Day 160: Storm

I can feel myself getting depressed today. I can feel it coming on. Everything is slower, more difficult. I'm wading through sludge, there is black tar between objects. My thoughts are dragged downwards into negativity. I force myself to think something positive, and immediately a weight is tied to it and it plummets down through the clouds into frustration and despair. The flowers of thoughts begin to sprout and immediately curl into weeds and rot and die as ash.

It's tiring. Getting from one thing to the next takes so much effort. Nothing flows. There's no buoyancy, no accomplishment, no reward. I must drag myself by my fingernails into the next moment, and all that is waiting is the need to drag myself again to the moment after that.

My soul has no poetry. Words are leaden and crusty and weak.

So I do what has to be done. I write long lists of reasons to be grateful. I shower, put on clean clothes. I do three loads of washing, clothes and towels and sheets. Drink water. Eat food. Walk around the houses as the sun goes down.

And I don't ask too much of myself, I accept that when I'm like this I can only get a basic post up on my blog.

It's so disheartening being like this, falling into this mindset every couple of weeks, every week.

But what does arguing with reality get me? Nowhere. Better to stay completely still, be very calm, do the things that help even though they don't feel like it, avoid the things that make it worse though they whisper of momentary relief.

Stay still. Accept this. Let the storm within me bluster, rage, and pass.

Day 159: Piddling

Piddling rainslicked snarl of a night, cruel bar shift dragging on, bin juice on hands, smeared juice on jeans, mind roiling with the beginnings of a cold. Finally home to Earl Grey steaming and Chopin soaring and desk and keyboard aflame in whirring darkness.

I notice these things. I feel the moisture in the cool night air. The streetlamps casting pools of light upon the wet ground. The pressure of my gluteal muscles against the chair. Debussy over my television’s cheap inbuilt speakers. The clutter around this attic bedroom.

I am here. I am in here. In flesh and thought and blood. I’m skeleton and toes and regrets and heartbeats, I’m a failing flickering memory of a dream.

OK, that’s all I got. That’s all the words that are inside me on this cruel coiling October night. That’s good. Well done, Robbie. Well done for saying some words. I’ve been doing this blog for ages now. I’m not ever going to stop. I have no idea where it’s going. It’s going somewhere though. It’s a toboggan ride at midnight, only steering round a tree at a time. That’s as it should be.

Sleep now. Off tomorrow and there are towels to be washed and a shower to be scrubbed and bed sheets to be changed and foodstuffs to be purchased. Will the thrills of adult life never end?

Day 158: Gratitude

Here are some reasons for me to be grateful, because it always pays to train your mind into recognising what’s great in your life. Going down to the soil of the brain and carving little plots and filling each one with a seed of gratitude. 

• I’ve got money in my bank account
• I can afford a trip down to London to see my cousin's newborn daughter in October
• I can afford a long weekend to Berlin with Fran in November
• I can afford a fixed 50 lens for my camera
• I ate three pains au chocolat for breakfast this morning
• I drank lots of strong black coffee
• I’ve been able to lie in bed for hours and play Super Mario Bros. 3 on my Switch, which has been fantastic
• I’ve got a roof over my head
• I’ve got two lungs, two kidneys, a heart, digestive tract, liver (bombarded with less poison these days)
• I’ve still got some hair left on my head, and lots on my face
• Got ten fingers, and ten toes
• Got this sweet mechanical keyboard, and this gaming mouse with EXTRA BUTTONS
• No work for the entire rest of the day
• There’s a chill to the air outside but these sturdy walls keep me warm
• Been listening to, and appreciating, classical music, which appreciation of music I was not able to do when I was in the depths of depression, it was all just harsh noise, meaningless, cold, cruel, empty
• I’ve kept this blog up for 158 days, I don’t think about it now, it’s just what I do, and it’s often only half an hour at the end of the day, but I’m still doing that, turning up, over and over, even for a short time, and that must be helping to slowly build a sense of responsibility and dedication and willpower and pride inside me, even if at glacial speed. Glaciers can be powerful forces, they crush and smoosh everything in their paths. So keep turning up, buddy-roo, keep putting little snowflakes, unique, glittering, some beautiful in their symmetry, some wonky and broken - keep putting them one on top of the other until there is an unstoppable wall of ice moving forwards
• The low pale light gleaming in through the skylight window hitting the wall turning the blacks of the poster there to silver and gold
• Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians playing on Youtube
• Stompy steel-toe-capped boots that Steve bought me for my man work with him, now to be reappropriated as excellent winter/delivery-day boots for many months to come
• I’ve got plenty of clothes. I mean, I’ve got hardly any clothes compared to many of my friends, but I’ve got way more clothes than lots of people on this planet, which is the only planet we know of that has any people on at all, and there are an infinitude of empty atoms twirling in the cosmic void that possess no clothes at all, so I think on balance I’m up
• And hey, anyway, the fashion industry is now the second worst polluter in the world, after only the oil industry, due mostly to the trend of recent decades towards disposable fashion, buying outfits for a tenner made in Bangladesh by basically slave labour, then chucking the outfits away after a month and buying new ones, because you’ve been manipulated by high street retailers who want all your money and tell you lies and make you feel worthless to trick you into handing it over. So it’s a good thing I’ve got three-year-old shirts and stretched t-shirts and jeans with the knees all worn down, is what I’m saying. Everything you dislike about yourself is something great, seen from another angle
• I’m grateful that Fran is in my bed not commenting on how loud my EXCELLENT mechanical keyboard is as I clatter the keys down one after the other after the other - but I probably shouldn’t push it too far, by which I mean I'm going now, goodnight!

Day 157: Blancmanging

The sky is a fiery black phantom; silver clouds shiver across aphotic night. Foul-limbed birds slumber in crooks of trees. Cars howl down murky lanes. Street sweepers trudge the crunching gravel. I limp doorward, synapses stuttering from onset migraine, nauseated, senses overloaded, concepts jostling and vomiting up into consciousness, mind a fetid roiling marshland, vision blancmanging, but shift ended and heading for home.

Day off tomorrow. Day off. Blessed day off. Going to stay in bed. Play my Switch. Read Naomi Klein. Pour over New York Times. Get up eventually just to make coffee, walk to the shop for croissants in grubby clothes. Wait around for Fran and then order takeaway and watch noisy television in bed. Get takeaway on the covers. Put takeaway leftovers aside for later. Do glorious elastic excessive nothing, and nothing, and more of nothing, and lie in tangled blanket lair.

But first: sleep.

Day 156: Bollard

Sat on a cold stone bollard outside the expo centre, under a brooding sky, waiting for the go-ahead to start packing down the display. John in the cab of the van checking whether his Ryder Cup bets have come through. Steve wandering in his cut-off shorts. His father off on a reccy somewhere. A dark bird flapping against the wind. Cords tied to metal pipes snapping in the breeze. Concrete and rusted iron girders. Splintering wood. The sounds of private jets taxiing on the runway. Transits and artics snaking into the distance ahead and behind. Marching mashed potato clouds clumped one against the other. Sombre land, utilitarian, sad.

…

Echoey hall emptying of use. Clatter of dropped boards, metal plates. Plastic Coke bottles kicked into aisles. Workmen in hi-vis carrying bits of stands in twos, threes. Clank of ladders. Men in groups, strolling. Other men by themselves, leant on pallets, hunched on the floor, bent over their phones. The scriiitch of duct tape pulled from the roll. Gathering darkness outside the loading bay doors. The melancholy of evenings, of eternal afterwards - after weekends, after Christmases, after all excitement and action completed, the central illusion abandoned - the illusion that the event would save you, would show you something you don’t already know, would provide the glamour and sense of belonging that you have for all of your life lacked. But there is only this. Ripping up cheap carpet and flinging spent screws to the ground. Vinyl stickers torn from their displays. Vans loaded, detritus abandoned, and workmen driving off into dusk without once looking back.

Day 155: Bombling

Jesus F Christ on a kayak, am I tired? I am tired. That was rhetorical. I am really tired. I have been working for 11 straight days now, long bar shifts and days building trade displays with Steve. I’m working with Steve again tomorrow, and then I’m working a close on the bar on Monday, and then after that I finally have a goddamned day off. Except I’ll be doing this blog of course, which I have to do every day.

Want to. The blog I want to do every day. I don’t have to. I chose this. It’s good. It’s all good. I signed up to help Steve. I literally signed a contract to work in the bar. And I guess I sign something of a tacit agreement every day to stay alive by… well… staying alive.

I could just die. We can always do that. But every day that we don’t is another day of saying, you know, I choose this. Whatever this is, I choose it over nothing at all, which is the only serious choice I ever get. Well, that and the… I dunno. I was going to make a joke about some meaningless decision and pretend it was important. Gareth Gates vs Will Young. I dunno. Just invent a joke that you enjoy and tell it to yourself there. That’ll do.

I can’t even… I don’t even… What is… what? I can’t see straight. The monitor is bombling around in front of my face.

Bugger this for a game of five-a-side hopscotch, I’m off to bed. Seven hours before I need to be up to get ready for work with Steve.

Waaah waaah waaah. I chose this. But I’m still going to cry about it. Waaah.

Day 154: Interstices

Walking to a coffee shop before work, the September sun low in the sky, the sun shining through leaves that are turning red and bronze in the air that is empty and infused with the first brittleness of an autumn reaching out its clawed hands. The leaves cast complex shadows that dapple across the brick facades of the university buildings; beneath the buildings is a lattice of shadow on the ground stretched through an iron walkway's open interstices. Throngs of students jostle and wait. One brown leaf on the ground, two more, mushed under foot. A beggar crumpled against the wall of an express supermarket. Chinese students with face masks clenched over mouths.

In the coffee shop the lamplight is warm. The customers wear olive green and navy and black. They talk, type on laptops, cradle their phones. Coffee cups clatter. The din of conversation is pleasant. A group of female students in a cloud of cloying perfume debate about boys in their lectures, about who doesn't do the washing up in their houses, about how to edit Bitmoji avatars. The lampshades are opulent. The girders are polished metal. The tabletops worn varnished teak.

From the table of perfumed students, incongruously: "Is any of this real? Are we living in a dream world?"

...

Work is the screaming maw of an insatiable beast. All commotion. All noise. Swallowed for hours into the dark, not knowing which way is up, struggling to breathe.

On my break I pass another homeless man on my way to the shop. He is sat with his legs out, against the wall, shuffling this way and that. He is trying to get his behind onto a thin strip of cardboard, warmer (moderately) than the cold stone of the ground. The cardboard strip is so small. He's trying to find the placement that causes the least pain. Every option causes some pain.

I think about him as I walk on, and returning I offer him one of my cookies. He nods. I open the packet and hand him two. He tucks them into an inner fleece pocket. I don't know what to say so I leave.

The ground is hard. It is cold. The leaves are falling and they are red and bronze and brown.

Everything you have ever seen is made of universe. All matter is patterns moving at speed.

Know this. Sense this. Walk on.