Goodbye to all that

Mere pseud

I’ll look back from some vantage point in the future and laugh. I’m merely a pseud, nothing more. What was I really expecting?

Petrifaction

Listen you ignorant crass BASTARD!

Yes, YOU!

Now I’m getting facetious and letting slip that since June 8 1980 I haven’t made one FUCKING bit of progress—no way. Situation ‘hold’. Unshaven, things in a mess, looking ill-fitting, wrong somehow in the mirror, not to the desired formula. I look a mess.

I think about things that pain me: the loss of momentum, mystification of objectives. “Break through in the grey room”? More like petrifaction.

Rain outside, but no more on that here, because I feel I ought to sum things up with words of breathtaking, all encompassing wisdom and wit. 


Words of wisdom.
Words of wit.
Words that show I’m full of shit..
Words of splendour,
Words of power,
Words that show I’ve had my hour.
Words of facile, artless grace,
Words that mock me to my face.
Words like concrete,
Words that bend,
Words beginning-middle-end.
Words of insult.
Words of merit.
Words, my misfortune to inherit. 


Late night angle poise

I’ll never regain what’s been lost, and I’ve lost it simply through idleness and the acceptance of chaos. So I’m writing in an effort to escape this claustrophobic sense of self but, in turning to words for relief, I find only undisciplined thinking and a suffocating, limited vocabulary.

As long as I live I’ll never overcome this dissatisfaction with wordsWordsWORDS!! 


It’s hard to express ideas and emotions through this confining medium, and this is an oft-repeated thought I know but it’s one I can’t escape. Some people find words effective at conveying the ideas and images they want to pass on to others, but I’m scared of them and that’s the truth of it, no more, no less. All my writerly aspirations and hang-ups and beliefs in the bookword product, the final act, has me forgetting the real purpose behind language, which is the communication of self.

Words must serve self, and the sooner I learn that and shake off all these half-cocked and self defeating attitudes the better. At this point and from this angle I’m beaten before I’ve even begun. Which must be wrong. So let these words declare themselves as immutable and irrefutable evidence of me as I am now, a fixed point in space and time (Friday November 2nd, 1984, 10:17 p.m., 12 Westdorgan Road, Watermouth), which at least gives me a reference point, a start.

What am I trying to say? At the beginning of this entry I had no clear idea or intention as to how to proceed, no purpose or methodology, just a pen scrabbling across the paper and tired eyes in the weak piss yellow of late night angle poise. Look back at the top of the page, see the mistakes multiply and expand, rolling forth with their crazy unplanned distortions and fabrications across the page. I’m lost in the tangled tentacles of language, lost in the ‘city of words’.

Any original purpose or meaning is dulled, nothing becomes clear or clearer, and I’m left with the dry taste of stale tea in my mouth, tealeaves between my teeth, feeling helpless.

Inadequacies! 


Headlong

I feel like giving up with all this and pitching headlong into a thoughtless routine of easy laughs, drunken bouts, food, and TV.

Guilty as charged. 


Pages be witness

I slept most of today, rising in the dark at to stumble across to Andrew St. and the newsagent. At this point, Lee and I experienced a trough of frustration at our mutual decline into stagnation. We were tired and bitter at ourselves and our own weakness and enslavement to the Present.

Pages be witness: another dayweekmonthlife like all the rest, time squandered in self-perpetuating torment at my spineless existence.

Eyeless, brainless, no thought, no future, no work.

I’m driven to the conclusion that desperate measures are all that can rescue me from the stinking pit of MOMENT, and yet I’m simultaneously overwhelmed by the hopelessness of my case. I’m trying hard not to use words inappropriately. I don’t want to exaggerate, distort or paint an inaccurate picture, and I appreciate how easy it is to let dramatic words and phrases swim into mind’s view, and yet . . .

My plight is serious.

I’ve attempted nothing in the way of work, and the work that I have done is dissatisfying and infuriating. My essay on chance has preoccupied me in an indirect way for several weeks. The incidental moments and passing frames of mind have, with neglect, blurred now into an indistinct ribbon of interminable afternoons and nights. It’s impossible for me to pick out specific instants and dwell on them, in my usual fashion.

The particulars have gone and all I’m left with are the generalities . . . and as my life ‘in general’ has no structure or purpose at the moment I’ve got little to write about other than my work and housing situation . . .

Scourge of Britain’s youth

Routine: Masquerades, Barry there with his girlfriend (“I’ve got to go now” whenever he sees her alone).

Afterwards, Del and John finally went round to Broad Street and Lee, Lindsey, Stu and I went along too. Del and John subjected Barry to an hour-long verbal assault for his association with Jason and co. and his indifference towards what Turney kept referring to as his ‘true friends.’ I kept quiet, listening to the pointless wrangling and quite enjoying it. Then we all retired to Maynard Gardens to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween III on Ian’s video. 


Endless afternoons and evenings at Westdorgan Road—TV, kitchen, collective apathy, Boredom with a capital B. More drugs tonight after Maynard Gardens—the scourge of Britain’s youth. 


I’m tired. My eyes are heavy and my mind isn’t feeling up to much. The effort required to put thoughts into words is too great at this late hour. I find myself rereading things I wrote a year ago and looking back regretfully at the ease with which I seem to have lost a whole way of thought/writing.

It’s slipped away.

I am £80 overdrawn, with £50 in the Building Society, and another £70 on my limit at the bank available. Here I am, 20, time flying by. Two years is such a long time at 16 but now, it goes before I’m even ready to savour the moment.

Tits on a bull

Lee and I (the old formula over again) ventured once more to the abattoir amidst the skinned cows’ heads and cheerful slaughter men, because Lee’s latest piece (to be titled “Adam and Eve” and to be unveiled at a second year's exhibition) demands a cow’s cunt and bull’s equivalent which he will sew onto pillows:

“Could I have a cow’s genitals, please?”

“Only bulls have genitals, you prick. Is it the tits you want?” 


I loitered in the fresh air waiting for Lee and at length he emerged with a Londis bag full of still steaming fat and bloody flesh, uterus n’ all. Such tasks are becoming routine. He wants to create shock and confusion by being brutal and inconsistent, and a recent tutorial of his began the trend, although by all accounts his shifting position and constant U-turns came across less as brutal inconsistency and more as simple defeatism.

His next scheme is to create a disgusting room, à la Texas Chainsaw Massacre, complete with bloodied walls and, instead of a door, a curtain of human teeth. 


We at Westdorgan Road view the goings-on at the Art College with cynicism, and I think it does Lee good to be with us, otherwise he’s in danger of getting sucked in by the incessant pseudery, posing and bullshit that seems to be part and parcel of that College, and thereby losing all perspective. The trash which passes as ‘art’ in that place is incredible, and there doesn’t seem to be any critical faculty operating in either tutors or students. Any old rubbish is OK so long as it’s accompanied by an appropriate piece of self-justifying bullshit. No one is willing to be thorough or self-critical. 


At least I just joined the record library, which is something I suppose. I took out Stravinky's The Soldier’s Tale and Charles Ives' Pictures of New England and Symphony No. 2. 


The vocabulary is lacking.

24-hour lethargy people

How do I start?

I feel helpless and disgusted with myself for my laziness and blinkered attitudes. The thought of these blank pages is enough to fill me with a leaden sense of my own futile striving and hopelessly lazy temperament, whereas once I would’ve just picked up a pen and just started to write . . .

It’s almost as if I see myself as an empty shell, devoid of any colour or depth . . . This household has a grip on me, and I can’t shake it off. Brain like jelly, words wafting by, just beyond reach. 


Individuality is eroded in this environment of 24-hour lethargy, chronic inability to rise from bed in the morning, interminable TV hours red-eyed till close-down. My work suffers, and I’ve missed two successive tutorials for Harrison’s European Modernism course, for which I hate myself (the course is actually rewarding), and I’ve still to finish one of Faulkner’s novels let alone the dozen or so we should have completed by now.

I keep shoring myself up with the familiar, weary promises: “Always tomorrow . . .” 


I submerge myself in the collective nihilism of our little world here at Westdorgan Road and I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to be alone and to read and to feel body-mind-hand suffused with power and shivering excitement at an idea.

I partially blame my cell-like room, although admittedly my lifestyle can hardly be called austere, but I still think that the absence of any private space into which I can retreat occasionally is responsible for my steady decline.

You don’t look the type

I’m dreading the Letter (or the ‘phone call) with the verdict on my future. Just now the telephone rang and I went to answer it with jangling nerves and a thudding heart . . . but it was only Andrew ringing to talk about the match.

Things are better left hidden and unsaid.

 Last night Lee called in at Westdorgan Road and he and I took the bus into town and went to the Underground. It was full of first year students and I almost felt pity for them all having so long left. I talked briefly with one, a Poly student named Jim who seemed surprised when I said I was at Watermouth.

“You don’t look the type” he told me, which I took as a compliment. 


Afterwards Lee, Barry and I went to Maynard Gardens. These days Gav’s room is always full of people coming and going. While we were there several soul-boys came and settled down, acting very familiar with Gav. His room presented a sordid sight; foil, wads of dirty cotton wool, used syringes, and Rizla papers littered the floor, all the seedy paraphernalia of the drug culture. Ian got quite carried away by it all and started talking about “jacking up” and “dorking out.” 


Barry too is always coming out with drug clichés, endlessly trotting out all the miserable words and phrases (“Chasing the dragon,” “skag,” ‘Blow,” “crash-out”). It’s difficult to believe he takes it all so seriously, but evidently he does.

This afternoon we were at Broad Street, in Jason’s room, and it made me realise again how much I despise that whole type (for it is a definite type that’s about these days, a newer version of the old hippy dope smoking, pacifistic, ‘Bongs-not-Bombs’ formula).

Lee and Stu and I amuse ourselves by parodying the sort of “it’d be good on acid” type comment that they’re always coming out with and which sums up their outlook completely. And sure enough, today as Barry and Jason discussed the relative merits of music vis–à–vis painting in terms of its impact on the audience, Barry declared that music is much more effective and Jason came back with, “yeah, but if go to a modern art gallery while you’re tripping . . .”

I should have got up and walked out right then.

Affliction

Lindsey is leaving University at long last, after constant trouble over her lack of work and non-attendance. She’s away at the moment, staying with a friend in Swansea, and has been since yesterday morning. I think she’ll leave Watermouth completely.

She was down about it last week, saying she feels as though she’s let her mother down. This dropping out of higher education is a congenital Aukin affliction from what she said.

I think she’s made the right decision.

Stu has escaped being stopped from taking one of the units of his degree by the skin of his teeth; he had to plead with his tutor to be allowed to continue. He’s home in Basildon this weekend. 


Bookish

This morning PC Essex, the arresting officer from the Great October LSD Caper called at Maynard Gardens to tell Lee that all charges against him had been dropped and that Stu and I’s files were on the Superintendent’s desk; he’s now deciding what to do with us.

So I called at the police station on Michael Street and saw PC Essex who told me that, in his opinion, I’ll be lucky to get off with a caution and will probably go to court on the charge of possession. He thinks the charge of supply will be dropped because “you’re obviously not a pusher.” He never mentioned Stu, so perhaps he’ll escape punishment.

I haven’t worried much about the pending charges, and it’s only over the last week that I’ve been assailed by bad dreams, and as I stood listening with nodding head and a fixed expression of gloom I was told not to let it ruin the rest of my term. I got the impression that PC Essex had every sympathy with me—as he should if my story were true.

It is difficult to pick up the pieces of shattered continuity. There’s always the “I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll do it tomorrow” and never the actual process of sitting still and writing. It’ll be difficult to attain past levels.

I’ve noticed an element of self-consciousness and fear creeping into my thoughts when I direct them towards these pages, as if I’m unsure of how to write, or scared of speaking ‘unnaturally’ or ‘falsely’.

I’ve led myself into the trap of allowing bookish pretensions to dominate the content of what is written.

Too much

At this point, the remaining slog towards release from University seems almost too much.

My work has gone from bad to worse; I’ve missed two tutorials for Palfreyman’s Faulkner course, although my other one goes OK. No essays yet. At least I got my extended essay in on time, which was an up-all-night-before job.

None of this affects me deep down. I continue this ‘charade’ of education for Mum and Dad’s sake alone.

Girlfriend

Barry has a girlfriend, an A-level student who he met at one of his band’s appearances.

I saw her tonight at Masquerades but I have never spoken to her. “She goes to all the trendiest parties,” says Lindsey. By all accounts Barry is very happy at the moment and he told John Turney that the first weeks of this term have been incomparably better than any term last year.

Cruel joke

Consciousness is a curse, a cruel joke played on mankind. The ability to abstract

Cuttings

At three today Lee and I investigated a couple of apparently empty houses standing side by side on Goodwood Road, beside Dee’s Diner.

As Lee stopped to peer through the letter box and I sidled conspicuously along the pavement, a neighbor shouted and we fled, adopting an air of contrived nonchalance as we did so. It’s difficult at present, and we haven’t yet recovered momentum after the Sutton Road setback.

The other day I asked Ian about moving in, trying to pin him to a definite commitment, but all he would say was, “I don’t feel like it” and left it at that. This left me feeling frustrated and helpless at others’ apparent lack of effort or will to move. Lee scarcely ever mentions the housing situation although he knows that Gav and co. know about Mrs. Coldman-Hicks’s death and will soon be scouring the streets for available properties. It’s hard getting rid of the disappointment of last time. The more I think about it the worse it gets.

It’s one of those familiar and by now routine Sundays. As usual, I’ve trudged to the newsagents and bought the papers and in kitchen or toilet or in my cell poured at length over the league tables, drinking cup-after-cup of tea as the day has slipped by.

Turney turned up as per usual at eight or so, continuing the trend of the past four Sundays. He’s intolerable at times and fuck knows why Lindsey spends time with him; he’s a real manipulator and scarcely seems to care for anyone, least of all women who he sees as good for a fuck and little else. Yet although I dislike his presence at one moment, I find myself laughing the next.

As expected he was mouthing off about the Barry / Z troubles, and he seems to live and breathe this episode in our lives—it’s all he talks about—Barry and Z’s wall, the way we are “showing those cunts,” etc., etc. It grows pretty tiresome after three or four hours. He told me Barry thought I was ignoring him yesterday afternoon in town when we’d all accidently crossed one another’s paths because I’d rushed off to see the football results; this he took as a slight—according to Turney at least.

Lee’s here too. He came to the Univ. library with me this afternoon and I’d intended staying until it closed to do some work for my Faulkner tutorial, but nothing achieved and so I returned to Meadspike via Dee’s Diner at five.

I phoned Andrew to arrange a visit in the next few weeks and fulfilled the Sunday ritual of TV and chicken madras, then bed.

I’m looking forward to continuing my current dabblings with the idea of chance (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle etc., “nature as fundamentally indeterministic”), psychology (abnormal and otherwise), subliminal and waking suggestion, dream control, etc. . . .

I’m collecting all my cuttings together into a scrapbook and want to write seriously, this a view to the future. I have several boxes of newspapers waiting to be sifted through.

Worse than useless

Narrative description or introspective monologue? I need to choose.

Del has been back in Watermouth the last few days and stayed here at Westdorgan Road last night, sharing a double bed with Stu. He’s all but recovered from his phobic anxiety depersonalization disorder of last summer and seems now to enjoy talking about it to anyone who’ll listen.

It was interesting discussing my LSD panic attack with him and he thinks I was suffering from a perfect case of temporary depersonalization, hence the unreality, deadness and isolation I felt then and then the other week, when under LSD again.

Lee called round here briefly to see if I was going to go with him to the crypt down Smith Square, this after we discovered the other day that one of the large wooden gates was unpadlocked. He seemed distant and left after a little while . . . 

Tonight Del drove Stu, Lindsey and I down into town and we picked up Turney on our way to the Lancaster. Enemies of the State throbbed away upstairs but we didn’t see Barry once and were loathe to fork out £1.50 just for the privilege. Del managed to see him and Barry promised to be down in five minutes to see us all, but we waited twenty minutes and were finally thrown out at closing time and still he hadn’t shown up.

I am finding little success in my attempts to overcome this great block in the way of work, writing and thinking. Instead of fighting it I’m content to swan about lazily, watch TV and sit in the kitchen doing nothing.

No books read, nothing worthy recorded or even in my mind. I feel completely ordinary at this moment in my life, a feeling worse than uselessness.

Usual fictions

We had a houseful at Westdorgan Road.; Mo, Shawn and Penny, and me, Lindsey, Stu and Gareth. Mo was rescued overnight by firemen when the flat below hers on Stoneways Road went up in flames.

We had a big meal and then drank wine and a bottle of whisky. John Turney turned up on our doorstep and Lee too and so we all went up to the Westdorgan and got pleasantly pissed.

Turney and Lindsey and I were up until 3 talking about translating our dislike of the Broad Street crew into violent action. We got quite carried away by the idea. John is spending the night in Lindsey’s room, probably on the floor, although my mind invents its usual fictions and sordid scenarios.

A poem of incoherence and absurdity

Lee reenacted Act One from Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry at the Art College. He made a puppet theatre and puppets - Pa Ubu was a piece of Lee’s shit, Ma Ubu an egg, MacNure and his merry men sticks painted red and white.

I helped shout the lines.

I never did decide about moving back into Maynard Gardens and now Damion and Tony—a caveman friend of Gav’s and Gav’s brother respectively—are established there. So I’m stuck in Lindsey’s old room at Westdorgan Road, all 5’ x 9 feet of it; barely big enough for a bed.

Stomach

A stifling air of apathy is abroad at the moment. My own days are sliding into a stagnant rut, and I can’t seem to do anything about it.

Heady thoughts are a thing of the past.

It’s as if I’ve suddenly grown very impatient with certain people, no longer willing to tolerate them with easygoing comments. I should think I’m alienating quite a few people at the moment; the crew at No. 38 and at Gaveston Street, Lindsey, the people at Mo’s flat (who’ve never liked L. and I since Lee’s behaviour at their party).

I can’t help feeling at times that there is something wrong with me, although I don’t think there is. It’s nothing that can’t be overcome.

We've made a promise to John to be down at Masquerades again tonight, but at this moment I haven’t the stomach for it.