Breeds Contempt

Dreamt a seemingly inexhaustible stream of people kept moving in to the flat. Tolerated them at first then tried to convince them to leave, at which point they became fiercely antagonistic. Kept trying to push them out the door, fight them off with household objects, but they were indefatigable. Scared violence would escalate I eventually appealed to the landlord, who seemed confused by my complaint and happily welcomed them all in, offering to clear space for them. Finally I moved out, followed by the triumphant jeers of my usurpers.

~

They’ve told me to write down all the distressing thoughts, which with me are mostly the spiteful ones: resentments too petty to dress up as anything but; unreasonable frustrations; contemptuous observations I am ashamed to have made about people. They being singular being the doctor, the resentful they. I do not like having these thoughts, but I find that they run through my head non-stop at all hours of the day, especially nights. The logic of the journal being I suppose that you can sort of exorcise thoughts of this kind by getting them down on paper—that the journal will act as a sort of purgative for all these quote ‘negative emotions’, which characterisation by the way seems like a value judgement of the kind I thought they discouraged. Which, we’ll see.

I live with two other men: grasping, irksome men with whom it is impossible to live. Call them A. and B.

A. is the sort to inspire a really visceral genre of contempt (he has done nothing wrong), the sort that curls your insides and whom you can’t hear his voice without a sharp spike of pain running through your skull. Where is he now. What’s he doing. That type of thought (he has done nothing wrong). To start telling you about him it will be necessary to take upon myself the task of constructing an internal life for him, given I can’t detect any sign of one. Possibly he has one. I am not going to be charitable. I won’t have you telling me the mitigating factors. I am going to get angry anyway, and I don’t need to feel bad about it. Shuffles around in flip-flops indoors type, when he yawns it is a whole performance, his door-opening and -closing can best be described as overzealous. Compulsive noisemaker. Type to ride a motorbike, though he doesn’t. A frequent whistler but not a good one: the sound always brings to mind a dying bird. I know his tuneless whistling is all he has (he is terribly unhappy, he has done nothing wrong) but still I resent him it. Always talks to women like he’s attempting artlessly to fuck them. Always puts on for men an unconvincing performance of vulgar bravado. Knows no greater joy than his favourite racial slurs. A sort of humourless comedian, A. insists on making jokes but it’s all a performance, he has been told you have to make jokes for people to like you but never got the hang of it. Never responds to the humour of others, blank and lifeless until he is called on to contribute his own flaccid quips, it’s like he’s asleep when you try to engage him. Not interested in others unless they’ve something flattering to say about him. (Curiously A., who performs without fail this boisterous, vulgar persona in public, this idiot’s conception of a man of the world, is known by almost everyone in his social circles to be a soul in distress. There is always some intolerable affectation, for a while he always yelled ‘yo yo yo’ upon entering a room, this was ironic of course but did not succeed in being funny. Which performance grates on everyone upon whom it is inflicted, yet seems more a compulsion in him at this point than a strategy, unnatural as it is. Yet not infrequently do you hear him weeping softly in the next room.) An idiot building up a fortress of cultural detritus around him. Completely ignorant of anything outside his immediate radius, he devotes himself to the superfluous artefacts to which he has formed an arbitrary attachment, dismisses all else out of hand. He got into drugs for a while in lieu of developing an inner life but it has stopped working. Now when he feels down he types ‘positive energy music’ into the YouTube search bar. The scope of his vision is such, he is so utterly a product of random chance and of his time, that he convinces himself the most tepid ballad imaginable is, on the strength of its being the one he happens to have stumbled across, a masterpiece. ‘Listen to this, man,’ he says, ‘it’ll make you cry.’ He plays fucking Adele or some shit.

B. is a different sort of loathsome. His teeth and his English are bad, which you hold against him though you shouldn’t. He is from somewhere crushingly impoverished. He is somehow despicable in his wretched obliviousness, his strange habits you’d rather not ask about, his piss-stinking food, nervous laughter, his entering the room at a bad time and hovering too long, which sort of thing he does with discomfiting aplomb, an uneasy presence flickering in your peripheral vision. It is surprisingly easy to hate someone whom you know to be completely non-malicious, who is only ugly and clueless. (Must stop laundering my resentments into the second person.) This hatred is only deepened by my feeling myself to be uncomfortably close in caste to the despised object. He is not equipped to realise when he is being mocked, patronised, taken advantage of, he takes everything in a spirit of innocent good humour, and we—A. and I, and presumably others too—are reluctant to burst his bubble, thinking when we care to think on it that his ignorance is perhaps bliss after all.

So you see how it is here: how I am here.

~

Passed a prostitute’s window and could not tell if she was a real person or a big creepy doll. Felt caught between two kinds of shame.

~

Man I often cross in the street genuinely looks midway through transforming into a wolf. Or else a dog, something in his facial features and patchy facial hair suggests a sort of sullen dogness. You have to wonder if he knows, if he realises the impression he makes upon others. Suspect he cannot be entirely ignorant.

Quite beyond me the notion that other people might simply not notice the same things I do, that the impressions I cannot scrub from my eyes might have just passed them by entirely. Exhausting to think that they’re not operating from the same perspective, with all the same antipathies, the same assumptions and ideas, even knowledge, as me. Surely everyone is just pretending not to notice the world around them is like this.

Still, wonder what it’s like for the dogman, knowing or not knowing his own condition. Suspect pretty terrible either way. There, that is almost sympathy.

~

I’d estimate 80% of the fights I hear playing out in public are in another language—one of those loud languages whose native speakers are not sufficiently ashamed of themselves to have stopped gesticulating in public. The intimate dramas of others, playing out in a barrage of mutual recrimination. Tends to be I get angry hearing it. The complaints expressed on one or both sides may be perfectly reasonable, tragic even, but because incomprehensible are only ever a racket to me.

~

For appearances’ sake please try to display more affect. Recompose face into less hatefully despondent arrangement before stepping out into the world of others. Launder ugly ill will into presentable snark. Increasingly specific resentments one concocts to keep oneself in one’s miserable little corner (where one is quite happily unhappy, thank you very much): Humourless yet flippant. High-strung aloof type. Standoffish busybody idler. Smile accidentally falls on you. The shrivelling up inside. In fact I am very ashamed. Now who’s laughing? Pervasive sense that every concern and quibble they try to involve me in is over the pettiest possible thing, and that the vanished country of nostalgia would have effortlessly assimilated everything of this sort, and that we would have laughed, and but that now we make our lives in this stuffy room in the fading echoes of arguments over nothings. Horrible habit of saying ‘ek setra’.

~

The man at the counter at the chicken place has started acting as if we are friends. When I come in he is jovial, he taps my shoulder and calls me ‘man’. I do not like it, firstly because it is insincere, and secondly because I do not want to be reminded that I spend so much time in such a dismal setting. It feels like being made accomplice to a crime.

One day I go in and he says to me, ‘man’, and I tell him I am not his man, I am not anybody’s man. This kills him. At this he simply cannot stop laughing.

~

Went to a party. Suppose I was invited through some sort of administrative error. Made a scene. My sense from the start was that we were not on the same wavelength—the other attendees and I. It might surprise you to learn that I am not in the habit of expressing contempt publicly. The licence you have given me to do so in this notebook has sent me rather off the rails with it, I fear. It’s not pleasant. I am not deriving any joy from it, it is a compulsion. Point being though that if I’m called upon to interact with people I am well capable of being jovial, decent, not the life of the party but equally not the catalyst for its dissolution. But then depending on circumstances this can go wrong. Not blaming you you understand. But perhaps I’ve become over-accustomed to quote ‘letting it all out’.

Anyway what happened was that I was trying to be funny. You know how it is, if you don’t put on a good enough show of having fun then all of a sudden people are saying they ‘get it’ and ‘aren’t offended’.

So I was trying to make jokes, not like what A. does but attentively, seizing on what people say where I can and leveraging it into little bons mots, nothing likely to quote ‘set the table on a roar’ but the sort of thing people appreciate at parties. Repartee, back-and-forth. You know. And I thought I was doing pretty well with it, in myself. That is I thought in my head as the words were exiting my mouth ‘this is good’. I could scarcely fail to get a laugh, I was confident of deserving one, was the attitude I sought to manifest in my words and deeds. And but anyway it transpired that nobody thought I was witty or charming after all. While the words were coming out of my mouth I scanned the faces around me and got to thinking, these are not the faces of people who are pleased to be listening to me, who are glad I was invited. Rather their faces—didn’t fall exactly, but assumed a sort of neutrally fake-interested look, a look that isn’t particularly amused but doesn’t want to offend the teller (me) of the joke or anecdote in question. And if I’d made it clear enough by my tone or expression that the utterance I’d been making merited a laugh, they’d make sort of the minimum possible noise that could be construed as a chuckle and immediately steer the conversation away from whatever I’d been talking about, often sort of half-turning away from me in the process so that I was gradually excluded from the circle as time went on. Or they’d keep looking at me for a few moments as if still expecting the punchline. So I think I must have been getting the rhythm wrong.

As the evening wore on I kept trying, telling myself tough crowd, they just need to get used to my characteristic timing and delivery, but I think that increasingly my face sort of twisted in on itself in an ugly grimace, at least that’s what my guts felt like they were doing and usually unfortunately my face can be trusted to follow suit with whatever they (my guts) are doing. At some stage I went to confirm this in the bathroom mirror and indeed it had that sort of a twist to it that makes people uncomfortable. But I was not up to admitting defeat being that this was my first party in well quite some months, and so I suspect what happened was that my jokes sort of became more and more like threats, not that that was my intent you understand but that it ended up seeming that way given aforesaid facial expression and my mounting frustration. And so the responses of my captive audience became more and more muted and uneasy. I have also this bad tendency when I am nervous to say things very quietly and then get annoyed when no one hears me. So I think by the end of the night I was sort of whispering veiled threats at people in hopes they would receive them as warm-hearted jokes. Eventually what set me off was they began laughing again at last but it was nervous laughter now (not like that of B. but the sort of civilised nervous laughter that well-to-do elegant types use to signal amongst themselves their common rejection of the less elegant type currently upsetting the equilibrium of the gathering), and so I don’t think I will be invited necessarily to the next party because from that moment through getting my coat and things and exiting the flat and going downstairs and then for a while standing outside the building looking sometimes up at the window and sometimes sort of just at the night sky I started and continued and did not stop screaming ‘You’re not laughing right! You’re not laughing right!!

~

Fought with A. First time we have clashed openly. It started off being about his aforementioned tendency towards compulsive noisemaking—yawning, whistling, shuffling, opening and shutting of doors—all of which in the night when I am in the throes of one of my insomniac episodes becomes quite insupportable. In fact on these nights I think his noisemaking has only a marginal effect if any (he has done nothing wrong) on my ability or otherwise to sleep, but as I prefer not to blame my diet or caffeine consumption or psychological disposition for these episodes I find it agreeable to fixate upon this racket as scapegoat. Plus there is my compulsion to anger which we have discussed before and which I know rationally to be unhealthy.

But so lying there stewing in sweat and impotent rage I finally lost my head and began banging on the wall and shouting and then got up and went out and began banging on the door and shouting, and then once he opened the door looking docile and half-asleep continued shouting in his face. I am not sure any longer the exact words I used but I remember his stoic, impassive demeanour and how it made me increasingly angry and at the same time increasingly ashamed. He conceded after I let up that he had been inconsiderate and promised to remain quiet as a mouse for the rest of the night, and I went back to bed and didn’t sleep and became angry with him, who did he think he was, for being so obnoxiously quiet.

Next day he felt the need to follow up on this clash, gently informing me that he had been unaware until now of his night-time racket’s posing such a nuisance to me, and telling me he would be mindful of it from this moment forwards. (He loves this word ‘mindful’ when he considers he is in the process of maturely dealing with a situation. He completely lacks self-awareness, yet believes more than anything that he is perceptive, mindful, a deep and careful thinker. He is self-aware insofar as he is aware of a phantom self that simply is not there, a self more thoughtful than the real one, an inner life worthy of the name as his manifestly is not.) When I gave him the silent treatment he made a big speech about well he understood why I was angry with him but this was not a mature way to handle it, that we would have to come to terms with each other some time if we were to continue living together, that at this point he had apologised and promised to right the wrong and if there was still a problem the problem was not, as it were, on him. At which point he said something that I have not been able to dislodge from my head since, that obsesses me nights the same way his now-absent clatter used to.

He said, ‘I am happy in life, I make other people happy in life.’

I have heard him say similar in conversation with others, it has become a sort of mantra with him, senseless, stripped of sense. ‘I am happy, I make others happy.’ I still do not know if it is true. Maybe he is. It doesn’t bear thinking about.