Gabrielle #52 – Blister Pack

Diary of a warm weekend.

Body Heat (1981).

FRIDAY, 7:50AM. I could tell it would be a hot day from the temperature of the tap water. Like every morning, I rolled out of bed, padded barefoot to the bathroom sink, and splashed my face. Lukewarm. The first sign of British summer.

It was the first weekend in forever that I didn’t have anything in particular to do. No plans, no obligations to anyone, no work projects without a discernible beginning or end. Boredom, finally. At some point in your thirties you start craving the opportunity to be bored. You drag yourself through all the things you need to do for the people you love and the career you almost killed yourself to have, like a surfer paddling out past the break just to sit on the board for a minute and feel the waves, man. A clear horizon. That’s when your true desires tend to reveal themselves.

8AM. Free time is a tricky thing. Too little is dangerous, but too much is lethal. A day without a plan can go one of two ways: a series of pleasant surprises that make you feel like Snow White being dressed by forest animals, or a prospective Saw script loaded with nefarious psychological traps. It depends entirely on what headspace you’re in. Wake up on the wrong side of bed and The Voice will start enquiring whether you’re a frivolous person. You will whisk eggs while considering the possibility that you’ve already wasted the best years of your life, or attributed consequential decisions to pragmatism that were actually the result of cowardice. “Are you a good woman???” The Voice screams over the sound of the coffee grinder, like a drunk priest from the 1950s. I’m a bad person to the extent that everyone has done things they aren’t proud of, but I’ve done some things I’m really not proud of, and given enough leeway they will start to eat away at the centre of me like a four-pack of Red Bull on an empty stomach. The image of suicide that hides behind every thought of the future starts to flash a little more crisp. Not in a serious way, you understand, it’s just sort of ambiently there. An option like any other – ‘Could make plans for Wednesday, could break my razor open in the shower.’ My friend tells me this is “normal brain behaviour” for men, a category he considers me a part of. Though I strongly suspect there’s something seriously the matter with both of us.

8:30AM. The first thing I do every day is pound black coffee while consuming the 45 combined Reels my most deranged acquaintances have sent me overnight like the morning news, and watch a church service broadcast live on YouTube from a monastery in the Appalachian Mountains. A friend put me onto it a long time ago. Experiencing those things in tandem is often evidence enough that modern life is simply too funny an event to dip early from. Twenty years ago, not even the most DMT-pilled Bristolian could have conceived of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, and look at us now, watching a generative AI filter of an anthropomorphic piece of wood holding a baseball bat clap cheeks with someone’s boyfriend while monks in rural West Virginia perform sacred rituals in service of God’s light. We have front row seats in the theatre of the absurd; settle in, anything could happen.

5PM. If you make unconventional life choices you’re usually saddled with the imperative to do amazing things with them, or suffer endless gut-punches from the fear that you have betrayed your own happiness and comfort, and that of everyone around you, for nothing. In my experience the only way to win that fight is to lean into it and do something profoundly not amazing. Find a physical pleasure – sport, sex, something tasty – and let it snap your spirit back into your body like it’s trapped in the basketball from Space Jam. I already did sports and I’m currently in a WhoaVicky-style war with my flesh, so I choose to go to flavourtown. There are few things a good, greasy slice of pizza washed down with a mid-but-cheap beer can’t make you forget: the harmless man’s “send him 2-3 years Dagestan.”

10PM. It’s still hot out. You can feel the heat radiating from the concrete. For the first time this year, I leave the flat in a light jacket with bare legs and go for a nighttime walk. Obviously, it’s London, so you can’t simply go for a walk unless you happen to live somewhere particularly interesting. You have to get a bus to the walk. Turns out half of Southwark has the same idea. The streets are packed; people spill out of pubs and restaurants to smoke or assemble a plan for the rest of the night or try to make its final moments last a little longer. The roads are jammed with bumper-to-bumper traffic. The whole city honking, shouting, laughing. Random man outside a phone repair shop says he likes my tattoos and “how old? By any chance?” The sweet smell of birch trees mixes with wishful thinking and bus exhaust.

10:40PM. It’s already late and I’m running even later. I text my friend apologising and he replies saying “The moon is well nice.” He’s right. The Flower Moon is out, bright, buttery, and majestic looking. I’d forgotten it was a full moon night, despite discussing its potential risks with someone just yesterday. It’s very important to have friends who attribute the correct amount of weight to the moon.

11PM. Certain parts of London feel like anywhere in Britain. A poorly lit network of A roads, laybys, and pylons surrounded by overgrown common land that goes largely unutilised unless it’s the school holidays, in which case every carny fair within a 20-mile radius descends on the city’s green spaces like a fleet of UFOs blasting Cascada. There’s also a lot of Ministry of Defence land you don’t expect to find in Zone 3. None of it looks particularly inviting, especially in the evening, unlit and potentially full of crackheads as it is, but for whatever reason I find it comforting. The city wants you to believe that you need to be in a licensed venue paying out the arse for things in order to have fun at night, which has its place, but so much of it ends up unmemorable due to its regimented nature. Order this, split that, on to the next spot. I consider myself lucky to have learned from a young age that you can step outside your front door and do whatever the fuck you like. In one of the most surveilled cities in the world, you can still wander into the dark, broken branches and fly-tipped debris crunching under your heels like a round of applause, to have your skin serenaded by the light of the moon.

SATURDAY, 1AM. The war is over.

SATURDAY 1:50AM. Too often it feels like every action falls on a knife-edge. Was it worth it? Or was it worthless? Personally, I don’t think anything is inherently either. Everything is whatever you say it is. That’s one reason why I no longer bother with therapy. If something or someone is making me feel bad, no matter. I simply choose to view it differently. Possibly this makes me delusional, but I would prefer a life filled with meaning over peace. Not all meaningful things are simple; most of them aren’t. It helps, also, to resist grand linear narratives. Hot weather makes this easier, since it wilts your senses and leaves you more receptive to little romances that, in the end, amount to something more valuable than the architecture of amazing things. A cherry Coke sparkling over ice when your mouth is dry. A cat lying on a hot bin lid, dreaming. Bleached arm hairs and stiff deodorant patches on t-shirts. Someone who makes you laugh, and you make them feel calm, and you can both breathe at least for a little while.

Life is a rosary of moments like these. It’s just a matter of counting them.

SUNDAY, 8PM. The war resumes.