What the fuck?

Wait, sorry, I’ll start again.

Patient FJ

Recovery Diary 1

On second thoughts, should this actually be diary entry number two? Only if I go back and treat that first bit I wrote as entry number one, and according to Hatchjaw I can’t go back over anything I’ve written and change it.

Don’t they realise what that means to a writer? To be unable to rewrite? I always begin a day’s writing by going back over whatever I’m working on, from the beginning, and tinkering with it obsessively, then writing a bit of new stuff, which I then rewrite the next day along with everything else I’ve written so far. Obviously, there’s a process of diminishing returns as I write less and less new stuff each day, but somehow I’ve still managed to finish several books, so fuck Achilles and the Tortoise he rode in on.

Do people still know about Achilles and the Tortoise? By people I mean the younger readers to whom I am appealing less and less, according to my current agent (my sixth, which isn’t as bad as it sounds as one of them died while representing me, and another was jailed for assault). She says my writing is getting old-fashioned, and would claim that by tossing in things like that reference to Greek mythology I’m proving her point. Wait. Is the story of Achilles and the Tortoise from Greek mythology? I mean, I know Achilles was Greek, but maybe the story is actually a fable, from someone like Aesop, or someone later, that French one. What’s his name? It’s on the tip of my tongue. God, it’s really annoying not having access to the internet. Not even a reference dictionary! What are they trying to do to us? And writing in longhand! It’s been years since I’ve written anything longer than a cheque by hand. It starts to hurt even if I have to write my address on the back. But cheques aren’t used any more. She’s right, I am old-fashioned. Look at the way I wrote ‘to whom I am appealing less and less…’ back there, and how I’m indenting the paragraphs, even though Hatchjaw says nobody is ever going to read it except me, and it’s just a facilitation tool in the recovery process. So at least I know where I am, even if the details are a bit puzzling, because there’s only one place where they talk about things like facilitation tools in the recovery process, and that’s in good old rehabilifuckingtation.

But this place doesn’t seem like any rehab I’ve been in before. I’ve only gone halfway along the corridor so far, partly because I was feeling a bit sick and I got dizzy. There’s a lump on my forehead, which may have been caused by trying to get out of bed when I was, in fact, underneath it. Which reminds me of something I used to say to women if I found myself staying the night and they asked me which side of the bed I preferred. ‘The top,’ I used to say. God, I was a funny drunk.

The other thing that made me turn back when I got halfway along the corridor was the noise coming from the room at the far end of it. There was something familiar about that sound and the voices making it that discouraged me from going any further.

I’d stopped at an intersection in the corridor, like a crossroads, with a passage stretching away on either side of me. I remained very still so that the nausea I was experiencing would think I had gone away, and leave me alone. It did, and as I slowly turned around to go back to my room I saw someone peering at me from an alcove about twenty yards along the passage to my left. As soon as he saw I’d spotted him he darted back into his hidey-hole. I thought about going to try and find hi