A nice evening turned into a difficult night, with interrupted sleep and emotions like skidding along black ice in the dark.  I think I got to sleep around 2am, finally by cramming myself into a corner of the room where I could lie against the drywall for cooling purposes.  I woke up around six, and I don’t remember what I was dreaming but I’d finally started to enjoy being asleep, and all of a sudden I had to blow my nose and before I knew it I was sitting upright in this room again.

I won’t exhaustingly describe just how bad I felt when I became awake, but it really was bad. Probably best to say simply that I’ve felt in danger for some time of utterly stalling on my project and/or being dumped and/or doing something rash to myself.  There are lots of ways in which my mind shits all over me in response to any one of those anxieties, but the details are labyrinthine, not very interesting, and largely meaningless outside my fucked-up imagination, so I won’t, but I’ve been deathly tired of feeling punished.

What followed was useful.  I’d like to think of it as a little bit of a breakthrough.

For a while since I got back from the UK in October, I’ve been keeping an emotional journal on my computer.  The act of writing makes it easier to be honest.  I’ve never got the hang of talking to people, and left to my own devices I prefer to avoid it, and when forced into it I’ve noticed I have a disturbing tendency to lie, in small ways, almost like I’m trying to reassure myself of something – precisely what, I don’t understand.  I often have a terribly hard time of understanding how I feel at any one point in time.  Writing seems to help me understand.  So I write.

Lacking any other idea of what to do, I got up and started writing in my journal at 6:20am.  There are a few paragraphs – “My imagination is a bastard.  I wish I could give it a vasectomy.” should be enough to give you an impression – and then right at the end, I typed: God, do I feel lonely and worthless.

I got up.  I think I went to the toilet.  I came back, feeling something still worrying at my brain, something I’d left out, and started writing again at 6:45am: realising that my entire life, I’ve felt two things as universal constants: loneliness and worthlessness.  They’re just there, like gravity.

The breakthrough is noticing that these things have behaved like constants.  I mean, they may end, gradually, and by all means let’s hope so, but to think, to have thought, that one day they would just end and be over and cured – well, I can see how I liked thinking that, especially when a boy was hypothetically involved, who doesn’t like the idea of being redeemed? – but it sets me up for some dreadful disappointments.  Say, for instance, when I make the biggest change to my living circumstances I’m ever likely to make, and later notice that I remain fully capable of being a shit, or feeling needy, or waking up and wishing I hadn’t.

If I choose to believe that these feelings of loneliness and worthlessness are constants, like gravity, I can limit some of the damage they do to me.  Because gravity isn’t my fault.  Because I can’t blame anyone else for its persistence in pulling things towards the centre of the earth, even after I’ve sold my guitars and given up my home and my job and many of my excuses.  Because I can’t argue that gravity shouldn’t apply to me, and I can’t expect that it will ever go away and leave me alone.

This isn’t the answer to anything, it’s not the truth and the light, and it’s such a recent discovery that I don’t know what all of its implications are yet, but if it means that I treat the people in my life, including myself, with more generosity and kindness, I’m all for it.  Perhaps I’ve arrived at this idea many times before, and will arrive at it many times again, each time failing to remember that I have decided to believe this before.  I confess I feel a little haunted by this possibility, which is why I’m writing this here rather than on my hard drive or in a notebook.  But I’ve written enough now.

When I shower, which is every morning and occasionally in the evenings too, I like to hold my head and especially my face directly under the shower head as the spray rushes all over my hair and skin, and into my ears and eyes, and imagine that I’m something like a fish in a limitless deep. Most likely in the Atlantic Ocean, which I’ve had my differences with in the past. I’m something like a fish so I don’t have to think about any of that, although afterward I’m pleasured by the idea of reconciliation. But while I’m beneath the shower there is water everywhere, above and below, and I have a new shape or no shape at all, which is what I’ve always wanted.

“He slept with the radio, he talked to the radio, he disagreed with the radio. He believed in the four-way radio land.

“He believed he’d never find this land, so he reconciled himself to listening to it only. He believed he’d been banned from the radio land, and was doomed to prowl the airwaves forever, seeking some magical channel that would reinstate him to his long-lost heritage.”

– Sam Shepard. As read by Risé Cale on “Risé, Sam, & Rimsky-Korsakov”, from John Cale’s Music For A New Society

Of the records I have at home I realised I was looking forward in particular to listening to Heroes and to Low, neither of them exactly “The Green, Green Grass Of Home”.  As it happens I didn’t get to do either, with the family stereo’s turntable out of commission.  But otherwise, while I’ve been in transit I’ve been listening to Scary Monsters and to 1. Outside, for heaven’s sake, and bits and blobs I have otherwise (“TVC 15″, “Golden Years”, “The Loneliest Guy”). And I’ve felt thirsty ear-water in my mouth thinking about side two of Low, or about the German-language recording of “Heroes”, which I’ve never heard but which in my imagination sounds unspeakably demented, or about “Wild Is The Wind”.  And when I hear him do that shuddery repertory thing he does that sounds like a combination of John Hurt and a Hammond organ, god, it does something for me.

One evening last week I sat up into the early morning working on part of my project while listening to “Ashes To Ashes” over and over again and getting progressively more amazed by what an intricate, self-supporting, nourishing labyrinth of a song it is.  Like, how inhuman the drumming is, or how improbable it is that a song so desolate should have a groove (thank the bass player), or how long I’ve been alive and listening to this song (about 22 years, by my estimate, which seems ridiculous), or how wonderfully precarious both the melody and the words are (“I’VE LOVED ALL I’VE NEEDED / LOVE: SORDID DETAILS FOLLOWING”, as bleak as anything from The United States Of America or The Carpenters, fo’ sho’).  Until I was too tired to keep my eyes open, and fell asleep with it playing on my headphones.

And then, this evening, after a big row with him that’s now subsided and been appeased and made up, I’m servicing my dependency, reading about this eminently unreliable and intermittently ridiculous bastard David Bowie, who had most of the ideas I ever wanted to have about twenty years before I had any say in the matter, on this excellent blog, and I read this quote from poor brilliant unhappy dead Ian McDonald, years before I ever came about:

Uprooted from his native context in the cultural artifice of Europe, isolated in a largely unironic and cultureless alien land, Bowie was forced back on himself, a self he didn’t much like.

(2004) THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING THE DARKNESS

For the New Musical Express.  Cut substantially from the original 32,000-word submission, this finally appeared on pages 15, 16, 18 and 34 (beside a Jamster advert) of the 17th July printing.  All references to reification and abdominal surgery removed.  Fully restored in the 2012 collection, IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER, IT HASN’T HAPPENED YET (q.v.).

(2010) A REFUTATION OF RICHARD CURTIS’ LOVE ACTUALLY

Six years in preparation, REFUTATION OF RICHARD CURTIS is Kedges’ minutely-detailed, chronologically-ordered of every last objectionable thing about Richard Curtis’ 2003 romantic comedy LOVE ACTUALLY.  The level of contempt sustained throughout its 566 pages (illustrated at times with diagrams in the author’s own hand).  It includes a number of appendices which strive to contain longer-form objections and digressions, among them the celebrated ‘WHY I WANT TO FUCK RODRIGO SANTORO’.

Plays

(1988) IN SEARCH OF LAND
(1991) SHAWLRIGHT’S COMPLAINT
(1993) BREAKFAST IN SPACE

BREAKFAST is a superficially deceptive three-act tragedy in a science-fiction setting. Husband-and-wife astronauts Mark and Janet Crane are trapped in a slowly-decaying orbit around the planet Neptune, beyond any hope of retrieval or rescue after the cancellation of all space programs due to economic collapse.  The debut production ran for a mere fortnight before closing, thanks to an intervention by Kedges himself during a matinée performance.  Revised twice before finally being abandoned as a lost cause.

(1996) JONATHAN RICHMAN IN HELL

with David Byrne.  Philip Glass provided three songs for tax purposes.

(1999) THE COMPLETE NAMELESS
(2001) FROM YORK
(2003) FIELDS OF ALFAFA SANG THE COLOURS OF HIS EYES
(2005) NOT WITHOUT MY MOTHER-IN-LAW

MOTHER-IN-LAW was one of Kedges’ favourite pieces, as he repeatedly insisted.  Originally conceived to run for ten hours, or “as long as it takes for somebody in the audience to honestly laugh”, the play is perhaps best described as an aleatoric comedy, wherein five actors work from autocue prompts loaded with disconnected lines of dialogue from over two hundred appropriated farces.  

(2006) ASMODEUS PAINTED BLACK HOLES
(2008) THE SIXTEENTH DREAM OF DOROTHY ARACHNID

One-act silent comedy about a man trapped in his mother’s bedroom with a buzzing fly and a loaded handgun.

(2009) ELECTROPLATE ME INTO A TURRET
(2011) THE MAN WHO COULD ONLY INTERRUPT

Lividly pornographic, this fictional account of the life of BBC journalist Mark Lawson led to a libel action and the fall of the constitutional monarchy of Belize.

1995 Gibson SG Standard in red. This was my main gigging guitar for fifteen years. The finish on this is scuffed and scratched up and back to the wood in a couple of places, but the rest of the guitar is lovely. I’ve replaced the electronics, the tuners, the strap buttons and the knobs, and I put one of the pickups in ass-backwards. It comes with a gig bag and a strap. £550.

200x Burns Club Series Double Six. This is their Korean-made twelve-string, pictured with eleven on. The entire thing is enormous and you can play single lines on it in determinate fashion. Those pickups sound amazing. This, tuned to C, through my fuzzbox, into a bass stack, is the single best thing that’s ever happened to my prostate. Comes with a bag. £325.

There’s also a Steinberger Spirit cricket bat thing that I originally intended to take to the other end of the earth with me. It’s got a DiMarzio Fred and something like a Seymour Duncan Jazz or JB in it and an adaptor you can use for regular strings, and I’ve lost the trem arm. I’d like to get £250.

There’s a Carter Starter pedal steel guitar. This comes with all the accessories, but no cables or volume pedal. It sounds fantastic if you can play pedal steel. If I didn’t have anything else to do with the next three years, that might be a possibility. But it isn’t. I’d really like to get £550 for this.

At the lower end of credibility, here’s an Encore fretless bass guitar. This is the fretless version of whatever their cheapest P-bass knockoff was c. 1997. I stripped the vile finish off the body and put on an oil finish, then I added a DiMarzio bass pickup and circuit. It’s heavy as hell but it sounds pretty good. I’d love to get £125 for it, and for that you get a hardcase too, but really, make me an offer.

My father once had intercourse with a polar bear in Canada.  If you ask him, he will deny this, not completely astonished.  “Canada!”, he will shout in a restrained manner, playing for time.

Scott Walker, Montague Terrace In Blue.  She wanted badly for someone else, someone other than herself, in the shipshape house, in their garrison of a home.  Her husband, it seemed to her, was not malicious or cruel but thoughtless and forgetful, and that was clearly worse.  Their evenings together were calm in the way that a murder scene is calm, and the sun set and rose again over outlines taped onto the floor and furniture and the refrigerator and some of the other appliances.  Whereas this had made her feel exhilarated and alive, if not actually predatory, and she felt as though it had become easier to breathe.  In company with, with some of his friends, she had felt less ashamed on arriving, and less hurt on leaving, and one afternoon stopped in disbelief to hear herself telling them all about a funny thing that had happened that morning, and doing the different voices.

Patto, The Man.  When we reached his parents’ house it had almost stopped raining.  We put our shoes on the oven door.  I bandaged his hand where he’d fallen outside the tailor’s and cut it on a piece of window.  We’d seen a red Mercedes drift on its side down the High Street, folding up one of the lights at the zebra crossing outside the old post office.  Some parts of the town still had an electricity supply.  We sandbagged the french windows with his brother’s clothes and stuffed pieces of wardrobe down in between.  We were dressing for bed that evening, each of us still shy with each other, when I saw the hole in the lawn, and what was coming out of it.

Stars of the Lid, Piano Aquieu.  If you go looking for them, all you find is a hole.  Places where they could be or possibly were, but are no longer, or places that someone remembered to suggest but that are now, also, holes.  Some holes have signs that say things like “what you want, when you need it,” but these are to be trusted less than others.  You cannot look behind a hole.  The hole is simply there.  Somewhere, you have reasoned calmly and less than calmly, there must be traces, breadcrumbs, some sort of receipts.  Who on earth goes missing these days?  Someone must know, and is withholding.  But to ask openly would betray your inexplicable need, so you don’t ask openly.  Creative variations on awkward spellings yield nothing.  Appeals to the cosmos yield nothing.  You grow callused from feeling for the impression of a warm pulse.  One day you are on a short street in an unfamiliar country, walking from thrift store to pawn shop, considering all the while that this would make a certain amount of sense: that clothes and books are given away all the time.  Hair follicles, a clear fingerprint, a tin badge, an eyelash fallen between two pages.  Treasure beyond imagining: an old sweater, faded and stretched.  There is, of course, an alternative approach.

I’m about to turn thirty.  This weekend, in fact.  Saturday.  Actually, Sunday.  I haven’t been able to get very worked-up about this.  I said to him last night, I’ve already had my momentous life-altering event for the year, really, about eight months ago.  This Sunday, it’s fine, you know?  It’s not that much of a thing.  I want to clean the house up, and maybe see if we can find the garden centre that’s supposed to be in town.  It’ll be shut, of course, because it’ll be a Sunday, but even so.

Introspection has always been fractious for me.  Unpredictably hard to control, my feelings.  It’s nothing new: it’s how the rest of the world has always seemed to me, with a few precious exceptions.  I take such relief in practical things, despite clumsiness and the evidence that I’m not much good at them.  It gets so you look forward to cleaning the cooker.  Which I would suggest is no bad state of mind, in and of itself.

I would like some of that–the fractiousness, that is, not the housework–to end.  A number of things didn’t turn out too well in my twenties.  Being here rather than there is some sort of considerable accomplishment, but I just can’t slap myself on the back too hard for that while there’s a degree to be earned.

In spite of all the things about my life that are wonderful, improving, or greatly privileged, at the centre of me is some deep sadness that I don’t know where it comes from.

Coming here has taken away some of the playthings that used to distract me from this, playthings I was so accustomed to that I didn’t realise, or had forgotten, they were merely playthings.  What I have now is so much more real and valuable to me, but there is still that thing–very sad, far away, hard to predict, generally unhelpful to anyone’s peace of mind–and it has to be recognised and dealt with, like any problem.  Coming into closer proximity with it, or just spending time looking at it, whichever, has been pretty brutal at times.  I feel so scared of it that most of the time I try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Well, in fact that’s not quite right: I’m not just scared of it, precisely.  I’m also bored of it, and tired of it.  I’m bored and tired of writing blog posts about it or journal entries about it or constructing imaginary creative projects around some elaborate conception of it, because, so what?  It’s a broken spring, a slipping gear, an inessential part of the machinery that doesn’t stop the engine from working properly but nonetheless makes an irritating noise.

But human souls don’t come with a service manual–Haynes need to get on that–so you’re always worried at the back of your mind whether it turns out to be a linkage that disarms the warhead in emergencies, or something.  And in the meantime you’re burdened by shame at wondering whatever this stupid thing might mean, and that has a way of wearing you down to feeling sorry for yourself over days or weeks, in quiet moments when you feel alone.

I would like to be convinced that I know entirely what it is, its origins and all of its implications.  It’s clear to me that it has something to do with my father and my sense of place in the world, with a sense of being an impostor, of not being what was intended.

It seems equally clear to me that what I have all around me right now is the best opportunity I have ever had to convince myself and anyone who cares to observe that I can be a kind, resourceful, decent sort of presence in a world that urgently needs an increase in the supply of kind resourceful decency.

That’s all I want.  I really do believe that.  So I’d better get on with it.

Sunshine.  Blue skies.  Tiny colourful birds.  Small, happy memories.  Good books.  A bit of music now and then.  Hanging out the laundry.  So much sunshine.

And from the steeple a sound came like days of laughter pouring out all at once, air on air, over waste and shit from the municipality sanitation strike and dogs fighting, around the various monuments to the various wars and the various dead, past rich black and white kids, around car guards and bastards and weirdos and spoiled hippies, in the campus and the townships and the mountains and the trees, and I was right then no longer a sorry made-up thing hurtling forever down and strangling in its own parachutes, but a real person, certainly as real as any other, in a world that I knew was absolutely alive because I could tell by the echoes.