I don’t know if it’s a combination of increased work stress and other personal stuff, but I’m enjoying waves of rage, breaking across my heart and mind like a bloody tide. Perhaps it’s just that so few people out there (in my cynical moments) appear to offer any real worth. Not like you beautiful internet people, oh the delights you inflict upon my soul!
Terrifyingly I’m even struggling to find time to record how angry am through the journal of terse verse. That’s not good. It’s probably bottled up inside, ready to detonate and shower my colleagues with spittle shrapnel and pieces of vein. Ho hum.
I Want to Understand You
Don’t do it
That way:
It’s wrong
Why did you do it
That way?
It’s wrong.
Why are you this way?
It’s wrong.
Why do I shout
This way?
You are wrong.
Finding a Purpose
Like a diamond
That’s been ground down:
Still sharp
In tiny ways,
But worthless.
Good for chewing timber,
Pencils or pens.
Just sit there
Quietly.
Whirling Devious
Like an elegant dance
Where you slip and slide
Twisting malice into lies
Making a messy
Alliance of bad ideation
And abortive creation
Dance.
I Missed You
How quickly the memory fades…
I’d forgotten in your absence
The level of ineptitude
That leaks out of your brain.
Oh, memory
Protects me from you.
Feeling Broody
Nasty little gashlets.
Screaming squalling
Continuous bawling
Rampant noise engine
Powered by uncaring
Parents.
Ravening horde of future thugs.
There’s Something in Physiognomy
Too fattened with ugly
To think
Excess skull
Shrunken brain
More face than an average human
With a head 1/3 of your creasing brow. The Road to Hell
Rainbows and unicorns
Acid shower,
Napalm your dreams
Fry your My Little Pony ideals
Burn off your skin
Idealism in ashes
Fuck your happydumb.
During the last month of counselling I’ve found myself pretty traumatised and upset by the details which I couldn’t recall, and the things I re-discovered. It ain’t been easy – for me, or anyone unlucky enough to spend much time with me. Compiling a timeline, to give myself reference points and really start to understand what happened has felt very important, although I’ve typically minimised its importance and my desire to compile one. Score one for prevarication. Regardless, some common sense has won out and through my diary entries, some help from Dad and application of some logic it is starting to come together. I have to accept that through my own choices in the past there are areas that will never become clear. There are others where I have chosen to record quite useful information, thoughts and decisions. It’s the danger with diaries – they are self edited, censored and potentially full of lies by omission and intent. We create history as we go along. That’s not awesomely helpful.
Anyway, the work on my timeline was aided by a few hours (with quite a lot of whiskey) going through my diaries from when I was at VI Form. It’s the only period of my life I’ve ever attempted to keep track of – in part it was because I was being hit by bewilderingly vivid dreams which struck me as worthy of record and that eventually became a record of my mental states during those two years (although always primarily a dream diary). I’ve intentionally not returned to them for many years. In fact they’ve been tied up in a bundle inside a locked box for about the last ten years.
I’d started to review them during counselling which had not been pleasant. Some of it is hilarious, in a wistful kind of way – there’s nothing like the pretentious profundity of teenagers (a thing we romanticise endlessly in film and literature), and I discovered that there’s relatively little about Ric in them. It’s apparent that there’s so little because I literally could not express how I felt. As a fairly articulate fellow (even then) my frustration and painful rage are almost tangible when I do manage to write about him. It’s very noticeable in the handwriting, which declines well below more normal poor legibility.
I still haven’t read through them in full – just skimmed with an averted eye – looking for dates and matching facts for the timeline. I have also marked them all up so I can find them easily, and avoid them when I’m looking for something else.
This is the timeline I have:
’88 (10) my parents split up
Sep ’90 (12) I choose to live with my Dad (in a very acrimonious and destructive way)
Late ’90 (12) first meet Ric when he’s a lodger with D (my ex-steps-sisters’ mum)
Early ’91 involved with our family activities, drinks with Dad, theatre etc.
Late ’91/early ’92 (12-13) – moves to Winshill, about half a mile away from home
’92-’93 (13-15) Ric founds BYTE (Burton Youth Theatre Enterprise) and I spend a lot of time with him
Aug ’93 I turn 15
Nov ’93 Ric moves to Amsterdam – we exchange letters for the next year or so
Aug ’94 I turn 16
Sep ’94 start of 1st year Sixth Form
Oct ’94 I have a bad falling out with almost all my close friends
Nov ’94 start of a close friendship/relationship with Miss L
Feb ’95 my beloved cat, Holly, is put to sleep
Feb ’95 I visit Ric in Amsterdam (Spring bank holiday)
Mar ’95 1st reference to self-harm in my diary
May ’95 1st account of what happened in Amsterdam in my diary
May ’95 account of my nosediving sleep habits and history in my diary
Jun ’95 I write to Ric, challenging what he’s done and forbidding him to come to Burton (he’s supposed to be visiting in Jul/Aug)
Jun 95 account of self-harm in diary
Jul ’95 increasingly infatuated with Miss L
Jul/Aug ’95 Ric visits, sees Dad. I see him very briefly but avoid him
Aug ’95 I turn 17
Sep ’95 start of 2nd year Sixth Form
Oct ’95 brief fling with a guy in the year below at school
Oct ’95 lost virginity (Miss L)
Nov ’95 last reference to Ric in my diary
Aug ’96 I turn 18
Sep ’96 start of university
Oct ’96 split up with Miss L
I realise there’s a lot of stuff in there which doesn’t necessarily sound relevant, but I’m increasingly thinking it is. All of life is tied together. When you’re talking about predatory child abusers it’s important to see the bigger picture. How could I possibly be a victim? Well, I can increasingly see that far from my current “go fuck yourself” aura of self-confidence I was a vulnerable and at times very lonely child. And that’s what these fuckers prey upon. I had a genuine need for an interesting friend who would make me feel good about myself and tell me about interesting things. And that’s sort of what I got…
February ’95 is the tipping point. Before then there was a year of peace, except for letters (which we’ll talk about separately later) and before that the two years in which the rest of the molestation took place. I don’t have any diary records for that period, and I don’t see how I can ever piece it together. I may, if I feel tough enough, write down every instance I can recall, though without dates or surety that they are separate or complete.
Although it takes me a while to write about I distinctly recall clawing at my own skin in horror, being unable to sleep and physically wracked with horror. I remember snapping the razor blades out of disposal razors with a penknife and a compass. And of course, I’ve got the scars. Though not too many. I remember cutting and hoping it would bleed through my clothes and someone could stop me and ask me if I was alright, and then I could collapse and break down in tears and let it all come flooding out. That never happened. I eventually had to explain to Miss L because I was just not the same person when I came back from Amsterdam.
I got out of the instant decline awful self-harm and depression by burying myself in a relationship with Miss L. From my diary I can see that was actually an incredibly stressful relationship (as well as being quite marvellous). I’m clearly fighting back – making choices to affirm who I am, at heart, away from what has happened to me. I don’t yet know what choices I made by myself, as opposed to those I felt compelled towards.
Whatever happened worked for a while. I got lost in love and A Levels, and then when I got to university I buried it all in drink and drugs, and love again. But then it came back. That’s one of the things I need to figure out next. Where did it go, why did it come back; did it ever really go away?
I’m most amused to follow a successful writing week with an abject failure of a week. Apologies in advance for the lack of novel scribblage. I’m being somewhat overtaken by work at the moment. I resent it bitterly but they do pay for me to live in a house and such. So I suppose I ought not to be too glum about it all. I shall be redoubling my efforts this week.
Nottingham Comedy Festival
The other distractions have largely been caused by preparations (or lack thereof) for the Nottingham Comedy Festival 2012 – I’ve got three shows, a spoken word night and two three hour workshops to cram in alongside work and life. So that’s going to be awesome – I hope to survive it. There’s also Teen Imps starting up soon (I’m teaching improv to the teenagers of Nottingham). It’s all very exciting and has required design time which has replaced writing time. Pff.
Talk Like A Pirate Day
Holy crap! I nearly forgot about TLAPD! Well gosh, I am missing it this year. Although I’ll be growling down the phone at work, I’ve no specific events lined up in pirates’ honour. I figure I do pirating every day, not just once a year. But I’ll be re-posting a load of stories all day so you’ll get a chance to re-read pirate tales from years ago.
This week’s scribbles
Tuesday: Twinned With Evil – part 2. The ruined city returns – this time, a look at its past.
Wednesday: a massive link to my pirate stories so you can massively overdose on piracy!
Thursday: Eric The Bewildered Weasel part 4. And why not? Let’s see if it’s starting to become less bewildering for the poor animals yet.
Round Up of Last Week
11th September: How We Hate HR – my 25th alphabetic story. This one’s mainly about HR being dicks. Can you imagine?
OK, so I admit I’ve cracked open a bottle of beer in order to start writing this one (also related to eating a massively hot bowl of chillis and olives – this is how I prepare to blog?!) I’m not certain that’s a good start – it may not indicate that I’m ready to talk about this stuff. Ho hum.
So my last post was about me (it’s always about me) figuring out the timeline of stuff that happened to me, and the other events that were going around them. Mostly I’ve done that from odd diary entries, including an abortive diary from way back in 1991. Not all of it though. On Monday, at my counselling session I decided to take another one of my bold leaps forwards. These are not necessarily well-reaoned leaps. I get annoyed with my own reluctance to open up and to talk about things (I need new terms for ‘things’ and ‘stuff) and, especially when I feel I shouldn’t be wasting my counsellor’s time, I am prone to unthinkingly kicking open tins of worms.
I am one of those people who are unable to throw anything away. I think it’s pathological. In addition to my diaries, a million flyers and birthday cards and cinema tickets I’ve kept every letter I’ve ever received (no, not including bank statements or bills). So I’ve got birthday cards and letters from Ric during that year between him moving to Amsterdam and me going to visit (the temptation to add “fateful” or similar is strong, but I don’t want to turn this into a TV melodrama). Like everything else I’ve kept them tightly bundled up and enveloped, not wishing to accidentally expose myself to them. Well, that changed on Monday…
The letters are dated, obviously, so I thougt I might be able to add some bits into my timeline. However, I couldn’t figure out the post mark time stamp so I figured I may as well open them. In retrospect that just shows me how tense I was – never mind that I nearly cracked a tooth during the session, I apparently couldn’t work out the dd – mm (in Roman numerals) – yy system.
Honestly, I found them horrifying. They’re friendly, joking, encouraging – the sort of letter you’d hope to get to cheer you up. Funny, that’s really not how they make me feel now. Just the sight of his handwriting sent blades of pain through me. The typed letters are fractionally better, despite the old bubblejet printer feel, the italic habit is weird. But these are just distractions. Why I found them so hard to read – and I’ll be honest, I grabbed the dates from all of them (which allowed me to instantly not read the last letter – that’s definitely for a much later day) and just read the first two – I don’t know, this is hard to express.
Second try. The letters make me remember Ric as a friend. That’s what I wanted him to be – and found to be worthwhile. We all need friends. But he chose to ruin that (I think he’d always planned to); if it weren’t for whatever the fuck is wrong with these people we could still be friends – I could always have used an extra uncle or mentor. But I know what happened, both before and after these letters. I received them during a year of peace, in which Ric was out of the country and I was untouched.
Re-reading the letters, I’m vividly cast back to the mental states that I experienced as a teenager – torn between admiration and affection for this really interesting man who treated me like an adult (yeah, that ought to be a massive red light right there) and the discomfort, pain and fear for this man who abused me despite that, who dismissed the trust that I placed in him, made me lie for him, trapped me and fucked up my head for 20 years. I suppose it’s a kind of cognitive dissonance or optical illusion – when I read the letters my mind is popping back and forth between affection (and the most fucked up thoughts follow – maybe I was in the wrong, I really blew that out of proportion – this is clearly just a feller who’s gotten confused about the boundaries…) and then immediately to memory of what really happened. It felt fucking awful. That’s when I nearly cracked a tooth clenching my jaw so tight. I need to chew gum in future.
I felt incredibly disoriented, nauseous and angry; that’s a confusing combination I can tell you. But it’s interesting too. Reading them now I can see that the tone of the letters is waaaaaay too familiar – they’re like something I might say to a friend of the same age, maybe. They’re also signed off with “love” which almost made me vomit. I might post one of them up here, just for context. The thing is, and it still gets me now – they’re nice letters. That’s where the dissonance arises. It kicks back in when I realise I’m sitting in a counsellor’s office forcing myself to read through this shit that puts pain in my body and mind; then it flips again.
It is precisely like being groomed to begin with, neatly encapsulated in letter form.
It’s not my fault you know. I have to keep reminding myself of that. I’m used to taking responsibility for my actions. I believe that I am a (more or less) rational agent. I forget that this wasn’t always the case. As children, and even as teenagers we have virtually no freedom; no ability to choose. We pretend that we did – “oh, I wish I was a child again” “school was the best time of my life”. If those are your genuine thoughts then you’re really not making the most of adulthood.
In addition to lack of genuine choice we’re also (mostly) insulated from both our good and bad intentions and what few independent actions we achieve – our parents, school, society insulate us by and large from their effects. And those choices we thought we made for ourselves – within the tight confines of being a dependant in full time education who has the friends they met and was hated by least on the first day of school in the class we were deposited based on our previous school’s report and assessment of how we behaved in another tightly restricted environment… well, I imagine you can see where I’m going with this. Despite that I persist in extending my current freedoms (which are somewhat illusory, though vastly more genuine than as a teenager) backwards in time – to justify my actions and inactions as if I were who I now am.
It’s absurd. I am no more who I was 20 years ago than you are. I don’t just mean biologically – every single cell in my body is a different cell now of course. Me inside – I can barely scratch at who I was, why I acted as I did (I’m fond of the diagnosis that as an adolescent we are literally insane). Yet my thoughts persist, fractured, distorted, distended through time and change.
It feels, or seems very important to me that I can assert that being abused was in some sense my fault – that I had the freedom to choose – to leave – to say no – to tell my family – to run – that I chose, genuinely chose to stay – to allow – to permit – to condone – to assent – to participate – to want it.
It’s a lie. What my mind is trying to do is rewrite my history – if I can convince myself that I chose to be abused, to enter consensually into a sexual relationship with an adult, then I can take solace in the notion that my intentions were good – to be loved, to have a relationship, and the consequences – well, if they were not as I’d hoped, well… shit happens. We do things with good intentions every day that turn out horribly (and vice versa).
Thing is, that’s like forgiveness (another monstrous, morally reprehensible lie): the easy way out. By blaming myself I focus my pain back onto myself. I’m here, I can be punished. Ric – that fucking child molesting cunt – is not. How much easier to take the blame onto myself where I can do something with it (beat myself up)? Well fuck you pal.
What I am struggling to grasp (and my weak mind is making it slippery, so I can fall into the easy goal of self-blame) is that this was orchestrated. I was groomed. Identified as vulnerable, conditioned, exploited, abused. The choices that I wish I had – at best, at fucking terrifying best – were the least worst choices I could make to survive. Acts of omission, easier, safer to commit. Jesus fuck.
That’s scary – to accept that I was pushed to the point where being fondled by a grown man in his bed when I was 15 was actually balanced out by having had a nice evening watching Silence of the Lambs and drinking cider. Are you fucking kidding me? Does that sound like someone making a valid choice? Does it fuck.
I’ve been agonising over why it was that I actually went to Amsterdam to see the man who had abused me. It seems incomprehensible to me now. Right now, I’d either get on the plane and buy a knife from the first supermarket I found or simply tell him to go fuck himself. As if either of those were options at 16. Amsterdam is possibly the coolest place in the world to go to when you’re 16 with an adult friend who will take you to bars and coffee shops. There’s that, there’s having been friends for years, not having previously disclosed to family what had been happening (“well, why don’t you want to go?)”, and the sheer pitiful desperate hope that maybe, just maybe it will just be fun and we’ll be just friends like I always tried to believe we were. The choice that I keep thinking I made is a myth.
Still more, once we were there: 16 year old kid, in a foreign country, staying in the flat of an adult man who has your passport, pre-mobile phones and internet. Sound planned much? Yeah, and that’s some of what I’m forcing myself to realise and accept. So the choices I made once I was there: already conditioned not to complain, not to run away; trapped; disinhibited (alcohol and weed in the fabulous bars of that glorious city); in a horrible net of trust and fear. You tell me: how many choices were real after that? I realised tonight in counselling, and I don’t think I’ve quite articulated it like this before (though I think that I’ve thought it) – if I had said no; if I hadn’t (as I even now perceive it) given in, there’s a very real chance that I would never have come home.
I did what I had to do to survive – I did all I could do at the time. The conditions were not set by me; they were imposed on me in a clever, manipulative, intentional way. And to think that what has been mind-fucking me recently is that I’m trying to fathom the man, trying to reconcile the good parts that I recall with the monster. What a joke. I’m still being groomed. That’s how effective this behaviour is.
In part I realised tonight that what I’d forgotten was hate. Maybe I’d passed beyond it – the stage where it’s just exhausting to be so angry and full of loathing, and maybe that loathing was too closely associated with myself, so my mind had separated us. The memory of Ric has become detached from the things he did, the things that torment me and crush me inside. Perversely he has attached to the good memories. Hence my confusion about the man or the monster. Even inside my fucking mind he’s attached himself to the good parts.
Well that’s not on. That’s not right. That’s not fair. We’ll not be having that.
To be fair, writing this immediately after counselling has helped. I’m enraged now. Now I’m associating correctly again. Its going to take some work, but I’m going to re-learn why I hate this man.
This is the second part of a story – read Part 1 first (if you want).
I am relieved to find the old apartment building still standing in the light. The street lights flicker and strobe as I walk towards it and I will them to remain lit. They do. My hand hardly shakes at all as I fit the key into the lock. The shadows rush out past me; I feel their passing against my skin. They flee to join the night and the bleakness that infests it.
The flat is dark and empty. But still mine. Not much more than a round table and a bed. It is clean and the cupboards not as pitifully bare as I left them, so my boss must have had it maintained; he always feared I would need to return. Night falls heavily outside, the darkness reaching up to pull the blanket over itself. I draw the curtains to keep it out.
Dreams torment my sleep. Being here brings all my memories of the last time back in a flood. It is one of those awful dreams where I dream of waking and am still asleep. It takes me back to the last time I was here: before I banished myself my role was to adjudicate in the election. I wake in the narrow wooden bed and the light is plowing through the air above me, painting ghosts and nightmare figures on the scarred wallpaper. Breakfast is a nauseating lurch across the flat and back, puppeteered by the dream. My mind seems intent on replaying the details I have cast aside; the ashen taste of cereal, the sourness of milk. My clothes do not fit properly.
The door slams behind me, beating an echo into the air which travels before me. The distance between the flat and the office goes by in long stutters of treacle slowness and flashing speed. The city had not gone bad then, but it was surely on the way. Even by daylight the streets were subdued, the people reclusive. Just a month earlier the last music hall had burned to the ground and the football stadium had closed. We no longer wanted to associate with others. Quiet bars, and oddly, the libraries had even had a resurgence of interest. The shadow of imminent violence hangs over everything.
I pass the staring faces that watch me as I walk down the roads to the office. They had relocated the government offices underground after the murder sprees started. Bloody, awful affairs that ended hundreds of lives. Shop workers, wives, teachers, electricians. There seemed to be no pattern until we looked at where they lived or worked. “Frequency of contact” was the official conclusion, and it held true for all the later events. It was as if we’d hit the maximum number of people we could see and still care about and yet society just kept pushing more in our faces. There was that, and something more.
I was recruited when I survived the Beynemouth Slaughter. That was when I discovered the kind of threat I, and those like me are. We can talk about good and evil, light and dark and get all philosophical about what makes a woman good or evil, we can euphemise as much as we like. It doesn’t change the facts, only hides that some of us revel in the violence and in the darkness. Our existence made it worse – people already hated being near each other but we thrived on it, instigated it. If we’d known we were doing it, if I’d known that was what I was doing… well. I didn’t, and in our ignorance we hit a critical mass of hate and fear in the City, and made it real.
Evil became a presence, and people succumbed to it. The community purges which followed as religious and political leaders, as well as the damaged people already waiting for an opportunity, incited further fear, spreading the darkness and ensuring that blood was spilled. I could feel it, almost smell the hatred in the air. I’d never really felt alive before. I attended a rally where I found myself shouting and shaking my fists. The darkness moved with me, like streamers from my fingertips and I cast it over the crowd with my words.
The Beynemouth Slaughter that followed tore a hole in our world, a place for the bleak consuming hate to live and fester like a gash in our City. The agency was formed shortly afterward and I was one of its first agents. Cedric knew what I was, had picked me out of the photographs of the riots and turmoil. I was scared and repentant. I’d relished the sensations that surrounded me as men bludgeoned each other to death, loved watching the dark blossoming from the mob. But I saw that it lingered, saw it become part of the city. I watched it grow, felt it grow and stretch, distort and gnaw at everything. Despite my lust for it I realised that it was destructive. I’m not a bad person, just an evil one. That’s what my boss helped me to understand.
Not all of those who lived outside the forest were so vocal in their disapproval. In fact some had managed to rise above the peer pressure and met with the missionary squirrels. Anthony Cornstook, father to the small family vaguely recalled that his great-great-great-grandfather had dwelled beneath leafy boughs, and well – what a place: word was, the food was good and prospects were bright. When they arrived, they would find a rich social life (including the promise of old friends) and a more secure home. There was a lot of appeal there. Why not shift nest? And that was that.
Harvest mice aren’t particularly materialistic but they had enough to warrant hiring a young hare as guide-cum-porter. Tonight was the night and a nervously excited family finished strapping down everything within their round apartment.
Anthony sat at the door, overlooking the fields from their vantage point up in the wheat. A pair of long ears rose out of the long grass, twitching and turning. Satisfied, Everett hopped over the rise and tapped the wheat stem twice. The high house rattled under the hare’s touch and five mice scurried down the stem leaving Anthony at the door. When they reached the ground and greeted Everett, Anthony climbed on the roof of the apartment and bit through the twine binding it to the stem. Anthony rode their home down like an elevator to the bottom where he hopped off. Everett snapped the wheat stem and placed their home on the ground.
“All set then are we?” asked Everett cheerfully. Anthony took a last look at the old wheatfields, knowing in his little heart that he had made the right decision, for him and his family. Then the hare bounded off for the forest with the nest strapped tightly to his chest, the six harvest mice nestled inside.
It was a hell of a journey, or a journey through hell, depending on which of the mice you asked. Finally, Everett reached a small clearing near a stream. He stooped to crawl into the middle of a dense thorny bush, bumping the mouse house along the ground.
“Right, this is it. Welcome to The Oval!” he declared and released the dizzy harvest mice. “There’s loads of mice round here, I moved the Barleywhites and Cornflowers down here just last new moon,” Anthony knew them well but was trying to find a single point to focus on while the ground stopped lurching around.
“It’s been great actually,” Everett continued, “I’ve lost track of how many folks have come back, not just mice but birds, and frogs of course, so you might want to stay close to home for a bit. Oh – do watch out for owls if you leave the hedgey bits and don’t worry about food – ah I see you’ve brought some anyway. Either way you’re expected, people know you’re arriving this evening, so I’m sure someone will pop in once you’re unpacked. I don’t know whether you’ve thought about going diurnal yet? Well, I’ll leave you to think some more about that – it’s a family decision I’ve always thought,” the hare paused to draw breath so Anthony interrupted him,
“Well, all that sounds splendid. Could you lend us a paw to place the apartment?”
“Naturally, I’d be delighted to help,” They heaved (well, Anthony heaved as Everett easily lifted) the little home high up into the thorny branches where it would be safe from almost anything. Everett left them with only a few more words of advice and then leaped off, satisfied. The family unpacked anything which hadn’t already been unpacked by the journey and settled down for the night.
Two of the mice stayed up for a little while longer peering out through the thorns of their new home. Anthony’s youngest daughter, Lizbeth smiled sleepily at him. He stroked his daughter’s ear fur fondly and sighed with satisfaction. He and his wife had been worried about uprooting the kids. But they seemed happy, if very tired by the move so far. Lizbeth was delighted just by being surrounded by trees: they were high up, but the trees themselves were still higher around them.
How odd, thought Anthony. You go your whole life quite contentedly in a field – regular food, known enemies, then one day you wake up and realise you need something completely different. When that squirrel had bumped into him in the field one day, he found that he didn’t just want to go, he could go. In fact, Anthony had been so impressed that he brought the squirrel straight home to meet his wife. That there was such a nice and polite rodent from the forest quite outweighed her suspicions. The children had been won over especially quickly. It turned out that several of Lizbeth’s creche-mates had already gone.
“The Order of Squirrels has always been interested in providing assistance to our emigrating cousins,” the squirrel had explained, “and in encouraging others to help them. How can I help you?” Anthony had explained how he felt, the Order was sympathetic and it was all arranged there and then. Elated, he explained to the family that “It’s a ‘boom’ time for moving! The thickets have never been thicker!” And so here they were.
Looking out at the night sky, it all looked so different than in the fields. The branches of trees framed the rising moon beautifully. Anthony began to yawn with Lizbeth asleep under his forepaws, snoring gently. He stopped mid-yawn as the moon was blotted out by the silhouettes of a bat and an owl gliding side by side.
“Not in the country anymore,” mumbled Lizbeth in her sleep. He picked her up by the scruff and went to bed.
I’m taking a week off. Yep, it pains me to say it but I’ve been running myself ragged at work, out of work, at fun and at some less fun stuff too. So – no stories planned for this week I’m afraid. There is a enough other stuff going on this week anyway! It’s the Nottingham Comedy Festival, we’ve had one improv show already with more to come…
This will be loads of fun – I run this as an open mic poetry karaoke night. Anyone is welcome to come along to share and hear delightfully comic verse, stories and any other word-formed humour you can muster.
We’re at the Canalhouse in Nottingham (upstairs) THIS MONDAY (24th Sept) at 8pm – lovely pub, great beer and food and Pub Poetry is entirely free. Bring your poems and stories, books of favourites and your friends. I’ll be reading some short pirate tales, maybe some Shankanalia and I believe we’ll also have some of the other MissImp team reading their work and contributing to the overall fun bag. Event info on the NCF site here.
Gaargh, this the main event- meself spinning pirate tales and compereing a night of fantastic comic songs from the admirably hillbilly folk strummers of The DH Lawrence & Vaudeville Skiffle Show. They are a wonderfully talented gang of dark Americana songsters with fine soulful voices, knowing winks and instruments ranging from “proper” guitars to washboards, bells and those funny tiny little banjo things. Looks like we’ve got a good mix of their collective in attendance – click on the title link above to get a peek at them in action. To improve it even further, the whole thing is FREE. It starts at 8pm at The Golden Fleece pub on Mansfield Road Event info on the NCF site here.
This is a bit different – less piracy, but ideal for anyone with a theatre, comedy or creative mind with a sense of fun – this is a full introduction to the wonders of improv, led by meself in me improv performer guise. The only thing I can guarantee is that you’ll have a good time. 1-4pm £10. Get yer tickets now. NCF info.
So that should all keep me busy for the week…
Last Week’s Scribblings
Tuesday 18th September – Twinned With Evil – part 2 the city filled with evil continues to fester and we get a peek at when it all happened.
Wednesday 19th September – Talk Like A Pirate Day – 3 posts with links to all of my pirate tales many thanks to those wonderful friends who shared and retweeted these tales: Pirate Stories part 1
My head is full. I sit, in a bar. Before me are a pint of Elsie Mo, and a short of Maker’s Mark. These seem like the right things to have. There are people moving around but I can’t feel them. I’ve decided that writing immediately after counselling sessions is a good idea – the meat is fresh, unspoiled and still has the shape it had before I killed it. Don’t make it easy though, hence the rambling prologue…
Today I began with analogies. People describe therapy as a journey. I dislike the metaphor. It (to me) implies a starting point, route and destination. That just feels inappropriate. I started long ago – and while assembling a time line of sorts has proven useful, that kind of literalism isn’t intended. I go from a point of tired, angry confusion, regret, shame – I travel through the past and my present (real and imagined) – but the act of travel is to place those things on a map which doesn’t exist; the landscape of the mind – a futile, half-remembered, changing entropic playground subject to the emotional vagaries, chance connections and brain damage of life.
This is a stupid journey. Not only is there no clear destination (and please don’t give me the whole “the journey is the important bit” – if so, why the fuck would I go somewhere? May as well just wander aimlessly), but the route which is to be travelled is unreliable and unreal. Basically, the metaphor fails badly for me.
This, I suppose, is both the reason for metaphor and its vital problem – we take them too far. It’s the sense of the imagery that’s important – the further you chase it the more it falls apart. However, we crave them. I crave them. I want a way to describe what I’m going through in a romantic shorthand which conveys my wrestle with the false constructs, memories and beliefs. Ideally, it should elevate me to an heroic status…
I’ve temporarily scrapped the journey notion in my mind. It’s endless, potentially, and the more we try to fit it to a map, the broader it will grow till the infinite dark sea overwhelms us and we drown in our own hopelessly imagined aims. Ahem.
What I’ve found consistently helpful though, is to find an apt metaphor for understanding memory and why some ideas have such radical prevalence in my own mind. I’m fond of boxes. Today it’s helped me give shape to the thoughts of that fucking cunt Ric which pop into my mind unbidden.
You see, the memories and associated emotional memory of Ric and the abuse he chose to perpetrate upon me as a teenager have a disproportionate mass (and consequently gravity) in my noggin. In a balanced sort of view, the time between meeting him and being coerced into being masturbated occupy a period of perhaps four years. And even in that time, the events themselves add up to less than a few weeks in total. There are many, many things I have done for that length of time or been involved intensely with that have far less hold on my mind. The gravity of those memories is such that they have drawn other associations to them. Emotional memory is a ghastly mess. We remember being distressed, and for the memory of being distressed we extrapolate further that it must have been fucking awful, so awful it’s more worthy of recall than anything else.
We bolt memories and feelings together like the Germans do words, till everything is stuck together and to remember a face or a touch, or a word is to recall everything. Worse, you can get the feelings alone, without the concepts that might serve to moderate those emotions. So I can be brushing my teeth, undressing for the shower, have my arm brushed by a stranger at the train station, look at the sky a certain way and am suddenly struck with an intense feeling of horror. But nothing else. Or be hit by the memory of touch and feel revulsion. Often it makes me want to drive a knife through my chest. I can lie awake imagining leaning on that blade, feel it tear through skin muscle bone and body. It’s a relief. A counterweight – an imagining of vast pain and suffering to draw my mind away from the past. I read today in my diaries that I started doing that after I came back from Amsterdam- fantasising about perpetrating fantastically violent acts on others and myself to get to sleep. Now that sounds pretty fucked up I’ll grant you. It works though. For a bit.
Thing I’ve figured out (belatedly, in my slow stupid way) is that I’ve bolted that feeling onto the chain too. So, hoho haha, now, when I think about Ric and the fucking bastard exploitative shit he did, I get the whole lot – I get the shame and hurt that I remember (but is, remember, a memory of feeling – many times remembered and misforgotten), I get the anger and hate (which I justly preserve) and the knowledge that hurting, or imagining hurting will bring me succour. Fuckin’ genius.
So, ultimately I feel bad (in part) because I remember feeling bad before and know that hurting badder (I know…) will make me feel better.
Our minds are remarkable things. What’s especially brilliant about them is that they actually do this to protect us!
What I’m right now amused by is that this gravity metaphor is not the metaphor I wanted to write about. That’s one that popped unbidden into my mind. I blame the beer. The metaphor I wanted to talk about is the one we toyed with in counselling today. Boxes, yeah. It’s a conception of memory chunks I get sometimes (being fond of boxes and tins as I am) and the notion that there are some boxes on the shelf of the mind which are open, carelessly locked with contents that creep out. I dislike that particular version. I dislike models which reduce personal responsibility and give independent agency to ideas and aspects of ourselves. I suspect that it leads to magical thinking and futile imaginings of gods. Anyway… I see it this way:
Most things in my mind are not in boxes. I do not have Alexander’s Memory Palace (seriously, look that stuff up, it’s awesome), rather I have a Memory Shed in which someone broke the shelves (yep, me) and dumped pretty much everything on the floor. Really we’re talking about Sets here (yup, it’s time for some bastardised philosophy of mathematics). I can draw together certain memories into sets, or boxes if I wish. I can integrate my memories of university as a set, or put my relationship with The Lady M into a box that contains all memories associated with her. But that ain’t the way that most of my memories seem to work – I access them randomly, through delightfully surprising chains of association. These are the scattered trash on the floor of my Memory Shed – I love ’em, but I can’t find them when I want them.
On the other hand I have some very well ordered boxes: I have several about work, which allow me to access related information quickly and effectively – this is purposeful and useful on a daily basis. I also have some boxes for improv – slightly messier given the nature of the subject, and for writing. And then I’ve got a fucking glitter covered neon box which glares out from the general depravity of memory – unavoidable, overriding the chains of coincidence and connection which link the rest. Yup, that’s the cunt box. Or Ric box, depending on how much alcohol I’ve consumed. (An aside because I am conscious that some of my friends and family read this, as well as some people new to me – I personally have no gender or sexual association with the word ‘cunt’. I have a degree of respect and love for the word based on its remarkable history and the evocative pugnacity of shouting it when angry. My use of it therefore is a personal choice and I have no intent to offend – if you feel offended then you are applying too much of yourself to something which is about me, not you. I offer no apology however. Insert smiley face here) And that glowing box just screams out whenever I even pop into the Memory Shed.
I think that what I need to do is empty that box and smash it. My goal (my journey’s end – yeah yeah) is that the contents of this box be rendered as important/unimportant as all the other crap in the shed. I want to tip the contents out and forget about them.
I believe that it is not just the past that upsets me, it is the associated mass of seventeen years (half of my life) worrying, fretting, cutting myself, ruining relationships, occasional impotence, fear and horror that I have subsequently applied to the experience of being abused which causes me distress.
What is worse: I’m invested in that chain of emotional weight. It’s hilarious actually – by refusing to look back at what happened, to balance it and seriously evaluate it I’ve added to it that fear of doing so. How much does that suck? So – my conclusion (of course), being a practical sort of fellow is to rip back through that – back to the source. I know my memories are unreliable, and even though I also have a horrible lurching sensation when I realise that perhaps, just perhaps what is worse than the feelings I suffered when I was abused, are the accumulated feelings I’ve piled onto that since. If I look back, and discover that how I felt, that what happened wasn’t so bad (relatively speaking), what does that do for my feelings? What do the years of pain then mean?
It’s fascinating. Say I look back, and despite all that happened, I say “meh” and move on – what then? What does that leave me with? Seventeen years of pointlessness. How do I resolve that? I don’t know. I can say that I was wrong – or that how I felt at the time is not how I feel now. To change my mind, to grasp as an adult what happened to me as a child is not necessarily to reject it – it is to encompass it, to understand that we do change. It is easy to assume (as I have written much about) that how we feel now is how we felt then. It isn’t. It so, so, so isn’t. We forget how we are just these beautiful fleeting moments of consciousness skipping like fairies across a breezy leaf. We have no true conception of yesterday.
To deny myself freedom because of the weight of the past… madness. I’ve forgotten tonnes of stuff. I spent more time cumulatively on glaciation in year 9 than I did being felt up by a paedophile. I can forget feeling bad, or at least relegate it to the same quality of recall.
But what do I keep? Make no mistake: having this cunt’s actions in my head has several times come close to ending my life, caused me to bleed, caused me pain, ruined my mind. But do I give him that satisfaction? Do I fuck. I will persevere. I will persist. I am change. The memories of abuse and the pain that followed are a part of me. I am the sum of all of these things – I am not the minutiae. My self is greater than the aspects it has passed through – I am literally greater than those things and they are my past. My future is a mutating amalgamation of the past.
I grow drunk and prophetic. I need My Lady M.
I am a hoarder. I keep everything. Even the birthday cards and letters from someone who abused me. I know, right? It strikes me as odd sometimes too. I choose to see it as a form of prescience. Not the psychic kind; that’s just delusional bullshit. (Warning, I have set myself to some pretty serious drinking this evening.) When I was 16-17 I wrote in depth about how I felt, and about my dreams. I’ve babbled at length about the failings of memory, and I know that this is why I wrote the things I did as a child. They are my closest connection to how I really felt at the time; I don’t trust my recall – it’s too bound up with how I’ve felt subsequently and is demonstrably unreliable. That’s the human condition folks.
So I kept the letters which Ric sent me between going to Amsterdam and my visiting him (the oft-referred to Time Of Doom; having typed this I realise it has the same acronym as Time Of Death. Telling? Or just an unfortunate accident of coincidence? Such things as emotional suffering are made of…) I wrote at the time because I was unable to contain my horror – words were my only escape. There are some sections that make me proud, and ashamed of later weakness:
“…the other option (from killing Ric) is, of course, suicide – nonviable I’m afraid, I’m not prepared to die so that Ric can do this to someone else”
Isn’t that glorious? I’m so pleased with the sixteen year old me. I already had the “fuck you” attitude.
A few months after Ric chose to take up his previous grooming attempts and escalate them to a new level in Amsterdam and totally destroyed my psyche I wrote to him. In part this was self-defence. There was every likelihood of his returning t England and that I’d have to see him. There’s a powerful sense of shame and fear in my diary that I honestly find somewhat difficult to associate with now, but it motivated me to write:
I think it’s charmingly ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in style… I attached to it the (to me) heart breaking blow by blow account of what happened in Amsterdam. This was me, aged sixteen and recently abused, fighting back. I cannot imagine how I achieved this. Now, my past self seems impossible. I can’t imagine managing to do this. It wasn’t me?
What is, to me, even more incredible is that I don’t just have this letter – the motherfucker actually wrote back. I expressly requested no contact… what does that tell you? This is a letter I’ve kept sealed inside a writing book inside a locked box whose key I routinely lost for more than a decade. I am only providing excerpts right now, but I will post the whole thing because… well – that’s the whole point no?
So – to be super clear before we get into this: I wrote a short letter with the explicit request that I never hear from Ric again, with a copy of the most heart rending soul-destroying narrative of what I have tried for the last 17 years to escape. He replied. Now y’all might be inclined to read such a letter with a sensitive and generous disposition. That’s naive. It’s how I read it at sixteen – exactly how it was intended to be read. Keep that in mind, and keep your head.
Step one. He breaches what I requested. Sure, that seems reasonable – has to put his point across; a letter invites a response surely… Let me flip your context. As a teen that seemed okay, sure – I’ve said some stuff – he deserves a response. It’s a vicious opening gambit – it goes from being about me (the victim) to him (the perpetrator) in two sentences. Just keep that in mind. He continues:
Sounds reasonable no? Thing is, it’s a complete lie. He came over that summer. I was horrified. His very presence made me scar myself. It’s very different reading the letter now. Back then I was still blaming myself and ridden with guilt. Now… well, now I know more about grooming and paedophilia. The protests and dodging don’t ring true. That said, I still experience brutal cognitive dissonance about “Ric as my best friend” and “Ric as a paedophile”.
The next part is all about how he’s having to re-discover and destroy himself in light of the revelation I’ve offered – that teenage boys don’t actually welcome having their genitalia pumped by a middle-aged man. And y’know, I’m just not going to give that credence. I don’t have to – this is about me, and the letter that cunt wrote is about him. If you imagine this to be unfair (as I sometimes do) then you are wrong, and need to spend some time wondering why you are siding with an adult against a child. It’s a problem I too face, so I understand. But just recognise that.
As an abused person, a survivor if you will, I like the sentence:
“Your writings brought home to me the wrongfulness of my actions towards you – I totally accept responsibility for them. The clarity and hard hitting nature of the text left me in no doubt that my actions were unwanted and have caused you a great deal of worry and stress”
That’s nice. “Worry and stress”. Right. Sounds good yeah? Almost, almost like an apology. It does, it really does and briefly lifts my heart. It’s followed by this:
…which just rips away any pretence at giving a flying fuck. It’s actually amazing. Take a step back. Look at this as you would a piece of prose and analyse it according to A Level principles. This is almost the definition of passive aggressive. “I’m sorry but it’s all your fault. If I’d only known that you shouldn’t try to touch the penises of teenagers I’d have stopped – why didn’t you say anything? Why are you blaming me? I thought we were friends. Friends jerk each other off, no?” Yeah, fuck you. As a kid, this destroyed me. Now, well – I’ve been to work; I know what passive aggressive is. “I cannot accept it all…” well, y’see – that’s the crucial bit ain’t it? Accepting that other people have feelings, and that my experience is equivalent to or of worth in comparison to his. The next part is priceless:
So… I’m wrong? Unfair? Okay. I forgot – it’s all about you. I’ve constantly struggled with the dissonance of Ric as my best friend – someone who gave me such lovely ideas vs. a man intent on abuse, cynically planning and manipulating me into a position where I could no longer resist – in fact with the aim that I would consent and shield him (fuck, keep reading). It literally gives me a headache trying to reconcile the two. This letter helps. Ironically.
What do you see here? (I imagine that my current rage is palpable.) Massive cognitive dissonance on Ric’s part. Allow me to summarise, “You seem to be upset. I like your Dad and step-mum. So – don’t say anything, it will be terrible if you do.” Yeah – for you, motherfucker. It nailed my fears at the time: guilt and shame are so easy to pick apart. I was worried that if I said anything I’d ruin a whole chain of friendships. Now of course, I sensibly say “so what?”, but then I was young and saw only part of the picture. This letter is clever. It is deceptive. It blames me while pretending apology and asserts that I should keep my mouth shut. You have no idea how angry I am. That’s a threat – at the time it worked because I misunderstood – I thought that I and my friend would be in trouble. What it really means is that he’d be locked up, or killed by my Dad (godluvya). I haven’t read this letter in seventeen years. I do recall Miss L denouncing it as exploitative lies at the time. That kept me alive. Ever did Miss L keep me together as a teenager, though I do regret the force with which I transferred my need for positive emotions to her. She deserved better than obsession; devotion would have been sufficient.
There’s not much left:
Even now I struggle to make sense of this. “Sorry, can we still be friends?” Many, many times I’ve struggled to grasp what kind of fucked up sociopath can do this, but this end to the letter actually makes sense. My abuser, Ric, is so broken, so beyond the normal that he can abuse me, shallowly apologise and genuinely believe that we can just be friends. These people are monsters. I don’t need to understand how he can think like that; I have been troubled by that – how could someone think that way, and it’s fucked me in the head; he is broken – it’s the kind of person he is. That doesn’t require sympathy or empathy. That’s for other people, people who haven’t been hurt.
I say “fuck ’em.”
For fun, and because it fits with the cognitive dissonance that so regularly shakes my mind world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjJ_b8isMzc
Okay… so one week rolled into several. I guess that’s the way it goes. I took a couple of weeks off because I’ve not been at my best and I have suffered for it. I am back. No, I don’t have anything new for you which is all a bit poor really. I’m just that kind of person. So you might be wondering, “if you’ve written no bleeding stories then what have you got for me?” Perfectly reasonable. I bring you… hope?
I’ll be doing some more yarn spilling soon at the launch of Derby’s Speaker’s Corner on 20th October (in Derby, keep up). How very nice to be invited! Tis a public event so I must find the stories with the least swearing and sex in them. I’ll be able to spill me scribous seed later the same day in Beeston however, for Oxjam Beeston Music Festival at Latinos.
The Pirate Coves
Great gig! We were bedevilled by tech failures all round which was a shame but we battled through, like when those aerial squid got caught in the mast. I read lots of stories (aye, many), some of which I’ve got on tape. Tis not really tape I suppose but that’s the only way I can grasp it. What I’ll do this week is convert a bunch of it to audio as the video’s not at a grand angle once ye take the broken tech into account and that the music was all done behind the camera. Gaargh. I prefer wood. So I gots to sort that out. Here be a nice snapshot of ye captain (to the right – tis I in the hat). Below ye may find an action shot of me beloved bosom buddies The DH Lawrence & Vaudeville Skiffle Show about whom there simply are not enough fine words to utter.
This Week
Wednesday 10th October – The Pirate Coves Audio Adventure – aye, might be pushing it a bit, but ye’ll definitely get a nice recording of The Cetacean Adventure and maybe another I’ll have snipped out.
Friday 12th October – Twinned With Evil – part 3 – I promise! The final part of the bleak little series.
September 27th, 2012. Twas a magnificent night of music, tales and technological horror. A horror that flowed not just through the sound deck of impossibility but into the ears of the microphones and the eyes of the camera. In consequence, I’ve mainly audio of a size so vast that I cannot place it anywhere.
And so we’ve none of the sound for the three tales I opened the evenin’ with (though me gestures’re charming and I could dub it poorly), and in matchin’ fashion none of the video (save the side of Misk Hills’ face) for the last hour when the lads and lass were forced to descend unto the punters for the unamplified making of music. Never mind…
The lovely folk of The Golden Fleece were most accommodating and we drank much of their beer.
A Mermaid’s Fishiness
Avast! I have however sliced out this snippet of the Mermaid’s Tale and present it to ye in a format visual:
Misk Hills & Minin’ Bill Kerry
Here be a longer segment featuring Kazoo madness with the Misk Hills Mountain Rambler and Minin’ Bill Kerry III and another yarn, though I fear I’ve broken me internet by uploading it. Gaargh. The audio’s all too huge (for Reverbnation) and beautiful and I’ve about an hour of the wonders which The DH Lawrence & Vaudeville Skiffle Show brought to the proceedings. I’ll be having a thunk about how to make that fit in ye computerised ears. If ye have any suggestions me one good ear lies ajar.
Want Ye To Listen More?
For now though I urge ye to seek out me wondrous musical compatriots and show ’em ye full love:
This is the third part of a story – read Part 1 and Part 2 first (if you want).
My dream takes me past the security doors and its grim faced personnel. The corridor into the building folds back and forth in a paranoid maze until I reach the stairs and descend into the subterranean bureaucracy. It is cool and airy in the modern way, with no receptionists in your face and the offices muted and private. My feet lead inevitably to the Map Room. The room is swept periodically with light, illuminating the wood-panelling that surrounds the huge table. It supports a detailed map of the city; my eyes are drawn to the lines of force that arc and twitch around the city’s landmarks. Two wooden figures stand on the map.
We’re here to supervise the voting process. Now that good and evil are viable terms for social policy some measure of them is required in politics and the wheels of civil governance. It is not yet acceptable to build a party on such philosophical nightmares though, and that in part, was cause for our attendance. Still religion and economics attempts to take the fore. My boss, Cedric, in his constant suit and hat calmly regards the map.
We had a visitor present, from the inspection committee. He was a dark-faced man with a temper and no patience for our talk of good and evil. I felt nothing but contempt for him and pointedly ignored him. The map is more than enough to focus on. We made it together, Cedric and I. We infused with the forces we can sense; it exactly represents the City and its mood.
As the voting progressed the figures on the table grew steadily. We were watchful for deformation, sparks of colour and speed – all of which would indicate the influence of evil, or good on the proceedings. The feeling of mirrored energies surging across the table map and into the two men’s figurines was exhausting. We spent the day watchful for those sensations to which we are equally but diametrically attuned. We guard each other in raised eyebrows and significant glances.
The election seemed to go well, though the inspector offered constant distractions from our quiet vigil. He fussed and huffed until we could assure him that the figurines on the map were untainted by excess, that they contained a normal degree of good and evil, and that neither of us had exerted an undue influence over the outcome of the election. That showed how little he understood – our job was to monitor each other for our own sakes. The temptation to encourage your nature, tease it out from its hidden corners is powerful and we helped each other to curb ourselves. I don’t even recall who won. It hardly matters – they were ordinary men, equally subject to our extremes; the future was not within our remit and that future was beyond a mere election.
The day left me restless and unhappy. I spoke quietly with my boss, we touched hands and I left. I knew that I was a danger to the City. Despite our influence on each other I could still feel those coils of darkness in the City. They were drawn to me, and I to them. It was not safe for me to stay.
I wake. It is not an election today but the dream of it lies heavy in my mind. It has been years since the election and as I predicted, events have overtaken politics. The City fell to the darkness and it has spent the last ten years consuming everything. On the outside I was insulated from those curlicues of violence in the night. With the City sealed in a bubble of its own decline my role has been to watch from the outside, detect any escaping dread that might infect the rest. The emigration from the cities has been effective, there have been no more desperate purges, riots, terrible acts of rage and fear. The threat had been contained, or so I believed.
Having already made the trip in my dream the journey to the office smacked of deja vu, but as if through smoked glass. Parts of the city I remember fondly are gone, unseen by the residents. There are more people about today and I watch them ignoring the gaps in their City, taking extreme diversions around blacked out streets and buildings. Even the crawling death across the paving slabs is nimbly stepped over.
It all feels wrong, and yet so right. The evil inside me thrills to this subsumption but it is exactly that which persuaded me to join the agency. I know to be wary of that feeling, it is seductive. I regret my return even as I am welcomed.
I meet my boss at the office. He seems much older than he should. We exchange weary smiles and touch hands. The office is precisely as I remember, until we reach the map. It is riven with darkness like a cankerous parasite clawing the City into itself. He raises an eyebrow and makes a dismissive gesture.
“Let’s go out for dinner” he says, “there are some people I’d like you to meet.”
The sky’s blue is fading already and the birds are playing their speed stunts again. A warm wind blows sepia through the city. We walk down a street of restaurants and bars. Many are closed, but several are lanterns in the night, full of cheerful faces and happiness. We don’t look at the other side of the road where the houses disappear in a ragged darkness and barely coalescent shapes haunt the shadows.
Sometimes you just feel slightly grim. For no particular reason. It’s been a good week (except for The Lady M being very unwell yesterday), sleep is back on track (admittedly with the use of sleeping tablets, so I don’t know whether to count that in or out of successville), had a good improv show last night, finished a great book… So why do I feel all flat and glum-faced today? It’s a puzzle ain’t it?
I had no counselling this week (yep, even counsellors get holidays – they deserve them) but I am keenly conscious that it’s back tomorrow. I had my day of mind-windage last Sunday which was basically just a day in the pub getting hammered in a cheerful attempt to reset my skull. I think it was largely quite effective, although I didn’t get anywhere near as wasted as I’d promised myself. But it did occlude and drain the brain-sac for which I’m grateful; it took a few days to get my mind back on track. With that and the sleeping tablets I’ve been quite good emotionally I think – able to focus on other stuff, get my writing more on track, deal with work and so on. Even with the sleeping tablets I feel better able to do improv on them this time around. Either I’m just more used to them or I’m better at improv. Don’t know; both are a win.
Work, I suppose, has been the main cause of stress and tension. The end of the week before this one particularly. I’d given myself a tough time in counselling (I realise I’m pushing myself hard in those sessions) and spent the evening in the pub scribbling and drinking. It’s honestly not the worst way to spend a Monday evening. That was fairly cathartic even if it meant that the rest of the week was one species of hangover or another (that’s what codeine’s for…) I may or may not have mentioned that work has been in a state of flux for a while; staff losses, role changes and the usual much more to do with less time and the consequent raised tension of the whole team. Our director chose to make it all much worse on the Thursday by picking a fight with me over some data. It was unnecessary, stupid and unhelpful. I, however, refuse to back down when unreasonably challenged and defended myself. Of course, the guy had chosen to do this in the middle of the office so when I disagreed about something he decided to be the big man and demand my resignation. I treated this with the contempt it deserved and held my own until he finally fucked off. It was a lovey aggressive situation with him sitting on my desk looming over me and getting over-excited. Sigh. It was rather surprising and stressful. I assumed that was the end of it only to have the tool return half an hour later and drag me and two colleagues into an office where he proceeded to apologise while drowning it in personal rhetoric and bullshit. Once again I got a chance to challenge his unreasonable behaviour which was accepted (as well as a few satisfying digs). Finally we were released and wasted the rest of the day talking about what a dick he was being. So – fine work from a boss: wanders into an already stressed (but working) office and totally destabilises it. Skillz.
The day after I got taken out for lunch by my Dad and step-mum. Always a nice thing and we went to a pub that I cycle past every day but have never been into. I knew one of the things we’d be talking about was how counselling was going since they’ve been reading this blog and staying up to date with the various failings and successes in my mind. It’s also been very upsetting for them; they are victims of Ric’s deceptions albeit in a different way, and are also trying to come to terms with the apparently incompatible behaviours and personalities. Dad’s formed the view that it’s some kind of personality disorder which enabled him to misunderstand boundaries and social norms. I think that’s missing a huge chunk of the predatory nature of the behaviour and the painfully evident grooming process that’s visible in the letters I have. It seems to me to reduce the intent portion of what I blame Ric for; I don’t think any of this happened by accident or by chance. That it looks like chance is one aspect of how clever and manipulative this abusive behaviour is. By worming his way into our family’s life he became family and therefore almost above suspicion. It makes no sense, when you imagine him to be a true and honest friend, that he would risk all of that to abuse a young boy.
So what does make sense, given that such things occurred? That it was intentional. Seeking out a vulnerable family – and we were certainly that – recently divorced parents, a grandparent who had just moved in with my Dad and was ill, work problems and stresses, fighting between my parents and the fall out that has on relationships between siblings and parents (I myself had found it so hard that I’d left my Mum entirely and moved in with Dad. All this was what Ric walked into – in fact moved into when he apparently failed to get anywhere with another family on the other side of town. And he was with us all the time. Dad’s diary shows him involved or around several times a week, every week. Omnipresent. As my counsellor pointed out, this is an excellent alarm mechanism – if I’d said anything to Dad or if anything was just not quite right he’d have been able to see it immediately. Instead he had the confidence of the family; left to look after the dogs, and me when my folks were away for a weekend. That doesn’t seem accidental. Sure, you can be a single guy looking for new friends, but this is self-insertion into a household.
Anyway, this was the stuff I talked about over lunch with my parents. After that I went back to work, feeling supported if a little confused. And what do I walk into? That same fucking director, still trying to make amends. I realise this might sound like a good thing to those who don’t know him. Five years ago he joined the company, aggressive, arrogant, bullying, sexist. Great boss. But now he’s trying to change, engaging (ish) with staff and imbued with a vision that we should all share (the general rhetoric we suffered the day before). Since then he’s bullied, intimidated, ignored and abused staff of all grades throughout the organisation. This is the man who got briefly in trouble for allegedly making an actual list of staff he’d sleep with. A twat. So – forgive me if I have little interest in being involved in his metamorphosis into a human being.
When I got back from lunch he’d apparently been enquiring whether everyone was okay and wondered if I might have time for a little chat. I didn’t want to, but he came down and despite my protests insisted that I come to his office which I only agreed to when it was phrased as “a favour to him”. Well, I don’t know if I’d been primed by counselling and a long conversation about being abused but it seemed to set me up well for dealing with a bully. He wanted to apologise again, and make sure that I was alright – because he hadn’t meant to upset me, and he didn’t want it to change anything. Sound familiar? Some of the phrases he used were exactly the same as in the letter I received from Ric. That was pretty shocking, but it clarified quite a few things in my head. For one, it empowered me to tell him exactly what I thought of him and his behaviour; I realised that the issue was his (I’d been shocked by his behaviour but not hurt by it – I honestly don’t expect anything better from someone like him), and told him so “this is all about you”. I talked about how he was the one who had to deal with the consequences of his actions, not me. It was enormously satisfying and I suppose in some respects it gave me the opportunity to say things to an abusive bully, a man who abuses his position of power, trust and responsibility who for a moment felt frighteningly like Ric, things that I doubt I’ll ever have a chance to say to Ric (I really don’t know if I could). It also made me reflect on the words I heard back from this guy – what sounded like a desire to change, to be a better and more responsible person – and how shallow I found those words. How hollow and self-deceiving. It’s a bit like that superficial charm you read about psychopaths having where as soon as you scratch that surface and they realise they’ve put themselves at risk (in this case a very real risk of my raising a grievance or going for constructive dismissal) and they put on this simulation of humanity; the behaviours that they’ve witnessed in others but never really understood. In a way, that’s sad – for them.
I realised some important things, or rather stuff I already knew was made concrete in that meeting: I didn’t care if he was genuinely remorseful, I didn’t care if he was really going to see the error of his ways and do better in the future. Those aren’t my problems; they’re his. All the apologies in the world can be accepted (as I accepted his) but as I said to him, that doesn’t change what he did. I’m not into forgiveness – I think it’s a really twisted idea that is thoroughly amoral. I think I can understand that my problems are in relation to what happened to me. Aside from seeing justice done (by which I mean revenge) there is nothing that will affect his understanding of what he did. And even that won’t make me feel better. I don’t need to understand why he behaved the way that he did – I probably can’t, because I’m not the kind of person who would do that. That’s a good thing. I also realised that these abusers are very similar, they talk the same way and they behave the same way. Well what those people do does change things – they are responsible for the consequences of their actions even if they don’t think they are. It’s their fault and they are the ones to blame. There’s no reason for me to blame myself – it’s not my fault.
I have to keep reminding myself of this. It helps to push these matters into the past, towards that homogenous remembering of things that happened, to take out the emotional spikes which hurt when I recall them. If I remember anything – I want to remember that it wasn’t my fault – I’m okay because I did nothing wrong – and that there is a person for whom hate is the right emotion.
A relatively quiet week for me – much appreciated. It ended with the all too brief return of a friend from Texas (and fine drinks in the pub), and then a splendid improv comedy show at The City Gallery in Nottingham where we performed our Consenting Partners show and welcomed guests Project 2 and their improvised sci-fi show. All round marvellousness and laughter.
There’s some freshish poetry for you to enjoy (should that be your wont) over on Reverbnation, Shankalline Structures or click here to get it:
Reading Update
I’ve read two books – one that I loathed and one that I loved.
Chapter 2 started with “Libby Chastain, white witch extraordinaire, was naked, wet and horny” and it went downhill for me from there. There’s rampant misogyny too- see the FBI agent who agrees to have sex with a prisoner (child killer) to get information, but it’ll be okay because she’s use Zen meditation to keep her mind away, oh and she was abused by her Dad. I don’t know, maybe I was just in the wrong state of mind but it all felt unnecessary and attempting to be shocking.
Loved – Rebellion, by James McGee. It’s the fourth in a series set in the Regency era / Napoleonic Wars (depending on your viewpoint I guess) featuring Matthew Hawkwood, an ex-army Bow Street Runner – a kind of policeman. Dripping with period detail and bursting with action this one moves the action to Paris and an attempted rebellion. Ace fun. I’d recommend them all to you.
This week’s scribbles
Tuesday: Shankaphone – Shoving Angry Poetry in Your Aural Canal – some more charming and blissfully short tweets of poems inspired by my life
Thursday: Twinned With Evil – part 4. Genuinely the last part – honest. This story is based on a dream which it follows quite closely, but getting some sense out of a dream is always a challenge, so apologies for it having to stretch out to get there.
Round Up of Last Week
10th October: The Pirate Coves LIVE – two clips from the show we did in the Nottingham Comedy Festival – a pair of pirate tales and a brace of songs with Kazoos.
Oxjam Beeston Takeover– Saturday 20th October 3pm, Latinos Restaurant, Beeston – Captain Pigheart stories and an improv hour at the end of the comedy show
Had counselling this evening after a fortnight’s break. I’ve been a bit up and down, though largely I feel like I’ve gotten a much better grip on the contents of my mind. In part that’s from getting the strange opportunity I recounted the other day of confronting an abusive person (in this case a manager) and asserting a number of issues about their behaviour. High among them is the notion that they, not me are are responsible for their behaviour regardless of whether it was a mistake or “just how they are”. Well sorry pal, but that might be something you want to address…
It’s important to me to know that what I’m dealing with are not my abuser’s intentions and actions – those are very much his problems. My problems are only how that makes me feel. Sounds simple laid out like that doesn’t it? But it’s roughly a third of the things I maybe once thought I had to resolve. A bit of arbitrary arithmetic does wonders for the soul. So what I have to figure out is how I do feel about how I feel. Yeah, we is gettin’ meta. Necessarily I think. One of the things that has always intrigued me, and did when I studied philosophy is the theory of mind, specifically the notion of continuity that most of us persist in believing in. I’ve discovered, of myself, in the reading of notes, letters and diary entries from when I was 17 and 25 that I have been through this process before, at least in part. In my diary from just after I was molested in Amsterdam I’ve got clear descriptions of how it’s not my fault, of whom is to blame. Then I buried it all (after some judicious self-harm and tears) and it resurfaced after university.
Man I was fucking tormented by that stuff. I did my best to kill it with drugs and obtain that happy ambivalence that cannabis can bring. It didn’t work though and when I was 25 I had to tell my Dad what had happened because it festered within me, eating me up. And again I knew that I wasn’t to blame, remembered what had happened and wrote it down, tried to work through it. And failed… and now I’m back there again. I have been several times before – getting to a certain point and having to restart from scratch. All because I was too afraid to read what I’d previously written, what I’d previously felt.
I had to figure it out again each time. Well not anymore. Tonight I finished reading everything (I think). A fortnight ago I read what I thought was the worst, that fucking manipulative cuntish letter. Between then and 2005 there isn’t really anything – I hid my mind from my writing and just suffered in silence, verbal and scrawled. In 2005, for reasons that aren’t very apparent to me I found that it was time to tell my Dad what had happened in 1995. Ostensibly it was triggered by Dad and my step-Mum being about to visit Ric in Antwerp. I have no details about what else prompted this, but I wrote Dad a letter – a terrible letter. That’s what I read this evening. I’ve actually shocked myself by what I wrote. It starts with tonnes of preamble and prevarication but it has all of my questions:
1. Why did no one notice?
2. Why did no one ask me if I was alright?
3. Will you believe me?
4. Will you blame me?
5. What should I have done?
They are valid questions – I have answers to them now.
1. Because these bastards are clever, and our family was a mess – we were all vulnerable and exploited.
2. Because I’m a good actor; I could never bring myself to do enough to prompt someone to bully the information out of me. Also, see 1.
3. Yes.
4. No.
5. There was nothing else I could do. Choice is an illusion.
I’ve actually given myself horripilations in answering those questions for myself. I’m gonna choose to believe that’s because they’re true answers.
The letter continues, and oh… it goes into such detail. It’s a graphic and brutally honest letter. I’m almost embarrassed that I sent it to my Dad. Any yet – I needed to. There are details in the letter that I had forgotten, things I’ve never written before or since, that I’ve prevented from sliding through my mind. I can only apologise for sending such a detailed letter. I needed to though – I can see my desperation to get it all out, just once. It’s evident in the handwriting which gets increasingly stressed and difficult to read. It’s not a letter I want to reproduce here.
I realise that I had thought all of these things before – I’ve been here, but with slightly different answers and slightly different pieces of the puzzle. It feels a lot like The Three Doctors. I’ve got the 17 year old me – utterly distraught, semi-suicidal, the 25 year old me – desperate, but able to express it and reach out for help, and Me me – 34, ready to deal with it. Able, for the first time, to go back through this. I’ve read the 17 and 34 year old me. I feel sorry for them. 17 year old me was broken, 25 year old me might even have been worse. And me? I’m not sure. Older, wiser (maybe), certainly more reflective, definitely more distanced, more centred and in control. I’ve got a chance this time. I’m engaged in treatment, more people know now than have ever known before about what happened to me and how I feel about it. That’s a good thing – for me it’s the secrets, the hidden-ness of it all that burns, makes it sordid and different.
Most folk I know would probably note me for my honesty, outspokenness and willingness to open up. I want all of this bollocks to be the same – something of as little worth and note to me as how I felt when my parents split up. (Not to demean them, but those feeling aren’t part of Me me anymore – just the memory of them.) I’ve got to separate myself from the me of the past – his pain doesn’t have to be mine. The agony is in his memory, I just remember feeling like that.
I’ve talked before about how one of the things I feel like I have to deal with is the fact that I’ve been upset about this for so long. That in itself is investment in feeling this way, and a perverse reason to keep feeling that way. But I’m only 34. Sure, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow (or tonight, cycling home), and that 17 years feels like a lot. But in ten years it won’t be as big a chunk of my life. I’ve been with The Lady M for 14 years. It’s catching up. Time to re-prioritise how I feel and accept that I am not a continuity – I am Me now. Now. Now. Now. Now.
My diaries and letters give me an insight into the me of yesteryear (always wanted to use that word) but it’s a mistake to take on their feelings and emotions. They just aren’t me anymore. I carefully sealed away the breakthroughs or breakdowns I had when I was younger so that I wouldn’t accidentally read them or stumble across them. I hid them too well. Perhaps if I’d read my letter to Dad sooner (I’d never read it, even when I wrote it), with its savage summary of what happened and how I felt about it – maybe I could have worked through this stuff sooner. Maybe. Like I said before – choice is an illusion. We made the choices we did; there’s no going back; there’s no way of making a different choice. Pretending we could have done something differently is just a special kind of torture.
My Short Lesson (as promised 500-odd words ago, sigh) is one of labelling. If, like me, you are a hoarder of letters and diaries, for fuck’s sake label them. I’ve had to go through thousands of badly-handwritten pages of ideas, thoughts and teenage petulance and depression. The smartest thing I did was cover them in little post it notes so I could find what I wanted. I was always good at sealing things away, knowing that one day I would want or need to re-read them. But I could have fucking labelled them.
The finest example of this, for me, is one that has bothered me since I embarked on this voyage of self-discovery. In my wrapped up books and ribboned letters is a manila envelope, sealed with wax, with no words on it whatsoever. It was bundled up with the letters from Ric and has had massive high status anxiety for me. Since I sealed it, it must have been both important and something I needed to protect myself from. I’ve idly fingered it each week in counselling wondering if now is the time to open it, but no – there are other things to read first. It’s attained a mythical, terrifying status in my mind.
Tonight I finished reading the last of the diary entries and letters. The one I’d written to Dad shocked me so much I though, “fuck it – what could be worse than this?” There were no letters left – at worst it would be a copy of the letter to Dad, or from Ric, or the photographs of him (more on this later). So I tore it open… extracted the contents… and… it has nothing at all to do with Ric or abuse. It’s just a letter of apology from me to my girlfriend, Miss L, back in 1994 when I’d done something stupid and felt horrible about it. It’s totally innocuous. The Me now can’t even imagine why I sealed it up. Still less why I sealed up two draft letters and the final typed letter… (yeah I know). Maybe I never sent it. I don’t care. It was hilarious – I’ve never felt so silly and relieved and happy. It was nothing! Nothing! All I needed to do was write a single word on it and put it in the right bundle of letters.
So my lesson – to you – is to label stuff. Never imagine that you’ll just remember what it is. What was important to You of 18 years ago might not be important to You.
Fuckin’ tit.
Photographs. I strongly recall cutting Ric out of a whole bunch of photographs and removing them from albums. I expected them to be in this bundle of stuff, but they’re not. What I’ve probably done (and I’ll need to check), is separate them in their own sealed envelope, but left that in the giant box of photos. because they’re photographs you see – so they couldn’t possibly be anywhere else. That would be a category error, and that would be awful. For fuck’s sake.
Well it’s been a bastard few weeks, comprising both extremes of fun and misery. Excellent combination. These poems are all from a while ago – possibly even the first half of this year, and yet they call to me fresh and relevant from the rosebed of life.
They tread once more my familiar themes of loathing stupidity and the desperate failings of others to communicate either elegantly or well.
I recently read some more Shankanalia out at Pub Poetry and was thrilled to find they were both terrifying and amusing.
Internal Distemper
Oh hello there
You must be a feeling
Come and find a place
To be
In a space
On my face.
I don’t know you well
But you feel
Right about
Here.
Punctuality is Next to Accuracy
Starts at 9.30.
Starts at 9.30!
Be on time,
Get there early,
Don’t be late.
9.15:
It’s a 9.30 meet for a ten o’clock start.
Motherfuckers.
My sleep.
Brevity, An Impossible Feat
Indeed,
To summarise –
That is,
Condense our verbosity.
To briefly compress,
With short words.
I think you’ll find
The answer – we’re out of time.
Aneurysm By The Slide
I understand.
I do,
Oh god I do.
Don’t you have a handout?
Please.
I can’t take it:
PowerPoint doom,
Collapsing cogitation,
Death brain…
Oh I weep.
Quick Witted Fuckwit
My brain is dying.
The speed of your discourse
Like mind treacle
Wading through the slovenly
Progress of words-
Time too short;
Faster please.
Eleven AM
Fist chasing madman
Looped fist looping
Frenzy of fisted blur
Every throw misses
Circular punches
Maybe not drink so early
In the day?
Ask and You Shall Receive
If you didn’t want it
You shouldn’t have asked
For it.
What you got
Is what you needed.
You don’t know
How much I need to gut you-
Extract it from the source.
This is the fourth part of a story – read Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 first (if you want).
Cedric leads me down more stairs into the restaurant. It feels like a refuge of the past – its sunken floor is pitted with pools and miniature waterfalls. A waiter leads us courteously across stepping stones. I cannot resist giving Cedric a quizzical smile: this is not the sort of place either of us have ever haunted. The waiter deposits us at our pavilion where two men wait for us. One is the inspector from years ago, I sigh inwardly. The other man is large and perhaps in his twenties. I find him immediately aggravating.
“Old neutrals are new friends now,” Cedric offers as we take our seats, “you remember Clement.” I barely notice him. Cedric and Clement accept their drinks from the attentive but unobtrusive waiter and settle back on the other side of the table. I stare at the other man. There’s something in him I recognise. He stammers, makes some attempt at conversation. Then he finally meets my eyes and I know what he is, and why Cedric wanted me to meet him.
~
The second my eyes met hers the restaurant seemed to fall away. I’d been here with the inspector for perhaps half an hour, chatting quietly and enjoying my beer. When they arrived I felt my heart stir and I knew they were Clement’s guests. They approached us with a sense of inevitability. An older man, and a slightly younger woman. At first I thought she was old because of how she dressed, then young when she sat down, quickly and sullen. She sat in silence while the other man greeted the inspector.
The woman just stared at me, without a hint of feeling. Her eyes bored into me. I try to strike up a conversation but she totally ignores me. The waiter lays the table between our moments of awkwardness and leaves. The inspector and the man in the hat have arranged themselves on the other side of the table and are just watching us. Me. I’m sitting right next to the strange woman. It makes me nervous. The edge of the world shudders.
That’s when I notice that the water around our pavilion is receding from us and the air feels darker and heavier. I look into her eyes and they’re like black holes – the darkness in them devouring the skin around her eyes. Tendrils of night stream out of her face. I lurch backwards in alarm as black cracks striate her face and clothes. I seize the knife from the table and slam it into her chest. She screams, and doesn’t stop screaming.
The skin in her face unravels becoming just one terrible mouth lined with teeth all the way down the back of her throat – the teeth hum at me hungrily. I rip the knife back out and plunge it in again as she bucks and twists in my grip. She gets too hot to hold down, the fires within pierce her smouldering flesh and she bursts into a flaming corpse. She won’t stop screaming, I can feel it tearing at my mind.
The restaurant is gone, fallen into the darkness that has enveloped us, it is just me and the screaming. With a brutal and impossible contortion of her spine her back rotates to face me and splits; a black carapace ridged with blue and red spines forces its way out of her burned flesh and swells in size. Her limbs stretch, crack and reform into a nightmarish crab-like thing that becomes enormous, looming over me dripping ichor and shaking with hatred.
With one claw it tears the roof away and the gloom clears a little – we’re standing on the roof of an old church. The monster that the woman has become squats with its hind legs gripping the steeple, its fore-claws and mandibles still shriek the horrors of the world at me. I dive under it and jab upwards with the knife again, under the jaw where I can reach. The creature involutes itself impossibly, its jaws opening underneath me. I fall down into the night.
~
The restaurant is quiet save for the distant chatter of other diners. I take a small sip of water and glance at my boss. He raises his eyebrow. I straighten the dinner service. “Good instincts,” I say. The man next to me is shiny with sweat, eyes wide and shaking. I hand him his knife back. He looks terrified, justly. “Don’t worry,” I say, “you get to choose”. The dark-faced man nods. “He’ll do,” I say.
I left the city that same night, the same way I came in. It feels like the last time. I don’t think there will be anything to come back for. One more point of force inside the city won’t help it now. Together, perhaps, we can stop anything getting out when the city finally does die. Until then, I’ll be here. Watching.
Gaargh, this Saturday’s a proper sack o’ maritime joy!
Derby Speaker’s Corner
First of all I’ll be rising with unusual earlitude to voyage to that renowned place o’ culture and free babble – Derby. I’ll one o’ a gaggle of speakers inauguratin’ the rather damp looking corner (see below). The event starts at 11am (ahar…) and ye cap’n’s tellin’ me least fish-loving and innuendo-laden tales to the fine folks gathered thereabouts at 12.20. I’ll be a-yarnin’ The Dancing Adventure and The Flock of Fear.
11.00-11.10 Cllr Ranjit Banwait Opening of Derby’s Speaker’s Corner
11.10-11.20 Louise Third Nottingham Speaker’s Corner
11.20-11.30 Neil White Singer/songwriter
11.30-11.40 Tony Bigissue Peppiatt Comedian
11.40-11.50 Peter Bradley Speakers Corners
11.50-12.00 1623 Theatre Company Supernatural Shakespeare
12.00-12.10 Mik Scarlet Beauty Through Damage
12.10-12.20 Delicata Singer/songwriter
12.20.12.30 Captain Pigheart Poetry and short stories
12.30-12.40 Matt from Karl and the Marx Brothers Singer/songwriter
Oxjam Beeston Takeover 2012
Shortly after that I’ll be turnin’ me literary ship Beeston-wards once more for an afternoon o’ comic marvels. Me good mate and fellow MissImp improviser Nick Parkhouse is compereing an afternoon of fundraising comedy at Latino’s Restaurant in Beeston. In truth tis a blinder of a show. I’ll be yarn-spinning once more (with the usual degree of merwenchery since we’re safely ensconced indoors), and then takin’ up the spontaneous comedy arms with me MissImp comrades for an hour of bemusing buffoonery.
Oxjam Beeston Takeover– Saturday 20th October 3pm, Latinos Restaurant, Beeston. There’s a billion other things going on all day which are accessible for a mere £5 for the whole cursed shebang.
I feel like I’ve had a quiet week in my own mind. I am quite aware that Ric has not been present in my thoughts much, and when he has, he’s slid off my mind and away. Curious. I wonder if it’s partly to do with getting through all of the diary entries and letters I have. There’s nothing left to surprise me – it’s all there. With the exception of photographs – which I still need to seek out and deal with. So I have control of all that information; master of my own data. There are no other sources of information about what happened to me. Some will be held by a few other adults, but it won’t be about me. That’s also something I’ve come to realise and believe – this shit is about me. There’s lots of possible information about other people, but I can’t take that into me and take responsibility for it -it would be endless and I can’t do anything with it. Of course, the other person who knows something about what happened is Ric. I don’t want his mind in mine – I don’t think I’d understand it and that’s all about him, not me. We’re no responsible for the actions of others, or for their feelings. So fuck that. The only way I want contact with his mind is when stepping over the puddle. So anger is appropriately placed again: good. I’m not going to say anything daft like I feel that I’m fixed, but I’m a pragmatic sort of person (not practical, never practical…) and I do believe that personality and mind is transient; we are who we are now and we leave behind us a series of shadows and half-forgotten reflections. I’m not the person I was. In a very real way those things didn’t happen to me, but I do remember them. I’ve come to realise that it’s remembering the things and how that made me feel (the feeling of memory) that has obsessed me for so long, at least as much as the events themselves. I’m changing – into the person who remembers feeling hurt by memories, not the person in pain or the person who remembered and felt pain because of it. I’m now aware of phrases that I’ve only said out loud before, and repeated to myself, somethimes incredulously, sometimes convincingly. It wasn’t my fault. I know I say this a lot, but it takes repetition and understanding to insert a belief and idea so contrary to what I have lived with inside for so long. Paradigmatic shifts ain’t easy. It feels more, I don’t know, structural now. Like something I know, something I can accept. It shatters the world. I also know that the choices that I thought I made weren’t choices; at best I made the least worst choices that would enable me to survive. They were’t free decisions. These are good things to know. It feels… fragile though. While this crap has been mostly out of my head this week I’ve been feeling that awful grinding tension in my stomach instead. So it’s possible that I’ve had a mental breakthrough and bumped it down to the emotional level. I’ve had it for a few weeks and I don’t really know why. I associate it with being nervous about the future. Not future with a capital F, just the awareness that something has been planned and I need to attend to it. Going somewhere for work, or for fun – a decision that needs to be made, knowing that I need to leave work at x time to be somewhere. All of these cause me some measure of physical pain. I’m not a good planner. I was flicking back through my blog posts in advance of counselling tonight (it’s a good habit, allows me some view of progress and reminds me of what I’ve forgotten. Since the issue of what we forget is so fucking central to my experience it’s important to review, to remember – to know that the record is here and that it’s safe, and useful to go into.) and noted an entry from a few months ago where I was totally wracked with guilt and numb horror at the prospect of even planning what to do for my birthday. Sometimes it’s like that – I just find myself unable to visualise the future, to juggle the concept of choice. That sounds really fucked up. On reflection, it’s probably why we haven’t been on holiday for years and our house still needs to be plastered. Sad chuckle. At best I’m maybe a month ahead. The offer of a night at Dad’s over Christmas actually wracked me for days before I could bring myself to consider it seriously. I’ve developed an awful habit of deferring decisions so late that the decision is taken out of my hands and an event is now in the past, so of course we can’t go. It’s an enormous relief when it reaches the point of being determined. Do I fear choice? Do I fear the future – or a future that I influence? I feel that much of my life has been inevitable. I’ve never subscribed to a genuine philosophy of free will. We’re so obviously the products of decisions made years ago that it strikes me as naive to imagine that we have control. Even wanting to make x decision is the product of a complex chain of causes and effects; it’s the choice we want to make because of who we are. That doesn’t mean we don’t have the illusion of control and choice however. This will all be very counter-intuitive and self-deprecating and logically inconsistent. I realise that; I’m thrashing it out for myself. The last time I recall feeling genuinely positive about the future was at the start of my A-Levels (it is probably no shocking note to say that this was just after Ric had moved to Amsterdam and I was free, albeit temporarily) but after that it was all… easy? University was both obvious and inevitable for someone who could do exams. It was crucially, easier than not going to university – it involved less choice and struggle than doing anything else. The rest of my life has followed suit. Apart from that one first, fuck-awful job after university, I fell into temping and was offered an opportunity to go permanent. With a bit of pressure from (some incredibly supportive) line managers I accepted the various enhancements and changes to my role that were offered to me. We got our house through risk of losing our tenancy and doing the easiest thing – buying from our landlady. Since then, I don’t know – maybe I’m being too harsh on myself, but we’ve only done things to the house when the opportunity arose rather than planning to do it. I feel as if I haven’t sought anything out – just accepted what was offered. I don’t think it’s always felt like that though. I do recall the terrifying yawning sensation of grasping possibility though – once when I was maybe 14 I imagined becoming a boxer (I don’t really know why; if you know me you’ll recognise that it’s implausible at best) and being strong and successful as such. I felt hollow and tingled with the notion. I think I’ve felt it since, though I may be imagining it. It feels a lot like that internal tension or at least I think of them the same way – something to be avoided. Now that I’m thinking about it properly, it’s the same sensation I’ve felt when I’ve found something that I could be good at – really good at. And the yawning sensation has sent me running the other way. That’s probably a good chunk of confirmation bias; since I associate the sensation with feeling stressed. So I say yes to things that are offered, because it’s easier that way (and often beneficial), but demur and decline only when I actually don’t like the thing offered (roller-coasters for example, which I hate) or when I’m putting someone else’s preferences ahead of my own. But I don’t reach for things. That’s not always bad, but it’s not really making choices is it? In counselling today we wondered if that’s an aspect of taking the easy choice, the safe(r) choice. It worked once, got me home safely, and in fairness rarely leads to anything awful… but it has perhaps become ingrained. It’s like improv: I accept the scenario, I go along with it. I don’t want to get hurt… if I say yes I won’t get hurt, or not hurt too badly. If I say no, there might be consequences. If I decide I want something, not just that I’m content to accept what is offered. What then? Do I do what I want or just what I like, or what won’t hurt me? Can I tell the difference? I am good at accepting opportunities, because it’s easier, and I end up with things that I like. But they’re not necessarily the same as the things that I want. Have I ever thought about what I want? What I really really want? (Oh for a zig-a-zig-ah.) Have I ever seized something that wasn’t offered? That’s not really making a choice. I can’t tell if it’s because the possible consequences concern me – or that I can’t visualise a different world. I am allowed to choose, to have preferences – aren’t I? I’m so used to being defined by hiding from my thoughts and memories, a life so structured to keep them out, that change seems inconceivable. Structure though, has its place. I devolve into chaotic identikit time with nothing in it, no action, no joy except for that which arises on its own. I’ve created structure and schedule that makes me happy – Tuesdays climbing, Thursdays improv. Without planning them in I just won’t do them, and then I won’t be happy. It seems silly, to say that I’m happy because I’ve scheduled it in, but I recognise that when I have no form to my life it just passes and I recollect nothing from it and achieve little. The bedtime and basic timetable that I got from the sleep therapy CBT earlier this year has been incredibly useful, even if it’s slipped a little. It works for me. Otherwise I end up with the totally shapeless life at university where nothing mattered and I had no motivation to get anything done. I’ve implemented things that make me happy, and give me space to be happy in the unstructured time. Maybe I could extend that into the future. While I’ve never been good at the future I’ve always been pragmatic about my actions – I’ve accepted offers that brought me security and stability. I shouldn’t reject those out of hand. Having a home and reliable income (an absolute miracle I realise) has been a consistently good thing, if largely accidental. Even with self-harming I reasoned my way out of it – I didn’t want to kill myself because there is always difference out there, what future fell upon me was at least interesting and different. Self harm was a cry for help, but I realised that I wasn’t ready to accept that help, and that the harm I’d need to wreak upon myself to defeat my fears and actually be noticed would be so great that I’d never be free of it I think I knew that my emotional scars might one day be passed, but if I had the scars then I’d always have to see them, and explain them. So the cuts are off the wrist, nowhere they’d be seen by accident and gratefully minimal (the blessings of youthful recovery). Being aware of the present in fear of the past has kept me safe, but it allowed me no space to look to the future. If I’m not afraid any more maybe I can look to the future. I’d like to choose my future. I just don’t know, or didn’t know, that I can know what I want.
Yup, successfully distracted by life and the usual tedium of blundering through work. Still… we’ve had another improv show which featured the erotic properties of vegetable beasts. It made me happy. So – what before that? Well, Speaker’s Corner Derby went well – more about that on Tuesday. We finally recorded another podcast discussing improv and comedy with MissImp (you can enjoy that here), hopefully we’ll hit a regular schedule soon.
I finally finished Twinned With Evil. I was sure it was going to be a three parter. Ho hum. I know it takes a slightly odd turn at the end when perspective shifts to another character, but it seemed to be the only way to go. In part I think it’s due to the story’s origins as a quite disturbing dream. I’ve remained pretty faithful to the nightmare and I do find it difficult to deviate from a reality I’ve already experience. The problem is always adding meaning and context to the weird crap that sneaks up on us at night. During the dream those inconsistencies and menace already feel loaded with meaning – sometimes it evaporates on waking and has to be re-imagined (not like a Tim Burton film). I think it went alright. I’ve had another odd dream and am in the process of rendering that into fiction too.
This week’s scribbles
Tuesday: Derby Speaker’s Corner -some of the press and people involved in the opening on Saturday 20th October, and a nice video.
Wednesday: Re-posting of some fearsome Hallowe’en Pirate Tales
Thursday: The Tusky Adventure. A return to pirate adventures!
I was kindly invited to help open Derby’s Speaker’s Corner on Saturday 20th October and tell a few of me tales in public. I’ve no particular politics, but spreading love between pirates and merfolk is always important. Twas a grand event all round, with a range of charming and interesting speakers and an appreciative crowd of folk. I was born in Derby so it was nice to do something for the city. With luck the Corner will be used by radicals, crazies, story tellers and entirely ordinary people. Many thanks to Derby Live for supporting and organising the event There’s been a bit of press, so there’s a few photos below and a video for you to peek at.
Ahar! Tis likely ye’ll be wallowing in a surfeit of sugar and approaching a life-threatening coma. Enjoy then these tales of fear on the high seas (and nearby)!
The Gelatinous Adventure
A tale of nightmarish were-creatures:
Ye clouds clustered about ye swollen moon, like octopi menacin’ an expectin’ merwench (gaargh, memories…). Twere an ill omen, for ye lunar cycle breeds anxiety ‘mongst even the saltiest seamen, who prefer to be docked and drunk midst full moon. But we’d no chance of makin’ land fall for we’d lost both map and anchor in a bet over who were the most superstitious: ourselves or the crypto-astrological whalers of Gullible’s island.Read more…
The Terrified Adventure
The crew are whipped through time to a time that time forgot, a time o’ brutish reptiles:
We were, naturally enough, a-drink and adrift in a mysterious fug. Twas cloying and clung to me beard. From the densest o’ the fog came a dull roar and a twinklin’ sound such as ye might associate with frozen fairies tumblin’ to a floor o’ tiles. I made to alter our course but me peg leg’d been wedged in ye wheel as part of a curious game. We’d no choice but to boldly plunge deeper into the growling smog. Bolts of pink lightning sizzled into the seas about us. Read more…
The Triffic Adventure
In tribute to The Day of The Triffidswe’re attacked by devil plants from beyond the stars or surf:
Gaargh, I awoke from a night o’ disturbin’ dreams. We’d been swiggin’ vodka for a change, since takin’ it off Danish merchants just after dawn. Me final memory o’ that night were haulin’ Billy aboard after ‘e leapt from the bow to catch a shootin’ star. Yarr, all night the sky’d been full o’ light streakin’ down as if aimin’ for the giant crabs crawlin’ across ye sea-bed. ‘Twere pretty, like a rainbow on fire, though technically it boded ill for us all. Read more…
The Orthodontic Odyssey
Wizards, magic and miniature pirates in a tale of ensorceled teeth:
Gaargh, once more I were bound against me will. This time it were not, strictly speakin’, me own fault. Ye see I’d fallen for the beauteous but eccentric Discombobula Dentata, Queen o’ the tiny island o’ Munt.
Of course, she were not aware of me adorin’ until I broke into her bedroom and offered her me hand. Yaarr, she took it, along with me teeth. Them she returned these to me mouth after sowin’ each tooth in the volcanic earth o’ her magical realm. There they gained the power to sprout into dinky homunculi – little versions of meself with twice the cursing. In reciprocative devotion I were to slay her nemesis, the wizard of Ars’Hole; bein’ young and on pain o’ death I agreed. Read more…
The Grim Bastard, our noble ship, seemed bound for a sad landing. We saw the murderous water from way off, but like a grotesque and many breasted tramp it was unavoidable. We stared, gape-wise at the mouth until The Grim Bastard ground into the vicious lumps of ice that littered the sea like buboes on a whore-master’s buttocks. Reluctantly we debarked from the wreckage of our vessel, and shambled onto the shifting sheets of ice that made up our makeshift landfall.
Me eye was captivated once again, for across the grimy whiteness appeared a man. He strode across the ice towards us in slight sliding hops. As he slid down the nearest ‘berg I noted that his feet were… oddly shaped. Twas as he picked himself up that I realised his feet were shod in a pair of baby harp seals. They blinked at me. I felt I ought to offer a wink in return. The man, girt in the slippery mammal slippers grinned of a sudden and let loose with a flurry o’ Frenchish hooting. I’ve a smattering of Grenouille and I discerned from his barbarous exposition that he hailed from the Canadish lands, though sadly from the wrong colony.
The fellow had apparently been enagin’ in the habitual slaughter of innocent and cute creatures to which his people are predisposed and had grown stranded when he mistook a pygmy walrus for a baby seal. The beast had reared and shown its frightful tusks, then with speed and alcacrity, plunged ’em into the surprised Canadian’s thigh. He kicked the brute to a still silence and bled his way across the packed ice and weed to our stranded ship.
His tale of woe twanged an harmonious chord in me black heart – many’s the time I’ve been bested by a seemingly vulnerable creature. I strive to overcome me innate sensitivity and bludgeon the thing without thinking. I hauled him aboard our forlorn ship. Gunther slathered some offensive unguent on his stab wounds and deposited him in me cabin.
Vincent de Vache-Gauche was the fellow’s name and we caroused into the night, our drinking punctuated by the curses of a thousand tongues and cries of “huzzah”. We attained five bells in the morning through continuous imbation of rum and the coffee brewed (in an increasingly incompetent manner) by Monty McBuboe. Twas fortuitous that we’d intoxicated ourselves in such a manner, for it meant that we were awake to hear the watch be slaughtered at their posts. That in itself was not the luckish part – twas in truth an upset to witness their bubbled shrieks and gasps of horror, never mind the thumps and dragging of their bodies about the deck.
Twas only when we burst from the cabin, swords bared and leanin’ on one another for balance, that we discovered the cause of the awful sounds (which troubled me for some days and ruined quite a number of naps) – the corpses of me men were being raced back and forth across the deck by a pair of bull walruses like a pair of tug-along toy ships, their tusks firmly stuck in the ribs of those poor men.
At our approach the beasts attempted still further exertions to free their penetrative teeth, but to no avail. For though they raised themselves onto their muscular hindquarters and shook their heads to cast off their burdens, it seemed more some morbid puppet show, to which their roaring chorus added but an element of greater grotesquerie. We spared little time, beyond that of considering the artistic merit of their marionetted massacre. Vache-Gauche and I plunged our sabres into their thick neck fat and gently persuaded the swimmish man-beasts to release me mates.
Normally I’d have laid the blame at our visitor’s feet but we’d spent the night a-frenzied in caffeinated liquor. Instead I railed at the stars, who were most certainly culpable of being there and failing to intervene. Damn them pointy pricks o’ light what puncture that veil of night with their promise o’ foreign dawn that never comes to brighten our fates. By that disingenous starlight I spotted a lumbering presence without the vessel. We rushed to the rail and saw, in the astral gloom a thousand shapes, humping their graceless way across the ice. When the walruses realised they were spotted they let loose with a deep hoon of rage, reminiscent of one o’ Hamish McMuffin’s intestinal exploits.
Twas to be a hideous battle of blades and blubber. I lost count of the tubby legless manimals I ran through, the tusks I turned away and rammed into the wood of me deck, before decapitating the beast with me shiny blade. Wave after wave they came at us, their flesh rippling with the effort. If it were not for their numbers their very ineptitude at attack would have doomed them all. They ran as if humping jelly, truly they are better in the water. Twas almost cruel to run ’em through. Vincent and I pierced, poked and prodded back to back with a fury born o’ inebriation. And yet they mobbed us. In truth, twas in fact the violence o’ their onslaught that ensured our victory. For the constant pounding of their flubber against The Grim Bastard’s waist eventually shunted her from the frosty clutches of the iceberg.
The few monstrous mercows that remained on board we slew; the rest flounced at us in their watery way, too far below the rail to threaten us. We left a wake of obese corpses behind us into which killer whales plunged like babes drowning for apple bobbing. The action ceased and we found ourselves giggling hysterically. Twas clearly time for another coffee, and perhaps a dance with these curiously lady-like sea beasts, well, if ye squint and drink a great deal they’re not at unappealing. Twas an unusual voyage and one I must confess is a haze of regret and hangover. Vincent de Vache-Gauche seemed a promising crew member and we allocated him the task of identifying prospective wenchery. He’s proven partially successful.
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I don’t know if it’s a combination of increased work stress and other personal stuff, but I’m enjoying waves of rage, breaking across my heart and mind like a bloody tide. Perhaps it’s just that so few people out there (in my cynical moments) appear to offer any real worth. Not like you beautiful internet people, oh the delights you inflict upon my soul!
Tuesday: Twinned With Evil – part 2. The ruined city returns – this time, a look at its past.
grand angle once ye take the broken tech into account and that the music was all done behind the camera. Gaargh. I prefer wood. So I gots to sort that out. Here be a nice snapshot of ye captain (to the right – tis I in the hat). Below ye may find an action shot of me beloved bosom buddies 
A relatively quiet week for me – much appreciated. It ended with the all too brief return of a friend from Texas (and fine drinks in the pub), and then a splendid improv comedy show at 
Tuesday: Shankaphone – Shoving Angry Poetry in Your Aural Canal – some more charming and blissfully short tweets of poems inspired by my life
Well it’s been a bastard few weeks, comprising both extremes of fun and misery. Excellent combination. These poems are all from a while ago – possibly even the first half of this year, and yet they call to me fresh and relevant from the rosebed of life.
Tuesday: Derby Speaker’s Corner -some of the press and people involved in the opening on Saturday 20th October, and a nice video.
Ahar! Tis likely ye’ll be wallowing in a surfeit of sugar and approaching a life-threatening coma. Enjoy then these tales of fear on the high seas (and nearby)!
The Grim Bastard, our noble ship, seemed bound for a sad landing. We saw the murderous water from way off, but like a grotesque and many breasted tramp it was unavoidable. We stared, gape-wise at the mouth until The Grim Bastard ground into the vicious lumps of ice that littered the sea like buboes on a whore-master’s buttocks. Reluctantly we debarked from the wreckage of our vessel, and shambled onto the shifting sheets of ice that made up our makeshift landfall.