I Wonder...

When I close my eyes and want to go to sleep, I think of death, instead of sheep.

When the world closes its eyes, and can no longer see, what does it think of? Is it sheep? Is it me? When the sun sets and day becomes night and the demons come out and sanity takes flight, does the world's slumber become a nightmare causing a rumbling, grumbling quake of the earth?

Ask me another because I just don't know. I dream of death.

So. Last night I had a dream.

I dreamt of Joy and joy and smiles and laughter. Things that I remembered, but then... after... Her face became molten. It seeped and it cracked and it melted and dripped down onto her lap. Her eyes still had their sparkle, she couldn't lose that, even though one was sitting with the drips in her lap. But her voice was a bubble, the velvet was gone. It sounded like gargling glue had gone wrong.

I awoke with a start - or was it a stop? Either way, I sat upright. I was sweating and hot. My mind was spinning away with the wind and more than the others, I thought Sin had sinned.

But it had nothing to do with me, I am sure. Joy simply couldn't deal any more. I couldn't blame her really, I had been there too - all the deaths and the screams and the horrors down to me, and the ghosts that haunt in the dark I can't see - so why did I dream of her face becoming goo?

For a while I just laid there, staring up in the dark. My mind drifted like a leaf on a breeze whirlpooling in the park.

Was I was telling myself that I should do it as well? Take my own life and leap down into hell. Maybe I knew that by just being alive, it all carried on, the beast continuing to thrive. But I couldn't, I wouldn't, I didn't have the strength to draw the final curtain and bring it all to an end.

But perhaps, deep down, I knew that I must, lest the world, due to me, crumbled to dust.

That knowledge I bury under a mountain of guilt which I pull over my head like a thick winter quilt. I'm doing what's best and what's right and what's... easy. And if they give me the drugs, it's almost lemon squeezy. And I'll continue to ignore that I know Joy is right. That to kill herself was to win the fight. If I don't, then I know that I'll have to stand up and be a man. I'll have to commit suicide. But I don't know if I can.

When the world closes its eyes, and can no longer see, I wonder, does it dream of me?

The Power....

We had a power cut today.

With a loud click, coming from nowhere in particular but seemingly everywhere in reality, the lights went off.

And the television set went off.

And the blinking light on the CCTV cameras.

Oh, and the security locking on the doors.

Nobody noticed that one straight away. In fact, the only thing that bothered anyone, apart from the orderlies, was the television. When you only have the company of the insane or the indifferent, a TV is your lifeline to the outside world.

Granted ours was stuck on MTV, producing a raucous mix of beat and breasts - sometimes a bit much for a few of the residents - but at least it had a semblance of life. At least you could see people having fun.

Not that it was always a good thing. When you're wallowing in misery, dipping your toes in the pool of pissed-off-ishness, someone ELSE having fun kind of put the boot in to kick you over the edge so you almost drowned in the sea of shitty-attitude.

Today, though, everyone had seemed to put on an up. The mood was light. The orderlies had minimal reason to interfere with the residents and the residents themselves gave the orderlies little to worry about. It was sunny outside and the warmth was filling everyone with an unusually buoyant radiance.

Then click.

Then moans. Cries. Screams, in places.

Then chaos.

NEXT is a popular clothes store. When they have a sale, people queue up outside from around 5am. I imagine, when they open their doors, the scene would be much like it was here. People would be milling around, running, pushing. Clothes would be torn or dropped to the floor. The odd unfortunate would be trampled underfoot.

A sudden lack of television had the same effect, pretty much, the only difference being that there wasn't 70% off ladies skirts.

I wondered if NEXT sold asylum scrubs... Maybe there was a gap in the market...

The orderlies must have been dozing, lulled into a false sense of sanity by the morning's mood. It took them a few precious seconds to react and jump in, attempting to instil some calm with their usual brand of brute force. Head locks and half-nelsons did next to nothing to bring the throng to heel.

In the ensuing pandemonium, someone fell or was pushed against the door.

Now Dr. Connors is all about high-tech. State of the art. Top of the range cameras. Top of the range locks. Why use a key when a four digit number will suffice? You can steal a key, but not something that's committed (no pun intended) to memory. Less chance of the lunatics taking over the asylum.

Yes... Good luck with that.

When Ian, who never listened to the voices in his head no matter how much they screamed at him, fell backwards into the corridor, there was a sudden hush (possibly even from within his head). It was as if someone had taken a 3D photograph of the room and everybody was frozen in place. Then the milling about ceased and a flood of patients very impatiently poured out of the recreation room and into the hallway.

About three minutes later, the power came back on.

About three hours later, order was, once more, restored. Well, apart from dear old Edna Cuthbertson, who'd accidentally found the furnace room and decided to burn her clothes. Unfortunately she'd used her hands to put her scrubs into the incinerator. She wouldn't be putting her hands anywhere after that.

Only two residents had managed to find the door to outside, through the nursery. They were caught picking flowers, just this side of the stump. Eight were back in their cells, curled up on their beds quietly. A further fourteen were found in the laundry room, making tents out of towels and singing around a small fire -the source of which hasn't been discovered. Eddie, all smiles and sunshine - despite the dent in the back of his head from playing catch with a bowling ball - had a broken femur from the rugby tackle used to catch him.

And me. They spent an awful lot of time searching for me. I hadn't actually moved. Whilst everyone else was enjoying the pseudo-freedom and running riot, I didn't move. I stayed in my seat and stared at the blank TV.

The sudden hush from Ian opening the door had been preceded by another one. In my own head. When the electricity went off, the screams - even the dull echo of the screams - stopped also.

I, for the first time in so long, was sitting in silence. Internally and externally. And I relished it.

I wasn't under any illusion that it was the electricity causing this beast to come alive inside of me. That was my own creation. I certainly wasn't Frankenstein's prototype or anything of the sort.

But, when that click was heard...

I wonder if it came from me. Whatever curse I battle with has an off switch, and some sort of electromagnetic pulse was emitted that killed the TV and everything else. I suppose it was better than leaving MTV and killing the patients.

No. It wasn't me - this time.

We had a power cut today. All of us. Including me.

The Silver Screen...

The silver screen.

Why is it called that? Well, because the screens used to be silver - duh! Back in the days of black and white film, when a flickering feature was the highlight of the week, screens were silver for the better reflections and contrast. And now 3D movies are growing, they might make a comeback. Same deal.

And anywho, the White Screen just doesn't have the same glamorous ring to it as the Silver Screen, now does it?

If a movie were to made of your life, would you go see it? Would there be enough in your day of waking, working, soaps and snoring to enthral the viewer? Would a red carpet be laid out, flashing photographers shouting out your name?

"Look here!" "Smile!"

And who would play you? Someone dashing or alluring? Brad Pitt? Matt Damon? Ryan Reynolds? Jennifer Aniston? Penelope Cruz? Or someone more... normal. An actor without the perfect skin and face and nose? Who would you choose?

Me. What do I think?

Is my life worthy of a movie? I doubt it. Even in the days of Avatar and Harry Potter, or where werewolf and vampire vie for the love of a girl, the story of a man who can kill people with his mind. Not entirely believable, is it?

Saying that, it's not even my mind. I don't actually know what it is. It's something inside of me. Evil? A demon? Ask me another.

I really don't know. But that's why I'm here. That's why I eat the slop and spend my days in a single recreation room with only MTV and puddles of Mickey's mucous to keep me company.

Who'd want to see a film about that?

But. Who would play me?

Now I'm not vain enough to believe the like of Pitt or Damon would want to step into my shoes. Maybe Mark Wahlberg. He's not the clean cut action star. He's played the comedic and the calamitous. Or Kevin Spacey. Sure I have a little more hair. No. He draws attention to himself. Even without intending it (though he is an actor and that's what he's there for), you're drawn to him. I'm an everyman - and I believe that is glorifying myself.

Ordinary Joe. That's me. A little more ordinary than most. Or, at least, that's what I'd like. But the deaths. The screams. Maybe that's a little more than ordinary. it doesn't change me, though. It simply drags me out of my shoes and throws me about in the grumbling storm clouds above. And the deaths rain down.

A movie about me, on a screen silver or white.

Hardly Oscar material.

(Support Independent Cinema: Fiveway Films are creating a 100% public funded movie NOW)

Songs in the Key of Life...

Songs in the key of life.

That's what she sang. Forget upper 'C' or an octave lower than the bottom of your boots. She sang songs in the key Life, with a capital Luh.

Not that she sang, as such. She didn't warble one hit wonders from the 80s or rap like Eminem in a skirt - or rather scrubs. I don't think I heard her even so much as hum a happy tune, but she could sing, still.

"What you talking about, Willis?" I hear you say.

Well, of course I don't hear you say that at all. Partly because, I would assume, many of you don't even know who Willis is and partly because you're there, wherever 'there' might be, and I'm here, snuggled up cosier than a bug in a rug in front of a roaring fire. With the central heating on. And a thermal vest - though I doubt they make thermals that small or with that many leg/arm holes.

You never know, though. You can get anything on Ebay these days.

Anywho.

Songs. Life. The key of. Of what do I speak.

Have you ever heard someone pluck at a harp string, perfectly tuned and perfectly plucked? No? How about crystal shattering on a stone floor. Probably on a summer's day when the air is fresh and silent. All you hear is the noise of the smash, but it's almost a flawless sound. As sharp and as clear as the crystal itself.

No? Well, imagine it then. Think of what those sounds would be like. They'd pierce your eardrum with an absolute clarity and ring through your brain.

Zoe was like that. They say someone can be a breath of fresh air. She was. In the enclosed space of the recreation room - and, to be honest, the rest of the asylum as 'Outside' was almost forbidden territory - the air always felt recycled. It felt used and second hand. Like it had been picked up for 50p at a car boot sale early one Sunday morning.

But when she swept by (she did sweep -it was never simply a walk), the wake of her passing was like the harp string being plucked, possibly with a crystal shard as the plectrum.

You found yourself breathing in, a breath so deep it filled your lungs and kept on going, storing reserves of freshness from your treacle-toes up. She sang with her body and with her spirit. Always bright. Always a smile -not necessarily dazzling, but there nonetheless. Her eyes held a twinkle in them that, I don't doubt, was there voluntarily rather than being held captive, imprisoned by the iris behind the bars of the lens.

Why would such a girl be in here?

The death of a baby. The dark place it must plunge you into. The bright cell of denial she locked herself away in.

What do you do with that pain? How can you bind it so tightly you are able ignore its presence? Does that make you a master of deception - the deceived being yourself? Does it show the Hulk-like inner strength, but without the green, pants tearing aspect? Or does it make you crazy?

Zoe sings a song of Life inspired by the absence of the same. A song of Life composed after a visit from Death. I didn't realise the Reaper was such an artist.

Maybe I should sing along.

Sin... Ants in your Pants...

Ants in your pants, apparently, make your belly button dance.

I'm sure that, if ants were indeed crawling around in my pants, it wouldn't just be my belly button dancing. I'd be bouncing around like a bungee jumping Pinocchio if the little blighters were invading my interiors. They'd be like moving grains of sand - getting into all my nooks and crannies no matter how I tried to brush them off.

I don't mind flies, spiders, moths or man-eating mosquitoes, but ants get to me.

Maybe it's because I expect them to be able to club together and carry me off to their nest. I'd be their Gulliver and they'd be victorious in their conquest of me. If an ant can carry multiple times its own body weight, I don't suppose a whole nest's worth would have a problem carting me off. The food in this place isn't exactly nourishing. Or appetising. Or, really, anything resembling actual food. Any ants would be better off with the likes of me rather than anything the kitchen might produce.

It's almost as if the food goes through a filter and all of the goodness is sucked out, leaving us with the pallid, paltry remnants. I suppose that filter would be like the digestive system - all the vitamins and nutrients are removed for the good of the body and all the crap is expelled. The slop they serve us essentially is another four letter word that begins with 'S.' Rather than it saying 'Lo' to a 'P', though, it says 'Hi' to a 'T.'

It appears I'm not the only one who's not keen on them. It appears that, instead of just not being keen, some are positively fearful. Whether this is an underling, pre-existing fear, a result of the individual's dementia or a side-effect of the drugs, I'm not entirely sure.

But...

This morning, when we were led from breakfast (slop on toast - at least, I'm assuming the cardboard wedges were meant to be toast and they weren't just handing out free door stops) to the recreation room, one corner was moving.

Yes, moving.

In the bottom corner, beneath the TV and to the left of the window, a shadow shifted and shuddered. I did the same. My friend Bender Benny looked, shrugged and parked himself in his favourite chair for his after-slop snooze. A couple threw up - a bit excessive, methinks - and then someone tipped the domino.

Brenda, sweet and low with a saccharin aftertaste, screamed. Carol, a woman whose fastest speed was a shamble and was only so far into the room because she'd been swept up by the throng of residents and orderlies, took the proffered baton of hysteria and ran with it.

Like a forest wildfire, all crackles and sparks and chaos, the madness - appropriate for an asylum, you may think - spread. Butter on toast (cardboard or otherwise) it smothered everyone until the orderlies had no option (they'd tell you) other than to resort to their mini version of cattle prods.

A few good zaps later and a few good cans of ant spray and order was finally restored. It didn't take much. A mop for the vomit. A hoover for the husks of the once-active ants. A nudge to wake Benny because his favourite programme was on in a minute. Grumbles from the orderlies about not being paid enough for this aggravation - though they didn't really need to smile as they jabbed their prods.

Hours later I still scratched myself and twitched occasionally as I was sure I felt an ant crawling on my arm or neck or under my scrubs. But I didn't. It was, most probably, their ghosts.

Ants in your pants make your belly button boogie.

Ants in an asylum make the residents riot.

Sin... Snapping Synapses...

Why is the number pad on a computer different to the one on a telephone? And why, when I'm calling someone, do I not forget this and end up calling Outer Mongolia instead?

It feels perfectly normal to be entering figures on a keyboard and then upside-down myself to call the local Indian takeaway for a nice Balti or Chicken Tikka. Sweet chilli naans please, and yes, I would like poppadoms. Or poppadums if you have them instead.

Why is that? The human brain is weird in some of the automatic connections it makes. I remember seeing an email in which the internal letters of the words were muxed ip and you were still meant to be able to read it as your brain automatically figures it out as long as the first and last are in place.

If you see waht I maen.

But that's on a small scale. Even upsidising your mind to adapt to which number order you're using, though it probably takes millions of snapping synapses to sync, is small fry - and not in the way of crispy bacon and eggs.

Edgar Alan Peterson. Ed to me and a small number of others and Poo to most of the rest. His synapses snapped along at a crazy rate, jumping from subject to subject, leaping tall bananas in a single bound. The Jack of all Juxtapositions and Master of Madness.

Well, not quite. To say he was Master of Madness was to steal Connors' crown like a thief in the night, sneaking from shadow to doorway to... other hidey thing... until the crown was in your possession. Beware of those thorns though. Not only did Connors think himself as, in here at least, the Almighty, you could be sure there'd be plenty of pricks involved.

Most involved drugs or orderlies, syringe or (though, of course, it never REALLY happens) succubus.

Anywho. Ed. He spoke at a rate of knots the coastguard would have little chance of keeping up with. He'd be a fast disappearing dot in the eye of the river police I think I saw Bruce Willis playing in a film once. And everything he said, however disjointed and tangential, made some sort of sense.

He played a permanent, tumbling, game of word association that had your head spinning as you tried to keep up but, when you attempted to replay the conversation back in your mind later - in the slow motion of a spit flinging Van Damme movie fight -you could, kind of, see how the path managed to meander from its start to its ultimate end.

Somehow the fact that the sun was shining became a discussion on mountaintop dew levels, moving to the number of times he's hit his thumb whilst hammering a nail, then being swiftly overtaken on the outside lane by the fact that he preferred KFC to McDonalds except on Fridays because Friday is Fries-day. Then it was a race for the finishing line between why men's shoe sizes are different to women's and is a bubble stronger from the inside than it is from the outside?

And, during the whole conversation, he would take, perhaps, three breaths.

That was why he was in here. He was a telephone man in a keyboard world, but, somehow, he managed to fit. You couldn't quite figure out why, but you accepted it anyway.

I wonder if that explains me. I wonder if I'm upsidised. The buttons are being pressed in the wrong order. Something in my head is the wrong way round and that's why they all died.

That's why they all die.

Sin... Fair to Middling...

Fair to middling. That's what people say, isn't it?

"How's it going?"

"Fair to middling. You?"

"Not bad, not bad."

You walk on, not particularly remembering whether the person you just spoke to had actually said "great," "wonderful," "fantastic" or "crap." It's almost a rhetorical question, in so many cases. You're so tied up in your own slide from 'middling' to 'fair' to 'crap' that the "How's it going?" was out of your mouth before you even realised the words had escaped. It's a reflex, an automatic social custom that you don't notice you do until you've done it.

"How's it going?"

"Shit, thanks. My cat just died, my wife is having an affair with her step-father and my kids hate me. I've lost my winning lottery ticket and a plane landed on my house while I was on the toilet so I had no paper to wipe my arse. Oh, and my dog thinks my leg is next door's poodle for some reason. I assume that's why he keeps humping it. You?"

"Not bad, not bad."

It doesn't quite go like that, but it could. The response is never really listened to. It's blah-blah-blah, a white noise that simply elicits a nod and a smile. Even if you were told that their budgie had died and a Panzer tank had accidentally driven over their car on the way to parking in their front room - without using the door and stopping right in front of the TV - you'd nod and smile and not even register.

And if you did? If you did stop and ask and listen to the answer, so attempting to strike up a dialogue? The other person would be taken aback, shocked that the customary question was being mutated into an actual CONVERSATION! How dare you? Don't you know the rules? Don't you know that, beneath the 'fair to middling' simmers a witches cauldron of sickly popping circumstances that were wearing away at your victim's psyche until their frazzled husk could do naught but stare into space and wonder how 'middling' became 'murder.'

But you know this, so you don't. You nod and walk on. They nod, and they walk on. Neither really remembers what the other said. Sometimes neither remembers who the other was, let alone the fact that someone was even there.

It's like telling the time. You look at your wrist and you see it's 3:30. It's afternoon, clearly, as it's daylight and you're not tucked up in your bed or propping up the local bar to make sure it doesn't fall over and spill your tenth pint or fifteenth vodka all over the floor.

You're nice like that.

You don't consciously think that it's half past three, post meridian, it's more of a feeling. The time grazes your mind, leaving only an impression. If someone sees you look at your watch and thus asks you the time, you have to look again, and it takes a second to work out what you'd seen and knew only a second or two before.

You meet, you ask, you pass, you forget.

Fair to middling. A throwaway phrase that masks the underlying fear of actually opening up and interacting. You need to catch your wife, find the ticket, make friends with your children and spay your dog, all before the local shop closes at 8:30. Otherwise you'll be too late to buy any toilet paper.

Of course, let's hope no-one asks you the time.