On becoming and being a Longhair

The Longhairs might sound like a clan of medieval Scandinavians, but aren’t. A Longhair is neither a species of monkey nor a type of carpet, as far as I’m aware. A Longhair is a man (sometimes a woman, too [see UrbanDictionary]) who (pay attention here, because this is pretty complex) has long hair. Longer hair, anyway, than most men, who subscribe so strictly to a shorn scalp. I came across the term on-line a few months ago when I was trying to find out what – if any – effect having hair longer than the average male’s would have upon my life. I was researching this, because now that I have long hair at last, I am pretty reluctant to let it go. At this point, I would honestly rather feel happy in myself and be looked at askance for it than to chop off my hair and blend in – outwardly, at least – with the crowd. People might (and do) see me and dismiss my ‘look’ as an immature rebellion against some indefinable authority, but I don’t see having my hair long as me making a statement. It’s just me enjoying existing in my most comfortable, natural state.

I clearly remember sitting in my classroom aged ten or eleven and wishing more than anything that I had hair that flopped down over my face at the front and tickled my neck at the back. I remember pulling at my fringe, which didn’t reach my eyebrows, and despairing over how long it would take to grow. Worse than the time it would take to grow was knowing that before long Mum would have me back in that bloody chair and Sue-the-hairdresser would be buzzing around my head with the electric clippers, that favourite line of Mum’s ‘when you’re older, and you’re paying, you can have it as you want it’ ringing in my exposed ears. It was so unfair! My sister was three years younger than I was and she got to have exactly what she wanted. I had to walk around looking like a boring boy – like a boy who played football and was friends with other boys. ‘This isn’t me!’ I was silently crying from beneath my high, straight, carpet-like fringe. When I watched the Disney films I lusted over the smooth wave of the men’s hair as they swung themselves about after the women. Tarzan was really fucking cool. Kind of attractive too, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on just yet.

By the time power over my own appearance was finally granted me in my early teens, I had been struck by that fear of ‘being different’ that I’m sure plagues each of us who within him-or-her-self feels not quite the same as everyone else. I habitually shaved and sculpted my locks into the towering, gleaming sculpture of wax and fringe that was so popular amongst my male peers. I regret to admit that, furthering my appeal for normalcy, I played a (slightly pathetic) part in the ‘wars’ between ‘townies’ and ‘goths’ that broke out in the playing fields of my secondary school on a regular basis: I on the side of the gold-chained, wet-look, trackie-wearers, lobbing bottles, sticks, and stones at the  long-haired ‘weirdos’ in the corner. For this, I apologise. In my defence, I can only plead duress: that of peer pressure, made only more difficult to avoid by my own particularly crippling fear of exposure as not truly feeling I was one of the crowd.

I think I was fifteen when I finally decided to let my locks grow. My girlfriend (yes, really) of the time was disgusted by the idea. Long hair was for girls, and short hair for boys. She is now a fierce homophobe, or so I’ve heard. For the first time I made a conscious decision to do something I wanted to do even if it did set me apart from the majority. My hair grew, and I loved my floppy mop, swinging in my eyes and hanging over my school shirt collar way beyond the bristles of the other boys’ ‘dos. I would have liked to grow it out longer, but that still seemed like ‘goth’ territory, and not somewhere I wanted to venture unless I fancied a bottle across my own head, courtesy of my ex-war-mates.

I kept my hair relatively long, hanging somewhere between eye and upper lip level, following me through my ’emo’ experimentation, and my brief baggy-clothed ‘hippy’ identification, until I reached seventeen. At this point I followed that long-fringe, short-around-the-edges trend that was popping up in the fashion magazines and on all the trendy ‘indie’ boys of the time, but still enjoyed a good lip-level swish of fringe across my face. By the time I reached university in 2009, something had happened. In fact, something awful had happened, and it was not to end until the early months of 2011. Leaving school, I felt I had to somehow ‘change’ as my life did. I felt I should grow up, and I decided that meant adjusting my image to better suit others’ expectations of how a young gay man in 2009 should look. I began to wear make-up. I bought clothes in sizes I might now dress my big toe with. I once shaved my chest, and felt a bit sick. Worst of all, I cut my hair. I cut it to the scalp, leaving just a minimal flap of fringe, and I had the lot of it dyed a horrifying raven black. (When I was alerted to the colour’s contrast with my pasty face in mid-2010 I began staining my skin orange to counteract my ghostly glow.) Looking back at that time now, I can see what an idiot I was being, but at the same time I still understand how I was feeling. I was growing slightly more comfortable with myself inside than I ever had been in my teens, but how best to match that inner adjustment to my outward appearance remained a mystery. The basic thought process, I believe, went something along the lines of ‘well, I’m gay, so I’ll look gay’. Thus ensued a year and a half of a very strange period of my life. People I met at the time now tell me they thought it was odd even then, and that my personality and my garish appearance clashed more obviously than the raven hair and Caspar face had before the ‘tan’ had taken care of it.

It wasn’t until 2011 that I actually looked at myself in the mirror, probably whilst cooking my fringe with the straighteners, and thought ‘what the fuck is that?’ This, I believe, ended up sparking in me a shift that has transcended many more layers of myself beyond my skin. Over the last almost-two years I believe I have changed more than I ever have before. But that will be for another time. For now, we’re sticking faithfully to hair.

Growth: On June 30th 2011 (I remember the date because on that same day I bought a new railcard at Swansea train station, which I have kept as a memento), I got my last haircut. So, since then, it has uninterruptedly grown. ‘You should trim the ends, you know. It’ll grow faster.’ Bullshit. It’s grown perfectly, and I’ve not a split end in sight. Having abstained from blow-drying, straightening, and dying for this entire time, everything is just fine as it is, thank you. And as it has grown I have felt cosier, happier, and more relaxed in myself with every day passed. I am at peace with my outward self (my nose still isn’t straight, and I would like whiter teeth, and bigger arms, but time, lasers, and continued exercise will rectify these issues), and it is blissful.

The problems I face now are not my own, but those of the people around me. I am told I should cut my hair by various people, and for various reasons. Yesterday I was yelled and sworn at by a group of shaven-headed youths speeding by in a very small car, something about cutting my hair because of something to do with ‘look[ing] like a fucking girl’. I can ignore these Neanderthals easily enough, having grown used to their ignorant type in the town I’ve grown up in. Closer to home, however, the strong suggestions of a trip to the barber’s are not so easily pushed aside. My father tells me I should cut my hair for the good of my career, which I accept as fair advice. I know very well that discrimination over skin-deep elements occurs. But I don’t want to spend my time here pretending to be something other than that which I feel I am. So I feel as if I should say sod it to being employed by anyone who wants me to be their version of me. I want to be my me in all ways and in all the parts of my life until the day that it comes to its end. My sister tells me I should cut it, just because. Her friends, I hear, think I’m ‘not hot anymore’. How tragic. I’ve been told by another I should cut it because I need to ‘grow up’. If cutting my hair off truly constitutes ‘growing up’, then, please, call me Peter and let me be. If being a grown-up means allowing myself to be moulded by the crowd to the extent that I can’t even control what my hair looks like lest it should offend anyone by its differentness, then I’m quite happy playing in the trees and dreaming my days away with my curls around my ankles. Surely the greatest ability of the mature human mind is that which allows it to open itself up to all of those varieties of appearance, thought, and behaviour; to accept that differentness is not inherently bad, or in need of rectification; to do battle with the prejudices indoctrinated in the minds of children and which remain largely taken as gospel, and carried to the grave unquestioned. I don’t want to live my life in battle for assimilation. I am no longer the thirteen-year-old boy who consciously tailored his mannerisms to replicate those of the other boys around him so that they would stop calling him ‘girly’ and ‘gay’ (which I then considered an insult – I was a child homophobe). If the length of the filamentous biomaterial (cheers, Wikipedia) growing from my scalp offends you, then I suggest it is in fact you who has the issue in need of resolving. I won’t be getting a haircut, but please feel free to indulge in a little self-enlightenment. You really should.

You might say that I’m setting myself up for a struggle I needn’t undertake. You might say I should grow up and wholeheartedly conform. Watch The X Factor and stop thinking. Have a Big Mac and shut up. Cruise towards the end with a close-cropped cranium. Well, thanks for the advice, but no thanks. At almost eighteen months and counting, I consider myself Longhair and proud, and as long as my thinking remains much the same on this topic, only baldness might stop me now.

P.S. Mum says my hair is lovely, so there.

A post for a post’s sake

It’s been a while now since I’ve posted. I’m asking myself whether quantity or quality is the more important. Of course the answer is ‘quality’, but I can’t just write nothing. I have to do something. If I give myself too much of a break I’ll begin telling myself that there’s no point carrying on and that people already know I’m unreliable and uninteresting so I needn’t bother trying. I just don’t have any developed ideas right now. I’ve been thinking over a handful of things but I’ve not had the time to consider them properly. If I sit down and just start writing about one then I’m liable to miss out some key points that later I’ll wish I’d got in there to begin with.

I have turned twenty-two since I last posted. I was born on the twenty-ninth of November, nineteen-ninety. It was a cold day (it was November), and my mother was screaming (probably), and my father was crying (probably). North Tyneside General Hospital is the setting. I came out of my mum and I was fine and I went home with my parents and everything’s been pretty much all right all the way until almost the end of twenty-twelve. If I were either of my parents I would be terrified by the fact that it were even possible to have a son in his twenties. They probably are terrified, actually. In fact, I know that my dad is because he told me so, or at least said something to me to that effect. He’ll turn fifty-one tomorrow. My grandfather was fifty when Dad married my mum. Dad was twenty-three. He says he remembers him (that’s my grandfather) as being an old man on the day of his wedding. I don’t see my parents as old. (Mum isn’t yet fifty. She has roughly seven months of her forties left to her.) I see them as in a sort of undefined stretch of life. Both still have young children, so maybe that’s what makes them so hard to define. We’re no longer the nuclear family, and our definitions haven’t quite been set in stone just yet.

My dad says that now I need to sort myself out. I need to cut my hair and change my image, he says. I won’t. Not for now. It’s taken a long time to settle into myself and I don’t want to uproot everything again just as I’ve breathed a sigh of relief at just being me. I don’t want to give up on my dreams (excuse America’s influence) already. There are things I want to do. One of them is not to get stuck in a life that is going to make me miserable. Wouldn’t it be so fucking simple to do things with our lives that we actually enjoy? So few of us manage it. We’re all so skilfully led into the pen that is a career. In we go, and on we plod until we reach the man with the stun gun who knocks us on the head with it so that we’ve no idea what the fuck is going on but we’re still essentially living beings, and then Death is looming and as he’s nearing we’re bleeding out over the floor and after a bit of a shake we’re dead.

I’m sure I’m covering old ground here, but I am so scared. My life is sitting on the road in front of me and I just want to crawl back into the warm den where Mum and Dad and all the other adults were such mysterious beings, doing their adult things like ‘meetings’ and ‘work’ and ‘taxes’ whilst I fiddled around at their ankles with a pencil and some card, oblivious to what lay ahead. They were so rich that they could buy cars and houses and masses of things to keep in them. They’d stay up late and talk about secret things in semi-whispers, and sometimes they’d slip into broken Welsh to disguise the mysterious grown-up conversation topics as I fell asleep to their deep voices amongst the big feet beneath the table.

I’m considering teaching. I have always said I do not want to be a teacher. It’s beginning, isn’t it?

The onset of odious opinions.

Aside: I’ve been putting off posting anything. The last entry I made to this blog got a few really nice reviews from a few people whose opinions really matter to me and although I felt encouraged to begin with, I have inevitably ended up in battle with that great nemesis, Self-Doubt. I have told myself that what I wrote must have been a one-off. I must have fluked it. To begin with I thought ‘fuck, yes, Ben – you are good‘ and I had to hold myself back from quickly bashing out another entry to add to that which had received so much praise. Although I’m glad that I didn’t do that, I have now reached a point at which I feel I have to post something because if I don’t then I’ll lose my way and stop posting altogether, and people will stop paying attention. (Didn’t I, in my first or second post, declare that I was writing this mainly, if not solely, for myself? I am a liar. Who writes anything with the intention of nobody ever reading it? If someone writes a journal [which I have tried and failed at a couple of times] that they claim to wish nobody else to read, then I am almost certain that they are lying too, and at the very least dream of its posthumous reading by some unknown stranger of the future who will find it beneath the loose floorboard it was left beneath.) 

What I really wanted to write about leads on almost perfectly from what I wrote about in my last post. Worried about the possibly illiberal opinions my brother might develop in the next few years as he enters that minefield that is The Teens, I didn’t consciously suspect my eight-year-old sister of being the one more likely to take the path towards black-and-white conservatism. The girl is only eight years old. I can’t hold her responsible for everything that comes out of her mouth. She is regurgitating constantly. Half of the things she and her peers talk about they most probably don’t understand. But, sitting with her and my mother, I browsing Twitter, with Come Dine With Me on in the background last night, I heard her say “he’s gay – that’s disgusting”.  For a moment I almost let myself allow the moment to pass with nothing more than my own raised eyebrows and a moment’s eye-contact with my mother to mark it, but, realising that I was calmly controlling a deep stirring of anger inside myself, I felt obliged to say something.

Me: ‘Why is that disgusting?’

Her: ‘He’s gay. He kissed that man.’

Me: ‘Why do say think that’s disgusting?’

Her: ‘Because they’re gay.’

It went something like that. Not much was said, and my mum left the room on a household errand. Abbie remained and thought no more of my chirping up at her comment, and continued to play at whatever game she was creating for herself on the footstool. Again, although I told myself to breathe and let the matter lie, I felt I had to speak up. I asked her again why she had said what she’d said and she told me that being gay ‘isn’t normal’. I told her that’s fine, but that to be ‘not normal’ isn’t bad; that to be different from most other people doesn’t necessarily make someone a bad person. There is a great difference between ‘different’ and ‘bad’. I asked her where she had got this idea that for someone to be gay is inherently bad, and she named her peers at school. I asked her what she would think if someone she knows turned out to be gay, and she told me that had she known this person was gay from the outset then she would not have become friends with them at all. My brother entered the room and joined the conversation midway through, and offered the opinion that ‘gay people are just the same as everyone else: they just love different people’. I was relieved, and delighted, (see my last post – you’ll understand) because even if this is a regurgitated opinion too, then at least the opinions he has been fed are those which I believe should be offered to all children in this day and age. Where my sister and her friends have heard what they have heard I am at a loss to imagine. What parent, teacher, or any other adult exposes a child to as strong and damaging an opinion as that?

This is where my issue lies. The children are unaccountable, and will lap up whatever it is that they are handed. At some point they might rebel against those beliefs, but I believe that usually a child will follow its childhood influencers’ values to a fair degree. So what are these siblings of mine hearing that allows them – causes them – to think this way? Perhaps it is partly what they are not hearing. The film Weekend by Andrew Haigh includes a speech by Chris New as the character Glen, outlining his ideas about the overpoweringly dominant and exclusive nature of heterosexuality in popular culture and the complete lack of any gay role models in everyday life. On adverts, in books, films, TV, stories, songs, sport, and everything in-between, we see straight people. Homosexuals are today slowly being let out of the gloom into the light of the mainstream, but are still a long way from shedding the shackles of their social subdivision. It is still considered newsworthy for a gay couple to feature on a television advert. What impact does this have on my siblings? The idea that the gays must not be spoken of is blindingly obviously insidious. Like the devil, children learn that what is not to be spoken of is bad, and not to be trusted. Don’t let children know about drugs, because they’re bad. Don’t let children hear about the rape stories on the news, because they’re bad. Don’t let children watch horror films because they’re bad. Don’t let children develop awareness of homosexuality, because it’s bad.

Is this a valid argument? I believe so. I believe that if my siblings had grown up understanding that their big brother likes other men (they are yet to find out) the way that Daddy likes women and Mummy likes men, then there would be no question in their minds that there is nothing wrong – nothing even to comment upon – about homosexuality – that homosexuality just is. I believe that the sooner we bring up our children to think this way about homosexuality amongst the various other divergences from the norms of human nature that have for so long been lauded as the good against the otherwise bad, the better for our own social development. I won’t be letting the subject lie, and I have hope for my siblings yet.

The next step? The big reveal.

Brother

My brother will turn ten years old in less than a fortnight, just under a week after my own birthday. He, one of our two sisters, and I are in the house alone. Our sister was sleeping already. I sat with my brother on his bed and we both read separately. He often asks me, when I’m around, to sit there with him at bedtime.  I read Nausea; he, something about animals to begin with, before moving on to Read Me and Laugh. From the first book he read out facts about ants. The Fire Ant, I think, can kill a man in twenty minutes. He looked up my birthday in his next book, written as a diary, and showed me the poem on the page. It was about the carrying of the simple pleasures of childhood into later life: I can’t remember any of them now because I’m tired. I need to get to bed. One verse was about ice cream. Maybe the poem isn’t even about what I thought it was, but as I read it I realised he was experiencing one of the pleasures I remember from childhood: sitting late at night with somebody older, leaning on their big shoulder, moving up and down as they breathe; feeling so safe because there’s someone so much bigger by your side, and they’re on your side, and there’s nothing that could hurt you because they’re there.

My brother misbehaves. He shouts and screams and we don’t know why. He does this almost daily. But he is equally sweet, and helpful, and generous, and affectionate, and funny.

We both read for a while. He tired quicker, lay his book aside, and linked his arm through mine. Head on my shoulder, his breathing deepened and he dozed. I continued to read, and at the same time I felt an intense love for my brother. I don’t mention it as if I’ve not felt it before. I often do feel this way for the people I care about. But the peacefulness of the moment and the gentle breathing of my sleeping companion felt somehow poignant in its finiteness. He isn’t going to be this little boy for much longer, and I believe that when this boy is gone I will miss who he is at this moment. He won’t ask me to sit with him on his bed when he’s fourteen, and it wouldn’t feel the same to do that either. He won’t want to tell me how long it takes an ant to kill a man, or to show me what my birthday poem is. Sitting with him, letting my book fall back as I began to drift off too, I felt that feeling of love that makes me want to curl up so tightly that my face is tucked right into my heart and my knees are touching my head and I’m smiling like The Cheshire Cat.

I’m frightened of him growing up, of his teenage opinions of me and how I am, and how I am not what he is. He is as boyish as a boy can be. As much as he turns his nose up now, he will like girls. He doesn’t know that I don’t. I think he should have been brought up fully aware of that fact, but that is for another entry. Maybe that won’t ever be an issue. Maybe I’m underestimating my sibling’s liberalism. Still, as he grows older, the differences between us, I fear, are going to widen, and I’m going to miss moments like that moment when he fell asleep on my shoulder tonight, when I was just Ben, his big brother.

I woke up, and I tucked him into bed, treasuring the act.

Time to tie my laces

I’m in Wales and it’s raining. I’m in the kitchen of my mum’s house, and once again this house is my house. I moved to London two months ago and now I’m back here because I made a mistake in leaving in the first place. I’m holding up my hands and admitting that, yes, I fucked up. I should have listened, and yes, Dad, you told me I would be back here by Christmas, tail between legs, plans in pieces, and yes, Dad, you were right. I didn’t even make it to my birthday.

I’m planning to begin writing this week. I’m going to make myself write and stick to a project. I’ve let countless ideas fall through my head to rot in the landfill of my mind. If I can just grab one and hold on then maybe I can…

I don’t know.

I feel like I’m in a vacuum. It’s like I’m not an actual thing. I’m looking around, and everyone is doing something and they seem to know what they’re doing, but I can’t seem to do anything. I want to sit in a room for six months and create something, and shout out ‘I MADE THIS’, but that’s not possible. I have debts to pay off. I have to go and get a job I don’t want to earn money that I am made to want, to give that money away to fill up this intangible thing that is my bank account, which my bank tells me is empty (less than empty), so that I can continue to do work I don’t want to do to get more money to exchange for more stuff I don’t want to give it away for so that one day, maybe, I’ll have enough money to stop doing this work in order to concentrate on what I really want to do and so that one day, a little later on, I can try to enjoy myself when my body and mind are finally so exhausted that they’re too useless and broken for doing what they’ve been made to do all my life.

I’m terrified. This is all happening very quickly and I have to keep up with Life, which is very fit and fast from all the running it’s been doing from all the billions of people who have lived before me, but I think I must have forgotten to tie my laces and I’m going to trip up and hurt myself if I don’t just take a moment to bend down and pay some attention to these things flapping around my feet.

Just hold on a minute. I’m not ready yet.

I don’t bite my nails.

I have a bad habit, and like other bad habits I don’t notice mine until it’s plainly pointed out to me by an irritated other. My bad habit isn’t bodily, nor is it mannerly, nor is it directly detrimental to my health or that of those around me. My bad habit is silent and nameless, and I drag it behind me like an invisible train, tripping people up as I go. My bad habit is obscure. My bad habit is social.

People have never been easy for me to deal with. I’ve always been too worried that somebody would think I’m ‘weird’ or ‘different’ to feel completely comfortable in their company. I think this developed in me as a result of desperately trying and pretending to be straight throughout almost my entire secondary school life, and being constantly conscious of what other people were thinking about me. Throughout primary education I saw myself as just ‘a boy who is friends with girls instead of boys’, and I didn’t really have any understanding of what that might mean. Then secondary school happened, and suddenly I was hit with the quintessentially ignorant quips of the teenage playground: ‘you run like a girl’, ‘you throw like a girl’, ‘you’re gay’. (I’m losing my way. This is going to become my ‘coming out’ story before long and you’ll never learn of my ‘bad habit’. Bear with me.) All of this made me incredibly self-aware. I consciously tried to change the way I spoke, walked, sat, laughed, and put my hand up in class, and I was dumbfounded when despite all my best efforts my schoolmates still somehow saw (and had no qualms about pointing out) what I was desperately trying to hide. Needless to say, I eventually conceded. All the girlfriends, all the times I’d tried to enjoy straight porn but found I’d kept my eyes fixed firmly on the phallus, all the engineered shoulder-swinging struts were to no avail. I was, and  am, alas, a ponce.

I’ve come pretty far from the point of what I wanted to say, but what I was hoping to indicate through that last paragraph is that I believe being a fairly sensitive person already, and on top of that being brought up to be one thing when somewhere inside I knew things weren’t quite right, has left me a little too self-conscious; a little too wrapped up in myself; and a little too distant from everyone else.

I recently spoke to a friend from school who pointed out to me that she had no idea I’d recently moved away from home to London. ‘Shit’, I thought. I hadn’t told her, let alone said goodbye. I just went, focussed on myself and what I wanted for my life at that moment. It wasn’t just this one friend I’d not told, either, and this was not an isolated incident. I have before now unconsciously cut ties with numerous people for no apparent reason. I’ve known about people having a tough time and not even written them a message wishing them well. I’ve built bridges and let them crumble again even though it all seemed to be going well between me and the person at the other side, and I honestly don’t know why. I falter at the moments when steadiness is key, as if I’m frightened by things becoming all too serious, and I slip away silently to be on my own again.

I can’t pretend to have any idea about this sort of thing. I have no understanding of the workings of the mind. I don’t even know what I’ve just written. It hasn’t come out as I wanted it to.

This isn’t what I expected, but the basics are here. I have a bad habit, and isn’t admission the first step to recovery?

What Direction?

This week I attended an interview at a recruitment firm in central London, but don’t wish me luck.

If you know anything about recruitment, and anything on top of that about me, then you will understand that the gulf between those who call recruitment consultancy their calling and he who is typing this is pretty fucking wide. One might say the gulf is so great that, standing at one side and facing the other, the far ledge is barely distinguishable from the gulf itself, and that I to them, and they to me, appear as barely visible fuzzy black dots, featureless and strange on their respective horizons.

I was interviewed by men, or boys, of my own age. They were wearing suits and were clean-shaven and had a suffocating air of arrogance about them, and I felt like a lamb waiting to be diced up and served for lunch. How did they do it? They have proper jobs. They probably earn more than most people ever will. They knew exactly what they were doing. They’re sorted.

I applied for the job in the first place because I just want a job. I’ve also applied for nannying jobs, bar jobs, admin jobs, publishing jobs, and a trainee barista’s job at Starbucks.  There is nothing I will not apply for, and I think that in that lies the clue to my major problem: chronic direction-less-ness. I have no idea what to do with my life. I studied English at university and all I see before me as I plough my way through page after page after page of graduate positions available is requirement after requirement after requirement of a specific degree related to that specific job. English is as unspecific as the faces we’re told we see in dreams: not really there, but not really not there. A bit of this, and a bit pale and washy, and not really sure what they are. Why didn’t anybody tell me this when I was seventeen and had to decide the course of the rest of my life? Instead all I heard was ‘you must go to university and that is the only option and if you don’t go to university you will become a poor person and a waste of space and nobody will love you and, frankly, you will be a really fucking shit piece of crap’. I wanted to take a year out to think about what to do, but the pressure was too great and I crippled beneath it. I just chose what I liked at school, and not even what I liked best, which was probably art, because I thought an art degree would be looked upon as useless, and spent three years pretending everything would just go swimmingly.

The thing is that I think I’ve made a really big mess. I know that I have time to turn things around, but even so I don’t know what the fuck to do with that time. I have no direction. I am Katy Perry’s plastic bag, blowing along in the breeze and wondering where in the name of shit I’m going to land, which is probably under a bridge or in a box somewhere damp and piss-stained.

Airhead

What’s that thing called at the end (or beginning, or middle) of the sentence called? The flashing black line telling me ‘type something! Type something! Type something!’ even though my head feels like a dusty old urn with the ashes tipped out.

I am empty of things.

Inspiration does this. It comes like a whirlwind that blows the leaves all around me for a day or two and then suddenly it dies down and I’m left with complete stillness, and I have to force myself just to write about being unable to write.

And it’s always this odd time of day (or night), usually within a few hours around midnight. (‘It’ being the strike of inspiration.)

I desperately want to create, to make a thing. I spend a lot of time wondering what ‘s stopping me. The rest of my time I spend wondering either what I might like to create if and when inspiration does next strike or making plans for various dream lives that exist within my mind. (A small portion of my time is allotted to real-life worries: bills, employment, ‘the future’.) I think I read somewhere recently that people generally spend a lot of their time doing this. (Or is it a certain type of person? I don’t remember it exactly.) Anyway, we spend our time in these fictional worlds we create that make us happy. I have a few. Some of them revolve around travel and exploration, others around having children and a long-term relationship and a completely stable life at some distant future time, and others are purely materialistic.

I’m writing! I forced myself and it worked. The lesson? Not to give in to lethargy, or apathy, or whatever it is that’s keeping me in bed watching video after video of cute animals and scientific facts and make-up tutorials (yes, really) on Youtube; to push, sweat a little, and admire my creation at the end of it.

The Tea

It may be the case that weeks go by without The Tea showing up in my mug. Day after day I will enjoy a tea, but it will not be The Tea.

The Tea is that tea that when first enveloping my tired tongue invokes memories of cosy afternoons spent reading a book in front of the fire, watching the kittens snooze on the backs of the sofas, and listening to Mum pottering about the kitchen. The Tea is that tea that when swallowed can be reacted to in one way only: that is, by closing my eyes, grinning like The Cheshire Cat, and saying to myself: ‘mhmmm’. The Tea is a remedy. The Tea saved my life today.

Having discovered I had lost my Oyster card, I spent three hours on one bus this afternoon in the unexpectedly lengthy process of getting it back. It was by the end a matter of pride that I should not give in and come home empty-handed and pay the five entire hard-earned pounds required for a new card. Three hours of shaking about the bus as my frozen berries and spinach deteriorated into bags of mush. Three hours of researching Furbies (I would like one for Christmas) on my iPhone, and finding that after the fifth review there is really little more to learn about them. Three hours of wanting to cry because all I wanted was some tea and a sit down in a chair that doesn’t rattle along the roads at thirty miles per hour.

At last, I was home, and The Tea made everything better. How lucky I was to have come across The Tea today. I dare say that had I not come across it this evening after my three-hour transport binge on the H28 from Osterley Tesco to Bull’s Bridge Tesco and back again, I might well by now have been voluntarily lying in several bloody pieces across the stretch of the Piccadily line running beside my house.

Praise be to The Tea.

Into the Wild

Tonight I am inspired to drop everything and go. I have watched a favourite film of mine: Into the Wild.

I think I like travel films especially. I think I would really like to travel. I just don’t have any money to get myself going. I often feel this way, as if I can’t or don’t want to deal with ‘normal’ existence. A job, a gym membership, a mobile phone contract. The laptop and internet connection I’m using right now. I am, and we are so convinced that we must have these things that it’s almost impossible to imagine not having them. The thing is that when we have to put up with not having them for a while that, actually, it isn’t that bad. There is life outside of Twitter and treadmills, believe it or not. 

‘I just don’t have any money to get myself going’. I typed that almost without a second thought. But I’m pleased to say that as I typed it I realised I was perfectly exemplifying my tendency to make excuses for myself at times and in places when and where I am daunted by something I desperately want for myself. ‘Be sensible’, says my head, both my parents’ voices talking at once. As I crave some sort of escape or other adventure I simultaneously tell myself ‘Ben, don’t be so ridiculous’.

‘Get a good job and earn good money’, says Head.

‘I don’t particularly want a lot of money’, says something else. 

I don’t particularly want a lot of money. Do I? I don’t know. ‘The future’ still seems far off to me. It’s obscure and I can’t make it out. How much money will I need for what I’m going to want? Isn’t there a manual for this? I have no idea what I’ll want in five or ten years’ time. I’ve changed inside so much in just the last few years that there’s no telling what state my head and my ideas will be in come my thirtieth birthday. People buy houses in their thirties, right? I can’t even afford to buy myself a coat right now, and it’s getting cold.

I just want to do something. I don’t want to be Mr Franz in in fifty years’ time.