?

This life is getting to me.
A slow suicide diet of codeine, beer and weed is not what the doctor ordered and nor a healthy way of living. Trapped once again when I thought I was free. How ironic and the new kitten keeps smashing glasses which is not good for my temprement. Oh sweet winter. Oh sweet Woolstone. What the fuck next?

Mr Nobody

I need to be a better person.
I care about the wrong things.
I take joy in problems and chaos and forget what it is that I have until it is always too late. It somehow does not feel too late. It feels about the right time.....

Mr RAF

I really want to tell my boss to go fuck himself as I know inevitably he is only going to do the same to me. It’s not an engrained paranoia but more a simple and cold business reality and business has always been a grimy place to be, so many lies hidden within those pinstripes. I feel as if I am a puppet, much the same as most I guess, but most, do not have their boss peering through the window or knocking on the door, most do not have to put up with mood swings that should only be attributed to severe menstruation or crystal meth addiction not that of a pub landlord. Once again his simple presence has left me with a dirty feeling that I am finding hard to shift, that slimy feeling of spending too much time near or around those that are directly responsible for paying my salary. At times, especially now, I feel no more than the salt whore I am, clutching the grains between my clenched fingers, hanging on for dear life hoping not to lose any but just like water eventually they all disappear, what is left is barely enough to season my chips.

My secret drawer is becoming fuller, close to overflowing with the evidence of my sins, torn and ripped, plastic and empty and resembling that of the monster it has become than the drawer it always has been. It’s endemic of this situation I find myself in, perhaps a case of borrowed time. As usual it may seem just waiting to be screwed and fucked over once more, protection pointless, wasted, a bore of ones time, living, pretending, hoping that things will get better.

I find myself miserably lost within the mis-management of others in such a small environment that means I am mis-managed and feel like a sheep without a flock. I wait for a degree of normal, rational decision making to take hold but instead each horrible incident is followed by another of even bigger magnitude. My boss who is completely oblivious to the fact that at times he is very bad at his job makes decisions that make my life uncomfortable at best and currently untenable and almost a severance is necessary. I sit and lose myself within the magic of the remastered copy of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles wishing for a simpler time and one in where I had followed the music rather than this humble and shallow existence. I try to fit in but no matter how hard I try I simply do not want to.

Freemans Close

The centre of attention I find myself once more and a situation certainly not of my own seeking or wanting. Nursing the lives of those around me with a stuttering care born out of a selfish desire for an easy life, where at least a small portion of it, I can sit, wonder, and revel, cry and laugh, in my own company, maybe sharing it with a musical hero, but ultimately my own company,my own thoughts, the warmth, the comfort I am mock building around me as if in the style of a mock cartoon cuckoo. All i seek is a let up from this summer madness that seen me settled in a corner house in a quiet village on the very outer rim of oxford. A chance to breathe and reflect, pause and thought, plan and action, composure, deep breath, start again only in winter clothes.
I find myself lost within marvel recently delighted by the choruses that remind me of a band I still love and a memory long ago, in a borderline like club, the bright lights and neon for the first time, the bite stuck and forever I am drawn to the neon, tacky and overcrowded that it is. Billy Talent sound very much like Ether should have been, both as an overstated and ambitious authour, are highly recommended, as is the corner house with conservatory in a village that absorbs your pain and provides flowers and good mornings. It has been a near three week stint working every day in a hell hole I proudly call mine and a five months that has stretched my patience and resolve every day to the limits and still all I can think about is that flower and Pippy. I do wonder, whether that symbol, was much more, or whether it was simply a kitten and with "house full signs" up at Battersea I think, and I do think too much that it is time to return for a forage around, a rustle and a stir. To see what lies dormant and what is still active and to find a new Pippy and perhaps the missing jigsaw piece to content and soothe when a winter batters and the winter will batter, the senses, the mind, control and motivation, the winter is always one of discontent but in all fairness perhaps at least winter will live up to its billing this year, spring stunted by snow, summer seemingly over by the start of June, autumn, well I can see that being consumed by Summer spreading itself a little more thinly, a warm October hopefully. It is a ramble. That makes sense to me, as its a vent. You are secret. Perhaps.......

Tolstoy wrote it first...

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life"

Desire

It has been a love affair. It is still a love affair as I write. Ash falling off my naked body, smoke swirling all around and that taste, like the ash and crack taste that addicts find so difficult to never taste again, this tar and slime that coats the inside of my mouth has been there for so long it is normal. It is hard to break normal as then it becomes extraordinary, by default maybe, but nonetheless, the habit, the smoke, the skins and packets, hard tops and soft tops, different brands for different moods, plenty or none, scrapings of tobacco, the love affair has to stop. It is a two front battle though with smoking being both the mighty tobacco and the weed and both have had their day like the pink cardigan I should never have wore as a teenager or the gola trainers I insisted would be cool in twenty years, its more irony than observation I was right and that I still wear Gola trainers. Smoking has been with me since I hit twenty and taken hold like a monster that is never quite fed, always hungry, snarling like a beast. My cravings for all and everything smoke related has always threatened to manifest health, mind, body and spirit problems but only now am I starting to see their slimy marks all over this crazy thing I call my life. There never appears to be enough air anymore and wind is a total relief although a sporadic weather force in the height of summer. Those scurrying little things that only come out at night and under extreme duress have started to surface in the days, sometimes brazenly winking until I look and then they scurry and the mind, well the mind is perpetually unsettled like it is trying to work out a math problem just out of its reach, as so often it is the difference between the gutter and the stars. There is a financial aspect to it all too which many would argue is long overdue, but those many probably do not read anyway, so still a Mr Nobody I am. Smoking is soon to be a thing of the past. Booked in for hypnotherapy, made lots of soup, got lots of puzzles and big lists and interesting books to read as night changes into day once more with me still awake trying not to scratch out the walls or my eyes wondering why, why did i ever choose to quit smoking.

Children

As the wind whistles around the building as a summers day becomes a stormy evening the soundtrack for the day as it tends to always be at the weekend is that of children, playing and laughing, shreeching and skurling (whether the latter is even a word(s) only seems to fit in nicely with my point) I forgot crying as that is the sound that most resonates at this current point in time. I sit, out of the back of the kitchen, on my builders chair, watching the children generally act like children which seems to be for the most part really annoying and obnoxious. There are the little creatures that are supposed to bring such joy and love into our life but all I see is a bastard love child of the devil. My mum was right when she merely went along with my previous conclusion that perhaps I would not make the best father but then most fathers I guess perhaps think that they are not particularly good fathers. Maybe not most but again its a whole world I know nothing about and avoid like the plague, shunning all family gatherings of mine and others, of that world where normal people go and talk about so called normal things all the time constantly telling little Maddie or Jo to shut the fuck up but always in that parental loving kind of way. Working here, well working is is strange and for the best part of it I surround myself with a little serenity, for the other part I have an unrealistic boss with a head that baffles me at times and a presence that scares me and a whole life within a life within a bubble like existence that I always seem to want away from but have no idea where. Mr nobody once more. Perhaps

There is a bedsit with my name on it. Perhaps not my name. Maybe Mannorca House or Sky View but it could be my name. Somewhere by the sea rather than Milton Keynes or Swindon, somewhere inevitably and predictably like Brighton but bedsits there are apartments and well out of the league of a travelling nobody. More like Bournemouth with with its skag and old age running through it like a disease, Eastbourne is no better but at least the pier resembles what life used to be like before this whatever that this is of course. At some point obviously I will have to switch to rolling tobacco once more and endure the wrench and heartache of smoking the devils poison, not for the nicotine, but for the time, a poor mans chess. That bedsit has always been there haunting me daily, nightly and like torture at times of desperation and horror somehow urning itself into a little point in my brain, there to lure me, distract me, comfort me and inspire me to be anything but that. That white cider swigging, failed nobody living for the reason of living with nothing but shattered dreams and a million lost loves. It a hearty thing to perpetually carry around but I think only because I illuminate it with such imagery in my mind that number forty six mannorca house seems more real than not. That struggle has always been the heart of this blog and is no different now with the exception I am actually about to do something.... or perhaps that is an illusion to.

Swine Flu

For well over a week now I have been ill. My latest symptom although less of a symptom and more of a excruciating pain is my right ear. Suddenly and in the space of the three hours i slept from midnight until three am it became very angry, started ringing with pain and has cut itself of from the outside world. Noise does not seem to permeate the thick swelling and wax that lies beyond that little black hole. The pain reminds me of the exact same pain was i was a kid who regularly suffered with ear infections and that same pain nobody could take away, I would curl into my duvet, head pressed against the cold wall trying to avoid the pain and the tinnitus rattling around my brain. Having my brain jangled so violently means I am literally nothing, all but reduced to a frail old man losing his marbles and blinded by pain.
It safe to say i have worked my way through the swine flu symptoms one by one starting with the more nasty ones first, the coincidence is funny if not a little unnerving considering my travel movements albeit not Mexico. Watching the endless stream of propaganda masked as news float around my headspace its hard not to feel more ill than one actually is. In reality if it is so, then it is so and i will be fine, it it is as it is supposed to be, then whats one more person in the millions. Its safe to say it has put me on my back at the worse possible time but i guess there is no right time to be so ill the only place that feels right is under a duvet in a bed. A luxury when you are homeless and once again hanging onto life with a feather and a prayer.

Double-Barrels

She changed her name. Its the first time I have seen it written down and it threw me for more than a day. It is an obvious thing to do when you marry but seeing it. Everything is still the same. Never thought it would be this way. Thought it would be like a yo-yo, I would grow out of its addictiveness but still always love it. I am still so totally addicted to that time and that place and that little flower I so soorly miss.

Wednesday

I have been obsessed with the thought of snails and steak for four months now and it is starting to grind me down that I cannot find a venue in which to cook such simple fare. The world has gone mad it seems and the closure of so many and the culling of so many more has made the industry a little glum looking to say the least. Its a hard thing to swallow bouncing from temporary shit job to temporary shit job making the most of each and everyone with recreational abusie and elicit behaviour of the highest order. Its not as it was. It more seedy now that it ever was. I am old enough to know better, and indeed I do know better, but finding the platform or even faux stage to perform on is proving tricky.

I started at six thirty in the morning today for a breakfast that is over by seven thirty. Thirty residents swarm down like uncontrolable savages with the most peculior requests for breakfasta I have ever seen- these are grown men, builders, brickies, sparkies and such like. Who eats egg white omelette? I always believed that to be an in joke in Sex and the City. Sadly I missed the brunch revolution as I am either sleeping or working at such time, lucky me it seems.
Before eight I am knee deep in pots, pans, trays and buckets of used debris and utensils. There is a cooling section, near the window surprisingly in which near piles of containers sit with the progress of my preperation. I am well into a packet of fags, drowning in tea, coffee and fruit juice and my body is clogging with the grazed pieces of breakfast or the misfires. By ten I am ready for sleep. I am not wanting to down espressos, red bull or pop pro plus these days, especially not so early in the morning - my organs aching from the previous night never mind today. I pop some codeine, turn the music on full and power through the day - breakfast, lunch and dinner with a few hours in between to maybe bathe, maybe wank, or just simple smoke myself into blissful reverie. Hotel work is so easy, volume is taken care over-staffing and I float most my way through the day waiting for that all important phone call or text message that will put to end this day to day nothingness. Meandering my way through under the guise that this is what we do, this is what life is like, this is a chefs life. In all fairness its a bit bollocks. I live the stereotypical life although somewhat downplayed and subtle these days but loathe every single minute of it. I think the loathing and sheer contempt I show for myself must shine out but it seems to endear me to others who think the same way, its not a productive or positive move forward. It is just treading water. The KPs are smoking out of the staff house kitchen door, chatting in Latvian, hip hop blazes out from speakers somewhere above and television spits out word in subtitle fashion making everything seem that little bit more real. England won though and one more day of this shit I am out of here. To pastures new, maybe not better, but who knows.....

Ramble

Like so many postcodes the names of the past litter the memory and trigger reverie on a windy but sunny saturday afternoon. The view from the window is mock idealic but mock is better than muck and it is good albeit perhaps only a temporary restbite from the misery that has been or maybe a new start. The problem with a new start is that is feels oh so familiar, a little tired now and i am becoming one of those travelling Nobody's that hide behind the service door afraid to commit to anything actually real. It is indeed another hotel, in another oxford market town - it feels the tired cliches of hotel life and the incestrious nature and debahuchery that becomes normal. It still all fits but more like a favourite but old suit, one that perhaps you shouldnt wear anymore but still do because you think it looks good, and it can look good, but in short bursts, at the right time, not all the time, the suit that is the security blanket. Freud would have a field day. Its a stop gap onto somewhere else yet somewhere else seems another world away. My heart, soul, brain and sometimes seperate common sense are call clashing for opinion space and quite clearly all disagreeing. My teeth ache and at the back of my head for over a week now there has been a nagging pain barely relieved by codeine and made worse at the smell of alcohol. It has been a hard week, pain does funny things. All these little symptoms create that worry that one of those million plus cigarettes was one two many or that something else has finally caught up with me. Its hard to imagine myself ill. I have had accidents and hurt myself but my body has recivered naturally and quickly but have never been ill. Boredom has set in. The sun has been hidden and there is no milk for tea.

Its not quite London....

Bulwell of all places. I guess I should have always known that once you delve into the ghetto even further all you discover is a different breed of fucked up people, clutching harder and stronger to that tangible thing we call life.

A Sunday night of all times though becoming more Monday morning but a good enough time to update and fill in the missing gaps that some will know, some will have worried and some will have wished were more permanent than it is so obviously not.

The funny thing about re-inventing oneself is that when you choose a city and  job, and choose a life that simply is not a patch on that of practically everywhere else, is that is is not really re-inventing. The same music, the same people and an a more so than I even remember or have ever encountered fuck up state of mind that seems to infect even within the months i have hidden within a city where literally nobody knows who I am anymore.

The simple day to day tasks of commuting from either the camera studded bleak environment of Bulwell and through central Nottingham which still remains a mystery to me, a gathering place for everyone, yet everybody seems nobody. Clifton happens to be my so-called home although it is as it always has been, well-kept for, community orientated yet really fucked up. Shameless for the masses and so much more. It is a total surprise there are not more murders here, riots, or just general civic unrest as it seems over-run by so-called shotters and wannabe gangsters - kids with attitudes and spots where morals should be. Its not so much a scary place as a funny place but for the neutral I am sure it is noticeable more so than ever before just how menacing a council estate set away from it all can be. Clifton is a so-called home, if only for convenience and obligation than anything, it is less of a stopping gap than prison of my own apathy. Things change though. The weather is. It is a start.

She is, as there is always a she is, another fucked up casualty of the wreckless nature in which some of us continue to live our lives. She has been a book within a week and yet still defies all literal description. I guess a forensic anthropologist and mortician as full-time professions really can define a person and with that i may well leave alone, scarred and tired, exhausted by the antics of a life I think I leave best for documentaries and late-night Channel Five television. It has been emotional as they say but some things, like lollipops have short runs. 

It is a life of pointless endeavour but somehow amazing. Inspirational in all the dark places. A home that seems more like a haunting than ever a home.  It is obviously inevitable that the big bang will happen and with nights like tonight, rock music, bite marks and blood one does wish massively for the bright lights and neon of a city I know rather than a city I hate. It is a peculiar city built upon the legend of a myth and one in which I may well be trying to tell a story from even as a brief guest, a sightseer, picture postcards from Nottingham.