27th September – New inscriptions

27^th September – New inscriptions

Well the Funky Penguin bar crawl is now about 8 hours past. I tell you in case you don’t know, because it is one of the most manic nights of the year for DMU students. Large groups wearing certain colour t-shirts going to various Leicester bars, meeting new people and err, drinking.

Without this knowledge, an observer of me might wonder where this badly drawn moustache that still adorns my face came from. If so they would truly marvel at the 11 inch penis inscribed on my chest, especially given the somewhat dubious “10x larger” written next to it. But this is the tip of the iceberg… My arm reads “I rule – worship me”, the penguin on my t-shirt seems to have been given a cigarette (or maybe something else) to smoke as he smiles and delivers a thumbs up. “Leg-end” has been inscribed under one arm pit and opposite “Black Fuckin Magic” resides. On the back more writing says “Crinkly Chrisps”, “Crazy Chris” and “Tinkall Winkall”. These are the ones I have found….

Make no mistake I think I know who drew each one and I remember more or less all of the night, which I know is more than some will this morning. Fresher’s week is definitely under way. I must however admit, I'm dreading seeing the pictures!

22nd September – Grey days are back to stay

22^nd September – Grey days are back to stay

It’s been quite a week. Tuesday we went to re-sample Mosh and it was actually quite good as usual. I met some new people, ladies I should say really. Wednesday I went round to As___, Do_ and Vi___’s house and we watched Team America and s funny film called without a paddle. During this night no alcohol was drunk at all. Thursday night Ni__, Jo__ and Me descended on Jo__’s house for some old school drink action. Everyone got very drunk and I remember bits of getting home. The burger meal a purchased and later gave to the toilet. Ahhh such fun.

The grey days of hangover sickness have begun. Today I have done very little, to compensate for my hard working life. We’ll I've done some washing and cleaned the kitchen and my room a little bit but that’s about it.

I've looked online and found out my timetable is almost exactly the same as last year, except the creative writing people have seen sense and moved the 9am starts back to 11pm. Who can concentrate on the history of writers such as Proust and Woolf when it’s less than 9 hours since your last drink?

Tomorrow i think is the day when it's all happening; Ste___, An__ and To_ come to stay, i do believe. And it's when the room disputes will be settled for good i hope, the worst thing would be bad vibes between people lasting all year round. Monday is the day Fresher’s Week begins again... oblivion waits.

11th of September – just Drunk

11^th of September – just Drunk

We went out last night to Mosh, Ste___, Ni__, Jo__, Mi___, and some of jo__’s friends. They have upped drinks prices a little, and changed the lowest priced drink from a respectable blueberry-vodka mix, to some horrible cider-blueberry mix! It’s awful, but thankfully the middle floor was still selling the same old stuff we know and love. At first it seemed empty but eventually a lot of people turned up and it was “buzzing” as they say.

I danced for the first time in ages, months perhaps. I danced in the crazy and useless style I always do, but it feels good. I felt good, really good. Here is a guy that’s spent almost three months in a boring job cleaning stuff, seeing the bare minimum it seems of friends from home, and of course being quite depressed for a lot of that. The guy is in the space of a week, finished in work, moved back to Leicester, and back with his university mates, of course I'm happy.

You get the wonderful feeling that everything in the world is going to be fine, all your worries slip away and you are left with this great feeling of their being no better place to be than here, with these people. Moving your body in ways you cannot accurately defend or explain. Everything is subjective and even death and taxes are not so black and white, the feeling that everything is good. You’re one step closer to true everlasting happiness and in this new found state of mind you will always be happy.

I'm not going to argue against these points. But no, you’re not reaching some higher level. The world is not without bad things, and you never know where you will be so how can you say this is the best you have ever been. You’re just drunk, that’s all.

And that’s not to say the experience is meaningless, it’s very important to have these euphoric experiences, to feel as special as you wish to be. To be held in the hands of good fortune for the tiniest yet significant moment of your life in which you feel more than conceivable happy. Or maybe yes, you traverse the world of the unnatural and gain access to feeling and understanding beyond anything we can scientifically prove, or even imagine with our creative and romantic minds.

All that matters is that moment, one small moment, that requires neither booze or drugs or anything at all. Not even the dance floor, the friends, the location or that invisible spark of life which exists inside us all. The moment is yours and only you can understand it.

10th September – Knackered and fed

10^th September – Knackered and fed

Yesterday I got my room more or less sorted. My many bags have dissolved into cupboards, wardrobe and a small space I created behind my bed. I put my collection of DVDs, games and home made movies on top of the fireplace (yes my room has a fireplace, but it doesn’t work, at least half of the perimeter of this room has wires around it. There are also eight speakers which are mostly hidden in corners unobtrusively.

I also put up my poster collection too, which took probably two hours. Well there is 75 of them (and more to come). For a wonder I am actually tidying up after myself too! Something I always have trouble with when I'm at home. Maybe it’s the knowing that mum’s around, some kind of instinct switches on. Like one of those natural survival issues, doing it because you need to do it.

In the evening Jo__ and Mi___ came round and we got a fair bit drunk, and invented a game called “Dice of Death”, a drinking game of course, it requires two dice. It’s quite hard-core, like “Circle of Death” with turbo boosters. It does the job. After playing this for about an hour and all being quite inebriated we went in search of Maryland Chicken, and it was roughly about then that I realised just how far we were from the town center. After the Maryland we came back home, knackered and fed and went to bed.

9th September

9^th September

Sunday had been a strange day, nothing much has happened except Ni__ had gone home for a day or so. An__ came up today, seemed a little disappointed at the room situation, but not very much at the minute as he only came to move some stuff in and is not going to be back until the 23^rd. There’s very little else to say about today.

2.06pm – technically Monday

Well about 30 minutes later my evening changed considerably. The phone rang, it was As__. Asking if I’d like to go to Jo__’s place for a evening. Jo__, Mi__ and her were at the bottom of my street 20 minutes later and we whizzed round to see As___’s house, very nice indeed. Her bedroom (the smallest) is at least as big as mine; they are paying £7 a week less rent than me.

It was good to see these guys again, Mi___ is growing this really good looking moustache, but is not sure if he is keeping it or not. Jo__’s baldness is being replaced by hair, albeit the shorter version of his previous moppage.

We got a little drunk playing everyone’s favourite drinking game “Circle of death”. As always, we spent the first half of the game trying to remember the rules. The second half was spent trying to remember the rules we had forgot over the course of the game. And after all that my lovely “Chauffeurette”, As___ drove me home. Not a bad night and to think earlier I was ready to just go to bed at a civilised hour!

8th September

Well, that was quick! It’s early evening now and I'm in Leicester. There was no time to talk before leaving as my dad arrived a full hour earlier than he told us he would and ninety minutes before we expected him. However, I had planned ahead and had got basically everything packed an hour early. Intent on having one last bath at home, before making the final preparations for going. It turned out that dad turned up just as I was about to turn the tap on.

So we loaded the car and the trailer he brought (the same as last time), and set off. Half way down the M1 we were scared off by orange words saying “DELAYS AFTER JNCT”, we were in Nottingham, and the rest of the journey was made on normal roads. This slowed us down but eventually we arrived, just in time to see To_ leaving for the week. He had come up briefly to do some painting, as the original colour of his room displeased him. Unloading the car didn’t take long, but parking did, as this “cul-de-sac’s” road is quite narrow.

After unloading my gear, we went shopping. Parking was problematic as my dad brought the trailer along, so we had to find a double space, not just a single space. I know mum told dad NOT to wrest my choices from the decent stuff to the cheapest stuff on the shelf, but my dad was paying, so I had little room for argument. It wasn’t so bad, and he’s right to be getting me to save money. It’s just aggravating to see him point out much cheaper deals than I even consciously consider as a consumer.

7th September – Throwing down the plastic

I'm retarded. No really, I am a bloody idiot. I've just had the worst drama in months going off. Being scared out of my wits, dashing from my nearly empty bedroom to the bathroom, jumping over the landing like Indiana Jones, with a 500 page book on how to design custom levels for the classic pc game “DOOM” in my hand… because of the spiders.

Yes two of them, a while ago there was one on the landing and it was fucking massive and that’s no joke. That beast had a size of over 3 inches! I and mum just cowered in our rooms for the night. In the morning it was gone.

This evening though a small one, a child-spider emerged from behind my desk, it was barely an inch and posed no threat to me. So I watched it with interest. I decided if it crossed the half way point of my room, and started heading for the bed bit, I would kill it. It went around half of my room and then out of the second door which we don’t use anymore (it’s from the time my room was two rooms).

I went out; to watch it, and make sure it strode far away from my room. I watched it move a little along the skirting, moving with impressive speed for its little size. Then two things happened almost at exactly the same time. The first was that I noticed I was standing in the landing at the top of the stairs, where the big spider had last been seen, the second, almost as a direct answer was movement, fast and close by my feet.

I screamed involuntarily, not a girl scream, it was more of an “arrrh!”, but surely it must have woken my mum (but if it did, she hasn’t stirred). I ran to the bathroom, now trapped. I looked back and saw that… yes indeed. The big spider was back (although thankfully no bigger). The small spider had, in a few short moments ran it seemed to within a few feet of the other spider, which seemed to not notice. My heart could have been emulating a very fast hardcore song at that moment and I had a weird feeling that it was going to give. It didn’t.

However I was now trapped, from my bedroom where I knew all the potential weapons were. My previous feelings of benevolence were gone, now I was in survival mode, and there are no ethics or laws to govern how you think in such situations. It was kill or be killed. I can cope with knowing perhaps that there is maybe one spider in the house but not two! And certainly not when one is that big bastard over th…

OH SHIT IT’S MOVING LIKE A FERRARI, MY WAY!!

Something then clicked and I knew I had to get to my bedroom, which was the other side of the landing, door still ajar. There was a book in there, heavy and big, it could do the job. I mustered my courage and simply performed the most impossible long jump for a house, I almost crashed into my desk, I found the book (its hard to miss) and went back, the little spider was coming back my way.

I dealt with that first, it ran up the wall and I slammed the book into it. Although I hate the things (and that is rather xenophobic isn’t it?) I didn’t want it to suffer. Last I checked it’s crumpled body was still stuck to the wall.

Then there was the big one, and that bastard could really move. As proof of this, whilst I was killing the big one, it had gone, vanished. Or so it seemed. Then after a moment I noticed, right there in the corner a mark on the carpet, where I had not seen one before. To be sure it was what I thought it was I chucked pennies at it. All missed.

When I had returned to the doorway with penny number four it had gone. Couldn’t see it, couldn’t find it. Then I noticed it, right in the other corner, it must have warp factor or something because I could not see anything that moved that fast at such a size as being natural. It was book time.

It took me almost four minutes to aim the book and muster the courage to throw it, and when I did the book missed it completely, and fell downstairs. For some miracle, mum had not stirred at all. But my constant mutterings about “I've got to kill it” and “oh fuck it moved” may have put her in the know. Then I got another weapon, as the spider would never let me reach the book.

It was a flimsy plastic rectangle, weighing very little. It is one of those things that come in the bottom of big bags to keep the base flat and square. The spider was moving, it moved, now limping up and under the Hoover. I tried to shine a light on the thing but couldn’t as my lamp was at the length of its cable. The landing lights could not shine under it.

Then it made a break for it, heading for my mums door. It was now or never, I crossed the landing threw down the plastic and jumped on it, but to make sure the job was done, I stood on it, proper and all over. Nothing besides sheer rock would have survived my weight. It was all over.

That entire insanely useless story, which outlines the cruelty of humanity when faced with the unknown, has left me little time to talk about my actual day. So I'll write again tomorrow morning, before I leave, if possible.

5th September – Penultimate Days

My bedroom is emptying as its contents slowly make their way downstairs, wanting to get away from this place. Their feelings are shared by their owner.

My imagination experienced death twice today. The first time was when I was crossing the bridge from Meadowhall to the transport interchange. The bridge is more of a corridor with full size windows on either side. As you cross the river you can still see the damage done by the floods; brickwork and metal from the road-river wall that fell in had been exposed when the waters lowered. From the bridge you can see roads, Meadowhall itself, and beyond, some hills.

I saw in my head, a huge black hole appear, where suddenly, the atmosphere and ozone had been ripped away. Something hit the biggest hill and it exploded. The debris did not go in all directions, but towards the hole, and eventually out of sight. The hole seemed to be acting like a hoover, sucking up the very land. And cars and people were flying into the hole, exploding as they did so. Then the bridge was suddenly snapped free of its cables and weldings and was flying towards the hole. Either end was ripped from the building by a force nothing I have ever seen could equal. After a few seconds the ends suddenly seemed to cave in of their own accord. A few last seconds of air for me, the only occupant of this flying thing that soon would not be. Cracks appeared in the window, then suddenly the whole structure seemed to implode violently, I was crushed but not quite killed, but then the whole structure, now in some weird blackness, exploded into nothingness, and so did I.

The second time was more paranoia than violence, I was almost home, walking along the street outside. I could see and sense the car that seemed to be driving along the road too slowly. I saw it’s light light up the passage that takes me to the backdoor. I felt as though some awful weapon was trained on my head, ready to fire. I even sense I felt something hit or perhaps even go through me, but nothing did.

Besides those morbid visions today has been pretty normal. I did almost nothing at work but talk and wander round the place.

2nd September

Drunkenness has stolen me again, but only moderately. The guy retching in the toilet is my mate Burke. His and his girlfriend’s party has ended now, at the respectable time of 1.30pm

It had been planned that the journey from Leicester to Sheffield would fit in with a party here that he decided to have, during which I met his girlfriends sister, some local friends of theirs and my old friends Techie Jules and BJ. There were a variety of drinks on offer, none of which were very weak in ethanol rating.

I however took it reasonably steady I guess, compared to Craig, who has just finished retching, or whatever he was doing in the bathroom. Tomorrow it’s a short hop home and then back to Meadowhall, for the final week of oasis work ever. That’s for real this time.

1st September (00:58) – Red Rivers

No thought had been put into anything. No gloss or trim, no reflection. There it was… all of it, down on paper, even if it was in his minimalist form. Before bed, he had to go to the bathroom and get a drink, eyes still filling with tears for reasons he no longer even thought about, he had cried till his head hurt and he felt dizzy, and only then did he try and stop. He’s never cried like that before…

The dreams came;

People went through their routines, faceless and gaunt. In a huge city by the sea. In the distance were mountains, with rivers running down into the sea, clearly visable, somehow. The sun was setting/ Before it did, the mountains started to weep red tears instead of blue. The red rivers flowed down, clouds of billowing red below the surface, until all the water was red. The people carried on. Puppets or symbols in a unreal world that never was and never shall be.

He swam in the sea and it was warm, so he swam further out. He called to people to come and swim and they didn’t hear him. He couldn’t go back now, the sea turned to mud and he is stuck, being pulled down inside it, yelling and screaming, no one listens, no one hears. Before he is sucked under he takes one last breath and sees something… There is a silhouette of a person by the sea, with the sun hiding behind, holding a present. He guesses it’s for him, he reaches out, but its too late. Wake.

I spent over half an hour just thinking about that dream earlier. Not something you would probably expect me to share and you can take any meaning from it you wish.

Last night… it’s not something I want to live through ever again. A horrible empty feeling as some hard truths hit home, things I have thought I knew suddenly seeming to be turned into fact, and by the most natural (to some) of events. It felt like I was a city suddenly being scavenged by nuclear blasts

Get your philosophy hats on…

Life is entirely what you make it, true. There are no gods but the ones we choose to believe in, and they exist because we need them to. The same with lovers, we believe in them so they exist because we need them to. As priests love god, lovers love each other. You can see the common word emerging… love. Love, should it exist or not, is both wonderful and terrible.

The person in love sees nothing but love in their life. The problem is.. this is exactly what the person not in love sees. They see love everywhere, else. Some of my problems stem from this situation. A life without love you can (and many do) argue is a terrible thing. A realisation dawned on me yesterday that made things seem awfully devastating; I have not been in love for over 7 years.

True, I've had girlfriends, even long term partners, but never loved someone who loved me, or been loved by someone I would have wished for. That’s what being in love for me is all about. Theres a question though, a silly little *if*. What if, I just don’t feel love? What if a terrible event almost 7 years ago to the day has left me numb to it? My recent examinations of life in my spare thoughts and moments left me negative, without love’s influence. So things tend to look bleak, and yes, I still argue that there are no gods, aliens or even love because we cannot prove any of it.

Life is meaningless; death really is the brick wall at the end, but so what? Life is also a gift, to us that are allowed it. Hundreds of children die everyday, people are still being blown apart and gunned down in most corners of the world, even Britain. So why not be glad to be here rather than there?

Winds of change

Winds of change

We packed up mum’s car and made the first journey to Leicester today. Hers is a small thing but hopefully it will ease significantly the stress of the main journey, the one which happens next week. My dad will be bringing me down, this time to stay.

We went to the housing place, on Western Boulevard. We parked in a very familiar car park, by a very familiar building, to which I no longer have the keys. It stands empty, all rooms cleaned, familiar thick blinds of the windows drawn half way down, all rooms reset I suppose to some empty state. All for the next inhabitants, who will probably start arriving in about 3 weeks time, but for now, Bede Hall is dormant. I saw my room, my mirror, my bed I wonder if the cleaners were able to remove the ultra-violet paint with which I wrote on most of my walls, if so it never made the bill, messages to those that might find them, advice on good times. I don’t know if I ever expected to see the building so close again when I left it in dad’s car. It was quite emotional to see it cleansed of any personality we had given it.

One entire desk of the housing office was filled with envelopes containing keys, there were at least 50 there, and each needed ten pounds and a signature from the recipient. That was all. Then we went to the place, where I would be living. A place I hadn’t seen since a cold day in early February.

Seven months later and here I am. Unlike my last visit, there’s no near naked man in the middle bedroom (now mine), no baby in the upstairs front bedroom and any other trace of the occupants has been washed away, almost. There are some flaws here and there. There are only a couple of major ones, like the boiler does not work, so we have no hot water for bath, shower or washing up. The cooker oven also seems to be at fault. Besides those we are in a perfectly usable residence.

The room controversy goes on! I managed to take the room I was after, but only by approximately about 10-15 minutes. Any later and I am sure nick would have taken it and I would be where he is. Which incidentally is the front lower room, the one Andy was after. I'm in the middle front room, which isn’t as big as the one nick is in at the moment. I say at the moment as I imagine that when Andy gets here, there are going to be massive arguments about it. The house is nice though, and as last year, my bedroom is the nearest to the kitchen, but further from the toilet.