Here's some more prosaic stuff

I tramp a never-ending journey, said the poet I’ve never read. When I hear his name, I always think of the colour grey. Maybe he was a grey poet, a poet who wrote grey poems; or maybe it’s just because of the picture of him that we all have seen on the back of a yellowing paperback at a book sale in October, a picture in white and grey and black of a white man with a grey beard and a black suit.

(For years, I’ve liked it better when people spell grey with an “e.” It’s a much greyer-lookingword than “gray”, which is too rich, too loud, too Americanto come near a proper evocation of the melancholic, three-quarter-view, diminished shrinking specter that is the presence of the color grey. Most colors add; grey subtracts, taking away the bloat and boast and leaving a subtlety that fills and spreads around objects and people, making the world a much more beautiful place than we imagine we make it, when we assault the buildings and t-shirts and pet dogs with paintbrushes and airbrushes and make all of it a perfect pink and yellow.)

I woke up this morning in a big darkness, punctuated on the far side by the unsubtle light of a phone screen. The hostel room was windowless and hot. It could’ve been any time, but it was 8 AM. I felt oppressively neutral, in such an advanced state of homeostasis that I was without the complicated liability of emotion. Actions lose their punch when I’m in these moods: it’s an effort to continue doing, well, anything, and when anything gets done, it seems to take ages. Civilizations rose and fell as I brushed my teeth. While I waited for the toilet, the English army won a battle. As I stepped into my shoes, they lost the war.

I lay in bed a while after I woke up, worrying about what I should do with the hours available to me before I began a complex dance with the British transit system at 14:43 at Lime Street Station. After a good while of unproductive thought and research, I decided that what I would do was “get breakfast”, and then I would do whatever I darn well pleased.

I saw a homeless man sitting by the sidewalk the second I walked out of the front door of the hostel and I put my headphones on so I could pretend I didn’t hear him asking me for money. I told myself I was too generous, that if I made that a pattern I would go over my budget every single day. It wasn’t even hard to walk by.

A minute later, a few streets gone by, I wondered how I could be so heartless. My soul was beginning to wake up, an hour and a half after my body had. When I passed a beggar, later in the day, I gave him a pound coin. When I passed an old woman on the accordion, I gave her my other pound coin. I don’t regret it.

“Whatever I darn well pleased” ended up waiting a while: I wanted to blog during breakfast, an impulse for which I am grateful, because if I hadn’t wanted to blog I wouldn’t have looked in my bag for my laptop, and if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have realized I left said computer at the hostel. Another walk back, then, in the hot sun with a ridiculously heavy pack doing its level best to dislocate one shoulder or another.

The rest of my morning doesn’t really matter; it’s over now.

HEY GUESS WHAT EVERYBODY, I HATE TO INTERRUPT FROM THE LITERARY NONFICTION INSPIRED BY THE PROSE OF ALI SMITH AND BEN OKRI BUT I JUST LEARNED THAT IF I GET OFF MY TRAIN A STOP EARLY I DON’T HAVE TO BUY A NEW TRAIN TICKET!!!! I CAN JUST WALK TO MY HOSTEL!! GLORY BE!!!!

Well, that’s cheered me up no end. Still proud of what I wrote about emotional numbness, though, and I hope it’s struck a chord. The best (and in my case only) reason to show the world what you have created is this: to show people that they are not alone.

I’m gonna watch some TV.