12:19:04 a day within

26:01:97

Welcome to the (absolute) show(er) that never (?) ends, now in its 27th great year.
This one’s unexpected. Came home from work on Thursday to find a missive from Brother Billy (to whom this is thereby and therefore dedicated) containing a single strawberry, best wishes for the weekend and the assertion that he will be with me in spirit, if not in corpo(or any other sort of)reality. This alerted me to the fact that said weekend contained (today in fact!) Superbowl Sunday (somehow I had temporarily forgotten), so despite the facts that I had only brought home enough blow to last until, well, today; that I have not had more than six hours sleep in a night for close to a week (circumstances and sick wife – some kind of hell virus that sequentially agonizes various joints, arthritis on a Cook’s tour); that, as ever, I’ve got pressing work to do on the morrow; and that it was less than an hour ago that I had lunch (Arbroath smokie and chicory/coriander/cress salad): despite all that , I’m about to hatch the whole fruit (yes, its 2:50 and I’m actually straight(ish – a few sucks on twigs and tar have added a pleasant skew to everything except my throat). Can you tell?

*    *    *

& can you tell the difference now at 5.25, dog walked as I photographed filigrees against a satin sky flavoured with Fruit Salads. Return to feed dog in dismemberments of warm oozy chickens, half-time roundup with Alan, Jimmy and an embalmed-looking Des. Don’t you notice what remarkably ill-shaped skulls people have under these circumstances?
The wife’s been in. “What are you doing?
“Working.”
She peers, her features taking on the simulacrum of peevishness without the thought of such a thing ever clouding her eyes, at these words forming on the screen.
 “Real work.” I offer elaboratively, “not Work Work. Art.”
And at the utterance of the Word the whole universe hushes and trembles at the next move of my fingertips.
Snap!
that’s better..
The football continues downstairs, the dog, upstairs.
Having checked the score, to find that in 20 minutes Chelsea have turned 0-2 to 3-2, perhaps I’d better go and watch it

*    *    *

l8:05. Chelsea won 4-2. Why aren’t I listening to music?

*    *    *

18:45 I am now. 40 minutes of twiching and mild disatisfaction (probably that I had a few false starts in the music) that seemed like months but weren’t particularly unpleasant. I’ve got 45 minutes before I have to cook, but I have to eat too and I’ve had the good sense to set the Olivia Tremor Control on automatic pilot in the hope that it’ll carry me out of this giddy sentence into the calmer waters of
This one; dearie me, I do appear to be remarkably intoxicated.

*    *    *

19:15  (seems longer) And for the second time I have been driven from my living room by a Scottish preacher twiddling twaddle on the TV. Everywhere I sit I should be somewhere else. I’m missing everything including what’s in front of me, in my desperate frenzy to seize the limited time available and throttle the juice from it. And in 15 minutes I must cook sausages! That’s the wurst joke I ever heard.
And we’re still on track 7. Joy to the CD. No more where-the-fuck-are-we-adrift-in-this-seamless-symphonic-soup? worries with our dear friend Digital Display.
But you still have to stand up if you want to dance.

*    *    *

And you know what:? (20:30) I had to eat. After all, cooking is an art, too, which Chip so graciously acknowledged. And the pause button holds the soundtrack. This may well be the last leg. Food anchors, of course, and six hours in (I always start to get anthropological about my experience at about this stage) everything kind of abates anyway – and I’m drinking (very weak) coffee – (so weak that I had to go and make some more for the wife, then confusingly write what appears here subsequently, before reappearing to take up the thread in the middle of this hiatus). And while I was away, this is what I saw –
Wild-eyed, ragged and gaunt, I leered vulnerably (a difficult trick - the key’s in the eyes) into the bathroom mirror.
And grinned

*    *    *

20:55 Doesn’t it, though. No laughs without Stan and Ollie. At least, not out loud. (a reflection on lonely dripping)
Still, why worry when you can stay at home and be terrified by the stereo of your choice. Track 16 burns its way in then 17 explodes out again, 18 mumbles awhile in a dank corner then oh God here comes number 19 (meaningless without soundtrack, I suppose, but then again, isn’t everything?).
And to think, earlier this week I was planning to write to Fortean Times  about the remarkable replicating rabbit mystery
But I didn’t. Oh well
And this is the sort of insight for which I have mortgaged a couple of days of my immediate future? I’m just wasting time, waiting for the airplane, listening to the birds and the languid dripping of – well, fluid, one has to say (It’s even easier with the lights out). I travel speedily past the openings of beguiling corridors, but I can’t turn the steering wheel on my Zimmer,
Follow the Glimmer
of an idea
Oh god here comes the airplane. Sing, birdies, sing!
Wake up
Oh God, I think I understand Green Typewriters.
Does this mean I have been Recruited? I don’t want a head full of prawns. I never should have turned out the lights.
One of these days I’m actually going to have to read this fucking thing, rather than just scrolling through it, but such a scroll does bring me to ponder on what happened to Superbowl Sunday last year. Suddenly sagging spirits and energy. More drugs needed.

*    *    *

9:40 If you need to look at your parents in a different light, try painting them a different colour.
In the picture I look horribly like Charles Windsor. Mum does a passable po-faced Queen but my father looks like he knew what it was to be a trapped spirit. A body that would not dance, an awkwardness and gawk in every mirror bar the reflections in my mother’s perspex specs. You have to acknowledge the absurdity to appreciate the beauty. I wish he was here so I could tell him.
{those black and white images give an achingly insufficient resonance of the way that typing them caused me to dissolve in sobs and outwelterings of snot (I may be sickening for something but it’s equally possible something important and even developmental may have happened back there).
Run away!}
No.
{A further explan(complic)ation. The Picture I started off describing, which I had been recolouring in pastels and guilty intensity, was not the one that moved and connected me with my dad [who knew he was a bit of a geek, but didnt’ care because people loved him and he had a fine wit. Except that this is sentiment, not passion now. Stop it] was at a Granger-side wedding – Brian’s or Pat’s – with Kate & Ivy (ever intertwined those names) off to one side, mum in the centre still young in her eyes, dad’s leaning forward eager, slick-back hair, grinning (rather like Mike S or Idiot), rumpling the V-neck jumper he wears with (beat) best suit, shiny tie windsor knot, work-marked hands cradling a lazy dimp, limp Bacofoiled carnation in his buttonhole, and behind them there’s a row of fire buckets (and you know that the O of my mum’s mouth is here opening it to complain about that very fact) but he doesn’t care, he knows it’s all absurd, and sad, and that there are wonders out there, but maybe not for him {and even if he doesn’t know that, I do, and that’s what hurts}, but you’ve just
         GOT to laugh.

*    *    *

22:50 A change of venue hasn’t exactly upped the word count. Now in the living room, avoiding the build-up to the Superbowl by gawping at Melvyn ‘of all people’ Bragg’s vision of American cultural colonization of post-war English youth. Been there, done that, worn the yoke.
Somehow, I have contrived to become (as Mr Woof, the human Setter, expatiates on screen) thoroughgoingly enraptured. or possibly stoned.

*    *    *

“One, two, three! Dominate Let’s go!” Looks like the Packers are getting fired up.
Now there’s an idea.
But obviously not an imperative one, as I remain nailed to the sofa. A fat man – Lutheran Van Dross to the life and larger – sings a soul version of the Stars and Stripes. We must be in New Orleans but this time (obscurely) with George on our minds.
Sooner or later I’m going to have to eat something, or at least have a drink. Chip’s fallen asleep on the other sofa, despite the best efforts of the Crass Empire to impress us.
She doesn’t even stir when Favre throws a 54-yard touchdown with his first play. “That’ll settle ya down.”

*    *    *

11:50, but more to the point, 10-7, and I’m engrossed. Here we go again.
The puss is suddenly on the move, exploring her way up the north face of the slumbering Mummy. Watch out for avalanches.
14-10, and suddenly the most unexpceted of all pleasures on this day of many looms – could we actually have a great game to watch? We’re still in the first quarter.

*    *    *

The Patriots have got a killer defender called Brewski (sounds like) in a homage to Cheers, and Tallulah has draped herself along and over the wife’s hip, moulding herself in lazy French curves.
In a natural break, The Sky at Night. Now there’s a rich source of mis-shapen skulls (“Astronomers have affectionately come to call it “The Monster” and apparently it’s at the centre of our galaxy).

*    *    *

12:15, first quarter’s over, the wife’s evicted the cat, I’ve walked the dog, I need a slash, I’ve had an apple and the Packers have just got another huge touchdown and I still need a pee.

*    *    *

1:20 and this is in the nature of a postscript, really; 27-14 Packers at the half, I’ve got a huge owl of bopcorn (could that be one of the most serendipitious typos I ever buttered) and they’re still not playing football on Channel 4. Oh, now they are.
Howcum they sell popping corn in health food stores. Organic or not, surely something this simple and this good must be deadly? Well, salt and butter are, (un)naturally.
27-21  Meanwhile, on BBC2, it’s Zabriskie Point. Bang. Seen it before, didn’t understand it then, don’t give a shite.
Desmond Howard returns a kick-off 99 yards. 35-21.
Chip went to bed at one, the puss went out around midnight, and now Sallywags slumbers on the sofa. Unfortunately, that’s where I want to sleep, and at 2:30 the hour is approaching fast. Though I really must defrost the cat first.
And now, at three, dislodge the dog, and pull the switch.

*    *    *
*    *    *
*    *    *

Things fall apart

The centre is definitely not holding

12:19:04 an introduction

I started to keep a diary when I was 20, at the roach-end of the 60s. This was about the first time I fell in love, but that was not the motivation so much as the idea that I was a writer, and my life was Really Important. I finally gave it up 13 years later, around the last time I fell I love, and now some 30 hard-back quarto notebooks slumber balefully on a high shelf in a corner of my cave.  I often think I’ll do something with them one day, and maybe I will: be afraid. But not yet.
Anyway, when I started writing a diary I had been drunk just once in my life (during the week I spent in a Thomas Hardy novel - I’ll get around to that one day), and, although it was the ’60s and I was an undergraduate at a trendy university I had never even seen an illegal substance, let alone taken one.
And then, staying on at college to do a PhD, I fell in with a good crowd and all kinds of possibilities opened up to me, and I dumped sociology for socialising and went from being a nerdish innocent to a nerdish drug-addled innocent in a couple of years.
I was still scribbling away through all this (this is not self-deprecation; i had no typewriter – it had disappeared due to the aforementioned week I spent in a Thos Hardy novel – and my handwriting was barely legible at the best of times) and became very interested in writing my diary while under the influence of whatever was around, and particularly LSD, my chosen poison.

The problem was that the very act of writing became problematic, as my head fell towards the page and I became lost in the sinuous movements of the pen, the uneven bleeding of the ink, the way the ghosts of letters on the other side of the page showed through and miscegenated outrageously with the current flow; my brain was generating a thousand smiles a minute and my hand was lumbering to form an ‘s’ that did not rear up, hooded, to strike.

So I did not manage to write much.

Anyway, as years went on, and I continued down the road to excess (even though I realised, even then, that if a road led to the palace of wisdom, it also led from it, and I had no idea which direction I was facing – usually flat on my back gawping at the sky or face down on the ground), I also spent a surreal six months at secretarial college, and learned to type with zip, and found that I could at last – especially when my mad skillz were allied to electronic keyboards – keep up, to some extent, with the fizzing and popping of neural pathways.

By this time I had cut down on my trips to Dizzyland – the tickets were hard to come by – but I started on a project I called 12:19:04, my acid diary. It wasn’t that I thought I could accurately nail what it was like – no communication between the aethyrs as the wise men say – but one of the remarkable things I’d found about taking acid was that, on entering the difference, the last trip, no matter how long ago it had been taken, was like the day before, and the memories appropriately fresh and vivid, even though they had been lost to straighthood in the time intervening. As a result, the writing became, in effect, a daily diary.

So, one day at a time, they will start appearing here*, minimally edited and thus often incoherent, so that their Joycean wordplay, fidgety inconsequentialities and agenbites of inwit can be pitied or admired, as appropriate.Or even ignored. Please yrself.


*But not today.

Druggy fools pt 1

redacted, sorry. Just pictures of old pals in the ’70s getting messed up, fell victim to photobucket shenanigans

Lines

OK so this is a sort of poem.
I promise I won't do this often, but I was looking for something else and found it on my Mac. A meditation on getting older than I ever thought I'd be.

Lines

So we start with 0, which is not O,
no sirree bob, it’s zero,
And an egg,
The quantity of absence,
the quality of incipience,
of the beginning of everything,
or at least of a chicken.
(Incidentally, have you ever noticed that promulgating an egg in three dimensions creates an ovoid, a shape that is both nothing and nowhere. This is an interpolation, by the way. It doesn’t have to rhyme, or be in time)

(And don’t people get excited by zeros? Put three in a row and all their millennia come at once, a year early. They fell for the flim-flam of the three ring circus.
And yes, it does bother me,
and I know it shouldn’t,
that I should rise above
pallid pettifoggery,
piffling pedantry,
platitudinous pomposity and
pusillanimous priggery,
and turn my face to the dawn,

Hash pipe clenched between my teeth
Freudian Slippers on my feet
I contemplate my fissured fizzog
in a mirror short of silver.)

Chorus
Squads of zimmerframes overtake,
If this is living I’d rather be baked
Rah rah, rather be baked
rather be baked, rather be baked
or Peruvian Flaked.

and just as forty brought the reading glasses
and fifty the seeing glasses
so, as the zero rolls on the six,
something once elastic snaps,
and my chest
slumps down
and out.
The 60s model comes with built-in shelving.

I thought I would take some acid to mark the passage of my 60th year.
Then I changed my mind.
And changed it back again, a process I rehearsed
More than once.
Currently I’m confused.
Which one was it?
Again

why am I here?

Because I'm 62 years old and things are falling off - or declining, if you prefer.

I have a sickly, but immensely talented wife, a dementing mother and dog who's had more than his share of dinners.
 
I'm not expecting much in the way of drive-by traffic, but I want somewhere to park stuff for the delectation of my few and scattered friends.

There will be whines and gripes, possibly the odd bit of deathless (I'm a writer by trade), photographs if I find out how to post the furshlugginer things, and possibly the odd cry for help. But don't hold your breath: it's not that I'm busy, just slack. And not only my muscle tone