6 o’clock AM. I am violently, abruptly woken, surfacing from a deeply unpleasant slumber, psychically hungover from last night’s night of the long subconscious knives.
Fragments of the dream emerge, in a stoned paranoid way without the killer kaya herb – of trying to escape from a devilish underground station, by squeezing between a sea of wheely suitcases blocking the gangway exit – and the famous maverick, dead chef, Anthony Bourdain is checking and outwitting my every move like a master chess player.
Lying there, coming up for breath, the false dawn chorus of lairy seagull’s races round my addled mind. I can hear the distant whisper of the Blackheart Man, who seems to be sharpening the knives, on a morning when the long walk and reach for the medicine cabinet feels like a bridge too far. Feels like time to double down on the meds and retreat under the duvet, but I get up and begin this knotty blog in the pale and furious dawn light.
Twenty hours earlier. I was writing, chiselling out a blog loosely titled ‘Zero to Hero’, about how in a few sweet moments of deep contemplation on Zero – an incoming muse from the mind’s in-tray occurs – how I have a bookshelf stacked with Heroes.
So, I begin. Pulling out and reading the blurb of a timeless, dusty DVD of Kop icon King Kenny; thumbing through creased, comic books with tales of childhood idol Tintin; ferreting out documented facts of CIA ills from war correspondent and rabble rouser John Pilger; and flick through the pages of the smoking genius of comedian Bill Hicks, who rumour had it died with a cigarette lighter in his hand.
And so, the tale of the ‘Hero to Zero’ begins…
The blog never came to fruition – lost in a doomed fog of writer’s block – that would twist and turn into a gargantuan psychic meltdown as the setting sun surrendered its pink dusky hue to the night.
The words on the laptop disappeared down a blind man’s alley, looped round on the steering wheel of an infinity roundabout and pulled up exhausted, broken down, in a dead-end cul-de-sac of knackered graveyard sentences.
Later that evening – as Liverpool crashed out of the Champions League, in an empty Anfield stadium, season left in tatters – my manifest mood and sensory experience was taking an episodic turn for the darker.
I could feel the burning hand of the Blackheart Man on my left shoulder, signalling the beginning of a long night on the cold conservatory tiles, chasing away old familiar and infamous demons lurking in the malignant shadows.
Fate would have it – watching a trippy streamed episode of globe-trotting chef and raconteur of excess, Anthony Bourdain – he happened to stumble on a sleazy exposure of malevolent roman catholic forces in a sleepy red rock hamlet of southern Italy. And so, the demons skulking in the shadows of my world, took their cue to skyrocket my mind, as I resisted the urge to double down on downers and surrendered to a dark-yet-close night of the soul.
And so, the tale of the ‘Hero to Zero’ ends.
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