Bumps

When am I going to grow out of spots? It's been almost fifteen years since my initiation into this misery, and it shows no sign of abating. I thought this was a teenage affliction, like sulking and monosyllabism, but no, each day I wake up with yet more facial based humiliation. Spots are like an early radar system for pretty girls. You wake up with them, you can bet it's gonna be a day of talking to the ground. I have a feeling that even when I'm a corpse, pimples will still be flourishing. Let's hope they close the lid.

Peace and Quiet

If money isn't happiness then what is happiness?
If work isn't happiness then what is happiness?
If sex isn't happiness then what is happiness?
If love isn't happiness then what is happiness?
If god isn't happiness then what is happiness?
If happiness isn't happiness then what is happiness?
If nothing is happiness then is that happiness?

The Nusiancists

When I arrive, I’m angry, and I don’t even know what I’m angry about. Is it that the journey has taken four times as long as walking? Is it that I’ve been shoved into a strangers armpit for what felt like longer than my actual existence, smelling their smells and having their expellings expelled on me? It seems to me that more and more there is a concerted effort these days to disturb the people. Transport lines go down on a daily basis, getting around the city on the weekend is like trying to crawl through soup when you're made of croutons. Never mind the constant fear of terrorism, the day to day reality of discomfortism is doing far more damage.

Showman's Land

Magic is all around us these days, I wave a wand of many buttons and my television lights up, I approach a closed door at a supermarket and at the touch of my shadow they slide open. No one remarks on this. I place a deck of cards on the floor, stand well back, and make them move without touching them. People scream as their chosen cardboard shoots across the floor. Then, on the walk home, they open locked doors with their magic cards, they stand in a lumbering hunk of metal uncannily predicted by an ever changing lightboard and send thoughts across the globe with a block of ever glowing colours.

Reading to London

I go through phases of heavy reading. Once in a while, perhaps twice a year, I can’t read enough. It becomes like drinking, and I pour the words from the page in one long glug glug glug. It is a thirst for stories, for connection, for the knowledge of others; a thirst to find those with common ground to relate, despair and elate. These spells usually last a month or two, and on any given week I can knock out three or four books. Today I managed half a book of essays, some Don DeLillo and a few pages of the Road Less Traveled. And as I'm starting to wonder when this will come to an end, exhuasted from my reading at twelve o'clock at night on the last tube home, I pick up a discarded copy of the London Lite, and like I've eaten half a packet of peanuts and a salami, I begin to smack my lips.

The Camera of Life

The camera of life is the lens I shoot my asides to; the angle I find for my raised eyebrows, sideways glances and eyeballs to heaven. The camera of life is my frame of reference for when no one is around. Those times I turn up to a black tie event to find a fifty kids and a clown missing; those times I'm performing street shows to three hundred people with a deck of cards and they don't even speak my language; for when I'm drinking champagne in a Dragon suit surrounded by Jimi Mistry and the Frames; that's when I cut to the camera of life.

Public Inconvieniance

I’ve often been told don’t shit on your own doorstep, but never did I imagine it was a necessary instruction. The estate I’m living in is a bleak, high rise, council block, so communist I think of my neighbours as comrades. It’s the kind of place you imagine getting cancer and begin to chain smoke to cover up the smell. A few days ago I opened the lift and nearly blacked out at the stench of vomit. As I live on the sixth floor, and to me, exercise is as foreign as a call centre, I held my breath and stabbed at the button. It didn't work, halfway up I had to take weird, short, sucky nasal breaths for the rest of the ascent. It took two whole days before the caretaker cleaned the mess up, and by lunchtime day two, I was taking the stairs. Finally it was scrubbed clean, aired out and disinfected, and I enjoyed two vertical trips of hygiene, before someone vomited in the exact same corner. Not only that, but someone else also pissed in the corner in an attempt to either compete or fragrance the scent. I mean guys, come on! You live here! Maybe I should just install a toilet roll holder in the lift and deal with it.

Strangers

How do you know someone? Really. When you come down to it, how do you really know someone, you know? When do you really know someone? Maybe you get to know them less and less the more you spend time with them. Like you create your own person, out of mental papier mache, and the more layers you add, the less and less it is them that you know, the more it is the person you have created. Maybe that first impression is our one shot at true knowledge and it’s downhill from there. If we miss it, if we forget what it was like that one time, we have nothing left but a pretence.

Urbanned

I'm in Croydon, that great unwelcomer of all things good, a town in eternal sneer at the finer things in life such as tailoring, and manners. I spent ten years in this place as a child and have gone out of my way to avoid it ever since. However, circumstances have prevailed against me and today I must pass through as I'm visiting my sister in Mayday hospital. The name is entirely appropriate. So it is with dispirited steps that I walk from the train to the bus stop, avoiding the lanky grown men pedalling low bmx bikes in lazy arcs on the high street, skimming small children and knocking old women off balance. The men strutting around with trousers at their knees, the lower the waistband, the higher their status, like they're saying, my opinion of myself is so lofty, gravity takes special effect. Shops sell the promises of a lifestyle no-one can afford, the luxury of handsoap, the chic of matching china. And when I get home that evening to find someone has vomited in the lift and pissed all over the doorway, just it's distance from the twilight of Zone 5 makes it smell like the sweetest of scents.

A Study in Deep Blue

Out of nowhere it hits me, a tiredness, a compelling tiredness, that starts at the back of my knees. I need to sit down. I walk past the mirror and when I look in the mirror I ask, is this a face in danger of salvation; is salvation possible for this kind of face? I hail a cab and take a ride and as we pull in, a fight is taking place. Do you know who I am? he bellows, a question I’ve always thought was answered in the asking. But maybe this is a search for identity, a huge misunderstanding, and it is this unknowledge of himself that fuels the rage inside. I leave the peacocks behind me, strutting and shoving, and flip the door. I only have a few rules, Japanese food on a Sunday, I like to feel clean at least once a week. I watch my miso soup bloom, the ever expanding nuclear clouds flowering, and I think, what does it mean that this is the most beautiful thing to happen to me all day? After I've eaten I hit a Starbucks, where peace and quiet is packaged alongside the imported coffee. A boy walks past, his feet slapping like a penguin. He stops to look at me, his eyebrows set in eternal concern, mouth twisted in a mournful smile. I find a coin in my pocket and produce it from his ear. He says nothing and walks off. It's amazing the indifference you can make.

Philosophistry

It is inarguable that suffering exists,
Yet it does nothing but improve me.
I do not understand why this needs to be true,
I understand only that it is true.

It is inarguable that goodness exists,
Yet it does nothing but confuse me.
Goodness is like the sun,
Although not always present,
Existent nonetheless.

Sometimes Goodness = Love + Synchronicity

If God exists and created us as free beings,
He cannot appear to exist without invalidating this freedom.
For how could we fail to believe in a thing undeniably there?
Therefore, as we have free will and God does not appear to exist,
The absence of the existence of God does nothing but prove Him.

And of course if God exists, then we have no choice to believe in Him,
And hence no free will.

If we say God is Love, and the absence
Of God implies the absence of love,
And if eternity is a fact, and merely
A question of destination, if heaven
Or hell is determined by a choice of
Whether to move toward God or away,
And hence toward love or away, to love
loses it's meaning. This, of course, is
The gun to our heads.

But then is to love to live?
And if to die is to strike against love,
And hell is the absence of choice,
And to choose heaven is to choose survival,
And hence not a choice but a necessity.

If the gun to our head is not loaded,
Or is actually a joke toy,
Not actually a gun but perhaps a bunch of flowers
That we can't see because we are not looking that way,
Just feeling the cold steel against our temple,
Which perhaps happens to be the bottom of the vase,
Then perhaps all we must do is open our eyes
And breathe deeply.

- for edyta -

10.52am

It’s one of those pens you can rub out, he says. Oh, I say. It’s a ball-point pen, but you can rub the ink out. He stands there looking at me. I put it back on the shelf and pay my 19.98 for stationary items. You don't want the pen then, he says. No, I say, sorry. I leave the shop and walk down the Holloway road. This is not the kind of place that makes it to the brochures. Shells of people, not so much walking as collapsing from foot to foot. Burnt out husks of people, in tracksuits, jogging bottoms, anything with an elasticated waistband. It's like the apocalypse out here, but with more shopping. I go to the department store, I take the automatic door because I don’t have the strength to push. I buy a dish drainer and two matching brushes. I buy a clothes horse despite there being nothing equestrian about it. It even has six legs. I buy a small pan and a smaller pan. I buy a skillet. I buy two reindeer glasses because the cartoons make me smile. I come home and clean my microwave, bills are piled by the door. I look out of the window and wash plates; trains rush by with the fleeing commuters; on the walls graffiti spells the names of those who need to be noticed. And in the silence I am surrounded by a hum that lets me never forget I have white goods to support.

Sticks and Stones

If I had a son I'd call him Dogby. I'm not saying I do, but if I did, I would. Dogby vanderput. You've got to admit, it's got a ring to it. My best friends are about to have a baby, it'll be their second, a girl. I've been petitioning to name her Johnana, but it's not going so well. I've offered them an alternative, but somehow, Mirandaput has yet to win them over.

Thinking for Dummies

It's bad news on the tube today, the driver has a personality and he's not afraid to use it. He issues squawk after squawk of non-stop pronouncements that scrape on the tinny speakers like nails on a chalkboard, telling us things we already know. I’m being attacked by tannoy. His sentences are as interminable as the delays, his interference a wall of static, a white noise I have to close my book against. I get off the train and change lines but it's not much better here. What do they think will happen if they stay silent? A whole station of people disappearing down the gap? Stand behind the line, comes the instruction, I'm surprised they don't tell us which side. Before the PA was installed were people plunging lemming-like onto electrified rails? But to be honest, with all these voices in my head, it's beginning to look quite attractive. I take a step back from the platform in case it all gets too much, and out of the corner of my eye, I see the platform attendant swell with pride at a job well done.

The Broker

No one ever really knew what he did, because the truth of the matter was that he never really did anything. He would arrive in a black, bespoke suit, a suit he wore like no one else, a tie creased to perfection and a white shirt of pristine crispness. He never had a case, a bag, a file or folder, he wore his hair clipped and his nails trimmed, he never seemed hurried or hurrying, he was never late, never early, but always precisely, supremely, majestically on time. When he walked in the room he would move directly to the chair at the far end and draw it in like an impending storm. Officially his card said he was a broker, but that wasn't the truth, wasn't even close. I can tell you what he really did, why he was really there; he was a breaker, plain and simple. He sat there letting others talk themselves into holes and walk themselves out of a job. And there was no one better at it. He'd watch unblinking as nerves failed, he'd raise his eyes at the precise moment of embellishment or call for coffee during the height of the pitch. Ties would be loosened, sweat would glisten, water would be sipped from, chairs adjusted. He once demolished a firm of investment bankers by attempting to reassemble a ball-point pen. Without fail he'd weed out the bullshitters, separate the wheat from the chaff and anyone still at the table after seventeen and a half minutes was sure as hell worth their salt. Then, once he'd purged our premises of all the pretenders, he'd stand up, look at the remainder, nod to his employee and walk out without a look backwards. The room would always seem smaller after he'd left, smaller than it was even before he arrived. He was there to create an impression, a certain kind of impression, and they paid him well for it.

Ties

It's one of those nights when the curtains are drawn and the chairs are covered in newspapers, books and laundered clothes. I'm in the yellow glow of our living room lights, and my dad stands ironing. There is a silence in the room and one of us needs to fill it. My mother taught me to iron shirts, he says, collars first, then the sleeves, front panels and the back. I watch him as he talks, moving through each stage with hot, precise motions. The most useful thing she ever taught me, he says. I sit on the couch and watch. This is what comes back to me, all these years later, as I stand in front of the mirror and knot my tie. My dad taught me to tie ties, I say to no-one in particular, a Windsor knot, left over right and right over left. Small, neat, sharp knots. I pull it tight against my neck and fold the collar around it. I smooth my jacket and button to the first hole. Always leave one undone, he used to tell me. This is what I learned and carry around with me, this is how I take his presence with me. We may not be perfect, him and I, far from it, rarely we understand each other, but here we meet, and I am grateful for it.