Hello you spectacularly splendiferous chaps and chappettes, it’s time for another joyful, bouyant jaunt into my literary mind. Thank you all for your kind comments and feedback on my last post, it means so much.

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Thank you for taking the time to cast your eyes over my writing, this is a particularly dark one, so I really hope you can enjoy it and don’t have to watch too many episodes of ‘Happy Days’ afterwards, to cheer up and convince yourselves that life isn’t all that bad.
Cheers,

G

Part 1

Just Another Regular Day

To tell you the truth, or as close to the truth as I can get, I’ve been finding it more and more difficult to get out of bed these days. I’ve even started sleeping with a kitchen knife in my bed, just under my pillow, appallingly close to my carotid artery. I’m not really sure why and I’m pretty sure it’s dangerous, since I usually wake up and it is precariously near my face or my eye. I’m sure I will end up hurting somebody, but I like to have the comfort of it there close at hand. Having a weapon so close to me while I sleep invokes a bizarre mixture of fear, excitement and security in me.

It’s really just like lying in bed next to a warm sleeping woman; it is the risk of losing something so sacredly personal and the threat of being deeply scarred that is most seductive and enthralling. I tend to rise for my morning ablutions in the afternoon, so I don’t even have the excuse of it being too early to get up. Not like most conventional, bleary-eyed, hard-working individuals who are maintaining and consolidating the very economic prosperity of the country as we speak, fuelled by nothing but caffeine and the pressure of various financial encumbrances. I just lie there, rotting. For no explicable reason, performing no function whatsoever. I am the loose, rusty cog in the machine, just lying there looking up and counting the cracks in the ceiling.

There are seventeen in case you are interested.

I am actually finding it difficult just to care about getting up. It’s as though it is so pointless even stepping out of bed, it’s like I’m infected with this penetrative, dreary hopelessness and I have no identifiable reason or explanation for feeling like this. I don’t know what I can do to make it go away, I mean I’ve tried Lavender and Chamomile tea and everything. Admittedly, I have never been much of an optimist, but I generally was able to maintain a realistic, if somewhat cynical outlook on life which enabled me to continue functioning on a daily basis, on the pretence that my life had some overarching direction and there was some pre-destined, ultimate goal that I was striving towards.

‘Success’ I believe it is called, although I have never been sure how exactly this is quantified, most likely in monetary terms with having lots of pieces of paper with substantial printed numbers on them with far more plusses than negatives, which implies a nice big fat bank account and a joint savings account with a nice wife with nice big round tits and a loose sagging lady parts from having too many children and an ISA and a car loan and having a nice house and a nice manageable, tracker mortgage and nice smiling, well-educated, obedient, respectful rosy-cheeked cherubs for children and despair and depression and pills and pain and an early grave.

It’s all just so fvcking nice.

Ever since I can remember there has been a clearly demarcated path which I was expected to follow within a seemingly inexhaustible chain of stuffy buildings and institutions full of dusty books.  This obviously started in a sterile white hospital with birth as I slithered into existence, then after passing the requisite entry exams, progression into nursery, where I was left screaming and crying in abandonment and isolation, then primary school education, then indecipherable shapes and letters and multiplication tables, then secondary school education, then algebra and precipitation and mitochondria, then SAAS applications and personal statements and then university education, then statutory instruments, the Gorgias and the EU Council of Ministers, then employment, shirts and ties and nooses and then money and then LIFE can begin, out there in the ‘big bad world’.

Every step was planned out for me and all I had to do was take each step in turn and ‘jump through the hoops’. But the emphasis was always the same, you have to move forward. Forward into progress and advancement, get your foot on the ladder, onwards and upwards, move up through the company, never look back: work, work, work and keep on working and producing and consuming until you are dead, then leave what you have left to your children so that they can do the same. But you always have to move forward, you can always afford an even better, shinier coffin for your eternal, slumbering reward for so much work. There’s no time to sit still and do nothing, there is no time to stagnate and slip into depression, there are important things to do, important people to meet and conferences to attend with post-it notes and paper clips and iced lattes and perpetual humiliation and enforced silence and repeatedly drumming your fingers on the table, waiting for your chance to speak: but no matter what, you just have to keep moving!

To return to partial reality for a moment: when I do finally manage to drag myself to the edge of the bed, I am convinced that some horrible accident is pre-destined to happen to me on this day. In order to assuage this unnamed, unavoidable horrific event, I take great care in putting on either sock in the exact same way and ensure that they are a pair and that I always start with my right foot. If I can’t find a pair I tend to have to lie back down in order to gather my thoughts and gather strength for the arduous search in the mounds of books, paper and mouldy clothing that I never wear which form a stinking, sulfurous mire alongside my bed.

Inevitably, I can’t find a pair, so after this torturous affair; I fall back into bed and ruminate over the crushing futility of existence. I am beginning to think that I read too many books; they are starting to get dangerous, like a literary overdose, a deep pestilence that clings to my brain and slowly eats it away and turns it into thick, gooey mush.

Then I fall back asleep.