27-6-2021: Day 17
I woke up this morning in a sea of shame. The ebbing and flowing tidal waters of last night’s excess lapping over the hull of my soul. I had been binging on the hard stuff – a potent cocktail of off-the-shelf supermarket booze, off-the-shelf prescription meds, cheeky tweets, and streaming hand-scrolled tunes by the flick of a finger. Now I’m suffering for my nightly sins, listening to Massive Attack’s ‘Mezzanine’, feeling the inertia moving up slowly.
Last night I unearthed an old friendship, lost in creeping inertia to my thirteen years spent in exile in the suburbs. We spent the night pinging banter back and forth over the airwaves, making up for lost time, reminiscing on the near-forgotten scrapes, scraps, and scenes of yesteryear.
He had been reading my blogs and likened my steps to recovery akin to the rise of a dirty, ragged old eagle. I took this as a premonition I was doing something right, as the first cover of my book, ‘The Soul Asylums’, features the crest of a rising black phoenix.
Somewhere, in the dark symmetry of the universe, we are living parallel lives, though they may be oceans apart.
29-6-2021: Day 19
Lying in the soapy bath water, my head felt like cold concrete slurry had been poured inside, mixed around with a giant paddle, and left to firm up. A familiar morning scenario played out on a bleak, rainy summers day, washed out with concrete clouds to match. Lying there with eyes closed, I slipped in and out of waking consciousness, tuning into my deadened brainwaves. And I was left contemplating how these anti-psychotics dull and dampen the thought process, leaving a numb, slightly bitter, after-taste to life.
In these moments I often resort to shock therapy, to think of something outside the box, to recharge the synapses. And in this instance, I found myself in the BBC Radio 4 studio choosing my Desert Island Disc’s. The ear worm of the morning was REM’s ‘World Leader Pretend’; an epic ballad of power flipped on its head. Then one of the greatest love stories never told, the Stone Roses ‘Waterfall’. By the time I reached No.3, the bath was stone cold. Time to face the concrete reality of the day.