Sundays, lyrics, rhetoric and other such bollocks.

she was all right cause the sea was so airtight she broke away

she was all right but she can't come out tonight she broke away (Interpol - Stellar Was A Diver)

I hate Sundays. They are tepid days always fuelled with the faint feeling of impending homework or lately, riddled with hangovers. Today, I am in St. Kilda hoping that instead of smoking rollies and finishing the last night’s wine, covered in last night’s make-up, some sea air might convince me that Sunday’s aren’t entirely loathsome. I follow my nose to the beach, passed vegetarian restaurants, dimly lit bars and crab stalls until I catch it - that faint smell of salty air between a mixture of coffee and nicotine that hangs around the cafes invitingly. As I walk down a white-washed backstreet (I don’t know the area at all, I am literally chasing the smell) I see that first glimpse of the sea.

all this time you were chasing dreams,

without knowing what you wanted them to mean. (Jose Gonzalez - Cycling Trivialities)

What is it about the ocean that enthrals us humans so? The mystery of nature perhaps? The seemingly endlessness? To me the it is the day time equivalent of looking up at a starry night sky. (Though it often conjures up childhood nostalgia and the left-over guilt of skipping school to hang around with boys at the beach.) Looking at it gives you that terrible smallness that is so torturingly enjoyable, almost like an out of body experience or a shot of tequila.

we'll cut the whip and lose the anchor

as long as you jump the ride (Joan As Police Woman - The Ride)

All that beauty that we don’t understand at all. A feeling of shallow loneliness washes over me, thinking this, and I quickly change the music I’m listening to… something upbeat… ah, hip-hop.

don’t you go and let the world bring you down (Shapeshifter - Electric Dream)

I fear anything acoustic might Do Me In.

Now that I’m sitting, journal pressed against me, away from the wind, sun probably gleaming off my white forehead I dare to put on something melancholy.

but alas, I cannot swim

I'll live my life regretting that I never jumped in (Laura Marling - Alas, I Cannot Swim)

To maybe tap into some poignant, some trapped genius that may/may not be lurking in my lentil-burger-flavoured-breath. What is the best condition for us writers to write? Between the thirsty hours of midnight and day break? In this indulgent loneliness - when we seem compelled to act on some Sylvia Plath-like desire to drown ourselves? Should we be falling in or out of love? Should we have been neglected by our mothers and have a father complex? Should we have our tongues planted firmly in our cheeks? Should we be perpetually penniless and drunk forever? Or on some sort of Benzedrine high or look heroin chic? Writing is understanding, isn’t it? But I am twenty-one and have absolutely no clue to the workings of the human condition…

I know when you hear these sappy lines

You'll roll your eyes and say "nice try" (The Shins - Pressed in a Book)

Oh, sod all this, where did I leave that wine?

One Year Without Light - an excerpt

“I know you will find some one to love you in ways I can’t.” It wasn’t exactly the words of Mr. Darcy, who she loved, whose male counterparts she idolised on the ancient television at the foot of her bed. But words spoken from the heart are often more simple, less eloquent than those we plan. They left me deflated, waiting for the next response from her, yet her freckled cheeks remained still. I left her there, sitting cross-legged. A stronger man would not have looked back, would not have hoped she would come running to my car, slide into the passenger seat and take my hand, the way she had after so many fights. Or drunk, slurring and hiccupping, reach across my thighs, and I would take back anything I had said to upset her wholeheartedly, not caring her makeup was smudging and her hair tangling in my palm. It was as if all the shouting, all the slammed doors could be summed up in one simple sentence. I felt those heavy words in my hands, weighed them a moment and drove home.

"Beyond Ink" - an excerpt

I THE DECLINE

She had become rather demented around the time her first novel was published. It was a dark, scathing tale about young women living in various poverty stricken conditions. It was hailed by critics, yet its apparent readership was limited to close friends of Madeline’s. Huddled in her loft apartment they lamented over the plights of the characters as if it were their own misery.
It was around this time that Madeline stopped paying her electricity bills. Friends who called often were only greeted by the constantly closed doors. No one had heard from her for several weeks. Not her mother, nor her sister, nor the married cartoonist for the New York Times with whom she was conducting an illicit affair. She had, in a sense, disappeared and no amount of phone calls, nor urging could woo her back. Her friends thought perhaps she was writing her much awaited sequel and as friends often do, soon lost interest in her.
No one remarked that since her book was printed there seemed a undefinable unease about her. No one recalled at the dinner parties where her whereabouts was often discussed quite rabidly, the glint of something-not-quite sane in her pale eyes, that she had lost weight. Or perhaps most disturbing and obvious of all, that her apartment had become filled with notes, taped over doorways, across each inch of her mirror and one solitary note wrapped tightly around her toothbrush. Perhaps they had not noticed, or did not want to.