NeonBlue Dreams
People live inside my head

I’ve lived with them since then - Kerry and Finn and their friends and colleagues. Now I know them just about as well as I know me. They go about their daily lives and I look on while they live their lives, listening in on their conversations, and watching their reactions. When I nip out for a quick ciggie break at work, sitting on the seat of my walker by the bike park next to the litter bin behind the office, they’re chattering away in my head, or arguing in the office about who’s turn it is to make the coffees as usual. In odd moments when I’m not busy doing something else they’ll pop into my head. Sometimes, frustratingly when I’m wanting to capture whatever it is they’re doing, they go away. Last year for a couple of weeks they all took themselves off for a couple of weeks, without a word to me - not even a postcard, and no explanation of where they’d gone to when they came back.

During one spell when they disappeared, on the spur of the moment bored late at night on line I somehow ended up writing a western (not my usual style at all) with my good friend Peter, who as it turned out had ulterior motives in that the whole of the plot was geared towards wooing his now wife, who had a starring role in the story. It was fun to do and a great release of some pent up frustration, and although it’s never going to see the light of day, which is a pity in some ways, but it filled in some time, kept me in practice, and by the time I’d finished that, Kerry and co. had come back from their little jaunt away.

They’re now like old friends. I’ve lived with them now for getting on for seven years - a lot longer if you count the time they weren’t really very chatty. I know their quirks and their bad habits, and I know how they’ll react in any given situation. Writing’s in my blood. I think it was Stephen King who once said when asked why he wrote, “Because I have to.” In the opening chapter of his autobiography “On Writing” he describes it that it’s like he’s got a sieve in his head, and some things go straight through the sieve and others get stuck, and they’re the things he has to write about (I hope I’m paraphrasing that rightly from memory - I don’t have the book to hand at the moment).

I think I’m relatively normal (though obviously by degrees) though I suppose many people don’t have a whole bunch of people living in their head. Okay, we know my head’s not wired up quite right - more bad pings than is really good for any communication system, but I’m not a major psycho. Interesting though I did learn last summer when I had a CT scan and got my mitts on a copy of the scan report, that I have a “persistent cavum septum pellucidum”, which in English means that the two hemispheres of my brain aren’t fully fused like they should be and are in the vast majority of the population. It’s apparently of no clinical significance, though I’ve learned from my online research into it that I’m apparently at a greater risk of developing schizophrenia. Maybe all literary types have brains that get wired up slightly differently so they absorb everything that’s going on around them and store away snatches of conversations overheard on buses. From an early age I was always more interested in “people watching” than joining in at social events, and I remember spending a lot of my time in clubs when I was at college (at least the relatively sober bits) sitting on the edge of the dance floor watching how couples interacted together and watching people’s body language.

Now’s probably a pretty good time to introduce Bliss. Bliss is my alter-ego (and no, I’m not schizophrenic as far as I know) my pen name, and she’ll be putting in an appearance around here sooner or later.

Having spent much of this week reading (a wise old English teacher told me years ago, writing’s 50% writing, and 50% reading - anything and everything) it’s kick-started me and Bliss into the writing mood again, having spent so long recently coding and putting precious little time aside for reading. Kerry and co. are all back at home in my head after an absence of a couple of months, so there’s no better time than now to crack on and get writing again.

Some day it’d be nice to see Mr Cook again and tell him I’m still writing.

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