You’re awake. Write this down, or remember it for later: “A Peek Inside The Noise In My Head On Any Given Day”. Title for a new post. Something to that effect, refine it later. Capture the cacophony of your head while you’re insomnia-struck, and in the mood to articulate it. Vent it from your head like drilling a hole in your skull and letting it bleed out some of the pressure. It’s barely dawn, and you’ve barely slept, and you’re struck by the insistent compulsion to write your way into tiredness, so now’s as good a time as any to get back out of bed, turn off the desk fan attempting to keep you cool like an overheating computer, and waddle into the living room with laptop in hand to write until your stomach growls.
So much time, so little time. Are you going to finish any of those books you’ve been reading on and off for literally years? Get back into Infinite Jest. Re-read House of Leaves, now that you know it’s its 25th anniversary. Finish off Stephen King’s Misery, you started that in 2013, on the morning of the day when you were waiting for the delivery of the double bed your mother decided to buy out of the blue the other night, so you two frantically spent all night clearing up space in her never-used, hitherto bedless bedroom she only ever used as storage space for the mountains of materialist accumulation she’d built up thanks to her hoarding tendencies, buying so much shit she never used, including that very bed when it came, and in fact wasn’t delivered pre-built like she stupidly believed, and you had to build it yourselves over multiple nights, sweating bullets and breaking your back to build a bed designed for two— but wait, who the hell else was ever gonna sleep in it besides her, and why is that only striking you now as you think/write this? What was she thinking? What the hell was she ever thinking? But you started reading Misery that day 12 years ago, and thanks to the movie version with Kathy Bates, you’ll never forget what occurred in the previous pages you read way back when. Remember that killer of a quote from it that you took a picture of? The one that struck a little too close to home? “The survival instinct, he was discovering, might be only instinct in itself, but it created some really amazing shortcuts to empathy. He found himself becoming more attuned to her moods, her cycles; he listened to her tick as if she were a wounded clock.”
Got to pick back up Room To Dream, and the Lynch On Lynch book, both in memory of David Lynch, the latter of which you started reading in 2019, during your trip to see Muse perform live in London. Got to finish Lolita so you can return it to the library, and never have to read it again, because you hate inhabiting Humbert Humbert’s grotesque mind for pages at a time, no matter how mellifluous Nabokov’s writing is to read. Got to finish so many books, and start so many others, so many books to read, so many movies to see (so many lists that say there’s 1001 of each) before you die, whenever and however that’ll be.
The Severance theme is playing insistently in your head. Gotta watch more Severance, catch up on the rest of Season 1, then maybe get up to date with Season 2 before it finishes, and spoilers start leaking into your various social media timelines. Also gotta prepare for Daredevil: Born Again by rewatching seasons 1 and 2 of what was once the Netflix era of Daredevil to remind yourself of everything that happened, then watch Season 3, but also try to cram in The Defenders, but there’s no way you can catch up on all the other Netflix Marvel shows that might be relevant to Daredevil’s return. Sure, you’ve got an annual subscription you don’t have to pay for for Disney+ (with ads; hoo-raaaaaay), thanks to that Club Lloyds benefit you redeemed, but just because you can watch all that content, doesn’t mean you have the time and energy to feasibly do it when there’s such an insurmountable smorgasbord of—
—(don’t you dare say “content” you bastard)—
—countless shows backlogged for you to watch.
The remaining episodes of Luke Cage’s first season you missed when it originally dropped, then its second season, plus seasons 2 and 3 of Jessica Jones, and, well, who are you kidding, you’ll happily skip Iron Fist (sorry, Jessica Henwick)… how many hours does that all add up to? You can already feel the ache behind your eyes at the thought of all that screen time.
But Severance, yes, Theodore Shapiro’s theme calls to you with its David Shire-esque dissonant piano chords. Then perhaps you can finish The Sopranos, see everything past the Season 5 ‘Test Dream’ episode you got up to about 9 or 10 years ago maybe. Still got to watch The Penguin. Got to watch The White Lotus. Got to finish Ted Lasso’s third season (do you, though? Yes, for completion’s sake, now shut up, brain). Got to watch The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher, all those Mike Flanagan miniseries on Netflix before you cancel your subscription because hell if you can afford that uptick in price to £12.99 a month that’s due to hit your account later in March. Got to watch as many of the Netflix Original films from the past decade-plus that you missed. Have you seen Marriage Story yet? No. Have you seen the Fear Street trilogy yet? Beasts of No Nation? Mank? El Camino? Speaking of Breaking Bad stuff: Christ, you haven’t even seen past Season One of Better Call Saul yet! Got to watch The Boys. Got to watch Invincible. Got to watch the rest of Reacher’s second season, ‘cause the third’s already started airing. Gotta watch Mythic Quest, apparently. Gotta watch It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Gotta watch the last few series of Taskmaster. Gotta watch the last two seasons of The Leftovers. Gotta watch The Last of Us. Gotta watch seasons 1 and 2 of House of the Dragon. Gotta watch House of Cards— no, wait, don’t have to worry about that anymore, Kevin Spacey made sure of that, the officious prick. Remember reading that phrase in Stephen King’s The Shining, back when you started reading the actual book about 20 years ago when you were 11 or so? Your mother was in the hospital with whatever her latest sickness was at the time, and you had the book borrowed from the town library, reading it during periods of waiting room tedium. You also read in a newspaper, left behind on a chair next to a bed on the ward, about that film Gothika coming out, and it bombing critically and commercially, though you were still interested in it because its trailer looked scary, its cast was incredible, and it was one of those horror films Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver produced together after their previous collabs with House On Haunted Hill, Thirteen Ghosts, and Ghost Ship, all of which you’d seen and loved. You liked the Gothika trailer, especially since it introduced you to DJ Shadow’s ‘Stem’, though it took years for you to find out that was the song in the trailer. Better add it to that YouTube playlist you’ve been compiling of movie trailers you’ve liked over the years, because nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Just ask Watchmen (2019). Is that meant to be a joke? Sometimes you wonder if you’ve lost the ability to be funny anymore. It’s not funny, it’s just a reference. You’re no better than Ernest Cline, you hack.
You’re so tired.
So many Substack posts to finish writing, or start writing. So many ideas to flesh out, but the anticipation of the time-sinkage inevitably awaiting each article fills you with quiet dread, and another ounce of tiredness to your bones.
You’ll leave the Pokémon Sleep app running a few hours longer, even though you’re too busy writing this rubbish to actually be sleeping for real. You’re gaming an app that gamifies sleep. Have you no shame? Hard to have shame about something that means nothing to you or anyone else, and doesn’t matter by any conceivable metric. Just let it record the dead air left by your absence from the bed - the selfsame bed you built in that other room in that other house, and which you’ve slept in more than your mother ever did when she was alive - until the app says you’ve got a 100% sleep score, and all the imaginary digital Pokémon have their imaginary digital energy recharged, and the imaginary digital Snorlax can be fed its imaginary digital food. Then you sneak in a Duolingo lesson or two before midday, so you can claim the early bird chest for double XP to use in the evening, so you can claim the night owl chest for double XP to claim in the morning, and so on and on and on the cycle goes. Remind yourself to later Google “how often should you change pillowcase”, because you were never taught that elsewhere, and you’re probably not doing it enough.
Eat breakfast while watching YouTube videos on your TV that don’t require much mental bandwidth for you to expend while watching them. Hope your cereal and oat milk supplies will last until your next Universal Credit payment on the 17th, not to mention all the rest of your food supplies in general. You know they won’t, and there’ll come a point where you just dwindle the number of meals you eat per day down to one, and then your right shoulder will start to hurt again during this fasting period, who knows why that happens every time? Let the milk soggify the cereal so it’s not too hard on your ever-ailing gnashers, because you’ve already had two back teeth removed, and you don’t want to lose any more if you can help it. Though of course, how is your measly diet on your measly monthly budget of ~£150 a month for a month’s worth of food affecting your health without you knowing it? You’re shocked that you’re not (overtly, obviously, diagnosably) malnourished after all these years. But you don’t want to be a hypochondriac about your concerns. You don’t have scurvy, you don’t have weak bones, you don’t want to be like the overdramatic, fake-fainting Aunt Caroline (no relation to Shayne Topp’s Smosh character it took you years to realise was a name applicable to your own life). You already have enough health problems that keep you from being a productive member of society as it is, you don’t need to add your own sprinkles of feared faults with your body and mind to the mix. You put in a mental health request with the local GP coming up on two years ago to see if you have genuine bonafide OCD, rather than your years-long running joke about having “non-OCD OCD” to explain away your frequent need for hand-washing, because you don’t want to self-diagnose yourself as if you know more than an educated medical professional would, and given the strain the NHS is always under, it’ll be a miracle if they ever get around to your name on the likely endless waiting list, and you don’t want to make it any worse if you can help it. You were also meant to fill out and send off that self-assessment-for-autism form equally as long ago, and you can’t blame anyone else for not having done it yet. Are you burnt out, or just lazy? Besides the depression you began medicated treatment for in 2014, do you have some other mental health malady you’re not definitively diagnosed with yet, or are you just looking for excuses for your failure to make something of your life in the years since your mother died, and your years as her caretaker came to an abrupt halt?
You doom-scroll on your phone for a bit - your black mirror, your rectangle of sadness, your only avenue to the outside world - while the sound of whatever you’re half-watching on TV fills the emptiness of the flat you inhabit alone. See, but don’t interact with, the deluge of nastiness and horrid news and braindead hot takes and blue-check bots on what was once Twitter. Get a peaceful reprieve on the quieter Bluesky, and then on Substack’s comparatively saner notes feed. Go on Facebook, and find out yet another person you happen to be friends with has at some point fallen down some ideologically toxic rabbit hole you weren’t privy to, and after algorithmically being kept out of your sight for years, has suddenly appeared on your timeline again to spout whiplash-inducing levels of bigotry, conspiracy theorising, and all that other sort of right-leaning unpleasantness our oh-so-wonderful internet age has indoctrinated so many once-rational people into. Hop onto Instagram to watch stories from various beautiful celebrities, cute animal accounts, and that former friend spreading her latest anti-Palestinian/Zionist propaganda in opposition to all observable reality that debunks her at every turn, always finding sickening new levels to stoop to in showing she has seemingly zero cognition of how horrific, contradictory, and oftentimes just flat-out fucking stupid her views are. Get news notifications of another celebrity’s untimely death, another UK governmental blunder by the spineless Kier Starmer, another absurd catastrophe caused by Donald Trump in his second shit-for-brains American presidential term, another display of Elon Musk vying for the top spot as one of the most smooth-brained, uncool, cringe-inducing, loathsome sentient walking turds on this planet; a real-life villain on par with fictional villain Percy Whetmore from The Green Mile, in terms of how much they make you want to rip your skin off in abject rage every time their vile visages stain your eyeballs. Another injustice, another war crime, another expert saying we’re probably too late now to do anything to stop climate change’s rampant devastation on present and future generations, all because countless capitalist organisations and billionaire individuals have spent decades being unimpeded in their vampiric efforts to suck this planet dry of all its vital resources for their own selfish goals of gaining money and power, and everyone else has to pay the ultimate price for their insatiable greed and unstoppable influence on politicians all too happy to be bought out for their complicity in humanity’s downfall. You can’t even recycle plastic for real, and yet where else can you put your empty plastics except for the dedicated recycling bags for plastics that get collected every week? There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. Yes, you know. Everything you do is wrong, and nothing you do can make things right. You watch movies made by bad people, you’re tacitly supporting them. You use social media to connect with friends, you’re helping line the pockets of billionaire oligarchs controlling the information we see every day, and aiding the rise of fascism. You buy any foods and drinks contained in plastic, you’ll contribute to the infestation of micro-plastics that’s likely already infected your body and brain.
You suspect death will come to beat fulfilment to the punch. You suspect you’re not meant to be happy. Whether on antidepressants or not, you’re entrapped in a labyrinth of compounding Kafkaesque circumstances that’s left you alone, poor, stuck, aimless, isolated, removed far from all friends and family, and with the inescapable feeling you’re a leech on others’ happiness. How many times a day do you ponder the veins in your wrists? How many times do you sigh and dispel the thought, because you know your loss would make other people in your life suffer worse than if you didn’t choose to cease yourself? How many times do you wonder if there’ll come a point when even that salient justification to save yourself won’t feel like it’s enough after all?
Shit, what was that thing you meant to Google? You’ll remember insignificant autobiographical details from moments that happened two decades ago, but you’ll forget a note to self that was meant to make you fix a prevailing housekeeping problem in the here and now? When are you going to wash all those dishes, wash down the counters, wash your clothes and bedsheets, wash the shower curtain, vacuum the floors, clean the inside of the oven, clean the bathroom, clean all those hard to reach nooks and crannies around the flat you avoid because it’ll hurt your lower back to bend down to their levels? When are you going to, when are you going to, when are you going to, when are you going to—
There’s too much to do, too little time, you don’t know where to begin, and comprehending the sheer eldritch enormity of the mountain of stuff you want and/or need to do makes you exhausted. Switch your mind off with YouTube, switch your mind off with games of Marvel Snap, tire yourself out so you can sleep the day away, cock up your sleep schedule, eat something that may or may not count as a dinner during dinner hours, see you’ve successfully had an unsuccessful day, wait for tiredness to creep back in, trundle off to bed again.
Your body is too hot, so you turn on the little desk fan that’s on its last legs, where you have to push the button in just the right spot with just the right pressure just enough times to kickstart it into life, and repeat the process until it stays on consistently. You need to get a new fan before summer comes. You try to get cool, but if you get too cold, your joints ache, and you can’t sleep. And if that weren’t enough, your brain won’t shut the fuck up. You finally get the urge to do things on your endless, unwritten to-do list, but you’re lying in bed waiting for sleep to come, in the hopes you can reset your body clock to a semblance of normality and stability. Snippets of songs are stuck in your head on a loop, songs you heard playing on the radio in the local shop you stopped by to see if they had any yellow-stickered, reduced-price products you could more easily afford, as opposed to their full retail cost. Every time you go in lately, you seem to always coincide with the station’s scheduled plays of either Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘Unwritten’, Benson Boone’s ‘Beautiful Things’, Noah Kahan’s ‘Stick Season’, KSI’s ‘Thick of It’, etcetera. Lord help you if you’re unlucky enough to be there when Tones and I’s ‘Dance Monkey’ gets yet another godforsaken spin on the airwaves like a cheese grater viciously run across your eardrums. Maybe it’ll be these songs, maybe some others, but your brain will keep having snippets of songs, film dialogue, sitcom scenes, recollections of past embarrassments, book quotes, flashes of imagery you don’t want to remember, ideas for things to write, sentences to edit, the omnipresent thrum of existential dread vibrating in your bones on the same frequency as the rumbles and hums of the building’s electric fans you can see from the outside that… wait, what do they do exactly? Ventilate the building to cool it? Ventilate it to avoid damp and mould? You realise you don’t how to refer to them, nor do you quite know their purpose. Same goes for you. Oh, how metaphorical.
Shut up, brain. Why won’t you stop being so noisy? At least in sleep you’re allowed a temporary sojourn from the clatter of your inner monologue, and its accompanying collage of free-associating images and sounds. Then again, your dreams and nightmares are hardly peaceful themselves. The same rotating selection of locations from your life, impossibly linked together across time and space by dream logic, as your hair magically grows back, your cat is magically alive again, your mother magically never died, you never moved (or you somehow live in two houses at once, and alternate between them), you return to secondary school as a thirtysomething among kids half your age and less, you have to re-learn everything for your exams again, you get stressed by missing buses and trains that were meant to get you home, but now you’re stranded overnight in some place with nowhere to go. What was that recent nightmare? Oh yeah, the one where you’re an old man at a cinema, and a demon in the shape of a little girl has latched itself onto your back, whispering into your ears in stereo, and no one else can see it, and no matter how you try to scheme to get rid of it before it hurts you or others, the threat of it showing its terrible face to you looms over everything, as you await a jumpscare from your own brain scaring itself.
Goddammit, you meant to Google the thing about how many times you’re supposed to change your pillowcase. Your skin does not appreciate your absent-mindedness in tackling what’s probably one of the root causes of your face and scalp so often breaking out in red splotches and dry patches. You know you’ve got that seborrheic dermatitis condition that makes your stupidly sensitive skin susceptible to dryness and damage no matter how much you try to care for it, but how is your pillow regimen (or lack thereof) affecting things? At least when you unexpectedly got chickenpox at age 29, you knew then you simply had to keep changing pillowcases every night. What are you meant to do here? You’re ashamed that you’re an adult who has to look up such things you imagine are probably so elementary to everyone else, and you’re just an adult in arrested development who can barely look after yourself, because you never had an example to learn from. How are you ever going to find a romantic partner when you’re such a mess? You’d hate to live with you if you were someone else. And that goes to show you obviously hate yourself, and they always say you can’t love others until you love yourself, so you’re cooked. Granted, you’ve gone your entire thirty-one years without a girlfriend, so what’s the rest of your life matter? You know people far more unattractive than your distinctly average self have found love incalculable numbers of times before you, and will continue to do so long after you’re worm food, but hell if you can find anything appealing about yourself that makes you worth a romance. And the last two (only) times you almost maybe nearly sort of got close to the inklings of establishing the foundation of a relationship, things weren’t right, you drifted apart, and they’ve both since gone on to have years-long relationships, one of whom even got engaged (to someone who made you realise that they had a type - bald guys with beards - and so you recognised you were just the wrong bald guy with a beard, which is a gross oversimplification you are aware you’re deploying to defend your precious little ego, and you know you have no one to blame but yourself). And so you singly sleep on this doubly bed.
Google says you’re supposed to change pillowcases every two days, bare minimum.
Fuck.
You’re awake. Write this down, or remember it for later: “A Peek Inside The Clatter In My Head On Any Given Day.” Maybe the title will stick, maybe it won’t.
Your head hurts.
You have accurately captured my mindset regarding all the movies and shows I missed while I was in prison. Since I got out, I've focused on the movies, but now I'm getting into shows and realizing, oh God, that's a lot of hours! Streaming didn't even really EXIST when I went to prison!
Fromtheyardtothearthouse.substack.com
Read first paragraph, then audibly gasped as i scrolled down for how long this was 😂
Mad props for this, I found much of this too relatable, I gotta go for a walk