Scunnered

Tastebuds rebel

Smoked out of flavour

Bringing me soapy

Juices and perfume

Three pints too much

No longer tasty

Switch to another

Flavoursome brew

Too late for me

Niceness has flown off

Left me with staleness

In body and mind

Movember

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Romance Versus Reality

I conducted an experiment recently using the age-old question: “Is this glass half full or half empty?”  Most people promptly opted for half full going on to describe their sunny outlook and positivity.  Much the expected result given my use of a somewhat hackneyed question to which everyone thinks they know ‘the answer’.  However, I posed the same question to certain friends whom I knew had suffered or were suffering still from melancholia.  This time I asked them to describe the glass as they would have seen it when at their very lowest.

“Glass?  I wouldn’t have the strength to look at it far less describe it.” said one.

“It’s a glass of water.  Get over it.” said another.  It seems that melancholics are too preoccupied to comment on hypothetical situations.  What was surprising is that absolutely no one opted for half empty.  Not a single person wanted to be known as a pessimist.  A bleak outlook has become unfashionable.  Or has it?  Spend enough time socialising in any ordinary crowd and you will eventually meet those who wear irony like a t-shirt; the complainers; those for whom the best days are over and the future is a toilsome burden.  In their day the glass was much bigger and the water was beer.  They are the pseudo-melancholic.  Once known as romantics they became the New Romantics and as they got older they got grumpy TV shows and their grandchildren became Emos.  They are everywhere.

 Shakespeare managed to avoid listening to Radiohead or The Manic Street Preachers but he seemed to have met one of their most ardent fans:

“Away from light steals home my heavy son/ and private in his chamber pens himself/ shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,/ and makes himself an artificial night.” (Romeo and Juliet Act 1 Scene 1)  Romeo in his melancholy adds clouds to his misery.  Any parent will recognise the jilted teenager, barricaded in his room, refusing to eat, surviving on a diet of tears and music that reeks of loss.

Every age has their pop songs that celebrate sadness; The Great Pretender; I’m a Loser by the Beatles; What Do I Do Now? By Sleeper in the 90s and nowadays Pink will provide all the angst any teenager needs.  There is and always has been a market for romanticised sadness.  But how does it compare with actual melancholia?  There are marked similarities.  For example, both conditions are incredibly self-indulgent.  They both require a preoccupation or perhaps an obsession with the self.  How am I feeling?  What is happening to me?  Michel Foucault called melancholia a kind of ‘monomania’.  A one-track mind, which will focus only on the problem totally rejecting any solution.

Nostalgia is another factor in both conditions, longing after a golden past, grieving for what has been lost.  But even these apparent similarities contain stark contrasts.

The pseudo-melancholic is indulgent in that their behaviour is self-focused, they isolate themselves quite deliberately.  On the other hand, a melancholic hates the isolation, fears it, will even seek out friendships, parties, crowds and will happily spend their entire bank account buying drinks and presents just to numb that feeling of loneliness.  This very gregariousness in turn isolates them because most people don’t know what to do with such a needy person.  If you’re pseudo-melancholic you isolate yourself by deliberate withdrawal.  The melancholic is ruining friendships with late night phone calls, a bombardment of text messages and perhaps even turning up on a doorstep in the early hours of the morning.  In their desperation to avoid loneliness they, in fact, create it.  They reach out with tainted hands that repel rather than attract.

The pseudo-melancholic’s loneliness, mood swings, tear stained face, are in fact a well-planned advertising campaign.  They demand that people acknowledge their misery.  At root it’s a way of seeking attention.  Look at me.  Join with me in my sadness.  Share my tears.  They seek sympathy, affirmation someone to share their pains, to console them, to agree they’ve been dealt a bad hand.

Melancholics, conversely, have no ulterior motive to their sadness.  They do not and cannot revel in it.  They do not seek to share it, they seek to eliminate it.  Theirs is no romantic, nostalgic pain.  It is the very weight of worlds of misery pressing them down and their only goal is escape either by distraction, sleep or finally death.  Nietzsche said: “The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort:  It helps one through many a dreadful night.”  Every melancholic knows this, has wrapped themselves in a blanket of non-existence and found relief there.  It is in this ebb that glasses half filled become irrelevant.  All effort is concentrated on one thing, monomaniacally; survival.

Thankfully, melancholics also have their bright spots.  There are times when they rise from incapable to very very able.  Able to relate to others, able to see the world as a shining beautiful place to be.  They are the lucky ones, who will weep at the trite emotions of a pop song yet laugh at real adversity with the knowledge that it is beatable and with the wisdom to know how to keep going when the battle seems lost.  I’m beginning to sound romantic.  Forgive me.  I’m still a recovering melancholic.

Am I Too Drunk

Is it too late

when you eye up the glass fridge

and the beer bottles

look like they’re queuing

to get out,

to get bought and drank?

I see them.

They plead like dogs in the home.

Pick me!  Pick me!

And I feel guilty

about leaving them.

Stitched Up

They frighten us

The scarred men

They look like the fights

We managed to avoid

Arouse suspicion

Did he deserve it

Start it, do time for it?

Looks like it

A war we did not

Take part in

Or condone

Fought without our approval

Or understanding

Yet the scarred men

Walk among us

Drink with us

Laugh with us

Begging us

‘Ignore our wounds’

But, we can’t

No, we won’t

Untitled

The time had come.

The preparations had taken weeks.  Apart from preparing himself, Roy had to source the equipment he needed, fund the project, take delivery of the items and yet somehow leave no trace, no telltale sign that could lead back to him. 

He’d faked himself a student card and gone into the university library to use their computers or he’d find a back street internet café, the kind that transients used as they back-packed around the world, making sure he wasn’t stuck in a window, ensuring he could see everything going on but not be seen. 

He had to find a place for the deed, trawling the classifieds, appearing in pubs for one pint only, eliciting the information he needed before leaving, never to return.

He had found a quiet enough place, paid for it in cash using a false name.

The place was clean, out of the way and there would be no strangers blurting through the door.  Roy had made sure of that.  Now the place was ready.  Nothing had been left undone.

He’d gathered the people here that he wanted to witness this event.  He kept them silent.  They held their breath knowing not to cross him as he shut one eye and peered down the scope.  The place was in darkness.  Roy was calm, poised, ready to strike.

The door opened a little.  Someone was coming in, nervously, trying to adjust to the gloom.  The lights went on and Roy sprang into action.  He pulled his explosive, pressed a button and shouted: “SURPRISE!” in unison with everyone else.  His daughter’s shocked look turned to a grin, a moment Roy had captured on camera: “Happy Birthday darling” he said as he handed his daughter a glass of Champagne

Extract from A Stranger's Tears - Get your copy now

I’m visiting a place, a place where my friends and family have already been.

It’s my suicide attempt.

But this time I can see it from the outside.

I understand that it must hurt.

At the time (still at times) I honestly believed with every inch of my being that this was the right thing to do, that this would make everything ok.

I know now that it would have hurt people, I know that it did.  I feel guilty about that but I can’t yet see why they’d hurt so much.

I can’t believe that the feelings I would have if one of my friends committed suicide, the anger, frustration and that aching loss. are how people would feel, how people did feel, when it was me.

I don’t think I’m worth that much emotion.

When I glimpse the truth now and again, it makes me cry.

I still feel I have to earn it.  I feel like my actions can turn people’s love off and hopefully on.

I know that’s not true but I can’t feel that truth and I can’t yet live it.