So Manic Now - Dubstar
I’m Not Even Going to Try - David Devant and his Spirit Wife
I’m An Asshole - Dennis Leary
In The Middle of Nowhere - Dusty Spingfield
Insomnia - Faithless
What To Do With Myself - Emiliana Torrini
You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet - Kirsty MacColl
Wasting My Time - Klaus Nomi
Human Afterall - Morrissey
Je Ne Veux Pas Travailler - Pink Martini
Poor Little Rich Boy - Regina Spektor
Silent All These Years - Tori Amos

Now all I need is a song called “Ben, the boy who never wrote but instead dyed his hair, played computer games and chatted to boys a lot” and I’ve got my own morning (de)motivator anthem.

loves to spend extravagantly.

A boy like me cannot, however, afford to love Patrick this much.

Had the price been remotely affordable I would have become all pompous over being outbidided. As it stands now, I’m okay with being the bigger man by just walking away. But this isn’t helping my issues over missing out on the concert tickets in the first place - which you can see the original price for if you scroll down.

Little Wolf is clearly on the way up. Damn, I hate it when things I like hit the mainstream. I’ll have to find something else more obscure now.

Two days ago I asked a question. Last night I received an answer.

Two women got on the bus. They prattled for a while about the sort of meaningless things humans talk about these days - banter both fascinating and infinitely dull depending on your mood and regard of the world and its most itinerant species at the time.

And then one of them said something that really caught my attention:

“Do you like my necklace?” I half heard the first woman say.
“Oh yes,” the second replied. “Where did you get it?”
“Glastonbury. It’s nice isn’t it? I like it because it’s unusual.”
“It is, yes. I like the heart” At this point I think I rolled my eyes. “What’s that beneath the heart?” the second woman then asked.
“It’s a caduceus.“
I looked over, a little less subtly than perhaps I should have done. A description isn’t really necessary - it looked just like you’d imagine a heart with a caduceus beneath it to look. Caduceus. Medicine. Hermes. Messenger of the gods, and himself god of magic. I noticed the woman was wearing a blouse beneath her black jacket - something halfway between red and pink, the colour in basic magic for…

And then the lyrics that have been spinning round and round my head for the past week began their little pirouette once again:

…love is the answer to a question
That I have forgotten
But I know I’ve been asked
And the answer has got to be love love love

So there it is. My answer.

And I have only the most rudimentary understanding of what it means. That’s the tricky thing with asking questions. They’re like jelly beans. Or kisses. Or gherkins.

One is never enough.

Yup, it’s going to be another one of those days.

After the fun of yesterday afternoon I’ve been procrastinating from life to the point where I’ve made steady progress on my short story. I came home from Jon’s last night and carried on with my scribblings, and woke up at half 8 this morning so I could submit it to the group in time to go to Jim’s later on to help him decorate his Christmas tree and watch fuzzy-framed 1950s Christmas feelgood movies. It must be a Canadian thing.

Evidently however, my CrapBook (previously known as MacBook) had other plans. Not content with having shut down whenever it felt like it over the past few months until Apple FINALLY admitted something was wrong and released a firmware patch that compensates for the luxury of only shutting down when you tell it to by eating up your battery life, it’s now decided to crash on whim, for me to find anything left open corrupted after I restart. Yup. Short story, completely gone. Totally corrupted. I’ve now lost forever the really decent stuff I got out this morning, purely through closing down my conscious brain and letting my imagination stream out. Sure, I could do it again - I have a draft from yesterday afternoon and I still have my mind, but I’m evidently becoming too human as I was rather sentimentally attached to that spontaneous composition I came out with earlier.

Not only that, but I’ve had to rebuild my iTunes library (AGAIN. You would have thought they’d make this pissywanky application a little more robust than blasting its airbag in its face at the slightest whiff of a crash), and reset all my passwords and (perhaps most irritatingly of all) window sizes in my browsers. I wouldn’t really mind but I’ve only just got Airport to stop asking me the sodding password to our Wireless connection and connect automatically. Does anyone remember when Apple used to be a good, reliable, decent company? Right now I see little difference between them and Microshaft, other than the prettiness of the machines. Maybe that’s all that matters now.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, I then, right on cue, receive a phone call from my mother. Not content with making me feel worse whenever I have this foolish urge to call home to make me feel better, she’s now developed the apparent ability to pickup my frustration telepathically. Twenty minutes of listening how incompetent the builder is (during which I left the phone in my room and made a cup of coffee. No. Really. She was still talking when I came back), how lazy my sister is (the recurrent sequel to how helpful my sister is) and infuriatingly well-meaning advice on how to resurrect the quite sodomised aforementioned short story. This she then ended with a customary reprimand on never calling and a near-trademark guilt trip for not demonstrating much interest in hearing the same story I hear every week about how incompetent the builder is.

But do you know what I did? After walking repeatedly around my very small room in an angry little circle - half wondering how I could repair a corrupted RTF and half just saying “fuck” over and over, I came upon another brilliant idea. I thumped my MacBook. I gave it a damn good twatting. And then I giggled, I giggled my mo-fo arse off. Probably not very good for the machine but made me feel a whole load better.

Haven’t smoked in over 24 hours because of yesterday. Feeling much better already. Think I might go for a walk in Highgate Woods in a bit. It’s been raining and I love the scent of wet earth and mulchy leaves. I could definitely do with getting far away from technology - from my laptop and mobile phone - for even just a short while.

Just poked my nose into the local Virgin (so to speak) to see what was on sale. Shuffled absently up to the counter and handed over my selections - Priscilla and Supergirl - two nostalgicky happy movies with memories from two very different periods in my life. Technically, from these choices alone, the second glimpse at my velvet coat wasn’t necessary, but it made me feel special that the sales assistant at least went through the “Ooh look! A gay!” ritual.

Today is actually a scary day. I’m sort of absent at the moment, alone in the office and trying not to think about certain things - busying myself with finishing a short story in between little snacks of work.

Do you think that this could be the day that everything changes? Profundity loves to dress itself in the mundane. It’s tragedy that loves to look fabulous.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this, but I recently joined a writing circle. It was something scary and proactive I committed myself to after my recent manic depressive meltdown. Do one thing every day that scares you, as Eleanor Roosevelt once said.

Since university, and barring the recent abortion of the play I was working on with Little One, I’ve only really been tap-tap-tapping away by myself, in my own dimly lit corner of North London. It was ironic perhaps to think that I always worked with my back to the window, never seeing the many other little windows lit only by a bedside lamp or a computer screen. As a result I completely lack discipline; motivation; a friendly ear (or indeed mouth) to say “God, I know” when talking about how impossible it is to find the time to get stuff done, and then to use it properly once you do; and, perhaps most importantly, feedback. Because anything I produce comes entirely from my own universe and the laws that govern it, I’m completely unable to deal with criticism. I take it too personally, perhaps even as a criticism of myself. It was perhaps rather fortunate that the first piece I submitted as a sample was distributed to the group without my prior knowledge for discussion - had I know I’d have spent ages agonising over what to send. As it turned out I just took a snap decision. Fortunately, everyone’s feedback was very positive. And I learned a new word that day. Confidence.

Anyway, I received an email just earlier welcoming a new member to the group. Apparently she is looking to get a UK book deal (who isn’t?), and is concerned about showing her material to the rest of the group in case one of us pinches it. A resonable concern I think, and one most probably shared by every single person round the table. This is the wonderful conceit about writers - you’re far too preoccupied worrying about people stealing your own ideas to even think about how to go about pinching someone else’s.

Reading this email gave me a sort of mini shock. Perhaps even a flicker of recognition - a half chewed memory found at the back of the fridge whilst hunting for margarine. There was something familiar in this weird idea that authors can get published if they:

1) get up off their Sims2-playing / Merlot-glugging arses (not that, as far as I know, my arse can glug Merlot, or indeed Cabernet Sauvignon. I certainly haven’t tried and don’t think I’m about to);

2) actually (and get this bit) submit stuff to agents and publishers; and

3) perhaps most important, ACTUALLY WRITE SOMETHING.

Thus my resolve has been galvanised into movement (you see how the repeated use of words containing the letter ‘v’ somehow adds a sense of force to the sentence?). My plan for this weekend is thus:

I WILL:

1) Make up a list of agents to send three chapters of Beasts of the Field to;

2) submit three stories from True Beauty to a specific agent;

3) finish a short story for the writing group (which will hopefully make up part of the above submission).

I will NOT:

1) Drink so much I forget who I am, what a pen does or how to spell Thesaurus;

2) so much as touch The Sims 2;

3) spend all evening talking to boys and then pass out in a post-flirtative heap dribbling dozey drool onto my spacebar;

4) spend all night at Jon’s on Friday and Jim’s on Saturday drinking so much I forget who I am before talking about boys and passing out in a post-commentative heap dribbling dozey drool into respective friends’ sofas.

Bring on the night. And the coffee.

This morning on the tube I started to smile.

It wasn’t anything to do with the fact that I actually had room to breathe for once, nor the rather attractive blue eyed “red” who was sitting a few seats from where I was standing. It wasn’t even the cute nerdy looking guy diligently updating his “things to do today” list, written in jolly bright blue letters like stationery for the attention-deficit disordered. It wasn’t even because I’d just about manage to wield power over my hair for once this morning. None of that.

I was smiling because I had realised something profound about origins. I suddenly knew why exactly I’ve been going wrong as of late - since I left university, why my life in London seems so out of sync. Terribly clever thing the brain - you ask it a question without realising, it mulls if over without you knowing, and then, in the middle of bathing or walking or during a dinner party in close and quiet company - EUREKA! - an answer to a question you never knew you asked presents itself, and for a brief moment you fit completely with the universe and each and every poor prior attempt at addressing your malaise is answered at once. Everything. It’s sort of like the finalé of a TV series where every loose end is tied up, often as a dangling thread of the same tapestry, and the heart-stoppingly “Oh my God” scene of terror it ultimately depicts. Most of my friends will know of my obscure look on the stages of my life as seasons in a TV series. Coincidentally, this revelation has come at the end of a typical 7 year run.

I realised this morning that it isn’t about where I need to go, but about where I’ve been. Because things haven’t been going wrong since I left university.

They started going wrong before.

And I caused that.

You see, a few months after I arrived in St Andrews, I got cut in two. I did that, consciously, willingly. This is not some trite human metaphor about getting your heart broken. I used to think I’d had my heart broken by experts, and in a way I was right. We’re all masters of our own torture in a way that no one else could ever be quite as efficiently. This is because a great deal of love is arbitrary, not the feeling but the object. We all have the same capacity for love - deep, near-endless reservoirs of devotion and virtue that really do bring out the best and the worst in us. Little pieces of God’s power I used to call them - the ability to feel every emotion, in pure potency, and all at once. These reservoirs we can pour into anyone else’s eyes, and with it blind hope, unquestioned trust and the belief in the goodness of this person, because you can see it looking back at you now. There’s no one person for any of us. The person we choose, and we do choose, revolves predominantly about the human sentimentality regarding time. But more on that… well, more on that another time.

So, I cut myself in two. The severed part I no longer wanted was put in a box, along with everything else I chose not to carry about myself. I didn’t realise it at first, but this wasn’t a box. It was a cage, and the items in this cage - the severed remains of myself, the thoughts I no longer wanted, the hurt and pain I chose not to feel - this all gave flesh to an entirely different identity. It became a personal demon.

Let’s give this demon a name. It’s wrong to reveal such a thing’s real identity, because a demon becomes manifest when you call it by its name. The giving and knowing of names are, after all, evidently very powerful things. But I don’t see that this makes much difference anymore. This demon has been swelling in my head since the end of the 20th century - perhaps longer, and causes just as much harm as a bulging tumour in my subconscious mind than it can as a manifest aspect. The cycles come faster now than they’ve ever come, and they cut deeper. I just know why now. I know where they come from. I know what to call this condition, this malice, this sickness. For now, let’s call this demon Teragh. It even sounds sufficiently old school pagany/Celtic to be credible.

Into Teragh was cast all the things I hated about myself - the jealousy, the envy, the lust, the furious burning rage, spite, malice, selfishness, pettiness and doubt. And most potent of all, self hatred. He became an unwanted child, locked in the basement, blamed for everything that went wrong, whether it was his fault or not. This left me, Ben, able to strive to become something better than who I was, to become the person I wanted to be, stripped of the things that I believed held me back. This act was not conscious at first. It was accidental, and it was cumulative. A byproduct of one simple statement of self identity.

Of course, It was never going to work.

For a time everything went well. But soon enough, as is my undoing, I began to neglect the cage. The monster would get out every now and then - increasingly more often than not, until it could be chased through my synapses, held down and dragged back to his prison. Whenever he gets out he goes straight for what will hurt his captor most. He lashes out with his filthy talons at his friends, chases meaningless encounters with unfulfilling souls to pollute the vessel that imprisons him, sows little seeds of doomed affection for people impossible for his jailer to obtain so that he might escape again in the distraction of inevitable hurt when it fails. He likes it when I feel alone and hopeless. Teragh may look like nothing more than an awkward teenage boy, but he is just as clever as the systems that bind him, only far more dangerous. He lacks morals. He is hate unrestrained. He is the siphon for every disappointment, every failed relationship, ever bereavement and every noted injustice. He squats in his own filth, pisses into that pure reservoir of faith and trust you’re meant to pour into others’ eyes and, sometimes, screams until his jailer is left quite dizzy with the sounds echoing around the hollow prison. He is scarred, malevolent, destructive and restless.

And he is in my head.

Unnoticed and forgotten, he has been eating me alive from the inside out. Through his rages and tantrums he took away vital supports that I didn’t realise had suffered irreparable structural damage, and collapsed when I later tried to lean on them. It’s only when you’re not under the demon’s thrall you realise how powerful he is. How pervasive and destructive - how he completely robs you of hope, logic, reason and your ability to feel even the most available emotions in response to things.

He is not the source of my destructive, chaotic duality but the manifestation of it, with everyday Ben, naturally, selflessly cast as the epitome of all that is good. He is the aggravator of seeds already sewn, the unholy ghost for primordial voices, whispering their chants and curses from the deepest darkness. He is the twisted champion of abandoned memories, screaming to be heard, to have their suffering finally addressed and not shoved into another dark place where they can be ignored until they are forgotten.

When this occurred to me this morning, as I said, I felt the urge to smile. It wasn’t because I’d solved anything that was wrong, but simply that I’d recognised where all this wrongness comes from. It was because I felt peace with that knowledge, for the first time in a long time. I have been hiding in the light because I’m too scared to step into the darkness, but there is no ground to be made in hiding in one extreme over another. I cannot kill this monster, because it is part of me - it is an unacknowledged aspect of my identity I have already ignored for too long. I have to integrate it into my life, always keep an eye on it, and not make anymore excuses for the behaviour of this child locked in the basement for years.

Know thyself. This is another tidy little axiom I say a lot to those few close friends I have left. Know thyself, because only then can you make peace with yourself, and exist as well as you can in the world around you. In a way, I feel like a charlatan, that I offered up to myself this most fundamental piece of self knowledge only this morning, years too late, with so much unnecessary damage already done.