Wow. I’m starting to worry I’m not gonna be able to write to you.
I thought I’d start. I’m at a jazz bar. But I got mallorted.
Someone decided I was being too well behaved so they got me a shot involving wormwood absinthe and who the fuck knows what else. Christ. I am at least indoctrinated in some way. Essentially it was being hazed by two separate crews.
This town has been remarkable.
Mel took me to The End of the World, behind the squatted naval base in bywater. Wasteground and people have constructed shrines for loved ones taken too early. Ashes to the river but these memorials that stand for as long as we collectively wish them to stand.
The societal respect in this country is deeper than what we have in the uk. Some disaffected fucknut would almost immediately deconstruct these things if it was in England. These things are only gonna be fleeting, but let them rot like we do. Once they are built there’s no stupid kid who prioritises their own noise. Shrines.
A malort is a herbal distillate with wormwood. I asked Mel to define it. “It’s like anger in a bottle”. Well. I trusted and slammed. I have no anger. But it was the end of the evening as far as I was concerned.
Thankfully Mel is one of my oldest and closest friends. I’m safe. She’s got me. I told her about the woman passed out in the snowy gutter in Chicago. Nobody is trying to establish themselves as anything in this city. Everything that’s interesting here is in the gutter. This city understands mortality. We are a breath on the wind.
This place goes deep and I feel it. This evening they blindsided me. Mel is strong here and she fits. We stopped at the Columns Hotel, and she was there for a few months when she was teenager, before she trained as an actor at RADA with other friends of mine, in her early teens.
I can’t stay awake and I am astonished I have written sentences in this state.
AlBarclay 