Monday II

I’m doing this again. I feel things have changed a great deal since early March, and I want some kind of mental assertion of those changes. I want to see if the good things in my life extend to my mind, or if I’m pretending as I became so used to doing. I don’t want to pretend. I want to feel, and love, and live. And write. I definitely want to write, and not only a little.

I woke up late this morning with a stabbing pain in my left shoulder. This is what age feels like. Last Friday was my xx birthday. I feel yy, or even zz. I’m worn out to an extent. My mind holds up a mirror to my body and tells it it can’t do things. 6li7ch waves back and tell it to stuff it.

I roll and stretch in the ecstasy of half-wakefulness, letting my conscious mind slowly dredge itself out of a mass of twisted dreams. Maybe my head hurts a little. Maybe that has more to do with keeping the radiator on all night than the babel of meshed thoughts that ran through me last night. The fact is I don’t mind. I’m past seeing it as a bad thing. I’m past the misery of it.

By the time I’m up, it’s 8 o’clock. I’m house sitting again, a small sanctuary down in xxxxx, crammed thick with books and age. I’m here for almost an entire month. I intend to spend a great deal of that time reading.

I waddle off to the kitchen in my underclothes and make myself a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of tea. I boot up my laptop (which scarily enough takes longer to wake up than I do) and read through a chapter of ‘salem’s Lot, crunching mouthfuls of roasted and smashed corn corpses as I do. They taste delicious.

When my laptop boots up, I remember I wanted to do this account, and I hurriedly write everything down before I can forget it. I get all of it. In the mean time N has woken up (somewhere in her car in The City, I imagine, and am proved correct) and we chat about our plans for the day. I connect to the internet with a portable modem and despair as I realise the automatic updates are draining my bandwidth with vampiric verve. I try to deactivate them. I restart my pc and return to ‘salem’s Lot. Small town America. Ghostly decay. An apocalypse of a different sort to his Dark Tower books, perhaps; a more local, manageable apocalypse. Any less horrific? No. Even beauty can die, and strut about in grim leathers and a death mask. That’s her by any other name.

N sounds almost shocked to hear about me writing down my week, and tries to recall when I did this before. I explain to her as I push my legs into the floor and make them vibrate up and down. Mini-exercise: for lazy people. The smell of staling milk in the bowl next to me is gorgeous. I love that smell.

A message from J’s mom. Lifts start tomorrow. Money! I’ve had a slow August, and haven’t made much of an income. The future looks promising, though. I’ll get by.

N and I continue to chat. The internet continues to elude me. ‘salem’s Lot grows a bit friendlier as I get to know it.

Now it’s working. I slowly manage to send N a link to refresh her memory and then organise some troop movements on Iron Grip Marauders. Arr! I am a steampunk sky pirate. Fear me! I boot up my imagination and see tanks dropping from my airship to go and perform mischief in the Kathos countryside. Click. Click. Click. Action points spent. And I wait for reports on the success of my raids to return.

I message N. I’m rolling through ‘salem’s Lot. I send out more pirate troops to rob a bank. I revel in the simple motions of it all.

‘salem’s Lot’ is strange. I’m curiously reminded of Lovecraft, though in a modern style that is far more familiar and personal, as though the Dunwich Horror or the Colour out of Space curled up and mated with Pride and Prejudice or one of Tolstoy’s babies. It’s early days yet. I carry on. I received more books than I can read in several months for my birthday, and now I feel crowded by their unread being. I must cut back the obscurity. I must bond. I must gain a clearer picture of Totality.

I, Librarian.

I get up to make myself some tea, now wearing yesterday’s shirt and underwear. I pluck a sushi roll from the fridge, douse it in wasabi and ginger, and plop it in my mouth. My sinuses alight. The sensation is rapture. I could live on this stuff. It’s magical.

Sugar, milk, Earl Grey, water. I stir it six times clockwise, six times counter clockwise, and six times clockwise again. Perfection. I return to my chair, wrap myself in a blanket. I read.

It suddenly occurs to me that I may have become boring since March. I... am okay with this.

Mmmm. Sleepy. Sleepy. It’s 11:08. What was that about Circadian Cycles? It’s way too early for a siesta. I check the contents of my e-books folder with glee. I message N. I return to the book with my mind drifting here and there. Moose. The music from Dollhouse is playing in my head. I could go to sleep... just for a little while...

Facetious.

Hmm... I load an episode of True Blood onto my pc and the music from that starts playing in my head. I tentatively approach an episode. Swearing, violence, spatter. Not particularly interesting. I pause after ten minutes and read another chapter. message. Repeat. Jerky loser sex and violence. Read, Tea, messages, repeat.

I find myself dwelling on the idea of the Marsten House, and Ben’s proposal that rather than being haunted his imagination is acting as lubricant on the emotional charge left within the house to produce supernatural hallucinations. This is, of course, absolutely plausible. I should know.

I remember Matheson wrote something similar, about a writer (they always write about writers. Why don’t writers write about readers? Readers are more openly identifiable to the reader than the writer. Lazy sods.) who becomes suicidal and has his house and possessions attempt to kill him out of a sense of self-preservation. There are, in fact, places that come alive in our minds, and through them in our lives. A sixth sense. A haunting.

And as ever, I think of death, and I ponder what it entails.

Yeah Suki, don’t go to the hospital or anything, drink V-blood. That’s better for story progression. Idiot. You can read minds, for goodness sakes. Who cares if your spinal cord is severed? It worked out for Charles Xavier.

La la la... chatting to N about the act of indiscriminate human genocide, its benefits and detriments. You’re so smart. :)

There’s one very loud clock tick-tocking in the background, mingling with an electrical signal so that is smashes into it like a sharp ocean rock against a continuous wave of noise. Tick-bvuuus-tock-bvuuus-tick-bvuuus-tock. I consider removing the clock. I leave it for the moment.

They always start by killing animals, and move on to bigger things. Writers are no different from serial killers. We lose our humanity piece by piece, until we at last feel brave enough to set ourselves aside and commit the act of murder. They welcome us to the idea of horror slowly... desensitise us. And that’s the real horror. Not the bodies or the gushing fluid or tentacles or heaps of skin and muscle and bone, but the moment in which they make us feel that all of that is normal... acceptable.

I have a handroll for lunch, squishy and partly frozen. It is still good. While I’m up I take the three clocks nearest to the bedroom and put them in the lounge. Now there’s just the regular ‘bvuuuuuus’ of electrical signal. I wonder if I can find the source and disable it...

Not if it impedes my work. I shall sit here and bear with it.

Good boy.

Messages. Existentialism! Fun. Book. True Blood. The cycle goes on and on. It is welcoming, ordered, clean. I love getting myself into these little cycles, and avoiding all else. I feel like a miniaturised Phileus Fogg, reducing my day to a manageable course of events, and ever approaching mastery of them and my self.

It’s rare to meet someone why behaves like the stereotypes on TV. What are we doing here? Creating some kind of mental avatars of our best and worst characteristics? Why not just portray normal people doing extraordinary things? Plegh. Drama. Curse you, Shakespeare.

It does make me wonder about the aim of Dramatism and the whole ‘Guilt Purging’ thing achieved by adhering to the Pentads of believable action – at what point was it decided that we needed to be shown what we want to believe over what we generally would believe? There’s a thick margin between the two. It’s like that part in the Matrix about how humans rejected the first model of reality because it was too perfect and happy. We reject that too with Art. Maybe it’s easier on us to still be able to distinguish it from reality, because it makes it simpler to say that valour and heroism are impossible and we shouldn’t feel bad about not striving for them in real life.

What guilt are the AI purging anyway? What were they trying to teach humans by exposing them to the Matrix?

Someone is playing loud electro-zap-disco-pop next door, so loudly it sounds like it’s in the room with me. This is what happens when people don’t eat their children. Despicable. I counter in with Ben Houge’s Arcanum Suite.

Okay, now they’re playing Daft Punk. At least they aren’t total idiots.

Suki’s shirt looks so good with blood on it. They should make a range of spatter-themed shirts.

Read, read... meditate. It’s about the right time. I set my alarm, crank up the volume, and lie back in bed.

I stretch out as much as I can, scrunching together all of my muscles and letting them go in a single glorious wave of release. I focus on the golden glint of a hook holding a puppet secure above my head, and I stare at it as I drift into the afternoon heat.

Every day, in every way, I get better, and better, I think to myself, reciting Coue’s formula. My thoughts are quicker, my memory sharper and longer lasting, my pursuit of excellence swift and conclusive. My stammer is fading away with each and every day. The pains and aches of mortality that once troubled me are becoming insignificant in the wake of my transformation. My body does as it wills, no more, and sculpts itself as granite and steady, liquid motion as it does so.

I drift into a deep, dreamless trance. The buzz of my thoughts do not trouble me. My consciousness is serenely wrapped in the blanketed layers of my inner thoughts. I heal.

A quarter of an hour later, I rise, and greet the world renewed. I struggle with the chaotic lethargy of my laptop as though I am battling the meanest of all Decepticons, shutting off its update function for good. It is fine where it is, for now. Try again later, you electronic vermin.

It is strange. I haven’t felt anything approaching anger in a long time. Annoyance, on occasion, which is definitely part of the genus, but this is something else... frustration, maybe? I don’t enjoy it at all. There’s a vile sensation combining with it in my gut, acidic and nasty. I push it down. I haven’t vomited since I was 11. I’m not about to start now. The same goes for losing my temper. It’s foreign to me.

I read more. I send out more pirate troops. I send messages. I get a message from the past which I’m quite pleased with. Today is all about comparison with February 27. And I read it clearly: things have gotten better, saner, (faster, stronger, more than ever make it better do, do do, do, do, do do do, do).  I’m in a happier place. I’m healing. The voodoo cowboy has descended into a green valley and found respite from the desert glare, and a place to snooze. To sleep.

Cycles, cycles. Frozen feet. Tea! A gulp of tea and a frozen strawberry. Everything here is frozen. The thermostat in the fridge is broken, and sits permanently at maximum. The frost kills my teeth. I let it sit on my tongue, and feel it melting. I gulp it down. Rawr. Sorry little strawberry creature.

People have no respect for police tape...

Cordon

Messaging D. Messaging A. Happy happy. Having friends is an odd thing. I’m glad I let it happen, though. Sometimes I still worry with a bit of Roarkish egoism that I spend too much time analysing and judging them. I’m not quite sure if I’ll ever be comfortable with the idea of other people thinking about me, making decisions based on what they know of me, being a part of my everyday life. It’s just a level of humanity that’s difficult to adjust to. I am a reader. An observer. Writing fiction is all well and good, but writing reality? I have to be so careful. I don’t want to hurt anyone.

I’ve never had to worry about books.

I’m still learning.

I exercise (sort of). I shower. I spend an ungodly amount of time trimming my hair, and use the time to slip into contemplative solipsism over recent memories of things that did and did not happen. I shiver. I wonder if I am ever going to finish this episode of True Blood...

I am surprised when it has a part that makes me laugh. Clean, honest laughter. Not at something funny, exactly, but at empathy. Feeling what others are feeling, or at the very least pretending to feel. I enjoy this moment. It is strange and beautiful.

I feel cut off from the art I love, sometimes. I get analytical and contemplative, and I forget to feel. This is one of the things I’ve been relearning from N, in the past while. Watching her react to a movie, or the passion with which she approaches a book... it moves me. It makes me hunger for the simplicity of such things. It makes me think losing myself to them may not be such a terrible waste of time and subject matter. It’s okay to be out of control, sometimes.

‘salem’s Lot progresses well. At this pace I’ll be done within the week. I finish the episode of True Blood. I take out a roll of sushi, wait for it to defrost, eat it.

It’s late. Time to review. One or two mistakes, but mostly good. I am, perhaps, feeling less abstract than I once was, but I have retained my humour and occasional weirdness. This pleases me. I want to change a lot of things, but I have never wholly hated being who I am.

I am retiring to my bed for now with a cup of tea and my book, so goodnight, dear reader. Whoever you are. Probably Gabby. Whoever you are. Sleep well.

See you later, alligator.