Multi-coloured paragraphs

All over the world people are leaping out of bed in the morning to build great bridges and skyscrapers, to write award-winning books and songs, to discover new fundamental particles of matter, to kill or be killed for honour, to deliver babies, save souls, to debate to their Platonic essence the mysteries sleeping beneath the surface of everyday life, to bang each other senseless on supersonic aircraft, to dance themselves into whole-body orgasms… and I look out of my window feeling very close to nothing about the bounteous, complex, beautiful, grotesque world showreeling past my eyes. I long to be doused in cold water. I long to fuck off into the wilderness, climb on a winged horse and gallop out of the atmosphere, past the Milky Way, to the end of the universe, and there to pierce through its outermost membrane and into the annihilating light beyond.

But it’s just not me.

You feel sunk and that you are a waste of atoms, then an empty ultimatum. You’ll do it now or not at all. No more of the ‘I wanner be a rider’ shite. Hopes telescope to the present. All your worst fears about being an empty vessel brought up close. But you can’t go back. So you throw yourself into something without really knowing what it is. Even though you feel as if there’s absolutely nothing to give, as if you’ve proved beyond doubt that you’re incapable, that all you’re good for is cleaning up after people and keeping time… you just keep moving the pen and scribbling on. It seems like you’re annihilating yourself in the process. You’re spilling yourself out until you’re not there anymore. It’s just this constant scribbling, this eyeless, you-less effusion. But you push and push, and the brain starts to respond and the body starts to respond. Suddenly you find that you have emerged. New. Not unhappy. Not desperate… It’s like sodomy for the first time… unsure whether what you’ve done is good or bad. You’re the same but different. And you feel as if you were right to do it, right to push on without knowing what you were doing, because there’s mystery and wonder and ecstasy that you’ll only ever know if you take your clothes off and join the party. And then the drugs wear off and that old shame throbs red raw...

A feeling that I’m getting away with it, having everything my own way, every urge, even the most idle desire, answered punctually and to satiety. Life isn’t like this, ergo, I must be some sort of genius. And so inner smile becomes outer swagger becomes uncontrollable arrogance, til I’m thinking and saying things that make people think there’s something ugly about my soul. From here to shame, from shame a return to ‘penitential loneliness’, then up the Sysiphian slope again, in search of that place where everyone smiles at you and thinks you’re a ‘great guy’.