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.