Autumn Hedonia

Bloc Party - Flux What is it with everyone on Tinder just looking for an adventure? There are people with photos of themselves climbing mountains and eating exotic food and kissing the foreheads of exotic children and swimming in deep blue seas like goddamn mermaids – and they’re still looking for an adventure as though their life is so humdrum and boring.

A letter tracing exercise. Maybe I heard it last night. Singing “ And All That J azz ” for the millionth time. The way my voice is rich and characterful and how it now has confidence in this song – knows it inside out – but is still so rough and unpracticed around the edges. Like there’s a narrow passage down which the notes run, and although my voice follows that passage pretty well now, instead of drawing a smooth, flowing, exact and practiced line, it's like a child or someone with fine motor control problems attempting it. Almost all within the bounds, but shaky and jagged and unsure, too textured and at times a little short of the mark. It made me sad in a way, because I’d hoped confidence was more (all) of my issue, and once I “broke through” that, the voice would follow. But I can’t escape the fact that I have a very untrained sounding voice. So not only am I missing the confidence, I’m also missing all the hard yards that go into molding a trained voice. Like the many

I apologise a lot. For a lot of things. All the time. In fact I do more than apologise, I inhabit my remorse in a perverse drama of penitence and self-reproach. I won’t just say sorry and try and fix the problem, I will say sorry, and sorry, and sorry, and sorry again with more desperate adverbs. I will tell you that it was all my fault, no matter what has occurred, no matter how unlikely the scenario, I will find a way and make a leap of logic you can neither follow nor repute – and blame it all on me. I will tell you what a terrible person I was to have done this thing, and all the awful things that I deserve to have come my way for having done it. I will inform you that I have been a terrible person all along, a truly worthless and defective human being from the very beginning, sinking to even greater depths with each misdeed. I will beg you to never let me be trusted with the responsibilities that have gone so awry, and further apologise for ever attempting to rise above my station

“Inadequacy” You never had it in you Just to give up, rather Than to try your hardest It was too much a part of you Just to give up, rather You held onto that sickness It was too much a part of you Better not to take that risk You held onto that sickness Never knowing if you could Better not to take that risk Than to have that hope crushed Never knowing if you could It is better to fear you won't succeed Than to have that hope crushed Just to find out It is better to fear you won't succeed Than to try your hardest Just to find out You never had it in you It's quite evidently a continuation of the “Better not to have tried and to live always in hope, than to have tried and live the rest of your life in the shadow of your failure.” maxim from earlier.

I am not a hypocrite. My mother is a hypocrite, just like she was an alcoholic; and I revile the two things in the same way, and I have ever sought not to become either. But there is one way in which I am not taking my own advice, one way in which I am not ‘being my honest self’ or ‘living my truth’ and this that story.

This morning I woke up, and out of nowhere I just thought, “I’d really like to write a blog.” I don’t know exactly where it came from. The desire to write again (although I had no specific tale to tell)? To display who I am inside? To have my way of thinking make its mark on the internet? To see how far I’ve come? To be freer and better than I was before on my blog? To see if it really combats depression like I’ve heard writing about your feelings can? To create some pretty new web design? To feel like I was creating something tangible on my computer, some art, to show for my long days sitting in front of this machine? Definitely. All those things and more. But mainly, I just missed blogging. The view from my bed while I thought about blogging again. I used to have another blog. It was called   The Harrington Files , and I was called something different then too. You can go visit it if you like. But it is a bit of a relic, and I think it’s best left that way. I thought about j