And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil's in his chair

Tweet Eh oop, but it were grim in Dublin last night. Talk about a doleful, watery streak of an Autumn eve. That funny 'turning time' feeling was in the air too. Clock hands turning too quickly in moonlight. Toadstools emerging with uncommon speed from the season's mulch to greet a sun that's grey and exhausted before it's even risen. There was a familiar yet uncanny feeling last night. A sense I think poets get more often than the rest of us. You know the one that steals just enough normality out of things to prick our thoughts with the tiniest touch of the pagan. Late yesterday, it was brought on by the sight of sodden cardboard boxes pissing channels of rain out of the sides of skips, by the electric light emitted wanly from closed butchers' shops, and from the shadow-people who scuttled across the Ha'penny bridge through the howling wet riding down the Liffey from the blackness out past the ferries.

And from further beyond that dark and choppy mass, I imagined monstrous clouds of modern unease boiling up and rolling forth. A low yet insistent buzz of uncertainty and queasiness is in the air these days. Is it to do with those ubiquitous descending and jagged red lines on the News Channels? They remind us that our lives may soon be buffeted by global events completely beyond our reach but which are slowly drip-dripping into the everyday of everything. The slightest fog of something fearful is rising up around us all. Generalized anxiety? It's hard not to think of all those scribbledy, screaming faces looking skywards on an old Radiohead poster peeling from the wall of my mate's flat.

 

Normally, on such nights, I'd indulge myself and put something obligingly gloomy on the headphones. Johnny Marr's liquid guitar and Morrisey's humdrum towns often suffice (there's no such thing as a former Smiths fan, you just visit them less as you grow older). But tonight wasn't even a Smiths night. They were always more rainy day music to me anyway. Grey, smelly carpet days. I couldn't listen to anything uplifting either, because the feeling in the air would suck away the music's essence and corrupt it to fuck. I once tried listening to 'Good Day Sunshine' by The Beatles while, ahem, feeling paranoid and emotional, thinking it would be the perfect antidote to my tremulous state of mind. Yah right. Their cheery blast of heat and sun seemed to mock me from a void. It was as if I looked down an extremely long, dank pipe toward an unreachable past which shone iridescently, but belonged to others. It amplified my gloom and loneliness.

No, the only way to get through this sort of shit is to not try to fight it, but to try to appreciate the beautiful artifacts offered up to us from others in a similar state of mind.

So I listened to this... MP3: The Pogues-The Old Main Drag

And this... MP3: Young Marble Giants-Searching for the Night

And this... MP3: Galaxie 500-The Fourth of July

And some other similar stuff.

My sleep paralysis blog is gestating (I'm gonna sleep on it!). This blog was going to be about it actually. The title refers to a Pogues lyric, which might be about delirium tremens, but always struck me as reflective of the baneful dream-hallucinations associated with the condition that I shall describe in full in my next despatch. Hey, Hallowe'en is coming. Indulge me. I have an unquenchable fascination with creepy shit. Now's the best time of year to rinse it out of the system.