… a couple of weeks back and I chose to ignore it… along with the pictures of the caravan… Talx… t-a-l-x… it means nothing to me…

What he tagged up for me was a picture of Eddie, Eddie who I live with, big stupid, gentle Eddie, who attacks me everyday.

The picture is on Flickr.  Of course.  Like all the others… in a way I wasn’t surprised, perhaps a little disappointed but not surprised.

It means they’ve found me again.

This is immensely satisfying in a way.  It means that I’m somehow worth pursuing.  I was getting worried that before I was just a bystander to a whole larger drama and didn’t realise it… that my egocentrism was mistaken… that everything wasn’t about me.

But it is.

About me.

Someone – this Talx – has taken the time and trouble to find a picture of Eddie – load it to Flickr and then pester me with it…

So – now I’m no longer worried that I’m forgotten – now I worried about why they remember me…

I’m not sure which is worse.

When we left Hellingly way back, what six months ago, I thought Travis had a plan.  He seemed so calm and confident and he told me “not to worry”… he was like, “Don’t worry yourself there boy”.

Which dug inside me a little, you know in that way that someone can when they tell you not to worry and all you can see around is reason to worry.

“We’ve been driving…”

“So long I know.”

“For days.”

“That we have”.

“I’m tired.”

And we drove… for days… I thought he knew where we were going.

“You know where we are going?”

“Don’t worry yourself”

And so I hid in the back of the car… tightly curled upon myself… clutching at myself… and we drove.

We threaded our way across through the arterial motorway system, that horrible, repetition of the congealed traffic, a viscid mass of metal sliding around the country.  Travis at the wheel, and me in the back, clutching at myself… rocking and swaying… yeah I did a bit of swaying back then.

And we drove on.

And we stopped and bought coffee and petrol and lifeless sandwiches and Dorittos…

And then… we drove on.

The only people we spoke with were to buy petrol or porn or packs of Pringles… the only people we spoke to wanted to take our money or swipe our cards… people with the rough translucent skin and bruised eyes of the shift-worker…

And we drove on…

And the stock market collapsed and the politicians shuddered and on the radio the voices began to run out of superlatives and told us the whole country, the whole world was nose-diving… but you know everything looked the same… everyone looked the same… not happy but you know… kind of removed from everything… the same pensive faces pinched and angry over their car wheels…

And we drove… on.

It was easy to drive like that – following the flow of the roads – listening to the voices on the radio… all those words… all the doom just rolling past you…

We talked, Travis and I, talked together and yet never faced each other.  We went over the events, over and over the events… pointlessly over and over the events of last October.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDwcgJ5RKYE