Send via SMS

31.7.04

The Drawer Of Death

"I can't see the end of me. My whole expanse I cannot see. I formulate infinity, stored deep inside of me."

My lighter ran out this afternoon. I've never been too hot at keeping hold of the things, so I tend to either buy disposables or just steal them from friends or even total strangers. Lighters are transient like that. Hell, the lighter phenomena could be a post in itself.

Which is neither here nor there. The most important thing about the transience of lighters is that a regular smoker will have at least seven of them in his or her living environment at any one time. I didn't panic when my lighter died. I knew its brethren were close at hand.

But could I find them? Could I fuck. I checked my writing desk, the accumulated debris beneath it, the top shelf of my wardrobe, even underneath my bed. No lighters. Not one.

Shit.

Because there's only one other place in The Darkened Room where one can be sure of finding a lighter. I didn't want to have to go in there, but addiction is often more powerful than fear. Indeed, it is fear that largely leads to addiction, and I must have my cigarettes.

If you have any appropriately sinister music, please feel free to slip it into your CD player now, because we're about to take a trip into the murky depths of...The Drawer Of Death.

Okay, everybody has a junk room or a junk closet or cupboard or whatever. Everybody has a place where they store those uncategorisable relics and memories and gimcracks that just don't fit anywhere else. But nobody has a Drawer Of Death. Nobody, that is, except me.

I didn't intend it to be a small shrine to all that is evil and forsaken in this world, it just turned out that way. At some point in the murky depths of the past, I reorganised The Darkened Room. Books, CDs, DVDs, clothes, writing stuff, alcohol, essentials, non-essentials...all found their place. I threw away all the junk I didn't want, and what was left was a bizarre tribute to the power of memory. I wanted this stuff, for a wide variety of reasons, but I didn't want it in plain sight and I didn't want it anywhere where I'd keep accidentally stumbling across it. Because once you're in the Drawer Of Death, you're in there for days, man. Maybe weeks. Maybe forever.

I was fast, like a cougar or a shark. I yanked the Drawer open and scanned until my eyes alighted on the object of my desire, taking every care not to let my gaze linger on any other item. There. I snatched the lighter and slammed the Drawer closed. Mission accomplished.

Only it wasn't, because one of the things I saw was a photograph. It was half-hidden beneath a pile of old letters, and all I saw was a leg. But it was her leg, and the photo was taken the night she wore that dress. These are notes from some other darkened room, notes that taste of tequila and smell like weed. They speak of kisses and whispered promises, of laughter and shouting in another part of the house, of sweat and friction and breathless memories I'd rather forget. Not because they're bad, but because comparing them to now is so painful.

I want another chance. I want to go back there and make it right, change it somehow, do or say something that means I don't have to end up here, feeling so stale and alone and tired.

I can't. I know that. So here I am. Here are the words. Here is the one thing I believe I do better than anybody else. I can't make it right, but I can make it beautiful. And wouldn't that be an epitaph for the ages?

Michael - He didn't make it right, but he did make it beautiful.

And there, friends, is a demonstration of the hideous powers lurking within The Drawer Of Death. It lures you with the promise of nostalgic comedy joy, then smacks you in the head with the baseball bat of remorse and sorrow. It is evil, and someday I will burn it.

But not today.

30.7.04

It Only Seems Kinky The First Time (Part Two)

"All I ever wanted, all I ever needed is here in my arms. Words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm. Enjoy the silence."

When Denise told me she loved me, I was sitting in the passenger seat of her car. We'd pulled over on the way home because neither of us particularly wanted to go there and we had nowhere else to be. So we'd decided to prolong the journey, to remain inbetween for as long as possible.

Hard to express how I felt in the moments after she'd said those three little words. I'm sure, if I think about it, that somebody must have said them to me at some point in my life. I just don't remember it. The first time I can clearly recall being told I was loved was that night in her car. It was a big deal to me. It was more than a big deal. It was everything.

I didn't say it back right away. I didn't want to react. I wanted to say it because I meant it, not because it was expected of me. I needed to think about it, to be sure of how I felt and what I thought I was involved in. I'm a great believer in following your instincts, but there are times when it's all too easy to confuse instinct and stupidity

Our relationship stepped up a few gears. We were still playing the same games, but there was a more serious edge to them, a sense that something really was at stake. Every orgasm was another step towards a place I don't think either of us understood. It stopped being about exploring for me almost immediately. It started being about doing these things with her because I loved her, and because there was no-one else in the world I wanted to do them with.

I told her I loved her, and as soon as I did, that love was tested.

"Would you ever...would you be interested in a threesome?" Denise asked me. We were sitting in the pub, late winter, talking over the top of empty pop music.

"In what sense?"

"In the sense that I'd like to try having sex with more than one partner."

"With another man, you mean."

"Ideally, but I'm not against the idea of a girl." She looked around for a few moments, took a drink, took a drag on her cigarette, shrugged. "Why not both?"

"Why am I suddenly sure you have this halfway planned already?"

She smiled and kissed me lightly on the mouth. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean," she said.

About three weeks later, I was sitting on the couch at her house with a friend of hers I didn't know. His name was David, and he was much, MUCH better looking than me. Denise had left us alone for random reasons of her own, and we were actually getting along quite well. I wasn't at all sure that this situation was what I wanted, but I intended to let things happen and then see how I felt rather than leaping to condemn her for wanting to try it.

"So...uh...you two do this a lot?" David asked me.

I laughed a little, more out of nerves than anything else. "First time. How'd you get here?"

"Into the weirdest conversation I've ever had, or the whole scenario?"

"Both."

"I went to college with Dee."

I had to ask. "Ever fuck her?"

"No."

"So...what...she just asked you to?"

"More or less."

"This is insane."

David nodded. "You're right. This is insane."

It was a couple of minutes later that Denise wandered back in again. She immediately sat herself down in my lap and we started kissing. And...I felt comfortable with that. He was the outsider, the one who didn't really know why we were doing this or what his role was. For all I knew of David, a girl he fancied had asked him if he wanted to get into a threesome with her and her boyfriend, and he'd accepted purely on the basis of a girl offering him no-strings sex.

We did it. I'm not writing this for the fine details. We did it and I enjoyed doing it, and in the process, I managed to ditch a fair amount of the discomfort I had regarding my own gender. I already believed that sexuality was a matter of socialisation, and that encounter represented my first steps on the road to practicing what I preached. All in all, I was happy. Not to mention that, shortly afterwards, we reversed the situation, and I got to have sex with two women at the same time. That wasn't such a groundbreaker in terms of my sexuality, but it was fucking awesome.

On we went. That was the last new barrier we really broke. After that, Denise seemed sated in a lot of ways. We went back to having sex of the non-kinky variety much more regularly. The part of our relationship that was all about love (and yes, I do separate love and sex in the context of Denise and me, though I didn't then) blossomed. For a while, I was very happy.

The reasons our relationship went downhill have no particular bearing on this story. Suffice to say, by the time it got to both of us heading away to university, we'd essentially broken up. I say essentially because I found it extremely hard to let go. She was studying in Nottingham, while I was in Cambridge. After a silent first couple of months away, we began communicating again. She wrote me a letter, I called her, we got away from the harsh words we'd exchanged and started building something new. I went to Nottingham to see her a couple of times.

Everything had changed, but I was blind. I was still seeing her with the same eyes. We got back to intimacy, but it wasn't long before I began to suspect that I wasn't the only one she was sleeping with. Denise would neither confirm nor deny this. She would only ever say that she was still 'finding herself'.

Words cannot describe how sick I got of that little phrase.

Denise never came to Cambridge during the five month postscript to our relationship. I was always the one that travelled. I think that applies emotionally as well as physically. She was who she was, comfortable with her evolution and with the things she wanted. She wasn't a whore. She never relinquished control and - to my knowledge - she never did anything she didn't want to do. I was the one beginning to feel pushed and bullied. I was the one whose eyes were beginning to open.

One night in Nottingham we went out with a gang of her friends and proceeded to get very drunk. From the Student Union bar, we returned to her halls of residence, where everyone piled into some girl's room and continued to drink, smoke, and talk. I was pretty well in the bag, but not so far gone that I didn't notice how many people were pairing off right there in the room and how far those couples were going without seeming overly worried about who was watching. I remember glancing across at Denise and catching her watching me, reading me, gauging my reaction. I mouthed the word 'no' at her and stood up.

"Wait, wait, wait." She caught me at the door, drunk and obviously excited. "Let's do this. I want you to do this with me."

"I don't think so."

"Why?"

"We were...we were stable before. Stuff like this was okay because I loved you and I knew you loved me, too. I'm not sure of that now."

"I love you," she said.

"Then let's go."

"We're into emotional blackmail now?"

"Works both ways."

"I'm staying," she said. She looked genuinely upset.

"I'm going."

"If that's the way you want it."

"I don't want it any way. If I could have it the way I wanted, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. Just so you know, I've got a pretty good idea of how you view this relationship or whatever it is now. I've never seen it as open, though, so if you're sleeping around, you're cheating. That includes tonight."

"I'm staying."

"Then goodnight," I said, and stomped off up the corridor.

I had nowhere to go. I was lonely and unhappy and I had only a return ticket that wasn't valid until the next day to my name. I went to the only place I could conceivably go. I went to Helen's room.

Helen was Denise's closest friend at university, or at least she was then. Denise had a crowd she partied with, and then she had Helen, the one she confided in. Helen was sensible by comparison, but then so was pretty much everyone else I knew. She seemed surprised to find a tearful Michael at her door at 2am on a Sunday morning, but she took it in her stride and showed me a kindness that's stayed with me ever since. She was a friend of a friend and she owed me nothing, yet she invited me in and listened to all I had to say without judging either me or her friend. As for what happened next...I'm at a loss.

Somehow she ended up hugging me. I was upset, she was torn between sympathy and friendship, I suppose, though I've never had the opportunity to ask. Hugging became kissing, kissing became undressing, and so on and so forth. I didn't intend it, and I don't believe she did either. It was a mutual catharsis, and it lasted as long as it lasted. Once it was over, there was nothing between us.

The thing that always strikes me as really twisted is that my night with Helen is still the best sex I've ever had. Make of that what you will.

It was over between Denise and I, at any rate. We saw each other one more time, but that was only because I believed there were things left unsaid that I didn't want to carry around with me for years afterward. Once that was done, we went our separate ways.

I never hated her. I never even disliked her. I just think that it's inappropriate to drag a relationship along for the ride when you want to 'find yourself'. Denise is still the strongest woman I have ever met. She was open, she was fearless, and she was incredibly smart. She taught me a lot about sex and a lot about myself. I don't know where she is now, but I hope she's happy and I hope she found whatever it was she was looking for. I wish her well.

As for lessons learned and later experiences and all the webs of theory I intend to weave around these tales...well, those will have to wait for part three.

Après Moi, Le Déluge

"And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on; and so did I."

Up early this morning, awakened from a short and uncomfortable sleep by the sound of female laughter, the doorbell ringing, someone rapping on the glass. I struggled out of bed and staggered onto the landing. More laughter, retreating footsteps. By the time I got to the foot of the stairs, silence.

My visitor had stuffed a twenty pound note through the letterbox. When I opened the door, I found a carrier bag filled with bread and milk and a note that said "Buy yourself something nice."

I puzzled over this, but not for long. Twenty pounds is twenty pounds, and it was already approaching eleven o'clock. If I was going to shop, I had to be fast. I wasn't being caught in the midday sun again.

Four hours sleep had other ideas, though, and I lacked the energy for a shower. Instead I settled into a long, hot bath, resigning myself to starving until the evening. I've been in worse situations, and I had cigarettes.

When I emerged it was a little after twelve. I thought vaguely about returning to bed, but it was too hot. I was already sweating and it was as tough to breathe inside as it probably was out there. My eyes fell briefly on the banknote, sitting crisp and new beside my computer, and I remembered going out to the garage to fetch my bike last night, remembered glancing over at the tarpaulin in the corner and the machine it hid. I could, I really could, I'd thought to myself. But I hadn't. We cover things with tarpaulins for a reason, and that reason is not always vanity.

I dressed quickly and snatched my stepfather's keys from the table as I left the house, making sure no-one was watching before sprinting down the garden and into the cool darkness of the garage. There it was, that ominous green tarpaulin, just shapeless and grimy enough to suggest some old wreck, perhaps a lawnmower or some kind of ancient bicycle, something embarrassing. But I knew the truth.

***

The local paper came today. I was outside watering the flowers in the middle of the afternoon and some pre-pubescent girl yelled "Oi, mister!" and launched the thing at me from the pavement. To my credit, I caught it one-handed whilst keeping the hose trained on my mother's thirsty geraniums with the other.

A little later, in the kitchen, I unfolded the thing and settled down to read it while I waited for my lunch to cook. I knew immediately that I would be blogging it, and here's why:

I don't normally read the local paper. It's boring, the journalism is of a woeful standard, and nothing interesting ever happens in Borehamwood. Or at least, that's what I'd always thought. But for those of you who believe I exaggerate in these matters, this week's (30/7/04) Borehamwood And Elstree Times covers some extremely weird shit, from innocent civilians being attacked by an army of rats, to a man sent to jail for attacking another man with a chainsaw, to festival-goers being frightened by clouds. It was an awesome edition of the much-maligned weekly, and I'm glad I took the time to read it.

Rats are running amok in a row of houses, screamed the front page, to the point of settling down to watch television with residents. Can you say 'genius'? Intrepid journalist Martyn Kent, in the FIRST LINE of his report on this insane story, already had his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. I can just picture him now, typing away on yet another small town article, bored to tears of these small town people and their small town hygiene problems. "You wouldn't have rats," he mutters darkly, "if you bothered washing once in a while. Fucking Borehamwood scum."

More disturbing, though, is the following nugget: At least four houses in Newcome Road have a similar problem, she explained. One householder had even found teeth marks in her soap.

Believing that soap-eating rats were stretching the boundaries of credibility just a little, I looked it up. Check this out.

Norway Rat Species (Sewer Rat)

Digs burrows along foundations and under debris piles, often found in basements.

Can enter homes through toilet pipes.

Prefers meat and fish, but will eat anything.
Very aggressive, strong burrower and excellent swimmer. Large range - may travel 50 yards from nest to find food or water.


The article in the Times seems to gel with this information, suggesting that the rats are indeed coming up from the sewers, gnawing through plaster and even floorboards to get to any source of food, including soap. However, JUSTICE has reared its magnificent head in the form of Mrs. Lesley Cuthbertson, who has taken to killing the Dove-devouring fiends with her bare hands. "Some of them scream before they die," she commented, "it's horrendous and very traumatic."

Martyn Kent, Giant Soap-Eating Sewer Rats, and Lesley Cuthbertson of Newcome Road, Shenley, The Darkened Room salutes you all.

***

My stepfather is something of an idiot-savant when it comes to mechanics. He can do just about anything with a couple of pieces of metal and a soldering iron. And that is his one saving grace, in my eyes. He would have gotten along just fine as a member of the A-Team.

This, though. This is his masterwork. Stripped of the tarpaulin it is magnificent, yellow and black and shiny in the darkness like an evil chrome wasp with wheels. Yes, it says Suzuki on the side, but that is merely a label. Written somewhere on the warhead that fell on Hiroshima was the word 'bomb', and you'd have been a fool to take that at face value.

I wheeled it out of the garage and onto the front driveway, surprised by its lack of weight. I have ridden a big bike before, and I know how difficult they are to lift. Usually, if you drop anything of 600cc's or higher, you're going to have a struggle getting it upright again. Not this bike, though. I could have lifted it off the ground, had I been of a mind.

I straddled the seat and and twisted the key in the ignition. The bike started easily and quietly, but when I checked the thing was in neutral and gave the throttle just the slightest of twists, it roared like an angry tyrannosaurus, the vibration rushing up my arm like an electric shock. I quickly eased off, and in the silence that followed, a single tile fell from the roof of my house and a child burst into tears.

I had considered taking my trip to the supermarket as I was, but the more I learned about my stepfather's machine, the more I felt sure it would be prudent to grab my leathers and helmet.

It was closing on one o'clock when I finally eased out of the driveway, keeping it as quiet as possible in order to avoid alerting the neighbours. Indeed, I made sure I was well away from Crown Road before I finally screwed on the throttle and went for it.

Jesus. Suddenly I was travelling at about a million miles an hour down Brook Road, the scenery around me stretching and warping like something from Back To The Future or those crappy bits in Star Wars where they go to light-speed. I clung to the handlebars for dear life, feeling as though my leathers would be torn from my body any second, the faceplate of my helmet moulded to my face, the reinforced plastic shaped to my mouth, forever, to the form of my final syllable, which was 'fuck'. Before I had time to wonder whether I could actually get my fingers around the brake lever, I'd been blasted out of Brook Road and across the roundabout as though shot from a cannon, and I was already leaning into the tight right-hander that marks the entrance to the supermarket car park. For all its speed, though, the Wasp cornered like a unicycle, defying the laws of physics with effortless grace. I overtook several family cars on the inside, laughing manically as I caught a frustrated dad giving me the finger, then levelling out and finally slowing the thing down, looking for a place to park where it wouldn't attract too much attention.

***

Sadly, the Times didn't see much to shout about in the chainsaw incident. Apparently, it was enough for them to briefly mention that a Borehamwood man accused of attacking a neighbour with a chainsaw was due in court today. Perhaps next week we'll learn how the very same Borehamwood man managed to take the judge's arm off at the shoulder and behead several jurors before being restrained by police. I'll try and remember to look for it.

In the meantime, BOREHAMWOODSTOCK. Yes, the event took place, and The Times has all the coverage. According to reporter Charles Whitney, a rock 'n' roll revival took place in Meadow Park On Sunday at the Borehamwoodstock music festival. Hundreds of people watched the one-day extravaganza, which kicked off with the amateur rock competition Battle Of The Bands.

Hundreds of people, eh? In the photos, it looks like a couple of mums with pushchairs. Some extravaganza. Still, let's not be downbeat. The Battle of the Bands was won by local lads Stifla (An American Pie reference? Say it ain't so), who were awarded with a voucher for ten hours of studio time. The article then goes on to give honourable mentions to Rewind, who apparently whipped the crowd into a frenzy, and The Looters, neither of whom I've ever heard of.

But trust the Times to give us a genius closing paragraph: The only disappointment was the weather, as dark clouds discouraged some people from staying for the whole event.

DARK CLOUDS? What the fuck is wrong with you people? I don't care if you'd forgotten to waterproof the baby carriage. They don't run away from clouds at Glastonbury, I'll tell you that for nothing. Most years it's like Monsoon Season out that way, but that doesn't stop anybody from going to see Oasis or Paul McCartney. But not you fuckers, oh no. A few dark clouds and you abandon the mighty Stifla. You bastards. You RUINED the festival. RUINED IT.

***

There were crowds outside Tesco, sitting in groups of two or three up against the fences, some of them holding signs. I wondered, briefly, what the fuck was going on. Then I realised. Big Brother. It was the parasites. My week had come full circle.

I turned the bike around and drifted quietly over to the fence, letting it roll rather than gunning the engine. That might attract attention. It was a target that was too good to pass up, these starfucking bastards with their signs and their cheering and their empty little lives. I didn't want to murder anyone, that would be a bit much, but all those outstretched legs...

The Wasp exploded into life with a monstrous roar that echoed across the car park. Before the Big Brother parasites even knew what was going on, I was gone, launching the bike away across the car park and out onto the high street. It had been like riding at high speed over railway sleepers, and I knew it would be a few more moments before many of them realised that they no longer had legs.

As for me, I could do my shopping at Sainsbury's this week.

It Only Seems Kinky The First Time (Part One)

"It hurts to set you free, but you'll never follow me. The end of laughter and soft lies, the end of nights we tried to die. This is the end."

I've been meaning to do this post for a while, given that so much of this blog has already touched on sex and sexuality. I wanted to get it out from behind everything and do an essay/story on it, just so people stop mentioning a) how frustrated I've appeared lately, and b) the fact that I haven't posted anywhere near as filthily as promised. I don't think I'm going to get too dirty here, but there's a definite possibility of a controversial view or two. As usual.

So I was talking to my older sister tonight. It's actually fairly rare for us to meet up online, mostly because every time we do it becomes a debate about something. In this case, we kicked off with my lack of gainful employment, found our way along the well-trodden paths of my disdain for convention, then wound up arguing about what is or isn't natural in relationships and family. That, ultimately, is the point I want to get to in this series of posts. But the road to that argument is long and winding, and there's some fairly funky scenery. So let's do it.

Firstly, my views are obviously based on my own experiences and those of the people around me. I come from a broken home, and the very reason that home was broken was my father's drinking and infidelity. In the aftermath of the break, my mother saw a lot of different men. It was obvious why, even to a child. She settled in the end, but I don't think my father ever would have. The only thing that stopped that guy was death.

I was around a lot of relationships that shifted and changed and broke up and came together again. I can think of three stable, traditional partnerships within my extended family. The rest are all over the place. It seemed normal to me as a child and it seems normal to me now. To stay with one person forever is not, in my experience, the done thing.

I lost my virginity at either fourteen or fifteen. I've forgotten the exact date, telling you just how memorable the experience was. The girl who took it seemed to want to do so simply to get it out of the way. She was pretty popular, and I harbour no illusions that I was her first. I did have a huge crush on her, though, which was why saying no was almost unthinkable. That experience, in my memory, is a two-minute loss of self-esteem. That orgasm is not one that has stayed with me. That girl...I saw her a few weeks back. She didn't recognise me. I made no effort to be recognised. I noticed her and then kept my eyes resolutely forward. What would we say to each other?

I slept with a few other girls during my time at school and college, but there was nothing dramatic or exciting about those encounters. I don't recall actively caring about those people. If that sounds cold it's because I was a cold person then. Puberty was a nightmare for me. My father died, my mother remarried, we moved to a new town. I was cold because I didn't know how to express the sadness I felt in some way that would make it different to everybody else's sadness. The things I did were just things I did. I didn't attach significance to anything. I drifted through life like a ghost. And yes, there's no doubt that my behaviour during those times hurt some people. It was who I was. In some respects, I still am that person.

Sex came alive for me when I met Denise. I thought about not naming her in this story, but there's no point in anonymity. Anyone that knew me through that period of time knows who she is, and it's only a name to those that didn't. The chances of her reading this are somewhere between slim and none. But if she ever does, I'd like to think I'm going to give an honest account of her.

Denise bowled me over. She killed me. We'd known each other by sight as children, but never on a personal level. One bright summer day in 1996, I was walking out of a record shop in Edgware when I heard a girl calling my name. I turned around and there she was. Denise. Maybe five-feet-two standing on tiptoes, slim and pale and fragile like all the girls in my fiction since, owner of the blue eyes I got hooked on, of the wide and wonderful mouth that was usually either kissing or talking or trying to do both at the same time. If talking was an olympic event, Denise would be a multiple champion. I loved that about her. I loved talking to her, arguing with her, listening to her. In bed, I was always surprised at the way that beautiful mouth could frame itself around such dirty words. It seemed wrong somehow, wonderfully deviant, like graffiti scrawled on a priceless painting.

We were opposites in many ways. At seventeen, I was confused and emotionally uptight. I didn't know what I wanted from life, and I spent much of my time buried in books. I was studying politics and sociology, and the theories of Karl Marx were just beginning to set bells ringing in my mind. Denise was closing on her nineteenth birthday, taking a year out between college and university in order to make some money and - as she put it - 'find herself'. For my new girlfriend, this exploration became almost exclusively sexual. With the benefit of hindsight, she always had the zeal of a fresh convert to some cause. She could talk politics. She could talk about pretty much anything. But she preferred to talk about sex. She liked to voice new ideas and she preached the gospel of limits, a theory that's stayed with me ever since.

You're probably thinking, but Michael, that sounds like fun. That sounds like a big ol' box of joy and sexual ecstasy. And you'd be right. It was fun. At first.

We fucked on the first date. And the second, and the third. We fucked anytime we could get away with it. I started staying over at her house. Just the night at first, then weeks at a time. I couldn't get enough of her. I'd turn up to her house from college and we'd go straight to bed if her dad was home. If he wasn't, we might just go for it in the hallway, or the lounge, or the kitchen. Then we'd take a shower and wander down to the pub, where we'd sit and toss theory around for a few hours before heading back home for more sex and then the kind of late-night, wrapped-in-each-other conversations that will always be my favourite part of any intimate relationship. That's a typical night in the early stages of our relationship. It wasn't every night, but that was mostly what we did.

In a way, she was training me. Training's the wrong word, but it fits. Maybe waiting for me to get acclimatised. The first few times we were intimate, she did everything. Over time, she encouraged me to come out of myself. I was falling for her, and she found it easy to get me to do things. Again, with hindsight, maybe I could have stopped the spiral that followed. But I didn't see and I didn't know.

"Don't you see?" she said. "This may be the only chance we get to do these things, to live like this. We should try it all, open ourselves up and see what happens."

I did see. But as it turned out, I didn't see in quite the same way. We started out with a little light bondage, nothing serious. We tied each other up, we played sensory deprivation games, we played with lit candles and ice cubes. We laughed while we did it, sometimes nervously, sometimes because it was genuinely ridiculous. It was always Denise who encouraged the next step. She'd ask me about my fantasies, ask me if I wanted her to dress up, if I liked the idea of taking her roughly or even hurting her. I wasn't comfortable enough with myself to answer those questions. I'd shrug or change the subject.

But we got there in the end. I did want to explore those things, but I didn't know how to say it. She seemed so bold to me, so fearless. She introduced a roleplaying element to our time together. She'd play the whore or the unwilling innocent, loving every minute of it. I'd be the embarrassed client or the lover that wouldn't be denied. Denise got so into her roles that she introduced a codeword in the event that things got out of hand.

"If I say 'red'" she told me, "it means I'm telling you to stop. Immediately."

That was how we got into the pain games.

Hell, I'm sure you've all had your own experiences. I'm sure you've read the books and seen the movies. Some of you, no doubt, have even got the T-shirt. So let's just say that, while things were escalating, it never got serious. There was no blood and no major bruising. My arms ached sometimes, and I had some pretty awesome scratchmarks about my person, but that was about the extent of it. We were having a lot of fun. Both of us.

Then she told me she loved me, and everything changed.

27.7.04

Lessons Learned, Bridges Burned

"I got more sick with every sour second rate kiss, everything I never would miss again."

Somehow I'm still conscious. Actually coming out the other side of this dead-tired thing now. Figures. I wanted to get to sleep by maybe four or five. Of course, the way insomnia works, I'll be wide awake as soon as my head hits the pillow.

I was writing an e-mail earlier, and I got to thinking that maybe I'd lost sight of the reasons I started this blog in the first place. Yes, it was about my writing and my politics and various crazy theories. But it was really about how I felt when I turned twenty-five. That was the theme of my very first post here, and I seem to have avoided it ever since. I think that's because my current malaise strikes me as extremely childish. My mid-twenties seem to have signalled something of a second puberty. Suddenly I'm questioning authority for very base and obvious reasons. Suddenly I'm analysing the way I feel in ways I've largely ignored for the past seven years or so. Suddenly I'm as horny as a ten-peckered owl.

No sudden growth spurts or embarrassing incidents of my voice cracking yet. I'll keep you posted.

I appear to be going through the things that many my age go through, while at the same time experiencing something I missed out on when I was twenty-one. I dropped out of university after the first year, and threw myself straight into a job. It was only then I began to feel that I'd left behind all the emotional baggage that plagued my teens. It was only then that I found myself and started having a good time. I didn't think or analyse at all. Work, drink, write, repeat. I was enjoying it, but it was all happening on a very visceral level. I was just existing. Which is no bad thing.

I climbed the promotional ladder with surprising swiftness, going from popcorn seller in a quiet suburban picture house to manager of a highly-regarded West London cinema in a little under two years. When I was twenty-one, I was making decent money, far more than any of my graduate friends.

I wasn't switched on. I was on auto-pilot. I allowed the routine of my work and my social life to take over. I never sat down and thought about what I was doing and why, what I expected to gain from it. The absinthe binge was what changed me. I haven't gone into great detail about it here because I've written it up so many times now that it bores me. For those still curious, there was a night a few years back when I got into a drinking contest that resulted in me downing eleven shots of absinthe (75% by vol., fact fans) in just under an hour. This on top of a night that had already been dedicated to the great God alcohol. I wound up in a very bad place, physically speaking, and I'm sure - with the benefit of hindsight - that I almost died that night.

After a hangover that lasted three days, I remember waking up and realising I felt okay again. The first thought that followed that revelation was what the fuck were you doing out there? I couldn't answer that question, and it troubled me enough to act as something of a wake-up call. I realised I'd drifted away from my writing and the things I wanted to achieve. Instead of fighting against the things I didn't believe in, I was removing myself from the world. I was giving in. Something had to change.

Two-and-a-half years later, I'm unemployed and living at home. Not exactly life as I intended to live it, but better than what I was doing. Better than being lost. I'm sure of myself now, and I'm sure of what I want. That makes all the difference in the world.

My point, I guess, is that twenty-five is one of those landmark ages. The closer I got to my last birthday, the more horrified I became. Suddenly I was an adult. It's not like being eighteen or being twenty-one. They call you an adult then, but it's accepted that you're not. You can still afford not to have a proper job or a steady partner or a mortgage. You've still got time to decide. You can still hang on to the last fragile threads that connect you to your childhood. Once you're in your mid-twenties, that's no longer normal. You look around and find that your friends are suddenly married and have careers and maybe children. Even those that don't are on that road. Things have changed. Suddenly you can no longer relate. Suddenly you start to feel very immature and very alone.

I refuse to feel that way. I think things like marriage and mortgages and careers are merely a process of acceptance. I think most people are frustrated and desperately unhappy and infected with a kind of insanity. I think we're pushed into these things with little or no choice. It's the way the world works. It's what everybody else does. It's traditional. It's...well...it's conservative. It's the ultimate behaviour of the herd.

Now, I didn't come here to piss on anybody's chips. Some of my friends are very happily married, and they tell me that they genuinely enjoy their careers and their lives and their property and their children. All good. I'm not saying those people are wrong. I'm not even saying those institutions are inherently wrong. What I am saying is that the moment you settle down, get married, and start dropping babies all over the place is the moment that you give up on your dreams. What do you think the mid-life crisis represents? Why do you think it is that the idea of a middle-aged woman going back to college after a divorce or after her kids are all grown-up is such a cliche? Why do you think men of a certain age tend to gravitate back towards the trappings of their youth, towards tattoos and motorbikes and young girls? It represents dissatisfaction and a desire to revisit that which has been lost. It represents stolen dreams.

I have many friends who encourage what I do, but even they tend to look at me from the corners of their eyes sometimes, as if wondering how it is I can possibly still be comfortable with my childish pipe-dreams. The general consensus is that it's something I need to grow out of, or that I'll meet the right girl and she'll change me.

Wake up call for those people: I do what I do because I believe with a passion that you'll never catch your dreams if you don't chase them. I won't change for anybody because I am what I am and I'm very comfortable with that. I won't ever meet a girl who persuades me that settling down is a good thing, because I wouldn't be attracted to a girl that desires such a thing. I'm not settling. I only have one life, and I don't intend to waste it looking at the same scenery with the same people day after day after endless fucking day. Maybe when I'm older, when I've achieved the things I want to achieve and gotten tired of lighting my candles with a flamethrower, maybe then I'll pick a place I love and want to call home. Until then, the only home I need is the one inside my head. I don't believe in marriage because I don't believe I need a ring or a legal document to prove that I love someone. If anything, I believe that dilutes the idea of love. 'Here. I love you, but just in case you're a little insecure about it, here's PROOF'. Hell, if you need me to prove it, I doubt very strongly that you ever loved me in the first place. I don't want children because I have no desire to bring a new life into such a hateful world. That's another one that may change someday, if I ever get past the fact that I know my beliefs would make me a terrible and conflicted father. I had one of those myself, and I've absolutely no desire to inflict that pain on another. I don't want to put down roots because I don't want to be tied to one place. I like that I can just move on if I want to. I like to walk away. I like to burn my bridges. I like to feel new.

That's me, and I sit here and judge you now only because of the massive judgement you have passed on me. Don't label me. Don't try to impose your belief system on me. Those aren't my rules and they never will be. I don't consider myself a genius. I don't consider myself above you. I accept the way you live your life, even though I don't believe in it. I would never try to change you because the reason we're friends is because I like you, not because you're like me. All I ask is the right to be me without your strange looks and your tendency to roll your eyes and this certainty you have that someday I'm going to wake up and join the rest of the world. Is that such a harsh request?

Above and beyond all the rhetoric and the bullshit of quarter-life crises and childhood dreams, what it boils down to is that, despite our differences, I believe in you. Unconditionally. I accept what you are and I'd never want to push you to a place where you feel you have to defend it.

So why can't you just believe in me?

26.7.04

The Kinetic Circus

"Start with your eyes when they eye me in twilight, picking up pieces of mind. Tie me up with the twine in your eyelight, string me from heaven to time."

Autumn leaves are not beautiful. Motion makes them so. The wind playing in the trees causes those ripples of colour that so attract the eye, and it is that same element that eventually plucks them free, allowing a delicate and final journey to earth. A thousand metaphors are born, and none consider the truth.

As with the leaves, so with these streets. Dawn parts the sky for light to pour slowly yet irrevocably over this bleak, urban landscape. Yesterday's purchases are today's debris, given definition by morning. Crushed metal in the gutters, garish packaging lying torn and broken, flapping vainly in the breeze. False life. No thought, no feeling. A parody. A kinetic circus for an audience of one.

A gust of wind momentarily bloats a carrier bag and scrapes it across the pavement. Polythene on stone. It's a sound that can only ever be heard against a backdrop of silence. The sound of desolation. A soundtrack to nothing. The wind, as if offended, blows harder, and the bag takes to the air. As if on cue, a lone and unseen bird begins to sing the new day.

Another grey day. An army of clouds, thick and endless, roam listlessly across the sky, denying the sun's existence with lies burnished orange and fringed with gold. The tower blocks hold formation, pointing uniformly upward in a single, sad accusation. The trees, sparse and lonely, tremble with bitter humour. The bird sings on, gaining in confidence as one voice becomes many. A concert, for precious few moments, of nihilistic beauty.

But beauty is always stolen, and we are often the thieves. An anonymous woman shouts from an open window, a distant car coughs its first breath of the day, a plane slices open the sky. There are no miracles here. Just another day.

Another grey day.

Counterweight

“… she said to a man, what do mean really want from women, and he said, blowjobs, and she said, you can get that from a man.”

I need a routine. Never thought I'd hear myself say that, but there it is. This past month has been an education in that respect. At least when I have work, when I have commitments and some kind of life other than the chaos inside my head, I can feel like I'm a part of something. Since I fled to The Darkened Room, I've been existing in my own little world, putting myself into other's lives only when absolutely necessary. My grandfather's funeral, numerous job interviews, mundane things like haircuts and shopping. Even then I felt unreal and disconnected. It seems I can only relate to the people around me at moments of high drama or epiphany.

Three days of constant consciousness. My system crashed just before lunchtime and I slept until nine this evening. Then I grabbed something to eat and slumped on the sofa in front of the TV, channel-hopping desperately, searching for something, anything I could get my mind around. A film I like, a familiar news item, a cartoon from my childhood. I needed to identify. I needed a counterweight for the hours I've been keeping and the thoughts I've been having. I needed to think or remember or even laugh. Just...something.

Closing on 2am now, and the biggest decision I have to make is whether to take advantage of my current state and try to grab a few more hours sleep before it gets light. I'm not sure if I could or not, but then I don't know how long my Judas mind plans on keeping me awake this time. I need to get out there later. I need to take care of this whole food/water/shelter issue by getting myself a job. Then I can relax a little, get back to talking to people instead of just typing at them all the time.

2am. No thoughts worth having. No stories worth writing. The manic frustration and cartoon hatred of yesterday has dissipated, leaving only a directionless fog of vague disgust. At the world. At myself. At whatever's closest. I do feel like writing, but rather than ramble, I think I'll kill this one here.

25.7.04

An Antidote

"Hey. Wait. I’ve got a new complaint. Forever in debt to your priceless advice."

Seeing as the blog seemes to be geared towards hate rather than love recently, here's another pet hate of mine: Forwards.

See, I'm not actually interested in your stupid chain letters that promise wish fulfillment if I'll only force your greeting card idea of love onto five of my unwilling friends, and I'm not moronic enough to believe that you actually work for Microsoft and want me to help you test their new features in exchange for money. Neither do I care to contribute any of my hard-earned wage to some orphaned child that you invented because you think you're some kind of clever con-artist and not a complete tool.

I loathe those kinds of forwards. But there is a kind I loathe more. Not because it's worse, but because it comes from people I know. Yes, it's the questionnaire.

'What's your favourite ice cream flavour?'
'What's your middle name?'
'What shoe size are you?'

Fuck off. Why do you care what my answers to these questions are? And why would having this knowledge enrich your life? Are you planning on buying me ice cream and shoes? No. You'll take one read of my reply, chuckle a little at my pathetic attempts to be funny, and then consign it to your recycle bin.

Just by-the-by, when did it become a RECYCLE bin? Are we somehow saving the rainforests by getting rid of junk e-mail? Or is it just a really DUMB idea somebody had to instill a sense of environmental awareness in a generation of kids raised on the internet. The recycle bin. Well, that changed the fucking world, didn't it? Try thinking of a useful feature for Hotmail, like an anti-suck filter. Hell, that'd kill at least three-quarters of the mail I receive on any given day. It'd make me a happier person, too, and stop me wanting to track you down and beat you about the head with a brick.

Whoops. What was I talking about?

Yeah...those questionnaires. I'm so sick of reading the same bland questions with the same bland answers that I've decided to design one myself. This questionnaire will actually help you to learn new and frightening things about your friends and/or enemies. Copy, paste, and send at will. I give you free license.

QUESTIONNAIRE
All questions must be answered truthfully and in less than thirty words. Failure to comply with these rules will result in millions of small children and fluffy animals dying horribly. If you forward this survey to everybody in your address book, beautiful people will suddenly want to perform oral sex on you, George W. Bush will fall into a really big hole, and Bambi's mother will only have sustained a minor flesh wound.

1. What do you wish your parents had named you?
2. When was the last time you hurt somebody (physically or emotionally)?
3. Who are you most jealous of?
4. If you could be a public figure, who would you be and why?
5. Which of the people you're e-mailing this to would you be most likely to sleep with?
6. Why?
7. Who are you going to vote for in the next presidential/general election?
8. Why? (If you're not going to vote, explain why not)
9. What was the last thing you said that you didn't mean?
10. What was the last thing you said to make yourself look good?
11. Name one person you pretend to like but don't.
12. What's the most painful thing that's ever happened to you?
13. Have you ever attempted suicide? Why?
14. What's your biggest regret?
15. When was the last time you masturbated?
16. What were you thinking about?
17. How much do you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?
18. If I asked you to close your eyes and think of love, whose face would you see first?
19. What if I asked you to think of hate?
20. Write your epitaph.

There. Fill out your own answers and post them in the comments box, if you so desire. If not, well, fuck you.

24.7.04

Home Alone

So my parents went away on holiday this morning, leaving me all alone in this big ol' house. Of course, they had no concerns about doing this. After all, I'm twenty-five years old. A grown man.

Which is why they would be quite surprised to know that, as soon as they left the house, I scampered upstairs, stuck an Anti-Flag record on at full volume, and proceeded to jump up and down on their bed whilst playing air guitar and singing loudly.

Yes, I know I post lengthy socio-political rants and serious fiction and all the rest of it. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the subtle joys of, say, running round the house with no clothes on.

In other news, I was round at the newsagents this afternoon, and while I was tucking my cigarettes into my back pocket, the girl behind the till asked me if I was going to the music festival tomorrow. After a moment of pure confusion, I remembered what she was talking about...and realised that the world had to know how much this town sucks.

Yes, I live in Borehamwood. Home of Big Brother and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and Eastenders. All of these programmes are filmed at various locations around Elstree studios. Which is interesting, because the studios aren't actually located in Elstree. They never have been. But then Elstree is quite a posh, arty area. Borehamwood, on the other hand, is a hive of scum and villainy. Which is fair enough, I suppose. Nobody wants to think of Stanley Kubrick doing his filming on the run for fear of being twatted with a pint glass.

I hate this town. I truly hate it. I was out job-hunting the other morning and all the trendy media types were walking from the train station to the studios like some kind of invading army, flashing their laminated Big Brother passes as though they were some indication of social status, rather than the next best thing to wearing a big sign that reads 'I am a whore. Please kill me'. Fucking parasites.

Ugh. I feel a hate crime coming on. Or maybe...a Hate Fable. There's a project for tomorrow.

But back to the main point of this ramble, which was tomorrow's music festival. The people that are organising this festival are wankers. There are no good bands in Borehamwood, and there are virtually no people who would want to see good bands in Borehamwood. Hence the 'music festival' becomes a chance for the local scum to get beered up and fight. As usual.

But that's not the best bit. Oh no. See, if I was holding a music festival in Borehamwood, the first name that came to mind would make me smile briefly and then get down to some serious thinking. But not these fuckers. They couldn't help themselves. They had to go for the obvious pun. They had to. Because they suck.

So, tell me...

Are you ready?

Well, are you?

Because tomorrow, my hometown plays host to...

BOREHAMWOODSTOCK.

I'm moving. To Beirut.

This Movie Life

"What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I know goes away in the end."

This is a slightly bizarre little story. On some levels it works, on others it fails miserably. It's far too short, though. If I re-write it, it'll be a lot longer and I'll change the rather sudden ending. If you've come to this after reading the other one, the parallels I've drawn between the two should be obvious. In that sense, they belong together.

Fast-forward through the morning. Make a montage of it at the very least. The people don’t want to see the little details. Give them a trendy soundtrack and a rough idea of what I do before work. Yeah. Give them Nine Inch Nails. Head Like A Hole. There’s a good, up-tempo rock song with lyrics that reflect the mood of yours truly as I prepare for the day ahead.

So it goes like this: Fade into me waking up. A room bathed in dawn’s half-light. An alarm going off. Head Like A Hole going through its opening sequences in the background. Just as the song hits the first of those staccato kick-drum impacts, I roll over and punch the clock. Kill the alarm, bring the song to the fore. Cut to…

I stare at myself in the mirror, my tired face bathed in harsh fluorescent light. I look pained. Cut to me splashing my face, brushing my teeth, getting dressed. Hurry this sequence, but don’t rush it. We’re introducing a main character here. Let it build with the music, maybe accelerating the speed of the cuts as Trent tiptoes up to the chorus.

No you can’t take it, no you can’t take it, no you can’t take that away from me…

Cut to…

A well-dressed young man striding purposefully down the high street, moving more quickly than those around him.

Head like a hole.

The camera moves like a stalker, ducking behind cars and weaving around the zombies as they stumble to work.

Black as your soul.

The young man crosses the road, unmindful of the traffic. Beneath the soundtrack, we hear the sound of horns, a screech of rubber on tarmac.

I’d rather die.

Now the camera actively follows the young man, like the opposite of that video The Verve did where Richard Ashcroft walked towards the screen. We can see his destination just ahead of us. It would be silhouetted if you could superimpose grey on grey. Instead it’s a monument to the ever-repeating monotony of suburban nowhere.

Than give you control.

The train station. The music fades out as we cut first to the young man standing at the ticket window, then to the platform, where he joins the massed ranks of commuters. All are in smart suits. All are carrying briefcases. All are looking to their right, where the camera picks out the train as perspective makes it swell until it almost fills the screen.

I’m a veteran of public transport. I’ve been riding this train for three years now. Twice a day, five days a week. I know most of the commuters, most of the tricks. When the train draws to a halt, I’m standing just to the left of the doors closest to the driver’s cabin. Two reasons for this. One, the front carriage is always quietest. Two, the station exit is to the right. When other passengers disembark, they invariably get involved in minor scuffles with those waiting on that side of the doors. While this is going on, I hop onto the train and claim the treasure of an aisle seat.

The window seat, traditionally, has greater value. This is a leftover from childhood. For some reason, people will always go for the window seats, even though most of them know this view like they know their own faces. The other pattern is that nobody sits next to anyone else unless they really have to. Some people would actually rather stand than sit next to another person. I think that’s really sad.

But I digress. The reason I like the aisle seat is because I’m tall. Once everybody’s on and we’re moving, I can put my long legs out into the aisle and not have to worry about sitting with my knees against my chest. I get cramp. Also, Scarlet always stands, and I might miss her if I sat in a window seat.

I slip my headphones over my ears and listen to the song I always listen to when I’m on the train. It’s called Furryvision and it’s by a Welsh band called the Super Furry Animals. It’s a funny little song, and I think it fits the scene perfectly. In the film of my life, I would make it the soundtrack to this scene, and I’d make the train completely silent. All you’d see would be what I see; people swaying back and forth, reading their papers or books, drinking their coffee. Hardly anybody talks, so it’s not like we’d be losing anything worth having.

I don’t know where Scarlet works, but I wouldn’t mind finding out. She always gets on my carriage. She’s beautiful in that older woman/secretary kind of way. In the film, there would have to be a tongue-in-cheek scene where she takes off her glasses and lets down her hair. Of course, if I wrote it, there would also have to be a scene where she takes off her clothes. Scarlet looks a bit like Angelina Jolie, I think. Only smaller. I’m not sure if she has any tattoos. I would ask, but I’m shy. In the film, she would be the one to approach me. I’d be really surprised and embarrassed and she would think I was sweet. Scarlet’s smart little skirts make the train journey bearable.

The reason I call her Scarlet is because she wears really red lipstick. It isn’t scarlet as such, but I thought that was a sexy name for her. Once, when my sister stayed over and rode the train with me, I pointed out Scarlet and said I fancied her. My sister laughed and said that Scarlet’s lipstick was the shade you’d expect to see smeared around the base of a cock. I spat my coffee out in my lap and everyone laughed. Scarlet looked at me and smiled. She didn’t hear what my sister said, but I blushed anyway.

The song that soundtracks me stalking Scarlet through King’s Cross would have to be This Love by Maroon 5. It would be sort of funny, because stalking someone is a bit unhealthy and nothing like love at all. Also, having a big hit song on the soundtrack would mean more publicity for the film. They could do a video for it and everything.

I’m not really a stalker. I just like watching her. When she goes left to the Victoria Line, I go right to the Northern Line to catch my next train. I’d leave me following her in the film, though. It makes me look a bit dark. I’m quirky and funny, but I want to be dark as well. Girls like that.

We’ve already done a train sequence, so we’ll just grab a quick shot of me looking bored on the Northern Line. Cut to…

The well-dressed young man breaks away from the West End crowds and turns into a side road. The difference is striking. Compared to the claustrophobic bustle of Oxford Street, this place is defined by an almost reverential silence. There are a lot of places like this in London, but they’re easy to miss. No music here. It would spoil the quiet. All we should hear is the city fading away and the young man’s footsteps echoing up between the buildings.

He approaches a door set back from the pavement. He punches a code into the panel beside it with practiced ease and slips inside. Cut to…

Work. This would probably be another montage, maybe with a pause now and again for some snappy dialogue between me and my boss. He’s got that archetypal boss thing about him; fat and loud and condescending, yet ultimately the mental inferior of the people that work for him.

Marcy Playground’s Ancient Walls Of Flowers plays over a montage of your hero typing away at his keyboard, talking on the phone, exchanging the occasional jibe with his workmates. We could occasionally cut away from this to show the fat, loud, condescending boss sitting in his office doing nothing. Maybe he’s smoking a cigar, drumming his fat fingers on the desk, clearly frustrated. Cut to…

Fat boss exits his office and hears me talking on the phone.

“…okay, mate. I’ll see you then. Yeah, no doubt. I’m looking forward to it. Bye.”

Fat boss frowns. “Was that a personal call?” he asks.

I’m very relaxed and casual. “No. It was a business call. Mark Riley. He’s a friend of mine,” I say.

“Oh, really,” Fat boss says, raising his voice so that the conversation now includes the whole office. Heads turn. “And what’s the rule we have about personal calls?”

“I thought I just explained quite clearly that it was a business call from an acquaintance. Mark’s handling one of our larger accounts, sir. Would you rather I be cold and impersonal with him?”

“No personal calls,” Fat boss says, but his voice is getting quieter now.

“No, sir. Next time I deal with Mark, I’ll let him know that you asked me not to be nice to him on the phone."

A long silence with the camera focussed squarely on Fat boss. In the background, my colleagues can be seen smirking.

“Have you compiled those reports I asked you for this morning?” He finally asks.

I smile and shove a fat sheaf of papers into his chubby, sweating fist. He stares at me a moment, then turns and storms back into his office. I take a moment to grin at my workmates. Cut to…

Early evening and the now-slightly-dishevelled young man leaves the office and heads back out onto Oxford Street. The atmosphere is heavier now. Clearly, this is a Friday night. After work drinking is just getting up to speed, and the younger crowd are just beginning to filter out from the tube stations in a steady stream. The young man smiles as he crosses the road, turning his head to watch a couple of teenaged girls in miniskirts and tight tops.

I love London at night. And this is an important one. I feel nervous but good. I’m going to do it tonight. I’m going to talk to her. I’m going to tell her how…

We hear the sound of rubber on tarmac again, only this time much louder. The car strikes the young man at speed, lifting him off his feet and throwing him up onto the bonnet. The camera follows the still-moving car as he rolls bonelessly up the windshield and across the roof, where he bounces once before being thrown clear to land in an untidy heap in the road. We hear the car finally screech to a halt off-camera. The girls the young man was watching are standing motionless on the pavement, frozen with shock. Already, a crowd of onlookers is beginning to form.

I’m numb all over. I had plans for music and camera shots and characters. I had plans for which actors were going to play which people. I found out where Scarlet goes after work. I wanted to sit and watch her from a darkened corner while Sex And Candy by Marcy Playground made the other customers nod their heads to the beat. Wait. Didn’t I already use Marcy Playground? Isn’t there a rule about that? Why are all these people staring at me? Sirens in the distance. An ambulance weaving through the traffic. Siren-cam, like in Police Squad. My spine’s on fire and my legs are full of lead. Could use that Super Furries song again here. Ridiculous to be lying in the middle of Oxford Street while people oh-my-god and look-at-him. I feel weightless. Can’t keep my eyes open. Can’t think of a new song for Scarlet. Can’t think of a new song. Can’t think of a song. Don’t look at me. Cut to…

Tomorrow

"Through every forest, above the trees, within my stomach, scraped off my knees, I drink the honey inside your hive. You are the reason I stay alive."

I've had a busier day than expected, but I did manage to find the time to hammer out these two stories. This is the 'erotic' short, but I'm not sure you could really classify it as such. It does have an erotic element, but it's predominantly a straight story of a brief encounter. This is my favourite of the two, if only because the characters have more depth to them and I haven't tried to go anywhere clever with it. That's usually my undoing. Keep in mind that both of these stories are first drafts. I've edited for spelling and sense, but that's all.

I happened to be looking at the dark-haired girl when she got hit, and I knew it had to have hurt. She was beside me in the crowd waiting to pick up coats and bags from the cloakroom, the pair of us shuffling slowly forward, sweating in the oppressive atmosphere. Large numbers of people in enclosed spaces have never been my thing, and I was distracting myself from claustrophobia by watching the girl. She was about a head shorter than me, slim and pale and fragile in a tight-fitting black T-shirt with an Atari Teenage Riot logo on the front, skate pants hanging loosely on her hips. It was just as I was leaning forward to get a better look at her face that the can came flying out of the shadows behind us.

I don’t think anybody else saw it, though it was quickly obvious that something had happened. A male voice shouted “Fucking hurry up,” and then a crushed beer can coloured Heineken green connected with the girl’s skull. She made no sound, but immediately bent forward, her hand coming up to clutch at a place somewhere just behind her ear. I put a hand on her shoulder, to reassure or comfort or something, and turned to see the wanker who’d thrown it glaring at me. He was about my height, clad all in denim, sporting a haircut and shades that were pure Liam Gallagher circa 1997.

“Watch what you’re fucking doing,” I said. I didn’t shout. I didn’t need to. The area around the cloakroom was suddenly very quiet.

He smiled and then threw something else, a coin maybe. I heard it hit the wall behind me.

“Make me, cunt,” he said.

And I was going to, I really was. I’m not usually one for fighting, but sometimes you meet people who really do deserve to get their heads kicked in. For the good of us all, I mean.

“Don’t. It’s not worth it.” The girl standing upright, showing she was okay.

“Sorry, love. Wasn’t aiming at you. Your boyfriend’s a wanker, though,” Liam said, and actually earned a few laughs.

“You’re the one on your own, mate,” she fired back, and gave him a wonderfully slow and elaborate hand gesture to indicate what she believed he did on his own. The crowd reacted with yet more laughter, this time trailing away into the murmur of conversation.

The girl and I realised simultaneously that we were at the front of the queue, and we turned with tickets in hand to reclaim our coats.

“Thanks,” she said, and offered a shy smile that was somewhat at odds with her previous hand movement.

“Anytime. Didn’t look like you needed my help, though.”

The smile broadened. “Thanks all the same,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, offering a grin of my own. “For thirty seconds or so, I was your boyfriend.”

On which throwaway remark we were ushered towards the stairs by bouncers that had been conveniently absent for the can-throwing festivities. I glanced back and saw that Liam was close behind. It was hard to tell if he was looking at me, but his body language was threatening and the smile was gone.

“Shit,” I murmured, but there was no-one to hear. The girl had gone on ahead.

I hit the pavement and started walking quickly, hoping to distance myself from what was surely going to be a confrontation. No such luck. I heard his footsteps running up behind me and braced myself just before he shoved me in the back. It was enough to keep me from falling, but when I turned, he shoved his chest hard against mine, lager-breath washing over my face.

“Think you’re fucking funny, do ya? Think you’re a comedian? Where’s your bird now? Left you, did she? It’s ‘cause you’re a fucking wanker, mate.”

I got my hands between us and shoved him away, dimly aware of my temper rising. My heart was beating fast and my stomach felt shrunken and empty. I was shaking.

“Leave it,” I said. “I’m not interested.”

Liam stepped forward and shoved me again. This time I stepped back off the kerb and almost fell again, half-turning and placing one hand awkwardly on the tarmac to halt my stumble. I immediately threw myself at him harder, sending him into a passing group of lads who pinballed him right back at me. We collided, and he bounced awkwardly off me and fell to the ground. I took a couple of steps backward to compensate for the impact, then…

Then something hit me so hard that I lost all sense of reality. Suddenly I was in uncontrollable motion, lights kaleidoscoping around me as my body made repeated contact with some unforgiving surface. My back, my ribs, my arms, my legs. Then a moment of pure silence before I crashed to the ground, the back of my head bouncing so violently off the road that the world turned briefly grey. Nauseating colours danced across my vision.

“Oh my God!”

“You fucking idiot!”

“Is he okay?”

Stunned, winded, numb. Strange faces looking down at me. This odd perspective making the nausea worse, making me want to throw up.

“I didn’t see him. What was he doing in the road, anyway? Fucking idiot.”

“Shut up. Can’t you see he’s hurt? Somebody call a fucking ambulance.”

“I’m alright,” I managed. Then a little louder, “I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?” A girl’s voice. The girl’s voice.

“No.”

I pushed myself up into a sitting position. Hands grabbed me beneath the armpits and by the collar of my coat, helping me to my feet. The world span crazily and then focussed on the face of a middle-aged man.

“Fucking idiot,” he said, with the air of a man who knows one when he sees one.

I punched him as hard as I could, my fist making a perfect contact with the centre of that smug face, splitting skin and crunching against bone. He dropped immediately, and in the silence that followed, I could hear him moaning.

“Top banana,” someone said, in an awe-struck stage-whisper.

More laughter.

“Come on.” The girl’s voice again.

I let my arm be taken, let myself be led back to the pavement and away up the street. I could hear sirens in the distance.

“Nice work, slugger,” she said.

“What happened? Where are we going?”

“You got into a fight. Then you got hit by a car. Then you decked a cab driver.”

“Shit.”

“You’re doing pretty well so far.”

“I couldn’t even tell you my name right now.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to hospital?”

“No. I’m okay. I just need a few minutes.”

“I live just around the corner. You can get a glass of water or whatever.”

And somehow, despite all that had just had just happened, something in me smiled.

I’ve no idea where she took me. I was too busy trying to will the numbness in my body to hold on just a little bit longer. I could feel it fading, giving way before the crowd of individual agonies my body had become. By the time she was helping me up a flight of stairs in a block of flats somewhere, I was breathless and sweating. Every sudden movement brought a stab of pain from somewhere, and every time I gasped she would pause and I could feel her looking at me. Finally, she pushed me back against a wall and I heard the jangle of keys.

“You’re a mess. I’m gonna call an ambulance,” she said. “Come on.”

She led me into her flat. Hunched over as I was, all I saw of it was a stained and rather threadbare carpet. Through another doorway, and she let me fall into the cool softness of a bed.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

“Don’t call an ambulance.”

“Look at yourself.”

“Nothing’s broken,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sure.

“Yeah, and where would you be now if I hadn’t come along?”

“I wouldn’t have been in this situation if you hadn’t come along.”

I managed to wriggle onto my back just as she sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed. Her face was nothing like I’d expected. The first thing that hit you were the eyes. They were blue and almost comically large, like a character from one of those Japanese cartoons, and they flanked a slightly too-long nose that was forgiven by a wide and full-lipped mouth. She was pretty, but not remarkably so.

“And what the fuck are you staring at?” she said, smiling.

“I was trying to get a look at your face when that prick threw the can,” I said. “It took me this long.”

“Two fights and a car accident. I didn’t think I was that nice looking.”

“You’re not,” I said, and she laughed.

“You’re no oil painting yourself. Especially not now. Where does it hurt?”

“Everywhere.”

“The most.”

“My ribs. And my fist. Where I hit that guy. He was the one who hit me?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a relief. What happened to Liam?”

“Liam?”

“The wanker.”

“I didn’t see. I think he legged it. Show me.”

She scooted up the bed and pointed to my T-shirt, which was damp with sweat and maybe blood. Too tired and weak to take it off, I pulled it up as far as I could.

“No bruising yet. You look okay.”

“You have first aid training?”

“No. I just don’t get many guys up in my room. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Trent.”

“As in Reznor?”

“As in Stoke-On. I was conceived on a boat.”

“Oh, the romance.”

“How about you?”

“I don’t know where I was conceived, and I don’t want to know.”

“Your name, I meant.”

“Scarlet.”

“That’s…unusual.”

“Nickname. I used to dye my hair red. The name stuck. I like it.”

“I like it.”

“Then all is well. Tell you what, I’ll go and get you a couple of Nurofen and then maybe you should try and get some sleep or something. If you still can’t move in the morning, I’ll drive you to a hospital.”

“I’m okay.”

“So you keep saying.”

Scarlet left the room and came back a couple of minutes later with a glass of water and a pack of Nurofen. Aware that the level of feeling in my body still hadn’t fully returned and that further pain was a possibility, I took four.

“An overdose? You’re really going for it, Trent.”

“Yeah…”

Scarlet held my eyes for a few moments, then took the glass from my hand.

“Get some sleep,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I managed to wriggle out of my coat and my T-shirt, but further undressing seemed too difficult a proposition. I was as comfortable as I was going to get on my back, so I stayed where I was and closed my eyes.

I don’t know how long I slept for. Maybe an hour, maybe two. I woke up in darkness, and it had already been early morning when I’d left the club. The painkillers were still working, though. I could tell that much. Apart from the stiffness, swinging my legs off the bed and sitting up was a relatively easy task. Still, I was careful. I kept my hands on the bed and let my legs take my weight a little at a time. I was still trembling, but the pain had receded.

I wasn’t creeping. It was dark and quiet and I was in a stranger’s home. It seemed only natural to walk slowly and carefully to the door, then to pull it gently open. If Scarlet was sleeping in the next room, I didn’t want to wake her.

The next room was the living room, and Scarlet wasn’t sleeping. She was lying on the couch, her naked skin painted in shades of light. The curtains were as threadbare as the carpet, and both the moon and the streetlights shone easily through the frayed material. Her breathing was steep and ragged, loud in the stillness and silence of the room. I could see the way her body was tensed, the way her arm was resting on her belly. All else was speculation, but it was clear what she was doing.

The feeling was not dissimilar to the way I felt when I was sure Liam and I were going to fight. The same empty fear, the same sudden and stark choice. Stay or leave.

Scarlet whispered a moan, light and airy and beautiful. She shifted position slightly and that queer mixture of light briefly touched the hand that moved between her thighs.

I swallowed and concentrated on silencing my own breathing. I could see her eyes were closed. I took a few steps towards her, mindful of the light and positioning myself outside of its influence. Even if she had opened her eyes, she probably wouldn’t have seen me.

What I thought before, about Scarlet being unremarkable, seemed ludicrous now. Caught in intimacy like this, breathing and sweating and taking pleasure in her own body, unclothed without shame or insecurity in this patchwork of light and shadow, she was beautiful.

My own arousal seemed to increase in concert with hers. As her hushed sighs became more frequent and desperate, as her body tensed and relaxed ever more rapidly, as the pale skin at her hairline and between her breasts began to glisten with sweat, I felt myself slip into a state I’d never reached without physical contact. In the back of my mind, I recalled a magazine article I’d once read about a man who could will himself to climax. At that moment, it didn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea.

All at once Scarlet’s body seemed to seize up. She caught her breath and held it. Her free hand clutched at the sofa beneath her while one foot pushed repeatedly forward, as though seeking purchase. Then her head went back and she sighed, all of her strength seemingly exhaled with that one breath so that she lay boneless and spent, her chest heaving as her lungs struggled to catch that lost oxygen.

Then she said, “Feeling better?”

I froze.

“Are you feeling better?” she repeated, enunciating each syllable as though she was speaking to a five year old.

“Y-yes. Better. Yes.”

“Anything you wanted?”

I swallowed. “No. I was just…I woke up. I was confused. Wondered where you were. I’m gonna…get back to bed now.”

“Want to go to hospital in the morning?”

“No. No, I don’t. Really, I’m okay.”

“Want to take me out for breakfast?”

“What? Yeah. Why not?”

“Okay then. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Absolutely.”

I turned and shuffled back towards the bedroom, my mind reeling.

“Scarlet?” I said, pausing in the doorway.

“Uh-huh?”

“It was… It was worth it.”

She laughed, soft and delicate like her sighs. “Tomorrow,” she said. “When everything’s not going at a million miles an hour.”

“Tomorrow,” I said, and closed the door.

22.7.04

These Broken Days

"I watched with glee while your kings and queens fought for ten decades for the gods they made."

I couldn't face the world today. This lack of rest is making a coward of me. My dreams are so fragmented and so brief, haunting my brief forays into unconsciousness like so many unfinished tales. These broken days are a sensory overload for me sometimes. Like watching the first half of a film, then the last half of three others, then the next quarter of the first. And so on. Over and over.

I dreamed a girl I do not know last night. I dreamed her in fragments, starred and then shattered like glass. When consciousness defeated me again, I knew her name. Still, I shivered, outraged. Who is my dream-self to put faces to names like that? Such predictions can only ever be precursors to disappointment. Yet my sleep-phantom, in all his capering glory, smiles and dances at this knowledge, taunting me from places forever beyond my reach.

I dreamed her mouth on mine, her taste and her scent. I clothed her in fantasy and undressed her in same. She smiled, she spoke, she laughed. She came to me theatrically, as though she'd planned it forever.

In a room filled with smoke and music and conversation. Everything is background, nothing clarity. Rhythmic bass and cliched chatter. She's telling me something, and I take her meaning from the expression on her face and the way her hands draw pictures in the air. In a moment of respite, I glance around and notice that I've slept with everyone in the room, and that they're all smoking. She reclaims my attention and her clothes and hair have changed. I touch her face and she grins and then kisses my hand, her eyes telling my fortune in a promise.

I woke, briefly, warm and uncomfortable. My head was swollen and pulsing. The walls looked nicotine yellow in the almost-light of a grey afternoon expressing its frustration through curtains untidily drawn. I closed my eyes, hid behind maroon walls. Fade from grey. Fade to black.

Earlier, or later, or another time, we walk through the cold, dark streets of Soho. She looks paler, slimmer. There are dark circles beneath her eyes that might be make-up or a reflection of my own sleeplessness. She's unhappy, and she clutches my arm tightly with one hand while pointing out people she knows with the other. They are all film stars.

For a moment, I'm sitting in front of the computer typing. She walks into the room clad only in black stockings. She speaks the words of an old song without moving her lips. She straddles me. Her voice in my ear says, "Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints. As heads is tails, just call me lucifer, ’cause I’m in need of some restraint."

I woke up with her name on my tongue, with a tumour in my head and needles in my spine and a smile on my face. I woke up, but I'll sleep again.

19.7.04

Doctored, Strange Love (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The 'Net) - Part Two

"I guess I should be one to talk, there's nights that I can't even walk. There's days I couldn't give a fuck, and in between is where I'm stuck"

My first experience of 'online romance' came at the hands of a girl who jumped all over me before I'd even noticed her. I'm not going to mention any real names, but she adopted the username of PoetryLady, sort of a tribute to my HappyHarry moniker. I was really flattered by the attention, and I found her easy to talk to. In fact, we got along famously. I never saw any future in it, though, and I certainly never saw it in the same light as I saw real life flirting. It was a game to me. It was fun.

PoetryLady didn't see things the same way. We'd swapped pictures and - in keeping with my honesty policy as regards the blog - I didn't find her at all physically appealing. Realising that there was at least a possibility that she was taking the whole thing a lot more seriously than I was, I began to distance myself, an action that only served to fuel her pursuit of me. Finally, after weeks of stilted chatting and an atmosphere that was affecting the entire room, I told PoetryLady the whole truth about how I saw our 'relationship'. She told me that I was making her cry. I felt like a manipulative bastard, despite the fact I was also sure I'd been nothing but honest.

And there, I think, is everything that's stupid and pointless and wrong with people that take internet relationships seriously. Yes, it's a great way to meet new people, but until you know them in real life, it's just a fantasy.

Steffi and Alun, two friends I did make over the internet, came to stay with me not long after that. The little clique that dominated the Rainbow Room had fallen apart, but Steffi had come over from Germany and I was still in touch with Alun via Messenger. The three of us went bowling and then spent an evening at my house, where we shot the breeze for a while and found that our real-life conversations were nowhere near as much fun as those we'd shared over the internet. I still exchange e-mails with Alun about once a year, just to see how he's doing. I have no idea where Steffi is.

After the weirdness with PoetryLady, I stayed away from the internet for a while, worried that my experience would repeat itself. Boredom drew me back in after a couple of months, though, this time to the brave new world of MSN chat.

I was a newbie again, but I was a little more prepared this time. I knew what all the little acronyms meant, and my constant writing practice was improving my typing all the time. Under my new username, NeonExile, I found I was able to stand out from the crowd again. In a matter of days, I'd relapsed.

After surfing various rooms for a period of several weeks, I settled into a chat called Movies. I was working in a cinema, and I loved film, so it seemed like a logical place to go. I made new online friends, and pretty soon I was a fixture.

It was through that initial foray into MSN chat that I met Ray, Ana, and Jammie. Ray is linked from this very page, Ana makes up one quarter of J.A.R.T., the evil masterminds behind Softcore Sewing Circle: Season One, and Jammie can be found commenting on these very pages. These relationships, as you can see, have been far more enduring. In fact, the first time I chatted to Ray was over three years ago. We've only met twice, but on the first of those occasions, I had to be dragged semi-conscious from a pub. On the second, I had to half-carry Ray to a waiting cab. We've stayed apart for our own continuing health.

Ray met Ana at the same time and in the same place I did. Now she lives over here and they're married. On particularly dark nights, I still get jealous of that jammy bastard.

Jammie came over from Oklahoma to England in the summer of last year. I helped in her planning and even went on a brief tour of London hostelries to find her a place to stay. When she finally got here, it was me that met her off the plane. The following two weeks ruled, and plans are already being formed for many more kinds of Anglo-American cultural interplay.

But before all that, and as a counter-argument against the PoetryLady experience, I fell in love.

You see, me and Beckie never meant to get into any kind of relationship. It just happened. She was in Liverpool and I was in London. A mutual (online) friend had enlisted the pair of us to help him with a short film he was making. In the weeks preceding her visit, we started chatting a lot more than we had before (we were both regular visitors to the Movies room) and suddenly discovered that we had chemistry to spare. Of course, neither of us mentioned this, but it was obvious enough.

When we finally met in a dingy Ealing pub, we were sat together for maybe half an hour before we were all over each other, much to the consternation of our drinking companions. We shot the film, I took Beckie out the next night, and we agreed to meet up for further adventures.

Those further adventures turned into a two-year relationship. And while I'm no longer with Beckie, that's the longest and most satisfying relationship I've ever had.

And those, I think, are examples of why the internet is so fantastic. So long as you don't get hung up on people you haven't actually met, so long as you understand that the internet is all about masks and barriers and secrets, you really can meet new people. You really can develop fascinating and enduring friendships.

Yes, I have had further bad experiences with the internet over the years. In fact, the bad probably outweigh the good. But that's the drawback of the medium. It's easy for people to lie, even if they're not lying maliciously. You can't see facial expressions and you can't read body language. And somehow, when people you're starting to trust or at least like online start going behind your back or lying to you, it's worse then real-life. I think in real-life, some part of us at least has an idea when somebody isn't telling the truth, especially if we know that person.

The other thing is that there are a lot of desperate and unhappy people out there. You don't meet them down the pub because they don't go down the pub. But on the internet, you can be anybody you choose and go pretty much wherever you like. That's why the internet has the reputation it has and why you come across so many freaks and dickheads and people that are so obviously deeply lonely and miserable that it makes me want to cry.

It's a world, this internet thing, but it's not the world. For that, you need to look outside your window instead of logging on to Windows. But if you take it as it comes, with all the freaks, weirdos, arseholes, fakers, and arrogant pricks...not to mention the viruses, spyware, pop-ups, redirects, and javascripts...well, you'll probably meet at least a couple of people you'll be proud to call your friends.

I don't worry about it anymore. I've been here a while, and I know what I'm doing. I communicate with all the people I possibly can and then see what happens. If it all goes wrong, well, the block button was invented for a reason, right?

Happy surfing, kids, and if you happen to bump into a NeonExile at some point in your travels, say hi. I'm not a weirdo.

Honest.

Into The White

"I never meant to cause you pain. I never thought I'd be the one who took the fall. I got lost in the moment."

I have an addictive personality. As a child, I was hooked on milk for years. Yes, milk. I'd drink four-pint bottles at a time. Which is probably why I've never broken any significant bones and have such beautiful teeth. I grew up on a diet that was 90% calcium.

I took up smoking at the age of fourteen. I was a three-a-day man for about four years, but when I got to university, that suddenly shot up to twenty-a-day. It's stayed there ever since, apart from the occasional, half-arsed attempt to quit.

I had my first alcoholic drink at around about the same time I had my first cigarette. I didn't really enjoy drinking, though. As a teenager, I'd hang around on street corners with my friends and drink Diamond White or cheap Belgian lager from Tesco, but I never did it when I was by myself. To be honest, it was always a peer pressure thing.

My first real experience of drinking was at university. I described it briefly in the post that precedes this one. I went off the rails in quite spectacular fashion for several months. It wasn't that big a deal, though. I recovered from the wobble, and life went on.

Two things happened to change this. First, I became friendly with a guy called Chris. We worked together at Borehamwood cinema, and quickly discovered a shared love of the Evil Dead films and loud guitars. We started hanging out, going to see films and hitting the pub...all the usual things friends do. Then, one night when we'd only just begun to enjoy our drinking, it was suddenly eleven o'clock. We found ourselves back out on the streets with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It was pay-day, though, and we both had money in our wallets. Enough for a jaunt into London? Indeed.

Chris and I had such a good time that we vowed to have a proper night out every Friday, whether others came with us or not. After a while, this became every Friday and Saturday. Then every weekend and occasionally on weeknights.

At the start, we weren't drinking all that much. But the more often we went out, the harder it became to get drunk. The amount we spent on booze increased dramatically, and our nights out became the stuff of myth and legend amongst our friends and co-workers. They accompanied us less and less often as our trips into the city slipped further into the realm of the insane. I would wake up aching and ill, unable to clearly recall what I'd done the night before. I lost count of the times I regained consciousness to find myself in some unexpected location. Park benches, bus stops, benches, strange beds. Over a period of eighteen months or so, I did them all regularly.

The second thing that happened was that I took a management position at The Coronet cinema in Notting Hill Gate. My monthly pay doubled and I found myself out on the town almost every night, rarely taking the time to think about what I was doing or why.

I worked at The Coronet for almost two years. During that time I was hospitalised on three separate occasions, once for splitting my head open whilst attempting to jump off a table at the LA2, and twice for drinking myself into unconsciousness. My third and final visit to the casualty department of University College Hospital came about when I drank so much absinthe I nearly died.

I took care after that. I knew my limits, and I stayed well within them. Nonetheless, I was still drinking heavily on a regular basis until I left the cinema and had to cut back for financial reasons. It helped that I was in a long-term relationship at that point. While my girlfriend was no stranger to the depravities of excessive drinking, she didn't have the problems staying away that I did. Her influence was good for me and - with a couple of exceptions - I stayed relatively straight for a couple of years.

I took the eventual break-up well, I think, and there was certainly no repeat of my previous behaviour. I still drank, but always in moderation.

Such a relative term, that one. Moderation. Without the financial burden of a full-time relationship over a considerable distance, I began to retreat into myself as I always do when there is nothing of note going on in my life. Chris had found his own long-term relationship, and it took him out of my life and away up north, where he and his partner bought a house together. I continued to struggle with my first novel and took a part-time bar job. I'd work three or four nights a week and wrestle with words the rest of the time, usually accompanied by a bottle of supermarket-brand bourbon. Looking back, I'd guess I was getting through maybe four of these in a week.

That trend continued when I moved away from home. I was living above a pub, and it was all too easy to get hold of alcohol. This wasn't helped by the fact that one of my managers was clearly afflicted by the same disease.

It's now almost a year since the end of that last relationship. I moved back home just over three weeks ago and immediately settled into the familiar routine. I wrote, I worked on the blog and surfed the internet, and I drank.

In a way, it was writing this little journal that made me take a long, hard look at my life. It got me analysing myself in a way I'd long since forsaken. The image in my head, of the alcoholic, chain-smoking writer, sitting in front of his computer trying to write the poison out of his soul, no longer seemed so attractive. I was putting on weight. I wasn't sleeping. I felt spaced out and mildly ill most of the time.

I realised it was the limits. Always the limits. For Chris and I, the drinking and the partying started out as fun and then mutated into what it truly was: An escape. The more we realised this truth, the more we tried to outrun it. The faster we ran, the more likely it became that we'd hit the wall. And part of us, part of whatever that strange symbiosis was, desired the impact. The night this became clear to me was the night of the absinthe binge. And I know, with the benefit of hindsight, that what I did that night I did deliberately. I didn't run for the wall, I threw myself at it. I saw my limit, and I decided to go through it. Into The White, as the song goes.

It isn't the taste of alcohol, though I enjoy it. It isn't the feeling of being drunk, though I thrive on it. It's the limits that attract me. Something in me has to know them and flirt with them. I feel dead sometimes. I feel empty. And when you feel that way, knowing that there's a place where you can creep right up to the edge, where your body screams and burns and your mind has to process more than it can handle and you feel so fucking alive...well, it's an attractive proposition.

I quit drinking last week. Not forever, because it's a crutch I know I'm going to be needing again. But for now. I've taken up cycling. I've started looking for a new kind of limit. It's out there, I know it is. Tonight, riding hard up a steep hill with my lungs on fire and my thigh muscles spasming in protest, I felt it.

Adrenaline and alcohol are both about heat, and in a lot of ways they're alike. I know this because I lay on my bed a couple of hours ago, sweating and shaking and struggling for breath, my body protesting at the harsh regime I'd imposed on it. And you know what?

I wanted to go out and try a little harder.