"If you keep going down you'll hit the bottom"

As I left the job interview yesterday, the words by the kindly woman wishing me off left me with no small sense of irony. In short I had bombed.

I sometimes wonder about orbits, how we tend to revolve around something or another - perhaps our partner or our family. After a big break up in 2003, I found myself gravitating towards anything that seemed stable enough to spin around. When that failed, I settled back and let the reverse happen.

Briefly, as 0.1 took off, magic was in the air. Incredible connections and opportunities appeared. Things grew and expanded up to the point where I felt like things were revolving around me and my wishes. I delegated work and focussed on trying to get the relationship back together. But things were starting to unravel. In short, my ego had expanded astronomically. I remember not going to a meeting with Fox about a VJ TV series because they were part of News Corp. I expected to be able to get anything and everything on my terms - including the relationship that I'd previously stopped trying to make work. And like a solar body that just got too big, I supernova'd and imploded, black hole style. Sucking in the goodwill and help and care of those around me and, well, just doing nothing with it. Opportunities, friendships, wonderful moments, the big love - as I sunk into ever deeper dark despair I burnt most of them.

And there is a fear that sometimes comes up, what if like a black hole that's where I'm stuck. The last few years have had no end of second chances - the funding book, and netribution, the former of which sells well and the latter is read widely. But it's not like the days when I would run across the Thames from the NFT, having given a talk on film funding, to a club where a dozen video projectors are being installed for gig I'm throwing with Hexstatic.

If I compare myself to my former self, and think how foolishly and arrogantly I behaved, I sink into something quite dank and horrible, a state I climb out of, at times by consuming everything around me - drink, food, drugs, people's attention and care. Classic black hole behavior. Like the ghostly character in Spirited Away, none of it ever fills the hole, none of it can compare to the time when I was riding high in love; filmmaking, developing, surfing london's cutting edge.

So as I left the interview having struggled to present the kind of person I would consider going for a drink with, least of all employing, the parting directions sank deep.

"If you keep going down you'll hit the bottom"

What if I do? What if the fallout continued until I had no friends, no confidence to get a job, no satisfaction with whatever job I can get, no home, no partner, no nothing.

I try to file the thought to the large suitcase at the back of my mind where these kind of things live alongside Man City scores and Things I Say When I'm Drunk and head on my way.

It even crosses my mind that she was so disgusted by my interview performance, she wanted to rub salt into the wounds as I left, and chose the words deliberately to unnerve me! It sounds crazy now, but I guess it's like when you've got your nose pressed right up against a mirror - you're not going to see a fair reflection.

I set off on my way. And keep walking, past the kindly person asking me to sign something that will help make poverty history, and on I go, reminding myself that I don't really want a full time job in IT, even if it is for a good charity. I walk past a newspaper stand - 'charities' £20m black hole' says the sheet. And I think how they probably don't need me. The last thing a big social care charity needs is someone arguing persuasively to divert resources into high concept web projects that are ultimately untested prototypes when there is so little money around. 

I pop into the CCA where a van is decked out with a video projector on the roof, and watch a video from artist Andrew Sunley Smith where a piano is tied to the back of a truck and dragged along a lane until it collapses. Inside a large packing crate a man swims in milk, on the other side, in blood, in the rubble of his destruction.

Outside again, disjointed and abstracted by the art enough to let go a bit, I carry on walking. The mind tooing and froing like a set of scales trying to find balance.

And then I hit the park.

You know how at this time of year, with the gold leaves and the blue sky and the early evening long shadowed light.. how sometimes they can combine, merge in holy harmony, melt into a sight that makes Chris Doyle look like Dogme, a  vista that words or pictures or paintings will never capture totally, sights which instantly knock any great work of art off the top spot of beauty, sights which just remembering as I write these words now makes my spine hairs stand salute.

And i walk through it, glide through it, and all is suddenly forgot.

It hits me then that whatever happens to me, whatever happens, the sun isn't going to stop being there. And tho I've taken it for granted my whole life, it was more priceless to me at that moment than any work of philosophy, any possession, anything really.

And I think, well if this is what is at the bottom, maybe that's ok. No matter what's taken away, or what I lose or fuck up this will always be there.

Not to romanticise being jobless, homeless, friendless and so forth. But as I walked down the red brick road to my flat, I felt like nothing more was needed. I had found something to orbit, along with everything under my feet. My soul could stop looking. Start to relax. Start to make amends and repair some bridges - boy how I'd love to do that. Maybe even start to publish some of endless reams of words on my computer that lead to this point.

And then to top it off I finally watch Garden State. Cheesy, yes. But it chimes with something a friend said earlier on the phone - about a delight in the exploration of the infinite abyss, the 'house of leaves', the darkness. That exploration, no matter how painful and claustrophobic, perhaps expands the capacity of the soul for being filled with moments and wonders like that walk in the park.