Can't stop my mouth, my big mouth...

So, I wrote this story once upon a moment. It was rubbish, but for one part when the guy says to the girl, the fantasy:

"You are my crust. You form on me, congeal and coat my thoughts. You are my end of days, and at the end of my days you form on my heart, gnaw through it like plaque, and when I awake into the afterlife, I carry you on scales over my skin.

You are... my crust; you have emerged on the fringes of my life but, when you break away, you unleave me and expose my unsatisfied, molten mass. My crust, peeled off unhealed to let blood, clinging to me at the edges, inevitably falling away and lost."

Simply, she lives in my lap. My motivation is more than the connective glance, it is the connective word. Her text is there, is it unwitting, authentic, just rare?

plumbing a depth

So, there I am, thinking of my three-five-double-"O" heartbreak and lust, trying to get though the day, ruminating on my alienation from god-knows-what... then real life comes and dumps me back on my arse.

The hot water cylinder in my flat has a developed a crack, resulting in a pissing leak that threatens to invade the downstairs neighbours. Today, the plumber called me up with his sobering assessment - a new cylinder is needed, and it will cost... wait for it... £700 + VAT. When you think about the hours taken to do the work, he's really asking for over £100 per hour - extortionate. But it's not something you can refuse - a bit like removing a dead organ and replacing it with a transplant: you can go without, but you won't last long. OK, that's somewhat of a melodramatic comparison, but you understand the sick feeling I have now.

Me without you

"What if now, after all, what if everything you've got made you want more?" What if? by The Lightning Seeds

So the song goes.

My readership is dwindling - perceivably to the outsider, and in my own inner sense. I think I am now talking to thin air - not that this is something unexpected. I felt, some time ago, that I was losing the curl of tongue. Recently, I've gone dark for a week and more, with few updates. I guess, also, the promises have not been kept. My excursion into the world of internet dating bored me so much I abandoned it with not so much as a whimper. My letter to Pandora remains unwritten - primarily owing to my loss of voice, and my inability to find the grounds for word.

It seems as though I'm failing miserably to account for any kind of excitement or development. The truth is, however, that I am actually going through one of the most exciting periods for a long time. It's just that this excitement is nothing to do with my personal life - events at work have accumulated into something of great pregnancy, and that most rare of opportunities: the underdog moment.

It's a long story, but basically, the research/analysis project I've been fighting to promote went and scored a big win last week. We met with a major UK broadcaster, and came out having secured primetime TV & radio airtime slots to promote the public consultation that's a key component of the wider project. They want to make programmes about our project. Our project? Our project!! This means, simply, that we're no longer selling a simple research project but what those in the media call an "event". What the research and analysis will uncover is going to be made accessible and available to millions across the land (and maybe beyond).

The stakes have upped considerably. What was an underdog project from a tiny organisation now has a realistic shot at being top dog for a while; and what I took on as a near no-hope project could become a contender.

There is, however, as always, a hitch.

Whilst these splendid multimedia sweetmeats turn our dogmeat into haute cuisine, success is now conditional on us being able to find the c. £900,000 needed to run the project at sufficient scale from May 2005 - November 2006. Time is tight - we have until the end of April to get the money, which is no small challenge. But it could happen - primetime sells, and sponsorship loves TV/radio. We could become players!!

My next four weeks look like being a rollercoaster of hope, disappointment, aspiration... and maybe, just maybe... success. It could happen, I keep telling myself... it could happen!

Angry days

My achilles tendon remains violently inflamed, so for a 4th successive weekend I have been unable to go for a gym session, play football, or just go walking into town... and yet, during weekdays, I have been dragging my sorry corpse across the capital's unforgiving footpaths for the sake of work.

So I ended up, in bed, on a Sunday morning, the morning after a beer and wine supper, listening to the Proclaimers and trying to make sense of things as the first quarter of the year approaches its close.

Anger. Again, I seem to be experiencing moments of great anger inside me recently. Tempers fray. My irascibility stuns me. Now, however, I am beginning to see this as evidence of my becoming freer, revelling in a fresher expressive candour. I guess I am often perceived as a quiet kind of person, and this is something I have cultivated when it suits me - nothing fucks me off more than people saying shit when there's nothing that needs saying (sometimes silence just works). That does not mean I don't want to talk - or that I'm aloof, as someone once suggested to me. Recently, however, the anger has been wresting free and there are moments where I feel as though my skin will spontaneously combust and I'll be this huge flaming torch. I like it. It feels good - anger that is. Is this inevitable? Is this the death throe of true youth, as the venom of my twenties-youth wanes and the thirties beckon? OK, maybe it's not that serious - another couple of years to go before that!!

Weekend debris

The weekend seems to have evaporated ahead of time. How can 48 hours have passed so quickly? I recall the euphoria of Friday afternoon, having needed this brake more so than many before.

I did begin one task, at the least. I began my letter to Pandora, and stopped after about 4 hours. I have retained only four lines of the first attempt. It is proving much more difficult than expected. I mean, it has been about 9 years since we last had any sort of communication, and after such distance... how can you bridge the silence and get back to what and how we exchanged. On Monday night, rattling back home on the overground, there seemed so much to say, which was perhaps due in part to the combination of the London Pride and the Drambuie. But when I sat at my desk, clicked the top of my ballpoint, hand poised on unruled paper... nothing came.

In a fit of frustration, I am going to try to engineer a nostalgic reminiscence, a kind of deliberate Proustian meditation. I shall put "Dark Therapy" on the CD player, clap the ear goggles on, lean back in my chair, pour a vodka and ginger ale mixer, and think back to 1995-6.

On another note, my experimentation with the world of the internet dating community has terminated in farcical circumstances. Actually, I've withdrawn in disappointment and boredom more than anything else. There have been minimal interesting responses to the lances I've thrown out, and I'm loathe to subject my eagerness to such iterative disappointment.

More to follow...

Rolling back the decade

Everything is a blur. I wish I was 18 again.

Monday night, a night that remains in my veins, keeping my head rolling like a cannonball and my fingers out of kilter. Tonight, I met up with my old university friend, Simon for pints of draught bitter and shots of single malt. Simon is my first friend from uni - when I moved into my room, in my first year in my first hall, he was in the room opposite. We became fast friends, whiling away our time and allowances drinking. I reminisced this evening on summer days spent loading the sink up with Smirnoff Mules and drinking ourselves into oblivion whilst waxing lascivious on the virtues of kylie or Justine from Elastica.

More importantly, we talked about old flames and the never-was-lit of infatuations. Notable in the conversation was my ongoing, inner, irreconcilable affection for a girl who remains mysterious beyond my fleeting memories of her. Simon recommended a purgative: I am resolved to write a letter to Pandora, who was the unwitting goddess of my early adulthood, and who was most likely oblivious to the legend she incribed on my impressionable soul. Even now, I am not sure I am over the experience (see September entry "Sweet Pandora, so sweet").

At last, a true subject for my pen to work upon. Rest assured, reader of mine, I shall make visible to you the unfathomable bind I feel.

Exoricising the corporate demons

Today was a big test. I logged onto my business email and picked up the promotions list.

Context: As a large corporate, my erstwhile employer practises an annual promotion process. It's a repulsive, hypocritical process that has a track record of rewarding the unworthy brown-nosers and disregarding the people who are spending all their time actually delivering on their work and hence have not the inclination or time to kiss arse. Over the period of about 4 months, several largely self-interested managers write disinterested recommendations out of obligation, or glowing paeans to their favourites. A meeting is held where line managers and fat partners barter over who makes the cut. Then, a few weeks later, a spreadsheet is sent around to the workforce with the list of those who made the cut. It's a horrible day for those who don't get the nod - you already know you lost out, but you have to go through the indignity of omission, whereupon your colleagues immediately identify your absence from the list and there are uneasy moments of consolation or simple avoidance of the issue.

OK, my description of this process expresses a degree of bitterness, and maybe I exaggerate a little. But you must understand, the career promotion process used to be a point of soreness for me. At the beginning, things went well. I got an accelerated promotion within 17 months of starting my job, and I seemed to be on the fast track to swift elevation. Then, I began to see that things were not going to be rosy. Until about March last year, I was one of the guys who worked hard; I was committed; I gave the Man every spare moment to advance the project; and I was good at what I did. But it never got recognised - I was shit at self-promotion. In the end, I was overlooked. The sense of injustice I felt would chew at my gut at night, warding off the peace of sleep my heart longed for. For those who have read the early entries of my blog, it was my realising how badly wound up I was at this ludicrous process of pursuit after false career gratification that forced me to undertake my hiatus, to discard this stress and to take the time to regenerate my better parts; to re-skin myself, in reptilian terms...

So, as I began, this was a big test for me. Opening up the excel, would I see the names of peers and others and feel pangs of jealousy and rage? Would I feel that I had fucked everything up by not fighting to get my name on the list?

The answer is, no. I opened up the document, looked through calmly, saw names of people I knew, some friends and a few erstwhile rivals, and I smiled. Nothing negative, no rancour or bitterness of any sort. Instead, I immediately wrote emails to all the guys I knew who had made the promotion list, and congratulated with total sincerity. I was genuinely happy for them, and I felt the compassion of a friend - knowing what it must mean to them, and the relief they must be feeling made me feel good for them.

This magnanimity could only be achieved by my reaching a very particular state: emancipation. I've emancipated myself! I'm free of the sense of obligation to the artificial glory that such career medals offer. I'm free. I could stay outside the corporate world, or I could return, but I don't think I'd be the same coiled spring as before. I just want to do something worthwhile with my life, to get paid enough so as I can pay the bills and save a little, have a reasonable level of comfort, and most importantly - go home, spend time with the people I care about, read, write, drink scotch, smoke a cigar now and then, and send & receive messages of genuine feelings. Moreover, I'm really enjoying my work at the Institute and, however precarious our funding and finances are, I think my project designs are resilient. Suddenly, interest in the designs is growing. Some exciting opportunities are emerging. I'm designing without compromise or concession to the rules of the firm. It has the stamp of "me" on it. It feels like art, and I mean that in a personal sense - what I'm doing will endure, even in the restricted constituency of the Institute.

I'm still smiling. It was a test, indeed, and I think, I hope, I feel... I passed.