harrison-abbott

[harrison-abbott]

You were reading a book by an author who you hadn’t encountered before. All across the book were lauding comments from other people, celebrating how good this writing was. Chunky book, filled with five novellas. And, inside the cover, you read the biography of the man who wrote it. At the end of it it said that the writer eventually killed himself. In a country far, far away from where he was born, on a different continent. Yet another suicide of a creative person. You wondered why this seemed to be so common …

[harrison-abbott]

He often got cracked lips in the winter. When he was sleeping his lips would dry up, and, with the cold air (for he never had the heating on in his bedroom, always had the window: he preferred the cold) his lips would tauten up, too. And when he opened his mouth, they would crack. In the morning there would be a blackened crack in his lip. Every time he sneezed, the crack would open again. Little bits of blood. That he dabbed away with a tissue. Or, he would forget to moisten the lips before taking a bite of something, and the crack would open again, leaving a bloodstain on the sandwich. The blood reminded him that he had a body. He’d been thinking a lot, of late, about characters from the past. He barely had much company these days. And was often under spells of nostalgia and regret. Even looking at photos on the net – cities around Europe where he’d been to in the past – they sent him downward with nostalgic blues. But the cracks on his lips reminded him that he was just a body. He could still bleed. The cuts wouldn’t kill him. It was important to remember that he could bleed. That he bled.

[harrison-abbott]

CARCINOGENIC

They were cooking downstairs. I could hear the oil crackling in the pan. Then the fumes of animal protein wafted up the stairs … amidst their laughter. I wouldn’t be going downstairs to join them for their lunch. Not that I was invited anyway. Last night I had seen them all behave in such stupid manners. They kept injuring themselves. And their jokes weren’t funny, only abusive. I didn’t understand what the sniggering was all about. At one point one of them fell over and cracked his head on the fridge. I was concerned for her until she just lay there, guffawing, with a blushed face, whilst the others took photos of her. Jesus. I didn’t want to stay up here and overhear them, or smell those ugly smells … but I also knew that if I went downstairs then they’d see me. I’d be ordered to clean up. Even though none of it was my mess. Or, more likely, they’d all join in the pisstaking. I was half the age of all of them and it was as if they were way younger than I was. So I stayed in my room. The meal began. Why was their cutlery so loud on their plates? As if they were trying to hurt the china. I was glad that I didn’t eat farm animals. All of those carcinogenic chemicals going into your body, poisoning your liver, your heart, all the rest of it. I fantasised about the day when I would outlive all of them. Unless something kills me violently – be it a car, a terrorist, or some thug in the street – then I will definitely live way longer then these people. And when the last one dies, of cancer or whichever other lethal disease, it will only be me. I won’t laugh at them. I’ll be content with breathing. But, yes. For now I just had to stay locked in my room. An hour or so, and they should leave the house after their gluttonous meal. Then I could head downstairs and eat something healthy. You have to suffer in life. Often with the same folks who created you.

[harrison-abbott]

Some books you read are pretty short and you get sad towards the end of them, knowing that they’ll finish soon. They’re so good you don’t want them to end.

[harrison-abbott]

The birds sang through the rain and the dark and the cold and the horror of the world, without any hesitance in their ripe melodies.

[harrison-abbott]

There was nothing resolute you could do about sadness, you were finding. You simply had to embrace the forlorn notions, and live out across the day, finding concentration in the other things you loved. Whilst realising that that thing you once loved was never coming back.

[harrison-abbott]

A pool of soccer teams were playing across Europe and you didn’t know some of the teams and looked them up online and some of them came from moderately sized towns in Eastern or Northern Europe and you thought about all of the people over there following the game with their hearts and spirit … and that was the wide silly magic of football.

[harrison-abbott]

She talked about ‘guys’ as if they were items on a grocery list. She spoke about guys as if they were ingredients on a package of food, that she read out. When she explained the other sex, it was always like a series of information. And there was little emotive about what she was saying. There was nothing about them personally. Only what they looked like. Or if they did something that annoyed her. And there were so many of them. Throughout the time that you lived with her. A whole year, that was. Honestly, she spoke about boys as if they were a commodity. As if they were stats in the market place, where she worked. She didn’t work on the stock market. She worked as a teacher. And she never even spoke about her schoolkids as much as she did with ‘guys’. And now that you no longer lived with her, you were really glad that you didn’t have to listen to that amoral, repetitive garble anymore. You hoped, for her own sake, that she was treating men as people, rather than a commodity, these days. But you kinda doubted it.

[harrison-abbott]

News about the James Bond franchise was posted in the top bracket of most important news posts on the national news and this pretty much summed up why the media was so absurd. A film franchise about a misogynistic serial killer was right next to an article about the war in the Ukraine, which will have repercussions for the whole planet. Jesus.

[harrison-abbott]

You passed a cat in the dark. It slinked atop a wall and it peered at you with its agile, spidery shape. And you understood why felines were worshipped long ago.

[harrison-abbott]

Yes, it was their birthday today. You remember spending their birthdays with them. The date is etched in your mind. This year, you will not be celebrating their birthday with them. Even if you tried, it wouldn’t be possible. You’d have to get on a plane. And so some insane planning, even if there were any flights available … no, that’s not happening. You don’t even want to wish them a Happy Birthday. It’d be too painful to read their response. The best thing to do was to simply leave it be.

[harrison-abbott]

An old villain came up in a dream. You hadn’t dreamed about them in such a long time. They were a villain in real life, ten years back: they hurt you a great deal. And, surprisingly, they hadn’t entered your dreamland in a decade or so. Until last night when they made an ugly cameo. But the dream was important. For what happened in it. The villain was smugly sitting around, expecting your company, with their whirly, manipulative voice. You had been over what they said to you so many times. Those crushing sentences. The slights. The miserable thing they did to you. But this dream was different. You realised that you didn’t have to listen. They wanted you to. But you didn’t. And so you chose to leave them, sitting in that smug posture. Leave them where they were. They had no lock upon you anymore. You got up and you bade farewell to them. And you left. The dream ended. And a short while later you woke up. And suddenly your consciousness, in real time, was able to cope with that person in a better manner. Their cruelty wasn’t as poignant anymore.

[harrison-abbott]

And lots of the time you were on your own. But you still had books, and you still had a keypad. And literature could be a companion, across the dark meandering hours of the night.

[harrison-abbott]

You wondered whether these liars actually enjoy spouting their lies. Whether they saw lying as something addictive and enjoyable. Else, why would they do it so often? When did they first learn to lie? When they were children? When did that sadistic knack for not telling the truth, and not only that but saying the most horrendous things, start to proliferate?

[harrison-abbott]

The wind sighed

and shoved and breathed

and coughed against the

framework of the old house.

[harrison-abbott]

I had a history teacher in high school called Mr Mowat. He was one of the only good teachers in the school. Largely because he had a genuine passion for his subject – history. Anyway, one time we were covering World War One in class. And, Mr Mowat himself was pretty old. This was back in the early 00s, when I was a kid. And he was approaching retirement age. He remembered a man from his neighbourhood, when he was a boy, who was a vet of World War One. This man who had experienced trench warfare. And Mowat was saying that, after his man came back to Scotland after France, he couldn’t pass a lamppost on the street. He was just terrified of lampposts. Had developed a phobia for them, after the psychological mayhem of the conflict. And so when he was walking about town and saw a lamppost, he had to take a run at it and shield his eyes. Or he couldn’t do it altogether. The war had harmed his mind so much and for some reason this visual cue was impossible to stand.

[harrison-abbott]

As you may or may not know, there was a pretty strong storm across the Scottish central belt a few weeks back. It was on the news, with Red Level Alert warnings across that part of Scotland. Anyway, yeah, the storm was a bit nuts. So, earlier on I went into my local woodland, to see if the storm had caused any carnage. And, I got to this spot in the valley. And it was as if a bloomin bomb had gone off in the river. All of the surrounding trees were poleaxed and lying in mass splinters on the floor. And I’m meaning huge, old trees – older than me. The trunks were so thick you could climb over them like bridges. And they had all covered the river underneath. I remember playing in the river at that point when I was a boy. Now the area is completely changed. Crazy stuff.