1) A Very Unoriginal Beginning/ Feeding The Alchemist /Truth Be Told
There were four of us - Charlie, Codeine Artane Roofie Prozac III, myself and Sid Vicious.
We had been sat up the best part of the night, eating the hash cakes we'd bought in good faith from the kids who had ripped off Prozac's car, and talking about how unoriginal we all felt ( unoriginal from an entirely new standpoint of course ).
The speed at which things became confused could not have been helped by the fact each cake had been spiked with a large amount of peyote ( heavily flavoured to give the impression they were safe to eat ); now - huddled in our old Brighton squat - the bitter cactus aftertaste and its' crippling stomach ache brought us down.
It was a terrible and cavernous train of thought to be caught in. Each of our brains flickered dutifully like an old fashioned neon sign so that, even though the world appeared more colourful and complex, I was struck with the feeling it had grown functional and limited. Some guy I met at a party once told me our generation takes so many drugs because there is a magician inside each of us searching for an elixir that will turn emotional lead to gold.... a beautiful outlook ( only flawed by being sentimental and untruthful ).
Now I find it strange - even after everything that has happened - such sentimentality still appeals to me. Parts of my heart will always adore the notion drugs somehow exist to feed our soul's lost alchemist; I feel like a burnt out moth, with black wings smouldering, desperate to flap back towards the flame.
See.... it's only recently I acquired a renewed vigour for honesty. The love of truth, a thirst for the real... so often had I heard these things muted as redemption's source. The desire to reclaim past honours haunted me. I was desperate to repair lost virtues. It sounds simplistic, but I wanted to put everything that had come before behind me.....to hang my old life out to dry... to watch it turn to dust in the sun....
The past is where I lied to myself... where I lied to others.... where I lied to myself whilst simultaneously lying to others..... where on every one of these occasions I lied some more ( to intricately weave fresh lies in place of holes and gaps).
I wouldn't say I was pathological. I just got bored real easy. It might sound strange, but to start with each lie was nothing more than a Jackson Pollock splat of paint. Thrown to enliven circumstance. My grand delusion (oh and what a grand delusion!) : my fictional life could resemble art.
Although I was living in a "nice" flat it was only "nice" in the respect that it was squatted ( and therefore cheap ), only "nice" in the respect that at least the rats were friendly; only "nice" because with a bit of Pollock magic there were windows ( Pollock lets you count second hand Perspex as "windows" )... hell...some floorboards had even been loosely re-nailed beneath our feet...
I'm not trying to make excuses for myself...really I'm not.
What I am trying to do is tell you everybody needs something "real" in life - and that, if "real" cannot be true or solid - it's just as easy to invent. My own addiction to lying peaked when it became evident I needed something enormous to make the Brighton seafront licking and tickling outside the perplex front windows of my ninth floor squat seem bright and happy again.
Truth be told, I lied because I couldn't deal with life. With reality there came facts.
See lying is a bit like smoking. At first you have to work at it because every breath feels alien and wrong... but with practice.... well.... before you know it you are blowing fabulous rings, far prettier than the air that they are cutting through.
" Sentimental ," I think, " but not untruthful ". Then - tiring of the birds trying to communicate through day-glo cracks in Perspex windows - I ignore the peyote in my bloodstream, and sleep.
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