The empty street

Last week the empty street I stood on. There were dense green bushes planted sourly in pavement cracks, the old shut-up 1980s office with coloured placards in the window. It was eight or nine in the evening and stifles were stiffening like ghosts inside. The road was grey and there was nobody on it. There were old grey terraced houses that lurked eitherside, swishy trees behind.
These big greyish domineering old mother matron houses, which are exactly like the dank parlour glumness of their inhabitants. Meaty redscrubbed washing-up forearms, grim dinnertime satisfaction, sepulchral gossips.
The scent of washingpowder on the back stone step which is damp from rain and worn like the stone of destiny. Combined with the sight of a billowing white sheet on the line which I bet still happens here in these sensible and common backyards, half-remembered by slimy kneepatch toddlers of yore. Sitting nobly on their proud arses.
In her room there were accoutrements set down in front of a little mirror, just a cloistered discreet mirror set modestly just right in the little corner alcove. Little pathetic feminine powderpuffs and potions in front, china clutters of objet d'art or maybe a dumb plastic comb, gathered there like a little temple of aching vanity. Even sadder, there were little pictures and things stuck on the mirror, as well as scraps of memento sensibly tucked away. Half like the thin dressingtable of the disgruntled circus clown who is really nevertheless a teenager girl stooping to fiddle and twiddle with bits of stuff to paint on an awful face.
When you see cosmetics in application the full wretchedness of it hits you. Those dumb screwings up of mouth and flickings at the eyelash. The powdery flicker of her birdish intensity and naked tragic wrist.
That intelligence most of all.

God of Night

Her blue eyes, her sandy hair swishing, her nice young breasts underneath her top, her placid careful footsteps down the lane, the way she twists to look around half-concerned at something behind her in the afternoon street, her softly shaded blurs of feature and set in there the clear blue eyes, her T-shirt is smooth and lined in indie girl black and white burglar stripes, her jacket is for summer all nice and smooth, swishes, her feet tread markedly down the plaza.
She disappears past the fences smiling evilly to herself and is swallowed up past housecorners by mounds of grass. Her pretty shoes swishing the soaking ribboned grass of late summer rain.
Now in the evening in the dark outside it rains again. All is silent outside. Then murmured young voices meeting darkly in the street to plan dingy kitchensink dramas. In the dark their faces are as glum as opals, they move on, eyes upraised in the glorious hope of kitchens and early nights somewhere behind locked prefabricated doors all inked with the cloudy effervescent flood of night everywhere, hiding impenetrably with her in the midst of her warmth, she doesn't know, can't ever care, she's pink and fleshy and utterly exhausted drowning in a big dreamy sulk like the sleep of Orpheus angels in cells everywhere, like malcontent eyemovements neath crinkly eyelids surrendered in a silky tomb.
Just then I heard the loneliest sound in the world and a sound which always echoes in my heart, the rhythmic sound of a faraway forlorn car passing on distant road in the dark and through the rain, which coincided sadly and damply with freezing dripdrops of splatter rain that dimpled the clinical uncaring iron rim of the double glazing, these orange suburban houses all have double glazing and are dead. Still I can hear that heartbreaking hush faraway on the edge of hearing almost which is utterly grim and satanic and like purple intensified till it all becomes a blueblack cloud of night.
To me the God of Night was always tall and crooked and gaunt, he was plushly enwrapped in purple velvet coffin linings, he fills every inch of the sky with his purple, just like a vast curvaceous cinema screen which michelangelo laboured for fifteen years to tarnish potblack, tinctured with a dab of deep azure.
The God of Night is blue and has a hollow face, curls around the whole sky. Sometimes when he's really feeling wet and drippy in his awesome gloom he sets the silent stormclouds to weep and disperse like wraiths and dimples the dome with stars, glimmers of eyes in the black fabric.
The noise of a car door opening on Halloween. A Celtic prince just ran outside and slammed and locked the door of his car. The sound of it echoed round the silent neighbourhood and he struggled back indoors. As if he was fleeing from some vast inevitable pursuit.

Vision of the Garden

This street of quiet suburbia, the little girls go n play in each other's houses till evening comes on.
The little blonde girl, her dad comes over to knock. A thin dude, blond spiky hair, glasses, gentle smile. Wearing a big padded ski jacket. Often to be seen carwashing. Also his son, dressed identically, a rotund, selfish face. Knock knock knock. Is Tracey there? Obviously its hometime... Chap at th' brownwood door.
Up the hallway into the cosy kitchen where the light is already on. Mum n that are sitting in there smoking, not moving. The hall is dark. They nod n smile, very gentle like with their big jackets on. The evenin twilight.
"She's not here". Blue shadows gathering in the shallow cul de sac. No lights on in the semi-detached suburban mansion, of orange brick, of tiles, big plaster-walled rooms. The bedrooms empty and dark. A huge silent block of darkness.
Why do they sit so impassive in the kitchen, so drowsy in the yellow electric light? They look on, amused, judgemental, not moving unless to flick ash in an ashtray. A distant setpiece in electric light, still and even. My mum's brown sweep of fringe, my brother languid, crossarmed, unspeaking. Entertaining friends in the lamplit kitchen, the stereo softly on. Not participating.
Off go the dad n brother with soft OK's. I close the front door. The much-maligned scuffed and maltreated brownwood door, metal letterbox, frosted glass pane. Some impulse makes me yank it open again for otherside revelations.
Outside.... The twilit cul de sac had vanished, and in its place, through the portal, stood a vision of a beautiful garden.
A garden in summer, a mid-August garden, a garden in a blaze of light. Suburban garden. In one corner, a marked-off flowerpatch. And standing on the grass, a number of wild beasts. Oh garden where in summer we'd lie on the grass and wait for rain, where I'd watch sunrises or laze with books in the shade, miserable grasspatch, arena of childhood.

Christmas on Earth (beginning)

When Christmas morning comes around, dragging itself slowly, everyone is disappointed. The day itself is often grey, not crystalline and swathed in snow like in the movies. The morning comes reluctantly, like all winter mornings, so that it seems a half-morning, almost impervious to celebration. Small wonder then that behind our thick walls, having crawled from bed and downstairs, we react against it, that great sorrowful dullness of the winter day,  and want to light up a huge blaze in the grate, become ruddy-cheeked and drunken, to carouse, to wear down the weary day with the glitter of tinsel and the shining gloss of rosy-red wrapping paper. 

How horrible then, and yet how fitting, that at the end of the momentous day you realise your efforts have failed, and you find in yourself only a great apathetic horror, a slumbering, monumental dread that falls like the death of the year, a deadness to match not only the deadness of winter but the deadness of your plastic surroundings.

This, then, is the story of one typically sorrowful Christmas that had, atypically, a real jubilation and purity at the centre of it, albeit one very briefly known.

It began with Christmas Eve in the bedroom. All was pleasant, mild, sleepy at bedtime. There was a semblance of what seemed to be happiness. The heavy curtains were drawn, the cheering yellow lamp was switched on. The heavy, fragrant blankets were thrown back, and M and the girl beside him at first slept content. 

M and his "wife"- for so she seemed to him to be- had pacified each other with little kisses and pettings, sweet for the festive season,  with the maudlin memory of Christmas lights and tinsel incumbent on their drowsy minds. The girl in nightie, placid, respectable, and M himself feeling almost middle-aged as he settled down to sleep. Their bedroom was neat and softly carpeted, suggestive of rest, and with a sumptuous white-sheeted double bed. With the lamp turned out, and with heads hitting pillows, it did not take long for the room's real character to prevail. As M's restless eyes grew used to the darkness, the room seemed warmly staid, as comforting and banal as a womb, and M began to feel about it almost as an infant feels about the menacing shadows of his room at night, or a travelling salesman suddenly waking up to the anonymous contours of a cheap hotel room. But no, M banished those thoughts, buried his head in the pillow, and screwed up his eyes, vainly trying to intoxicate himself with the cheap fragrance of matrimony and Christmastime.

The girl beside him was a petite, neat-figured brunette, who had changed fussily into a clean nightdress and settled down beside him, laying herself carefully on the mattress like a sacrificial victim. Tonight, although full of lazy festive spirit, she seemed even more remote than usual, and the way she gathered the blankets around her seemed curiously formal and distracted. She had responded to M's goodnight kisses with smiles and words that weren't altogether convincing. 

When the lights went out she lay perfectly still beside him, with her back turned, seeming to be asleep almost immediately. Even by listening hard M couldn't hear her breathing. He wondered whether he had done something to offend her.

It was only after a period of sleep that the nightmares began. 

The three-week novel

I set myself the task of writing a novel in three weeks. I had a schedule all worked out at great length, and had already marked out the days on the calendar and laboriously prepared. This schedule would involve me sitting at my desk at every spare moment I got, all day every day, twenty-four seven, and writing exhaustively. 

The project I had in mind was vast, no less than a huge epic poem explaining the whole scenario of life to myself, all the problems of youth, of life in the twenty-first century.

I wanted to take every element of this and extend on it, make it lasting. I always had about three or four such novels and large poems on the go at any one time, and I had grand delusions about the depth and scope of my works in progress. In those days I very  much tended to write quickly and exhaustively til I had finished. I found out in this way the terrible feeling of uphill struggle one has to face when contemplating writing any kind of large work, the long, lonely hours bitterly struggling with yourself in order to create, the endless days and weeks and months of creative turmoil with seemingly no end in sight. But I knew one thing clearly, and that was that to be a writer you have to write, and write unceasingly, every day of your life...

Alone at nights in bed misery descended on me. My thoughts were stripped to the bare bones of anguish, all pretension was lost. I saw myself and the world exactly as it was, foregoing all fantasy, lies, and escapism. In these moments I felt acutely the impossibility of fulfilment. I forced myself to face the facts, one by one, and put them to myself in the bitterest way I could. I stripped everything down to the plainest facts, the most harsh home-truths.

And upon waking, that's what I wanted my writing to be, infused with some of that truth. Everywhere I went I enthusiastically quoted the words of Jack Kerouac: "fiction is for kids". I wanted to look with brave eyes at the real world around me, and set it down truthfully on paper. I wanted to tackle the status quo, strip away the layers of appearance, contradict and twist everything I was told until I found the barest fundament, the rock of truth. This is dynamic realism in action, a negation of all current forms, a denial of everything, a reduction of the world to zero so that in that void may be found a new starting-point for new values, new perspectives, and a new, broader truth!  

Encounter with Alex

On TV the TV presenter giving good lines ad libs and syllabic puns.

In a close room after the ad break my second floor bedsit room, the paint peeling off the windowsill and patchy plaster walls.

Her name is Alex, dark hair rather bland or pretty looks, standard Midwestern accent inflected with a bit of Glaswegian. Shortish hair, skinny t-shirt, a certain voluptuous inflection of words in mouth.

Static interrupting on the screen every now n then. D'you know when the TV screen seems to disgorge or vomit itself into reality and its static and ozone becomes evaporated into the air and seems to blister further the paintwork round the doorframe where outside it's four o'clock. The door ajar...

All signalling that the TV show has come to an end. Quick titles scroll upwards and a 30 second themetune leading to a quick-sliding ad break.

We have in our bedsit patchy shadows and a fishbowl green. Twin beds too, her's over on the left, the smooth cream duvet. Stormclouds go over, shadows descend. The TV screen has disgorged its contents all over the room as if its flesh were suddenly real and not mere static and buzzes of light.

Alex, I love to watch her reading her emails say for fifteen minutes.

Like the peephole bars where you watch the coy girls or secretaries at computer terminals. Weird bars in Tokyo wit mirrored floors.

For fifteen minutes I watch her unobserved slumped on my single bed the ruffled counterpane, skinny-armed and gleeful. What have the myriad stoners and deadbeats to do all day but dream dreams like these.

In a large oblong gap between the last frame of the teen TV show and the delayed commercial break. I watch soporifically thru a plastic screen thinkin I had once a comicbook promised me the revolution would be televised... gettin harder to distinguish between fiction and reality...

Old pervert that I am, as if I was a veritable tramp I get up off the bed no concealment thump-fisted beatin off in the duvet. The cock stalk-like outthrust n the prepuce semi- or fully retracted showing the shiny bulbous head. And all for the pretty cherubic smile of the girl, coyly down-smiling at the computer monitor.

... Vapid white-skied afternoon outside the paint-peeling windowsills and the blocks a council flats. 

An Enemy of the People

I have done something peculiar with my life, half-submitted to it and half-opposed it. I could quite easily become "an enemy of the people".
So much of mankind's energies go to opposing one another. This seems to be his nature. So much strife occurring on the globe seems to be unnecessary, petty, when viewed from a distance. What is needed then, obviously, is to put aside differences and unite.
Nowadays though, there is no solid basis for this. People have lost faith in socialism. The old socialist ideas just cannot flourish in today's world. The old figure of "the industrial proletariat" is nowhere to be seen. He's as much an anachronism or ghost as the old top-hatted capitalist who formerly was such an obvious target.
We have settled for an easy option. We have drifted into loose consumer capitalism. The public loves celebrities more than anything. Our culture is attuned toward shallowness, artificiality. This kind of atmosphere can sustain nothing but a wretched cynicism. (Special pleading?)
Our culture is dead for me because on the one hand it supports elitism and on the other artifice. Consumerism has taken over our ideas. It has lost even its old vitality... there is torpor in many people's ideas. This torpor comes from the dead weight of an inherited popular culture which is characterised by the fact that it is over,  that it perished some time ago. The eternal rehashing of the past is ghoulish, and bespeaks nothing so much as spiritual poverty. Rosy nostalgia is often close to impotence.

If you go to the fair

If you go to the fair there's a certain huge tent where waits amid the clutter the old stand-up comedian with his long straggly beard now turning white. He's wild-eyed and enthusiastic, he'll lead you inside in spite of your trepidations.
In the disorder and dimness inside spread out on the floor among dozing tramps is a large blue quilt sewn with scenes and colours. Leaping dolphins sporting in azure seas, freshly depicted on the tapestry. And these flitting birds of a dull brown colour, he tells you (he's read it from a script) represent the souls of despondent suicides. The suicide epidemic among young guys means that the gloomy birds have proliferated, and are perching among the branches of a bitter tree. But who knows whether the old stand-up comic can be trusted? His thoughts and gestures seem disordered and over-dramatic.
And after reading your tea-leaves and administering the drug he ties you up in a foul-smelling tent where animals have recently been. Calls you "my dear" and tells you not to worry. Strokes your soft, exposed throat with his long finger. Perhaps preparing you as a candle-lit exhibit for the after-hours black mass, where all the carnies come masked and solemn.

Bob Seger is in Detroit

Bob Seger is in Detroit and he says, "Hey Dee-troit!" from the stage. Cue cheers and rejoicing. One of their native sons has returned and is bolstering their civic pride. So go home to Glasgow, the Detroit of Britain, and proclaim your love or pledge your allegiance from the stage of the SECC. "We knew Franz Ferdinand, we did coke with 'em. My momma is from this town and all my ancestors swill around in its environs, and my friend knows the guy from Deacon Blue. That makes a nigga like me proud." Not a dry eye in the house. Ironic, o course.
Then we close with a cover of "Into the Valley".

In the Shop Part 2

Anyway it's dusk and closing time, and next to the shop down a spiral staircase is a bar, already brightly lit and inviting. Tempting to stay.
And as I see the pallid languid boys leaving, and the gangster proprietors put their white heads together, the colours of their sharp suits blending in the shadows, I begin to imagine. What if I could stay here through the night, when the place was shut up and quiet...
What if I could stay forever? What if I was a spy cop private dick there to eavesdrop, I'd hide myself in a long gallery-space upstairs, behind thick curtains. Down in the shopspace the old gangsters have taken out a bottle and shot glasses, in the dimness by the counter they sit and murmur. One of these old geezers has an enormous head of white hair, is crafty, distrustful, unsmiling.
And perhaps the spy cop, the investigative journalist, is in the overhanging gallery, or hiding behind the curtains, or locked in the hushed ballroom when he steps on a loose floorboard that creaks its echoes around the wide room, one of those lovely varnished floorboards so often seen in galleries. The gangster's heads glance up and the FBI man's cover is blown, his mission aborted.
Now he runs him outside to the anonymous-grey back of the store, where a short gravel path  leads from the fire exit, simultaneously drawing his official handgun from its holster at his side. He sees, almost before he has time to take it in, the white-haired, huge-headed, portly gangster dashing down the concrete fire-escape, and he seems to the hero movie spycop to be reaching for a weapon, to make good his escape. The honest man from the bureau's firearm flashes in response once, twice, and the gangster-actor performs a marvellous stunt, plummeting down the concrete steps, really impressive and I hope the actor, who must be over 60, hasn't hurt himself.
His weasely, thin-faced accomplice meets a similar fate, while dashing across a nearby concrete gangway. At the end of it a squad car has already sped up, and the sexshop gangster is bundled inside, in a flash of gold bracelet and spiv moustache.
Another triumph for the G-Men.

In the Shop Part one

In the city I go to a certain street, in broad daylight. Maybe get some comics, magazines.
Because this is a city shop it's hip and laidback and urban. Split it into different sections. You wander up some stairs and as you pass the long galleries and counters you gradually ascend, like walking uphill, till you've reached the very summit of the backwall of the shop.
Near the glass frontdoor as I roam idly in I see a sour-faced little goth girl who wrinkles up her nose at me in disgust. Shorn hair under an anonymous beanie hat, one eye swollen from an infection from being plastered in out-of-date make-up. T-shirt says "chaos". Short trousers and stripy tights beneath, beetlejuice-style. I know her vaguely. I glance at her but she acts like I'm not there. I am being sent to coventry.
So I pass by quickly and continue on, ever upwards into the shop.
In this shop can be seen comics and magazines and DVD's and items of clothing. Bored dishevelled boys or girls at dark counters, the floorspace is long and narrow. I pass by the comics and I head for the adult section.
The adult section is run by gangsters, quite plainly. There lurks a whitehaired, grimfaced geezer in a sharp suit. Looks at me dangerously, obviously a proprietor. Also a couple of girls in there, tall and vulgar, awed and giggling at all the filth, wide-eyed curiosity hidden behind amused disgust. Normal girls.
And I look at the DVDs and DVDs and DVDs. Because the market has diversified and the filth has abundantly proliferated. Look at the categories: girl on girl inter-racial college girls the gonzo stuff older women big tits. All specialisms luridly competing. At the cheaper and softer end of the market, I view the ripoff titles, a pink-white DVD cover, some random wife shot from below, unlovely face turned away, gripping her pendulous breasts. But now that the market for natural flesh has developed, quality can be found: This beautiful model, Mediterranean, trussed up in a tight basque, white-toothed and spread-legged; this voluptuous Welsh girl, her abundant flesh held balanced in a bra; this English girl-next-door, with enormous breasts, two huge soft slabs of flesh overpowering her chest. Next to the boxed dildoes in excitingly-coloured boxes, are the solo DVDs where the dildoes are put to use. In a glass case nearby, buttplugs and metallic lovebeads. Near the shoddy and soft-lit backwall of the store, near the fire exit.

Beneath the Suburbs 2

And even in my digital entertainment fantasy world I see nothing but strife and violence. Mondo wrestling, a bitch fight taking place in a room not dissimilar to my suburban bedroom. Like a music video, like one a those oh so ironic postmodern movies that reference 70's trash culture. All the reference points are tediously in place.

This is the stuff of mass media now, the stuff that weary America dreams of when it slumbers. A blonde and a Chinese chick Lucy Liu-like are really laying into each other. The blonde is in a split satin skirt, she gets the Chinese girl in a hold from behind and gets her hand bitten, the Chinese girl emitting an angry high-pitched shriek loud enough to alert the neighbours to call the cops.

Like a fightscene in one a those old Batman episodes. Full of blam and kapowie. Now their exertions are trashing the room, brushing ornaments off shelves. That big-legged and booted blonde, savagely intent, wrenches back China girl's head but she wriggles free and delivers a telling blow to her midriff...

Where to present this scene? Bitchfight in the bedroom. Pre-Superbowl Show. Before the music awards, before the video awards. Guest-starring. Stick in the canned laughter later. 

Beneath the Suburbs

But it's back to art school for me. Struggle and arguments with mum, epiphanies reached, harsh words thrown, tempers lost. And the student has to migrate from his suburban blue-carpeted bedroom, has to cram his stuff into bags, stress himself out all over again.
The comfortable suburban master bedroom! From here I launch myself into arguments, hysterics, with my dark-haired mothers and sisters, they fling ultimatums at me, their faces bruised with mascara, they shriek or grunt with rage.
Rage, despair, violence. Always under the surface of the quiet suburbs, setting for the great melodramas of our time.
I pack my accredited paperwork and my pathetic schedule.
And in London a huge downpour ends the heatwave.

Peter Parker

Read, say, 15 Marvel comic books and you get a greater insight into life than if you study the greatest works of the philosophers.
Here's a badly-drawn example from the nineties, with a certain rough charm. A character from the dark and tangled personal life of Peter Parker, after his death or disappearance, gets a roomsearch. In a deskdrawer he keeps a handgun. Didn't Ernest Hemingway keep his gun in a drawer? Reaches for it angstily. Perhaps a secret compartment.
Reminds me of when a cop came to see my flatmate and I had an illicit replica handgun lying on the couch. I heard the static of a tinny voice on his radio as he ascended the stairs and went into a paranoid panic, flung the gun into a bottom drawer.
A boy with something to hide.

a small prayer

Grace, descending from above, gild the paths of those I love.
Strife, erupting from below, deliver all my foes to woe.

New Art Class (Neue Kunst)

Having enrolled in a new Art Class... I am waiting patiently in the hall where I reckon the Klass is to take place. Having avoided the brown-clad dusty teachers and the grey-haired matrons. Togas and memories of Olympia. Now is this where the Klasse ist to begin? Let's wait unconcernedly and see. My brown eyes, my clever fringe, my Art School jumper.
A large symposium-type hall, like in latter-day schools would be a gymnasium. ie, with marbled lacquer, squeaking floorboards, porticos of Christ-like learning personified in pictura.
I have a bunch of biros, pencils, and paintbrushes in a glazed mug on the desk. How sweet and thoughtful.
But ye know when the drudgery and intellect Junges come in, like bejumpered Oxfordensians, to take seats, and all betiding me keenly. I begin to bethink me is perhaps an examination about to commence?
I sit, and speak not to no-one.
After a period of say ten minutes when the shady lads n lasses are a-coming in to choose seats and lift pens, the idea comes into my mind to take a longsome stroll, say of fifteen minute's space, to kill time and ascertain the veracity of the concurrent programme.
Accordingly, I leave my seat wordless and traipse out.
And gaining the dark lowdown groundfloor corridor. I mope strolling, my draping schooltie and shoddy shirt, the perfect postmodern schoolboy, complete with hundred dollar perspex glasses. To add a shade of intellect.
And entering out I come to the packed entrance foyer. Which is packed with the hangout schoolkids and young student types slouching Angus Young-like in doorways bedraggled.

Absolution

We'll say our goodbyes, then,
We'll "share a drink and step outside"
Onto the streets where once we dwelled,
And tonight we'll laugh at our deaths.
Let us follow each other home once again,
Ignoring the dreams that seep in like a tide,
Under the skies where the angel first fell,
Onto the rooftops where we first drew breath.
And if, weeping, yet laughing with hope, I could send
My soul to the bus-station where I first died,
I would cling to the sound of the clock-tower bell
In summers afar when youth's spirit was left
Forsaken, abandoned, in the jubilant glen
Where the ghosts of old autumns surrender and hide-
To the newness of winter's ethereal shell-
Ere our failure we sought its cold soul, and were blessed.