Friday 15 February 2019

The end of work.

Trewin had a giant whiteboard on the floor in the middle of the room. He navigated it like a game of Twister. I was slouching on half a chair, drinking my fifth deep mug of coffee and shoving tobacco up my nostrils until it burst out of my ears. The sun shone outside and while a musical project was up and visible on the computer screen beside the window, the speakers sat undisturbed.

We were plotting, literally, for another project.

The technical term is avoidant. This is avoidant behaviour. I am very guilty of this sort of thing, and that’s why I know it when I see it, and, after years of battering my head against the tendency, wilfully indulge in it. It is the only way to find peace, and you cannot complete a work until you find peace within it—be it the peace of carelessness abandon or the peace of some kind of holistic achievement. A spell of avoidant behaviour is the ageing of the steak. It is the non-watching of the watched pot. It is the abandonment of all heretofore accepted responsibility justifiable only by arrogance and solipsism. No, wait...

Anyway we threw our arms up and down and touched our chins and held our fingers over our mouths and talked about character arcs and thematic development and held our heads. I span around a lot in the old wheelie chair, throwing up ideas about chase scenes and desolate locations while Trewin drew arrows in that whiteboard turquoise colour from person to trait to scene and gave up little chunks of propellant. And then this. And then that. All deeply interpersonal and with a possibility of gaining compulsory attention. Every idea brought forth ten new ones until we had to reign it back in again to keep the whole thing manageable. Never too much. Which trapdoors should we leap over, and which should we sidestep?

But we never lost enthusiasm, which was good. Tiredness came but it came after we'd worn good routes on the island in the middle of the floor. We smiled as we gave up but I looked out the window and said how I didn’t like the day. I’d left the house without a jacket for the first time in months.

Ed arrived and my brain was a broken cog, whirling to no effect, so I left. On the way home I was so cold I sang to myself to distract from it.

The next few weeks will bring a lot of work that we are in no way prepared for. Such is the method.

Monday 11 February 2019

Buy and sell.

We had cancelled another meeting, and with the freshly neutered day I walked into Brighton to meet Woman from her dungeon of work.

The two of us were ten jovial minutes from home, and just walking into the gigantic Hove Tesco, when management called me on the phone.

“Pick up a basket now,” I told Woman.

Management laughed through the speaker.

We sauntered through the vegetable aisle as management talked about the release of the new album. Woman picked up a cauliflower and looked at me with her eyebrows raised. I nodded.

I jabbed an excited finger at the courgettes. Woman scrunched up her face. 
 
On the way here we had passed a man talking loudly on his phone.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s a difficult one to challenge,” he said into his hand.

Woman and I walked a few steps in the night, then talked without looking at each other.

“It is,” she said.

“It’s a very difficult one to challenge,” I said.

“It’s true. It can’t be denied.”

“I know.”

And then there I was, not ten minutes later, hanging out beside the vine-ripened tomatoes and loudly talking lead times and effective project management and revenue streams into the ears of shelf-stackers and mothers wearing slip-on shoes.

I walked casually and mulled the Philadelphia while management chatted about things that would happen, and what my part to play would be and why they would be good. Since these things were first mentioned, maybe a week or two before, I’d discovered a little burst of enthusiasm in myself which was helping things fall out of me here and there that might be of use. I had, in fact, been working.

But now management talked of opportunities and of plans and of reality. And of history. And of potential. These are things that I have faced up to before and found no benefit in. Maybe they excite some people—but not me. The last time I started to touch on those things and what they might mean, I developed a chronic pain condition.

So the floodlights shone on the minced meat and I picked some up, as Woman and I had decided to have bun-less burgers for tea. I make very good burgers. It’s something I make well without really thinking about it. I felt good about making dinner.

I told management that I’d been working hard on creative stuff and that I would send her what I’d done.

I felt empty when I hung up. I figured that from here on in I would be forced to open up a little more than I’m comfortable with. Sometimes I get caught in strange little loops of solitary habit that only get shown as the waste-of-time/road-to-absolute-misery they are when somebody asks me about what I’ve been up to, and I have to turn up my palms and show them. Suddenly I’m going to have to open the box of mystery and show off what I’ve been hiding in there. And now that that’s about to happen, I don’t understand how I got here. I don’t understand why there’s a box. I don’t understand why I’m in this room. Stop looking at me like that. I don’t know why you’re treating me this way. It’s just a box. It’s just a few pieces of paper. I don’t know what they mean. Please don’t make me scream. Not here in the middle of Tesco. I just wanted the burgers. I just wanted to walk Woman home. She’s buying mayonnaise and rainbow peppercorns. How did things end up like this?

The reason the meeting was cancelled was sickness. That’s a good one. I'll have to use that.


Monday 4 February 2019

Rosy.

Our manager was due to drive up from the South West, but she had to cancel due to the snow on the roads.

Things were running fairly smoothly, she told us, but sometimes she likes to come up and check we’re all OK and tell us what plans she’s made, what people she’s been talking to, what our aims need to be for the next few months—things like that. These meetings have a reputation as ending up a bit boozy, but that’s slowed down a little, of late.

One thing that has perhaps contributed to this has been a change of location. It’s been about a year now since we moved operations out of the shared house and into our palatial studio. The thing is, though… I liked that lampshade. Well, it wasn’t a lampshade as such. It was a shirt. It was a perpetually damp shirt, draped around a lightbulb.

Our manager is happy we’ve moved on. She would often stay over in the house, and I have no doubt that her drive home the next day would necessarily include a stop at a pharmacy for some kind of cream or other.

“You’re manager of Phoria, right?” The pharmacist would ask.

“Yes.”

“That place on the hill?” 

“Yes.”

A pitiful shake of the head.

“...this one’s on me.”

And our manager would limp to her car with a crooked back, smothering herself in ointment with both hands.

But I liked the place. We could kick the floor, there. Things peeled and fell apart. The house stank with the effort of slight improvement, but we were never able to lift ourselves out of the swamp. The doors all sat uneasy on their hinges—especially the ones removed from their frames and stacked against the wall, blocking the hallway. Vacuum cleaners ran, but they rumbled like 4x4s over the black encrusted lumps of chewing gum that enhanced the carpet. Tables looked like bits of trees that had rotted into shape after being thrown into the room. Cushions burst unevenly with makeshift stuffing and dusty display cases creaked every now and then, holding unread books and unused old toys found and brought in from the street for no other reason than that they needed a home.

The front garden had boat engines and a moss covered sofa with springs sticking out of it, and you had to walk through overflowing rubbish to get to the front door, which you had to break in to, because nobody had a key.

When it rained, and you were in the house, you had to put a jacket on.

We used to sit in the lounge and treat it like a railway waiting room. Any ghosts in the house no doubt looked on and grew fearful of us all. We were often disturbing and rarely sober, passing sheets with figures on showing how we were doing, discussing release strategies and whatnot before folding the pages into ashtrays and later on mopping up beer with them. Everybody smiling, sitting on the floor, laying across each other and listening to music and talking about where we were heading.

Now we do things in a chandelier strewn cathedral. The walls are pure white. There’s a picture rail. The windows are large and look out onto trees. The place is filled with antique furniture that’s comfortable. The carpet is actually fitted.

I can’t pretend it’s not nice. And I also can’t pretend there aren’t little islands of squalor that speak of who we are—but they’re islands on a calm sea. The old place was one single tempestuous bog. I loved watching the bubbles rise out of the swamp and burst. That doesn’t happen any more.

(I also love the chandeliers and the ability to breathe and the relative fearlessness with which I now enter the studio, but that’s beside the point.)

So instead of driving up, our manager booked us in for a conference call, and I joined in from home—a damp, bug infested hole in the ground near Hove seafront. Home. I drank coffee brewed in a stained espresso maker on a crooked oven that snaps the electric if you turn it up too high, and sat in unwashed clothes on a paint-stained chair while we talked about everything we were going to achieve. I cooked bacon and sniffed richly at abandoned glassware while she talked. My eyes were dry. It was cold, because of the drafts, but I wore layers and spoke calmly.

Tim

Achieve.

All milky and lava-lamp-ish the street-lights reflecting on my big red car bonnet as I curl it round at night all sound and echoing engine...