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"Fear is such a charlatan... it hammers on your door like a bailiff with piles"
 It's been some time, but then I say that a lot these days.
For lunch my father walked me, with now obvious zeal, to a reastaurant
he knew of near Marylebone. I remember its layout so clearly I imagine
that I am still digesting my meal and even in memory that place
functions as MY dining bar would function, in the future, or in another
life, if only there were someone hanging around to perceive it.
Let it flow now, dear reader.....
Walk in off the street alone or with a friend. Sit either up at the bar
counter (on the right) or at a banquette style booth (yup, on the left)
and order at your leisure from a short menu. The food arrives either
through a hatch behind the bar or within a dummy lift drawn from the
basement kitchen.
Eat
Talk
Pay
Leave Happy
That day, hmmmm, 14 years ago, we ate salt beef
sandwiches on rye with gherkins and mustard so hot your eyes bled on
the table cloth. We had a short glass of lager apiece and my father
downed an espresso in one. In and out in 30 minutes.Perhaps it all
started there? How odd. A dining bar is all I would ever wish to own.
Life is good. It must be, I just said so didn't I?
It will be
light soon. I cannot sleep so I have made a tea of the following
ingredients:Verbena, mace, cinnammon, rosehip, cardomom, star anis,
dried ginger root, cloves and a few other anonymous spices. Royal Tea,
as a berber from the middle Atlas called it.
I cannot help but let my thoughts wonder off into the long grass. How
will all this be? How will that? And will I be more lonely, or less? I
have suffered from impatience more than many.
I drank warm milky tea in my bottle as a baby. Hot mugs of strong,
milky, sugary tea were the first of many subsequent vices. Coffee had
its fun with me in my late teens, it still abuses me from time to time.
In my 28th year it reached its terrible zenith, and I did suffer.
This tea is good but I do not yawn. I have rolled another cigarette and
remembered why it is that I do not yawn. It is the latent effects of
marijuana (and the late coffee of course) that conspires against my
aching back. A bar or two of a song plays repeatedly somewhere and
thoughts, like families of curious tourists, offer passing comments and
reflections as though I am lying half dead in the street, as though I
don't even have a say. There is certainly not a place on Earth where I
could find peace from this steady procession of thoughts, mourners at a
wake with an eye for the bar. Never a dull moment.
But during those ugly times when I feared for my ultimate state I had
the savvy to learn some tricks. Can I take credit for that? Hell! Why
not?
There is never one thought. They grow from one another until they die
out and one finds oneself back again staring into the Great Real. And
when one has returned that is the time to smile, yawn even and imagine
it all on the other side, a player in your own fantasy, made up as you
go. Fear is such a charlatan. Always using the same old tricks to
hoodwink you, steal your pocket money and pack you off in a cold sweat
down some deserted pier with nothing but a broken lampshade and a
fistful of broken dreams.
It hammers on your door like a bailiff with piles, but only when you
are tired, only when the planets have got it in for you. Then it sells
you crummy advice on a promise, makes noises of distrust about your
lover and leaves with your last truffle trodden into the rug.
In a quiet moment, lie back and watch the thoughts do their thing. When
they leave you, pick up the last one by its tail and make it walk back
through the train, pointing out the sights on the way. If you can work
back through five or six of these trains you might learn a few things.
Things I learned:
1. I am not responsible for my thoughts.
2. I have a choice in whether or not I allow a thought to develop or morph into another.
3. Fear doesn't give two craps about me.
4. Fear needs a negative thought like the devil need an invitation.
5. Anxiety is the clue, I work back through my thoughts from the first moment of angst. What caused it?
Honestly, this wasn't planned and you probably don't want to hear about
it. Well good luck to you. I've been feeling lonely, blue all day and I
miss that German girl with the terrible English. She was brave enough,
looks that made me thank God, and she made me laugh out loud, over and
over, until I needed a damn nurse or a some massive Turkish masseur to
thump me on the back. Damn she made me laugh! Haven't laughed like that
since I was a boy, before those dreams that changed everything, made me
think. Love to see her again, have some lunch, smile at one another.
Hell, I'll fly over for the day, anything to laugh like that again!
Poxy romantic....
Ecce Romano
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