A couple of years ago I dated a girl, and I met her parents very quickly, and ended things with her very quickly. The girl had informed her Father that I loved an ale. This is true, and so as I sat down for Sunday Lunch with them, and he proudly presented me a few choices of ale, I gleefully chose an Old Speckled Hen. I first drank Old Speckled Hen as it was offered to me at a reduced price at the supermarket, due to the box for the cans being missing and replaced by parcel tape holding each one together. Aside from the ale, her Father was watching the Snooker World Championship. I was immidiately fixated, remembering my Grandfather’s love for it. One of my few memories is of him shushing me and my sister as we played, so that he could listen to the snooker. I obsessively watched the rest of the tournament. I knew nothing of the history, but there’s something beautiful about the fluidity, the skill, the culture. Simon calls it ‘liquid snooker’ when it’s played well. It’s a flow state.
It was a scorching hot spring. A couple of days later, the girl came over to mine. She wanted my attention but couldn’t peel me away from the screen, the coloured balls pinging across it. We tried to fuck, but everytime a cheer came from the crowd I got distracted, stopped to look over. There was no intimacy there. Again, it was a scorching hot spring. The walls were wet with sweat. A faint breeze through my window opened just a crack. She put on lipstick and kissed me all over.
We broke up soon after. I wondered if the snooker fixation would pass, and it did, when the tournament ended. And when it ended, I could not re-fixate on her. I was taking any distraction at that point.
We saw eachother again a few times, as friends. Now it’s been years. But I think of her every April, into May, as the bluebells are blooming and the snooker plays out before me.
I appreciate an English Father. My Father, English, is the reason I love an ale. My Grandfather was a real Father (clergyman). His constituents all called him that, but I didn’t understand. To me he was Gramps. Her Father, who’s name I don’t remember and I’m unsure I ever knew, is the reason I watch snooker. Simon, another Father, brought out the beauty in both ale and snooker combined once again. I lost my voice, screaming at the telly, screaming for Mark Allen to win, ale drunk. The day after we passed out on top of eachother watching Twin Peaks, wine drunk.
Simon taught me about the greats. ‘The Bad Boys’ of snooker. Kirk Stevens is my decided favourite. He oozes style, had a cocaine problem and ended up selling cars & doing gardening. He’s Laura Palmer. He’s me if we swapped coke with booze. We’re all going to end up selling cars, doing gardening. That’s the way of the world. That’s what I hope, anyway.
I love sport, the pointless passion of it. I’ve never even played snooker. But I love it, and I wrote all this just to say how crazy it is to see the favourites all go out this early on. I’m watching Ronnie play, liquid. But Brecels out, and so is Carter, and Selby, and Williams. I love an underdog. It’s why I lost my voice screaming for Allen. And I love a tyrant, and that’s what the final will be: Ronnie, the big shot, the tyrant, VS what I assume will end up being an underdog.
It’s the pointless passion of sport that makes sport so important. As we have increasingly moved away from God, we have had little come and replace it. The internet as God is the closest thing, but it is a false substitute - the glow of the screen is nothing like the glow of the physical world. Sport, even when you’re not playing it, has a physical element, the same way a church service is physical. Whether you’re in the pews surrounded by your family, or at The Crucible surrounded by your fellow fans, there exists a connection, an electric energy you can only begin to understand in the short time you’re there. You need to believe in something. Me? I’d rather believe in Ronnie O’Sullivan, believe in him to have an outburst on live TV about the terrible state of the game than, believe in a false God. Believe in him to get a 147. Believe in him to win this World Championship. Sport is all an allegory for religion, the way we follow the teams, the pilgrimmage to the venues to watch it, the culture & the traditions associated with it. I am thankful to be able to get passionate about sport, something that at the end of the day is silly and doesn’t matter, as a way of staying grounded. It isn’t all that serious, at least, it doesn’t have to be all that serious.
I think my Grandfather understood this - despite being a vicar, and certainly having a love for God, I often wondered if his other passions (cricket; snooker; sailing) were his true Loves.
I want to write a poem about Kirk Stevens. About being the bad boy.
^POST APRIL 2024 INSANITY^
(I’ll keep the below here, but I want to go into a more structured format. I’m bad with chaos)
(I’ll keep the below here, but I want to go into a more structured format. I’m bad with chaos)
PRE-APRIL 2024 INSANTIY:
my siblings will talk to their about me one day and say ‘my brother moved to america and bought a gun’. I will talk about my family fondly, and tell everyone I meet that I love them. I will eagerly await Christmasses and other holidays spent with them. I will relish in my new life away from everything I’ve ever known.
I’m asking too much. There’s faint hope for me but really I do it all because I fucking have to. i don’t know where i’d be without you.
The Online Schizophrenic Manifesto26/03/2024
1. Exist online in as many places as you can, with as many different personas* as you like/want/need
*a Persona is an identity created to serve a purpose. It can exist across multiple different social medias/blogs/forums, but should exist as a certain type of personal, or with a certain role for yourself. For example, a Persona could be one that is obsessed with Philosophy and Literature, and exists on twitter, reddit and /lit/. The purpose this serves for you may be that this is a genuine interest, or an interest you wish to explore and gain knowledge on. By assimilating with this crowd through social media, etc., you become closer to becoming this person. This could be done anonymously or not.
2. You may have another persona that is a writer, a musician, artist, etc. You can always see them as different Aliases that musicians often go under. Take for example Sam Ray of teen suicide, who has multiple different bands and projects that all satisfy different needs: Ricky Eat Acid - experimental electronic; Julia Brown - basically just teen suicide lol; American Pleasure Club - sanitised woke version of teen suicide; (they all served a different purpose/exploration for Sam, even if osmetimes they appear as the same/similar things. Seperation, even when subtle, can be important to development.
3. You should exist in different circles across different social medias - because of the anonymity, or the (ironically) detached nature of social media, it is much easier to create these different Persona’s online than in real life. You can thus exist as multiple different people and satisfy your interests in different ways, engaging to a high degree with each of them and living as if this one niche interest encompasses your life, while actually doing this across many interests/personas.
4. Each persona should satisfy a different need
5. Disregard old personas and create new ones as you please**
**You may be obsessed with something for a while and then lose interest: that is human nature. You don’t have to cling onto trying to exist somewhere that you don’t want to. My suggestion, as is said later in the manifesto, is to never delete an account, as you can always come back when this interest/want calls again.
6. Try and connect microblogging to each one***
***e.g., you exist mainly on Twitter, but also have a very insane schizophrenic blog that is infrequently used to upload food blogs. Or something related, or something unrelated
7. Play between the lines of anonymity and reality
7.1. You can exist as many different things, but each should fulfil a purpose****
****e.g., [REDACTED] exists an art experiment/extremely personal and vulnerable version of myself. [REDACTED] used to exist as a safe space to write stupid shit without friends seeing. [REDACTED] was a short lived writing project. They don’t all need to be obviously you, and it can be fun to be completely anonymous, but you can try world building / linking them together if you want to. There’s many paths to take here.
8. The persona shouldn’t be completely false/‘fake’ - you should not pretend to be black, or a woman, if you are not either of those things. It should be about taking part of something you feel you are lacking in your life, or a way of workshopping feelings and ideas with others. It should be something you feel in yourself and want to express but can’t do so through normal social methods. Social media becomes a surrogate mother to help birth your desires/feelings.
9. Never Delete Anything. Keep track of them all, see how they influence your other projects, strangers other projects. Forget about them and re-discover them months, years later. See them as a timestamp in a journal, an explaination of an aspect of yourself at the time. All of this is in part journaling, just more schizophrenic, sporadic, non-linear.
Justification:
- A want to delve deeper into an interest: by creating a ‘Persona’ that is invested deeply into the communities of it’s core interest(s) (achieved through social media) it inevitably learns more and connects are with those within it. Thus, persona’s can exist as a learning tool, where learning is done through association and assimilation.
- A want for community: by creating these personas with the goal being to exist on a social media, it becomes almost inevitable that you will join communities to get closer to the aim of the persona. You will invariably meet people who will guide you, like you, hate you, etc.. It is basically a microcosm of a life, where you exist as a few things (a few things being your interests, as a persona you exist as your persona/interests, not your usual/IRL self, although what you truly want to be IRL may be first done through a persona, leading to actual transformation in your interaction with others IRL) for a certain period of time (which is undefined and likely unknown too you, it can go on as long or as short as you like).
- It’s a form of escapism: to exist as a new person, in a community, is undoubtably an escape. This can be a good thing and shouldn’t be disocuraged: rather than purely describing as an escape, which has certain negative connotations, it can be seen as a way of ‘reinventing yourself’. This escape from your normal life can, through assimilation into your personas community, morph yourself closer to your persona than your original life pre-persona, and this may indeed be the aim of the persona. The persona exists usually out of want or lack, a want to be something (an artist, an avid reader and engaged in certain discourse). Thus, through anonymity, or separation from IRL activity and currently existing networks, you can learn to become this persona without the fear that is often associated with reinventing yourself IRL, through your own community which may not accept these changes. It almost exists as a trial run.
- It’s fun: to delve deep into certain interests, to try and do something you find interesting and engage with it on a deep level with others is a really great feeling. Persona’s are a system for allowing vulnerability through a level of anonymity, which makes the vulnerability far less scary. Without this fear, you are hopefully able to engage as deeply as you want to take it, allowing you to make mistakes, learn and be supported and support others in communities you want to be apart of but, as said previously, may be fearful of because of the real, non-anonymous form they may have taken on.
when i die i want it all out there. i want everything i’ve ever done written on my gravestone every achievement fail dream lover thought movement for all to see
/ to be dead and yet remain on in memory as living
& if I die young do not let my mothers memory of me be that of my pale face in the coffin.
oh to want to be remembered
that is my biggest failure of all
IF YOU THINK IT’S FOR (YOU),(YOU) FAILED AT THE FIRST HURDLE.
its all mine
When I feel something it takes hold of me completely: i am a man of action tuned into a man of inaction. i am stuck slipping (further)down. desert heat & the bright sun. stuck. the ocassional mirage (glimpses of hope - gone as fast as they came).
I used to force myself to sleep drenched in sweat with the songs of spirits moving loudly through my room, the clip-clop of horses hooves, BEADS OFF MY FOREHEAD, your beautiful (blue) eyes and our mutual fears.
You were mentioned today and today was a strange day. The last time I saw you you were in a bathtub reading Miranda July and likely wishing me away, silently. And I sat on the toilet and watched you, the ends of your hair getting wet, the rest dry. a warm steam coming off the surfce off the water, off the surface of your skin (goosebumps up your forearms). and that was it, lost forever.
One more time:
1. Outside the bright neon lights
One more wish:
1. Brushing my teeth with you, the euthymol & hard bristles turning the sink bloody pink.
One more time:
1. Outside the bright neon lights, and never again since
PRELUDE
I think I could write forever. I think I can live forever. I think about dying twice a day, if not more. Your sister said she thinks about dying about 7 times a day. And then something bad happened.
I am quitting therapy so I get to stop thinking for a while. I did it for a year every week (except the weeks I missed). I thought about things a lot. I realised I’m not a terrible person. and then something bad happened. And everything I thought about had a different weight and texture, heavy to carry, too heavy, to carry. And so I’ve stopped thinking, I’ve stopped therapy, I’m kind of just here.
I think I could write forever. I think I can live forever. I think about dying twice a day, if not more. Your sister said she thinks about dying about 7 times a day. And then something bad happened.
I am quitting therapy so I get to stop thinking for a while. I did it for a year every week (except the weeks I missed). I thought about things a lot. I realised I’m not a terrible person. and then something bad happened. And everything I thought about had a different weight and texture, heavy to carry, too heavy, to carry. And so I’ve stopped thinking, I’ve stopped therapy, I’m kind of just here.
Diary of a guy. I’m just a guy. I wish they’d see that
The light is fading, the light is fading slowly, the light is fading more and now... the light has faded.
The light is fading, the light is fading slowly, the light is fading more and now... the light has faded.