the English eel plumbs the depths with silky modulations, don’t let’s be blunt and boring
“My perfect lifetime-day would coerce the sun to shine through a pall of obscurity, dimmed and tame and icy. Iceland, where morning time resembles evening lights, and where the cold preserves simplicity inside a blue balloon. Outside my weather-worn cottage, I sit and write, slumped in a wooden chair, a blanket cozying up to my laptop, lead-poisoning my limbs. I’ve lived through everything now, no more left to experience that would merit noteworthy phrasing spilled onto the screen. My manuscript is finally over – a choice in passive career paths, the cure for a Libra’s passive-aggression, and my check-out guilt-free pass. There’ve been stopgap successes throughout, trickling serotonin now and again to trump depression, poker-face the world. The lack of human contact masking my misanthropy, I smile thinking the bullet of a teeming lifestyle’s been dodged, and at the end of the day the wind billowing, trees rustling, the uselessness of it all – it’s soporific enough, but chemicals are still needed for a solid punch line. I’ve surrendered myself to lone-furrow-ploughing therapy to counteract the years of societal pollution, slid into the reclination of no nonsense anymore, just the comatose R&R of clear-cut desires fulfilled via wireless connection. And when I go out, it’s the world turning to sooth – the last white lie I’ll ever comfort myself with – because after my eyelids drop, lulled into sound sleep and blissful blindness, disappearance fuses with everything outside, the pills funnel reality into my last remaining synapses, inducing death by landscape ingestion. I’m forty something, I know. It’s not that I’m not aware of the potential for novelty, more like sick of the knock-on anemic response it’s always triggered in myself. The little trust I’ve placed in the divine has somehow taken the superior edge off humanity and at this point the puzzle’s gotten too blurred for the worm’s-eye view to hope for any absolute certainty from clawing at its joints. It’s all about control, always has been, but by now I would have shunned figuring that out long enough to circular-file the whys and move on to managing the hows. Eyes scrunching upwards, consciousness dripping in bright frills from my lid rims, blood thickening to a crawl…hands void, flaccid and alien, the body leaves like everyone else I’ve driven away.”
My eyes gushed again, soiled with mascara and dousing till sodden all sorts of quivering dimples along their way, pathetic really. Pesky little buggers, symptomatic of misery, but also as addictive as you’d expect their endorphin whiplash to be. I spent a weekend with house m.d., alternately indulging in self-pity for skimping on the brain jog, then jolted by the no-one-really-makes-a-dent penny dropping, and, for a swan song, just brushing it all aside, when the delusions’ m.o. of buttons-pushing is blown up into full view: right after watching supernatural my susceptibilities swell, twist and knot my peripheral view goading it further down Casper’s rabbit hole; after watching house m.d. the expectations tug at similar heartstrings but lurking in the shadows to implicate reason is a hallucinatory diagnostic. audio-visual genres reign supreme, wreak royal havoc with my senses and keep me in check, hooked putty in their hands.
I’m not in control – but I avoid being blindsided by relegating it all, eventually, to red-carpet distance
: the perfectly pitched fan the dull crackling flame of prevarication and vicariousness, so my oasis with celluloid walls forever lit is safe. ultimate control.
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