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.

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.

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.

No yoke

In the early hours, Lee and I talked about an Act, a moment of will, an overcoming through which we'll cast off boredom and woolly headedness like dead skin.

We're both like-minded on the subject and I for one am sick of talking and writing about it. We’ve both fallen into a deep rut and every task seems to require an immense effort and usually defeats us (Lee describes it as feeling as if a yoke has been slipped over his shoulders when he’s not looking). This is Enemy Number One, the Big Disease, like the Plague only worse because it eats away its victims on the inside.

I trudge on through day after day of grey routine with blank mind and knotted heart wanting a discipline, needing a discipline to take away the uselessness and knock this cotton wool stuffing from behind my eyes.

Only occasionally do I surface to give notice of my anger and frustrations in these few scattered and ill-wrought lines.

Cleft stick

Last night, Ian, Lee and Philip and I investigated our probable new squat, the empty No. 39 Sutton Road.

We were surprised to find the front door unlocked. The house is OK, three floors and a basement in quite good condition, a little plaster and wallpaper fallen away here there, a large kitchen, all the rooms bare and austere with big drafty windows.

The sheer effort involved in moving in struck me forcibly, perhaps for the first time—the uncomfortable nights shivering in cold rooms, waking up with no running water, unable to have a wash, all routine dislocated. Just like at the vicarage, we are all starting completely from scratch, except Lee who has the furniture from Maynard Gardens. An empty, unfurnished and unheated house is a miserable prospect, and neither Lee nor I are looking forward to it, but perhaps me least of all.

I’m on a cleft stick, not wanting to go forward, loathe to stay where I am. . . .

My frustrations at myself and my surroundings smother all thought and reduce me to a state of abject boredom. Today I’ve let daylight slip by and done nothing with my time.  I did start typing up my extended essay on the Beats, which I'll have to turn in (late) tomorrow. It’s too easy to blame circumstances, but circumstances do play a large part in the paralyzing malaise I find myself in at present.

My mind’s in a straitjacket and I can’t write—I’m searching but the words aren’t there and the pages feel cramped and uninspiring and horribly tainted by my boredom and disinterest. What to do? Perhaps really I know—with a conviction I should probably act upon—that I’ve exhausted the possibilities for this diary-format. For these diary-words to become words of more lasting appeal then the diary-format must go, or the thrust of my efforts should be directed elsewhere, and this be left for what it is: a book of events, and of people, and of other outside things, things that impinge on the inside, instead of vice versa.

I will carry on as I have been for a while to come, trying to capture something of past ‘glories’.

Soul mates

Saturday has come and gone and I've hardly left the house, content instead to slump in front of the TV most of the day or to continue reading Colin Wilson, picking up where I left off weeks ago.

I’ve lived on a diet of sausages, soup and tea—cup after cup of it. I’ve watched In The Heat of the Night, Airport, the film version of The Likely Lads, a documentary about still born babies. . . .

I’ve deliberately avoided going round to see Lee as he has eleven days left to finish his two essays. I haven’t seen or heard from him since Wednesday afternoon. Lindsey has been away all weekend with her family and Susie has gone up to Leicester to visit Conrad’s parents, so I’ve been left to my own devices.

Laziness and its soul mate Boredom are my biggest enemies.

How hard it is to really know anyone in this life

What have I done today? Very little.

I got up at two and sat about idly, winding Pete up most of the day. . . . I’ve done no reading lately and I’ve quite let work and other things slip. I started off the term well but things have deteriorated.

I’ve got to read the 200-odd pages of Hermsprong for tomorrow at eleven a.m., but it’s nearly half-ten already and I’m only on page 26 and so I may have to stay up all night.

Barry has gone to Masquerades by himself. Earlier today he went round to see the girl he met at the Cellar and she and her friends are going to the club tonight too, so Barry once again sets out with raised hopes. Ade returned today to tell us his “love life is just about going again”; he’s in Barry’s room listening to records.

I keep pretending both to myself and to others that at the end of the year I’m going to shave my head and give up all drugs and drink, but I should realise that this would require more mental resolution and effort than I’m capable of . . . Why would I want to do this?. . .

It’s not important.

I still can’t decide about America—I wish I could make up my mind. I can’t even answer this simple question, so what hope for me? Decisions! Current financial position: £104 overdrawn . . . I look at Grant’s poems and they make me think how hard it is to really know anyone in this life.

This diary says so little. No doubt there are innumerable thoughts and passing shades of mood that have touched me and marked the last two days, but my words have such limited power against the great yawning gulfs of time they strive to combat. One day when I read these words again I’ll curse my lack of skill at fleshing out these transitory moments. What’s clear now won’t be when the surrounding chaff of living and peripheral thoughts have been swallowed up by the years.

This narrative is dull and uninspired because I’m a bit drunk on the whisky Mo brought back from London as her payment towards rent.

Hairsbreadth's deviation

I had predictable dreams in which I was pursued through Wollstonecraft Hall by a vampiric Lee. I didn’t get up until midday.

I rang Grant. He told me that he and Nik are producing a magazine. Grant will contribute the poems and Nik will illustrate them. They’re having around fifty printed and Grant wants to get in touch with Yorkshire Arts.

I spent the rest of the day playing records.

My inaction is dangerous; say it time and time again and never lose sight of this fact or I’ll never be rid of it. It's like a terminal illness or increasing blindness; I’ll have to struggle all my life to stave off this chronic apathy. I must keep my head above water. But, I don’t feel pissed off and I’m still cheerful. I just kick myself for wasting opportunity.

Rob and Carol arrived back from Conishead at teatime and brought an atmosphere with them; it felt like they’d been arguing. Carol still suffers pain from her mouth which isn’t healing.

Robert, predictably, was full of talk about the week just gone: “I could’ve stayed there for years.” Buddhism dominates his life to such an extent that I wonder how long it will be before he renounces the trappings of his teaching career and goes to Conishead permanently to live. I wonder if he appreciates the significance of his comment, for one day he’ll have to go, or give his beliefs up as a bad job, because it seems to me that you can’t compromise.

You have to go the whole way. I feel very restless.

The Horla

At twelve Dad ran me onto Grant’s. I found him in a similar mood to the one I’ve been in, very disillusioned and bored with everything around him. After the now obligatory playing of records we went down to get fish and chips from the Chinese in Lodgehill.

It was a sunny day and we sat and ate them on the wall outside and then wandered down through Lodgehill, eventually ending up sitting among the rocks near the railway sidings which overlook Three Locks Road. It was warm again and quite sticky. We perched there above the road and traffic and cursed Easterby for being such a dump.

Grant can’t wait to get away. The ‘A’-level results come out on Thursday and he needs a C in English to get in at the University of Gloucester, but if he fails again he intends leaving to get a flat in Easterby or Whincliffe. He keeps telling himself, almost as if to keep it at the forefront of his mind, that he has to move out no matter what.

“Life's a sick joke,” he declared, and said that there’s nothing to give lasting pleasure. “It’s all a big con to get us here and then Bingo, you’re saddled with a lifetime of tedium." He said that he “almost got screwed” at a party in Thornaby, “but I didn’t cotton on and the girl left with her boyfriend.”

His friend RJ has left home and has moved in with Jackie in Bavaria Crescent. He’s eighteen, she’s twenty-three, but he’s done something decisive, made a move, even if it’s for the worse—a decisive act that could go wrong and not work out, but that’s not what’s important. What matters is that he’s done it. It is the same sort of decision I look for by dwelling almost obsessively (as I did today) on the idea of packing in my course at Watermouth and doing something else. I think such an act would be a positive step, although not necessarily viewed as such in the eyes of others, Mum and Dad in particular, but a step towards that something I’m looking for. . . .

I couldn’t make up my mind about buying something to drink so I didn’t bother and we walked back up through Lodgehill in the sticky heat to the woods near Grant's house, quite near to where an abandoned brickworks chimney soars above the undergrowth. We sat awhile in the sun with our legs dangling over a shady weed-choked stream.

Back at Fearnfield Drive I read “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant, then Grant read it and we sat in the back room in total boredom.

In the evening we went up to the Albion and I bought Grant drinks as he was totally broke. We sat in solemn silence, broken only by the occasional tired comment or little joke. He told me that February ’81 was the worst time of his life: “Before autumn 1980 I didn’t exist. I started getting pissed and behaving stupidly, and for some reason I thought I was getting on with people but they just thought I was a wanker. It was impossible to talk to anyone.”

We went back to his house and I left at 10.30, and as I walked home I interrupted a hedgehog that was scuttling up the road in the darkness. It curled up at the touch of my foot and I carried it gingerly to the bushes.

Rob and Carol rolled up shortly after I got back. Rob’s friend Paul Lyons and his girlfriend Anita from London were with them—Anita wanted to see ‘The North’ as she’d never been further than Watford, so they'd taken her for a curry and a drink at the Volunteer and then on to Cross Green where Carol and Paul had ended up in the river. They’d just got back from having a drink in  Knowlesbeck. Anita's nineteen, and Robert can’t seem to get over the fact that she was only eleven when he and Carol got married.

Robert slept in my room and I lay there for a long time as he talked and talked. . . .

A fly buzzed

It’s approaching one a.m. and I’m sweating to death, with only the whine of the flies to keep me company. It’s too warm to sleep.

Today we had blazing cloudless weather for the second day running. Mum and Dad spent part of it watching cricket in Moxthorpe; they stayed out until eight thirty, enjoying what Mum described as a “perfect golden evening.” She says she’s worried that I don’t get enough fresh air. “You’ve hardly stirred since we came back from Calverdale,” she chides anxiously and she still thinks I could be unwell.

Not unwell, just a dullness and weariness brought about by day-after-day of unremitting—and quite self-inflicted—mental tedium. Trial by boredom. I “hardly stirred” from morning until night, watching the final day of the World Championships from Helsinki, between times pacing the house restlessly. Lethargy weighs me down as surely as if I was prisoner here. The one thing plays on the other; it’s a vicious circle and the more bored I become, the harder it is to muster motivation to escape.

I can count my friends here on one hand

Jeremy called in last night and stayed until well gone midnight. We were almost like two orphans, and spent a long and not particularly thrilling evening having a strange, ill-at-ease sort of conversation that touched on deeply paranoid subjects.

When I think of all the work I have to do my reaction is ‘What is the point?’ The academic drudge doesn’t ‘do’ anything for me and I doubt if all the effort in the world would really alter the feeling that all I’m doing is ploughing on and on through book after book, with nothing truly relevant to me as a person or the way I live my life. I wish I had the guts and assurance to just say “Fuck it” and jack it all in, strike out on some new path. But knowing me (as I do so horribly well) I’d end up vegetating on the dole, without even the cover of a degree course to give my existence some point.

Y-reg Chevette

I signed on again today and got home to find a £47.30 dole cheque waiting for me. My overdraft now stands at £77. I also bought Mum a card and present in Farnshaw; she’s forty nine today.

I got a letter from Shelley who's very busy in Watermouth. She has a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Penny has a temporary job as a receptionist in a psychiatric unit which, predictably, “is cracking her up.”

I started a library book on Nietzsche but did so with little-to-no-enthusiasm. I aborted it a half-dozen pages in. I’m suffering through a state of majestic boredom, an almost irretrievable state of brain death.

Outside in the nightmare suburb, everything’s frozen into an afternoon calm; the petty little domestic rituals and the soft sound of the garden hoe are the only evidence of human activity. No strife, no “anti-social” behaviour permeates this self-satisfied little world of privet hedges and Y-reg Chevettes.

Easterby is a shit-heap and doesn't raise its sights above its own red-tiled rooftops. But then I suppose the whole country is the same.

Tedium

Dad took Nanna B. out for a run. She’s had a prolapse and is going into hospital on Tuesday for an operation; Mum says that at her age it's quite a serious thing.

Andrew and I were left to lounge in yawning tedium in front of the television watching the cricket.

Outside a breeze has taken hold, although it’s still an oven both inside and out. The setting moon is a dim reddish crescent.

Realms

A continuation of the boredom and inaction of the past week. Dad and Andrew watched a vintage car rally in Farnshaw while I slumbered peacefully until nearly afternoon. Later, Dad, Mum and Nanna P. went out for a run in the car up to Oughterdale and I listened to records while Andrew unpacked.

Gripping stuff.

I’m pissed off, needless to say. The decision to come home, so easily taken, seems now to assume the magnitude of a major blunder. I’m so fucking bored up here in this world of narrow horizons and happy family neutrality. A fatherly blast this morning on the subject of hanging gave me a foretaste of the prejudiced angers to come.

Three months of this! I can’t see a way to get enough money to go abroad; the first week of July is gone already, and I feel destined to wallow here in hopelessness until the end of September. Steve called round yesterday to give me a couple of tickets for the Former Students disco on Monday at Harvey’s which at least will be a chance to see everyone. Harvey’s is going to be closed down because some poor bastard was kicked to death there in January. Steve is still as straight as ever. Some things never change (says he).

Thorough dissatisfaction, lack of imagination, total lack of confidence.

Robert rang. He and Carol went to York on a Buddhist course over the weekend and met a Tibetan monk who lives in America. They also went to Neil’s house.

Dead like Sunday

The week sails by indifferently enough and I labour under a real pall of boredom and claustrophobia. Every day feels dull and dead like a Sunday; we sit dumbly around sighing in one another's rooms or occasionally playing football outside, which is one of the few enjoyable group activities left.

The end of term offers no respite. Occasionally I feel optimistic, but occasionally too I’ve been struck with a real sense of depression.

How can I turn boredom into an artform?

Another hot day spent lounging about, watching the election news in the morning and kicking a ball about in the afternoon.

I got a letter from Andrew asking me what I’m doing over the summer. It all depends on whether or not I get a job. I intended making a start on my essays, but I frittered the afternoon away in the sun and listening to the Velvet Underground and Joy Division.

In the evening, Barry’s friend Mike from Manchester arrived in his car. Of all of Barry’s friends he's probably the easiest to get on with and the least ideological. We went up to the Town and Gown with Shelley, Pete and Lindsey. Lindsey and Shelley sat quietly talking while Barry and Mike laughed and talked Marxism, the RCP, and shared tales of Patrick and Carl Cotton.

Lindsey seemed quite cheerful. Earlier, she and Susie bought me a badge (“How Can I Turn Boredom Into an Artform”). They said they thought it quite appropriate. For some reason I felt very down, as though suddenly the semi-contentment of the last month had been stripped away and I'm filled with the Void. I felt dead and helpless and I didn’t know why. Even talking seemed too much effort, and I could only parry Pete’s attempts to cheer me up. How do I explain what I felt? It’s such an effort and virtually impossible probably to capture the precise essence of my mood at that time. But all I could see around me was total meaninglessness.

Everyone left, Barry and co. to go into Watermouth in Mike’s car, and Lindsey and Shelley back to Wollstonecraft. I sat on my own for a moment, my inner state dominating every thought, denying me any peace. There was nothing I could do, so I too walked back to Wollstonecraft, where I lay on my bed in a state just like the old times. In a way it had something to do with Lindsey, but not entirely. . . . For an instant I felt myself begin to crumple. Quite out of the blue I felt as if something had dropped into me from a great height.

The corridor was empty, so I went to bed. It was only 11 p.m. and as I lay there uncomfortable and wide awake in the dark I heard people returning, mumbled voices from someone's room.

I look back on what I’ve written and I wonder why I’ve gone into such painstaking detail. I didn’t intend to. In years to come I’ll appreciate all this for what it is—mindless, utterly mundane trivia. I’ll laugh at my typically adolescent obsessions.

Laugh, or probably throw up.