And I mean to say it as one word, because that’s the way I feel it, that’s the way I felt it, fuckit, fuckit, fuckit!! I want to scream and shout and wail and cry, stamp my feet and pound my fists against the wall. I want to do something.  I want there to be something I can do, but there is nothing. I am just like everyone else, I am just like every other living thing, every piece of living matter on this planet and beyond.  I am ageing.  I am dying.  I am slipping faster and faster towards the end.  Towards nothingness.  Towards a void of emptiness that will forget you so quickly. I want to tell someone that it is fine, it is fair, it is as it should be, but just to be kinder, just to be a little more gentle on someone who is soaking up this life as much as they possibly can, just to know that actually that kind of makes it even worse, just to say slow down…slow down…can’t it all just slow down a bit?  is there any way?  Does anyone know a way?

Moments build into hours, hours rush by in days, days flood into weeks, and this timetable, this human calender propels me towards old age.  It is not dying I fear, it is not ceasing to exist that bothers me; it is getting older, getting older faster!  The years make their mark as they do on everything and everyone. They stamp and stain you.  They try to pull you down, to sadden and dismay you.  I fight back.  I rage against it.  But in the end that hurts more; the futility of it.

One day I will still be me, trapped and scratching beneath a crinkled skin.  I will still be wailing and raging underneath it, enraged that it happened, furious that time took me.  You might hear me screaming it, fuckit fuckit fuckit! I cannot deny myself the truth.  I cannot pretend it is okay, I cannot pretend I do not mind.  Because when I see that storm of youth below me, I want to soak it up, but I am on the outside, and it makes me want to cry.  Cry out with the injustice, that the more you love and enjoy life, the faster it seems to go. The end days are upon us always.  Mowing us down, so brutal, and the memory of yesterday just slays us, just hurts and it takes me out, it takes me down.  Fuck it, I want to freeze time! I want to slow it down, make it fairer. I want missed chances and too lates to be wiped out and freed. I don’t want to be hurled screaming towards the light, I want to dance slowly towards it instead

All I can do is warn them.  Warn the young.  Even that is futile and pointless, because the young never believe they will get old until it has already happened.  I will tell my children, I will coach them, steer them clear of my own mistakes, and try to impress my learning upon them. Stupid stuff.  But it is always the stupid stuff that haunts you.  Slaps you in the face, ha ha, you can’t go back! When they go to a gig I will tell them to make sure they have enough cash to buy a t-shirt, to buy a memory they can touch and hold and smell. I’ll tell them, when you’ve moved on, keep it anyway.  Put it somewhere safe, and by all means forget about it, but know that one day it will be important to you again.  Roll up your band posters and store them carefully. They might be vital again one day, you never know.  Let life be in you.  Let it surge through you and don’t have any regrets, and don’t slow down until you have to, and see everything, and everyone, and know them, and know you, and breathe it all in.

And in the meantime, while the days scramble on, fuckit, I’ll do whatever I can to fight back.

Hi fans! I know you are out there. Extremely slow proceedings tonight, for I am drunk on cider and sangria, most vile stuff, and only for the most desperate. ie me. haha get it? I am cold.  Cold.  It’s not that bad, if you ignore the fact it tastes like red wine and red wine tastes like shit! What the hell are they singing about?

I am listening to Radiohead. Ho ho.  The sound of our generation.  I’ll have to know what they are singing.  I have to look.

‘Hysterical and let down and hanging around. Hysterical and useless. Crushed like a bug in the ground. Let down and hanging around. I am going to grow wings’.

THIS IS WHAT YOU GET IF YOU MESS WITH US!!

‘karma police, I’ve given all I can. It’s not enough.  I’ve given all I can.  But we’re still on the payroll. For a minute there, I lost myself.  I LOST MYSELF!’

It’s not late yet, I don’t have to worry.  This stuff is actually not that bad.  It actually is ok.  It reminds me.  I am nineteen.  Every year I hit seems to be a weird one.  Every single age I am.  But maybe it’s just me maybe.  Don’t know.  I am not fit.  Not fit in many ways.  A Pig In A Cage On Antibiotics. What a great line! Possibly the greatest line ever written.  I will write a book about it one day.  I am merely trying to avert attention to myself.  Fair enough.  Go backwards.  I just don’t want to get on your nerves.  I am trying very hard to do this with two hands, all fingers, and no mistakes, putting all my effort in.  I have always been good at spelling.  I was in a weird sad mood and I decided to get drunk alone.  Very unlike me.

‘I am the key to the lock in your house.  That keeps your toys in the basement. And if you get too far inside you’ll only see my refection.  I am the face when she sleeps tonight.  I am the pick in the ice.  Do not cry out or hit the alarm.  We are friends til we die. Either way you turn I’ll be there.  Open up your skull. I’ll be there.  Climbing up the walls!’

WEIRD STUFF!!! Yes very unlike me.  In fact this is a new experience for me because I have never got drunk alone before.  Wowee.  I know it is sad.  But you have to try everything once.  Will you help me.  Hey now given up and gone back to one hand one finger and proceed very slowly but still correctly because I always was very good at spelling and still am.

Chan’s talents; reading fast, reading lots, reading good, great, magic stiff, understanding the magic once in a lifetime stuff, writing, wanting to write, spelling! Knowing what programmes are on what channels, liking the best music, understanding it, observance of all, silence, wanting, dreaming, losing, crying, vomiting oh yes, ten out of ten, burning, thinking, now I can add one more, drinking alone!

My life is so fucked up. I’m all alone, all alone.

‘This time I feel my luck could change, kill me again, with love, it’s gonna be a glorious day, pull me out of the aircrash, pull me out of the lake, I’m your superhero, we are standing on the edge.’

My life.  I cry at my life.  I cry at my past.  All the time it is with me. Can’t breathe.  Lucky.  I am so fucked up.  In secret, I am the most fucked up sad person that I know.  I hide it from myself every day.  I laugh at myself and I go along and smile.  What has happened?  What has happened? Waiting for the sun.  Haha I am the biggest joke I know.  I am so fucking obsessed.  I am obsessed, and no one knows me.

‘Staaaaaay for a while, I won’t mind if you do, I been getting nothing done, and I can’t blame it on you’

I’ve never cried such silent tears. Feels like my eyes are gonna explode.  What I’ve written is a load of shit.  I need to help myself.  I need to tell the truth.  I want to have kids one day, and I want to be a fit mother.  I am an adult now.  That’s the scary thing.  More woman than child.  I can’t hide anymore.  This year has gone so fast and so much has happened, and we’re not kids anymore. Got to figure out what to do…This stuff I’m drinking looks like blood.  I’m so lonely.  I wish I had a friend here.  But then I would look a state and pathetic and I don’t want people looking down on me…won’t you let me see you smile? Nothing.  No one.  Nothing.  No one.  And now I’m never gonna’ be happy and I’m never gonna be satisfied and I’m never gonna stop.

Sometimes I look at other people and wonder if they are anything like me inside, or if in fact, I am a complete weirdo.  I look at them and wonder if they get a kick out of anything.  I wonder if they wonder, I wonder if they wonder about me. I wonder if they think anything at all, ever.  or are they truly what they they look like?  Sort of plastic, and tedious, and stiff and stodgy inside, where all their feelings should be.  Sometimes after a few minutes of talking to people I am not sure if they are human at all.  Or maybe it is just me.  Apparently I just need to get some discipline in my life.

We all wanna change the world.  I just want to be a writer. I just want that and only that forever. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but something has to happen.  No one can understand this thing. I might as well confine it to my own heart and head.  Simpler like that.  Seeing as how I feel different every day anyway. That’s why no one takes me seriously, because they know I don’t know what I want.  I am dozy, dopey, in a dream all the time,. It’s all dreams, isn’t it?  That’s what they all think and know.  All those stiff people and their stiff plan B’s. I so want to prove them all wrong.

You don’t have to follow a mapped out direction like everyone else.  You can do whatever you want, and still be someone. Of course.  Am I always going to be like this?  I always have been.  My guts run out.  I remember that at school.  Panic.  Total fear.  Those days when I would wake up with a distinct lack of courage.  Days when I knew I couldn’t even go outside, let alone go to lessons and sit there feeling like a freak, trying not to cry.  Whole weeks, one after the after, when this huge black cloud would just sit over my life, and nothing meant anything anymore.  Nothing.  I would feel like I was fading away.  Becoming invisible.  I was losing all my grip on things, and it was like everything was a weird sort of dream, all hazy and meaningless, and transparent, and it comes to me now.  Life.  Everything.  I feel swamped and trapped and confused and lost, and so worked up, and I can’t see the future, my future and it scares me, not knowing what I want, or what I’m doing, and it’s driving me insane.

I am so amazed. Listening to new Oasis album. It’s totally like the summing up of the 90’s and our generation, and it’s totally everything, every single song is amazing.  I am so blown away.  Listening to this all alone. ‘We’ll have our way, in our own time, we’ll have our say, ’cause my star’s gonna’ shine’. What a cool song. ‘You got a feeling lost inside, it just won’t let you go, life is sneaking up behind, no it just won’t let you go…’ Maybe things will be good, if I just believe it, if I just be strong, and stand up, and don’t crumble or give in every time something goes wrong…

Was gonna go and buy a print ribbon today and print up some chapters of my now rewritten first chapter of ‘I Knew A Place’ so that I can take it to my class tonight and let the bastard tutor read it, and see what he thinks?  Am I going to be a classic writer or what? Don’t feel like it no.  Don’t feel like doing anything.  Just hanging around here.  It’s gonna be a great day.

Three months until 1998. I still don’t know what happened to 1997. Hello, where did you go?  I didn’t notice. I remember something I wrote in amongst my sociology notes at college once, up in the library, in a free, with friends around me, not working, but laughing, and receiving warning looks from the dragon-lady.  We were younger, younger than we are now, and it wasn’t all that long ago, but really it feels like a lifetime, like we were just children then, and now we are adults? We all liked Pulp, and it was 1996, a good year for us.  Nothing bad, nothing scary, just nice, fun and easy.  We knew what to do.  There was a structure.  Now there is such an urgency about all that we do, and the walls, we have to build them ourselves, routines and order.  Making our futures, that’s what we’re all trying to do now. Like busy little builders.  Figuring it out, doing our best, crying, when the bricks all come tumbling down again, and we have to start from scratch, wondering, who the hell do I want to be? I wrote, from Disco 2000, to my friends, I wrote, ‘et’s all meet up in the year 2000, won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown?’ And now the year 2000 is only two years away, and then, we were all friends, different to how we are now, not ever suspecting that time might really move on, and take us with it, and make us older.  But it did.  What?? I thought, I’m sure, that just a couple of hours ago we were there, skiving from lessons, ripping the piss out of each other mercilessly, laughing until our sides ached, and when since then have I laughed like that? Discussing the future, ’cause it was never gonna really arrive, doodling in the margins of our notes, avoiding revision, and we were young and sweet and had plans, didn’t we?  Plans and promises and dreams.  Life just gets in the way folks. You are forever in the present, and maybe that is why it hurts so much, in a strange, aching, nostalgic way, when I hear a song that meant something back then, and it makes me feel, oh, all kinds of things, like Disco 2000 and how I wrote it to them.  I’m scared when I look to the future. But it will come.  And what will we mean to each other then?  Will Sam and I still be together?  Will any of us be married or have kids?  Will it all be good?  Will it be better than this?  What I’m listening to now, the music, will it come back to haunt me then in the future, and poke a finger deep within my heart, and say cruelly, ha ha, don’t you just miss the good old days?  I fear that it will.  I know myself too well.  Here is another song from back then, and this is how I am feeling right now, and have felt for a while:

‘Oh yeah, they say that the past must die, for the future to be born,

In that case, die little mother

Stomach in, chest out, on your marks, get set. Go!

Now, now that you’re free, what are you gonna be?

And who are you gonna see?

And where, where will you go, and how will you know?

You didn’t get it all wrong?

Is this the light of a new day dawning?

A future bright that you can walk in?

No, it’s just another Monday morning

Do it all over again.’ Pulp, Monday Morning, 1995.

That was another one./