it's an interesting bus, this. nicer than any other i've been on, probably a virtue of its more salubrious destinations than my current wakefield and former croydon homes. i like provincial buses. they remove me from urbanity and take me to calmer places. i like to read and listen to soft guitar music and think about undefined lust.
i settle myself into my seat as the bus pulls away from lovell park. a single seat on a bus is a rare thing, and unless i'm with someone i like i always go for the solitude. a good bus is like a bubble, not a fragile bubble but a firm shell, insulating you from the outside while affording you some of the benefits of its continued existence. the yorkshire outside has a special loveliness to it, the rolling hills and endless green somehow never fails to calm my mind.
i'm reading nobody's empire, stuart's semi-autobiographical tale of a formerly vital person struggling to adapt to new-onset chronic fatigue. he writes a song in this bit. he says the tune attached the words, like the arc of a rainbow. he said that doesn't make any sense. it definitely does.
i'm listening to can't be sure by the sundays, the first track on nobody's empire, a CD stuart chucked at me after i took stevie's place in an acoustic performance of fox in the snow at rough trade east. it was a strange thing to have happen. he said people should join him so i did. the words left my mouth without me even really thinking about it. i'm not tolerant enough to be using a discman to listen to it, but i digitised the CD almost immediately.
i like this song. i like harriet's voice. and i'm not really that sure at the moment and this makes me feel ok about that. i hope it comes to me later.
i've recently moved, as alluded to in the lede, from croydon to wakefield. this is not the culture shock you might have imagined.
i enjoy it here. i enjoy the fact i can go out and see people in the street. no one likes being out in croydon. sometimes it feels a bit like that danny boyle film, the one where cillian murphy wakes up from a coma to find everyone's gone mad. i also enjoy the fact that sometimes i see people i know, just randomly. that hasn't really happened much in croydon. i've tried to attend social events to find people i like. freshers isn't a great time to get to know most people as they're all bolloxed, and i'll know them all soon enough. for now i can be quiet to them and loud in other places. once or twice a week for a few hours feels good to me right now. i still see uni people sometimes.
this is one of the christian parts of the book. stuart recounts the tale of zacchaeus, from luke 19. i'll spare you the full thing, but it's summed up well by this line, a very scottish reinterpretation of jesus' words after the crowd start having a go at him for visiting zacchaeus:
'I can [go to Zacchaeus' home] and I will. I'm not here just to talk to you lot, I'm here for the tricky bastards too.'
and yeah. i can't fault that.
star sign by teenage fanclub is playing. i'm slowly finding where i belong, and i'm not sure on the star sign thing.
no side to fall in by the raincoats is playing now. it's suitably eclectic for my mood, a cacophony of harmonisations over a simple percussive rhythm. i like it.
i'm in a place called alwoodley gates, the last vestige of leeds before the a61 runs out onto nothing but open fields. i'm glad to be out of the suburbs.
the book, funnily enough, is now talking about the song i'm listening to. stuart is vainly making a mixtape for a girl he's never spoken to, in a bid to win her affections with his amazing knowledge of violin solos in songs and superb skills at acrostics. i wish i could be that tragic.
maybe, what i do is even more tragic, going on buses and thinking about my lust instead of doing anything about it. michael stipe reads poetry into people's answering machines. apparently they even listen to it. heave ho, g minor chord, et cetera, et cetera.
i keep an eye on the time. i don't really know why, i'm not in any sort of rush. london instinct remains. i've been out of education, employment and training for over four months at this point, and some days it feels like i'll never do anything ever again. i like to be busy, and though i needed the stillness, it has killed me a little bit. i feel worse when i'm still, but also when i'm not. things like that are odd. stuart talks of having an energy bank, the type of bank where the manager's a cunt. i think i'm starting to know what he means.
in my mind life contains two types of event, two ways of categorising the things that happen to you. there are the things you wait for and the things you don't. as you wait for the first sort, the second drags by, begging to be noticed but still being passed over, like the food you don't want in one of those conveyor restaurants. i'm not very good at living in the moment. i live in the future, the what-ifs, the possible realities and the impossible dreams.
stuart's saying he doesn't want to be alone anymore. he was fine with it before, but not now. i know the feeling. i used to drift between people, groups, never staying, never remembered, with but isolated. i'm bored of that now. i want people to rely on, and i have them. i love them. thank god for friends.
take the skinheads bowling now. a brilliant song by any stretch, full of strange ideas and good tunes.
we're in harewood now. i don't really know where that is and nor do i really care. i want to get out of it and return to the trees and fields. stuart is trying to define himself by "other phenomena" to illness like soft guitar music and undefined lust. these seem to follow me around, like i've caught them in my orbit (or rather i've been caught in theirs, a strange trinary system). the soft guitar music parallels and portrays my unsteady life, undefined lust, and unreal longing.
nick drake is playing fly. i wasn't surprised he's on this mixtape. a familiar salve in a salvo of unfamiliar tunes.
we're in the suburbs of harrogate now.
i think of the week ahead as john sebastian croons darling be home soon in my ear. i'm seeing someone i like tomorrow, for coffee and a chat. stuart has written this, about a girl called yvonne at his ME support group:
Why is it that if we like someone, we think we can hide it? We think we're being clever and aloof, but we're not. It's so obvious. She could probably feel my look.
i wonder if he feels mine. and i wonder if it's an illusion when i feel his.
we pull into the bus station. sigh. unplug cable, put away kindle, fold down armrest, pull myself up from seat. sigh again. head downstairs. and think a bit more.
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