Phantom of the mundane
Mundane Elegies and Lamentable Reveries
There’s this girl…
…and if I held her hostage, I’m sorry. Really. But then I think I should apologise to myself even more. Cause I held myself ransom. Towards what? For what? I’m still figuring that out… But I know one thing and that’s that I still haven’t cut myself loose. Or cut her loose. I mean she’s gone. As gone as can be, in this tumble-drier of a city. Yet she didn’t take with her whatever shit-spirit she conjured in me. On purpose, I think. So I’m gone too. Downwards. Far gone, you know. Yet I’m still here. No closer or further from the ransom I took out against myself. Taken out against whatever. Cause it’s still here, whatever poison she released. And I can’t get rid of it.
So, I guess I’m waiting for something. What it is I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s a person, but I know it isn’t. Some sort of release. Not bodily fixed. An intuition letting this inhibition of self-inflicted incarceration go. I Imagine it like a eureka! moment: a vanishing, all-banishing “CLICK!” of liminal enlightenment and glorious sentiment. An awakening!
Afterwards I can turn myself in. I can show myself it was worth it. All this crap. I can hold myself up at the press conference of inner dialogue. Sit there, after a perp walk with myself and tell everyone that he gave it a shot, but that it was time to pack it in. Time for the shadow of myself to retreat back to the shadows. Say this in front of an audience of one: myself.
Then I can say “I’m back in business” and how good it feels to be back. That the key to my enduring my own kidnapping was within. That when I traded it in, whatever the invisible bile was, I could finally live again.
Isn’t it funny that most people interviewed after something negative, loosing a football match or having been in jail, usually always talk about wanting to get into the ‘swing of things’ again?
Like them, I’ll say how much I look forward to finally ‘feeling alive again’. Gosh I hate that statement. Also, it wouldn’t be true - because to be honest, I turned myself in long ago. I did the perp walk, the press and I even went out and started another education, got a job, lost an office, got another job, got another office which isn’t an office, but somewhere to be.
So yes I lied, but not really. See I needed to lie in the start, so you understood. Understood that what I’m saying is that turning myself in didn’t free me from the whatever. And that whatever keeps me from a certain something which was there long ago. A something which I feel the lack of is what makes me not fully get into the, and there’s that phrase again, ‘swing of things’.
I don’t feel alive just because I’ve got some sort of forward motion in the everyday. A sense of movement. In the sense that I’m walking, like many of you are walking, or she is walking for that matter. Or sleeping. Maybe that makes more sense – as for many, the act of how and who you are sleeping with – is the somehow the guiding principle of your unconscious – your animal instinct. What Freud called your life force, your inner Eros.
As in sleeping on top of him. Or under her.
Well, I tried all that and not even that does it. Not even in the slightest degree.
But I do have a life force. It just doesn’t feel all like what it’s cracked up to be. Maybe I’m to impatient. Maybe life, past a certain threshold of gambling debt - the type not rightfully accrued - shows you the door and never lets you roll the dice again. Then demands repayment and takes control of how you settle that debt - through seizing control of your means of consciousness and its capacity for stimulating joy. Puts you on a payment-plan and decides that your brain gets no more explosions of fulfilment or exhilaration; but rather vegetative, carefully weighted incremented payloads of ‘meaning’, ‘belonging’ and ‘happiness’ nestled together in an efficient DIY-tool-kit you can assemble yourself. New assemblages for each and every hit. A forever downer of IKEA-warehouse proportions, that never keeps you under too long. Just about lets you enjoy just a little bit of LIFE before it self-destructs and points you to the nearest IKEA-of-our-souls.
Am I supposed to be relieved that I’m moving unshackled but weighed down? Like I carry an invisible chain gang where the rustle of the chain is inside my head. Because it’s always rattling; the difference now being that I can see beyond it. But I still I miss this blindness of depression. This leaving of the earth. This lifeless passage of time. This freshly concocted blend of nothingness. Cause really, not dissociating and being present isn’t synonymous with having a great ol’ time. The world’s kind of shit and now the channel stays on, all the time, where before there was chemically-induced static or just nothing.
The purgatory like hellhole I was in and its inertia – that still follow me like a shadow ready to pounce if I don’t keep moving, to swallow and envelop me black – was kind of comforting. At least there were stakes in there. In that ring with the black dog. Simple ones. To be or not to be. That’s a lot better than whatever Sisyphus shit I got going on now. I mean it was always a boulder there. But now it moves you see. So now I feel how the environment and ground beneath it change the boulder’s texture. Affects its coarseness. Like, if it’s slippery because of the rain or burning hot because of the sun. Stuff like that. Meaning now my hands develop blisters and calluses through each roll.
It was simpler when I was my own prisoner of war. Then it was just there. It didn’t change. It didn’t vary. It just stayed as uncannily stuck and rooted however I pushed and there was a sense of safety in that. A reliability.
And I felt I could stop pushing. Whenever I wanted. Now I feel I can’t. I must push. I want to push. And apparently, this is what freedom is like. This is what it means to be back in the ‘swing of things’.
Hating that, this and feeling catatonic in movement and impatient in happening. I want to get out of myself. Like many do. But since apparently you got to keep the ball moving – and I really haven’t done that and losing yourself simultaneously before – I’m at a loss. I need help.
So, I dial the lose-yourself-hotline. There’s a little bit of static. I get through. On the other end I hear her breathing. Yes, her. Exactly as if she’s been by the phone all this time just waiting for me to call. A wanton hallucination through a warped spell of synaesthesia, creating dreams of regression with Hollywood twists.
Of course it isn’t her. I know it isn’t her, but it feels like it. That heightened sense of now, elevated sensibility and that long-lost fleeting sense of purpose touches my ear. Yet she says nothing of course, because she isn’t there and her respiration isn’t either. It was there for me, a split-second but no more. Not that there isn’t any life on the other end; cause there is.
A portal to a road, a room, a group in a room. And I knew it before I heard it that it wouldn’t be any answer to my problem; but that it would be an honest response to the poster advertising the number for the lose-it-yourself hotline.
That poster which says dead or alive and has your face on it. As in I saw my face and you might see yours. The poster which so many of us must face through our life. In our crossroads, moments of reckoning and ‘sink-or-swims’. Again, it says dead or alive and I’m not sure what I am and which is which.
Anyways in this space between dead and alive, exists the other end of the line. Where the portal inviting you to a road, a room, a group in a room, ends. Kind of like the peer-support meeting you actually fancy going to. Where the 12 steps aren’t dreary but more like a 12-bar blues steeped in a mud-bath that taste like chocolate, with the surgical elimination of the slight queasiness you felt in that sugared image. Where the resident band (because of course there is an in-house band, duh) sounds a bit like Slint on ketamine with faded, Londoner accents where they constantly display a fear of being bothered, without being too bothered about anything.
So, I find myself listening to the group, and it’s named after the road where you might, if you ever see the poster, find yourself sitting. Now, if you see me sitting there too, dead or alive – don’t go after me. Don’t tell me which is which. I’m just the messenger. Go ahead and find the sheriff of the road. Sydenham High Road.
FREE PALESTINE
- ‘gassed out
