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?

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.