Am I Sure This is the One?

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There is also now a Thoughts Too Loud Podcast!

Those old movies play out of sequence in the kitchen. Image of butterfly, rain on window, silent scream, someone’s iris up close and bright from nearby light reflecting off it. The volume is down and you can hear your own heartbeat like a man in mania trying to break free of a strait jacket, padded walls. Didn’t we move beyond this? Is that still going on? Your heart is a fucking lunatic and there’s no volume except the scream of banshee wind beyond the curtains. And how the thoughts look like plumes of coloured smoke before they explode, big crescent waves of thick paint stifling your mind, drowning your heart. And the white noise wind has a sort of rhythm.

Two days before being unemployed weighs you down like you’ve betrayed your father. Not your father but your line. Your lineage. Without job you are of no value, without job you are disgrace. But without job you are human, nature, life. No one says this. Live inside the real world, you know, the one we made up. Filled with all the money we made up and all the things we made up that you have to pay for with the money we made up. The real world is our fantasy. The fantasy land without jobs and money and things is the real world. Funny how we got those mixed up.

Waiting on an email. Always waiting on email. That’s what it’s come down to. That’ll be life or death. That’ll be I can pay rent or I can’t. All depends on an email. Isn’t that the world we live in now? It can be. Doesn’t have to be. But we choose it and so it is.

I had to start my landlord’s car earlier. She said she couldn’t get the key to turn in the ignition. So she knocked on the door and asked if I could take a look. I don’t know anything about cars, beyond the change of a tire, change of oil, things the average car owner knows. Once an engine of a car I used to own seized while I was driving it. Died a death is what we’d say in Cork. I rolled it into a ditch outside a house and got my mother to drop me to work. The car was no more good to anyone after that. That’s what my uncle said anyway, and he’s a mechanic so he’d know. Turns out there were just some crumbs, detritus, lodged in the rim of the ignition of landlord’s car. I scraped them out with the edge of my thumb and turned the key. She was delighted then. I was happy to help, was surprised I was able to. But it wasn’t really car trouble.

Most days it’s just this. Sat at the laptop remembering things that happened. It’s just me. And it could be more. I could be out in the world meeting people and experiencing it. But there’s something in me, pre-programmed that says, no matter what, we have to be here, doing this, always. And part of me rages against that idea, but most of me succumbs to it.

Is this really the version of the world I want to choose? There are so many other versions, am I sure this is the one I want?