High
My son, who was written off seven years ago by his headmaster, and recommended for an institution, learning to play the guitar and playing his first gig.
I don't mean to have a go at you, mate, but I feel I need to ask a couple of things! Firstly, how can a trip to CHESTERFIELD be among your highlights of the year? Secondly, how is posting some innocent and probably stupid remark on a messageboard remotely comparable to a serious car crash? Just asking
Unsurprisingly my answers to this simple question are lengthy and tiresome and bitter and imprecisely buttoned. I suppose the highs for me are the dreariest daily events for other people, but in my head seem the hugest signs of recovery, resurrection, metaphorical pregnancy. They involve words on the whole, ones i could then daily give birth to. I suppose it concerns identification. How me nominally identifying something or someone adds a scattering of letters to my name, or an underlining there beneath it. I can be walking along analysing the snippets in my every thought, and see a dog scampering across the cracked pavings of a poorer suburb and envy it for it's lack of care for what eats and saddens it's surroundings. It has only the job at grubby paw to run after that which moves; a leaf cajoled by gusts; a pigeon so convinced that no one's watching pecks effortfully at the germed, breadcrumbed chicken-bone in the dampened, scraggy box of sunlight and blood a careless, two-legged hound tossed to the ground in the last 2 days; a Costcutters carrier bag with strained and mis-used teabags swirling surreptitiously in the breeze, determined to apportion itself to a prominent, uncrackable branch for centre stage in any squirrel's autumn nut-hunt, always beyond a park-cleaner's unladdered reach. This dog just wants. And i feel mightily squelched by the undoubted loneliness i have in not being able to tell anyone what i saw and thought and how much broader my unhappy view of the world now is.
They say that time is the greatest healer, and they're right if you're at a certain age, which i am. But to watch every moment pass is hellish. Especially when what's gone is the ability to describe the emptiness you feel. And the impossibility of reading the future means it's best not to look toward and base all hope and fortune on a lucky month or Easter. So you live alone and just wait for things to pass, smirking innocuously at a joke you thought to tell yourself in full that evening. It's a quotidian nothingness you have to unhappily face.
This makes High and Lows ineffably placed. Memorable events lose their importance and significance. They are just things.
Although saying that the odd journeys to Madrid and Berlin with a woman who so oddly and seemingly damagedly says she loves me in the murk of our opening months of togetherness can't be seen as anything but a plus, no matter how hard i try to smother them otherwise. So Cristina is a High, and our long weekends in foreign climes are always worthy of note.
So, to sum up, bingle bangle me me me miaow and wuther.
Happy New Year
Mustn't grumble then?