The Day Compels Me

Yesterday, Holly signed into her old myspace and I saw and was like WOAH, blast from the past much. Signed into mine. Yeah, this takes me back. Pretentious "about me" section, check. Lack of colour, coding etc. so as to seem like a guy with an "I-don't-care" attitude, check. Image to conceal the stupid "In your extended network" box which recalls a line from Less Than Zero, check. Oh, what a twat I was. Am. My about me has been updated sufficiently to say I'm at Oxford studying English, I slip in some melodrama, mention eternal my hair colour concern ("I used to have blonde hair, but it got darker") and brilliantly contrast that with the staccato "I don't know if I've ever really been in love." I think I was literally channeling Bret Easton Ellis when I designed my myspace, that day. I think I wanted more than anything to be Clay from Less Than Zero: sexy, blonde, bisexual, passive, expressionless, mechanical. There's something ironic about trying really hard to embody that jaded, indifferent '80s LA aesthetic.

"Oh, you've got BLOGS, you're one of those guys" she observes, noticing that literally half of my myspace is the tiny little box which links you to my most recent blogs. Myspace was my old blog site, but I decided that as Myspace got younger and younger and I got older and older maybe I should just get an actual blogsite, perhaps interlink it with my Facebook. Cynical, I feel like I'm working for ratings. I'm constantly selling my emotional outpouring for some vague, half-hearted admiration of my prose style. Bleed all over the page, all over the keyboard. So yes, I was one of those kids. Boy, I haven't changed that much. Certainly I'm a lot healthier than I was: a lot less depressed, a lot less lonely, a lot less insecure. But really, I'm tracing all my old blogs back to when I was 15 and first wrote a blog where I bitched about the universe treating me unfairly and here I conclude that the same themes have haunted me as far back as I can really remember. All my teenage angst has not been properly jetissoned. I'm so emotionally retarded.

Cue my looking over the comments as much as the actual blogs. Ones from my first ever boyfriend, a girl I thought I fancied, a friend at school who wasn't my friend. All to the same effect: "everyone feels this way" or "you shouldn't feel like this" or "you're only fifteen/sixteen/seventeen, you shouldn't be thinking about your life this way." I tend to write in a style which emulates the way I think but it conscious of a listener, an edited account of my thoughts, a streamlined and much truncated adaptation of this maddening, harrowing, neverending life narration. It's even worse when I have headphones in, and I'm silently going somewhere, because everything is interpreted as the movie of my life and this is the song that's currently playing and I'm the director all of a sudden asking the actor playing Liam, "is this how Liam feels though? Maybe you should try and be reflective of the surroundings. Try and BE Liam." I blame Bret Easton Ellis for that, too. Stupid but throughly amazing Glamorama. And yes, where was I? My conversations with people who I cannot properly interpret take yet another mode, one where I'm trying really hard to speak to them in monologues and convey the reality of my experience but I do not account for their input (or at least, one which deviated from how I would imagine it) and it all goes wrong and I find myself just repeating "I'm having trouble finding words which can accurately express what I'm trying to say. But I know exactly what I mean, Ok." Reality is so much more complicated, especially when it's all going wrong.

"The Day Compels Me." Blog title. What day? Valentine's, of course. If I did one for Christmas, why not one now? The Christmas one was a really sort of malicious one where I took out all my anger about stupids friends of mine who think it's not utterly transparent that they're both lonely at Christmas despite being entirely incompatible, but also malicious that someone I fancied but was respectfully giving time to get over their ex and someone I used to fancy had coupled up. Over it, not bitter. Anyway, THIS blog instead has taken the form of a rant perhaps. An account of my day, in a sort of non-linear fashion as I seem to be recalling various events from 2005 to now, and am running them parallel with allusion to various episodes from last December to last week. GOD: last week. Hellish. ANYWAY. Anyway. I keep saying "anyway" like this will help me spit it out. Anyway ... spit. Doesn't? Doesn't. My prose style is getting more INTENSE as if I think I'm doing this intentionally, but it doesn't portray how I really think in the best light. I am genuinely quite a sane individual. Where was I? Anyway. Yes, I find a blog lamenting Valentine's Day which I wrote when I was 15 and I couldn't help but feel I could have been writing this -- I like my style of writing at that age -- I could have written as much last year or this year or any other. It was like, WOAH. Liam's big concerns are just not going anywhere. They are essentially thus: Liam wants a boyfriend; sometimes, Liam wants a girlfriend; Liam feels like no one looks at him in clubs, like no one fancies him; Liam feels he's deserving of far more than he gets. So yes, today has compelled me to write a sequel, I suppose. I feel like I've completely exorcised the ghosts of my Not-My-Ex. All the Never Weres are Never What?

I worry that I'm becoming consumed by all the vanities and superficialities of the world that I used to look down on. For example, the major counterpoint to Valentine's-Day-Sucks is I-Got-A-New-Haircut which puts me in a majorly good mood and I balance out around normal. I feel like being the kind of student who gets a Toni & Guy haircut is probably a bad thing. I feel worse today that I went to Boots to get that platinum shampoo that makes your hair slightly lighter every time you use it. I don't know what I'm becoming. Maybe one day I'll be happy because I'll have become one of those monsters who I hate and perhaps envy in equal measure. Then I can do monstery things without remorse.

The Speculative Wildnerness

This is a poem I wrote several weeks ago and was extremely disappointed in because it did not convey what I wanted it to. I deleted it in a rage. I later discovered that Blogspot autosaves everything you enter into it, and I found it incomplete. I haven't bothered to edit it or even finish it, because I realise it has no conclusion and that was part of what I was struggling to find with it. I think it stands now as much about the futility of unexpressable emotion and about the feigned attempt at looking for love where you never really felt it. It's also something about my attempts at trying to work certain sets of imagery into my writing and accidentally imbuing some contrary images, which I think itself encapsulates the dyad between expectation and reality.

So here it is, under the original title I gave it which now I think could mean anything (perhaps not entirely related to the poem's content, but more to the feeling to which the lyrics sprung from). The poem's title is "The Speculative Wilderness."

The tide is splashed upon the shore
Which saw the closing of my heart,
Wherein the thought remained no more
of love which could inspire art.

Each frothy bubble, born anew
Bursts or breaks at fresh horizon,
And to air and touches true
Union of unrivalled poison.

And I sit fiercely, perched atop
These rocks which have seen many pairs,
Who felt in themselves no strength to stop
Nor care to count the whys and wheres.

This beach, along the coast it stretches,
For many ones to contemplate
How men and women alike make wretches
Of the loves they cared to half-create

Against the sea I see and saw,
The eyes within the water's blue.
Against the rocks I hoped to paw,
The cracky lips and heart of you.

No nature remains at all consistent,
The beach to forest, and then to desert
They're all but nought within this instant;
Manifest of just desserts.

And wild woods, I look upon
Just as I might have done the shore,
And cannot find alas the one
Who I have been looking for.

He sits acrowd, as one rock,
The one I have misplaced.
And time the fiend, the ticking clock
Makes worry that I've lost a race

For other men on other beaches
Are looking for one not dissimilar to you
And falling away and out of my reaches
Is everything I claimed was true.

So I reach into this endless ocean,
And find myself aloss,
With hope that swimming through emotion
Will return me what I want.

I cry to sirens, "Let the this ship sail!
That mistakes might not repeat",
Your siren song steals away all,
That ever docked before beside this seat.

My voice carries some seven seas:
"Oh cruellest creatures of saltwater,
Release this man! I beg on knees,
As you would a widow's only daughter.
I beg, condede. I bleed, I plead."

And