Day 170: Solemn

Home from a quiet Sunday close, a night like any other, unremarkable, routine, dull. In my room now listening to chillhop, my room a tiny speck of blazing light on the shores of the vast dark cosmos, my computer monitor bleeding coruscating light, the lo-fi vibes drifting gently, my desk cluttered, my clothes scattered, the darkest dark waves outside the window. One planet alone, winking into nothing. Are there other souls out there on other planets, in other realities, sat mushed against rainslicked windows, gazing out, dreaming of more?

This is the kind of evening that used to be made for whisky. Thick rimmed tumbler, scolding pleasure, the biting amber flames warming all the way down. The romance, the nostalgia, the promise of more than could ever be delivered. And it never was delivered, that sadness when you felt you had peaked and the wave had crashed back and you had never quite got there. But in that moment, with the spirit flowing, the bottle still weighty, the edges softly rounded, you could have sworn there, just for an instant, that you were close, that for a heartbeat you'd been running parallel, that your stream was beside the universal, that you could have reached out your hand and touched eternity. But now it was over and you were still corporeal and your goopy human bones were aching with the beginnings of hangover, and there was nothing to be felt but soil and matter and silt. And on, to the next time.

None of that tonight. Mug of black tea and posting on my blog (though I don't feel like it, though the words aren't alive like I want them to be), and then sober sleep ready for the next day. No making a beast of myself to forget the pain of being a man. Just working solemnly, quietly, to make being a man a touch less painful.

By the smallest of degrees I think it is working.

Day 91: Dive bars

3am and 20 degrees, slowly broiling in this bedroom at the top of the house. Both Velux windows are thrown wide, but the thick night air brings no respite from the heat. Home from a late close, understaffed, the kind of shift you set your jaw, stop hoping, stop hating, just grind it out. Time feels like it won't go but it will go, you know it will, you've done this before, just put your head down and watch it pass. Another tray of glasses. Another. Another. Never mind that you're too old for all this, that they pay you nothing, that you're bored to death. Do the tray of glasses. Do them the best you can. And another. And one after that. Suffering is a teacher, you just have to be willing to learn.

Day staff are still drinking in the beer garden, call and joke when you go to collect glasses. They're inside something and want you to enter as well. But you're on the outside, tired, stressed, and you can only reply in monosyllables, turn your body from them, smile awkwardly, walk away. But then come closing they rise and scurry back and forth with tables and chairs, ashtrays and glasses, get it all cleared in minutes, good little worker ants. They go right on scurrying, when there are no more tables they go for you, lift you, by arms and legs, try to carry you off to the next bar. You let them take you halfway down the square. They chant your name, shout that they love you, then hurry away into the night. You watch them go. They're so young. Off swaying into dive bars, stouts and whiskies, bad karaoke, then off down streets and alleys, through moonlit parks, spliffs on hills as the sun comes up. Then bed until the evening, then a bar shift and start again.

That was me not long ago, still desperately searching for a glimmer of the beauty in the nighttime madness, for peace and meaning at 4am.

Now I'm content to sit alone and tap out these words, then do my teeth, do my stretches, and get up tomorrow for it all again.

Day 36: Taking stock

I've been feeling down on myself today -- will there ever be a day when I'm not? -- so I think I should just pause right here and take stock.

I've been sober for 36 days. That's incredible. Not a drop of alcohol. I've not had anything to drink in all that time. I've saved myself from so many expensive nights out, so many wretched hangovers, from groggy days wasted in bed drowning in self-loathing getting nothing done and then as the light fades popping the lids off a few chilled bottles to get over that dripping sadness, thus setting in motion the whole process once again.

But no. Instead I've felt all the negative feelings -- and I've felt them a lot -- and just forced myself to carry on through them. And slowly, I think, I've begun to change the habits of over half a lifetime.

And I've been blogging daily for 36 days. Sometimes I've felt like I was flying, and felt touches of the enthusiasm and excitement that I used to feel for writing, and I've produced pieces that I've loved. Most days I've had to struggle to force something out, and it's not been great, but I've done it, every day, and I think I'm getting better at accepting that and moving on. And not putting all my sense of self in the work, of letting whatever is in my brain come out, and knowing that sometimes it'll be nothing, occasionally it'll be something. This is still such a struggle for me, but it's getting easier. I know it is.

And regardless of results, I've come and done the work every single day. I saw Margaret Atwood on Twitter recently replying to a woman saying she'd wanted to be a writer for 49 years and still wasn't one. Margaret Atwood said this: "If you are writing things you are a writer."

For a long time I wasn't writing things. Now I am writing things. They're not all great. But I am proud of every one.

Anyway, I have a girlfriend on my futon waiting patiently for me to finish this so we can watch trash TV together and eat orange chocolate and get an early night, so no offence, but I'm going to go do that instead of this.

I'm off to London all of tomorrow to watch a live performance of a comedy podcast, so I'll probably just do another short update on the bus home.

But I will do it. And I'll be proud.

Day 32: How to gain mainstream appeal

In an effort to make my work more desirable to publications such as Buzzfeed and LadBible, I have written a list detailing the fifteen habits shared by all bartenders. Everyone knows a bartender, or was him-or-herself a bartender, or is still a bartender, stuck in an endless cycle of depression and self-loathing and alcoholism. So here, without further ado, are fifteen common behaviours that I've personally witnessed in bartenders the world over:

1. Holding up an attached barrel in the cellar, giving it a shake, and saying, "I reckon there's about another three pints left in that," despite no one having asked how many pints there were left in that.
2. Forgetting that the distance across the bar top is not actually soundproofed in any way, and discussing the intimate details of sex lives and bodily functions while preparing a margarita as if the customer a mere foot away was not able to hear every word said.
3. Opening bottles with a bar blade gripped in a style that is to regularly-held bar blades what the sideways gangster pistol is to just holding a gun the normal way, yet with a nonchalance that suggests the bartender has no idea they're doing anything to draw attention to themselves, and certainly didn't practise popping off bottle tops using this grip every day for the first six months of having the job.
4. Becoming instantly critical when leaving the home bar and going to an away bar on a rare night off. "Christ, that absolute amateur never even offered me a glass with my Rochefort 10, and when I asked for one he gave me, get this, a Stella glass! Harrfff harrfff harrfff," is what the bartender with the night off is custom-bound to say.
5. Laughing disdainfully at the mangled ways customers pronounce esoteric product names, because the idea of someone having, say, a full-time job, or a family, and not spending every moment of every day surrounded by beers and spirits learning what they're all called is, to the bartender, something too tragic to comprehend.
6. Putting the word "ware" on the end of the word "glass" to produce the phrase "glassware", out of a mistaken assumption that referring to glasses as "glassware" will trick anyone overhearing into believing bartending is serious profession. It won't, and it isn't.
7. Walking home at 2am and sucking the nutrients from the linings of discarded crisp packets found lying in the street because minimum wage is in fact not enough of a wage to live off.
8. Uploading flaming cocktail pics to Instagram late at night, alone in bed, in the hopes of attracting a regram from a famous bartender in the field, thus validating the bartender's many poor life choices up to this point.
9. Going for a sit-down wee mid-shift because pretending to wipe the back bar for an eighth time would surely attract the attention of the duty manager, so going into a cubicle and locking the door and pulling out the trusty phone, having a cheeky peruse, and seeing a notification of a new comment on last night's flaming zombie pic from Derek Nugglins. A beat, then a double take. What! The Derek Nugglins who can stir down six negronis in ten seconds? The one and only Derek Nugglins who was in '08 part of the Perfect-Serve Seven who turned a raw-fish fiasco on Mad Friday into the biggest Christmas sushi event the North had ever seen? The same Derek Nugglins who the bartender's own bible, the discerning Difford's Guide, named "Best at Banging on the Speed Rail in Time to the Killer's Mr Brightside while Pumping His Fist in the Air to Attract Swooning Middle-aged Women" three years in a row? Yes, it's really him. The comment on the screen, lit by the flickering toilet bulb, simply reads: "We have been watching you. We are pleased. Be at the ice machine at 0600 hours if you believe you are ready."
10. Going to the ice machine the next morning, a coffee clutched groggily in hand, to find no one there. Waiting fifteen minutes with a rising sense of self-doubt, before finally kicking the metal panel in frustration -- and watching as, with a mechanical groan and a hiss of escaping gas, a small door swings slowly open on the back of the large, whirring machine. Looking around, seeing the usually busy pub eerily empty, hearing only the sounds of the cleaner off somewhere buffing the tiled floor, and so with a hard swallow crouching and pushing through the waiting door.
11. Crawling down the clammy, moss-covered passageway onto which the door opened, feeling a lump in the throat, reaching out on the twisting downward path to grasp at jagged, cartilage-like protrusions jutting from the earthen walls, slipping occasionally in pools of clinging mucous, until finally, with a rush of fetid air, finding the tunnel give out onto a dark chamber lit only with the lambent flames of a ring of torches rising from the spongy ground.
12. Hearing a chilling voice mutter, "Welcome, my child," as a cloaked figure steps into the dancing pool of light, whereupon a thick, hessian hood is thrown back and the face of Derek Nugglins arranges itself into focus, but slowly, as if the light itself was giving the features form, and in the same place moments ago there would have been nothing save a thick, dripping blackness.
13. Listening to the voice -- a shrewd, serpentine voice, seeming to not arrive through the ears but grow instantly in the mind -- continue: "We have watched you for many years. You felt alone and yet you were not. Our eyes eternally have looked upon the dark places in which you slept. We saw your dreams. We caressed your thoughts. And now we sense that you are ready."
14. Turning, as if in slow motion, to find the entrance to the chamber has sealed itself shut with a squelching, organic slurp, feeling a surge of breathy wind, turning back now suddenly inches from the body of Nugglins -- a body now hunched, jerking spasmodically. Seeing the man's cloak flung back and a dark shape rising, rising, unfurling itself into the heights of the cavern, a towering, chitinous thing, flocculent and suppurating and horrific, insectoid arms scratching spectrally against a tumescent belly pocked with matted fur. "Witness my true form!" the Nugglins cries. "Witness and join our cause. For though powerful, I am but the gatekeeper. This great hall sits directly below what you call your bar. For it, and all bars in the land, are built upon the remains of temples constructed in aeons past by my kind in worship of the Ancient One we call in the old tongue Caa'Lyng. He slumbers yet, but with your help he will awaken. Each day more of the young and lost of your species join our ranks. You may recognise these acolytes by their long beards, haggard eyes, by the arcane symbols tattooed across their skin. Just as I serve my lord Caa'Lyng, their role is to serve the sacrificial caste, the ones above who grow round of waist and florid of cheek and simple of mind, their brains rotting from devil liquor. You will tend this flock, help our human lambs fatten themselves and lose motor function to the point where the old tongue flows from their lips and they begin to chant the summoning ritual: 'Du Ydu Caa'Lyng', over and over, building in crescendo to the final prophesied night of Baa'Nk Hoh-Lii-Day when the Ancient One will rise and engulf the world in a purifying flame of blood and semen and cheap mainstream lager. So make your choice, mortal: join us and be reborn as one with the swarm, or turn away and be immolated with the rest of your puny kind..."
15. Sighing when a customer orders a Guinness as the last drink of their round. So annoying!

Day 31: A new plan, again, again

Well I feel pretty gunky for sharing all that personal stuff yesterday, but what can you do? You have to do it. There's no point writing if you're not going to be honest.

Got an abomination of a headache chiseling into my cranium, and work at 5, have to go be a Mr Manager and make someone who ain't me a whole load of money. But there are a few hours now that, providing Mike doesn't message asking me to play Diablo, which'll obviously take priority, but otherwise there are a few hours now in which to do nothing but sit here and write.

Ah, hey, you know what? Feel grateful for the little things, and a little thing I feel grateful for right now is being able to type on this keyboard. Have I told you about this keyboard? Oh, boy.

It's a mechanical keyboard, which means... I can't remember what it means. Something about how each key has its own mechanism underneath it, rather than most keyboards these days which only have a... umm... there's a word for it. Uhh. Not "film". Like... viscous? Plant matter? Membrane! Yes. Regular keyboards have a rubber membrane under the keys that registers... I don't know how it works. I have no idea what I'm talking about. But mechanical keyboards are all clacky and clunky and solid and just utterly gorgeous to type on.

And this one here has got... Right, a lot of mechanical keyboards are marketed to gamers, because they register more simultaneous key presses and you can multi-tap keys quicker, vital in fast-paced shooters or strategy games... So most mechanical keyboards cost upwards of £100 and have LED lights underneath the keys that can be programmed to flash in a multitude of colours in garish, gauche displays, because obviously that'll bring the ladies flocking, Kevin, sat alone in your bedroom pumping an 80s disco out of your computer peripheral as you fight teenagers over the internet in Fortnite.

Dunno why I'm nerd-shaming, actually. Whatever makes Kev happy. But my keyboard has none of that. It cost £38 and is a sophisticated black number, with a luxurious red metal plate under the keys that you can only see when you're directly above the board (people who are into keyboards call them "boards", because they think it sounds cooler. It doesn't. But I'm in too deep now).

There's a classy Rosewill cursive logo in the corner, in glossy black against the matt of the rest of the board, and under it sit three elegant blue LEDs used to highlight the toggling of the num-, caps- and scroll-lock keys.

The keys themselves sit on Cherry MX Brown switches -- there's a whole world of switch mechanisms out there with differing rebound rates and actuation forces and whatnot, and the Cherry MX brand is to keyboard enthusiasts what Patron is to American hip-hop artists; if you're anybody who has the slightest sense of taste or discernment you use Cherry MXs -- and the Brown varieties are a nice mid-point between the Reds favoured by gamers and the Blues preferred by office typists, and when you type on my keyboard it sounds really sexy like you're in a crumbling newsroom in Havana with the sun filtering in the blinds and a smudged glass of rum by your hand and a rolled cigarette wedged in the corner of your mouth and you're typing about youth protests and government corruption and everything is dusty, everything has to be dusty, but also you can play a bit of Diablo if you get bored, because that's important too.

So that's the story of my keyboard, I hoped you liked it. I was feeling on edge after yesterday, but I now feel sufficiently warmed up to talk about what I'm going to do with my blog.

I'm going to still write it. Every day. I'm nowhere ready to stop this. Eventually I'd like to move to more controlled pieces, researched and measured (and, crucially, edited), but for now I can just tell that I have to keep going like this until I've fully ingrained the habit, got over the perfectionism that has choked the breath out of so many of my pieces before.

If I started allowing myself to post once a week I know I'd write loads the first day, get distracted the second day, rush the post on the sixth day, feel rubbish about it and leave it two weeks, start trying to do a big post explaining why I missed the last one, not be able to finish that, fall into self-loathing, never write again.

So currently it's about keeping on keeping on. A day at a time. Not over-pressuring myself, not allowing myself to falter, just putting one foot in front of the other over and over and not stopping.

And no booze or anything yet either. In the future, who knows? For now: nope nope nope.

90 days is the new target, which is to say 60 more days; I'm a third of the way to that goal already.

Something I am going to change is posting links to this on my personal Facebook page. It was necessary at first to create accountability, to use the fact that I felt many eyes on me to make it too shameful to not put up a post. But I hope I'm confident enough now to do it regardless, and I don't want to drown everyone I know in updates. I'll share to my Scouring of Saucepans Facebook page, and anyone who isn't interested can not follow or mute that or whatever.

I also want to keep the format loose enough to encompass smaller challenges I might set for myself. Maybe one week I'll blog about getting up at 6am every day. Maybe the next week about cooking a new meal each night. Then a diary about my efforts to play through one of the many videogames currently sat on my shelves and digital Steam library gathering dust and whatever the digital equivalent of dust is -- memory fragmentation, I guess -- making me feel sicky and bad for all the money I've spent on these virtual worlds I've run around in for 20 minutes and thrown aside when they got difficult.

There are still loads of ways I'm lazy, uncertain, totally fucked up, and loads of styles and tones and voices I want to play around with, and daily blogging feels like the best tool to use for all that.

So I'm going to be here, day after day, doing my thing. Drop in if you fancy. You'll be most welcome.

A new plan, again: Day 21

Quick one before work. Three weeks today since I stopped drinking and distracting myself, started blogging every day.

How do I feel? Honestly, not great. I still wake up depressed every morning, bleak and hopeless, not wanting to face the challenges of the day. I still hear negative, self-critical thoughts in my head all the time. It tends to settle as the day goes on, then evenings bring loneliness and an aching sense of loss. And I am tired, all of the time, a kind of morass of lethargy coiling about the base of my atoms (I don't think atoms have bases, but if you imagine them like trees, and the tiredness like a morass or actually more a mist wrapping around their trunks, that's the image I mean), weakening them, calling for me to climb back into bed.

Right at this moment I am not much enjoying writing, feel uninspired, stressed that I've got no time to make this good before leaving for work.

But all of that is OK. Because now isn't everything. The unhappiness is still there, but I'm getting better at not adding to it. Getting better at letting myself be how I am. The petals of my flowers (new metaphor, we're done with the trees and mist now) may still be coming out shrivelled and brown, but I'm watering the roots, tilling the soil, trying to pour in no more poisons, let the acid that's in the ground slowly work its way out.

Be miserable now, be pissy, feel like giving all this up. It's fine. I'm still not drinking. Still coming here every day to write.

And along with the shrivelled petals there are, it's fair to say, brighter ones starting to come through as well. I'm feeling spurts of energy, especially this last week, of joyousness and warmth. I'm noticing colours looking more vibrant. It's easier for me to cry. I'm a touch more alert, more confident, my head is slightly less full of silt. I can weirdly sense my physicality more, my grounding within my body, and the bodies of the people around me. Like depression is an illness of the mind (duh), a distancing, a removal into cold abstraction, and what I'm sensing is a return to the incarnate reality of the world.

And with that I can sense not just the matter but the space between us, the nothingness that holds us together, the glorious silent potential of the void.

Interesting thoughts there, at least to me, but I'm going to have to leave them for now because it's time to get ready for work.

Three weeks in, then, and plenty of downs, but plenty of ups, as well, and plenty of room for things to improve.

Until tomorrow. Take care x

A new plan, again: Day 20

They're odd things, awards ceremonies. Pretentious circle-jerks for the representatives of companies who have spent enough on advertising to be shortlisted, bored guests sitting around trying to work up enthusiasm to clap for winners they hope will in turn clap when it's their turn on stage, some z-list host wiping the powder from his nose wishing he was young enough to still do the thing that made him just famous enough to be invited to this gig, everyone getting rapidly battered off cheap wine and taking photos of themselves with their own cameras and then going home alone and vomiting in their toilets and secretly hating themselves.

What I'm trying to say is that we didn't win Best Bar.

No, but all cynicism aside, it was a good night. If by "a good night" you mean "the worst way to spend a Thursday since the Hindenburg Disaster".

No, I'm joking, it was actually all right. We got free cake. We clapped Sean from Beer Central (though he didn't win). Mike made a joke at a woman from OHM while we queued for polystyrene trays of potato raclette.

"Is it Ohm, or O-H-M?" someone asked.

"I don't know," the woman said. "I say O-H-M, because customers always go 'ommm' and make jokes and it's like, fuck off."

"I bet there's some resistance to that," Mike said.

The woman carried on talking. I looked at Mike, and Mike looked at me, and then Mike looked at the woman and pretended to be listening. I think I'm in love with Mike.

After the ceremony I made is as far as The Old Workshop and Dev Cat and Wick, getting a contact high off the others, drinking vicariously through them, then when they were heading to the Harley I got Mike in a taxi and took off. Partly because nothing good has ever happened to anyone who's older than 30 in the Harley, and partly because I was working the open today, and also partly because Mike was trying to get cash out from a postbox and it really seemed time to get him home.

- - -

I woke up wishing I'd escaped three or so hours sooner -- I had not had nearly enough sleep, and had flaunted my "in bed by 2am" rule -- but at least I wasn't hungover. I'd felt sadness and isolation in the Wick, as the voices soared and the cacophony set in and the spirits of abandon began to come alive-- felt sobriety was one cold grey afternoon for the rest of eternity and all true life was the flame, the chaos, the lambent liquid glow in the bottom of the bottle when the strange music starts to howl. Christ I wanted a drink. To give myself away to the goddess of booze, incinerate all edges, rise reborn an angel of furious belief...

But shaking the mustiness from my brain and showering and travelling to work I was so glad of my choice, of the quiet path, of not burning up but letting an element steadily heat me for the whole of the week.

- - -

Paint-by-numbers Friday shift, then an Uber to meet Jake. We were off to see Missy's play, starring Dale also, written by Dreads, with stage management and props by Joe. Their little baby, and the fruit of months of hard work.

I wasn't in the mood for am-dram (is anyone, ever?), was tired and knew I had this writing to do. But I wanted to support my friends, so forced myself along. And it actually was fabulous, full of energy and mirth, and in contrast to the awards ceremony created for no reason other than inherent delight. There were some great lines, and Dale and Missy smashed it. A man played the part of a magical door. He made door-related puns. I was in heaven.

And Jake was at his best, on the way to steaming from an afternoon of Stella with Big Steve, now having to hold it together in front of Missy's parents and his grandparents and everyone, but and so just giving himself to love, the thing he does where he gives himself to love, talks to every person, sees them all as his friends, a world of friends either known or ready to be made, a jolly adventure, life nothing but an excuse to feel joy -- his boyish face beaming, unable to hold in the warmth -- And we took our seats and thirty seconds in he was roaring with laughter, the sounds escaping with only maybe the gentlest of nudges, no space for black feelings, for jealousy, for nerves.

That mindset is contagious. Come the interval I'm shocked to find myself weightless, sailing, buoyed by my heart. Who needs perfectionism, cynicism that it isn't Pinter or Beckett? Let it go and remember we're children riding a storm into space. Let it go. Live for a lark. Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.

"It's great, isn't it?" says Jake afterwards, trying to articulate. "They've put on a thing. You know? We haven't put on a thing. They've put on a thing. For us. Isn't that great."

I nod. It is.

A new plan, again: Day 17

More late night blogging, clacking away on my keyboard against the clock, home from a day with Jake because we've not seen each other properly in months and he wanted us to have time together just hanging out for his birthday. Missy and Bobby J as well, of course, playing catch in the garden, barbecuing, watching films, playing X-Box.

Tired, as always, waking up. One of my two staff on the close last night called in sick, no one would cover, so Sanders stayed as long as he could and then Mike and I had to slog through the closedown together. Such is life.

Wrecked this morning, sat yawning and editing photos over coffee, then dressed and walked the hour down through Crookes, Broomhill, across the Porter Brook, through leafy muted Nether Edge, along Abbeydale Road and up Woodseats to Jake and Missy's. Stopped to see Grace at the Bloomery on the way. Snapped pictures of sunlight filtering through flowers as I went.

In Jake's garden lay in the sun and drank juice, felt nice. Chatted. The impossibility of beer or spliffs meant I just had to live my bloody life, getting my heartrate up throwing the American football around, taking portraits of Missy in the shadow beneath the tree, joking with Bobby about this and that. We walked to the shops and I felt alive, played with the toys in Sainsbury's, goofed around down the condiments aisle making the others laugh.

It was like having a weight lifted that has been on your chest so long you forgot the pressure wasn't part of you. Normally I would have planned to stay sober, to go home afterwards to write, but then that voice that wants instant gratification would have started slobbering over gorgeous gluggable lager in the fridge, cold to the touch, condensation forming on the can, just one maybe because I'd had a hard night, because how can you ignore that voice in you that roars so constantly... and next I'd know it would have been three in the morning and I'd be asking to sleep in the spare room because I was too smashed to stagger out unwanted into that lonesome night.

And I had those urges today, often, but I had no choice but to ignore them, which made the voice sad it couldn't have what it wanted, but within only a few seconds the urges would have passed and I'd be back in the world. Back in the sun, back feeling the dimensions of my body and its movement through space throwing the ball, finding photography options, feeling closeness with my friends, knowing I was fine to leave at the end to go write.

And, yeah, I felt really shitty a couple of times, that I was annoying everyone with jokes taken too far, that it mattered too much to me that I was liked, that I was selfish and stupid and dumb and repulsive. But during these moments I was also able to recognise how tired I was, that the low mood might not necessarily be the truth of reality but could instead be simply a passing state of mind, so vivid and beguiling one instant, dissolving the next.

And the sun went down and the flies came out, and we ambled inside to wash up and watch the new Jumanji film, which was funny and charming and warm-hearted, much better than it had a right to be -- and snuggled there on the sofa with a steaming cup of tea and my friends, my family around me, I realised that for 17 days now I have done nothing but be myself, and that that is enough. It really is enough.

And now this is written, thank God, and I am off to pass out. TTFN. Love love love x