Playing House

Reduce yourself to nothing. Boil yourself down until you are nothing but eyes and ears. And a heart. And then re-assess the importance of things.

Meaning and value are what's important here. They say lessons repeat until they're learned. Well this is my daily lesson:

Here is as good as there.

I've played at being a housewife. A domestic goddess, a grown-up who sweeps the kitchen floor. Living alone allows for this kind of reinvention. I've played at being a well-heeled drunk. Luckily I was only playing. I enjoyed the pose of the lush: sleeping late, staggering up and down the stairs to stock up on Tesco discounted wine. Knocking back 2am mint tea, lukewarm and pointless, missing the yoga sessions which I always miss anyway, sobriety aside.

I flirted with drug abuse. But too many waking hours made me depressed. Being awake when all others are sleeping and I can obsess alone over the missing screw on my mailbox does little for my sense of worth. Couldn't a human hand fit in there? Couldn't they then easily turn the latch? Doesn't the postman know very well that it's loose and know very well that a single white female lives here alone, slightly saner and less tough than Jodie Foster. What's that? Oh, a pigeon fluttering busily on my roof. But what's that? It's the ventilation being rattled by the wind... isn't it? Given enough time in the dark and I will beat myself up so no one else has to.

Give myself a kicking for not renewing my driving licence photograph since it expired in 2009. Trip myself up with my lack of an NHS number. Oh God. Must register with a doctor. Must get a GP to discuss a few things. And what about this definitely-chipped bone in my elbow which should surely be more painful? Look at this stack of unread newspapers, building up along with the tidemark of my own guilt. I really should read up on what's happening in Libya. And what about Japan? Everyone's forgotten about them. And my Amnesty membership has lapsed. Must phone them and donate. And get internet. And fix the fucking washing machine so I can stop hand-washing or just buying new clothes whenever I run out – which I never will because I cant stop buying new clothes on a daily basis. At least the profits are going to charity. So prattles my inner monologue. While the other half goes 'Hmmm another cuppa tea/piece of chocolate/chicken/beer/line/cigarette/shag? Of course'.

Which is why it's better when I'm on a bicycle. Or a dancefloor. Or in a book. I can hypnotise myself with another activity, distract the child in my head for 5 minutes of peace.

Like most 21st century females, I have settled into an uncomfortable obsession with looking 'hot' or 'stylish' or 'cool' or 'clever'. When really, none of those things are related to how I look. I should be spending time nurturing feeling all of those things for good reason – like just having completed a really amazing short story.

So here it is...

The Journey From The Door to the Edge of Sanity.

'A trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three on the teeth.'

I am continually searching for meaning. Of course I am. Aren't you? And I cannot find it on a screen. Who cares if 'Kylie Goes 3d!' who cares about 'hot girls in tights?'

Too much information. Absolute Information Fucking Overload. My mind freezes like a PC when I just click click click refresh. Anything but refreshed. Click through rates, traffic, but the traffic is actually a sedentary person looking for meaning, sitting frozen in a chair looking for meaning. They will not find it here. Leave! You will not find it here.

Check out my own lack of meaning. Check out my unbridled confusion. I want to return to the 70s when everything was on vinyl and you had to go to a library to look up a fact. Really. I am not joking.

And the fact that this is the first uninterrupted 26 minutes I have spent all day is proof of the scourge of the internet. The erosion of my concentration is proportionate to the amount of windows I have open, multiplied by my number of facebook friends and cubed according to how near a Friday (or Monday) my current situ actually is.

Fucking heck – life with your face in a book and a honeyed tea on your table is so much sweeter. So much slower.

A return. A hark back. I'm off. Off to the country hopefully to slow things down a little.

I wonder what I would have been like if I'd never encountered the internet. Or hair dye. Or rizlas.

If I'd been a 70s child would I have grown my pit hair because it was a political statement?

If I had a clue.

No Fate But What We Make

There has been a seismic shift somewhere. A pebble has become dislodged, throwing huge rock faces into freefall. Tectonic plates are grinding, groaning as they move towards new destinies. The way the dice will fall is completely uncertain.

After lots of talk, most of it typed and hurriedly read between getting on with our real lives, we have been told that the leaving date still stands. 'Proceed' is the message from the top. Get out. So this leaves us in a bit of a jam. We have a factory full of stuff, a gleaming factory i might add, and 9 people with no where to go. And that's just our place. Including the other warehouses there is a total of 23 people being displaced. All with mountains of stuff strewn across the massive spaces we have gotten so used to calling home.

We have 15 days until that date. And in between now and then we have a small matter of Glastonbury festival to contend with. Some of us are building and running venues. Others are project managing areas. All of us are going. And working on many other projects in between. It's masochistic in its ridiculousness. No one is making steps to move just yet - as we have nowhere to go. It's almost hilarious. Except that it's not.

I am frozen by the immensity of all we have to do. I should set to and start packing, except that I can't. The urgency still isn't there. Why? Maybe it will take a gang of shadowy, suited figures to be looming. There remains a small part of me that suspects it will come to nothing. Will it even seem real when we are lifting boxes? Will it take glimpsing another security firm wandering around the yard, sitting on our decks-chairs, to fully absorb the loss of our home of three years?

The Unemployment Files

My employment history is pretty much a disgrace. The common thread running between the brief stints of loathing and plotting of revolt I have been paid to contribute to various establishments over the years is that most of them cottoned on pretty quickly to what a distinctly awful choice had been made - or I could take it no more - and the whole sorry agreement was kicked to the curb (cue drinking and reassertion of my euphoric unemployment status).

The speediest example of this process was my regrettable employment by Spar. Now I don't even know if Spar are still going or have been engulfed by the advancing rash of Tesco Express', but back in 1996 I needed fast cash to buy awful, tyre-laden hash and the foolhardy manager at Spar believed me when I said I'd make 'an excellent addition to her team'. Pity the fool.

One Sunday I was idly plotting revolt and scribbling away the hours as I 'manned' the till, writing a letter to my best friend Ruth about a boy who had just been in to visit. The letter was peppered with casual insults about my bitter and decrepit co-workers and denigrated the company in general, contrasting its impotence with my greatness and absolute zero potential to give a fuck about what happened to it or any of its contents.

My shift grindingly finished and real time commenced as I skipped out the door to spend my wages on terrible hash and strongbow. A few days later, my boss called me in for 'a chat'. I experienced a smidgen of the sense of foreboding felt by a shoplifter who is just about to be caught or the sinking feeling you get when you realise the person you've been shouting about is actually behind you.

As I walked into the office I saw the dried up old she-demon was holding what looked like a photocopy of my letter. 'Is this your writing?' Not waiting for an answer she pushed on: 'I had to read this to the area manager THREE TIMES'. Steam was rising, I could smell sulpher. 'He just couldn't believe it was written by an employee of ours' she spat as I hovered by the door.

Turns out I'd penned my letter whilst leaning on the credit card notes, forever immortalizing it about 500 times onto the waiting sheets below... Everything happens for a reason.

I wish I'd had the courage to tell her to get fucked after she'd thoroughly digested the contents of my wittily scribed note but I said nothing. 'GET OUT.' She screamed 'And NEVER come back'.

Easier said than done when your town has one shop. 12 years on and she still recognizes me as I skulkingly pop in each Christmas to pick up my gran's Daily Mail, my parent's Observer. She still knows who I am. And when I'm there I'm a guilty 16 year old all over again.

The End Of Our Home Is Nigh...

OK. So we discovered last Monday that the building we call home, the Sugar Factory which has been pimped beyond recognition and houses a deviant and incessant repertoire of rolling parties, has been repossessed by the eminently popular and rabid maintainer of morals and business sense that is the Royal Bank Of Scotland.

A couple of cronies came round, handed my housemate a thick wadge of typed declarations, asked him who, what, why, where, when and were promptly thrown out after a flat refusal by said mate to tell them anything. It was conducted very courteously by both parties fortunately - the last thing they want to do is alienate us and force us into a Section 6 situation.

So this throws us into rather a puzzling quandary.

The economy's fucked, so no one will be doing any developing anytime soon. And RBS will have the same needs as our former landlords regarding building protection...won't they? Fricking hope so or it's all over kids, it's ALL over.

Growl

What is it about life that when it starts to go wrong, everything follows in an inexorable slide towards despair and barely controlled lunacy?

Ovaries spitting blood. Mouth spitting obscenities. Mind plotting revolt.

A Bunch Of Cuts

Cripes. Back in A and E for a follow up during which I beg the doctor to hack my arm off. I mean my cast. He obliges me by cutting it in half. I can now bend my elbow (plus shave my own pits and tie my own shoelaces) - although he assured me it would 'hurt like a bastard' for a few days.

He's not wrong.

My only solace during the 3 hour wait is reading about Bret Easton Ellis' 'self-loathing and vast apathy' and his 2 week crack and smack binge during the run up to the premiere of American Psycho.

'I only hang with friends if they're carrying an eight-ball' he says.

I know the feeling.