Friday 8 June 2012

Get down from that cross, we could use the wood



My head was spinning slowly and there was the dim beginning of physical pain, just about everywhere. I decided to go out for a walk about, fill the time creatively with something, maybe take photographs and avoid the weather. Soon I was wandering on a stony, muddy beach but the dimmed pain was getting stronger and I felt panicky, coming up like a tropical storm on the horizon. Quivering as if in anti-gravity boots I stumbled, there was a warm flush, physical pain gives way to physical weakness. I have been in a car crash, it happened a few days ago but it was real, only now, much later am I beginning to feel the shock. Is that me? So desensitised, so uncoupled from feeling that I take a punch like a dinosaur. The punch is landed, the blow presses the flesh and triggers the nerves but the scream and electricity and pain travels so slowly from the source on the long and winding distance to the centre a huge portion of time elapses before anything registers. How can that be? I conclude that I'm wired up in a way that lends it's self towards the dysfunctional, perhaps it's a gift. It may have been drugs or witnessed family trauma, years of religion and cod philosophy, or being nurtured in the best working class hopelessly emotionally stunted traditions, maybe read too few or the wrong books, now I'm lost inside myself.  

Naturally I contemplated some kind of inner suicide, a easy way to run away that, in the plan, always has some pleasurable activity factored in there as a prelude to the final awful ending. A pleasant golden frame into which the unspeakable act is conveniently placed. These are generally complex, warm and foreign activities, like a holiday but with an end that's the end. They've been rolled around and developed over years, thumbed like some business contingency plan written when there was a staff surplus and a big box had to be ticked. They follow the “Star is Born” model (the black and white version) and promise the dreamer a suitable and almost dignified conclusion, “shaking off futility or just punishing somebody”, so that's about it for that. The experience is like visiting a parking lot but not being able to find your car so you have to shuffle to the exit and rely on public transport or make a quick phone call to be rescued by a family member. It's an embarrassing audition and rehearsal sequence that will not lead to a performance but the script remains familiar and well thumbed over before it's finally filed away.

Once I'd stopped trembling from the most likely age related stumble I felt better, strangely the sun came out and I started taking badly composed flimsy photographs and fiddling with the phone. It was a useful distraction but I still felt that illicit urge to run, like I was walking around with a target across my chest. I responded as per normal, turned my back on sunny highways and ideal quiet airports and went home. I self harmed with a packet of plain crisps in the kitchen, they seemed extra oily and greasy. This helped my inner loathing just a bit. Then I flopped, the couch conveniently caught me.

I don't know where stuff comes from. Perhaps I should make honest lists or fill notebooks. Here I am and I've no idea where I'm going. Life's directions has become caught up in flotsam and jetsam theories and methodology. Like yellow bath ducks or ping pong balls thrown onto the tides and now circulating around the globe, probably in the Pacific Ocean by now.

No comments:

Post a Comment