Swearing, cringes and crazy talk.

Monday, June 8th, 2009

I’m a proper mental me. I don’t mean I’m “a bit of a character” or a “whacky guy”. No, what I mean is that I’m a full on section 38, schnauzer licking head the ball. I have bipolar affective disorder, or so I’m told. It’s not something I talk about much, as people can’t help but perceive you differently when you fess up to something like that.

It’s a right pain in the neck. I’m supposed to take a cocktail of anti psychotics every morning to prevent me from going all R.P. McMurphy and streaking down the High Street in frenzied messianic delusion. The real problem with being a nut job though is that I’m never quite sure which elements of my behaviour are just my inherent character, and which are symptoms of the loony tunes. I often feel guilty of using my condition* as a means of justifying my all-pervading social inadequacy.

Yes, I’m a crazy person, science says so, so it must be true; but if I rummage through the more lucid and rational depths of my consciousness I’m forced to accept a far more disturbing and problematic truth. The truth is, and this isn’t easy for me to say, that I’m also a massive knobhead. I’m the kind of knobhead that uses words like knobhead in a poetry blog, even though I’m fully aware that this is exactly the kind of behaviour that emphasises my knobheadishness. I can’t seem to help myself, and it gets worse. Take last Friday for example:

Up until Friday I’d only ever had a couple of interviews in my entire life. The first was with the school careers officer when I was fifteen. He was an ashen haired ex army sergeant who was sporadically imprisoned behind a battered desk in a neglected broom cupboard. A sort of despotic Philip Schofield but without the gopher.

It was a succinct interaction. He didn’t even lift his gaze from the accusatory file he was perusing as he brusquely enquired about my employment hopes.

“I fancy something creative” I offered, “perhaps photography”. His reaction to this suggestion was to literally laugh in my face before packing me off to do work experience as a builder’s labourer; a job that being ninety percent twiglet, I royally sucked at. I spent the following fortnight dragging things ten times my body weight over rubble whilst fat men with football tattoos sipped insipid tea and shouted things like “put your back in to it Doris” over the top of low rent porn mags. My appraisal said I’d been the worst student they’d ever had. I don’t doubt it.

The second interview came shortly after I’d been kicked out of school. It was for a job as a cleaner in a factory on a near by industrial estate. The woman who hired me said she thought I seemed like a pleasant and intelligent young man. She told me that the job would be a doddle for someone like me, that a trained monkey could do it. A week later she fired me. To this day I get a pang of insecurity whenever I see an intelligent looking gibbon.

So it was almost two decades since I’d been in an interview situation. This time it was for a poetry commission. To be honest, I hadn’t given it much thought. I had no idea what to expect, so it was impossible to prepare for, right? And anyway this is a thing I’m good at, this is going to be a cakewalk, isn’t it?

It was only when I wandered through the daunting gates of Leicester’s De Montfort Hall that the reality of my situation was thrown into sharp and forbidding focus. I bumped into Joshua Idehen who just coming out the building. “It was nerve racking” he said, he informed me that they’d had 80 applicants, and that we we’re in the final seven. All of a sudden the whole situation felt a lot more real. I decided to combat this by spending the next thirty minutes slowly building myself up into a fractious bundle of debilitating anxiety. I was highly successful in this endeavour.

Eventually one of the interviewers came to call me in. My stomach immediately leapt into an impromptu acrobatic routine and my heart struggled to escape through my rib cage. The interview room was a large imposing oblong affair. Sat at one end were a group of maybe seven or eight people. I recognised one of them to be Stuart Silver of Perrier award winning double act Noble and Silver. I was offered a seat facing my judiciary. It felt like a cross between X factor and that scene from Trainspotting where Spud self-sabotages his job interview by boshing loads of speed.

The board were all lovely, welcoming, polite and pleasant; unfortunately I was unable to relay this information to my quivering bowels. They asked me to kick things off with a brief performance. At this point I had intended to calmly rise to my feet and authoritatively but personably deliver my piece. Sadly my legs had other ideas. I stayed in my chair, awkwardly gesticulating as I self-consciously stumbled through what was increasingly feeling like the most turgid insult to doggerel that had ever been committed to paper. Like I said the assembled panel where lovely and professional, this is in no way a reflection on them. They generously applauded before firing a series of questions at me. This is where everything goes a bit hazy. Someone asked me how my proposal would fit in with the PAC ethos. I panicked, what the hell was a PAC? I fretted for a few protracted seconds before remembering the commission was being hosted by Phrased and Confused.

I talked a lot, I said very little, or at least that’s what my neurosis tells me. I do remember referring to myself as an “Attention whore” and describing how I’d once bombed at a festival. Taxi for Vincent.

I continued babbling, repeating myself, my seditious tongue lashing itself in endless verbal knots of clammy handed stumblemumbles. At one point Stuart Silver asked me a question, but before he’d finished I heard myself abruptly interrupt him. I tried to make my mouth stop moving but my synapses appeared to be staging a mutiny. He continued to speak, but I just spoke over him, my brain shouting STOP FUCKING TALKING YOU MORON at my incessantly flapping gob. I wasn’t even saying anything of any relevance, just submerging myself further in a quagmire of treacle like loquacity. If by any chance you’re reading this Stuart, please accept my apologies. I didn’t mean to be rude, I’m just a massive knobhead, a stuttering, panicky , knobhead.

After half an hour or so proceedings wound up. I tried to convince myself that it’d gone ok, I’m an artist I thought, people expect us to be a bit twitchy, but the more I reflected, the worse I felt. There was no escaping the facts, I’d made a proper pigs ear of it, but at least it was all over, I couldn’t possibly make things any worse now could I?

I bid my farewells and reached for my rucksack. The same rucksack I’d taken to Berlin a few weeks earlier. The same rucksack I’d been carrying when I’d purchased a miniature bottle of Jagertraum, a cheaper more disgusting looking reproduction of cheep and disgusting spirit Jagermiester. I’d forgotten it was there until it leapt out of the side pocket, landing squarely at the feet of my potential employers like a crack pipe fashioned from a seal fur swastika.

Needless to say I didn’t get the commission, shockingly though they did offer me what they referred to as a “headline slot”. So I guess it can’t have been as bad as my mixed affective wrongbrain painted it. Which leads me back to the question, am I crazy or just a massive knobhead? A massive crazy knobhead I suspect.

On the upside, Facebook tells me that Josh did get a commission, so congrats fella. I can’t wait to check out the new piece.

You can check out some of his collaborative stuff here:

http://www.myspace.com/apoeminbetweenpeople

That’s all for now, I’m off to have a little word with myselfs, ahem.

Happy Monday xx

*I hate that turn of phrase, it reduces my personality to something that sounds akin to Thrush. If anybody has a less reductive expression for describing the mental I’d be happy to hear your suggestions.

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