Saturday 31 August 2013

Last Day of Summer Again

When I woke up this morning, in the still-calm of no-hangover, the air felt different. As I eased my 10-o-clock self out of bed, the air was cooler - that breath of something nostalgic and premonitionary that you always get this time of year. Autumn is here, and outside, the sunlight is different - bright and hot but laced through with something; nights drawing in, deepening skies, all those dark breeze comforts. Another summer done, another season put away, and into the autumn where nothing is mapped, nothing is known.

Wednesday 28 August 2013

Nearly 1:00am

The online housing benefit form made me sad and anxious so I looked at Youtube instead. After two hours of this, I noticed it had gotten dark. I went and watched the television. Old episodes of Peepshow were being repeated. They were early episodes and everyone looked so young, and I thought, again, that time passes.

Tuesday 27 August 2013

Time Passes

I got up at 7:00 this morning and walked into town, listening to the just-downloaded second album by eighties metal band Fifth Angel, and an also-just-downloaded nineties album by noisy Japanese black metallers Abigail. I ran into a few people I used to work with, on their way to work. I walked with them to the entrance and then carried on down the beach. A bright, hot day, and all intimations of autumn are no longer here. End of summer fever. This is no-time.
People I used to work with.
It strikes me that I no longer have a job. The thought is disorientating and freeing. I am glad I am not at the call-centre any more. That place was nudging me ever closer to some place where growing levels of stress and anxiety were going to cause me at some point grave concern. The future is open. Anything is possible.
I tell everyone that I am going to concentrate on my art, at least for a while, and though I shall undoubtedly produce, maybe lots more artwork, I'm still not sure whether or not I'll ever have the courage or motivation to do anything with it. If I ever work out what doing anything with it actually means.
I went down the Pavilion Gardens, sat on the grass with a coffee and continued working on the drawing I had begun in Portland on the morning of the day we flew back.
Hot and unreal day.
I walk back home, and head off to meet Em at her house. We walk into town, and the heat is relentless and unreal and strangely cathartic.
Someone I used to go out with.
I borrowed her wireless and registered my Kindle my parents had bought me, rather fantastically, as a present on Friday before catching the train back to Brighton. I downloaded Thomas Ligotti's book of pessimistic philosophy The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and Chris Limb's Confessions of a Teenage Toyah Fan. I used to know the latter author - very vaguely. I read the book in one sitting. It is a rather fantastic paean to nostalgia, memory, time passing and things changing, threaded through with a strain of obscure and not unattractive melancholy. Highly recommended.
Someone I used to vaguely know.
Time passes alright. The one thing of which we can be certain. As I sit in my room in this late summer twilight (September on Sunday! Autumn!) listening to Fifth Angel again, (the kind of then-commercial metal I would avoid like a plague during my teenage years, now full of an odd nostalgia) I feel time pooling about me. I don't mean that time feels stilled, or stagnant (though, to be honest, I can conceive of no other season by late summer) but more that time is refusing to flow, building up against some dam. The river rising. Ready to burst its banks. Ready to flood across those fields I can't see, those unmapped meadows, pathless woods, and lanes lit at twilight by crooked street lamps that only sometimes work.
I only feel like this of course because I have no future plans, I have no idea what I am going to do, but am aware that things could go anyway, both good and bad. This feeling is further accentuated by the fact that I am giving myself two weeks off. Permission to not do anything except what I want to. I don't want to panic-rush into some unsuitable course of action. I want this space. I need this time. It's hard to do nothing - even if you're given yourself permission to.
Then again, I think of the council website, and the housing benefit form I need to fill in online, and that I might have to find documents, and that I might have lost then, and that I might get into some kind of unspecified trouble, and that...
7:50pm. Time passes. Through the gap in my curtains I can see that it is getting darker. Nights are drawing in. The year is growing older.
Remember 2013? Two-thirds of it are now done...
I wonder where I'll be come Christmas, and the thought vacillitates between both hope and despair.
I have no idea.

Monday 26 August 2013

Doctor Occult at the Bus Stop

Between the restaurant and the pub, I spotted a familiar figure at the bus-stop. Despite the soggy rain of last night, the man we call Doctor Occult, that well dressed gentleman of his mid-sixties, was looking as suave and mysterious as ever. We stopped to talk to him for a while. I asked him how he was.
He considered this for a while, as if I had asked a question that demanded some degree of real thought.
'Well, I'm alright... but I'm feeling a little blocked up though.'
'Really? Some kind of late summer cold?' I replied.
'No...' he said sadly, but with a degree of lachrymose glee, 'I've just had too much hashish'.
He said he would see us in the Evening Star, which was unfortunate as we were going to the Lion and Lobster. As we departed I didn't tell him this, but said we would see him in the Evening Star. I have no idea why.

Saturday 24 August 2013

Back from America

Back from the USA, still feeling slightly jet-lagged and strange - everything made even stranger by the fact that I don't have a job top return to - no post-holiday gallows! As I was lying in bed last night unable to sleep, I realised that it was three years ago to the day that I started my job at the call centre.
My only plan at the moment is to have no plan. To take off two weeks without thinking about the future, jobs, employment, money, which will bring us to the end of the first week of September, and autumn will have begun properly. September is always autumn.
I have been to America of course, which I would have expected my first return to Bridge 39 to have been about, but as there is too much to write about, I'll have to do it by degrees. All that really needs to be said is this; I got to walk through American suburban streets at twilight.

Wednesday 14 August 2013

Haunting London Road

Sat in the study at my parents house in Cleobury Mortimer. I can hear the sound of the TV from downstairs, and my fingers on the keyboard. The silence - compared to Brighton - is quite striking. To my left, the uncurtained window shows me a silhouette of the house next door, beyond that the deep blue of the sky. I remember that colour sky from childhood, from staying at my grandparents house out in the country at Stone
I left Brighton this morning at 9:19am. A train with no problems to London Victoria, then the tube to London Paddington. The London you travel through is very different to the London you actually visit. It becomes a city of platforms and passengers, draughty concourses and screens showing departure times for trains and tubes.
The train journey to Worcester passed without incident, aside from a deep, deep exhaustion as I neared my destination. That old refrain; I could sleep forever and wake where...? Well, Great Malvern. The train didn't go any further.
I got off at Worcester Shrub Hill.
Back to Worcester again.
Always back to Worcester.
I had two hours before I was due to meet my parents so I set off for London Road, where I used to live. As I left Shrub Hill Station it began to rain. The sky was covered with thick, white cloud, depthless and wet. I remember so many skies like that when In lived here. Gloom in Brighton has a whole other quality to this. I walked along the canal, cut through the Commandery grounds to the base of London Road hill.
I was last here July 2012, and before then, May 2011. As I walked up the hill, it all seemed so much more familiar than an annual visit, an accidental yearly pilgrimage. I spend so much time thinking about London Road, and dreaming of it - and currently working on a comic strip based on the time I was living here - that it seems as real and vital as everyday life. It was an eerie experience, walking along it as an actual place, rather than one dreamt or imagined, or seen on Google Streetview.
As I walked up the hill, I tried to imagine living here. I couldn't. There was a hollow, empty atmosphere, some sense of something sad and lost... The gloomy weather didn't help. At least by this point the rain had stopped. I pass by Harrys Wines, now called Bargain Booze, pass the entrance to the flats where Joe used to live, follow the slight curve of the hill as it levels off, and there it is...
136 London Road. My old house.
That place haunts me. Maybe I haunt it.
It didn't look impressive from the street - it never did (there's a whole other level you can only see from the back) - but this time the house seemed to have faded further, as if it was shrinking, collapsing in on itself. The house (the whole building, 136 is one of four in a terraced house) had the same empty quality as that white sky above. I looked up through the old bathroom window above the front door. I could see another window. Was this the one out the back? The one that was next to my old room? I couldn't tell. As I walked on, I wasn't even sure if I had been looking at the right house. Was I looking through next door's window?
I went to the petrol station where I used to work, bought a chilli chicken wrap, and walked back.
I crossed the road so I walked right past 136. I could see right into the back garden - the long green lawn leading down to those two huge trees at the end. I used to watch those trees from my room, wake in the mornings when Ruth would stay over, and right through that autumn of 1997, the leaves on those trees stayed green, only becoming bare as Christmas approached.
I looked through the window into Al's old room at the front of the house. I couldn't make out much; bottles on the wall, some kind of bong maybe. I could not imagine living in that house, ever having lived there. I could imagine Al still living there though, that that was still his room, and the front door might open, and Al might be there, still with his long hair, and he would look at me and wouldn't recognise me. He would go back in again, close the door, slightly puzzled, as if he had seen someone that he thought he should recognise but didn't.
I walked back into town, had a cup of tea down by the river (grey water, wet-drifty air, breathing in the kind of daydreams that are thick with soporific drugs) and went to meet my parents.
The taxi comes to pick us up at 1:45am to take us to Birmingham airport.
This time tomorrow I'll be in America. 

Tuesday 13 August 2013

Into The Unknown

I pause at the door, wave goodbye to everybody in the call-centre, and they wave back at me. The lift comes, and I press the ground floor button one last time, and the doors shut, and I will not see the fourth floor of the call centre again. I say good night to the security guards at reception, as if I am going to be back in tomorrow, and then, for the last time, go through the revolving doors, out onto Western Road and into the unknown.
The air has a pale, white quality to it. I move up the street in slow motion. I have left my job. Four weeks ago, I was on holiday, playing with the idea of leaving at the end of August, if not the end of September, but nothing planned, nothing certain, and here I am, a month later and I have already left.
It is a rare thing in life that the future is truly known. Tomorrow I catch the train to Worcester to meet my parents, then the morning after I shall be on a flight to Portland, Oregon, America (this seem to be an unbelievable statement, America must surely be as unreal as childhood or dream, some film of a place rather than anything real). A week later, I shall be back, and then... Well, as I said, the future is blank. Someone's thrown down tarot cards, but there's no pictures on them, nothing there, no prophecies, no predictions. The last time I was in a similar situation was back when I had been made redundant from Telegen, back in May 2010 where I wrote; 'In closing though, I have no idea what happens next. No idea at all'.
I wandered up Western Road, got some fish'n'chips from Bankers and went down to the half-deserted seafront where I ate them on the pebbles, and watched the troubled sea and restless cloud. It was still warm, and it started to rain slightly. After I had finished my fish'n'chips I walked back up to Western Road and came home.
I can hear the sounds of people next door move about, but aside from this, there is a remarkable silence about this evening, something slow and steady, like some undercurrent in a river heading inexorably to some unseen and inevitable sea.

Monday 12 August 2013

Night Before the Last Day at the Call Centre

Closing down the last three years.
My final day at work tomorrow, then a week in America, and then the unknown autumn begins. It seems impossible to think that after tomorrow I shall never see the inside of the call centre again. No more looking out the window at the sea, at the calls waiting on the wallboard, no more 5p coffees, or the coolness of the stairs... There will be people I shall see again only on Facebook.
Three years.
It doesn't seem possible that three years have gone by, or that it shall be finished tomorrow.
This time tomorrow night, my future will be looking very different, one way or another.
One more time the alarm will go off for work... and when the alarm foes off for work again, it will be a different place, a different time.
Change is the only thing that lets us know time is happening.
Whatever happens, at least I shall have this autumn.

Sunday 11 August 2013

Vodka and Nostalgia

I drank vodka into the small hours, sat on my mattress, and the window open behind closed curtains. The time climbed up to 2:00am (the dark heights of the small hours) and I listened to music on my headphones (a lot of Kristin Hersh). Nostalgic and slightly drunk, I traced over past regrets - should I or shouldn't I have done this or not done that in the summer of 1989? Still puzzling over things a quarter of a century long. After I became bored of Kristin Hersh I played the song 'Stop Me' by thrash band Anacrusis.
I remember...
I used to have this album on vinyl - bought back in January or February of 1990. I used to listen to it in the dark of my room, moonlight falling onto my bed through the curtains, and wonder, or wander over the future. I was a few months away from being 18 and I hadn't particularly enjoyed adolescence. The lyrics were like somethign sharp and incisive; I remember the lost confusion of innocence with feelings worn so clean, wish I could look on this with different eyes, ignore the blinders reminding me... It was never my favourite album, and I rarely played it after those first few initial months after I had bought it.
Those words and that song stayed with me though, I would often find myself humming them over the next two decades, though didn't hear the song till I downloaded it a few weeks ago.
So I end up in the dark of my room,a 41 year old man listening to the same song I did when I was 17, except instead of pondering over the future as I did back then, I was pondering over the past.
There was something pleasingly circular about it all.
And I got up at 8:00an without a hangover.

Wednesday 7 August 2013

Not Outside

There could be an old summer night out there; a path that leads to a small wood no-one knows. I might wake in the midsummer light of 4:00am (even though midsummer has long passed) and listen to the wind in the sun-lashed wood, listen to the branches creak like boats on seas.

Hollowed Out

I had thought that having handed in my notice at work would make work slightly easier. The opposite has been the case, and each day at work is now more stressful, and seems far, far longer than before. Each time that 'beep' comes through on my headphone signalling another call coming... it's another pick axe through my skull. An exaggerated metaphor, but it is an almost physical feeling of something being inside your brain.
It doesn't help that I don't have any plans for what I am actually going to do either. I say to people that I'm going to 'concentrate on my artwork' but really, I'm leaving work because I couldn't stand it any more. I hope that leaving work will have a good knock on effect for my artwork (last night I was unable to do anything after work but lie exhausted on my mattress). I'm worried about the future it must be said. I like security and structure. There is a part of me that regrets handing in my notice, even if staying at work would mean (which it would at some point) some kind of 'breakdown'. Hopefully things will look brighter in a few weeks time.

Tuesday 6 August 2013

Premonitions

7:30am.
I swear I can feel, if not autumn, or even the beginnings of autumn, then perhaps the end of summer. The sense of this is numinous, and does not make much sense, but the bright blue sky I can see in the space between the curtains is a deeper blue, sounds seem sharper and more redolent of the distance, and there is a coolness in the air, despite the sun.
It is not autumn of course, but these premonitions are reminders, warnings perhaps, of time passing, the year moving on. This autumn, of course, is an unknown quantity for me. I have a week left at work, then a week in America, and then... no plans, no design, nowhere I have to be. I look at it all with a dull sense of muted panic and hope that it won't all go wrong.

Sunday 4 August 2013

Deep Summer

Blue skies, a seagull crosses by.
I walked to the Marina and back this morning. Sunburnt air and the sea green as the trees, and even just after 9:00pm, the bathers gather, lying on stones and deckchairs, and the sun is hot and bright and doused with deep summer.
I meant to remember the dreams I had last night but I forgot.
August 4th.
I can remember no other season but summer - each breath tastes of dusts and attics and school holidays, and the metal taste of the roads in the heat seem empty and waiting for something. Angles in the air, corners of alleyways.
Everyone sleeps with their windows open at night.
I forgot to close mine and there was a storm, and the rain and thunder woke me.

Saturday 3 August 2013

Snapshots from Tower Country

In the tarot cards, the card called The Tower often indicates unpleasant but necessary change, sudden events and nasty shocks. As such 'Tower Country' may not be the most accurate description of where I am in this year, but will have to do.
Anyhow.
These are the landmarks and signs I have noticed since reaching deep in Tower Country...
1) Everything is hot and disquieted. This is summer of course, but this is an internal heat... I tried to sleep yesterday afternoon but was unable to. I could not relax.
2) Spent most of last night sleeping shallowly, the rest of the time I spent worrying about my physical health.
3) My room strikes me as being... wrong. The mess in my room seems an extension of the uncertainty of the future. My room is always messy, but this mess seems like an illness.
4) An absolute dread (and slight terror) that I still have another ten days before I finish work.
Oh well. 7:30am. An hour and a half until 'good morning, you're through to Stuart at...'

Friday 2 August 2013

Result of Work Stress

Heatwave, thunderstorms, deep summer. Welcome to August. A week and a half till I leave work, and each day becomes increasingly difficult to get through. I discovered today that the company I work for are going to charge me £150 for an exam I didn't take (I didn't take because work left me too exhausted to do anything). Hadn't even reached midday when I found this out. I was furious, so furious in fact that I was given the rest of the day off. Words cannot describe how I feel about that disgusting, disgusting company I work for.
The sun has made everything unreal and too bright. This is like those old crisis-Augusts of the past; 2009, and the court case against my flatmate's violent boyfriend, 2006, those long weeks of awful depression, 2003, a heatwave month and that flat I hated living in, 2001, being made suddenly out-of-work from the photo shop.
5:39pm, and here I am sat on my bed. It feels like no time.
A week and a half, then a week in America, and then the unknown autumn. I would like to feel optimistic about it all, but I don't - or can't - at the moment. Any relief I feel at leaving work is hot and complicated, and tempered with the disquiet of a future that feels out of my hands... but what choice did I have but hand in my notice and leave work? I hope I am not dealing with pyrrhic victories here... I suppose I am suffering (quite badly) with stress - still feels I should somehow pull myself together - every time I am not at work I am consumed with the dread of returning - I feel myself beginning to fall apart when I am at work, cracks becoming fissures, becoming earthquakes, and the rumours, the threats, of everything being consumed.
I think I'll sleep now, for a while. I remember the summer of 2001, I remember a similar heat and NATO planes being captured in China, and worrying about a third world war, and this was before 9/11, and I had a week in Malta a week after that happened.
Heatwave, thunderstorms, deep summer.
August is here.
Welcome to everything changing, one way or the other.