Some of you will have noticed that I have massive, brief highs – for a couple of hours my head is running at full speed, the world makes sense, everything connects to everything else [1]. The real world mixes with the archetypes and they all jiggle around until they make a plausible sense.
It’s not _really_ true, but that makes no odds. It’s about apophenia – that fantastic word for a state where you ‘reconcile the seemingly disparate’ [2], madness blending into genius. It’s about pumping myself with a shot of drama that lifts me past the practicalities. And that’s something I’m taking far too long to learn: the need for drama. As a teenager I was convinced that the solution to life was to avoid drama. I was right – then – I had far more of it than I needed, and any escape into the mundane was a blessing. But I did what I’ve done with every one of my problems: I solved it, and then I overcompensated. Now I need to hold the balance, learn to pump up the drama, then let it down while practical-Dan makes something out of what it produces.
You’ve probably guessed I’m on one of those highs right now. No point talking about the content: in a sense, there is no content, or the content is so divorced from the real world that I’ll never be able to put it into words. But it’s only fair to thank the lj-friends who’ve put me here, wittingly or not: i_am_toast, mazzarc, ioerror, kiad, verlaine, the_alchemist.
The problem now is to convert the feeling into doing, and find a way to extend it through the months ahead when I’ll be drawn back by practicalities, and fear, and knowledge of how silly it looks when put into a balance-sheet. I know (always) that the high me is the real me, and everything else is a warped, inferior copy. But I need to learn how to make inferior-me blindly follow the orders of real-me, without giving up and sacrificing myself to the easy life of spodding, drinking, and never leaving Cambridge.
So: let’s put some things down in writing. In two months time, at the end of July, I’ll be leaving Cambridge. naranek, that means I’ll be leaving my room. raggedyman, that means I’ll be leaving my job. Everybody else: this
is
what I want to do. It’s me jumping off the cliff, lashing myself to the mast, throwing my cap over the wall. And I’m weak-willed enough that I need your help if I’m going to follow through on it. Please don’t try to talk me out of it, and if I try to back away then bribe and bully me into getting out of here. If I’m still here in August, I want you all to refuse to talk to me. Seriously.
I don’t know what I’ll be doing. The fallback plan is to spend some time in Russia. I can’t get a job there, but I have enough money to take some language classes, and survive for a month or two. After that I can pick a city, get a mcjob, and survive – but survive in a new environment. Dublin, Edinburgh, Bristol, London.
As I said, that’s a fallback plan. If any of you see an interesting job elsewhere in Britain, or
any
job in another country that would take me, please point me at it and force me to apply.
Now I’m going to post this quickly, because I can already feel the doubts creeping in, and if I give it another read-through I will have convinced myself that it’s a bad idea, I’m too crap to find a job elsewhere, and I’m doomed to spending the rest of my life in Cambridge.
[1] I’d be fascinated to know what’s going on in my head, neurologically, at times like that.
[2] If you’ve not read the Bagthorpe books, go do it. Not because they’re good (they are), but because how much they explain my head (especially when my mind’s in an interesting state)
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