Straw Man

"I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out."

I crawled out of bed this afternoon just in time to catch the salient points of Tony Blair's keynote speech to the Labour Party Conference down in Brighton. While I was impressed as always with Blair's speaking ability and natural charisma, the whole thing was basically a massive downer. What Blair essentially seemed to be saying was: "I'm right, you're wrong, and I'm going to win a third term to prove it. So step the fuck back, junior, and let the pros show you how politics works."

The third term is a certainty anyway. You'd have to be a moron to think otherwise. As for Blair proving his promises and ambitions right, I guess that remains to be seen. All I know is that I heard a lot of unrealistic claims today. Okay, so it was a conference speech. There was always going to be a lot of back-slapping. But Blair's apparently 'low-key' speech struck me as a prime example of the high-minded bullshit our Prime Minister is forever spouting.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Astounding hypocrisy, really, for the Prime Minister to give a keynote speech that touched heavily on on the war in Iraq and our role in international relations on the same day that two stories on these very subjects broke in the news: Two British soldiers were killed during an ambush in Basra, and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was caught on camera shaking hands with everybody's favourite evil dictator, Robert Mugabe.

I actually caught the Jack Straw story first, and was almost doubled up with mirth before the prospect of yet more senseless death in Iraq bought me back to earth. Straw, sporting a new hairstyle and contact lenses to replace his glasses, was apparently the toast of a lunchtime reception hosted by Thabo Mbeki in New York. Indeed, shortly before the hand-shaking incident, Mbeki was quoted as saying that Straw was a 'new man'. High praise indeed from the President of South Africa.

Man, I can't stop thinking about this... Jack Straw strolls through a crowd of his peers, feeling good about his new look. The men have been full of praise, and he has detected many sidelong looks from their trophy wives, looks he is sure are both lustful and admiring. He is high on himself. He is a man on the move. When he finds himself guided towards a large black man in a blue suit who is seated imperiously in an armchair, he thinks nothing of it. Just another foreign diplomat, he thinks. Just more flesh to press, another face to smile into. Something familiar about this one, but Straw can't quite place him.

"Nice to see you," he says, and smiles warmly.

The man grabs his hand and shakes it firmly. He is smiling, and Jack has just enough time to notice that there is something of the shark in that grin before he is lead away, wondering why it is that the Newsnight film crew following him around are exchanging looks of disbelief. Some of them are laughing openly. He nervously checks his hair.

Straw has back-and-forthed on this one since it happened, saying initially that he 'didn't recognise' Mugabe before later asserting that the state of relations between the two countries in questions did not mean that he should be 'discourteous and rude'. Fortunately for Straw, talk quickly turned back to his new look, and whether or not it indicated some fresh political ambition.

Idle speculation: What if Straw had recognised Mugabe? What if he'd given him the finger? What if he'd thumbed his nose, waggled his fingers, and stuck his tongue out, yelling "Ner ner!" as he was restrained by Mugabe's aides. Hell, if Straw had political ambitions, he could have come up with something far more newsworthy than a handshake. After all, if he'd leaned over and hit the Zimbabwean leader with a straight right to the jaw, I guarantee you that no-one would be talking about Tony Blair's stupid little speech right now.

Shit, Straw could change his whole image. He could come right out and say stuff like: "I had to hit Mugabe. He's a charlatan and a vicious sewer rat. I did only what the entire international community has been itching to do for years."

Jesus. He could go on and challenge Blair for the leadership, noting that the "only change Tony's hairstyle has gone through in the last seven years has been the exposure of forehead that has matched the exposure of his constant lies."

Of course, with soundbites like those, with the hair and the lenses and the attitude, Straw's Labour would go on to win the next election by something like forty million votes, and many problems would be solved by pistol duels at dawn and fist fights conducted under the Queensbury Rules.

Unfortunately, Jack Straw is a worthless hack and a dingbat. In shaking Mugabe's hand instead of kicking him squarely in the balls, he has doomed us to five or ten or even fifty more years of our own benevolent dictatorship.

Thanks, Jack.

Dead Time

"And the puddles reflect the sky in the morning, and the pavements lead to another place. With one ear to the west and an ocean beside me, I swear if you listen you might just hear our song."

A nothing day, the highlight of which was walking home down Witches Alley, which was (obviously) the inspiration for Witches Path in Lanterns And Shades. Autumn is stripping the trees of their leaves, and this particular section of my post-work walk is starting to look almost as sinister as the fictions I've built around it. In the hands of my favourite season, Witches Alley is a dark, cold, and isolated place. Though both ends lead out onto busy roads, civilisation is hidden away from the walker by screens of tree and fence. At midnight, the traffic is silent, the air is cold, and the illusion is complete. When the only sounds are your footsteps, even the breeze dragging errant leaves along the path can be enough to make your heart beat a little faster, to have you looking over your shoulder in defiance of all that is rational, if only to be absolutely sure that some creature from beneath the bed of childhood isn't creeping stealthily up behind, ready to lay a clammy, clawed hand on your shoulder.

I felt pretty good tonight, though. Between Jennifer and insomnia, I got very little sleep last night, and I staggered through work like a zombie. By ten o'clock, my apathy and sluggishness was so obvious that when I mentioned the possibility of being let go early, the duty manager was almost enthusiastic. Before I left, though, I partook in some of the many drinks I've been bought over the last few weeks in the form of a can of Red Bull, a pint of Carling, and a very large JD and Coke. These I drank quickly, one after the other, leaving my empties on the bar and then staggering out into the night without saying goodbye. By the time I was walking down Witches Alley, alcohol and caffeine were kicking in hard. I felt synchronised and awake for the first time since falling out of bed this afternoon.

That feeling is fading now, and I'd probably already be in bed if I didn't feel so restless. As usual, the option of sleep seems the hardest to commit to. I know I'll lie there and stare at the ceiling, watching creases and cracks emerge from the darkness as my eyes adjust. What's the point? It's just dead time, wasted time. So here I am, doing what I do to fill the holes in my life and listening to the senseless patter of my fingers moving over the keys. And if I'm honest with myself, that's not as bleak a picture as I sometimes paint.

Maladjusted

"All I can say is that my life is pretty plain. You don't like my point of view. You think that I'm insane. Its not sane, its not sane."

Drunk again. This is the same state in which I've spent the last two nights. I haven't slept and my body clock has gone all to hell. Funny, but this feels like a more natural state to me. I feel like I do my best work when I'm all fucked up and out of synch. Sober and straight and dodging insomnia, I work to a schedule and get nothing done, sleeping and working at The Toby Carvery and chatting to Jenn. Some of these things I enjoy, others I don't. But the simple fact is that I get nothing done.

These last couple of nights have seen me slipping back into my old pattern. I sleep all day, work until midnight, then come home and type until the early hours. Jenn was at school on Monday and had to write an essay last night. This left me at a loose end, and I used the time to work on various stories and - eventually - a letter I'd been meaning to write for some time. Between Friday and today, I have written maybe 30,000 words. That's more than I've managed in some time, and a lot of it was stuff I know I'll still be proud of ten years down the road.

That's a part of what makes it so hard for me to straighten myself out and lead some kind of normal existence. In routine and structure I am impotent. I write, but the words don't really flow. It all makes sense, but it seems empty and cold. It's like writing as a practical exercise. There's no real feeling.

Yesterday, I wrote part 3 of Lanterns And Shades. I chased it with a fluff porn story I wanted to get out of my system. I followed that with a letter to Jenn that ran maybe 5,000 words and was probably the most honest, blunt, and true thing I've ever composed. I don't think it was good, I know it was. Sometimes, as a writer, you read the things you've just written and can be sure that wherever they go, they will have an impact. That's how I feel about that letter. Jenn's at school today, and hasn't replied. Hell, maybe she hasn't even read it yet. But I feel sure that when she does, it will touch her. That was my intent, and I feel that this is one of the few occasions when ambition and result speak the same language.

At 7:30 this morning I was in the bath, reading Richard E. Grant's film diaries. At 8:30, I was making burgers from mincemeat and cheese and paprika. At 9:30 I was in bed, watching film after film after film until five o'clock, when I had to get up and get ready for work. I finished at ten because I was tired and there were two of us on the bar where only one was required. I'd intended to come straight back home, but I ended up drinking with a group of builders that have been staying at the hotel for the last few weeks, exchanging idle chatter until a little after midnight, when I staggered back home and immediately opened a bottle of red wine. Tiredness has passed, and I am now doing my laundry and updating all that needs to be updated. When I am done with this post, I plan to open up a fresh, clean Word document, type the words Welcome To Forever at the top, and go to work. I've been planning to do just that for weeks, maybe months, and it just hasn't happened. Now, at the point where I am giving up on quitting smoking and drinking, where I am falling into old and damaging habits, I finally feel as though my mind is in the right place and there are enough hours in the day that I can actually get some work done.

I don't know if it's just this novel or if it's my creativity in general, but I find that I am at my best when it's six or seven in the morning and I'm drunk and without sleep. In that state, the words are natural and powerful. I don't even have to think about it. My mind races and my fingers scurry over the keys in a vain attempt to keep up. Everything wants to be ten or twenty thousand words. Everything is easy. Everything reads as though written by a man with a talent and a firm eye on where it will take him. Worries and insecurities fade away, and I feel as though anything is possible. I feel as though nobody can write like I can.

I want to quit smoking and drinking so much. I want to be in control of myself. I want to be safe and sane and in control. I want to drop the extra weight I've gained through unemplyoment and settle down each night to work on a novel that I really think could be great. Problem is, I'm no good at doing any of these things, and they bring me nothing but pain. When I can dull that pain, when I can twist it and turn it to my advantage, when the words and the thoughts and the feelings flow, when I can do it without ever worrying about it, that's when I do my best work.

In a truly pretentious and slightly horrifying way, I need to be destroying myself for my art to be truly representative. I need the cancers to be inevitable, the control to be lost. I need my head spinning and my heart beating fast. I need to be real, casting aside all the baggage I carry around with me when I'm straight and whole. I need to be fractured and broken and real.

That's my reality. That's my forever. I just can't see myself as somebody well-adjusted and confident at the wheel. It isn't any fun unless there's a chance that you just might crash through the barriers and bring an end to this ride that can only be destructive. In a way, that's exactly what I want. It terrifies me, but I see it as a kind of inescapable destiny. I am incapable of saving myself.

Don't think that I don't see the lights of friendship and love. I do. It's just that I am naturally cynical and downbeat. That's almost the point of the story I'm trying to write, of my life. While part of me searches for something or someone that can pull me out of this freefall, another part searches only for what I'm feeling, and for new and painful ways to put it into words. I find a kind of desolate romance in that, and it drives me to the alcohol and the nicotine and the strange high that rushes through me when I've been up for three days and I'm typing to beat the devil.

Maybe you don't understand that. Maybe you don't want to. Maybe you see me as a friend or as some kind of presence in your life, and the idea that I might want to destroy myself is abhorrent to you. Maybe you think I should just cheer the fuck up and find something that makes me happy. Hell, maybe you're right.

I can't stop. There's a scream inside me that never fades away. I have to drown it in booze and articulate it in these strings of letter and word and paragraph and story. If I don't, I feel I might go insane. I feel that this metaphorical scream will become real, and that once I open my lungs and let it out, I won't be able to stop.

I'm sorry if that doesn't make sense to you, if you think I'm something or someone that I'm not. I can only be me, and I can only ever do the things that I will do. Everything else is a lie.

Hi, My Name's Michael. How May I Help You?

"This flower is scorched, this film is on, on a maddening loop."

I was walking back to the bar from the kitchen tonight when I looked up and noticed a sign above the swing-door that I hadn't seen before. It said:

Never Pass The Half-Empty Glass

My current workplace is full of such cheesy slogans and unity-encouraging posters. For example, the staff room isn't referred to as such. No, it's the Team Room. The fucking Team Room. You know, where the Team hang out. I have two words for whoever it was that went to the McDonalds University and came back with ideas like that one, and one of them's 'off'.

So anyway, I was sitting in the Team Room (italics indicate weary sarcasm) during a cigarette break (shut up. I'm working on it, okay?) this evening when I noticed a couple of things. The first was that, on the noticeboard in the corner where they scrawl various inane comments about staff performance, one of the management team had written the following:

Mike, new to Toby Carvery, already seems like he's been for years.

Funny, I feel the same way. But...uh...when did I sign the slip that gave you permission to call me 'Mike'? And in the Team Room, no less. As Maddox would say, CHOO CHOO, here comes the clue train, last stop you: I didn't. If you address me, you will call me 'Michael'. 'Sir' is also acceptable. You will not call me 'Mike', 'Mick', 'Mickey', 'Mikey', or any variation thereof without my written consent. Especially not in the fucking Team Room, which, by the way, should be renamed the Hate Room, seeing as all the Team ever talk about when they're in there is how much they hate the job/management/customers.

The second thing was a 'hilarious' poster reminding the Team that they should always offer the customers drinks and table service when travelling about the bar area. It was styled after the posters that show the actions you should take in the event that somebody stops breathing or has an attack of some kind, and featured intricately drawn diagrams of thirsty clients with empty glasses that you didn't replace before they were half-empty.

It was funny...like throat cancer is funny.

My point is that I was a customer service manager not so long ago. Over a period of time I built a group of staff that were reliable, punctual, hard-working, and pretty cool in general. I liked them, and I like to think that they felt the same way about me. But I never expected them to believe that we were a Team, that we were working together to achieve the goal of total customer happiness. We weren't. We were a loose grouping of people who worked reasonably well together and were united only in our unanimous hatred of our job and the people it forced us into contact with.

That isn't a unique situation. By and large, customer service jobs pay minimum wage and are frequented by people who are either just passing through or aspiring to reach the next level in whichever company or trade the job happens to be in. Nobody LIKES being on the bottom rung of the customer service ladder, and nobody feels that they are part of a Team.

So fuck off with your team-building, your humourless slogans, and your twee posters. If you've got money to spare on such pointless 'motivational' tools for your Team, then maybe, just maybe, it might be better spent on giving the poor bastards a little pay increase. They might even work harder, at least for a day or two.

But to be honest, I doubt it. After all, that glass we're always passing? I couldn't help but notice that it was half-empty rather than half-full.

...And God Wept

"I was born whole. Fractured, divided, shattered into a billion fragments; A million piece puzzle; A million piece jigsaw puzzle with no this and no that."

So I got a little bored after Jennifer went offline this morning and started fucking around with the feature Blogger replaced their banner ads with a little while back. Now, don't get me wrong here, I hated those banner ads and coded over them just as soon as I figured out how. With this new feature (which you can see at the top of the page), it's possible to jump to a randomly selected blog or even search for specific keywords. That's both more interesting and less intrusive than a big fat ad splashed over the top of your page, and I salute Blogger for taking a step away from the evil corporate influence that presides over pretty much everything that comes free on the internet nowadays, with the shining exception of those lovely folk over at Mozilla and anybody that thinks like them.

However, taking the step of actually clicking on the 'next blog' button in the top right hand corner of this screen is something marginally less exciting than the lottery you might be expecting. In fact, chances are you'll get one of the following things:

1. A page written by somebody who is clearly around twelve years old and unable to type in anything that isn't text/chat shorthand, exposing you to the joys of trying to read something filled with stuff like: "Hey guyz!!wazup??well..2dae was a very irritating dae 4 me..coz..dose biatch..find trouble wif me!!havent dey have enof??i said i wont disturb dem..so y disturb me??dey got problems wif thier studip brainz!!dono how 2 tink!!if dey r na students,dey should have brains n common sense!!dey juz irritate me!!can take it animore!!" (I copied and pasted this from an ACTUAL BLOG).

2. A blog that has been created not to assail the reader with insightful opinions and a view into the life of a random and possibly interesting person, but one covered in keywords and links to commercial sites that are simply taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the good people of Blogger in order to make some more money or attract the unsuspecting surfer to their page of porn and spyware.

3. A page that is dedicated, in some way, to Jesus. Again, don't get me wrong. I am more than tolerant of those that hold religious beliefs and more than willing to engage in calm and reasoned debate. But fundamentalists and ignorants just piss me off. Go spread your intolerant words of barely-masked hatred and bitterness elsewhere. I do not want your page to pop up when someone clicks a link from NFADR. The very idea sickens me.

4. Something in a language either you or your computer cannot read. I'm fairly sure this is covered in the Blogger sign-up bit, so if I'm logged in, surely I can be directed away from pages you KNOW I'm not going to be able to decipher.

5. A page created by somebody who appears to have copied and pasted random HTML from all over the place so that my screen looks like I've projectile vomited on it and then practiced my fingerpainting in the resulting mess.

6. A blog that somebody has created and then never bothered posting on.

7. A blog that was abandoned years ago.

8. Maybe, just maybe, something half-coherent and vaguely interesting. But don't bet on it.

Yup, if Blogger's newest little plaything is to be believed, I'm surrounded by morons, illiterates, fundamentalists, corporate scumbags, people I don't understand, slackers, psychopaths, sociopaths, and the occasional bright shining light of comprehension.

Well shit, maybe it's more accurate than I thought.

Ghost Town State Of Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in the days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe, but maybe not.

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