i was enjoying being a firebrand revolutionary from the manics reference yesterday and carried on with some lefty hyperbole. i hope you don’t mind!
do you consider yourself to be a left-wing firebrand?
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?
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?
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?
well this was quite an autistic line. i felt quite a lot of shame about writing it down at the time. and for what it says about the company i keep. but now i know i am neurodivergent i feel a bit safer in saying it. i am trying to learn to live on my own terms. to embrace my inherent weirdness. to understand myself a bit better and to judge myself from a perspective of generosity. and to extend that same courtesy to everyone else.
and in fact, i’m sure a lot of the people i love are neurodivergent too, although not all are or would want to be diagnosied. and do you know i even love some neurotypical people!
what are your atypical traits?
i was going through a process of self-understanding. a bit late, to be honest. i guess i’ve known for a while that it takes me a lot of effort to react well to things. i now know that i’m autistic, and a highly sensitive person. i panic when i’m surprised, i hate criticism, i don’t even like compliments much. a few deep breaths. ok maybe this email is just an invitation to a seminar that i can accept or not and there is no underlying passive aggressive message to be offended by.
we want what we want because we want it. to some extent. not much more advanced than a flower turning towards the sun. but because we have so many complicated ways of expressing our desires, and because it can be quite hard to be sure what our desires are (am i hungry or am i anxious?) we can trick ourselves into believing that the ‘me’ from the internal monologue is running the whole show from a place of reason. when actually its just a chatbot that calms you down or riles you up or whatever.
i guess what i mean is that reason gets us what we want, if we use it well. but passions aren’t rational. hunger and horniness can neither be summoned or subdued with reason alone. (food and sex will do it though)
how do you take criticism?
i spend a lot of time in the bath. at least once a week but ideally more. i’m always sort of faffing about, never quite relaxing, reading with the radio on while starting out the windows and rubbing my eyes. so i like a hot wet environment to sort of slow me down every couple of days. immobilised in the bath, i have a tendency to be quite creative. so much of the poem is written in the bath. i wonder how many creative works were conceived of in a hot bath. how many bars of music and novels that only exist due to the miracle of modern plumbing.
where do you find inspiration?
the love epochal. n.n. benn 