Yeah, lame About a Boy / Badly Drawn Boy reference.
But I guess, it is about one.
Then again isn't it always?
Coming back from holidays, to Oxford, my mood has been soaring continually higher and higher. Here's an episode from Brighton, to illustrate how heart-wrenchingly awful it all is.
Scene: Ext. club. Dark, dingey, hazy with cigarette smoke, lit with purple, loud with muffled music.
Me: [spewing out months-old confession] I love you.
Them: I love you too.
Me: Really?
Classical music rises, lighting warms, camera pulls in for closeup.
Them: Yes!
[they kiss]
Music suddenly stops.
Old man drug dealer: Hey.
[other two kiss, and grope]
Black and white.
Anyway. All is well. All is good. Mock exams went smoothly, I think. Real exams are set to go well enough. I am seeing myself positively more often. I haven't actually been sad in a while.
Naturally, when I am writing (not for blogs, but for possibly commercial end) the entire tone is inflected with a sort of wistfulness, which I'm fond of.
I feel like on the horizon of this beautiful lake I'm sailing on, there is something that I really want to happen. Which is set to happen. Which has the possibility to be magnificent. I'm not like, raving about this in person to people, but I feel like everything is about to Go Right For Me.
So, why am I waiting?
Showing posts with label gay clubbing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gay clubbing. Show all posts
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Thursday, 9 April 2009
A 100g Bag of Mini Eggs
There are 1,920 calories (kcal) in a single 100g, yellow bag of mini eggs. This is precisely the right amount to end my whole world. This is agonising. Let's roll back against the winds of time, let the Earth spin backwards on its axis for a moment, and take ourselves back in time 31/2 weeks. The sky is a brighter shade of whatever ambivalent colour we can conclude this is: greyish, murky, misty blorange, sprinkled with toxic glitter, stagnant like the depressing glitz in carbonated water. My arms and heels are equally tired from taking a long train, carrying all my essential possessions in a suitcase, from the comfort of my green, warm and friend-filled quad in Balliol all the way to my timelost little hicktown of Southwick where no one knows who George Eliot is. My room in Oxford is gutted and bare, and my room in Brighton is by contrast full of the forgotten trappings of youth, and memories of schoolyards and friends who like I did the trapping, forgot about me. It is only when I am nearly at Southwick (catching a connecting train from Southampton to Hove, somewhere on that stretch...) that I begin to realise that my own thoughts on the train have been identical to Neville's hateful inner monologue in The Waves, in a similar scene, and it brings my mood somewhere deep underground to know that I am so easily captured by another's words, unintentionally. I put down Lunar Park, which I have just begun reading, into the bag with The Great Gatsby, which I have just finished on the same journey, and prepare myself for the trudge up Southwick Street, past Southwick Square, back to monotony.
And I am hauled sometime that evening by arms not my own, not even present in a physical sense (the arms of fate, predestination, determinism, inevitability, hopelessness, and inertia, and other words which evoke my preoccupations) upon a cold, white, metallic square and stare down to the glowing, red, digital display of numbers. I am not going to say exactly what the scales weighed me as, but it was grotesque. A stone over my last weight count, 8 weeks prior, which itself was pushing the boundaries of what was considered thin or "normal" weight. My mother says to me, later, that I look like I've put on weight. This is disheartening. This is why I'm single, this is why sometimes I'm sad for no reason, this is why people don't take to me without my effort, this is why things always go wrong. Some terrible, unlucky number. So, I vow to lose (at least) a stone before I go back to Oxford. My other objectives are to finish Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, to start and finish Atomised (Les Particules elementaires) by Michel Houellebecq and À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. (I would later, get distracted by another title, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and decide to temporarily delay my reading of À rebours.) The results of the weight loss vow were almost instantaneous within a week: something like 8 pounds in a week, just by changing from Coke to Coke Zero and cutting out inessential snacks and seconds. The only gym I can afford is a free one, though, and the only free one is ironically back in Oxford, but problematically below the Pantry and opposite the bar.
However, weight has become stuck at Xst 6lbs, which is still many pounds too many and I cannot see the weight loss in the mirror so I worry I am grotesquely fat still. I worry this, despite knowing all the symptoms of body image dysmorphia, etc. etc. but am comfoted by knowing that my critical awareness when it comes to myself has never been impaired before, so I have come to trust my eyes in this instance. I am not fat, per se, I am not stupid enough to quite contend that - but I miss the skinny me of 14, or the brief time when I was 17 before my A Levels that going to the gym had made me slightly toned. I blame Balliol bar, the sedentiary life of an English student and my discovery of English breakfasts, courtesy of Pantry.
I've woken up and had an ultra-lite breakfast. Ultra. Plum tomatoes on toast, if you must know. Then, skipped lunch, and had dinner - kievs, roast potatoes. Fairly carby, but way under my 2000 calory daily allowance. I'm ill, too, so energy exertion is limited. I treat myself to a bag of mini eggs (curse the season) while I sit back to watch an indie film about kids on prescription drugs (The Chumscrubber) which feels like it's black and cynical enough to garner a few chuckles out of me, and then turn around the bag (now reduced to two or three eggs of vile colours, due to my rapid snacking) and read that each egg contains 65 whole calories. What's more, an entire bag is 1920 calories. What. The. Fuck. Why do they even sell these, when they know a single person is likely to gorge and eat them all? My entire day of practically starving myself (I am a very hungry boy) is ruined for nought, and I have now essentially eaten double my daily allowance.
I am going to get fatter and fatter and it feels like there's nothing I can do. I wanted now to describe in achingly ill-constructed metaphors the problems of my life hatching from chocolate eggs, and the contents of my mind falling like napalms from my head into the bag of Cadburys, and myself strung on the cross and rising days later as an Easter Bunny, but I can't be bothered at all. I have exhausted myself mentally, and this is in itself a worry. I will put it down to flu, or whatever this ailment is, but I cannot be certain.
I am not going to Revenge tonight, much like I didn't go last week, because it is no fun. And because I am not thin enough to have fun in a club like that. And because no matter who I am that night, in what mode of mind or state of soul, nothing ever goes my way. (He says, vaguely contemplating an impromptu reading of a Morrissey ballad.)
I am staring at the yellow bag, full of the evil chocolate eggs, and my eyes are hungry for revenge on some nameless entity which has made me this way.
(He relents.) Please, please, please, let me get what I want, this time.
And I am hauled sometime that evening by arms not my own, not even present in a physical sense (the arms of fate, predestination, determinism, inevitability, hopelessness, and inertia, and other words which evoke my preoccupations) upon a cold, white, metallic square and stare down to the glowing, red, digital display of numbers. I am not going to say exactly what the scales weighed me as, but it was grotesque. A stone over my last weight count, 8 weeks prior, which itself was pushing the boundaries of what was considered thin or "normal" weight. My mother says to me, later, that I look like I've put on weight. This is disheartening. This is why I'm single, this is why sometimes I'm sad for no reason, this is why people don't take to me without my effort, this is why things always go wrong. Some terrible, unlucky number. So, I vow to lose (at least) a stone before I go back to Oxford. My other objectives are to finish Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, to start and finish Atomised (Les Particules elementaires) by Michel Houellebecq and À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. (I would later, get distracted by another title, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and decide to temporarily delay my reading of À rebours.) The results of the weight loss vow were almost instantaneous within a week: something like 8 pounds in a week, just by changing from Coke to Coke Zero and cutting out inessential snacks and seconds. The only gym I can afford is a free one, though, and the only free one is ironically back in Oxford, but problematically below the Pantry and opposite the bar.
However, weight has become stuck at Xst 6lbs, which is still many pounds too many and I cannot see the weight loss in the mirror so I worry I am grotesquely fat still. I worry this, despite knowing all the symptoms of body image dysmorphia, etc. etc. but am comfoted by knowing that my critical awareness when it comes to myself has never been impaired before, so I have come to trust my eyes in this instance. I am not fat, per se, I am not stupid enough to quite contend that - but I miss the skinny me of 14, or the brief time when I was 17 before my A Levels that going to the gym had made me slightly toned. I blame Balliol bar, the sedentiary life of an English student and my discovery of English breakfasts, courtesy of Pantry.
I've woken up and had an ultra-lite breakfast. Ultra. Plum tomatoes on toast, if you must know. Then, skipped lunch, and had dinner - kievs, roast potatoes. Fairly carby, but way under my 2000 calory daily allowance. I'm ill, too, so energy exertion is limited. I treat myself to a bag of mini eggs (curse the season) while I sit back to watch an indie film about kids on prescription drugs (The Chumscrubber) which feels like it's black and cynical enough to garner a few chuckles out of me, and then turn around the bag (now reduced to two or three eggs of vile colours, due to my rapid snacking) and read that each egg contains 65 whole calories. What's more, an entire bag is 1920 calories. What. The. Fuck. Why do they even sell these, when they know a single person is likely to gorge and eat them all? My entire day of practically starving myself (I am a very hungry boy) is ruined for nought, and I have now essentially eaten double my daily allowance.
I am going to get fatter and fatter and it feels like there's nothing I can do. I wanted now to describe in achingly ill-constructed metaphors the problems of my life hatching from chocolate eggs, and the contents of my mind falling like napalms from my head into the bag of Cadburys, and myself strung on the cross and rising days later as an Easter Bunny, but I can't be bothered at all. I have exhausted myself mentally, and this is in itself a worry. I will put it down to flu, or whatever this ailment is, but I cannot be certain.
I am not going to Revenge tonight, much like I didn't go last week, because it is no fun. And because I am not thin enough to have fun in a club like that. And because no matter who I am that night, in what mode of mind or state of soul, nothing ever goes my way. (He says, vaguely contemplating an impromptu reading of a Morrissey ballad.)
I am staring at the yellow bag, full of the evil chocolate eggs, and my eyes are hungry for revenge on some nameless entity which has made me this way.
(He relents.) Please, please, please, let me get what I want, this time.
Thursday, 26 March 2009
The beauty of inaction; 2pn
There is nothing quite so empowering as the option of doing something, and denying it. From the same hand, there is nothing quite so painful as being denied a choice in one's matters. Perhaps this is where all the angst you were going through originates?
Naturally, attending a party should only be fun as long as everyone knows how much better you are than the party. There should be a wave of attendance to your presence, a remark of gratefulness, and maybe attempts to appease. Simply knowing that they are there however, one is happily capable of dissuading attention ("I do remember, it was wonderful. But on with the present...", you say, vaudeville) and getting on with events as they are. Drinking copious amounts, not elegantly but with the same juvenile zeal which took you through your earlier teen years, when alcohol was a new novelty consumed at the beach which in turn, consumed the beach by midnight.
A great sustenance of admiration carries you to eleven thirty at some troublesome affair which took you to arrive early, like some guest of honour denied being fashionably late by Dalloways and Buckets who would have you make a splash. But here comes fun. You are whisked away, with little parting word to your fellow guests ("Goodbye, famous lady" you say to a transsexual with her self-appointed title, "See you" you say casually, to an old friend you'd like to have spoken to, "Be back in an hour" you lie plaintively to the host.) Roads turn you, drunk, in directions unintended, and you must loop your life around on a wonderful callory track get to your destination.
The nightclub! How wonderful. And in paraletic glory, you are as close to God as you care to be, just as you were told in less grandiose words by those boys who broke you. With deft hand movements, you change the song and will strangers across from podiums and flatforms to before you, to press against you, to caress you and share the smoke of their cigarettes with you by taste. And another, and another. Somehow, as if given great status by a night of speculative fame, a chance to relive your youth with the superiority amassed since those days of surface equality ("added value") you are able to carve yourself out in new flesh and new form and be whoever you want.
Delete, destroy? You could, with a mouse, and a keyboard. Cripple, corrupt? You could, with a pen and a paper and a student publication. What's a "bunny boiler"?
The night continues and you tire. No chemicals in your system, other than the one you predict will give you cirrhosis of the liver and may well be killing your brain cells; your creative zeal, your critical faculties, reduced. Kisses. Hugs. More friends, more strength. But as sobriety hits, you lose the power to manipulate others and so, Italian suitors and underdressed strangers are lost to a procession of Thoughts: reclaim power through action. Reclamation begins. But you allow it all to disappear, to bathrooms, the promise you always recall "to be right back", meaning never.
Somehow in an hour or so you're walking home, half to destruction but still on high. The iPod in your ear is playing French synthpop, Death Cab for Cutie, new Morrissey, and from shuffle god-knows-what: Halloween Alaska, All-American Rejects? Tears of power, held and pointedly cast aside. "Cosmic tears", some song reminds you.
In one hand you are holding sex, but it feels like a place to stay that night and nothing more. You are holding several similar orbs of sex in that palm. In the other, you hold a bus journey with tiresome conversations, half-read books and a bitter walk to aggravate a cold sore, in no specified form like an orb but rather a draping ribbon, one also stuck to the back of your shoe and coiled up your arm. But to hold both at once, in your control, to some extent, that is power.
Much like when you sat, deciding whether or not to exact revenge, and some forgiving soul in you (not by religion, not by moral concern, or fondness, you affirm) decides to spare. There will be no exposé. M.S. need not fall like H.H. just because you have spite. But it does not deserve to live, either.
Years of harnessing this power, the tension of the choice suppressed slowly stirring a creative electricity within you, will see you get a greater laugh one day. Those cells lost to alcohol will eventually be obsolete, under this new creative spirit you slowly wean into existence.
But for now, the walk from Portslade station back to Southwick is a bitter one.
Naturally, attending a party should only be fun as long as everyone knows how much better you are than the party. There should be a wave of attendance to your presence, a remark of gratefulness, and maybe attempts to appease. Simply knowing that they are there however, one is happily capable of dissuading attention ("I do remember, it was wonderful. But on with the present...", you say, vaudeville) and getting on with events as they are. Drinking copious amounts, not elegantly but with the same juvenile zeal which took you through your earlier teen years, when alcohol was a new novelty consumed at the beach which in turn, consumed the beach by midnight.
A great sustenance of admiration carries you to eleven thirty at some troublesome affair which took you to arrive early, like some guest of honour denied being fashionably late by Dalloways and Buckets who would have you make a splash. But here comes fun. You are whisked away, with little parting word to your fellow guests ("Goodbye, famous lady" you say to a transsexual with her self-appointed title, "See you" you say casually, to an old friend you'd like to have spoken to, "Be back in an hour" you lie plaintively to the host.) Roads turn you, drunk, in directions unintended, and you must loop your life around on a wonderful callory track get to your destination.
The nightclub! How wonderful. And in paraletic glory, you are as close to God as you care to be, just as you were told in less grandiose words by those boys who broke you. With deft hand movements, you change the song and will strangers across from podiums and flatforms to before you, to press against you, to caress you and share the smoke of their cigarettes with you by taste. And another, and another. Somehow, as if given great status by a night of speculative fame, a chance to relive your youth with the superiority amassed since those days of surface equality ("added value") you are able to carve yourself out in new flesh and new form and be whoever you want.
Delete, destroy? You could, with a mouse, and a keyboard. Cripple, corrupt? You could, with a pen and a paper and a student publication. What's a "bunny boiler"?
The night continues and you tire. No chemicals in your system, other than the one you predict will give you cirrhosis of the liver and may well be killing your brain cells; your creative zeal, your critical faculties, reduced. Kisses. Hugs. More friends, more strength. But as sobriety hits, you lose the power to manipulate others and so, Italian suitors and underdressed strangers are lost to a procession of Thoughts: reclaim power through action. Reclamation begins. But you allow it all to disappear, to bathrooms, the promise you always recall "to be right back", meaning never.
Somehow in an hour or so you're walking home, half to destruction but still on high. The iPod in your ear is playing French synthpop, Death Cab for Cutie, new Morrissey, and from shuffle god-knows-what: Halloween Alaska, All-American Rejects? Tears of power, held and pointedly cast aside. "Cosmic tears", some song reminds you.
In one hand you are holding sex, but it feels like a place to stay that night and nothing more. You are holding several similar orbs of sex in that palm. In the other, you hold a bus journey with tiresome conversations, half-read books and a bitter walk to aggravate a cold sore, in no specified form like an orb but rather a draping ribbon, one also stuck to the back of your shoe and coiled up your arm. But to hold both at once, in your control, to some extent, that is power.
Much like when you sat, deciding whether or not to exact revenge, and some forgiving soul in you (not by religion, not by moral concern, or fondness, you affirm) decides to spare. There will be no exposé. M.S. need not fall like H.H. just because you have spite. But it does not deserve to live, either.
Years of harnessing this power, the tension of the choice suppressed slowly stirring a creative electricity within you, will see you get a greater laugh one day. Those cells lost to alcohol will eventually be obsolete, under this new creative spirit you slowly wean into existence.
But for now, the walk from Portslade station back to Southwick is a bitter one.
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
Thankful for everything
It's weird. It's not even ironic that I'm saying this. I discussed this with my spiritual counselor (Tom Phipps, ironically) and I think my conclusions were backed up. Essentially, when you're in the throes of an emotional high or meltdown, two things occur to you.
One: creative overload. I have to thank you for all the things you've done to my writing. I haven't felt the need to post any of the good stuff I've written onto my blog, but I am submitting one long poem for the Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize and I think my Scrawl contributions this term will be superb. I am fairly happy with Darker Angels (Scrawl, HT09) and The Tyrant (Newdigate Prize Entry 09). I have been relatively successful this term on the 'scene' and in terms of boys, if you're counting them. But of course, I attempt conversation with you and am consumed with some sort of resentment. Which is fine. It's not nearly as bad as it was. It will pass. Very soon, I predict, I will be entirely indifferent to you. But thank you, thank you, you've done wonders to my writing in both your roles as a positive and later a negative force in my life.
Two: critical faculty dissolution. Here we see where Hilary Term and Michaelmas are opposites. My Michaelmas nightlife was depressing, but academically I felt I was doing well. Now I churn out terrible essays about Crow in Ted Hughes, or half-formed theories about aestheticism in James Joyce or literary techniques in the Old Englies elegies and I get bizarre looks from my tutors. My entire reading of Crow became informed by the Emily Bronte connection supposed in a later poem ("The Wind on Crow Hill was her darling," Emily Bronte by Ted Hughes). While I enjoyed that part of my essay, a comparison of Bronte and Hughes, it fell outside any usable function in Oxford terms (Victorians and Modernists don't mix!) and distracted me from the actual set question. But Emily Bronte is a poet I can deal with. My blogs come from that same voice as hers, that address of a nameless you who is not solely one person. If you're reading this, don't flatter yourself thinking you're the only "you" contained in "you". Point being, it's hard to focus on essays when you've completely rewired your mind and are sitting in your own little autistic Palace of Art half the time.
I've started drawing again. Haven't done it in years. I used to be good. I'm not anymore. I sat down, one lonely Sunday Balliol morning when everyone in college was in bed with a hangover or trapped in that neverending Sainsburys queue buying hummus and I decided I would draw the college. I stopped for my own embrassment because the world I was drawing was slightly less real, slightly idealised, slightly distorted like a vision of land seen across desert sand and swaying in the sweltering heat. I tried drawing a person, a beautiful vision of a face I imagined, but it came out a sinister gypsy stereotype staring back out of the pad at me and making me uncomfortable. I later, in the throes of my the emotional epiphany the otehr night, where I stayed up till six in the morning writing my Newdigate poem, I discovered my aptitude for drawing caricatures. There's something suitably childish about my style and the unironic annotations placed around the drawing.
I've started sticking things to the tack board in my room. Besides my unfollowed Routine (wake up, stretches, 30 crunches, etc.); there is the Homage to Assholes (a reminder to stay away from heartbreakers); there is the drawing I found in my pad that I did when I was 14 (it is in blue, pink and purple pencil and it indicates I should "Taste the Rainbow" like I am some Skittles salesman); there are two Toni & Guy business cards (the cutter, the dyer); Vacation Residence form with useful dates; post-it note listing books I'm meant to have read; two poems I wrote ("Candles" and "Church Siren") and a poster for our bop of my friend Ronan dressed as the Heath Ledger Joker with the declaration "Ronan Is Not The Only Fruit". Bizarre literary references are just one wing of my Bop campaign (Georgina and I are in charge of the Week 8 LGBT Bop, and promote accordingly. There's also a poster of Me as Uncle Sam declaring "Liam Wants YOU To Come Out (nearest recruiting station, Bop Friday 8th week)" and one of Georgina comically with cigarette-in-mouth beckoning "Treat yourself, have a fag."
I've got endless ammounts of work to do. Tomorrow I have a commentary due for the Old English poem "The Wanderer" (subject of my last dreadful essay) which I will have to do today if I want to go out tonight. I don't know if I can face PopTarts at Babylove tonight though, I still feel tired from Rainbow! at Thirst Lodge last night. I have set myself the topic of Graham Greene for my Friday 8th Week (familiar date...) essay, although I haven't really thought of a question and I still have 2 and a half books to read in the next week and a half if I am to accomplish this. Which reminds me, I'd best be finishing Brighton Rock.
One: creative overload. I have to thank you for all the things you've done to my writing. I haven't felt the need to post any of the good stuff I've written onto my blog, but I am submitting one long poem for the Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize and I think my Scrawl contributions this term will be superb. I am fairly happy with Darker Angels (Scrawl, HT09) and The Tyrant (Newdigate Prize Entry 09). I have been relatively successful this term on the 'scene' and in terms of boys, if you're counting them. But of course, I attempt conversation with you and am consumed with some sort of resentment. Which is fine. It's not nearly as bad as it was. It will pass. Very soon, I predict, I will be entirely indifferent to you. But thank you, thank you, you've done wonders to my writing in both your roles as a positive and later a negative force in my life.
Two: critical faculty dissolution. Here we see where Hilary Term and Michaelmas are opposites. My Michaelmas nightlife was depressing, but academically I felt I was doing well. Now I churn out terrible essays about Crow in Ted Hughes, or half-formed theories about aestheticism in James Joyce or literary techniques in the Old Englies elegies and I get bizarre looks from my tutors. My entire reading of Crow became informed by the Emily Bronte connection supposed in a later poem ("The Wind on Crow Hill was her darling," Emily Bronte by Ted Hughes). While I enjoyed that part of my essay, a comparison of Bronte and Hughes, it fell outside any usable function in Oxford terms (Victorians and Modernists don't mix!) and distracted me from the actual set question. But Emily Bronte is a poet I can deal with. My blogs come from that same voice as hers, that address of a nameless you who is not solely one person. If you're reading this, don't flatter yourself thinking you're the only "you" contained in "you". Point being, it's hard to focus on essays when you've completely rewired your mind and are sitting in your own little autistic Palace of Art half the time.
I've started drawing again. Haven't done it in years. I used to be good. I'm not anymore. I sat down, one lonely Sunday Balliol morning when everyone in college was in bed with a hangover or trapped in that neverending Sainsburys queue buying hummus and I decided I would draw the college. I stopped for my own embrassment because the world I was drawing was slightly less real, slightly idealised, slightly distorted like a vision of land seen across desert sand and swaying in the sweltering heat. I tried drawing a person, a beautiful vision of a face I imagined, but it came out a sinister gypsy stereotype staring back out of the pad at me and making me uncomfortable. I later, in the throes of my the emotional epiphany the otehr night, where I stayed up till six in the morning writing my Newdigate poem, I discovered my aptitude for drawing caricatures. There's something suitably childish about my style and the unironic annotations placed around the drawing.
I've started sticking things to the tack board in my room. Besides my unfollowed Routine (wake up, stretches, 30 crunches, etc.); there is the Homage to Assholes (a reminder to stay away from heartbreakers); there is the drawing I found in my pad that I did when I was 14 (it is in blue, pink and purple pencil and it indicates I should "Taste the Rainbow" like I am some Skittles salesman); there are two Toni & Guy business cards (the cutter, the dyer); Vacation Residence form with useful dates; post-it note listing books I'm meant to have read; two poems I wrote ("Candles" and "Church Siren") and a poster for our bop of my friend Ronan dressed as the Heath Ledger Joker with the declaration "Ronan Is Not The Only Fruit". Bizarre literary references are just one wing of my Bop campaign (Georgina and I are in charge of the Week 8 LGBT Bop, and promote accordingly. There's also a poster of Me as Uncle Sam declaring "Liam Wants YOU To Come Out (nearest recruiting station, Bop Friday 8th week)" and one of Georgina comically with cigarette-in-mouth beckoning "Treat yourself, have a fag."
I've got endless ammounts of work to do. Tomorrow I have a commentary due for the Old English poem "The Wanderer" (subject of my last dreadful essay) which I will have to do today if I want to go out tonight. I don't know if I can face PopTarts at Babylove tonight though, I still feel tired from Rainbow! at Thirst Lodge last night. I have set myself the topic of Graham Greene for my Friday 8th Week (familiar date...) essay, although I haven't really thought of a question and I still have 2 and a half books to read in the next week and a half if I am to accomplish this. Which reminds me, I'd best be finishing Brighton Rock.
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
Brand New Day
I'm not going to mention Babylove last night too much. I had fun dancing for the first part of the night, but there weren't enough hot people there so I weighed the odds and just decided to leave.
I'm over my daytime drinking/spiritual crisis/Death-Cab-for-Cutie-on-iPod-on-repeat fetishes now and am feeling pretty darn fine. A conversation with the Devil Himself sorted me out (figuratively).
Party coming up, so that should be good. Tonight is LGBT Film Night so I think I'ma show 'Transamerica', which promises to be a hit; I might buy popcorn. I realised that I looked really good last night which is good, because it was really important that I did. I bought some new clothes and wearing them also picks up my mood. I met this really attractive girl yesterday, and I plan to find her again and ask her if she's going out that night (Kukui, Bridge, Lava/Ignite?). I realise that all the dead weights I have clung to in the past are just that: lifeless, soulless, not quite monstrous or detestable but certainly not worthy of any profound affection. I have a massive Virginia Woolf essay approaching, but I love her so it should be vaguely enjoyable. OH, and I got an email from Spilt Ink this morning and my poem "Silent Love Song" (which debuted on this very blog) got accepted for the anthology of the best poetry at Oxford University, which I'm happy about.
Life will be good. I make it so.
I'm over my daytime drinking/spiritual crisis/Death-Cab-for-Cutie-on-iPod-on-repeat fetishes now and am feeling pretty darn fine. A conversation with the Devil Himself sorted me out (figuratively).
Party coming up, so that should be good. Tonight is LGBT Film Night so I think I'ma show 'Transamerica', which promises to be a hit; I might buy popcorn. I realised that I looked really good last night which is good, because it was really important that I did. I bought some new clothes and wearing them also picks up my mood. I met this really attractive girl yesterday, and I plan to find her again and ask her if she's going out that night (Kukui, Bridge, Lava/Ignite?). I realise that all the dead weights I have clung to in the past are just that: lifeless, soulless, not quite monstrous or detestable but certainly not worthy of any profound affection. I have a massive Virginia Woolf essay approaching, but I love her so it should be vaguely enjoyable. OH, and I got an email from Spilt Ink this morning and my poem "Silent Love Song" (which debuted on this very blog) got accepted for the anthology of the best poetry at Oxford University, which I'm happy about.
Life will be good. I make it so.
Tuesday, 11 November 2008
Dance, Dance (then stop)
You probably all know the situation where someone you're not too into starts dancing with you, and to be polite you dance back for a song or two. Then you discretely say you're going to get a drink or go to the toilet or for a cigarette than you'll Be Right Back, Honestly. For the rest of the night, you avoid that person and act as if you cannot see them on the dancefloor. What really sucks is when you're that other person.
"Make the first move more often" is what Liam is told by his Brighton friends in great numbers, "to be bold and more confident." Before being told this tonight by Dougie, by Ronan, by Beca and Georgina and Luke my LGBSoc dad and even the guy who runs the Pop Tarts night at BabyLove and some old geezer who looks like Truman Capote, I had this in mind. So, while Georgie is out getting a cigarette and Beca and Ronan and I are on the dancefloor, I notice a striking young man who at first I decide is far too attractive for me. This person will never notice me, but as he catches my eye I smile anyway and he smiles back and continues dancing with his hags.
Still finding this guy rather attractive, I smile at him again and he smiled back prolonged and we start dancing together. Unfortunately the song isn't too good but we both seem resolved to presevere and I think he fancies me which is just as well cos I think he's hot and I decide I probably wouldn't mind taking him home one bit. I consider for a moment that he's probably got some great body and guys with great bodies don't care much for guys with very average, boring bodies, but I don't let this insecurity show and a much better song comes on which is just as well. He's not a great dancer as far as I can tell but it's ok because in that is the encoded message that he's a fairly reserved, straight-acting guy who's not going to embarass me when he inadvertently meets my staircase buddies or want to overstay the morning lie-in time if he does inevitably (or so I thoguht) come home with me. And yeah, he's hot, and I'm chuffed that as far as I can tell someone I think is attractive seems to be into me for once and it's the only time that gay clubbing isn't an absolutely abysmal failure for me.
Except it is, because he grabs my shoulder and says in my ear in a sexy, manly voice that he'll be right back and those are the only words I have ever heard him utter. Later, he returns with his hags, and I dance nearby him again to get his attention but it seems as if his eyes are trying their best not to meet mine and he and his hags walk off after a song or two. I am instantly upset - not to the point where I want to cry, but only because he is symbolic not of one guy or one shag but every guy who I rightfully am otherwise too afraid to go over to because they will not fancy me and they will not want me and they will only reject me and leave me alone, on my own, while everyone vaguely attractive couples off. I rub my eyelids as if to soothe a coming headache and then I'm a bit better and dance with extra enthusiasm as if to say "Fuck him" but it really gets to me because I really did want to fuck him.
I spend about an hour telling Luke how hideous I feel I am because no one wants me at any club, not here nor in Brighton nor presumably any city in the world. All the uglies are macking and it's sickening and I'm not getting with ANYONE which means I'm uglier than them and I stop to despair at how many complete strangers I must sicken purely by existing in their vicinity. How much kinder they are than me because they never seem to tell me how they really feel about me. I contemplate going to Bridge and picking up some braindead Oxford Brookes girl because even though I'm not horny I feel lack of sex actually chilling my veins. I have ice blood from lack of sex. I have also been (officially) single since January and "more or less" single (not seeing anyone) since like June. I also contemplate becoming a Roman Catholic priest and letting my stifled eroticism come out in poetry about Jesus. Who woudn't like to infer the act of fellatio to the messiah? I wonder if I'd have been happy if I was intellectually starved back home with more willing, forward guys but then I remember I was just as despondent on the club scene there as I am here.
Doug and Costas mention going clubbing in London on Saturday and while it originally sounded like such a great idea, I'm no longer too sure because I realise how gay clubbing and I do not get along and by 2am I always feel like I want to die. My standards are too high - higher than me - and the guys I go for always go for guys even better looking than they are which means my only option is to go for guys uglier than me, which I'm not sure exist and if they do I'm not certain I am guaranteed action there. Nor do I want it. Sex is only really good when it's someone I really care about or someone I am attracted to on an extreme level. Half-measures suck. Sorry, imaginary Brookes person. Sorry, Jesus. In the end, I give a strong maybe and odds are I will go to Heaven or Soho or wherever with the intention of a good night but end up asleep on the streets of London till an early train, probably actually crying.
I get home at 3am and write a blog in which I can't be assed to change anybody's names. I'm not sure how to make Facebook recognise the publication of my blogs but I'll figure it out. I wonder if I should allude to the night's other subplot: the guy with the mixed signals. Well basically, I don't know what to think. Do I interpret certain words as flirting, or certain actions? I can't be more explicit in a blog... but I wish he'd more explicit with his words. Or, with his nudity. I'll settle.
Thanks for reading my extra-gay, extra-uncensored edition of Liam's depressed rantings. I don't normally write so unambiguously about my motives. It's kind of Brat Packy. The novelists, not the actors. Although, Molly Ringwald...
"Make the first move more often" is what Liam is told by his Brighton friends in great numbers, "to be bold and more confident." Before being told this tonight by Dougie, by Ronan, by Beca and Georgina and Luke my LGBSoc dad and even the guy who runs the Pop Tarts night at BabyLove and some old geezer who looks like Truman Capote, I had this in mind. So, while Georgie is out getting a cigarette and Beca and Ronan and I are on the dancefloor, I notice a striking young man who at first I decide is far too attractive for me. This person will never notice me, but as he catches my eye I smile anyway and he smiles back and continues dancing with his hags.
Still finding this guy rather attractive, I smile at him again and he smiled back prolonged and we start dancing together. Unfortunately the song isn't too good but we both seem resolved to presevere and I think he fancies me which is just as well cos I think he's hot and I decide I probably wouldn't mind taking him home one bit. I consider for a moment that he's probably got some great body and guys with great bodies don't care much for guys with very average, boring bodies, but I don't let this insecurity show and a much better song comes on which is just as well. He's not a great dancer as far as I can tell but it's ok because in that is the encoded message that he's a fairly reserved, straight-acting guy who's not going to embarass me when he inadvertently meets my staircase buddies or want to overstay the morning lie-in time if he does inevitably (or so I thoguht) come home with me. And yeah, he's hot, and I'm chuffed that as far as I can tell someone I think is attractive seems to be into me for once and it's the only time that gay clubbing isn't an absolutely abysmal failure for me.
Except it is, because he grabs my shoulder and says in my ear in a sexy, manly voice that he'll be right back and those are the only words I have ever heard him utter. Later, he returns with his hags, and I dance nearby him again to get his attention but it seems as if his eyes are trying their best not to meet mine and he and his hags walk off after a song or two. I am instantly upset - not to the point where I want to cry, but only because he is symbolic not of one guy or one shag but every guy who I rightfully am otherwise too afraid to go over to because they will not fancy me and they will not want me and they will only reject me and leave me alone, on my own, while everyone vaguely attractive couples off. I rub my eyelids as if to soothe a coming headache and then I'm a bit better and dance with extra enthusiasm as if to say "Fuck him" but it really gets to me because I really did want to fuck him.
I spend about an hour telling Luke how hideous I feel I am because no one wants me at any club, not here nor in Brighton nor presumably any city in the world. All the uglies are macking and it's sickening and I'm not getting with ANYONE which means I'm uglier than them and I stop to despair at how many complete strangers I must sicken purely by existing in their vicinity. How much kinder they are than me because they never seem to tell me how they really feel about me. I contemplate going to Bridge and picking up some braindead Oxford Brookes girl because even though I'm not horny I feel lack of sex actually chilling my veins. I have ice blood from lack of sex. I have also been (officially) single since January and "more or less" single (not seeing anyone) since like June. I also contemplate becoming a Roman Catholic priest and letting my stifled eroticism come out in poetry about Jesus. Who woudn't like to infer the act of fellatio to the messiah? I wonder if I'd have been happy if I was intellectually starved back home with more willing, forward guys but then I remember I was just as despondent on the club scene there as I am here.
Doug and Costas mention going clubbing in London on Saturday and while it originally sounded like such a great idea, I'm no longer too sure because I realise how gay clubbing and I do not get along and by 2am I always feel like I want to die. My standards are too high - higher than me - and the guys I go for always go for guys even better looking than they are which means my only option is to go for guys uglier than me, which I'm not sure exist and if they do I'm not certain I am guaranteed action there. Nor do I want it. Sex is only really good when it's someone I really care about or someone I am attracted to on an extreme level. Half-measures suck. Sorry, imaginary Brookes person. Sorry, Jesus. In the end, I give a strong maybe and odds are I will go to Heaven or Soho or wherever with the intention of a good night but end up asleep on the streets of London till an early train, probably actually crying.
I get home at 3am and write a blog in which I can't be assed to change anybody's names. I'm not sure how to make Facebook recognise the publication of my blogs but I'll figure it out. I wonder if I should allude to the night's other subplot: the guy with the mixed signals. Well basically, I don't know what to think. Do I interpret certain words as flirting, or certain actions? I can't be more explicit in a blog... but I wish he'd more explicit with his words. Or, with his nudity. I'll settle.
Thanks for reading my extra-gay, extra-uncensored edition of Liam's depressed rantings. I don't normally write so unambiguously about my motives. It's kind of Brat Packy. The novelists, not the actors. Although, Molly Ringwald...
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