I had another call from my father tonight, I’d dreamt on Friday we’d talk this evening, it usually happens when I’m feeling ill, that oh so familiar state of precognitive delusion. I’m still recovering from the wine binge. I’ve avoided booze for over 15 years, but suffice to say I’ve found plenty of alternatives in my time on earth. Some months back I had a clear out, or rather I wanted a completely clear head, no toxins, nothing to distract me from what I suppose I presumed would be some kind of state of clarity.

It was awful. Reality is for the most part for me a repetitive and pointless perception, but I stuck with it, hoping against hope (which again is completely out of character for me), that somehow I’d attain a form of nirvana-like normality. I didn’t like that guy, he was impatient, irritable, and perhaps it’s simply all the junk I’m clearing out of my body but it’s been a long time since I felt and looked as unhealthy as I have recently.

Over the last few weekends I’ve wavered, that’s rather an understatement, the truth is I’ve simply replaced one cycle of self-destruction with another. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a twisted nostalgia for those times in my life when I’ve been closest to death. Just to make things clear I’ve never seen a tunnel of white light or heard a choir of angels, or been tortured by devils and demons. Just nothing, which to some may sound like the most frightening experience of all. Nothing is a void for some. It’s a holiday for me, or as the Americans scratching their heads might say, a vacation. A vacation from experience. Nothing means not having to think any more, not needing or providing reasons, whys and wherefores for every moment of existence. However that is the nature of life, to qualify one’s being, be it through thought, feeling or action. It’s the instinct, desire, urge that drives on the human race to do what it does, no matter the consequences.

Money is debt, consumerism is destruction, communication is noise, people are a distraction from each other’s personal hell. It’s a terrible dawning of realisation when we have to limit our thinking to a relativity we can comprehend to survive. Anything more abstract than what affects us, or by extenuation through those we know and love, our friends, family, society at large, even the human race ,without these consciousness becomes damaging. For without these connections thoughts can reach the infinite, yet adversely the finite cannot exist within an infinity, it ceases to be. Still we persist, I suppose you have to admire that on some level or other.

I don’t want to get involved in semantics here, religion has for the main part created more pain, war and suffering than any other cause in the history of this planet. If man won’t kill man for his country then perhaps he will for the notion of a higher consciousness, an abstract benevolence beyond his understanding. It’s merely a means of control, but we will both have to cease to exist before most of the world will agree with that particular point. For here and now anything is better than nothing. If you want it to be a symbol of the infinite and that works for you then there’s no argument. Most human beings feel that one individual’s beliefs are a direct violation of their own, an affrontery, an attack. Especially when one individual encounters another with no belief system whatsoever.

Belief, hope, wishing, wanting, praying, it’s not exactly a mature outlook on life, it takes a lot of effort to ignore the facts all the time, but I can never blame anyone for trying. I’m not a hard and fast sceptic, I have experienced strange experiences in my time, I can’t explain everything that has happened to me, the notion of coincidence for instance, that old chestnut seems to be stretching the truth a little too far for me. Then again it could simply be a result of untapped resources of the subconscious mind. I may just be able to hear my father thinking or feel his feelings from a hundred miles away in 24 hours time, or maybe not. I’ve met old friends and foes in situations that don’t make sense, I’ve had witnesses, so and so is going to walk around the corner, and then they do. Perhaps it’s a miracle, perhaps it’s simply the laws of chaos at work, which in fact means there are no laws, no rules, nothing.

Life is filled with assumptions and presumptions, each and every word I write fixes me to a stationary point in a mutable universe, a contradiction in terms and a simultaneous fallacy of logic and belief. The truth is I don’t know, but more so neither does anyone else, I will wear a badge with those words printed bold, I’d follow that faith, the lack of understanding, proof or knowledge religion of I don’t know.

Dad talked about his dead girlfriend, she died in her fifties of cancer, it wasn’t a long-drawn out death, they hadn’t been together for many years, but I know it will affect him deeply for many years to come. Still, when he talks about her it reminds me of my own periods in hospital, near enough dying in bed, watching the drip feed saline into my body and flushing out the tainted blood, and realised that all we do have is those who know who we are, those who persist in being with us despite all our faults, those who love for the sake of love. That’s something to believe in. That’s most likely the only reason I came back from the brink, and why I’m so attuned to my proximity to it day by day, week by week, year on year.

I tread carefully around death these days, for the sake of those I love, I’ve experienced a lot of it myself, beginning with a best friend who died of a brain tumour at seventeen, we were going to start a band and get famous, then he went deaf, then he died. I realised then that death was a fact of life, I can’t think of many "miracles" to counteract that experience. Still I’m here, he isn’t, that must be something to consider, although there have been many times I wished it had been the other way around.Yes my opinions are obviously nostalgic towards the guy, but he’d not even lived, and I’ve lived too much. At first I wanted to live life for the both of us but as the drugs and booze and girls and late nights kicked in along with increasing bouts of depression I realised I couldn’t hack the responsibility. I let go of his memory, and many others who have died throughout my lifetime.

I spent a few months in The Priory in Brighton for a while, the NHS hospital was full, it was a blessing in disguise, the food was better and the place didn’t smell of urine and vomit like some of the "homes" I’ve frequented, but it did make you drop your guard. I made friends with a girl called Naomi, we’d chat for hours about the meaning of life sometimes, making sure to lighten the tone whenever a psychiatric nurse walked by. Then one morning I was woken by a team of paramedics, police, detectives and even a few firemen. They broke into Naomi’s bedroom, she’d hung herself, all I could think for weeks was that I’d said the something wrong, I’d triggered her suicide. Some months later I took another overdose and really tired to make it count, perhaps a few hundred paracetamol or was it aspirin? I can’t recall. That the event that induced a parallel life for three days, was it just a hidden reflex, an instinct for self-protection, a delusion, or was it something more mysterious, I don’t even ask those questions these days, you know why? Because no one really knows, I and everyone else knows just a finite amount of information, and in an infinite universe of matter and light and energy that is nothing. I believe in nothing.

Dad talked about his dreams, his dead lover looked beautiful, she caressed his hands and spoke in comforting hushed tones. He couldn’t cope after a while and began to question the dream, the vision, he told her "This cannot be real you know? They are tricking us." Her hands, her face, her body faded away into the ether and dad awoke.

I tried to comfort him, telling him as I tell many who I love exactly what I think they want to hear. There are ghosts, there is an afterlife, everything will make sense one day. It could be the truth, yes a subjective truth, but with enough scientific understanding of parallel theory I’m sure I could back it up. But like I say, deep down, just between you and me, I find my greatest solace in the peaceful calm silence of nothing, nothing at all. It has no answers, then again it provides no questions, it is just that, nothing.

This post is tagged belief, choir of angels, consumerism, cycle, death, devils and demons, father, ghosts, god, haunted, haunting, hell, mourning, nirvana, perception, Reality, religion, self destruction, suicide, time, wine, zen