I've never trusted Neil Gaiman.
Oh, I know refusing to trust someone is a stubborn weakness, and one that I fall prey to often when it comes to overpopularity, but there's just something too slick about him, as if this persona he's built for himself in the media, all scruffy hair and profound expressions would end up the sole survivor of having boiling oil poured on his head by enraged wantons gone mad up a clocktower.
I can just see the oil sluicing from him as if it were milk and his leather jacket lactose-intolerant...
Anyway. Every once in a while I maintain enough clarity to remember that this stubborness is ridiculous and when a new friend, in good faith, hands you a book...
Well, you read it. You read it to discover one of this new person's worlds, you read it because you're bored out of your skull of handbooks and textbooks and whitepapers, you read it because the title makes you sigh and want to draw a bath.
"Neverwhere". Neil Gaiman.
He's struck, and he's struck hard, strumming some forgotten 7th chord on a dilapidated guitar that I use for my romani wistfullness.
Good timing, on the book, on finishing it last night, lying in bed and shivering after hours of EQ and brainache over my mum.
Y'know, yesterday, I think *I* did wrong by her... In my haste I wandered into court with my lawyer (or brain) asleep in his shoes.
Regardless, I meandered the trek to work today trying to melt in the sun and disappear through the cracks in the pavement...
Comfortably happy and somehow still wondering, or wondering once again, about the choices I've made.
And last night when Richard Mayhew, uptight and mundane and boring as all hell had the courage to wander out of the pub where his coworkers were sharing a drink, and draw a door in a brick wall, and step through it into the "underworld"...
I couldn't sleep. 3am...4am...little carmine figures on my sleek black digital alarm clock marched past me, leering.
I wore extra make-up to work today, half-worried that someone might notice that I'm still caught in a dream.
Maybe that's why I won't trust Neil Gaiman. Maybe it's not that his work strikes me as insincere (the main cause of mistrust in me), maybe it's because he understands too well the places Man Has Left Behind in the race to conquer fabricated priorities.
And I felt myself slipping too, half-listening to Mayhew's friend telling him he's cracked and gone insane, half-telling myself that this occasional desperate urge to break pretty things and scream obscenities in foreign tongues and just go running from all this...plastic is the voice of pressure and discomfort and the shrill whine of not fitting in.
Oh, I still dream, and fain to tell myself that they are noble dreams rife with cyberpunk visions and culminations, but...
Or And...
I dont' scream much anymore and that's good because the more I scream the more harm I chance doing but...
But...
Maybe I'm missing the poetry that used to sing to me along the cracked pavement that no one else ever seemed to look at, maybe I'm feeling guilty at spending so much damn time doing... Sensible things, responsible things, ambitious but EMPTY thing...
Maybe I just saw all too well where Richard Mayhew was headed before he snapppppped, and occasionally I yearn for explosion rather than this quiet seeking out of balance and beauty amid the rubble.
But I think I decided, at some point on my meander here, that I'd miss the quiet sweet-smelling bits, the soft light and sharp mornings. For all the magic and romanticism of hurling it all to shards against concrete, there are other kinds of wistfulness.
And maybe another acid trip will be enough to make this one true unrequited love fade a little, or maybe it will never fade or maybe one day I'll learn better...
In the meantime, it's been a thoroughly rockin' kick in the pants that I've been wandering around with my jaw gritted a little too tightly as of late.
I will not forget so soon the visions of dusk from the Other side of the hill.