26/10/2020 2.50 am I just had half of a terrible takeaway, (the bin was treated to the rest). I forgot that the supermarket shuts early on a Sunday so I slept in and missed its opening hours. I got up at half past four in the afternoon. I needed some rest. Saturday night was pretty busy at work and tomorrow I have meetings and training as opposed to a second day off. All of which are necessary and welcomed of course, but because I’m busy tomorrow, I wanted the extra sleep today. So I had no food in and decided, late, to order in. The highest hygiene rating I could find on the well known unnamed ordering service for people who just want to eat was a four. Honestly a four is pretty shit but the rest were either three’s or ‘submitted’ meaning they had no rating and could for all anyone knows be rat infested shit dumps. The food was terrible, and I felt sick halfway through eating it. A total waste of money and time and I would have been better off with a slice of toast and an early night. But no; I am awake and over thinking every aspect of my life as I often do and to add to it all I now have the impending sense of a morning in the bathroom.
I haven’t updated in a while, not that anyone will have noticed, because I went and fell off of an E-scooter about 5 weeks ago and had to spend a month off work feeling sorry for myself with a broken collar bone and a severely bruised ego. My time off was boring and lonely, the sick pay was ghastly and I was glad to get back to work when my Doctor eventually agreed to sign the paper saying I was fit to return. I’ve been back at work around about a week and in my absence everything has changed. With the new government guidelines we now do nothing but table service, and the general manager I had for the last year has moved back to Spain to pursue a quiet career in god knows what. Our new manager starts this week, and my meeting tomorrow will be with him and the other members of the management team. I have really tried to come back from my time off strong: come out of the corner fists raised feet fast and ready to take the punches, but I’m more tired than ever and my time off with the broken bone has had me reacquainted with my old addiction to prescription painkillers. I tried several times during my month off to slow down on them and to stop drinking, but so far these efforts are to no avail. No matter how hard I try, how fast I run around and how many times I say yes of course to the people who ask things of me, I feel like I’m a million miles behind. I feel like I’ve let everyone -myself included- down and ultimately I end my days with a sincere sense of worthlessness and longing. I really am trying my best, but I often think that perhaps life, adult life to be specific, just isn’t for me. But what option do I have? I’m lucky to be employed, I’m lucky to have parents who love me and friends who care about me. I have a roof over my head and food (albeit terrible food but that’s aside) in my stomach and a bed to sleep in at night- all of which qualify me as being much richer than an exceptionally large portion of the world’s population; but I still feel so empty inside. I try to be grateful for the things I have and I try to work hard at the opportunities I am afforded but at the end of the day all I want is to take strong drugs in a dark warm corner and unplug from reality.
I’m sure if I got clean again that some of these views and feelings would change, at least for a little while, but unfortunately the larger part of me doesn’t want to be clean. A big part of me wants to be drugged and drunk and out of his mind. Right now I don’t have an awful lot to say other than I wish I could turn off the darker parts of my mind and move forward through life with the same careless abandon that normal people seem to have mastered. With that, here is the last passage I wrote (undated) during a heavy drug relapse whilst I was signed off sick and struck suddenly by suicidal thoughts, which ended with a manic episode that I couldn’t control:
(A few weeks ago at 2.30am)
I broke a collar bone riding an electric scooter a couple of weeks ago and have been off work since. I have been bored and depressed and utterly alone. I wake when I wake and begin to drink whisky for breakfast, to wash down my pain pills. Now it’s half 2 in the morning on a Sunday into Monday and I’m off my face on cocaine, whisky and pain killers. What a fucking mess I’m making of this precious gift of life the universe has bestowed upon me. Did I one time think the drugs would make me a genius writer? Did I think that if I drank like Hemingway I’d write like him too? Yeah. Yeah I really did. I neglected to remember all of the work these heroes of mine put into their craft; Bukowski, Hunter S Thompson, Kerouac, Hemingway... they and their work were all more than the sum of the substance abuse. I guess I believed that if I drank like them, sniffed like them, smoked like them and cried like them that I would one day write like them too. But alas, here’s the rub... These men, these beasts of brilliance, they had something deep down in them that once upon a time I believed I might have too. But instead of emanating their work ethic I emanated their worst and most miserable traits. So here I am- wasted on drugs and booze and still no more talented than I was when I was sober. Nothing has changed in ten years.
I sent a tonne of video messages to my brother J, bitching and moaning about my lot in life as if I’m the only person ever to experience emotional turmoil at the hands of their own brain, and I spoke passionately of how we have to do something to make a difference in our lives! But maybe the bitter unwanted truth is simply that I am not special. I think, perhaps I’m just another drunken druggie with delusions of grandeur, about to sniff another line and die a little more inside. I really have thrown it all away, and pushed away every good thing that was ever afforded to me. I think I might die now, or soon, tonight or tomorrow or in a week perhaps. But soon all the same. I don’t know how to change, or if I even want to. Maybe it really is too late. And if this is the last thing I ever write then; I’m sorry Mum. I’m sorry Dad. You deserved a better son than I was ever able to be.
W.L
2.45am on a fucking Sunday.
Now I lay me down to rest, with pills and booze, a total mess.
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