In Orange County, only poor people ride the bus.

Suburbia, of course. Not a million miles removed from Borehamwood in that respect. There are places where mass transit is effective and places where it exists because some people can’t afford cars. The OC is the latter.

5am and I’m standing outside a deserted parking structure opposite a McDonalds and not much else, one foot in the street while I stare through an intersection like I can identify a bus from some half a mile away by headlights alone. I’m so tired I barely register it even when the gap is small enough to read number and destination, and I find myself thankful once again for how far out of their way these drivers go to stop for passengers. Such a contrast to those moments of London distraction and forgetfulness, where a failure to observe proper protocol invariably results in the bus sailing happily on by, passengers staring down with sadness and a hint of disapproval. Here they slow down if you happen to be standing nearby or even walking past a stop, eyebrows raised in offer of a ride. In California, I have flagged down buses on street corners and in traffic. I have climbed aboard only to discover that I have the wrong change or no change.

“That’s fine,” they say. “Go on and take a seat.”

Like it’s nothing, this something very English in me that is somehow offended by their nonchalant charity.

Understandable, though. Only poor people ride the bus, and poor people are trouble. On my 5am ride through Fullerton and Anaheim, I am very clean shaven and very smartly dressed and very, very white. I carry this off only because I am used to traveling this way, because I am of a species that isn’t quite as alien to my fellow travelers as those overtaking in their SUVs. Each new arrival takes a moment to stare at me, and most end that initial inspection with a small nod of acknowledgment or acceptance or some form of etiquette I don’t quite understand.

I sit back in my seat and watch the street-lights strobe by, the men and women standing at the bus stops and sitting outside coffee and donut shops that are anything but Starbucks. I feel comfortable here, and I find myself craving these small friendships and secret handshakes and murmured conversations in Spanish. So far from the corporate house of cards I stand in day in and day out.

Days later, when my father-in-law makes an off-hand comment about Orange County having a better quality of life than anywhere else, I close my eyes and remember the chill of the morning, the gentle rocking of the bus, the sense of rootlessness and transience.

From the bus to the train station, another world, taking a weaving path through a business park to dodge the sprinkler-spray that tends perfect lawns with blanket coverage so that the cracks in the sidewalk are streams feeding into a gutter-river that keeps the storm drains gurgling contentedly. My night-time wanderings have long since confirmed that these sprinklers - a fixture throughout Southern California - chitter intermittently throughout the night, wasting millions - perhaps billions - of gallons of water on neatly trimmed decorative lawns. Meanwhile, the drought holds steady as the fourth or fifth item on the news all summer long.

Half an hour on that platform, waiting for the 5:55. I grind my teeth while the fingers of my right hand wriggle and flex, form a fist and then abruptly straighten, rub frantically against one another as though attempting dislocation. Half an hour on that platform and I can’t smoke.

A train from LA down into Orange County, a way of avoiding the angry mess of traffic that congregates on the freeways every morning and evening, is an example of an effective mass transit system. By the time I pick up this service, we’re already in north Orange County, and the carriage is full of commuters. This is the white collar version of the bus phenomena, loud and bright and jarring, every conversation fighting to be the most important, the air occasionally filled with high, desperate female laughter from a group seated close by. I receive no stares and no nods. It’s very clear who knows who else, who is in the Monday-Friday Commuter Club and who is not. I feel I’m intruding somehow, a feeling magnified by the fact that there is one person more in this carriage than there are seats. I am the extra.

It strikes me that this is ultimately how I feel about living here, caught somewhere between these warring states of alienation and belonging. Some days are bus days, some are trains. Sometimes I feel differently about each. I like this idea of transience on its own terms, of moving through the world and adapting to different environments, of being able to spend my morning in the company of people who grew up the way I did on my way to an afternoon spent teaching a class about leadership in a retail environment to graduates. I like the idea that I can still do that and be genuine in both moments.

And I feel like that’s slipping away.

Those strange twinges again, that sense of having passed through the looking glass, or at least come close enough to have a good idea what lies on the other side. In Compton, strangely enough. Or at least, strangely enough if you happen to be a young man from the other side of the Atlantic whose only experience of such a place is through the lyrics of West Coast rappers listened to in a fashion that skin colour and nationality dictate be at least partially ironic.

We were on our way to help out with a mass hire, negotiating Long Beach Boulevard in Steve’s SUV; three pale young men and an equally wan young lady with Metallica on the stereo. We found our cross-street lined with hookers, the building where the hire was being conducted surrounded by a fifteen-foot fence, its length crowned with loops of barbed wire.

The company I work for, when they talk about hiring for certain stores, there’s a lot of talk about the ‘market’. It’s hard to hire in a place like Irvine because we pay a shitty starting wage and everybody in Irvine is rich. So the pool of applicants is tiny, but those the stores manage to hire tend to be of a high standard. Compton is at the exact opposite end of the scale. The huge number of potential applicants drives the wage as close to minimum as possible. Hiring people is easy. Hiring good people is not.

For what it’s worth, I say ‘good’ from a professional perspective. Anyone with eyes can see the difference between Compton and Irvine, and anyone with at least half a brain should be able to figure out that the ‘market’ figure in terms of wage is about more than just a glut of applicants.

That glaring difference between my personal and professional politics was never more apparent than when sat at a table in a hall in Compton turning down applicant after applicant within the first few questions, working from my professional criteria and feeling, as the morning went on, the weight of my roots growing ever heavier.

Not that I can compare Burnt Oak to Compton. That’d be like comparing a slap from a drunk to a machete attack from a PCP-crazed sociopath. My point is not about any real or imagined hardship on my part, it’s that they work in the same way.

Only now I find myself seated on the other side of the table.

I should feel happy about that, I suppose. What I feel instead is terrible sympathy and vague guilt and this sense of looking out through my own eyes as this clean-cut, viciously efficient executive I’ve somehow become scythes down applicant after applicant, penning a brief summary of each before applying a cheerfully luminous post-it with an abbreviation of the final verdict.

And I’m good at it. This is what horrifies the internal me, the one huddled in my brain, rocking back and forth. Most of these kids are a bundle of nerves when they sit down. I smile at them, chat to them, relate their experiences to my own. I rephrase questions and pare down answers, start to build examples they can use when they’re struggling, let them fill in the blanks. When their five or ten minutes with me is done, I stand up, lots of eye contact and a firm handshake.

Then I sit, scrawl ‘Turn Down’ on a post-it, slap it on the last page of a guide I hand to a passing helper, already mentally preparing myself for the next applicant.

There’s a flicker in there, a moment somewhere between the handshake and the post-it, where I absolutely fucking loathe everything I have become. Without the Jack and the cigarettes and the constant denial that someday I must grow up, without the thing that will somehow replace all of that being in any position to stand on its own two feet, that bright little flicker - of hope, of hate, of something - has begun to feel like a thing to be nurtured and kept and allowed to grow.

Eight days probably isn’t a particularly significant milestone in the grand scheme of things, but it feels pretty good and I know from previous experience that the first week really is the bitch of the bunch. Progress. I’ve walked more than four miles a day. I’ve worked out for 90 minutes on six of those days. Today I walked the more-than-four miles to work, buried myself in Human Resources for fifteen straight hours, then walked the more-than-four miles home. All this so I don’t have to mark time. I walk blinkered until I adjust, waiting for that earthquake moment, that chemical shift just a few metaphysical inches in some random direction. Real or imagined, it means something. It counts.

Out wandering yesterday, I found myself at a bookstore in the strip mall a couple of miles down the street. I’ve had this idea of writing a zombie novel set here for a while, of taking the local history and twisting it to my needs, of penning the present as though it were entirely real, a first-person journalistic account starring - well - me. At the bookstore, I asked about the local history because the only books that seem to exist are pictorials, all postcard nostalgia and stock images. After much discussion, I was directed to a novel entitled Oil!, by a gentleman named Upton Sinclair. This, my guide explained, was the book that the movie There Will Be Blood is based on. It’s about the oil and the railroad and the way several towns were born in a manner that can only be described as wonderfully corrupt. The place I write from is one of those towns, and I’m finding it very hard to resist that dangling thread.

But resist I will. One of my more recent creative tics is hopping from one project to another, and it’s a habit I intend to break before it really takes hold. If I can write as much as I’m writing right now and dedicate it to to one piece, I may actually finish something novel-length. Or at least a fucking novella, yeah?

Exhausted. Time to scribble some fiction and then take a bath with William Gibson’s latest. Then bed and sci-fi-fetish dreams. Then back to more-than-four.

I’m winning.

There are many things that make me angry, especially when I’m at work. Usually, though, I take them in my stride. After all, “I work for a major retailer,” is a perfectly valid answer to the question, “Do you spend more than 75% of your time interacting with fucking morons?”

Today, for example, I made one of my rare forays out onto the sales floor and ended up helping some customers with their purchase of two fire pits. Now, a fire pit is a fairly sizeable item. It’s also a fairly fragile item. Anybody with an ounce of sense could see that these two ingredients are going to add up to a pretty big package.

So I go to the backroom and help the guys to pull the things down from way up in the steel, then we load them onto flatbeds and bring them up to the front of the store, where I help the customers ring up their purchases. Having done all this, I extend my magnificent customer service to helping them out to the parking lot, where their Camry is waiting.

Their Camry.

Seriously, what kind of brain damage do you have that you fail to notice the difference between the space taken up by two fire pits in full packaging and the room available in your economy fucking four-door? If it was, “Ooh, I don’t think this is going to fit, but let’s give it a try, eh?” I could accept that. You want your pits (’cause it’s not as if you could save yourself $500 with the judicious application of rocks or anything), and a little over-enthusiastic shopping could make anybody’s estimate slightly wild. But this wild? Fuck off. You may as well try and force-feed a kitten an SUV.

Bastards.

Meanwhile, back in the happy, healthy world of Human Resources, something else happened. I was having a conversation about training with a colleague, when he - talking about a particular class - said, “I don’t really think it was value-added.”

Readers, it was all I could do not to push my chair back, vault my desk, and kick him square in the face. The thing I despise most about working for ******, the one thing guaranteed to turn my inner amp up to eleven, is corporate language.

Value-added. Listen, you gibbering fuckhead, an extra chicken McNugget is value-added. 30% more Cheerios for the same great price is value-added. Human knowledge is not, and never will be, value-fucking-added, okay? As much as it may satisfy your inner whore to be described in terms of a product, I resent your lumping me in with that implication. I resent it so much, in fact, that if a genie were to appear and offer me a single wish, I would express a desire to beat you to a bloody, incoherent pulp without a single person ever realizing I’d done it.

Except you.

Man, you know what a blog’s really fucking good for? Quitting smoking.

Late night/early morning, stumbling down the melancholy side of that last alcoholic rise. Ridiculous to say it, to even think it - that I could possibly overcome such deep-set habits, somehow unweave the strands I sometimes feel are the only thing holding me together…

And…well…that was dramatic. Over-dramatic. Melodramatic. I can’t help myself. Giving up exaggeration would be like giving up…hah.

As last hurrahs go, it was a good one. Vegas was fun, and I spent the two days I had spare saying my goodbyes to Mr. Jack, using my accumulated knowledge of the effects of my particular poison on body and mind to peak on that last drink, its edges sharpened by Grand Marnier and Triple Sec. I sipped it on the couch, playing Lost Odyssey, spending this night as I’ve spent most of my twenties; uninspired by the uninspiring.

A strange, light sadness now, sitting here thinking about the cigarette I’ll smoke on the balcony when I’m done typing. When it’s gone, I’ll crush the pack and go to bed without thinking too much about tomorrow. No level ground for a while. Anger and self-pity, all of that.

But I’ll do this, and I’ll do it on my own terms. No twelve-step programs or shrinks. I’ll change my habits, but I won’t change, and I won’t become one of those smirking, sanctimonious bastards whose lips twitch every time someone lights a cigarette or orders a drink…

I can’t work up the anger for a rant. It’s too late and I’m too tired and I have too much to do tomorrow. All I’ll say is that I’m not going to write about it much. To write is to dwell, to dwell is to live, and I’m supposed to be living somewhere else now.

Milestones, maybe. Markers.

What in the fuck am I letting myself in for here?

Strange inspiration in the desert. As much alcohol as I can possibly get down my throat in these remaining days, writing inside my head all the while, building blog posts and short stories and something that may or may not be a novel, a strange tale that starts with a parachute that doesn’t open and ends with a gun that doesn’t fire…

Or maybe not. I’m forever revising.

Coming home this morning, I found myself in the unexpected position of looking out of the window of a limousine at a burned and bedraggled beggar, the question they all ask in his eyes as our driver waved him away and he stared at the tinted windows as though trying to imagine what lay beyond.

Not that I often roll in a stretch limo. This was a one-off treat, a surprise from Jenn because I’d fulfilled one of my life’s minor ambitions that week and she wanted to see me fulfill another.

1. I was at work and a reporter called to ask about a recent change in the way we deal with age-restricted products. “I couldn’t possibly comment on matters of policy,” I told her.

2. We walked out into Las Vegas airport and there, standing by the baggage carousel, was a chauffeur carrying a sign with our name on it.

Small things I’ve always wanted to happen.

Change gathering steam ahead and yet somehow behind, the beast’s breath between my shoulder blades. Got to stop thinking of this as something I’m pursued by, something that’s been running me down on a never-ending home stretch. The thing behind me should be everything I’ve posted about so far, the change a passing of the baton that stretches this ugly fucking metaphor past the point of no return, handing off to a fresh runner with the same face.

Olympics-inspired, I guess. Not like you can switch on the TV without being reminded.

Nothing to write about so I’m writing about nothing. I have a chapter, I think. A starting point.

I need to go and work.

Reason was interrupted by a stupid, drunken evening in Huntington Beach. I didn’t drink that much, myself, but I was swept up in the tide of alcohol my younger colleagues were consuming and - before we ended up in The Black Bull - we made our way down to the beach, where wood and lighter fluid for a fire were produced seemingly from nowhere. There were footballs from both sides of the Atlantic, chairs and blankets, a goal designed for children and some inflatable figures we were supposed to throw the American ball at.

They were too drunk for such things, and while I’ll admit to throwing back a few shots amongst the JD and cokes, the issues I mentioned in the last post meant that I was the second most sober of the group (after the girl that drank water all night). So the games never really took off, but I removed my shoes and socks, rolled up my jeans, and got involved in the simple mechanic of passing and catching.

It was nice. I enjoyed it. I’ve gotten kind of agoraphobic in recent times, and to be amongst people and relaxed, throwing a ball back and forth as dusk crept over us, the constant roar of the sea as soothing as the simple pump and release of throwing the amateur’s equivalent of a Hail Mary out across the sand, laughing as inebriated friends fell over each other to catch it was a good feeling, every bit as nostalgic as the dirty kick I get when I pour that first shot of Jack.

I don’t know if I could have been a real athlete, but I was pretty good as a child. I’ve always been physically awkward, but the trade-off comes in the possession of some odd genetic gifts. I’m tall for my family, 6′3″ in my bare feet, and the combination of long legs and stamina meant I was built for distance running. I was just starting to get good when I discovered girls and cigarettes and alcohol. Likewise football of the kind where you actually use your feet. They’d stick me at the back, count on my size and endless running to distract and unnerve the opposition forwards. They don’t play baseball in English schools, but it would have been fun if we had. I’m ambidextrous, so when we set up for rounders and the lanky red-haired kid came up to bat, the two or three fielders never knew where to position themselves. I’d let them run off to one side, then switch hands.

These were all things I thought about while we charged around on the beach, sobering ourselves up for the next bout of drinking, and perhaps it was that mixture of adrenaline and alcohol that made me fail to notice I’d hurt myself.

That same fucking foot. Three times in the last few years now. A sprain, stretched ligaments, and then…well…hitting The Black Bull for a couple more drinks, watching my colleagues ride the mechanical bull that gives the place its name, and then deciding to call it a night. I felt proud of myself for doing that. It would have been easy to kick out the jams, to take another trip down memory lane, to see just how badly I could scare the shit out of my new American co-workers. It had been a while.

No. Home to the apartment, watching Evil Dead II until I was tired enough to sleep. I’d earned it. A good night.

Later, I dreamed I was in an accident of some kind. I was looking down at my foot, twisted at a nonsense angle, covered in blood. I jumped awake and the pain was real. Reacting as though to a cramp, I rolled over and planted both feet on the floor. A jolt shot up my right leg and I came close to crying out, rolling back just as fast, coming to rest flat on my back, panting up at the ceiling and trying to process this strange injury.

Eventually, I woke Jenn up, and she persuaded me to go to the emergency room. X-rays told them it wasn’t broken, but sprained badly enough for crutches and Vicodin.

Strange combination. I haven’t taken any time off, and hopping around at work on my new assistants has made my entire upper body sore. The Vicodin take the edge off just as surely as they dull the pain in my foot, and the last two days have been spent in an oddly enjoyable state of mental drift. I think too much, worry too little. It’s pleasant.

But not forever. I have decided that D-day will be after Jenn’s thirtieth birthday. We’re heading out to Vegas, and trying not to drink in that particular city will be an exercise in failure. But I go back to work on the 6th, and that’s the day I’ll start. Or stop. Or whatever.

At this point, I suppose it’s fair to say that I can basically tell my story using only nicotine, alcohol, and whichever writing implements happened to be within my reach at any given moment. Like any life story, there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that, but the mundane details are not as exciting as the heady mixture of near-death experiences and transatlantic adventure that got me here.

The question I’m asking myself is about where I go next. It’s a many-headed question, and most of them bite. There are some truths I’m going to have to admit to before we take this thing any further, and I don’t feel especially comfortable sitting here writing about them. But there are things to be confronted and things to be said, and one of the reasons I created this thing a couple of years ago was that I don’t deal with saying those things too well in the real world.

The first is that I have a pretty serious drink problem. I hesitate to use the a-word mainly because these days I only drink three, sometimes four days a week, and it’s not like I roll out of bed and crawl to the kitchen for a shot of bourbon. But those three or four times a week are always a pint of Jack Daniel’s each, and that’s not a small amount of whiskey. It’s not a terrifying amount, I grant you, but it gets a little scarier when you consider that - the vast majority of the time - I drink alone. I’m drinking as we speak, and the only company I have is the cats.

It kills me to say this (and if that’s not indicative of my problem, I don’t know what is), but in order to move forward from here, I’m going to have to stop. I’ve tried for years to restrict it, to pick that one day a week I’ll get trashed, to remove it from my domestic life altogether and only drink when I’m out. It’s time to admit that none of those things has worked, and that my addictive personality is as much the driver now as it was five years ago.

The thing is, it’s not fun. It’s a coping mechanism. Right now, the reason I do it is because I usually work a fifty hour week. When I come home from another day of Human Resources, I’m so tired that all I want to do is recover. So I play videogames or I watch movies or I lie in the bath for hours and just read. All week long, I look forward to Monday. That’s the day when I get home from work, head down to the liquor store, and buy a bottle of Jack. Of course, I don’t work on Tuesdays and I switch over to the evening shift on Wednesdays, so sometimes (like right now) I indulge myself for a second night. Then I do my Wednesday evening followed by early starts on Thursday and Friday, and by the weekend I’m exhausted all over again. I work a weekend rotation, so if I’m on then I grin and bear it and wait for Monday to roll around again. If I’m off, however, Friday and Saturday join Tuesday and sometimes Wednesday and suddenly - looked at from this angle - I’m spending half my week sucking on a bottle of Jack and playing Metal Gear Solid.

In my head, I’m constantly preparing to give up. In my head, every night is the last night. I owe it to Jenn and to myself to do better. Then I go to work and I wear myself out and I can’t quite face the idea of going a whole week without a drink.

Which takes us back to that whole Fifteen On The Inside bit, which - as long-time readers will remember - has been my imaginary subtitle to the blog for a long time. Despite not writing anything of any note in…we’re being honest, so let’s not fuck around…years, I’m still doing the tortured artist bit. My work week is harder than everyone else’s, my sacrifices greater. I’m doing this because I have to, because of the responsibilities I’ve taken on. Etc. Etc.

Golly, I bet that makes my wife feel good about our marriage and the fact that she’s apparently locked into some freakish social contract with a pretentious, spoiled monster who treats a day’s work like it’s the end of the world and would apparently rather spend his evenings in the company of Mr. Jack and Niko Belic.

And there’s the handle, the skyhook, the point of all this. I really, really need to grow the fuck up. I’m twenty-nine years old, for christ’s sake. Fifteen On The Inside needs to be the bad joke it is, not a strange and depressing admission of truth. If I’m going to be a writer, I need to write. I’m not going to be able to dedicate my life to that while I’m making no money from it and wasting my time charming my employers into the continuous promotions that will someday lead me to that mythical place where what I have to do takes up so little of my time for such a grossly magnificent amount of money that there’s room in my life for work, fucking around, and the kind of sustained writing I need to do if I’m ever going to take it anywhere.

Work is a necessity. My salary makes my life possible, no matter how much I hate my job. Writing, at this point, is also a necessity for the simple reason that giving it up would basically cut a large slice from the cake that is my reason for getting up in the morning. So it’s the fuckery that has to go, the many hours playing videogames and watching movies and dicking around on the internet in the middle of the night. I can keep these things in my life, but they need to make a very definite move into minority territory in terms of how I spend my time.

So I need to quit drinking. Only problem is, I have no idea how to go about such a thing. I mean, do I start going to AA? Do I need to see a shrink? Do I hunker down and deal with it myself, despite all prior experience and evidence pointing to failure?

No idea. No idea at all.

I was young when I started writing. As a child, I was ahead of the curve in just about every aspect of my education. Not because I was especially intelligent, but because I benefited from having a sister that was two-and-a-half years older than me. A sister who - let’s not forget - went on to enjoying working with kids as a mentor and advisor. Cath would come home from school and share things with me, and I was a bright enough boy at that stage that I was able to pick those things up quickly and run with them.

The first book I ever read - cover to cover - was a Ladybird version of Jack And The Beanstalk. I read it lying on my stomach on the floor in the bedroom I shared with my sister, sunlight streaming in through the window. I remember an intense feeling of accomplishment and pride, an overwhelming desire to tell somebody what I’d done. I have no idea how old I was.

My best memories of my early years all have that same atmosphere, as though it was one long day I spent lying around in that warm, bright place teaching myself how to understand new words. I did this by context. When I found a word I didn’t understand, I’d store the sentence away and wait for the next time I came across the word. Then I’d compare context and start to decipher the meaning. As a kid, I was able to correctly spell and use words at a much higher level than my classmates. The funny thing was that - because all this learning came from books - I couldn’t pronounce them for shit.

In my final year of junior school (1989-1990), my twin talents were writing and math. In retrospect, both of these were based more in memory than intelligence. I learned to be a critical thinker much later on, and I don’t consider myself especially bright or gifted in the logical sense - a couple of years into secondary school, I was barely average at maths and science, a standard I’ve kept up ever since. But I’ve always had an incredible recall, especially when it comes to strings of letters or digits. And I’ve always been able to remember words; how they work, how they’re spelled, where they fit.

My peculiar math talent in junior school was times tables, specifically the speed at which I could recite them. I could reel off my seven times table, including the sums (Like this: “One seven is seven, two sevens fourteen, three sevens twenty-one…”) in seven seconds. From the same place came a talent for writing short, simple poems based entirely on rhyming couplets. I stood up in front of the class often, and it was always to do one of these two things.

Of course, a talent for your times tables doesn’t get you very far in secondary school, and the fun went out of numbers very quickly when they became homework, became teachers asking you to stand up in class and solve equations. No, better to focus on those things that let me be creative, that let me chase those talents down open roads. Cul-de-sacs were and are dull. Thanks for the maths and the science, but no thanks.

So my talents became English and Drama and Music. The latter two are more of a footnote in this particular tale. In drama class, I’d team up with my friends and we’d come up with these crazy short plays based entirely around dreaming up the craziest death scenes we could possibly imagine. Our favourite part, the part our classmates would be waiting for, was when the guns or knives or whatever it happened to be came out and somebody got killed. Me or one of my friends would fall to the floor, there would be a couple of beats of silence, and then we’d do the Death Dance, this weird, post-expiry jitter; head jerking from side to side, heels drumming on the floor. They loved it.

In both English and Music, we’d be asked to devise commercials. In Music class, me, Craig and Neil came up with O’Mahony’s Chili Con Carne, a chili so hot that it killed you. We wrote a rap, killed the titlular character’s grandmother with a dose of the chili, then finished with this mad, synchronised dance that ended with Neil and I delivering a simultaneously pelvic thrust to the audience.

“You lot are mad,” was our Music teacher’s verdict.

Meanwhile, in English class, we came up with Mad Monk’s Ale. I wrote this commercial where a couple of guys are sitting in a pub trying to decide what they want to drink. The bartender recommends Mad Monk’s Ale. The first guy takes a sip and makes a disgusted face. “Wow,” he says, “this is awful.”

The doors burst open and the Mad Monks, headed up by their leader, the Insane Abbot, charge in with machine guns. The first drinker goes down in a hail of bullets. The second takes a sip, looks over the rim of his glass at the gun-toting monks. “Mmmm,” he says.

“Mad Monk’s Ale,” says the voiceover. “Like it, or the monks won’t like you.”

Later, I started writing stories. I was heavily into Stephen King at that point, so it was all horror. I wrote this bizarre short about a kid being chased by unknown assailants. This was notable because - at the age of thirteen - I deliberately inserted a curse into the dialogue, just to see what would happen.

“Mark, you bastard,” called the main character, creeping around in the darkened living room of his friend’s house, “where are you?”

My English teacher, Miss Carrick, an elfin creature whose top we often stared down when she leaned over our desks to check our progress on various works of fiction, never said a word.

My reasons for not taking English beyond the age of sixteen had a lot to do with my GCSE English teacher, a (perversely) Canadian woman named Miss Robertson. Remember that my dad died when the year I turned fourteen. I could be excused for the way my grades plummeted, the way I got distracted, the way I lost interest in my studies. I kinda sorta had bigger things to think about. Miss Robertson never got that. Despite my obvious talent for English, she hated me. To this day, I’ve no idea why. I had my clashes with other teachers, but we always worked it out in the end, from Mr. Smith - who once pulled me out of French class to ask me why I couldn’t be more like my sister - to Mr. Naylor, whom I bumped into years later, and who told me a C in the same subject was a waste of my talents…I eventually made my peace with every enemy I gained through that time. Not Miss Robertson. I have a vivid memory of being at a Parent’s Evening with my mother, who sat patiently through a diatribe about how my grades had slipped, how I was wasting my potential, then responded, with an outrage that still makes me feel an absurd sense of love and pride, “But his dad died!”

Miss Robertson, she didn’t seem to care. I parted company with English as a subject when she made my mother pay for me to take the final exams because I never completed the last piece of coursework, 25% of my final grade. My mum paid, and I aced those fucking exams, emerging with two Bs and a savage sense of satisfaction that I’d earned those grades in spite of a penalty that meant they were the maximum I could possibly have achieved.

Later, when I’d just started sixth form, I was walking down the corridor by the staff room when I heard Miss Robertson behind me, frantically calling my name. Maybe she wanted to apologize, maybe berate me further. I’ll never know. I walked through the door at the end of that corridor, held it for a moment as though I planned to let her through, then released my grip so the stiff springs carried it back into her face. I walked away without looking back, never spoke to her again.

My education carried me away into Sociology and Politics. I wrote in my spare time, and that writing was the wellspring that eventually poured forth my contribution to the world of erotica. See, I never really knew what to write about, so I just wrote about what was in my head. At 15, 16, 17, what was in my head was girls. So I wrote these crazy fuck-stories about girls in my classes, my teachers, girls I saw in the street. I took every fantasy I’d ever had and turned it into a short story. When I got bored of that, I built elaborate fictional scenarios and then rolled dice to decide what would happen, like some pervert’s version of those Choose Your Own Adventure books I’d been reading just a few years earlier. Which clothes came off, what sexual positions we adopted - all of that was decided by the die. Just imagine, 1-2-3 for missionary, 4-5-6 for cowgirl. It didn’t start out that way. Hell, when I first started writing and fantasising about sex, I couldn’t have told you what either of those meant. But then I discovered girls and porn and I found reserves of creativity I never knew I possessed.

But Sociology and Politics took me to university, and writing about sex was never as interesting as the wonderfully slutty (and believe me, I mean that in a completely positive sense) girl I was in love with, and I stopped putting pen to paper except in my diary. It was only when I broke up with said girl, did my time in alcoholic oblivion, then came to my senses and realised everything was wrong, that I noticed just how much I missed it, how much I needed it in my life.

Which was how I came to write my first screenplay.

This is another one I’ve fictionalised and even posted on the blog before, so let’s keep the description to an experience I had while attending a Socialist Occupation of the university library as part of a protest against the re-introduction of tuition fees for Further Education students. It kinda sorta turned into a party, and I was kinda sorta mainly responsible, and I kinda sorta wound up going skinny dipping in an abandoned quarry with some friends I’d made that night. It was the most amazing experience of my young life, and I quickly realised that not writing about it was going to kill me.

So I wrote Good Intentions, the most aptly titled screenplay in the history of everything. It was a horrible screed, but it had some fun moments and some fun characters and I still feel that someday, one or two of them will emerge in some other, far better fiction.

It was this that made me understand that what I wanted to do had very little to do with Politics and Sociology, and it was then that the car accident mentioned in the previous post occurred and I parted company with the Great British Education System forever.

I went home, met Chris, started drinking heavily. Then, after I quit my first cinema, I got a job at Tesco, working the overnight shift. It was then that I started Scenes From An Unexamined Life, which ended up being a confused and embarrassingly autobiographical first novel.

But fuck, I could write back then. I mean that in the sense of being prolific rather than being good. I write with far more clarity now, but it’s become significantly more of an occasion when I actually put fingertip to keyboard in any meaningful way. Which is half the reason I’m doing this blog project in the first place.

Anyway, SFAUL was much like Good Intentions in the sense that it had some great moments but was ultimately a confused mess. I liked it and still like it, but when my friend John described portions of it - with creditable tenderness - as ’sixth form drivel’, I sat back and understood what it was that made him say such a thing. This was a story I had to get out of my system. This was my story. It wasn’t all that interesting, but everybody’s first novel - especially when they’re as preachy as I - tends towards a derivative, cliched retread of Catcher In The Rye or whatever. I had to get it out of my system.

And then my life went haywire and I didn’t write shit for about three years. Like the frustrated student I once was, I went back to my fuck-fantasies. This time, however, I posted them on my blog and sent them to places like Clean Sheets and discovered that - my God - there was a market for this stuff. I was young, free, and single, and weird internet chicks seemed to love what I was doing.

Which was awesome, despite it not really being what I wanted to be doing. But I met my wife as a kind of offshoot of all that action (and let me say for the permanent record that we didn’t meet as a result of my filth, rather in a flirty e-mail debate about politics) so it’s not like I’m in a position to complain.

Someday I will write an erotic novel, truly I will. But not now.

So I entertained bored ladies (and gents) on the internet, and then I got tired of being edited by people I felt weren’t fit for the job. All the while I was working on what I thought was my Masterpiece, an unfinished symphony entitled Welcome To Forever. But that was way too complex and time-consuming and eventually I lost interest and began to focus on one of the short stories I’d been writing to get away from the heavy political stuff that made up the themes of WTF. That short was a surreal sex/drugs/violence tale called Moongirl And The Tracksuit Boys that I eventually expanded to novella length and re-titled Scratch. It has yet to see the light of day, but I’m not done with it yet, so we’ll see.

Most recently, and despite the intrusion of domestic bliss and then a job that takes up way more of my time than I’m comfortable with, I’ve started work on a far more zeitgeist-y project entitled Wayward, which is very violent and very dirty and a lot of fun to work on when I’m not dog-tired from being a Human Resources rep for fifty-plus hours every single fucking week…

Which in many ways is where we came in a few posts back. I want to write Wayward and finish Scratch. I want to rediscover the part of me that got the girl but never bothered slaying the dragon and thought - at the time - that it was okay. Because it’s not okay, and in some sense I’m just coming to grips with, I depend on writing far more than I depend on smoking and drinking and whatever else. Those are just crutches. This is how I walk.

And keeping up the act that says I can do this, that I can do my little job and live my little life and get drunk on the weekends, it just isn’t working anymore. The purpose of these posts is not to entertain or to tell you the same stories I’ve already told you or amuse myself by reliving my glory days.
It’s to write. To write and write and write until it’s natural again.

Bacardi and Cokes at my dad’s wedding, the only one of the three that I attended. That’s where it started. Sure, I’d had a glass of wine or can of beer here and there during my formative years, but that particular free bar was the one that tipped me over the edge. Not that I knew it at the time. I barely remember that day, just that I and a couple of barely-known and never-since-seen cousins took advantage of the fact that the bartender happily placed drinks in the hands of anybody close enough to run rampant on rum and - in my case - the disruptive and sudden presence of step-parents.

I can’t actually remember if my mother had remarried by then, but my stepfather was certainly a fixture in my life. And while I felt then roughly the way I feel now about my additional parents, the merry-go-round had only just started spinning, and falling off by other than my own motive power seemed like a reasonable option.

It wasn’t deliberate. I was a child. It was more coincidence than anything else that these weddings happened at roughly the same time my social activities began to revolve around surreptitiously drinking cans of Diamond White in parks and on street corners. And it was more ill-fate than anything else that demanded my presence at the funerals of father and grandmother just a few months later.

Those days are hazy to me, and looking back now, I’m never sure which I was; the social drinker desperate to outdo my friends, a precursor of the young man I would become; or the pretentious outcast, hiding in the darkness of my room, burying myself in the bands and the movies that would shape me. A little of both, I think, and a lot fucked up.

The weddings and the drinking and the smoking and the loss of my virginity all occurred in that strange, formative time between ‘92 and ‘94. Puberty was a balancing act between the social pressure of adolescence and my dad’s legacy; the frustration and the tendency towards self-destruction.

With hindsight, I feel like I did pretty well out of my teenage years. I kept it on the rails. My teachers and mentors may have felt that I failed to live up to my potential and the example my sister was setting, but it was enough that I made it through school and through sixth form, and even though - true to form - I fucked the latter up through a lack of focus and dedication, I got to university.

And that’s where things got weird.

I kept a journal through my time in King’s Lynn and Cambridge. Christ knows where it is now. I remember burning the original, but there were copies with Beckie and with Jenn (the former my last serious relationship before I decided to flee across the world and get married). Maybe they’re still out there someplace, in-depth supplements to the names and school dayz pictures I’ve been browsing on Facebook lately. There’s no way I could remember every word, but I remember the thoughts that were running through my mind, and I remember the path I was on.

For all the terrible things I’ve said about mother and stepfather and sister, they were a stabilizing influence. Cast adrift at age eighteen in the nightmarish town of King’s Lynn, I started to lose it. I was renting a room in a big house all by myself, smoking and listening to music, writing lengthy diary entries and falling into depression. Somehow I’d ended up at this strange college where everyone else was either a mature student or a local. I was that strange Boy From London, and I everything they said and did was to humor me.

I took a job - my first - in a hotel bar where the busiest night was Karaoke on Thursdays. I remember a couple of lorry drivers playing on my ignorance, having me pour doubles while I charged them for singles. I remember staring at myself in the bathroom mirror after I’d fucked up the drinks and then the change for a couple of gorgeous girls on my first Saturday, hearing their laughter in my head, feeling small and humiliated. One of the girls I worked with bullied me incessantly, sneering at my lack of knowledge, knocking my key out of the register so the retracted cord that kept it clipped to my waist would snap viciously back. When I returned fire with the wordy, vicious comebacks that were becoming my stock-in-trade, she began to flirt with me, and we got as far as a frantic blowjob in the back of her car before her attentions moved elsewhere.

One night, some of the other students invited me to a local nightclub. I was working, so I didn’t get there until pretty late on. None of them showed except this one guy with whom I shared a mutual distaste. I flitted about on the periphery of his circle for a while, fishing for introductions. When it became clear they weren’t forthcoming, I walked away and got trashed by myself instead. I didn’t say a word to anybody all night.

By the time I found my way to Cambridge, where I should have been all along, it was November. I’d missed all the Fresher activities, the opportunities to make a fool of myself without penalty, to make friends. I ended up in a house with a gang of Greeks and a Spaniard, in the only free room several months of searching turned up. I made a couple of friends there, but nothing lasting. In the social group I found myself a part of, I was the only Englishman. I knew nobody in my lectures and seminars, and the opinions I voiced were not especially popular.

Bored and unhappy, I spent most of my time in my room. I slept only occasionally, fitfully. After a month or so, I stopped going to lectures. In my other life, what I thought of as my London Life, I was breaking up with my long-term girlfriend. Drinking had become a way to pass the time. I’d sit in the Student Union with a beer in front of me and write my essays and my diary entries. Pretty soon, they knew me. Pretty soon, I was finding a pint of Fosters sitting on the bar by the time I took my stool.

One day in February of ‘08, I was sitting outside the Union bar contemplating a choice between going to a Sociology lecture and drowning my sorrows. I picked the latter. By the time I came up for air, it was April. I had gained two different reputations. One was amongst my acquaintances, that of the hard-drinking and unpredictable barfly. The other was among my lecturers, and it was this - the label of failure and potential drop-out - that led me to pull an outrageous scam where I visited many of my mentors and broke down in tears, lamenting my social misfit status, the time I’d wasted in King’s Lynn, the things I’d missed that had left me a miserable outcast. All this while my friend George stood stoically behind me, a supportive hand on my shoulder while his face was twisted with barely-suppressed laughter they took for empathy.

It worked. They gave me the same kind of leeway the credit card companies were giving me when I gave them excuses and half-truths for the insane amounts I was beginning to spend on nights out. When I went back to London, I went back to party, sleeping on the couches and floor of acquaintances, in the beds of girls I’d just met. When I returned for my last exam of the year - the climax of an introductory module in Modern European History - I hadn’t slept in three days. I hit the Union bar right off the train, drank something like ten straight cups of coffee, did the exam, then borrowed fifty pounds from my friend Thomas for the train home. In a bizarre twist, that was the best grade I got all year.

The meager inheritance mother won from from stepmother in court kept me going through that summer, and I struggled through the first couple of months of year two before a guy I knew only vaguely - a London Life friend - was killed in a car accident. I went home for the funeral and never went back. I got a job in a cinema and for a while things were okay.

Then I met Chris.

I’ve done this story too many times, in the blog and elsewhere. Chris and I were kindred spirits, and we quickly graduated from discussing our mutual love of bad horror movies to hitting the local pubs after work to heading into the city and indulging ourselves pretty much every weekend. We were both self-destructive as fuck, and by the time I somehow found myself managing one of the most prestigious independent cinemas in London - some two years later - we’d added week-days to our calendar.

Chris was always the exhibitionist, the one who had to be carried to a cab or lifted from the asphalt of Oxford Street at three in the morning. I had my moments, but my exploits were mild by comparison. I was the sensible one, the one that got us home at the end of all those long nights.

But when you drink as much as we were drinking, the bar (no pun intended) gets higher. Every night Chris passed out or wandered off was a night I’d find a spot and work on walking my own path towards oblivion. It got so I was drinking a ridiculous amount. One night I split my head open on the ceiling of the Mean Fiddler and didn’t even notice until I felt the blood pouring down my face and had to go to casualty. Another time, Chris and I got so drunk that I passed out at a bar in Leicester Square. Having been unceremoniously removed by the bouncers for the crime of unconsciousness, I picked myself up and had a two-hour blackout before being recovered from a pile of trash by the police. I still have no idea what I did that night.

Then came the night of the drinking contest. We were in Sound Republic in Soho, watching the kids pogo to some horrific Nu-Metal. I was listening to these twats having a conversation on the stools beside mine, telling tales of their legendary drinking exploits while they sat cradling Heinekens. My annoyance at being exposed to their bullshit swiftly dialed itself up to an inexplicable anger, and I challenged them to a drinking contest. They let me pick the poison, and when my eyes found the Czech Absinthe hiding among the bottles behind the bar, I knew that we were all fucked. I picked it anyway, drunk them into oblivion and then kept going. Chris, my partner in all this, perhaps sensed what was going on, but the girl behind the bar was somehow as much an enemy as the kids I’d just destroyed with cheap foreign liquor. She ignored his protests and his requests not to serve me any more. In fact, one of my only clear memories of that night is of her leaning over the bar and telling me there was no way I could do ten in a row.

I was up to seven by then, and I handed her a twenty pound note and told her to line them up. The last thing I remember is taking them from the bar and placing them on the floor, going down on my knees and looking up as the goths and the Nu-Metal kids crowded around cheering. One, two, three. Instant oblivion.

Outside, the bouncers gathered around my body and tried to force-feed me water while they waited for the ambulance. Chris knocked a paper cup out of some brute’s hand, told them what I’d been drinking, slapped me and kicked me to no response. By his account, he was genuinely scared that I’d tiptoed right up to the edge of the precipice we’d been daring since the start, and terrified that the moronic behavior of the Sound Republic staff was going to bundle me over the edge.

I woke up in St. Thomas’s hospital, attached to an IV drip with the worst hangover of my life. Chris was at my side, and his tired, bloodshot eyes filled in the blanks as well as the story he eventually told me. That was essentially the end of our partnership. Sure, we went on after that, but it wasn’t the same. I quit the cinema business and hooked up with Beckie, and he met a girl named Sally who’s currently pregnant with his child. He moved north, and we started to grow apart.

Rather than quitting the drug that had almost killed me, I started drinking alone and in a controlled environment. After leaving the cinema, I worked night shift at a supermarket for a while before falling back into bar work. Once I started keeping evening hours again, I began drinking at home, loading up on Jack and Coke and staying up all night writing and fucking around on the internet, stumbling to bed as the sun came up. When my bosses at The Rising Sun in Mill Hill took an assignment at The Old Chequers, an ailing pub in the back-end of nowhere, I went with them as bar manager.

The very idea of an alcoholic living in a pub sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that’s exactly what and where I was. I worked all day, drank with Chris and Vanessa in the evenings, then filled a giant glass with Whiskey and Coke when they went to bed, retiring to my cottage, to my ancient PC and my portable heater, writing and drinking until the sun came up. I have fond memories of that time, though I wrote little more than bad fuck-fantasies and some garbled short stories that will never see the light of day.

I knew I had a problem. I mean, I always knew, but in those times when I was floating close to something dangerous, I always had a strong sense of self-preservation. After a year, I got away from The Old Chequers and came back home, where I hit my quarter-life crisis and drank my body weight in ever-cheaper brands of bourbon, whored myself to Blockbuster, and spent my nights penning noble screeds about all the things I’d someday do.

Which is about where we came in, as far as NFADR is concerned.

I’ve no illusions. I have an addictive personality. If I let myself, I’ll drink until it kills me. The counter-weight for this has always been the strange combination of dreams and arrogance that informs my writing. The only thing I’ve truly believed, though all of this, is that someday I will tell stories that people want to hear. Everything else, background. Narrative. Useless details.

I never really entertained any notion that the adventures of the last few years would somehow save me from myself. It’s not really about that. Meeting my wife was huge. Escaping to her was huge. But all of that is separate from the things that haunt me. It always will be. Jenn stopped me from going out of my mind. Her quirks and insecurities are the other half of me in a way I can’t describe without descending into horrific cliche. She makes me the person I always imagined I was, the person I bemoan as super boyfriend/husband when in particularly black mood.

I never wanted to be saved. I’m not built that way. I’m built to save, fix, inspire. I’m built to take hold of things, to make them right according to the strange standard that lives in my brain, the example I hold others up to, the example I myself continually fail to meet.

Do as I say, not as I do.

Which is where we are, I think. What this is all about. Through it all, I’ve been a son and a brother and a friend and a boyfriend and a fucking husband to be proud of. Sure, I’m a long way from perfect, but my intentions are noble and my batting average, if you were to ask the people who know I genuinely love them, is pretty goddamn impressive.

What’s missing is me. The other half of all these relationships. Lately, I’ve begun to worry that I’m a disappointing husband. It isn’t my intent. It isn’t the things I say or the goals I have. It’s the waters rising, the old demons clawing at my back. It’s my inability to compromise or settle when it comes to me, to Michael. It’s nothing anybody else does or doesn’t do. It’s that I can’t turn my back on what I am, that indefinable thing that makes me write, makes me drink, makes me smoke, makes me fail at pretty much everything else. Not by their standards, by mine.

I’ve never really let it happen. I’ve been loading myself up with distractions since I was old enough to have some understanding of what that meant. Like I said a few days ago, it didn’t have to be alcohol - that just happened to be the devil of the day - it could have been anything. I don’t know what happens when I stop filling my life with…filler. I’m afraid that if I take it all away, there won’t be anything left.

3am melodrama. 3:01 punchlines. I’m rambling. I’m tired.