One of those days

It's when the objects you usually love look flat and cold. It's like closing one eye and only seeing in two dimensions, flattened shapes, rendered forms, where there used to be physical and emotional abundance. I don't want to put on an oufit. I don't care for quenching combinations, I don't want to paint my face in shades of normal with accents of the look, because I don't feel normal and I can't see the look. I want to draw a cartoon bag and cut some holes in it and put it on. I might tie a woolly belt around the middle, or I might not. I'll make a similar head covering, not too itchy, made a rough cool linen, with enough gap for vision, breathing and ingestion, but hidden enough from the world to suggest cowering, and caves.

I can't go to the canal side cafe because I am not carrying the plumage of display and flaunting a casual perfection. I am raw and open, seeping cleansing fluids, melding, meshing, nature happening. I'm shocking. I would cause questions. I don't want to put on a fine face when I don't feel fine. Think of how many people all over the city aren't letting themselves out into the world today, how many people are paralized by a lack of time, direction, desperation. One day before I give myself back to my definition. One perfect day is happening now, only I'm swollen and puffy and behind and just fucking tired actually.

"If you don't like your job, find another one. Stop looking for the love of your life, they'll be there when you start doing the things that you love." So much pressure to make everything perfect, and once you've made everything perfect, you'll be some sort of supreme being.

Illness

There's a filter which comes off when illness sets in. Interaction with the world softens, edges become candy floss fuzzy, delicate, porous, possibly sweet possibly salty, depending on the stage of illness (salty at the start, jagged attack at the gullet, sweet at the end as the juices start to caramelise and hang out in gaps in your face). Maybe it's more like popcorn, you're a walking popped kernel, all gaps and crags and places for the world to nest in. Ideas are free to roam, thoughts too, you feel like a child exploring a man-made bedroom underworld, all chairs and sheets and secrets.

When you're ill, logic falls by the wayside. Logic is in the gutter, kicking leaves and butts like an excluded year 10, bored and aware that no-one really cares that it's not at school today. Unemployed, impotent, excess. Logical left brain, is seemingly useless. Raucous right brain, is having a lovely fun time. It's as though the logical side of your self is absolutely involved with the operating of the body, Tom Hanks all serious as the captain of the ship, leaving the fun side to just play out. I walk past the school and see the mini people in glee, utter freedom, I'm jealous.

When you're ill, your ego, Ahamkara, takes it the worst. The part which normally acts as your super-shell, an annoying parent holding you back from both things that are actually bad for you (insert socially unacceptable situation) as well as things that would actually be very character forming (learning by doing/falling etc). The ego sits in bed, coughing and spluttering and moaning for pity, the intellect wants to play out in the sunshine like a 5 year old who really does not know what's happenning next, the mind admits that bed and iPlayer is the only option. With biscuits.

I was reading my book yesterday, aware of my fluffy outer layer, corroborating with my imagina4tion, pooling their resources for a ticket to good times. That part of my head which usually resists your meaning, other people's pictures and possibilities, today I take it on. Today I realise there's enough room in this brain for the two of us, and more, there's enough room for ideas ad infinitum, and so sweet they are too, they make a sundae with my own sweet ill juices. I'm cosy in all my coat layers, heading back to work prematurely, and I'm making a new little world. I'm reshaping my brain over here on the last but one seat on the drivers side on the top deck of the 73. I smile smugly around, I'm still ill, and I like it.

The downside, as one gets to work, back to rational life, well everything is so much harder. I seem to have both gone dyslexic and dropped several sets in maths and English I can't add up my two Cash v/s Card figures without the aid of Excel's dumb tools, I can't seem to transcribe telephone conversations onto Post-its, I cannot make hierarchical decisions with the Outlook flags and their shades of importance in red. But there's a cake downstairs I made, look how good my outfit is today, I really want to know how to curl my hair like yours, and can I please open the cardboard pinhole camera and give it a go? The screen hurts my face but life seems so alive right now.

Constellations

Starting is like joining the motorway; you see a gap in the traffic, and you just have to go for it and get in there. There's no stopping, no reversing, no options except ahead. There will never be an ideal time when the motorway is completely empty, and you can career on in any fashion you please. And faster. If you thought you were going fast enough, well you're not, go at least half as fast again. Also, you will never be master of it; it's dangerous, precarious, it waits to receive you, it allows you, it exists for you. Start, join, get involved, as they say.

I got home an hour ago after a thoroughly enjoyable morning of walking, swimming, a haircut, and a stroll around the often-too-lovely locale looking for posh stock cubes. The swimming was free by some trick of my out-of-date working tax credit still being loaded onto my membership card (a heavy repayment burden, but hey, free swimming!), and when things are free you both enjoy them more and expect less. I skipped to my haircut and am quite pleased with her skill and our chat, we talked figs, philosophies and visual intelligences, there was free cake as it was Thursday, and I found a kind of kin I wouldn't have predicted from the outset.

I got some satisfactory stock cubes and headed back, eating the scraps of rye bread piled with salmon and reduced avocado, as the French onions caramelised. There's a gap here, I felt. A constellation. Magical timing when things feel exciting and open and daunting and possible. Where everything's in line, you're in the car, you can see the sign for the motorway, you can see that there's going to be a chance to make things happen. It's one of those oft-parodied blue motorway signs, chunky white writing and smooth arrows directing you to The Zone, 300 yards. Oh, but hang on, I just need to watch my onions so they caramelise and don't burn, for a bit longer, so I'll just read Stylist and listen to Radio 3 raging war for a bit. Notice the non specified time of said 'bit'.

A little (?) later, the flow has ebbed, the potential got wet it seems, the baton floats in the foam, you didn't catch it then? Didn't keep it dry and honor it? Is the gap so small that it commands me? In fragile times, it seems so. The Zone is a delicate offering, sitting on a velvet cushion edged in gems, wafting around the room on a posh tray like a pile of not-for-you-madam Forerro Rocher. Look, people will point and Ladies will giggle, the Zone! How special if feels when it brushes past you, look how close it came, did you see how close it came to me, it was like this close!!

Not quite sure where this is going. Yes I am that's a lie. Where am I going I said last night, as he shoved me into a move I didn't recognise, Nowhere, he said, our feet hovered, shuffled. Yes I am, I countered, I'm going everywhere! Everywhere and nowhere. I was kind of still, not twirling it was true, but my feet were gentle and preparing to be everywhere, unfurling grossly like a pearl in a tea cup. So here I am again. I don't know where I'm going but I'm going to really try and give this time because not doing it is really choking me up. I'm going to honor it.

I hung on the side, quietly contented, a warmth of laughter still resonating. I drew to the door to see her familiar blond flash, watched it slope to the bar, and wondered whether to make contact. It seems it's now commonplace to be jealous of people who were not yet alive by one's first conscious favourite year of the eighties. Or any year of the eighties. He stood vaguely in front of me, all hair and t-shirts, reminding me of you again, again. Why are you everywhere lately? Everywhere and no-where.

Why was I so dry? Why did I have nothing to say to anyone? I bought this amazing Oulipo Compendium, I could've shared, Have you got anything exciting happening with the Design Festival, cool boy with compass? Instead I hung on the radiator cover, balancing achy femoral heads, feeling glad I was A Person again, not just A Job. I was warmed, like a bun under the grill on low, not yet toasty. Not yet ready, still quite an empty shell.

I hate these moments. You're so super aware of yourself that that awareness is all there is. The rest is on holiday. The rest is on the forbidden Cyprus beach holiday. On lunch. In the bath. Out in the back garden too far away to call. All there is is you being you. No references, no hung beliefs, just a naked idea, a framework less its weight, not yet bearing the guise of fact. I'm in hibernation, you can't shout, I've been internet shopping all afternoon (for money) and I've given my entire consideration to the screen. I'm not normally like this. I can be A Person. But right now I'm also slightly A Job.

I got the bus out of town to the chip shop.

How Necessary Is A Relationship?

How necessary is a relationship? We're looking at the proposal in a severely limited, Hollywood rom-com kind of way, an internet dating kind of way, a mortgages and dogs kind of way, a him and her kind of way, a lead and a follow kind of way, a black and white kind of way. Coupled up or singled out, that's the way I went in, and I came away with a new set of potentials. Not either or. Not binary. Not this or that. It expanded my thoughts on the matter for the first time in months.

I walked back from the recycling bins, noticing the detritus on high balconies, the leaves on the trees, and just felt like I had a lot to be self-satisfied with. I sat in the kitchen with delicious soup heated by the new perfect porridge pan, a warm bowl of romance for one, and it's not sad actually, it's fucking perfect and if anyone else was here it would be actually slightly ruined. It's no fun when they're not enjoying the film as much as you are. It actually ruins it for you. Romance is not dead, and it's not just for two. At all.

You're lucky you caught us, she said, as I checked the sign and clock through the glass. I pretended I hadn't done this pre-check, fully believing the 'open' sign, (unlike the confusing sign earlier, 'Sorry we are open'). We shut at five but we've just been chatting, she said, and I could see how eight hours together wasn't enough for this pair, after we'd talked moth prevention for over fifteen minutes I didn't want to leave either. Eight years of dry cleaning, seven years of sale rail, twenty minutes of moth tips, six part-eaten admissions, two amazing friends. I wondered whether they talked dry cleaning all day, because with them, I certainly could've.

They said on Wednesday night that good friendships, like theirs, seem to continue way back before you literally knew each other, and continue to some infinite point long after death. I watched them watching each other read, a glow from both. To see two people in respect and awe of each other is quite voyeuristic heaven. Contrast this with overseeing a romantic couple merging into one; bodies and styles locked, a street pair that fuse into ultimate dullness, two separates amalgamate into a waste. Fit them one body with four limbs, rolling down the street, two wholes rendered new useless.

How necessary is a relationship? Necessary enough to connect with other humans but not lose yourself. Necessary to support and nurture but not hold up or drag down. Necessary to inspire and spur on, help fill in the gaps, not fill them with selfish glue. The romance is all about you. Not yous. Relationship does not mean sex. They don't have a class called How Necessary Is Sex, but maybe they should. Relationships are free and all over the place, and you can make them in the dry cleaners at 5.29 on a Saturday. Or indeed take up the 84 year old's offer of the role as his part-time girlfriend.

The new ego

Oh how I worship at my own altar since I know that she loves me! I didn't shout, at the point in the evening last night where it may have fitted, my thought in her 'conversation', well Goethe's thought in my moment in her conversation. My veins coursed with potential, there's a point that fits, and, you, don't take it. Where does that energy go? They were talking about soap operas and Mike Leigh films and I didn't feel it was appropriate to shout out, didn't know if my point was just to prove I had a point, to prove to myself I had a memory (a memory! A good one!) without choice.

The point, is I didn't shout it. Again I didn't say something I had formed in my head, didn't do something I could minute-momentarily see as correct, something kept me back, restrained me. The ego. The ego is not always out for your best interests, naughty, naughty ego. I don't like this trick it's playing on me at the moment. An over-arching sense of self-awareness, a person-proofer, a social filter hiked up to a million. No, I won't press if they speak mostly French in Antwerp, ask whether you're familiar with soaking pulses overnight, say that you look totally melt-worthy in that suit. I'll step back into my up tight self and keep all these wonderings in, because they're not worth anything.

Isn't it much more fun when you're under slept and hung over, saying things you didn't know you thought, let alone meant? The ego grumbles under a cold thin bed sheet and too much gin, and you're free to be as loose as you please! What's that? I'm fun today? I know I'm fun today, I feel a bit mental to be honest, but isn't it also, fun! Maybe I've been sleeping too much lately, my devotion to good dincharya perhaps a little too meticulous. It is perhaps odd that I was up before the light outside my window went off. This is an extreme version. Perhaps I also tricked the ego this morning, peeled open the sheets to the first birdsong before it even stirred.

She was talking about the mind, intellect and ego. I was glad this was around two thousand years ago and not just a modern Freudian thing. It started on the course, seeing this weird outside version of myself, just another comparison of paper and pens to bring to the sharing table. It poured out from creativity into the everyday (if at all discernible). I'm standing in my own way! I shouted last night as I spun round a corner at high speed to bedtime castigating my quotation refrain. The thing is I don't know if I said it, or thought it, was it in, or out, did I stop it, or did it pour out riotously while the ego wasn't looking? More of this please.

Going Out again

I honestly tried to go out. Twice or so a year I feel strong enough, weird enough, foreign enough to head out the door alone on a traditional Night Out, without so much as a bag or coat for props. I ran to the bus stop with bulging dress pockets, hopefully countering the bulge I made all by myself from the dress's seams. The deadline was 10pm free entry. I merged into the crowds, counting bus stops in minutes, gambled to get off at this stop and run, rather than wait for the next one which might catch the lights. I ran the last bit, sloped into the door, and got told not only was it three pounds all night, but the gig I'm looking for isn't on.

Now, I've done this before. I've been had by the Digital Age and it's virtual 'flyers', unless it's in print it's not in, print, and facebook events are 'subject to change' but most normal people can track this on a smart phone. Not me with my 2002 Nokia. Shit, I scolded, storming back down the high street toward the bus stop I ran from, picturing the piles of old Guardian Guides on the kitchen table, willing traps for getting the wrong week. I walked a mile before I realised I'd been at the wrong place. A venue prefixed with a The seems to be boxed off into one giant venue of The Definite Article, non-important non-places, aka The Place To Be. Shit! I scolded again. It's not the gin and lychee I just drank, it's foolishness.

Once at The correct venue, I pleaded stupidity to save 5 quid. I'm not proud, in the face of a twenty-two year old girl with clip board and parody John Waters mustache. She wafted the clip board at me, I saw the line up. The band weren't on it. I felt STUPID. I topped up my Oyster and bought a street Pimms. Something made me double check my error; were this band not on tonight? I asked, they canceled, she deadpanned. Triple reasons for failure but I was glad to not just be an idiot. I added baklava to my Pimms and got the bus to find some dancing.