Life'll kill ya

(Begins August 18th, 5am- written over four days)

If I wear glasses with an orange tint, then I don’t look too pale in the mirror. If I don’t look when I use the toilet, then I can pretend my piss is clear and that I’m well hydrated and healthy. If I don’t make eye contact when I look in the mirror I can pretend I’m happy, and if I pretend I’m happy then I can postpone the crushing sense of desperate depression that washes over me at the most inconvenient times. People ask me a lot lately, why are you back on the drink? What happened to sobriety? Didn’t the Doctor tell you you’ve got liver damage? Well; ‘Show me the man who is both sober and happy, and I will show you the crinkled anus of a lying asshole’ – William Burroughs. I struggle to stay stable at the best of times but in the current climate, happiness and stability seem less and less attainable without the aid of substances. The moments of laughter and bliss are fewer and further between than ever before, and the medication I am prescribed by the Doctor doesn’t quite seem to be doing the job it used to do, when things were a little brighter and the future felt like something worth waiting for. Now? Well in the immortal words of Warren Zevon, my shits fucked up. The werewolves of London are out in full force and this Studebakers broken down again.

It is 5am. I am listening to Warren Zevon and drinking Wild Turkey 101, cut with a little cold water (three parts whiskey, one part water). I’m listening to WZ on Spotify as opposed to vinyl. I have the record but I broke the needle a year ago in the middle of a drug binge and haven’t bothered to get it fixed since. It’s on my to do list, but like most things on that list it remains undone. For dinner I had a Chicken and Ham salad, in an attempt to trick myself into believing I’m moderately healthy. Right after I got done eating I took a couple of codeine with a large glass of Glen Moray single malt. The irony is not lost on me. I would like to be reading, but I’m too unfocused and too drunk. It’s been weeks since I sat down with a book and escaped into its pages. As I said before, I am always more depressed when I’m not reading. But honestly I’m too restless and tired – (yes, I know those two things conflict, but anyone who suffers with mental health and addiction will understand how the two can coexist).

Aside; My music stops, and someone is trying to sell me something I don’t need. It depresses me. I decide to take some Valium and go to bed. I will finish this piece tomorrow. Remember to upgrade to Premium.

It is half past two in the morning and I have an alarm set for half past ten. I’m working from twelve until close (around eleven hours) tomorrow, so I’ve taken it easy today. I’ve had five glasses of whisky and I’m nowhere near a little tipsy. I’ve eaten dinner, been to the supermarket and done my laundry. The things I need for tomorrow are already in a bag and my clothes are hung out with clean underwear and deodorant waiting for the morning. My phone is fully charged and my bed is made, ready for me to take to it. This is as close to prepared, as close to stable as I get. I have a lot of aches and pains and I know they’ll all be worse in the morning. I’m going to try and sleep soon but being relatively sober and having only gotten out of bed at 6pm the evening just gone, I know it’ll probably take me about two hours to properly fall asleep. So I’ll have six hours of sleep before I get up for eleven hours of work. It’ll be a busy day tomorrow, with the governments eat out scheme in full swing and I’m the manager on shift from open until close. I have been responsible to a point in abstaining as much as possible from alcohol today, so that I can be as close to the top of my game as can reasonably be expected given my current physical and mental health issues. I can get through tomorrow with a lot of caffeine, then crash out into a bottle when I get home. I’m not working until 5pm on Thursday so I can eat late, sleep at 6am and stay in bed until most of the daytime is past. All I have to do is get through a (comparatively) long day tomorrow.

Whilst I sit here over thinking every aspect of the next 20-odd hours of my life, I can’t help but wonder if normal people do this too. Do they sit up all day and night thinking about what exactly it is they have to do to get through the next day? Or do they just go to bed, get up and get through it with relative ease? Do normal people have to actively monitor their consumption or do they simply not drink, or not take drugs? I know normal people don’t get up and take a handful of pills to start their day, and I know that mostly they don’t have to carry several packs of pills in their bag ‘just in case’. I know that normal people don’t worry about every little thing that could conceivably go wrong the next day, or the day after, and I’m sure that even if they occasionally do, they don’t let that worry consume them. I wonder what it’s like to be ‘normal’, and I wonder if I’d really be happier as one of ‘them’. Probably not, but it would be nice to find out.

Sleep

Having made it through what ended up being only a ten and a half hour shift, I am sat listening to a ‘writing’ playlist on Spotify and Drinking Wild Turkey. I am very drunk. It has been one of those days; idiots to left of me, morons to the right. I just renewed my Spotify Premium and now have an eclectic mixture of music playing in my ears, whilst I consume my 50 proof medicine. I am almost too drunk to write. Perhaps. No, definitely.

Sleep

It is 4am on the 21st of August. I closed early tonight because the pub was dead. I came home, convinced that I wasn’t going to drink. I lasted an hour. When I woke up this afternoon, around 3, I felt like death. I definitely drank too much last night, lured into a false sense of security being as I didn’t have to go to work until 5. When I arrived at work I felt like I’d been to hell and back on a packed and dusty bus. I was thankful that it was quiet, but being so quiet, the night dragged. 5 Hours felt like 15, and the hangover consumed me. When I got home I showered and put on a show to watch, to distract myself from the craving for alcohol. As I say, I lasted an hour. I have since had five whiskeys. I have eaten a meal (the classic Chicken and Ham salad that has become my go to quick dinner) and spent about an hour talking on the phone to my brother C. He was on his way back from London and was passing my bar, and decided to call me and ask if I wanted a ride home. He did not know I’d been home for almost two hours at the time, and we ended up just shooting the shit; about life and death, Covid and work, love and nihilism and everything in between. He pushed me to finish writing this piece and get it uploaded. He reminded me of the poetry complitation ‘Another Drunken Sunday’ that I wrote and self published about three years ago (he calls it ‘good work’ and ‘solid stuff’ but of course I fucking hate it). For context, here is a short poem from the compilation;

Rain. I don’t know why I love the rain, but when I’m sad it calms me. It’s not for everyone. Some people hide from it; under umbrellas, trees and roofs, and newspapers. I don’t know why I love the rain, but when the world seems too large it comforts me. Some people find it disquieting. Not me. No. I find it helps the noise.

When I cannot sleep, the sound and the smell of it soothe me. Some people can’t sleep through loud thunderstorms. They get frightened. I don’t know why. I love the rain. – W.L

My brother C is a musician and a singer. A very talented one. Once upon a time we were both young college students together, studying acting and enjoying every second of our lives. I used to dream, and I used to believe that dreams came true. I vehemently denied the idea that I’d one day have to join the real world and throw those dreams away. When my parents told me that, talented though I was, I needed a ‘back up plan’ I’d tell them to get bent, I’m gonna be a star! But life does happen. You grow up, and all of a sudden you got bills to pay, rent to make, laundry to do, shopping to buy. My brother C is making a living doing what he loves, and he deserves it. He’s worked his arse off. At some point in the last few years I stopped working on making my dreams come true. I started to drink and take drugs, I stopped caring and stopped believing. The next thing I knew, I had bills to pay, alarms to set and laundry to do. I was an adult, and I was slap bang in the middle of that ‘real world’ I had never wanted to be a part of. My dreams were dead, and all that mattered was getting up for work and earning enough to drink and cover the rent. I stopped writing poetry. I completely abandoned the acting, and although I tried, I was just too busy to finish writing the novel that was supposed to catapult me onto the New York Times best sellers list. I think a large part of it was the potential I was constantly told I had when I was younger. My writing had potential, my acting had potential, I was talented and had potential. I suppose I kind of rode on that potential, and stopped actually working on it. I wasn’t dedicated, I didn’t study enough. Hey, I didn’t need to; I had potential! Well that turned out to be bullshit. Potential is only what you make of it.

At some point I got so caught up in the rat race, in living an adult life in the real world, that I let my dreams die. I can kid myself into believing I’m a real writer because I occasionally post some bullshit on this blog I’ve created for myself. Or that the plays I’ve written or the screenplays or the two subpar books count enough to call myself a writer, but at the end of the day I’m just a barman. A barman and a fantasist. Life ended up getting so real, so busy that my dreams just died. Which brings me around to the beginning of this post, which I started four days ago and am only just finding myself motivated enough to finish. Life will kill you. Both literally and figuratively. In a literal sense, from the first slap and cry we all begin to die. The more you live the closer you are to death. But figuratively (and this is the important part), the minute you start to focus on life, the real world kinda life they tell you you’re supposed to live (the 9-5, the wife the kids the retirement plan and the life insurance) the real you, the idealistic –slightly narcissistic- college student who lived for applause and practiced his (/her) Oscar award acceptance speeches in the shower, dies. And you have no one else to blame but yourself. You swallowed the pills you jumped in the coffin and you lowered yourself into the dirt.

So what do you do? Quit your job and live like a pauper whilst you follow your misguided dreams? Well no, you can’t do that. You still have to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach (not to mention whiskey in your veins). But if I could give one piece of advice, it would be to work at it. Work a little everyday on not dying; both literally and figuratively. It’s taken four days for me to make this very simple point (which just goes to further the argument that my position in life –or lack thereof- is mostly down to my complete inability to dedicate myself to anything) and I am tired. Today was a very long short day. It is just gone 4am and I am drinking Wild Turkey and (still) listening to Warren Zevon. I am emotionally exhausted, and to be honest, if it hadn’t been for my conversation with C, I wouldn’t even have opened up this document. So this post goes out to my Brother, and to anyone who left their dreams in their early twenties in favor of pursuing the bland and basic. It’s not too late. Life’ll kill ya, but it hasn’t yet, has it? - Walter Laurence, On Warren Zevon, Wild Turkey, and Watered Down Dreams.

BONUS CONTENT Rain (Two). It was raining, but the sun was brilliant. I remembered a girl I used to sleep with, when I was a little younger. She would cry a lot, but swear that she was fine. I never understood it at the time, but now I do. It was raining, but the sun was brilliant. She was crying, but she swore that she was fine. – W.L (2017)