Travelling Sideways
at a million miles an hour.
“The world doesn’t give a shit what I have to say.
I’m unnecessary”.
So proclaims the Paul Giamatti character of “Miles” in the Alexander Payne directed “Sideways” from 2004 and like a host of characters from innumerable films I could bore you to sleep with, I am Miles, and the screenplay quote above is me.
Before we continue, a quick disclaimer:
Please don’t expect a catharsis by the denouement of this article because it won’t be arriving even though I haven’t, as yet, decided how this screed will develop. But there won’t be a happy ending.
I’m not entirely sure why I feel the need to add this early warning as frankly, aside from a kind young man from the other side of the world in Canada, no-one reads my writing anyway.
Much like my books.
This current failure in a lifetime full to overflowing with them isn’t the reason for my depression as with next to zero social media presence, agent, publishing house and associated promotional arms I’ve received the exact reaction to my books I expected. A bittersweet fuck all. So I tried a Youtube channel for the first time. 300 videos in under 2 months is some going considering the length of some of them and from a standing start and with no outside help whatsoever. I even perched myself on the banks of the River Severn with the oldest iron bridge in the world as THE most perfect backdrop, tried to make them entertaining (as they are just me reading to camera and more than a little “dry”), tried to make them human, relevant, thanking and engaging the audience, welcoming them, wishing them well, asking for feedback, replying to the albeit minimal comments with grace and humility, and at today’s count, after 2 months of performing for the camera and being openly front and centre for the very first time to the world wide web, I have a gargantuan subscriber list of 35.
Thirty fucking five.
The cynic in me knows that many of this number will be bot accounts and the unscrupulous shysters who continually send me emails promising all the riches in the world but only if I part with some cold hard cash in their direction first. What larks. A few friends, distant and current, have subscribed, so add those to the kindly souls who have tripped over my videos and after 2 months of heartache, self harm, and playing like a chimpanzee for the camera I’ve probably snagged a dozen people to my particular internet video book club.
Bit sad that isn’t it?
But that isn’t the reason for my deeply dark depression and the deepest ever of all holes I currently find myself in. Nor is the next new venture into the new and unknown world of audiobooks as armed with a newly purchased microphone I’ve spent just over 2 weeks reading and re-reading my very first published book, chapter by chapter, over and over, and over again. I’ve played with the recording software, edited and refined the raw “takes” to what I believed to be acceptable, dare I say entertaining and releasable quality, but all I hear are the recording demons of mouth clicks, pops, plosives and various other definite no-nos that will ensure my hard work never sees the light of day let alone anyone else’s ears. So, alone once more, I’ve played with a software suite completely alien to me and tried, and tried some more, and tried and tried and tried. Despite what some people may have you believe about me, I do try.
But I fail.
Constantly.
Take my writing for instance. I’ve written my entire life but only seriously since 2012 and now I’ve book-ended the decade that has since past with some opus works of amateur literary scribblings, with first huge works on the entire film careers of over two dozen film directors and more recently, huge works on the sports of cricket and football.
The result?
Since April of this year I have self-published four traditional paper books and seven mighty volumes of e-books. 11 published books in the space of just 5 months.
The result?
I may as well have sat at the seaside and watched the tide roll in and roll the fuck back out again.
I was staring at an old photograph last night, for hours, and I could post it here but I’m not going to. It’s a photo of my Mum and Dad from their infamous Christmas parties of the late 1970’s and there is so much love and joy and laughter and contentment surrounding the dreadful wallpaper and furnishings of the era in that one image. I stared at it for hours.
I told my ex this morning whilst prefacing it by saying that I fear whatever comes out of my mouth these days. So I told her of the boundless love and laughter in this one photo that I stared at for hours before saying what a horrible and despicable creature these two loving people had created and how they’d despair for me.
And I made her cry.
It’s Thursday 7th December 2023 and exactly 7.25pm as I commence this paragraph and my beautiful son is sat to my left and squarely in his PlayStation world of hunting zombies. It’s our little “bubble” together. I have a fake smile upon my face but I won’t need that tomorrow as he won’t be here then and I return once more to being a part-time Dad and all alone once more. All alone, traipsing around saying “sorry” to him (even though he isn’t here) and sorry to so many more people that aren’t here either and never will be. When not doing that I’ll be asking myself out loud what am I going to do now or more specifically, and a particular personal favourite clouded in streaming tears is “I don’t know what to do”.
The rub is I do know what I have to do, it’s just that I’m not man or brave enough to kill myself. So I’ll wait instead until the evening and when darkness fully descends to stand at the kitchen door, peer into the stars above and plead for my parents to come and get me, to end my pain.
That photo which I won’t share really does encapsulate my dear old parents. My Dad, probably more than a little drunk and with his own bar behind him, a smile as big an ocean and the cheekiest of glints in his eye. My Mum, smiling and happy, but cuddling shyly into the embrace of her husband, and a man she adored to the moon and beyond. I tried to take the pulse of that man a few years later when still a spotty teenager before days later kissing a stone dead man on the top of the forehead before his funeral, a memory that fucking haunts me. Three plus decades later I waved goodbye to a frail old lady on a Zoom call when I should have been with her in her final earthly hours. She barely recognised me, that dear old lady who lavished such love and care on me I couldn’t begin to describe, and I should have been there, holding her hands, telling stories, making her laugh, telling her how thankful I was to call her my Mum.
I wasn’t “allowed” to be because the world is a horrible place.
And that sodding Zoom call haunts me now too.
I’ve been so depressed for so long I don’t even know what to pin it on any more. I go to bed, after pleading for ghostly stars to come and get me, to pray to an absent landlord to not let me wake up in the morning and take the ending of my miserable life out of my hands. Sadly, those stars aren’t our dearly departed loved ones and God doesn’t exist. Someone may read this (and thanks if you do) and that certain someone will exhort me to “keep going” or “it’s coming”, “don’t lose hope” or “keep trying”. He’ll probably throw in the example of a certain author who, apparently, wrote a rather successful series of books whilst sat penniless at a coffee shop table. But that’s a rather lovely exception to the rule or just a fanciful fairy tale and anyway, like Miles in “Sideways”, no-one gives a shit about my writing and what I have to say.
And I do keep trying.
And I keep on failing.
Constantly.
I have a growing list of “never’s”
Never going to fall in love again
Never going to feel the loving embrace of a lady who truly cares for me
Never going to get married
Never going to go abroad again
Never going to own the roof above my head
Never going to own my own car
Never going to have financial independence
Let alone never find happiness, be a successful writer or be any sort of parental role model for my son.
Sadly I’ll never kill myself either even though it’s my only way out.
By the beginning of 2024 in a few weeks I’ll be in a worse position than I ever was in 1994, and that was rock fucking bottom. I’ll still be hoping to die, still unable to open any mail or emails for fear of what doom I’ll find inside, still never answer the telephone, still fear a knock at the door, still not check my bank account and still thoroughly and completely despise myself.
And I’ll still be unnecessary.
Try writing some poetry, blank verse, the exterior world as I see it, peaches seashells, the power of photography, inchworms, etc.
This article resonated with me so much that I read it through twice. It was an exceptional self-reflective piece without the tiresome padding I feel like I’m seeing more and more online, especially with infra-40 subset of writers and social media influencers who seem to be quite fond of referring to themselves as “life coaches”.
As a child of the ‘70s and fellow writer who feels as if he’s whistling to the dark, the way you parceled out your experience(s) in decades parallels many of my own musings about where I’ve been and where I’m going. I’ve personally found it bewilderingly different I am now from the guy that makes me wince from 2013, the one who makes me sigh from 2003, and the eager young lad of 1993 who was so excited about life and a genuinely likable person.
During the COVID madness, I started reading books online for Librivox.org. I vainly thought this would be the beginning of something grand, perhaps a slew of “by-name requests” from famous authors begging me to read their works. Well, that didn’t happen. And after two years of toiling at the computer, trying to smooth out all the indelicacies (like the “plosives” you mention) and being constantly “scooped” by other volunteer readers whose voices were much better than my own but who would never have known about the obscure as hell story or poem they made famous, without my inferior reading having put it on the map, was discouraging. And after nearly a hundred of these recordings with a handful of “nice job”s in comment fields, I gave up on it.
The power of these old photographs, like the one your mentioned, is also difficult to communicate to people who don’t store their memories in that multisensual and comprehensive way, where it seems as if the sounds and smells were trapped in the same camera click, and where you feel as if you’re reliving the experience.
I agree with David Perlmutter that you have a lot to share. And I hope you continue to post essays like this on your Substack, because I’m a few seconds away from hitting the subscribe button, although I know little about football or cricket. 🙂