Hard Work
when i was 16, with albert camus as my god, i had a set poetic idea about what it meant to be creative. above all i thought it would be social or else romantically anti-social.  didn't creative types flounce around with one another in chic clothes, discussing heidegger between shots of absinthe? wouldn't sartre sit in the corner of a coffee shop on the left bank, breathing on his pipe - entertaining piaf and collette should they be passing by? - and yes, scratching down the way a waitress's skirt would sway to the left as she tided up the plates in a jotter occasionally...then back to piaf, who surely needed a little top up.

 by the time i was 20 i was in london which would serve as a substitute paris. i'd dropped out of my philosophy degree as any good existentialist would, to read simone de beauvoir in a darkened room by day - and tour the alternative clubs by night. i had no money - not even the dole - i would shoplift my food, justifying an increasingly addictive behaviour with socialist principles: everything is everybody's, including that cheese, those books and that spice girls dolly. i made friends in clubs who would buy me drinks and supply me with drugs. i would wind up back at their houses for days talking shit and writing down political manifestos when they went to sleep. this was what it meant to be creative - surely. drink and drugs and shallow friends - pretty women with hair cut short, sharp tongues and romantic ideals. gay boys with floppy fringes and an ironic penchant for motley crue. was i gay? why darling, isn't everyone? you're bi - oh me too! shall we all sleep together in this bed? fuck away -don't mind me, i'm singing smiths songs whilst plucking the acoustic guitar.

so it was squat parties and dressing up. lots of hat wearing and nights without sleep - and the creative element reduced to rambling journal entries and bad poems jotted inside the blank hallways of novels. i was having fun and it was all very decadent (people attempting suicide all around me) as imagined - but i hadn't written 'l'etranger' yet.

i grew disillusioned with the set of people i was around. i was soon able to deduce that their artistic sensibilities were if anything post-modern. some of them went on to fashion school, others ran club nights - a few became politically radical and served time in a gothenberg jail. i would stay in my room looking at the crack in the ceiling, thinking about death and writing letters to people in arizona.

when my best friend died i took back to partying. gay clubs and the ghetto til i found my chap. if he could cast out and make films at such a young age then i could write. i would enrol in classes and give it a go.

now - i've known all along that i wanted to do it - and though i've flirted with music my heart wasn't in it. the love was for words and the assembling thereof - the beautiful, terrifying english language. and so - having brushed away the romantic cobwebs with a cotton duster i could see what i had to do...and if my life as  flaneur was my apprenticeship now began the work.

and it is work. drudgery at times. as romantic as the life of a coalminer and as painful. the agonising over details - the toiling over plot. the million things i have to do before i feel myself able to actually sit down and do it. the solitude of it all - which i have to explain with a blush to those who want to see me: sorry i can't enjoy myself tonight, i'm busy putting myself through the grinder, on my own in the corner again. some other time. it's like depression or a sickness. when i'm not doing it, i obsess. the skimpy life i allow myself to live is all being set down in the little jotter of my brain. ordering coffee, i have dreamed up a whole dramatic life for the barrista by the time he's dusting the cinnamon on top. if i have backache, i try desperately to commit the pain to memory - so that when i'm writing about an old woman, some time in the future i will know her lumbago. if i miss someone i procure to heighten it - an evanescent twinge is drawn out like a nightingale's song. i will feel it, to write it...the heart will take the pain and spindle poetry from it..or else. it's like a life lived through a perspex glass, and it's sick.

sick. sick. sick. inflicted solitude. turn yourself inside out. lash yourself for failing. such masochism! and yet i love it still. how's that? somehow i've given purpose to my life - and in the event of that,  it's shrunk. besides writing, and the numerous diversions (like housework) which ritualise the process - i do next to nothing. tv. the odd day hanging out with fyzal or claire. a seat on the deckchair as i read in the sun. a trip to the shop for baked beans or cigarettes. and my class - where kindred sickos want to talk about writing, obsess about it just like me.

will i ever write something worthwhile? i believe it so - but til then i'll keep grinding away; i'll only stop now for armegeddon.