Getting drunk’s got a nice sense of order. Order your pint up at the bar, smile knowing pleasantries at the girl pouring your pint, count out change from your open hand or if drunk, dive straight into the wallet for a note.
Maneuvre for your table. If carrying one or two pints, you have some leeway to look about you. If carrying three or four, it’s best to keep your eyes on the prize. Don’t think too hard about your grip, just don’t lose it.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, spilling out into a small black car. Made sure my left leg was nestling up against the right of a pretty girl and rested my head back on the headrest. Tuning into possibilities in the future and ignoring the hum in my head. Top it up from a couple of bottles from the fridge when you get there. Spin some idle lines over donuts and then off out into the cold, wondering where you missed your chance.
Text messages are a funny thing aren’t they? Chiming in from the ether, with a discordant rumble from your pocket. Reach in and withdraw the small black lump of plastic. Moment of hope, till you realise that it’s a message from your mum. “Are you around for dinner this Sunday?â€, but not this time. Something promising about the day after next and enough encouragement to put a spring in your step, turn your ipod up to a favourite tune and you walk home, wondering still.
Or what about this weekend, where a love of lager saw me recounting anecdotes to a girl with a pretty face and big arms. Saw me convincing my pal to let us all back. That’s it, whack the stereo on and shuffle. Everyone got a song in their heart after a few beverages and the girl’s got a small smile on her face, like the song you’re singing badly is her favourite, but she don’t mind what you’re doing to it. Reach out a hand to caress a face and then slump down in your chair. Videos on the screen, too much pox and it’s time to sleep again.
Drinking with my sister tonight. Something of a change and a chance to crack a bottle of red and talk about the family situation. Thinking this isn’t the way they explained it to me. Mumbling about relationships and Hockney and the perils of modern living, but laughing about the way the dog acts. No way he can can be eleven already, and no way either of us can be worrying about medical trials and field research, when all the old arguments revolve around the programmes on tv and the tunes that make it better. Hasslehoff on YouTube and Bollywood videos and pantomime ceilings.
Lame, shaking off melancholy is a bit like shaking off a bad hangover. You don’t really know you’re better until the day after the day after, and by then you’re too busy getting up or down about something else. Still that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Just time before these fingers get too numb to head out into the garden, root around for the key out of the kitchen first. Spark another cigarette and consider how that makes you feel. Actually I feel a little ropey, and this thing is stuffing up my throat. Still room in the legs for another run tomorrow, and feeling near enough salvation and damnation to not give a damn for both. Spark another another cigarette and pace the length of the grass, whistling and thinking about the possibilities lying in sleep or the promise of open arms and weakness and rest.
After a few weeks of anguish, triumph and the ominous prospect of madness and depression peering out from cracks in the fence, while euphoria rains down from the sky, I have decided that I need a holiday. Not least, to stop taking myself so seriously. Feel a bit like one of those pamphlet merchants at Oxford Circus that harrangue passers by about their consumerism and lack of moral values, brandishing a megaphone, and that, believe me, is no way to feel.
Woke up this morning with a blazing hangover, after another good night. Ended up back at the G-unit’s house blazing pox and watching Jackass 2. Inadvertently took too much – man – and struggled to keep my head up at the end. Strange visions of blonde ladies and whisky decanters and then slept in nearly the whole day today.
But I digress, again. This post is about my holiday, so listen up peeps. I am relying on your good will and hospitality on this one. Basically, my plan is to load my car up with clean clothes, weapons and the good doctor’s trusty kit bag and drop in on a few acquaintances. I have booked the 1st to the 12th of December off work and would very much appreciate the chance to put in some miles driving to your distant locales and taking the opportunity to sample the local nightlife and womenfolk. Please let me know of your availability during these dates by commenting on this post or by emailing directly and I can get going on formulating some kind of half-arsed masterplan.
Essentially, the trip should be a classic affirmation of everything brave and true in this world and will be characterised by heavy drinking and much fist shaking at the moon. I am going to purchase a camera and document the experience, may even try to blog it on the fly. Either way, there’s definitely a good film or short story to come out of this one.
So, just let me know if you are free. Probably can’t make it to Spain, Breakingstein (but we should get a trip booked in for February or something), but France and other nearby locales are certainly very much in the frame. Hoorah.
Oh and by the way, those of a discerning nature should definitely check out the new Frankie Wedge website. Though I say it myself, it is very much a rudy. Not guaranteed to work entirely properly just yet, we’ve marked it up as a beta, but hey you get the gist.
Did you ever have the feeling when you were loving
That you just couldn’t get in within enough?
Couldn’t get in within inside her skin enough?
Couldn’t get one-ed enough?
I don’t just mean penetration
I’m talking interpenetration
I’m saying you just couldn’t get dissolved / absolved
/ unbound / beyond (you) in her enough –
‘cause however hard you strained there
was always flesh in your way?
Always limit in our ecstasies
The word itself presupposes this:
ex-stasis: it means to go out beyond
-what? Evidently: a limit, of some kind
II
Limit resides and abides in matter before mind –
All that reaches mind enters-in through eye or ear
(or sense) in short it passes from out there( to (in here
(a distinction that implies a limit)
So, all we can know ’s made up of our embodied (limited) minds
Rubbing up against limits of different kinds
Call limit ‘form’ and see you never saw a thing without it
And yet how we long to thrust beyond it
And so here’s our human situation:
seeking life beyond limit in the only way we’re able:
rubbing our limits against the limits
that assail us
III
Her limits though were finer than most
And swaying thus in ecstatic laser lights
Exhibiting across a dervish dance floor
She cocked an eyebrow
And inclined an invitation
And there I was again:
A limited lunging thing
All astir with promise
Though by the time I reached her side
She was gone somehow swallowed by the throng
And that gaze that had punctured drudgery
– loosing rays of possibility
of bloodpound breathstop ecstasy – withdrew and
I was revealed, again, as one of our kind:
Lacking lunging and limited, adrift in loss
And looking back on that time
It then as now seems that
pill-head, pothead or pope in this life of
sinking sinning sighing and singing
in this loving through loss
we’re broken beyond our limits
and prised asunder we all find our lives loosed
and our selves bloody sundered under
the sign of that unshakable godforesaken cross
About to go into a period of intensive website launching. Which is a good thing actually, cos it’s been a while since a project I began saw the light of day. They all begin, but then they don’t stop, they just go on and on and then one day you surprise yourself by coming to the end of one.
Hopefully, if the wind doesn’t change and my face gets locked into some kind of rictus, I will be launching a few more in the coming month. Most notably the new FW site which is looking so shiny I damn near slipped over looking at it. I actually finished the bugger Sunday, but had to withdraw it sharpish like an overheating laptop, having discovered that the thing was not rendering properly in Microsoft’s new baby, Internet Explorer 7.0. Hmm, progress is overrated.
Oh how they make me laugh, 2 cats flying about my living room attempting to kill each other. Proper going for it. Claws out, tails swinging uncontrollably from side to side, they spring for one another before breaking and lining up to do it all over again. In between times they tear away at my decrepit sofas and cast me a look so choc full of attitude that a lesser man would wet himself in fear. And all the time I watch intently, chuckling away like the village idiot, willing them not to stop.
But of course, I shouldn’t encourage it. Sooner or later it always ends in tears as I have to spend yet more time and, more painfully for the son of a Yorkshire accountant, money at my local vet, as 1 of them inevitably deals enough damage to the other that I need to get it fixed. Such are the concerns of the day for a man who dwells in the foothills of South Wales, the distended and thoroughly unneccesary pot belly of Britain.
I don’t mind the place so much, but these bastards who live here just don’t seem to get it. At a time when people are attempting to break down the boundaries between civilisations, these fuckers are attempting to put them up.
The Welsh language for example – the damn thing is practically dead, but the minority insist that god knows how much time and public funding needs to be wasted attempting to keep it alive. For a start, everything – road markings, street signs, leaflets, standard government notices & literature – has to be written bi-lingually. The hospitals are failing, schools are closing, pensioners are getting locked up for not paying their extortionate council tax bills. ‘Where is the money going?’ cry the masses. I’ll tell you where, you backwater pigeon fuckers, its paying for all those things you have that cost double what they do in the rest of the UK because you insist on printing them bi-lingually.
Then there’s S4C. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s an all Welsh speaking TV channel. Now I’m not set against this in principle, if you’re going to insist on having a 2 bit national language it makes sense to broadcast some TV programmes in it. What really bugs me however, is that this doesn’t exist as a channel in its own right – no, it takes the place of cunting Ch4. I mean, if you’re going to replace 1, why not replace ITV, it’s absolute dogshit. Don’t replace the best channel on terrestrial TV, anyone would think that they want the rest of the world to think that they’re genetically retarded.
I’ve succeeded in getting myself all gnarled up inside now, I may have to wank.
Suddenly I was hit with a halcyon moment. A second of revelation when I realised I had spent my early twenties contemplating the mysteries of life and was now ready to embark on a new trip. It was time to start using this knowledge to get somewhere. It was time to take what was mine.
Getting drunk’s got a nice sense of order. Order your pint up at the bar, smile knowing pleasantries at the girl pouring your pint, count out change from your open hand or if drunk, dive straight into the wallet for a note.
After a few weeks of anguish, triumph and the ominous prospect of madness and depression peering out from cracks in the fence, while euphoria rains down from the sky, I have decided that I need a holiday. Not least, to stop taking myself so seriously. Feel a bit like one of those pamphlet merchants at Oxford Circus that harrangue passers by about their consumerism and lack of moral values, brandishing a megaphone, and that, believe me, is no way to feel.
About to go into a period of intensive website launching. Which is a good thing actually, cos it’s been a while since a project I began saw the light of day. They all begin, but then they don’t stop, they just go on and on and then one day you surprise yourself by coming to the end of one.
Oh how they make me laugh, 2 cats flying about my living room attempting to kill each other. Proper going for it. Claws out, tails swinging uncontrollably from side to side, they spring for one another before breaking and lining up to do it all over again. In between times they tear away at my decrepit sofas and cast me a look so choc full of attitude that a lesser man would wet himself in fear. And all the time I watch intently, chuckling away like the village idiot, willing them not to stop.
Suddenly I was hit with a halcyon moment. A second of revelation when I realised I had spent my early twenties contemplating the mysteries of life and was now ready to embark on a new trip. It was time to start using this knowledge to get somewhere. It was time to take what was mine.