DESIGNING A TABLE AT A TABLE

DESIGNING A TABLE AT A TABLE

When I discovered the sheet where pictures grew, I made The Dream Suitcase. It contained the sheet, my newly emerged net-book from when I was seven, the tape I cooked in the AGA when its small pause where resealed in the reel healed and was gone, an empty baccy tin supposed to contain a magic designer drug called “Strictly Free,” a pair of orange swimming trunks and also a handwritten copy of the Nirvana barcode:

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At some point it was disbanded and I went to London with only the sheet, and was put in an Emergency hostel by the council in a queue for housing. My dad had just died and I hadn’t properly mourned him; and one morning after missing a night’s sleep, everything got to me and I had a break down, lost my mind with grief, was heaving with cold, sudden stabs of sadness, whereupon voices told me WE ARE THE GOVERNORS OF THE SCHOOLS WHO EXPELLED YOU AND WE WANT YOU TO WALK OUT NAKED AND GET SECTIONED. I did what they said: I took my clothes off and walked out into the heaving capital.

The police were onto me and I was put in a cell, compress sans nicotine, compress sans medication, for three days and nights, before the doctors arrived. I was so desperately ill I was drinking from the toilet in the cell. When the doctors got there I was deemed to have thought-disorder and sent back home, up north, to a psychiatric Unit I had been to before, by Ambulance. When I got there, I got to a table in the Arts Room and designed a table myself.

The Periodic Table of Altered States = puddles

Calculator Tomb = clay

Frozen in red = fire

By Sensation in blue = sea

Random Access Imagination = rain

The Extinction of the Gun = rainbows

Digitalis Principalis = snow

The Death of A. I. From The Spirit of Music = air

A Trance of Stalks by Prof. Quentin Ponsonby = grass

McTruth And Flies = light

The Future That Ain’t What it Used To Be = glass

I used felt-tip pens and made it colourful, this alignment of tomes that will likely never be written and elements according to some kind of logic. There was also a kind of “aftershock image” that followed on from the table. It’s only four lines and was also done in colour. It’s a picture really and goes as follows:

Bart Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d

@ Van Goghian black border sun

heard James Joyce would just use |||| 4

ROYGBIV in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile

I actually sat there and made a barcode for the smile going through the colours of ROYGBIV according to the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. It was definitely something, and I suppose I found a pocket where I was a beautiful mind. It was when I got home that I fleshed out the Nirvana barcode into a full piece including the figment

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In time to come I would be sectioned again. Overall I have now had five sectionings and six hospital admissions overall. It really takes it out of you. It was the last time I was in hospital that I wrote the lines:

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the soul w/ demons,

H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for extra sensory allowance.

By that stage the Dream Suitcase had been stolen, though I had taken the melted tape out and given it as a gift to my gf, and luckily had given the sheet where pictures grew back to my brother who owns it. So whomsoever took the Dream Suitcase only really found my boyhood work, which I still have largely typed up so haven’t lost entirely.