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...

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...