Crybaby Blues, or, Clear Glass Pane

[bennie2]

Of late, I've been drinking a lot more than I have in recent years. What's changed? I don't know. People around me seem to be pairing up, moving on, growing up, living a real life... It could be that. It could be that I feel magnificently alone now, whereas, before, I used to just feel that I was on my own. The difference being that now it seems like less of a choice. No longer a loner, merely the lonely. It really does make the weekend sail past a lot easier if I'm slightly toasted.

It's only recently struck me how deeply depressing Pulp's Different Class actually is! I took a wee wander down to the convenience shop on my street, listening to Live Bed Show from Different Class, to buy some cheap booze - two bottles of sickly sweet cider. Let's get fucked up and sing the songs of our youth! He says! I also bought some strawberry lip salve (strawberry was all they had) because the cold frost wind has dried and cracked my lips.

Walking out of the shop with bag in hand I looked up, the sky, so clear, distant, faded. Such a winter-faded blue with edges of falling, failing sun. Looking at this is usually such a joy... now it just looks like something I can never touch, like a smooth, sculpted marble god behind a red rope of velvet and a sign saying, "do not touch", and I think, well, where's the fun in that! Is all art just a tease? And what of nature anyway? Isn't it just a tease? You can have all of this... if you develop a 300 mile reach... I trudged on up the road.

As I write this I turned the music off. It's playing on some chord in my head too much and the ringing of those notes is shaking my retina...

Anyway, I've been drinking a lot more than I used to drink. Last night I took 10 codeine pills (30mg x 10 = warm blanket of smiles falling all around my flesh). Tonight we'll drink it away and fall asleep watching something soft and warming on DVD. My head tonight says Garden State but who knows?! It could be Eternal Sunshine... (which I do think of as a "heartwarming" film), Almost Famous, Amelie...

When I was in high school, aged 15 or 16 (around about the same time of Pulp, Blur, Shed Seven etc... britpop made us all think we could do something special even though we were working class scum with holes in our jeans) one of the kids from this "gang" of people I'd known since beginning primary school, aged 5, asked if I'd like to come out with them on Friday night. They were going to Garfields and apparently it was "really easy to get in... you don't even NEED fake ID...". I turned down the offer... I wonder if that was the turning point in my "social" career. Since then I've always sort of existed outside of everyone and everything around me. I know we all do but... I've always felt a continual sheet of glass running alongside me and the years; I've seen and heard and laughed but I've never touched or really smelt any of it. Interestingly, any girl I've ever been with has always been separated from me by the same glass sheet. I was going through the motions and felt nothing at all except mild embarrassment about the situation (other than one semi-failed "thing" I've only ever been with girls for one night. I'm not bragging, far from it, I just want to say that I've never really gotten to know a "her" or a him for that matter...)

I'm still unsure about all of this. I'm 20 fucking 9. You'd think I'd have developed some answers by now! I feel sick from the spinning of the earth, spinning of my head and the spinning of the stories that I see, read and hear around me. These are stories about the people on the other side of that glass sheet. I don't think I have the words for the stories on my side of the sheet. My vision of Blake currently eludes me and my voice feels like someone else's.

If I had to say only the things I genuinely believed
my mouth would fall silent forever.

[Lightning Rod]

why does this remind me of The Catcher in the Rye?

Is there a reasonable mixture of Holden Caulfield and James Joyce? Perhaps.

but as usual, your flow is like mulled mead, bennie

break the glass

[Arcadia]

Let's get fucked up and sing the songs of our youth! yeah, they are good but they are not forever enough!! a rock?

[bennie2]

thank you, lr. catcher in the rye... naive sweetness perhaps?

You've likened some of my stuff to Joyce before. I have to say... I like the comparison, even though, after the first time you said this to me I decided to "up" joyce in my reading list and bought a copy of Ulysses, which I have yet to read. I started to read it but didn't "get" the language and style until 100 or so pages in, then I got fed up and frustrated with it. I'll give it some more time, sometime.

thank you for the compliments though. mulled mead. I guess that's a compliment?

get fucked up and sing, arcadia! let the morning after worry about itself!

[mtmynd]

a good piece o' writing, bennie. i enjoyed your pain and frustration... wait! that didn't sound quite right. i enjoyed reading and sympathized with the fact that you're 29 and lonely as a son of a bitch.

re: 1st return of saturn. we all go thru it if we live thru it.

[Arcadia]

gracias for the rock, bennie!!!!! I´ll follow your advice and listen to the jazmins in the streets!!!

[SmileGRL]

raw...i enjoyed the sun-being-out-of-reach tease

& i wish you love & connectedness...

[goldenmyst]

Bennie, you put to words what I've felt all my life. You said it better than I ever could. I don't drink but I take a sleeping pills just to find rest. Your creative spirit thrives in the face of your loneliness. This contemplation is superb. Your prose flows excellently.

John