Here’s a little trick to write better. Just start. Don’t worry about what’s gonna come out or where it’s headed or if it’s good or not, just start saying stuff and – look, here I go. Sometimes when I start writing I write the first thought that comes into my head. Sometimes it’s really pathetic things, or stupid things, or just bland. My teeth hurt. Wish I had darker hair on my legs. There’s a fly in my room and I want it dead – and then you just go from there.

Another trick is to write quickly. Don’t give your brain time to go ‘now just hang on a minute–’ because then you’ll second-guess yourself and your writing won’t be as good or honest. Just say stuff, even if you seem mad, even if you feel you’re not making your point as eloquently as you’d like. Can always edit later, if you want. I’m doing that again, here. Look at me. Watch me go.

I’ve been going mad again. Once every couple of years I go mad. Never quite the same madness twice, but this time it’s bad. Like, doctors-and-forms bad. Worrying-the-family bad. Not even gonna bother trying to detail the source of it, because there isn’t any one particular source of badness. It’s just, you know, sometimes you’re trundling along in life and you feel pretty good, and then a mosquito flies in your earhole, and you laugh it off, and then you get a sudden attack of allergies, sneezing, and then you slip on discarded Elf Bar and you start to think ‘hmm not my day today hey!’ and then a great crocodile leaps up and drags you into an open manhole.

Just feel beat-down. Wanted to be Che Guevara. Wanted to be Indiana Jones. Wanted to be Jack Kerouac, Joe Strummer. Nellie Bly, I dunno, Gerda Taro. Alexandre Dumas. Feel more like Rain Main. Except at least he was smart. Rain Man minus the one thing that made him good.

I know I’m having a depressive episode – or whatever it is, doctors unsure, NHS waiting lists are years-long – because I start getting all bitter about everything. Hate everybody in town. Every time I leave the house and go out among the public I’m like a reverse Quasimodo – instead of being all awestruck and inspired at the sight of the colourful public, I just feel angry at everyone for being so shit and lazy. In the gloomy lighthouse on the sea-battered isle in the centre of my mind, I sit in my rocking chair, a tattered judge’s wig on my head, and laugh like a banshee as I dole out verdicts on passersby. Moron. Imbecile. Halfwit. Arsehole. And I bang my gavel and throw back my head and howl a great cackle as lightning strikes the tower and makes my eyes pop and my hair stand on end, bones flashing white through translucent skin.

Of course I’m probably just projecting – I call myself a moron imbecile halfwit arsehole most every day too. And before you say it, yes, I know you’re not meant to do that – shut up. I know I’m supposed to be very tender and sweet with myself and talk to myself like a lover. But Gollum tickled his own shoulders and cooed and called himself ‘precious’ didn’t he – and look where it got him. Everyone thought he was such a prick that they banished him to live in a pitch-black cave for 500 years, and when he finally tried to crawl out they shoved him into a volcano.

I keep making lists. Big lists, bold lists. Lists that will change everything. “This list – this list will change everything,” I say to myself, as I wrap up the writing on a page titled ‘6 month plan’. These lists contain all the stuff I always go on about. Get fit, write novels, find peace.

I can’t find peace, man. My brain is too nuts. I can’t sit in a chair for two minutes without opening my phone, checking Instagram, deleting Instagram in a self-betterment inspired huff, downloading it again, pulling out several hairs from my beard, swiping through old photos of happier years, staring out the window and sighing and wondering if this is it – if I’m old now, past it, if my best years are gone, and all that wildness with it – those fantastic highs, the laughs, the optimism of it all, the sense of everything rushing towards me, soaring dreams, so much love in my heart – wondering if I’ll ever find love again (wondering if I even want to) and if I really did fuck up the only chance at true love and happiness I ever had. And then you come back into the room with the cup of tea you’ve made me and you find me looking at you with sad eyes like one of those big Bernard dogs, and you’re like ‘I was gone for 90 seconds, Dan, what are you doing’ and I’m like ‘yes, no, I apologise, my mind is a bag of spiders, don’t worry’.

Grumble.

I do quite like being grumpy, sometimes, to be honest. Not all the time, of course – that’d be horrible. It is horrible. But there are moments when I’m this particular brand of grumpy, and it’s enjoyable. I call it: actually I don’t have a name for it. It’s just silly grumpiness – when my gloom tank overflows and floods the other sections of my mind, dousing otherwise normal Dan traits in squalid blue oil. I enjoy it in the same way that vomiting is quite nice when you have food poisoning, because at least after it you get that gigantic sense of relief – you know, when you lie there naked on the bathroom floor at 3am, shivering and sweating, but also oddly euphoric. Purged? I don’t know. Maybe I should try an ayahuasca retreat.

Alright, that’s enough. Gonna go eat some toast. One slice marmite one slice jam. Sometimes honey but that feels a bit indulgent. Brown bread.

Shit just remembered we don’t have any bread in.

COCK.

Nevermind. I will drink another tea instead. Decaf, naturally.

So – that’s me, crashing through mental healthcare like a goose through a series of washing lines, honking desperately, gigantic comedy bra over my eyes, occasionally being swatted by a shrieking milkmaid wielding a broom. Working hard anyway, despite my general new ‘hate’ vibe. Applying for lots of jobs, teaching lots of English classes, all that stuff. Working on my book, working on this sick bod. Looking for flats in London so I can move out of my mum’s, finally. And yeah, gonna go find one of those private plague doctors with the long beaks and ask if they have any therapy and/or pills they can give me to make me feel and think better etc. That’d be cool.

Oh – forgot. Ending articles. I taught you how to begin articles but forgot to say how to end them. Well here’s the thing – I still don’t know. Starting is easier than ending. I used to try make them have a nice sense of finality, comfort, maybe a joke revisited. Something something Gollum getting better. Smeagol, Frodo, I dunno. But now I just leave them by saying something very lazy like:

Bye 🙂