Right Or Left?

Beginnings – a falsehood.

I underline the words in my textbook, twice. Staring at them for a solid sixty seconds, I feel I should dog-ear the page. I dog-ear the page. The mewling of what I can only describe as a shantytown pussy echoes out around me, a sirens call to my agitation. Sitting on this marble bench has numbed me, but I won’t be able to tell clearly which parts until Christmas next year. Sighing, I pick myself up and literally dust myself down before striding towards my fresh start.

It feels good to move. Annoyingly, excitement is sorely missing from my chemical make up today, so I accept a substitute when I order an Americano on the way. It’s only when I blow the steam from my (my?) cup, do I realise that I haven’t a clue what “on the way” means. I am lost. Despite ample time to research where the float tank induction actually is, my will simply hadn’t let me look it up. Assigning the blame on something or another but most probably that and with vindictive clarity, I settle for the answer that walking should solve the problem.

My shoes rap the stone floor with a sweet relegation, and as I sip my coffee and walk and walk and walk, I slip back into my careful focus on whatever is my issue this day. The job interviews are coming in at a regular pace, which, of course, I am thankful for. Of course. Nevertheless, my past impeachment of working culture (ha!) cannot be forgotten in a float tank. Or maybe it can. Isn’t that one of the reasons I’m here? Jesus, the marijuana haze clings to my thoughts like a stupid fat fruit bat. I’d like to say that I pinch the elbow of some childishly cute beauty and ask for directions, but I’d also like to say that everything worked out fine. I’d like to say a lot of things.

The sun was nailed onto the blue sky, and it seemed to be keeping a close eye on my wanderings. What was I worried about? Answering ones own question may not be wise or clever by any degree, but well, clearly quite a lot. Every single thing around me sighs. You didn’t ask, so to start, being left standing in the cold – a worry that stems from a clearly crucial night in Angel Tube station. Seven hours I’d waited for her. That’s excessive. Another – what exactly was ‘the start’ of something? One more – should you invest anything at all in a person who sets out your career path in front of you, but can’t remember your name an hour later? If a man is clearly an imbecile, can he give directions? Who says what is beautiful? Does everything matter? Really?

I realise I’ve been watching two pigeons fighting over cast off ciabatta for longer than is acceptable (both their fighting and my leering). One has only one leg and the other an eye missing, both bags of bones and meat and junk tussling over ownership of salty stale yeast. I’ve stopped drinking my coffee at all, so I launch it to the side of me, placing my heated hands into my cotton pockets. One Eye seems to be getting the upper hand as Peg Leg is losing balance constantly and seems to somehow be breathing heavily. Pick your battles, a concept unfortunately lost on a pigeon. And there it is, down he goes. One Eye proceeds to peck at his strangely dense cranium. Peck. Peck. Peck. Peck peck peck. My god, are those the chords to Van Morrison’s It Stoned Me? Spurts of brain blood matter fly into the air, One Eye gobbling them up. The ciabatta remains stale and lonely. The air seems a lot more vibrant, but not for One Eye, as he waddles away and drops dead a few seconds later.

Rapping along the courtyard, I assess my options. I could travel. That would be nice. Nice in the way it’s nice to have an arm wrapped around you at night. But not all night, that can lead to some serious mid-morning breakdowns. I could learn something new. That would be nice. I just don’t believe in paying for the privilege, a belief that may not be entirely conducive to the world I’ve not at all chosen to live in. I could care about something so deeply that it eventually makes me the person that I choose not to be. Or I could go back to Her. That wouldn’t be nice. If I wasn’t sweating so damn much, I could really delve into that rabbit hole, but thankfully it’s the Hottest Day of the Year (re The Metro) and my haziness is holding hands with a spell of dizziness fuelled by way too much thinking and half-drunken coffee. I slow down, but remind myself to keep walking.

I come upon a notice board, and instantly think of GCSE’s and A Levels and obvious bad lucks and bottomless disappointments and genuine well dones and oh for fuck sakes and PLEASE REFRESH PAGES. From the patchwork malaise, I pick out that a) Working Clash are playing tonight, warming up for Emmanuel Petty & His Diminishing Return, b) an Improv Club is surprisingly struggling for members, c) Play By Mail RPG’s are still a thing and d) the float tank induction is in the Stanley Building, group to meet in the atrium at 11am. Tomorrow.

News

Perhaps now they would all take notice.

The excitement he’d felt coursing through his veins on his way to the pub was still pumping away when he parked up. Today he felt like pleasing them more than usual. Just as well he’d found the final breakthrough, and by ‘final’ he meant it, more than usual. Gulping down the last of the stale and sticky beer, he checked his necessary amenities in the mirror before exiting.

He summoned the grace from somewhere to order a drink without screaming at the barmaid. What’s unshared news good for anyway? A cruel non-permanence at the pit of your stomach, that’s it. Before he could spill out the good news to her, she was handing his change to him and moving onto a far more unsettled man at the end of the bar.

Working his way to their nook, he spotted them sitting at a table that was not at all near their nook. Oh fucking hell. A bubbly group of girls were in their place, and already it (life) was resorting back to the slap-in-the-face tactics it loved to employ against him. This wasn’t the embryonic journey he’d mapped out when rushing to get here. Oh fucking hell. Before the foggy feeling of dampened spirit could hug his head like a cold vice, one of them spotted him and waved him over. Oh thank god.

Feeling himself beaming way too much on his way over, he dialled it down a notch before sitting down. As he went to sip his pint, he noticed that a good portion of the head was missing. He could not wait to get out of this place. The plodding chatter concerning a summer road trip across America was seemingly engrossing, so he engaged with the hellos, the smiles, the nods. Shortly (instantly), the dim dawning of realisation caught up with him; he was biding time whilst basking in the banality of yet another conversation about visas, about petrol money, about Joshua Tree, about The Road Trip Playlist, about the ‘70’s, about Esalen, about red necks, about squealing pigs, and about massive burgers and limitless refills. Even they must get the joke (and it was a joke) now.

Thankfully, the engrossment had an extremely thin veil, and the triteness of the discussion seemed to be turning the heads of those who would be spending the summer firmly on these homely shores. Fuck massive burgers. He clocked onto the face nearest to him, a quite familiar girl he’d known for roughly eighteen years now. Last time, they had both talked about how reality television was letting women down across the globe. Or was it lifting them up? With the question still buzzing in the back of his head, he gave into form and asked how her day had been. That’s the spirit.

It turned out that her day had been extraordinarily ordinary, but she proceeded to break it down to him anyway. He’d grown bored of mulling over the politics of conversation a long time ago, and by rights he should be able to drop his news into this one. He convinced himself that he would do so, and do it a lot more subtly than her damning declaration of a need for a man or a dog around the house. It had been longer than justifiable since she’d taken a drink of from her glass of cider, and like that the gaping opportunity opened up before him. Embracing the beat before the bomb, he took a slight breath.

Too late. A raucous guffawing from the thankless Summer Trippers (exclaimed by some unnecessary thumping of the table) superseded his tale. For a second, it even ripped open his mind to the clear stark raving madness of it all. How had he lived up to this point without going absolutely insane? Somewhere down the line he’d decided this was the person he wanted to be, and by natures law it was too late to go back on that now-crucial decision. Fuck the ‘70’s. He noticed (far too late) that he was laughing hysterically at the conversation about what exactly he didn’t really know, and so he dumped a few more gulps of beer down his gullet. At least they were looking at him now.

Or past him? The unsettled man at the bar was now throwing pork scratchings. The murmuring and giggles seemed to provide enough soundtrack to make him the star of his own movie, and yet again the cruelty of the situation smacked our man in the face. Fucks sake. He conceded to smirking whilst the others giggled along. He’d see this out and launch into his good news as soon as the unsettled man was relegated to deserved sideshow debacle.

That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. The unsettled man wasn’t going down without a fight, nonsensical in almost its entirety. The beer wasn’t the cheapest, but still. As the unsettled man attempted to straddle the bar, our man weighs up either getting involved or going for a piss – it wasn’t really worth weighing up. Unfortunately for him, the universe wasn’t interested in his need to evacuate his bladder, and eye contact with the unsettled man was made before he could open the door to the rest room.

He was almost serenaded by the sharp focus of the unsettled man’s eyes. Bounding from his post, the unsettled man was in his face within a remarkably short time. He had the most unkind face, mangled by despair or whatever the opposite of hope was. It was clear that this unsettled man had grown entirely tired of playing in the sun, had found a leathery groove when walking alone through life, and was simply exhausted by the concept of living contently. Thrown away were the notions of living arrangements, filling up the tank, your five-a-day, a hard work ethic, cosmic consciousness and wanking just in your bedroom. Every injustice the world had dealt him was pockmarked across his face, ploughed deep into the lines across his brows, nestled surely into his bushy eyebrows, constantly poised to pounce from his thick juicy lips. He was the most beautiful person our man had ever seen.

Crack. Like a bullwhip his neck snapped backwards as the solid part of the unsettled man’s forehead smashed against the uneasy bridge of our mans nose. The hot water came gushing out of his eyes as he fell to his knees, grasping at the mess on his face. Today was supposed to be a good day. It had been a good day. Screeching chairs were pulled from under tables and the ringing in his ears just would not go away. Tumbling to the floor, his eyes forcing themselves shut through the acute pain, he finally noticed that his phone had been ringing for what seemed like hours. A friend answered it. It was his wife.