The feeling of a splinter in your finger
Whatever whatever whatever.
Hi everyone it’s been a while. I am writing like this because writing like that has proved fruitless. I hope you’re well, I hope you’re still here. All it feels like I do at the moment is work from a chair and ride the tube, so I’m going to write about doing those things.
A few days ago, at Elephant and Castle, I completely zoned out, like, physically as well as mentally. The lift doors shut and before I knew it I was underground. I didn’t notice the lift moving at all, I didn’t feel that it was moving, though I did notice spit on the ground and I still remember it. I also noticed the spelling mistakes inserted by my phone as I type into it. I continue to.
An advert for a coach bag in the station announced it had the power to “unlock your courage”. Or maybe it was just advising me to unlock my courage, bag or no bag. Hard to know what to make of that. I’m trying to go on my phone less because recently social media has been making me want to commit sudden acts of violence and I wish I was joking. On the train I crack and look at photos of my brother in a salt marsh. He looks happy. But did I need to look at that, right at that moment? Hard to know. I can’t focus on focus. The focus and no focus is relentless.
I think about content management systems and how there are none. Instead there is a kind of content lawlessness with no container, so we have to make the containers ourselves. Like, literally. (sorry if this sounds like improv poetry). I see photos of my friends bleeding out of the edited outlines of their body, their handiwork shoddy and visible at a cursory zoom. I wonder why they feel the need to warp themselves to such proportions, but I don’t really wonder, because I know. My tube station is closed due to a ‘lack of station staff’ and for some reason I am lit on fire by this fact. When I ask why I am told to email TFL. The man’s jacket says TFL. I see two CCTV cameras, both stamped with the TFL logo. Is this not TFL. I genuinely don’t know. Systems of management, containers. Things feel really difficult, have you noticed that.
My friend sends me voice notes telling me she has been vindicated over a thing that happened a decade ago and I’ve forgotten the details but I’m happy she’s happy, though she sounds sad. I type this in to my phone and my phone adds spelling mistakes. More work for my fingers. It makes the front of my head ache when that happens, not out of tension but out of frustration.
I walk outside and check my phone immediately. A reflex. November sunshine is obscured by the light that I direct at my pupils. I look up and a woman walks past me in a ski suit. I use my phone to check the temperature. This morning I woke up bleary-eyed and cold and looked out the window and it was snowing so I automatically picked up my phone and checked whether it was snowing. Does this happen to you?
There are so many spelling mistakes being inserted as I type that it’s sort of unbelievable really. They say we are addicted to these devices because they are a kind of seamless portal to information, or I don’t know, why do they say we’re addicted to them again? Is it muscle memory? Either way, they don’t work. I don’t know why we don’t talk about this more, but we don’t. Maybe it’s obvious, or boring. Or maybe I should have a second coffee, or stop drinking the first one. I should probably go outside in the daytime more, but when I do, they close my tube station and I’m on my phone asking it what the temperature is, as a woman walks past me in a ski suit in November.
I haven’t written here for months and I’d love there to be a good reason but the reason is after a while of not doing something you develop an aversion to thinking about doing the thing. I don’t care about reasons anyway, and neither do you. It will be December soon and I’ll break my own rules and go to a party in a matching underwear set that nobody will see, and none of us will think about this.
My kitchen window has possibly frozen shut. Just know that my fingers are red as I’m typing, have tried and failed to unscrew it. I will try again before we’re done here. Well, I don’t know when you’ll be done here, perhaps you were done paragraphs ago.
I listen to Youtubers debate the ethics of a genocide, the death of feminism, the rise of reactionary traditionalism. All of it is so fucking boring. It feels like we are on season 2 of culture, the same characters, some now played by identical but allegedly different actors, stealthed, plot lines meander, we know where we are.
I think I see adverts for suicide as I descend the escalator at Moorgate, but can’t quite believe it. Then sand bags that look like a body between platforms. Then a body that looks like sand bags outside the station. The things that contain us can’t contain us, but they try to contain us, and do we want to be contained. Maybe. How do you slip through the system. How do you have a thought, that burns, that becomes an action. The days are brighter but shorter. Suddenly it is zero degrees, but of course I have to check my phone to make sure I’ve got that exactly right. Just feeling the cold is hardly enough. I manage to open the living room window. The air is cold and fresh. Suddenly an incredibly loud tapping sound as I type, which lasts for a few letters and then dies down again. I wonder - spelling mistake - what kind of warped machine logic would explain that sudden increase in volume. Feeling my strings pulled by bits of metal too tiny to keep track of, pressed into the skin of my fingertip and inspected under the light. Nothing to be seen. Is that paranoia? That’s a serious question.
In Kings Cross station I get a splinter from a wooden fork I’d forgotten in the pocket of my bomber jacket. I can’t remember the last time i got a splinter, the feeling reminds me of being young and I enjoy it, the thrill of seeing it stuck there in the skin. I pull out the splinter with short nails and suck my finger on the platform of the Circle line. Sharp pain is so different to dull pain. Sharp pain feels like something is happening. Sharp pain is better. Maybe. They are naming an overground line the Suffragette line and another one the Lionness line. I have experienced largely only confusing, sexist and painful gynaecological treatment in this country. What do you do with this feeling. How do you have a thought. etc.
I walk over the new bridge between Moorgate Station and Barbican where thin wide puddles are collecting, dark on graphite. Shoes track in and out of the puddles. I imagine the prints of bare feet padding out from the black water and leaving their soft repeated shapes on the granite. Another spelling mistake.
For some reason over past few weeks London’s guts have been turned to the air, roads torn up and clumped with wet tarmac, wires and sand and just dirt, no other word for it, none needed. The crust of dirt that contains every journey, every footprint. I was born over this dirt, does that matter. Does that mean something. Well it means something to me.
I leave the warmth of an owned home to go to my own home to wash my hair and body, which I don’t want to do but I understand that I ought to do.
On the way back I am not surprised to miss the train spelling mistake
A man with his head in his hands, eyes closed, signet ring to the wind.
An online calculator tells me my rent is 80% of my income, as if I didn’t already know that.
I buy an authentic french baguette
and chew on it.