Can it, hang it off of a tree, a neck, a bauble, both are actions, nothing more, well maybe one is definitely more…
I can’t give in. I can’t give up. I have to know in my gut that these feelings I fend off on a daily basis are not a forever relationship but I wish their ship would sail or sink or drink itself to death cos I’m pedestrian bored of thinking about death and investing time in running away from the intrusion of thoughts that make me small, make me call out in the shower to my spirit family to calm me, balm me with tiger till this Leo is soundly sated.
It often comes to me in the shower, rhymes and crimes I can commit myself to that will ease the pain of existence and so a few days ago I wondered about intrusive thoughts and where they come from and how on some level they must come from me, from I, from self but self is part of a bigger sphere that is part of all so… room in ate and converse ate…they are lingerers, malingerers passed down from ancestor, produced from trauma and so on some level, this awareness helps, yelp of dog when human stands on paw, I am raw and so I do the same and I can climb my wall out of well of doubt, relax pout and walk out when inside time overwhelms…
My point is always the same, what I make of it, what I make out of it…
These are my thoughts, intrusive and otherwise on Wednesday the 4th of October 2023 at 7.11pm
I have not the energy to capitalise and apostrophise and place the symbols where the English language dictates them to be.
sometimes they capitalise themselves, they know what country they are in and if they’re meant to be small or thin or fat or lack of food in belly.
I met with a man today. he asked me questions about my situation. my health. mental or otherwise. he shared truths he should not have if a supervisor were listening but only our smart devices were.
I give you half a story today cos I’m fucked. if Scotland is great for one thing, it’s containing humans who express their truth without any fuckin filter.
I hate a fuckin filter.
that said, I’ve been so low I’ve even watched the kardashians!! my need for escape so great, it reminds me of the time when I was about 16 and I got sucked into ‘in bed with that woman who attaches her name to some great tunes but whom I don’t like cos she seems like a bit of a prick who is all about ego and nothing more…’
in amongst it all I wrote some other lines, watched people on tv snorting lines and got caught up in lines of parents picking their weans up from school…
I can’t remember the rest and now I need a rest so I’ll escape into something much better and beautifully and perfectly irreverent and real-ish before bed; schitts creek…
The thoughts, the thoughts, the thoughts. They poke out of the poke of sweets in my pocket. They seek an expression. Art school feels over yet there are more than three months left to calendar cross off. I write. I’ve always done this, well, always is a long time, but for as long as I can remember as this being I currently am. Words are the entity that help me to uncross my carrier fingers when my pigeon has gone to the dogs, torn apart with ceremony the human cannot always detect.
I think with changing detection of what comes next, not just tomorrow but next next. When my body knows it is time for the soul to vacate it. I think this way because I see my Mum in pain so real, so detectable, vocal and unmanageable that I resent others walking by, laughing at things they find funny because they have not yet been touched by these depths. Such places can teach, can be poetic in some regard. Others see I am pained through such experience and offer words that they mean as a comfort. A casserole dish filled with their feelings of silent disquietude that sate them in their dissonance.
They do not sate me. Perhaps I still seek in ways that do not allow me to find the hiding gems but the human is resolved to condition and thus I sit with it till I cannot any longer.
I pause. Turn the drying clothes around so the heat might find its way to the damp fibres seeking the solution of warmth. I think of my Mum in her hospital bed, unable to sit up straight, to bear the weight of her own body, her legs and feet looking like a war zone infected with grief and anguish that is eating at her body. Her skin stretched so tightly over her deformed bones that do not look like they could ever be attached to a working human machine. Time is the illusion that kills, pills swallowed each and every day that barely make an impact. Without opiates, what would things look like. A prescription that is not collected.
I notice the veins in my hands. Just like hers. They are the exact same size and I remember so vividly as a child, sitting on her knee, loving nothing more than softly pushing those veins with my small fingers, thinking how rich they were, these hands, a landscape of stories, strong and powerful but with a delicateness that was so pure, so determined and may frighten easily but would always stay the course. A tornado could blow through but my Mums hands would still be holding onto her own pillar of strength, burdened but never beaten. Never. Beaten.
I recall, earlier today when the doctor who seemed so far removed from the working-class roots of our family, spoke in her posh, pronounced tones and stated much that was obvious, my Mum strained to hear and so thrust her upper body forward in a bid to understand the pedestrian words she uttered. The recollection of the body language gives me hope now. That strength I have borne witness to for more than four decades is still intact. But days ago, I asked my Mum if she was ready to give up. She looked at me as only a mother can look at a child and I knew instantly what the answer was. My Mum has never backed down from any battle life has thrown at her. At 86 years old, she is not for changing.
Is it intense cos all the people that occupy the space are intense?
Maybe…
I mean, not all of them are intense but artistry goes hand in hand with intensity, doesn’t it?
Je sais pas, je sais seule qoui je sais et je crois…
So what do I? Crois that is… I do believe I am learning. At the start of fourth year I wished I could go into first year instead cos I could do it all differently now. I know more, about myself, about the machinations of art school, about human dynamics but I can’t go back, I can only go forward, reverse is for cars and moonwalkers and I am neither, as much as I might try to be so.
They talk in riddles that don’t make sense to me. Their speak is not the seek I wish to meet with my ears open. I understand through feeling more than anything. You suggest I reread the thing that I read and then responded to because you deem my response to be dissatisfactory to you. You are sometimes a pedestrian walking down a street and your response to my response is pedestrian to me but I don’t say that to you directly as what good would it do, yet it obviously finds me frustrated as I take to here to release. Triggered and I am hippy too. I felt cool experiencing that song and video for the first time, Morcheeba, channel 4 probably in the late 90s as my teenage years expired. Do I return to this memory to paint comfort colours on the canvas inside my head…
Three dots but are they asking to be joined at some point. The sharpest parts of the pyramids knew, they align with planetary bodies at certain… points. I know what makes sense to me but I can’t always explain it and don’t you think that frustrates me at times. I need help to, don’t we all or do we? Am I too curious, surely that cannot be, I can be guilty of asking the wrong questions but surely curiosity is such an essential part of this act of being human, and do I, act? Yolanda seemed to think I was good at it and I am. Pretending. Let’s pretend. It’s fun, being a kid and pretending I am not that kid but something different, something more, something that exists in a home so full of love and nothing else, there was a lot of love in my home but there was great tension too, the 80’s, working class, glare of Thatcher with her Saurons eye staring down the Scottish contingent, yeh haven’t I told this story before, come on Neil Kinnock, let me buy you a drink, you were definitely the goodie to Maggies baddie embodiment of a thing that even the devil was shocked by. How many can relate, we play in order to create a space that feels safe for us to exist in, that’s what I did and what I still do at times, call me Lucy Jordan, hopefully before she got taken away by the white coats.
I don’t know who Marjory Daw is but she once saw the sea.
And that sea stood for change.
The thing I want to taste on the skin of my tongue. I want embrace. I want relief. I want escape. I want to watch a film with my Dad. I want some sort of experience that makes me feel comfortable about this overwhelming sense of discomfort that crept into my life a few days ago. I have to stop myself from berating myself when I see self in mirror. That I am not disgusting. That I do not need to shave all of my hair off. That I do not need to dye it as I used to time after time after time in a bid to make myself feel different. I changed the aesthetic on the outside but it was the beast inside I wished to sate as I do now. I regret none of it. I loved my grey dread like mane before the tone became a trend for the masses. My lavender punches of punk and multicoloured shapes that made me feel deeply self conscious on trains and buses as people passed silent judgement and others took a vocal approach. I was frightened but I did it anyway.
Nowadays though.
I sometimes feel like the boy who dragged himself out of the well, and once out, has no idea what to do with himself. In some ways, I am certain it is a byproduct of living through 2020 and 2021 and the somewhat precarious collective energy that lingers behind the masks of the many but ultimately I am tired of getting in my own way. I have had a period of mostly not doing so, so to begin the new year in this way is frustrating. Living alone does not always help. I have no immediate human available to bounce off of. I am in the process of changing that by reciting a manifestation I wrote three times every day; one in which I continue my act of gratitude for my life and its many experiences that, as of late, has certainly been punctuated with the spirit of transmutation.
I am too hard on myself. I know it. Many have stated it. I am a gregarious fucker who craves solitude sometimes. My ex called me fickle on more than one occasion and over the last few months I have wondered if he unwittingly meant it as a judgment. I am mercurial and can change my mind very easily and often do not know why I have. I am trying to judge myself less and remind myself that it is ok. To be naked. To have a body. To have genitalia. To have immundus thoughts. To long. To hope. To judge others. It is all ok. I am a spiritual being having a human experience and as Thich Nhat Hanh reminds me in his book, Fear: ‘I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death.’
But.
The nature of living alone and spending so much time alone or not being completely authentic when in company is the thing that draws me down. I am sure I am not the only person who feels that they miss people. Not just because of how we have lived over the last two or so years. Fear mixed in with over thinking, salted with behaviour that berates and belittles the self keeping it small is a combination that tastes good to no one. I tire of text messages, I tire of communicating through a dead machine I hold in my hand. I want the organic. I want to see veins in arms move with motion, legs and limbs shift in seats as bodies connected to ears and skeletons smeared with flesh and skin take in what I might say in response to other and others.
Marjory Daw saw the sea and it spoke to her of change. Today, in this moment, I want to do as she did.
If social media didn’t exist people would talk on the phone more. The way we used to twenty years ago. Not the smart fucker, the one attached to the wire and the wall. We would meet in the pub and arrange it hours ahead of time cos last minute textual devices are still dead. Communication is sacred, the sort that happens in real life, face to face, body near body, on dog walks I talk to Dave, he owns a face I can see in real time and I won’t txt him tomorrow to see if he’s fine. I miss something I s’pose. I’m craving, longing, yearning. Now is not the being I wish it were. I don’t want to feel this lonely but what the EMF is loneliness cos one I call self has felt this antithesis of wealth when in company.
I didn’t know that for a long time but this knowledge has begun to emerge more and more. I often feel compelled to make art. Back in May after collaborating with another creative, he described me as being an intuitive artist and it really felt like he’d given me a piece of the puzzle as to the why of the why of the why that I am often searching for.
Why do I need the why / maybe certain whys do not need to be recovered from the box stored in Pandora’s loft. She said she’d keep it there for me and it is the size and depth of an ocean so why do I crave each why I ever come across to be a beast, a yeast infection or a priest who wants to kiss me again unlike the order he was ordained into. Why, for want of a better word can I not simply accept that a man walked down the street wearing a yellow jumper.
Devil has an Adams apple and an advocate and she is Libran and understands my want to unwrap the word beginning with W. She says it aloud and places not, post. Says it’s ok, it’s all ok. If I want, I can get but sometimes consequence is salting the soup therefore it really, simply, all comes back to choice. If I make a choice to understand the reasons of why then that choice belongs to me and will reveal something to me, it may not be the thing I sought but I can be sated and satisfied if I remove myself from the iron grip of expectation.
They being me, not a part of me, all of me that believed in not, in can’t, in incapable, in worthless.
But
Through the through I found all of me did not believe this to be true, that some part of me felt different, some part of me still believed in the opposite of not, in can, in capable, in worth of self, self that is me, is I and the barriers I had put in place began to dissolve and resolve ushered in a new feeling that ceiling was not out of reach, peach could be licked, pen could be clicked to ignite the writing of a new story that I could sign all of my names to.
Art me 