manic street preachers was the first band i saw live and will always low key love them. what’s not to like about welsh weird glam rock marxists. men in dresses talking about dialectical materialism. would recommend. so as a little tribute i put some manicsy sounding left-wing angst into the poem.
what are your favourite rock bands?
i don’t know how often you touch your genitalia after fingering hot chilli peppers, but really one time should be enough. so why does it keep happening to me?
do you have any self-injurious habits?
2024 was a bit topsy turvy for me. firmly a year of transition. i was most of the way through a sort of period of reflection and rebirth. psychologically unmoored as i examined and reinvented myself. i found myself a bit stranded from time to time. doubting the process. and just when i needed it, i’d get a sense of that feeling of rightness in the world. that its all for a reason. that life gets better with understanding. that sometimes you have to hurt to heal.
have you been through a period of transition in adulthood?
our attachment to reality is not as strong as we believe it is. we live in the permanent now. we can’t really trust out memories. they could be fake. we make plans for a future that we assume will happen, but based on what? all there ultimately is are the sensations we feel and the stories we tell ourselves about them. but, as a practical matter, it is helpful to just believe reality is as you see it. otherwise we’d never be able to brush our teeth and drink our coffee in the morning.
do you believe in reality? do you trust the sun to rise again tomorrow?
i used to always have this dream where i found another room in my flat. ‘all my problems are solved,’ i’d think to myself. how did neither i nor the previous owner or like the builder or the estate agent notice? but i haven’t had that dream in a while. life changed i guess. i got a bit smaller. need less space.
and the road is a real road. that runs near a road i know well. i am aphantastic. on some level, i don’t believe that the world that i can’t see exists. new places frighten and amaze me.
how vivid is the imagery of your mind’s eye?
so I was listening to a lot of the streets. shilling for a limited europe is a reference to european bob, from weak become heroes, while also being an ironical statement about brexit. and then my identity fading, delaminated, again, a statement about brexit, but also a reference to the fake student id card i had in 200x that sometimes got me into nightclubs and sometimes quite literally delaminated in the bouncer’s hands. and then the drunk / well nourished bit is basically a cryptic reference to an in-joke i was in-on in high school.
do you still ruminate on in-jokes from your days of underage drinking?
i saw an episode of the jerry seinfeld car programme were he said he knew a lot of comedians who smoked weed – a lot of broke comedians. it’s a good enough line for me to steal it anyway. i was listening to a lot of the streets at the time. original pirate material. come rain or snow the buddha flows. lock down your aerial.
are you an unsuccessful comedian? have you considered sobriety?
this is the husk, the kernel of my character. a horny chasm, which forms the foundation that my superstructure of art, personality and lifestyle attempt to conceal. profoundly, inherently lazy, but driven to outrageous (solipsistic?) achievements in the pursuit of lovemaking.
and my girlfriend’s dog thinks i own the entire apartment building i live in. she is always alerting me to intruders. and this one time she barked at my neighbour for ages in the hall. i think that was the first day that i ever picked up a dog poo. and in that act, i understood love.
do you have a special canine in your life?
i have alexithymia. basically i spent most of my early life feeling desperately anxious without really knowing it. just learned to ignore the signals my body sends. i often don’t eat until late in the day. i would probably die of thirst if it wasn’t for the fact i need caffeine to motivate me to do anything in the morning. but eventually the stress breaks through in a way even i notice and i enter burn out. i was getting close to that point when i wrote this line.
have you ever suffered from burn out? are you burned out right now?
this did happen but it wasn’t actually traumatic. i’m not entirely sure if F was really mum’s BEST friend. but a friend of long standing anyway. anyway, F just collected me from primary school and took me swimming. i think i had fun. but it did spell the end of that friendship for my mum. and was probably a symptom in the unwinding of F’s marriage.
i’m not good at swimming. i don’t think i could have swam without arm bands when this happened. i’m still crap at swimming. i hate cold water.
can you convince me to join the cult of ice cold water?
the love epochal. n.n. benn 