How to disappear completely in In which our ignoble friend

I was sat reading just now when I dropped out of the book - I do this recently, fucking meds making me spacey, and the lack of sleep, fran’s side of the mattress is wrecked and she lacks the knowledge of how to suffer gracefully, another catholic skill set / scar - and ran through a conversation.

(I’ve been setting up a safety net with uni services, in case my brain fails, so that I might not run out of road or rope immediately. Fran and I argued tonight about some stuff that I actually care about - there isn’t much, no I won’t say what - and I was imagining a situation in which I was about to be homeless because we’d broken up.)

I was sat in front of some disability assistance officer saying “I should like very much for that not to happen.” The homelessness. The most fay, pretentious, smarmy thing, really. Trying to be cute, make pretty turns of phrase, act better or more or quicker than, all while the ceiling’s round my knees and I’m choking on someone else’s powdered glassware.

I read this, sometime this week.

Make it to the end, it makes a difference. Especially if you were a weird kid. I was a very weird kid, for where I was. Maybe not so much for slightly more middle class places. Wasn’t one of those places.

And I remember, the last time I spoke to a girl I used to know - my first real crush, and one of my closest friends (or at least someone I talked to a lot) for a couple of years - she accused me of being a kind of verbal elitist. She said that one of our teachers and I were the same, that we both thought that using the right, clever word made a difference, made you better.

Maybe there was some of that, although I wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t get on with people there - I did enough drinking, fucking, using short words in short sentences, and general self abasement immediately thereafter to disprove that theory - maybe I was pushing them away because they’d pushed me out. I’ll even accept that such behaviour is counterproductive. But that wasn’t all.

It was fun. It was like dancing alone and precise and unbridled, being exactly the thing. It was, like in the article above, a signal flare. Here I am. Is there anyone else about who gives a fuck? It was armour.

It puts distance, a lens, some artifice, between you and reality. When it horrifies you, and you can’t get away. You don’t have to be trapped, powerless. You can control this one thing. You have some power. You have some choices.

It’s almost dissociative. You are writing, a character speaks.

That there, that’s not me/
I go where I please

I’ve always liked that song. Only just got that angle of it though.

Peace. (I fucking wish)