I guess it was mid-june when I felt I was missing the literary limb.

Without fear or looking I can roll a cigarette – but the act of walking to a shop when I have no tobacco has become a very sad, held-back thing.

Celtic Frost… oh aye.
Get up outta’ that with yer Darkthrone’n’Subhumans.
Wait until around eleven and cut the mix with a drop’o’Nick Drake. ‘Gonna see the River Man’ and all the swelling hearts and strings that go with it.

Will it be in the leaves with two fags in the pocket and an expression of old mornings and unsent letters?

Or in the snow like a piano tinkling dirge pulled out late at the last holy swig?

In an old car left at a wall, disappeared and not able to count the change anymore?

In the diminishing returns of a staggering forest walk, with all types of worm staring up through the windows in the ant-piss ground.

Here, we find ourselves again. Not so much on the cusp of greatness as looking down the barrel of swollen feet and a nagging suspicion of nearby dreadful events. I found myself taking the wrong fire escape and was upset to learn of its wrongness and to look back at the closed door of my passed-out friend. I was in an entryway facing a huge gate.

It was terrible. I was doomed. Where could I go?

That Friday night, we lurched around and made dangerous friends with every nationality of head-case close at hand. We were exhausted from our rotten job with the toilet-Nazis and the flying beetles with teeth and I wet myself on the way to the campsite potty. It was glorious and we had made it.

In early 70’s horror there was a great alternative to Hammer’s endless parade of fainting aristo-ladies, somewhat camp Transylvanian counts and Peter Cushings permanently worried expression. Over in Spain director Amando De Ossorio had began a run of films that were and still are totally unique to the genre.

Yeah, it happened just like that. On a weeklong drunk we do obscure and sometimes frightening things. That warm feeling when the bile comes is your get-out clause but fuck!

It was me, The Scab McCabe, Hawk-Eye (Haughey) and Richie. Our lives amounted to nothing at home so a caravan on the coast of Holland was sorted and it was decided that madness, starvation and the very worst elements of humanity would be our dear friends for a while.

The day I went to look for a suit I became very angry, very quickly. I had been in the town fifteen minutes at a push when I began to look for an entryway or even a fucking open window to heave my guts out.

You see, there is an obvious weight and rather than lift you add weight with years.

Yesterday evening I scrambled up the church wall and looked at one of the last places I had felt right.

The new truth, when it came, made me retch, but I felt a little put out when I saw the Stanley Knife. It was late, they were hungry or strung-out and I had shaken visibly, but my money was just that.

From start to finish it was an ugly scene.

I was drunk, had pissed down my leg earlier, was hungover, sweaty, half-mad and began to attack the Popular Music lecturer and a classmate I had never spoken to. I had come in to warm up from December park drinking.

He had joined the workforce at McIntyre and King, Brunswick Dock and ate with his face for the most part. His head was bullet shaped but his pace was slowed by chemicals he took for his brain. Some kindly fucker had thought I needed to care for a man who ate with his face.

I couldn’t go into the rooms I had rented because I had locked the key in there.

There was a lady who owned the florists downstairs who had a key but she was not open this early. She had a round face and always sang Danny Boy because I was Irish, but the flowers were garish and I had no pride in where I was from.

It was early and I stood at the window beside the curtain with the dust.

When I wasn’t drunk and sad, I was hateful and drunk and when I was neither of those I was drunk and asleep.

Downstairs they held illegal gambling bouts all night between a cross-section of races, and would scream at each other and pull knives.

I woke up and my head and hands were numb.

It was freezing, the heater didn’t work and i sat on the side of the bed with the duvet i never liked.