I'm genuinely scared of this book. The way it sits there, emitting so many unspoken volumes of thought that I can never grasp, let alone even see as they shimmer past my perception. An unending stream.

Burnt Trees, and the Manchester Dogs Home Fire

The whole burnt-trees-somnambulism incident is creeping me out. Haven't spoke to the neighbours, but judging by all that silent ash, the blaze must have been enough to alert the authorities, or at the very least wake someone up.

So far, nothing though. I sit in the living room waiting for police to come asking for details on arson, but nothing. The family thinks some crackheads must have broken in and decided to go 1666 on the trees.

All I can say is that I'm glad I'll be back in the flat in a few days. Having those stumps facing me from the bedroom window is unsettling. Can't sleep well with their glowering presence, but judging by how I ended up before, maybe that's for the best.

I just hope nothing similar happens when I'm at the flat. My girlfriend'll be there to check me in my path if I get up in the dead of the night.

In other news, a local sanctuary for dogs was burnt to the ground. Just over 50 dogs were immolated before anything could be done. I know it can't be related, pretty sure they already caught the culprit. Weird timing though - but confirmation bias does that.

The image of that fire does nothing to help me sleep. Hearing the inhuman screams of those mutts, mongrels, Pomerinians, Labradors, Alsations, Huskies, Poodles, Pekinese, echo through my skull, roam rabidly through the city streets, never to find a street curb to rest upon. And the hounds themselves, rattling in their cages with wide, rolling eyes, frothing spittle flying from their mouths and hissing as it collides and is ultimately devoured by the fire that draws closer and closer, louder and louder and hotter. And all the while those screams still going on, because, yes, I have to go back to those screams, the cries of alien vocal cords creating a raking of anguish through the ears, that turns your blood to ice and turns the September night darker than an arctic winter. Rousing nearby residents from their sleep, dragging their senses beyond the walls they've chosen. Here is the sound that calls us gladly to our graves. A poor approximation, built in the still chill of black scratches somehow etched in light, but almost enough to fulfill its purpose.

I think it's time to close these curtains.

Back to Uni

Term at Manchester Uni starts in two days. In this time I might be less active, not that you'd notice.

To make up for it, I'll tell you a story from last week.

I woke up in my garden.

It was 6AM, which is unusual for itself, considering that I usually am going to sleep a few hours before then, and waking up in the morning would usually be entirely out of the question. The sun was glaring softly¹ on my face. I'd gone to bed earlier than usual. Around 1 in the mourning, after doing nothing much when I could have gone to bed hours before. Nothing's All. I just got carried away.

I think I was studying the etymology of 'Ash', as in 'Ash Tree'. Spear.

And when I woke up I was lying with soaked clothes on dew-cleansed grass. I've been known to sleep walk. The odd thing is that I haven't done so since the age of 10. I might have left the back door open, which would have explained how I got so far. What was odder though was that I was fully dressed, with shoes and even a coat on.

So I guess I'd just gone through my wardrobe before I left my bedroom in my somnambulist haze

Except there's one more thing. All the trees in my garden were burnt down, and my hands reeked of gasoline, and had charcoal beneath the nails.

If I were to look out of the window now - and if it weren't 2:45 - I'd see them. Black, spiteful stumps, slouching sternly, black dust radiating from their trunks like shadows that learned to be tangible.


^1. Somehow.

Outside the madman hunches over his own gut, and a tire-track dog dozes in the middle of the road.

Soul Architects

The soul architects slid along the pavements,
sniffing, murmuring between themselves.
They watched for the moment before the storm,
the aftermath of which was their creation,
in such destruction their resurrection,
in such anguish their ^house was built.

At times I wonder the words they murmured

The afternoon haze cast itself a brilliant illumination across the prairie.
Taking steps forward,
Backward
seeking. They were hesitating,
while the future kept beckoning,
because they wanted no part of it.

"There is Now," Malone's words kept passing through their thoughts,
their inflamed minds that once ignited
would never droop to a smoulder
and the atoms that they would become
had never known another,
and in the span of half a century
they finally came together.

A separation so intolerably long would one day
melt
like a frozen finger of ice beneath an afternoon haze.

Until then, they were just holding on.
 Holding on to this moment,

Now

the only moment that had ever - would ever - matter.

The Library

The sun glared on the bare legs of figures spread over Piccadilly Gardens. I don't know how that's relevant, but it seemed a good way to start telling you about something odd that happened yesterday, even though that particular moment happened two days earlier.

I've started volunteering in a library this summer. It's one that specialises in antiques; old, crumbling tome after old, crumbling tome. I get to climb high among the books, like a midshipman scaling the crow's nest. It's an interesting way to look at books. It also gets tiring, spending hours on end reshelving.

I was sat behind a desk taking a break when she came along. Her age was indecipherable. She could have been anywhere from late twenties to early fifties. A lot of the time her age seemed to vary on the lighting, or her mood. Maybe it was just the make up.

She glanced about the place absently, and I watched. Just a habit, I suppose, or perhaps my eyes just happened to plant themselves on her when she turned and caught my eye. I was in trouble now. I was just a re-shelver. Not a receptionist. Hell, it was my second day.

I asked her to sign in on the sheet because that's what the others did when someone came in. When I looked at what she had written later, all I saw was an indecipherable scrawl.

She wanted to know where the section on marriage-advice was. Remember, this library specializes in antiques. One section's even called 'polite literature'. There was no marriage shelf, let alone any self-help section.

Also, her hand was bare. No wedding ring.

Could have been trying to find a book for a friend but she seemed way too personally involved. Her eyes kept flitting about the room, she couldn't settle on her feet. I don't think she ever stopped moving after she entered. She scratched at an arm a lot too, and all while giving the saddest smile.

I didn't notice any of it at the time, but I knew then she was acting oddly, even if I couldn't explain how. None of it bothered me too much beyond the usual parameters of disliking social contact. What really made me hesitate was when she turned to leave. It took some convincing until she believed me when I told her that we didn't have that kind of book. And then she'd gone on a tangent about how I should be careful using the ladders, that I could fall easily.

Anyway, when she started moving off, she did this sort of stretch, and her shapeless beige shirt lifted up slightly. Creeping out of the hem of her jeans was a faded sliver of grey and white. A tattoo. A cartoon rabbit. A Thumper tattoo.

All you who sleep tonight

All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above -

Know that you aren't alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.

Vikram Seth

That was an exceedingly depressing conversation.

FATE

Two shall be born, the whole wide world apart,
And speak in different tongues and have no thought
Each of the other's being, and no heed.
And these, o'er unknown seas, to unknown lands
Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death;
And all unconsciously shape every act
And bend each wandering step to this one end -
That, one day, out of darkness they shall meet
And read life's meaning in each other's eyes.

And two shall walk some narrow way of life
So nearly side by side that, should one turn
Ever so little space to left or right,
They needs must stand acknowledged, face to face.
And, yet, with wistful eyes that never meet
And groping hands that never clasp and lips
Calling in vain to ears that never hear,
They seek each other all their weary days
And die unsatisfied - and this is Fate!

Susan Marr Spalding [1841-1908]

"We're allways sixteen..."

www.onlyrevolutions.com

Without you, I am only revolutions, of ruin.

They find it impossible to conceive of the perceptions of a mind filtered by a lobotomy.

We Carry The People We Meet With Us

Why is it that whenever I catch eyes with one of them that I'm drawn to her to such an extent that her face is burned into my retina? This stranger girl draws me in so much that I leave with part of myself lost, or stolen; a thousand hypotheticals leave my heart feeling drowned.

Out of Reach

I do believe that it's ending. All of it.

Falter

This is why they continue:

I saw my friends turn and falter
one by one
turning a lie on its heels,
their rationalisation of inhaled defences
had failed. Their ashen lungs heaved,

but try as they might, the rain continued to fall.

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Are you beginning to understand?

Quote of the day [night].

"The angel of his youth became the devil of his maturity. He went out with women when he was young, always holding something in reserve. There would always be a reason to break it off, which opened the door to a multitude of relationships. Heaven. Or so he thought. As age encroached upon his sensibilities and form, he longed for something with enough vitality to endure. But the covering cherub of his Lothario days had stayed with him and was no longer so angelic. It haunted him, guarded him, kept him from intimacy promising the ash dry glory of so many toppling relationships, toppling like dominos, one after another, ad infinitum, or at least until he died."

Of course, I'm paraphrasing.

A proffessor of theology asked what the problem with merely following emotional dispositions in ethics would be.

A student replied, "All people would be whimsical".

"Echolocation comes down to the crude assessment of simple sound modulations, whether in the dull reply of a tapping cane or the low, eerie flutter in one simple word - perhaps your word - flung down empty hallways long past midnight"

"Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children..." - A quote from H.O.L. I'd attribute to old man Z.

I've been looking back at my oldest posts today. Did that boy think he'd grow? Well he did, in a way. Heroin, ketamine, LSD, coke, glue, crack, shrooms, alcohol... Anything to help me forget. That's all we do these days, isn't it? The wild youth? We try to burn our memories.

Ever since I moved out of the house and got an apartment near the uni things have been getting exagerrated. I read a lot more now. And not only because I'm studying English Literature: there's no tv in my room, no phone reception, dodgy wifi that barely lets me make a post on here. No students live in these apartments either, just a few quiet middle-aged people sleepwalking through their lives. A few doors away a Frenchman with a habit of talking too long, midway through a divorce. And the landlord, although I only saw him once, and he was more interested in me paying a rent than making conversation. At least he doesn't care when the smell of cannabis seeps into the curtains, escapes through the cracks beneath the floorboards and permeates the hallways.

I thought I'd be fine, I'm an introvert anyway. This is my own private squalid sanctuary. Although of course it isn't squalid. The rent is reasonable and the rooms are clean. I suppose things seem dingy when you're rotting inside. Good old Doctor Louise knocked up the dose of fluoxetine. That should help add to my trench, my fortifications, my wall and Maginot line of defense. Along with the other drugs. Being alone a lot has led me to the books. Any book really, as it always happens. Doesn't help lessen my growing obsession with House of Leaves. But why would I mind that?

I settled for making a few alterations to the old posts. Maybe later I'll have the courage to delete them, maybe the whole blog. Let the URL sink into oblivion. Right now I've spent too much time on it to feel like ending it.