~ The Mask Of Normality ~

August 2, 2019October 28, 2019 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

~ The Mask of Normality ~

“So Bryan, what is it that you do?”

I looked at my fellow wanderer across the dinner table from me. He was a man of the backpacking world. He was a man who had done many jobs, who had travelled many places – a man who, like me, struggled to categorise his entire existence in the universe within a specific labelled box of employment. Still, after swallowing the food he was chewing on, he began to try and justify his bohemian lifestyle to the family. I sat back and studied him curiously, knowing that it was normally me on the receiving end of this question, flapping and flailing around like a fish out of water, unable to give them the solid answer they sought.

After a couple of minutes of explaining how he worked and travelled, how he didn’t have a set home, and how he had recently spent a year living in a hostel, an awkward silence fell over us. I looked at the mother and father across the table. If they had been culturally programmed robots, then you could almost see the sparks flying from their eyes. You could see the circuits crashing and the sound of ‘malfunction – malfunction – malfunction’. It was a sight I knew all too well; whenever people couldn’t categorise you easily within a culturally and economically defined box, then they often stalled and didn’t know what to say. Their silence was deafening but thankfully Bryan found some humorous words:

“Well, it looks like my mask of normality just fell off.”

I let out an awkward little laugh and thought about the absurdity of the scenario. Here we were once again justifying our bizarre and unconventional lives to a family we were visiting. Often we had joked about the looks of bewilderment that were cast our way whenever we talked about our lives. I guess you didn’t really think about it until you were out of education. When you were still studying you could say you were in education to get people off your back. But the second you were out of school and didn’t have your identity assigned by a job role, the looks of bewilderment and judgment were thrown your way by the bucket load. It seemed that in society a man or woman’s destiny was to become a particular thing, a labelled component of the cultural machine, and this was reflected in the fact that one of the first questions people asked each other when meeting was ‘what do you do?’

No matter where you went in life, the question was always there. Meeting a girl in a bar – “what do you do?” Meeting a stranger on your travels – “what do you do back home?” Meeting some relatives – ‘what are you doing now?’ Even turning on the television and watching a game show – one of the first questions was always “what do you do?” Everywhere I went I curiously observed my species take part in this behaviour when interacting with each other. If you could toss out a label of economic-based existence and explain it with a couple of sentences, then the process would be very swiftly done. Out your label would come, the other person would then categorise and judge you on what sort of person you were, and then the conversation would move on. The problem for Bryan as well as me was that I just didn’t have an answer that would satisfy them all. Once somebody asked me the question, I had to go on a long-winded explanation telling them of all the different jobs I had done, my partition in medical trials, my backpacking trips, my writing and the general disastrous concoction of chaos and anarchy that was my life. Like Bryan had noted, it was usually at this point the mask of normality was blown off and I was exposed for the abnormal creature I was. From the top of my head, I could remember at least ten times this had happened, and I had been automatically cast as the outsider of the group. Their stares of shock and confusion were seared into my mind.

I guess I should have just accepted it and replied that I was effectively a drifter. I mean, I was a drifter, there was no way around it anymore. But I guess I was a little uncomfortable with that label due to the connotations it had. It’s not that I was completely destitute or homeless or something like that, but it was true that I roamed around from one place to the other with not too much of a long-term plan. Of course, there was a romantic side to the image of being a drifter, but mostly it just scared people away and made them think of you as a loser, a loner or an outcast. Yes, all things considered, the mask of normality was well and truly off if you gave yourself that label.

One day I decided I would just make up a role whilst out on my travels. Meeting people you were never going to see again made it possible to experiment with alternative identities, sort of like a mild schizophrenic, I guess. I went ahead with this idea and started to say I was a journalist. This masked identity had a level of credibility to it because I had actually obtained a degree in journalism early in my adult life. I could talk about the industry and use its terms and even reference a business magazine I had done unpaid work in the past. What’s more, it was a revered profession, so this allowed the person I was speaking with to have some level of respect for me. This answer allowed the mask of normality to stay placed on my alien face. With a nod of the other person’s head and a smile on their face, I was an accepted member of the human race.

To raise the stakes one time out of the interest of an experiment, I thought I would go all out and give myself the label that was revered as ‘successful’ and the epitome of a respected profession. I decided to say I was a lawyer. I had taken a few law modules in my journalism degree and even sat in on court hearings while writing and reporting. Because of this, I again knew some of the terms and areas of law I could talk about. After hearing their profession first to make sure they weren’t actually a real lawyer, I explained away my made-up role as a solicitor. As I did, I observed the looks of approval on their faces. My mask of normality and acceptability was fixed on my face stronger than ever with this label. People in bars gravitated toward me. Girls even desired me more. It truly was amazing to see the difference what a single word could do. With this mask I was more than just an accepted member of human civilisation; I was in actual fact a respected member of human civilisation.

The schizophrenic madness went on and eventually I got to a point in my life where I had self-published a book and received a total of two hundred and something sales. I had been writing all my adult life but now I actually had something published which was available to buy online. This meant I could give myself the labelled identity of a ‘writer’. I mean, ultimately in reality I was a largely unknown writer with a very small following, but to some other fellow outcasts and outsiders who read my writing, I was indeed a ‘writer’. I got started with using this answer whenever I was struck with the ‘what do you do?’ question. As I did, I noticed that people responded to it the most out of any of the labels of existence I had fed them. The interesting thing was that the mask of normality fell off your face if you said this anyway, especially if they went on to ask what sort of stuff you wrote. My stuff consisted of stories and thoughts of an outsider, all full of existential and alienated angst. If they were to actually read what I had written, then that was an automatic exposure as the misfit I was. Often, to my horror, some of them even bought my book – at which point my mask of normality was destroyed beyond repair and they naturally distanced themselves from me cautiously.

Eventually I faced the facts and realised I didn’t really have the right to say I was a ‘writer’ either. The ‘do’ question was more referencing what you did in order to get money. I hadn’t made more than a few dozen pounds with my writing; in fact, I had actually lost money taking into account the online adverts I occasionally did. So I retreated back to being a person with no real label. It was time to just try to avoid the question and stop lying that I actually was a regular human-being with some sort of actual normal identity. I couldn’t keep my face straight and live in my world of lies anymore. Back to being undefined and unclassified I went.

As my life went on this way, I resigned myself to the awkward pauses and stares whenever the ‘Do’ question was thrown my way. Consequently, there were great moments when imposter syndrome struck severely. Talking to girls in bars or attempting to apply for jobs, I never truly felt comfortable that I was one of them. At all times I was just a couple of questions from being exposed as the misfit and weirdo I was. I guess this hit its peak when I went back home with a city career girl who promptly packed up and left when I described my life to her as we lay in bed. Naturally I soon started to feel a million miles away from the world of normal people that continuously pounded the pavements of society next to me. They were all around me and often it got exhausting interacting with all the new people you’d meet out on those streets. I had rarely come across someone who even remotely understood what I was attempting to do with my life – that I was more interested in exploring, adventuring and seeking to create art over anything conventional like a career or starting a family. What I ‘did’ wasn’t possible to define within one word. At the core of it, I was a misunderstood individual getting more and more tired with humanity with every superficial interaction and tongue flicker of that awful question.

Sometimes, when the social alienation got too much, I would rack my brain into thinking what mask of normality I could try and give myself to get people off my back. Maybe I could just reside myself to a normal career. Maybe I could eventually even get a job in copywriting or something off the back of my creative writing. Maybe one day I could be a regular person, shepherded and confined within a labelled box of economic employment like the rest of the human race. I got lost in these thoughts gradually but eventually sobered up from my mental musings. The truth was the truth and, in all honesty, I guess I was just an alien like my good friend Bryan. An interstellar mutant of some kind, destined to wander on from place to place and job to job until the end of my days. The mask of normality had no place on my face. I was too awkward, too incompatible – too insane to fit into a socially approved box of existence. In a world of accepted citizens who had found their place in human society, I limped on through like some out-of-place extraterrestrial, winging it and somehow finding a way to get by and survive. ‘Too weird to live; too rare to die’ as Hunter had said. That is what I did. That is what I do. And that, as I sit alone again in this dark room pouring the mess in my mind onto this page, is what I will always do…

thoughts

~ Alien Nation ~

July 17, 2019 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

~Alien Nation ~

“Sometimes I just wanted to spill the contents of my soul to another. I wanted to talk about life, philosophy, adventure, the stars, the universe, the shadows of trees, and the dancing birds at sunset, but everywhere I went I found it hard to break on through past the barrier of trivial small-talk. Instead of discussing the cosmos, we discussed work colleagues; instead of talking philosophy, we talked television; instead of sharing ideas, we shared gossip and rumours. The times when I thought fuck it and decided to speak about these things, the conversation usually stalled as I was met with piercing glares. It seemed like there was some sort of cultural script we all followed, and anyone reciting lines not on the script was seen as an intruder who must be silenced. This was a travesty; I wanted to talk about something real but I was surrounded by a population of mannequins, of stage characters – of toy dolls where you knew what was going to be said once their string was pulled yet again. Silently in the crowd, I yearned for something more. I began to look for others wishing to break free from the script of society. I looked for a particular look in an eye – a wistful look that was often confused with somebody daydreaming. I searched for that look in bars, in supermarket queues, in the crowds that momentarily formed at the traffic lights. Sometimes I think I spotted it – the living creature in a crowd of mannequins – but I never did anything about it. I kept quiet as the robotic small-talk filled the air and a collective, cultural insanity left me alone in my mind once again.”

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poetry

~ No Final Solution ~

July 11, 2019 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

~ No Final Solution ~

The doors have shut and
the people await their fate
in these cities
in these chambers
where we live and die
and fight to survive

amid it all I see
the fearful eyes
the hands clutching together
sometimes in prayer
sometimes in marriage
but always in futility

in this world nothing is certain
but the panic and pain
the decay and death
the crashing and the burning

yet with these brains inside of us
and these hearts that plead for peace
we struggle and seek
a way out – a secret door
that leads to something else

but it cannot be found
and so here I stand also
trapped with everybody
awaiting my fate
in these cities
in these chambers

with my hands
scraping the walls
scraping at this typewriter
trying to find the way out

before this slaughterhouse

does what it does best

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thoughts

~ Moments Alone ~

January 25, 2019February 10, 2019 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

~ Moments Alone ~

“There are times when there aren’t enough words or combinations of words to explain yourself to the others. There are times when it is simply too exhausting to stand once again before non-understanding eyes and feel the futility of conversation. In those times what is needed is complete solitude, a total release from the suffocation and toxicity of the crowd. What is needed is a return to nature to remind yourself that, although you may be often misunderstood in society, the universe still holds a home for you out in the wild. It holds a home for you in those empty fields, sunset shores and lonely forests. It holds a home for you in the untamed spaces of freedom and purity. And often all that is needed to carry on is a moment out in that wild – staring out at a sunset sky or listening to the water sing its way down a meandering stream – that you remember that somehow, in all the mess and madness of this world, you are and always will be totally where you belong.”

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thoughts

~ Starved ~

January 19, 2019January 19, 2019 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

~ Starved ~

“After another day at work, I came home and faced the man in the mirror. The reflection showed a tired stranger. His face was pale and his eyes timid. I could see the visible effects another week of drudgery had done to me. In an instant I felt the weight of this concrete world pull me down stronger than ever. I wanted out but in a society which left you starving for freedom on every street corner, where else was there to turn? It seemed like either you starved from hunger in the gutter, or you starved from monotony and routine in the offices and suburbs. From where else could you fulfil yourself? From where else could you nourish yourself on the flesh of existence? The bars and clubs offered a temporary escape, but ultimately left you further in the pit the next day. The shops and malls offered momentary material pleasure, but ultimately left you empty and decaying on the inside. If you kept your eyes open then those grey streets told a sad story. A great famine was upon us and you only had to look into the eyes of the commuters on those rush-hour trains to see how bad the situation had gotten – to see that we had become over-civilised and under-fed with the fruits of life. Whatever ‘growing up’ and ‘finding your place’ in this strange society meant, I was certain that I was a galaxy or two away from it.”

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poetry

~ Over The Fence ~

January 19, 2019 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

‘Over the Fence’

Wide-eyed and wild
I roam these haunted woods
living off the carcass
of my own
madness

this is me now:
nowhere left to fit into this farm
so out on the edges I linger
like a poisoned one of the cattle
away from the herd; over the fence
slowly dying – but then again
aren’t we all

may as well have fun
may as well feel good
may as well get lost and go insane
before the butchers and slaughterhouses

have their way with us

thoughts

~ In The Madhouse ~

January 18, 2019 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

~ In The Madhouse ~

“There I stood on that city sidewalk once again: haunted and disturbed, my mind stained with Monday morning madness as the weight of this concrete world pressed down upon me. All around me the human race persevered on like normal. The traffic jams slowly stuttered by; the shoppers trudged on with their plastic bags; the cranes of doom loomed over me constructing our grey future. The insanity was relentless. We were a species stumbling recklessly toward the future. The rainforests fell as the skyscrapers rose; the rich bought $5000 suits as the homeless begged for money; the sociopaths flourished while the most intelligent sat in therapist offices paying for the right not to go insane. When you opened your eyes and really looked at it you could see something wasn’t quite right; something had gone wrong. In our undying quest for the good life we had become confused, deranged – dangerous. We had lost ourselves to illusions of success and future and wealth. But what good were those things when the air was poisoned? When the streets were littered with the homeless? When the buildings burnt down violently because the development agency skipped on fireproof materials to save money? The chaos of it all tormented me. It left me isolated on streets of thousands. Often I worried about ending up in the madhouse – but then I looked around and realised I was already in it.”

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short stories

~ Alone With Everybody ~

January 10, 2019January 29, 2019 nofiltersnecessary3 Comments

~ Alone With Everybody ~

Back alone in my chamber of solitude once again: the small bedroom in my apartment with only a bed, a backpack, a set of drawers and a looming sense of existential dread that now filled every crack, crevice and dark, cobwebbed corner.

I sat in silence on my bed and looked around at my surrounding lair. On the walls sat some photos of my travels out in the world – good times with people who were now out of sight, some of them no doubt also sitting alone in a small apartment room in somewhere on planet earth. I also had my laptop beside me from where I been pouring the contents of my mind onto a blank page never to be read by anyone except a few random strangers on the internet. It was an act of release and many words had been typed the last few days. Whenever I felt most starved for human interaction, I often found my fingertips scratching and clawing at keyboard keys in a desperate attempt to reach another out there in the wilderness. I sent my words out into hyperspace like a flare of my own madness, hoping to attract another one of my kind roaming somewhere in the far reaches of human civilisation. Sometimes people responded, but still I was left stranded in front of a keyboard, staring into a screen with nothing to do except to keep on typing more words onto that all-too familiar blank page.

In a moment of realisation, it struck me how alone I was. My head spun around and I felt like I was stranded faraway on another planet in another galaxy; I felt like I was stuck in some kind of void of nothingness where no person, animal or god could reach me. It was true that normally I sought solitude for a decent amount of time in my everyday life – my introverted mind demanded it – but like most things there was a limit to it all: a boundary where a real danger of genuine insanity lingered on the other side. Us humans were inherently social creatures who needed some kind of occasional interaction to stay sane, however despite a few electronic messages across that virtual wilderness of the internet, it had been almost a week without any significant form of human contact. Consequently I could feel the walls around me closing in; I could my own aching isolation eating me alive from within. Before I was consumed totally, I crawled out of my lair and ventured up to the roof of the apartment block to get some fresh air – that was usually one thing which I could rely on to help clear my mind when the storm inside got too fierce.

I climbed up the stairs and reached the rooftop. I opened the door and ventured over to the edge where I stood and stared out at the surrounding city landscape. There it all was sprawled out before me: the concrete jungle in all its chaos and madness and urban sadness. From the edge of that roof I looked out at the mazy streets; I looked out at the houses with their windows all illuminated like Christmas tree lights; I looked out at the parks and the bars and the restaurants where so many couples would be dining together in love and companionship. I thought being out the room would do me good, but the sight of civilisation only made me feel worse. It just didn’t seem to make any sense. How could loneliness exist when thousands of people surrounded you? How could we be so close but so far away at the same time? And how did it all end up like this? What had gone wrong in our species for us to develop technologically but not as beings capable of true connection and community for all?

Alone as I was, I looked out at that city and knew that there were others far worse off than I. Often in my life I spent large amounts of time travelling in foreign lands with fellow wanderers, but I knew how many souls out there were constantly dwelling in lives of inescapable loneliness and isolation year after year. The homeless people. The old people. The disabled. The alcoholics and drug addicts. The depressed and the anxious. Even on the apartment block below my feet, I wondered how many people were sat alone scrolling on their phones, desperately aching in their flesh and bones for just some basic form of human interaction. What made it worse that so many other souls close to them but separately by some shoddy walls. It was a strange situation. The thought of it made my mind wonder with possibility. Maybe there was someone like me sleeping just a few metres away in a vertical or horizontal direction? Maybe the girl of my dreams was just a few rooms away? Maybe there was a chance? A chance to connect with someone or something?

The more I thought about it, the more absurd it all seemed – the scenario of being so united yet so separated simultaneously – of being together under one roof but segregated alone in private rooms of darkness and isolation. It seemed that our society at its core was constantly stuck in that apartment block where everyone was so close and so far away at the same time. It was just innate of our species in the modern world of hectic cities and so-called civilisation. Everyday we were separated into offices, into cubicles, into traffic lanes, supermarket queues and apartment blocks. And not just physically; the strongest and most rigid barriers of separation were usually lined up within people’s skulls. If it wasn’t religion, race or social class, then it was that people put barriers up because they were simply sick of or scared of each another – of what people would say and do and the sudden sight of their unfiltered souls was revealed to the crowd. Mostly that fear was justified; people often didn’t react well to seeing the gritty contents of someone’s genuine self. In a society where superficiality and conformity called the shots, such an uncombed sight often caused people to be rejected, hated and sometimes even murdered depending on the culture. Because of this we kept the mask on in the crowd and let our true thoughts linger in the dark apartment rooms inside our skulls where our deepest secrets and desires lay gathering cobwebs and dust in dark, forgotten corners.

I thought back to when I myself had shared the contents of my heart with the crowd. The times I had opened up myself up to others I had been rejected and cast out from the group; I had been looked at like an utter madman and a lunatic. There were a few who delighted in what they saw, but mostly people were concerned, disinterested or even resentful towards me. Over time I came to the conclusion that generally people didn’t want the raw and rugged face of someone’s true self. Such an image was an unwelcome sight and instead so many wanted lives dressed up in pretty fonts and filters; they wanted people pretending on social media that their lives were wonderful and great; they wanted people insincerely asking people how they were before giving the generic ‘yeah okay you?’ response. At the very core of it, it just seemed the majority of people had no time for anything that wasn’t clean and polished. It was just more convenient for us all I guess. I would have liked to think that I was as open as possible to another soul, but I also knew there were times where I too had distanced myself from someone trying to connect with me at a deeper level. Like most people in these cities, I was overcome with a fear that left us afraid and unwilling to let someone slip under the walls we put up inside our own minds.

Such a nature lead to the loneliness that afflicted so many dwelling in towns and cities and apartment blocks far and wide across the world. Right now throughout the urban landscape that lay before me I knew that people sat alone in rooms watching the clock tick slowly towards their death; I knew some already had died alone and were waiting to be found in an old house no one ever visited. Elsewhere some of those in the peak of their youth scrolled through internet forums and blogs hoping that there were others like them somewhere out there in the chaotic mess of society. Throughout our modern civilisation were so many lost souls dwelling alone, starving, dying, decaying in modern isolated lives of sedentary comfort but spiritual pain. They were the lives where people had followers but no friends; the lives where people’s greatest moment of connection was being served by the cashier at the supermarket; the lives where people screamed out through bloodshot eyes and internet blogs because their physical voices had been silenced out of fear of judgement from the crowd.

Looking out at the convoluted mess of houses, streets and apartment blocks, the thought hit me that perhaps we had just simple gone too far? Humans who once lived in close-knit tribes on the plains of the wild were now living in gigantic, industrial cities where underground tubes transported us robotically around like electrons around a circuit-board. One could sit in a tube of fifty silent people and watch everyone look away from each other’s eyes and down to phones, floors and newspapers. It was a strange situation: the more the population continued to grow, the more separated we seemed to all become as individuals. Often the moments when the loneliness hit you greatest was when you were sat on those packed tubes, or stood in the crowds that momentarily formed at the traffic lights, or waiting in a long queue at the supermarket. There you’d stand and look around at that sea of faces, scanning and searching the eyes for another of your kind, yet you would always end up sailing on alone back to your dark apartment room. I guess I speak for myself mainly here of course, but I am sure for many other souls dwelling somewhere out there within the concrete wilderness too.

Thinking back to my travels, it struck me that the greatest moments of connection I had with another human were usually with complete and total strangers out hiking a mountain trail in foreign lands. Whenever you were out on that trail, all the barriers and shoddy walls of society disappeared. Being in nature without the crowd surrounding and suffocating you allowed our true nature to shine as individuals. Amongst the hills and lack of civilisation was a haven for the soul – a paradise of mental freedom where the social masks could be tossed away into a ditch and we could finally just be ourselves in all our gritty messiness and madness.

I recalled hiking in the French Alps with a young Israeli guy in the summer of the previous year. I was walking towards a mountain pass when I came across him sat on a rock in the shade eating some nuts. After asking if I wanted some, we began walking together toward the pass. While walking it quickly became apparent we were of different cultures, of a different theological belief, and of a different age – yet none of those things mattered on the trail. Instead of distancing ourselves, we spoke from the heart about what lead us to travel; we shared our hopes and aspirations for life; we cooked and shared food with each other in the shadow of the mountain. As we continued walking we met other hikers including an American girl and an old English nomad who lived in his campervan. Again, despite all our obvious differences in backgrounds and demographic, there was nothing but community and connection between us all. We sat around our campsite at sundown eating dinner, drinking wine and discussing life, adventure and philosophy. We looked into each other’s eyes and spoke freely from the heart with no shoddy walls to separate us. It felt good; it felt strangely like how it should have been.

But those times on the trail were a long way away I realised as I stood alone on that rooftop edge in the middle of the concrete jungle, hearing a distant siren wail out into the night – the sound of another ambulance on its way to retrieve another life which had ended. The mountains of freedom were out of sight and I was back on the stage of society where masks had to be worn, scripts had to be recited and anyone who deviated from social convention or normality was seen as an outcast or a hippy or simply crazy. Thinking about the absurdity of it, I looked up to the skies above, staring out into the few visible stars shining through the light pollution, dreaming of something ineffable – some kind of home that I could never seem to find for any more than a short period of time here on planet earth.

Eventually I decided to retreat back down to my lair to pour all my thoughts onto that blank page yet again. Enough air had been breathed in for now. I crawled back down the stairs, entered my apartment and sat in solitude before a computer screen, sending out that flare of my mind’s madness via some some words typed on a grubby keyboard. A raised voice shouted out from the room beside me and I knew I was back where I belonged: in my small space, cornered by society, alone in the dark, my mind filled with madness as my fingers scratched and clawed at those keyboards once more.

If this is to be my continual fate and someone does happen to find me one day in this apartment room as another old person who watched that clock tick slowly towards their death, know that I truly wanted to connect with you all like I did with those people on that trail. Here in this society there are just some shoddy walls in my skull and yours that I can’t knock down. Hopefully these words at least let you know that behind my social mask was somebody who wanted to unite, but was too consumed by a society and system that lead me pour these words onto this page. I am alone with you all, lost in a concrete jungle, afflicted by the human condition, floating through space on this rock towards an unknown abyss. If these words don’t help anyone else out there, at least they helped me momentarily escape this dark room. If these words don’t help anyone else out there, at least they let my heart sing out in all its truth – if only for a brief moment – the spirit bird fluttering free in the sky before returning to its rusty cage of isolation and separation and segregation.

thoughts

~ Behind The Looking Glass ~

January 7, 2019January 7, 2019 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

~ Behind The Looking Glass ~

“Twenty hours later and there I sat alone on that cross-country bus – head pressed against the window, gazing out at the towns and villages, watching the human race go about its existence. I watched the mothers hang clothes on washing lines; I watched the old men sip coffee in roadside cafes; I watched the kids playing football in the dirt. Everybody was there belonging to a place in space and time as I passed by like a transient cloud in the sky. Many people detested those long bus journeys but I found a strange comfort and peace within them. In the temporary situation of being in between places, I had momentarily transcended some boundary of static belonging. I was invisible; a ghost – a voyeuristic stranger on a bus briefly belonging to nowhere – to nothing – to no one. As I continued down the meandering road of my life, it became clear to me why I found comfort in those long journeys on the road. On those journeys I was in my natural state; on those journeys I succumb to my gypsy fate. Holding a ticket to some vague place beyond the horizon, it was my unavoidable destiny to be a stranger on a passing bus, lost in space and time, gazing out the windows of curiosity, doomed to never step off and belong to one particular place or group of people.”

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

short stories

~ Toward The Keyboard ~

January 2, 2019July 20, 2019 nofiltersnecessaryLeave a comment

(taken from my upcoming book: ‘Scraps of Madness’)

~ Toward the Keyboard ~

It was true. Oh god, oh god: it was true.

The opening years of adulthood had passed and my conclusion had been drawn: I was an alien – an outsider – an outcast. I had tried to a reasonable degree to slot myself into the paradigm of human society, but I gradually realised that there was just no place for me amongst those stern-eyed creatures of culture and convention. Each attempt to fit myself in had lead to the usual bout of alien anxiety and staring up existentially into skies above. I stood still on those concrete sidewalks of life with my hands in my pockets knowing that I just simply wasn’t compatible with any of it: the jobs, the paperwork, the contracts, the football teams, the small-talk, mortgages, Ikea – Ant and Dec. Even everyday simple things like supermarket shopping somehow made me sad. Those cold aisles had a still sadness which made my heart ache for something which couldn’t be made in any factory, or purchased in any store, or stored in any house.

People with good intentions encouraged me to mix myself in but I was hopelessly allergic to it all. A life of comfort and security was okay for a few months at the most, but after that my restless eyes lifted once again to that horizon of adventure and anarchy and chaos. That possibly explained why I had spent at least three of the last five years on some sort of travelling expedition out somewhere in the world. Expedition makes it sound like I was climbing Mount Everest, although I did trek to the base camp twice, but too often I was bumming around, getting drunk in hostels and attempting to seem like a normal, functioning member of the human race so I could hook up with some young German girl who was about to become a lawyer and begin the middle-class existence in the suburbs.

People back home said that there was something wrong with me – that I was immature – that I was out of my mind – that I was running away from life and or something like that. Maybe they were right, but in my head I wasn’t running away from life, but rather running toward it with wide arms, a heavy heart and a weathered backpack full of dirty clothes and a couple of books on esoteric philosophy to boot. It was just a different perspective and all that, you know? I guess truthfully I just saw no thrill in a life of bill-paying routine, in a steady career, in promotions, parking spaces, weddings, television sitcoms, shiny cars or that all-inclusive holiday once a year to somewhere in Spain. Was that really what human existence was all about? Was that my destiny as a sentient organism in an infinite universe? Was that to be my fate whilst briefly incarnate in this transient cage of slowly decaying flesh and bone?

It was an interesting situation to say the least. I truly and genuinely wanted to understand their way of life so I did the usual things. I watched TED talks; I listened to Jordan Peterson lectures; I spoke to career councillors, to parents and work colleagues. I argued with strangers on the internet in YouTube comment sections. I tried and tried and tried, but in the end I just didn’t understand how the majority could do it so easily. What they called ‘growing up’ and ‘the real world’ to me seemed like a weird sort of bubble of unnatural behaviour. After all, what was natural about sitting in an office in artificial light all day, only to drive home in a gas-guzzling car and eat processed foods while watching a blinking box until you went to sleep? That wasn’t what the real world was. To me the real world was out there among the trees and fields – the wolves; the monkeys; the sunset beaches and mountain wildernesses. That’s where the life and adventure was at. Even better was what was out there in the cosmos with the shooting stars and black holes. It felt so cruel to be able to see that endless universe on a clear night above me. I wanted to go out and explore it all, but I had been subjected by gravity and government to instead exist in a world of monotony and mediocrity. Instead of sailing through the cosmos, we’d stutter through traffic jams; instead of exploring other solar systems, we’d explore supermarket aisles. Why was it like this? Which cruel god had created this circus? This pantomime?

Okay, so I guess I was a little bit jealous and bitter of the others being content with what they had – at actually managing to make the journey from the maternity ward to the crematorium in some sort of steady and orderly fashion. I envied their contentment about neatly fitting into system without any friction. They peacefully rode the cultural conveyor-belt through the education system, the jobs, the mortgages, the family life, the Christmas holidays and retirement before arriving safely into a wooden box to be duly buried six feet under the ground. It was a simple and smooth procedure. But me? I was a chaotic mess waiting to move perpetually on to the next adventure. I just couldn’t stay still on that conveyor-belt; I had an itch that couldn’t be scratched – a madness that couldn’t be cured. I was just so excited to even exist at all that the 9-5 routine seemed impossible to do for more than a year at the very most. I needed frequent adventure but travelling all the time was tiring and most notably: expensive. It was true that I needed to find something else to help me kill the time in between the maternity ward and the crematorium like the others had done. There must have been something that fulfilled me other than travelling? Something that I could do while I was living in one place? Something? Anything?

There was: writing. Switching on some ambient music at a computer and letting myself lose my mind at a keyboard was a very fulfilling thing indeed. It reminded me of being a young kid again, picking and piecing those Lego bricks together, building structures, creating things and images – only with words and ideas instead of bricks. It was an act of joyous play which never ever felt like a chore or job. Even the essays in school were somewhat enjoyable as long as there was some sort of agency and creativity involved. In a society of rigid and concrete systems, the act of writing allowed me to create an alternative reality where I was the archetype of whatever world I wanted to create and momentarily migrate to. Quite simply it took me to a different place. A separate place. A better place.

Yes it was clear to me that being a writer would have been something to solve my problem. So naturally I looked at the realistic and sensible options available and decided to start studying journalism at university. I guess I thought that the role of a journalist would provide a way to make money while joyfully strumming away manically on those keyboard keys. However, about midway through that three year course, I realised that sitting in an office and typing up a news story I had no interest in didn’t really interest me either. What I wanted to do was to WRITE – creatively and expressively that is. In a world where you were slowly suffocated by sanity and sensibility, writing was my personal opportunity to go insane – to explore the spaces down the rabbit hole and create my own wonderland of words and bizarre and unexplored ideas.

So after finishing my journalism course with gritted teeth and a damaged liver, I went on to study creative writing at masters level. The thought of the situation made my heart pump with excitement. This was my chance to explore my passion with like-minded creatures. Finally, my tribe: my place with people who wanted to create with words, who wanted to explore their imagination – who were also driven to write out of the total incompatibility with absolutely everything else in society.

I was certain I had found my place of belonging but soon after starting I realised I was out of luck once again. I sat in a room of middle-aged marketing executives having a mid-life crisis, trying to write the next War and Peace or Wuthering Heights. One guy read out some story and I watch as about five different people from different demographics weigh in with their conflicting opinions, to which he then butchered the essence of his piece apart to make it sit in the middle of the road and please everyone. For some reason it made me sad and I decided there and then to quit. Maybe I wasn’t a writer, but these people weren’t definitely weren’t, so off I went again – quitting the course, flying one way to Mexico, travelling around, staring out into sunset skies – getting drunk and hitting on German girls who were about to qualify as lawyers and begin the middle-class existence in the suburbs. The usual.

The more I traveled the world, the more I started to appreciate the wilderness of planet earth. The party and the girls and the foreign cultures: those sorts of things were definitely fun while travelling, but the best parts were always getting out the cities and hostels. It was those little camping trips or hikes into the wild. The mountains, the forests, the fields and volcanoes – the sunset beaches and rugged plains devoid of any substantial human civilisation. From the volcanoes of Central America to the untouched, empty wilderness of Iceland, to the isolated Buddhist temples of the Himalayas – it was all a great magical wonderland to me. Like writing, it was a beautiful escape from the concrete world of clocks and calendars and citizens and contracts – a place where the soul and spirit could rest peacefully without being disturbed by a traffic jam or deadline or some boss belittling you over something trivial.

Recalling being a little kid, I remembered that I always found a great joy in the time I spent in nature. Even if it was just a field or something: there was a sense of life and adventure in a simple field which had more life than any buzzing city could ever hope to achieve. The average field mouse had more adventure in one day than many humans had in an entire year. And it’s not just that the animals’ lives were more thrilling, it often seemed like they were smarter than us too. Take the birds for example: instead of bulldozing entire rainforests down so that they could use the materials for cosmetics and tabloid newspapers, they instead picked up and recycled fallen branches and used them to build homes integrated with the world around them. The animals understood that they were interconnected with nature and that rather than trying to rape and destroy it, it was better to work with it. Dogs too. They didn’t chase the stick because they saw an advert on the television for it – or because they thought they would get some sort of promotion. They just did it for kicks. They knew existence was playful not political, and they knew not to stress and strain and waste away their lives working for trivial things or the opinions of other dogs. And cats, well, they knew what life was about to the absolute core. Just look at them sitting there doing nothing. Total zen masters. Godlike geniuses and gurus – every goddamn last one of them.

Yeah, so I guess maybe I was a bit jealous and bitter again when it came to the animals. I felt sad that I was spawned on this planet as a human-being and not a mouse or something. Since childhood I had often felt that I was born into the wrong species. I stared out into the eyes of the humans thinking that perhaps there had been a mix up back at the soul distribution warehouse. Perhaps my soul had been wrongly delivered to the human department instead of the cats or the dogs or the birds? Probably that was it: some incompetent god not doing his job properly in the depot centre. For a while I tried to be like a cat – a total zen master, meditating and sleeping and eating and staring into space with no excitement – just total acceptance of the here and now. But after a while I realised I was still actually human and needed things like money and companionship and hobbies and purpose. As usual I was out of luck: I was a human-being and nothing was gonna change that. Sex changes had just about hit the market, but species changes must have been a few centuries away at the least.

And so with a heavy heart and a broken bank account, I retreated back into human society. I flew home, got a day job in a bar and tried to get back into writing. By now I had realised it was the one and only thing I enjoyed at home, so naturally I had to pursue it ferociously and uncompromisingly in an attempt to stay sane. I had been writing for a while, but I had never really had anything read by anyone else. I wanted to find my audience and so I started considering the possibilities. It was the 21st century I had realised, so maybe online was the way to go? Okay. Online I went into the virtual wilderness – to the lands of trolls, porn, junk mail and depressed people trying to make it look like they lived lives of happiness to strangers on the internet.

Firstly I went onto Instagram to check out the hotshot authors: the ones with thousands of likes on every post – the ones who somehow managed to actually make some money off pounding some keys on a keyboard. As I read, I realised that there was some sort of trickery taking place. Everyone on Instagram seemed to post bland comments about life or love and then dress them up in pretty fonts and filters in an attempt to make their words look more meaningful. Even worse was the way people had to like and spam comments on each other’s posts in an attempt to get more followers and views on their own pages. It was a strange situation; it was like watching those suited marketing executives in the city network with each other in swanky bars after work. Confused as ever, I decided to carry on my way.

Stumbling further through the virtual wilderness of the internet, I came across Facebook. At least on Facebook you could post lengthy pieces of texts, I thought. I logged in and started a blog called ‘The Thoughts From The Wild’ where I posted images of people walking in nature with some sort of internal dialogue about travel or life or society or something. It was a simple concept and it worked! My blog took off within a few weeks and people, real people (hopefully), somewhere out there in the wilderness of planet earth were reading and interacting with my writings for the first time ever. I felt like Shakespeare or Hemingway back from the dead, armed with a grubby laptop, hopelessly and poetically alone with everybody on the internet. The pen had moved on and here I was: hiding my face behind a pseudonym online while being read and digested by a few hundred people sporadically scattered somewhere around planet earth.

As I carried on sharing my words and thoughts, a quiet flame of joy began to flicker in my heart. I wasn’t even adventuring and I was still finding some fulfilment by just bleeding my brain dry at a keyboard and sharing the bloody mess that was the inside of my mind. What a joy it was just to have your stuff read by others somewhere out there! One woman even messaged me saying she had quit a job and was about to drive around Australia because of something I had written. Another young painter told me something similar – that I had given her the courage to pursue her ambition to become an artist.

Yes, oh yes! I sat back delusional at that keyboard like a man of importance – like a man of purpose. I was content knowing that I was helping to spread some colour and madness into this grey world. I looked out at the window with a sort of smug grin. Soon those streets outside would have mad men and women crawling down the sidewalks, eyes full of fire and saliva dripping from their mouth as they quit their desk jobs and chased their passions with a demonic sort of possession. The revolution was coming over the horizon, I knew it. I just needed to keep writing away and helping the side of the crazy and disturbed.

Of course I still needed money while I was toiling away in this endeavour, so naturally I toiled in the monotonous jobs in the meanwhile. Jobs like bartending, factory work and customer service came and went in short bursts. They were always the easiest to get for an inexperienced and introverted creature like myself. Some were bad; some were awful, but they all helped pay the bills I guess – and I could even find inspiration for things to write about while daydreaming the hours away as I stared wistfully into time and space of the universe around me.

This state of existence went on for a while. It would be a day of menial work followed by an evening of losing my mind at the keyboard. Somewhere in there I would find time to eat a basic no thrills meals, and maybe even treat myself to a bottle of red wine. Occasionally I would go out and walk the streets while listening to some zen philosopher’s podcast through headphones. With the sound of existential philosophy in my ears, I looked out and observed the humans like I was on some strange kind of safari. I wandered aimlessly through the city neighbourhoods and watched the way they all walked and talked while taking mental notes for my writings. Situations like standing in the crowd that momentarily formed at the traffic lights, or waiting in the supermarket queue, would turn out to be schools of ethnographic observation. Maybe it was a little strange I guess, but such an undertaking added to whatever it was I was striving for in a way I couldn’t totally explain to myself let alone others. There was some burning desire inside me that told me I needed to observe, to learn and understand the absurdity of the human condition. To what end? That wasn’t clear, but I just I needed to know what made them tick.

After doing this for a while, I realised I had substantially segregated and closed myself off from the rest of my species. As the months drifted by, I realised I was living dangerously in a world of isolation and bad diet habits. I was somewhat used to keeping myself away from the masses out there on the streets. I liked it that way mostly – the situation of being content with your own company – but my hermit-levels had slowly reached castaway proportions. Everyday I went to work and avoided any significant interaction with my co-workers before going home to sit in darkness and empty my brain at that keyboard to random strangers on the internet. It was an extreme situation and carrying on at this rate would almost certainly pave the road toward the madhouse. ‘Venture down the rabbit-hole just enough to find the magic; hold on to normality just enough to avoid the madhouse’ – something I remembered I had scribbled once into my diary. With this in mind, I decided that I would go out and have a drink with a friend.

By now my circle of friends and acquaintances had shrunk considerably, but luckily I had came across a few other outcasts and outsiders out on the road during my travels. I remembered one who also lived in my city and got speaking to her online. Her name was Emily – an anxious girl who also lived in Brighton who didn’t have any idea how to fit herself into this world either. I recalled her telling me how she also listened to ambient music to escape normal life. She seemed the ideal person to befriend. We spoke for a while online and then arranged to meet up for a drink down the pub.

“So your life sounds interesting” she said, sipping a glass of wine across the table. “I do worry about you though.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Humans weren’t meant to exist in solitude all the time. Too much time alone sends you crazy. That’s what happened to my ex”.

“Don’t worry about me” I said. “I’ve got it all figured out. I am just gonna write my books and start the revolution this world needs.” She looked at me like the madman I was.

“I’m glad you are enjoying writing now and not feeling like you have to run off to a foreign country every month. But what are you planning to do for work in the long term? Do you have any plans for the future? A career? It’s so hard to make money from writing these days. Everybody with a laptop and internet connection wants to be a writer you know.”

“I don’t know” I said “I just want to write and maybe have a few more adventures here and there. I guess I’ll work whatever job I have to along the way. I’m not sure. I stopped planning too much.”

“Come on. You know I love that about you – your adventurous attitude – but realistically you can’t just continue living like this forever. You need to spend some more time with people and learn to live with others. That’s what I did. Sure, I have to bite my tongue from time to time, but it beats being lonely and isolated and depressed. That’s what being alone all the time did to me.”

“I’m sorry Emily but I like it this way. Maybe you do, but I just don’t understand this species. I am just here to observe and write about these creatures of conformity and convention before I return back to whatever place it was that I came from.” She rolled her eyes.

“Oh please just stop. I hate when you speak like this. You say all these things but I know you don’t mean them. I saw you were happy with those people when we were travelling. You do like people and you are human – just accept it! You have to face up to it and learn how to be happy in this society. You can’t just hide away on your own forever.”

“I can try.”

“No! No you can’t! You need a way to make money, some security, a way to stay sane – a place to call home! You need friends and you need family. We are all social creatures and you’ll go insane if you just keep secluding yourself in that apartment of yours. I know you are working hard on your writing but why don’t you go out and see some of your friends some time? The ones from school you told me about?”

I sat back in thoughtful silence, pondering her words. Some of the things she had said did ring true. I couldn’t deny she was right in many regards. Human-beings are social creatures and often the suicides and the mental asylum patients were the people who had been subjected to years of isolation. It was true that I felt pretty good in my own company, but maybe she was right with there being a limit to it all? Maybe I did just need to spend some more time with the humans – try and see things from their perspective? Enjoy the camaraderie and gregarious nature of my fellow man?

In the end I decided her fiery and feisty words were right. I had gone too far; been too audacious in my behaviour. I had wandered too long over the fences of normality and it was time to return to the farm of social sanity to braze and touch shoulders with some more of the others.

The next week I decided to go to a birthday celebration night out of one of my friends from school. It had been an arranged date on the social calendar for a while. A large group of people were going and naturally I had planned to avoid it at all costs. A lot of people consequently meant a lot of small talk – a lot of small-talk meant a lot of explanation about what you were actually doing with your life. Such a situation was never appealing but, with gritted teeth and a determination to cling on the ledge of sanity a little while longer, I booked my bus ticket to London and went and met everyone in a pub somewhere deep within the concrete jungle.

I arrived late into the bar where all my friends were sat around a table already on their second and third pints. The jolly laughs and banter was flowing in full steam already. That camaraderie of my fellow man was blossoming right in front of me. I breathed in, composed myself and headed over to join in the circus. As I approached, they looked up at me with their big eyes and smiles. “Here he is” one of them said enthusiastically. “The stranger! He’s still alive then.”

I forced a polite smile and sat down among them. I got comfy and began getting through the formalities – reciting the socially-approved script of small-talk and making sure everyone felt I was happy to be there and see them all. After a few shaky minutes, I went up to the bar and ordered myself a beer, along with a sneaky double whiskey coke to steady my nerves. I returned to the table and carried on mixing in with the crowd. The conversation flowed away and soon came the inevitable questions I so feared – the questions the normal people used to categorise everyone and everything – the questions that determined whether or not you were an accepted member of human society.

“So what are you doing now mate?” one of them said. “We haven’t heard from you in a while. Last I heard you started a masters in creative writing. You still doing that?” I sipped my beer slowly, mentally sifting through preparing my answer in the messy office inside of my skull.

“Nah I quit that after three weeks and flew one-way to Mexico” I said. “I didn’t like the course so I decided to save my money and do something I actually enjoyed.” He looked at me with curious eyes.

“Fair enough… I guess it’s better to do that than to pay thousands of pounds on something you don’t enjoy. How was Mexico?”

“Great” I said. “It’s a great country to travel.”

“That’s cool. I’d like to go there sometime.”

“Yeah you should.”

An awkward silence briefly lingered; I still hadn’t answered the original question.

“And so what is it that you’re up to now?” Boom. The justification of my madness had begun. I sipped my beer slowly again before beginning to explain away. I wasn’t even sure how to answer that question by this point. Often I felt that I was simply too insane to justify myself anymore. My life was like being stuck in a car on fire speeding toward a cliff that dropped into the abyss of the unknown. It was seriously difficult to justify to myself, let alone others, but I began bumbling away anyway, talking about my job, about my blog – about adventure and some vague writing goals for the future. I of course knew that vague goals for the future were a key thing when justifying what you were doing with your life; if you didn’t have some sort of plan and long term targets, then the looks of concern were thrown your way in the bucket load.

Fortunately, this round of small-talk went better than expected. I explained away my job and writing, and, as I got more comfortable, I began opening up and speaking a bit more from the heart. I began talking about the things that actually interested me – about the universe and art and consciousness and esoteric philosophy. But I soon felt them dissecting me with their eyes. I was pushing the limit of social acceptability and naturally the conversation began to stall. I could see the sparks flying in their eyes; the buffering taking place in their heads. I realised I had gone to far and panicked. They were onto me. It wouldn’t be long until they figured out that I wasn’t one of them. That I was an intruder of the human race.

Naturally I responded to this problem by drinking faster. Over the last years I had discovered that alcohol could act as a temporary bubble of warmth in which to nestle oneself in whenever the humans and their society were swarming too loud around you. This blur of drinking went on until the world faded away and I entered into the black void of nothingness I knew too well. The next morning I awoke in a friend’s living room before dragging myself back home on a two hour bus with a hangover great enough to make the devil weep. I was still alive though, and looking forward to returning to my lair of solitude where I belonged locked up alone with my own madness.

After that occasion, I realised that there simply was just no returning back to that world of social normality. I had jumped the fence and got lost in the woods with no chance of ever returning back. I was no longer one of the regular humans capable of being considered an upstanding, regular member of society. With this in mind, I sat in silent solitude and decided that the only thing left to do was to abandon myself recklessly to the one thing that set my soul on fire: writing. Writing, writing, writing. If human society was the army of zombies closing in on me, then writing was my way of fighting them all off – my way of blasting away the darkness and keeping that flame of joy flickering forever bright in my heart. I opened up my laptop and stared at that familiar blank page. I rode into war once more with words as weapons to fight my battles. My fingertips fought for freedom. For life. For sanity. For my own alien spirit.

In the meanwhile life went on as it normally did. I worked those low-paying, menial jobs while staring into space and daydreaming about things to write down when I got home. As soon as I finished work each day, I marched through those concrete streets toward the keyboard to pour the thoughts from the day onto the page. It had all become some sort of private religion of madness. Writing was the only thing I truly understood – it was the only time I felt at home when my fingertips hovered over those grubby keyboard keys. As human society buzzed on outside my window, I sat alone in my room and wrote and wrote my way into oblivion. Other than that, I didn’t know where the hell I was going or what I was doing. I was at the point where I didn’t even care anymore. I was out of the farm of sanity, over the fences of normality, running with the wild horses barefoot and bewitched into those woods of madness. As planet earth continued spinning and rotating its way through an infinite universe, I just sat alone in my apartment hitting those keyboard keys, listening to ambient music, dreaming of exploring distant star systems, chained down to the earth by gravity and government, writing words and smiling to myself in the dark while sitting back and knowing that life was absurd.

Life was totally and beautifully: absurd.

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