As you may know, the first 22 posts of this blog are the text of my ebook, 'How To Become A Crack Addict'. If you want to read this here, that's fine by me, or you can buy it on amazon, which is even finer, because I'll get £1.35 from it - I can't say where the other £2 go. Anyway, here are tonight's reflections, after a day of quite a lot of solitude, some cider, dope, and a sleeping pill, which may cause typing errors.
SILENCE, A SYMPHONY UNWRITTEN
Today I saw my most recent drugs-counsellor. He's an ex-user, of something or other, but not one that comes with a pamphlet, or a reading-list. I told him I'd been adding to my blog whilst listening to the cricket, before arriving at his place at two o'clock, a little alcove of my doctor's surgery, just a few minutes from my own alcove. Sometimes I'm silent for such long stretches that my lips feel almost stitched, but a therapeutic hour with Mr Drugs Worker allows for a bit of an exchange, some client-counsellor badinage, to bandage the silent wound of what's been.
Increasingly, I can feel the silence around me, dormant, yet waiting to erupt into sound, and possibly fury. Although silence gloats about its golden status more often than it should, it longs, underneath, to be peppered with people's contributions, craves to be filled with song, for a time, as long as it's either suitably indie, or perhaps early baroque, something churchy with scrapey viols and clavicle, harpsichord and choir, and maybe some flute. But silence can't really do Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms and so on, likening them, as it does, to a thick pork bap. All you can do is sit there, looking down on the frenzied elbows of violinists, turgid tubas glinting, onerous oboes, avuncular cellos, and incestuous violas grinding out variations. It may seem edifying at first, a filling and wholesome snack, worth persisting with, chewing over, even recommending, until you find, on completion, the theatre is emptying out, and you're back on the plaza, amid others with stomachs laden with bread and half-chewed pig.
But at least it's not in the name of some genocidal regime. So count your blessings, and enjoy your gig.
And that is all I have to say right now.
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