Everything’s moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. I’m not coping would be the best way of looking at this past week or so. Still most bills aren’t paid, and I’m down to zero in my account. I haven’t heard word on my rise yet, and I have had several reveries of walking out due to not getting one at all. My radishes have been eaten and I looked into encouraging hedgehogs but that the garden is too hemmed in and fenced off for them to make it in. (Plenty of reveries and story ideas from this one.) Halifax rang about the credit card. All I would have to do is bring a couple of forms of ID to the nearest branch. Of course, that has proved beyond me so far and I have doubtless lost the piece of paper I need to that end. Not only that but we still have no contents insurance. Legal and General wrote to me a few times. Initially, believing it all to be sorted, I filed the letters away unopened. Then came another, which I thought suspect since it should long since have been done and dusted, only, here was a request for payment. I checked to see if my statement contained any payment to Legal and General, if this could be a mistake. In fact, I did this the day of the last posting. There was not. And so I filled out an incredibly badly laid out form for means of payment. There was no option of doing so online. One option was credit/debit card, and yet the number of boxes was too many for my card number, and there was no option for issue number. I figured this may be the last digit and added it, labelling it Issue number in biro. No response and so, done and dusted once again, it was one thing to tick off my list. Until the next letter. The card number was invalid! We have lost one bill, the water bill, and I have not yet paid the bill for the telephone when they “connected” the wrong house, the flat of the woman who moved out of here, disconnecting her from her current provider so she cannot reconnect for another couple of weeks. There is so much to do and I cannot cope.

Then there has been the issue of a book I ordered, Demanding the Impossible by Peter Marshall, a history of anarchism that I enjoyed at university and lusted for again on reading that little of Anarchism for the introduction to Darren I was writing. I ordered it on E-Bay and have not seen it since.

I wrote a nasty e-mail to Audible and they rang me again a few times (I can’t remember where I left this story). Once re-ordering the books for me to upload once more. I did so and it didn’t work. That made me angry. Angry that I was losing time. I drove back with M_____ full of rage, and silent. The kind of car journey we have had too many times already, and which a couple can only have so many times.

They rang me last the other day. I was by the boat, which we have been working on with the students away. Of course, I wasn’t at the computer, which wasn’t ideal, but I had the device. Regina took me through the problem, and asked me to have the device at the ready. I had it in my hand. I waited as she re-familiarised herself with my problem. I turned on the player, and flicked through the files:

Absurdistan by

Pimsleur Russian

Stoparuv Pruvodce Galaxie [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy]

I did so by flicking the scrolling wheel on the side of the player, a little joystick which controlled all the functions. It was easy enough to get the hang of, skipping at first through folders, and then files within the folders once you settled for a while on one of them. Whilst in the audiobooks itself it did something more clever, skipping through sections. Something occurred to me. I tried something I hadn’t tried before, changing the mode somehow from skipping folders to skipping files. I pushed right.

American Prometheus

Bleak House

Here were the books I had bought and uploaded, written e-mails about, conducted transatlantic calls over, and wasted so much time upon. They had downloaded without problem and worked on my Creative Zen player like a dream. It hadn’t been difficult to retrieve them at all, only I had followed the ADDer’s path, getting angry and losing it before I had done something simple. I see it every day at work when something so small goes wrong, or doesn’t go as expected. The whole world falls in, and those little logical steps the brain needs to make to solve the problems of this world are the first things to go.

So, of course, feeling a little silly, and yet relieved, and even amused at myself, not to mention looking forward to my future listening pleasure with that irrational buzz I always get with new books, even though for years and years, since childhood indeed, that has rarely seen itself through to fruition, I thanked Regina and apologised profusely for my little slip, she told me it was ok, lied that it was understandable and went about her business.

Only, of course, I didn’t. Immediately, while she was still reading over my letter, I started thinking up how I could pretend that the files weren’t on the player. I did what I had done a thousand times before, equally irrationally.

When I was around fourteen I received a note from my classmate.

Do you feel like I feel?

I felt depressed. I had done for a long time. A cloud had come over me. A black dog had started hanging around me long before. I figured he had noted this, and of course it takes one to know one, and he was ready to get his own dirty secret (for that was what it was) out into the open.

Yes, I wrote.

What should we do? he wrote.

I don’t know, I said, my facetious tone developed even then as a means of defence, take LSD?

The notes continued. But of course, he was not depressed. This soon became clear. At what point I don’t know. F_____ had one time given me a Benneton brochure. In it were pictures of men and women of every colour, naked. I was grateful. My life at the time revolved around masturbation. It was my only pleasure, and the one thing I was good at. He was of course testing a theory of his. I was too naive to know it.

When I found out what the notes were about, I behaved in a strange way. I demured. I answered noncomitally, but I did not at any point say that I had misunderstood. The notes continued to no real purpose. We then went on a skiing trip and I woke up one night in a double Austrian bed to him with his hands all over me. At least, I think I did. Everything was so much a pea souper back then that it was impossible to tell. What is true is that I ended up sleeping on the mattress on the floor.

As far as I can remember (and it is imossibly opaque, this being the time that I first started really descending into a complete mental fog, stimming with strange quacking noises and talking with constant neologisms), there was no real mention of the notes after that time.

What I do recall is a trip I made with B_____ to Newquay. There we met a few old school friends. It was the summer of limbo. I was awaiting my A-Level results, desperate to escape Black Herd Mews. We hadn’t kept in touch. I had left that first attempt at my A-Levels with my tail between my legs, so deeply depressed that I had skipped school, sixth form, for weeks telling no one, just walking around town and catching buses and trains to Birmingham and back, looking at guitars I couldn’t afford, and buying the occasional CD and bags of liquorice allsorts. I hadn’t been able to study and had automatically written the word suicide whilst copying from the board, not even copying from the board but from a neighbour who was copying from the board. I was once photographed in the local newspaper walking along in my ill-fitting ex-army grebo uniform, my head hanging down on my long neck, a flacid greasy ponytail behind me.

There I was hyperactive and inappropriate. I danced flailing my arms everywhere as if I were on drugs, euphorious. Probably it is my closest experience ever to being on E, except that I struggled to talk to anyone. Girls would make an effort to talk to me and then walk away.

F_____ made his excuses half way through the holiday. He had driven there. He talked about his father. For years, living on the worst estate in the town, he had talked of his millionaire father, and made up stories about his uncle and his father’s lover and the like, the building he was renovating as a project, the cars he had, and so on and so forth. For my part, I made up stories about a gang of kids I hung out with, smoking pot and fucking beautiful brunettes with Ducati 916 motorbikes. They would call outside my window, rev their engines and wouldn’t shut up until I crawled out of my window and escaped the suburbs. Meanwhile, the most exciting thing in my life was listening to Ian Perry’s Midnight Line and setting fire to the inards of my petrol lighter after I had gone to bed on the end of a cheap Swiss-imitation knife, waving a flare-like white mass out of my window with dripping flames coming off it, thinking I would set fire to my house.

B_____ saw him on his way home. His eyes were wild, scared, like a rabbit in headlights.

While on the holiday F_____ said things like “I haven’t had a fight in ages.” Since I had left the school, he had started hanging out with people like V_____, who had always been with the tougher kids in school. With the guys in bands, the guys who played rugby. As in really played in bands, really played rugby.

He was found hanging in a friend’s house.

V_____ was found sometime later.

He had escaped to university, only not to the best. Nottingham Trent was not an accepting place, and he had been still on the receiving end of prejudice. And then he saw me, and something unresolved came up from his past.

I was unprepared at that age to have conversations. If I am honest with myself I still am. I come out of every one like I have cone out the loser of a fight, my head reeling. But what is it that drives me to continue these conversations as if I cannot correct an obvious misapprehension.

“I think I might go into town,” I said one time, at the Sound Engineering course I began the year after quitting my A-Levels the first time round.

“How would you get there?” said a classmate, a black country fellow in a band called Opaque. He had understood the word town to mean Birmingham, which was a good few miles away.

“I’d walk.”

I forget how this conversation continued except that it became clear there was a serious misunderstanding going on, and I carried on then somehow as if I had been speaking of travelling to Birmingham all along.

I don’t know why I do it. These are just some examples. It must raise plenty of legal issues if someone as ostensibly intelligent as me can make such fundamental errors of conversation.

I thought about it again and again. Felt like an idiot standing there, being put on hold, being asked questions and faking answers while Regina spoke to the techie guy on another line. I felt like such an oddball, an idiot, a coward, a freak.

I got two credits out of it on Audible stores, but I’m still reeling.

And imagine how I feel when I recall that clash. Because that is how I see it. It led me while in Prague to think of a kind of philosophy, or part of one. Brownian Motion. That is what civilisation is. People propelled by the actions of others just like Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being who’s life Milan Kundera describes as like a billiard ball, continuing from the motion of the player’s arm, and hurtling along, trying all their lives to get used to their spin, their speed, their momentum, until they hit or get hit by another, and have to start thinking all over again. I had no idea what was happened to me, with me, in me. I was depressed, I was hypomanic, and at all events, so brittle of personality, so unable to relax into a conversation, and then I clash with him in these notes, and then again, and it is too much.

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