Private World

I have been in existence for fifty-five years. By the time anyone reads this it will be fifty-six, all being well. The title would have been Solipsism but I'm trying hard to avoid disappearing up my own back passage, and Private World amounts to more or less the same thing whilst also being one of my favourite songs by the New York Dolls.

For some reason, I've always been driven to order things in sets or to alphabeticise them - books, records, art, or whatever - essentially to create frames. The books I accumulated as a child, only some of which I actually read, were ordered to my way of thinking into three main groups - excepting outliers such as Winnie the Pooh or anything containing pictures of dinosaurs. These three main groups were Doctor Who novelisations, cranky flying saucer literature, and humour. The last of these, humour, encompassed incomplete collections of Tintin and Asterix, then Mad magazine paperbacks, TV tie-in material such as were spun off from the Goodies or Monty Python, and more or less anything by Spike Milligan. I was a sporadic reader, but I liked anything with pictures that was funny. While the Who novels and the saucer books tended towards a certain stylistic uniformity, as did the Asterix and Tintin titles, the funny books were of all different shapes, sizes, and composition, which apparently bothered me. I therefore attempted to redefine them as a coherent group by writing The Loony Library - blue or black felt tip, all capitals and underlined - in the upper left corner on the inside cover of each book, as though they might constitute a body of thematically associated research material. All I knew was that I liked things to be in sets.

Much later, at the age of fourteen or so, I got my first mono portable tape recorder and took to borrowing novelty records from my friends, making up two C90 compilations for which I laboriously drew covers in felt tip; and, still very much in the thrall of Milligan, I named them Songs for the Hard of Thinking volumes one and two. Somehow it wasn't enough to simply have a couple of cassettes featuring Funky Gibbon, Friggin' in the Riggin' and selections from the K-Tel Looney Tunes album, so I framed the tapes on my own terms - packaged them even.

A year or so later, the enterprise had come to seem a little juvenile even to me so I peeled off the labels I'd glued onto the cassettes and taped over both volumes with pop songs from the radio - Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex, the first Public Image Limited single, Instant Replay by Dan Hartman and others. I was trying to grow up, but I wasn't picky.

However, this arbitrary assembly bothered me somehow, being nothing like so tidy as the few record albums I'd bought, all with nice covers and each one recorded by a specific artist or band. It was a good few years before I bought an actual vinyl compilation album because the basic concept had struck me as untidy. I found peace, at least with taping stuff off the radio, by instigating another set or series or whatever you want to call it on Saturday the 19th of July, 1980. The series was named The Illegal Tapes as a rebelliously sardonic nod to the notion of home taping killing music, and I remember the date because it's written inside my hand drawn cover for the first volume in reference to a Simple Minds performance broadcast during Radio One's In Concert slot. I filled the numerous volumes of The Illegal Tapes with stuff from the radio and singles borrowed from friends, diligently noting down the details of each on the cover, just like on an official release - credits, time, record label, owner of record and so on; and I listened to these tapes at least as often as I listened to my albums despite the shitty quality.

After thirty or so volumes, I began to recognise the faithful indexing of all that small print as essentially ludicrous, but I continued to make covers for the things and somehow kept the series going for one-hundred and twenty-two volumes, finally breaking the habit at some point in the nineties; and naturally I still have all of them because that's how my brain works. I frame things with which I furnish my own private world, possibly as a ritual affirmation of my being in control. I create a framework within which I feel better able to operate, by some definition.

In recent years I've grown increasingly conscious of the fact that I will, at some point, look back on this piece of writing and think, fifty-fucking-five, possibly also lamenting the passing of the ease with which I am able to function, both physically and mentally. I'm also aware that it may feel as though very little time has passed because it will have appeared to race more and more with each year. Childhood seemed to last forever, with eternities such as the length of time some friend was borrowing Spike Milligan's Little Pot Boiler measured in weeks. These days I can read a book I regard as a recent purchase and discover that I bought the thing five years ago.

At the age of ten, five years counted as 50% of the full span of my time on Earth. Five years is now 9.09% of my existence, and my existence is, I suppose, the sum of memories I've accumulated thus far; hence the sensation of my having stepped on the figurative gas in recent years. Elvis Presley released Heartbreak Hotel in 1956, which seemed like prehistory when I was a teenager in 1980, something belonging to the milieu of the second world war and Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston; yet Heartbreak Hotel was just twenty-four years old as of 1980, which is now forty-one years ago.

Twenty-four years back from 2021 brings us to 1997. Oasis were bothering the charts on a regular basis, but I'd given up on rock music and was listening mostly to rap and churning out a series of paintings based on various supernatural figures from Mexican mythology. It doesn't quite seem like yesterday, but maybe the day before yesterday. There were things I began in 1997 which I still vaguely regard as work in progress, while avoiding thoughts of whether or not I'm ever actually likely to get them finished.

I scribbled a hasty, non-committal cover for my final volume of The Illegal Tapes at the age of thirty-five. I had interests, creative pursuits, and habits but it didn't feel quite as though I'd ever fully engaged with anything. There wasn't anything I did which felt vital in the sense of being more than just a means of passing time, at least not with hindsight. I loved making art, recording my own music and writing, but everything I produced began to feel half-arsed once the initial fervour of creating yet another set or series had passed. All I could see were the flaws. I'd begun to suspect that I might be prone to fads or faddish behaviour, because I hadn't consistently stuck at any one thing for more than a couple of years, excepting working as a postman for Royal Mail which I didn't really like to think of as a calling. When I noticed pre-Hispanic Mexico and found myself becoming rapidly obsessed, I told myself that this time I was going to go all the way with it, whatever that meant, and so I did. I'd only ever been a sporadic reader, but now I really threw myself into it. When I ran out of library books, I made trips to Foyles and worked my way through their shelves, beginning with fairly general reading, ultimately graduating to specialised academic texts, translations of Codex Chimalpahin and so on. Eventually all that was left was to go to Mexico and have a look around, so that's what I did. Above all, I loved the discovery that the more I read, the more I understood, and the more I felt as though I had a grasp on the subject beyond my usual waving a hand in the air and explaining well, it's like, you know, it's like, stuff, and that's really interesting, and you know…

The more I used my brain, the better it seemed to work.

I began something called Hueyteteotecuhtin mainly for the sake of having a focus and making use of all that I was learning. Hueyteteotecuhtin would have been a book collecting my series of mythological paintings together with essays explaining the same.

The more I understood, the more I enjoyed the understanding, and the more I realised how little I had actually understood anything up until that point. I took copious notes of everything I read or saw, filling ring binders with scrawling essays and observations which informed the paintings; then eventually realised that Hueyteteotecuhtin, my proposed visual encyclopedia of Mexican Gods would be, with the best will in the world, a potentially cranky undertaking due to the uneasy combination of pseudo-surrealist art and notionally scholarly essays in the tone of an autodidact. I dislike leaving anything unfinished but have come to accept that Hueyteteotecuhtin was probably one of those undertakings where the journey was ultimately more important than the destination.

While pondering what form Hueyteteotecuhtin might eventually take, I wrote a novel, Smoking Mirror, and then another novel, The Other Side of the World when Smoking Mirror failed to find a publisher. The Other Side of the World was eventually published by Obverse Books as Against Nature following such extensive revisions as to turn it into a different book. My attempts to write fiction began as a sort of appendix to Hueyteteotecuhtin, an undertaking I tried on the side for the sake of light relief as much as anything; but also for the sake of making use of all that research and those five trips to Mexico City, at least ensuring that it had all amounted to something and wasn't just another dead end.

By 2008, fiction had become my main thing and writing was becoming something like an end in itself. It was never anything I did in pursuit of fame or money, although I don't think I would have had a problem with either. It was simply what I did, and as such I struggled for proficiency, to be able to pull together a sentence with the sort of aptitude and skill I'd never really achieved with a guitar; and at some point, I think I got there.

I'd agonised over Smoking Mirror, crawling forward one sentence at a time, usually finding it to be drivel and requiring extensive revision next day. The Other Side of the World came a little easier, following which I took to short stories, writing and rewriting almost every day in an effort to get to grips with it.

As I took to writing science-fiction, it occurred to me that I hadn't actually read much aside from about half of Philip K. Dick's body of work and a stack of Doctor Who novelisations; but I'd read enough to be able to tell when an author's main influences were films or television serials because their novels read as though they would rather have been something else, and I didn't want to be one of those people. If you're writing a novel in hope of it becoming a series on Netflix, I probably won't want to read it.

The discovery of self-publishing came as a revelation to me, a means of framing my writing like I'd framed stuff taped from the radio as The Illegal Tapes. It meant that I could produce decent looking paperbacks of both Smoking Mirror and The Other Side of the World, legitimising them as finished pieces which I could then sell to anyone who might be interested. Self-publishing served to frame all that work as something beyond just a stack of printouts in a ringbinder or files sat on my computer and, to be frank, the sequence of my own Lulu publications occupying the book shelf between William Burroughs' Blade Runner treatment and Octavia Butler's Mind of My Mind means more to me than whether anyone is buying.

As it happens, I do seem to have generated a few sales on Lulu, although I have no idea who these people are beyond that they must almost certainly have read Against Nature and then gone looking for further material. I've been told by a good friend whose novels sell by the truckload in actual book stores that if you don't want your work to be read by as many people as possible then you can't call yourself a writer. I file this maxim away with others which may work for  people who aren't me, aside from which I don't call myself a writer. Writing is something I do, and try to do to the best of my abilities. That which readers have thus far taken from my writing has often seemed slightly different to that which I've tried to put in, so I find the feedback and even the praise to be confusing. I can't always square it with what I've done, or thought I was doing. It seems like a distraction and I have no real interest in writing for a specific audience.

In addition to the novels, I've spent much of the last decade chronicling my own existence. I've maintained online blogs of semi-autobiographical material as well as reviews of books I've read and music I've enjoyed. The first of these blogs was Pamphlets of Destiny, although it spent the first two years of its life on a couple of internet bulletin boards. Back in 2007 when I realised I should perhaps make an effort to read more of the genre within which I was trying to write, I took to writing short reviews of everything I read, principally as a means of analysing and understanding the genre, what worked, and what didn't work. This additionally resulted in my feeling better able to tackle books I might once have left on the shelf as either too demanding or at least nowhere near so much fun as reading an X-Men comic book. It additionally meant that, then in my forties, I began to catch up with all the authors I probably should have read during my teenage years - Asimov, Simak, Dostoyevsky, D.H. Lawrence and others. The more I read, and the more I wrote about what I'd been reading, the more fluid I found the process of writing. My vocabulary began to expand, reducing the need to revise each paragraph a million times over before it began to flow as it should; and the more I wrote, the more capable I was at expressing myself, at matching the thought process to words by means which yielded something a bit more coherent than well, it's like, you know, it's like, stuff, and that's really interesting, and you know...

This chronicling of my own existence has taken the form of self-published collections of my reviews, vaguely autobiographical blog posts, diaries kept whilst travelling around in Mexico, and even material written for fanzines or just for the sake of writing. It's self-indulgent, I suppose, but I am my own audience; and I exclude from this undertaking anything which I wouldn't have bothered reading had it been written by someone else. What this means is that I work on this material at great length, getting it into as respectable a shape as I can so as to avoid having to look back on it and wishing I hadn't bothered. Self-publishing has an arguably poor reputation as the home of people who can't fucking write and who tend to think that'll do before hitting the publish my gibberish button on Lulu, and I don't want to be one of those people either.

The purpose of this chronicling and framing, of all the work I've put into self-publishing paperbacks which may only ever exist as a single physical copy on my own book shelf, is mapping where I've been, where I am right now, and how I got here. It's an extension of what I've been doing for most of my life, the ongoing task of elevating myself, or at least trying to live a better life than I was living, by some definition. The legitimacy of this undertaking seems supported by present circumstances under which I'm probably happier than I've ever been. I'm happily married and settled in Texas, and have been for the past decade, and I enjoy what I do. I no longer feel like I have to create an impression or appease anyone outside of the usual civic forces. This was never the future I envisioned for much of my first forty or so years, and it doesn't feel like something I simply stumbled upon through pure luck.

It has been observed by former acquaintances that my obsession with Mexico and all that came in its wake might constitute a magical or shamanic journey, and I recognise the notion that the successful practice of magic - or probably magick - improves the quality of ones life and can be identified as such by the opportunities and coincidences which begin to present themselves with astonishing frequency when you're doing it right. Personally I see it more as a case of simply getting ones shit together, and the esoteric terms arise only by way of contrast with how few people actually do ever get their shit together, for whatever reason. Calling it magic is just another dead end, a flamboyant means of identifying the individual within their peer group, and further validating whatever showy crap someone has adopted as their reason for being.

This chronicling - itself an extension of my framing - is presently what I'm doing instead of having the traditional mid-life crisis, now that I've reached the age at which my childhood may as well have happened to someone else in terms of memory. I create markers by which I can observe the process of how I got here, to return to that particular theme. Much of the autobiographical material from An Englishman in Texas records details I'm beginning to forget whilst attempting to answer the question of what the fuck that was all about. Even the book and music reviews serve a similar purpose, at least from my own perspective, charting attitudes and preferences which have changed over time, including even how well I've applied myself to the creative process.

I've recently spent about two thirds of a year revising all of my own earlier self-published work, having discovered that my proofreading regime up until about 2016 still left significant room for error. Mostly the revisions have been limited to an excessive use of commas and the occasionally errant spelling or typo, but I found this in Crappy 1970s Paperbacks with Airbrushed Spacecraft on the Covers - the first collection of science-fiction book reviews:

I have an old tape interview where he describes starting work as a teenager at some radio repair place, having an argument with the guy over whether what comes out of a speaker is music or merely a simulation of music produced by minute fluctuations in air pressure.

I don't know how obvious the problem will be to whoever reads this, but to me it suggest that the young Philip K. Dick was once employed to have acne, spend too long on the phone, and to yell, I hate you, it's so unfair! at his mother. The first half of Crappy 1970s Paperbacks, even after all of the revision and polishing, still reads like fanzine level writing to me, but - with reviews printed in order of having been written - seems to pick up around the summer of 2010, the point at which I'd been away from Royal Mail for eight months and had begun sorting everything out in readiness for my relocation to Texas. I don't know if the circumstances were a factor, or whether my thought engine was simply running better, but it feels as though something had changed.

As any legitimate scientist will tell you, the uncomfortable fact of engaging in any field of scientific research is the realisation that what you come to know additionally reveals the sheer scale of what you don't know and may never know; and I would say this applies as well to any course of applied thought. This, I suspect, is why people adhere with such tenacity to blind alleys of pop culture, because it's not that hard to learn everything there is to learn about the Marvel universe or Doctor Who or whatever else is clogging up the internet this week; and achieving a comprehensive understanding of something which doesn't really matter is a nevertheless comprehensive understanding which brings with it an illusory but satisfying sense of achievement, and I should know because that's where I started.

This is also, I would suggest, why unintelligent people often tend to be so terrifyingly resolute in their convictions. They believe in knowledge as something small and finite, something which can be complete once you have all of the facts, or all of what you're prepared to accept as the facts; and whatever insecurities may be in operation serve to preserve and fortify their convictions as something which no-one is taking from them, because those convictions may be all they have.

In summary, if any of above makes any sense whatsoever, then my assessment of my own progress is possibly accurate, or at least refers to real world occurrences rather than just whatever has been happening inside my head. On the other hand, it may read like the ramblings of some cunt talking to himself because that's actually what it is.

Back in 1997, I was single bordering on incel status, loosely financed by a back breaking job, and unable to imagine a future which was likely to represent an improvement on the present. In 2021, barring minor inconveniences, I'm happier than I've probably ever been for any length of time and I'm able to look back on that which I've left behind in my wake and think, yeah, that was okay. I put this down to hard work and learning to think in a straight line, and occasionally having to face the fact that nothing is ever automatically a masterpiece just because you did it and you were expressing yourself.

In ten years time, I will be sixty-six, and I may read this back and think, what a load of old bollocks, which will hopefully mean that I'm right, because the journey will always be more crucial than the destination.