Category: Uncategorized

Being homeless is not much fun.

This is Gabriel, who is homeless and bathes in the Los Angeles river when things get stinky.

I’m not that homeless, but when you’re between moves, pissed off with your parents, and your girlfriend is in the throes of those sorts of issues of temperament that come about roughly once a month and subtly infer you should get the hell out of her face, that pretty much qualifies you as without home.

And like i said it’s not much fun. Until now.


Enter the…


HOTEL IBIS EXCEL LONDON DOCKLANDS

A stone’s throw from the delightful Canning Town roundabout and only accessible by four lane motorway, the location leaves everything to be desired. But with three hours notice it remained the only place with a vacancy in east London, and weighing up the situation, seemed a superior option to hitting the streets or braving the lair of the aforementioned fire-breathing dragon.

And let’s be honest Ibis has a classy ring to it.

Two hour’s bike ride along motorway towpaths cutting through weird parts of London I didn’t even know existed got me to my destination. I breezed through the double doors and hit up reception with the nonchalance of somebody checking into a hotel, on his own, in his hometown, for no real reason. The place didn’t exactly ooze atmosphere, but I could tell things were just warming up.

The elevator stopped at the 8th floor, i stepped out, hooked a left and saw this.

DEJA-VU motherfucker.

Shit just got freaky.

I Usained it to my door and fumbling around with the keycard like a girl for two minutes I calmed down, summoned a milligram of coordination and finally got inside. There is nothing quite like the feeling of opening a door to a hotel room that you have booked, for yourself alone, in your own hometown, for no real reason.

All the mod-cons yo. Bathroom capsule with power-shower, tv with up-to-date adult movie selection, high-speed internet, sick mood lighting, no view whatsoever. My night was licked. I spent the next two hours doing all that shit you could never justify in a million years doing within the confines of your own home, but feels like the only shit you could possibly get up to within the environs of a hotel room.

When that got repetitive I spruced up and hit the hotel bar.


Things had not warmed up. Not even remotely.

I was certain the man left of centre in the blue shirt was either made of plastic or in rigor mortis. In the time it took me to work my way casually through two jars, he didn’t move once. Still, when in Rome.

As the cold gold inched its way slowly towards my dome it dawned on me that a lack of atmosphere that acute was severely endangering my health, and it suddenly made sense that the only guy in there was dead or made of plastic. So i got up, checked that the guy was actually plastic – he was dead – and braving the freaky corridor arrived back to the sanctity of my double-room. I spent the rest of my night nonchalantly watching the paralympics from the comfort of my polyester sheets.

Lincoln once said that good decisions make you feel good and bad decisions make you feel bad. The next morning, superbly well-rested and with a disturbingly wholesome spring in my step I bounded out of there feeling like the King Of The World. I can’t quite put my finger on what brought about this elation, but something tells me it’s that indefinable X-factor that is just simply trademark Ibis, the very same thing that made that place more than just a hotel, that made it a home away from home, and more than anything a home for the homeless.

The questionnaire says more than words ever could.

Ibis you’ll be in my heart always.

Next stop, loyalty card.

Everyday is littered with tell-tale signs reminding us of the unwavering passage of time. One such sign I find particularly affecting, is how far I have to scroll down the DOB year list when I’m buying plane tickets or whatever. It’s not good. Also, Discmen.

Another one I find a little stinging, is that the film Cliffhanger is so close to my heart.

Anything you watch when you’re like eight is going to have a profound affect on you, and my brother and I wore the tape in this VHS down to the nub. But the above looks so old it could be a retro Bond poster. And that makes me feel old. I envy the youth of today, with their angry birds and their snapchat and most of all their attention spans.


But no youth of today has ever watched, or will ever watch Cliffhanger. As a result, no youth of today will ever be able to describe the unbridled joy of finding the best acting performance of all time, hidden within the first five minutes of this staggering bit of cinema.


It concerns the – in almost all respects – pretty tense scene when the lady falls from the trip-line.

Strange the way Sly’s triceps can’t take the weight of an 8-stone girl, but plot inconsistencies to one side, it’s the performance of Frank the helicopter pilot that is worthy of closer inspection.

As the scene nears its disturbing finale, Sly is doing his absolute worst to keep hold of this girl who’s about to fall to her death. Looking on from the side is the husband of the lady, some hench rock-climber with even less acting prowess than Stallone, and our aforementioned man Frank.


And it’s the performance of Frank the helicopter pilot that steals the show. While this lady is very evidently on the brink of death…

Frank is absolutely creasing himself.

Check him out.

Seriously just watch the scene.

At 0:15 he’s just warming up, but it’s on 1:10 – as she’s falling – that he’s in absolute hysterics.

I don’t know if Universal weren’t paying him enough and he’d decided to botch the film in the only way he knew possible, but I mean how else can you explain this behaviour? I’ll tell you one thing. At that moment in time acting was pretty low-down on the list of Frank’s priorities.


My brother and I used to spend days rewinding and watching this again and again and again. I love the fact we weren’t alone. Someone uploaded the same scene having hit upon the magic too.

You said it brother.

So am I buddy, so am I.

*

So to all those ragamuffins born two decades after me, I can’t play angry birds – I could but I won’t – I don’t know what TickTock is, and I won’t live to see the 2070 World Cup final. But I can recall the unbridled fear of buying a porn mag, and I can tell you about Ralph Waite’s frankly unbelievable performance in the first five minutes of Cliffhanger. And that makes me feel alive.

Somebody recently wrote an article for Vice about the irony that 85% of his muslim brothers who wholeheartedly called for the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, had never actually read The Satanic Verses. He ended it with the sentence, ‘The Satanic Verses is to Muslim intellectuals what Infinite Jest is to hipsters. It’s on everyone’s shelves, and they all have strong opinions on the author, but most haven’t read past the first 30 pages.’

Bulls–eye my brother.

As you can see from the above copy, I didn’t get past the end of page 2. But like many people rolling around Hackney with no socks and shoes on, I do have a weird interest in the author of the book, David Foster Wallace. In the words of the Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky who followed him around for a week in 1996 at the back end of his book tour:

He was six-feet-two, and on a good day weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through school, wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated, went to writing school, published a thousand-page novel aged 32, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California’s Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

They recently made a film about this exact encounter, the week Lipsky spent rolling around with Foster Wallace interviewing him, called The End Of The Tour. It’s totally brilliant. Try and watch it.

Given our generation’s newfound affinity with an attention span most akin to that of a housefly, the following is going to be a long-shot. But save it for a rainy day or a cycle-ride or an especially uneventful afternoon at work. It’s an interview with David Foster Wallace’s sister Amy about her brother, and it’s amazing and heartbreaking and an insight into an incredible mind.

In 2005 he went to Kenyon College to make a speech to the graduating class of 2005. It was recorded, and now known as ‘This Is Water’.

It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard I think. And reverberated around in my brain for weeks afterwards. It touches on many things, and in twenty minutes there doesn’t seem to be a sentence out of keeping with the message of the talk. His voice is so calming that it wraps you up in a blanket and takes you smiling with lids half-closed every step of the way.

About the things staring us in the face, right under our noses, to which we have become so accustomed, we are no longer able to see them. He speaks of the importance of trying to see these things again.

There are two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys.. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other one and goes ‘What the hell is water?’

P G Wodehouse, the guy who wrote Jeeves&Wooster, was also a golf obsessive. Amongst a multitude of references to his favoured pastime, he wrote the below.

The man who will go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only the eyes of God are on him, and play that ball from where it lies, is the man that will serve you faithfully and well

Quite asides from golf, the interesting thing about this is the idea of how we act when we know nobody is watching. With the knowledge that only the eyes of God are on us. And whether what we do in these situations differs from how we might act if we knew we were being watched. What do we let ourselves get away with. Would we play the ball from where it lies, or would we shift the ball to an easier spot, from where to lift it seamlessly onto the green.

All human interaction is an act of sorts. If you didn’t bend somewhat to the situation in front of you you’d spend your life hitting metaphorical walls at 100mph. There are people who do this but they tend to have extenuating circumstances like autism. People who bend too far tend to be slightly creepy. When someone is telling you everything you want to hear, you don’t believe a word they say. At the end of the day all we want is honesty and something real. Someone telling you every word you want to hear might be nice, but is slightly confusing.

There used to be an old function on Sky Sports called Player Cam. It gave you the option to ignore the game and just follow a single player of your choice running around the pitch, most of the time nowhere near the ball. It got boring after about three seconds but it did give birth to an idea.

The idea of Player Camming people.

People in the street. Your friends. The idea of watching them when they don’t know they’re being watched. To keep on recording after they think the cameras have stopped rolling. To keep your eyes trained on them when they think only the eyes of God are. Because this is when their guard is down and their act is over, when you get them at their most real. And you see the really weird shit.

Stuff they would never let you catch them doing in any social situation. Watch them while they wait at the bar getting a round of drinks in. Watch them watching tv. Next time you see them in the street stop yourself from bounding up and saying hello. Stalk them for a few minutes. See what they do and how they act. By the end you’ll have a pretty good idea if you still want to bound up and say hello at all.

This is one of the benefits of good friendships. And the greatest benefit of relationships. How they are under God’s watchful eye and how they are with you, become one and the same. You’re let into another person’s world where that person no longer gives a fuck, and is just one hundred per cent themselves to you, day in and day out. No longer trying to impress you, no longer trying to hide themselves from you. They’re so comfortable in your company you might as well not be there, in this situation you really are the equivalent of the eyes of God. Which means you get them all, the whole of them. The bravest and most generous gift they can give. What’s more, the gift is yours. No-one else’s.

What Robin Williams called the good stuff.

‘How did it get so late so soon?’asked Dr Seuss.

This post comes with its own soundtrack. Hopefully by the time you’re nearing the end, the bridge around the six minute mark will kick in, where all the horns come in, and your head will explode. That’s the idea.

The winter that bridged 2016 and 2017 passed by more quickly than I can ever remember one passing. I mean this morning was bone-curdlingly cold, I’m not heralding any freak arrival of spring. But seeing as how a whole lot of life is lived in the anticipation of things, I’m surprised how fast the moments themselves went by, how quickly the future became the past. It’s like Christmas and New Year got all Keyser Soze and, like that…

… were gone.

Some old greek guy once said that in childhood, the days are short and the years are long. But the older we get, the longer the days draw out, and as the years go by more quickly the shorter they seem. Which could be down to an increased lack of fascination with the world. As children all things astound us, and the nature of fun being that it flies by, this means the days pass by in the blinking of an eye.

But the older we get, with the responsibilities we take on, the routines we establish, the formulaic nature of our years pass without much to distinguish one from the next. And as we enter old age as happens when not much is going on, time drags. But because the years themselves go by with less life-enhancing content, they morph into one, so the polar opposite pattern from childhood emerges. In old age the days are long, and the years short.

Which must be why the armchair pipe and slipper brigade deem it so important to remain childlike in your perception, to do your finest Peter Pan impression around the clock, to prolong a fascination with things as much as you can. To make each day as memorable as possible. Doctors tell us that – illness to one side – the one thing that kills us far more quickly than old age, is loss of enthusiasm.

But asides from upping sticks and seeking out the ends of the earth on a pair of roller-blades, how else can we slow the speeding juggernaut of time? As memory-forging as it would undoubtedly be, you can’t spend your entire life blading across the Australian outback.

The answer….


– d r u m r o l l –

… is to keep a record of it.

That might come across a bit PG13, but a concrete way to fight time is to fight loss of memory. And our memories are so bad we need all the jump-leads we can get to kick start them. It’s no coincidence that one of the most famous works of world fiction called itself In Search Of Lost Time. I haven’t read it, but I know enough to know Proust was bemoaning the tendency life has to go all Keyser Soze on us. And the idea of memory as a means to combat this.

Because without memory, what do we have? If we can’t make sense of the past, we’re zombies. That’s why nights out when you can’t remember anything are so debilitating. You wonder where your life went. And that’s going to a lot more when we’re older. People who say all that matters is the present man are right only up to a point. Live the present like a gee, but if you don’t log it, how can you refer back to it. And that’s the point. To not let your life pass you by without taking time to check yourself. Before, during, and after you wreck yourself. To nurture memories you can later bask in.


Reading yourself back you realise how much you change. You get to trace your own evolution.

*

When you travel there’s a sadness you take with you. Even the most indelible experiences have their melancholy because the further afield you go, the less the probability is that you’ll ever go back there. Below is a photo of me on a stretch of road in the Andes mountains in Argentina on a bicycle trip.


I’d never felt more alone in my whole life. I wasn’t lonely, but I’ve never experienced deeper solitude. It was deafening. I was miles from anywhere, I hadn’t seen a car for about a day. As the sun set, for half an hour I went a bit cuckoo. I was overcome with this unquenchable energy and ran all over the place, screaming out across the vast mountainous emptiness like a fucking weirdo.

I know I won’t go back there. I won’t ever walk down that stretch of road again. An friend of mine told me once about the necessity of leaving yourself behind. You leave parts of yourself everywhere you go, little bits of yourself that you scatter here and there. They are yours to leave, this person said, and somewhere deep inside you know you need to leave them. In order to grow. The fact I won’t ever go back to that place shouldn’t bother me, because a part of me is still there, by that roadside, running around like a madman. And in my head, whenever I want, I can go back there.

*

This year, for the first time in my life I’ve kept a scrapbook.

I’ve written diaries in the past, but I’ve now started a discipline I can imagine continuing for good. The joy I’ve already taken from rereading the last 8 months of my life has surprised me. It’s time well spent. When I finally join the armchair pipe and slipper brigade I want to have piles and piles of scrapbooks. It’ll be like the richest dvd collection in the world. I can’t think of many better ways to while away idle days than by rereading your life, and discovering anew this person you’d forgotten. This might sound a touch self-indulgent, to spend hours alone with a book, written by you, about you, reading about yourself. Like a dog eating its own tail.

But to make sense of the world, it might be just what we need.

In a film called Elizabethtown, Kirsten Dunst spends a fair amount of time doing an unimaginably annoying thing. I would’ve lost my shit with her ten minutes into our first date. When she sees a moment she likes, she raises her hands to her face, making an imaginary camera with her thumb and index finger, and takes an imaginary photo.

But she’s on the money. It’s actually what I’m getting at. If we don’t take time out from life to log moments and situations in our heads, or in scrapbooks, or in diaries, we won’t be able to understand our own evolution. We’ll wake up wondering where the hell it all went.

The joy in rereading these moments is that you travel back in time and get to hang our with your younger self. You’ll be amazed by how much you change. The point is, we have to trace our evolution. We have to eat our own tail. If we can never understand why we’re here, at least this way we’ll come closer to understanding who we are.

On those rare occasions when one pipes up with an opinion one has put some thought into, the result of a few idle hours of concentrated daydreaming, something on the whole a bit more meaningful than your sandwich-preference at Pret, I’ve found that the manner in which people respond to your waxing can be split up into six different character types.

*


The first type is the what the fuck are you on about type.

The look your five year old might shoot you when he clocks the topic of his bedtime story is fiscal policy in the upcoming US elections, or the reaction to removing the Sky remote from the clammy hands of some horizontal brother settling in for a Sky Sports News marathon. These people will never get you. But they never professed to. You might never get them. They’re harmless. You enjoy their company but you can’t really figure out why. For some reason inside they make you feel warm and fuzzy.

*

The second type is the yeah I kinda get you but I don’t really give a shit type.

These are the straight talkers, they’ve got the decency not to blank you completely, but they’re not exactly on your tip. They deem your philosophy to be pretty fucking far from the most important thing on the agenda for that evening’s pale ale smackdown. They’re probably one of your oldest mates, ones you made when you were twelve, ones you might not befriend as seamlessly now because you wouldn’t have that much in common. They think you just as stupid as you find them insensitive. But there’s no beef, you’re happy to be different. And they make you who you are.

*

The third is the but that’s completely fucking obvious type.

They look at you as if you’ve walked in the pub and announced on loudspeaker that you can spell ‘dog’ without fucking it up. And then fucked it up. They drink at the shallow end of the sensitivity-pool. These cats are so intelligent they already know everything you have to say. They like to turn discussions into arguments. They’re not overly interested in asking you about yourself, but they do like to shoot you down. They’re drowning in opinions, by far the cleverest guys in the room. So clever in fact, they’ve mastered the art of making you feel stupid. These people are the stupidest of all.

*

The fourth type is the do you really think so type.

The wide-eyed amazement type. The child in all of us. They make you feel like the cleverest people in the world. Almost too clever. Almost Godly. The drawback is they leave you with the sneaking suspicion that if you said the exact opposite, they’d react in the same way. This is a pretty great way to be. Grown adults with the open-mindedness of five year olds. I’d take this person over the previous three any day of the freaking week. These people are heaven-sent.

*

The fifth type is the silent serene nod of the head type.

No words. Perhaps not even any eye-contact. Just a few imperceptible nods of the head, and the hint of a smile. An understanding. These people make you feel everything is going to be okay. They make you feel like you belong at least somewhere. The people you could walk 56 miles along the hard-shoulder to Brighton with. The people you talk to past closing time, the people with whom you’d never think of pre-formulating conversation. The people you can be silent with.

*

The funny thing is although none of the first four might have understood you the way you wanted them to, each of the first four will have someone who reacts to them like number five, like Mr Miyagi. Their number five. The guy lying on the sofa opposite when number one suggests getting a Dominos in during the Sky Sports News break, for example. Or the person staring back at number four in stunned silence with pupils the size of suns.


Everyone has their Mr Miyagi. Everyone can find someone who agrees with them, even if they don’t agree with you. In here lies the endless variety in people, the spice of life. The reason you’ll see someone in the corner you had absolutely no vibe with whatsoever, laughing their arse off to the point of KO with someone else you never had any vibe with. Thank God for that. Otherwise we might all be the same. We might be the sixth variety.

*

We might be… Tom Cruise.

I can’t really figure out who or what Tom Cruise is, but he scares the shit out of me.


There’s no communication there. At all. None.


… so those are pretty much my thoughts on the universe.

Did you hear what I said?

Why do you never clock anything I say?

Tom?

Did you really do all your own stunts in Mission Impossible 2?

What’s with the scientology shit?

Did you love Nicole or was it all a cover-up?

Tom why do you never answer me?

Tom?

Tom?

There is this coffee shop. And a girl. She is sat directly in my line of sight, a few steps ahead of me. From my table to hers would be six steps. I have positioned myself here so I can look at her. She is in profile. And now she is obscured behind a pillar, sitting back against the wall. She is writing. I can tell. I’m perceptive like that. She glances intermittently up towards the window.

Her glances pull no weight. They don’t even make it halfway across the room, before running out of juice and dropping back down to the screen. She is seeing without looking. Up in there she is conjuring worlds. Her notebook is open on the desk, red pen scrawled on top of black pen. A coffee mug is vying with the keyboard for her finger’s affections, but isn’t doing very well. 

She can’t see me. She could if she turned I suppose but she isn’t. She has on no makeup. The kind of face you’d have no trouble imagining old. Her nose is curved a little at the bridge, her eyes burn lazily. No laughter lines. Sweet little shadows under her eyes. Her hair is blonde with streaks of brown and is lapping on her left shoulder like the folds of a renaissance robe.

Her left leg is crossed over her right but still touches the floor easily. Undistracted she types, and deletes, and types, and pauses, and glances, and types, and deletes. Going backwards to go forwards like a rugby ball. Her laptop is now resting on her knee, stuttering arrhythmically under the pressure from her fingers on the keys. Making the light skit off the screen towards me in some blinking Morse code. Tap, tap.

I wonder if I sat here long enough, years perhaps, if I could work out what she was writing just from studying her.

I can make anybody like me. Except clever people. I wonder what we’d say to each other. Thoughts would do more work than words. They always do dickhead. Yeah but even more so with her. We’d give our tuppence worth on long walks on Wimbledon Common. We’d gas about the manner in which things show themselves to us. I’d take no pleasure in agreeing with her. Our sameness wouldn’t interest me.

She smiles at her own internal monologue. She’d be close to her mother. She’d take ages to give of herself. She lets silence speak. She lost big once. Tap, space, tap, tap, tap, tap, space, tap, tap, tap.

I’m not sure this girl cares enough about me. She’s been gone behind the pillar for ten minutes. She doesn’t care. Meet me halfway. I’m leaving now. I won’t ever see her again. People appear in your life just like that, and just as quickly as they come they’re gone again. If I see her again i’ll…

I swear i will.

Does anyone ever sit and write about me. What story do they make up, how far does it diverge from what I am, which me would I prefer.

The unhealthy thing about social media, at least for kids who have grown up surgically attached to smartphone screens, is that they opt for digital connection over the inherently human pastime of hanging out face to face. They’re living in physical isolation but having 58 simultaneous conversations with 58 other cats, all at the same time. In terms of not feeling lonely there is much to recommend this, but also something a little fucked up and matrix-style about it.

Being a luddite with no social media presence can take its toll too. Today is my birthday. It’s 11am and not one person has wished me the square-root of nothing. Here i am crying salty tears into my iced coffee longing for a facebook wall so people i haven’t seen since the 2008 festival circuit can wish me many happy returns. Or write happy days on my timeline, whatever that means.

In the age of reminders no-one has to remember anything, and so the Catch22 of opting out of facile communication with people you met on the 2008 festival circuit reveals its Hyde-side. No-one remembers your birthday. Which is fuel to the fire of the inherent fear in every one of us that we are completely alone. Which we are.

Luckily you still have time to make me feel less lonely.

Send me a text message. I’m on 07786548126.

Something like..

Or…

A compliment goes a long way.

If you want to ask a favour, that too.

If you want to get more eloquent, you could send me an email.

[email protected]

If you’re feeling generous then perhaps a monetary donation.

Barclays
Domingo Cullen
28-00-87
4521724

In fact if you all clubbed together JD have just dropped some old-school Jordan fire.

Surprise drinks, even at this late stage, wouldn’t be out of the question.

The Albion in Islington has a nice outdoor area, in a relaxed setting, and some good beers on tap.

Maybe even a weekend away.

Some fantastic deals here.

Whatever you decide, just make me feel less alone.

You could sing me a song at least.

Go Go GO Go GO Go Go GO

The Godfather of Profiteroles aka Greg Wallace aka Greggie 2 G’s has been absent from our television screens for too long. Thank the Lord then that in little under a week, a new series of Masterchef is back to remind us why Bake-Off is an overrated bunch of turd.

Annoyingly Gregg has reigned in terrestrial tv’s most famous sweet-tooth and has discovered the joys of a morning run, and is managing to look boringly svelte these days.

You know it my brother.

But we all need reminding of the good old days, when the mere mention of puff-pastry was enough to turn Gregg into a gurning wreck. Nights-in as the creeping winter mist enveloped the world outside were never better than when watching Gregg react to each and every desert menu the budding chefs stuttered in his direction, in the way only a man with two g‘s at the end of his first name can.

*

Calvados parfait with mocha tuile

Vodka and buttermilk panna cotta with seasonal berries

Chocolate fondant with green olive and coconut merangue melt

Black treacle tart with spiced ice cream and roasted crab apples

Shitloads of snickers bars dipped in maple syrup

Mary Berry is three hundred badrillion per cent incapable of providing this level of entertainment.

Quite often on pills, on hot dancefloors, I bound up to total strangers because the chemicals have morphed their faces into those of my best friends. I run up to them and hug them. They smile back. They’re fucked too. And it dawns on me the face smiling staring back at me is not the face I thought it was ten metres ago. First off it shocks me, then embarrasses me, and then I realise it’s fine, and lovely because we’re both out of our trees.

Now, sitting here in the corner of a dimly lit pub in Brixton on a warm Tuesday night three days after the clocks went back, there’s a strong feeling of seasons changing and the battening down of hatches and a migration indoors. It’s October, but today it got dark at five fifteen.

Summer was huge and made my mind flip and went on long. And now in the opposite corner of the pub looking across the bar, I see you. Look at you. The slight of your hips. The way they lilt like a seesaw when your weight shifts. The desert boots I don’t associate with you. They’re there, in silhouette beyond the legs of a bar stool. And the line of your very straight nose that hooks into the horizontal that wades into that space above your upper lip, and the hair you don’t let fall over your eyes.

I see you every day. We’re always in the same places. I think that must be because we’re similar. It means we’re similar. There you are. Skipping across the road nowhere near a crossing, sitting in the corner of a plastic coffee place in a part of the city I don’t imagine you being in, watching you focus in on a book you’re trying harder than me to read because words jumble up in your head when you look at them. That’s what makes you so fucking intuitive, and why you scare the shit out of me.

I wonder if we see our friends on pills because in that heightened state we want so badly for it to be them. Because we’re so in love we visualise the people we love the most and we bound up to them.