Dopamine dark highs that become fixtures. Weekend crashes that you see in advance. What can you do this time to satisfy the toxic pact of pleasure, self-destruction and shadowy-searching for humiliation?
A long-held conviction concealed even from my sober self, that the connectivity and bonds that make life alive are impossible to attain. The more desperate I long for the latter the more desperately destructive the former becomes. Like a snake eating its own tail, trying to return the where it all began, but simply devouring itself.
All because I want to come home, to myself. Obsessing for clues in these empty landscapes, in which monoliths begin to look like capsules concealing a way of how to be in my home time and space, to repossess myself.
Staring into space, straining. Devising a million and one ideas, trying to get somewhere but having no clear what or how.
The lasting sensation that somehow you still haven’t arrived.
Endless reels of justifications on repeat, for failure to comply, failure to achieve, failure to understand common sense(!). Failure, period.
Burn out around the corner, again.
Up here I sit with every regret. Individual failings blend into a thousand million mis-endeavours and begin to come back into focus, as if all our misdoings rest here in happenstance, like the rocks dumped here by the last ice age.
But down there, there’s always more rocks to scatter….
Nearly 40 and the horror show scours for next season’s hot gossip. It makes puppets out of plenty as they try to make their way back home.
It’s hideous to watch time pass, to see your flesh grow old, whilst you remain trapped in a frame, precisely because the moment in that frame never truly materialised, and merely dumped you there. It’s promise to give you back yourself in your home time, fatefully misread.
Banging my head on these rocks as a kid – my second baptism. Awaking to the sunrise of a new world, a pain-free world. The edible-looking graphics of sugar-rush Sega games. Entering the brand new ark; the open gates to Jurassic Park. Now we all create our own fantasy worlds.
What I didn’t realise was that the gates would close behind. Locking you into a world where all there was was fantasy and sugary escapes. Haunted by a disconnection for oneself. We were offered wings, whilst being rooted into the sediment below. Flapping in perpetuity, into exhaustion, into ever more desperate measures.
Let me out.
‘Let me out’, we would cry in silence. But there is no exit from here, how can one escape from a freedom to do what they want?
Give me more, give me more! I will be ruined! Because ruined is the only way out of this!”
From the memory-scouring anxieties of WKD blue night outs, the desperate need to keep the night going and going, to the Coldplay cuddles, the reassuring promises that Chris Martin will finally bring us home from the dysphoric collapse of certainty in the wake of 9/11. Nothing between the dopamine scream and the dreadful retreat was ever given body.
…and this is where we have been.
Here, the hills rise slowly. Through 3 clear stages that resemble rites of passage.
In my late teenage flight state, I would experience one after the other on the Trans Pennine trail as I peddled as fast as I could away the post 9/11.
As one landscape replaced the other, greener, wooded landscape, to exposed high flats, to black moor, it felt like moving into time as much as space, going deeper and deeper into the earth even as one ascended.
To always expect the main city at the other side to be in a different time as well as space. Not the same frantic dead space of post-industrial patchwork and new glass buildings, habitable for only one type of successor, they who can successfully be a body in accordance with this kind of world.
At least the emptiness that precedes the parallel sameness at the other side affords you a separation.
“Can’t keep getting burnt out down there. It needs to stop.”
“…I can’t keep doing this”.
Knowledge feels old itself in a world made weary from a certain kind of knowingness. Who, anymore, has it in them to seek out the novel? There is nothing new under a sun that rises with standardised global time. The motor neurones have run themselves into the ground in a race that only ever gets faster, leaving the young as weary as the old.
Everything begs for the exit. In spleen, bitterness, denial, hatred, conspiracy, fantasy and dead-end pleasure-seeking. An exit that cannot be tracked by Google.
John B Ledger 