in hospital

It’s 5am. I wake up and clutch for a cardboard bowl which I vomit into. The ward is so cold and I am shivering. I look at the liquid I have just produced, swimming in the grey bowl, it is dark red. Blood red. I call for a nurse who tells me not to worry and provides an extra blanket. I lie down and pain shoots through my back. Lying is agony, moving is agony, being is agony. Pain is unbearable when you are alone. For three days I’ve been alone, trapped in the dark. Stuck in a cave with walls so far away there is no echo. People arrive and leave, I watch, always in pain, never able to talk. Their faces show me the state I am in, pale, weak, frail. Time crawls past; I watch other patients edge closer to their death, hoping to make an improvement despite the news every day. In a corner an old Jamaican man recites daily prayers. I try to follow along, but the liturgy is unfamiliar, so I let the words flow around me. The drip drips.

sick

drip drip
All I hear is the
drip drip
Of the hospital
drip drip
Fills my head with its
drip drip

Friends are calling me
ring ring
I try to reach my phone
ring ring
I can't get near to it
ring ring
one by one they give in
ring

Slowly raise my eyes
drip drip
I see the liquid flow
drip drip
Timeflow slows to a
drip drip
I think this is it
drip

Hot diggety dog

I stand in the hot dog shop, another long term goal achieved. 3 months I have been considering trying a Rollover dog. Today I decided to walk in. It was ok, not too pricey, but not too filling either. I eat my hotdog on a bench by the window. Outside there is an Indian mother and her daughter. The mother is of big build, solid, but not noticeably overweight, the girl is small, gangly, perhaps 12 years old. They sit with two cans of fizzy drink, unopened on the small table in front of them, not speaking. The girl is looking around her, fidgeting, wringing her hands with a preoccupied nature. She gets up, comes inside and loiters near the till. Standing there, leaning back and forth from the counter, I watch her. What has brought her here. Is her mother sick? Is she sick? Awaiting an appointment? Has her mother tried to cheer her up with her favourite food? Or has this been long promised as a treat for her good behaviour. Perhaps neither of them are the patients. It may be her grandmother, or father, or sister. Will this be one of those memories that stay with her forever. Will she always associate the sight of the unopened drinks and the smell of ketchup with her small world falling around her in huge lumps?

Cat with a Hat

A very important landmark was achieved today, as I finally purchased the Hat. The Hat I have been meaning to buy for about 8 months. If you check out www.vanderput.com/writing you can see a letter that I wrote to a girl who will remain anonymous. Well that morning when I woke up and found that note it actually read something along the lines of: call hospital (for more pills), stalk girl, buy hat. A very worrying moment in my life. Anyway, two months later I realise it is time to take the hat issue seriously. It took a whole day of shopping, and ended up being a pricey little fella, but I feel I ended up with some good Hattage. This is a direct result of growing my hair long, in that I now feel like I have bad hair days every other day, and thus need to cover up my mop top with a cool cap. I’m wondering whether it’s a little Just William, but I feel over all I made the right choice. I also bought a nice new small pocket notebook. Mont Blanc. Mmm soft brown leather. And that is what I have achieved with my day. Rather sadly I still felt productive.

Cold

Last night I had a vivid dream, one of those dreams where your senses decide to join in. So I was wandering around the streets near my house, it was night, and it started to rain. And rain hard. Pouring down, soaking my clothes to the bone so they stuck to my skin, and plastering my ever growing hair down on my forehead. I'm going to catch a cold I realised. It is a very odd moment attempting to think in a dream. I think that is called a lucid dream? I saw a great film about it called Waking Life a while back. An animated thing, but animated from handheld dv. So anyway, I realised by standing in the rain I ran the risk of a cold. I can no longer remember anything else from my dream aside from that. And then I awoke. With a sore throat, stuffed nose, and head cold. The exact same feeling that would have come from standing in the rain a little too long. Strange.

Happy Days

Today I decided to buy some stamps from WH Smiths in Victoria station (the big one, right in the middle of the station). I've needed them for a while, and I thought I'd strike while the iron was hot, and especially while i remembered. So I approach one of the many seven long cues of commuters, standing in lines with their heats and their standards. Until i notice a till tucked away around the corner, one girl paying for a magazine, and no one else around. I skip over, trying hard to draw no attention to myself on the way. After the girl has paid for her glamour, I ask for 12 first class stamps. I pay by switch, not a word is exchanged during this transaction. Until! I go to leave, and the thirty-something brains from Thunderbird look-a-like dismisses me with the delightful phrase: "Happy Days!" And two words make the world a much better place.

My Cool Jade Fox

So we draw nearer to the relaunch of the world of vanderPut. Time to make another pre-post to the offline blog. The last few days have been a little strange and unproductive. Mostly spent sitting around waiting for things to occur. I haven't been getting much sleep either, which led to the strangest moment two nights ago, when for about five minutes, I thought I was Michael J. Fox. No other way to describe it really. I thought I was the Foxster. Very strange. Anyway, I should be very busy as I should really be in the middle of writing the second draft of Maybe, and working out how to act for an audition at Central. How hard can it be...

The first Cycle

Whilst helping (or more accurately observing) friends fix a bike in clapham I was reminded of my first bicycle. Yellow, and about the size of a grown man's shins. It had two features of pure genius, dreamt up by an engineer obviously far ahead of his game. For a start, the pedals were attached to the wheels. Now this is all very well initially, as a turn of the pedal results in a turn of the wheel. However, the rather disarming predicament this leads to is that a turn of the wheels results in a turn of the pedal. In other words you better make sure you only travel as fast as you can pedal, because once that speed is exceeded your ankles are in mortal danger. Secondly, it only possessed a front brake, which is more than we can say for whatever possessed the designer. Surely this has been an age old problem of the brakage featurette. Back brake results in cool skidding, gentle slowing, and basic general honest-to-goodness safe riding. Front brake leads to loss of front teeth. Everyone knows brake with the front and over the handlebars you will go. So two features of rather astonishing impractability for a first bike. Couple that with the fact that I grew up on a hill, and it's a wonder I made it to five.