poetry

~ Escaping the Farm ~

December 13, 2020December 13, 2020 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

~ Escaping the Farm ~

Often the less sanity a man has, the freer he is
Not shackled by the restraints of conventional thought
He is free to journey into a wilderness
That is untouched by the hands of others

In this wilderness he may find treasure
Or he may wander too far
And be consumed
By whatever awaits in the unknown.

For me, I have been losing my mind
And exploring this wilderness
For a long time now.
I have found myself in some dark places
Been close to the edge more than once
But I have also found things
that have enriched
and enlightened me as a person

And as time goes on, I start to realise that sanity
Is something similar to a farm
The people on that farm are safe and secure
They do not have to worry about the wolves
Or the creatures of the darkness

But they also live in a world of limitation
Confined by a rigid perspective
Unable to explore uncharted territory
And see things from a different angle

You know, they say that the road to creativity
Often veers close to the madhouse
And from my experience, I think that’s true

I’m pretty sure that these words
Come from a place
Many have feared to go

But just hear it from me:
Losing your mind
Can often take you
To some pretty interesting places.

This forest is alive
The wolves are howling
The wind is singing
And my soul is dancing

It’s not all bad out here,

I promise.

short stories

~ Off The Rails ~

March 28, 2020March 28, 2020 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

~ Off the Rails ~

Off the rails. We all go there at some point. At least many of us do. We have seen our parents go off the rails, our politicians, our celebrities. We have seen our friends and our teachers. It’s a time when a man or woman just can’t hold on anymore to whatever it was that was giving their lives some structure and stability. The absurdity of life strikes hard and we can’t keep it together as we pretend to know what we are doing and what path we are following. Our behaviour thus becomes volatile as we drink the beer, consume the drugs and venture into the general realms of self-destructive madness.

My mind was particularly turbulent at the best of times, so it was only naturally the rails had fallen out of reach many times in my life. I had been there broke on the other side of the world while drinking myself to sleep every night. I had been there when my heart was broken for the first time. I had been there when I quit a university course and flew one-way to Mexico. I had been there many times and now I was there on the South coast of France visiting a friend I had met in Nepal. Like me his life was total mess and madness. Another young guy in his twenties staring out at contented members of society strolling down sidewalks and wondering how the hell he would ever be one of them. He had recently broken up with his girlfriend, was working a temporary contract job, had little savings, was living at home with his parents, and just generally didn’t know where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do with his life. Naturally this had led him to self-destructive behaviour such as excessive partying and driving while under the influence.

The reason this trip was doomed was because I was also reaching the peak of my latest spell of being off-the-rails. It had been four months of heavy drinking, sleeping around, starting and quitting a job, and just generally being hurled around by the anarchy of my own restless heart. Us together was a recipe for disaster and that disaster unfolded nicely as the beers went back while we sat in his garden in the hills above Cannes.

“Fuck, I am so lost man. What am I doing with my life?” He drank his beer and stared out at the hills. “No money, no girlfriend, living at home with my parents. I don’t know where the hell to go next.” It didn’t help that all around us were the fancy homes of accepted members of society who had ‘made it’. We looked at those finely groomed houses as he kept venting about his issues. I wanted to help him but naturally I didn’t want to offer any solutions to problems I suffered from myself. Fire could not put out fire and within days we were drinking till 8am in the morning, searching for girls to meet on Tinder and driving around town heavily intoxicated while blasting 90s rap music. It was another episode of madness for me and I thought of many of my friends currently out there also doing the same in some shape or form. I knew one guy drinking five bottles of wine a day in an apartment outside of Milan. I knew one woman who had quit her career job and moved to Switzerland to be a starving artist. I knew another who had just arrived back into the U.K penniless after blowing all his money on cocaine in South America.

Over the years I had noticed that I seemed to attract a certain type of person in my life. Some might call them beatniks, bohemians or bums. It was the type of person who went from one storm to another and whose life was in a constant state of disorder. They were the ones perpetually off the rails, spiralling out of control and constantly circling the drain of defeat. I guess I was one of them myself. My life was currently as turbulent as it had ever been and the global outbreak of the coronavirus sealed the fate. My year fell apart in a matter of days as my travel plans were cancelled and I suddenly found myself jobless and facing the prospect of moving back with my parents. For now in France they had announced a curfew on the streets and for all international visitors to head home as soon as they could. Naturally I responded to this by getting drunk and arranging to meet a girl off Tinder. My life now had no hope or direction for the foreseeable future, so meeting a girl and watching the sun set as we got smashed off a bottle of rum seemed like a good option. After that we drove around town drunk until my friend found us a hotel. The three of us checked in and carried on drinking in the room. Suggestions of a three-way were made but my friend decided to leave as he was too depressed about his ex. So there it was just me and the girl who was totally off the rails too. Listening to her story, I found out she had snuck out of her parent’s house and hitch-hiked to meet me from a small village. I also found out she had had a miscarriage a couple of years back which no doubt explained why her arms were covered with a succession of self-harm scars. She was clearly still haunted by some demons and naturally it felt good to be with a fellow scratched and scarred soul who was also no stranger to the storm.

The next morning we were getting kicked out of the hotel as it had decided to close due to the outbreak. We left the room covered in beer bottles and wine stains and headed back out onto the streets. Back in the burning daylight of reality, I looked around at the eerily empty neighbourhoods and wondered what the hell I was now going to do with my life. My phone had no charge and we wandered around in a dreamlike state for an hour or two. She had to get home as soon as she could; her parents were worried about her and wanted her to come home to quarantine like the rest of the world. My parents didn’t even know I was in France. I guess it would be time to tell them soon. For now I decided to take the train to Nice where my flight was due to head off the next day. We headed to the train station where we bumped into a German man smoking weed and also not knowing what the hell he was doing. He had been travelling around Europe with no money for the last two months, carrying only a small backpack and a bible. The oncoming lockdown was sure to leave him in a sticky situation for the foreseeable future. I wished him some luck as we carried on our way.

I almost convinced the girl to let me stay with her at her family’s house in her village but I eventually ended up alone on the streets of Nice, wandering around aimlessly, considering what the hell I could do until the next morning when my flight left. By now the curfew was in full effect and police were patrolling the streets to interrogate people on why they were outside. If they were to ask me, what the hell would I say? I didn’t know what I was doing with my life at the best of times and this wasn’t the best of times. I was just kind of stumbling around in a hungover daze while waiting to go home the next day (that was if my flight hadn’t been cancelled like the majority of flights had). My situation was bad but not as bad as my friend. After finally finding a place to buy a phone charger, I managed to contact him and find out that he had got arrested for drink-driving the night before. The police had pulled him over just a short while after he had left us at the hotel. He had tested four times the limit and had been stripped of his license for at least six months. His life was already off the rails but this was the thing that would surely cause him to sink even further into the depths of self-destructive madness.

His spell off-the-rails was taking a new nosedive and I was sure that mine was too. As the world turned to anarchy with the outbreak of the coronavirus, I just headed to a shop to get some more beers and drink at the beach somewhere out of sight of the police. I sat there alone on the shores of France, my back turned to the madness of the world as I thought about what I was now going to do with my trainwreck of a life. I had left my job to travel but now that looked unlikely for the rest of the year. It would also be difficult to find another job with the country going on lockdown for weeks or possibly months. Money was going to be an issue, especially with the horrific damage I had done to my bank account in a matter of days in France. I downed my beer and knew my life was spiralling out of control to a degree I hadn’t seen before. I had no direction, no chance, no hope. I couldn’t even be bothered to fake an answer when people would ask me what I was doing with my life. Truth is, I didn’t have a clue anymore. I had never really had a clue, and out of all the peaks of not having a clue, perhaps this was the highest. Like my French friend and the girl from Tinder, I was totally off the rails, circling the drain and waiting to be sucked permanently into that sewer of defeat. It was a state that I was to always return back to no matter how many periods of stability and sanity came my way. Deep down I knew I couldn’t be cured from this reckless behaviour and a part of me didn’t even want to. The world was falling to pieces anyway and I wanted to fall apart with it.

With that decision made, I gazed out into the Mediterrean sea, cracked open another beer and toasted my descent further into the abyss of self-destructive madness.

short stories

~ The Voice Of Insanity ~

January 13, 2019January 13, 2019 nofiltersnecessary1 Comment

~ The Voice of Insanity ~

“Back again from the road, looking out at that grey, grey world. That concrete world. That mechanical world. At another crossroad of life, once again it seemed like I had all but two choices: to join the herd, surrender myself to the system and let the normality of everyday life slowly suffocate my soul, or to just let go further and go more and more insane. It was true that by now I was sure I was in some strange minority of the human race. Sure, I had done all the personality tests and tried to psychologically analyse myself, but it really wasn’t necessary. The fact that I was allergic to every cultural task, to every bit of small-talk – to every social expectation and tradition that surrounded me – meant there was absolutely no chance for me to ever fit into my surrounding society. The searing pain I felt at even the smallest task of convention told me that trying to be a part of that world would probably leave me as a future suicide case. I didn’t want that to happen, and I wasn’t going to let that happen. A haunting voice whispered inside my ear and told me to keep on going on my path – to keep on wandering towards some sort of personal salvation and nirvana out there in the wild. Perhaps it was the sinister voice of madness trying to lure me over to the other side of sanity, but at times it seemed that voice was the best friend I had – the only one to reliably guide me through the dark swamps and forests I so often found myself in.

It was funny when I thought more about it – those voices you followed; those voices that guided you; those paths you walked. When I also looked at my idols – the writers, philosophers, adventurers and artists – and thought about their story, it seemed like they too had followed that same voice through the wilderness. Perhaps that’s why those souls had appealed to me from such a young age. In many ways they were just like me. In a species that requires individuals to conform and lose their adventurous spirit and creativity in order to uphold the mechanical system of society, the ones who are possessed by the need to express themselves and perpetually explore their inner and outer worlds were destined to lose their minds among the static masses. When walking those concrete streets and facing out at the grey absurdity of it all, I understood why they chose instead to go insane. It made sense why they chose to sit in dark rooms and write until their fingers bled, to try every drug and meditation under the sun, to climb the mountains, to live in camper-vans, to play the blues – to create great works of art and then blow their brains out with a shotgun. This is what had to be done; for some this was the only way to save oneself from the pain of a scripted life, to escape the automatic life on the cultural conveyor-belt – to fiercely protect the wild soul inside of them from being captured and killed by the mundane requirements of everyday civilian life.

Yeah, maybe they were madmen, or masochists, or simply deluded – and maybe I was too – but for me they were the only people I truly understood in the core of my heart. No matter how many years passed me by, I still couldn’t stomach or accept the life society expected me to live. And coming back again from the road once more, it was clear that I probably never would. My basic realisation each morning was always the same: I was a conscious, living organism riding a spinning rock through a universe full of exploding stars, black holes, and infinite horizons. The possibilities to life should have been endless, but mostly you we were subjected to a life of routine and monotony and trivia. Why was it like this? Was it all some kind of cruel prank? Maybe I had I got off at the wrong stop, or the gods had made a mix-up in the planetary warehouse when sending me here?

Whatever the case, it was clear that the only thing for me to now do was to keep on following that voice through the misty wilderness. For me this is what had to be done; for me this was the answer. I was to continue on my path. I was to abandon myself to art and adventure. I was to keep on following that voice through the wild. And yes, maybe it would lead to me madness, but I simply no longer cared. For some that place of madness is the last refuge of freedom from the machine. For some that place is the only realm in which the free spirit can survive. For some – in a world where sanity meant a life of slow suffocation – going insane is the gasp of fresh air that keeps them alive.”

(taken from my book ‘The Thoughts From The Wild’ available here)