Warm Recollections #15
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
The peculiar and inexplicable female system of kitchen detritus morality, which states that it’s wrong to have more than one book on the kitchen table, yet a half-eaten peach can be left anywhere in the room to pleasing effect.
As when you’re looking to buy a new house, or selling the old, and the house takes its leave of you… the same happens with the foreign country you’re in. The tipping point is when you no longer have a backstage area. Once you no longer have a house, flat or hotel room to call your own, a place where you can shut the door and sit in silence, where you can simply be, without having to buy anything or explain yourself or deal with other people’s gaze and enquiry… then you are no longer living in the country, however temporarily and artificially. You are a refugee now, waiting to be airlifted home. To truly be in a country means to be able to be there alone, silent and unchallenged, without having to deal with strangers or part with cash.
So imagine being homeless. When even trying to make yourself a backstage — that ragged tent — is met with fury.
Love does not conquer all. It merely looks more glamorous in retreat than other emotions — and takes longer to admit the war is lost. Five years later, or twenty, triggered by a song or recollection, love may still protest that it could have been a contender, that part of your heart remains missing in action.
Annoying aspects of modernity: the other person’s assumption that it is always your mobile phone signal which is breaking up, when you can quite clearly tell that it is theirs.
The near-audible sound, seconds after the announcement of an award, of all the other nominees’ speeches popping back into non-existence; of carefully-managed hopes snapping like old rubber bands.
As always, if you can think of anyone who might enjoy this Substack, please spread the word.
It occurs to me now I read this that nearly all of the homeless people I hung out with in my youth had learned how to "just be" ON stage due to having no backstage options. It was what attracted me to them as people in the first place - their rawness, their realness, their inability or unwillingness to hide the parts of themselves that people in polite/civilised society usually hide because they don't play nicely with social mores and expectations: to sit among them and be part of their experience was refreshing and consistently eye-opening to the sheltered, teenaged version of me who was just beginning to learn about and become fascinated with the dark underbelly of reality.
In my naivety, I had assumed that most were homeless/outcast because of that quality making them unable or unwilling to fit into regular society, rather than that quality existing in them because they simply had no place private to be their secret selves. Now I think of it, nearly all of them had some kind of substance abuse disorder, which suggests the latter: because they had no real sanctuary available, they couldn't "just be" without inducing an artificial sanctuary to take refuge in, one that both temporarily took away the reality of the shared world and shielded them mentally and emotionally, if not physically, from the hate and harassment they constantly received.
Maybe I did intuit that at some level, because I did try to offer a couple of them an alternative place of refuge - if not a home, then at least a safe space, emotionally as much as physically. But it was too late for them: the substance already ruled, and the inevitable inevitabled.
Sorry for the random comment, was trying to track down an email, but came up with nada. Will you ever continue writing tales with Nolan and Co.? I read a lot, more than I should, and somehow The Anomaly has remained the pinnacle of fiction for me in the last decade. It even got me to travel cross country to Newspaper Rock. Point being, please explore that world again? You’re the man.