The Gut Chronicles: Open Wound
1) From Me To You
Well, it sounds as though in the spirit of all hyperactive schizophrenics, you're operating on several levels simultaneously - The Theorist: who knows what he SHOULD be doing to alleviate these crippling symptoms, The Pragmatist: who attempts to modify his outlook to accommodate all experience, good and bad, as contributive to his ultimate manifestation as a human (see: fallibilism, no such thing as a failed experiment where a result is attained) and The Human ( i.e. Deeply Flawed) who is slow to change and to whom complacency is preferable to discipline. Human beings (homo shitfuckicus) are innately and uniformly lazy. So the feelings you associate with Lisa are warming and comforting and were for some time readily available, you got accustomed, grew complacent, became too dependent, reliant on attaching these feelings to the presence of The Other, namely, Her, wherein The Pragmatist would have the resolve to act upon the advice of The Theorist, and recognize that the source of these feelings is within oneself, and seek to generate a familiar warmth from within. the deeply embedded sense of attachment to The Other grows impotized with time, like a screen on the back of a trailer being driven away from the projector down abstract, grubby little dirt tracks. You're in the Nostalgia phase, because it's easy, but you're also fluctuating between this and the Defiant phase, because you're not by nature a deeply negative and regretful person, so this conflicting interplay between your opposing attributes is creating and unbearable tension, so in this scenario, may seek external guidance in the guise of an overpaid guru manipulator, to defer responsibility for their rehabilitation, but your inner anarchism prohibits the hiring of such a conman, so you're stranded, the onus solely on you to decipher the quagmire and either hurl yourself into the flames, or drag yourself out of the ashes of 'love' and continue moving forward. It took a while but I moved on, maybe adopt a creative outlet, as a private vault for the deconstructing of your apparently inarticulable tensions? And don't indulge in self-deprecation, don't succumb to 'I-am-not-worthy-I'm-shit-and-I-blew-the-only-chance-of-romantic-happines-I'll-ever-have' kind of mindset, because For Fuck's Sake, you're only just 18, ok? Like I said, you're compelling, good-looking, witty, precocious, keep your mind geared in a forward motion and don't allow self-desructive thoughts to malinger...
Look, you don't need to be scared of the future, or if you are, at least bracket the fear to excitement, you've got so much to look forward to, you're not a moron, you're weirdly beautiful (that's a compliment, duh), and you're governed by a tremendous and powerful will. I'll give you a massive boa constrictor hug when I get back, all I'm doing here is masking the durable cliche, it'll all get better and better with time, although half of that is getting desensitised to failure and disappointment, something I've not done, but I guess I'd rather feel alive than inhumanly numb to emotional trauma. At least George revived the human in me. Cunt.
2) 21:47 Morning Glory
Okay, so Joe’s downstairs on my bed attempting to gather his thoughts, I just contrived my excuses and fucked off upstairs to hammer out whatever creases I’ve incurred since we were attacked by glyphs and sigmas and mutant alphabets and shadows warriors and empty signifiers with breasts and hair and giggles and social contrivances that stem the flow of thought with every clouded glance and stifling gesture, eyes pleading, posture fucked. Fucked. How graceful, and all because I lapsed into a slump, like the base of a log flume before you resurface, like I’m riding the crest of a sine wave between states of perception, awareness, layers of consciousness. Whenever a door opens I get amplified segments of Japanese kraut-rock – sympathetic genres because they were both bullied by the Americans….same accounts for their technophilia? My arms bundled like a predatory carnivorous dinosaur, as opposed to those who hunt for plants, I would compare my general physical disposition to that of say, Jeff Goldblum’s fly in an advanced state of metamorphosis. And nobody else would, because they don’t have the warped associative function a) I am graced with and b) between like components and c) as milled through the coloured gels and distorting filters I recently laid across my lens of cognitive awareness. I still have this base yearning to be physically close to Joe so much of the time. I’d like to extract myself from the wake and brush and wrestle myself free of seaweed, just so I can ride the tide more airily, not weighted by such irreconcilable and irrational mutations of thought. At this point it’s totally futile presenting the conundrum in which cradles the notion ‘falling in love’, if the intention is to deduce something cogent and tangible… But I do sense a hair of longing if I peer at the sun, the sun being the body from which all things emanate, namely, microcosmically, the soul, if you will. And I don’t want this hair of longing to infect and sour our relationship, and yet the more I consciously negotiate my longing, the more detached from our mutual abstracted being he seems to be, as though my internally entertained desire (?) were attacking him with such weight that he can support himself leaning into this wind no longer. Or, am I creating a matrix of anxieties, a cat’s cradle of weak-willed wishes and paranoia traps, just by chewing over every conscionable permutation of energies and transferences and codes available within the parameters of me, Joe and the world and our individual and collective perception of it and they? For instance, is he by nature quite selfish? And an etiquette relapse punches him in the gut periodically, he repents, the deprogramming slurs to a flatline, and he reverts to deep, dense black hole into which all matter is hoovered and atomised? Or is my sexual pathology so pathetic and needy that I invent cities of subterfuge and conspiracy to reinforce the notion of my being strong and independent? Is this ALL, absolute and utter bullshit, undoubtedly to some if not many people, but it’s language arranged in what appears to me to be a navigable syntax, and as such shouldn’t be totally incomprehensible.
3) 22:12 Morning Glory Part 2
Or am I just being a drama queen? Or am I too self-conscious to actually be anything authentically at least in this state, or is this everyone’s actual make-up, only they’re less aware of it. Perhaps I should apply my agitated and hyper-aware and over-stimulated state to a more creative and pragmatic enterprise. My, this IS beautiful use of language, are you turning into a classicist, my boy? Ok, here goes, I’m post-natally depressed because I just gave birth to the devastating and numbing gambit that I WANT LOVE. How to start a novel, grab your readers by the heart-strings and strum a blinding and captivating overture, Thor’s Hammer squarely pounds their pliable heads into receptive aerials, dedicated to the time and travails of you, you, you. Where does style become substance, and on whose turf does the handshake take place?
Well, it sounds as though in the spirit of all hyperactive schizophrenics, you're operating on several levels simultaneously - The Theorist: who knows what he SHOULD be doing to alleviate these crippling symptoms, The Pragmatist: who attempts to modify his outlook to accommodate all experience, good and bad, as contributive to his ultimate manifestation as a human (see: fallibilism, no such thing as a failed experiment where a result is attained) and The Human ( i.e. Deeply Flawed) who is slow to change and to whom complacency is preferable to discipline. Human beings (homo shitfuckicus) are innately and uniformly lazy. So the feelings you associate with Lisa are warming and comforting and were for some time readily available, you got accustomed, grew complacent, became too dependent, reliant on attaching these feelings to the presence of The Other, namely, Her, wherein The Pragmatist would have the resolve to act upon the advice of The Theorist, and recognize that the source of these feelings is within oneself, and seek to generate a familiar warmth from within. the deeply embedded sense of attachment to The Other grows impotized with time, like a screen on the back of a trailer being driven away from the projector down abstract, grubby little dirt tracks. You're in the Nostalgia phase, because it's easy, but you're also fluctuating between this and the Defiant phase, because you're not by nature a deeply negative and regretful person, so this conflicting interplay between your opposing attributes is creating and unbearable tension, so in this scenario, may seek external guidance in the guise of an overpaid guru manipulator, to defer responsibility for their rehabilitation, but your inner anarchism prohibits the hiring of such a conman, so you're stranded, the onus solely on you to decipher the quagmire and either hurl yourself into the flames, or drag yourself out of the ashes of 'love' and continue moving forward. It took a while but I moved on, maybe adopt a creative outlet, as a private vault for the deconstructing of your apparently inarticulable tensions? And don't indulge in self-deprecation, don't succumb to 'I-am-not-worthy-I'm-shit-and-I-blew-the-only-chance-of-romantic-happines-I'll-ever-have' kind of mindset, because For Fuck's Sake, you're only just 18, ok? Like I said, you're compelling, good-looking, witty, precocious, keep your mind geared in a forward motion and don't allow self-desructive thoughts to malinger...
Look, you don't need to be scared of the future, or if you are, at least bracket the fear to excitement, you've got so much to look forward to, you're not a moron, you're weirdly beautiful (that's a compliment, duh), and you're governed by a tremendous and powerful will. I'll give you a massive boa constrictor hug when I get back, all I'm doing here is masking the durable cliche, it'll all get better and better with time, although half of that is getting desensitised to failure and disappointment, something I've not done, but I guess I'd rather feel alive than inhumanly numb to emotional trauma. At least George revived the human in me. Cunt.
2) 21:47 Morning Glory
Okay, so Joe’s downstairs on my bed attempting to gather his thoughts, I just contrived my excuses and fucked off upstairs to hammer out whatever creases I’ve incurred since we were attacked by glyphs and sigmas and mutant alphabets and shadows warriors and empty signifiers with breasts and hair and giggles and social contrivances that stem the flow of thought with every clouded glance and stifling gesture, eyes pleading, posture fucked. Fucked. How graceful, and all because I lapsed into a slump, like the base of a log flume before you resurface, like I’m riding the crest of a sine wave between states of perception, awareness, layers of consciousness. Whenever a door opens I get amplified segments of Japanese kraut-rock – sympathetic genres because they were both bullied by the Americans….same accounts for their technophilia? My arms bundled like a predatory carnivorous dinosaur, as opposed to those who hunt for plants, I would compare my general physical disposition to that of say, Jeff Goldblum’s fly in an advanced state of metamorphosis. And nobody else would, because they don’t have the warped associative function a) I am graced with and b) between like components and c) as milled through the coloured gels and distorting filters I recently laid across my lens of cognitive awareness. I still have this base yearning to be physically close to Joe so much of the time. I’d like to extract myself from the wake and brush and wrestle myself free of seaweed, just so I can ride the tide more airily, not weighted by such irreconcilable and irrational mutations of thought. At this point it’s totally futile presenting the conundrum in which cradles the notion ‘falling in love’, if the intention is to deduce something cogent and tangible… But I do sense a hair of longing if I peer at the sun, the sun being the body from which all things emanate, namely, microcosmically, the soul, if you will. And I don’t want this hair of longing to infect and sour our relationship, and yet the more I consciously negotiate my longing, the more detached from our mutual abstracted being he seems to be, as though my internally entertained desire (?) were attacking him with such weight that he can support himself leaning into this wind no longer. Or, am I creating a matrix of anxieties, a cat’s cradle of weak-willed wishes and paranoia traps, just by chewing over every conscionable permutation of energies and transferences and codes available within the parameters of me, Joe and the world and our individual and collective perception of it and they? For instance, is he by nature quite selfish? And an etiquette relapse punches him in the gut periodically, he repents, the deprogramming slurs to a flatline, and he reverts to deep, dense black hole into which all matter is hoovered and atomised? Or is my sexual pathology so pathetic and needy that I invent cities of subterfuge and conspiracy to reinforce the notion of my being strong and independent? Is this ALL, absolute and utter bullshit, undoubtedly to some if not many people, but it’s language arranged in what appears to me to be a navigable syntax, and as such shouldn’t be totally incomprehensible.
3) 22:12 Morning Glory Part 2
Or am I just being a drama queen? Or am I too self-conscious to actually be anything authentically at least in this state, or is this everyone’s actual make-up, only they’re less aware of it. Perhaps I should apply my agitated and hyper-aware and over-stimulated state to a more creative and pragmatic enterprise. My, this IS beautiful use of language, are you turning into a classicist, my boy? Ok, here goes, I’m post-natally depressed because I just gave birth to the devastating and numbing gambit that I WANT LOVE. How to start a novel, grab your readers by the heart-strings and strum a blinding and captivating overture, Thor’s Hammer squarely pounds their pliable heads into receptive aerials, dedicated to the time and travails of you, you, you. Where does style become substance, and on whose turf does the handshake take place?
4) Epiphany’s Terror
I don’t know what to do. I’m bordering on actual insanity. I find myself craving a holiday from myself. And the impossibility of this intensifies the claustrophobia into absolute crippling discomfort in my own skin. Perhaps I’m too tired to think properly, to efficiently isolate and process thoughts and concepts. I’m really quite scared. Maybe I flirted too recklessly with the edges of sanity, I really want Joe to…I don’t know. I feel very alone again. I sense he’d drop everything for Lisa, and that perhaps I’m largely convenient in her absence. Which makes his deflowering of my ass sore beyond the ephemeral physical soreness. And yet I’m now totally hooked sexually on him, and it seems apparent that this is pretty unrequited, and something I should get over. But he’s been inside my body, something nobody else in the world has achieved, and he’s still there, and it felt so good, and now I’ve relapsed into another junkie fixation, and I can’t get the memory of that sensation, or it’s significance, out of my acutely and relentlessly analytical head. So I’m obsessing myself into a muddy, debilitating depression, and consigning myself to an ever lonelier secrecy. Me, alone in a white door-less room, piggy-in-the-middle to a head full of giggling demons. I keep getting a glimpse, a taste of love. It’s always retracted immediately that I embrace it or recognise it as such. He can’t give what I want from him and it’s unfair to ask it of him, and yet, the body yearns so dumbly, in key signatures so at odds with the mind whose symphonies I conduct with such assured vigour.
5 )Ground Zero: Plea To An Anonymous Ear
Hey,
I've never done this before, but for some reason it seems easier airing this stuff to someone I don't necessarily know. I'm a 24 year old musician/artist/writer, gay, and in unrequited love with my housemate, who's 18. His father's the live-in landlord, and he doesn't like his son, but he's also homophobic. Joe, the son, and I are amazingly close friends with a strong emotional/intellectual resonance, more powerful than almost any connection I've ever felt. We're also responsible drug buddies, obsessed with exploring the far-out reaches of consciousness, in an experimental, and respectful way, we've shared - and hopefully will continue to share - some profound times together. Anyway, I found myself entertaining sexual ideas about him. My sexual pathology's an odd one, in that there were some nasty experiences as a kid, which programmed some pretty bad wiring in me, wherein I'd associate sex with violence, as in, I eroticised the violence inflicted on me, probably as a defense policy. Oh, and a babysitter when I was eight used to push me down the stairs and force-feed me alka seltzer, repeatedly. So, only child me, became very distrustful, alienated, found it hard to make friends. Then reconciled the idea that I was gay, raised in a shitty redneck wilderness driven by bigotry and homophobia, so i didn't come out to anyone/'enjoy' any sexual encounters until I'd left for university, when i was nineteen. And even then they were fleeting, unsatisfactory one-night-stands that had me quietly devastated. So I guess I'm somewhat retarded in that sense. But otherwise I'm probably quite advanced. Quantity theory of personal development. So now most people know I'm gay, still haven't told my parents, I find that idea so hard to manifest and reconcile. I'm friends with my favourite author, who's helped me immeasurably in terms of sexual identity - I despise the whole gay scene, the homogenised spandex, peroxide quiff, Hi-NRG stuff, so for ages I felt lost, alienated from everyone, never having belonged to any community, because I'm pretty singularly individual, find it hard to relate to the majority of people...my passions being creative, anarchistic, deprogramming stuff, Dennis Cooper's work helped in its depiction of a non-collective gay identity. So we entered into correspondence and he loves my music and writing, and I played at a literary festival in honour of his work, so my artistic career's growing wings which obviously feels amazing. And I've got brilliant friends, not least of which is Joe. Still, two wednesdays ago - and we'd/we've been growing ever closer for a while - he took ecstacy, and decided he wanted to try sexual stuff with me. He knew back then that I'm really into him, so we did, he took my virginity, I guess, and it felt amazing. Since then however, he's decided that he actually doesn't have sexual feelings for me, he's got back with his ex-girlfriend and I'm plagued with crippling loneliness and attacks of devastating longing for further sexual stuff with him. He knows that he used me to work out his sexuality, so I feel slightly exploited, and guilty for feeling that way, because I enjoyed it so much, the single-most profound sexual experience of my life so far. So now I'm totally attached to him sexually, and yet we're deeply in love as platonic soul mates, and I don't want our having sex to jeopardise that, as I get jealous of he and his girlfriend. So I'm finding it hard to separate the various strands of our relationship. He's my ideal boyfriend. I've never had a long-term relationship in my life, and here us two are, in the same house, and it's so perfect except for that one missing component - we sleep together, cuddle etc, but I just can't provide sexual fulfillment for him. So I'm slightly heartbroken, even though what we DO have is profound and invaluable. I'm just so tired - and it is exhaustion - of being alone, even around company I often feel totally alone, the designated fate for only children? I feel kind of under--developed, I see everyone else complacently entrenched in their relationships and think, why not me? I know that these few encounters in my very early-teens seriously fucked with my programming, but I work that out in my writing and music, and that's liberating, and people tell me it's totally courageous. And that means so much. Still, whenever I'm alone, increasingly my mind wanders to the Joe situation, he drives me wild, and so few people do - I'm probably fairly sociopathic, or at least a romantic idealist, still believing as I do, in perfect love. I really thought this could be it. And we'd have been invincible. But, alas, no. Everything but the sex, which I guess I've mythologised into something Hindenberg-esque in stature and density. I actually get on with so few people, I have no acquaintances, and I guess I must sound vaguely whiny and spoilt...but there remains always, just this hole. Thanks for existing, I didn't/don't know who else I could've turned to, I can tell my family less each day, my life is pretty outrageous and experimental, but sometimes, I get these windows where I'd just love to evacuate myself from my own head, and live a hetero-normative dog-wife-car-regular-job-style existence...but then I think, well, at least I feel utterly alive. Oh, yeh, I've been jobless for four months now, and I've been so prolific with my art, and yet of course, my money's trickling urgently away, and I'm gonna have to get something. I was in retail, but it was killing me inside. I probably drink way too much, but that acts as a purge - I assume the role of wise-cracking, avant-garde 'performer' when I'm drunk, I'm predisposed to entertaining people I guess, smoke and mirrors perhaps? I dunno. I'm getting freaked out now, my mind's getting overwhelmed with all of the data I'm trying to unravel. Thanks, hope you're able to make sense of some of this. There's so much more to say, but this is already way too long, I just needed to say at least something. It's a really sticky predicament - we're supposed to be moving out together which I'm super-excited about, and I guess in Brighton I'll be in a position conducive to meeting people, but right now, in this house, it's claustrophobic and I feel like I'm gonna implode.
Thanks for your time,
Nick.
posted by Nick Hudson at 12:02 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Nick,
just set up a joint blog thingy, so you should have an email. It might end up being interesting, and maybe other members can be invited or whatever. Haven't thought of anything to post yet, but I'd like to hear some ideas.
Your new piece of writing is heartbreaking. The last section in particular astonishes me. I hope this ill-fated tryst doesn't cause any longstanding ill feeling between you and Joe. I don't imagine it will.
See you soon. Love your words.
Paul
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