October Rust

I bought Type 'O' Negative's album 'October Rust' right back in early September 1996, just before I started Worcester University. I liked some some songs but never really got into it. I kept trying every now and again to 'get into it' properly, and always fail... But I keep thinking I will get into it properly. I'm listening to it now, still trying to get into it. As it has, this year, been 18 years since I first bought the album, you really would think I would have learned my lesson.
Apparently not.

Weather Report

The sun was out yesterday when I walked into work, and it was quite warm. The tides of doom receded for a while. By the time I left work it was raining again, so I caught the bus home, and the tides of doom were back.
I drank the last of the wine and fell to sleep.

Mid-January Already

I spent yesterday painting, only leaving the house as night fell, about 4:00pm. The outside was not encouraging; grey gloomy drizzle, everything robbed of colour. Not even twilight could make something compensatory out of it all.
I came back home, tried to watch television after dinner (nothing on) - and eventually got my scanner working for the first time. This is a remarkable step forward for me considering just how lost I am with computers most of the time. Now I shall be able to scan in artwork instead of  photographing it. Means also that if I ever get back into writing I'll be able to print out what I've written. For something to exist I think you need to have a hard copy of it.
I continued painting throughout the evening - it now has a title 'The Great Migration', and should be finished this week. The sense of impending doom and hopelessness that has been following me around since new years day continued to tighten it's grip around me, forcing me to take solace in a bottle of wine.
I went to sleep about 1:00am.

Monday Morning is Silent

Dreams of an abandoned hospital in which Cybermen are hiding. They only become active at night, but what am I doing in the hospital anyway? The Cybermen are harvesting limbs and organs to replicate themselves. We are having to gather weapons together - made out of silver - chain swords - to stop this threat. There is a feeling of impending doom.
I wake throughout the night. Anxious awakenings. Lie there, twist and wait to fall back to sleep again.
11:33am now. Got up out of bed half an hour ago. Sat on the sofa in my room. Grey skies, thick with rain, but there is sunlight somewhere. The houses across the gardens are all lit up.
Monday morning is silent.

Cold and Empty Days

Cold and empty days.
I walk to town to meet friends for coffee. The day struggles to get out of twilight. Before that I wake hungover and restless. I kept waking throughout the night. Recurring images of worst case scenarios that are hardly life-shattering but bother me deeply anyway.
Good night at the Evening Star last night, hence the hangover. New year ales and friendly old dogs. An old labrador took a friendly liking to my hand. Caught the bus down and the taxi back Fell into sleep almost immediately. Sleep is recompense, but not the waking, not the dreams.
How long will these cold and empty days last for? Till spring? It feels like they are here to stay forever, everything dark and immutable.
Three weeks till I find out whether or not I have passed probation at work. I think not. Back into the job market again, looking for a job I can tolerate, and these days pass by, and these years pass. Nothing thaws. everything grows more entrenched.
Anyway, I've got to do the washing up now.

Entropy and Inertia

At the heart of all these days, that building I work in, a cross between an abandoned hospital and a once-factory. It's actually a call centre. A cold centre. Wide empty corridors, hospital white walls, creaky lift that opens onto other floors. Wide stretches of emptiness, and almost a wind blowing through it all.
Inertia and entropy.
I remember the train doors closing, and waving goodbye, and the city streets now even more defined by absence. A coldness here, a coldness there. Her voice lingers, another room, another country. She knows the sun and I know this; the anatomy of concrete, the lethal witnesses of alarm call driven mornings.
The mirror.
Signs of ageing. Entropy. Something I've been ignoring too long.
I hide my smile. I wait for these January days to pass.

The Storms Won't Last Forever

I think I dreamt last night, I'm not sure. I've been dreaming a lot recently about paintings and in particular the artist Kay Sage, whose surrealist works are proving quite an inspiration to me of late. An article I read on some blog somewhere says that her life, though not unhappy, was threaded through with melancholy. I dream I am in her paintings. I dream of the photograph of her when she was young.
I dream of Southside and Kinloss, as always, and Woodstock Drive in Ickenham, and of course, London Road in Worcester, all these psychic generators made up of my own past. The dreams and myths I have concocted of these places somehow supersede their real life counterparts, their waking reflections. Almost anyway. When I go back to these places - Worcester most often - I find vague traces of myself as I was there. Haunting my own past. Haunted by houses. I would love to enter into an old house in which I lived.
The wind is constant now, rattling the house,s ending the lamps spun across the mews in a seasick rhythm that mocks the sea I've not yet seen. I should go down to the beach and watch that spindrift-mad ocean. Its been flinging pebbles up onto the boulevard, drowning benches, destroying huts. The storms won't last forever, and before we know it grey February will have started her reign.
After midnight now. Time to lie down and dream myself back into the past that only ever seems a fracturing of thin ice away.

First Sunday of the Year

Returned to work on Thursday afternoon. I spent the morning before painting, the only thing that could take my mind off the feeling of impending doom that was gathering about me. It didn't quite work, but at least I got some painting done, at the moment a dark landscape under a stormy sky. Work itself wasn't too bad, though seemed to take an age to pass by. It's always the waiting that is worse. I suppose I'm just a bit sick of working in call centres now, though this job is a lot less stressful than my last. Only a month left now (less!) till I found out whether or not I pass probation. Judging by how badly I did yesterday at work, this looks increasingly unlikely. A long stretched out day that too forever to end.

Claire's birthday last night - traditionally the end of the Christmas period. Dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, and then to the Craft pub. Don't want to think how much I spent.

Slightly hungover today.

Em has now left Brighton. I saw her off this morning (her parents came down for the rest of her stuff). She'll be back on Wednesday night, and then off to Greece on Thursday morning. Brighton will be strange without her.

January is often a bleak month.

Ah well, The Geekest Link pub quiz tonight, then tomorrow off, and back to work on Tuesday.

Gloomy New Years Day

Got of bed at 12:30pm. Checked e-mail. A message from our landlady headed 'water-rates' which I was unable to open. Sinister. More money needed probably. Gloomy afternoon in the day long twilight of January 1st. Couldn't settle to anything, but ended up doing a 9 panel comic strip about how gloomy today felt. Andy got up some time in the evening. Em came round for a cup of tea after she finished work (finished work for the last time - I still can't believe she'll be leaving Brighton next week!). Rained all day. House rattled in the wind. Headachey hangover kicked in about 6:00pm. Watched a bit more of 'Blood on Satans Claw'. Walked Em home. Rainy cold - the antithesis of anything cosy / comfy. Worried about money, about not passing my probation, about growing older. Dreading work tomorrow. 10:45pm. About to start another painting.
Lets hope 2014 has some nicer moments than the grey gloom of the past couple of years.