21st March 1995 3pm

Last night. What boolocks! Although I don't know why it is so embarrassing to reread things that felt right at the time. At least it was real.


I oscillate. I am an oscillator. Cynicism vs. Authenticity. I remember the first time someone told me they were being ironic. I thought it was big, cool and clever.


Today 'Lover you should've come over' amplifies my waves. I was reading this book once on Warrington Central Station and it had a description of this thing in it called re......., re something. I can't remember the word but it reminds me of re approchment. Does that exist? Reproshment! It's where you live your life according to a philosophy or set of values / aims etc that you're not especially aware of all the time, but then there's a change and you'r made aware of your old system, and a new possible one, and you become embarrassed by your unquestioning belief in the old one and take on a different set of priorities (which might be the new one, or not) and so on. Like when you suddenly discover orgasms or have a baby or your parents die.


I think that's had a big affect on me and although it turns out that I do it about 20 times a day, at the time, on the platform waiting for my train home, I thought a violent Ugh. How revoltingly embarrassing to really believe somehting, to have an ideology, and then discover it was fallible, to have to admit you were wrong.

So I thought I would believe in nothing and not be fixed to anything or certain. That way I could always be right, save face and be fluid and that's meant a lot of heartache, loneliness and floundering. Lack of commitment, fear of failure, fear of success. All to stop my pride being being hurt by a possible change of mind sometime in the future, possibly. What a fuck-up.


And, anyway, I'm doing it now, because I'm ashamed of my pride and fear and massively super-inflated, over-blown opinion of myself. So, this time, here's my new position. Feel free to mock and remind me in 10 years time (still positioning myself against the storm!): I'm a wanker; I might be mad, but I don't really think so; practice makes you better; you can't win if you're not in; don't give up; it doesn't really matter, but act as if it did; to thine own self be true; don't be afraid; you're not alone; it's never too late; give a dog a bad name and make mine a double.


There was this other book too, about the "Coma" time. The title eludes me. Read the blurb on the back and nearly died trying to get home quickly enough to read it. I was looking for answers, as usual. But shit, this was something else. Like reading "Candide" for the first time - mindblowing, jaw-dropping, oh my God, totally stunned, gomsmacked. It was about this man who is disgruntled (without grunt? stopped from grunting?) with his life and one day out strolling he finds a magician's shop and goes inside where the magician agrees to send him back to an earlier point in his life, 'If only I could go back to 12 years of age knowing what I know now'. Well he does, but can't help himself and does everything the same way that he did it first time around until, eventually he finds himself wandering through the streets feeling disgruntled with his life and stumbles across the magician's store.


It felt like the point of the story was that there's no free will, which was quite liberating because you don't have to be ashamed or afraid because this is who you are and were always going to be. And it's not an excuse to sit back and do nothing because either you were going to do that or not anyway, so you'll just react to the 'No free will' thing in the way you were going to react to it anyway and possibly carry on acting as though there is free will because that's what you were detined to do given the past. Each moment predetermines everything for ever because you can't go back and not have that moment exist. It did. So this does.


That's what I meant yesterday about all our cells having all our potential actions, exeriences in them, but given that we only exist in the context of the past and present our future potential is limited to one possible course. The big bang banging the way it did means I prefer pink lipstick ot red. I will grow to be 5'9 but not a happy president or whatever. Personal responsibility? Guilt? I don't know how it all fits together. Ouspensky. That's who wrote the book. I wonder if like all the things we come to know are in us from the start, are all the things that can be known in us all, or is it different things in each one of us? We could all be the same person if we were all raised in the same way, by robots in a sealed light and dark room with video screens for walls and the same toys and stimuli presented during the same exact times in our lives. 1 year, 4 days, 16 hours, 3 minutes and 25 seconds into life: present teddy. At 16 we would be freed and let out to meet up with each other and laissez faire. Two scientists working on the same problem, one gets there first, why? Is it all out there waiting to be pulled in or already in one of them but not the other. Would we have got to the moon if we hadn't learned to talk? Does the brain work like a muscle? Does the pope shit in the woods?


I'm getting giddy happy. Leaving the baths today this man, for whom I'd held a door open, said, "Thanks Angel" - ! - I know it meant nothing, but he could have said, "Welcome back into the human race, you're not irrelevant any more. I can see you", and it wouldn't have felt any better. So thanks middle-aged man wearing green, you made me feel very happy today.