The Drugs Don't Work Anymore
A story about a song.
I was walking through Hyde Park in Leeds listening to a song that reminds me of many things and yesterday added more memories to it, more than what I thought could be added to a song that I'd previously assossiated with boredom. Smoking cigarettes on my mums balcony or through the kitchen window, with the extractor fan whizzing behind my head worrying that it will wake the others up as I puff on the cigarette taking in the words. These moments already remind me of the past, The Verves album and Bitter Sweet Symphony in particular. It reminds me of my art foundation and a tutor talking in a lecture about how he had wanted to mimic Richard Ashcroft in every manner. I had no clue who the bloke was at first I recognised the song and the area the video had been filmed in that too had memories linked to it; greasy spoon cafes and leather jacket clad thugs. Walking over the car as it pulls to a stop at the junction in Hoxton the era of the early 2000's it makes me smile in a bitter sweet symphony through the bitter sweet simplicity of it all.
I played the song to myself last night I had recently got a free music streaming trial and was playing the music to myself as I was relaxing in bed we had just seen a mate to celebrate his birthday smoked a spliff with him and laughed our way home staggering past bins that line the streets of the students part of Leeds. I was in my room playing the music to myself when I had wanted a cig I guess its a habbit formed from the sound of the song, like information with chewing gum. I went downstairs and asked a housemate for one.
We smoked in the garden, the smoke tasting more toxic than normal. I got halfway through it and thought about chucking the rest of it but that felt like a waste especially as my mate was stood next to me, so I inhaled the rest flung the butt at the ashtray that sits on our rotting garden table and began to make some belated dinner, spaghetti and pasta. I've replayed the song about three times by this point and theres now three of us singing along to it in the kitchen. My other housemate who's not in the house at this point in time grew up in the same area as Ashcroft, so I brought that up in conversation. I began talking about everything that the song reminds me of; cigarettes on the balcony at my mums, being bored, missing Leeds and my mates there.
Suddenly I begin missing those moments. We all start missing home. Missing the feeling of missing Leeds.
It makes me wonder whats going to happen after university, what the song will remind me of then. The boys leave the kitchen for a moment and my girlfriend calls me. She's just been having dinner around hers with a girl that one of my housemates has been seeing we've somewhat adopted her as our own mate and he said that she would be coming over soon so the phone call was half expeted, she asks me to come over for the evening she asks me what I'm up to. I tell her about my meal at what I then realised was quater to twelve at night. I realised that I might still be stoned.
I finish cooking the meal and head upstairs as the boys play FIFA. The front door goes and my housemate goes downstairs to answer as I sit down. I open the widnow of the upstairs living room, a tiny one that was meant to be the residance of whoever pulled the short straw of bedrooms a law ignored in the name of comfort, swapping the bedroom that was in its place for that of the larger one that now takes its place downstairs. It's something of an abstarct painting. Cubism at it's finest or something like that. Anyway, I go to shout down from the window something stupid but the front door had already been opened and closed by this point and I could hear the footsteps approaching up the stairs. I change sofas sat on the arm rest and the food on my knees as me and the visitor watch the two other boys play FIFA. She starts telling us about the evening and makes a joke about how we're now swapping places.
"You've got a big space to fill" she says.
"Yeah... right" I reply with intended dry sarcasm.
The conversation follows of what I'm eating and so forth, plans for Christmas and drips of conversation from the evening.
I have a shower and leave.
Hair still wet as I confront the cold air of Leeds.
Earphones in.
The Drugs Don't Work Anymore plays to soothe me sweetly.
I get to my partner's flat and knock on the ground floor window. Balancing on a ledge that feels even more dangerous in the damp conditions on this December evening.
She smiles from her bed and comes to let me in.
We go inside and I say, "I've got a song that I want to show you".
About the Creator
John Gilroy
I'm a writer from London, now based in Leeds. Anecdotes, trians of thought and poems are what I write.
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Giving Myself Time
You know for the past five years I thought that being productive meant being out and working. Or performing or anything other than just being inside. I had this idea in my mind that it meant being busy that staying in and not doing a thing was a negetive and then today I just stopped and did some painting. My mum had said to take some time off until the new year. I'd been working non stop. Both working physicaly and mentaly trying to figure out my next move constantly not stopping to think about what I had done. There was bits of writing on paper all over my living room/ here living room, the space that I had occupied since coming back from university. Sleeping on the sofa and now the futon that had been dragged out of my sisters/ my old room. I thought that staying in was a luxury that I can't afford. As though to stay in the flat was somehting that meant that I wasn't connected to the outside world anymore and so I spent all of my time and money trying to get from place to place, trying to make the most of those wasted days. Two lines that I have repeated from a poem that I wrote called Ashtray. A poem that I recorded whilst studying smoking culture. It was something to do at a time when there was nothing to do. At the time of writing that all I had wanted to do was perform my poetry to people. Then a year or maybe even less later I was performing every night going from Leeds to Macnhester often and being invited back down to London by art collectives that wanted me to join in on their Jam nights. Life had become exciting and any moment between performing was a waiste of time or like some form of waiting loby if I wasn't working or performing there didn't seem to be any point to what I was doing unless I was around my girlfriends or in the pub with my mates there wasn't much point to doing nothing. I was always walking or trying to have a conversation with someone. I had hated being in my room. The past seemed to bounce off the walls behind my closed door. I would smoke cigarretes in my room, listen to the same songs over and over again on my lap top and stare at my un-made bed, simply pacing as I waited to do the next thing rather than sort my life out or my room for that matter. I would stand by the back door and try to figure out how I would be able to make some more money having sold everything of value that I owned to pawn shops or CEX. I was truly living that starving artist lifestyle things were pretty shit. And so nights of spoken word and laughter seemed to make it all worth it. The constant hang over from free drinks given to perfromers and the black out drunk nights were forgotten the moment I woke up the next day there wasn't even a chance to have a feeling of hangxiety what would eb the point in that. All words and conversations simply whistled over head like the airs of breath that they were. Cigarettes inhaled in the smoking area and spliffs shared with other performers. To fall asleep and do it all agin the next day at another place. Leeds was simply a place to keep moving. It sounds strnage to hear that, that was the way to live life in such a small city but there you go it was. To stop there scared me. I was haunted by the past in some way. Fragile memories echoed around my head in paralysed states leaving me unable to move anything in my room. I'd become the opposite of agoraphobic. I enjoyed that. I strived for that. Agoraphobia was somehting that my dad had suffered from hence his absence. I didn't really want to stop to think about that one. It was only after a conversation with my mum last night that I realised I could stop. On returning to London I had been trying to find trade work. I had realsied that my university degree might not be put to work staright away and that I needed to sort out a strong form of income and so I set off looking for trade work. Signwriting was the main idea. I found a point after a few months of working at a pub job where I could do the signwirting at a boatyard in Richmond there I also learnt the trade of boat building and hence with that carpentary. That last until I was chucked off the lot by the owner who said that he didn't have time for idiots. I felt stuck after that. Slipped into a bit of a depression and carried on looking for quick fix work. I gave myself a day to recover and then I was back out again. Going back to work at the pub on odd shifts and then going back to agency work something that had kept me going through the winter and summer breaks of university. It's soemting that I would come back to pick up everytime that I had run out of money in Leeds that was until I had managed to find constant work up there at Leeds united and Middlesbrough matches. Running the bars there and the odd paid gig with the spoken word and student loan bursts. I hadn't stopped to allow myself the time of signing up for the bursery amounts that are offered to students there for some reason I didn't think that I would qualify. I thought this against all of my housemates suggestions where they said that I definitely would. I would ratehr struggle through. I had this sense of self sabotage. Getting myself addicted to smoking and going out drinking everynight. Trying to cure something that I didn't know what it was, this feeling of complete loneliness. I would try and find myself in books but could never really sit down long ebough to sit through one of them so I was always reading three or four at once other than the Catcher in the Rye which I ended up taking with me everywhere, to bars and cafes, days that turned into nights out. I would find my solice in that novel for a while. I would sit and sketch that day of reading it. I managed to read it in two or three days. I thought that I might try and get it returned to the bookshop that I bought it from had I read it quick enough and then I thought that I'd hold onto the copy to pass it onto my children. This reading so quickly only happened with two or three other books in my life; Get Carter, To Kill a Mocking Bird and Giovani's Room. The last one because I had borrowed it from my friend Omar Abufares and I thought that he might have wanted it back quickly. I realsed then that I had a very quick mind or something like that. On meeting my cousin in Leeds I found out that we have a family trait of ADHD. This might have been the answer to the problems I guess it is, I dont know though. I still haven't been tested. My mother thinks it's trauma based, that's her theory anyway. I don't know I just like being outside. In the outside world you know. Theres some peace there in England anyway. London's busy. Leeds had characters. I was always talking to someone or getting into something with people there. I would share cigarettes with the homeless or pass by the cafe. No phone just following what had felt right to do. Whilst my mind ran a hundred miles ahead of me almost like a child as they ran ahead of there parents and then back to them as they carried shopping bags down a busy highstreet. That's how it felt anyway. It had felt just liek that to me. I was the mum with the shopping bags the thoughts were the children that get under other peopels feet. The mother shouting something at the child in a foreign language trying to get them to calm down. The shopping centre they're leaving could be my room I don't know I'm just spitballing here now. The language is something only me and the child could unferstand. Do you understand me? Anyway today I did something that I'd not allowed myself to do sometime now. I just sat down and painted. Whatever I liked. Last nigth after getting a Papa John's pizza after a day of searching for quick fix work. I did a self portrait. It wasn't very accurate. A biro skecth carved essentially into a blcok of wood that my mum was going to through out but I thought that I would save to do some practising of signwritting on. Instead I wanted to the painting. I thought fuck it I want to do this I want to do it, so why don't I just fucking do it. I painted lightly over the biro and white paint white sky blue enamel and let it try whilst I went to get the pizza. Then I came back, looked at it thought people might like that, watched some skateboarding videos for a bit and then fell asleep. The next morning I woke up and cracked on with the painting again. I thought about what I wanted to do with it. I stopped thinking about what other people might think about it. Why would that matter anyway. Why should I care? It's my fucking painting anway. So I added to it. Painted it Van Gogh style. It wasn't intentional really. I'd squirted acrylic paint straight onto the painting and had to do quick slashes with the bruch to move and spread it out a bit, you know cover the canves and form the image to how I wanted it. I did that. I went onto the balcony and smoked a cigarette. I saw the sunlight shine off the block of flats in front of me. I thought, you know what I'm going to paint that as well so I did. I went back inside. Poured some more paint onto another 'canvas' realy just another square of wood that I had saved from being thrown out. I'd had another idea for it a skerry boat with a team of people on it riding a wave, this was my pre cigarette idea then when I came in I had my mind changed, the skerry painting came later just now actually. Right before I decided to right about the painting and just stopping and doing exactly what I wanted to do for once rather than doing what it felt like I shoudl be doing. So there. I guess you have it. That's what I've done and so is this. It feels good to feel so lucky for a moment to gave that peace to do soemthing like to accept the moment that I've given my after years of hard work or whatever you want to call it. Now that I'm hardly working I can afford the time to do it. Strange that isn't it. The opposite of what you think you need to do soemthign is actually what matters. I guess that's were over thinking gets you nowadays. I wish that I knew this sooner.
By John Gilroy4 months ago in Humans
Embracing Life As It Is
Since I was young, I've always been envious of others' ability to be openly themselves. When I observed how wonderful they were at communicating with others, my insecurity would always press on me, hoping that soon I would be able to do the same.
By James E. Anduyan2 days ago in Confessions
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