The Peer Press Blog

When you agreed to rent your flat to us, I asked you to leave your books here. I only have enough to fill one shelf, and I thought it would look empty and dusty if you moved all yours to your brother’s basement.

I look at your shelves pretty often. I dance around in front of them when I do my exercises at roughly 4.30 in the afternoon, and as I read their spines I lose count of the number of sit-ups, and then I sit up on the floor in front of your books, looking for titles I haven't noticed yet.

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You don't like to order things - at least not alphabetically, or chronologically, or thematically. One shelf holds the following, in this order: Success through a Positive Mental Attitude, Lolita, Lord of the Flies, The Handmaid’s Tale, God: A Biography, Love in the Time of Cholera, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, Fathers and Sons, Ragtime, The Alchemist, The Brothers Karamazov, Pakistan (Lonely Planet), and Treasure Island.

Or perhaps your books are arranged in a way that isn't obvious to me. Maybe you've ordered them from best to worst - in which case, your favourite book would be The Three Musketeers, and your least favourite would be a memoir by a blind mountaineer called Touch the Top of the World.

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You really want to be happy, and you are hoping that books will teach you how to do it. You have three books called Happiness, one of which has a subtitle which I like: Lessons from a New Science. You also have a few books on how to get rich, be successful and convince people to do what you want. Two are written by a man called Napoleon Hill - and I can definitely sympathise with you for buying these, because the name Napoleon Hill does have something very persuasive about it. My favourite of your self-help books is called The No Asshole Rule, and it's by Robert I. Sutton, PhD.

I sometimes wonder how many of these books you bought yourself. Maybe there is someone in your life who really wants you to be happy, rich, successful and convincing, and who gave them all to you one by one, on each Christmas and birthday.

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You like to scribble in the margins of books to emphasise important points. You don't write notes, or add exclamation marks, the way my grandmother always does. But the ferocity of the biro lines signals a kind of hierarchy. In Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, you liked the lines His flaring temper singed the hearts of / Several women in the days / Before his chaste, ambitious days. And in The Great Gatsby, you drew a vehement scribble beside Daisy’s words: "I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool - that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

I like to analyse your underlinings, as if they could be laid end to end to create your biography. But the fact is, you mark too many things - that makes it difficult. If only you'd choose one line per book which summed it up for you, I'd have an easier job at pinning you down.

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At some point, you learnt the words "banns," "missal," "deportment" and "cleave" from D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, and from Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle you learnt, among others, "feculence," "tumid" and "tryst." I know this because you have listed vocabulary at the end of a lot of your books. Lolita taught you a great deal, including "concupiscent," "stippled," "tumescent," "sapphic," "cunnilingus" and "mackintosh."

These word-lists are very poetic, in a way; they encapsulate the style of the author and the style of your knowledge at the time of reading them. But I don't know when you read them, unfortunately, because you didn't add a date.

Du willst glücklich werden, und du hoffst, das Bücher dich lehren werden, wie man das tut.

I think I know where I am. After a sleep like that it's not always so easy to tell. When you have been awake all night and finally put your head down, sometimes it feels like a sleep that's as close to death as it's going to get. I can even sleep through my doorbell, which gives me a heart attack under normal circumstances. There is nothing that calls me to my finer self, or any self. I always spend the first hour or so going over and over the details of this strange south london flat, this repository for all of my hopes and dreams, now embarrassingly flat. I might eat something. It doesn't taste right. The blood in my limbs is not yet flowing, still in some mysterious way asleep. If a part of my body can really stay like that, would I be able to effect the reverse and sleep standing up like a horse? I am convinced I fell asleep with my eyes open on the 63 bus, on a morning after a night shift just like this one. The smooth, soporific motion of the bus is always tricky at the best of times, and something about  rounding that corner, starting off down the familiar litany of stops that signal I'm getting closer will make it more likely. One minute I am aware of being on the street with the cherry blossoms on dark wet roofs, of the housing estate charmingly and appropriately nicknamed 'yellow bricks' and of 'Bird in Bush Road' a bizarrely rural name in the most urban pocket of south London. That being home and nearly being home are the same thing is a deception that I fall for not for the first time, and I am somehow convinced that my feet are on the pavement, that I'm fumbling for my keys. In the next minute I have passed the residential streets entirely and the bus is curving on the lip of the mouth of rye lane, and I will have to struggle past statuesque African matriarchs on their way to church (when did it become Sunday? My last real sleep was Thursday night) trying not to knock their headdresses. Peckham is a miracle, a working class West African neighbourhood held in higher and higher esteem by those both from here and London in general as it slowly recovers from/deals with a troubled past of poverty, crime and, once last August, riots. This is the nature of cities, or rather, of suburban annexes within cities, that I can live here and not be of here, that I can rub up against the basic foundation of this culture on a daily basis without being required to participate in it myself. Still, knowing that a city has a 'strong sense of community' because I see the way people greet each other when shopping on rye lane, warm and determined not to let each other get away with 'pretendin you don see me' as I dodge past them to the open air shops to reach for that great advantage of living in a poor borough -- cheap food -- and wonder what else this specific place can offer me in any substance. Knowing all of this about a place without having it for yourself does not make it easier to bear. The flat is both a haven and a tangible reminder of the fact that I have to create life for myself. With the same possessions, some of which I have been carting around since I was four, I really could be anywhere, and it's fine.

It's not just now, waking from a sleep that makes up in depth what it might lack in peacefulness, that I am aware of a lack. It's not just that I don't feel like leaving the house because I'm exhausted, it's that drifting around the same four walls is what I'd be doing anyway, whether I'd stayed up all night or not. London, when will you show yourself? When will I make myself worthy of this, this ex-council flat in Peckham that we pursued with the single minded conviction that can only accompany whatever repository for hopes and dreams you choose. How can it be, that I am doing such a job, working in a hostel for drug addicts, working at such strange times? How many more favours will I do, how many acts of deference to the needs and preferences of other people, some of whom are manipulative and deceitful or plain abusive, even if it is my job to understand the ways in which their deprivations make them abusive and work 'creatively' with them. In much the same way I might reach for my red purse for a pint of milk in the ubiquitious corner shops or swipe my plastic walleted oyster card in an increasingly nonchalant fashion, I give my energy and my time and my consideration and my vitality and every last resource to some sense of whatever it is I need to do to make things work, to carve a stubborn niche in this his hard city. How much more of myself will I spend? How much longer before I wake up after another long shift and know I need to return to this question, when increasingly I am as stagnant as my own reluctant bloodflow after five hours of death-sleep, when everything is my fault, when my attempts to establish order on this cramped and colourful flat mirror my increasingly fruitless attempts to hold myself together. Easy's getting harder every day, admit it now, when you're this tired and you have no-one to hang out with. Once, after such I shift, I try make a list of every person I have ever met or known, names of people I can add to my collection, trying to remember who has contributed to my understanding of concepts of people in general, 'society' even, as if they hold clues to the way forward. Many photographs are lacking so I piece together memories, congregating in my heart from wildly disparate spaces and times. Geographically far-flung, emotional turmoil, spiritual pilgrimages, educational experiences, creation, companionship and, my favourite, times of being trusted with other people's vitality and life force, the very thing I am spending now on a situation I grow more and more suspicious of as being unworthy. I unite these people only with myself, having no other binding agent, no comprehensive narrative arc, no history or family strong enough to hold it. I unite them now with entreaties: are you all right? Do we still make sense? Were you ever there? I hope so. I miss you. Come back to me. Come back to me now, for I miss you terribly and we are so lonely. Entreaties that I could eventually be speaking just as truthfully to myself as in solitude the whispers become indistinguishable from my own breath, my own heartbeat.

Consolation? Everybody is young at some point, everybody knows what it is to feel unformed. But that consolation does not hold for long, I return to that moment of wakeful sleep born out of pure exhaustion on the 63 bus. a cautionary tale that being home and nearly being home are not the same thing at all, not even close. They're opposites.

Dass es das Gleiche ist, ob man zu Hause oder fast zu Hause ist, ist eine Täuschung, der ich immer wieder verfalle.

Works sucks. It’s actually not that bad. It’s shit. No, but, really, to be reasonable, it’s ok. Reasonably shit. The work is: “Grandi autorità di Roma antica”. On an early 90s mock rosewood  computer desk in Edwardian style. The work is Liebig Extract of Meat collectible cards printed in 1911. Read the cards, transcribe the information into the database. Italian:  Nessun problema (grazie google). Liebig's Extract of Meat Company. Baron Justus von Liebig, 19^th century organic chemist. In Britain, Fray Bentos is a pie brand. Pie brand.  In Uraguay, Fray Bentos is a town that processed cows into extract of meat.  And right here it is noteworthy events in the history of the authorities of Rome in Antiquity.   I’m glad I had a fish sandwich. I wouldn’t want to have to think about the transnational history of that shit.

Now Johnny Cash is singing from Spotify ™. (“Reach out and touch faith…”). “Great Leaders of Ancient Rome”? That's completely different from “The Authorities of Ancient Rome”. Rex? “Rex, a dog owned by Ronald Regan”. How original.  I can’t really concentrate ; it would be a waste.  To be fair, I’ve moved on: “PLANTES UTILES EXOTIQUES”. The future is rich with promise.  The peoples of the world are happy to harvest useful plants.  Have you ever touched pampas grass? It will cut you.  But I would rather be in my childhood garden being damaged by pampas grass than sitting at this desk.  Then again, it is better to have a proverbial roof over one’s proverbial head than live in the garden of the past.  “Reports of emo youth and LGBT people ‘being massacred in Iraq’” . Shit.

Dennoch wäre ich lieber im Garten meiner Kindertage und schnitte mich blutig an Pampa-Gras, als dass ich hier an diesem Schreibtisch säße.