People, Emotions, Deadlines

A huge crane dragon

Eating down a house

Of fine bricks and mortar

Crossing the small junction where there are a total of three traffic lights, I guess someone must have flagged safety or there’d been an accident, houses - whole streets more like are being bulldozed. It’s very dusty underfoot and quite loud overhead, lots of crunching and gargling from the machines. The crane that nudges the red walls thumps them harder and the bricks fall apart and crash down somewhere to make noise, which is drowned out by other noise, like aeroplanes and sirens.

The waking up in the mornings has been set to a different rhythm; since I’ve stopped smoking I've woken up with a clear throat but a fuzzier head, which I admit is unexpected. Less clarity in what I’m doing and usually hungry, I wait for the kettle to boil most of the time indoors in my own space. It takes an aeon. I could have a bath in that time. Need a new kettle. That’s what I remember instead of the things I am supposed to remember like train time tables or days of the week. 

Note: Must buy a new better kettle.

Crunch goes the white frost

Underfoot

Days are getting visibly

Longer

A little bit of sun crept up over the window sill and across the floor boards timidly, under my boss’ foot, reaching up to the brick walls but never making it. Some cloud faded it out. The laptops flunk; gone haywire and the internet’s disappeared. The life of a city dweller is disappointing. I think back to Eleanor (refer to the Turtle’s song) and imagine her lying there in my bed every early morning when I woke up, snoozing like a platypus. Those two or three months stolen in time when we were between jobs and lives and continents, well I think, that was a casual miracle.

There’s a singing girl in canary yellow

On the District line

Voice warbles

Poles green

Like a Rousseau scene

The Bakerloo seats are the most ambitious in pattern and also carriage structure. They pallidly resemble the ideal of the early 70s where anything could happen but those who’d lived through the 60s were already jaded and turning sour. Bakerloo seats are the dirtiest on the Underground. Two men with their knees wide open stretched out in suits and loud voices discuss their private lives publicly, and to no one’s surprise the conversation goes something like…

Harold: A lot of my friends play golf three or four days a week because they’re so bored!

(John looks bored and nods)

Harold: And when you see them what do they talk about?

(John blinks)

Harold: Golf!

(John and Harold share a belly laugh that peters out)

John: I play golf

Harold: So do I

(beat)

Harold: I play golf but I don’t want it to become a way of life, you see what I mean?

(John nods)

Ad infinitum

Furrowing my brows I know I’ve become bitter, as age and stuff that seem to occur randomly and daily incrementally build up in the storage of my heart; good things past must dissolve. Memories piling up… the ones at the bottom of the pile subtly disappearing. I had to buy toothpaste in a supermarket and I hated how it made me feel bad that I bought the cheapest one because maybe I’m endangering my teeth and you only get one set. There are people being killed over cartoons and I’m in a queue where old women are complaining about banks not being people. A gay bookstore owner doesn’t like my show poster because it doesn’t look gay enough and I stumble on the grounds that the performer wears a leotard throughout but has a wife, so does that make the show gay (?) and I just feel awful. Having minor pangs of panic being elevated by lifts and conveyed across by escalators and the city is very dead looking compared to the seaside and I have to tap at my phone for some light sensation of human communication with a friend thousands of miles away letting her know it’s all too much.

Rachel: What’s too much?

(typing…)

Me: People

Me: Emotions

Me: Deadlines

(online)

(last seen today at 01:37)

New Old Faces

When you plunge deep down in to a well. 
Submerge then emerge out like a newborn.
Old friends fall in to tread, on Hampstead.

Today’s Saturday is the first day I felt like embracing this new year thing. Waking up confused on the first of January swathed in an inflatable mattress on a floor surrounded by children is odd, and, so is moving in to a Mews as a place of work (our doorway is used as a thoroughfare for odd-lost tech-types and illustrators with fanciful turns into journalism - all very charming). 

Getting back in to the rhythm, picking up the stride, and clipping the straggles or at least neatly patting them down so that the threads don’t pull and leave you with holes in your cardigan, or whatever. It’s not that I don’t like to get back in to the old familiar lifestyle, it’s… that change of mindset where you begin to think nostalgically about a time when you were being yourself, say, walking in the woods or the seaside or a high street that you returned to potter about through during the slow slow yule.

A jumper was given in exchange for DVDs made of threads that protect the wearer, or so the people say. A chocolate rabbit was undressed from it’s golden paper and eaten. I’ve got a new walk to work where every day I pass a wall smashed wide open, one dead flat pigeon, I think. 

NOTE: The days are still short and the shadows are runic in their spindly length and starkness in that dusky orange hue.

I met a friend off the train at Paddington, he’s passing through to get back to the States, and he wears glasses now that make him look more Englishman-In-New-York. Today he flies on an aeroplane heading in the direction of the Atlantic Seaboard; and another friend coincidentally leaves on a Eurostar heading south to return to another type of school where they learn to clown. Simultaneously, one other goes skiing.

Have you ever stolen time?
It feels great. 
It’s like cheating but without consequence, 
it’s like finding a loop-hole. 

When I woke up today on yet another floor, but in a duvet this time so that’s fine, I remembered something but wasn’t sure what. There were slats over the windows that were failing to keep out the lilac light and I heard hushed sounds of birds, cars, people traipsing. I was in the house of an old friend who’d moved to Hampstead. Small fixtures from our shared house together last year featured in his living room; though I’d never stepped foot in it - a lightbulb here, a ceramic cup there. When the three of us ventured out it was snowing for no reason, so I said Merry Christmas, which felt natural or “natch” as the twats say up here. 

The walk over the heath was where I could do my dog-browsing, and where the two best-friends of old with nothing so noteworthy to share apart from time could do their walking. We walked and as we did we talked less until just our treads fell in to a pattern and then home. 

And then bye. 

And now back south of the river where I belong and happier for it but also lost in the midst of memory, that morning of today’s where I thought, I am certain - we skipped out time and made some up where it didn’t belong.