Notes On 27 Hours Without Sleep

Strange sensations, curious dichotomies, synaesthesic moments…

Bizarre phenomena of the physiological and psychological varieties…

To see the sun set then rise then set again in the one stretch - once or twice a month, it seems, is about as much as the mind / body can cope with. More than this - two such stretches per week for three months, say - and the brain rebels, the body says no more!

The sun set yesterday and I watched the dark swallow the room around me, leaving nowt but the phosphorescent glare of the laptop. Afore a man knows where he is the brittle azure wash of the dawn is busy siphoning detail anew from the shadows.

Ah, it was a guitar is what it was. A dresser. A pair o’ knickers, bejeesus.

-The mind lurches left and right with maniacal zeal now and then and the body too tired to heed thon crazed and devil-charged ravings… -

The sun sets and rises and looks set for setting anew, and the street, like these words, like the frames of that film careering past in maddening, insufferable screeches… a tapestry of nonsense is all. An unknowable web of lunacy and …

This, I can’t edit this - not because of any pretensions I might harbour about the truth of the unedited splurge, y’unnerstann, a bullshit notion if ever was one - but because I don’t understand it.

What to cut and what to leave and what difference would either o’ them articles make, pray tell?

The wind rises and the rain bratta-ba-tats from off the window.

Sometime after 2PM - The strip lights in the tube station hollows crack and flicker stroboscopically - faces smile electric, blisters of blue heat rising and popping at the corners of the eyes.

The daytime wavers eerily tween the ceiling and the floor - uncanny shapes appear. A woman with blonde hair and denim jacket - at the door of my room she stood just now but no more, gone…

That paranoia peculiar to this city far as I can tell - stemming from two seemingly incompatible fears;

1 - Everyone Is Looking At Me

2 - I Am Invisible

Everyone is looking at me and I am invisible…

Camden Town passing by and the second sun of the day strewn in streaks o’er the rain-slick pavings.

Fleet Street with thon dragon stood gallant on its pedestal - the City Of Westminster and the City Of London bleeding into other for a time and the words of ol’ Tennyson haunting the brick and the bronze round about.

A black-haired woman smiles at me and I think about inviting her to a gig I’m doing tomorrow night. And if not her then maybe the fella sat there day in, day out in the construction tunnel with the blue sleeping bag pulled up about his shiv’rin shoulders. Irish, he tells me. From Dublin. I give him a cigarette on account of I’ve only the 90p for the bus to my name.

75 MG of Effexor XL and to sleep son, for God’s sake, to sleep…