Blue Saturday

No, definitely not.

Truth about this last week is it ended up being a haven of peaceful stasis. Now I'm stood on the train platform, sour and edgy and a little anxious at having to take life off pause. And I want a cig and yeah a drink and that's OK, I'm not asking for purity just a little control.

I’m at the vet this morning. Someone decided to hoover which upset both kittens, but now there are two Doberman puppies here and they’re cute.

Mood is much better since time off, feel am reaching a decision on something.

How are you now NV?

To be honest I'm not well, full of self-pity and suicide thoughts and I'm embarrassed by it. I just want to shut/fold up. Stupid honesty.

shtyupit revulsion emulsion at my own state of me and the imagined horror of someone finding your half-naked corpse and the. It dawns we all exit as naked fleshlunps the last indignity

Pewll out Yr drugs #nd snort owl Yr plugss

would you not wait out the end of the season at least

I talk a big game and then the minute I get these weird brain spasms that feel like imminent death I freak the fuck out. I seem to have googled "painless" at some point last night. Am watching god-botherer cartoons cos there's fuck all else on and I can't get it together to play video games

omfg this happened

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gLT0vrda4k

Surely this is the daddy of insane religious cartoons?

https://youtu.be/NTnjhUUzaEg

making ulysses 2000 jesus qualifies it for me tbh

In counselling waiting room. God knows what I've got to say.

You can always whistle if you're lost for words. Good luck man <3

give em hell, if you got it

good place to be imo, glad you made it there at all - good luck buddy

Day's off to a strong start. Here's a fist bump. 🤜

Say what you feel, sometimes it comes out uglier than you expect, but they are professionals. Good luck!

good luck NV!

Yeah, they've seen a lot - good luck and take care!

good luck mr vague!

Didn't shut up for the duration :D

👍

Solid value for money focus

Good stuff

i had thoughts but that's me done thinking for a day or two. counsellor seemed good. go back in two weeks to start working on my nonsense properly.

at least this was incentive to have a shave this morning

anxiously misread this as "go back in two tweets to start working on my nonsense properly"

good luck w/everything NV!

well now here's my theme music today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cw2PeikVgo

Was this your first time doing something like this and does your head feel cleaned out of shite?

no it was my umpteenth time and i still felt woozy afterward - didn't sleep properly last night and this was the first time i'd had to get up this early in ages. but the counsellor seems like she gets me and i feel like i get her, this could be productive. and altho it was just me rambling i felt like i at least pulled out some threads that are part of my long term dissatisfaction. two weeks is a long wait between appointments and this was just an intro really. i need to do some thinking obviously but thinking is hard and i'm often told i think too much, i dunno, Wolves are on tonight, i'm going to watch them in the pub and start doing difficult stuff on Monday or something, lol another Monday.

(Dé?) Luain gorm imo. Pissy cold weather and I’m going to Scotland tomorrow where it will undoubtedly not improve on that aspect. Am looking forward to not being woken by kittens though.

stalled by a sudden glum wave today: i'm surrounded by a proposal i'm about to send off, another one i think i've cracked (and anyway i'm sending it first to advisers not the actual target), the page i'm preparing for the professional org i just successfully (if very belatedly) joined, a mountain of research material for a big long piece for an anthology i kinda effed up the first draft of but got a very helpful and not-too-rude feedback report from the editor plus an extension yay, and i have another good proposal idea just motored into my brain yesterday…

but ppl on twitter were discussing the medium-term health of *two* mags i want to start working for (possibly bad) (which isn't a surprise to me but), and do i really want to move into e.g. academic research even if it makes (some) sense in the wake of the book? it's not like it's a happy sinecure lol. and i'm all too aware i owe a bunch of ppl a bunch of stuff which they've already paid for and the money is long spent, and instead i'm scrabbling around for subbing work and writing assignations (and getting some but nothing long or lasting so i have to start scrabbling again before i finish) (and i always put so much work into the writing that the money i've been paid is in the end negligeable): i ought to be much more employable than i seem to be but i don't seem to know how to re-tool my self-presentation after i quit my nice safe magazine-proofing space to do the book, and it all collapsed after i left.

and if my health isn't getting worse it isn't getting better, and shouldn't i just be thinking abt selling up and retiring somewhere cheap and picturesque except it feels like giving up ? and all i can think as i nervelessly look at place i can afford is that ppl i know and care abt are all scattered to every point of the country and if i move near one the others will all be offended but if i move near none if in ten years (if i have ten years) i'll be near no one and that seems bad too. i don't actually want to move out of london but i'm hardly going out and about much in london any more…

some of this i'm know is just belated deflation after the book getting published and vanishing quietly in a super-chaotic world (exactly as i knew it would lol lol). but some of it is feeling that my time is passing and the things i very much cared about and committed myself to made no great difference then or since -- if they didn't actually make things worse they didn't stop things getting worse, and i can honestly feel my "fuck you then, this is all wrong and will end badly but YOU do it YOUR way" responses (tantrums) gathering and gathering. plus the space i so much wanted to work at the heart of in my 20s and 30s has just become so unremittingly dreadful except in tiny pockets (and their medium-term health etc etc) and while in a sense i still trust my instincts (i am very arrogant) i know perfectly well and have always known that they are not pointed towards breakthrough success and never were. good work that a tiny number of people appreciate. if it pays some bills that's a bonus. which bonus increasingly rarely comes. my best breaks always came when one of the tiny number of people acted off their own bat to point me in a good direction (or lol even to employ me). all the good jobs i ever got i got bcz someone else noticed they were advertising and pointed me to the advert (and coaxed me into applying) -- except the best one, where i was just rung up out of the blue and asked if i wanted to do it.

so i'm just about ready to send off the first proposal -- the delivery guy just this minute brought me my printer ink, which is sort why why i had this space to go glum and vent -- and here i am thinking "how will i feel if they say YES? happy? or just harrassed all over again?"

half of these seem like way better problems to have than many ppl's problems on this thread -- "oh noes what if they like my idea?" -- so tl;dr i got old and how did that happen, is there game reset?

<3

i'm taking my daughter to the pub but i wanted to acknowledge that post and come back to think about it later

i find myself wanting to reset a lot because the speed setting was wrong, yeah we got older and it was too quick

oh and yr problems seem very much similar mostly: how the fuck to LIVE? (and less importantly make a living)

mark I have nothing useful to say but I know one of my in laws got your book for Christmas and was ecstatic about it

but you should stay in London if you’re happy there. no point in feeling the same somewhere that’s not for you.

Trust me, mark, you'd have even less of a readership within the confines of academia. Keep up the quality work.

And books don't vanish, they go on undercover missions out there unbeknownst to their parents

So I like to tell myself as well. And occasionally those missions turn out to be successful.

See also: Paul Celan's definition of the poem –

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something.

What the others said and <3 "How the fuck to live" nails it imo. I def feel the dread of it not being satisfying enough for oneself, having to settle for 'it didn't make things worse'. Your work is quality, proven over and over.

xp That's beautiful.

Books definitely don’t vanish. One of my longest loved books is one that is extremely obscure and probably only had one print run - if I knew how to contact the author and tell him how much that book meant to me, I would. If he’s still alive, he’s probably thinking similar things without knowing that he made such an impression on me over the years.

One of my favourites has a wiki page but the link to the author is red text :/

You remain a wonder, Mark - you have rolled the wheel of the world on a few inches and sown a few minds. And I'm pretty sure you have some divilment left in you.

a reason i am fond of ilx is when i first arrived here 20 odd years ago i discovered readers of my old 80s work at nme and wire who were delighted to encounter me and say nice things abt ancient magazine nonsense -- so yes, i do retain my trust in the old "digging a tunnel under world" aspect of it all. i arrived in a bit of a blue mood then also -- i'd recently lost a job i'd really enjoyed (they slimmed down the subs desk and i landed here while was surfing on the internet at my new job which i hadn't yet come to enjoy)* and also i'd recently wrecked a friendship by falling in LOVE and being a bit of a dick abt it (i was miserable and inevitably made the other person miserable too)… so this is where i re-found my feet and got the idea for my first book (starting a thread abt if… and discussing it w/norman phay among others) and also met the gang that included the person who gave me the connections to set up the birkbeck conference which led to the more recent book (= the pinefox! hullo pinefox!) -- so i *can* be pro-active and effective now and then, contra my claims above

my default when i'm stumped or baffled is to plunge deep back into detail, literally making sure the i's are all dotted and balancing this with cryptic mischief here and elsewhere -- and generally that's fine. but i need to get another couple of larger things out into the world before i really am too old and slow, and one of them is something i've spent decades trying to make happen and a lot of it already exists but somehow it always feels like all the doors are shut against it unless i win the lottery and pay for it that way (which i won't bcz i don't do the lottery)

*i stayed for 14 years in the end and it served me p well, and when i quit it all fell apart quite quickly so i couldn't go back but also OK maybe i was a valued part of it

anyway many thx for all the pleasing and supportive things ppl have said!

i enjoy your posts as much as your writing gigs, mark!

or perhaps a better word is appreciate, given the thread

hi mark yr good not bad

whenever i get the sads i just remember that the world ended on december 21 2012 and it helps tbh

also who knows, i might get to drink tomb juice one day

I'll never be a lawyer, cos I can't pass the bar

that’s a lovely post from mark. i’m tired and a bit drunk and in bed but i am feeling a lot of warmth to everyone here.