cycling down a road like the dream where i find another room in my house / moist stroll, jelly tower shuffle, cheesing postbox, very cruel

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?

shilling for a limited europe, my identity fading, delaminated / not drunk, just exuberant. and well nourished

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?

all stoned poets think they are funny—well i am funny / or unusual anyway

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?

leaving a slugabed trapped in a pole vaulter’s libido / territorial, barking at my next door neighbour on the landing, hello / stand up for yourself, for [] sake / ah, woof! we all rely on the good souls who forgive us

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?

unrelated: the knot in my chest will spring from my mouth and rip out my guts

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?

I wonder if being kidnapped by my mum‘s best friend as a child had a lasting effect?

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?

ebitdata scientists don’t budget for trauma: / cutting teeth. immersed in the pain pearlescent

i consider myself to be good with numbers and knowledgeable about business type stuff. i know about politics, law, finance, accountancy, tax. and i’ve read quite a lot of self help re self-management. absolutely useless at telling people what to do. panic and nasusea at the idea of writing my own to-do list on a monday and never plan more than like three days ahead. but nonetheless, confident that i understand business generally. and anytime i see ‘ebitda’ i wince. you may as well be telling me turnover. it’s an irrelevant metric. it means ‘earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation’ – but so what? apple computer’s ebitda may be 100 billion dollars. but it can’t achieve that without paying taxes, paying interest on its debt, replacing out of date hardware (depreciation) and developing new intellectual property (amortisation). apple needs to keep incurring all those costs or it will go bust.

do you suffer from executive dysfunction? how do you cope?

our reunion was a salty affair, trolling agents and sellers

my love got back from her sister’s and we ran across town to view flats and eat the best pizza. it was a very salty evening. she ended up buying one of the flats, so it was nice that i was there. i didn’t go to that many of her viewings. one of the estate agents we met mentioned he was training for a half marathon and we casually told him our pbs, which were quite a bit faster than what he was aiming for. hopefully we inspired him to try a bit harder. its not like we are in the olympics or something.

what are you training for this year?

any task, i’ll find a way to do it / my first instinct may be wrong but given infinite time…

i actually said this in a job interview many months later. and got the offered the job. i am quite an anxious person. full of doubt. and things don’t tend to come easily to me. despite this, i do sort of believe i can do anything if i keep trying. hence i’m learning piano in midlife and recording an album of spoken word poetry and trying to find time to self publish several works of fiction while semi planning my first ski holiday.

what are your best and worst job interview experiences?

credit for debit, the difference solo temporal / evolve the revolving door, better round than in

it was never part of the plan, but on one of my many diversions around life i happened to learn double entry bookkeeping. it took an afternoon or so with a textbook. i was on holiday, sitting by the pool. credit this, debit that. i remember wondering: if there is a debit for every credit, how does anyone make a profit or a loss? well. i read the textbook. so now i know. and there are lots of ‘timing differences’ in accountancy. i definitely prefer poetry to accountancy, but there is a poetry about numbers too. i quite enjoy bookkeeping once i get going. but the inertia is hard to overcome.

do you find poetry in numbers?