Exemplars

Awake at 5am – I was immediately very conscious that it is almost exactly 12 years since I got the job at the medical library, over 10 years since the trouble with the threatening yobs began, and 10 years since my dad became so ill that he couldn't really cope from day to day anymore.

I remember thinking once it became obvious that the trouble with the yobs was going to continue, that this would probably take about 10 years to go away, by which time I'd be 50, my life would be past the time of promise and development, and would be more or less over, and my parents would probably be dead. In fact it took 7 years, but in the meantime my parents did die and my health failed.

Given the seven years after 1991, the summer I realised I didn't want to be an illustrator, when I was mostly unemployed, that's the last 18 years of my life, from 32 to 50, wasted – the years of children, of career, of career consolidation. The ten years before were hard themselves, but they didn't feel hopeless.

This is all something I already knew, but for some reason it hit me with great weight this morning, and I became very anxious – how or why I can be anxious about something that is passed, I don't understand. Sad, depressed, yes, but not anxious.

Separately I've realised how normal, how everyday the sexual and romantic part of life is in most people's lives. Because I was on my own so much I didn't notice, but it's utterly normal – it's why there are children playing in the street, young women walking with pushchairs. It seemed something extremely difficult to achieve to me, but almost every damn fool achieves it. It's not necessarily easy and straightforward but it is common and everyday. I think part of the reason that I didn't notice this is because it wasn't happening in front of my eyes, I didn't have a group of friends I saw pairing off, and obviously people don't commonly have sex in public. Even passionate kissing and clinching in public makes other people uncomfortable, the comic response to the sight being "get a room".

So for me at least the evidence of other people's romantic and sexual relationships was implicit not explicit, and I either didn't notice it, or I blanked it out to avoid the pain of acknowledging it.

It's only now, since my mother died and I've connected to some degree with people of my own age again, that I've realised how life works and how late it is.

Martin van Maele

I know very little about Martin Van Maele except that he worked around the start of the 20th Century, but I liked his surreal and violent erotic illustrations from the first time I saw them in a Taschen anthology of erotic art.

There is more available at All-Art








I know very little about Martin Van Maele except that he worked around the start of the 20th Century, but I liked his surreal and violent erotic illustrations from the first time I saw them in a Taschen anthology of erotic art.

There is more available at All-Art

On the Other Hand

On the other hand I might as well carry on...

A Day

Even the porn and erotica don't hold my interest now. this is the third blog I've tried and it's just more restatements of my old, old problems.

I don't even feel sexual excitement any more, just numb or painfully sad.

So this is my last post

Bellmer

Regret

To H

I dreamt about you this morning, just before waking, probably because I was on co-codamol for my extraction and sleeping quite soundly for once - we  met by accident attending for interviews for an MA course sometime in the mid 80s. I was conscious in the dream of somehow being aware that it was 2009 and 1984-ish at the same time.

It doesn't need much interpretation - I'd been thinking yesterday about how well-matched you and P are in life experience and status, and in the dream my mind was imagining the last time you and I might have been more or less equals.

_____________

Almost immediately after waking I remembered how I started playing truant at secondary school. On the afternoon we were supposed to register for Games (I hated Games and PE) I was sent instead to accompany another lad to hospital who had broken his arm. I never registered and was able to skip Games every Wednesday afternoon. From then on I realised I could skip any lesson I disliked or in which there were problems, and I truanted from many classes for the next two years, until I failed all but two of my O Levels and had to re-take them all at 6th form along with "A" Levels.

Up to that point my life was going relatively normally. If I had to name a point when I took the wrong track, that afternoon was it, or more accurately the next games day, when I should have registered myself rather than truanting, was it.

It's not that I'd forgotten this event, more that I realised today what a pivotal point it was in my life. It was the moment when I chose to retreat rather than deal with things. I could have changed the path many times over the following decades, but I didn't, and a time comes in every life when things have gone too far wrong to be put right. I probably reached that point 5 years ago when I began to feel like I do now.
_____________

Another useless insight because it doesn't change my life now and can't bring back all the lost time, experience, and opportunity.

But then again, my deep sense now is that nothing can put my life right or onto any track I would want it to be on.

Which, if I'm open, is an acceptance that my life is over.


B
x

Poverty of Poverties or "Oi! Chavvie!"

For some reason I can't identify I've just realised that the defining problem of my life and my family wasn't anything I've mentioned here, it was poverty. And by poverty I don't mean not having much money, I mean growing up in a family where there was often none, nothing to buy food or pay the rent with, where my parents had to go cap in hand to relatives for loans and hand-outs, where I grew up on overspill estates in the middle of nowhere hearing people on TV and in the street disparaging "council estate types", where my dad struggled to find even low-paid work at anti-social hours, where my parents never had holidays or even socialised because they couldn't afford to. Where hard work and effort went unrewarded. I got to college but after I left college I returned to that poverty myself.

We didn't have a car - my parents know they couldn't afford to run one -  and I feel the same myself to this day.


I sometimes call myself "3rd Generation Underclass Shite", is more or less true, it's just that I don't come over as such because I'm bright, so can I probably pass for middle class on the surface.

But the exclusion and alienation and sense of worthlessness that goes with knowing that one is powerless and looked down on is grinding and dispiriting, and one is looked down on.

So much of what I feel, so much of my sense of inadequacy and inevitable failure comes back to this strong sense of powerlessness and worthlessness and enforced lack of opportunity and experience and expectation, a sense that I've lost before I even enter the race. I used to have a friend, Shirley, who was black, from Jamaican parentage (she got married, moved to the States, and we lost touch) and we once discussed how hard it is to attempt anything when you feel every hand is turned against you  I remember saying that poor whites get a similar bad deal to black people, it just isn't so obvious, and the similarity goes far deeper than most might realised, in that the rural poor in this country were effectively enslaved during and after the enclosures, when they were driven off the land and forced to sell themselves into indenture just to survive.

But that's a digression.

I'm just noting that a lot of my problems came from being born into and having grown up in actual poverty, like and amongst the people who now get called Chavs, and the diminished ways of thinking and looking at the world and myself remain with me.