Gigs, Gripes and Good Times

Wednesday 1st August 2012

Worked all day. Northern Elements flyer PDF’s made and posted. Only stopped for two sandwiches. One at lunchtime and one this evening.  Haven’t seen the news, haven’t listened to music. Spoke briefly on the phone to Jenni this morning. She should be able to ride her bike in six weeks time. Ironic, just as autumn kicks in. This summer has been the least relaxing I’ve had in years. So much to do, but at least I’m getting paid. Would like to watch something on You Tube before bed. Maybe a bit of Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. Ready for my final sandwich: cheese and tomato toastie. A bit of work-log scrawl and my fourteen hour day is done. 11.04pm.

Thursday 2nd August 2012

First day at Waddy in a month. Printed some flyers for Dominic Berry gig. Have a bit of a headache coming on. Hope we get a decent crowd in for Poetry Jam tonight. I keep forgetting things. Left a bottle of pop on the bus. Was reading the Metro on the way but had to stop coz I thought I was going to puke. I have about an hour and a half before people start arriving. Pleased my cold has cleared up. Gonna have a sandwich and a rest. Select a few poems for jam and that’s it. 5.18pm.

Friday 3rd August 2012

Excellent sets from Sarah Hammersley, Dani Quist and Ian Waugh with Tom Hollingworth last night. Some great jam sessions with newcomers. Haven’t had the room so full for a regular jam night since Harry Zavenbergen was there in 2010. Brilliant to have Viv Wiggins in and Amina Evans in the audience, a bunch of the Easington Writers as well. Great to see Jenni walking unaided, she had a good time. Poem about conspiracy theory went down well last night. Felt really casual just reading as opposed to performing but in Waddy it works. Took nearly two hours to get home but totally worth it.

Today I’m really tired. House is a mess. Pleased I videoed bits and pieces last night, will do a photo album of stills today. Don’t want to write, wrist really sore. Need to chill a while today but need to work also. Would like to go for a wander, maybe down the river. Can’t ride though. Wrist stinging. Bastard, bastard. Hate RSI. Want breakfast. Won’t be using mouse for a while. Really need to put the pen down. 9.52am.

Very sickly, took ages to do the morning pages. Did email checks, wrote a thank you blurb on facebook wall for last night’s Poetry Jam. So pleased with the turn out. Did edits of stills and uploaded. Re-edited the logos on Northern Elements flyer. Finally got the event wall made. Hopefully we’ll get a good turn out.

Been listening to Depeche Mode quite a bit today. First heard them properly in 1989/90 on the way to and from a works trip with Hadrian International to the National Exhibition Centre giftware trade fair in Birmingham. Bought Violator when I returned and loved it. Never bothered going to see them live coz they used backing tracks but great on record.

Hands twitching again. Got a writing marathon to plan and flyers to print. Stressed and tired. Chasing my tail. 9.34pm.

Saturday 4th August 2012

Woke up feeling a lot better today. Think the nausea experienced was due in part to adrenalin from the Poetry Jam gig. I need more exercise. Been stuck in front of the computer for most of the week and have put on nearly half a stone. Half a fucking stone. Will try not to overeat in the next few days. I don’t seem to have taken a proper day off during the week at all since the end of the workshops. Will be able to take it easy today but next week will be another busy one. Abstaining from computer activity from the moment I switch off this afternoon till tomorrow evening. Looking forward to a lazy time for twenty four hours. Me and Jenni are going to Inua Ellams outdoor theatrical spoken word show in Newcastle this evening. Have to be at Live Theatre by seven. 1.57pm.

Sunday 5th August 2012

Last night we saw Inua Ellam’s Night Watch down by the Quayside. The setting was brilliant for it. Like a run-down warehouse dockland scene. He did the show wearing a head-mic and was very physical. He had percussion and wind instrument backing. The rhythms were great. One section was in rap, the narration was good. Pleased the book was on sale coz I wouldn’t otherwise remember it. A great turnout.

Day at Jen’s place. It was good to find the little note she left in my rough book this morning. I wrote my usual rambles then went back to sleep for a while. We ate crumpets with lemon marmalade for breakfast and chewed jelly babies till lunchtime. Watched ‘12 Again’ on kids tv till half two after a chicken curry. Big rain came which leaked into Jen’s room a bit. The quayside in Newcastle flooded. The shit weather set us up perfectly for The Day After Tomorrow film about climate shift in America that pitched parts of the country into an ice age. Some of it was a bit unbelievable but a good film. We intended to follow it up with Watchman but at two and a half hours decided to leave it till next week. So we caught the news which was basically the Olympics plus a couple of world headlines. Then four episodes back to back of The Big Bang Theory. They are on freeview so often that even in the short time I’ve been watching at Jen’s I’m starting to see repeats. On the bus home I read Inua’s Night Watch and tried not to think about the state my house might be in when I got back this evening. Luckily no sign of flooding in Consett and my place was fine. Now I’m chilling with a bit of Depeche Mode on Spotify before looking at some tv stuff on iplayer then bed. 11.19pm.

Monday 6th August 2012

For the last few days my wrist has ached whilst writing. Today I’m trying to go slow and keep it straight against the page holding the pen further up and find this seems to be working. Dreamt that I placed a passage from Shades of Grey on a bridge in Durham and David Ike jumped into the River Wear. Then a conversation with my cousin, who is a vicar, about all the tattoos she’s started to get. Neither of these dreams had much basis in reality – I’m not an Ike fan, although I’ve watched a few of his interviews, and I only see my cousin once every seven or eight years.

Didn’t go to bed till half two this morning but was awake at half eight so here I am morning paging.

I gave Jenni thirty-two quid to get me a train ticket for Edinburgh for the Buddy Wakefield show on 23rd August – that way she can set the schedule to suite herself, as I’m okay with any train there and back.

I’m not a travel person. There has to be a real reason for going places beyond holiday. I don’t own a passport nor do I intend to. I don’t have a divers licence and at present don’t have a birth certificate because someone from a degree course agency took it away for I.D. verification. I wonder when it become compulsory to carry I.D. Probably when paper money is phased out and that will come with the microchip system that the New World Order want us all to have. Whether this is a real issue or not remains to be seen. Anyway, at present I am on an easy ride so I don’t care about much today. Okay. 9.11am.

Tuesday 7th August 2012

It’s alright if you fancy an ice-cream instead of a freakshow. We’ve been to the cabaret many times, now let the goo green dayglo just flow through your toes and the sea air will fill your nose and soothe your throbbing skull meat. Let’s go eat ice-cream and savour the dream. It’s alright to sit in a puddle of love on the cloud behind the wizard in a Kentucky Fried Easter parade so long as you know which side of your brain your circumstances are best buttered. Keep it small and sociable and the world will let you carry on with the dream. Do you read me. Over. Sometimes a hot bath solves almost everything. Just get on the right wavelength and we could all live happily ever after. Until the next maniac breaks the signal.

Black flecks of lint on the beige floor. A pile of books by the bed. A pile by the printer topped with The New Diary by Tristine Rainer. Then there’s the Gospel of Filth by Gavin Baddeley with Dani Filth; and The Pleasures of the Damned by Charles Bukowksi. We have a red A6 noteback. A4 journals. Black socks, brown envelopes. Assorted white print-outs. There’s yesterday’s black joggers on the back of the swivel chair. An overflowing wastebasket has dead batteries, banana skins, tissue paper and snot, false starts and pubic trimmings. The cupboard is crammed with nonsense. The drawers groan under the weight of bureaucracy and home-recorded VHS. The bookcase has Selby, Nietzsche, Rollins, Atwood, Miller, Beckett, Walcott, Olds, Henri, Hattersley, Michaux, Cave, France, Armitage, Dobyns, Gira, Lunch, Crews and more. The bed has a tall thin man about to exit. Outside the bin men know nothing of the order or chaos they’ve overlooked. 8.51am.

Wednesday 8th August 2012

Low ceiling, strip lights, large makeshift plywood work surfaces. About a dozen people in there all wearing the same bright orange and green sunburst t-shirts, all packing orders of action figures, comic books, DVDs and novelty sci-fi items into plain brown boxes ready for despatch. The only person I recognize is Sharon Brown from Blackfyne Comprehensive. The rest are all geeks with goatees and ponytails, balding blokes, tattooed skinny guys and big gutted bulldozers who live for fantasy. I go to the guy with the invoices and he gives me small orders, only a few items on them. It’s a friendly but claustrophobic atmosphere and I wonder, What the fuck am I doing here?

In another dream I drop a ceramic lamp and it smashes on the pavement - that’s another sixty quid to pull out for a replacement on top of the cost of contact lenses. In a grotty terraced street pub the locals are talking about a missing delinquent. Most of the blokes in the bar have slept with the kid’s mother. Seconds later I’m crawling under a wrought iron gate in a castle wall. The guy behind me has a green swirl tattoo down the left side of his face and complains about putting on weight since the last escape. He has bicycle oil on his hands and says, It’s no use - time to pay for a way out.

It’s a nice surprise to wake to a stretch of open floor instead of books and papers and other work junk that covered my room this time yesterday. It’s good to be catching up on my workload.

Sleep goes so quick. Doesn’t seem so long since I turned off the computer after a couple of hours watching Jesse Ventura’s ‘Conspiracy Theory’ tv series on You Tube. I think it’s great when he wipes the floor with mainstream anchormen. Some might wonder why I focus attention mainly on America. At present I’d say because they snap their fingers and the world seems to jump. I want to see where the next catastrophe is going to come from. But I’ve always been drawn more towards American literature and alternative music than home grown culture. Some people who have been to the States say I’d love it there but I reckon I’d hate it. Most of the material I like is actually tearing strips off the place, not bigging it up. I seem to be programmed to nitpick. I’d be bored in Paradise. I want to understand the nature of calamity.

The sun shone brightly yesterday. I stayed indoors and got on with my work. Maybe today I’ll take a walk. Something always sidetracks me these days. Ah well, never mind. 9.14am.

I am looking at the pamphlets and collections I’ve published or appeared in or helped come into being and it makes me smile. Sometimes we don’t take time to reflect on what we’ve achieved. Of course it’s bad form to simply rest on our laurels but on the bad days when things seem hopeless, we often forget just how much we’ve done and how far we’ve come. So it’s great to see Reflecting Hurt on the screen. It’s amazing to read the intro to the Waddington Street Writers  anthology The Great Dinner Expedition and remember sitting with that strange title and agonizing over endless sentences – how it took a group of five or six of us two or three sittings to come up with a piece that encapsulated the contents – and, during out public readings could be used as a fantastic set opener prose-poem as well. It’s good to see magazines such as Smiths Knoll that published a list poem about security. It’s nice to remember the workshops that led to a service user at the resource centre getting her debut collection of poems together and the amazing turn out for her launch in 2009. It’s great to remember the naivety of my early twenties and the stubborn determination to make a paperback book of angst. And what about the fantastic artwork by my good friend Stephen J Clark – his creativity draws people to a table. His creativity cracks open the subconscious. I am looking at the best part of twenty years of words. Words that have been scrawled, typed, pulled apart, pruned, twisted, tweaked or simply thrown against a page and somehow miraculously managed to remain as they fell and resonate… I have good days and bad days. I have weeks, months of thinking, what’s the point in trying to do anything? Looking at what I’ve done instead of agonizing over what I think I need or want to do shows me that it’s all part of a process. I am pleased I made time to take stock this evening. Feel good now. 8.52pm.