Through all my bolted doors,
I’ve let in so much more
than my silly sensibilities can bear.
Now I’ve a marathon to run,
but you hold the starting gun,
and I’m of the kind of mind,
to wander faster, not farther.

So Barkeep, bring me
a bottle of your cheapest Whisky,
a gun and some dark sunglasses.
I’m in training for a date with Destiny,
and good God that girl’s gone
and let herself go.

All these moments of weakness,
hit me like an ambulance,
they might hurt like hell but
they’re all so strangely convenient.

Too soon to freely fall and be a little risky with me,
you’ve got to find your feet before you can land.
In the meantime, desperate dame destiny and I
will drink and despise every soaring soul we see
fly.

These moments of weakness,
hit me like an ambulance,
they hurt like hell but,
damn it they’re convenient.

Wasting love was never one of your games,
you could play it cool but never twice the same.
Your smoky smiles and ever welcoming charm;
no one will ever miss you boys too much.

Since that morning we’re left yearning,
searching two stars newly burning.
We look, and with heavy hearts:

Recall-
When times were tough they both had such a knack,
for colouring greys and lighting up the black.
Chasing smoke and mirrors from our dreams,
‘til our tapestries tore at what we thought were timeless seams.

All you were;
all you gave;
was all we needed.

With brothers on your shoulders, 
and lovers in your arms,
you carried all our tunes,
and settled all our qualms.
With a mother on your shoulders
or a memory ever-warm;
you carried a torch for all of us
but now you burn like two suns
inside of us.

While I cannot remember the moment we fell in love, I remember clearly the moment you said you no longer loved me. I remember it with a sigh and recall our passion with gladness and the way you cooled with riddling sorrow, and then I remember the end as it should be remembered; with a breath of relief and a nod to the future. 

One twenty-fuck in the morning and insomnia, for which I have nicotine withdrawals to thank, is toying with my consciousness. By ‘toying with my consciousness’ I mean I shouldn’t be conscious. But I am. To babble safe in the arms of cliche for a paragraph or two: young Me - the young Me who had ideals and callow, flood-lit dreams and a vision of a future-self being strong and as unstoppable as he would be immovable - would make a damn good attempt at kicking the shit out of me right now. My father was a smoker right up until his heart gave out and he had three of his mainlines replaced with tubes from his arsecheek and ankle. To leave any semblance of grit or affront and to keep you from trying to sympathise or empathise, I’ll say simply, that throughout much of my childhood and all of my adolescence  he and I were not close, so it was to ensure I’d never be able to be held akin to him that I chose never to pick up a cigarette:

“I will never smoke; it’s disgusting,” I’d so often declared.
One might suppose that’s proof that the pressures of youth, or rather the pressures of life as an approximate human in this world are all too much; especially so for the young. That isn’t entirely true, though. Well, it probably is, but it’s not the entire story. I’ve learned since that the children of smokers are at least twice as likely to smoke as those of non-smokers. I can’t provide a citation, I’m an avid but entirely unscrupulous reader of New Scientist. I’d provide a percentage but I don’t want you to get antsy when you realise I don’t check facts. To paraphrase Capote, ‘this isn’t writing; it’s typing’. According to another study I can’t cite nor really summarise in a fashion that will do it justice: human genetic make-up can be influenced by things as seemingly exclusive as experiences or life-choices - albeit the more existentially cataclysmic of those things - that a parent might have made.
Both of my parents smoked, before and after I was born, so it stands to reason that by the genetic pre-programming I received I would be inclined, at some point, to take it up. By the reasoning the aspect of nurture plays in child’s formation into an adult human further provides: as a result of simply being in the environment that I was raised in, among the mimetic idiosyncrasies I would take on would be a propensity toward cigarette smoking. That’s right, those noxious sticks that made me cough, made me feel sick whenever my father smoked them on car rides (it was too cold to have the windows down, of course), those things that once left me burned and almost blind in my left eye for three months, are now things I enjoy burning and sucking on myself.    
This, however, really does need to stop.
There are many things my upbringing and my life so far have prepared me well for, but this battle between smoking and singing is one that I still am entirely unable to pick a winning side to. More than anything, I adore music. It is, to plagiarise and dip into the cliche tin again, my one true north. The feelings that come with listening to it, seeing it being played, and then more still those of I experience when composing or playing it and singing it myself. They’re sensations - states of being -  which nothing else comes close to providing.
Like writing and reading and conversing and the perception of the otherwise imperceptible via abstract reasoning methods such as mathematics and metacognition, music is an entirely exclusive form of stimulation for our minds, coming at once intellectually, emotionally, and depending on the experience, sometimes even physically. The crux of our nervous systems, our brains are the biggest and most sensitive erogenous zones in our body. For me, music hits that spot like nothing else.
You get it, I LOVE to sing - but partly because of my beatnik upbringing and genetic predisposition to smoking and partly because I’ve let the addiction get out of hand, I really have had awful luck sending the smokes packing and letting my voice be what it should be, and what I like it to be. The smoking stops me from singing as well as I can. Not being able to sing as well I can means I enjoy singing less and often stop doing it altogether for long periods of time. This is why I want to quite smoking.
The thing about quitting smoking, which I’ve never experienced every other time I’ve quit, because apparently this is the first time I’ve been addicted enough to experience them, are physical withdrawal symptoms. It can be physically painful.
This particular discomfort I’m experiencing at the hands of these withdrawals is making the cough and the reek which no amount of deoderant or gum can ever quite mask and the fatigue and the emphysematous cardio-vascular unfitness, and the gritty, mucus-drenched larynx which can’t hope to hold a tune seem an entirely fair price for a slow burn of a succulent cancer stick. Right now a smoke sounds more appealing that an incredibly thorough and attentive fellating from an incredibly attractive woman while listening to an incredibly well written piece of music, or even while playing one.
Steak ‘n’ potaters? Damn right, Bill.
Quitting smoking is Hell prep school for the weak willed.

I’m buying Nicotine patches first thing in the morning. 

PLEASE HELP ME! 
An upcoming project of mine is still without a name, not even a working title, so please, WHAT SHOULD THE BAND BE CALLED!? This is always such a frustrating decision to make.

Here’s a list of titles I’ve been considering so far:

-Spider’s Ire.(Yes, this being a homophone of ‘Spy Desire’ is deliberate, and yep, this was what I HAD chosen for a failed “solo[ish] project” I once embarked upon.)
-Watchword.
-Ode.
-Wanton Daze. 
-Earnest Anyway. 
-Pen Well. 
-Ways Lit Well. 
-Mon Tout. 
-Fart Sucker. 
-Zero Imagination. 
-Endless Arse Kiss. (Say this one quickly for full effect.)
-St. Smegma. 
-PIE ASK WHERE’D?
-Bent Bandito and the Arseless Chaps. 
-Banned Names.
-To Strain Jest. 
-Board.
-Satin Pod. 
-Moon. 
-Babblical. 
-TESTICLE SMOOSH AND THE RAPEX CIRCUS
-PayPal Rule. 
-Windward Suns
-Wayward Sons


P.S. Leave a vote as a comment containing the name(s) you like if you want to help save my sanity. The ones in bold are the only ones I’ll really consider, the rest, I’m almost sorry to say, are just indicative of the tatterdemalion state of my mind. 

With love, 
Nate the strugglefish. 

The sneaky satisfaction of saying “Ciao, knives” to your Chinese girl friend. (But not girlfriend.)

My housemate’s girlfriend has one of the most irritating voices I’ve ever heard. This is especially true when it’s droning through the floor with that griping duck quality it gets when slightly muffled. (Unmuffled it’s more like an Aristocat from Long Island who’s long since realised it’s going to be eating out of dumpsters indefinitely, but is staying hopeful. Nervous, whiney, but upwardly inflected with inexplicable positivity that only a moron can maintain. That analogy bears no resemblance to her, apart from the NY bit… and maybe the moron bit. She’s quite lovely though, really.)

Dear housemate,
can you please muffle her more?.. gag that bitch if necessary. She might even like it!
Cheers,
the troll downstairs.
 

In order to try and make myself seem less of an arsehole, and this ostensibly unnecessary amount of arseholery seem less absolute, I’d like to assert that once, while discussing the subject of marriage, this housemate’s response to my question “Would you ever think about proposing to S#@&y?”, after finding this housemate does in fact quite like the idea of marriage, was a plain and definitive “Jesus fucking Christ No.”
This has been posted because her drone is keeping me awake, and short of going and telling her to shut the fuck up because it seems unlikely she has anything interesting to say anyway, or perhaps setting a fire outside the housemate in question’s bedroom, this is the best I can do.