Bend over baby, I'd like to take a bite...

I spent much of today carefully eyeballing the German consultant across the way. She has a permasmile, glasses that make her look like a secretary from a pornflick, and a rear end that just begs to be chewed on. I went through a whole pack of gum in the space of the afternoon, and if things continue I will have to pack something more durable, like jerky, to manage my masticatory fantasies.

My chronicle of 1996 is slowly coming together - it's not quite there, but it's strange how focusing on a particular moment in the distant past can revive the things you blocked out for so long. Like how you woke up with a girl who had vomited over you after a clumsy, drunken fumble and quasi-fuck; or the time you got kicked in the face and tore up the insides of your mouth, meaning you couldn't chew solid food for a fortnight; or the moment that you realised that a moment to declare yourself to the-one-that-might-have-been had already passed you by, just as you thought you were ready... Yes, dear readers, these delightful reminiscences and more await...

In the meantime, life in my world is a bit of a mess. My brother-in-law and my parents are at loggerheads, one of my best friends is leaving town, . All the same, I am feeling quite serene. "Scrubs - Season 2" and "The West Wing - Season 6" on DVD are contributing to this mellowness, as is the weekly dose of "Lost" (rubbish, but fun). TV, oh TV, what would we do without your healing touch? What would be there to remind us of what the benchmarks for our lives should be?!

I'm up for a couple of jobs, so am having to conjure up diverse mendacious reasons to leave the office and attend interviews on the sly. In my reasoning, these exercises in professional subterfuge are the most noble of lies - I feel no guilt, and actually I like trying to come up with ever more outrageous excuses. I mean, once you've exhausted the eye test, dental appointment, physio session, blood donation, funeral of a remote acquaintance, train delay, traffic incident... you start to become more elaborate. The visit from your great-great uncle from the jungle, the illness of the fictitious pet, and of course the bout of food poisoning you never actually had.

The best birthday gift I received was from my brother - a book about ice and snow sculpture. I have always wanted to go to see the ice & snow carving competitions in Breckenridge, Fairbanks and Japan, and seeing these fleeting marvels. My only sculpting experience so far is with stone, which defines itself in terms of its resilience and permanence. Ice is fleeting, defined by its transience, bound to its demise.

Getting on, getting by...

My posts have been pretty unhappy recently, so I'm going to try and make this a more upbeat one - both Abby and Lauren shame me with their positivity, as I languish in my navel-gazing. All my blogging negativity is due, in truth, to laziness - I'm not writing with any regularity, which mis-influences fluency. So, I have a plan to make better my verbal gunfire.

I turn 29 on Tuesday, and I have to admit it's a weird feeling. Entering the final year of my twenties, and it will be time soon to evaluate the third decade in its totality.

Thus, I am proposing a series of retrospective posts, each focused on each year of my twenties. I shall use as my material the life, loves, sounds, visions and words of what was, at that time, in that scene.

Coming soon - 1996, the year I turned 20.

I mumble on...

I've been remiss in my blogging, and it pains me. I am fast approaching the year's anniversary of my existence in the blogosphere, and words fail me. It's funny how we await word sometimes, with impatience and expectation.

Sometimes the words just gush out, and I'm on a train or driving my car, and the words evaporate before they can be captured properly. So much that I could have said that is good just disappears, and gets forgotten. I worry sometimes at the brainwaves and inspirational ideas that have missed their shot by a twist of fate to be when I am unable to save them. Like doomed sperms, they writhe, unfulfilled, full of the potential of life, yet never to be anything more than failed half-lives.

Incidentally, whilst we're on the subject, "sperm" is a disgusting word that I have never liked - phonetically, it is unsettling, and stark in its monosyllabic self.

My favourite word at the moment is "machinal". I'm reading Sophie Treadwell's play of the same name at the moment, and I'm fascinated at the variations of pronunciation that can change the feeling of the term. It is supposed to be mouthed thus: "mock-en-al", but I have always preferred the faux-french "ma-shin-al". Even with this latter approach, variance in syllabic emphasis can create nuances that delight the vocal chords... "MA-shin-al", "ma-SHIN-al", "ma-shin-AL"... wonderful...

***

"There's this girl I like, and I think that maybe she likes me, and I want to kiss her, but my lips are rough, and my hands rougher, and I'm afraid she'll melt away from me..."

***

It's strange when you find yourself falling for someone, and maybe it's not really "them" that you're falling in love with, but the idea of them, then the generated fantasy of them. What, or rather, who they actually are falls away into irrelevance, and all you want is your version of them.

I've forgone who she is, or might actually be... but that makes me want here even, ever more...

In pursuit of the willing ovary...

Everyone seems to be on a short fuse these days. My dad, my bro', my friends. Even I, with my known tendency to anger, feel positively serene in comparison.

So, in a bid to avoid the wrath of late-summer blues-affected circle, I am retracting into myself and resuming my reading.

I'm currently reading "My Ear at his Heart", a memoir by Hanif Kureishi (Note: Anyone who has not read any Kureishi should go out and buy "Buddha of Suburbia" or "The Black Album" immediately). It's about his memories of his father, who was a failed writer, and the experience of reading his father's last, unpublished novel.

I lament, silently but persistently, the death of my writer's dream. In many ways, it is a dream that never really was - I never had the discipline, let alone the talent, to write with any substance. I once envisaged punchy novellas, effervescent with what would be considered by the critical press as the prevailing anger of the age. Now I'm rapidly leaking the venom of youth and all I'll be good for are half-baked comic capers.

A screwy idea is now burgeoning in my all-too-flippant thinking. Should I go out and have a kid, who I can one day hone into the writer I most probably will never be? Now, all I need is a willing young lady...

Addiction to the darker word

“I’m weary. But it’s not a physical weariness, it’s not as if I’m aching all over or succumbing to some debilitating muscular dysfunction. It’s more of a moral weariness.  I just don’t know what’s wrong or right anymore, whereas it all seemed so very clear not so long ago. And I’m only twenty-eight! Who’d have thought I’d be this jaded this young?”

“Oh God, that’s not good…”

So the conversation went, in the bookish bar in the depths of the village…

“We don’t talk about love…”

Moral weariness?  Imagine, the sense of right and wrong that has been safe in the mind, that has withstood tests of a decade, that has broken temptation… that certainty has become mobile, and seems to be flowing away.  Certainty recedes from the centre to the periphery, a surface ripple from the pebble that has sunk beyond view.  When do submerged pebbles ever get seen again?

“We only want to get drunk…”

I drank alone in the softly-lit hotel bar a couple of nights ago.  It was abandoned but for me.  I drew whiskies down, haloed in the bar light as dark corner tables remained empty.  It felt like being on stage, and I would gladly have lapsed into a monologue to my silent interlocutor (think Camus, La Chute).  But there was only emptiness – my meaning receded from the centre of my mind to the periphery of no-one else’s.

“And we are not allowed to spend…”

I have taken refuge in consumption.  I’m working in Newbury, which is 55 miles away from my home, a hellish commute by substandard British public transport.  So, I bought a car.  It’s German, probably more expensive than I should afford, but it’s fast and I like the colour.  And, to be honest, I don’t feel any guilt about the spend – I just don’t.

“As we are told that this is the end…”

Across the ocean, people were drowning.  The saucer of their home submerged as the barriers broke and the waters came.  I imagined the end of Atlantis, when there were no cameras to capture the wrath of the sea.  Perhaps most frightening was the image of sewage and chemical excrement forcing its way to the surface, forming pools of fetid hatred, garishly coloured, beckoning disease.

Sometimes I feel as though I’m addicted to elegiac thought – and it seeps into my written word.  It is not as if I am unhappy in life as such, but I struggle to “write happy”.  In fact, I feel my emotive space expanding – a kind of diversification of anger into other feelings.  I had the first inklings of a tear this week, and it was when I watched the pictures of mourning mothers in Beslan on the news, late evening.  Normally robust when faced with such imagery, I was moved, and could not fight a solitary tear… a redemptive tear, perhaps?