lucky

this was the first night i'd been out after my operation in hospital, so i'm a looking a little more pale than usual, but it was a celebration for Luise's birthday and the completion of our short film "Cigarettes Burn Faster in the Sun" by Arbi Lawang starring Luise Metelka, Nicholas Denton (click their names each for a teaser) and myself. We were at one of my favourite places to get pizza in the world, Lucky Coq. Note if you are LUCKY enough to be in Rome next week, the film is making it's European debut at MASHROME film festival.  PS check out the behind the scenes video.
And this teaser featuring yours truly..



Yep, looks cool huh?




















POST-OPIATE DREAM

i was in hospital for 3 nights last october/november to fix my nose after a lifetime of not realising that you are actually meant to be able to breathe through it. rhinoseptoplasty, bilateral turbinate reduction, double intranasal antrostomy and functional endoscopic sinus surgery (i know it's not necessary to write out all these words but i think they look pretty) to improve breathing from a severely deviated septum, unblocking my airways, clearing/restoring sinus function = no more fucking chronic sinusitis and fix the fracture in my nose. 

//afterwards for the duration of my stay they injected in my legs large doses of Pethidine 4 x day that made me enter some waking dream state initially manifested as an intangible pure ecstasy - bodily orgasm. injected again periodically throughout the day - these very sharp moments of bliss faded quicker and quicker before descending into some pit of nothingness progressively becoming deeper and increasingly more dull each time, the further i went down, the less i rose. hallucinating through flashes of heightened exhaustion, becoming so heavy, Pethidine crippled me to the white sheet of the bed, passing out and back in and out and in. out. in. out. what i wrote during as "living through this post-opiate dream." it became difficult to sit up, let alone walk, my body was losing it's function and the understanding of, my legs turning into two dead slabs of meat. Pethidine was a chain, some form of restraint, some type of paralysis. Pethidine removing the human, the ability to concentrate and focus, for the most part it was not possible to use my gameboy or phone or watch anything; losing the ability to do anything. my eyes occasionally falling shut between staring out the window to the plain walls that i wasn't actually looking at all. Pethidine was spaced out blank thoughts. very few and disappearing, disjoined and faint, distant and empty, there - no thoughts - nothing was moving, nothing was growing, nothing felt like it was even living anymore. particularly after the 2nd night, around the 10th or 11th comedown from 10th or 11th shot, it did not feel at all like i was recovering for few days from a somewhat minor surgery, it felt like i had been trapped in a psych ward for months, everything suspended in slow-motion, weeks in replace of hours, in this box, in this tiny room, unable to or attempt to leave the confinement; time beyond irrelevant and dissected from consideration.

it is not possible for me to accurately express the nightmarish element of this state as i continued to receive the Pethidine into my body, my mind floating further and further away while the world got darker in my eyes and hope washed out as if it was never there: it unsettled me way down to the secrets of my bones.. this is the end of a poem i wrote on the third day:

"the occasional interaction
when the nurse comes to give me the next shot 
is the only reason i haven't 
faded to a monster. 

the worst part isn't the solitude, 
or the furnishings or the food 
or the comedown from a high, 
but the very clear and obvious fact

that the world is no different out there 
than it is in here.

and how do i live with that?"












it rises,
it rises,
and it rises
and it rises to white noise,
to white noise
and then,
and then it doesn't matter anymore.
It doesn't matter anymore.
fuck.