Amazingly, considering all the chaos and sadness that has happened here over the last 12 months, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is the 30th book I’ve managed to read this year. I might just sneak one more in before 2025 if I possibly can. I’m working on a post for next week so I thought I’d share this wonderful book by an author I’d never read before.
By the way. WordPress has just sent me a happy anniversary notification telling me I did my first ever post here, 6 years today! Time flies and all that. Anyway . . .
First published in 2018, this book was (and deservedly still is) an incredible global success.
Stubbornly I didn’t buy it at the time because everyone was all over it (and I was also probably furiously attempting to begin blogging in WordPress for the first time). Also, I hated the original cover with a passion. But things change, just like life, taste, underwear, and book covers.
It’s the year 2000. Our unnamed narrator is blessed with the physical DNA of the gods: young, impossibly beautiful and adored by men and women alike. She’s intelligent, street-wise, smart, and lives in her expensive apartment in Manhattan. Everything is paid for by the inheritance from her dead parents. She has everything a human could possibly desire, apart from happiness. She wants out. She wants to sleep.
She decides to opt out of the everyday facade of life – the mindless chatter of Smalltalk, the fake veneer of the rich and wannabe rich, the dating, the bad sex, the good sex, the inconvenient deaths, and shitty lives of everyone around her. She wants to pull the plug for a year, then she can reevaluate her life.
Enter the very off-kilter and shamanic quack, Dr Tuttle. She offers terrible medical advice but is willing to offer every drug under the sun for cash. Our narrator decides she will never find another ‘professional’ as irresponsible and weird as the drug-pushy Dr Tuttle, and sees her as the only hope to her year-long oblivion.
She loses her job at the art gallery because of all the naps taken in the utility cupboard. She leaves her crappy boss a ‘present’ like no other.
Pills are popped like toxic candy. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she watches VHS tapes of terrible films. She idolises Whoopi Goldberg. Her long-suffering friend, Reva is her only visitor. Bulimic, materialistic and stuck in a bad relationship, Reva babbles away about her terrible life. Although our narrator treats her like garbage, she is oddly soothed by her whining, sisterly presence.
Eventually, Dr Tuttle prescribes the drug Infermiterol, and the rest and Relaxation descends into a zombified, blackout chaos of not knowing what went on: the night, the day, or the week before. But eventually, the sleep finally comes.
If you took the murders out of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, you wouldn’t be a million miles away from the satirical nihilism of this book. The sarcasm, cruelty and the black humour are high here. Oddly, I found the last chapter quite heartbreaking.
Ottessa Moshfegh is an incredibly engaging and gifted writer. She renders her off-the-wall and unlikable characters beautifully on the page. Razor sharp and biting. Moshfegh does gallows humour exceptionally well (actually, she’s hilarious). Now I need to read more of her work. Highly recommended!
It’s been a while. Two years! That’s a hell of a long time to be away from here. A lot has happened – plenty hasn’t. But I guess the main thing, the whole reason I started all this random rambling here in the first place many moons ago, is . . .
I’m now 6 years, 7 months, and 9 days sober (I don’t count the days, I prod my trusty sober app). So, that happened. Yep, still hanging in there.
The last actual post I wrote in here (aside from the more recent book rambles) was 17th November 2022. I’ve totalled fifty-one posts in six years. Hardly prolific by any stretch of the imagination. It could have been a lot more but poof! I disappeared. So why the gap when everything seemed to be going so well here?
The honest answer is the same as always, I let life get in the way. It’s still getting in the way and it always will, but I may as well be here, in good company and write about how, when, where, and why it’s getting in the way. It’s kind of the whole point of blogging, isn’t it? I need to remember that. So why come back to WordPress, babbling into the ether again?
I missed it. Thinking, writing, creating graphics, uploading, sharing, and commenting were a big part of my life here for a while.
I would have been back much sooner but for two reasons:
1: The trusty WordPress app I was using for these posts was informing me to change to the new Jetpack app. When I was considering coming back, not only had I completely forgotten how to use the original WordPress software that I once confidently navigated in my sleep, I had to move over to another software and not know how to use that either. Of course, there were conflicts, issues, glitches, missing images, missing this–that–and–the other. Slowly, I finally got my head around everything and began finding my way around again. Things began to make sense. I’m still blindly navigating my way around, but it’s getting better.
I began reading and checking through all my old posts again. Holy shit!
2: So yeah, the old posts. That was an eye-opener. Reading through them again had me tempted to delete the whole site and begin again from scratch. To say I winced, squirmed, and cringed is a huge understatement. I didn’t recognise the person writing it. Seemingly arrogant statements began revealing themselves as I scrolled. Declarations such as ‘I never give advice on this site but . . .’ Then I give advice. Onward to the rushed and ridiculous attempts at poetry – sheesh. The recovery memes (word noodles as I called them) Jesus. The anger, the frustration, the overconfidence, the self-deprecation, all wrapped around an annoying cockiness that I was finding hard to bear as I reread it all. But I stayed away from the delete button and slept on it for a night or two.
I began to think back to who I was, where I had come from, what I had lost. The few hopes and dreams I still had, and the extremely low expectations that I could ever get (let alone stay) sober. What I was actually reading were the words of a terrified little human who was trying everything in his power to make amends with a ragged life. A person trying desperately to fight his addiction with everything he had. The (not so poetic) poetry, the self-made recovery memes, the overconfidence, and self-deprecation was all he had at the time. All in the hope that it would work out and eventually come good.
Well, it worked out!
At the time, every single word of every post was a lifesaver. I had somewhere to go in my head, something to do. They helped get me through some crisis/event or other: a minute, a day, a week, a month – birthdays, bank holidays and the very dreaded Christmas period. Blogging in here helped me. Most were written on a bus either going to, or coming back from a recovery meeting, group, or rehab. Every word at the time was important – to me. So, rereading everything in here brought me back down to earth. Instead of judging my old self, wincing and squirming in my seat, I was proud of myself.
But! Before I could even contemplate starting this all again with the aim of people reading my new posts and possibly scrolling through older ones, there was another huge hurdle to overcome. The horrific, unfathomable, and indecipherable writing needed sorting out. Wow! That isn’t me judging myself, it was awful.
You don’t need to be a literary genius to write a decent blog post, and I’m no literary gymnast. But you do, at the very least, have to make sense. You know, so people can read and understand what the hell you’re talking about. I took a big breath and began repairing, deleting, adding, rearranging, editing, and re-editing every single post, right from the very beginning. Also, many images had to be resized because they were enormous data vacuums that slowed the site down. Some were replaced. Most of the posts didn’t have a featured image, so I created new ones from scratch – I don’t know if I needed to but I enjoyed the process and carried on anyway.
I started all that in the beginning of August this year. It took some time. Right at the end of all that, when I finally finished editing the last post, my mum sadly passed away. But that’s a subject for another time – maybe. Maybe not. But I’m finally back here.
I haven’t done a total hatchet job to the old posts. In fact, if anyone who has read them before and has the energy to reread them again, the only difference I’d hope they would notice is that they are now coherent and make sense. I’ve taken many things out, but also left a lot in. I didn’t want to ruin the spirit of the original posts. Things are left in there because that’s what came out at the time (as tempting as it is to hit delete now in 2024). Me and my older self, compromised. It seems to have worked out well.
But I completely understand why the posts were chaotic at times. They were written in a cycle of excitement, hope and terror. I was taking my sobriety seriously for the first time in my life. If I had an idea for a post, it came out with enthusiastic urgency. They were written in hurried spurts, maybe checked once or twice (without really checking), a flick through my phone for a graphic and Bam! Uploaded and published online. Onto the next post or idea. I simply wanted to move forward as fast as I could with what I had at the time. Everything seemed urgent, demanding to come out there and then. It felt good, achieving something in tandem with my sobriety. Also, (as if getting sober isn’t enough), obviously I wanted to save every addict in the world because I was doing well. I had words of wisdom, and obviously every addict in the world was reading my wobbly WordPress blog of insightful genius, right? It’s a lovely, deluded thought but . . .
Yeah. Anyway. Time and tide calm most things down. Sometimes to a complete halt, poof!
So those are some of the rhymes and reasons for why I disappeared and returned, that you never asked, thought, or cared about in the first place.
But there they are and here I am, again. Sorry about that.
So, what now? Will this continue be an addiction/recovery/writing blog with some book reviews and possibly some of my fiction thrown in now and again? It’s why it all began in the first place. I guess the answer is yes, for now. Will I still be asking myself annoying, rhetorical questions throughout every post and answering them? What do you think? Yes, I think I will.
But I promise not to inflict any more poetry attempts or recovery memes on you. Feel free to sigh with relief, whoever you are.
Who are you? Maybe you are actually me, and all my old and new words are actually yours truly, sorting things out and making sense of things – talking to myself again. Possibly that is the real reason why I’m back – just another place to ramble, question, and argue with myself. I’ll take that.
But if you are actually, you and not actually me – hello! Feel free to join in, or not.
To anyone who said nice things way-back-when, regarding my old posts – thank you so much. You were very kind, and made a quaking, hopeful wreck very happy. I can’t promise a massive improvement from now on, but hopefully from 2024 onward my nonsense will make sense (if that makes sense).
I’ll be here next week with either a book review or a post. But I’ll be here, saying something about something, or other. Sorry about that.
They say: never judge a book by its cover. I say: never judge a book by its title, or you’ll miss a beautiful gem.
I knew absolutely nothing at all about this book before now. I’d always seen it about on the shelves in bookshops but never bothered to check it out. I bypassed it as a book about drug culture, and I already had Brett Easton Ellis and Hunter. S. Thompson for that. But I was wrong. Dead wrong!
Firstly, it is not a book about drugs.
Secondly, this is quite possibly the most dazzling work of fiction I have ever read in my life!
Thirdly, you must definitely, definitely read it while your heart still pumps blood around your body. It’ll be too late if you’re dead, apparently.
Describing the book may possibly make this wonder of words sound wholly unremarkable, passive and pedestrian (boring?). And in a way, that’s what makes the whole thing a life-altering joy. It’s the story of a very human life without frills or glamour. A story of awkwardly dealing with the major and minor struggles, and sieving out the wonder in life. A story of you and me.
William Stoner grows up on a farm with his parents. He leaves for university in 1910, aged 19. He studies agricultural science until he discovers the beauty of literature via an eccentric and cranky lecturer. He changes his courses; he doesn’t tell his parents. He finds his pulse and heart in academia, a protective bubble from his past and the pressures of the real and terrible world that wants to swallow him with the rest of us.
He earns a PHD and begins to teach at the University. He falls for the wrong woman. They marry and have a daughter. He has a life, not as he’d like but it exists. He exists. He lives his life the best way he can, then eventually, as we all do, he dies (not a spoiler, don’t worry. We all die).
He teaches through both world wars. His students go to be slaughtered on the front lines, only to be replenished with new blood. His friend dies. His other friend lives. His marriage is as frail as ashes, his wife a stranger in his own home. His bright, wonderful daughter sours like milk in the sun, mirroring the rotten mess of her mother. Stoner writes a book that probably nobody will ever read.
But he does the right thing by everyone and everything. He carries on, and he lives until life tells him he can’t.
Beauty, unbelievable heartbreak, regret and glimmers of joy walk hand in hand through every page. The reader is guided by kindness and hope through the whole thing. The novel is a silent scream that we see but never hear.
I’ve told you a lot here but I’ve told you nothing. I’ve spoiled nothing. The genius of John Williams’ writing will tell you everything I’ve missed. I don’t possess the mental or academic tools to give it justice.
If this is a review, it’s a ridiculous and muddled mess – a bit like life. I know. I don’t care. It’s all I have while I still process what I’ve read. I may never finish processing. It doesn’t matter.
I just wanted to tell you. I’ve told you. It’s your turn.
This is the first book that I have read in a long while that I can truly say is addictive. Sarah Rose Etter has written a piece of work that I literally struggled to put down.
Cassie has a knot for a stomach. Not ‘in’ her stomach but born, body-tied at the centre where her belly should be. Just like her mother and grandmother. Sounds surreal? It is. But that’s nothing.
She helps her father and brother mining in the family meat quarry. She walks down corridors of wet walls, glistening red and marbled with fat. Cassie plunges her arms, elbow-deep to pull out bloodied meat the size of boulders for her father to sell.
She has visions: fields of throats and rivers of thighs. Heads are removed to watch their own bodies. Her jealousy is taken away in a removal shop, cut out like a cancerous tumour. She buys half a man because she doesn’t have enough money for a full one.
The men she meets in her real life are not good to her when they discover her knot. She’s treated like a freak, abused and left mentally dead. She’s does eventually fall in love, but things are far from perfect.
Everything in this book is disturbing and off-kilter, as if Cassie has been dropped into a Salvador Dali painting.
It’s a wonderfully layered and brutally surreal book. It takes on the agonies and trials of a young woman growing up; it could also be seen as the struggle of chronic illness.
Split into 4 parts, and rather than chapters, it’s written in very readable chunks of narrative, dreams, visions and fact lists. This format only adds to its addictive and waking-nightmare quality.
Highly recommended if you like your fiction surreal, dark and experimental. If you’re easily disturbed then this may not be for you. But Sarah Rose Etter nails it all perfectly in her wonderful debut novel.
Her next book Ripe is available soon. I can’t wait.
After reading the glorious Ask the Dust as part of The Bandini Quartet many moons ago, I was hooked on John Fante’s writing.
West of Rome was published posthumously in 1986. It comprises of one novella and a short story: My Dog Stupid, and The Orgy.
The novella My Dog Stupid is set in the late 60s/early 70s California. Italian American, Henry Molise is an out-of-work screenwriter and novelist. He lives with his wife and 4 grown-up children, and has countless chips on his angry and weary, 55 year-old shoulders.
Henry is rude, loud, cantankerous and bitter. If he has a filter, it’s buried in dust, unused. He has racist views (his son’s new girlfriend is black), and he says terrible things to his wife who has left him more than once.
Henry comes home one night to find a dog asleep in his garden; a huge Japanese Akita. The dog decides to take over the house (he doesn’t give them a choice) and they very grudgingly take him in. One of the children decide to name him ‘Stupid’ due to his . . . well, because he’s stupid.
It doesn’t help the already festering family unease that he mounts every male dog that he encounters. He doesn’t just stop at dogs; human males get the same, messy treatment too!
The dog acts as a catalyst and is blamed for everything that goes wrong with the family, as the children slowly fly the nest. Henry and his wife are alone in a home suddenly too big, and full of loving memories.
Is it the dog or Henry that’s at fault?
This is one of the best short works I’ve ever read. As with most of Fante’s writing it’s autobiographical; the author and Henry Molise pretty much share the same life and views. The racist remarks grate as you read. As an Italian American, Fante experienced much prejudice against himself as he grew up in America, and it’s obviously left a scar. But it still stings to read Henry ‘s (and surpringly, his wife’s) casual racism.
I don’t think I would have liked to have met Fante in person. He was notoriously bitter, angry, and confrontational. But he was a wonderful storyteller and writer.
Stupid did finally meet the love of his life but . . right sex, wrong species. Fantastic story.
The Orgy for the record, is the most misleading title ever. It’s the story of a young boy growing up in 1920s America, working for his father in his building business. The boy meets his father’s best friend who his deeply Catholic mother despises, sprinkling him with holy water whenever he comes near the house. The boy eventually sees another side to his beloved father as his ungodly friend leads him into the ways of Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s a sad, sweet tale of betrayal and growing up too quickly. Brilliantly written and full of Fante’s trademark Catholic guilt in hard times.
If you ever only read one book by John Fante, read his novel Ask the Dust. It’s wonderful. The film adaptation with Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek is stunning.
Steppenwolf was published in 1927 and reads as modern as anything published today.
I didn’t know much about this book, apart from its literary and social influence, but it certainly wasn’t what I expected. I didn’t realise I’d be reading something that feels so modern, fresh, and incredibly relevant in today’s world.
Harry Haller leaves a manuscript of his strange and wonderful inner and outer life to the nephew of his landlady – then disappears.
In the first few pages of Steppenwolf, the nephew tells us of his short time spent with the strange, sad, and brilliant lodger he so admires, but finds impossible to understand. Then, ‘we’ get to read the whole of Haller’s manuscript to ourselves. But is it real? Or is Haller simply a brilliant fantasist?
Harry is not happy. Harry is us.
Harry Haller believes he is half wolf. This is explained to us in dream-states, a magic theatre, and in conversations with the woman he needs to fall in love with and then – kill.
Suicidal, Harry meets Hermione and everything changes. She tells him he takes life way too seriously and teaches him to dance to music he hates. She also finds him a lover in the prostitute, Maria.
Every hour of every day, the wolf had ripped the meat and chewed the bones from the important parts of his academic, social and romantic life. It snarled and sniggered at his every thought and action, making him insular, self-doubting, and often suicidal.
But now he dances to jazz music with every woman in the room. He has learned to smile and enjoy himself.
But it never lasts.
Can Hermione save him from himself and keep him alive? Will he ever be free of his Steppenwolf? Can he save himself from himself?
I loved this book so much. More than my meagre ramblings can explain. I’m glad I read it before being hit by a bus, or decapitated by a speeding fin in a sharknado. Because you just never know!
Its been a while. I’m going to be writing regularly here in the next week or two. I’ve been working on some recovery posts, and various non-fiction, simply to kick-start my writing in general. But I’ve been reading a lot. I’ll post a few mini reviews until then.
I read this amazing debut from Gwendoline Riley when it was first published in 2002, and I’ve been reading everything she’s written ever since. It blew me away!
Carmel McKisco is a 20-year-old barmaid drifting aimlessly though the grey and rainy wastes of Manchester, navigating around the people who come in and out of her life. That’s pretty much the book, really. At only 150 pages she packs a lot into a little.
Like all her books, it’s a slice of life at a certain point in time. Not much happens, except everything. Her descriptions of a dreary Manchester at the end of the 1990s, the bars, the clubs, the second-hand bookshops and the people who inhabit them are written like a Russian master in All Star and Mary Jane’s shoes.
All Gwendoline’s books are slim, but they are filled with the swirling universes and black holes of life. She’s serious, sassy and funny (sometimes in the same sentence).
She was around 20 years old and working in a Manchester bar when she wrote this. It’s not rocket science to guess that she drew from her own experiences. At such a very young age her prose is startlingly mature and brilliant. And with every book she gets better. My Phantoms her latest novel is a masterclass of prose writing.
I’ve realised from many reviews of her books, you either adore her work or hate it. There doesn’t seem to be middle ground. She’s been praised and slaughtered in equal measures.
I love all her work and Cold Water was written by a northern genius in the making.
As always, my words fall short of describing how brilliant she is. Read her. She won’t take up much of your time.
Like many fellow earthlings, I beat myself up on a daily basis, for many reasons. My list of internal self-hammerings is endless. If I’m honest, most of the things on there, are out of my control. But there they are, existing and judging me anyway. The sodden, grey sponge in my head doesn’t seem to recognise the absurdity of some of these mental squatters that mess up my mind with their ethereal graffiti.
Our brains (a supposed wondrous biological miracle of evolution) often fall desperately short when we really need them. With its organic logic, and lightning-quick problem-solving components they can be a master of dodge and weave. When we need its full functionality and capacity for all the things that give us joy and harmony – Bam! All current thought patterns are replaced with that of a bored Panda swinging in a car tyre.
Are our brains simply too big and complex for us mere mortals to handle? The author, Kurt Vonnegut seemed to think so. I’m with him! ‘So it goes.’
There is one recurring subject on my ever-spinning toilet roll list of regrets. It always bleeds its way to the top. The one regret that demands attention, like the constant knock of a Jehovah’s Witness as I hide behind the curtains. This regret?
Writing.
I’ve been a bookworm for as long as I can remember. I began taking my writing seriously in the mid-nineties. When I say seriously, I mean actuallywriting it instead of thinking aboutwriting. Slowly, I began to learn the craft. I read the things that did and didn’t work. I read the good stuff to learn, study and improve. I also read bad stuff to know what to avoid like the plague. Whether the latter succeeded is another matter. I’m told I do ok at knocking the odd sentence together. I must be doing something right or you wouldn’t have gotten this far.
Anyway.
As a child, I always loved horror films, comics, and books. Naturally I went down that route first with my writing as I already had some knowledge of the genre. I haven’t read any horror fiction and fantasy for over twenty years. I don’t really know why. I guess I struggle with suspending disbelief that far anymore, which is such a shame. I miss that side of me. I tend to read literary fiction these days. Novels written about the human condition. Also, a lot of non-fiction. Maybe the horrors I experienced with alcoholism killed my fantastical side. It may come back. It may not. I hope one day it does.
Anyway.
I began writing short dark fiction. At the time email was still in its infancy so I would physically mail them to the various horror zines of the time. They were a wonderful and fantastic source for budding writers like myself. They were filled with amazing artwork and short horror and fantasy stories by talented beginners and professional writers. I waited.
The rejections plopped through the letterbox like waterfalls of pulp. My early stories were not very good at all. I’ve re-read a few lately – they make my guts cringe and tighten inside. They were bad.
But the rejection letters were unbelievably kind, friendly, supportive, and offered lots of constructive advice for improving my writing. I took it all on board and carried on. I learned with each failure. I’d love to brag that I learned quickly, but it took some time. My writing gradually improved. After about a year of constant rejection, advice and perseverance, I got my very first acceptance letter. Then I got another, and another, and another. Apart from the odd rejection here and there, most of the stories I wrote were accepted into the zines. The tides were slowly turning for me.
Most Zines could only pay very little money (by cheque in those days), if any at all. I didn’t care about payment. Simply seeing my words in print amongst the other writers I admired was payment enough.
Networking.
I joined the British Fantasy Society and began physically meeting and talking to the people whose novels and short stories I had on my shelves. They normally organise a Fantasycon once a year in a hotel somewhere. I highly recommend anyone to join them if you write horror/fantasy/sci-fi fiction. You will meet the cream of the crop of British writing. They are the most kind, generous, decent, and supportive of people. The things you’ll learn from them are pure gold dust. You’ll also make good, like-minded friends. The British Fantasy Society is still going strong. Give them a Google and check them out. So yeah, I had all that going on.
There’s the writing autobiography you didn’t ask for or want. Sorry about that.
Things were looking good for me as a writer if I carried on – extremely good!
And then . . .
All the writing stopped. Virtually all the reading stopped too. Ah, Alcohol was the culprit? Nope. I hadn’t even developed that particular nightmare addiction at this time. So then, what?
I met a girl. I moved down south. I got a job. We got married. We had a wonderful son and life together. So why no writing?
I let life get in the way.
I was so busy living, and getting on with my new life. My promising writing career became a rapidly lengthening shadow. I loved and adored my new life exactly as it was. My bubble. A bubble that I wasn’t keen on stepping out of, or letting people into. I didn’t realise at the time how incredibly bad and toxic my way of living was. After 5 years that bubble burst. During those 5 years – no writing. Zilch! The rupture of that life had absolutely nothing to do with the word-vacuum. I simply didn’t write. That’s it. Nobody to blame but yours truly.
True writers and artists never let life get in the way. Life becomes their art. Life feeds their art. Life is their art. Their art is their life, be it professional or not.
Writers write, painters paint, musicians play, sculptors sculpt – and nothing, but nothing gets in the way of creating. It’s the way of anybody in the arts. It’s always been the way. A part of you feels bereaved if it goes away. It’s in the blood, the bones, the heart, and the soul.
Art is life.
So, at fifty-six years old – where does that leave me now? Do I, could I consider myself a writer?
Not so long back, in my journal (my only constant source of written words since 2005) I wrote this admission to myself: ‘as much as I adore the idea of being a writer, and the fact that I’m not half bad at it – my life’s output has been worse than dire, to be totally honest with myself. I could never, ever call myself a writer. Ever! I guess I’m merely an avid reader of interesting books who can string some good sentences together now and again, which some people like.’
I wrote that to myself to let my creative brain off the hook. To stop it beating itself to a pulp and melting down with guilt.
I didn’t become the published writer that I wanted to be. But I lived a life!
I lived it as creatively as I possibly could with what I had at the time: music (I’m a drummer), art (I’m a decent artist when needed), and literature (see all the above). I strive to live my life as decently as I can, without knowingly hurting anyone. I’ve not had the best or easiest of lives, but I’ve certainly not had the worst.
But I do write. Writing that has no deadlines or pressure to be published or read. It doesn’t demand an audience or payment. It dawdles, Idles, and turns up whenever and wherever it wants. I make my own rules, bend them about and take a lot of liberties (especially with my ridiculously bad grammar).
What I write is important, to me.
So, what does all this have to do with alcoholism, addiction, or sobriety? Absolutely nothing.
When you’re sober, everything in life isn’t all about hardcore sobriety 24/7. Hopefully that’s all running nicely in the back of your mind like trusted software.
You must live a life – your life. I’ve just made it sound easy. It’s not. It’s hard. It’s simply easier when you’re not trashing your system with poison.
I’m getting by in life day by day. I don’t wake up in the morning to stay sober. I wake up to see what life has in store. It’s by far a perfect life, but it’s a life. I do what I can with the best I have, because that’s all I’ve got.
I write what I can, where I can and when I can. But I do write. Yesterday I began a short story. I hope I’ll finish it someday. If I do finish it and I think it’s worthy, I’ll research a few writing markets, send it off and see what happens.
My wonderful son turns 20 years old today. On the phone we say how proud we are of one another. We keep in touch every week and finish every conversation with, Love You! I’m happy enough with that.
Below is my little review of a dazzling memoir by the wonderful writer, Frances Park. Highly recommended! I’ve put a link to her (and her sister’s) site at the bottom of the page. Click on the book. She’s amazing!
* * *
I Don’t know Frances and she doesn’t know me. We’ve never met. She lives in the USA and I’m in the UK.
But now I’ve read this precious book, I now have the slight upper hand. I ‘feel’ like I know her.
For the past week, her words have been telling me some of the stories of her amazing life. She writes with such a wonderfully original and passionate voice that she could have been sitting next to me and reading aloud.
The main artery running through this book, were all the warm blood flows and pumps, is the early death of her dear father. A man I feel I know, but don’t. I wish I had. A Korean scholar; a peaceful, proud, and philosophical man who adored his family. He died at fifty-six years old. I’ve just turned that age – and I’m a dad. That’s a sobering thought.
Although the whole book reads like a love letter from daughter to her dad, it’s so much more. We get to meet many people in these pages: friends, family, colleagues and even a beloved dog. But with every story, you get to meet Frances.
As if through a movie camera lens, you’ll watch every version of her: the daughter, the sister, the lover, the friend, the teenager (who apparently she’d happily slap now), the wife, the writer, the sweet shop owner, the business woman and the dreamer of big dreams – to name but a few. But there’s only one Frances. The Frances that makes life better.
There is a lot of personal loss in the book, but these aren’t depressing or maudlin stories. We learn from them and they give us hope. Dream big, live your life, make your mark and above all, have fun with the time you have. Because you never know when it will be over.
I tried to read this book as slowly as I could so I could savour every page and take them in. But it’s hard when the writing and the voice is so good and blazingly engaging. I was gutted when finally it was over.
But Frances isn’t over. She’s dazzlingly alive and so are her words. I know there are more glorious stories to come. So I wait.
Tap the book to take you to more books by Frances. Oh, and chocolate. 🍫
Time, time and time again . . . recurring, until . . . End. Stop!
It feels lately as if I’m constantly drowning in a constant Tsunami of time. A raging Tinnitus of tick, tick, ticking time. A dirty bomb of spinning, jagged physics that never quite goes off.
Weekends flash by. Mondays loom like dark and imposing monoliths, constant reminders that our lives-lived have already been archived into the universal library, awaiting the next entry.
Weeks and months come around so fast. I seem to buy my weekly travel ticket, daily. In the morning I sit on the bus and wonder: how many heartbeats do I have left?How can I put the final one off for a little longer?Now that I’m being good, can I have some fun first? Am I wearing pants? These morbid and strange thoughts are still very new to me. I don’t like it, but I do. But I don’t. But I do.
I don’t like this new way of thinking because there is way too much thinking to think about at any given time to think. New thinking thoughts are hard.
But I do like this new way of thinking because now, I actually do think!
There were thirteen years when rational, cognitive thought processes were as rare as rocking-horse crap. Time stood still. A swirling black hole of constant nothing.
I’ve now created my own personal mind gym inside my head. I’m happy with the décor and the people inside seem nice. I read, I write, I listen to music and I work. I’m falling in love with my old passion, Philosophy.
We all dodge the existential tornadoes, waves, and lightning bolts of life whilst running through the killing fields of time. We exist because time exists. Time has, and always will be. It happens with or without us, whether we breathe or eventually become plant food.
I had a sure-fire, failsafe way of slowing down time to a crawl. If you ever follow these posts, you will know it’s not recommended. My key to bending the universal laws of physics that all light and life depend? Alcohol.
Back in the day, time simply idled around, sloshing here and there in no particular direction. It oozed over me like boiling tar, as feathers fell like rain. Nothing much mattered. The higher the alcohol content of my blood, the more time hung like the peeling 1970’s wallpaper of a grotty hotel that nobody can be bothered to cover up or take down. Way too much effort.
The internet, phones, computers, in fact technology in general, are not the alcoholic’s friend.
A couple of lines of a Facebook post would take me most of the day to write. The work of staggering genius that I’d drunkenly composed (and post) would turn out to be the most meaningless, shambles. What I thought was taking me minutes to write was actually wasting most of my day. Hours of squinting at the screen through alcohol-fogged eyes, only to produce a few meagre and embarrassing sentences. All would eventually have to be deleted.
Time was my silent drinking partner. I was barely aware of it. I could watch the same music video on YouTube all night, because by the end of it I would have nodded off. I rapidly developed Goldfish brain. I was Dory from Finding Nemo: just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming. The swimming turned into drowning.
Online, I was pathetic and worryiong, bizarre and self-pitying. I was always the last person to know. I would be pulled aside and ‘informed’ by others the next day. It was never good news. Alcohol anaesthetises your morals, for a while. Thankfully I was never nasty or aggressive. I existed in a tear-soaked, foggy world of pain and shame. Nothing mattered. I didn’t care.
That was my life in that time.
But now things matter and I very much care.
I literally care – it’s my job. I get paid for the privilege. I now care for adults with learning disabilities. Before that, I cared for people like myself, addicts at every stage of their recovery.
It took a lot of clean blood, mind-work, perseverance, friendship and help to get to the stage where I could even begin to care about myself, let alone others.
I now care about writing, art, literature, and music. I care about family and loyal friends. I care about the state of the country and the world. Although I dislike the monarchy, I even cared about the death of our Queen. I care about poverty, abuse, and discrimination.
Now I care, and it all matters!
But now that I’m finally here, there never seems like enough time. It’s racing, roaring and flying by. The blurring isn’t caused by alcohol but the speed of life. My life, your life, everybody’s life. Life’s life.
My son is now almost twenty-years old. How the hell did that happen? We are 250 miles apart but we still connect. I’m still here and he’s still there. It could have been so much different. He now has the best version of me that he’s ever had. My son was the only exception to the I don’t care – nothing matters of my addicted days. With him, I always cared, I still do care, and I always will care – heart-burstingly so.
The only thing that will stop that?
When time stops. When the heartbeats stop. When the blood in the veins dry up. When all thoughts finally stop. When (my) time stops. Maybe not even then. Love is full of surprises.
What do I know anyway? I’m only a pinprick in the vast and endless darkness of the universe.
As the author (not the comedian) says in his novel, Cloud Atlas: ‘My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?’
Time to go. Until next time . . . recurring, until . . . End.
Stumbling Towards Hindsight 