Ghost Town State Of Mind

"This town is coming like a ghost town. All the clubs have been closed down. This place is coming like a ghost town. Bands won't play no more; too much fighting on the dance floor."

It never occurred to me that I'd changed. Not even in the depths of these early morning bouts of self-analysis did I think for one moment that I was becoming somebody different. It crept up on me, as these things so often do. It tapped me on the shoulder as I sat exchanging stories of the past with an old friend.

"Guess what?" it said, an unassuming voice in the shadows behind nostalgia. "Guess what?"

We were sitting in a pub called The Avenue, a fairly large establishment on the road up to Barnet Church. It used to be The Felix And Firkin, used to be the place we started our drinking sessions, used to be the only local boozer where any kind of alternative music was played. C, down for the week with his girlfriend, sat sipping a pint of Carling he'd only bought because they were on offer. I was slumped on a brown plastic couch opposite, swallowing the dregs of my first paycheck in the form of a double JD and Coke. We were re-living the highlights of a drinking partnership long since fractured by time and distance and a pair of girls that had stepped into the narrowing breach between C, me, and oblivion at exactly the right moment.

I was noticing C had lost a lot of weight. I was noticing the fact that he's starting to lose his hair. I was seeing my own reflection in the window opposite and thinking that I really didn't look all that different, considering...

"...Considering," the voice informed me, "that it's five years since you and C first started drinking together, and two years since that alcoholic rollercoaster finally left the rails a lot closer to the ground than you'd secretly hoped."

I ignored it. I turned my attention back to past glories. After a while, I wandered up to the bar for another drink. Six people waiting, one person serving. I turned and walked back to the table, suggested to C that we head on home. We left.

Back at his place, we watched the football. The reminiscing went on. C got progressively drunker on red wine. I was drinking steadily from a bottle of Jack that seemed to have no effect. We were rambling pointlessly about things that had no meaning, yet we had no power to stop ourselves. We looked at each other across a living room that had been the springboard for almost as many crazy excursions as The Firkin. I felt like I'd turned away from something. I felt like I was peeking through a gap in the curtains. I felt like a voyeur.

At half-past eleven, I got up to catch the last bus home. C got up with me, saying his girlfriend would give me a lift, saying I could get a cab. I declined both. I wanted to go home and watch a DVD. I wanted to sit in my room and finish that bottle of Jack, smoke my way through a packet of Marlboro Gold, throw my thoughts at the screen once again. Back in the days, we would have annihilated the alcohol we had left. We would have staggered to the tube station and travelled into the city. Back in the days, I would have woken up in a ditch or a hedge, slumped in a bus shelter or laying in a field. Back in the days, beneath an apocalyptic hangover, I'd have been pretty damned proud of myself.

Back in the days.

S, C's other half, arrived just in time to pick us up as we left the house. I was tipsy, he was drunk. I sensed an argument brewing as she drove me home, and I sat quietly in the back seat. For the first time, I found myself sympathetic to her point of view.

They dropped me at the petrol station. I bought cigarettes and then walked home. I thought about C all the way, but really, I was thinking about myself.

Because some nights I feel like I made it all up, like I'm still making it up. It's just another story, you know? I wish - and I'm not fucking with you, no matter how much we both need a truth like that - I wish I'd hit the wall back then. It could have been done and over with. I wouldn't be sitting here staring at a box of dreams and getting set to walk the same damn road again. Don't think this is new to me. Don't twist your perception of me so that this is some grand ambition that will lift me out of the person I am like the ending of some fairytale. Life doesn't work that way. I know you want it to. I want it to. But it doesn't. And you know where this road has ended every time I've walked it before? Here. Darkened Room. Four walls, a screen, Jack, Marlboro, me.

Welcome To Forever. I sure hope the regular readers are making a connection or two. I sure hope those same regulars are remembering when I quoted DeLillo a few weeks back...

"The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, dear reader, if you went back to the living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here."

I don't believe I'll make it. I don't believe I'll ever be happy and complete. At the same time, I don't disbelieve these things either. They're possibilities, nothing more and nothing less. They're things that might be achieved through a combination of hard work, talent, and luck. None of these things are decided. If you're telling me they are, friends, you're telling a lie. This boy deals in realities, and reality - at this point in time - is Darkened Room. Four walls, a screen, Jack, Marlboro, me.

I'm telling you these things in the same way I was thinking about C on the last leg of my journey home tonight. I'm telling you to remind myself. I'm telling you so that I can live with that box of dreams stored carefully in a corner, always in sight, but never a distraction from what's real. Maybe the writing career, maybe The Maybe Girl, maybe a shot at the clear blue sky and whatever lies beyond.

Maybe, but maybe not.

It's a Ghost Town state of mind. All the clubs have been closed down, and bands won't play no more. It's nearly four in the morning. It's just me and the silence and a cigarette and these thoughts. No dreams, no distractions, no future, no percentages. Nothing but cold, grey reality. This weblog, this journal, this showcase, this community, this...whatever the hell it is, it's a lot of fun sometimes, and it's a place for dreams and fantasies and possibilities and friends. But never forget where these notes are coming from, and never forget why I make them. Because if you do, if I do, then we've really no business being here at all.