He wakes up. He hasn’t written for a while but it seems to make no difference because no matter the gap between each entry into his journal nothing much seems to change. Politicians keep politicking, Wars keep waging, Trash keeps growing and he sees that the projects for the kids at school about protecting the future of the Earth are the same projects that he had to do when he was a child twenty five years ago. No one pays attention to Children’s Projects. The Projects of Children are cooed at and then ignored. He has been reading a lot and even writing a lot and is making progress of a sort with his life. He is sad to learn that Maurice Sendak has died. He liked his books and now he is dead. A bomb plot was foiled, he learnt yesterday, but was it a real bomb plot or was it another FBI sting carried out with people too stupid to realise they were being manipulated by bored government employees? He cannot say but that often seems to be the case. He is sure that it is a real bomb plot and a real threat. Why would they lie? Why would they lie at all? Surface to air missiles are being placed atop the apartment blocks of London to protect the athletes from who? Aliens? Communists? Decepticons? It seems to be a little over the top. Then he meets up with a friend after work and they eat falafal and walk around the city that they are in at that moment and find dark alleys and do unspeakable things to one another and then he goes home and he sees a giant insect scrabbling across the floor of his bedroom that he is convinced was the size of a mouse but it couldn’t have been that big because it was an insect. Then he goes to sleep but his skin crawls as he does so because he imagines the creature will crawl on him and into him while he sleeps.
He wakes up. His chest is still heavy with congestion but this is an improvement on the depression and sadness and the unrelenting hopelessness that weighed down on his body throughout the winter months. He wonders if last night his body smelled of ammonia as he twisted sweating in the yoga studio. He feels healthy and vibrant. This morning he had to change a diaper on a child who had filled it with poo. The child was unhelpful as it sought to smear the excrement over it’s fingers and the uncovered parts of it’s body. He writes some more of his novel. He learnt last night that if he self-publishes a book then he can nominate himself for a Pulitzer Prize. This idea amuses him and he thinks that he would like to do this one day. He probably won’t do it but he would like to. He is truly happy at the moment and he is enjoying life and wonders why he didn’t try to be more proactive before but of course he has been this proactive before and he has been this happy and he knows, as it gnaws with tiny little teeth, at the back of his brain, that the unhappiness will return at some point. For now it is distant, stomping and unhappy on a distant hill. He will leave it there for now. He sleeps.
He wakes up early. He is full of energy except in his eyelids and his legs and his arms. His brain is buzzing but his body doesn’t want to connect to it so he lies in bed until he has the energy gathered to no longer lie in bed. He gets up and goes to the bathroom and pisses out the weight of his bladder. Then he goes and makes a coffee and uses unsweetened soy milk. He has forsworn dairy but it is so hard to do because he loves chocolate and he loves yogurt and it is hard to find large buckets of soy yogurt in mainstream grocery stores on his limited budget. He thinks about yesterday when he put make up on a bald man’s head. He has a strange job but he enjoys it and he gets paid enough so those are both good things to think about. He cannot find his kindle anywhere which makes him sad and he has not done bikram yoga for a few days because he has a congested chest and that also makes him sad because he really enjoys bikram yoga even though he thinks that he prepares like Mr. Bean and when he does it he smells of ammonia. Both these things could be in his imagination but he isn’t sure whether this is the case or not. He makes it to the bus stop and reads Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. He is enjoying the book and enjoying the feel of a real book in his hand for a change even though he likes his kindle a lot because it means that he can carry lots of big books on one tiny device. He feels like a commercial for Amazon. Everyone is forgetting the Rainforest and thinking of the company, much like the way that children think that Titanic was a fictional boat created by James Cameron and not a real tragedy that marked a turning point in the decline of the British Empire at the Start of the 20th Century. To laugh is to cry, he thinks and to cry to laugh. He feels energised from his recent healthiness and his lack of meat and dairy products may be a part of that but he is not sure. His chest is heavy, thick with congestion from allergies that began the Friday before and meant that he spent the whole day in bed choking and vomiting lumps of grim globs of sputum into his mouth to be spat away in lank lumps into the toilet. He has been drinking a lot of carrot juice and alternating between abstinence and unyielding marathon masturbation sessions that leaves him aching, weak, guilty and unhappy at his unwanted rawness. He wonders if he has a problem and concludes that he does not. He helps someone get a running machine and holds someone’s hand because they are sick with stress that they should be allowed to have at nine years old but life is often unfair. Then he goes home and he finishes watching The Avengers cartoon and reads some more of his Riddley Walker book and then he goes to sleep.
He wakes up. He is invigorated and energised from the yoga still that he did yesterday for an hour and a half in a sweltering room. He is still disappointed that he spilt a whole tub of bluberries on the sidewalk last night in the dark but he is glad that no one saw him or rather he hope that no one saw him because he only very half heartedly managed to sweep them up and when he walked past them to get to his car this morning they were jam on the concrete. He reads about the French and how easily they went back to normal after the German invasion during World War II. It makes him sad but he knows that there is nothing particularly about the French that made them do this, it was the fact that they were human beings and human beings do things that, in hindsight often look terrible and shallow and we think that we would never do those things but we would, we most likely definitely would. He then ate some lunch at work which was chicken and mozarella and tomato and carrots that he had cooked and it was pretty tasty. Then he thought about the future and then a little about the past. Then he focused on the present and thought about signing up for some more yoga classes whether through dehydration or energy he felt that it had given him something that he had not had in a long time. It could also have been the lovely sunny day that was doing this to him. The day continued full of energy and positivity and he really had nothing to complain about except for the fact that he could not play the piano nor sing professionally and that he had not yet finished his Great American Novel. He went to sleep bathed in happiness.
He wakes up. He is not getting enough sleep. He is going to start doing bikram yoga because of a woman that he met but didn’t really meet but spoke to on the phone but then he hadn’t made it clear that he was still married even though he had said he was separated and he thought that there was a difference between that word and divorced but apparently there wasn’t. September it is then, he thought, when life really begins if it can be said to ever have stopped. He tweets some things he thinks are amusing and they all get stored in the Library of Congress because all tweet get stored in The Library of Congress. He finishes a Philip K. Dick novel. He loves Philip K. Dick even though he seems to have been a number one asshole. He is getting skinny and toned and he is eating lots of nuts and dried berries and he has never felt healthier or more alone. He wants to stop drinking coffee. He wants to stop being a hypocrite. It took him far too long to find out how to spell hypocrite. So much for a University Education. The nights are hot and the days are even hotter. The summer is going to be a strange one and the cherry blossoms are getting ready to explode out of their buds this time for the 100th Anniversary of the gifting of the Cherry Blossoms by the Japanese to the Americans. He walks in the warm of the dark of the night and then collapses into bed. A chicken is slowly rotting in his fridge but he does not have the energy to cook it. Tomorrow he will cook it but not today. He sleeps.
He wakes up to the sound of dramatic science fiction swells and realises that it is his new phone. He smiles because it amuses him. Then he has a shower and waits for his landlord who gives him a lift in his car after eating wet oatmeal. He is in a valley of pain this morning after the plateau that he reached yesterday. He is without resolution even though the Woman he Loves has total resolution and has moved on and he acknowledges that the emails that he has been getting are bots even though he is pretending that they are not. He is keeping those two ideas in his head because he is a human being and can keep two ideas in his head at the same time. He eats a bagel and he tries to get one hundred twitter followers by the end of the day simply because one hundred seems like a good number except he keeps getting people called FuckbooknOw and huearda0m0n which don’t seem like real people so he doesn’t add them even though he wants to add them. He gets a definitive response in upper case from the woman he loves that IT IS OVER and not to reply and that she is getting uncomfortable so at least he knows now and he has tried because before she used to say that he gave up so easily and now he has gone totally the other way and has become a stalker so he stops even though stopping makes him feel sick and continuing calms his nerves. He is definitely in danger of going insane so he goes to bed early.
He wakes up and he is late very late so late that he misses everything. Then he goes back to sleep and then on reawakening has a coffee with some peppermint creamer and a turkey sub roll with mayonnaise and mustard and pepper that he made himself then he has a shower and he wonders how is beard can grow so quickly. The train is delayed because one of the carriages is broken so he sits and he reads his book until it arrives. Then at work he directs something in Welsh and everything sounds like poetry. His soul is full of poetry but his life is not. He goes down to CVS and he smells the stink of sewage and this is not a metaphor about capitalism and chain stores but there really is a smell of sewage in the CVS but no one seems to be bothered by it. The amazing power of the human nostril to get used to a foul odour very quickly. Then he realises that it’s not the nostril but the olfactory glands and not really the glands but the sensitive electrical interplay between input of molecules into those glands and the manner in which the brain interprets them. Then he drinks some cookies and creme milk shake and eats some chocolate. After that he goes to a pool bar and has a drink with friends. He talked with friends but couldn’t stay for long and only had one drink and then waited for the train and then got on the train and then got off the train and walked up the escalator and then ran for the bus that he could see in the distance and then had a burger and then had some wine and then put on his pyjamas and then and then and then. His life was unravelling.
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He wakes up. He sent emails last night that he regrets but then tries to forget as he rides in the car and rides off the wine and rides off the memories of embarrassment and missed opportunities. Then he logs onto an email address that he never logs onto and his heart skips a beat because he has a reply from the girl who he loves and he opens the message but then his heart is confused because it is a link to a page about working from home and he thinks to himself this is most odd and then he replies and tells the girl that he loves that her account has been hacked. Then later as he sits on the train his heart sinks very deep because he thinks he knows what has happened. After receiving the email last night she deleted her account and the moment that happened bots went in and took over the name and used it for their nefarious purposes so he was emailed by a bot. So he is even unhappier and looking at pictures of her doesn’t make it any better and when he gets to work he has failed to do a fundamental part of his job and he is reprimanded and he feels bad about his incompetence. Then he eats chocolate and then the day drags on for hours and he finds himself frozen with indecision and cannot do anything at all. Wrecked by the poor choices that he has made he finally gets to do some work that makes him feel worthwhile and he draws some more art and posts the art and hopes for validation with likes and rebloggings which he gets. Then in the taxi on the way home he texts the girls who’s email was hacked but really deleted and pretends to offer advice just so that he can contact her but it makes him feel better and then when he gets home he goes to sleep.
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He wakes up. He tastes wine in his mouth. He is late. He runs but he can’t run far or fast because he has a bag. He spends all day at work drawing a picture of a lorax and being satirical. Then he drinks some more wine. He plays some Mario Galaxy 2. It is an elegant game. He is not an elegant man. He sends an email even though he shouldn’t and he doesn’t expect a reply. He goes to sleep and wakes up to Lawrence O’Donnell at 1am.
He wakes up. His alarm from the week is still on and it wakes him up on Sunday and he cannot get back to sleep and he is annoyed at this. He watches some television and then plays some board games and then goes out for a walk and it is cold but fresh and refreshing then he learns that the woman he loves was accidentally texted by the woman he doesn’t love and then there was an exchange of words and this happened a few weeks before the Trip so he starts to whirr and click and think maybe that made the whole trip a failure, maybe it was these unknown texts but he knows that it is not but he wants to rationalise his madness and hope for his fantasies and live in a Reality that he lost last year with his cowardice and the choices he made to have to pick between selfishness and selflessness and he picked the latter and he goes to bed thinking that he hated that he had to make that choice.
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