Words

I think in a way reading My Booky Wook by Russell Brand has freed me. Dear god do I love words. I really love words. There are few things is this world that give me as much joy and satisfaction as words. It trumps shopping, which is quite something; but it’s a hard fought battle between words and sex. My prestigious side wants to say words, but I do get more intense enjoyment out of sex. But when it comes to ‘which couldn’t you live without?’ its words all the way. It’s an interesting question. I know some would choose sex here. Couldn’t live without that; but words? Piffle, you nerd; who needs them? But imagine this, a genie or some such all powerful fantasy creature comes into your life and poses a question: You can either not have sex for the rest off your life, or you can permanently lose your ability to read, write and speak? Alright, I still know some who would choose sex… but anyway.
Russell Brand writes “That feeling of “I can’t believe people are actually going to let me do this” has preceded many of my most gleefully decadent interludes.” I see a phrase like that and I just explode. It’s like the starving lyricist thing. Phrases like that I just want to claw at it, hug it, eat it, have it in my mind, feel how it rolls along my tongue, dine on the masterful subtleties of it, bask in the complete literary perfection of expression. Stare at the page going “Yes, yes yes!”
A friend of mine once remarked on the behaviour of another friend and myself while listening to… I think it was Nick Zinner playing the introduction to “Way Out” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live… that still does something to me, like a drug. We were looking at one another breathless and dumbstruck after one of my few truly teenage episodes of ‘Oh my fucking god, you have to listen to this…’– and he said “I never knew women could have an orgasm over music.” Not just music, but beauty, pure distilled awe inspiring perfection in art.

I think Douglas Adams is excellent. I cannot remember who first suggested that I read the Hitchhiker’s books; but I think the series first entered my consciousness through the TV series that was screened a few years back (which I never watched). The perfect, eccentric, meandering, poetic, over-the-top way he writes the story just delighted me. He’s amazingly technical, logical and precise, as one usually requires of a science fiction author, but there is also this other element to it, something that I have trouble describing. His prose almost possesses a cuteness, a humanity, an endearing dorkiness – in the little personalisations of things that we can all imagine.

A bit of a preface to this excerpt: Ford Prefect, the hero’s off-beat alien sidekick, has just broken into the Hitchhiker’s Guide offices on Saquo-Pilia Hensha. In doing so, Ford, an employee of the Guide, has just set off every alarm in the building (but not those in the accounts department, which is what he wanted).

He took from his satchel a toy bow and arrow which he had bought in a street market … hunkered down behind the storage cabinet, he licked the rubber suction cup of the toy arrow, and then fitted it to the string of the bow.
Within about thirty seconds a security robot the size of a small melon came flying down the corridor at about waist height, scanning left and right for anything unusual as it did so.
With impeccable timing Ford shot the toy arrow across its path. The arrow flew across the corridor and stuck, wobbling, on the opposite wall. As it flew, the robot's sensors locked on to it instantly and the robot twisted through ninety degrees to follow it, see what the hell it was and where it was going.
This bought Ford one precious second, during which the robot was looking in the opposite direction from him. He hurled the towel over the flying robot and caught it.
Because of the various sensory protuberances with which the robot was festooned, it couldn't manoeuvre inside the towel, and it just twitched back and forth without being able to turn and face its captor.
Ford hauled it quickly towards him and pinned it down to the ground. It was beginning to whine pitifully. With one swift and practised movement, Ford reached under the towel with his No.3 gauge prising tool and flipped off the small plastic panel on top of the robot which gave access to its logic circuits.
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).
A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches."
It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.
The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they had actually discovered was "boredom", or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like "irritability", "depression", "reluctance", "ickiness" and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as "relief", "joy", "friskiness", "appetite", "satisfaction", and most important of all, the desire for "happiness'.
This was the biggest breakthrough of all.
Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.
The robot which Ford had got trapped under his towel was not, at the moment a happy robot. It was happy when it could move about. It was happy when it could see other things. It was particularly happy when it could see other things moving about, particularly if the other things were moving about doing things they shouldn't do because it could then, with considerable delight, report them.
Ford would soon fix that.
He squatted over the robot and held it between his knees. The towel was still covering all of its sensory mechanisms, but Ford had now got its logic circuits exposed. The robot was whirring grungily and pettishly, but it could only fidget, it couldn't actually move. Using the prising tool, Ford eased a small chip out from its socket. As soon as it came out, the robot went quiet and just sat there in a coma.
The chip Ford had taken out was the one which contained the instructions for all the conditions that had to be fulfilled in order for the robot to feel happy. The robot would be happy when a tiny electrical charge from a point just to the left of the chip reached another point just to the right of the chip. The chip determined whether the charge got there or not.
Ford pulled out a small length of wire that had been threaded into the towel. He dug one end of it into the top left hole of the chip socket and the other into the bottom right hole.
That was all it took. Now the robot would be happy whatever happened.
Ford quickly stood up and whisked the towel away. The robot rose ecstatically into the air, pursuing a kind of wriggly path.
It turned and saw Ford.
“Mr Prefect, sir! I'm so happy to see you!”
(from Mostly Harmless)

Stephen Fry is another one of my favourites. He has such an intelligent, delicate, delectable and eloquent way of putting things. He’s the epitome of these qualities.

None the less, in the eyes of some, I do know that I can give off a quality that comes close to sex appeal. I was never a prettyboy, or anything like (you have the pictures to hand that prove it) but being a late developer sexually I combined a mixture of knowingness, insolently suggestive sophistication and some kind of appetisingly unspoiled quality that could, on occasion, take the people’s fancy. (from MOAB Is My Washpot)

I exaggerate, the kinder of you may say. But I repeat, without rancour if not entirely without rue, that I know this to be the case, because I know my country. I know the tribes of Britain. I have seen fifty summers, and during the course of my life I have long been fascinated this side obsession by the caste, class and clans of my people. We may not wear physical gourds on our intimate persons, but we certainly wear notional ones, and our war dances, face paints, initiation rituals, fetishes, tattoos, taboos and blood feuds are no less fascinating to the anthropologist than those of the tribespeople of Papua New Guinea. (from America’s Place In The World)

Both Fry and Brand have an inescapable penchant for language which is greatly intertwined with their character, and it ignites that same passion in me.
And then of course there is Amanda. I have shared my admiration and recitation of “pump up the volume” and “the onion cellar: a parable” as well as “On Not Taking Home A Stranger.” I admire “the onion cellar: a parable” on a technical level, for the story craft, for what it represents, how cleverly it was done, and the skilful use of second person narrative. “pump up the volume” and “On Not Taking Home A Stranger.”; those posts make me fucking cry. You can see so much of it in my blog writing. I took that post and I devoured it and it changed me. It was so me, and from it I became a different blogger, a different fan, and forgive me for the melodrama and sycophantic overtones, but a different person too. It’s only fair that I read it to you.

be honest, she kept saying.

fucking, with who? when? all the time?
bullshit.

life seems to be a beautiful game about using and abusing honesty.
it hurts, heals, it changes, it doesn't even fucking exist.
it exists as much as truth exists. it's relative and Not Real.

i was lonely tonight. i've been lonely for a while. i have my friends, my confidants, my intimates.
my secrets, my pains and worries, they don't go unshared.
but i do miss holding someone in bed, being close with someone, whispering things, doing lover-like things. i get my occasional fix, but it's small and rare and mostly insignificant.
it's been this way for years. i get glimpses, but i've more or less forgotten what it's like to have it on a regular basis.

there were two guys who came to the last three of four shows at the onion cellar. obvious fans. i liked them. they were sweet, we greeted and meeted and did the things that you do. the way to interact when you are rock-singer and fan. i found out they'd traveled all the way from the other side of the country for the show. they'd taken trains and busses and were staying in a hostel in boston, just to see our show.
this sort of thing still moves me, though it doesn't floor me as much as it used to. you get used to hearing things like this. "we came form australia just to see the play."
"we came from kansas city just to see the play."
"we came from germany just to see the play."
i hear it and try to let it all sink in, imagining the plane ride, the organizing, the amount of effort it took for this one person to be standing here in front of me. my imagination can never fully appreciate it, i know.

so when they came tonight, i recognized them. the quieter one, the dark-haired one with the hat, gave me a folded letter. i've gotten used to this too. i have. i could have guessed, by the weight of it, that it was going to say something more than "wonderful show, your fan, x". you just know. by the way something gets handed to you. by the way someone says nothing and presses something into your hand, shying away. you just learn.

the crowd had cleared out of the theater. i had stayed late tonight to finish an interview with NPR. i liked the reporter. he'd come to my house yesterday. to interview. we drank merlot and ended up really talking. that'll happen sometimes. it's rare. press = people , real. then you can talk and talk and talk. sometimes i miss talking to people.

so the theater was basically empty, the crew was still cleaning up, fireproofing the paper confessions, sweeping the floors. the dressing room was empty. it has a piano in it.

i don't play the piano anymore.

i've been noticing, through the show, that if you play some sad, slow chords underneath almost any dialogue, that you can make it seem sad and more meaningful, or add a depth of incredible profundity that wouldn't have otherwise been there. that's what music does. the soundtrack of our lives.

about a month ago, i was hit by the impulse to break out an old recording of my grandfather's 90-minute cassette-tape recording he made, right before he died, about his adventures at sea with the british merchant marine. just pressed play and pounded slow, minor piano chords while he talked. oh, it worked. his voice sounded all of a sudden weighty like it never had. so i knew.

i took the letter upstairs. went to the men's bathroom, like evry other night, and slathered my face with cold-cream and wiped off the excess with a towel. went back to the dressing room and put the letter on my arms at the piano and played e minor and c major with some random notes up top while i read. and of course

....of course it worked.

i mean, this would have been a sad and beautiful letter anyway, and anyone would have been able to guess by the length and the small hand-writing and the scratches-out that this was going to be a good one.

i wonder where they are, where;d they go? i wondered.

after the NPR reporter left my apartment yesterday i was too drunk with wine and conversation to do any work, so i took myself out to dinner, alone. i was feeling oddly depressed.
i ate and wrote and pondered my useless existence (this is fun!) and went home, watching the sidewal blur under my feet, all of a sudden light because i remembered lee had left a DVD copy of "adaptation" with nicholas cage on my desk and i'd been wanting to see it, and fuck the work and the catching up i had to do i could do anything i wanted i'm a free woman and it's a free country and i don't need to answer anybody i'm freeeeeeeeeeeee so i watched it. i paid later as i fought sleep realizing that i had neglected answering emails that had to be answered today and i had fucked myself.

it was a beautiful film. it reminded me of too much. how we try so hard to make meaning. you can make meaning out of anything, really, if you try. the idea is always better than the reality.

i kept trying to remember the writer of this letter, his hat, his hair, his sheepish grin as he handed me the paper. i've done this before. how many times? a lot. after so many shows. people hand you things. you know.

i played the chords and i read. i played a little soundtrack to this letter, a sad one, a perfect one.

when i got to the part, about halfway through, about his response to the pieces of paper, to be filled out by the audience, that the cast hands out in the play : "when was the last time you cried, and why". he didn't respond. he saved it (did he? or did he answer on the paper during the play?) for this letter. did he? i don't know. i read his story. him sitting there alone in the back room of the place he works, cursing himself. dragging that safety pin across.....but now, how much am i taking advantage of him? it's his story, his story. not mine. it is mine. he gave it to me. my heart cramped up.

my own little onion cellar, up in the dressing room and all alone. fucking, of course. My Own Private Onion Cellar starring amanda palmer and river phoenix. Ha - never on the stage, where i wanted it.

i imagined myself on closing night, fucking up the show, ignoring "coin-operated boy" and whipping out this letter, playing my sad chords and reading aloud. was this what i wanted. of course it was.
is this what anybody wants to watch, to hear?

i read, thinking already...will he leave a phone number at the end of the letter? sometimes they do. sometimes they do.....and if he did, i say to myself, i swear to fucking god, i'll call him. i will. i'll call him right now and pick him up from whatever bus or subway station or youth hostel he's at and i swear to god i'll drive him home, back to my apartment, pu thim on my comfortable couch and give him wine and tea and soup and a night he'll never forget, i'll hold him and hold him and stroke his back and hair and kiss his arms clean and unscratched and take all of his pain and hurt away and feed him breakfast and give him love he's never known.

this is where my brain hurts.

very funny, amanda.

can one really do that? isn't it impossible? i mean, wouldn't it be so impure? like: through his mind would be coursing Oh My God, I'm In Bed With Amanda Palmer From The Dresden Dolls, the girl to whom i wrote this long passionate fan letter, and she called me. (bad narcissist amanda! bad bad bad!). and now i'm in her bed. My Life Is Surreal. can kisses like that count? for real? feel real? or would i just be taking advantage of something...a modern day jimmy page ransacking a perfectly innocent person because of my own emptiness and need for a cuddle?

and could he even give up? could he forget who i am and just surrender to I'm A Boy You're A Girl and Here We Are....put your arms around me, hold me, forget everything, let's be Young and Free and Fucked and Spontaneous.....i don't know. i mean, really, there is no answer to this. people meet in the strangest ways.

lucky?
i assume so.
he didn't leave a number.
there was just an email.
i found myself wondering....oh oh oh maybe he's one of those modern types, who has a blackberry, who has a treo, ga gah gah if i just email immediately he'll get this message on his phone and then we'll, and then i'll...
i stopped right there.

the idea is always better than the reality, isn't it.

it's probably better, i rationalized.
i don't Do Things like that.
funny, i never really have.
not in a long time. i've always gotten too caught, i think, in the terrifying poetry of it all. who wants an unbalanced relationship to Start Out With? they all end up that way, for fucks sake, but at least you have that few months of bliss where you feel like One. who wants to be in bed an feel like some kind of otherworldy god?

jimmy page,,,,,

?

i remember once i was walking down mass ave between harvard and central square. i must have been 21 or 22. i walked by this incredible-looking guy. eyelashes, lips to die for. we caught eyes as we passed each other. we kep walking, as you do. and we both tuned around at the same time, as you sometimes do, to catch that second glance. and i remember thinking to myself FUCK IT FUCK IT and i walked right up to him and kissed him square on the mouth, tongue and all, thinking this was probably the most romantic and gorgeous thing i'd ever done in my life. and he kissed me back, and i kissed him back.

but then, HAha.

then what do you do?

then we were FUCKED.

the kiss was over and we sort of stood there, gaping at each other. if i'd been smart, i would have walked away, never said another word, blown his a kiss his way and winked.
done something perfectly cinematic, but no.

instead i spoke. we chattered for a second.
want to get a drink?
we went across the street to The Cellar, a perfectly quaint bar with wooden tables.
could've been romantic, no?
wasn't romantic. he was from brazil. a student. he loved soccer. i was into music? oh yes cool. that is cool. very cool. so you. what do you really want to do in life? do?
oh nothing. i am in school but i have no interests. i like soccer. drinking is also good.

this was hell. i had destroyed the most romantic moment of my life by inviting it into a bar.
now it was talking to me about the world cup and i wanted to vomit.

we never exchanged numbers.

as i left the theater i stuffed the letter in my back pants pocket. i walked by cafe pamplona and the waiter was pulling in the table from the patio.

"i heard your show was great tonight".

eh? from who?

"that couple, they were here after the show. they were talking about you".

the two boys? my heart jumped.

"which way did they go. they just left? just now?"

"they drove home, i think. the couple, you know...."

heart sank. oh, i know. this was the older couple i'd met in the cafe before the show. they were beautiful, this couple, in their sixties and making non-profit theater for woman and children with HIV and talking talking talking about pierrot and make-up.

i walked to my car and kept seeing shadows across the streets.
i'd seen them leave, these two boys, one of them my romantic letter-writer with the dark hair and the hat, they'd waved good-bye through the window. they were going back to the other side of the country. they'd said.

every time i saw a pair of people walking, i wondered: is it them? what would i do? accost them? tell his friend to wait in the living room with a glass of wine while i romanced his friend to DEATH in the next room?

i started thinking about writing this blog, looking at the bricks blurring under my feet. i thought about the film. i'm caught in my own screenplay, i laughed, i can never leave. i'm constantly writing myself into it.
i just played a soundtrack to a sad and beautiful and perfect letter, and the music is stuck in my head, and the last thing i am thinking about is taking home to the piano and writing a song. no. i want to blog. i knew it would come to this. i am no longer a song-writer, i smirk to myself, i'm a blog-writer. i'm made the switch to the dark side. and so i was thinking as i fished the car-key out and started the engine and drove home, calling pope on the way to see if he had a cigarette so that i could have something smoking in my hand so i could kick-start myself to combat the blank screen. better to write SOMETHIng, i said. better to blog than to sleep. better to blog than to go to the bar. who needs songs? you've written plenty of songs. when you need more, more will come? do you need more songs? right now? fuck no. what would you even do with them.

this is how i know i'm fucked. i used to only smoke at home while writing songs, now it's acceptable to smoke while blogging.
god, it's pathetic. i feel like nicholas cage except i'm not losing my hair. i'm losing my self. my hair is going gray. i dye it dark red.

i came home and poured myself a sam adams lager and started to write.

here we are. hi. hi. hi.

time for bed.

maybe this is better than a song?
instead of applause, i get comments.
sometimes they feel the same.
]sometimes i like the comments more than the applause.
i can read the comments, they're human. they make sense.
the applause. sometimes it just sounds like noise.

Amanda is forever fixed in my mind as being someone who fucking “gets it”, on a soul deep level. Her ability to tap into the artistic condition and dredge it up for all it is worth is priceless. Concepts such as ‘rock love’, ‘the PLACE’, ‘mindfuck’, ‘blog paralysis’ are not just words that have permanently entered my consciousness and my lexicon, but whole experiences and a views on life that I share with her. She makes me shout at the page with ecstatically comprehending shouts of “Yes yes yes!” like the people at her parties in college, while she wore her kimono orchestrating these conversations and never having them. She makes me remember things like that. A whole fucking life opened up. The passion behind her words is the most affecting thing about her work. You can imagine her writing this blog. You are told about the Mac, the kitchen, the disused stove now home to thousands of CDs, books and letters which arrived in the mail and remain unopened, the tea and vitamin collection, the cardinal on the fire escape, the album artwork strewn on the floor… You feel like she is your friend, your amazing, eclectic, verbose, famous friend; and she knows that you are hers, her undistinguished, grateful fan. I remember living in this blog. Living in the words and the descriptions for days at a time. I read 4 years of it in 4 days. I still keep a copy of the whole thing, from the start until the middle of 2008. I was addicted. It was everything I knew about her, loved about her, learnt about blogging, and wanted to give to the world with my blog. And on a final note, maybe it’s just me, maybe I slowly became disenchanted with the experience, maybe I finally shed that obsession that so besieged me, maybe I just became rational about the situation – but her blogs ain’t what they used to be. I remember when she wrote them like a diary, when she shared things with us like the blogs I mentioned above. When the blog was psychologically cathartic, emotionally charged, long and rambling, when it had stories and old boyfriends and rude bits and laugh out loud bits and awful bits, when the fans said something and Amanda wrote more instead of being overwhelmed and letting them say it all, when things could be talked about, had time to be talked about, and it wasn’t all an off limits complicated personal life with a fixed cast – and it didn’t all consist of fucking tour updates!! When the blog meant something to her as a person, rather than an obligation to the fans and an itinerary wasteland.


But back to the man who brought all of this on, Russell Brand. If I had to describe his writing style in one sentence I would say he melds easy warm colloquial Englishness with considered archaic eloquence. There is just something about it that is so genuine and palatable, be he taking you through the death of a beloved family pet, the horrors of drug abuse, the warmth of true friendship, the joy of language or a side-splitting prank.

After my holiday with my dad there was a period of eighteen months where I moved back to Grays with my mum and Colin—it was fraught. I kept myself as anesthe­tized as possible and signed on. I grew the plants to save money— pointless business, I’d have got a better buzz from bludgeoning myself over the head with the pots they were planted in. For someone who smoked as much weed as I did, I was pretty en­raged, and carved into my arms as a kind of medieval release and as a palpable demonstration of internal trauma. One of my mum’s friends advised her, “Next time Russell cuts himself in front of you, just call the police.” She did. I went berserk in the midst of some tiresome conflict and slashed myself with a knife. My weary arm yawned bored blood, and Mum called for an ambulance; the police came too, perhaps for something to do, they were always on the lookout for an interesting collar in Es­sex. Before they arrived, I’d gone. I must have been eighteen by now, and I’d been doing a kids’ TV show called Mud. There was a car that I’d bought myself with my wages parked outside. I couldn’t drive it yet, but the only way I ever used to get anything done was by setting myself a deadline: “If I get a car, then I’ll have to learn to drive it.”
As sensible as it was, this plan did not allow for uncontrolla­ble losses of temper. I went outside and gave that car a Basil Fawlty– style thrashing while it just carried on being a car much in the same way as it would have if I’d given it a glass of wine and combed its hair. I broke the windscreen and kicked the door in—then sobbed off round to the MacLean’s house, carry­ing the knife that I’d cut myself with and loads of grass in my sock—and I was smoking a joint and calming down with the sympathetic surrogates when three carloads of riot police in shields and helmets arrived simultaneously through the front and back doors as if they were about to nick “Leon.” As the police poured in through every orifice of his house, Bill MacLean—a great big hod-carrying Northern man bemused by this overkill—shook his head and said, “Fooking ’ell, it’s only Russell.”
I’d managed to get rid of the knife in the house, which wasn’t an incredible operation—it was a domestic kitchen-knife, I just put it down, I didn’t have to hide it in the concrete of a flyover or feed it to some pigs, but when I was escorted into the police car, cuffed and crestfallen, I still had the grass in my sock. At the station I encountered all the shoelaces and belt business and the realization that there are forces in the world that can curtail and contain you. I didn’t want to be in that cell. I wanted to leave. But the police left me in there for ages. It was sad and annoying, full of sick and shouting. Plus I was meant to have a bird coming round.

He has a way with words and grammar that bridges speech and writing. He writes as he speaks and he speaks as he writes. Alongside elegant phrases such as “My relationship with conventional masculinity has always been much more problematic” and “your house seems to be inhabited by refugees from Roald Dahl’s jotter”; you find perfectly endearing slang, as in “It weren’t like them nubile, Nubian Henry Moore women I’d imagined earlier.” The best thing about it is you can vividly imagine him delivering it all with a flourish in his imperative, slightly camp, slurred Essex accent. You never have to question that it is real. It’s a pity that he’s so sexist though. He has all these amazingly satisfying relationships (friendships) with men, and has so many compliments for them, such love. Whereas women are portrayed as objects, expensive novelties, the subject of obsession without substance to him. It would be quite easy to dislike him, for all his arrogance, blind ambition, sexism, stupidity and immoral acts – if it wasn’t for his supremely likeable narrative voice. The story is told with such honesty, such volubility, humour and ironic bashful distance (but without making excuses or apologies) – that it is impossible not to enjoy the tale.

I started reading My Booky Wook back in March when I was writing University – A Blog In 12 Parts, and it stirred my suggestible mind in such a way, that I had to stop reading it in order to concentrate on retaining the integrity of the memories I had to relate in the university blogs. The blog about the literary upheaval that book brought on was already filling my mind with new and exciting thoughts. Which, I realised, would not do at all. But now I can finally tell you the kind of mindset it put me in:

I must get involved in student theatre. I want to blog so much. I love Russell Brand. I want to be that. I want to find my niche. Why was the stage not like that for me? Like it was for him, such a pinnacle, such a trauma and a success, cemented by emotional outpourings. For me it was all so anti-climactic. If only one could combine narcissism, exhibitionism and words. Sans song or comedy. The closest thing I have is the blog. “The Perpetual Autobiography Of The People Known As Anika Harrington”. This is all that internalising and externalising that my horoscope was talking about. I am meant to be writing this. My life. Not fiction, jokes, songs or poetry. But blogs and autobiography.
Russell Brand has such a knowledge of popular and classical culture. Where did he learn all that? This person kicked out of schools? Where did he learn all these names? This is something I do not have. University made him. He wanted to. He surrounded himself with it. All that culture and those references. So I am in the right spot. That book has changed everything for me, it’s been the defining book for uni so far.
Sitting in cinema getting a bit out of it. They never suspect the thermos, the coffee made of half Baileys. God I want to kiss some gorgeous full lips. Soft, smooth, pouty lips caressing mine… I’m getting sleep deprived. That’s why I always wrote my best songs at 2 am. I can’t do it in my right mind. Another reason people turn to drugs. I need to be off kilter.
Staying up all might, and to think that I have to do things like buy juice in the morning. Drinking a lot. Being open and fourthright and owning the idea of sex. Not in a – I am a grown woman, I have needs! Kind of way. But in a whole person sort of way. It’s an aspect of me. I have a right to that. I’m considering putting more of it on the blog. What with all my talk of liberating bank workers on the train…
Why do people do that, snap to attention when I speak? The whole room goes dead quiet and all their eyes focus. There are so many things that can be attributed to this to discredit it. I have stage fright and this is an illusion created by my paranoid mind. They’re not really all shutting up and looking at me. Or; I’m just going on what happens to me, and I couldn’t exactly know how it is through the eyes of another – ergo, each person in this room gets looked at in the same way and feels the same way because the audience knows it’s polite to pay attention and the speaker is nervous. But neither of these things are true. As a speaker I am as confident as the day is long, and this teenage audience has hardly any idea what manners are. So why do they look? It’s true, it’s not me. I join in with a conversation where people have been happily talking over each other, and the moment I speak the whole group goes silent and looks. Oh yes you might say, add ego to my list of discrediting suspects, but this silence is not something I desire. It makes things awkward, strange, disjointed, and above all it means you can never say anything offhand. You can’t mumble into your sleeve or say something flippant or downright misinformed, because it’s like you just delivered it as part of a speech. Surely there has to be a way of putting this curse to good use… But it doesn’t embarrass me. The things that embarrass me are amiss. Not having my bra out in class; but essays and dealing with teachers. Should I show my past teachers my blog? They’re exactly the right demographic. But is it comedy? Drama? Is it like Booky Wook? And always this thread of ambition drawing me towards fame no matter what the path. Radio, music, acting, writing, presenting, TV, stand up, modelling. All of it. Always. I don’t want to just be a plumber or a receptionist or something; happy, respected, paid, good at my job and esteemed. No, it’s not fame that I let go of. Noble as I wanted to seem. It was other things. Trying to close that chapter without ceremony. Is that so awful?
My writing class has made me realise the opposite of what the learning objectives must be. It made me realise how HARD writing really is for some people, most people; that there is an art in it – a job to it – a fecking uni course, to teach you how to do it. But I never had a problem with starting. I never had a problem with what to say or how to say it. Because this is what I was meant to do. Words.


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