Introducing You

By now you’ve been sitting here for hours. Time has become a type of static energy measured out as if by metronome by that flashing cursor beating ceaselessly against that white blank space.

You think to yourself; how do I define me?

You suppose you’d start at the start.

You fell out somewhere around Cambridge, in February, the bleakest month, in 1985. 

Just some cosmic hitchhiker who overshot his true temporal destination by some forty years.

Oh well, shit happens. Your first and most defining thought.

Your first memory probably isn’t true. More, it’s a mosaic made up of impressions, sensations, disinformation and connotations. A child’s first snapshot, when everything was abstract. You remember it snowing the afternoon they took you home. It wasn’t snowing. Your mum is certain it wasn’t snowing.

You grew up listening to The Beatles and Dylan and reading anything you could about everything you should and shouldn’t. You reckon that by about sixteen you were able to think.

On your first day of college a bunch of people crash a couple of planes into a couple of towers and redefine the Western concept of freedom. On your second day of college you think that freedom is being able to wear jeans.

And still you’re sat here, thinking and remembering and juxtaposing. You think about lifting lyrics of favourite songs and passages from favourite books and pasting them together

That would be cool. You say.

That’s just a gimmick. You say three hours later when all you have in front of you is I was born in a crossfire hurricane. That false memory thing about weather again.

By now Bob and Bob and Jimi and Jim have led you into the drunken waltz of the undernourished existentialist. Half-cocked and half-cut.

You study Art, English Literature, Film Studies and briefly Psychology. You go to the bar down the road and get really good at pool. And the world keeps changing around you. From the hysterical rages of the Daily Flail and The Pun, to the hardcore pornography and charity work of the internet; the twenty first Century was breached at birth.

You go to study Creative Writing at Derby, the wasted heart of the country. You suspect the bubble could burst at any time.

You think it’s just an age, sex, location type thing. A favourite colour, lucky number, shoe size, brand of smokes type thing.

You think; Do my cigarettes define me?

You finish University and you think; Fuck a career, I need a carer. And as your thinking matures you think; Fuck a carer, I need a car.

You get a summer job stacking shelves. You get a car.

Your summer job becomes and autumn job becomes a Christmas job becomes a job. You watch your friends settle down and give birth to careers and develop babies. You think; I don’t need any of that, I’m built out of words,

You fetch a beer from the fridge and return to the computer where all your stupid ideas have gathered in concert. You try and forge yourself in the crucible of the empty page. You think; Maybe if I had a kid or an interesting job, I’d have more to write about.

Along the way you meet some good people, some bad people and some people. By your mid-twenties you’re throwing away a week a thousand words. Sometimes you forget who you are. Sometimes you write the final chapters of novels you never wrote just to throw them away. Every so often the chorus of wasted potential pipes up. And that band plays on.

You move to the coast and smash up your television.

You write a novel.

You smash up another and don’t write a scratch for six months. Blank pages haunt your dreams; a flicker book of nothing.

You wonder if it was a one shot thing. You’re thirty one now and you’re wondering how to define yourself.

What words do I associate with me?

You smash up your smart phone. You smash up your laptop. You decamp to the beach with a pad and a biro and a beer and a cigarette. You decide to write something for the sheer bloody minded hell of it.

When you get home you could swear that it had been snowing.

When you get home you still can’t define me.

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