I quietly observe standing in my space, daydreaming…
Find the pulse, reality void, disagree agreeably etc etc etc, words for wankers, it will start misbehaving one day
These are the hands
That touch us first
Feel your head
Find the pulse
All the mail I receive is from the NHS.
All the phone calls I receive are from the NHS.
Do we ever stop to really celebrate this miracle organisation of endless hope and gentle nudging communication? As a nation, maybe we’ve become too blasé about the tiny miracle at the heart of what we do.
The country last clapped hands and banged pans for the NHS in the early days of Covid19. During 2020’s first lockdown, the people who ran the hospitals and those who worked each and every floor - the GPs, the nurses, the doctors, the cooks and the cleaners - were gratefully praised. God bless those people I am praying I don’t have to see while all of this shit is going on went the country’s Thursday night mantra.
For each new hospital meeting I will get phone calls, a letter through the post, multiple text messages and a bunch of pings on the NHS app. Weeks in, it feels like the only way I’d be allowed to miss an appointment would be because of actual death, such is a brilliant and restless persistence of the team at the hospital.
I’m left wondering where they find these people, all these perfect souls who tend and mend and emit the kind of warm radiance that makes a nervous soul feel a little less stressed and a little more welcome each time they walk through the doors? Admittedly the message I’m being given is pushing me towards a positive outcome.
Nervous glances around the waiting rooms. It’s clear not everyone’s stories point that way.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock
Pulse pulse pulse
There are holes in my thoughts. Holes like boxes, like chasms. Holes that are impossible to stitch back together.
Has my memory always been like this?
Is this depression?
Have I been this way for years?
Feels that way.
And yet… as the tumour becomes a more real physical presence in my head, it focuses my thoughts through its own prism. Knowing it’s there, ever-growing, a pressure that presses on regardless, a mighty black hole that drags all light towards it. All curious thoughts move towards this spot, this disrupted star that sits on the left side of my brain, sucking reality into its void, twisting every rational thought back in on itself, a spiral of misery that springs out of nowhere. If that’s not depression, I’m not really sure what is.
Although that word isn’t used, talk in hospital meetings often turns to one’s mental health. The implication is always there. We know you’re going mad. We’re just trying to help. And while questioning the health of my mentality thanks to this unwelcome guest, there is a lingering thought that spins my spiral back towards something a touch brighter: Finally. I’ve got something real to worry about.
As weeks turn to months, music becomes a maelstrom, an abrasion.
There’s a an alternate reality where I’m drowning out all of these new and strange conversations in brutal noise and relentless metronomic clicking pounding rhythms. A night in a dank, loud club viewed through the unmistakable fog of ecstasy would perfectly smooth all of these nightmares out.
While music has been a supportive crutch during my life, now listening has become so much harder. My preferred volume has always been 11 but my ears won’t stop ringing. Whatever music I choose is a two fingered act of abrasion. My permanent tinnitus won’t stop buzzing. At times, that buzz becomes so intense and focused it’s like it’s own overpowering musical note, a discordant hum that’s happy to override everything. If I sit and focus, calm my whole process down, that sound might fade back to something resembling loud gig level distortion. It feels like a curse after all those years spent hugging the speaker stacks, of trying to become one with the music at The Albany while The Dust Brothers played.
With a hole to fill now music has been blasted out, I end up deep in podcast world. Escape is now two well-informed, plummy adults prattling on for forty-five minutes about the chess moves being performed within the global political landscape. This is something I can’t influence in any way that brings its own low level chaos to the mind. Although the duo bicker like children over small change and dick moves, my blood pressure never actually seems to rise. Disagree agreeably, they keep saying. It’s a lack of conflict that suits this shrunken version of me, one that makes me return over and over again. Elsewhere on the dial, two bubbling chatterbots talk endlessly about a world that’s drifting away from you, a world of Hollywood and excess, one where someone who’s now worth billions this week has made soap from their own bathwater.
In dreams, I’m back in a appointment room with the hospital’s neuropsychiatrist.
On request, I’m trying to find a name for the tumour as it stakes out more space in my subconscious. It’s an occupying force now, enough of a problem that it deserves a title.
Organism
Manifestation
Predator
Leech
Alien
Hitchhiker
Curse
Traitor
Growth
Cloud
Dust
Bomb
Clock
Walliams
Williams
Morrissey
Cunt
All conversations about the tumour keep coming back to memory.
The blot sits in a space that deals with both speech and memory. In the specialist’s words, this is an eloquent area.
There’s no point speculating about whether any sections of my brain are truly eloquent. That ship must have sailed decades ago. I’ve long felt that the place is like a fraying old scrapbook made up of half formed thoughts, snapshots of dog-eared magazine cuttings, caustic handwritten in-jokes from years ago and the odd Nigel Slater recipe that’s now memorised verbatim from a faded Observer magazine from the 1990s. That problematic clutter has dominated for years and it’s been a sluggish hinderance to both work and family life. Eloquence just feels like the specialist is adding a level of drama, intrigue and renaissance pizzazz to what I’ve long written off as an overflowing rubbish bin.
Sorry.
Back in the room.
The specialist is mapping out what will happen to said eloquent spot. Any operation will involve entering that area of the brain and exiting tumour in hand. As previously mentioned any operation needs to be performed awake, with me holding conversation with the surgeon throughout. After having been dosed and opened up, I will be brought back into the room for an hour or so and tested. That test will be a cascade of repetitive questions. As I answer, I will have to pulse my hand continually into a fist and let my arm pump up and down up and down while the surgeon works out how far into my head he can go and what he can cut from the Marina Trenches of my brain. The testing by the surgeon’s team is to preserve and protect memory and speech. Without that, who knows what’s getting cut out.
There isn’t another way. The option is this, or surrender yourself to time and wait to see what happens next. You can chose to ignore what’s being said but the words that keep coming back in hospital meetings - whether specialists or oncology staff, psychologists or the person working in the hospital branch of Costa Coffee - are always the same. It will start misbehaving one day.
But on top of that decision, there’s one unshiftable, unchangeable fact that sits right at the heart of it all of it. Something I’m reminded of time and again. The decision to go ahead or go home is mine, and mine alone. There’s nothing right now forcing my hand. I am not suffering seizures, my balance and direction are fine (within reason) and my speech is as normal (we won’t include behaviour after four or five pints). None of the noticeable symptoms are currently visible as the tumour has been discovered accidentally.
That choice – that impossible decision – unexpectedly brings a small amount of tranquility. In my heart, I know the operation will happen. There’s no debate there. And I know I’ll be awake for as long as I can be, doing tests or talking crap with whoever in the room wants to keep going.
Life, then, is still that flowing, shifting river. After all of the darkness, the deluges and storms, the river’s banks are unrecognizable but there’s some kind of brightness in the distance. Nothing visible or conceivable from here, but there’s something there, a destination.
And we’re going there. The main issue is not the if, it’s the when. So, let’s book a date.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock
Pulse pulse pulse
This week, Keith McIvor - aka JD Twitch, one half of legendary Scottish DJ/producer duo Optimo - announced the discovery of an inoperable brain tumour. Keith’s statement is up on Instagram - read here. So firstly: massive, massive love to Keith and family.
When I think back, I’m pretty sure when I did press for mad industrial bands like Front 242 in the early ’90s I sent Keith records. Then and now, he has always been more a genuine fan of music than a DJ, showing off the kind of fascination, love and belief that a fanzine writer might. DJing or recommending, he was the kid whose house you’d end up back at after a club, with a Weatherall-like mind, ready to switch you on to insane and brilliant music you’ve never heard before.
I’ve adored the Optimo (Espacio) mixes for years. 2005’s Psyche Out and 2008’s Sleepwalk are monumental (like everything these days you can find these mixes on YouTube but please buy if ever you see them as they’re essential mind expanders) and there’s a mass of amazing music on Optimo's Bandcamp page including music from a series of cassettes Keith made during covid lockdowns.
I was lucky enough to work with Optimo for a split second when I chose them to remix the title track off Manic Street Preachers’ Journal For Plague Lovers album. The mix was part of an accompanying album I put together featuring new takes by Andrew Weatherall, Underworld, Fuck Buttons, Adem, Four Tet and many more. Have a blast here, the mix is ace.
As you might imagine, it’s hard reading about anyone with a version of the same condition that you’ve had (if I’m being honest, I don’t think prior to last year I’d really thought about brain tumours at all, apart from in moments of mad panic about terrible things that could happen to a human being). So, this is me just going back to what I said at the start, and passing on my absolute love and total respect to Keith - one of the true greats.
Something else buzzing round the head this week is The Observer’s investigation into the story behind huge selling walking-wallow misery memoir Salt Path*. Rather than me try to break down my thoughts, just read my pub friend Sophie Heawood’s brilliant piece on the whole thing here instead. The piece isn’t related to this in any way other than it raised the question of how people write up their life stories and how aspects of the truth can get twisted inside out to make into something more sellable. I’ve tried to not bullshit on these posts as best I can (though post operation, I might occasionally have to squint quite hard to see the actual truth). If you notice me drifting off into mad fantasy world, please either pull me up on it or take into account that I’m out there now fully bending the truth in order to make some sweet, sweet cash. If it’s the latter, promise I’ll get the beers in. One day.
*originally wrote this as Salt Burn, which I missed until it was pointed out by my mate Deek. My point still stands though, especially if it’s about that bloody film.