The drunk crept up on me and now I feel kind of woozy and hot. I want to get up and have some coffee and write about nothing, but instead I’m under a too thick comforter, my wife asleep on my arm and one of my cats asleep on my leg. And the world outside continues. And I’m tapping on my phone again, writing nothing. Would be a good time to listen to a crumbcast.
From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Wednesday, March 22, 2016 at 12:36 PM
Subject: The twisty sounds of piano-fortes long forgotten
Oi mate, you ever been to a deli? It’s a place with a counter. Maybe there’s some weird rolled chopped animals hanging from the ceiling, they might be caked in white rocks from the ocean. In the deli sometimes there’s a red machine that you pull a ticket from and it has a long number on it and eventually someone will yell out one of the numbers on the ticket and boom it’s time to order your boiled pigs and processed simulated cow’s milk product.
If you look at the digits of a year, 2017 for example, in a certain way, you can see that it’s kind of like that ticket from the deli. You pull one out, you throw it away, you hope you got everything you needed.
What I been doing at The New York? I been doing it to death, my friend.
I used to think: I better not post every day; I don’t want people to have to read every thought that comes into my head; eventually they will get tired of me and unfollow.
You know what, I don’t know at all what people feel. What I do know is that search engine traffic comes from content content content. You can game the system, and I wish I knew how, but if I increase the amount of content on my blog, I figure someone is bound to look at this shit and give me a million dollars.
In 2017 I have not worried about the fact that I’m obsessed with money. I have given up on the dream of a utopian society, of having Tescos. Every empire falls at some point, all I care about is having enough reading material to ride out the apocalypse, and as long as I have one good book, I’ve got that.
I suspect that the more dreams you give up the more you know which ones actually even matter at all. Sure, you can think too small, but you can certainly think too much, and I have found so far that it is better to think nothing at all than to think big some days and on other days berate yourself for not thinking big.
I’m fighting with my cat to type this, and it’s cute like, “oh he wants to type things, too!” but I also can’t fucking focus for one fucking minute god dammit it’s like I have a kid or something. I play with this mother fucker all the time shit I love him but then I try to pet him just now and he bites me. He wants what he wants all of the damn time and that is it. The only time he’s nice to me is when he’s half asleep. If he was a human that’d be a fucked up and very common relationship.
I’m writing all of the time now writing writing writing I just love writing and maybe if I post enough times all over the damn place maybe I can just keep writing. I’m revising a story a little at a time and letting it take its course. Fuck it, you know? But people love to say that. And it’s pretty meaningless. Fuck what? I don’t know.
I know you’re not writing as much these days because you are a more complete person than you were before, but I miss your writing nevertheless. Don’t feel guilty, I don’t know how that makes you feel, but I wouldn’t want to feel guilty about making you feel guilty.
Ha! Feelings! Fuck ’em.
Love ya
G
From: Babe <listenotothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Friday, September 9 at 11:00 AM
Subject: 21 days with no incident
It is ten o’clock where I am, at a cafe, on an island down south, where a Thai cook is watching television, having already prepared my breakfast. It is low season, and in the course of the day, I am the only one he will see. Perhaps I will pass by again in the afternoon, for tea and to read my novel. I am reading John le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor, which is intriguing though not quite as intoxicating as The Little Drummer Girl, which remains my favourite.
It rains lightly in the morning before the sun punches a hole in the storm clouds in the early afternoon. In the evening, strong rain and winds frustrate the hotel’s efforts to provide al fresco dining. This is a pattern that repeats itself the entire time I am here. I am not bothered. It is perfect weather for someone convalescing. While this is a short jaunt– a mere five nights– it is still the longest I’ve been away from home. Two days I’ve been on the island and the vastness of my horizon makes me almost seasick.
I want to read your brown leather book. It’s barenaked and shows straight through to the bone like a leper dead six hours in a pool with a distracted piranha. Ha. That’s brilliant. I could never write properly by hand, but I like my typewriter. I ran out of ribbon though, and as I don’t know where to get things that nobody buys anymore, I may have to resort to Amazon.
***
I started this email on the island and now I’m back in Bangkok, and my pores are clogged up with pollution too. I feel my leaves slowly curl up around me. I have never liked living in cities, it has always been something of a necessity. I need to be located near a bookstore. Yet I am contemplating packing my life into boxes, moving into a smaller place in Bangkok, and going on the road again. Living out of a suitcase two months at a time. Why? The world has gone mad, have you noticed?
You must be lost somewhere in Asia by now. Are you intoxicated by the alien life?
B.
P.S.
I can’t conceive of distances either.
Damn I am tired and I have some bad gas going on. This shit is annoying as hell. People are like, aren’t you hungry? I’m like, no! I ain’t hungry, my stomach feels distended and shit. Got some weird acid reflux, too. And god damn cats walking around the apartment crying and shit. Fucking driving me insane. Fed this motherfucker like three times in the last hour.
Jesus Christ.
Decided not to get drunk any more. That sucks. Going to be like Neitzche out here and drink milk and shit. Not even going to get drunk. Damn, what will the world be like. So far I managed not to get drunk for two days straight, but one on of them I was violently hung over.
Blogging is discouraging for me. Pretty much everything is I guess. Or at least disappointing.
Cats are very photogenic. That is nice for them. Or for us maybe.
I started meditating three days ago with the headspace app. A coworker recommended it to me and it was easier than the last time a coworker recommended something to me so I did it. Easier than therapy. Another coworker told me that Xanax is actually for anxiety and not depression. What is depression anyways. Or anxiety.
Goddamn right cats are endlessly photographable. Fucking ridiculous, are cats.
Yesterday on the train, going up the stairs, there was a guy playing one of those Asian instruments with the long strings, you know, and I rode up the escalator and I thought something that I just forgot because I was thinking of those instruments. Good god damn Christ I just literally did forget…
Now I remember. It wasn’t to do with cats, I was thinking that maybe I should start believing that everything happens for a reason. I should start thinking that every thing that happens to me is part of some big plot. I’ve thought that before. That’s boring.
I was going to do things. Now I’ve decided I’m not going to do anything. Fuck doing things. Fuck that. I woke up today that’s enough. I did things earlier. I used to do things. Now I’m going to do no things.
I either have a splinter under my fingernail, or I just stabbed the skin under my fingernail so much with a burnt safety pin that it feels like I do.
I think sometimes people make the mistake of having children because no one loves them enough because no one can ever love you enough and well I guess you’re always looking for affection.
And you have the kids and you don’t know that you’re going to need anything from them you think…you’ll give them anything, everything they need. But then when they don’t love you enough you feel hurt and you make dumb choices and the two of you are locked in an adult relationship but they’re children and they don’t owe you anything they would have been just as happy not to exist or moreso.
You expect they will love you because they are a part of you but they are not a part of you they have just as little reason as anyone else to love you and the more you demand it of them the more they resent you and then finally they’re old and you’re dying and they realize that they owe you something and they pretend to love you as much as they think they should because now they are having kids and no one loves them enough.
You’re old and you can feel death every morning and you know that you should have never asked anything of them because they were your responsibility. But you need them more and more all the same.
By then it’s too late to realize that you should have just found yourself a succession of stray cats.
I am seventy-five hundred words into this new story and it’s going really well. I started looking over my old stories and counting how many actual new stories I ever wrote versus how many diary entries I wrote. It turns out I haven’t written all that many different stories. I mean there are a lot, but not in comparison to the diaries. So then I thought how much time do I actually spend even writing fiction and it’s not much, cumulatively over the year. 2015 year of new stories. I’m still working on that badger story, thinking of new shit for it etc. Now I spend only a little time writing fiction, between ten minutes to an hour at most per day, but I don’t talk about it as much. I’m only talking about it today because I’ve got some extra time before work and I’ve already exceeded my thousand word limit.
I’m listening to songs from Ok Computer over and over again while I’m writing today, even though I’ve never taken the time to get into Radiohead. I know I should, but I should do everything else, too. I’ve been watching Mad Men episodes again at night. Tonight there’s a party after work paid for by the managers for the staff of the restaurant and I told my book guy I am not going to drink a lot and then I told him the story of getting fired from that restaurant where I was a bartender. The whole story, that might have been a mistake. Another chink in the armor.
I ended up sweeping all over the apartment today, lifting rugs and such looking for this earring that we lost the night of the last big drink. Can’t find it. I guess the cat hid it. It felt a little like spring cleaning. The cat is sitting on the bookshelf with it’s eyes closed like it’s really digging the music. I would like it to be spring, because it is cold, but today it is warmer and there was snow yesterday and now it is melting so fast in the heat that when you walk a tree-lined street like I did with my wife this morning it feels like it is raining as the snow melts from the trees.
Yesterday my wife and I made meatloaf for dinner. While it was cooking I was like, well I got to write a thousand words before bed and she said fuck it just do it now while this is cooking and I did and she folded the laundry. It wasn’t the easiest thousand words I ever wrote, with her there talking to the cat, but I was surprised to find that I could get it done even on a day that we were together. It has been six days since I committed to the idea.
Today I tried to do more pushups but I am really pathetic at them. I have been to the gym three times this month, and my goal is five so, well I think I should make it. I didn’t think it would be this hard, but with the vacation I guess is what made it hard. What the fuck am I even talking about any more? I don’t know, fuck it.
Today I went down to the train to come back home but there were these signs talking about G train to church avenue on this side of the tracks and I thought I was on the wrong side so I went out and came back in on what I thought was the other side and I tried to use my card which is a monthly pass but you can’t use the monthly pass consecutively because you could be letting other people in with your same card so it wouldn’t let me in so I had to use a different card so there went $2.50 and then I went inside and realized I was still on the same sign but this time I was sure it was right and I looked down the track and there was my train but it was too far to run for it and so I had to sit down and wait another ten minutes for a train and I was thinking fuck man! Fuck this shit! New fucking York! God damn it! So then I read some Bleak House on my phone and it passed but I was like god damn it! for a minute there.
I was listening to Marc Maron yesterday and said that Maynard from Tool told him that if you don’t believe in Magic a little bit it’s hard to be creative and I’ve heard that before in a different way but I thought that was a cool way to say it or rather it was a cool person to say it.
Half an hour until I go to work now…feels like it’s been a while since I’ve been in this position of waiting to go to work and not really wanting to go, but here I am all the same. And just last night I thought for the first time that I was excited to have coffee in the morning and already I was doing something fun, watching TV, and I thought that I had achieved whatever it was that I wanted to achieve in life and so it was all downhill from here and downhill is where I’m happiest anyway and anyway it was a slow grade but just enough so I didn’t have to work any more…but now I feel differently and as Chuck Klosterman said, “This is why I will always hate mornings.”
But no, I’m good, I’m cool, I’ve just got too much time today, enough time to be thinking too much about myself. The subconscious mind is the smart one, the conscious mind can’t be engaged too much or your start wondering about shit that you shouldn’t be wondering about…again, what the fuck am I talking about?
This is what you get. Oh, Jesus Fuck I forgot to eat! Well, at least for that.
Anyone's Ghost 