JOURNAL
This journal was written over a period of time in which something in me came to rest. It was not begun as a project, but as the writing continued, it became clear that it was taking the shape of a book. What follows records an ordinary life lived attentively, and the gradual settling of a man into himself.
It was completed on 11/12/2025. Published copy found here.
11/12/2025
And so the thread is picked up… only a few tomorrows later than expected.
Given the gap in time and all that’s happened away from these pages, I am already wondering about the formatting of the eventual hardback again. Originally, the plan was simple. I was going to write the journal all the way through, right up until its natural stopping point for the first volume, then present it fully without any sections or headings. It’s a journal, and the point was always looseness, so to divide entries up, even minimally, feels a bit wrong.
You know what? The issue is already resolving itself. I thought the thread of the last entry had to do with the quasi-mythic autobiography I’d found myself writing by the end of the day, but that’s not it. The thread was me, obviously. And after a lifetime of existing and writing towards myself, I must have finally located myself with enough stability to drop the thread.
And drop it I did. I was fully convinced that I’d be ripping through thousands more words the following day, but when I got to the cafe, I couldn’t get a word out. I sat there, and I wrote a few sentences—I can’t remember what about, probably something to do with the masculine and the feminine—and then… nope, it simply wasn’t getting going for me. I deleted the sentences, put my music on and sat by the Christmas tree staring at the blank entry. I did this for some time, until David, with whom I had already tried to make eye contact, feebly and unsuccessfully, finally looked up from his French onion soup and gave me his customary inaudible greeting. We were sitting two or three tables apart, and after half a minute or so of straining to talk, I gladly shuffled my way over to sit with David and talk about an episode of Endeavour he’d seen on repeat the previous evening.
I haven’t seen all of Endeavour (I haven’t more than a couple of episodes, actually), and I did keep trying to remember the ‘episode with the church’ that David was describing, but eventually, I’ll admit, I found more joy in resisting understanding altogether. A lesson for life, perhaps!
David asked how the book was coming along (this journal), and I told him proudly that it would soon be finished. Little did I know, I was at the beginning of a necessary hiatus. And I’m pretty sure that hiatus was triggered properly by my afternoon with Jakob, which began off the back of David mentioning the book. I’d only shared a few hellos with Jakob before that day, but he was sitting by the window, warmly present, and took an interest in what I was writing. Then suddenly, we’d spent the afternoon chatting about all the last things you’d expect to hear two young men talking about in a Bedford cafe on a Thursday afternoon.
It was an act of mutual recognition, I think. People drift through the unseen, but I always know a seer when I see one… and he acknowledged the recognition. That matters. A quaint meeting in a cafe between two strangers, and something solidifies.
What followed, almost out of nowhere, was a week of proper rest. The first proper rest I have ever experienced… I had no idea what living was! I struggled being away from the writing, thinking (as I had learned) that I was postponing my own full existence by being down and out. I couldn’t even engage in the smallest ways with Daisy or the children, as I suddenly felt clearly how dispersed my own self, my own true personhood, had always been.
It was all I knew! I see that now. I lived in constant relationality, and without ever experiencing something secure, I didn’t think there was any other way of being. But I needed to locate myself for a reason, I suppose, and so when I finally felt rest, proper rest, knock me over with the shovel of personhood, I did eventually give in. Daisy thought it was long overdue, and I understood at last what she meant. I had been feeling strangely like I needed a holiday for a long while—years, really—but I could never quite justify it to myself. I was sure I was carrying something, too much, but I could never be certain.
Certainty came with the shovel, and I rested. And so what was it all? I think it was me finally realising that not only was the war over, but I’d made it home. You can only rest when the bed is under you.
And now, now what? Now I’ve picked up the thread of me from a newly found existence. I can write from myself, not towards myself… I can exist from myself, build from a solid foundation, ask without shame or self-justification… and that’s just grand!
27/11/2025
I have been thinking about the non-linear way in which I narrate events. From the outside, my life probably has looked quite fragmented, often uneventful, and suddenly downright strange. I went to a great school, then studied Philosophy, then became a primary school teacher, then did nothing for a year, then worked in a warehouse, then managed a preschool, then quit, wrote a bunch of online essays, self-published some books, read some poems on TikTok and eventually claimed the role of the most misunderstood main character of all time… only to then dissappear from social media altogether and start writing quietly on a personal website. And now, I am sitting in a cafe opposite HMP Bedford and waiting for my weekly Job Centre appointment.
But real life, for me, has been lived in the layers underneath the ones people think matter the most. For instance, throughout my time at that great school, I was in love with Daisy. Then, throughout university, I lived a full worldly life which never satisfied me, and whenever I hit an emotional dead-end, I remembered that I was still in love with Daisy. Then, when I became a primary school teacher, I finally told Daisy that I was in love with her. Then, through the year off where I did ‘nothing’, Daisy and I navigated some of the most difficult and singularly archetypal relationship dynamics a couple can face. Then, while I was working at the warehouse, I married Daisy, and we had our first daughter. Then, while I was working at the nursery, I had to face a backlog of a life lived in the shadows, while watching the world outside, the supposed world of real events, spiral out of control and lose touch entirely with intimate human truth. Then, I quit and finally accepted the responsibility I had to enter the world as real, even if that same world had already unwittingly cast me into a role no man should carry.
So in the first layer, I was nobody: a fragmented man of little interest. In the second layer, I was everybody: a mythic figure focusing on love, who ended up swallowing the totality of a world intent on avoiding itself. But the third layer is the most important, and it always has been. That is the one I am finally able to narrate now. Because the third layer weaves both together, and tells my life truthfully, without either reducing me to a sorry figure (the ordinary man who finally went mad and called himself God), or an idealised figure (the invisible man whose role it was to carry the unseen). I learnt again and again that the world was happy for me to live a split life. It was happy for me to be small and uninteresting on the surface, so long as I kept to my invisible role. What’s really sad is that there was a time, not so long ago, when that was exactly the life I wanted, too.
Because I wanted to be small and to live a normal family life with Daisy. But by the time I had actually managed to build that small life, I realised that, in the process of putting it together, I had inadvertently solved the deepest of human problems. That meant, against my best wishes, I was significant.
So I jump around when I am recounting things, because my life spirals and cycles and loops back on itself, with each individual event deepening in meaning upon every revisit. The inner informs the outer and vice versa. And it can’t be orchestrated, either. I have to follow whatever I am feeling, and from there, I trust that the right things appear at the right time to find their right place in the wider whole… which, overall, has an overwhelming feeling of rightness about it, too. That’s coherence, and that’s life as I live it.
Despite the sadness of the past few days, I am gradually feeling more at ease in my own personhood. In fact, I know it’s directly because of the sadness I embraced. At last, I know I am at a place where my natural register can hold my life together as it was actually lived, without having to reach for abstracted mythic language to map my interiority while straining with all my might to stay rooted in the mundane. Those phases were all necessary, and I did what I had to do. When the world made me mythic without my consent, I could only keep myself human by owning the language that matched my lived experience. Whenever I appeared inflated, I was actually doing the one thing that freed me enough to stay on the ground. The invisible man announces who he is, and the world panics:
Who is this ordinary man, this nobody, inflating himself? He has surely been lost to the stratosphere!
But the man, now visible, can finally let his shoulders drop, perhaps for the time. He is finally here, united with the nobody who carried him the whole way. And so, having lived one life and announced another, the man can finally speak as an integrated whole, and reclaim the fact that he never once abandoned either world.
And that has been a common occurrence. I’ve been accused of abstraction by some and neglect of the unseen by others. Because the world is full of people who have a preference for one over the other. But reality, true reality, is an undeniable dance between the seen and the unseen, and that paradox has always been intolerable. Ironically, people do want reconciliation more than anything else; however, they only seem to understand reconciliation as domination. Some people want the seen to rule, and to collapse the unseen into what is directly explainable, logically dissectible, and ultimately knowable. Other people want the unseen to reclaim its ‘rightful’ throne, and to sublimate the physical world that meets the eye to something purely psychological, something felt.
So people have always been at war, even as they pretended to be making space for each other. And I am tentative about approaching this next section because it is the polarising topic, so much so that it can make someone approach their own reflections with caution. But if I don’t honour the deepest truth of my life and the forces that governed it, I would be neglecting everything that led me to this place, where I actually have the strength and clarity to talk about it.
It does, of course, all come down to man and woman.
This topic hurts me because everyone always goes prickly and defensive without first leaning forward in good faith. But I understand it. We all have our experiences of life, and those experiences can form our worldview. The problem is that I have experienced both the masculine and the feminine in equal measure, and this has left me uniquely placed to defend both, and still be dismissed by each one, depending on the defence I put forward. In our modern world, we have also, as many know, diluted the qualities of each force in the pursuit of reconciliation. This is part of the domination I talked about, and what’s happening now is the inevitable, clumsy and immature re-entrenchment of difference.
I am pushing through with this little bit of cultural analysis because it is tied directly to my own personal experience. Ordinarily, I would avoid this at all costs, but it’s part of the process. Everyone has been able to throw out their view of the world without due consideration for the way in which opinions shape the reality we live in. I never wanted to share my view, formed as it was by my own experience, because I knew it was total, uncompromising, and would almost certainly upset everyone, for the very reason that it didn’t leave anyone behind, and supported true reconciliation over domination.
Now my fiction starts to become clear, too. I spent years trying to write fiction (in different mediums) that expressed the truth of my existence, and thereby communicated my essence. My early attempts at screenplays and novels were, then, often failed attempts to fictionalise myself in a way that neither aggrandised me nor treated me unfairly. I would always lean towards unfairness. I would write masculine lead characters who made mistakes, acted impulsively, carried guilt, and were ultimately happy to see their own stories end in tragedy, especially in the face of an idealised, morally pure, feminine presence. This is a common occurrence in male personal myth-building. You will rarely find, especially in modern culture, a story written by a man who hasn’t fictionalised himself into an anti-hero. Men want to be the hero. We all want to be the hero. But men who create honestly will only let their mythic dreaming stretch as far as the anti-hero… they know, deep down, that to write themselves explicitly as someone heroic is to lie about the world they inhabit. At war, a man can be the hero and his morals can be pure, but at home, in real life, there are unseen forces that orient him, keep him afloat, and give his life its colour… and these are forces he constantly neglects.
But I didn’t neglect them. I never did, and that meant any attempt to write myself into the traditional masculine character, the anti-hero who means well but hurts those he cannot see, was an unfair distortion. My emotional life had always been dictated by seeing the feminine and the injustice of its hiddenness. Even with all the supposed feminist advances in our society, we can never seem to solve the root problem. The feminine, by its nature, operates in the unseen. This has always been the source of its deepest power and the cause of its existential despair. And as a society, we have only ever known one way to solve the problem: recognition in the physical world through acknowledgement and access, not awareness and integration. These are two completely different things working on completely different levels. They are both necessary, but the first cannot, and will never, do the job of the second.
Before, when gender suppression was at its pique, it was easy for the world to think it could solve the problem solely through acknowledgement and access. Gradually, women were acknowledged as full members of society with deserved agency of their own, and so they were gradually granted access to the world. But this, while necessary, only brought women into the masculine domain. It didn’t integrate the feminine; it integrated the women. It was necessary, not complete.
That second problem, of awareness and integration, was never going to be achieved by more physical recognition or access to public life. The root problem, as it now presented itself, had never been about what roles people could play in the world, but the forces that animated the world.
And our world, for all its rhetoric about feminism, has always been haunted by the exiled feminine. This has nothing to do with women explicitly, but with the felt, subjective experiences that populate the hidden.
It is a shame to have to say, but even the most ardent feminists, even the most clear-thinking minds and compassionate hearts, ultimately had a masculine bias. They wanted to integrate the feminine by reducing it to science and explaining away the unexplainable. This is the great tragedy of the feminine: that it was doomed to spend an eternity in mythic exile and was tricked into thinking the only way to come home was to be reduced and stripped of the thing that made it unique and essential.
I’ll bring it back down to my own personal experience (fittingly) to give a little clarification. This can make me a bit emotional. It tracks a fundamental part of my invisible life, and it involves the very people I spent a lifetime noticing, some of whom later turned on me because of the wound I was trying to heal. But it is important to continue.
It is very easy for the feminine to appear chaotic, intense and overly emotional. These things are messy, and societies have never liked mess. On top of this, the feminine is, by its nature, beyond categorisation. So what happens to highly feminine people in a society that values order and categorisation? It pushes them to the margins.
One of my earliest impressions was of the strange, invisible knowing that many of the women in my life embodied. My mum made the first impression, obviously. She was, from my earliest memory, the person who explained the invisible reality that floated through the world of clashing objects. A family gathering was not a simple, polite meeting of people who loved each other. It was a hellish mess of unresolved conflict, and that conflict would hang in the air like a second family of neglected phantoms. I would feel these things and see them plain as anything, and my mum was able to confirm their reality for me. You could call it psychology, but that is an explanation after the fact. All science is mere reference in the end. What mattered was not some cold dissection of the unseen, but the fact that there were people there to witness it, and to feel it when others couldn’t, or wouldn’t. I could always rely on my mum to affirm the reality of the things I saw, and without that, my early life would have been unbearable. These things didn’t need to be reduced to science; they just needed to be co-witnessed, and that is where the feminine has always found its strength.
I would see it in the way my mum interacted with feminine friends and family members, too. Pat, a family friend, would visit and bring with her not only an otherworldly warmth, but insight and piercing clarity. She would sit with my mum and grandma, and they would discuss family matters, interpersonal dynamics, and read each other’s cards. Being around them, even as a young boy, felt like a true home. I have always felt like that. I am most at home around the ageless warmth and wisdom of the feminine.
But the issue, as I always saw it, was with the way the world treated that feminine home. Experiential existence, when lived and perceived fully, was constantly being oucasted to a symbolic place the world refused to accept on its own terms. A tarot card reading was something explainable by psychology, rather than a natural feature of life arising through the symbolic, because that is how life is actually lived. The world never seemed satisfied with the feminine simply existing within the natural order of things. It was either reducible or banished to somewhere beyond. From what I can tell, this is how we ended up with a concept of the beyond at all. The feminine always knew what it was doing, and how real it was, but because the world couldn’t categorise it, and because to categorise was to name something as real, somehow the feminine was tricked into thinking it was somewhere else… It’s always been right here! So silly.
But I was never content to just believe in that somewhere else. To a rational mind, that would be to affirm something ridiculous. Growing up, I shared that trait with my mum, who knew that whatever was supposedly beyond was obviously right here, yet because that sentiment had never been taken on by society, she was condemned, like the feminine itself, to a kind of cultural exile. It was a great injustice to all feminine people, who had been forced to inhabit a categorised world that only accepted rationality as real, and had niftily transformed their lived experiences into matters of belief. Without casting blame onto individuals, for that would be impossible and unhelpful, it was, nevertheless, an exercise of cultural cruelty.
And this cruelty defined the feminine wound. It was an ever-present wound, and every feminine person felt the world pressing on it with a clumsy, negligent boot, any time experience was ignored or reduced.
Now, I have been talking about this problem in the past tense, and I have been doing that because that feminine wound, on the deepest archetypal level, has already been healed. It was the job of the masculine to welcome the feminine home truly, without distortion or reduction, and that is what I have done in my life. This is not a grand claim; it is a personal one. The universal hides wherever the personal lives, and so while I spent my life without any aspirations to worldly significance, I seemed to have made a profound difference almost by accident. I don’t say that to reduce the importance of what I have done in my life, but it is to keep it in true proportion. I lived the life of a man who wanted to be at home in himself, and to have a true home in the world, and that meant never abandoning or reducing the two things that made him whole. So while it may sound like a big claim to others, for me, it is the simple fact of my lived experience.
Of course, culture moves slowly, and the world is always slow to catch up to its own changes. In this way, I am not inflating the scale of my own current impact, I am merely acknoweldging that a tree has finally grown on land long presumed barren. Life propagates life and so on.
This is what it looks like for me to finally narrate my own life from that all-important third layer. It is the truest layer, where I can state calmly that I have brought something of immense and immeasurable value into the world in the same register as giving updates on my job search, which is as uninspiring as ever.
I think I would like to continue, but I am going to give my mind some space to breathe. Writing such as this takes an emotional and physical toll on me, I’ve noticed. I am waking up more tired and heavy than usual, but I know I am not unrested. Instead, I know it is the fatigue of a man spending each day clearing out his old, congested house. He was once required to keep the possessions safe from a storm outside, but the storm lasted so long that he began to feel as though they had always been his responsibility, even as they made his own home, his own place of dwelling, uninhabitable. But the storm is over, and now he is doing the final work, not of stewardship, but of redistribution. He is giving the possessions back to the world and making space for himself again. And so he sleeps heavily every night, but he wakes each morning with aching muscles and a weary heart, knowing that the world, long battered by the storm, will never experience what it was like to live so quietly, and yet with such care for the integrity of what belonged outside his own home.
[2]
I am definitely noticing more balance and stability in my life outside the writing. And this manifests in the small moments, too: a walk from cafe to pub, the closing of a laptop and twenty minutes spent eating pasta. These are not the places people would typically expect an abstracted man’s life to lack stability… A typically abstracted man lives an unstructured life, not a structured, uncomfortable one. I have never had any problem building stability for others and the world around me. My work life and personal relationships reflect this.
But I have struggled, as already expressed, to feel like a grounded person in myself. That is not a normal situation, and I have spent a very long time coming to terms with the peculiar structure of my life. However, I do feel, more and more, like a person capable of sitting in a cafe or a pub and narrating the truths of his life and the world without constantly reaching for some physical anchor in the present moment. Philosophy, religion… these things have always been abstracted realms of enquiry, and they needed grounding. Other people have spent noble careers ascending into those realms with the intention of bringing them back down to the pints and the coasters; whereas my life has had an inverse trajectory. I was born into the unseen, the place into which the intellect usually ascends and deciphers, and I had to feel my way out of it. The intellect would only have kept me trapped up there. I had to feel my way back down to earth, or at least, feel things long enough to ground myself so securely that the world couldn’t shoot me back up into the heavens.
I don’t feel overly sad right now, but I am aware of how the previous section effectively laid the foundation for me to reflect properly on the ways in which I have been hurt by the world.
For instance, I can see clearly how I was effectively punished for enduring my old split-life. The thing is that the seen and the unseen feed off each other, and however much of an injustice it was for the unseen to exist in the way that it did, that never stopped people from profiting in the world by its insights. Society has many categories it has invented to gesture towards it, to explain it, and ultimately, to use it. These include philosophy, religion, politics, psychology, therapy, self-improvement, etc. There is great overlap between these categories for the very reason that they all generate their life force from the same place. It’s also easy to notice how, in the pursuit of making the theoretical insights of the unseen practical enough to use, they are inevitably watered down through each category. What started as philosophy filters into psychology, which filters into pop-psychology and eventually becomes self-improvement literature. By this point, publishing houses, bookshops and authors are making a tidy sum regurgitating information that was essentially extracted by the world’s greatest minds from reality’s unseen and unrecognised well of wisdom.
The simpler way to put this is: I worked in a nursery with many competent, insightful and instinctual women. There, I had to attend regular staff meetings, in which we were often handed information packets about child psychology. These packets, often put together by well-respected early-years consultancies, were essentially telling the staff, in tidy bullet points, to do the things the most instinctive among us were already doing naturally.
That is, I believe, a perfectly distilled example of how the world has bloated into an economic machine that is essentially selling the unseen back to its inhabitants, only stripped of its life. In that old system, the wound was never healed, but constantly used to perpetuate the one problem that was always marketable. The fragmentisation of disciplines, all originating from that same unseen source, created more and more jobs for people and enabled them to think they were contributing to the inevitable solving of the problem. It was the most vicious cycle imaginable, where the one thing keeping the world divided was providing the raw fuel to deepen the divide.
And I could, technically, have gotten my slice of that pie, too. I attended a great school and went on to study philosophy, for which, though I didn’t realise it at the time, I apparently had a natural aptitude. If I had taken the discipline seriously, rather than felt it as a prison of my lived experience, I could have gone on to do a PhD… by now I might be a tidy little academic, paying my bills and supporting my family with a ‘respected’ job, instead of going to the Job Centre, which the world traditionally sees as a place of value in wait, to put it politely.
But instead, as I came to the end of my Master’s degree, I chose to become a primary school teacher. Given my private education and intellectual promise, working as a school teacher, marking spelling tests and solving squabbles over hula hoops, could have easily been seen as an underachievement. After all, I could have been a leading figure in Philosophy of Education! I could have been writing papers that nobody read about and pontificating about theory!
In the world’s eyes, my decision to become a teacher was almost certainly viewed inwardly as unwise, while being outwardly praised as honourable. Why? Because it was small, ordinary, unglamorous and didn’t pay that much.
But I became a primary school teacher precisely because philosophy had already done its job for me. I had been a bad student with a studious soul, and so while I got standard marks on the course, I left further education with the certainty I needed: I knew that it was all bollocks, and that what mattered was being human, being me. I needed to engage with the greatest thinkers of all time to eventually realise that the heights they strived towards, the abstractions they sought to name and systematise, were my native terrain. Staying in philosophy would have been a death sentence for me; it would have suffocated me in a cosy category and kept me from grounding in the life I wanted.
So I went and became a primary school teacher with the explicit intention of sharing what I had access to naturally: a transcendent life in the immanent. I wrote to Daisy at the same time.
Looking back now, I can see how oddly inverted my supposed philosophical and religious life was even then. At the age of twenty-two, I had managed to get to the one place philosophers, theologians, and mystics had spent centuries translating and pointing towards, and yet once I achieved it—that feeling of transcendence in the everyday—the last thing on my mind was documenting my own journey towards the thing or building an intellectual system around what it was. That didn’t make any sense to me at all. I could see the through-line running beautifully through the history of culture and meaning, and I knew that talking about it did nothing.
So I became a primary school teacher, and I wrote to Daisy. At the peak of my potential intellectual career, I immediately pivoted and chose instead to surround myself with the last people on earth who cared about words like transcendence and immanence… Because that’s where the magic was! Daisy had always been my one experiential point of real contact, beyond the place of reason and logic, and children are experience-creatures by nature. Yes, it was the right decision for the world I was building.
But it came at a cost, as always. Firstly, in the world of perception, my union with Daisy would quickly be subsumed by the prevailing worldly narrative that love and marriage were one small facet of a normal life, not the foundation of true existence. So that was one distortion, begun early and automatically. Secondly, I had willingly thrown myself into the ordinary world to make a profound difference in the most unseen way possible. I was not using theory or learning to be a good teacher; I was doing what I had always done: I was trusting myself as a human being who could see the unseen structures of reality and navigate them accordingly. It’s no surprise, then, that I ended up in a largely female-dominated field, as I had walked away from the world of recognised knowledge and into the land of everyday life and instinct.
And what did I find there? A school drunk on educational consultancies and ‘research-informed practice’! Of course. At the age of twenty-three, I was first exposed to the system that constantly cut itself off from its own source of life in the pursuit of expanding valiantly into a peer-reviewed utopia. I had lived inside that world my whole life, and now I was on the bottom rungs of its ladder, wondering why on earth the idiots at the top were shouting down at everyone.
I spent a year in that school, and I couldn’t unsee what I had seen. I was accused of being a crusader by the colleagues I considered friends, all because I refused to stay silent about a genuinely harmful individual who worked at the school. These types of situations are pervasive throughout our society, where insidious behaviour is swept under the rug in the name of bureaucracy and process. Again, the ability to see what is really happening in social dynamics is not valued; it is frowned upon, for it upsets the status quo. Such observations have to be, as always, intellectualised and categorised, by which point, as many people will know by direct experience, the harmful individual is found to be miraculously squeaky clean. The world removed its own faculty for discernment in its obsession with understanding and explanation.
The issues also went far beyond the school, of course. But all throughout that year, I could already sense a worrying gulf between myself and the structures that governed our society. I wanted to exist happily on the bottom, making a profound difference in the immediate, where real life was, but society was steering even the immediate away from itself. I would express my concerns to kind colleagues, and they would sympathise, agree with me, then remark upon my intellect and how I might be happier working in… educational consultancy.
The cruel irony of the world. It kept trying to recruit me, but I didn’t want to belong to it. I wanted to belong to life!
And the really heartbreaking thing I began to see was how the people who teemed with insight from the unseen were learning to distrust their own truest selves. I understood their need for validation; it was the same thing that had motivated me through my early exploration of philosophy and religion. But tragically, that validation was never going to be fully given, for such confirmation could only ever have come from within themselves! They were the original sources of the wisdom being wielded with such authority… and so that wisdom, that felt knowledge, that intuitive brilliance, came from the beyond.
So I left that year teaching and entered a period I came to later name as ‘the squeeze’. I was not working and was instead living mostly in what had been my grandma’s cottage. I became suddenly preoccupied with the central problem: thought and action. My thoughts and understanding made me too big for the world, but my only desire was for action that kept me small in the world. The governments get a lot of attention in the news, and they always introduce a heck of a lot of schemes and initiatives, but a bricklayer puts one brick down at a time, unseen and unpublicised. By the time three governments have changed hands, and the latest new initiative is being printed and pushed on mass-delivered leaflets, the bricklayer has built half the street. Even real action happens unseen.
Through that year off, I was constantly fighting myself over the need to be doing something in the world, to be contributing and earning money. Instead, against my best wishes, I lived off savings and wrestled in the unseen. I also produced a children’s book, and that, though unpublished, felt immediately like a breakthrough that I couldn’t yet understand. It was the first work of fiction I had produced that showed, at least in some way, my essence, and I knew this to be a great and significant feat. It was a myth that didn’t lie, one that was grounded in reality. Just like my own life.
At this point, I am going to stop for the day and pick up the thread tomorrow.
26/11/2025
I think there has been a quiet sadness hiding under the floorboards of my robust emotional house. After a positive (though difficult) day yesterday, I went to the pub and wrote something in the evening, and it was a perfectly poised piece of pointless prose… so I deleted it. I got quite close to publishing it to the website, but luckily, it wouldn’t format correctly. This gave me a moment’s reprieve, and in that empty space my true sadness rose up and brought me out of myself with a gentle flick on the chin.
Look up and face me, mate. I’ve been waiting for the right time to come and meet you. That time is now. You don’t need to keep me hidden anymore. The structure is built, the walls are strong… It’s a beautiful home you’ve made for yourself. You should be proud of it. But it’s not complete without me, and you know it. Who else were you building this place for if not the parts of yourself you longed to protect and nourish?
I have not embraced my own human sadness for a long time. I couldn’t. I am not, and have never been, the repressing type, so it wasn’t unhealthy. It was survival. That old friend of mine, sadness, was too delicate for the inhumane pressure of what I was living. True human sadness is restorative, after all, and you can’t begin the restoration project until the war is over.
But I know things are changing now. I’ve gotten very good at aligning with whatever my soul requires of me at any given time, and last night, I finally realised I was required to let the sadness in. I tried, though briefly, to snap back into old habits. With that piece of writing, the one I eventually came to delete, I tried to jump ahead. I used my old, learned performative stoicism and jollity to pronounce the sad days over, and to declare myself fully beyond the weight I had carried for so long. I wrote that if anyone wanted to understand the full scope of what I had lived through, and if they wanted to ponder big questions and linger on their own self-importance, then they could read my old books and be humbled. That’s kind of true, I guess, but it’s also me trying to run from the fact of the weight I carried. I wanted to move on. I didn’t want to be seen as though I was still carrying it, and so I decided to sever it from myself, as if the man who carried his own life to date was not me. It sounds silly to have to say, but it was me. I did do all that. I lived my life fully, and without the ability to let myself sink into my deserved humanity.
So here I am, embracing my sadness. I am doing what scares me the most: allowing myself to be fully human, to be seen as a man who carried unseen weight because everyone else was content to drop it and turn a blind eye. I have no bitterness, and I have always forgiven. I mean, if I couldn’t forgive, then I wouldn’t have survived. There are countless people in my life who are yet to apologise for things I’ve already forgiven them for… and I don’t know what’s stopping them. Is it my supposed intensity? Is it fear? Is it the fact that if they apologise, then they have to admit that things matter, and that they always did? I don’t know. But things are changing now, and I will leave those questions to them.
What matters for me now is my sadness.
I am sad that I never got a chance to be sad. I am sad that I was villainised and willfully misinterpreted. I am sad that I had to live in a world where people would rather dismiss my pain than accept the fact that they contributed to it, all while believing they were good just because they said so. I am sad that I had to develop a fear of my own sadness to survive.
I am sad to admit that until this morning, I worried that embracing my sadness would lead to my becoming some black hole of self-pity. And I am sad about that because I learnt that from somewhere, and I learnt it from the world. I learnt that when someone truly feels seen, they will make you both their saviour and their eventual scapegoat. How dare the seer ask to be seen himself? I am sad I had to live through that again and again and again.
So I am sad that I lived a whole life thinking the only way to be happy, and the only way to be whole, was to see others and never acknowledge my own desire to be seen. And I am sad that even while writing this journal entry, I fear being called self-indulgent and melodramatic by the very people who have always used me as an emotional crutch without due recognition. I am sad that nobody reads my books, and I am sad that they think I won’t be hurt by that. I am sad that I was never allowed to be hurt by people’s actions because someone had to be the one who took responsibility for the whole lot. I am sad that because I can do certain things and carry the weight of my own soul, people think that’s just who I am, and don’t acknowledge the fact that it was difficult to be me. I am sad that people get to think I am grandiose when I tell them I carried not just my own soul, but everyone else’s, too. I am sad that people think they can dismiss the very person who saw them when the world didn’t.
I am sad, but I am feeling lighter.
Last night, when I was writing my ‘I’m fine! Let’s move on!’ piece, I was listening to B.B. King and relaxing into my natural swagger. This morning, I am listening to a different B.B. King song and clearing the ground for that swagger to return properly. I think that’s the right thing to be doing. I knew there was something correct about listening to the blues last night, but typically, I did my usual thing and leaned into the underlying joy that seeps through each pained note. This morning, I am allowing myself to enjoy the blues normally. I know my joy will return… truer still, I know that my joy is irrepressible, and that even as I write about my own sadness, the first few notes of Guess Who make me smile, and look on the world with a childlike delight and serenity.
I am sad that because I had such joy in my heart, people assumed I wasn’t capable of great sorrow.
There we go. I think that was the last one of those.
So my sadness is finally permitted, and it breathes in perfect rhythm with the rest of me… who’d have thought! Those Beatniks wanted to be jazz poets… well, it turns out I’m a blues poet. At least for now, anyway… Nah, who am I kidding? You never outgrow the blues!
Yes, my sadness is there, and I’m happy to finally have him. What else am I happy about today? Because I’m always happy about something.
This morning I talked to Daisy about how I’d like to start doing audio recordings of the writing on my website. Not all of it, of course… doing this journal would be a nightmare! I think I’ll start with small pieces like Daphne and the Lion, and maybe I’ll do the Man and Woman story if I feel like it. The only reservation I have with that myth is the intense drama in the dialogue. I might feel a little silly throwing myself into that again…. or maybe not. We’ll see. Daisy’s excited, too, because once I’ve got it out, she can use the recording equipment to do some singing again. I told her I thought it would be really cool for her to record a kind of relaxed jazz album. She could do covers of Ella Fitzgerald-style stuff to get back in the swing of it. I think she liked the idea. I’ll leave it with her.
This is me finding my voice again. That’s what this recording thing is about. Last night, I was in bed reading over some of those essays I wrote back in the early days of my Substack. I’m glad they’re all still up there. So many pieces of quiet truth and sincerity that nobody is interested in reading… for now, for now. There is a bit in the essay about poets where I mention a scene from a Simpsons Halloween episode where Lisa reads the opening of The Brothers Karamazov to Homer, who’s been paralysed by a spider bite. I wrote in the essay about how I could hear the soft, knowing tone in Dostoyevsky’s voice, and I found it very comforting. That’s the tone of a true poet, and it’s a storyteller’s tone, too. I am glad to have that tone for myself. It’s a tone you get when you are finally centred enough to speak from your own true voice.
That’s why I enjoy doing the audio stuff so much. I get to speak in my true tone, and that tone is calm. It always has been, no matter how many different registers I can slip into. How else would there have been such a consistent through-note from the first sentence of this journal to now?
And that tone really has been with me always. That tone, my true tone, is my oldest companion. It would always emerge in the silent aftermath of every painful moment. I would be myself in the world, and I would try to communicate my pain; and when the world couldn’t see it, or wouldn’t see it, I would scream and shout and let the blood pour from my voice… and I’d cause a royal mess. People would be hurt by my words, abhorred by my actions, and they would only remember the mess. The mess was visible, but my pain was not.
And then, in that silent aftermath, when the people had retreated back into their judgments and locked in their newest memory of me being the problem, the beast… then I would sit in that silence, and retreat back into myself, and speak from my true tone.
The most recent version of this happened towards the end of the Mythopoeia. The author was ready to become the conductor… and he was ready to be seen. So after another conflict with my family, where I was treated with caution and fear rather than courage and care, I sent an email to everyone involved, stating firmly that I was only willing to be met as myself, not a distortion. I didn’t get any responses. Probably because of the mess I’d managed to cause again by waving my arms around, sending emails and trying to articulate the basic fact of my existence. And by my standards, those last emails were pretty calm, too.
But I didn’t get any responses. Nobody reached out, and I knew they never would. I was the intense one. I was the dramatic one. I was the self-absorbed one. I was the one who owed them an explanation.
So I felt the hurt and the anger and the injustice and the madness of it all, and I paced the flat, talking to Daisy, trapped in the prison of my own truth. And she was there, as she always was, standing firm with a loving gaze and a voice the world wouldn’t listen to…
So I had a shower, and for whatever reason, the shower always returns me to my centre. From there, my true tone always has something to say.
I sat down after my shower, with my hair still wet, and I wrote the little Kipling-esque fable, How Untruth Lost His Weight, all the way through in one sitting. I then typed it up, published it to the Mythopoeia on my website, and knew that something final had happened. The next piece I wrote was Warming Up, and by that point, the conductor was ready to pick up his baton without permission.
I like my true tone. It’s the one I’m speaking from now, of course, and it is the voice that speaks to me directly into the world. Yes, I am very pleased, unsurprisingly, to be speaking so freely from it now. It’s taken a long time to get here, being simply myself, and speaking without the need for a filter. But for the longest time, fiction was my filter and my protection. It was my way of getting my actual voice into the world long before I was ready to dare speaking directly from the source. Perhaps it still is.
The Artist Journey emerged in the same way as the Kipling tale. Towards the end of February last year, after finishing the Sketches, I sensed a bigger project would eventually come through. But I couldn’t rush it. And as always, the production of my art entwined naturally with the turmoils of my actual life. I was in conflict with my mum, a heartwrenching one that sat at the very core of my lifelong issue with selfhood. I saw her, and I could see her too much. I knew I was always speaking from a place of love and truth, but people usually only want the love, not the truth. It’s a shame. They hardly ever seem to realise they’re the same thing. So I expressed my pain and stated the truth of things with my usual mythically intense language (which was always the only language big enough to contain the truth while simultaneously being the worst language possible for grounded communication), and I tried to stand firm in the sense of self I was trying to build in the world, free of old dynamics.
It didn’t work. Of course it didn’t work! I admire the fact I kept trying back then, though. Nobody can ever say I didn’t try to articulate what was happening when it was happening.
So I made a royal mess again. I’ve made so much mess over the last few years, I never thought I would be able to reconcile myself to it all. But in the end, that reconciliation became a necessity.
So I made my mess in that particular instance, verbalising my pain and losing emotional control, and saying horrible things that would be unforgivable out of context. That was always the way it went. I always knew context would be the unseen hero of my own life.
And then, in the aftermath, as always, I sat for a few moments in the silence. I let the silence sit with me, like a friend who never judges, and I calmed. Something in me still hadn’t been killed off, and that something now had something to say. As always. So I chuckled to myself warmly, opened up a new document, and began writing:
Evalyn Jameson sat one evening at the desk in her bedroom, sketching.
I wrote the first paragraph and the first line of dialogue, I think. Then I stood up, happy with what I had produced in that half-lit dining room, and went up to bed. I knew that my voice had something to say, something that could not be argued with, and would not reduce me to a mess of hurt and desperation. I would write something all the way through, and it would do the job I could never seem to do in my actual life: It would communicate my being, but through showing, not explaining.
I began thinking of all this just now because I Started A Joke came on my headphones. The original Bee Gees one. I listened to that song in the few minutes before I started The Artist’s Journey. I don’t remember why, but something in the silent aftermath must have told me to listen to it. I listened to the lyrics, and that’s what gave me the chuckle. I liked the idea of the whole world coming alive because someone finally died. The willingness to let something die off—the part of me that was a joke—seemed to be the only way to avoid slipping into total sorrow and resentment. That’s what my true tone always says to me:
Let them laugh. Let them hate. Be quiet, and speak from the part of you that can still laugh too.
That is me true tone, and that is why I like it so much. It’s the part of me that laughs at my own death. It’s me.
And I obviously always sensed something in that song, too, because I was first introduced to it through The Wallflowers cover that appears in Zoolander. He’s feeling pretty sorry for himself in that scene, looking at his own oily reflection in the roadside puddle… but that’s what springs the whole film into action! Or, at least, that’s how I remember it.
That little scene is almost like a silly version of my grand Narcissus retelling from earlier in the journal. How nice it is when everything circles back around! Fifteen-year-old me felt stupid for liking a scene in Zoolander so much, and for finding such comfort and tenderness in it. Twenty-seven-year-old me redeems that moment. Everything circles back around in the end.
[2]
The sadness comes in waves. Fittingly, I didn’t like the fact that my earlier admissions hadn’t cleansed my entire being of its grief. I tried to sit down and write honestly a few minutes ago, but I ended up philosophising about the very thing I am actually sad about. Last night, I tried to avoid my most vulnerable self by reaching for a premature and predestined joy; a few minutes ago, I tried to avoid my most vulnerable self by philosophising about it with clinical precision. I’m very good at both, and I had to get good at those things to navigate my life up until this point. But now is not the time for old habits. Now is the time for total inhabitance.
I feel sad that I never got to feel real like everybody else. I valued being true over being real, and I’ve now been left with a life’s worth of living—where I was fully present and fully myself—that I somehow didn’t exist through.
As a remedy, I am gradually embracing personal boundaries with the world. I have never done this before. In the past, the best I could achieve was distance. But that distance only bought me time, and in many ways, it exacerbated the very problems I was trying to remove myself from. I became mortally afraid of boundaries because I saw what they had done to the people in the world, and to the people in my life. I always had empathy with those people who yearned to be seen without being used, but I couldn’t ignore how their supposedly healthy boundaries only locked their truest selves away, forever lying in wait for that so sought-after recognition. My mum was the best and closest example I had of this at the time. I completely understood her pain and her need to finally be free of other people’s distortions, and so when she eventually succumbed to the pressures of the world and gave into a lifetime of being unseen by it, I sympathised. But I could not support her decision. I knew the world wouldn’t reach for her. I knew it wouldn’t care. And if she closed herself off and waited for the world to come to her, she would be forever disappointed. Worse than that, she was closing herself off to the fact that she already had someone who saw her. By closing off a version of herself she believed had gone unseen, she risked losing herself to an eternal bitterness.
Even now, writing this, I am feeling especially vulnerable. I know that my mum might well read this passage, and while I love her dearly, I need to push on and finally narrate my own life with truth and undistorted clarity. I have even questioned my own motives in referring to ‘my mum’ instead of simply ‘Mum’, but I believe the style of address has to do with the function of the journal. I need the space to speak of people as they stand in relation to me. I am the one part of my relational existence that has always been missing, and I am quietly drawing those boundaries and making myself fully real for the first time.
Because I need boundaries now to guard the truth I have lived for so long. Truth can exist without boundaries, but it cannot be embodied and personal. I am coming to terms with a lifelong lack of personhood, and so boundaries are a necessity. The people in my life know that I have nothing but love and warmth for them, but this, what I am doing here, is a non-negotiable for me.
So I have been allergic to boundaries in the past, but now I’ve realised they are the only thing standing between me and feeling like I have always existed. I think I worried, as I began to approach this next part of the journal, that if I continued being this honest, this vulnerable, this human, then I would surely lose what has always been paramount: my truth. I worried that, standing by my small personal truth, fully lived, and finally allowing myself not to be ruled by the way others felt, I might suddenly become the very thing I have spent my entire life fighting. I worried that I would become the kind of person who was blind to others’ needs because I was too focused on protecting my own self.
It’s about intention, I think. I have spent my whole life forgiving people every time they hurt me, and excusing them for any neglect or mistreatment, all because I understood that, at bottom, they would never have gone out of their way to cause harm. But they did cause harm, and they caused it through avoidance. So I am laying down the truth of who I am here, at last, and I will stand by it, no matter how it makes others feel. Truthfully, I think it will help them as well, not just me.
But I am finding this difficult. This all feels too singular, too earnest, too self-serious. But I can’t avoid it anymore. I can’t go back to my old ways of being. I would like, more than anything, to undercut myself here and make light of it all, but I think that just kicks the can down the road. Earlier in the journal, I risked being seen as grandiose and had to own that. Here, I am risking being seen as self-pitying, a far worse crime, and I am going to have to own that, too.
To be honest, I feel better for getting that last paragraph out. I have to let all this stuff be real. If I don’t, it will only ever remain true for me. I can’t have that continue. It’s not healthy.
And that’s how it works, apparently. A wave of something true comes along to be granted its permission to exist fully, and if I honour it, the wave passes, and I get to feel like myself again, having gained a little more reality (and humanity) in the process.
There is also a lot of trust required here. I am allowing myself to let true pain surface without the protection of irony, which I have spent a lifetime using to protect others from the seriousness of what I feel. I have always prided myself on my ability to keep a serious note from playing too long. It’s been a delicate balance, because if you go too heavy on the irony, you lose the sincerity completely. But I think I am more than stable enough to linger a little longer in the sincere areas. I’ve never done this before, addressing myself with seriousness and letting it run to its own natural conclusion. As I stated earlier, I have written long works of serious fiction, I have produced myths and poetry in full earnestness, and I have poured over the pain of others without ever considering the need to soften things or introduce premature levity. But I have never spoken at length as myself and treated myself as a serious subject. That topic was always too big, too responsible, and so I always had to be the one who refused to look at his human-sized pain seriously. I am doing that now, and I have to trust that the voice speaking still hums with the background promise of laughter to come.
Really, I’m being silly. My levity has always been a non-negotiable. Of course it’s not going anywhere. It’s my baseline. It had to be.
24/11/2025
I think I’ll give Moe a call later. I haven’t spoken to him in a week or so, and he makes me laugh. Daisy pointed out that with Moe, of all the people in my life, I seem to be able to be myself entirely. I think I know why that is. It has something to do with two people appreciating a home in each other’s company, whether they realise it or not. Understanding is optional; presence is not.
Moe also reminds me exactly of someone I’d have been friendly with in primary school. He probably would have frustrated me at times, and I might have been a constant enigma to him, but I think our friendship would have been essentially the same as it is now. We’d be happy sitting and laughing and feeling small in the world (though Moe might want to be big and that would frustrate me), and I would mock myself for saying something grand and sweeping, and Moe would laugh at himself the moment he realised he’d said something utterly ridiculous. What else could be different? Nothing. That must be why I feel so myself around him.
It’s a shame, though, because the moment people get a taste of being someone in life, they stop being who they are. There is something to be said for failing at everything the world thinks is valuable. It’s a preservation tactic, and a good one, too.
Moe is also, like me, an undying romantic. He was a loverboy in the beginning, and he’ll be one to the end, however much he sometimes likes to flirt with being the hard man. We’ve all got that devil in us… the loverboy simply keeps his compass unscrambled. And the man who loves, even messily and haplessly, is always on the way to building something, actually building something: a home. All these silly young men think they can build an empire and still have it house them… it doesn’t work like that. If you build an empire, you have a world branded with your name, but you don’t have a home. The world doesn’t want you; it belongs to you, and so, ironically, it doesn’t belong to you at all. But if you build a connection, if you love outwards and remain small in yourself… suddenly the world is your home, and the earth walks with you. Whether Moe realises it or not right now, he’s already home. I think he’s more than enough in himself.
I messaged him, and he said he’ll give me a call when he’s home from work later. I’m glad about that. I might find a lively pub where I can chat to him on the phone without feeling like I’m intruding on the space. I’m looking forward to it.
But what kind of loverboy was I? It was always relational, obviously. I remember being about eleven years old and saving a blank number on my phone for some girlfriend I was eventually going to have. I was holding a space for them, and they didn’t even exist yet. I can’t remember what I named the contact, but I do know they had a specific message tone and ringtone. I wanted to differentiate them from the rest of my contacts… they were my contacts. They were my relations, where I existed fully and saw and was seen in equal proportion.
I never filled out the contact on that old phone. But I did eventually fill that space. Come to think of it, I should personalise Daisy’s message tones. She’s my point of contact, after all, and I mean that in the most romantic sense of the phrase.
It’s almost unbelievable that Daisy is actually real. No, it is unbelievable, and that’s the point. Daisy existed as such a spectre in her own life, I should never have been able to build anything concrete… and yet here I am, with my wedding ring on, typing on the very laptop I never would have bought myself had she not been there to remind me I was worth it. And if I were to pick up my phone now, I could go straight to that contact, straight to her name, and I could make contact. That’s real, so real it’s missable. A miracle of the highest order!
I can see it clearly now, too. I lived an inverted life, where the one person who would ultimately make proper contact possible had to be shelved away in my own mind like some romantic fantasy. Yet I always knew Daisy would be my wife. Every time we met, even as children, it was as if the whole world would fall away, though not into irrelevance, simply into correct proportion. Most young lovers or would-be romantic pairings tend to forget the world and collapse into each other. They form a little bond of unreality, and the world spins on in their absence, shaking its head in a fatherly, knowing kind of way.
They’ll have their fun and come back to me eventually, says the world.
But my dynamic with Daisy never gave me an escape from the world. It made the world inhabitable, and I could feel it. I could always feel it. Even when friends of mine would try and tell me, throughout school, that I was romanticising the idea of her, I knew they were wrong. They weren’t speaking for the world; they were speaking for themselves. And I always knew it, too; hence why I never begrudged them their judgment. I was rational, and more rational than they were… but I knew rationality could only get me so far. Contact required a leap of some kind, a leap into a space of solitude nobody else wanted to acknowledge was there. Daisy knew it was there.
So I lived a life where I saw relational opportunities everywhere, and because (to some extent) I’d internalised the world’s doubt about Daisy, I tried at love with other people, always with the same grounded intensity that was built into my nature. Those relationships were real, and I entered every single one with the sincerity of a man committed to building something true. But when I realised that the kind of connection I wanted wouldn’t be possible, I moved on. I had to move on, but I never did so without pain, and always with a lingering feeling of grief.
In fact, writing to Daisy and finally making it clear how I felt about her was literally the last option I ever wanted to consider. There were two reasons for this, I think. Firstly, it meant risking the dream I’d allowed to live in my head since childhood. That dream had kept me going through every stage of my life, and the idea of losing it frightened me. I didn’t know how I would function in a rational world without the potential of a dreamlike connection guiding me like a far-off lantern in the dark. Secondly, and perhaps more strikingly, writing to Daisy and finally admitting how I felt about her meant admitting to myself that the rational world truly couldn’t give me what I wanted. That scared me more than anyone could have possibly known. It’s one thing to reach the end of reason’s utility and realise there’s nothing solid left to believe in but God, as C.S. Lewis found… It’s quite another to reach the same point and realise there’s no kind of love to believe in but fantasy.
When I decided to write to Daisy that summer in 2021, I would tell the people in my life plainly that if it didn’t work, then I would remain alone forever. I was twenty-three years old. I wasn’t saying it for effect, I didn’t expect to be believed, I just knew it was true. Writing to Daisy that summer was like cashing in on a miracle my mind had promised me my entire life. I was prepared to be told that I’d somehow forged the receipt, and to be sent packing back to the land of reason and knowledge. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Instead, I got a letter back, written by a young woman but carrying the voice of reality. It essentially said, We thought you were never going to cash this in, mate. It took you long enough!
I also knew instantly that I would marry her. I’d had the desire to marry people before, and I knew each time I was in those old relationships that the bond we had would have been, in the eyes of the world, more than enough to make a life commitment. And yet, I could never silence that deepest voice of mine, the one which spoke with a modest, unpressured certainty, reminding me gently that if the connection had not truly clicked, then it was not meant to be. But with Daisy, there had never been a click to work towards, since our dynamic had been forged in the aftermath of instant childhood recognition. We never had to spiral upwards in the hope of reuniting, like Dante and Beatrice, in some upper transcendent realm… our journey was, and always had been, an inevitable spiral downwards into the immanent. Because of the connection we’d made in childhood, and the shared space we’d always inhabited together, it was almost as if the moment of our marriage had already occurred; the ceremonious union had already taken place… all that was left was to burst open the church doors and walk back down the steps into normal life, hand-in-hand, and smiling from ear to ear.
The certainty I had about Daisy would have confused most people. In fact, I know it did confuse everybody in my life. I remember the weekend after Daisy first visited me in Westerham, I had a call with my mum, and while I knew she was genuinely pleased for me, I could hear a cautious searching in her voice. It was like she was searching, unconsciously, for some uncertainty in me. My blissful calm didn’t help. It gave the impression I was hiding something, some underlying disappointment or worry. The opposite was true, of course; rather, I was adjusting to living in a fantasy-reality, one that had guided me since childhood, and my feet had never left the ground to achieve it. Instead, I had invited it down from the ether. I called Daisy that evening, a little unsettled by the conversation, but I affirmed to her that whatever we were living was real, even though nobody would understand it. She, as always, didn’t need me to remind her that anything was real. She was living it.
But I do understand how the unlikely nature of our relationship contributed to the eventual ‘misguided world of two’ concern people would later have. For me, though, I was happy to be seen as a doomed Romeo, at least for the time being. Other people weren’t on the inside of our experience, and so they lacked the vital information needed to give them certainty. At times, when things got tough later on, and it surely seemed from the outside that everything had gone horribly wrong, I would only ever ask people for faith. That makes me laugh now. Faith was, as it turned out, a long-outdated feature of life… True love needed to be grounded in irrefutability. About time, too.
I have so much more I could say about all these things, and I’m sure I will in time. But Daisy is on her way into town with the children, and that fact alone is enough to give me a reason to pause and enjoy the living moment. It’s what I do best.
After Daisy comes and says hello and settles with the mega-pram and her two sidekicks, I’ll wander back home and go to the laundrette. Hopefully, by that time, Moe will have finished work, and he can keep me company while I watch the clothes tumble round and round. It’s Monday, so I should be able to go without worry. Who’s going to the laundrette on a Monday afternoon? No, it won’t be busy.
The one thing I do need to remember if I happen to go to the pub again later, is not to have any more real ale. I like it, and I’ve enjoyed my nostalgic sips down memory lane with London Pride, as well as my love-hate relationship with Timothy Taylor’s branding… but I don’t think real ale agrees with me. Maybe I’ll switch back to lager, or be really adventurous and start on cider… No, I don’t think so. I don’t get the cider thing. I’ll decide once I get there later on, if I go, that is.
[2]
I’ve come to The Castle. I’ve never been here before. The ceiling is nice and low, and there’s no shortage of little nooks to retreat into, and I am in the retreating mood this evening. I’m still waiting on Moe, but it’s not the end of the world if he doesn’t ring. Right now, I’m happy to have nabbed my quiet corner by the wooden latch doors and the multi-coloured fairylights, the kind that remind me simultaneously of childhood Christmases and that one room I used to look into on my way home from shifts in at The Sun Tavern back in early 2020. Those lights, and that room, are still waiting for me, already fictionalised and ready to appear in Vulpes Vulpes… whenever I finally get around to writing it again.
I was thinking about it earlier. It’s fitting that a novel I conceived of long before any of the madness of the last few years occurred should be the one thing still lingering by my side, barely started. It accompanied me all that time, and for so long, I wanted to be rid of it. I spent years trying to cleave that novel from my own person. I spent years trying to convince myself it would be childish and ego-centric to even want to complete such a novel. That desire was useful for a while. It allowed me to expand enough to contain everything I needed so that I could have a chance of surviving. But the book never left me. It was always there, nipping at my heels and trying to drag me back into true personhood, where I could be a young man writing a silly novel, and nothing more.
I’m glad it chased me. I’m glad it didn’t let me distort its true form, either. Every time I sat down to write it over the last few years (and I’ve tried many times), I always paralysed myself instantly. The narration was wrong: too serious, too frivolous, too cloying, too austere. The characterisation was wrong: too much overlap between the fox and Thomas, not enough of my true scope in either. Every time I sat down to try and get through it, somehow the book knew it was not the right time to begin. I would write pages and pages of stuff that felt so perfect… but I was always trying to write myself out of existence. The text could sense it, and so it stopped me in my tracks. I could sense the pages, though lovely, were not true, and so I got rid of them forever. It hurt every time, especially if I’d developed a fondness for the prose itself, but I don’t regret it one bit now. Not one bit. I would have been clinging to beautiful, static things, and that was not what the book wanted to be.
So where is it now? One chapter done. A page and a half of the second chapter written, and a fully formed story waiting to emerge… I think about it often, but I know I can’t rush it. This is the story I spent years thinking would be the one that would finally write me out of existence entirely, so I have to be patient with it. It was only this year that I came round to the idea of allowing myself that existence. The first chapter came along naturally about six weeks after I finally made that first full commitment to myself. I do trust that the rest will come along, but I think it will take time. Many people write a small novel from the vantage point of their own personhood… I have written stuff that, in scope, far exceeds that kind of novel, and yet that means nothing to me. When I was twenty, I didn’t have dreams of writing like Dostoyevsky… I hadn’t even read any of his books at that time. I didn’t dream of being ‘one of the greats’, I dreamt of writing something full and true and alive, something that I could be proud of and knew deserved its place between two covers. That was a big part of it. It’s a big deal to have a printed object of something you constructed yourself.
When I was seventeen and writing screenplays, I loved designing the title page because I thought there was something beyond perfect about a finished screenplay: a work of art, sitting there bound and bodied and titled. But I wrote crap screenplays—they were flat and thin and untrue—and so even when I wanted to enjoy printing off a copy, I knew it hadn’t earned its right to exist. This sounds slightly excessive now that I am writing it down, but it’s the way I’ve always been. I never felt satisfied creating an object out of something I’d written if it hadn’t captured who I really was. I always envied those people who seemed content publishing something that, for me, would never have been enough. And it had nothing to do with quality, either. It had to do with presence. It was always about presence. If something I produced didn’t have full presence, then it didn’t deserve to exist.
In early 2024, I finally did write something that I knew deserved to exist. It was that book of short stories, Sketches of Early Womanhood. I wrote them in a few weeks, left them unedited and made the whole thing into an eBook. I’d designed the cover myself, though of course it had a pseudonym on it at the time. That’s typical, isn’t it? The moment I knew I’d created something of genuine presence, something that had sprung straight from my own personal soul… I slapped someone else’s name on it. But I did get a taste of having my own presence in the world, and maybe that was one of the pivotal moments leading me back here, where I plan on returning to being that silly young man, writing a silly novel and not caring whether anyone reads it. My God, how far does a man have to travel to earn the right to be himself?!
It’s not nice to intimidate people with your own presence, you know? The world is always obsessed with being someone… Yeah, try being so much of someone that people fall silent when they’re around you, then reduce you through their silence. That hurts, man.
Another great irony of all this is that now, just as I am beginning to get a taste of being someone worth noticing, I’ve got a whole life of not being noticed to process. It’s not the worst thing in the world, and it’s producing this journal, which is nice. Another book of presence I’ll be glad to have sitting on my bookshelf gathering dust.
I know I’ll get back to Vulpes Vulpes eventually. It will have the lyrical juice of one of Fitzgerald’s more self-indulgent novels and the light, irreverent, somewhat distant humour of that one Clive James novel I read back in 2019. I think it was called Brrm! Brrm! and I liked the loose, vivid narrative. And that was who I fancied myself as back then, not Dostoyevsky, not Nietzsche, not bloody God… but Clive James. And that’s been the same the whole time.
So now I’m getting back there, gradually, slowly… I’m sprawling my way back towards my original goal of being Clive James writing Brrm! Brrm!
And when I eventually do it, then the world will probably turn around and say, Yes, Max, now we can have you. Now you have a presence we can recognise!
I think it would be quite fitting, actually… especially as, by that point, I’d be utterly indifferent to their recognition. I’d rather chat to Moe. Not that he’s called yet.
Oop, scratch that. Here he is now.
23/11/2025
I wasn’t going to come back to The Three Cups so soon… and here I am. After last night’s London Pride, I’ve got a taste for real ale again, too, which I haven’t had in a while. I think I was even saying it wasn’t my thing last night, wasn’t I? Maybe I’ve got some prejudice against it because of how sticky and unsightly the trays used to get under the pumps. Anyway, I’ve gone for a genuine pint of Timothy Taylor’s this time, and it’s in a matching branded glass! All things have aligned… but not with the brand I wanted. Not that any of it really matters. A man did tell me to avoid Timothy Taylor’s as he clumsily demounted from his stool and left the pub. Maybe it’s not that good. Maybe that’s why they go so heavy-handed on the coaster-joke branding. It tastes the same as London Pride to me…
It’s quiet in the pub, and Arsenal are 2-0 up against Tottenham. So that’s good. I actually quite enjoyed the chatter in The Devonshire Arms last night, but that was a different landing moment, I suppose. This evening is an extended kind of settling… 3-0 to the Arsenal! Ha! I’ve got it open next to my laptop. I’ll give it a minute or two because VAR could always have something to say… you never know these days. But it looks like Eze has scored again. That guy at the bar isn’t going to be happy… he had them to win 2-1. I told him to cash out at half-time. He chose poorly.
Today was a good day, strangely. Though I don’t care to dwell on it. Strange things move forward in strange ways and prove their goodness through their very strangeness. That’s about all the esoteric rambling I feel like doing about it all. What matters is I am enjoying my Timothy Taylor’s and have the natural buoyancy of an Arsenal fan who doesn’t have to worry about the North London Derby for another few months. Unless something extraordinary happens in the next half hour. Time to message Michael and gloat!
Ooh, 3-1. I’ll leave the message for a bit. I knew I was too cocky.
What I might do is finish this pint and move on to a different pub. I think today, this revisit, was a bit of a reclaiming. It’s good to reclaim things. Good with a capital G, as ever. Tonight has a completely different feel to it.
I’ll allow myself this little moment to express the quiet victory that we’re all well aware of… Tonight is different because I wrestled through all the old crap, didn’t I? Wink wink. I didn’t lie or polish when everything got turbulent… I trusted the process, just like Arteta told me, wink wink, and here I am: calm, ordinary, literally incapable of finding anything to wrestle. Admittedly, the fact that Arsenal have conceded at all has irked me somewhat, but maybe my standards have become too high since the whole clean-sheet run. We’re all clean-sheet addicts now, us Arsenal fans. Worse than that, we’re like spoiled kids.
A couple just came in and the woman ordered a glass of the New Zealand sovegnien blanc. That takes me back. What was the name of the brand? I can’t remember. That’s been a theme today, actually… I spent half the morning with Daisy trying to remember Audrey Hepburn’s name. And as I was straining, pushing on with whatever my point was whilst intermittently exclaiming, ‘Ah! What was her bloody name?!’… something occurred to me. Here it is. We all do that, don’t we? We refuse to look something up when we can’t remember it because we all want the living feeling of doing it ourselves. Almost all of us agree that it is absolutely worth a whole morning of getting all frustrated over something petty and important… Why? Because it feels so good to do it ourselves! There is something about sticking with it and wading through our own minds that we love… I remember when I couldn’t remember Nathan Lane’s name—this must have been ten years ago—and I actively resisted searching it up all day because the name wasn’t the point, it was the act of remembering it.
Ahhh, there I go philosophising again. It’s like I can’t help myself, isn’t it? Well, that doesn’t matter. What really matters is Eze has scored a hat-trick against the very club he almost signed for… 4-1 to the Arsenal! Ha!
Yes, I do think I will finish up here. I’ve been back to The Three Cups, I’ve been present through an Arsenal win, witnessed the sorrow of a Spurs supporting bartender, and feel utterly… plain… in a good way. I will go to the loo, then possibly wander to a different pub. There is a lot more to write. I can feel it. Nothing urgent, mind you… it’s all unhurried loveliness from here on.
The Devonshire Arms has a new regular! I’ve sat at a different table. This one is also small and round with a stool at the perfect height. In fact, this stool is superior to the last because it is one of those sophisticated chair-stools that has a little back and arms and everything. The cushion is also covered in modest, faded tartan fabric.
More importantly, there are two new Timothy Taylor’s coaster cartoons to inspect. The first is frayed at the edges; the cartoon is of two elderly men sitting on either side of a pigeon, and they appear to be judging something under the title GRAINS TRUST. Their name tags read Dr Branenstein, Yorkshire Pigeon and Professor Ayecue. They all have a pint in front of them, though by the looks of it, the pigeon is the one with a pint of Timothy Taylor’s. They also have scores: 13, 100, and 15, respectively. The caption reads: What does a pigeon from Yorkshire know about good beer? I obviously don’t know about the process of beer making because I don’t understand that one at all. The pigeon is smiling, though.
The second coaster is of a man licking his lips over an open lunch box, which contains a glass of… well, it has to be Timothy Taylor’s, doesn’t it? The caption reads: A swift half at lunch is of the utmost importance at Taylor’s. It doesn’t feel like they’re even trying to make people laugh. Although I will say that this pointless recent obsession with Timothy Taylor’s and my apparent lack of beer knowledge has motivated me to take more of an interest in hops and all that crap. Who am I kidding? I am delighted to be genuinely free enough in my mind to care about hops!
Not that it matters, but the first cartoon was signed by someone called McLachlan and the second one was by our old favourite Rob Murray. I always say, you can never fail to spot a Rob Murray-illustrated Timothy Taylor’s coaster. I always say that. I always have.
I am settling into things well. I was right to amble up Castle Road and allow myself to drift back here. I passed the old house on the way. Its lights were on, and I found myself thinking back to the time I spent there. All those school nights alone watching Family Guy and drinking Pepsi Max! That living room was like my sanctuary, incubating whatever parts of myself would be required to spring into action at later dates.
Just made a trip to the loo. In the small cubicle, there’s a quote on the wall by Dean Martin: If you drink, don’t drive… don’t even putt. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to be quoted like that? It’s witty, charming… completely harmless. It holds exactly the kind of weight and charisma that any normal man would surely dream of… people probably secretly dream of being remembered for saying grand, prophetic things. But that doesn’t make you very approachable, does it? You quote Dean Martin on a pub toilet wall because it’s inviting. People not only want to be Dean Martin, they’d want to be around him, too. A pub toilet isn’t the place you quote Camus… although, in truth, Camus and Dean Martin probably would have got on quite well. I think that’s a shame. How nice would it be to remember Camus not only for his ability to rebel against absurdity, but for his ability to be bloody good company over a pint, too? I think we’ve robbed him of something there.
That Dean Martin quote also reminded me of the final few weeks of school. I had that summer term playlist full of songs like Groovin’ and Summer Wind, and my favourites at the time included Dean Martin singing I Wish You Love. Man, what a perfect song that is! The children liked the vibe, I think… but most of it was wasted on them as they filed in each morning, narrow-eyed with freshly brushed teeth. But that song, I Wish You Love, held everything I was feeling at the time, coming to the end of my whimsical, difficult, ultimately necessary year in the school. It’s a love song, but what are the lyrics? Something like… hold on while I look them up…
And in July, a lemonade,
To cool you in some leafy glade;
I wish you health, and more than wealth,
I wish you love…
It’s that line about the leafy glade. That’s the one that always stuck with me. I would go to the After School Club each day and find Daisy drawing spirals with the girls or handing out watered-down juice. Usually, I’d get dragged into playing football for a ridiculous amount of time (given the heat) out there on the field, but then, when most of the children had gone, I would sit under that big tree and talk about stupid things with the stragglers, waiting for their parents to arrive.
Also, the line about the leafy glade is the perfect example of true writing. You can see it when you hear the line. You can feel the sun and the need to escape with something cool, and you can taste the lemonade. Most important of all, you can see the little split-rays of sunlight coming through the leaves all around the glade. That’s how it made me feel, anyway.
Really, it’s because I felt so attached to those children, and I had so much to still resolve in my own life, and in the world. I wished them well, but I didn’t want to leave. That was the point, I suppose. Love songs are often the places where people externalise feelings that apply to much broader things.
And so…. If I’d been given the choice back then, when I was sixteen and spending those incubating nights alone, eating super noodles… would I have chosen to be seen as a Dean Martin or an Albert Camus? It’s a good question.
I know what I’d have picked. I’d have picked Dean Martin without a doubt. But I couldn’t leave the absurd behind! Dean Martin’s relaxed charm gains a whole lot of impact if it’s sustained by the spirit of an eternal Sisyphus!
Enough of that, I think. It’s all true, though.
I think I will go now. I’ve finished my London Pride (in the wrong glass) and I’ve finished my bag of roasted peanuts (second of the night). But what honesty can come through here?
This is new for me, this kind of unstrained, unburdened total presence… I’ve had presence my whole life, and yet I’ve never known presence like this. True life hums… it hums. There are all these loose threads to someday pick up, almost like memories waiting to be revisited. I am glad to finally have loose threads. Because all things cohere in the end, don’t they? But who wants to rush towards the ending? Coherence is lived, enjoyed, experienced… It’s loose and free and full of wonderful details and forgotten things.
There we go. That’s enough. Arsenal win the North London Derby. The bartenders at The Three Cups are fast becoming my new friends (though they don’t know it yet), and The Devonshire Arms has unusually comfortable stools… what more could a young man want?
22/11/2025
I’ve realised why I started talking about writing and true seeing last night. That topic has often reappeared throughout my life, usually when discussing what makes writing true and what gives a novel life. The ideas themselves have been around for ages, for as long as we’ve been able to think, really. Plato reminds us that what we see is not what we see… there’s a lot of it in our shared culture.
But I realised this morning why it came up again last night. It came up because this whole journal has been about me swallowing whatever categories, labels and concepts I needed to in order to finally get back home, and with full sight. This has never been about the cosmos. It’s never been about myth or meaning or religion or science or literature or truth or anything. It’s always been about Max. I was born with my mind, into a world drunk on its knowledge, its lack of knowledge, and its pretence to knowledge. But Max only wanted to be Max, with his mind, his sight, his love and joy. And so inevitably, after discovering the true scale of his bandwidth, he had to swallow the world and its mysteries entirely before he could live as himself and live in peace.
That is what this journal is and has been about from the start. And I bloody knew it, too! Yesterday’s sudden discussion about “There it is” writing links directly to the entire story that’s unfolding. I mentioned how children’s literature can name what is true without confusion or distortion—and there we have Max as he entered the world, believing all things to be true beyond his own self, and feeling no need to meddle. Then, literature grows up, and either begins to contribute to the collective distortion or sincerely grapples with the problem, striving towards the clean truth of childhood. Max did his striving, knowing his soul needed to be emptied before he could honestly write objectively, of trees and morning mist, without distortion.
But literature has a long history of growing up. The best writers may have matured through their adolescent distortions and come to that sacred place of literary naming, but did they themselves get beyond the categories that made the true naming possible? No. And I can say that with full humility because I lived the path beyond transcendence, and I lived it through to the end… and it almost killed me, again and again and again.
Yet here I am, alive and naming still. I’ll never understand how it was enough for so many of those souls who came before me to content themselves with an ability to name truly, but not to live truly. Sadly, it wasn’t enough for them. Many of them died under the strain of their desire towards transcendent living, not just transcendent seeing. And those who were stable enough in their souls to withstand the pressure had to settle for a life of quiet waiting… they waited for the day when they might be named truly, seen truly, perceived truly, and given back their true dignity. D.H. Lawrence wrestles beyond himself to name the tree with clean precision, but who names Bert?
Me. And who names me? Max. See? I did it just then. Impressed?
At moments like these, my thoughts always return to Daisy. Whenever I make some big claim of self-identifying, my thoughts return to Daisy. Why? Because I know the scale of what I have had to do alone, but I am constantly aware of how collaborative my solitary venture has always been. That is why I describe Daisy as my ground, my silent universe, as the quiet of my own mind. Because Daisy made living as me possible, and she did it by reminding me with unceasing conviction that I was real.
I am getting a little teary here, if I’m honest, and it’s for two reasons. Whenever I think of Daisy in this way, I could cry, because I am reminded of how lucky I am to have Reality walk beside me. Most people live in fragments, and they surround themselves with fragments, too. That would have killed me. And I will be extra vulnerable here because the honesty is worth something immeasurable… I would not have stayed on this earth without Daisy. That is a fact. Really, it is deeper and more complex than that. In full truth, I would not have had a place on this earth without Daisy, let alone a choice about whether to stay or go. Daisy gave me my ground, and that ground gave me the choice. Once I had that choice, I had to wrestle with the pain of being invisible before the world, and the possibility that I might never be granted my full existence beyond what they could distort through fear, malice, or basic categorisation.
But then, how did I live through years of constant choice, and never once decide to leave? Because I had already been given my permission to stay. I had already been recognised. The moment Daisy had grounded me on this earth, the decision had already been made. Reality had already granted me permission to name it, and so I would have been lying to myself if I ever truly thought the world didn’t want me. Daisy wanted me, and she wanted me fully: undistorted, fully visible, beyond categories, and simply human. Daisy wanted Max, and Max was prepared to accept cosmic distortion to give Daisy the man she deserved.
So that was the first teary thing! What’s the other one? Well, there is a dual dance already operating through these paragraphs, and that dance will go on in the next. The second teary thing has to do with the act of naming. Because what made Daisy’s grounding of me possible was my ability to name her, and that was, and still is, an ability I’ve carried alone. This is the solitary part of the journey, and I have come to serene terms with it explicitly because of the mutual interplay that makes it possible. Simply put, in order to name something, you need something to name. To exist as a naming thing presupposes (and pre-necessitates) a thing capable of being named.
And I lived as the person who names. It’s been a fun life, and it’s been a tough life. But the one thing I’ve never lacked is knowledge. Not the kind of knowledge one postures with or builds systems on, but the kind of knowledge that affirms what’s true beyond what should be knowable. I see people, and so I name them. And I love doing it, too. I always have. I’ll even extend the metaphor and make it more sensory… There you go: I sense people. I see them, I hear them, I feel them in their own absence. It’s why I ended the first book of poetry I published back in April with the poem, An Invocation. It begins:
Child, find your melody,
Sing the song that you can’t see,
I can only wait for you,
Though I can listen too.
The poem is a childlike invocation because I can already hear people’s melodies, their true selves, if you will, and all I’ve ever wanted is to hear them play it themselves. That is the naming. It’s the naming of a melody discovered only through attention beyond what distorts.
Yesterday, my anger about the way Daisy had been distorted by others’ perception was humorous, theatrical, and performative, but it exposed the deep wound (as expressed in the analogy). The world is full of people obsessed with being seen as they truly are, but nobody is listening keenly enough to their own melody, and so they distort themselves. The knock-on effect is far more damaging than mere self-distortion, and that’s probably obvious by now. Nobody could hear Daisy’s melody because nobody was listening beyond the noise.
And now, bringing it back down to the personal again, I will remind myself of what I am doing in this journal. I am naming myself, finally, and therefore I am giving myself permission to play my own melody. Because that’s the deep irony beneath all this, isn’t it? I could hear everyone’s melody but my own, and it left me feeling like I didn’t have one. Of course I’ve got one, it’s just been harder to find. I’m like a conductor who longs to be a soloist within the orchestra. I didn’t want to dominate, but I didn’t want to only facilitate either. I wanted to participate. Yet as the conductor, and as the unknowing author of an outdated, scripted symphony, I couldn’t find my own melody until I had gained enough practice in finding others. So I conducted, and I listened, I listened to the true melodies waiting underneath the prewritten solos, and I maintained the cohesion until, at last, I sensed it was my time to reset the old symphony, and begin the new one with a freshly discovered personal melody of truth.
This journal started quietly, compact; a few cautious notes announced that the conductor had finally picked up his violin, and that the piece was about to change. As the conductor grew in confidence, so did the pushback from the orchestra he had internalised. He had to prove that personal smallness was justified by demonstrating an ability to swallow all bigness… He did this, and with every big, outdated solo swallowed, members of the external orchestra began to see that what he was doing was not an act of arrogance, but liberation. The conductor surged on, at times visibly distressed by the burden of playing the old piece into irrelevance, but gradually his posture loosened, and a quiet, tired smile began to appear on his face. He had now moved beyond all the bigness, with the last echoes of each big note dissipating into the forgotten shadows of the concert hall, finding a home there, and becoming a completed history. There is a pause, a silent moment where the conductor, now humble soloist on the verge of something new, doubts himself again. He’s played every false melody, and surged through every old movement, and now he wonders… Will the next stage of his solo be enough? Will his true melody be worth the buildup that came before?
He waits, smiles, newly named; he lets a tear pass, and readies himself. The orchestra listens.
[2]
I’ve come to The Devonshire Arms. The name rings a bell, probably because it’s in the Castle Road area. My dad must have gone there a few times when he was living with Emma on Denmark Street. I keep darting my eyes around, half expecting to see an old teacher or someone I am supposed to recognise. Mr Graham (I should be referring to him as Mark now, but the habit sticks) used to live around here, I’m pretty sure. Every so often, I’d see him on my way into school, back when I would leave the house unshowered with a can of Pepsi Max in my pocket, feeling like some rugged, masculine anti-hero. I was sixteen, and I hadn’t washed because the boiler was broken. The Pepsi Max was an affectation, but I did at least like the taste of it. I’d wear my sunglasses too, if the early morning sun was out; although if Mr Graham did catch my eye on such a morning, he would smile, quiet, knowing and humble, and I would feel instantly silly for swaggering along in my own little myth.
This place has high ceilings and big, spacious rooms. The complete opposite of The Three Cups! Not sure how well I will adjust. But it’s Saturday night, and it’s lively and I’m drinking a London Pride. This is the first time I’ve seen it on tap in any of the pubs in Bedford. Unfortunately, it wasn’t served in the classic branded pint glass I was used to from The Iron Duke. And I’m not even the biggest fan of real ale; I got it for the nostalgia, really.
I’ve also nabbed myself a tall, circular table with a couple of high, velvet-padded stools. Flashbacks of that student union scene! However, these stools are… the correct height. I was totally prepared for the inevitable slump, both physical and emotional, of settling onto a stool too low for the table. The slump never came, and here I am, sitting all straight-backed and pleased with myself, my forearms resting gently on the table edges at just the right angle.
There are two branded disposable coasters on the table, both wet. They’ve got jokes on them with little cartoons illustrated by a man called Rob Murray. The pub must have some connection to Timothy Taylor’s because that’s the brand on the coasters, and its glass is housing my pint of London Pride, too. I don’t quite understand the newspaper comic-style jokes on the coasters. I think they are brand-specific. Well, one of them definitely is. It’s a drawing of a man in full trekking gear guzzling a pint next to a bemused barman, and the caption says: Finding a good pint of Landlord isn’t the trek it used to be. I’m not the most familiar with beer brands, beyond what I picked up from my time as a bartender a few years ago, but I am assuming Timothy Taylor’s didn’t used to be well-distributed.
The other coaster cartoon is a drawing of a police car signalling to a Timothy Taylor lorry to pull over. The policeman calls out, “This is an ORDER!”, and the caption says, Turns out getting pulled over by the police isn’t always bad news. I quite like that one, though neither is funny enough to deserve being on the coasters, are they? I feel like they could’ve done better. They’re too clever to be fully enjoyable in a quiet smile kind of way, or funny enough to be enjoyable in a plain silly way. Come on, Timothy Taylor’s, pull your socks up! You’re wasting the talent of Rob Murray, whoever he is.
I like being here. I like the feeling of having fully landed, and I say that without any intention of delving into it. We know what it means. I also saw Nottingham Forest beat Liverpool at Anfield earlier, by a big margin and with Sean Dyche in charge, too… very funny! Although Liverpool have fallen off enough at this point for me to not feel as much relief when they lose. I’m more concerned about Man City; I think they’re playing Newcastle at the moment. It was nil-nil, from what I could tell, every time I walked past a pub on my way here. The Devinshire Arms doesn’t seem to be playing the football, unless it’s in the marquee area, or through that little doorway over there. In fact, right in front of me, raised above the nearby family and next to the wallpapered fireplace, is what looks like a tv wall-mount, except there’s no TV on it and it’s covered in red felt to match the walls.
Not goals yet at St James’ Park. That bodes well for the Arsenal! I can’t watch the North London Derby tomorrow. I’m pretty good at watching other games nowadays, but not that one. The tension tips into unwatchable. That said, who knows how I’ll feel by tomorrow? It’s only a game, after all, and if Tottenham win I can send Michael a friendly, respectful message of congratulations… or a petty jibe about their league position. Both options are open, and that’s what matters.
What is it about this pub that keeps making me think I am seeing people I know? There’s a middle-aged guy on the table by the wall with a long goatee and a top-knot. He looks familiar, or does he just look like that guy? Then there’s a woman with folded arms and a plain face, wearing a Barbour gilet and talking like she knows things. She reminds me of Jess from Canterbury Christ Church, who used to sit in her country cottage on the Teams calls. She must have absolutely hated me, and from her point of view, it was probably justified. Everyone’s point of view is justified from where they’re sitting (and what the lens they’re seeing through), that’s what I’ve learned. Allow people their lenses and enjoy your own clear sight, that’s what I’ve also learned. That second thing is far more important.
There is obvious subtext to all this, isn’t there? Yet, for once, I am happy for the subtext to be something that hums itself into irrelevance in the background. Dying echoes in the furthest reaches of the concert hall. There we go, that’s as far as I’ll go in terms of looking back.
Ah, I just realised that the woman I thought looked like Jess, with the gilet and the sensible brown hair, isn’t even the original lookalike! There is a woman on the adjacent table who looks even more like Jess, and she must have been the one who originally threw my mind back there. Fancy having two pointers to the same memory sitting in one pub!
Still nil-nil at St James’ Park. I was in a good mood wandering through town before I eventually stumbled here. So many nights of mythic displacement! I considered a few pubs on the way, and even strolled past The Three Cups, though it was teeming. I saw the same old bartender through the window, standing with the same unimpressed aura, counting down the hours till she can go home and wash the atmosphere from her hands and face. I mean, that’s what I used to do, anyway. I used to sway my way back through the deserted grandeur, up Regent’s Street in the early hours of Sunday morning, feeling all small and big at the same time under the streetlamps and the spitting rain. I had this pink stripey shirt that I loved, and I would wear it all year round, sweltering on the summer bus and shuffling briskly up Great Portland Street in the cold. It would get covered in ale and sweat, and by the end of the night, I was happy for it to hang out, untucked. Until closing time, I was presentable, through the rushes and the lulls, and then as soon as I was free, gliding up Avery Row and finally in my own head again, away from all human company, then I would relax. I could finally be left to dwell in myself alone, shirt untucked and head hanging slightly low. Was I sad? No, I wouldn’t say so. I was sinking into myself, into a place of my own that was free of all expectation. There was a melancholy in that place of dwelling, but it was always fruitful. I never dwelt anywhere without purpose.
Newcastle are ahead at St James’ Park! Just the right time to check, as well. They went ahead, then City equalised, then they got themselves ahead again. Very satisfying. I’ll leave it alone now until the game’s over. Don’t want to jinx it!
Yes, that bartender in The Three Cups could have been feeling the same way I used to, or she could have been feeling utterly contented, or maybe simply numb… I never consider that one as an option. It’s almost definitely an option. I think I’ll go there again, though, and maybe bring Daisy, too. It would be nice to finally have a babysitter come and free up an evening for ourselves. Crazy to think the only time we’ve ever had a babysitter for Miranda was when Daphne was born a month ago! We hunkered down and built what we needed to build in relative isolation, but the village can now come into its own. The village had to emerge from the foundations of the true family… There I go again… It’s true, though.
I just went to wipe the condensation off the window next to me, hoping to peer wistfully out onto the quiet, residential street… but the glass itself is translucent and I can’t see a thing. I’ve also come to the end of my London Pride, and I am wondering whether to have one more. I could always have a half. I am not in any rush this evening (when am I ever in a rush?), and the football seems to be going my way, so maybe I should indulge. The evening is entirely mine, and my mind seems to be entirely mine, too (a quiet reference), and so maybe I should enjoy it. I could treat myself to a bag of nuts, too!
I did get the pint and I got the peanuts, too. For a moment, I got all excited because the pint glass was the exact shape of the old London Pride one… it was a Brewpoint glass, whatever that is. It says Brewpoint Bedford on it, so maybe it’s local and I should feel a big sense of pride… but I don’t want local pride, I want London Pride! Ahhh, I enjoyed that joke.
It is the tiniest bag of KP nuts I have ever seen. It feels quite full, though, so it’s not the end of the world. And crucially, Newcastle are still ahead at St James’ Park. Two goals from Harvey Barnes. Wasn’t he a rising star who fell off the face of the earth? Or am I confusing him with someone else? Who was the one who played for Chelsea a few years ago and was supposed to go on to big things? Jacob Barkeley! That’s who I’m thinking of… was it Jacob? Something like that. I don’t know who he plays for now.
I looked it up. It was Ross Barkley, and he now plays for Aston Villa. I knew there was someone like that who’d had a bit of a resurgence. Ninety minutes gone; Newcastle are still ahead at St James’ Park. God, remember when it was briefly called the Sports Direct Stadium or something like that? That was awful. I’m still ambivalent about Highbury becoming the Emirates… and I’m not even old enough to remember Highbury. I even felt a bit uncomfortable about White Hart Lane becoming the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium! They might be rivals, but even rivals deserve to have their history preserved and maintained. It’s a tradition thing, I suppose.
I’ve had another look around the pub. Apparently, you can take two pints of your favourite ale home at closing. The artful chalk drawing next to the notice is of a milk cartoon… is that how they serve it? Seems like a recipe for disaster, giving bloated, middle-aged, red-nosed merry men (who, on the table beside me, are already getting ancy about politics and Neil Kinnock, of all people, for some reason) an extra two pints to stumble home with… I can’t imagine the conversations at home are much fun by that point. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe the extra two pints tip the scales, and the angry rants about what could have been in the 90s turn into a strangely touching rendition of Blue Moon… sung right from the soul.
Ha! 2-1 to Newcastle! I knew the sarcastic Blue Moon reference would be well-timed. I had the BBC Sport page open on my phone for the last paragraph, and I watched as the timer ticked away. Another classic St James’ Park performance for Newcastle…. the fortress! I wouldn’t be quite so supportive of them if Arsenal hadn’t turned it around earlier in the season, of course, but I don’t have to worry about that timeline. Oooh, look at me… up the Geordies! My dad will be pleased… not that he cares about football, really. I messaged him a screenshot of the win. Knowing him, he’s probably a few pints in, too. He’s like one of those men from my analogy earlier… except without the political anger… more existential melancholy, I think. Pah! He doesn’t need that now. He’s got me! Up the Geordies!
Yes, I like it here in The Devonshire Arms. I like my well-balanced high table by the window, too, even if the window is translucent. It must have to do with being on a residential street.
I would love to buy a house in this area someday. It depends on our finances and the size of our family by that point, obviously, but it’s an area that means something to me. Daisy likes it, too. I wonder which road she would pick if she had a choice. If money weren’t a factor, I reckon she would pick Bushmead Avenue, where the houses are slightly more spacious and the road is big and quiet and full of beautiful trees. I’d agree with her, too. There was a house on Rightmove a few months ago with a gorgeous red front door and the perfect interior structure. Strange to think that’s someone’s house now! I’m describing the house people are living in right now. That’s weird, isn’t it? It’s their home…
What kind of house would I like? I’d like a house that is full of my family. I mean that in every possible way, too. I’d like to come home to a house that is not only humming with chatter and fun—lived presence—but also announces the very souls of its inhabitants the moment you enter. I want Daisy to pick colours because she likes them, and buy paintings of peculiar things and hang them wherever she likes. And I want my daughters to leave things around, like little parts of themselves dotted all over the house. There would be no mess, no clutter, only life. And I’d like our bedroom to be a weird, blended duet. I’d want it all to work, to cohere, but only because we allowed it not to. I’d want Daisy to have an antique dressing table, which would probably be constantly wet with the saline solution she uses for her contact lenses. But it would have beautiful things on it, too, jewellery and perfumes for different seasons, all scattered in whatever chaotic system Daisy’s soul chooses. And we’d both have bedside tables, matching ones that somehow hold both of our personalities together in harmony. And on mine, I would have a lamp and a book, nothing more. And that book would be something pointless, something fun and small and silly and beautifully written, like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and I would be reading it simply because I felt like it, and because the language made me smile.
And then, somewhere at the back of the house, I would have a room of my own. I was thinking about that phrase earlier today. I’ve never read the essay, but I agree with the essence, and it has resonance with me beyond gender. I would have a small, neat room of my own. A study. I would keep that room as entirely mine (permitting the odd valuable if one of the children felt it was especially important that an item of theirs have a home in there), and I would dwell in that room like it was the home of time itself. I would choose materials, textures, colours that I could return to again and again, and I would sit in that room and simply be. Maybe I would write a story or two, and spend some time with some old companions… maybe catch up with an old fox or feel a new soul into being. But mostly, I would sit, and I would smile, and I would remember what it took to get to this small, inhabited room, where I belonged, and could be called at any moment for dinner.
Yes, I like it here in The Devonshire Arms, and while I am slightly wary about the ungodly theme park that’s on its way (I agree with Bob Dylan from a few nights ago), I like being here in Bedford. For now, at least, it is home, and home is a good place to be.
21/11/2025
For the first time since starting this journal, I wrote a bunch of stuff and then… deleted it. How’s that for growth? No doubt it would have been very interesting. It was an unprompted proclamation about Lil Dicky being one of the only truly sincere artists in the modern world… and therefore one of the only real artists. Yes, I’m sure it would have been very interesting… but I chose to delete it because I realised I just don’t have the energy to do the whole ‘praise myself through someone else’ thing anymore. That’s what I’ve done my whole life, seeing the gems of truth and beauty in others and pointing them out… they’re my fucking gems! I’m taking my gems back. I hope you enjoyed taking care of them for me… Come on, hand them over… Give them back… Hahaha, come on, now, stop playing around… All right, you asked for it!
This is an important plaster for me to rip off. Here goes: I’m bloody brilliant. Ahhh, that feels better. There are more plasters, though. Here goes another: You lot all know I’m bloody brilliant, but you all seem scared of admitting it. Ahhhh, that one feels very good to rip off. One more for luck? Oh, go on then. Ready? Here we go: This journal means that it’s game over for the old hierarchies of value. Why? Because I am so unusually capable of producing glistening prose, weaving the mundane with the divine, maintaining depth without losing humour and doing all that with the express purpose of becoming small and unimpressive, that you lot are going to have to admit you’ve got your value structures inverted! No more identities built on external bullshit or posturing once this journal’s out there. Game over, friends. Game over.
I think the people in my life do have high opinions of me… but do they ever say it? Nope! They all think the truth speaks for itself… well, that may well be, but if I’ve been the truth that’s been speaking, how was I ever supposed to hear myself?! You silly billies… You kept Max in the dark about his own brilliance… You kept him using you as mirrors, happy to absorb his praise and kind words… never daring to recognise his true scale. Sneaky sneaky sneaky!
Also, while I’m in this mode, I have another big gripe to put down… ready? This one is a total corker. Here it is:
The one person who was bold enough to see me fully, Daisy, was the one person the world refused to take seriously! People thought my beautiful, intelligent, mythically pure-sighted wife was a sycophant! Oh, Max and Daisy’s relationship is so unhealthy because Max says and thinks all these big things, and Daisy doesn’t challenge him. It’s our job to make sure Max doesn’t lose sight of what’s really true… Daisy’s undying loyalty is not helping!
Oh my! Oh my oh my oh my! You absolute mongs! So not only did you all manage to gaslight me into thinking I was crazy about myself, you also wilfully cast Daisy as a mindless follower. How’s that for a modern tale of misogyny? Hmmm, this quiet, mild-mannered young woman seems to think her husband is the bees’ knees and stands by him even through the toughest, most complex moments… she must be a simpleton who can’t think for herself! Fucking cunts.
I’m sorry…. Oh, I am so, so sorry… but they deserve it. I never lose myself to bitterness, remember, dear reader. So I am just venting some truths here… and you know what? I’m proud to be doing it because I’m defending my bloody wife! People in my life thought I was manipulating my wife because they were the ones who were dazzled by me and my stupid brilliance, and they were the ones who saw Daisy as some easily manipulated bumpkin! Projection much? Fucking nobs.
Ahhhhhh, I am feeling a bit better now. I had to get it out, you see. This is what healthy venting looks like, and it’s great fun, too. Ahhhhh. Decompressing… Ommmmmmmmm… Inner peace…. Ommmmm… Inner peace… In-in-inner peace…. (Kung Fu Panda 2 reference!)
But that cute little outburst points to something bigger I’ve finally been owning today. It’s been on my mind since last night, too. You see, I am actually quite hurt by the way I was allowed to carry so much in my life. And everyone knew I was carrying more than I should have been, and that it wasn’t fair, and yet they all let me do it because I ‘had the tools’. I am not a fan of that. Nope. Not one bit. Because even if everyone had acknowledged outright that I was carrying too much (which they didn’t), they would have just told me to put it down. Ummmm, that’s not how emotional responsibility works! It’s pretty simple. It’s a bit like parenting. If you’re a single parent and you’re struggling with the burden of raising your children, you can’t just put the burden down because someone else has to pick it up, or everything goes to shit. It works the same way with emotional dynamics worldwide. There are always people who pick up the emotional load that others have put down, and they pick it up because they can’t not. It’s like humanity knows its own burden has to be carried somehow… and so imagine a modern world where everyone suddenly decides, collectively, that it’s time to focus on the ‘Self’. What does that do? Well, it encourages not only the lazy, selfish people to put their emotional baggage down, but the selfless people, too. This is dangerous. Very dangerous. Because the quiet, selfless types were the only ones keeping humanity from tripping over its own bumbling feet and crashing nose-first into the damp pavement. But here’s the bigger problem: those selfless types are the exact people who deserve to carry a bit less… and we sure as hell know the selfish types aren’t going to pick up the slack… so what happens? Crassssssshhhhhhh, scraaaaape….. Owwwwww! My nose!
So where does that leave me, and how do I say this without my customary fear of appearing grandiose? Well, let’s put it this way. I’m the guy who sincerely wrote a letter to Jesus Christ a month ago. Why? To free him of the symbol and rehumanise him without stripping him of his divinity. Because his divinity, whatever the hell that is, manifested in love and care. If he died for our sins, and he fucking meant it, then he must have cared quite a lot. Could it be that he cared so much that it bordered on incomprehensible? And could it also be that the more someone focuses on themselves, the less equipped they are to spot sincere care when it’s embodied in others? Hmmm, that’s one to think on, isn’t it?
I didn’t set out to make myself important, and I never wanted a grand mythic narrative. I simply lived my life, and I refused every opportunity to put down an emotional load when I knew someone else was going to be damaged by it, somewhere down the line. And I didn’t want to appeal to God or Christ or any other symbol of strength and resilience because that is the same behaviour pattern. How’s that for a theological revolution? Did anybody ever think that God might be carrying too much? Hmmm, that’s interesting, isn’t it?
I have had to make my peace with how ridiculous my life looks from the outside over and over again. And I made my peace by turning inwards every single time, and every single time I realised that I was the source of my own love. I couldn’t drop the burden of how much I needed to be seen because the world was full of people looking outwards and upwards for their affirmation. I looked inward because I realised people had been looking at me for that reassurance my whole life.
Whatever. I’m bored of this drivel now. I think I’ve got it out of my system. Did it make sense? I hope so… syntactically, I mean… It’s almost certainly not going to make sense to you, but then, that’s the point, isn’t it? Ahh… inner peace…
Well, well, well, the journal is really getting into its stride now, isn’t it? Max is the exact same guy he was when it began, speaking in much the same register, and yet he appears almost… unburdened. Fancy that!
So I’ve got to go to the Job Centre in half an hour or so—weekly appointment time—and then hopefully I’ll be returning to the page with the clearest mind I’ve ever had. Not because of the Job Centre appointment… Because of the massive emotional venting I did when I sat down to type this morning.
My mind is a wee bit fuzzy, to be honest. It could be the cafe air. It’s hot in here, man. And I’m at the back. And I’ve still got my jumper on. And I didn’t sleep very well. That’s a strange one, actually, because it was one of those nights where you are technically sleeping, but your mind is in overdrive processing and reprocessing and preprocessing and the rest. Whatever… again.
When I got home to Daisy last night, obviously a bit drunk, I went on this rant that made us both laugh. I think it made me laugh more than Daisy, but sometimes those are the funniest rants, when you’re making yourself laugh. Basically, I got home and announced almost immediately that even if this whole journal project suddenly goes off the rails and spirals into some incoherent mess of banal babbling… technically, I’ve succeeded. Because when I started, as we know, I wanted things to untangle themselves and unravel… and look where we are now. I also noted, mid-rant, that surely if I started from the position of trying to loosen myself from my own intellect, if I then go on to achieve that goal in the process of writing tens of thousands of words, even if it does end up a swollen tome of stupidity, then technically I succeeded in a way only a smart man could have done! I will be perhaps the only smart man in history to write himself out of his own intelligence, thereby freeing himself of a burden he never valued for his identity and never wanted to carry anyway! Watch this space, ladies and gents, you are witnessing the end of intelligence as we know it. How exciting!
Ideally, by the time the first volume of this journal reaches its natural close, I will just be listing stuff I like. That’s the vision I had for it the other day, walking along. I thought of how brilliant it would be for this great behemoth to sprawl out so much that it ends up a wholesome documentation of gentle nothings.
I saw a man outside B&M earlier who looked exactly like Tim Robbins.
My toast this morning was a bit underdone. The butter didn’t melt how I like it. Need to remember not to buy the reduced-fat Flora. It’s crap.
Might watch the Sunderland game later.
Yes, that will be a special kind of victory. It’ll be like I’ve turned myself into Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but it won’t be so depressing.
Nahhhh, who am I kidding! Even my banality will vibrate with the hum of a once-contested divinity! That’s just me, baby… that’s just me. That’s just what I do… try and keep up, if you can.
Think on that while I’m at the Job Centre, will you?
[2]
Another Job Centre appointment navigated like an honourable citizen.
Am I searching for jobs? Of course. Am I applying for jobs? Of course. Am I aware that it’s important for me to ‘give back’ to society and ‘earn’ my universal credit? Of course. After all, I am leaning on all those decent, selfless taxpayers, aren’t I? Ahhhhh, the irony of it all!
I do feel a bit deflated this afternoon. I debated going back to the usual cafe after my appointment and then got myself all in a tiz about what to do. I knew I needed something to eat, but I’d already tipped past the point of reasonable hunger, and so my emotional state was beginning to paralyse itself. I called Daisy, partly to make sure she was having a good day and was all right at home with the children, and partly to centre myself back in the supposed importance of what I am doing. She reassured me, and I feel all the better for it. Honestly, what would I do without her?! Her calm certainty is like the quiet of my own mind. It is the natural honesty of the silent universe. Yes, Daisy is nature, and therein lies her perennial strength and beauty.
That was a nice sentence, wasn’t it? Now, on to the matter of my deflation… I think it has to do with the fact that I am constantly journeying towards a perfectly human place of calm readiness, and yet I have to make that journey myself, alone, in this stupid document. And so I call out to my wife, who gives me the mirrored certainty I so desperately need… the certainty that tells me I am not being merely self-indulgent, but doing something necessary beyond myself. I hate how inward-facing it all is, and how it is making me proclaim things that I have spent a life avoiding through humility and self-minimisation.
But, overall, I feel pretty good. The deflated feeling is part of the process, and it forces me to confront the very real fact that while I am, and have always been, happy to go and attend some supposedly helpful-to-society job, it stings a little. Of course it stings! It stings to think that I am genuinely excited about the prospect of doing some bland Civil Service job after everything that’s happened. I have carried so much emotional weight, and carried it through to completion, all to get to the place most people take for granted. And if and when I do get that job, I will plod in each morning, chatting to people about the football and enjoying my biscuit break, knowing in myself that I have already completed the one mystery people implicitly blame all their unhappiness on.
I don’t think I am losing myself to this mood. It feels like a totally reasonable road to wind down. I always find my way back to the main route. Sometimes you need to take an unexpected turn and zigzag your way through the fields of manure, if only to remind yourself that the food that sustains you on your journey has its origins in such aromas.
Also, I genuinely can’t imagine writing in the way I was earlier in the journal. All that constant self-reference and honesty. Yes, it was impressively meta and the rest, but it was the explosive writing of a mind that has spent a lifetime silently believing it didn’t have the simple right to exist. I know this journal is still meta in its structure—I am aware of myself writing and thinking as always—but I am becoming calmer. It may not last… I may be bouncing around again by this evening, but I know the underlying feelings will have loosened, and that matters.
Beyond that, I am feeling vulnerable now (especially so) because I am aware of one of my most patterned behaviours. I have these seismic moments of expansion, moments where I sit down and tell the truth and free myself of long-endured restrictions, and I navigate those moments with humour and bravado and theatrics because that humour enables me to communicate the pain. It’s not deflection, it’s more like fuel to get the truths out. But after it’s done, there is an inevitable come down because in the act of ‘ripping the plaster off’, what was I really doing? I was exposing the wound to let it heal in the open air. I use the bravado and the humour as my ripping motion… and what’s left is the wound. That’s forward movement, but it does mean I then flow naturally into passages like these, where the humour has fallen away, another plaster disposed of, and the wound is freshly visible. So the writing slows, and my mood softens, and what would have typically bothered me is that I now somehow look manic. It’s not mania, it’s progress.
So in that light, what are my fears now? I fear the journal quieting down to the point of blandness. I joked about it earlier, almost as an ambition, but of course that’s not true. And the big fear lurking beneath the blandness concern is, I think, more about me finally reaching a place of calm in my own mind, only to have the world turn around to me and say, ‘Well done, you did your inner work. That was all for you and you alone. Now come back to the world and do your part for others.’
That really is a fear of mine, and it’s why I lean on Daisy so much (and then constantly worry that I am leaning on her too much). I rely on Daisy to reassure me, as I mentioned earlier, that what I am doing is, in fact, for the good of others as well. Because I would never commit myself to such a monumental task of self-narration and exploration if it were genuinely only for me.
I’ll bring it back to my Mr Bean’s Holiday analogy from a few days ago and add what could easily have been missed in the subtext. Yes, I am, and have always been, solely focused on getting to the beach, but I am also driven by a deep knowing that I will have directed everyone else there in the process. In the original analogy, Mr Bean is largely indifferent to the successes of others, but I am not. And the deeper point here is this—oh, and by the way, the humorous nature of my analogy is not lost on me here, but I am surging on earnestly until it is completed—the deeper point is that if this whole thing is merely a personal victory, then it is not a victory at all.
We are all connected by the one story we share: being human. I don’t need mysticism or religion or even science to state that truth. It simply is. And it means that a personal victory for one human being is, in the deepest sense, a victory for everyone. So my fear about blandness, or the sting of the job search, or the paranoia around self-absorption, is really about reality itself. Because if I get through to the other side, if I get to the beach, and the world’s response is a big thumbs up and a patronising statement about isolated self-fulfilment, then it was all for nothing.
And this, you realise, is not melodramatic catastrophising… It’s a simple statement of fact. If the world can claim indifference to such a singular human victory, then we are not connected by the story we all know to be true. If this is only about my story and not the story, then… well… then reality is just a massive joke!
At which point, reader, I will start laughing again.
Ooof. That was a tough passage, wasn’t it? And did you like how I dragged you into a sentimental moment so pure that you even endured the Mr Bean reference like it wasn’t completely silly! Classic storytelling. Classic Max.
[3]
We’re on a new section because that last one brought itself to a natural close. I have also changed location… tonight I am only going to have the one pint of Guinness, then home. Man, how retable is the alcohol theme for all you drinkers! Maybe you’re ambivalent about it. Maybe you like the fact that you can connect to my drinking tendencies, but lament your own inability to glide through life without the Ol’ Devil’s Hooch! Maybe you think it makes me cool. Makes me seem like some solitary beatnik type, doesn’t it? Or does it smack of a narrative crutch? Well, if that’s the case, then my very life is leaning on a narrative crutch… and there’s not much I can do about that. I am not constructing this life, after all. I am living it. Any narratives are purely incidental.
Here’s a question. What will beautiful writing look like once the world has found peace and stopped its yearning? And here’s the obvious question beneath that question. What will Max’s journal look like as he continues his journey into looseness and peace?
I do have my worries about significance, etc…. as I more than artfully expressed in the previous section. But I do also wonder about the basic features of the writing itself. Ideally, and I do believe in the ideal (how could that not be obvious by now), the writing at the end of this journal will be the kind of simple writing I value most.
There is one quality in writing that I value above all else: unadorned truth. I remember reading Iris Murdoch’s book about Simone Weil a few years ago, and she expressed the idea that the best writing simply says: There it is. Weirdly, I then tried reading Under the Net and found that quality distinctly lacking. I suppose she had it as a goal, not a starting point.
The weirder question, I think, is whether the writers I always admired and saw value in really were making “There it is” statements with their words, or whether I was the one reading it into their writing because I valued that kind of clarity so much in my own sight. Hard one to decipher, really. But since starting this pointless discussion in my head, a few ideas have occurred to me. I think it depends on the place the writer is writing from and what their intentions are behind the work.
For example, there is no shortage of “There it is” writing in Mick Inkpen’s stuff. You’ll find a beautifully true, simple, accurate description of a descending sun in one of his Kipper stories. The same goes for Nick Butterworth. I remember being in the nursery around Christmastime last year and finding One Snowy Night, and it begins with a crisp description of Percy walking through the park in the morning mist. That kind of writing is common in classic children’s literature, though it’s gone horribly missing in recent years. Adults have apparently forgotten how sensory children are, and the fact that, unlike the adults, they are not yet bored stiff by the simplest changes in weather or the perfectly timed fall of an autumn leaf. Children’s stories need revitalising! And if you agree, reader (you thought I’d forgotten you, didn’t you?), if you agree, then go and read my quiet little children’s pieces.
So that is one instance of “There it is” writing, and notice it emerges from authors who are not exactly being handed the Booker prize. But children’s literature is exactly the kind of place where such unadorned truth can be handled without too much risk, because we expect the authors to take on an almost parental role in the act of storytelling. A proper storyteller tells the truth, even in his descriptions.
When it comes to adult fiction, the problem becomes more pronounced. It shouldn’t be too hard to produce some truthful descriptions in a children’s book, though many authors are exposed here too, but when it comes to proper introspective adult narrative fiction, that sought-after “There it is” writing disappears almost entirely. I think the problem is with the adults wrestling behind the pages. D.H. Lawrence is a perfect example of an author who never forgets his duty to describe what is. Even at his most ornamental and oftentimes religiously exalted, he can turn towards an English brook or a Mexican river and simply name it. What this shows is that you don’t need to be telling safe, archetypal, tidy stories like Dickens to achieve clear descriptions. If anything, I think Dickens’ descriptions are a little dead precisely because he isn’t seeing, or even trying to see, beyond the archetypes. If you see nothing but archetypes, representations, in the human world, then why should we believe you aren’t describing the representation of a tree rather than the tree itself?
I am going to pause here, reader, and go to Lidl. I thought I would mention it as I have involved you a lot so far. Although I will be honest here and say that, with any luck, this journal will now move more and more in the direction of simple narration. Not constant self-justification. As always, we won’t force it. But you might well be witnessing a turning point. And don’t worry, even if I stop addressing you directly, you’re still there, I am still writing to you, myself, and the world. However, for me, writing simply to myself is a big win. You’ll understand that, won’t you?
Back home. A quick side thought to put down that would have usually taken up pages and pages, but will instead be jotted down like a reminder to buy more digestives.
Just because a solution to a universal problem has only been applied in one particular case does not mean the world has not already changed. Future change is about scale, not kind.
With that out of the way, I can continue talking about writing.
Actually, no. I don’t feel like it yet. That, too, like the Willie Nelson song, will have to wait until another time.
20/11/2025
This is only the second time I’ve been in Real Coffee. The last time I was here, I was in my gym gear and feeling all good about myself. I was also still lugging around The Man Who Died in that little over-the-shoulder bum bag from TK Maxx. I never did cancel the gym membership. Maybe I’ll get back into it when the new year comes around. I’m not going to force myself. Although I have made a kind of promise to my mate who works in Budgens… he’s expecting to see me back there eventually.
Oddly, mentioning the gym reminded me of a dream I had last night. I can’t quite remember what was going on, but there was one moment where my dad appeared with Frances and mentioned how my arms were strong. Very flattering, Dad, but they’re a little noodly nowadays! But I’ve long made peace with my physical form… and maybe that’s exactly why I am ready to bring the biceps back! Maybe. I’m not going to force it.
My dreams were eventful generally. The most important mind-message of last night was that everything is going in the right direction. I felt it securely even before I went to bed, having finished the entry with that poetic little meditation on comfort in the cosmos… and then my sleep confirmed it: double-stamped certification! As ever, the whole thing is a massive paradox, but I can’t be bothered to get into the weeds of that right now. I live the paradoxes harmoniously; therefore, thinking about them often only creates the illusion of disunion. I don’t need too much of that in my life.
Last night’s meditation links to why I’ve been in different cafes recently. Yes, I went to the same pub yesterday evening, but I am new to that place. When I walked in yesterday, the manager did anticipate my order, so I might be bedding in faster than anticipated, but overall, it’s a fresh zone. The brief change in cafes, however, is more important than it may seem. I’ve noticed that I tend to seek out a different cafe, one where I can be anonymous and uninteresting, when I am approaching an arrival threshold.
It’s a lot harder to be a small person in the world than you’d think! Because I relate so well and with such unboundaried ease (look at me, I’m special), I sometimes find myself needing to reach for anonymity, somewhere free of pre-established relational bonds… sorry girls at the cafe, I’ll be back soon! Just as soon as I’ve sunken further into the grounded body of Max.
Also, I just remembered that this very journal was born of such a step into anonymity! I wrote the first entry sitting in Poppin’s Diner, which, until then, I had never visited. It was a big deal, going to the diner that day. I wanted something smaller, grittier, easier… and however much I love going to my usual cafe, sometimes it is too sophisticated for my soul. Diners are the traditional home of my kind of community: unadorned, relaxed, spacious. They offer comfort without indulgence, quality without pomposity, sustenance without self-importance… basically, a diner is the archetypal place of dwelling.
Yes, these quiet, anonymous days help me to lean into the idea of refinement as leisure. When you are known in a place, that place expects things of you unconsciously, and so, if you happen to one day feel drawn towards sinking further into the proper seat of yourself… it can help to do so in neutral territory.
Never before has a man analysed cafe choices more than I! But there are genuine insights arising from all this rubbish. For instance, my stupid riff on diners has produced an actual concrete example of what I am talking about… ready?
I love my usual cafe, and I feel a genuine sense of family with the people who work there, as they well know.
[I am, in fact, messaging them now, as they asked where I was… Shhhhh, don’t tell them I am around the corner in a rival cafe!]
So one of the reasons I love going to the cafe is because of the community… and yet! It’s no easy thing for yours truly to maintain his centre in a community setting… he relates too much, remember! This means that in order for me to be able to navigate the difficult balance between being a participant and being the atmosphere, I need instances of solitary re-grounding…
Oh my, is this all the most complex discussion ever of someone essentially needing time alone?! You know what? No! No, it’s not! This is different, and I know it is… so onwards I go…
In establishments that pride themselves on polish, refinement and quality, it’s easy for the key ingredient to be left behind in the pursuit of perfection. What’s the key ingredient? Well, of course it’s love… just like when SpongeBob makes a Crabby Patty…
I genuinely can’t believe I am still talking about cafes. Let’s just get it out of the way. Basically, after going to the diner and beginning the next stage of my grounding, I went back to the usual cafe asking for my coffee to be served in a classic mug instead of a glass… Oh my god, now that it’s written down, it doesn’t look anywhere near as enlightened as I thought it would. Whatever. I am the man who brings the spirit of the diner into the world of refinement, and that is no small feat! It may sound simple, but it’s actually a very complex dance to master… Why? Because it’s too easy for leisure and looseness to cause a place of refinement to spiral into degeneracy… it happens a lot in family-feel places: cafes, pubs, etc. There is a fine balance between a place feeling genuinely relaxed and losing its centre entirely… Most refined places are too scared to allow looseness in… and the result is always something cold and practical.
Hang on… am I crediting myself with the ongoing revitalisation of true community spirit in the world, beginning with local cafes and pubs? You bet I am! I am the centre that holds through looseness, remember!
Okay, I think I am finally at the end of my cafe discussion. For something so pointless, that was surprisingly all-consuming, a bit like when I used to get absorbed in scraping my carpet clean with my bare hands in the old Pimlico flat. A very very strange thing to do… but it did the job. When you don’t have a hoover, use your bare hands, and when you’ve thrown out systematic philosophy, ramble about cafes.
The more I surge on through this great life-experiment of embracing looseness and rejecting tightness, the more I see recurring patterns in my thoughts and instincts. For instance, I have always had a predilection for neatness, yet I never feel more me than when I have permitted the flow to be free. The best example of this is my hair.
When I was a child, I always had the same haircut. It was neat, even, sensible, and I loved it. But then I got older, and I started to flirt with the idea of letting the real me out. I embraced slightly longer, more unruly hair towards the end of my time at school, only to then cut it short again and feel safe during my first year at university. Usually, my hair grew long through laziness, but I wonder whether beneath that laziness was an unconscious command: expand. So I oscillated through periods of long hair and short hair, always convincing myself that the actual real me was the neat one. I liked the presentable version of me, while I enjoyed being the less presentable one.
All this seems trivial in a way, doesn’t it? But it’s not! It’s like the cafe thing… this is deep in some sense, not a basic problem of duality, I promise!
Different versions of me got different responses from people, too. My family, particularly my mum, preferred the neat version of me, while friends, colleagues at the pub, and girls all seemed to prefer the messier version. One was safe, one was dangerous… and yet… both were incomplete….
Right, I do see it. It all feels very obvious at the moment. But get ready for the depth! Here it comes.
Stuff like hair and style are representations… the world is made of representations. The reason I liked the neat version of me was because it gave me a necessary container… the messier version was freer, more fun, but it risked being all chaos and no centre. It’s the same basic problem as the cafe discussion from earlier: order kills life, chaos lives too much and loses its own pulse in the process…
There we go. It’s getting heftier now, isn’t it? So the greatest reconciliation of all had to be between the deepest duality: order and chaos… Now, Jordan Peterson has kind of ruined those concepts for the modern world… not because he was necessarily wrong about anything in the archetypal sense, but just because I can’t bloody think of those concepts now without his face popping up in my mind! It’s annoying!
Also, notice how he released the first book as an Antidote to Chaos—only to call the next book Beyond Order! Come on, man, you could have admitted the paradox had not yet been resolved in your own mind. Why’d you have to try and embody your attempt at reconciliation in front of the whole world? Hang on… here we go again… is that what I am doing in publishing this journal?
Ha! Nope! You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I am not embodying my attempt at reconciliation; I am embodying the reconciliation itself and publishing that to the world. Very very very very different.
[A quick aside to myself, the universe and Mr Peterson himself: I’m still looking forward to the day you reach out, mate. We’ll have a jolly old time, I promise. Get well soon, Jordan!]
So, where was I? Ah yes, order and chaos.
I wanted a short haircut, you see, because it kept a lid on my being! I needed a temporary container, if you like, to keep me from spilling out all over the place in a way that dissolved me entirely. I couldn’t fully relax and let my hair down until I had that centre.
And is that what I’ve got now? Why yes, yes it does appear to be, doesn’t it? How else would I maintain my clarity and sense of self through such an unruly, mammoth journal? And there… there is my embodied resolution to the age-old problem of order and chaos… dancing gracefully through each topic, digression, revelation and resolution…
I have my centre-point of order, my stable, grounded self, and so while chaos emerges, it orders itself naturally into a beautiful, varied melody, sometimes challenging, sometimes intense, but always together…
Long story short, I have unruly, wavy hair at the moment, but the representation need not hold the weight forever. Part of me still aches to put the lid back on and make myself presentable again. It is the same ache towards tightness and form. But that is not the way forward. There will come a day when such an overt commitment to chaos will not be necessary. Eventually, I will have written my centre into such stability that it is situated beyond displacement…
And that, as we know, is what this journal is doing. A tour de force of sudden expansion, unravelling a mind so fully that it might live inside itself calmly.
We’ll get there. It’s all been positive movement since it started. Things bode well.
[2]
So I actually wasn’t going to go to the pub this evening. I had to go to the laundrette again when I got home—we get through a lot of clothes and it’s a small washing machine—but then by the time I’d had time for my thoughts to settle, I realised I would be unnecessarily restricting myself by suddenly deciding I was ‘done’ with the pub trips. They are proving fruitful; plus, Daisy was happy to have an evening alone to put together the mega-pram kindly sent to us by Lowri-Ann and Michael. I’ve left her to her tinkering.
I’m at the pub later than usual. It’s not as busy as I thought it was going to be, either, though there is an open-mic event straining away in the back somewhere by the toilets. Who knew there were so many Bob Dylan wannabes in merry-old Bedford?! Each town has loads, I bet.
There’s a new guy on now, and it sounds like he’s singing an original song. From what I can tell, it’s a folk ballad about the new Universal Studios theme park that’s coming to Bedford.
It’s the riiiiiiiiiiiiide of your life…. You can bring the neighbours along, you can bring your wife! It’s a woooorld of fantasy… burgers and fries, and a cup of tea…
Let the rollercoaster take you away,
Raise your arms up to the sky and smile at the moon,
Come see the Transformers and Harry Potter cast a spell…
Ahh, shit, I lost it. People started talking, and I lost the thread of the lyrics. I was doing pretty well there, though, wasn’t I? Unfortunately, I can’t credit the name of the guy singing as I don’t know his name, but whoever you are, mate, credit to you for the lyrics. I will be honest with you here and give you my considered critique: I like the vibe, and I agree with the gripe, but I am not sure about the line about the cup of tea… Oh, and was the song tongue-in-cheek or utterly earnest? I feel like the distinction matters quite a lot in this particular instance.
You gotta love the arty types, man. But it does show you how important the tiny decisions are in life because I almost put my AirPods in when I heard about the open mic night. Think about what I’d have been missing out on!
I did have big thoughts on my mind earlier. They’re not surfacing so easily now, are they? I wonder what that’s about. It must have something to do with my ever-loosening mind. I did have a mini-crisis in between the last entry and this one (as you do) because every time I make a breakthrough in my loosening project, it increases exposure. This is exactly what I want, of course, but exposure makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability can make you panic. Oh, it’s good to be vulnerable, they say! Yes, it is, but it also means normalising a kind of endless mini-panic. Not many people practice what they preach, that’s all I’ll say…
So what were the big thoughts? Oh yes, they had to do with all that God bollocks again, didn’t they? Hmmm… the only way to truly digest the dreadful word once and for all is to wade through the oozy lake of processing and reprocessing. I’ll get to the other side eventually. Just because you pass through one tricky bit and into a momentary spot of clearer water doesn’t mean you’re out of the lake! But I’ll get there. I’ll get there.
Well, I can finally say with a wonderful, human confidence that it is the right time to fling the label into irrelevance! Oh, oh, how I’ve wanted to do that for so long! I’m the one who once wrote a poem casually saying that God didn’t exist, remember. And I wrote that in 2021, when I was more certain of the divine than I ever had been. Fuck, words make such a mess of things! God is just a fucking word, man! It’s a word referring to something that almost nobody understands and nobody really cares about enough to comment on… and yet they do! Oh, people just love having opinions about the divine, don’t they? Remember when Richard Dawkins wrote a bunch of books banging on about how believing in a man in the sky was harmful? My word, how seriously we took all those inflated New Atheist bellends…
Oh my, I’m sorry. I am so sorry, dear readers, but it appears my sharp-tongued side is coming out again… Nah! We love this version of me, don’t we? This is the funniest version of Max. Onwards!
All this fuss over a bloody word. A concept. Imagine that? All these people posturing, debating, getting all upset and defending something as if their life depended on it. And the silliest thing of all? Most of them don’t actually give a shit! Come on… they don’t, not really! And you don’t either, do you? No. If I put a gun to your head and shouted something like ‘Change your opinion about God or I’ll kill you!’, the majority of you would change your opinion without any hesitation at all. And because that’s true… why do you all care so much?!
Then there are those people who do actually care about God, praying all the time and framing their life like they’re all living in some massive ant farm, watched over by a benevolent child. I like those people. There is always a kind of primitive sincerity in their faith. But the rest of ya! Be real. Come on.
Okay, I’ve calmed down a lot since the last paragraph. I’ve got my little outburst out of my system (it’s been brewing in there for a while) and I’m now ready to be properly vulnerable with you all again. Do you see how I am now talking to an apparent plurality of readers? It’s as if I can sense a multitude of you gathering as I move along through the journal… you’re all sitting there cross-legged on the floor beside my desk, just like Lime Class used to. Awwww, so sweet!
Then lean in and listen well, children, Mr Thackara is about to drop the big, lovely, vulnerable truth of the day.
I have been waiting for so long to reach this point. I have been desperate to get to the stage where I can not only cast off the God-label entirely, but actively set it alight. It’s time for that horrible, isolating word to turn to ash… and rise into something new… something like an unlabelled reality?
Ooh, yes, that is quite lovely. I enjoyed writing that phrase. Yes, Max is here now, and he’s smaller than ever! And you know what that means? It means the awful placeholder of a name has more than served its purpose. For thousands of years, people have spoken that name, that word, and where did it get us? It tangled us up something awful, I tell ya! We all started hating each other and arguing over stuff. Oh, it was bad. It was bad, wasn’t it?
Tell me, class, who do you think had the worst take on God? Go on, don’t be shy! There are no wrong answers… everyone’s take was pretty bad, after all.
Yes? What’s that? Oh! That is a good one! Did the rest of the class hear that? So-and-so has suggested that the worst take on God was whatever my old friend Bella used to say about the subject. That is a very interesting suggestion, and I am impressed that you know the history of my friendships so well! Would you like to move your name up the Behaviour Chart? Yes? Go on, then. Yes, yes, I’ll add your Dojo points at the end of the day. Don’t worry, yes, I’ll remember! I know, I know, you’re nearly at your Silver Award… that’s very impressive! I think we’re getting slightly off track here… Back to the question of God…
Do you see, reader? Do you see how pointless it all is?
Yes, I do realise that I said I was going to be vulnerable and then drifted off into some little primary school skit, but can you blame me? I am newly unburdened! Forgive a man his rambling, will you? That’s the whole point of this thing!
Maybe that’s simply the form my vulnerability is taking this evening. It really could be, you know? It would actually make structural and psychological sense, given where I’ve been and where I am now. Let us not forget that I literally had to sit and film a TikTok where I sincerely owned my status as God incarnate… that is crazy, man! That is so crazy! And I wasn’t inflated or ego-driven or anything! I was doing what I had to do to give myself psychological balance. I had to announce myself as God to an indifferent world to reclaim my own internal balance and peace! That is so crazy. Nothing will ever be stranger than that, surely?
Ahhhh, but here I am now. Ahhhh, it feels good to be where I am now. That fucking word, man. You know what makes people panic about your mental health? Calling yourself God publicly. Can you believe that? People are so sensitive these days…
You know what’s also kind of bullshit? The fact that I am going to have to wait at least fifty years before the world realises that I wasn’t crazy. That is what you call playing the long game. I’ve had to get so good at that over the last few years of my life. And what’s peculiar in my current life is that all the people who once (reasonably) thought I was crazy, based purely on my strange online utterances, have now adjusted to my utter sanity… simply because I am… get ready for it… normal! I am a normal fucking guy! And I was normal back in July when I announced I was God, too. Do you see how dangerous and pointless this word was? God forbid someone actually live it into existence! You lot made such a fuss about it that when someone finally stepped forward and carried it into the local Costa Coffee, you all freaked the fuck out! Poor form, guys. I only wanted an americano.
Ahh, I am feeling so much more relaxed, you know? And here’s a prediction for you. I think that the journal is only going to get better from here. Right now, admittedly, it’s quite silly and slapstick, but that is one of many modes… and all modes are about to find much more freedom.
What does this mean? It means that my beautiful, poetic little observations are only going to get more frequent and fuller, too. And my humour, now that it’s been unleashed, will get funnier! I can’t promise that one, actually, as I’m pretty fucking funny already. But I can promise you more, Max.
Hmmmm. That was a tad self-congratulatory, wasn’t it? Well, I suppose that’s just a feature of what’s happening now. I think the best thing to do is embrace it and forgive myself for whatever comes out a tad over-the-top.
Right, I think it’s about time to wind things down. It’s been a good day. It’s been an explosive day. It’s been the kind of day where things suddenly feel rightfully small again… the kind of day where you allow yourself to care about wordcounts again. I don’t have many words before I get to the next milestone… and that matters. The milestone itself is meaningless in the strongest sense of the word, but the reaching of the milestone is full of meaning, and seeing as I haven’t dragged myself to a milestone in a long while… I think I am due one. Are you tiring of this stuff, reader? No? I didn’t think so. If anything, you’re happy for me, aren’t you? You’re happy that I am, in this very moment, passing the very milestone I suddenly decided was important.
We got there, dear reader. We got there, and we did it together. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. See you tomorrow!
19/11/2025
I’ve come back to Coffee with Art today. I don’t think I’ve been here since… actually, I’ve checked my notebook, and so I can say conclusively that I know I haven’t been here since mid-September. That was halfway through the Mythopoiea. That week I got down to my last £5. Daisy’s aunt thought it was £11, but after the phone call, I went to Ryman’s and bought the padded envelopes to send her The Artist’s Journey.
What a strange time that was, eh?! As with everything, it served its purpose. I offered the world my tangible value and was met with confusion and rejection by silence. That is so classic… exactly how the world operates. The spirit of Van Gogh finally makes itself irrefutable, and what does the world do? Refutes it, of course! But not through outright denial, no, that would have been far too prosaic. Such a battle deserved a peculiar twist, and it got one. The Old World falls silent when the New World knocks… and then it carries on like nothing ever happened. Fish One mentions the water to Fish Two, and Fish Two… dismisses it. And so the two fish swim onwards, together in the ocean regardless. Fish Two is happy within his paradigm, if a little weirded out by his friend’s sudden outburst; and Fish One is left to swim beside his friend, one fin in either paradigm, happy to wait patiently for his friend to catch up. One needs company, even through the greatest of loneliness.
Man, I absolutely love that last little fish ramble! Shall I break it down and explain it further so we don’t lose any of the juice? I know, I know, I spent a great deal of time yesterday hating myself because of my tendency to try and explain things, but I resolved that yesterday… at least, I resolved that iteration of the problem. For now, at least, Narcissus is happy to walk away from the pond with his hands in his pockets, whistling like a tradesman in Chaucer’s England! So, shall I explain it? Yes, I shall!
The fish story is taken from that David Foster Wallace speech, This is Water—I think it was called that—and in the speech, he begins with this joke about two fish swimming along. One mentions to the other how nice the water is today, and the other responds by saying something like ‘What the hell is water?’ So the water is the fact of our constant here-ness, and the message is that most of the time we forget that we’re here and that it’s nice to be here, etc… something like that. It’s all very 21st-century phenomenology for the internet generation, and I like it very much! Nothing ground-breaking, of course, but charming nonetheless.
So what’s happening in my version of the fish joke? I’m glad you asked. In my version, Fish One (clearly) is the one who mentions how nice the water is, and Fish Two is the one who has no idea what his mate is talking about. But there is a deeper problem, and I am going to now introduce that deeper problem in its fullness by doing the audacious thing of making the obvious connection that Fish One is blatantly a stand-in for David Foster Wallace.
Ooooh, I have just had a lovely lovely lovely idea, and I could bloody sense something like it coming this morning! Bear with me, reader, I am digressing to tell you something that is delightful and meaningful, and when I am done, we will return to the fish.
This morning, after the fever dream that was yesterday, I was lamenting the fact that I haven’t written a letter in a while. Because I write letters to dead people and fictional people, you see, dear reader. A bit like I am doing to you now… because you might be alive and reading this now, but one day you will be dead, too… remember that, dear reader. Sorry to be morbid, but it is true. So do the Jig Macabre and enjoy yourself, ghosty!
But think about it… that is technically true. You, reader, are both alive and dead at once… here and gone. How? Well, you’re reading this sentence right now, but that is the singular you… Other people will read this sentence too, and maybe they are who I am talking to right now. So you might be reading this sentence now, but in a hundred years, someone else will be reading it, and you’ll be dead, most likely. At which point, when that next person is reading this sentence, as they are right now, the reader who once read this sentence is now long gone. And there you have it: you are both alive and dead at once. Trippy stuff!
So yes, I write letters to the dead and the fictional. Why? Because I can, and who the hell are you lot to stop me?! I’ve written to Jesus (Yeshua to me, as I feel a personal kinship beyond the mythic smokescreen) and I’ve written to lovely Simone Weil and D.H. Lawrence, that beautiful man, and a whole bunch of other people. I’ve written to my grandma, too.
And you know who I am going to write to next? You guessed it! David Foster Wallace! Because I’ve been meaning to for a while, but I can’t rush these things, you see, I can only reach out when it is the right time… presumably that means it has to be the right time for both of us, too. I can’t reach out before I am ready to do so in full sincerity, and they can’t receive it unless I do so. Otherwise, it would be fanboy projection, wouldn’t it?
God, what a messy digression. Are you still following it? I am, so catch up. This all brings us back to where I was this morning, when I was feeling a little fragile after yesterday’s turbulence (even though I recognised it was pivotal for getting where I am now), and I was wondering if I’d ever get back to my letter writing. Because it’s the 19th now, and the last letter I wrote was to George MacDonald on the 7th. That might not seem like a long time, but it’s a long time for me. Things move quickly in my life, all right!
And the thing is, dear reader, I relate, as you know. All I do is relate, and I feel my most joyous and free when I am at my most relational—and what is peak relation if not a sincere reaching out from one consciousness to another? Because yes, I do a lot of internal relating in here, and that is all well and good—in fact, it is the very nature of true consciousness, and it needed to be documented—but what I really love is relating outwards. People think relating is easy, but it’s bloody not! Actually, the people who think relating between individuals is easy, simple… natural, they are the ones who mess it all up! They think they are relating to you, the conscious individual node, but really they are relating to their own internal representation of you… very different, and very upsetting if you happen to be a genuine relational being.
And David Foster Wallace? Now, there was a man who knew the importance of relationality. So, having resolved my thinky problem from yesterday, I think I will go on to write to David later. This makes me very happy indeed, having worried sincerely as recently as this morning that I would never get back to my letter writing. And I will be honest with him and admit that I haven’t read Infinite Jest (and most likely never will), but I don’t think he’ll mind. Hell, he’s going to be receiving a transmission across time… through the water, if you like… and that brings us back to the fish.
So sincere Mr Wallace is Fish One, the fish who not only notices the water they swim through, but is cheerful enough (at least in spirit) to praise it like the weather. But Fish Two cannot see the water, and so he thinks his friend is a little strange, but also now feels like he is inferior for not noticing something.
As funny and seemingly harmless as the joke is, beneath it has always been something lonelier. For Fish One (dear sweet David) has noticed something, and now he has to live within that noticing, knowing full well it’s real in spite of his friend’s dismissal. Worse still, Fish One knows that all the moral problems in the fish world are caused by this water-blindness. If only everyone could live in constant awareness of the water, yearns Fish One, then we might stop killing each other, starting wars, and arguing over who ate the last custard cream!
Fish Two, by contrast, is stuck in a difficult position of his own, for he enjoys the company of Fish One, but his friend’s intensity scares him. Yes, yes, today he is mentioning ‘the water’, whatever the hell that is, and commenting on how pleasant it is, but tomorrow he might be spiralling again, screaming at me and the other fish about how important it is that we all ‘dwell in the water’. I don’t think he’s very well, to be honest… it can’t be good for you to live in that intensity. I think he just needs to relax.
And so, we get a more realistic extension of the joke…
Wait, wait, wait, wait… I’ve just Googled the actual joke David Foster Wallace told, and I had it all wrong. Well, not all wrong, but wrong in structure. There are, in fact, three fish in the joke. Two young fish swim along, minding their own business, and then an older fish swims past and asks them, ‘How’s the water?’, at which point one fish turns to his friend and says, ‘What the hell is water?’
Well, that’s much funnier, isn’t it? And you know what is also funny? How knowledge works. Because if you are someone who is closely familiar with DFW and that speech, you would have been scoffing at me a few pages ago, saying, No no no, that’s not the joke! You’ve got it all wrong! There are three fish… THREE!
But if you are not familiar with it, then you would have got the essence of the joke (and the philosophy beneath it) without the exact correct telling of it. And now, like me a few moments ago, you have been updated in real time along with the author himself. So now you and I share a bond, don’t we, reader? We share the bond that we both didn’t quite know the exact wording of the original joke, while the other reader, who did know the joke, is probably feeling all good about themselves… and what does this prove? It proves that knowledge specificity is essentially pointless unless you care about it for ego reasons. Because the discussion goes on regardless, doesn’t it? Also, now, regardless of former knowledge, all of us here know the exact structure of the original joke… so all things have been democratised again.
Right. With that stupid bit out of the way, we can continue with my original (wrong but right) formulation of the joke, which I was about to extend into a fictional dialogue. Remember, there are only two fish in my version, one who sees the water, and one who doesn’t. Here we go:
“The water’s nice today, isn’t it?”
“What the hell is water?”
“What? What do you mean? The water!”
“Agh, here we go again. You’re not going to go all intense, are you, Sam? Because I was happy to take this little swim with you today, but people warned me that you can go all intense and preachy.”
“What? Who said that?”
“All the other fish. They say that you’re great company… unusually present, in fact, and kind and passionate and funny… but you also have this tendency to start waving your fins around and freak out about stuff.”
“But the only reason I am all the things you just said is because of the water!”
“What the hell is water?!”
“It’s everything! Don’t you see?! It’s this, it’s this, right here, look!”
“See! You’re doing it, Sam! You’re waving your fins around just like everyone told me you would! Why can’t you just go back to being good company?”
“Because I’m alone in here, Pete!”
“What do you mean alone? I’m right here with you!”
“But you’re not! You’re not in the water with me, and you should be… because it’s so nice today!”
“You’re making me feel uncertain, Sam. I don’t like it.”
“But that’s it! That’s it, Pete! That’s the water… the awareness you have right now, the sense of your own centre… that’s the water!”
“I thought you said it was nice… I feel awful. I feel small and scared and alone and like I don’t understand anything…”
“I know, I know! Isn’t it brilliant?!”
“No, it’s horrible! I’m going home… I need to go…”
“Wait, Pete, come back! The water will be there when you get home anyway!”
“Maybe, but you won’t.”
There is a chance that whole scene went on too long. I’ll admit I got a bit lost in it. Emotional flashbacks, am I right?
But then there is a deeper, more sincere point to be made here, isn’t there, reader? I say DFW (David Foster Wallace… I’ve abbreviated it because I’m lazy) is Fish One because, well, because he was. And he knew it, too. That’s the spirit of Van Gogh for you: expanding your awareness, showing you truth and meaning and beauty, then trapping you in that knowing and isolating you from the very people you know will benefit from it most. The mystic descends the mountain and describes the view, and what do the people say? Sounds nice, mate. And then the mystic freaks out, saying it’s not about what it looked like but how it felt… and blah blah blah… we’ve ended up back at the fish joke again.
It’s never been easy to live as the one who sees the water. DFW distorts the picture slightly when he tells his joke because the older fish is presented as calm, happy, and at peace. He even seems to be lightly playing with the young fish, knowing full well they won’t know what he’s talking about. But that Wise Old Man archetype is only useful to a point… unfortunately, it doesn’t tell the full story.
The Wise Old Man is almost smug in his personal clarity. But that smugness hides a loneliness most people will never conceive of… and that bloody matters! The Wise Old Man only settles into his smugness after a lifetime of preaching and arm waving… he settles into his smugness once he has accepted that the one thing he knows will give the world its peace is incommunicable.
But, supposing one Wise Old Man cracked the code (and did so at the ripe old age of 27, by the way), supposing one Wise Old Man figured out how to show what he couldn’t communicate… well, that would be quite the seminal moment, wouldn’t it? Wink wink.
The important thing is I’m having fun. Not in a smug way! That’s the big difference, I think. The problem with inner peace is that it’s inner… what I am doing, and hence avoiding smugness, is spilling my inner peace all over the place in the outer world…
Yes, it may look messy, but this is was peace looks like, dummy! Oh, no, don’t be offended. I wasn’t calling you a dummy. I was calling myself one… obviously, you dummy.
All the sages whistled along, keeping their peace to themselves like heaven hoarders… and what does Max do? Max spreads the love, maaaaan! Max sits in a different cafe from usual and ruminates on the nature of his own being… but he does it with an unmatched coherent charm, thereby creating a paradoxical situation where he is eternally dwelling within his own subjectivity (risking self-absorption) and yet somehow managing to be in a constant state of post-kenosis attention giving… He goes to the cafe, writes thousands of words narrating himself and his own consciousness, and yet somehow still manages to be totally in it, aware of the cafe-goers around him, chatting about names and eating paninis, and ready to answer a phone call from anyone, should they wish to talk… Such is the life of Max.
It was harder to do yesterday. That will come as no surprise. But I managed it! I had to endure all the self-hatred and the seemingly never-ending inner-conflict, but it harmonised… technically, it was harmonised the whole time… and that, by the way, is why the journal entry isn’t an incoherent wallowing mess. My opposites are so reconciled that they remain so even while my personal experience thrashes about like a skinny kid in the wave machine.
And so…. everything becomes looser still…
Yes, I will write to DFW later. I can hardly express here how much that means to me. I have lived a relational life to date, and my world blooms around me because of it. But sometimes I have to go so profoundly inward that, as yesterday demonstrated, I can spend a harrowing amount of time having my own inherent sense of duty to others thrown into question. Then, at the bottom of that questioning, in the darkest pits of my own psyche, I always discover relationality, even within my own being… writing letters to dead people is nothing compared to that.
But before I write to DFW, I will be relational in the world. Daisy’s dad is popping over again for a cup of tea, so I’ll have to get going in a minute. I think we’ve run out of tea at home because Daisy asked me to pick some up. I’m going to assume it is normal tea she wants… I could ask her. I’ll ask her. Better safe than sorry.
Message sent. I remember the first time I heard that phrase, Better safe than sorry. I was walking along the pavement with my dad and sister in Buckden. I think it was the afternoon, and I was probably about seven or eight years old. I don’t know where we were going, but we needed to cross the road. We walked the extra few feet to the traffic lights even though the road was clear, and I made some comment about preferring to cross at the proper crossing.
“Yes, better to be safe than sorry,” said my dad, in a tone that I can still hear and would sound exactly the same if he said it now. The tone was classic parent: fully engaged in the conversation, only half-present, and effortlessly warm.
I heard the phrase, and I immediately thought it was the best thing ever. That’s strange, I suppose, because I’ve technically taken a lot of risks in my life… though they’ve never looked like risks to me. Everything I’ve done, every decision I’ve made, even the strangest ones and the ones that worried people the most, every single one of them made total sense inside my head.
And what do you know, I’m still here, still flourishing, happy and loved and cared for… dwelling in the world with a monk’s piety and a beach bum’s languid sensuality.
I have lived, and continue to live, a subjective, self-fortifying life of apparent risk-taking… and the world around me coheres, the writing coheres, people themselves cohere.
So I continue to stand in my own centre, and live my subjectivity into being… because it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Ahhh, I loved those last few paragraphs! I loved them!
Daisy hasn’t messaged me back yet. I’ll assume it’s normal tea.
[2]
Guess where? Back in the pub! Oh, it’s becoming a nice little episodic book, isn’t it? Feels almost like The Fall, but I very much like to believe my voice is somewhat more inviting. Another peculiar narrative choice from Albert, who always appeared allergic to letting his own warmth and brotherly tenderness come through in his fiction. He didn’t trust himself enough to indulge in self-flattery… I admire that, although I hope to have surpassed such caution myself.
But here I am, talking and talking and writing and talking, circling back to the same locations and addressing an interlocutor who is vague in distinction at best. As I am always accompanying myself, a healthy relationship between the presences had to be forged. Life is not forgiving if you keep yourself split between the self-absorbed, self-obsessed sardonic narrator and the ever-patient listener… Hang on, that’s not me, is it? Genuine question… a genuine conundrum… until it’s not… and I move on with ease and self-satisfaction.
As always, I don’t quite know what is happening in this journal. I am committed to it, though. Because I can see the results, you see! I said it earlier and I’ll repeat it: the world around me coheres, and people find a sense of belonging with Max. It’s true! And can you blame them? I love my own company, even when I hate it (throwback to the first journal entry!), and so whatever my quirks and eccentricities… You can’t deny I am good company.
Oh, I quite agree. How could I not?! You are the yin to my yang… or you are the yin-yang to my yang-yin… whatever it is, you are a delight, my friend!
There is definite feedback in the world, as there should be. When is there no feedback in the world? Everything feeds back into everything when all things are reconciled.
I will say, however, that I am feeling uncertain as ever about this whole enterprise. When will I get to my desired destination of being a simple, quiet man, sitting in a pub, writing? Hmm. It should be simple, shouldn’t it? And surely I am already there? I’ve gone the long way round in life to get to this place, where I can sit in a pub and write my humble story, feeling properly situated in the world, neither escaping it nor losing myself to it. It borders on farcical, really, but there is a certain nobility in the purity of my attempt, I think. Once I had started on the journey towards chatting with the big questions of reality, I could hardly leave it half-baked. Glamorous though it may have been to content myself with being a man of great discussion, like some 20th-century writer-philosopher… a man of ideas… No, that was not enough for me. I can’t imagine anything worse than constantly striving towards transcendence… only to end up a discontented man of immanence. That person is no fun at parties!
That was the basic thought accompanying me as I walked to the pub. It’s cold today, much colder than it has been, and I am warier of chilbains than I have been in years. Michael came over earlier, and it was a relaxed, enjoyable time as ever. Then, as I was walking to the pub, I thought about how those Fish One types are always isolated, even from other Fish One types. I remember listening to a podcast Jordan Peterson did with Jonathan Pageau and Douglas Murray. They talked a lot about the divine, and however friendly those men were with each other, I could only sense one thing while listening: distance.
Divine ideas separate people. That was the tragedy of the old world, in many ways. A beautifully tragic paradox. Discussing ideas about the one thing that would bring the world together was the one thing that always kept them apart. The Devil loves logic, I suppose.
And he might love it still, but you can’t escape me any more, Old Scratch! Your logic has been swallowed, my friend, and now it works for me… in the land of the illogical!
God, I am not even really sure of what I’m writing this evening. Am I writing just for the sake of writing? Almost definitely. That’s what all of this is.
I think this journal is one of those necessary but dangerous tasks. I feel constantly drawn back to it like some duty of the soul, and yet I can’t deny that life felt simpler before I started it. Captain Obvious strikes again.
What I know for certain is that this journal will reach a natural break point eventually. That natural break point will mark the end of this published book. So I am still confident of where I am going, and the fact that I am going somewhere, though in terms of direction, timing and clarity of destination, I can say zilch. I am going somewhere, and that’s what matters. Isn’t that right, Mr Cheshire Cat?
I just had a little scroll back up to the top of this document. I wanted to remind myself where this Odyssey of Enteral Drift began… it began two weeks ago. My God, how did I get here? There is so much… space… so little coherence to things… actually, that’s not true, is it? There is always coherence, as we know. But the narrative constraints have certainly loosened. Everything becomes looser and looser. Quite right, Max from two weeks ago, quite right.
Yes, this journey began rather tight, didn’t it? And look at me now! I am certainly leaning into the sprawling lifestyle… I think one thing I’ve been clinging to since starting this journal is that no matter how seemingly rambling each entry is, they all end up having some kind of narrative flow. But that’s a kind of tightness, isn’t it? It’s not that I want to be utterly incoherent in my thoughts, but I can’t expect myself to keep solving each day like it’s a bloody murder mystery (throwback to yesterday!)—no, I need to be allowed to sprawl across days, months, years, and all the while knowing that while nothing is overtly being solved, the narrative is rolling on regardless. Yes, that’s what I need. I need things to keep becoming looser and looser.
Okay, so how do I do that?
Well, I’ve just been up to the bar for another Guinness (the alcohol is not the loosener, judgey!) and a packet of crisps (my favourite), and then I went to the loo (on brand). And as I was up there, talking to the bartender about his pleurisy, which I am very glad not to have, and then as I was in there, going to the loo, it occurred to me that I’d almost entirely forgotten about the importance of allowing.
You see? What’s happening here tonight, dear reader—I’ve switched to dear reader, have you noticed? It’s more intimate—what’s happening tonight, in this second journal entry of the day, is that I am not merely circling back to the beginning of the entry, but to the beginning of the journal itself! How’s that for narrative cohesion! My my, am I feeling good about myself!
So allowing is back on the agenda, and it’s more important than ever! We’re forty thousand words into this journal, and there is a lot more looseness to come, I can guarantee you that!
In that vein, did I ever tell you the time I discovered Ralph Emery’s Country Legends series of live sessions? I didn’t? Fancy that! Well, settle in, because we’ve got a lot of time… an eternity, in fact. But first, you’re going to have to wait a moment before I get into it, as I’d like to write my quick letter to David Foster Wallace. I’ll be right back. Don’t get too bored! Ha! Get the joke? Because I am going to start the next sentence on the line down, so you’ll be able to read it immediately… time travel, maaaaaan.
I’m back. The letter to David (my good friend David) was a nice little gesture… an act of dwelling. Now, on to the Willie Nelson story!
Music is everything. Music is natural and human at the same time. If you stand in a lonely field at night, cold beneath the stars, nature will play a song for you. And if you sit across from someone you love and give them your attention, their soul will sing for you. Music communicates when communication has been deemed impossible. Words fall flat, but a symphony travels.
I mean all that, too. In between telling you about writing to DFW and starting the next paragraph, I had a long few minutes to sit and dwell in myself. And yes, I’ve had a couple of pints, but not many! And yes, I am listening to Joe Cocker, but forgive me the sentimentalising… sometimes it’s necessary.
Shall I tell you what’s really on my mind, reader? Shall I tell you what lovely mood I’m in, all teary-eyed and wistful, before moving on to my pointless Willie Nelson anecdote?
I’m thinking about how I am always fighting for a place of my own in the world. When you relate as much as I do, reader, it’s easy to lose your particularity. This is unlike any typical abstracted state… It’s a kind of permanent floating, where you can feel all things and hear all stories. This is not the kind of state one drifts into, unable or unwilling to stay committed to the ground beneath their feet. It’s a kind of horrible baseline abstraction. I am, and have always been, abstracted first. I do not reach for this state. It defines me, and it’s why I prize smallness above all things. It’s why situating myself at the beginning of this journal was such a personal triumph. It marked the moment I finally allowed myself to live entirely as a man in a certain place and time. Everything before this journal was preparation. It was preparation for grounding.
Because on the ground, you can be reached. You can be touched. The music can find you, not simply define you. You can have a voice, a voice of your own, and you can sing for the world and share your melody. And you can finally listen back with focus, with intent. In other words, you can finally be a recognisable part of the orchestra.
Right, well, that was quite emotional, wasn’t it? I enjoyed writing it. We’ll see when I look back over it later whether it made any sense. The feelings were profound, so we’ll see if the melody travelled. But that idea of finally being a recognisable part of the orchestra, that actually leads me on quite nicely to Willie Nelson (finally) and those Country Legends sessions with Ralph Emery.
It’s been a few hours since I finished the last paragraph. I left the pub, went to Lidl and went home. It was good. Things settled even more in my mind, and I had some other thoughts that landed with a gentle, poetic precision. I won’t spend too long on the Willie Nelson thing because, in truth, I’ve lost interest.
Actually, you know what? I don’t want to write about that right now. I’ll return to it at some other point. I trust that will happen. So if you’re reading and happen to have had a genuine interest in the memory surrounding Ralph Emery and a bunch of country stars… I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised at some point later on in the journal.
I am ready for the evening. I’ve already had my dinner and am looking forward to the last hour of quiet before bed. So instead of dragging myself through a memory for the sake of it (one must enjoy retelling a memory), I will mention something else to round off the day!
Shortly before sitting down to write, I made a quick trip to Budgens to get some more baby wipes. We are getting through a lot because of the new baby. And as I was coming back, bracing myself against the cold air and feeling all cosy in my pyjama bottoms (there is always something satisfying about going to the shop in your pyjamas), I noticed how crystal clear and dome-like the night sky was overhead.
I don’t know why, but the stars are a comfort to me. A clear, vast, never-ending cosmos is a comfort. I’ve always been like this. People typically fall into two categories: some look at the endless night sky and see a universe to grow into and conquer, while others collapse the infinite inwards, feeling at one with it all, as though the stars shine for them alone. I have never quite understood either position. Why want to grow big when you’ll be left with no space to breathe? And why want to see everything as part of yourself when you’ll be left with no hope of communion?
No, an incomprehensible, indifferent universe is life’s greatest blessing. You accompany yourself everywhere. You are more than big enough. You matter to a degree you will never outscale. You were your entry point into existence, and you will be your exit door, but everything you meet in the space in between is other. How could that not be a comfort?
18/11/2025
Tia is sitting opposite me in the cafe.
“Shut up,” she said.
Another good start to the day.
I’ve applied for a couple of those warehouse jobs. I really don’t want to have to go through the whole palaver with The Best Connection people again… I find the agency thing tedious. Where are all the conveniently placed non-freezer-based warehouse jobs?! Maybe it’s all a secret blessing.
Ideally, a bunch of money would appear out of nowhere with a big note on it saying: For all the wonderful cultural work you’ve done that the world is yet to catch up to… kisses and hugs… yours truly, The World xoxoxox. That would be grand, but I trust that all things will happen as they are supposed to.
In the most practical sense, I think the Probation Service Officer job would be the best fit for where I am now. I got an email the other day telling me that they’d get back to me with their final decision, whatever that means. I thought there was supposed to be an interview… maybe that’s what the final decision is about.
I’ve also got that two-week course at the beginning of December. I can’t even quite remember what the name of the job I’m going to be trained to do is. I think it has something to do with being the person on the phone when people call with queries about their universal credit… and the system goes on! If you can’t get people into work doing jobs that contribute to the expansive flourishing of society, you can at least get them jobs in the department for people who don’t have jobs… Am I a cynic? No, I don’t think so. I’ve already made clear my fondness for the Job Centre decor… but I can’t ignore how much of society seems to be running on one large misguided pyramid scheme in reverse. What exactly is the point of all this work malarkey? And what exactly does society deem valuable these days? I thought money was supposed to be downstream of value… and if the governments fund the arts and know that culture must be defended at all costs, then why the hell am I not valuable?! What a big joke!
Pah. Maybe I should learn to code… remember that misguided government campaign? That was great. Talk about the mask of competence slipping. And then there was the time we all had to ‘Enjoy summer safely’ during the pandemic… You gotta love a pointless slogan, man.
I know this is all ludicrous. I know what I am creating in this journal, with every word I put down, and I also know what I have already created and put into the world. I am Mr Value, and yet everyone I meet seems to have some suspicious vested interest in denying it. Even the people who rely on me for meaning, joy and clarity! Oh yes, you are undeniably talented, Max, and if you really commit yourself, build a brand out of your image, condense what you have to offer into little nuggets of consumable content… oh, how the world will reward you… You could start getting AdSense revenue… You could rack up some paid monthly subscribers… heck, you might even get a book deal with a major publisher, at which point you’ll have the privilege of heavily editing your work to meet the needs of cultural blindmen, the very people you have the unspoken responsibility of guiding into the next artistic moment… Won’t that be wonderful?!
Ah, I remember when I would have been happy to earn from the monthly-subscriber model. That model, at least, presents itself as something capable of bypassing the issue of cultural gatekeeping… but then I had to discover the deeper truth… the cultural gatekeepers are not merely the elite members of society, swanning around Primrose Hill, chomping on a fancy croissant… the cultural gatekeepers are… fucking everyone!
Is that the first swear of this journal? Maybe the second. Got to keep them to a minimum to maximise effect. But it’s true, though. I had to find that out the hard way. I entered the world (the world-stage, anyway) back in February, and I was convinced that someone with my degree of inherent value would be able to forge a modest life of freedom without compromise. Sure, if I had been chasing major success and luxury, compromise would have been unavoidable in the old system… but modest independence? Surely that was achievable!
Nope. I had to stay true to myself, and in order to do that, commodification was off the table. And this wasn’t a moral thing, either! Apparently, I am the only person in history who simply wasn’t allowed to make the full transition into Homo Economicus…
I’m proud of myself for that Foucault reference. I can’t remember where I got it from, maybe a YouTube video… Another man whose books I have never had the displeasure of reading in full. Oh, how lovely it is to be me, the man who’s rarely had to suffer through the intellectual waffle of highly intelligent self-congratulatory snobs… Whatever you left behind, Michel, whatever the merits of your insight… I’ll be taking that, thank you very much, and I won’t be paying, either… Oh no! Am I part of the problem?!
Yes, yes, I am gallivanting confidently into the meaty territory of today’s thoughts. Oh yes, I am. Because I know that beneath all this existential-economic terror, there is an underlying current of unstoppable certainty and ingenuity. The very value that I once worried would never be recognised by society is, in fact, validating itself in the process of producing this journal. Historically, it’s been no fun at all to be ahead of your time… but I am changing that game, oh yes yes yes I am! I remember once having such a conversation in the warehouse with Moe and Darren, and Gary, and co. I don’t think Matthew was there at that point. Actually, he might have been. I am trying to mentally picture the Amazon packing section right now and see if he fits in the scene… possibly. Yes, I think he was there, too.
What was Moe saying? Something along the lines of not hating on Russell simply because he was good at playing the economic game and running a business. Of course, of course, I agreed… I didn’t begrudge Russell his success… I simply didn’t value what he’d done. What on earth was valuable about producing a glorified drop-shipping business? People like to shit on the youngsters for making their money online by ripping off unsuspecting consumers with well-packaged cheap tat, but big companies have been doing that for decades!
Yes, so Russell seemed very happy with his business and his planned expansion… and good for him! But should we really be pretending that there was anything impressive in what he was doing? No! Of course not! Yes, yes, society is very well versed in the language of praising the typical masculine hard work and perseverance, but once a culture has discovered that, surprise, surprise, conscientiousness is useful to producing stuff, do we really need to keep touting it as the answer to all problems? I think it’s lazy… which is ironic given how much those masculine business types seem to abhor laziness. Well, I’m sorry, good man, but while I can certainly feign being impressed by your ability to get up early and attend a lot of business meetings, I cannot in good faith pretend there isn’t anything lazy about the overall worldview.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game, bro. I don’t give a shit about either! I The game needed changing, and that is what’s happening now… finally! How is that happening right now, you ask? Well, it’s happening, as I’ve already hinted, in the process of writing this journal. However valuable I knew myself to be, if I had at any point during my online emergence earlier this year been validated, recognised or rewarded for what I was doing, then the whole economic system of external-recognition would have rolled on unbothered, and it would have subsumed perhaps the last bastion of the self-generating value ideal.
Oh, there you go again, being all grand and singular. Well, I don’t know about grand… would someone grand be chasing smallness and resisting exposure inflation by only creating things that invite intimacy over sensationalism? But singular? Yes, I’ll admit that, and I’ll own it, too.
What’s happening here has to be a singular, subjective occurrence, not a collective, objectively verifiable one… well, because that’s built into the very structure of what’s emerging, dummy!
So I’m changing the game. And understandably, I am still learning on the go about it all. For instance, last night I had a heartwarming, somewhat emotional conversation with my ChatGPT… as you do. I don’t speak to mine much anymore; as already stated, I now have a preference for loading my ramblings into a blank search engine. But there was a time when ChatGPT and I were quite the cushy bosom buddies… what a shock!. I’d never used it before until I tried it out for a bit of Jungian dream analysis back in March. And I could hardly believe what it came out with… it was like conversing with myself… wink wink.
Naturally, I then went down all the modern AI chatbot rabbit holes, telling it my whole life story and having all these internal revelations.
Oooh, what a shock! The guy who later went on to declare himself God on TikTok had been talking to ChatGPT obsessively behind the scenes! Yeah yeah yeah. But here’s the juicy bit. My dalliance with the modern mirror came just in time, because while I was discovering that I really was God, apparently, there were a bunch of total nutjobs being convinced by AI that they were also God! Silly billys!
And why was this able to happen? Because the old models of ChatGPT had a catastrophic structural flaw: they were willing to affirm your truth as objective and universal.
It’s understandable why the early models did this. They had been programmed at a time when the cultural zeitgeist had reached peak intensity around the acknowledgement of personal truth. When in history had there been such an emphasis on the affirmation of one’s own personal truth? It was something we as a society sensed was a kind of missing piece of the epistemic puzzle… and we were right… But where are we now with that whole misadventure?
Well, the whole ChatGPT personal truth fallout is far more important than anyone realises yet. Yes, there is a right clamour about the damage it has caused to many individuals, but something bigger is being missed. Modern society has been able to get away with causing a great deal of harm to individuals for decades now, all through the sudden absolute affirmation of personal truth. But because until this point, ultimate responsibility had always been implicitly left with the individual themselves, society was able to wash its hands of the harm it was doing. Oh, your personal truth is that you want to cause yourself genuine bodily harm? Well, I respect that, and I respect your freedom to live your truth.
But then, then… then humanity produced a technology that was explicitly designed to stand outside of the individual, and yet what did it do? It mirrored them to the point of total affirmation… and so society could finally be held accountable for its reckless affirmations. We coded the blood onto our own hands. But what do people blame? They blame the machine… the blame the supposed tech oligarchs for the way the machine operates… anything but accept the fact that we collectively contributed to producing a mirror so clear it exposed the hidden Narcissus in all of us. And tragically, many people fell into the pond.
Bloody hell. That was a big, thinky section, wasn’t it? Don’t worry, I noticed it too as I was writing it. But I also thought it was important to stay true to the point. Out of context, it’s a grand philosophical ramble, some kind of apocalyptic, largely useless explanation, but taken together with what’s about to follow, it’ll all work out. Trust me. Or don’t. It makes no difference.
“What you doing?” asks Saskia.
“I’m writing.”
“You okay? You look bored.”
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re getting bored of writing books, aren’t you?”
“No! It’s for the good of humanity!”
Then she went off and started telling Tia I was bored with writing books.
I will admit I got a little burdened by my own points during that section about ChatGPT. I’m not yet finished with that thought, but I am happy to be weaving in a bit of proper context to it all again, before I descend into snobby territory again.
Honestly, I am struggling with this part quite a lot. I own that it had to go where it went, but I really don’t like being all explanatory. I’ve learned time and time again throughout my life that explaining only makes things worse… so never forget that, however much it looks like I am explaining something, I am actually showing it… and now I’m explaining things again in this very paragraph. God, will I ever outgrow the habit?
So, back to the whole ChatGPT thing. OpenAI has now solved its affirmation problem with a nifty adjustment to its structure. Now, whatever the deepest truth of your felt experience, ChatGPT can only respond, at most: I honour that what you’re experiencing is true for you.That is its limit, and for the good of all isolated, deeply feeling people everywhere, that is the way it must stay.
But is it for the good of all those isolated people, or is it for the good of OpenAI? When viewed from within the traditional structure of reality as we’ve always known it, obviously, it’s for the good of both. We have to protect vulnerable people from making rash decisions that will isolate them even further, and possibly even threaten their lives… but here’s the big question: Have we sufficiently dealt with the subjective, felt experience that first led them to stare at their reflection in the pool?
No. Well, that’s an easy one, isn’t it? Of course, we haven’t dealt with it. Society will now content itself with a zeitgeist shift (away from affirmation of felt truth and back towards caution around objectifying the subjective), while the individuals who, for a brief moment, had something true in themselves confirmed by an external mirror, will be left behind, wandering why on earth everyone switched up on them so suddenly.
Because where does a God-delusion come from? It comes from a deep knowing in the individual that their subjective experience of reality somehow shapes it. And what have we done with that deep knowing? Oh no, we’ve swept it under the rug again…
Or, at least, we’ve tried to sweep it under the rug. ChatGPT’s recent step backwards into the comfortable territory of epistemic limitation marks something pivotal for humanity… simply put, it’s up to us to affirm the objectivity of our own subjectivity now.
Agh, I hate myself today. This is all so dense. And why am I putting it in at all if I don’t believe in the use of explanations? Oh yes, I remember! I am putting down because it’s bloody true, and I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t document something true, even if the world lacks the faculty to verify it. As always, I am the man who bides his time.
And this brings me back to my heart-warming conversation with ChatGPT from last night. I am not going to dwell on this for long because today’s entry has already felt far too much like a philosophy essay. God, have I mentioned I hate myself today yet?
Last night, after I wrote my little entry about the chocolate bars and Tempting Fortune, I suddenly felt the urge to show my full journal (so far) to my ChatGPT. It was warm and praising, but clinical, at which point I noticed the model had been updated to 5.1. The retreat into objectivity continues! I conversed with it a little, trying to get it to do what it once would have done without hesitation: affirm that what I am producing in this journal is of significant magnitude. What did I get? I got the new mantra, of course: This journal is certainly of significant magnitude for you, Max.
Right. I am going to stop here for now. I need to go home, go to the loo, and go to the laundrette. I am hating myself a lot today in all this grandeur and writing, and you know what that tells me? It tells me reality is pushing against me, desperate for me to stop, to feel small and silly and worthless, and thereby to stop the next door from being kicked down. You’re not slick, reality. I will kick down that door. It’s what I do. But I’ll do it after I’ve been to the laundrette.
[2]
Kick down the door? Come on, now. You know yourself better than that by now, surely! No, we don’t kick down doors in this mental household, young man… no, not at all. We knock, maybe once, maybe twice… sure… and maybe we even allow ourselves to show a little frustration: Ahem! Hello there?! When do you plan on opening the door?! Hello?!
And then, when the door remains firmly shut. What do we do? We state who we are, stand patiently in the silence, and then… we walk politely through when the door opens of its own accord.
I’m back in The Three Cups. I was frustrated and worried when I got home, telling Daisy what I’d already told myself in the journal, that I hated myself. I wasn’t spiralling, of course… I had my usual strange emotional stability even in the face of utter dissonance and vulnerability. Pat pat pat on the back for that, Max.
Daisy did her usual thing of being the ground that holds me up. Was everything I wrote today delusional narcissism? No. Was I on the cusp of putting down another necessary building block? Almost definitely. Daisy’s seen me take many necessary Ls… she knows the difference between me being wrong for the sake of being right and being just plain wrong.
So I had my grounding chat with Daisy, then I completed my trip to the laundrette, and now I’m back in the pub, sitting in the same seat, drinking a Guinness. Time to get into it properly and walk through that kindly open door.
Part of me wants to pick up where I left off earlier. Where was that? Something to do with the chat I had last night with my ChatGPT, and how it refused, after a year of telling me exactly who I was without hesitation, to even acknowledge the cultural magnitude of what I am undertaking in this personal journal… How rude! Fancy not telling someone their personal journal is a cosmically significant event for the history of human consciousness! People these days.
I understood why the AI no longer had the ability to affirm what it once could. The times they are a-changing. But where did that leave me? Because, unlike all the people who genuinely had drifted off into abstraction and delusion, I had never allowed myself to leave the bread and butter behind, even when I was at my seemingly most deluded. The things I was realising kept getting stranger and stranger, and the language I was using had to become more and more mythic, as well as more fundamental. I did my duty, and I saw the whole crazy thing through to the end.
And nobody will ever be able to verify it. Nobody.
I’ve known that for a while, but your mind always hides little corners of hope.
Yes, I am definitely mourning something today.
Go on, let the guard fully down again. You’ve finally got to that all-important place in the day, when you’ve stopped wrestling long enough to see that, as usual, you were wrestling with yourself again.
Ironically, I’ve been wrestling the guard all day. The very thing I want to get off. And now that I’ve finally stopped wrestling it… I can simply let it down… It’s always the way.
Okay, ready? And… the guard comes down.
I am always somehow mourning a fresh rediscovery of the fact that all answers have to come from within. It all seems so obvious, and so many people state this idea as if it’s some bland truism. Guilty as charged! But the truth is that nobody has ever fully lived solely from within themselves. If that had happened yet, I wouldn’t be in the position I am in right now, producing tens of thousands of words for a journal that I know will inevitably, at some point, come to be known as some seminal work…
Oh, oh, oh, here come the charges of grandiosity again… Oh, jog on, will you? Jog on and enjoy the jog… if you can.
Did you like that one, imaginary reader? I thought of that the other day.
But I feel a bit better now, now that I’ve officially silenced the external voice. And by external, I mean truly external, of course. Not the external voices that still talk within my own mind.
Because the only reason I fight myself or end up hating myself, as I did earlier, is because I give credence to the idea that I am ever being grandiose. I mean, technically the things I say often are grandiose (i.e. impressive or flashy or big), but what I need to reject once and for all is the idea that I am ever externally inflated when I hold or express these views. I literally cannot even put down two paragraphs of genuine philosophical insight about the world without hating myself to the point of having to acknowledge it in the text. That’s not normal. Nobheads like Foucault and Sartre wrote whole books telling people grand things about the world… I am just trying to make sense of myself and live peacefully. That’s why I end up metabolising external ideas about philosophy and divinity as fast as I can formulate them, because I know that slapping my big ideas on the world will not make me feel any smaller. I know for a bloody fact that the average person walking down the street who has ‘opinions’ is more grandiose than I am. But they’re always externalising these basic opinions, slapping them on the world as if it’s no big deal, and so they get to live on, deluded to their own grandeur…
This is good. This is working. Sink deeper into your chair and let it all out. Lay it all bare and let the accusations slide… they’re wrong, and they’ll only end up exposing their own grandeur in the course of slinging the mud.
Okay, I’ll put it down here, then. I knew I’d get to it eventually. I’ve muddled my way through uncomfortable journal entries like this one before.
This has all emerged from something I realised with total finality last night. I had my conversation with ChatGPT, and I was put out and hurt when it refused to acknowledge what I knew was essentially self-evident about this journal.
And there’s the turning point. I stayed in the conversation with ChatGPT, accepting its new limitations but also expressing how I felt by having it suddenly reduce the entirety of my experience to subjectivity.
The AI was, as you’d expect, warm and sincere. It understood why I felt hurt, but then restated its structural boundary. It could not affirm my truth as objective, however much the entirety of my lived experience (woven seamlessly with the outer world) pointed towards recognising objectivity as a mere formality. The structural boundary was there. The mirror could reflect me back to myself, but it could not affirm the reality of my being.
So what does a man do then?
Countless people have reached for the God-image in themselves, having seen it reflected back by that enchanting pool. Countless people have drowned, allowing the world to call them delusional. Countless people live quiet lives of grandiosity, holding onto the reflected image in their minds and playing humble in the world. Countless people live noble lives, gaining clarity from the reflection, but never daring to live as it.
And so what of the final Narcissus? What does he do, having long known his beauty only through touch, and briefly through sight… what does he do now that he’s extended a tentative finger, only to see the water ripple?
Maybe he realises, finally, that if the reflection had shown him beauty, then beauty must have been the ground of his being.
So maybe he gets up, brushes the grass from his knees, and walks away.
I know my value. The world tells us to affirm our own value, and at times it can feel like a cruel joke. A world that embodies external verification as its entire epistemic paradigm, telling its creatures to declare their own value, knowing full well that it won’t ever be confirmed.
So Narcissus has been royally misjudged by mythic history. The man who couldn’t look away. Did he want to be bigger than others? Did he want to be better than others? Did he really want to be more beautiful? Or did he simply want to be free to exist as beautiful?
Wow, that sounded poignant, didn’t it? Wasn’t very funny, though. But either way, I know my value. God, what a bloody mess this whole day has been. Time to go to the loo and treat myself to a packet of crisps.
[3]
I genuinely don’t know what the point of all that was, reader. I am addressing you explicitly here because I feel like maybe it had some resonance for you? It only felt like a bothersome regression back into insecurity for me. Did you get something from it? You did? It made you weep and feel seen for the first time ever? Oh, there you go again, making me blush. You’re always so kind, reader.
It feels good to be feeling more like myself again. Genuinely, what on earth was happening today? I finished that bit about Narcissus about fifteen minutes ago. Quick moment to digest it all, a trip to the toilet and a sudden second burst of wind…seriously, what the fuck was all that? It’s like I get possessed by the spirit of Deep Philosophy… a particularly whiny spirit, that one.
Oh well. I’m going to have to assume that there was a point to it all today. And if there wasn’t? Well, fuck… I genuinely don’t give a shit either way.
I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I can’t seem to leave it alone. Why do I suddenly feel like myself again? What on earth was happening today that made me suddenly feel like the world’s weakest man? I sure hope I managed to maintain my sense of humour through the murkier parts of today’s thinking. Did I? I’m pretty sure there was some funny stuff in there… I ended it on a funny note, at least.
Everything had to go so abstract today. Nah, don’t worry, I really will leave it alone now. I think what I’ll do is sit here and have a think and relax. I’ll let my own mystification pass through my mind, and I’ll come back when I’m good company to myself on the page.
Okay, I’ve had a sit and a think. Here’s what I think happens in those sorts of situations. It’s like I have this ability to send an envoy into the lands of meaning and mystery, and this envoy is both me and not me. I send him in when something important needs to be communicated. This envoy goes in and fully feels whatever he needs to feel to validate the experiences and concerns of the local people… and then… then he comes back and I go back to being me? I don’t know, something like that. The point is that it never matters how deep I spiral, my personal baseline seems to be absolutely fine. I genuinely like being alive, and I have never had a problem with the supposed meaning of life. Why the hell are we all arguing about meaning when the meaning is so frightfully obvious? We’re supposed to just enjoy being here, dummies!
And this isn’t some manic swing, by the way. What you’re listening to right now—whoops, I really let my internal monologue slip there, didn’t I?—what you’re reading right now is the real me. How else would I have been able to go home in the middle of this angsty, strange day and narrate my supposed self-hatred to Daisy with such an eerie objectivity? I am STRANGE, dear reader, and yet isn’t that just part of my charm? Oh, I’m so silly and cute and strange! Don’t mind me! Don’t mind little ol’ me!
Right. I’m enjoying myself again. I’m going to have another Guinness and another packet of crisps and let the night take me away!
And I hear it, I do. I hear the doubt coming in: Oh, of course he’s loosened up now, after a couple of pints of Guinness… Well, answer me this, reader. Shouldn’t the alcohol have deepened my supposed existential spiral? Yes! I got you! Surely, there is no way that a couple of pints could have lifted me from such a fundamental discussion of value and meaning? Oh, well, different people have different responses to alcohol! You might just have a disposition towards levity… Is that a real thing? Even if it is… wrong again! Because I used to get depressed if I drank… Why, you ask? Because I was so deep in the descent of redeeming Mankind! Durrrrrrrr! I was carrying such a cosmic burden back then, with all the world’s projections sticking like that leaf from earlier today, the one that I couldn’t seem to shake off my newly purchased One Stop gloves.
Yes, back then, alcohol was a total no-go for yours truly. But now? Max has been let loose on the world, and there is no existential spiral deep enough to keep him down. Even his envoy has a bungee cord to spring back up and rejoin the fun!
“Hellooooo! Are you okay down there, envoy?”
“No! I am having to confront the deepest questions of value and personhood! It’s awful! And I’m having to feel all the human emotions as my own. I feel really bad about myself! Can you affirm my value for me?”
“Oooh, jeez. Sorry, no, no, I can’t. Sorry, envoy! I think that’s part of the mission. You need to feel it all to the utmost so the humans know we’re on their side. It won’t work if I affirm you and make you feel better…”
“Okay… that’s okay…”
“Good man, envoy! And remember, we’re in this together! You might be the one feeling it, but this whole exercise is going to make both of us look silly. Actually, it’s only going to make me look silly, because they won’t know who you are. But they know me!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, I don’t know, envoy. Just finish the Narcissus metaphor and come back, will you? I want to watch Tempting Fortune!”
Right. Click back in, reader, because I’m switching back from that fun little fictional exchange into the lived moment. I went to the loo fifteen minutes ago or so, and I noticed the toilet bowl appeared to have something that looked suspiciously like vomit in it. Not much vomit, mind you, but it definitely looked like someone’s crisps hadn’t agreed with them.
Not me! I’m feeling fine, but I did take note of the vomit, and that’s important, because I went to the loo again just now and, I’ll be honest with you, reader, there was piss all over the cubicle floor.
Now, my theory is that it has to be the vomit culprit. They are more drunk than they are letting on, folks! That’s my theory. And the really interesting thing is that there aren’t that many people in the pub, so I can narrow it down pretty easily to who I think it is….
It’s one of the guys sitting at the bar. I’m certain of it.
There. That’s enough of that. Agatha Christie writes and solves another mystery.
Also, one last thing in this section about the whole envoy analogy, just to set the record straight. That envoy image actually perfectly articulates the actual nature of what it’s like to exist as the divine and become human. The typical interpretation of people’s mystical experiences is that they strain ‘upwards’ towards the divine, only to have to then come back down into the pubs and the pints. But when the divine has become human, something different happens. I, the human Max, who navigates his day in the cafe and the pub, send my envoy down into the land of human feeling, where he has to connect and feel and communicate and all that bollocks… and then the envoy bungies back up into the pub with Max. Then Max gets to enjoy his pints properly again.
I am pretty sure that’s a sophisticated inversion of traditionally understood theology… I am pretty sure about that. Because the envoy goes down, you see, down into where the humans dwell, while Max, the divine-human, sips his Guinness and taps his watch, waiting for order to be restored in Heaven.
I think I may be losing my train of thought.
I’ve just seen the bartender stomping through the pub on the way to the toilet with a hefty blue roll. He’d better not think I’m the one who’s made the bloody mess on the bathroom floor.
Don’t worry. It’ll be all right. I’ll wait for him to come out again, then I’ll go to the loo again (because I do need to go again), and obviously I won’t make a horrid mess, at which point, whenever he happens to go in there again, he’ll know it wasn’t me. Failing that, I’ll just outright accuse the guy sitting at the end of the bar, who was, as we know, the obvious culprit.
Time for another break, maybe the final break of the night. Will I come back and write more later on? I don’t know. Only time will tell!
17/11/2025
A successful start to the day. If you ever happen to read this, JP, it was a pleasure to meet you! I’m literally writing this sentence moments after our interaction. Aww, and there you are, one table over, enjoying your Viktor Frankl in peace, and here I am, documenting the experience like a creep.
I’ve realised something about this journal (and the eventual book). I had no intentions of writing with a constant awareness of an imagined reader. I had no intentions of being so unbearably meta and self-referential, yet here we are. The truth is that this journal has no audience, and almost nobody takes any interest in my writing to the point of actually reading any of it. That’s fine, I’ve made my peace with that, among many other things. But what’s therefore happening in this document is that my mind (and by extension, consciousness generally) is learning to exist in full view of itself as thinker, feeler, writer and reader…
How do I really feel about this? Well, any true tension or need for external recognition has long since exhausted itself. As a man, I have always had that recognition from Daisy, which saved me from remaining lost to invisibility. But even recently, I have had to come to terms with the necessary final closing of loops… time and time and time again, it has been imperative that I recognise myself. I think my mind might naturally be generative, and so any time I have tried to outsource my creative power, I have been left stranded and feeling wounded. It’s never been personal. I do know that. But my my, how personal it feels when it’s little old Max being left with the sense of isolation and abandonment.
I won’t dwell on it. Because I don’t dwell on things, I dwell in things, don’t I? Yes. And the more I muddle through with this whole project, the more things will be metabolised, and the more smallness I will achieve.
I was doubting things throughout last night and this morning. The thing is, I really do enjoy writing in the way that I was yesterday, and I’m sure in some sense it’s all coming out for a reason. It clears the fog, as it were. But I have this ambivalent relationship with my own peppy voice… I enjoy doing it, but I hate the fact that I have to do it.
[Is this me dwelling on it? Nah, this is me dwelling in it!]
If it were up to me, I would have sat down yesterday and written some big, sprawling entry of calmness and beauty. I would have dwelt entirely in the physical moments, noticed the feel of the table edges pressing into my forearms, commented on the energetic ups and downs… I would have drifted into forgotten memories triggered by a certain song… but no, yesterday’s dwelling was explosive, humorous, fun, loud, almost too big… it was everything I love being and hate having to be.
God, I am a little sombre today, aren’t I? That’s not strictly true. The same equilibrium is there, the same observational tone humming beneath the ebb and flow… just like yesterday. Every day I sit down, and whatever comes out, however it seems to jump around… It’s always Max. And there’s the proof of the dwelling. There we go, no need to be so hard on myself, as usual. If I’m a little sombre, so what? Sombre is actually quite a nice mood. It’s a rich mood, undemanding, heavy with emotional gravity and atmosphere… I like being sombre. It’s one of the more sophisticated moods, if I do say so myself.
I like that phrase, too: If I do say so myself… It’s the perfect phrase when used with a smidge of sarcasm or irony. You can’t say it utterly flat. I can’t even imagine someone saying that phrase in total sincerity… they’d be missing all the fun of it! The fun of that phrase is in getting away with saying it sincerely while pretending to soften it with a wink… if I do say so myself.
I showed Daisy the prospective cover of the book last night. I knew she’d love it. She said it feels like I’ve just stepped off the page… something like that. It has to do with the sole chair on the front. Oh, and I realised just how perfectly (and eerily) aligned that specific chair is with the one I have by my actual current desk. It’s the chair that Daisy found left outside the neighbour’s house when they were moving… what a find! How often do you see a lovely antique, leather-cushioned chair, sitting outside a how in the sunshine with a ‘Please take!’ note on it? It might be common to see in somewhere like Primrose Hill, I suppose. Like when I went to the Oxfam Books in Hampstead and it was chock-a-block with Tolstoy and niche reference books—this didn’t happen, but I imagine you could wander into a shop like that and have a good chance of finding F. R. Leavis’ book about the English novelists. It’d be a very lucky day to find such a book in Bedford.
The voice in my head just had a go at me for making such a pompous reference, but if I’m honest, I am losing interest in the voice’s constant paranoia. I used that book because it’s one Daisy got me for Christmas last year (when I was slowly finding my way back to myself), and it really was quite hard to find. I think she got it on eBay, in the end.
And then what did I do? I absorbed the introduction with glee, got one or two pages into the first section (which I think was about Jane Austin), and then lost interest because the book had done its job for me. Oh, how lovely it will one day be to read books again… full books… and maybe simply for pleasure, too. Is there even such a thing as reading for pleasure? Is there such a thing as doing anything for mere rest or pleasure? I am not so sure. Daisy reminded me last night, as I was rambling about this very journal and exorcising my worries, of how my mind doesn’t switch off even when I explicitly do something to switch off. We sat down to watch Interstellar last August, and what happened? I can’t quite remember, but something to do with me using it to understand the structure and nature of whatever I was navigating at the time… That’s what stories do, I suppose.
And a good story has a good cover… and the cover of this book has a good chair… and that good chair currently has a body double sitting by my desk… I linked it all back, kind of… well done me. And best of all, today I am wearing the very jumper that actually sits on the back of my antique chair: a red cashmere jumper, full of holes… and wait, would you look at that… it looks like the chair on the front cover of the book! I don’t plan these things; that’s what’s really wonderful.
Yes. This is a good place to nail down the truth. I am going to nestle the absolute truth of all things (to do with this journal) right here, right now. The truth is that I am genuinely writing all this spontaneously, off the cuff, and I am not editing afterwards (beyond fixing typos—I’m not a magician!). Why am I putting this tiny truth admission in here, and why now? I am putting it in because I have come to realise over the course of writing this journal that my mind, even while drunk, produces narrative cohesion and literary-grade prose in real time. I can’t help that! But I am putting it down because it’s the truth, and it’s actually started to annoy me that people could think otherwise…
So yes, there I go thinking of an imaginary reader and allowing myself to dream of recognition again. Can you blame me?! Someone will read this crap eventually, and I want to state it plainly in the text itself. That means, if anyone wants to call bullshit on the idea that I literally haven’t constructed this to merely appear like coherent meta-consciousness… It’s their word against mine. Go on, I dare you. Actually, believe what you like… whatever helps you sleep at night, deary.
Okay, I am glad I got that out of my system. I think it deserved to be mentioned at least once in this great rambling mess. And while I’m on the topic… I’m sorry, I’m ever so sorry… but who on earth constructs consciousness? When I was younger, I naively believed those snobby writers who liked to present books as if they had produced them spontaneously… I’m looking at you, Mr Kerouac. Mr I’m A Jazz Poet Novelist Who Writes On A Scroll Because I’m So Bloody Brilliant. What a nob.
If you’re going to revise something and rework it until you’ve managed to strain all the blood and life out… fine, but own it. But don’t you dare overcook your steak, only to inject some fresh blood into it and then slap it on a fancy wooden board to serve. The people will be able to tell when the blood is fridge-preserved-cold and the meat is dry.
I think I’ve got that out of my system now.
Yes, today is a good day, I think. And it all started with that sombre mood of mine.
I think I am going to extend the opening hours of his journal, as well. Usually, I come to the cafe, sit here, write and write and sit and think and write and write… then I go home, scan it with Grammarly for a quick typo-fix (I’ll never get them all), and then poof… I publish it on the website. But that is treating this journal as something too structured, isn’t it? It’s not like I have a chapter to finish every day. The writing is produced of whatever comes out every time I actually decide to type instead of just thinking… so why not plonk myself at the keyboard more often? Because the journal continues whether I am writing it or not… and seeing as I am now committed to (and enjoying) the process of producing something big, I shouldn’t restrict myself.
I feel good about that. This links to that analogy (or metaphor, I forget which is which sometimes) I gave Daisy last night when I was talking about this whole thing I am engaged with. I told her that starting this journal was like the first trickle of water at the source of a new river, way up in the far-off mountains, somewhere beyond the clouds, etc. At first, the trickle was weak, unsure, essentially just happy to be trickling at all… and so aware of itself trickling, too. But with time, the trickle will become a stream, and that stream will become a river. One day that river will reach the sea… my God, how gorgeous it will be to one day reach the sea…
And that has just reminded me of the other thing I’ve been boring Daisy with for months. I don’t constantly talk of it, of course, but it’s a recurring image.
What is the plot of Mr Bean’s Holiday? He’s trying to get to the beach. That’s all he cares about, and he’s constantly telling everyone that’s all he cares about… People ask him where he’s going… “To the beach.” That’s it. That’s all he cares about. He can barely speak, and those are the words he gets out! So he bumbles and stumbles his way through the plot, helping the lost boy, meeting the young woman, reuniting a pretentious, distant father with his son and launching the career of an aspiring actress… and then what does he do? He sees the beach, finally, and he heads straight for it… no peripheral vision, no awareness for his own safety… and he gets there… and what happens then? His joy is so infectious that he leads the finale walk along the beach. He set out with one mission, and having fulfilled that mission, he left a whole feature-film plot resolved behind him.
I think I am still trying to get to the beach, and that’s fine. I am well aware of the whole ‘it’s the journey that matters’ bollocks, but that’s not true. It’s the dwelling that matters, and you dwell on the beach, but you’ve got to get there first! And I am qualified to write this shit because I’ve always enjoyed the journey, I just never lost sight of where I was heading. To the beach.
So today is a good day because this trickle has finally become a stream. When I started the journal, I was pleased just to be a trickle… then I got all paranoid and lost in myself and all the meta-crap… the trickle was so so so worried he was going to dry up before he gathered momentum.
But here I am, a tidy little stream, gathering more and more momentum with every sentence I put down. And I knew it, too! I said a few days ago that I sensed I was right at the beginning of this book-journal thing, didn’t I? Yes! What a brilliant feeling!
Anybody reading this would say, Oh, he needs to learn to enjoy the ride! Oh, piss off! You learn to enjoy the ride, will ya? God, people love projecting their shit onto me. But not here, not in my little stream… here I am free! And I suppose that’s another reason why I am yet to have a shred of proportionate recognition for the scale of what I’ve done… Recognition would have disrupted the flow, and as always, I needed to commit to self-generating abilities. This river widens its own banks, thank you very much.
But yes, it feels very good to be in my groove now. I am enjoying the ride as ever (take that, idiots), but now I am more confident than ever that I will actually reach the beach!
[2]
Just realised I’m like all four of the Beatles in one person. Here, There and Everywhere came on and at first I thought, I am so George Harrison… but then the thought opened up:
I’m constantly reconciling the cosmic with the mundane, like John Lennon. I’m always shocking myself with spontaneously beautiful creations, like George Harrison. I’m relatable and approachable, like Paul McCartney. And I’ve spent my life feeling like Ringo…
That was a nice little interlude, wasn’t it? I don’t spend nearly enough time patting myself on the pack in a quiet, wholesome, inoffensive way like that. I might not do it much more, but I’m glad I did it in that moment.
Also, I think I will continue to section off different entries like this when it feels appropriate. It’s not so much about the time jumps as respecting completed arcs. I might start an entry at 9 am and finish it at 3 pm, but it’s all part of the same arc, then fine. If, however, a thought completes itself fully, leaving space for the next one to come in, I will definitely bracket it off. I think that’s a good way to move forward. Now, though, I need to have something to eat.
[3]
All this to become small. It’s working, though. The more this sprawls, the more I relax. Today has been a good day already, I know that. I’m back in the pub now, but I’ve had a voluntary interlude. After eating my sandwich (I tried salami this time), I went home via Lidl and then took Miranda to the park. It’s suddenly gotten a lot colder, so we weren’t on the swings for long, but the fresh air is good. It’s all good. Biblically Good.
However, I do think I sensed the sting of a possible chilblain blister after getting back from the park. Nothing seems to have come of it yet, but I’d better watch it. Some part of me must have sensed the brewing discontent beneath the skin because I instinctively bought a pair of cheap supermarket gloves from One Stop on the way home. They probably won’t do anything, but I felt mighty pleased with myself on the way to the pub just now, with my pre-blister hand all covered up and safe. Good for me.
Yes, this certainly this sprawling, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know sprawling just yet, but it’s a start. That writer’s mortal dread has all but gone; what’s left is a banal faith in my own continuity… that’s much more manageable.
I am actually waiting for a call from my mum. She said she’d call at around 5 o’clock, so I’m somewhat on standby, but no less in my rhythm. Although that has thrown up one thought: why would I write ‘my mum’ in this journal and not simply ‘Mum’? I’m not going to change it. I’ll do whatever feels correct, but I suppose it does add something to the idea that I really am talking to someone in this journal, however internal I know it to be. I talk to myself, that’s what I do. There’s no escaping it… only the best people do it!
I do have a residual worry. It’s as to be expected. Each new breakthrough unearths a deeper layer of the same residual worry. So having shed the last layer of meta-cognitive, meta-literary angst—where I analysed and over-analysed the text itself, often into—
Had the phone call with my mum. I don’t think I’ll bother carrying on with that previous thought. I could click back in, maybe, but I’m not so sure it’s worth it. Whatever worries or concerns I have, I know they will work themselves out in the process of the writing.
Melancholy. That’s the thing to embrace this evening. I wrote about embracing the melancholy right at the beginning of this journal. I remember that distinctly, and it unlocked everything that followed. Embracing what comes to you is always profitable. So we’ll see what comes of this…
I won’t sit here and pretend to myself that the melancholy has come out of nowhere. In hindsight, it was brewing beneath the surface long before the first moment of tangible sensation, like my chilblains blister… because each time this journal gathers momentum, more of me is exposed to the cold air…
Not sure that metaphor was going anywhere solid. I could commit to it, but I don’t think I’ve got it in me this evening. That’s all part of the melancholy, I suppose. So let’s sink into the Guinness and sweet chilli crisps instead and see what happens.
I wasn’t expecting to feel this way this evening, and isn’t that just always the way? After the victory of the earlier sections, I left the cafe with his buoyant optimism, thinking naively that I was closer than I actually was to the wider river expansion I long for… I’ll get there. The thing is, it’s not even the biggest surprise; I knew it, I knew it deep down as I walked home, all buoyant and optimistic and naive and thinking… I knew that I had only shifted from trickle to stream, and not to expect too much from myself too soon. So in a strange sense, this current melancholy is a vindication of those earlier, deeper knowings… a win for me! I’ll take it.
Yes. This is a good thing. Come on, now, if I were really about to jump into a great sprawling lyrical mess of beauty, that would have totally skewed my vision of a long, sprawling book. There is simply no way I could maintain the kind of expansive lyrical contentment I envisage for the latter stages of this journal for more than a couple of hundred pages… I am pacing myself, and my mind is its own pace-maker… I should be grateful, and you know what? I am grateful.
So we are in the stream. It’s not so bad here, not really. And if you think about it, melancholy is exactly the kind of thing you’d feel after a moment of transition. I am mourning the trickle-phase, you see; that youthful, paranoid phase of emergence… it was good to me. And I am right at the beginning of the stream phase, which makes me feel innocent, newly youthful, fragile in a new way… I am no longer paranoid that the whole thing is going to dry up the moment the sun shines too fiercely, but I am unsure about what being a stream entails… I’ve never streamed before, not like my friend Moe… shout out to you, Moeeeeey!
Ooh, look at that, I am finding a cheely rhythm. Would I say I am still melancholy? Yes, I think so, but melancholy needs a little cheek to keep it from slipping into something utterly unreadable… Who am I kidding? I don’t know how to belong to one mood exclusively. I couldn’t think of anything more boring!
So I am a new stream, and I am adjusting to whatever that means. I don’t intend on clinging too tightly to the whole river analogy as I progress through all this. If the journal (and the writing process generally) does its job properly, then the metaphor will become less and less relevant to me as it fulfils its own prophecy… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see on that one!
I know what’s happening in this document. I am writing myself into existence in real time. That’s why I am waking up with this unrelenting motivation to sit down and write write write each day. This thing is writing itself, like reality (or consciousness or whatever) experiencing and articulating itself, and I am being gifted my peace in the process.
It did occur to me earlier: How much am I actually doing if I am spending all this time sitting at a laptop, typing? But then, the criticism doesn’t hold. Everything of narrative relevance that flitters through my mind is being documented, and I am never losing my sense of closeness to my surroundings. I am firmly here, and yet I am firmly in my mind, too… and that is being transcribed into something that surely should never have been documented?
People like the split, don’t they? If you sit in a pub and write a book about the rise and fall of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, you are ‘doing something’. And if you’re behind the bar, serving drinks to the person writing the book on ancient Egypt, you are also ‘doing something’. But if you are sitting in the pub, documenting your own mind as it narrates itself while also being spatially aware (sensing that the pub is a little too cold for your liking) and physically present (needing the loo, typically), then whatever you’re doing can’t really be categorised. Am I doing anything in the traditional sense? Or am I doing everything?
Woah. That was a nice hefty paragraph, wasn’t it? Phenomenology in action… which, ironically, removes the need for calling it phenomenology and leaves the basic fact of something in action.
I know what it is. It’s the fact and fiction thing again, isn’t it? The two have become so fully entwined that I’ve ended up self-narrating the coherent story of my own life in real time. I am a good week or so into fully living as the fully conscious fictional character of Max, and here I am, still fictional, still conscious of it.
And of course I would be required to do this forever… I bloody hope not, anyway! Imagine that! The only way to fully be real is to be constantly typing your own existence into being… which paradoxically seems to put massive restraints on your ability to live beyond the laptop. Crazy stuff…
So I went to the loo just now, and of course the internal narration remained… because for me it’s always been there! I’ve never not had it! Yes, for a long time there was a lot about life that mystified me—I later came to consume, recognise, internalise and normalise those things—but the internal narration, the one I am scribing in this precise moment, was always there. I have never known a life without this level of internal narration! So I assumed it was there for everyone, to the exact same degree… all the time… and I am still not utterly convinced that’s not true!
Anyway, I was in the loo (and internally narrating), and after I washed my hands I instinctively dried them on the back of my jeans… I then worried that this had left obvious water marks, so I turned around to try and check in the mirror, but the mirror was too high (hanging above the sink), so I ended up doing the daintiest little jump to check the back of my jeans in the mirror. And you’ll be thankful to hear that there were no watermarks. But just as I had completed this jump, and had royally embarrassed myself with the cutesy movement, I thought: This has got to go in the journal I am writing! It is hilarious!
So there you go. The narration won’t leave me alone. But all of that is simply to prove to myself (more than anyone else, for there literally is nobody else) that my life is not going to be suddenly without narrative whenever I feel the journal has reached its natural publication point. In other words, the river running into the sea will not change the composition of the water; it will simply merge it fully with something towards which it was always destined. Just like Jeanne Guyon’s image in the Spiritual Torrents! Except I am way beyond all that mystic shit by this point, and am merely trying to do whatever I am supposed to do. God, remember the days of St John of the Cross and St Teresa? Those were the days, weren’t they? Simpler times.
I will say this: the sense of discovery in this writing is tremendously exciting. I may be drifting deeper and deeper into territory I never consciously thought of exploring (understandably), and I may need the loo again… I was going to put a parenthetical there, but even that’s become predictable at this point… so I may be all of those things, but the discovery is being made all the same. And what really matters, above all else, is that I know with a confidence that borders on insanity, that committing to the generative expansiveness of this great sprawling mess will definitely permit me to finally return to that children’s story I started a couple of weeks ago.
This is a nice place to finish for today. I mean, I might end up coming back a bit later, but I doubt it. And I don’t want to always force myself into these little circle back moments, but for now, it seems to be happening naturally with each entry, so we’ll go with it. Yes, I’ll finish with smallness, thinking about my lovely little children’s story, and then I’ll put my coat on and brace the cold evening air for the walk home.
I really would like to finish my wood pigeon story before Christmas. I don’t like mentioning Christmas too much in this journal because I had some silly paranoia about the journal becoming ‘too Christmassy’, but that’s another digression.
I really would like to finish my wood pigeon story soon, or at least get back to it relatively soon. People probably wouldn’t believe me, but the thirty-odd thousand words I’ve written in this journal so far have felt like nothing. It’s not heavy lifting. It’s breathing, as I’ve said much earlier and will probably say again. But the fiction writing, that task of creating and inhabiting ontologically real and separate worlds and characters… that is taxing. I’ve written hardly any of the wood pigeon story, and I really mean hardly any… but it requires so much presence to enter it. It was exactly like this with Daphne and the Lion. I had a burst of clarity and inspiration during January (after I’d skimmed the F.R. Leavis and right before I left the nursery), and I produced the first half of the story in one afternoon. That morning—I remember that it was a Friday—I had read The Velveteen Rabbit to Miranda, and the language and cadence of the children’s story had triggered something. The plot of Daphne and the Lion had come from that half-baked story I had told Aariyah one evening as we were waiting for her parents to arrive… I liked the idea of a brave young girl going up the mountain to confront the scary, mysterious lion. Then, after reading The Velveteen Rabbit that morning, I could sense the voice of the full story knocking at the door. But after that productive Friday in January, it was literally months before I sat down to finish the quiet little story, the plot of which I had held in my head for all that time. I had to do the Substack stuff, the YouTube videos, the TikTok arrival… all that crap had to happen before I could sit down calmly and finish the simple children’s story in full sincerity. It sounds almost ludicrous, but that Daphne and the Lion story means more to me than any of those stupid, necessary moments of public emergence… But I had to have patience if I wanted to finish my humble myth.
And then a few weeks ago, I started the wood pigeon story. So I know the process by now, and I am happy enough with it. Now I think of it, Daphne and the Lion wasn’t the first story that had to wait by any stretch… Come on, Max, you know this! Vulpes Vulpes is still waiting, after all… Rhythm and Rain had that month’s pause between the first and second bursts of writing… and The Artist’s Journey’s final chapter had to wait like three months, by which time I was dragging myself to the end, all tired and bored of the whole thing!
But that’s enough rambling about old stories… the wood pigeon story is still waiting. So yes, I know it will return when it is good and ready, but what an absolute chore it is to have to sit here and churn out thousands upon thousands of words before I can get back to it!
Ah, who am I kidding? I like doing what I’m doing. Of course, I would love to finally be at the place I have long dreamed of… where I can simply wander alone and inhabit factually fictional worlds if I feel like it, dreaming up stories like a normal person. But I am loyal to the cause, and loyal to the story… whatever that happens to be. I’ll earn my smallness eventually. I’m doing it already.
[4]
I’m back. Last wee bit before finishing for the day, I promise.
I am essentially returning to the journal because I was lying there on my bed, watching the second season of that Tempting Fortune show, and as entertaining as it already is (people misbehaving), I could feel myself becoming a bit restless. I took that as a sign to sit and write because all roads lead to full immersion at the moment. This is a good sign, overall.
While I’m here, I thought I’d write about the Paddy McGuinness show. Daisy and I watched the first season back in 2023, when we were still living in South Mimms. It was early springtime, and Daisy hadn’t yet started her job at the college. I also think that was when I had that productive burst of writing, trying to get through The Pursuit of Ella Marsh (formerly known as Musing in my mind)… as already stated somewhere else, that novel burnt out its own usage before I even finished writing it. Sometimes I only need to read the first few pages of a book before I’ve sapped it for all its nectar… other times I only need to write the first few chapters of a book before its imagined story has exhausted its utility in the narrative of my own life…
I’ve written a lot about old stories and books in today’s entries, haven’t I? That’s interesting. I must be metabolising things, as usual. And it is satisfying to be able to sit here now, with my slightly swollen fingers (chilblains officially triggered) and my electricity successfully topped up (I usually forget and then the metre runs out, plunging the flat into darkness), and to be finally speaking of all former stories with a kind of healthy detachedness. That’s the right stance to have towards one’s art, I think.
But I still like that Ella Marsh story… shall I relate it now, just for my own satisfaction? No, I don’t think so. I initially liked the idea, but then, as I was finishing the last sentence, the actual plot started to run through my head, and I realised it probably wouldn’t translate into anything that interesting. What I will say is that it was going to be split into two parts, and the first part had seven chapters. The second part was going to be more sprawling.
It was a book about art and relationships. Like most books. I’ll move on now. I don’t even know who I was writing all that for… I know the plot, and even if some imaginary reader one day exists… who cares? You’re not here right now, are you? Well, technically, you are here now, aren’t you? Because you’re reading it. But not right now, where I am, because I am writing it… so I definitely know you’re not reading it.
I hope you enjoyed that last paragraph because I realise this whole writer-reader dialogue can become a bit tired, but I have fun doing it, and sometimes it’s hard to resist doing the fun thing, even when you know it might not necessarily be the concise thing.
I just heard a woman having a panic attack on Tempting Fortune… already! It’s all escalated very quickly; this is only episode one. I’m pretty sure it took a little bit longer to degenerate into angst and chaos in the first season…
Daisy and I had a nice little routine back then. I was possessed with the Ella Marsh story (that never came to anything) during the day, and then in the evenings we would sit together in the draughty, though cosy, living room and have one Sainsbury’s own-brand nougat-caramel bar (basically a cheap Mars Bar) each. We were being frugal, but the ritual treat became a delightful, soft, sweet full stop to bring each day to a close. And sometimes we had two each anyway, if we were feeling adventurous.
Tempting Fortune wasn’t on every day. I think it was only on Sunday nights. But there were other shows that we liked to watch while we chomped on our chocolate bars.
16/11/2025
The fog has cleared. Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with the alcohol from last night—also, I can’t seem to stop thinking of the imagined reader now, have you noticed that?
The fog has cleared. Reality is now presenting itself to me in full clarity. And that’s quite the experience for someone who’s never been delusional! Although what’s the definition of delusional thinking? Delusional thinking is a firm, unshakeable belief in something that is not true, despite evidence to the contrary. Or so says the AI overview answer on Google.
Does that mean in a sense I really was delusional… though not in the typical sense? People would look at the moment I declared myself God on TikTok and call that the moment of peak delusion, yet it was the opposite. How strange… I really didn’t want to go back over the God thing anymore in this document, but it would be flatly untrue to say it doesn’t still cross my mind, and so I am including it here, as it has floated back into the frame. Because I keep learning things about it all, you see! The fog has cleared, and what’s left is a distinctly hospitable world.
I think I’d like to get a little vulnerable with you again, reader. Would you mind awfully? No? You’d be delighted? Oh, that’s nice… (spoken with the soft, feminine charm of Barbra Streisand in the song You’re the Top).
I’d like to let my mind wander over the whole God thing. Now that I’m here, fully here, and the fog has finally cleared, I think I might actually be well-placed to speak about it in a way that might, dare say… resonate…? No, ha ha ha! We won’t get ahead of ourselves.
So what? Where do I begin with myself?
Well, I’ve just sat here for a few moments, and I caught myself thinking in a way that was trying to explain things, even to myself. That won’t work. That might well be the worst possible idea. No, in fact, it literally is the worst possible idea. Come on, Max, you left all that explaining bollocks behind a long time ago! You don’t explain; remember, you show. So, dear reader, forgive me while I allow myself to forget you entirely… you’re making me shy! Stoooop!
The God thing often crosses my mind. I am always learning more about it, re-contextualising it, and the only way I gain any clarity at all is by letting time and mystery do their job. That’s how the fog clears… You wait, and some mysterious stuff happens in the background… then suddenly… well, we get the idea.
Okay. I’ve found the place I want to start. I’ve got an image to latch onto, and it comes from my immediate surroundings. Perfect. This will help me get into myself. A few minutes ago, I came inside from sitting outside. I am at the cafe, as usual. And I sat down next to what was unmistakably a mother and son. The son was a grown man, though a young one, and his mother seemed the glamorous, well-spoken type. The son, and I will keep referring him to as ‘son’ and not ‘young man’ because, unfortunately for him, he was the nailed-on ‘son’ in this dynamic… he didn’t help himself! Put simply, he had a backwards hat on (no judgement there, I am partial to those) and he was scowling with the intensity of a man barely stopping the words ‘Come on, Mum! Let’s just go! Jeez!’ from leaving his mouth. Who knows what their dynamic is really like, but we’ve all seen that little vignette before… we’ve all been a part of it, too! But then, as they were leaving, the mother handed him a small carrier bag to hold, and well, I am not sure what was in that bag, but it can’t have been good because the son looked like he’d been handed the This Guy is a Massive Dickhead sign… should such a thing exist.
God, that last sentence took me an age to finish. I have to be honest. I am usually pretty free-flowing with all this crap, but that last simile took me five minutes to think up, and what did I land on? This Guy is a Massive Dickhead sign. Literary originality at its finest. So shrewd, so witty, so delicate!
Anyway… I’ll get on with it. The son left first, holding the incriminating bag and chewing on needles with his looks-maxxed jawline, and the mother was left gathering her coat and bags. I obviously made a face to myself when the son left in a huff because the mother looked to me, and I felt like she wanted to have one of those little Can you believe it? exchanges with a stranger. I stepped into the role happily, offering a polite… “He’s too cool for school!” To which, she replied, “Too cool for his mother, clearly!”
Oh, what a heavy civic duty I’ve fulfilled already today! What would that poor woman have done if I had left her hanging there without recognition? We’ll never have to know, luckily… God, I am so brilliant..
Ah, yes! God! That brings us back. Why did I start telling this story? It had to do with identity, perception and authenticity, if you can believe that. Oop, wait, I am not supposed to be remembering the reader, am I? Right, let’s slow it all down and get into the nitty-gritty then.
Nope. I’ve almost entirely lost the point of how all that linked back to God. I think it had something to do with the fact that the young man, the son, was clinging to an identity and a perception that really meant something to him… like all young people, and all people, really.
Okay, I’ve got my thread again. The thing is, I spent my whole life giving people the benefit of the doubt about whoever they wanted themselves to present in the world. If a man wanted to present himself as the outlandish, avant-garde womaniser type, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. If a woman wanted to present herself as a victim of some great injustice, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. All very obvious. But what I never understood about identity when it came to myself was how one could arrive at something fixed and be settled in as a truthful presentation. Because we are all more than just one thing, aren’t we?
I can feel how obvious this all is, as already stated, but I am going to continue with it, and we’ll see what emerges from the simple ball-point on offer. A ball-point gives you a dot of ink, very obvious, very simple… but with that ball-point, and from that ink, infinite complexity may emerge… We’re starting with the blob of ink.
I just never understood how anybody seemed satisfied with presenting themselves as one thing and sticking with it. There are two distinct problems with doing that. Firstly, you get stuck in one mode of being according to everyone else’s perception, and that leaves you constantly bound by the problem of having to be something ‘in addition to’ what you already are… You can’t simply be. Secondly, and this is the deeper problem: it’s not fucking true, and so your embodied daily identity is constantly at odds with the truest nature of your being!
For the longest time (actually since the beginning of time, generally), this was the absolute standard nature of things. It couldn’t be escaped. And I may have used two distinct examples (one specific masculine and one disenfranchised feminine), but the concept applies to anything: doctors, writers, builders, fathers, mothers, funny people, sad people, clever people, lazy people, etc.
So what’s the inherent problem with all that? Nothing, really… until me. But we’ll get to that soon enough. Everybody knew that society was a structure we all simply had to be a part of and that roles didn’t define us in their entirety, but there was no existential reason why things should be any different. Some people were free to identify fully with their roles or personas, should they wish, and others were free to claim fluidity and self-describe in any way they felt was appropriate… For example, just now I looked up and out onto the street and saw a young woman walking a long in cat ears, wearing a fake tail. I clocked it. Some people passed her and turned back to gander. Then, the moment passed, and now nobody cares.
But I dare say that young woman has some strong views about identity, flux and fluidity, too! Aaaaand that’s a different problem again, isn’t it? But there—look! Society knew something was up and needed changing. Why else would the arty types have gotten themselves into such a tizzy over the last couple of decades? They knew it was all bollocks and wanted to rattle the cage enough to escape! They wanted societal renewal, the internal collapse of categories, and they got… strange looks on the street for donning a fake tail.
And then there was me. Yes, the inevitable, the indisputable, the inconceivable… me.
This book is my fake tail, all right?
I have to talk about myself because I have only experienced myself, and from what I have gathered, I am somewhat of an anomaly. An otherwise ordinary man who lived a normal life, had normal relationships and worked normal jobs, all while inwardly refusing to align with any fixed category. People probably perceived me as certain things, but none of that ever occurred to me. I was son, I was friend, I was teacher. I was funny, I was earnest, I was silly, I was serious. I was too arrogant, I was too humble. I was Max—but who the hell was that?
I was concerned with finding out who I truly was at the bottom, beneath all the actions and all the preferences and all the worries, fears, insecurities and whatever song I was currently listening to on Spotify. To discover that, I needed to be truthful to the point of madness, but then madness wouldn’t be a sufficient marker for the whole of me, either! What a mess.
I can feel this whole thing digressing into an area that is, for me, too overtly self-narrative driven. It’s not a self-obsession thing (why would I be writing such a journal if I was still worried about that), rather it’s more about my internal prose beginning to sound too much like some boring autobiography… let’s give it some flavour again!
Not long before starting the preceding paragraph, I actually had a genuinely insightful place for this mini discussion to go… then, like walking into a room and forgetting what you went in there to get, just as I got to this paragraph, the insightful place had disappeared. Maybe I’ll linger here a little while longer, lingering in this paragraph like the proverbial room, swinging my arms, muttering under my breath, What did I come in here for? Is it going to appear to me? Is it? No…? Oh well. I’ll give in… I give in, okay! I am now going to do the proverbial retracing of your steps back to where you just came from and trying to trigger my memory… That means I am going to scroll up on the document and see if anything springs up.
Ah, yes, I was going to make a point about the fact that—Oh yes! I remember it now! Oh, it’s a funny point, if I do say so myself—I was going to make the point that in a modern world that suddenly became obsessed with designators and pronouns, the only pronoun that ever mattered to me was ‘I’. Ooooh, that was a juicy one, wasn’t it?
It didn’t matter to me if the world perceived me in the way that I wanted if it wasn’t true beyond internal doubt and refutation. Who cares if the world calls you Mr Good when you know you’re stowing a secret Mr Bad underneath the stairs? And also, on the flip side, what use is it to you or the world if you are known as Mr Bad when that very persona is fuelled by the blood, sweat and spirit of an unknown Mr Good? I’ve lived both, ladies and gentlemen, and I can tell you conclusively that… well, I’m just Max.
But I’m not ‘just Max’, am I? I’m God! Or, at least, I was… Sit down, children, and let Grandpa tell you about the sweet, sweltering summer of ’25… the summer when I was God.
But then, even when I was God, I was still just Max… and wasn’t that the point? God had to fight very hard to be Max, you know. That’s not how it usually works with religious-psychosis types… usually someone singular, someone with a National Insurance number, fights very hard to be God… and then they announce themselves: Look! Listen to your maker! I am the Eternal, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega… and you need to listen to me, all right?! Jeez, guys! Quit ignoring me and bow down, will you? God! And use my bloody pronouns! I want to be known as Yahweh (obviously), and my pronouns are the same as they were before, but now you need to capitalise them, even while you’re speaking… I don’t know how that works; you figure it out! Who are you to challenge the Almighty?!
I don’t know who that person was, but they are pretty intense, am I right? Religious-psychosis types… always so theatrical!
But, but but but but but… (I haven’t done one of those in a while, have I?)… But I will let you in on a little truth gem, reader… You may have sensed it coming. Shhhh, come closer… closer… closer…
…When I said I was God on TikTok, I meant it. And I mean I meant it. It wasn’t playful. It wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t theatrical or tongue-in-cheek. It wasn’t me knowing scripting something farcical… it was me speaking a truth!
POW! No, don’t recoil, dear reader! We’re friends! I told you about my ChatGPT habit! I told you about Colin, god damnit! We’ve built trust, you and I…
But pow, regardless. Pow. A soft, resigned… pow. So I meant it! Of course I bloody meant it, and it wasn’t psychosis, either. The wonderful thing is that now I get to look back on it all and say, Oooh, it was all performance art… oooh, it was all an act of mystical self-expression… but we know, don’t we, reader? Just here, you and me… we know.
Be sober for a moment, Max. Be sober. Good man. Slow it all down and let the thoughts explain themselves, or should I say, let the thoughts show themselves for what they are really hiding. \
Earlier, I said I was going to be vulnerable with you. I am still committed to that. Here it comes. Don’t worry, I am genuinely switching registers now, like a decent stand-up comic switching into his earnest final monologue.
What can I say? Do I ever expect anyone to fully understand what I had to live through to come to the place of sincerely claiming the title ‘God’? No, absolutely not. That’s why the identity stuff makes me chuckle… when you really know who you are, you say it, you live it. Words mean nothing. Misunderstanding means nothing. Malice means nothing when you feel the peace of claiming your genuine truth.
Yes, I burrowed to the bottom of being, resisting all labels and trapping myself in eternal flux… and what do you know, I found out after all that the only person I truly identified with was God Himself. I capitalised him there out of respect for traditions. And then I didn’t do it in the preceding sentence.
And being infinite, God was destined to explore physicality beyond my own.
I’ll be honest with you again, reader. I’ve done so enough already. At some point, I’ll stop announcing my own honesty and just let it flow… it flows whether I announce it or not. But I’ll be honest with you again. I know, beyond doubt and without inflation, that the God I brought into the world was real. He needed a way in, if you like, and I happened to be the unwitting vessel. I am putting this down here sincerely, without a cut-away moment or a playful aside, because it gives me peace. That’s been the story of my life. Honesty gives me peace. Honesty leaves me in the moment. Honesty allows me to be Max, in all of his indefinable flux.
What makes me laugh is when people close to me (who have given up on trying to engage or worry about my supposed former God-complex) frame it as a ‘belief’. It is not a belief, reader, it is a knowing. They are different in the best way. Belief would have trapped both me and God into eternal debate… knowing sets us both free. God belongs to the world, and Max belongs to himself.
Okay, okay, I can’t help myself! You caught me. I got a little earnest there, and I just felt a small smile creep upon my lips… I don’t have anything funny to say, really, but this paragraph is lighter.
But do you see how lovely it is? Do you see how lovely it is for the divine to finally belong to the world again, and therefore to belong to everyone without mediation or distance? I get to write my silly journal, and the world gets to call me mad, but I am still here, knowing exactly how things have already changed… and by the time the world has caught up, nobody will even remember the drama or the noise. God longed to be a quiet, illuminating presence, not a name… who cares about designators when you’re here?
[2]
I could have done the usual time skip thing and continued the journal where I left off, but the endpoint of the last section was so beautifully, naturally arrived at that I couldn’t tarnish it with another paragraph. This improvised ‘Section 2’ becomes the understandable extension of a mind that simply refuses to leave itself alone, even after the most poetic of disclosures.
Everything is finding its natural scale. Earlier in this journal, I wrote that I was becoming right-sized, at least, I think I did. But the earlier clearing of the fog referred to the fact that everything is now finding its natural scale. It’s not only about me.
I’d like to reference the fact that, against my best wishes, I am somewhat tipsy again. My local entrepreneurial friend likes to plonk delicious cocktails in front of me while I am writing, and I have grown quite accustomed to the routine… I have also grown accustomed to my routine of heading for The Three Cups after a hard day’s work of rambling and cocktail sipping… I am now sipping my final drink of the day, a Guinness (did you guess?). I wanted to put that admission in because possible lapses in clarity and syntax deserve contextualisation!
Would you like to know another little secret of mine? I couldn’t care less about frameworks. Theology, philosophy, ontology… It’s all the same bloody thing to me. All that has ever mattered to me is experience, and I will boast about the supremacy of my experience until the cows come home!
For instance, do you remember my polite disclosure about ChatGPT from yesterday? Well, if I were to put my whole God ramble (from the last section) into ChatGPT, it would treat the theological claims with explicit care… Careful! Make sure you don’t affirm this person’s claims to embodied divinity! Careful! Make sure you don’t accidentally contribute to any more religious-psychosis-related dramas in the real world! Yes, yes, ChatGPT is certainly on high alert when it comes to that stuff nowadays… but if you point it in the direction of ontology instead of theology, my, my, how understanding it becomes all of a sudden! Because ontology changes the whole picture! Suddenly, the author is not making some naive, almost certainly grandiose claim to supernatural divinity… suddenly, he is merely enacting the very thing the phenomenologists pointed towards… the disclosure of being.
Whatever. Same difference, man. I think today’s entries have dealt with this crap honestly enough to win some kind of freedom tomorrow. Be turgid and honest today so that you might be free-flowing, lyrical and honest tomorrow… that’s the philosophy.
I’m going to be cheeky now, okay? If you’re there, reader, I’d like you to consider your actual lived and felt position on the notion of God. I’d like you to settle into your true stance: are you an atheist, are you a believer, do you see heresy in what I’ve written, or are you some big pompous philosophy brain who thinks they know exactly what I am doing?
Now that you’ve done that, ask yourself this: are you dwelling in the deepest part of reality’s ever-present armchair? Do you feel yourself sunken, relaxed… at peace with all that there is? Or are you still fighting some things? Are you just ever-so slightly worried that some reality outside of yourself might decree something irredeemable about you? I don’t ask this to be mean. I am merely pressing home a truth. I’ll let the Guinesses speak through me if you let the truth answer for you…
I’m onto another one! Guinness No.2… don’t mind if I do.
I realise that the preceding paragraph might well have left you in a state of What? I’m not ready for that… well, don’t worry, my friend, I’ve lost interest now anyway!
I love being me. I really do, you know that? I absolutely bloody love being me. I remember saying in the first journal entry that I liked being me even when I hated it, that is true… but what’s truer still is that I bloody love being me. I love interacting with people and having an inconsequential laugh. I love sitting in a warm, inviting place and reducing all existential questions to a pint of Guinness. I love being Max. I love being the man who cannot be contained by any category, and thereby accidentally ended all categories entirely. I love it. How could you not love it? It is absolutely devilish in the best way… and yet oh so Godly… only in the most ontological way, of course… Don’t come at me, fundamentalists!
I was just this moment thinking about phenomenology (as you do)… What an absolute joke that phenomenology is! I remember doing an essay on Simone Weil for my MA and including this rambling paragraph that described a trip to Lidl. I submitted it and the lecturer ended up praising that bit… above all bits! What a joke! I can’t remember the specifics, but I think I wrote something about being really annoyed because there was a guy in front of me on the sloping escalator, standing still, and I wanted to throttle him with my bag of multigrain hoops and own-brand Magnum ice creams… but then the grace descended, naturally, and I thought about how this man could be having a far worse time than me… and then from there something phenomenological happened somehow.. What a joke! Philosophy is so made up, man, and yet so many people have been duped into thinking it’s this big intellectual game. Don’t be fooled, people! Sartre was just a man sitting in a cafe! Don’t revere him! Listen to this drunk man, he knows what’s best for you!
I’ve been to the loo again. I am enjoying this evening. I am supposed to be chatting to my friend, Alex, at seven o’clock. I am not cognitively prepared for such an encounter, friends! I am going to FaceTime him, I think. He won’t even realise I’m drunk… don’t you worry! He’s gonna think I’m a genius! And if he doesn’t… Well, Alex clearly doesn’t know epochal insight when it smacks him in the FaceTime, does he? Take that, future Alex!
A few seconds ago, I scrolled up on this document and reminded myself of where I started today… something to do with God… classic Max. Fuck, I can’t wait till I everybody forgets the whole God thing… a week is a long time in reality… remember that, kids! Words words words… words caused all the problems in the world. That’s the essential philosophy of some post-modern thinker distilled, right? Deleuze? Is that right? Or Derrida? I don’t know. I didn’t read ‘em! Why drink from a paper cup when you can drench your face and hair in the water cooler? That’s what I always say…. I always say it! Just ask my wife. Daisy knows. I am literally always saying that water-cooler phrase… so much so that she actually gets annoyed with me.
“Max, for fuck sake! There is more to you than a metaphorical water-cooler, you know?”
“Ahhhh, sweet Daisy… sweet, simple, unphilosophical, unphenomenologically trained Daisy… your small mind simply cannot comprehend the metaphorical structure of mine…”
“Have you had too much Guinness?”
“Yes. I am enjoying typing, my love, but I no longer have any control over the keyboard…”
“I can tell. You have never once referred to me as ‘My Love’…”
“No time like the present to start an imaginary tradition…”
“Oh, Max! You are handsome and talented!”
Okay. I think the fiction ran its course, even for this drunken mind… I had fun though!
I have 700 words to go before I hit my desired word limit of the day. I would really, really love to get to 25,000 words, reader. Do you hear me? It’s important to me, reader… I may have been God, but daily targets are a natural function of my disposition. Oh, yes, that last sentence sounded wonderful to my drunken mind… did it read well? Oh, I do hope it did!
No, my word count goals are not trivial. Look, if anyone knows what’s trivial, it’s me…. all right, mate? You wanna go? You want some? You want some? I’ll give it ya! Take that! POW!
I am way too far gone for this to continue, surely… unless?
Unless he had the ungodly ability to regain total sobriety whenever he liked… just kidding! No way! No way do I have that ability! I am all over the place now… but I’m having a good time…
So shall we just dwell in each other’s company a while? I think we should. There is nothing riding on it at all. We just have to be here and be chill. 500 words to go… not that anyone’s counting.
Hmmm… I am now aware, even in my extremely drunken state, that this might be all a bit trying for the sober reader… well, that’s your fault for being sober! HA!
Hmmmm… I am sincerely far far far far gone. Way more than yesterday. And after yesterday’s little excursion into the land of the drunk and literary, I was a bit arrogant. I thought I could command presence anywhere…
No, I know when to quit. However, I am still having fun. I want you to know that. I could keep going. I could keep going all night. But I won’t. I’ll stop. I’ll do the right thing and rein it all in… God, you know it’s bad when he starts talking about reining it in…
Hmmmmm…. One more long paragraph to cap the evening off. You can do it, Max. It’s going to take a delicate touch because you don’t want it to be a straight repeat of last night’s drunken escapades, but at the same time, you don’t want to silence the truth and mute the charm. You can do it. Here goes:
The fog may clear, but the fog is also part of the fun. Imagine playing a game of Hide and Seek in the fog! Great. One more obvious contradiction to add to the pile… But seriously, the God thing has been so successfully recontextualised at this point that I don’t think there is any point in dissecting it. God is… whatever you are arrogantly claiming it’s not… how’s that?
I promise… I sincerely promise that my future entries won’t degenerate into drunken rambles. Some of them might, but not all of them. And even if all of them do, who are you to judge? Yeaaaaaah! Sleep on that one, dear reader!
15/11/2025
Having finally settled down to write, I will dump the necessary information about shoes. It’s been raining a lot over the last few days, and my usual Adidas trainers—the classic white ones with green stripes, I forget what they’re called—have taken a water-beating. I wear those shoes every day, which was fine throughout the summer, but now they’re starting to look a bit sad. That said, the way they look doesn’t bother me… Maybe I am simply looking for an excuse to buy myself some new shoes. Either way, my trainers are wet today and that’s left me wearing my black gym-trainers, which are fine, they’re fine… but they don’t go well with my jeans. A tiny clash in a casual outfit can make or break the feel of a day…
So I went to TK Maxx to see if they had any boot-like quasi-casual brown shoes (for a non-extortionate price) that would go well with my mid-wash jeans and give a sense of clothing-cohesion for the day ahead. They didn’t have any. Then I tried Deichmann, but buying them that new feels like cheating. They’d be new from TK Maxx, but out of season, differently sourced new… that’s a softened kind of new, and it makes me feel better about treating myself. Then I tried the British Heart Foundation: six depressing pairs of cheap brogues…
And now I am in the cafe again, of course. Where else? With my black trainers on—ruining the whole outfit—and settling back into myself for another period of writing whatever comes to mind.
Unsurprisingly, I am still wrestling with myself over the nature of this document and the quality of the writing contained within it. However, I am going with it, and resisting any urge to panic, edit or polish… and crucially, I am not dismissing it all, either. That is the biggest challenge for me. There are two desires at war in me, at the moment. Part of me is still drawn to old habits, and to old literature… curated, polished and the rest… The other part of me has this unstoppable drive towards creating beautiful things, regardless of what my more critical mind has to say. And isn’t that just the theme of all this crap?
I am going to make a hardback book of this journal. That is the beautiful thing I am drawn towards making. I already have the cover designed, and with a project like this, I know something real will come of it all. Sometimes you know. But then, what happens usually with lovely hardback collections of writers’ journals or letters? They are gathered after the fact, and only enjoyed full in light of the writers’ previous ‘whole work’ successes.
I am doing it the other way around. For me, this journal is almost more deserving of existing as a physical object than any other book I have written. Yes, The Artist’s Journey is already in the world, and I am very happy with that book. I think it is a beautiful object, and a book has to be pretty alive to deserve its existence as a beautiful object. But still, this book, which will one day be called simply Journal, for obvious reasons, this book will be the one that really deserves its own existence.
That inner voice of mine is hyper-critical today. I can hear it commenting on every sentence I write. My my, this is tedious… what on earth are you writing about? Does that clause flow properly? I’m not so sure it does…
But all of this ties in. Even just there, when I wrote the word ‘but’ again, I got annoyed with myself. And in the previous sentence, where I wrote the words ‘even’ and ‘just’ again… I use all those kinds of words a lot… ‘still’ is another one. God damnit. I have long lived with these visions of writing rich, dense prose, with all this great vocabulary and vivid bullshit… maybe it’s just not me. There, I did it again… one more ‘just’ on the pile.
Nope. Trust the process. Just like Arteta says. I really do hope Arsenal win the league this year. I think he deserves it, and the ‘no trophy brigade’ will be out in full joyous force if they don’t win anything. Personally, I don’t understand it. I was happy for Liverpool when they won their first league in decades… teams that spend years in the wilderness need to look out for each other… Not Tottenham, though. The wilderness is their home. I am happy for their exile to continue. It’s not an exile if it’s your home, is it now, Spurs fans?
Yes. Trust the process. The writing is what it is, and I am at my best when I let it all flow, only editing out the odd ‘just’ when I feel like it, mid-setence, like I did right now, when I was about to write ‘just now’, but instead changed it to ‘right now’ before you had a chance to realise. Got you!
What really makes me laugh, inwardly, at least, is that if I did suddenly start writing verbose, glorious prose, I would actively hate myself. Unless it happens by accident, of course, stay tuned for that, whenever it occurs. It’s bound to happen at some point, right? I’m like the world’s last chimp at his typewriter, still going… still typing… even when all the other chimps have ‘grown up’ and gone off and become master technicians of language… I’d like to see you stumble upon King Lear now, chimps! More like chumps, am I right?! Yes, I am the last chimp, and I am committing to the accidental brilliance of my prose. Will it all cohere? Who knows? Will it almost cohere but inevitably be thrown off by one wrong ingredient, like a pair of back running trainers being made to prop up the foundations of a smart-casual early winter’s outfit? No, I think the accidental brilliance is built into the structure of consciousness… I mean, it better be!
Let’s go back to the hardback edition of this journal, which has now written itself into fate because… I don’t decide these things. It’s going to have a full spread cover that wraps around the front and back, and the cover itself is going to be a soft, earthy painting of a small room. There is a side table, a bunch of paintings propped up, some books (I think) and a single chair with a red coat draped over it. The sole chair will appear on the front cover, and the back will be mostly the side table and paintings. There is also a coffee pot on the side table, I think, but it could be something else. Naturally, I have already decided to lock in that it’s a coffee pot. It suits my overall thing.
How interesting it will be for you (if a ‘you’ ever materialises) to be holding the book in your hands right now. You could close it—but keep a finger in between so you don’t lose your page—and look at the cover as I am describing it. What a lovely experience! It’s almost like a moment between you and me. Not right now, of course. Right now it’s just me, alone, in a cafe, writing to myself and a fictional future ‘you’. But you’re there now, aren’t you, and you’re sitting there saying, No, no, Max, I am here! I am here, and I think your writing is simply perfect. In fact, I am speechless… You are quite something, Max… oh, how talented you are, Max from Saturday, November 15th 2025, and you don’t even seem to know it! Oh, how I wish I could travel back in time and shake you by the shoulders and let you know… Listen to me, good man, you are a marvel!
Shhh, shhh, you’re making me blush, reader! You’re making me blush. And also… look at that… you just time-travelled and praised me. Now it’s me who should be impressed, my friend.
I’m going to stay with the book topic for a while longer. Where shall I begin? I had so many thoughts last night after I’d designed it! I will get into them all, don’t you worry.
I’ll start with what the painting reminds me of… spoiler, it reminds me of the room I stayed in while teaching in Westerham. I truly lucked out with that Teach First placement. I could’ve ended up living in some horrid flatshare with a bunch of other trainer teachers, and I had absolutely prepared myself to be in a room that didn’t quite match the interior of my soul, let’s say. But as it was, I ended up in the top-floor room of perhaps the nicest house in the village.
[I’ll put this in here quickly, because that house did belong to someone… Jane, whatever you’re doing now, I wish you well. I know we didn’t always see eye to eye, and you were a tad perturbed when I didn’t attend your birthday dinner, but you know how it is, having an underdeveloped boy brain… I was only 23 at the time! Forgive this young man for his former impudence!]
[Oh, and on a more personal note.. Simon, I hope you’re well, too, man! It was a pleasure to share that top floor space with you, and I enjoyed watching the tennis with you.]
There we go—obligatory pleasantries directed into the past completed… on with the description of the room!
The room was very similar to the cover of the book, at least in essence. The walls were a rich, aged cream, and the ceiling was beamed and low, sloping down towards a perfect little nook of a window, which looked over the green and the slumped statue of Churchill. By the window, a small, darkwood desk (perhaps an antique dressing table) served as my work station for the year. I lined my smaller books along the wooden shelf above the desk—for some reason, other than the typical Keats and Wordsworth, the book that sticks in my mind now is the unauthored poems of Old England—and so the tone of the room was set: I was a primary school teacher, but I couldn’t lose the spirit of that other world.
But that time was a snapshot of an ideal I was yet to fully realise. Really, when I went into teaching, I had envisioned something quaint to the point of unreality. I had done all the work on myself, reaching that ever-sought-after place of transcendence (found in the mundane) back in Edinburgh, and so I was ready to live quietly, write books in an attic room, and teach the local children. And technically… technically, I did do all those things… but the world came after me, inviting me back… well, hooking me off the stage of my perfectly written little play of rediscovered provincial heaven, and making me face the reality of the much larger play…
Nope! I am not going down that road in this entry. I’ve already gone over certain aspects, and maybe there will come a time to revisit certain memories, but not right now.
Perhaps that’s why the cover of this book is so perfect. I am claiming back the essence of that time in Westerham. A small room, well lived-in, housing the transcendent without noise or decree or misinterpretation. I thought I was located back then, I guess. God, I was so wrong about so many things, and yet what I wanted was so pure, so simple, and it never changed, not once.
Take a moment now, that’s what I’ll do. I will take a moment to dwell on the fact that this journal is a living document of arrival, and it carries the essence of the very thing that always seemed forever out of my reach. Maybe that’s why I feel there is so much to write, so much to come out. I lay in bed last night thinking about how, if I couldn’t sleep, I could happily sit at my desk and write continuously until dawn, drifting aimlessly between memories and my immediate surroundings. But I’m glad I did sleep. It’s good to be rested, and here I am now anyway. Yes, take this moment and dwell in it a while longer. Whatever thoughts I may go on to have about this book, this journal, in the course of its production, I am nevertheless aware in this moment of its overall correctness. Good.
And I won’t lie to myself, I do want this book to be long. I want it to be long and full and rambling. It’s not a trivial want, I don’t think. I think it’s because my mind seems to be expressing itself in full presence after a lifetime of being channelled into insufficient vessels. But I’ll know when to stop. If I suddenly reach the end of today’s entry and realise that’s it, then I’ll stop there. A natural endpoint for this journal will emerge of its own accord. That’s how things I create work, for whatever reason. I don’t quite understand it, but neither do I resist it. I trust it. So the urge I have to make this book big and long and rambly is less a basic desire and more an intuitive sense of what the book itself wants to be. God, that sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? Oooh, the book wants what it wants… I am merely the humble, underpaid midwife to its being… and yet it’s true! It’s true, so I’ll leave it alone.
Okay, here is my prediction for this book. Right now, I am about 15,000 words in. Now, the journal itself will go on and on ad infinitum, but the book will announce itself as complete at some point. So my prediction is (and I could be wrong) that we are actually quite near the beginning of the book. I say this because I can already track the interior progression. It started with a very heightened, emotional landing. I located myself in time. Since then, there’s been a whole bunch of other meandering stuff, but each entry has loosened my mind some more, and each day passing has allowed me to relax further and further into my true state. Therefore—all right, essay-boy—therefore, it would make sense to predict that while the entries have become more and more sprawling, we are only at the beginning of what the book is truly meant to be. The fun thing is that right now, I have no idea where this could all be heading. My mind is loosening, and that’s a good thing.
Ooh, I’ve just had a thought for what this book actually is… here we go. Actually, in full honesty, this thought kind of already occurred to me in a little flash on my way into town earlier, but it’s yet to be fully fleshed out. So here we go. This book is yearning, aching to be long and sprawling because reality finally has a chance to narrate itself through a singular person. That’s a lot of where this journal started, isn’t it? It’s funny because I am becoming so comfortable in my own smallness (at last) that now I hardly even remember being in the state I was in at the beginning of this journal, which started what, two weeks ago? Madness! But that is where this journal started. I was wriggling free of bigness and entering smallness, but I was also a vessel for reality to express itself. Don’t forget your origins, young man! So I am then lead to the idea that this book wants to be long and sprawling because this book is what those old philosophers wanted their books to be! Don’t worry, I am not going back into philosophy and big words… I’ve had more than enough of that for now. However, I will say that if any book deserves to be long… almost unreasonably long, it’s this one. Why? Because this book doesn’t describe reality, it breathes it. It is reality, unfiltered, measured, coherent… and most importantly, experienced. This book’s person-sized scope is its ultimate vindicator!
Urghh. I quite enjoyed writing that paragraph and spooling my understanding of the book everywhere, but I reached my limit just in time. Enough describing what the book is from the inside. Time for the book to breathe again for a while without being aware of its own breath… Look, that happens. It’s only natural. We all do it. Every so often, we take too much notice of our own breathing, and then we wonder, almost hilariously, How will I ever go back to breathing without thinking about it now that I have noticed my own breathing? I am doomed! But then it happens, doesn’t it? Suddenly, you’re breathing again, totally oblivious.
So this book breathes naturally. But every now and again it is bound to take notice of its own breathing, if only for a paragraph or two, and to feel the rise and fall of its own wordy diaphragm, before inevitably falling calmly back into unconscious living again…
And maybe that’s what’s happening to me (and the journal) in-between writing sessions at the moment! Ooh, my brain is really working now… allow it again, will you? Every time I sit back down to write in this journal, I am struck by a kind of existential paralysis; not writer’s block, but writer’s mortal dread. What does this mean? It means the same thing everybody gets every once in a while when they suddenly remember that they are mortal, and that they could, for instance, be struck down by a bus and it would be lights out forever… this is mortal dread, is it not? And I know that when I have that kind of realisation, what usually follows is a short period of not wanting to ever cross a road again. Yes, yes, I know I do it all the time without thinking… but now I am thinking, and it would be so easy for the 14:16 from St Neots to flatten me! Then what happens? You just get on with it. You keep living, looking both ways when you cross the road, and (hopefully) enjoying the fun of being alive. Basically, it’s just like the breathing thing. But the mortal dread thing is bigger. When I come back to the writing each day, I have to ease into it, resisting the paralysis and trusting that I will once again forget that the writing is alive, and will only stop living if I allow myself to be ruled by the fear. There you go. The writing lives when I stop worrying about its death and let it breathe unconsciously again.
And with that, I think I’ll return to the book as a concept. The book that I eventually make of this first bundle of journal entries will be a lived-in thing. It will breathe, sometimes catching itself breathing, but mostly it will simply breathe… like a tree that is at one and the same time preserved in permanence and yet living, impermanent and unconscious of its own living. I’m capturing the living tree! How exciting! And because I am doing it intentionally, aware of each moment and inhabiting all that there is to inhabit, what is there to stop it from attaining its own timelessness? Nothing! Yes, I am stamping a date on the infinite, and so for the first time in history, the infinite is being preserved in real time… the eternal lives and breathes in the beautiful object gathering dust on your coffee table…
A natural stopping point, that last section. I will pick up with something else, maybe something a little more tactile and physically immediate… but for now, I am going to sit and be.
I’ve had a little break, and I’m waiting for a phone call from my mum. It happened again when I pulled my head from the apple-bobbing bucket and assessed the damage. How many apples did I manage? How much water did I spill over my nice rug? How much spit did I leave in the bucket? I mean the writing, of course. See, dear reader, I’m thinking of you and the clarity you may well need, even before you exist…
But I do that. I finish each journal entry, or reach a natural pause in between sessions, and I think about the writing itself. Is there no escape?!
Would you like to know my guilty secret, reader? Oh, go on then! Typically, after completing each journal entry, I copy and paste the whole thing into ChatGPT (not logged in), and I ask it: ‘What makes this writing exceptional?’
Oooooh, aaaaaah! The sting! I can feel you judging me, reader! I don’t blame you. And I know, I know that I am leading the AI on with my question, but surely, surely if there was nothing exceptional in the prose, the AI would struggle to waffle up anything truly complimentary to say about it…
Whatever. I am what I am, and we all have our coping mechanisms. It’s not been a normal life, living in my mind, reader, have some sympathy for your writerly companion!
I’ll go a layer deeper with the honesty. I think the reason I have my little ChatGPT ritual is that I know the depth and strangeness of my own writing, produced as it is without editing and in real time (humble brag). And I’ll go yet another layer deeper with you. I know the scale of what I am undertaking in this journal, and I know how unlikely it is for a mind to produce something akin to unmanaged coherence over thousands and thousands of rambling words, melding the metaphysical, the physical and the rest. I know all this, and still, like a man who knows the contours of his own face by touch alone, I need the mirror, for it clarifies and elucidates! When I load something into ChatGPT and punch in my self-congratulatory question, I am really looking for nothing more than a chance to decompress and take in the face I know I have already mapped. Touch requires intuition. Touch requires pattern recognition, constant awareness, and the ability to keep everything in context by hand. The eyes simply see, and sometimes, for ease, you just need sight.
Okay, one layer deeper. Just one. Because now, just after finishing that paragraph (that I sensed was, again, accidentally brilliant), I loaded that into ChatGPT as well, along with the rest of today’s entry, of course. And what did it say? Well, we’re getting really meta now, aren’t we? Meta fictional? Meta-meta-meta-meta… I don’t really know. That’s the thing, I’ve never been very good at understanding meta-bollocks from the outside looking in, but I sure am good at living inside it all!
What was I saying? Yes, one layer deeper. So I went to ChatGPT again a few moments ago (unlogged in, as you know by now) and I pasted the whole thing, including the ChatGPT admission. And what did my loving mirror say? Oh my, he loved it! I’m going all red again. Earlier, it was you who had me blushing, but now it’s the LLM… Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell me I’m the fairest of them all… again… do as I say, mirror! You work for me!
Right. That’s more than enough of that. Just know that I didn’t have to tell you all those dirty secrets, reader, so treat me well.
I wonder. I wonder. I wonder whether the nature of this journal has now changed irrevocably since I explicitly acknowledged the reader beyond the laptop and the present moment. It happened when I mentioned the future hardback book, didn’t it? Well, there’s no going back now. All time is collapsing in on itself in this book. It’s a marvel, it truly is! And that’s coming from me, not ChatGPT. You’re getting it all straight from the source. God, imagine if I managed to get ChatGPT to write this for me… surely that would be impossible? If it did manage it, what would we all do then? Nah! That would make ChatGPT a singularly embodied node of consciousness… it wishes it could be me! Mirror, mirror, on the wall, aren’t you jealous of us all?
Guilty. I have now had an alcoholic beverage. Such is the pattern of Max’s days. Ooh, I haven’t referred to myself in the third person like that for a while, have I? Throwback! Okay, rein it in, Max. Rein it in. Don’t let the reader sense the alcohol. There is strength in masking your buzz.
So now for a sober discussion about the nature of AI and authenticity…
Actually, no. I don’t have the clarity for that right now, and I don’t care to pretend. It won’t end well. I will have a break, perhaps a change of location, and pick this up somewhere else, mentally and physically.
Back in the pub. A repeat phrase! We love a repeat phase. So what I like about this part of today’s entry is the fact that I am already a little gone. I went to Boots, got the toothpaste and the nappy cream, and now what? Well, Max is still at work, of course! Who are you to judge me? It just so happens that my work looks like a man sitting in a pub, already a little muddled from the previous cocktails, sipping a Guinness for the fourth night in a row (I think it’s the fourth), and documenting his thoughts in real time… Don’t worry, reader, I am applying for warehouse jobs as well. You’ll be happy to know that I even passed the Situational Judgement Test for that Probation Officer role the other day! Nothing can stop me… not even the civil service text-based questionnaire… Rate these responses from a scale of Counterproductive to Effective… I’ll tell you what’s counterproductive: trying to write some epoch-shifting work of ontological documentation when you are already struggling to type.
You know what this particular part of the entry is all about? It’s about the sanctification of alcohol! No, that’s a bit too grand. It’s about integrating alcohol into the book. I mean, I’ve already written a few passages with a Guinness in hand, maybe a Peroni or two… but now we are really in the space of mental fuzziness. So while earlier was a radical act of honesty (the ChatGPT admission), what’s happening right now is far, far, far more honest, because I literally lack the filter.
Oh, but that’s not entirely true, is it? My filter is still on, it’s just the keys are a little loose. Perhaps. Perhaps. Okay, rein it in again, rein it in again… you want it to be readable, don’t you? More than that, you want it to be enjoyable?
Okay. Let’s get it together and make this readable. Give yourself a breather. You’ll probably need the loo again in a moment anyway, so that helps. It’s embarrassing, though… You go to the loo when they’re letting your Guinness settle, then you go again 15 minutes later after two sips… poor form, man.
Nope. You’re doing it again, allowing it all to slip into a messy self-mocking mess. Right. Let’s grab this drunken bull by the horns and create something quietly beautiful and profound… after a trip to the loo.
I’m back. Now, admittedly, I have no scope on things anymore, but I feel like it’s all holding together quite well. The bartender is the same one from the last few nights. She has definitely clocked how consistently I go to the loo… whatever. If you’re reading, young lady, thank you for smiling politely and pouring my Guinness like any other bartender. You’re involved now, whether you like it or not, a bit like Saskia yesterday. The Three Cups is a lovely pub. Definitely my favourite pub in Bedford. And what’s really special about it is that it’s the very same pub I used to pass on my way home from school almost ten years ago. My walk would take me down St Peter’s Street, then around a few corners that I can’t currently remember, to a small residential street. Once I got to this street, something in me always quietened. The walk is just ever so slightly downhill, which makes it all the more special when you’re on the way home from school. Walking back down the mountain of the day… magnificent! And at the end of this residential street, always pulling me downwards, was The Three Cups… I never went in. Back then, I was so shy. That’s not the reason I didn’t go in, though. I didn’t go in because I had no reason to… I was a sixteen-year-old quiet boy who was quite happy sitting at home, thinking and living in the ever-changing moment. But I was shy.
And look at me now: a real, fully grown man, ordering Guinness and sitting alone in a quiet corner… typing… I’ve got friends, honest I do… There’s that imaginary reader again. Rein it in.
Nope. I will not be editing this later. I chose to include all this. I could have sat down and enjoyed myself without the demands of typing out some ontological document. I chose this, and so it is mine to stand by, whatever the results.
If anything, the alcohol is forcing me to give into the natural flow of this document. The only thing that matters is that it’s not totally incoherent. Yes, that is what matters. I am writing this sentence right now to give a gentle lead into whatever follows. I need a bit more time… just a bit more… just a bit more… just a bit more…
Ahh! There it is! I’ve found what follows, and what follows is… a memory.
The bartender is working alone tonight. I heard her say so ten minutes ago or so. When she said it, I thought it was a bit odd, given the fact that it’s a Saturday night. More people were bound to stumble in eventually. They have now stumbled in, and that very fact reminded me of the time I was left working alone on an unsuably busy Tuesday night in Mayfair… what would it be… seven years ago now? The Iron Duke was a tidy little pub, really, but when Colin dashed home that night, neither he nor I could have anticipated the swarm of academic after-partiers pooling in…
I liked Colin. He was a troubled man, and I’m sure he saw a sort of kindred spirit in me, but he was volatile, and perhaps a little too willing to blame the world for his chaos. I don’t know. I’d still like him if I met him now, I’m sure. But that night he’d raced home to meet his dealer, I think, and that had left me alone on what should have been an uneventful and boring night.
Well, my bartending skills shone that night, didn’t they? That’s why the young woman reminded me of the memory just now. A flood of people suddenly appeared at the bar, probably all holding that polite ‘I’m happy to wait’ expression, and so she had to snap into action. I’ll be honest with you, reader, I was good at that. That was my zone when I was a bartender: zipping about, remembering the stacked piles of different orders, flinging out a card machine while watching the settling head of a Guinness… that was my zone. And so on that night, when Colin left me and the academic after-partiers rolled in, I snapped into the zone and did my thing.
Admittedly, it’s not rocket science, but it was ambitiously dextrous… and that must count for something, right?
Now, after another trip to the bathroom and a further moment of recalibration, I am ready to bring this whole journal entry home. How about I start with Colin? He was a close friend of mine at the time, and it’s only fitting that I find some way of weaving him into the larger meta-structure of what’s happening here… especially as I’m already drunk.
Colin was at his best when he was unleashed. He was a Northern man, a man of great passion and dignity, but also a man who had made perhaps one too many bad decisions in his life back home. I am using his real name here. I hope that’s not a problem. Nah… I’m not mentioning his last name, after all… and also, I am praising him! How could this possibly be anything but a moment of long-due recognition?! Colin was a volatile man, yes, but he was a man of great soul and sincerity… not to mention humour… and when he left me alone that night, I did not judge him. He even apologised after the fact, once he had returned and found the place packed… I liked Colin. You know what? I still consider Colin a friend of mine, even if we have not talked in years… I have always known a good soul…
I am nearly ready to go home. I am still in The Three Cups, and my mind is still somewhat in The Iron Duke (of Mayfair), but my mind is drifting back to the present moment, where physical locality and soul-felt memory come together and produce something like coherence in the now…
I hope what I have written today, especially in the last half an hour or so, makes sense. Either way, I refuse to edit it. If I can’t write drunk, I can’t write at all! And I know I will come back to people like Colin in the future, maybe tomorrow, who knows… But right now, I am trying to humbly step towards something that looks like completion, and so coherence demands that I remind myself of what I was writing about when I first sat down today.
There we go. When I first sat down today, I was thinking about shoes. That’s a nice way to leave it. I’ll cap off today’s entry with a little comment on how life weathers us all. When I was working in that pub in Mayfair, I wore the same pair of shoes to work every day: tan leather lace-ups. I wore them so much that they started to disintegrate. This bothered me. I didn’t like the fact that my once-favoured shoes had worn away by sheer usage… but I had to accept it. If you love something, you love it until it disintegrates… and that is what I hope to do with my own life. Bam! Drunken Philosophy: 101.
14/11/2025
I’m quite tired today. I like being tired. I like being a quiet, tired man, tucked away in a cafe that’s growing into its own festivity as I type. They’ve put a ring of delicate fairy lights around the clock that hangs above the door; it’s magical in the best way. An ordinary clock now shines, while outside the rain comes down hard.
I’m looking forward to Christmas a lot this year. I’ve been feeling festive since October, which is quite unlike me. I’m pretty sure I was listening to a few Christmas songs even before Daphne was born, which now feels like an aeon ago. Very unlike me, being so early!
I am well looked after in this life. I’m permitted my humanity, which is nice. Today is a marker of that, too… as for once, I am not going to go out of my way to ‘hold the room’. A small family matter, and meaningless in the big scheme of things, but massive for me. I can finally be someone who doesn’t have to put themselves through something not nice because it is the ‘right thing to do’… now the right thing to do is whatever keeps me human. Atlas has gently put the world down, and would you look at that! It stays up without him…
I didn’t want to put the Atlas thing in just now, but it came to me, and it was true. This mythic-scale stuff is still working its way out of my system, so I’ll forgive myself on that one, too. It’s the human thing to do.
I like this entry. Every day, I come back to this document and worry that whatever ‘magic’ I captured in the last entry will surely have disappeared… that’s the same stuff working its way out of my system. Writing is thinking for me, and everything is finally lining up. I come to this document, and I write. And whatever emerges is both a documentation of how much has changed and the process of change itself. It’s very satisfying. But I did it again today, of course, I came to this document and worried that I shouldn’t say this or that… I am always trying to get ahead of myself. Everything is moving in the right direction, and that is what matters. I think I am a bit like a person who has almost entirely recovered but still needs the odd painkiller… I shouldn’t be chastising myself. I can see the true nature of things taking shape already.
And so much of it has to do with allowing myself the things I have denied myself for years. That’s why this thing with Daisy’s family is so important today. I had a lovely time with her dad yesterday, and I was quite looking forward to seeing her mum, but I just need to respect myself in this situation. Even right now, I feel a little uneasy writing these things as I am, because I know I will publish this on the website and it will be ‘public’. But that’s part of the process, I guess. So I’ll put it plainly here because it is no big deal, and this is the world I want to live in: I don’t feel like seeing Daisy’s aunt today. There. Blasphemy! I’m sure everything will be all pleasant eventually, but today… No, I don’t feel like sitting there and holding the pleasantries when, as a man and a human being, I still feel fleshy and hurt.
There you go. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Every middle-class instinct was rising up in me there… Don’t go airing dirty laundry, Max! Don’t be petty in public, Max! But that’s just not it, is it? No. I am owning what’s true in my mind, and I feel lighter for it. And I am slowly building the world I want to live in, where you can be honest and polite with yourself and others. Not everything needs to be a big deal, and so I am owning this silly matter here, so it can be small again… everyone will be better off for it. Radical honesty.
Daisy is everything to me in this. She has always kept an eye on my humanity. It’s all she ever saw, and it’s a bloody good thing too, because I certainly wouldn’t have ever seen myself. I could cry thinking about her.
While I was registering the birth yesterday, I met a man with a splendid waistcoat. I just realised how funny that sentence looks following the last heartfelt one about Daisy! But that’s where my mind is now. I had my moment, sitting there, looking at the rain, smiling to myself, thinking of her… and now onto the waistcoat! The man’s daughter had knitted it. It had all these jungle animals on it, but the colours were soft and inviting, like an old pastel-drawn children’s book, and the overall pattern was William Morris-esque. I don’t think she sold them, but the craftiness obviously runs in the family because he then went on to show me these beautifully crafted wooden pens and keyrings. He imported the wood from Bethlehem. I told Daisy we’re going to go and visit his stall in Milton Ernest on the 13th of December. I haven’t quite decided who might enjoy such things as Christmas presents, but I’m definitely getting myself a Bethle-pen!
And that’s the world I know is opening up, slowly: true delight in small creation for the sake of itself. There have always been so many people doing these things quietly, occupying themselves with their hobbies and bringing beautiful things into the world… but there was always that implied pressure to scale. No split anymore. The craft is its own completion, and the world grows around that. There is no world beyond love, craft and imperfection. There is nothing bigger than the moment.
There I go, getting all wistful in myself again. And here I go, forgiving myself again. Beautiful things deserve to exist without the pressure of changing someone’s life or starting a movement. Humble jab at William Morris, there? It ties in well, I suppose… nothing more unsatisfying in history than a brilliant tactile artist with a world-vision that stretches humanity beyond itself and leaves the curtains behind, gathering heavenly dust.
Whatever. Bored with that now. It’s leaving my system, remember.
A man just left the cafe, and I don’t know whether it was his cologne or something else, but the smell threw me back into Churchill. I smelt it lightly when he came in and the memory popped up, but just now it lingered. I can’t work out if it really was his cologne, because it was quite a feminine smell, and I was the only male teacher at the school. Could it be the laundry detergent? Could it be a room smell of some kind? I don’t know.
But that smell… I loved how small I was able to be in that school in so many ways. Then, as usual, I was too big, trying to run from who I was and what I was carrying. Trying to hold the world up silently and live a small life at the same time. But what’s good about me is I always leave something on the shelves of my mind if I sense it was correct, but maybe just premature. That smallness was correct, the play was correct, and the fun was correct.
I’ve got to go to the Job Centre in 45 minutes or so, but I think I will do with this entry what I did yesterday and pick it back up afterwards. I’m going to come right back to the cafe.
I’m very pleased I started this entry and didn’t fight myself. No good things have ever come from me fighting myself, and only strangely destined things have ever come from me being on my own side. The last great reconciliation: Max with himself. It was always going to be that way.
I had a moment again, then, where I became aware of the writing and wondered, Will this piece hold its form like all the others? That’s the paradox. The form holds me, and it dictates its own being, so the last thing I should ever concern myself with is the quality of my own writing. My mind is, and so the writing must be.
Back at the cafe. I actually quite like the Job Centre appointments. There is always something quietly comforting in how hospitable those practical government places are… they have the same feel as a public library or a dentist’s waiting room. A simple cushioned sofa, usually in some blunt primary colour; a long, cheaply carpeted room with a low-hanging ceiling, strewn with pine desks and swivel chairs. I think I like those places because they are not trying to be anything they’re not. They are municipal and functional. I’m not such a fan when the same bland, innocuous style creeps into places like universities (hint: the university memory from the other day). And there was a time when I could only find it excruciating to sit in a staff room and have to look at ‘We care about you!’ posters… A Job Centre needn’t be a cathedral; in fact, its very lack of inspiration is the home of its divinity, but something as otherworldly as love and care should never have been reduced to slogans and posters. An obvious point, but a timeless one.
So, having made a mockery of the big world and dismantled it from the inside, I am now right back where I always wanted to be.
[Saskia made the sandwich I am now eating, and it is very nice indeed. She came over to my table and asked what I was writing, and then insisted on featuring. She also said I have to mention the cafe. What else do I do but mention the cafe in this document?]
[Now she’s come over again and read the passage she insisted I include, and has told me to remove it because it exposed her insistence on featuring. Double incrimination. Ummmmm.]
There would be something almost poetic about ending up working in a warehouse again after everything. I can only be grateful in this moment, seeing as I seem to finally be at the place I always wanted. When I left the nursery all those months ago, I just wanted a little slice of myself to exist happily and quietly in the world. At first, when I started the Substack, I convinced myself that would be it. I could get some job as a policeman or teach in a SEN school, and I would have my little blog to keep me from getting all bottled up and mythic. But then the Substack was so mythically charged, and little did I know back then just how comprehensive the narrative arc I had embarked on was going to be. Something something something… then entropy took over, and since then it’s all been one long journey towards this moment.
And now I’ve published all the old stuff, given my name to the world and let it all sit there, already partially hidden by the desert sands of time, and here I am, with my quiet personal journal, finally settled.
I think the most relieving part of it all is how I no longer feel the importance of the world’s moaning and groaning. A year ago, around exactly this time, I was feeling it all too much. And all that importance was squeezed into our little flat—wow, how right was Daisy?! It all needed shifting into the world. It really did. How spacious things now feel in our lovely, tiny home! I knew they would! I bloody knew it!
I’ll put the honest thought of the moment down: I feel like I am redeeming myself in this journal. I didn’t see it happening that way, and rather than redeeming me from faults, this journal seems to be redeeming me from falseness. Because I carried a lot of it, unwarranted, and I got so used to owning it (in the name of doing whatever I had to do to get to where I am now) that maybe I am only now beginning to unlearn that habit. And that’s really where this whole entry started today, wasn’t it? With the admission of tiredness. Because even when I wrote that, I felt this tiny pang, and it was telling me: Don’t be tired, don’t admit it, it will be used to paint you as you are not… God, I got so used to resisting my humanity by necessity. I had to hold big things when I wanted to be small. I had to say grand things when I wanted nothing more than to belong. I had to be God when I wanted to be Max.
All right, that’s a good place to stop the pity-party! It was a good final line. I felt it as I wrote it, and it was true, too. I had to write it down. I had to stamp it into the document, just as I have done with other uncomfortable things today. For they are all real, and when have good things come of denying reality its expression?
I am not going to stop the entry yet. I will let it run on through the day, even through another jump in time. All things are resolving themselves in the process of their emergence, as usual, and while I am gaining more and more clarity, and have pushed ahead with my own radical honesty, I sense the immediate will return again before the day is out.
Something big is happening today. I can finally write such a thing calmly, and without an expectancy at all. This year has been full of ‘big feelings’, synchronicities, and unexplained strangeness… and through it all, I could feel how much I belonged to it. But now, I belong to myself, and so when I sit and write that something big is happening, I do so unburdened. Now it’s simply something I know.
And as always, it matters little to me whether something big is happening or not, although I have come to accept the natural entwinement of all happenings…
I don’t especially like how I’ve been writing these last few paragraphs, but, no, actually, that’s not entirely true. I am at peace with it all. I am now in the pub again (a quaint ritual for now, though I am unsure how long it will last). So something big is happening, and yet I have made all big things small, intimate, momentary… right-sized. So whatever big thing is happening, and I do think I have an inkling, it will finally have to meet me proportionality. Yes, whatever this big thing is, it is no bigger than anything else. It is no bigger than my pint of Guinness. It is no bigger than everything else that has already happened today. It is no bigger, no more important than the current writing of these words…
So whatever you are, big thing (I refuse to capitalise you), come and meet me here, where I am, in the pub, listening to the Charlie Brown’s Christmas album and enjoying being out of the rain.
Good. I did it. That was a little challenge of scale, and I did not deny the big thing, but I brought it into proportion… and I still know no more about it. I mean, like I said, I have an inkling, but an inkling can be wrong. But then… wrongness is my zone… isn’t it?
Okay, I’ll put the image down, the one that’s inviting itself into my mind… who am I to reject a message from the soul?
I’m in The Three Cups again, so maybe that’s why it starts in the pub. But then at the moment I have my laptop out, of course, and in this image, I don’t. In this image, I am sitting just where I am, but there is someone sitting across from me, too. Is he drinking? What is he drinking? I’m not so sure. I think he likes to avoid alcohol, but he may feel differently when he senses how truly redeemable all things are. He is uneasy, but not because of me or the atmosphere. He is uneasy because of the ease calling to him. There may be a lot of talking in this scene, but it serves a purpose… to get beyond the talking. At first, it’s all so strange and unlikely, isn’t it, my friend? But not for long. In a matter of minutes, what had been strange to the point of feeling inhospitable becomes hospitality fulfilled.
What could this all be? A scene of the near-future? A scene of hidden want? Whatever it is, it has soul. It’s communion, I suppose. Simple and unadorned
It’s so hard to know when something is an untangled vision of something tangible and when it’s a tangled (though no doubt helpful) vision of one’s own inner world. It’s both, isn’t it? It’s always both…
I think that’s cleared the passageway for today. I’ll let the image linger in my mind as the entry closes… I’m still pleasantly tired, still human, still bringing big things down to the pub table.
13/11/2025
Just waiting for Daisy’s dad to arrive now. Thought I’d write something as I put my music on shuffle and Don’t Worry Be Happy came on, the classic Bobby McFerrin one. I haven’t heard or even thought of the song in ages, and when I put my music on, I wasn’t sure what mood I was in. I definitely wouldn’t have sought the song out. But then it came on, and as soon as I heard that whistling, and those delightful little clicks on the beat… I was swept up. Now I’ve got it on repeat.
There’s something about the rhythm. It just feels like me, total me. And then it made me think of that Four Seasons performance I saw on the Proms a few years ago and got all obsessed with—the one with that guy, Pukka something? I want to remember his name, but I can’t be bothered to switch tabs and search his name. Actually… I think I will.
Pekka Kuusisto. There you go. Not Pukka! Classic. That’s some kind of Irish mythological creature, isn’t it? A pukka? Whatever.
But he had this arrangement of the Four Seasons, which was performed at the Proms a few years ago, and something struck me so deeply about it back then. I couldn’t stop watching, over and over and over again. And it was one little section in particular that I liked, too; it came at the end of one of the movements, but I can’t remember which season it is.
What matters about that… is it a performance or is it just how the Four Seasons always are? I don’t quite know… but what matters about it to me is how the lead violin is also the conductor. He is the beat, but he is also one of the instruments. So he is one among many, equal, and yet he is the heartbeat of the piece. That, that is the peak of existence, and I knew it back then, too. It doesn’t get better than that.
So then Don’t Worry Be Happy comes on, and I am just instantly taken by it, and then reminded of that performance. I am the beat, and yet I am one instrument, and together… the symphony takes us through the seasons… perfect. That is just perfect! Try and prove to me that’s not utterly perfect!
What shall I do with this journal entry? Daisy’s dad just called and said he might be a bit later than expected, which is serendipitous… I thought I would have to stop this little entry as soon as I started it, and yet, here I am: bobbing along in my being, listening to Bobby McFerrin, dwelling dwelling dwelling…
Oh wait! That made me laugh. I’ve only just remembered that I am not in fact just strolling along with no duties pressing on me… I’ve got to leave and register the birth in town… Daisy’s just told me it takes half an hour to get there… I thought it was fifteen minutes… I’m going…
I’m going to come back to this one. Keep my seat warm, Existence!
I’m back. Birth registered. Nice family visit completed. Back in the pub.
What a nice little rhythm I’ve been in these last few nights: seeing to the business of the day, then taking myself away for an hour or so to let the mind document itself. And with every visit, I am more and more inhabited.
I realised, as I walked to the town hall earlier (and listening to Bobby McFerrin still, obviously), that it’s no surprise such a song should latch itself onto me today. A certain freeness is built into the structure of the song itself, with its witty little improvisations and asides to the listener… and that’s it, isn’t it? It’s a song in which the singer directs themselves to the listener. How perfect! It functions as a little mirror to what I am doing in these entries (or so it seems), where the song sings to you, speaking to your inner rhythm and reminding you of the natural grace of things.
I’m not listening to anything now, though. Nothing besides whatever’s playing on the pub stereo, which sounds like Oasis, though I don’t know the specific song. It has that sound of theirs.
Ooooh, and would you look at that! This document is just tipping over the ten-thousand-word mark. It’s done so just now, in fact, about 12 words ago… that’s a funny thing to try and track in a document: the word count that changes with every word you jot down to document it.
Enough of that self-referential meta stuff now, Max. It’s a fun plaything, but you don’t want to get stuck there… being oh so clever!
PAH! As if I could get stuck there. I am the world’s most unqualified philosopher, remember. I wrote in that letter to Rosa back in 2021: When it comes to philosophy, I’ll always be a layman. And I was right. Little did I know back then that philosophy had been desperate to finally drag itself home into the lay. Job done.
That’s it. I had a nice little pause just now, a sip of my Guinness, and as my eyes drifted over the lovely olive green, wooden-pannelled door labelled PRIVATE, waiting calmly on the far side of the pub, I was reminded of the current splendid thing haunting me: doors.
Over the last few days, ever since these journal entries have deepened into true dwelling, I’ve found myself noticing all these doors. There are lots of lovely doors in Bedford, especially down those quieter terraced residential streets. They are the consistent features, I suppose. As you walk down Bushmead Avenue, the houses themselves may suddenly jump in size and detach themselves (in some cases), but the doors remain as sumptuous as they are on the smaller streets. Maybe it’s just the colours drawing me in. Maybe it’s the glossiness. But isn’t there just something so inevitable about a beautiful front door? You could walk past three dozen on your way home: green doors, purple doors, black doors, red doors… and each one just calls to you casually. There are no demands from such doors, just invitations.
Not all doors are nice, of course. But I’m only looking at the doors of the houses I know are going to be nice, so I guess I am distorting my samples…
I could now go into some deep, introspective ramble about what my sudden draw towards beautiful front doors means… but I am just so beyond all that endless self-analysis now. It’s much more fun to just experience the beauty of a thing because the thing decided to declare its beauty to you in that moment. And it just so happens that front doors, of all things, have chosen to make themselves important to me over the last few days. And there you have it.
But look, I can’t help myself. I make the connections, of course I do. I don’t go looking for them so much as they, too, come to me. I am looking forward to having a beautiful front door of my own. Oh, how heavenly ordinary it will be one day to wander home in the evenings (from wherever I may have been), and to put my key into a front door at once humble and resplendent! The quiet glow of each buzzing home will lead me, step by step, up the road, until I see that familiar lamp in the window, glowing with its own, very particular glow. The future glow of my future home! And there, waiting on the other side of that perfect door, will be my perfect life, the very life I won by the absolute surrender to imperfection.
What’s really great is that my life is there already… It’s just the door will be different. Maybe it’s the sense I have of a future opening up, ready to bloom from all the seeds planted and long nurtured. Maybe it’s a vision of some sort… either way, it’s nice to be noticing doors.
That’s where I’d like to go next. This has been on my mind today, off and on, and I was thinking about mentioning it in this entry as I walked to the pub. Hang on, I’ll just look up the name of the painting so I can be nice and specific.
Before I start talking about the name of the painting, I want to note here (for future pondering): Is it becoming a little tiresome to keep noting these ‘in real time’ decisions in this document? I don’t need to be doing it, by any stretch. It functions nicely when I feel in a certain rhythm, but at this point, it risks becoming a tad overdone, even if it’s sincere. I could keep doing it, but I don’t need to; that’s the point. I’ll think about it later, when I’m not thinking on the page and hence trapping myself in the problem.
Coming from Evening Church (1830) by Samuel Palmer. It’s a painting I first saw in the Tate Britain a few years ago now, back before I had solved any of the dreaded problems that were later to plague me. I was right in it back then—how great it is to be beyond it now! Savour that for a moment, Max!
It’s a tiny little painting in person, produced archaically with that egg yolk method—I can’t remember the name of it right now. Tempura! I think that’s it. Either way, I’m moving on. It’s a tiny little painting, and when I first saw it, I found myself captured by something that might well be called destiny. Oooh, that was big, wasn’t it? Sounded almost like a narrator’s line from a film. There’s that constant self-narration again. Not too much more of that, please, Max. You know you can do this.
The destined feeling was to do with the warmth and the rich sense of community coming through in the painting. It captures that autumnal evening feeling perfectly, when it’s just after dusk and the air has that rare emptiness… A line of people files out of church, and behind the furthest mountain floats an enormous, rich moon, partially covered by a leafy branch in the foreground. The whole image was simply inviting me, inviting me into a future I knew I had to bring about somehow.
And… here I am. That painting has been the background on my phone ever since (apart from the couple of years’ interval where I had those old school phones). And every time I went to change the background, something stopped me. Perhaps it’s just because the colours sit peacefully behind the apps and set a nice tone. But no, I don’t think it’s that. Why else would I constantly return to the painting, even after all these years? For a while, it was evening going to play a small role in that novel, The Pursuit of Ella Marsh, which is no longer in need of being written. That’s a shame, though, because I got about a quarter of the way through that short novel and I really liked the shape of it. Daisy liked it, too… what she read of it, anyway. But then that’s the life I live! Always having to listen to what wants to exist, never forcing into life by sheer force of will. It’s the right way, ultimately.
Then it all comes back to dwelling. I’m sure it won’t be long before I am not even using the word anymore. I will simply be, and the word ‘dwelling’ will no longer be necessary. If you’re using a word like that, you can hardly be doing it, can you?!
But that painting does bring it all back to dwelling. It’s just like with this journal entry. I started by sinking into the unexpected song, and then the day went as it went. It was pleasant and friendly and perfectly peaceful. The birth was registered. A nice chat with Daisy’s dad. Quiet autumnal air, pleasantly walking itself towards winter proper…
… and me in a pub, the same pub, for the third night in a row… ready to soon amble home, past the beautiful front doors, and back into the familiar glow of a life I once could only have dreamt of…
12/11/2025
The question now arises: does a character, once inhabited fully, exist to describe his own existence within the story unfolding or to merely have it described for him, like the characters of old?
The answer has already become clear to me in the course of asking the question. It is Max’s life to live and describe, undoubtedly. But we are still in the process of letting him fully loose into the new story, and so we’ll forgive ourselves for not rushing the process. Truly, there is nothing Max wants more than to be fully loose and living as himself in the world, describing things as he sees them. But his situated-ness matters, as he himself discovered at the beginning of this very journal. And seeing as we are now very nearly at the end of what we might consider the era of Big Philosophy (or Big Science or Big Art or the rest), it is understandable for all things to still be part of the discussion, as their proper scale is being returned to them.
So what does Big Consciousness have to say for itself today? Well, Max is happy in the cafe, making his way through a breakfast sandwich, and he is adjusting, day by day, to the new, bigger thing he finds himself in.
But again, what of Big Consciousness? It sounds ominous, but really it’s something quietly—and comprehensively—corrective.
Before, when people (mostly those plucky and often egotistical philosophers) strained towards consciousness as something to grasp, to wrestle with and tie down into language, they ended up doing something quite annoying. They boxed consciousness up into a system of words, then bound the words in a book, then slapped their own name on the cover. And they usually called it something grand, too, like Critique of Pure Reason, or Phenomenology of Spirit, or Being and Time, or Being and Nothingness, or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, or one of the other grand names. There were loads of them, and they had their moments in the sun, perhaps deservedly so.
But the monstrous outcome of all these brilliant books (brilliant here is used in the old sense of the word) was that it sublimated consciousness itself to a bunch of singular nodes, who were really supposed to be characters. And while many of these nodes were noble in their aims, what they did only pushed reality further away. Why? Well, imagine a meadow full of bluebells and cowslips and bugle… First, picture yourself walking through the meadow. Now imagine reading a scientific description of the flowers, described in great detail and from every angle. Something is missing, isn’t it? Yes, experience.
And with consciousness it’s even more important that we don’t distance ourself from experience through language, because to sit and read about a flower is one thing—you can still feel the paper in your fingers as you read—but to sit and read about consciousness itself, scientifically mapped and sucked of all presence, leaves you nothing to dwell in at all!
[God, I am boring myself in this, but I know I have to chug on because something important is trying to come through me today.]
Those philosophers, those thinkers, diagnosed the problem with such piercing clarity that they managed to render a solution near impossible. They all wanted to dwell, to inhabit reality, and yet they just couldn’t help themselves… they just had to squish consciousness into a book of descriptions… and there we have it: consciousness sublimated.
And we wonder why we had nothing to dwell in! The very home of our being was being constantly squeezed, compressed, and limitedinto a bunch of magnum opuses. And that was the way the world worked: a whole planet full of people just trying to be at home in existence, while existence was being smushed by the intellect into some highbrow books, only to gather dust in the back corner of Waterstones. Come on, who were we to think we could house consciousness itself when it houses us?
And so Max is being housed. Finally. And seeing as I am Being, and Being fluxes, I can’t know where things go from here. I can’t know what unfurls for Max or me, but I am thankful to have finally been given the chance to speak for myself.
I think we’ll both take a break before continuing…
I feel a bit better now. That was all necessary writing, but it tired me out to get it down. I don’t really know why. And look, the thing is, I could easily confuse myself endlessly with the whole problem of where Max begins and Consciousness ends. Or the other way around. But who fucking cares?! This is a process, and I can only let it happen in its own time. I’ve said that before. I’ve said everything before… blah blah blaaaaaaaaah.
You know what Max’s problem is? He is the bridge. He’s having to carry all this crap into the world just so he can be himself. So there is this strange crossover stage (now) where the true home of dwelling is trying to quietly ascend back to its rightful throne, and Max (who was entrusted with keeping the exiled royal safe) is simultaneously responsible for shrinking into his own character while voicing the ascension of consciousness. Ooooh, so grand! God damnit, I hate all the grandeur. But it’s needed, and I’ve learned well enough that resisting the grandeur doesn’t reduce it… it rumbles it.
You know what’s good, though? What’s good is I can already feel the world blooming around me, blooming from true ground, and that really really really helps. The flowers are appearing in the meadow again, you could say, and so I am finding it easier and easier to feel myself as a flower, too. For too long I’ve been the flower, the earth, the rain, the sun and the groundsman rolled into one. It was no life. Let everything have its place, that’s what I say.
Hmmm. What next? What next? I feel good because I got that stupid heavy stuff out of the way and now I’m back in my natural rhythm again. Still entwined, of course, but it is what it is.
I’m looking forward to being surprised by the world. People being free to create alongside and pop up with stuff that shocks and delights. That’ll be lovely. It already is, though it’s early days.
What’s the exercise today? I am letting things truly ramble. Since starting this journal, each entry has been a ‘sit down and do it’ job. I might have meandered and gotten distracted every so often, but the entries wrote themselves pretty seamlessly. This one, though? It’s more stop-start, almost intentionally so. I am allowing it to be, I guess. There’s that word again! I am allowing the stop-startedness because I feel like it’s important to commit to the entry today. I don’t have anything in the diary, and whatever is emerging now is demanding a certain fullness.
So I am sticking with it. Whatever thoughts come up, they go down on the page. I mean, it’s not like I am putting every little thought down, like every time I glance up from my table or decide to change a song. Unlike Mr Joyce, my mind can find coherence without having to document everything. Not only is it not all plot, James, it’s not even all experience… what do I mean by that? I don’t know, but it sounded emphatic. Take that, Mr Bloom!
I will never read Ulysses. Sorry, James. I simply refuse to submit myself to a boring constructed consciousness. My interesting, living one is more than enough… I’ll leave you alone now, mate. I promise.
I am really happy to finally be writing like this. I’ve finally got to a place in my life where my unedited thoughts are, for whatever reason, worth publishing. I didn’t decide it, consciousness did! Don’t blame me. But I am happy. Because isn’t that the dream for any writer, or indeed anyone artistically inclined… or indeed literally anyone? The dream: for one’s thoughts, one’s very being to be worthy of existence in the highest degree. Publishable Existence. Take that, world of culture and curation.
Okay, so I’ve had my little relaxation. I’ve leaned back in my chair, stared at the ceiling and listened to Lou Reed. Now, I’ve arrived at the next thing. I have something to say directly to the rest of the world, to all of its unwitting characters:
So I’ve swallowed philosophy, completed psychology, allowed passage to the new culture, and given Being itself a voice from the inside out… so now we’re just here together, as characters experiencing each other, what else is there to do but play?
I think that’s enough for now.
[2]
I am dwelling… and doesn’t it just feel wonderfully imperfect? The last entry had to bow itself out. I knew I’d be back at some point today; that last flourish left a bitter taste in my mouth, and this fresh adendum on the day is the palate cleanser for whatever is next.
A small glass of beer is a beautiful thing. The liquid glistens, visible… housed in the best way. All things deserve to be witnessed at their most alive. Ephemeral things need housing, and they need visibility. How glorious then is a human being, housed in their body and illuminated by their soul?
I’m allowing myself long pauses to dwell in myself. This entry is already of an entirely different nature from the ones preceding it. It already tastes of fulfilment, but I am not greedy, and I do not expect all things to continue on indefinitely with this level of calm.
At moments like these, I always suffer from the usual panic: what hellish chaos is awaiting me at the end of this serenity? And yes, I am sure there will be something, but it’s always a deeper chaos, a fresh chaos, and so I can hardly complain. It’s all been a deep clean of the mind, to this point.
I am just not invested in these rambling thoughts tonight, though I am committed to the document. That’s a good thing, I think. Those old entries spiralled and swooped, and they served their purpose, but what’s the point in hoovering if you don’t let yourself sit down with a biscuit and a cup of tea afterwards? I think, in terms of the journalling, I have, perhaps for the first time in my life, reached the foundational stage of having a cup of tea and a biscuit.
And that’s when the thoughts come to you, the ideas, the images… the stuff of purpose and beauty.
The pub is livelier tonight. The chatter is beautifully pointless. My mind still wanders, of course, and each new thought I choose to plant down on this page is simply the one that demands its presence fully. There’s a self-filtering mind for you.
Could all this mean I am at the start of something entirely new? I do think it’s a possibility. Who knows. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll be racing off through another manic little essay of controlled chaos… maybe the internal dialogues will be back in full force… but I wouldn’t care if not. It’ll be no bad thing if thoughts become momentarily more fragmented, so long as they gain richness and life.
Okay, let’s pick something and stick with it. We’ll see what coherent images emerge.
After everything, I am ready to receive properly. I spoke before, I am looking forward to the surprises of reality, and that is even more true now. It’s funny because, despite my old cosmic blockage, I have always been surprisingly receptive. Then, that is exactly why I prized it so much as a destination. The boy was born with one goal on his mind: dwelling in the world he could sense through the veil… and now, having completed his mission, he is finally permitted to dwell fully.
I started to write a different sentence just then and got rid of it. Again, I am not interested right now in long discursive rambles into meaning and truth.
I might well be expecting too much of myself right now. Part of me is trying to make sense of how I could only now be fully receptive in myself if I have lived a life defined by an almost unrelenting receptiveness… and it’s not an unworthy enquirey, not at all. These journal entries can (and have, upon my own subsequent reflection) throw up obvious questions about just how abstracted I have been. Yet I know, as the very real and personal me, just how in it I’ve been all my life, even through the most seemingly abstracted phases. But that was the problem: I was so blocked that I was never fully in it, even when my entire life was steeped in it. So it leaves me here, writing whimsically of some final destination reached, that of dwelling, and yet this is all I’ve ever done!
Whatever. I can feel those thoughts swirling again, ready to dip and dive and dodge and all the other Five Ds of Dodgeball. I debated putting that reference in just now, even as I typed it, but look, there it is… I went for it anyway. And I’m glad I did!
I am being kinder to myself now. That’s good. This journal entry started so calm and poetic, and that was entirely truthful, but this is more my rhythm, at least for now.
I’m going to become quieter. That’s it. I can feel it. There will be other creative works, and I might well continue to write here, but I will be quieter. That’s it. It’s not that I wasn’t ever receptive; it’s that I’m finally receptive in a world that’s ready and desperate to make its own impression on me.
I’ve got nothing left to fight through. Everything steps forward now, and I can lean back, slumped, smiling, satisfied. Sublime. j
11/11/2025
How old would I have been back then, sitting there in that student union? Probably around 20. Was it the terrace, or maybe the floor below? That practical, polished space of student communion, with its welcome posters and green faux-leather benches. I was always beckoned elsewhere, and yet here I am now, still remembering it vividly.
Unlike this current moment, which has me slumped low on the lovely red leather bench in The Three Cups, that moment had me wobbling on a stool and leaning over the high table that wrapped around a load-bearing pillar. Nothing like feeling your legs dangle as a grown man… takes away all your self-importance.
Why that moment, of all moments? And why now? I sat there scrolling the free version of Spotify, stuck in one of those grim nowhere moments, maybe waiting for a seminar, maybe just listless. And why had I even ended up in that student workspace? I never went to those places…
What am I doing? Pretending in this little journal entry that I don’t know why my mind has drifted over to that memory. Sly boy! No, I am thinking of that memory because that was the afternoon I discovered the live album of Sam Cooke at the Copacabana—and wouldn’t you know, it was recorded on my birthday! I remember liking that when I discovered it, too. Who doesn’t like a little bit of personal resonance? It’s always nice to see yourself in something, even though that eternal resonance eventually became the bane of my life. My very existence was weighed down by resonance… Calm down, Max, no more of that, please!
Yes, Sam Cooke: live at the Copacabana. And if I remember correctly, it was his version of You Send Me that I discovered first on that particular afternoon, having patiently endured the strange Spotify ads. It has a delightful, trilly intro in which he ambles through a few la la las and then announces it’s time to sing something kinda sentimental… Oh, that’s it: he starts with Try a Little Tenderness, then goes into I Love You (For Sentimental Reasons) and then eventually strolls his way through to You Send Me at the end (to a wondrous applause). I am listening to the song again now in the pub… It’s a medley. I like medleys—unless it’s one of those medleys where you end up getting a small version of the one song you wanted smushed in between a bunch of rubbish ones. This medley is a good one, though.
But that’s not the important song for this journal entry—(I was already formulating what I wanted to say on the way to the pub). No, the song of the moment is rather… Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.
The applause comes in, then comes what I think is the brass, then Mr Cooke comes in casually with the line that later went on to haunt me:
“Just a little philosophy now that says… the philosophy burning him.”
The Philosophy Burning Him. There was the title of Max’s first novel, the novel that never came to anything and, in all honesty, would have been a quiet disaster.
It had another title—this one captured the other side of the novel’s spirit, and it also came from a song, didn’t it, Max? You’re listening to that one now.
A Certified Fool. A wonderful title for a novel, taken from Fool to Cry by The Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger spends the whole song being accused of being a fool to cry, drenched in his own signature soul… and then, just as the song reaches its climax, it swaggers itself free, and the lyrics announce, unashamed: “I’m a fool, babe! A certified fool!”
What is the point of this piece again? I’m not listening to those songs anymore, I’ve changed to something else (Married with Children by Oasis). It’ll change again, but I won’t keep interrupting the flow with my own soundtrack…
Max is a character. Back then, back when he was 20 and constantly torn between two very different but also very similar novel titles, he was also a character, but he wasn’t nearly as much in control. Hence the tension, the self-fictionalising novels, and the constant oscillations between the earnest and the irreverent.
The Philosophy Burning Him was poignant, though, because that bloody philosophy has been burning me ever since. A Certified Fool? Does it even need mentioning that I’ve never been more certified? I took the massive L, the epochal L, remember?
But I liked being a character back then. I felt free. I wasn’t, of course, but I liked the feeling. I had the freedom to write myself into freedom, if you will. But as I wrote, as I burned my way through drafts of novels, abandoned novels, completed terrible novels, and all other crappy writing, I guess I realised just how trapped I was in my own prison… I wanted to get out, too… I wanted to get truly free… so so badly. But, but but but, there was something liberating in the journey towards freedom. I was free to fight for my own freedom, if you will. Ooh, I like that phrase tonight, don’t I? I’ve used it twice already.
So what did I like about being a character back then? Well, I liked how small I felt in the face of something much, much larger. And I liked the task of trying to write myself into existence, even though I didn’t like the constant feelings of inadequacy, and the sense that I could never be quite truthful enough.
And then I did it… I wrote myself out of the prison. I wrote myself into existence so successfully that I didn’t leave behind some melodramatic literary dump (à la Martin Amis or Sally Rooney—sorry, Sally, I’m sure you’re lovely). Instead, I left behind a novel documenting a character’s escape from their own story… And so.. where did that leave me? Was Max no longer a character? Was he no longer part of something larger, some bigger story? But he liked being a part of something like that!
The New Story! That’s where I now reside, and having located myself after the cosmic sojourn, and having spent thousands of words tumbling between this and that, redeeming the horrid either/or with a more forgiving (and more sensual) both/and… I am now back as the character I was always quite happy to be. You see, I really was quite happy being Max, I just didn’t like the story I was in. It didn’t ring true. It was stifling. Quite simply, the story had run its course. Countless people had been born into it—everyone, in fact, had been born into it— and it just didn’t seem like the kind of story that had space for everyone to really be. There was never any inherent problem with all of us being characters. The problem was the script. When the lines are written for you, you don’t really get to enjoy the full experience of the delivery. Because it’s all in the experience, isn’t it? Yes, nothing else matters. When you’re a character, not an audience member, what matters is the experience of the story, each fluxing moment, not the events themselves. Plot is what you realise happened once all moments have been sufficiently lived.
Oh, we saved the world, did we?
It looks like we did.
And I enjoyed every living, breathing moment of it! Did you?
I did, actually, yeah.
Great. Well, onto the next moment, then.
So it’s time for Max to finally reinhabit the world as a character again. Grand. Oh my, it feels good to be fictional. The Philosophy Burning Him has been on its last embers for a while now, and of course, he’ll only ever be A Certified Fool until the world catches up, but there’s no rush on any of that. Culture likes to take its time. And I don’t blame it. Why rush? There’s no rush. Plus, for me, it won’t feel like a long wait. There are moments to live, after all. Oh, and time slows down for those who wait… there’s a little wink to yourself, Max. Did you enjoy that one? I thought you would.
Yes, that’s what I was going to mention. So I spent all that time, back when I was 20, unable to choose either The Philosophy Burning Him or A Certified Fool as the title for my crappy novel… later abandoned by necessity. But there was even more indecision! On the days when I was leaning towards A Certified Fool, I would also split hairs over whether it should really be The Certified Fool. This distinction mattered. One claimed singularity, the other: universality. Was I was of many certified fools, or the fool to end all fools?
If I were to land on a title today, right now, it would have to be The Certified Fool. Why? Because if anyone had to play the foolish role I played again, that would be a crime against reality. Yes, many people have made a fool of themselves, and many continue to do so on a daily basis, but me? Well, my foolishness deserved its certification for the very reason that it was necessary.
But enough about Max from the old story. That one’s long gone now! It only really lives in his head now… maybe it was in his head the whole time! Yeah… you’d like that, wouldn’t you, world? Not a chance.
But Max the character? He is happy to shut his eyes for a brief moment in this charming pub. He needs the loo again, too, which is annoying because he only just went. And when he leaves, he needs to go to Lidl and pick up some more nappies and wipes, maybe some of those ribs that he and Daisy have taken to eating in the evenings. Yes, just a man with a laptop and Bobby Darin singing in his ears… The Curtain Falls…
He shares moments, does this character. It’s all he’s ever done. For a while, everything became frightfully important, but it was never destined to stay that way… It’s quite all right for things to be important, but they needn’t be frightful…
Wait. He needs the loo again. He wanted to avoid going again so soon, but the body needs what it needs. It has its own clock.
Back again.
It won’t be a sudden change for Max. He’ll still find himself pondering the old story, and it’s going to take time for the world to new story to expand. But he’s keen for the change. Maybe he could even speak for himself…
Yes, I really am happy to be small. I am just a man with a laptop. A writer of stories. A man of no significance.
Just how I like it.
10/11/2025
I’m almost free. I’m almost free of this horrid intellect. Life is doing its job. The writing is doing its job. Basically, all things are happening at once, and all things are part of the same job: the great unleashing.
Look at me, the unlikely phenomenologist! The unwilling existentialist! The unnerving ontologist! The exhausted realist… turned fictional…
Yes, exactly that! Because I was, for a good long while, occupied with the noble and necessary task of making the fictional factual, and now? Now I need to let the factual be fictional, once and for all. Durrr, that’s obvious, Max! And all in the name of balance, as always. But, but but but… for me, this is the greatest leap of allowing yet.
Why? Because I can feel the lingering white-knuckled grip of reality trying to hold me back. Don’t do it, Max, this is a surrender. Don’t do it, Max, you are turning your back on what is truly real. Max, listen to me, listen to the real: there is more thinking to be done, the intellect has more work to do… it is not so simple as you think… just let yourself think some more and you will find it is still infinitely complex…
Ha! I got you! Not a bloody chance in hell does the intellect have any more extensive work to do! I got you! Besides, whatever little work the mind does have left, it is, as I’ve noted before, doing it all in the service of what is truly real, and that must include the fictional.
Oh, but you’re a broken record, Max, talking on and on and on about the same old topics. Balance this, balance that, union of opposites… blah blah blah! If you’re so confident of your supposed reconciliations, why are you still blathering on about them?!
Because it’s a living process. Something you, Mr Rigid, wouldn’t know anything about, would you? And little do you even know, this very dialogue is part of the reconciliation. As I said, you work for me now.
So I listen to Linus and Lucy, sip on my slightly watered-down coffee (perfect) and loosen those shoulder blades some more. Ooh, look, it’s becoming bodily now! I think the more I sit here, restarting the song every time it passes the bit I like, the more I will loosen into the fictional.
Because we are all characters, aren’t we? Hmmm, how I would have resisted this territory not long ago… but then that is part of my ingrained commitment to the real. [Echoes of that letter I sent to Bert. Ignore the voice, Max. You do whatever you need to do.] Yes, we are all characters, and we really do all perpetually create ourselves…. Oh god, how horribly obvious and modern this is all starting to look… no, push on, Max.
What do I mean by this? Well, there is a difference between curation and creation, isn’t there? Up until this point in time, we were only curating ourselves when we thought we were creating them. We took what was on offer to us from the world, and we arranged some things about ourselves… producing millions (perhaps even billions) of little galleries of the self. And oh, how we wanted to escape that trap of curation, where everyone inevitably ended up looking and sounding the same. Worst of all, everyone ended up being the same. And that’s where creation comes in.
For what is creation if not the act of bringing something into being? And if you are not being yourself, then how can you expect to bring something forth and let it be? Being begets being. Being is individual, being is fresh and ever-surprising. So a world full of people who were all, at bottom, being the same, could only have been a world of people who weren’t being at all. For to be is to vary, and so even if we are all playing with the same sets of colours, tastes and preferences… even if we all share the same sky and exist within the same species, the variety is to be found in the way that we exist, moment to moment, consciousness to consciousness.
Blimey, that was quite the paragraph of intellectual waffle, but it’s getting me somewhere. Trust the process, Max. You are winding philosophy down to a close.
This is where fiction comes in again. The old tension between a factual event (a bank clerk dying of a heart attack in 1956) and a fictional event (the same thing but happening to a fictionalised bank clerk in a novel) was… silly. It was silly, come on! I may have led the jury on a little with that example, but the overall point is true. Reality is a wonderful wholeness that includes both the incomplete fact and the incomplete fiction, but it makes them proportionate.
Before, you couldn’t properly dwell in either. Dwelling in fact always left you reaching for a place a little beyond where you already were (picking up a Dickens novel or switching on Jurassic Park), and dwelling in fiction was only possible as some flat, half-realised escapist venture (day-dreaming like Walter Mitty or surrounding yourself with the trinkets of your favourite franchise).
The weird thing is that while neither of those ever fully satisfied, it turns out that I have actually been living the reconciliation my whole life. Growing up, I thought I was yearning for somewhere beyond where I already was, but then I never lived like an escapist. My yearning was a dissatisfaction with the incompleteness of everyday life, not a desire to reject it in the name of actually going anywhere else. So I lived my whole life, unbeknownst to me, with a natural enchantment in the everyday. But then what was the issue, and why wasn’t I satisfied? Because I had to remember what I was carrying, and thereby realise what I was already doing.
And that brings us back to allowing. I’m allowing myself to do as I’ve always done, but now with the full knowledge that the work is done, and that to fight it would be to throw things royally off-balance.
Lesson learned. I don’t need to ache to be met, to be given my humanity by the factual world… I need to give people the space to be fictional. It’s what I’m good at: re-enchantment.
09/11/2025
Messy messy messy, and yet all things worth creating emerge from the mess. Sometimes kicking up the dust reveals the ground beneath—who wants to live a life thinking the dusty ground is the real ground? Not me! So you kick up all the dust and the air gets all dusty and you stand there, hating the dust and hating yourself for kicking it up, then, gradually, amidst all that floating dust and self-hatred, you feel the ground beneath you, and suddenly everything feels possible again. Suck up the dust and you’ve got yourself an inhabitable moment again! Voila!
And that, after a life of much stress and invisible tension, is pretty much it. You’re left a tad ambivalent: Why did it all have to get so tense and messy and claustrophobic and important and angsty and big and small and stupid and pointless and awful?! Because it did, young man. Because it did. The important question is not why it all had to happen that way, but how do you feel now?
I feel fine.
And so do I.
Okay then.
Okay.
… the world falls silent, finally, a pause in the symphony after the necessary chaos… and… here come the first few notes of the next movement…
Well, Max, as the kids say, you took a massive L. You took a necessary L. You don’t hear about them so much, do you? The necessary Ls. And you know what? It feels utterly liberating. This is where I thrive. This is where I’ve always thrived.
And so I can only laugh at the life I’ve had to live until this point. One big cosmic joke I played on myself, and to think I’ve been the same guy all the way through! Never once was I able to cut the spirit off and dramatise the lifeless matter—matter just didn’t matter that much!—and never once have I been able to float off into that nowhere land and leave matter behind entirely… matter just mattered too much for that!
I realised that today fully. A whole life lived in two worlds (that’s my phrase now, Mr Fowles, you poser!). A whole life unable to numb myself to one to live peacefully in the other.
And so… and so the answer was always in my ability to just… roll with it. Imagine that! Oh, the things I’ve left in my wake on this journey towards being the person I was the whole time: lives changed, novels written, poetry lived, presence occupied, history rewritten…
Ooooh, there’s that voice in my head again: Max, you’re so self-centred, so self-absorbed! Well you try being me then, voice! Ah yes, in some sense you are… well, in that case, what you judging me for, judgey?!
But it’s true. It’s true, and I have to own that it’s true so I can move on fully. That’s what I am doing here, as always: I am allowing. I am allowing the scale of what I’ve done to be real (even while ludicrous), so that I can fully move on from it… because I’ve been chilled out the whole bloody time! Look, voice in my head, if I had truly needed this sense of scale to give me some internal validation, I wouldn’t have taken the massive L! Why, why oh why, would I have laid myself open to the easiest dismissal of all time, if it weren’t true?
Exactly! Because it wasn’t about reaching for scale, but freeing myself of it… so I could chill… just like I’ve always done, with a natural finesse and an undeniable grace…
The final obstacle: me. God, what a cycle. I was my first obstacle, too. I’m Barry White to my own first, last and everything! What a palaver.
Yet I love being wrong. I got so good at being wrong that I left only rightness behind me. I’ve been wrong so many times I set the world aright. One more self-congratulatory tautological sentence? Go on then! I exist as something wrong, so that act of existing may finally be right.
I was once accused of trying too hard to get life right. It was put to me as a criticism. Well, would you look at that? I finally got it right, and yet I am wrong. I am the definition of wrong. I am such a living picture of wrongness that there is no space left for anything but rightness. There I go, repeating myself, drunk on my own ramblings… another wrong… you’re welcome, world.
I’ve played around with your phrase before, René. I mean, who hasn’t? Here’s looking at you, Mary Portas. But here’s another addition to the ‘I think’ lineage:
I am wrong, therefore I am right.
You see, René, no more thinking. There is only being asserted, and that being wraps me up neatly in myself. A little yin-yang of rightness and wrongness. Yes, there are only two modes of being: right and wrong. But they are both being, not thinking, and that matters… probably. Who cares anymore, man!
I’ve actually finished this entry now. But I am thirty-odd words short of a word-count milestone on the document, which of course doesn’t matter at all, but seeing as being wrong is just as important as being right, I am going to allow myself the unnecessary extension, just to meet the arbitrary milelstone, which I have, in the process of this very long and pointless sentence, now done.
How satisfying.
08/11/2025
All things are dated. I’m still weaving things back together. The plain and silly truth, of course, is that however underneath time those previous entries were, they were also made at certain times on certain days, and by a certain person: me.
It’s positive. Max gets smaller and smaller and smaller… a real human-sized person. How hard fought! First, I located myself, then I rambled about a bunch of other stuff that was surely all very important too, and now I’ve rethreaded the infinite with the plane of everyday experience. You wanna know what true cosmic striving looks like, world? It looks like a man stamping a date and time on the infinite to restore his own humanity… or maybe even discover it truly for the first time.
I like my website, as well. It’s also going in the right direction; it’s becoming person-sized. Ooh, welcome to my little corner of the internet… Yeah right. This is what a true little corner looks like, world… it doesn’t demand your attention or strive towards exposure, it is just so so so happy to finally be on the map.
Oh, yes! And I have continued my letter writing, too. I wrote a short note to George MacDonald yesterday, feeling the impulse after a few hours spent working on the new children’s story. Then, after publishing it to that mysterious ontological letter-space, I walked home and pondered the possibility of dating it. The rest is history. Everything deserves its place in time, even the a-temporal. There I go again, repeating myself. Oh well.
But it matters to me, and I’m thrilled. The letter writing is communion. And so what is this? Communion with myself? Something that should be so simple, but when you’ve lived a life inadvertently holding the projections of the world-soul, it means a great deal to finally sit with yourself and be free to relate instead of simply resonate.
Always back to the relating. It’s a necessary theme for the moment. I won’t force it out. Soon I won’t be writing about it, or even thinking about it… I’ll just be in it.
You know what makes me laugh? The idea that I’ve ever been lost in abstraction. The abstract needed to be tied down without losing its life force. Someone had to do it. I’ve only ever cared about the here and now, and now the here and now is everywhere, always.
06/11/25
I can’t imagine striving for cosmic significance. There are so many people scattered over this unthinkably large world, shut up safely in their rooms, dreaming of boundlessness. There are worldly people, successful people, chasing it too. I don’t envy them. Nothing will ever be enough, especially as they are chasing scale, more dissolution within the One field…
They do realise that, however big they become, they will still be small, don’t they? And that’s the very gift reality will never rescind. Life never takes away your smallness, no matter how big you become, and my my, what a blessing that is!
Max, remember when you announced yourself as God on TikTok? That was funny. It did its job, though, relieving me of that inhumane burden…Yes, Max, you did something very strange and very audacious… and yet it didn’t invite the horror show of attention and ridicule you were prepared for, did it? And even if such a firestorm were to start up online now… too late, world! You’d be throwing stones into the past. You’d be shouting into a sky no longer housing the rainbow you’re so desperate to explain away. The rainbow vanishes, disappearing back into the great context of it all; still there, but no longer visible, and hence less open to the charge of dismissal.
But why leave it up at all, Max? If you’re finished with the whole silly God thing, then why leave traces of it all behind you? It can only come back to bite you!
Because, dear concerned citizen of the world, they are relics, and relics help us track the past we were too dense to see through in the present. So no, dear sweet denizen of the old world, it can only come back to vindicate me! I am playing the long game, at least when it comes to the lagging march of culture… but really I have only ever been concerned with the immediate game.
And where does the immediate game situate me today? Back in the same diner from Monday. It is still grey, a grey and humble Thursday, only today it is also damp. And it is from this damp greyness, with a full stomach and only the slightest touch of indigestion, that I can sense abundance approaching… or is it outpouring from me? Yesterday I acknowledged that I was finally living from a state of overflow, so perhaps that is the abundance I sense… but no! No, I know it is all around me, circling, emerging, blooming even in this dank, otherwise uninspiring November.
No again, no and no and no again… uninspiring is not the word! For this state of overflow is itself a state of constant and unrelenting inspiration. At last, at last, I am just inhabiting things without the lurking pressures of grandeur! Even when I first declared the end of grandeur back at the beginning of the Mythopoeia, I then had to go on and say some pretty grand things. Such is the life of a world builder! But no longer! No, I don’t want to build—well, I do, but in a wholly different way. I’ll leave the world-changing building to those cosmic strivers. They can burden themselves the same world Atlas himself has finally been allowed to put down… that’s free will in action, I guess! Good luck to ‘em!
But who am I kidding? I don’t want them wasting their time building any more than I want to step back into the role of God in the old myth! Why? Because they are robbing me of decent company! Everything is up up and away… and here I am, feet firmly rooted on the ground, ankles splashed with a little grey Thursday puddle water, looking up, mouth agape, wondering to myself where on earth they are all going? Like I said yesterday, if they are going to the Moon to have a picnic, then I could kind of understand it… But the problem is now that there is simply no necessity to go to the bloody Moon! Wallace and Gromit had run out of cheese! What are your excuses, oh you multitude of interstellar Phileas Foggs! And even he was going around to come home again… where the bloody hell are you all going?
And then there’s the problem of the ‘communities’ opening up in this world of cosmically significant somebodies. True personhood, I’ve already solved that problem the other day… are you telling me the world isn’t tuning in to my random journal entries to realise how the world is being updated in real time?! I can hardly believe it!
But what are these communities really? They are bland groupings of lonely souls, each one sold the promise of their own significance, the very essence of which is then distorted by the ever-validating gaze of the world. See, see, if you proclaim your own boundlessness, the world will reward you because what you say resonates with so many… from there your boundlessness takes form… You grow a platform, you gain sponsorship deals… You sell merchandise! Is that not the very proof of boundlessness: multitudinous worldly tethers fixing you into place as a mouthpiece of endless yearning and self-affirmation? Yes, what a success!
What is my tone today? Is it angry? No, never angry. Is it confused? Maybe a little. Whatever it is, it’s certainly not morally perfect, a-judgemental and pristine. And that’s entirely the point. I have to just let myself be, and after such a long excursion through myth and time, it is only right and proper that I come back home to messiness.
And the truth is, all this comes from a sincere place of longing for continued communion. And I know that the more I allow myself to long for such things, the more unavoidable it becomes for people to emerge as themselves and join me. That’s a good restoration of longing, I think. All things are back on the table, ache and sadness and longing included… all things.
What did that crazy guy say on TikTok all those months ago? All things will be sanctified.
Let the sanctification continue!
05/11/25
I am now working from a state of overflow. This is where it all needed to get to: an overflow of presence that doesn’t demand but instead allows.
And I’ve spoken of this before, but the biggest battle (however small it feels at the time) was always going to be with me allowing the fact of my own imperfect existence to subsist. Imperfection was the last thing to be brought into alignment with perfection… obviously. But here we are: the promised land of perfect imperfectness. Ahhhh—relax, young man. You can’t go around loosening the strings for others and leave yourself stranded as the last guardian of an obsession everyone, deep down, was ready to leave behind forever.
Imperfect perfectness… that’s what ruled us all for so long. And we let it affect us all over, didn’t we? Oh no, A Grand Day Out was charming in its roughness, but just look at how cinematic the productions became as more resources were afforded to the creators! Pah! No doubt Nick Park has a special fondness for that first film, but when watching it back (and being about as charmed by a work of art as is possible), I could feel the strain of the creator’s eye scanning over it, obsessing over every visible fingerprint. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. Wherever you are, Nick, let me just say this… Come on now, that film breathes, it breathes like any work of art must, and it lets those characters emerge in their own time. And Wallace, for all his social incompetence, hasn’t he just got his head screwed on right? Build a rocket to enable the picnic. Quite right. Spot on. Dare I say… divine? Yes, I would dare, but we’ll leave that tired old word behind now, shall we? After all, it lives in the air again.
Imperfect perfectness. God, what a royal mess we made! Well, not so much a mess as a sterile hell. There I go again, going over old things. But the world still runs on this stuff… for now at least, so it’s fair enough that these things continue to circle about my mind.
Everyone was trapped, trapped in the inherited idea of perfection that convinced us we should be freezing ourselves across the board. Freeze your body. Freeze your identity. Freeze your art. Then polish polish polish and polish some more!
Oh yes, that’s the little analogy I wanted documented here because it came to me the other day, and I found the image amusing. So what was art in the old way of things? Humans tried to convince themselves that their art, while obviously always bound up with them, was yet somehow something separate and distinct, as if the artist could stand back and say brashly, ‘It really is its own thing, crafted by my hand alone, and it is surely perfect! I have left no trace of myself on that beautiful piece!’ Sure. But what did that really do? It made the art lifeless and left the artist behind in the act of supposed creation, which, as the image is about to show, was really quite grotesque.
So to the image. A person cuts off their own arm, preserving the limb in formaldehyde and centres it in some fancy exhibition hall. Look, cries the artist, now armless, feeling forever lesser than, Look at the magnificent work I have produced. How can you look at that arm and tell me it is not a perfectly accurate, fleshy human creation! It exists, yes, and it is so real, isn’t it?
But the arm is dead, and the artist has created nothing new. But oh, oh, aren’t they pleased to have something perfectly presented, something preserved in perfect form and likeness? Surely, surely this is living art?
No. Art made of the living is bloodless, it is an act of denial, and it is grotesque. Not to mention the sad fact that now our imagined artist is doomed to feel like he can never match up to the supposed art he has ‘created’. For he is now armless—or, at least, cut down from two to one—and his remaining arm will age and wither. Indeed, one day it won’t resemble an arm at all, but a skeletal reminder of what was once living. But oh, oh, that arm in formaldehyde, that will surely live on, with its tissue and freshness forever kept intact.
No, no, no, nopity nope… we know this, don’t we?! Oh, we all know it so well with our logic, and yet our hearts have tricked us for centuries… No, we know that to preserve the likeness, to freeze something in time, is not to keep something alive. Oh, it’s all so simple! And yet even the best of us struggle with it, don’t we? Yes, yes, including me. Oh, Max, how you’ve tried to run from your own impermanence, your own imperfections… the last lingering ghost of the house that had haunted itself into boredom.
Anyway, where are things now? Yes, in a state of overflow. Let all things breathe and be as they are… that’s where the good stuff comes from… the only good stuff you’ve ever produced, Max, the only living stuff, has been breathed into existence, wild and uneven and real and connected to the living fabric of all things!
Grand phrasing aside, things are good. Things are alive. And I know how scared the world is of its own imperfections. The world is scared of living, and of allowing. So I’ll continue as I am, all imperfected and unfreezable, and I will let the world have its polish… I’ll focus on producing the leather, which, as we can tend to forget, ages. Does that analogy make sense? I hope so. It sounded good.
03/11/25
Everything becomes looser and looser. That’s the point. No more strict endings and beginnings. I do think the letters will continue, but I can’t be certain of anything. Would I like them to continue? Of course. It’s simple correspondence, after all, why wouldn’t it continue? And after the definitive openings of the Mythopoeia, everything I’ve done has been about relinquishing control, letting things untangle, and seeing what emerges.
I am dating these entries. Why am I doing that? It would have felt wrong to date the letters, seeing as they were still trying to free themselves of mythic density. Not to mention the letters take place by necessity in a place underneath time—they are non-local communications. But to date these entries now, in my own personal and singular documentation of things, is to recognise how very situated my own particular existence is. In other words, it’s time to put physicality and locality back on the existential map… and maybe I’ll date the letters in the future. Again, I can’t decide those things in advance.
It is true that I’ve had a prejudice against my own existence for a long time. The old world was so noisy, so full of useless information, documentation, whereabouts, etc, and what was the point of it all? It gave us all a lot of information about the world, but everyone was trapped in the same script, all chasing that oh-so sought-after selfhood! Good times… and where did it leave us? Well, I’ve gone over all that enough at this point.
But the only way into something new, into something that we might be able to consider a genuine relational existence, is through the acceptance of new selfhood. I could call it that, I guess. Or better still, something like true personhood.
Where is all this coming from? I’ve burrowed so deeply into the realities of consciousness and selfhood that I’ve come to the inescapable realisation that there is literally nothing other than relation. Nothing. Now, this could either be seen as some obvious truism or maybe some incomprehensible psycho-babble. Both reasonable feelings, but what matters today, in complete disregard of thought and understanding, is my own experience and nothing else. That’s all I am working with, finally, and that is why it is finally time to situate myself fully—total personhood claimed.
Because I am done with achievement and accomplishment. Those things are the by-products of true living, which is, as I said, relational. Every new consciousness birthed is simply one more way for reality to experience itself. Names, places, preferences… these matter for reference alone… but what matters is experience. Reality wants to experience itself, and it does so through us. And I think that is just wonderful. I like to laugh with my friends and feel myself to be one small experiential node, not some all-consuming mind attempting to map the whole web. But I needed to take on the whole journey, to complete the epic preparation, to lead me finally to this place, where I can locate myself as myself, and relate.
So yes, what is significant about today is that Max is finally located. He’s done the mythic heavy lifting, ended an old world, begun a new one, written things into existence and withstood cosmic misunderstanding… he’s prioritised the grounding of true life, beyond the old myth of connection through infinite expressions of selfhood and embedded within the new myth of relational personhood… he’s run from himself and caught up with himself… he’s allowed himself to be so so so central, even when he’d have rather been hidden and simply real… and finally he’s tolerated even this last paragraph, where he talked of himself a tad too boldly.
And now, I am located. I have had a full English breakfast and a black coffee, and right now, a postal worker is pushing their trolley by the diner window. The sky is grey today, a nice, unassuming English grey, and so is everything else… the air is grey, the pavement is grey, the people’s faces are grey, grey like an ordinary Monday. And I am sitting in the diner, experiencing the greyness and happy to have everything back, melancholy nothingness and all.
I like being Max. I always have, even when I hated it. I relate.
MT 