Near desert…

Langsett remains weird. An intrusion of the outside. Dream-like, in that all our dreams are breached by that which shouldn’t be there.

Nor should I… be here, ‘down there’.

I’m lost.

That horizon line that greats you as you ascend the first set of hills, with its weirdly rhythmical monotony, calls you forward…

Yet it cannot prepare the familiar to be easily breached, upon this fine line cut by the east/west trunk road and the reservoir walk that struggles to be itself underneath the heft of the Weird, uncaringly jotting out of its allocated zone.

This breach brings coastal nightmares onto water placed into the seemingly safe centre-land, gesturing to the great wildernesses of land and of sea alike, stalking our dreams with apocalyptic advancements.

For even though it is a place made austere by many human hands, it is never convincingly clasped from an amoral wilderness that annexes the plantation pines and 20th century pylons, which line up as marker points to the exodus sought through it.

What was once a wildwood has long since been a desert.

And a desert it must be, for it is the desert I seek.

… a nothing space with no more anything.

No more signs, fooling us into thinking all those ‘down there’ things. A place where gluttonous demands make mere meat of us, as we wrestle and twist unable to shirk the shape we assumed long ago at some fateful point, as options in life become harder to graft out of the setting stone of misplaced middle age.

There’s a black hole of comprehension in which 2000 became 2024, in which 16 became 40. Wondering how you managed to fuck up so embrassingly. To have allowed yourself to be spat out so easily. Back into your parents house, the four walls of a life humiliatingly trapped in teenage chains.

Even as I know more than ever that such admissions don’t bring saviour, and that the impetus for change is at red alert, as I twist and turn it’s still the same things reflected and inflected in the daily reconstitution of self-hood.  This Now consists of a daily dog fight, objectless lunges at a self-worth-sucking atmosphere, as ones eyes meet those of others in an internal contest for respect from ones inner critics.

But they, the inner critics, lose their hold up here, as the signage they utilise gives way to nothingness.

The wish to get lost up here is merely a logical response to how it feels down there.

Here is the site where elemental truth can speak clearly. Right here. About the great tragedy that befell our age, where soft Millennial promises mutated into a mute horror of which no polite voice dare speak.

That something has happened which may never be classifiable. Generations dislodged, like dislocated limbs. But yet a loose skin conceals the damage, leaving it to simmer in internal violence.

We all look the other way, only revealing our permanent stretch marks – the indelible stains of trying to hide collective trauma. But skin artificially held up in suspense flops to its death here, as the increasingly desperate displays of opulence, that overpower you and push you in a lowly road-side ditch, can now do one, and fuck off for an hour or two.

You can even laugh along with the hostile gale, as a shiny white Audi, a mere stand-in for a seemingly infinite amount of status cars that have poured into our hearts, forming part of the tapestry of 15 years of collective trauma, tries and fails to assert its power here.

As the near dark sets in, the landscape hunts you back to your place of safety. Stalking your imagination with un-belonging intrusions, as if it were a dream.

Evening beckons. Tomorrow will be hard, as life gets privately more painful, perhaps for all of us – but yet nobody is letting up.

The dark peak horizon which Langsett assertively unveils keeps calling, because it promises retreat to a place where you can’t possibly be lost because there is nothing to be lost in. A place where you can’t possibly be ashamed, because the social is withered to its bone up here.

Down there, one can only do their best to fight their shame. And this is me, here, doing that now, in real time.