The Symptoms of a Degenerative Creative Disorder

I thought I would do some drawing on Saturday. I got my pens ready (Rotring art pens) sketchbooks, and settled down to draw. All that happened was the pens didn't work, and i Ended up with sticky ink all over my fingers.
As an illustration for this still ongoing creative block, I can't think of a more concise one than that.

It is getting a little genuinely concerning though, and I am beginning to consider the possibility that my 'artistic' days, of whatever kind, may be, for the foreseeable future ended. Bridge 39 being the exception of course...
But consider:
The last time I wrote a poem was December 2009. This is the longest gap ever for me.
I haven't kept a notebook since last April.
I have only completed one drawing since at least last May. I keep starting drawings, but whenever they do, they feel lumpen and uninspired
I completed one painting last summer, and the one following languishes in a state of incompletion.
I pick up the guitar once every two months or so...
Even my blog entries are becoming more and more infrequent...
I wasn't that concerned when this creative block first started, but I'm beginning to feel a little alarmed now.

The ink on my fingers from Saturday has been scrubbed off, but I still feel that sticky sense of disappointment on my skin.

Two and a Half Pint Hangover

A mixture of growing older, perhaps, mixed with the fact that working six days a week means that I drink a lot less than I used to -not that I was ever a big drinker anyway- has led to the unfortunate outcome that I can have a hangover from the amount of alcohol mentioned in the title of this post.
This isn't a 'physical' hangover - apart from a slight headache and a curious tiredness, I don't feel ill at all - this is one of those dreaded 'mental' hangovers.
I suppose we've all had them, that nagging feeling that things aren't right, those odd Sunday afternoons where darkness comes, and it seems far too early, and the spectre of work looms up like an appointment at the gallows... and then you end up here. At this point I'm at now.
8:32pm on a Sunday night.
I am enveloped in a strange feeling of dread, a ghostly miasma of disquiet and foreboding. I breathe a portentious air. The bedsit feels strange. Altered somehow. As if I shouldn't be here. I certainly can't relax here. I shall be doing nothing for the remainder of the night but watch DVDs. The bedsit feels too wrong, like I'm living in a little used hallway of a house that isn't mine, as if people might pass through at any time.
I'm even thinking about going to sleep.
If this was summer there'd be another hour of sunlight left.
Two and a half pints. That was all...
Oh well. Monday to look forward to tomorrow.
I'm really looking forward waking up in the still-dark of tomorrow morning...

'dream of fuel station decay over time'

...which is the search term someone used last week to get to Bridge 39.
I wonder what they were looking for, and did they eventually find it? Was there a specific dream of decaying fuel stations that affected him or her so badly they had to research it further? It almost sounds like a Thomas Ligotti story - obsessive narrators haunted by nocturnal visions of rotting petrol stations.
I read the words again though. 'Dream of fuel station decay over time'. The words have all the logic and meaning of a phrase overheard in a dream; meaningless and yet, in the context of the dream - or that period immediately after waking from a dream - making a complete and inexplicable sense.
The words sound like something whispered, some dark and secret thing, some lost transmission, some signal caught in haunted cyber-space air.
It strikes me now as I write this that 'dream of fuel station decay over time' is exactly the sort of thing I would write, that |I might even Google to see what comes up.
In fact, as soon as I finish this, I think I'll open up another tab and...

A Glance into an Inexplicable Room

I glimpse that haunted room, again, of a ground floor flat on one of the squares leading down to the seafront.. There is something somehow inexplicably awful and compelling about it. I don't know why the occupant doesn't close the curtains. Or the shutters. It has shutters I think. I feel intrusive looking in. I only catch a glimpse when I walk by. A second, nothing more. Just a glance.
The occupant lies in bed reading. Maybe watching a television. The large room is bright and overlit. Messy, and... just haunted.
I think it is something about the light that reminds me of hospitals and illness and dread.
I can't help though to look in as I pass by.

A Milk of Magnesia Sky

From the call centre, through the newly tinted windows, I watch the sea. A patch of sun, far out, near the horizon. I watch a fishing boat drift into the sun, then out again. On the very horizon itself, a larger vessel, heading, perhaps, for Europe. An industrial junk. I think that's the word. A Chinese ship of sorts.
There were paintings of them everywhere in the seventies.

The other day, moving through the gloom of the late January North Laine, I saw a ghost. An echo really. Looked like a friend of mine, but how she would have been ten years before. She walked the same, smiled the same, but as she would have been if she was, say fifteen. I felt time do that weird flipping thing - if she was a ghost, then what was I? A premonition?

The bedsit breeds a curious restlessness. It is only possible to sleep here, and to lose oneself in watching DVDs - Buffy the Vampire Slayer again. I do not know why it is so hard to do, well, anything here. Even reading seems to require an effort that is exhausting in its complexity.
The man next door is playing his banjo again.
Oh God. He 's started singing again.

A woman on the phone today at work was telling me about the weather where she was. That kind of grey gloomy weather with 'creamy, horrible clouds'.
She called it a Milk of Magnesia sky.

Looking for France

They put up strange shields over the glass of the windows at work. It gives the outside a strange twilight look. The sea is in a permanent dusk. I have a new desk at work now, which means that, when standing I have a perfect view of the ocean. I drink coffee and stare hypnotised at the waves. Well, between calls anyway. Someone said to me I looked so far away today. I nearly replied that I was staring at the horizon and looking for France.
Which I actually was doing.
I couldn't work out if it was clouds or Europe I was seeing.

Worcester has haunted me this week. I'm not sure why. I think I dreamt of it a few times over the past couple of night. Stood at the base of London Road hill, looking up into an autumnal distance. I don't know what it is I miss so much about Worcester. I have a strange longing for the place. I wish I could wake up there tomorrow. Just spend the day wondering around before heading back to Brighton again. One of the things I like about Worcester is the oldness of the place.
Brighton sometimes seems too new somehow.

No other news from Brighton, but there seems a very edgy vibe out on the streets tonight. A sense of, perhaps, encroaching violence. Maybe its the full moon. If it is a full moon. if it does effect people.
Think I'll stay in though.
Just to be on the safe side.

Later in January, a Strange and Drifting Coast

Moving further away from Christmas and the New Year now. That strange and drifting coast between January and early summer. Do we call it spring? No - spring is part of it though, but just a fraction.
This uninvestigated season is far larger than that.

I felt it today during a brief trip down the seafront. Warm sun. Sat on the pebbles reading Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys. Air all clear and... well, not wintry, but not spring-like either. Hypnotic rhythms of the waves.
The pebbles felt wet beneath my fingers. - perhaps the retreating tides, but I remember rain last night too.

Ecstatic sleep last night. Unremembered dreams. Woke sometime in the small hours thinking about a play set for some kind of generic 'space' action figures. Echoes of a childhood toy that never existed. A labyrinthine space station moulded in plastic, with all manner of corridors, pulleys, spacecraft loading bays, and a detachable 'control-room' where the dark villain would plot to take over the universe.
All made sense at 2:00am.

Things do when you wake at night. Over the summer of 1996, waking at dawn with that strange feeling of euphoria, an implacable feeling of things making sense. When I woke, whatever made sense had vanished, though on one of these mornings I woke with the lines we make friends with the grass running through my head, and a dream-image, perhaps of a grassy field by a canal during a red sunset. More like a memory than a dream, though dreams are far more real than life of course.

'18th January 2011'.
I let the words roll around my mouth like bones, or dice.
They taste of something old and ancient, and not new at all. Something tall and narrow. An edifice constructed by some lost suburban civilisation.
(twenty years ago, walking with Edward round Hillingdon, obsessed with Samhain's 'Initium' album, the curly-wurly bridge over the A-40, lost in the orange street lamp light and the London skies behind, the bridge somehow representing January, always has been January since, suburban monolith, call up later January, call up the bridge)
But tonight, walking home and breathing in, I could smell, could taste the December just gone. That curiously burnt smell of winter 2010.
Something not more than seven or eight weeks old, but it seemed so very, very far away in my memory.

Five Notes in a Week haunted by Late November

1: I finally bought 'Wolf Solent' by John Cowper Powys for £4:00 from Snoopers Paradise in town today. I am hoping I will enjoy it. Over the past season - well, since last summer really - I've not really enjoyed reading new books that m,uch. Particularly not fiction. I don't know if this is the books I'm reading, or just me, but the last, well, year or so really, since finishing Bolano's 2166 last  February. I have tried East European magic realism, contemporary literature, modern steam punk, fantasy, non fiction, J-horror... and nothing seems to hit the spot. I still read a lot of course, but mostly old stuff, short stories and the like. I hope this reading drought ends soon.

2: I really did enjoy using the writing prompt found here. I am very much looking forward to the prompt posted up next Monday. Personally, the thing I found most fascinating about writing it was how, instinctively, I came back to the things which I have always been fascinated by, namely time and the power of memory to haunt us. I wish i could comment on Na's entry too, but alas my commenting facilities are still down. I really must get it sorted out. I am sure it is something quite simple. I wish also that I could work out how to put the accent above the a in her name. I wish I would also stop going off on tangents.

3: A dream last night where I couldn't quite work out whether or not I was living back in Worcestershire. Walking with Andy through slushy landscapes. The courtyard of a farm. Pointing out to Andy the strange rural-industrial signs on top of a barn, advertising obscure farming machinery.

4: Strange white January days. Not anything really. Both bleak and clean. No weather. The days are getting slightly shorter though, but when I wake in the mornings it is still dark.

5: A week in which I have been haunted by the song 'Late November' by Sandy Denny. I bought the album last Saturday after reading s short article about her in that mornings paper. An utterly creepy song, made even more so by the fact that I can't quite work out just why its so strangely eerie.

Prompt 1: Three Objects found on the Bedsit Floor

This post had it's origin here. I am rather pleased as the prompt actually worked. This is the longest piece of writing I have done for a while! Though I would very much like to leave a link as is suggested I still can't leave comments for some reason. I really must get it sorted out...
Anyway...

Prompt 1:  Three Objects found on the Bedsit Floor


They're all on the same floor, almost within touching distance of each other, and the first thing I can touch is

I: Hovis Medium Soft White bread...
...bought last night coming back from Em's place, a strangely melancholic remnant of yesterday's hangover. I spent most of yesterday sleeping. There was a short aborted trip into town; sunlight, cold-warmth, spring ghosts, those just-remembered January contradictions. Back at Em's house, oddly exhausted, I fell into a deep luxurious sleep. I woke sometime in the still early darkness, feeling that icy melancholy of the last hours of the weekend on me. Fragments of school days circle me like wolves; the top 40 on the radio, recording Talk Talk and Adam Ant and Olivia Newton John on my mono tape player. Watching it get dark outside, up the hill to the Black Woods. School hanging over the day and this new night time.
A gallows proposition.
After cups of tea and a dinner of leek and potato soup I headed off to face the strange and regretful apocalypse of Sunday night. The people smoking sat outside the Western  Road pubs seemed somewhat muted. Blue cigarette smoke in the quickly cooling air.
Sunday night feels middle-aged, still melancholy at the passing of youth, -the optimistic potential of teenage Fridays, the twenty-something promise of Saturdays, the reflective, serene thirty-something Sunday mornings.
Sunday night is all those things that could have been.
The newsagents were all bright with magazines and pasties and too many things to buy for dinner I couldn't decide on.
A loaf of bread the only thing that made sense.
I ate toast while watching the TV.

...with the thumb of my right hand on the bread I can stretch my little finger to touch...


II: 'Brain Storm Comix' number one, 1975

...bought back in the autumn of last year. 50 pence from one of the charity shops down London Road, twenty five years after it was first published. I paid 15 pence more than it was when it was first published.
Those Saturdays last autumn were strange, squeezed in between the morning shift at work and whatever I did that night.. I didn't read the comic then, not until this morning (or 'comix' the 'x' denoting it was aimed at adults rather than children) when I sat in the gloomy light of Monday morning - an early shower meant an hour to kill before work. Pulled this out from somewhere. I can't remember where now. From the pile of books under the kettle-table? from the strange dead space between the record player I've not switched on for years and the wall behind my bed?
Strange remnant from the hippy era. Chester P Hackenbrush distills a variety of drugs into one single pill, washes down the whole lot with hash beer. Goes on a 'trip', meets the 'knights of hallucination' and confronts the ultimate truth of his own reality, 'a character acting out a part... black ink on white paper'.
There's one picture of the eponymous hero staring out at the viewer, and, to another character talks about the viewer -myself in this case- '...its a huge form - a figure staring down at us... is it God?'.
Not even sunrise, not really, and mistaken for a god by a drawing in a comic, or comix, that was 25 years old.

...it's behind me, I reach for it with my left hand, a book, a copy of 


III: 'Ghosts of Cornwall' by Peter Underwood.
...bought over the autumn of 2006 on a trip to Cornwall to see my parents.
I've left it open, face down on the floor. What was I reading? Why did I want to save this particular haunting? Lets have a look...
'Roche Rock, a medieval hermitage with a brooding and sinister atmosphere'.
There is a photograph.
The ruined walls of the building do look sinister. A foreboding edifice. Actually, flicking through the text, it does seem a fairly interesting haunting. There is a tale about a woman, who, on a sunny afternoon encountered a strangely hostile atmosphere, of reports of scuttling shadows that people say may be the ghost of a leper, a monk, perhaps even a smuggler.
Ghost stories are always more effective without a real reason for them.
You can find these books almost anywhere.They were cheaply printed, with black and white photographs and bad pencil drawings.  When I was a kid they would be in the gift shop of every castle, every tourist country village, every 'open to visitors' manor house we would go to on the Saturdays and Sundays of childhood. Strange childhood remnants.  I've got these 'ghost books' from Bristol, Devon, Scotland (of course) and Kent, for some reason. My favourite is 'Scottish Ghost Stories'. The first book of ghost stories I ever bought. Not the original, I lost that years ago.
That drawing that accompanied chapter two the Attic in Pringle's Mansion, Edinburgh, still gives me the shivers now. Or Chapter three the Sallow Faced Woman. Oh yes. Of course. Chapter Thirteen. The Floating Head. When I was seven years of, I convinced myself that this floating head was hiding in the cupboard in my room. In my overworked imagination the floating 'head' became the far more terrifying floating skull. Over those endless summer nights in Scotland, I would pray to whatever god might be listening to not let the floating skull get me this night or any other night.
The Floating Skull always seemed ridiculous in daylight though. In a childhood marked by ghost-hunting as other kids played football, the Floating Skull always remained a somewhat private haunting.
They sell these ghost books at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton city centre. I never bought one though. Maybe because buying a book aimed at tourists in a city you live in would just feel wrong somehow.
Or maybe I would be afraid of what chapter thirteen might contain.

I'm sat on the floor, as well as the three objects around me. No connection between them, apart from the fact they were all on the floor of my bedsit on the second Monday of my 39th January. All objects hold memories, and all memories are ghosts.
I do a new thing, deliberately.
I place the bread on the floor to the left of my laptop, and now I place Brain Storm Comix number 1 on the bread and Ghosts of Cornwall on top of that.
An absurd tower of things, and I only do this because no-one will have connected these three objects before.

As far as I'll ever know anyway...

Meals of Ibuprofen and Chocolate Milkshake

A week in to the new year. Seems like an age since last weekend; a Saturday of sleep, and a long Sunday walk with Em along that moon-ish half circle that is the boundary of Brighton. Strange countryside there. Odd strips of wood and tangled waste ground, scrubby recreation grounds, and everywhere the constant shrill shriek of the ring road. Then that strange grey Monday, walking along the seafront listening to Electric Wizard's new album, wondering what Hove Lagoon would look like now. Like all those places of last autumn, the roads beyond the Old Shoreham Road, the Engineerium, I can't believe that they could survive into the new year.

A return to work and the arrival of a savage sore throat. Mild illness turning everything slightly surreal, meals of ibuprofen and chocolate milkshake. Disturbed but somehow restful sleep. Tuesday night, an endless sequence of half dreams that stretched until morning. Twin Peaks (watching the first series with Em at the moment). Different shots of different plot stands, translated as characters standing on different sides of the same hill, till finally the same characters were split in two seemingly. Different points in time taking place on the brow of the hill at the same point.
These impossibilities made sense when I dreamt them.
A revelatory absurdity.
Last night, my throat was particularly bad. Crept into my dreams. Another television series this time. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy infected by some vampiric throat disorder. Her tongue disengaging itself, curling round in her mouth like a snake. Unpleasant imagery, and when I woke it felt like a snake was curled in my throat for I could not swallow without pain.
A glass of water and I felt better.

The nights are January-black, but the days have an odd lightness about them, like those first few warm-ish days of spring. Sat with Mark at the beach at lunchtime. Warm enough in the sun.
Yesterday, it seemed that it had gotten darker considerably later.
Nightfall slipping back. The year, already, creeping on.

Thomas Ligotti and Boris Yeltsin in his Underpants

I dreamt a few nights ago of my grandfather's house at Stone in Worcestershire. The house was haunted as always. Dark brick work and stairways neatly avoided. A gathering of shadows I was investigating. Nan was there too - she died new years eve 1983 - and she told me in the dream that 'the white house is burning again'. I woke up at this point with that feel of encroaching supernatural presence.

A dream last night which was the polar opposite of the above. I was reading a story by my favourite author, Thomas Ligotti. For anyone who has never read Thomas Ligotti, well, imagine Franz Kafka writing post-modern horror. Not a very good description but you get the general idea. Anyhow, in the dream, I was reading a story I had never read before by him. It was a short two page story, more a vignette really, and concerned a certain photograph that would send anyone who looked at it insane. The story built up over that two pages, building up to the climax where the subject of this blasphemous photograph was revealed.
It was Boris Yeltsin in his underpants.
In the dream I was furious; what was Ligotti thinking of? Was he taking the piss? Had someone else pirated the book and inserted their own nonsensical ending?
I woke up and couldn't stop laughing...
I have no idea where this dream came from.

A Note to Tree Shadow Moon in Particular, Others as Well...

Na - 26n sounds fantastic, and certainly would like to play along! I really liked today's post - a haunting, slightly disruptive ambience which reminded mew of an album called 'Knive' by Svarte Greiner. I did actually attempt to post this up on your blog, and to reply to you earlier which brings me to...

...for some reason I can't post comments at the moment - on mine or anyone else's blog - It just keeps telling me to choose a profile. I am determined to work this conundrum out, so please bear with me.... (and wish me luck, solving technological puzzles is never my forte...)

Equations involving Nine Years

Everything is January. January is everything.
On this, the last day of the Christmas break, I took a walk down the seafront. Made my way there down the forgotten roads between Western Road and the Kingsway (?). The light drained of all depth, an horizonless day. A winter tree, all spiky and dead, nestled in a street corner. Gloomy front gardens backing onto gloomy front rooms. In one, I saw a middle-aged woman sat on her bed, a look of despondency on her face, surrounded by piles of rubbish. Cluttered towers of things that made no sense. I only glimpsed this private view, and quickly turned away. There was something too intrusive about it all.
The grey of the sea. Sluggish tides, and skies that belonged nowhere. I sat and looked at the waves, a part of me wishing I still smoked. People and dogs passed me by. The dogs, as ever, seemed immune to the somehow pleasing glooms of January.
Back in the bedsit now, listening to Orplid on the stereo, an album I bought nine years ago this year. 2002 is now nine years ago. My obsession with making equations out of the past is beginning to tire me now. An unconscious habit, it carries on; so when I bought the Orplid album, that would have been halfway between now and 1993, when I started Langley College, and nine years from now, I'll be 47, and today will be halfway between buying that Orplid album and whatever I'll be doing nine years from now...

Oil Wells and Asparagus

In the first few hours of New Years Day, a spontaneous trip to Andy's, who had elected to stay in.  Walked with Em from the expensive and busy Temple Bar along Western Road,  then turned right onto The Drive. Passed by the old nightmare flat I lived in over 9 months of 2009. I usually avoid the road, some kind of lingering, irrational superstition. Looking up at my old room, watching the old flat, the blank windows and undrawn blinds. All that darkness staring down.
The place looked deserted. Abandoned.
I remember that strange spaciousness of The Drive, the houses that reminded me of a Brooklyn I have never seen, and the tall posts of the street lamps.
The latter always reminded me of oil wells and asparagus. I don't think I ever had a reason why.

New Years Day spent at Em's place. Mostly anyway. There was a short trip into town where she bought my Christmas present for me - Electric Wizard's 'Black Masses' album. Then back to her place, where an afternoon nap took us past nightfall. Upon waking, we watched the rather excellent 'Let The Right One In' on DVD, which was far superior on second viewing than when I had first watched it back in autumn.
Autumn is now last year.
Strange to write that.

In the last few hours of New Years Day, a sudden restlessness led us onto the seafront, along Hove Promenade and to the BP petrol station by the King Alfred swimming pool. Petrol stations on cold winter nights are places of odd nostalgia for me. That strange desolate buzz of the fridges, the pinging of the tills when a petrol pump is activated, shelves full of overpriced drinks and tattered remnants of the days papers...
There was a basket of cheap Hallowe'en toys for sale. I bought a plastic orange ball, made to look like a pumpkin for 50p. There were any number of sweets and tiny toys inside - a miniature yo-yo with a cartoon of a random anime character on, a page of stickers with random words in 'spooky' typography (Creepy! Haunted House!) and a black plastic amorphous mess that may or may not be a bookmark.
I was particularly pleased with a badge of a spider, which is now on the lapel of my jacket.
I wonder how long I shall have it before I inevitably lose it.

Perhaps it will be one of those things which will follow me round forever.