A THOUSAND DAYS ENTRY ONE BEFORE THE END

 So the BOOK is called 1000 DAYS; without any further information.

With a thousand days remaining you begin your final assessment of living.

It is the make or break part of my life? No, my life will be broken no matter what. In a thousand days I will be what, 60? No. Maybe 61. Near the end of your life. Yes, I know, the lifespan of the average white man living in Europe is probably 20 years longer than that but I have no future plans. I was supposed to be dead long ago. I lasted a bit longer to experience love or what alleges to be love just one more last time before the end of living, parting gift of sorts before sending you packing into the afterlife. Some parting gift. This girl, this woman, seems to be a complicated package of demands, an ego-centric pig with pretty make up and smelling pretty because a bit of perfume can make it seem beautiful but it is all subterfuge just like your fucking relationship based on lies and deception since the beginning. So your life is summarized by being in fake love in a fake relationship, nearly all other normal human experiences, like family I do not talk to, friends I don't care about unless drunk, distant from everything and everyone, living in Paris with hardly a single friend other than the bird I live with. And she is no friend. She is a user and a demander. I want this, I want that, is her constantly fucking mewling.

Am I writing this in French or English?  Why not French?  Why in first person this time instead of third person?  Fuck it.  

So I want to say that I am at the moment 58, an active alcoholic in the middle of a period of detox, a three month period I may or may not make it through as I try simultaneously to stop smoking for three months.  I stop drinking or try to stop drinking for three months every year to prove to myself that I am stronger than alcoholism but I've not tried to stop smoking, that one free area of consumption that I always prided myself on you know, that I always clung to, smoked faster how many times in the kitchen of this 50 square meter apartement de trois pièces, how many times in that kitchen as my only refuge during Covid and lockdown, chain smoking to try and kill myself immediately knowing all along the stupidity of it, the idea that I could smoke myself to death in one sitting.

And what would I have lost if I had stopped living back then, one year ago or two years ago or three years ago?  The experience of Lithuania yes, the experience of Ireland yes.  Both of those experiences with Karen, your far away SF writer friend (San Francisco, not Science Fiction), the 50 some odd year old woman, post-menstral, how you say?  She who you feel closest to at times until her demands become too much and you try to create space or she tries to create space because her own emotional and psychological history is equally knee-capped.  

Today is, in America anyway, the country you were born in, the birthday of your dead mother who, one year earlier was still living and who you, one year earlier, called up drunkenly to berate because she was going to vote for Trump, loved Trump, was fully brain-washed and proud of her ignorance.  Always divided against your mother in particular, the symbol of hatred that symbol of combat.  Now she is dead and although it wasn't one year ago it was one year ago the last time since I talked to her and no, I don't really mourn her, haven't mourned her since her death at all because she was dead to me long ago, when she first started banging on about Trump or maybe that time several years ago when she unloaded on you with her diatribe of hate for you being a drunk, for you contacted family members and having conversations with them while ignoring everyone for every sober minute I was living.  I was never close to anyone it seems unless I was drunk and then I wanted to be friends with the world.  A good drunk.  I just say a scene from a tv series about a father and dysfunctional family.

What do I want to confess with a 1000 days left on the agenda?

That sometimes I look at my life as it is currenty and I wonder what lies I am living?  I have no kids, no family to speak of.  I am alone.  I am proud to be alone, right?  I have fantasized about moving to Belfast to die on the streets a drunk although I am not sure why and oddly, Karen is moving to Ireland, just across the border (for now but that could change thanks to Brexit and the fact that the Torys don't really give a shit about Northern Ireland any more apparently if it gets in the way of making more money) ...what evidence do I have of that?  None of course but time will bear this out.  

I can look at my life and my legacy which is what, two self-published novels?  Another novel written in French which is in draft which the supposed love of my life cannot be arsed to edit?  Fucking cunt who never hesitates to tell me a fucking thing about how to live my fucking life or about how I need to be there for her, right?  And a 4th novel about murder fantasies about right wing politicians called Murder On the Corona Express?  Four hundred pages getting whittled down to 200 so far....I am a writer but whether or not I am a very good writer is another matter all together and frankly, Karen is the only person in the world who has taken the time to read it and to tell me what she liked and didn't like about The Lie in the Mouth -your buddy Ben in the Channel Islands is the only one to have read and gave me his honest opinion about Pacing the Bird.  Sure, Kattia read Pacing the Bird and said she cried because back then I was still an innocent in her mind, she hadn't yet condemned me to her pathetic and hypocritical judgement.  

So I am a writer in the sense that I write and this apparently justifies working a shitty middle wage job (slightly above poverty level but not much given that you are a 58 year old grown man and if I were living alone I'd be living in a fucking studio with little or no furniture to my name and that is what I cannot tell Kattia when she asks why are we still together - she thinks it is simply convenient for me but in truth, I am one step away from living in a fucking studio like a pensioner no longer sexy to women just an old man and I guess I am afraid of making that leap even though in reality, that is where I am if you take away the window dressing of being in this superficial relationship.  I am nearly already there and the superficiality of existing is maybe the only thing holding my self-esteem together.  

I am a 58 year old man, duel citizenship once married never divorced.  Shari, the one you married once in New York and moved to the UK with, told you to fuck off a month or so ago and that she hoped you died.  Why?  Because you were planning on going to Ireland to hang out with Karen instead of spending time with her in Oxfordshire or going on some trip to Norfolk with her because her boyfriend wouldn't do it or had no money to do it.  Shari, another one.  Jesus.  Once I thought I loved her because she said she would wait for me in NYC while I fucked off to Poland which is where I thought I'd go to find a wife it seems, ironically, because I thought Polish women were strong and pretty and reliable.  I was living in a Polish/uKranian neighbourhood in the East Village, lower East Village at the time.  

So what, a million people have done a trillion different things in life.  What is so special about mine?  

Anyway, she got me this far sort of.  Without her I might have been trying to move to Holland again and again from America, close but far.  I was working where and why?  Oh yeah, I'd lived in Prague or had been living there, moved to NYC for some reason, because Marni was living there, my oldest friend active friend active shooter friend.  She was living there, is still living there, NYC is her home but her home is her family in Potomac Maryland.  Well-to-do Jewish people. Anyway, you slept on her floor for a few weeks before you moved to a flat shared with some fashion makeup bird and a Québecoise, a lost girl model who I befriended, who I had great fun with but didn't have a relationship with, who missed her family and the simple life in Quebec and probably moved back there by now and had raised a family of her own but I remember her once showing me the racy sexy photos and yes, I thought she was pretty but did I think she was hot so skinny.

Nah, I found a job working in a law firm in Manhattan and wanted to kill myself for weeks but never once went fully through with it but came pretty damned close, worked it up good, had a British bird friend named Mandy who was fucked up but funny who I used to get high with and be friends with but didn't stop me from wanting to kill myself but why?  Because I was sad about breaking up with Alexandra, the girl I thought I loved once - right I came back from Prague to be with her, I forgot.  I lived with her for a couple of weeks but she cried once because she got her hair cut and I lost respect for her, all that love for six months or maybe a year of love, half of which was spent apart me in Prague and her in I dunno, doing recordings of bird songs in Panama or some place and finally reunited passion in DC and that lasted only a few weeks before I broke up or the both of you broke up and that is why I moved to NYC to live on Marni's floor.  So yes, I was heart broken and when I got my own flat, a sublet in a basement in the East Village, I was drinking heavily and feeling alone - yes, this is the pattern.  I break up and find myself alone and want to drink myself to death because apparently being alone is the most miserable experience there is and I'd lived most of my life alone until I'd had the whiff of being in a relationship five years here three years there on and on with a variety of different women or birds or girls who knows.  My heart was broken in NYC and I was alone and miserable and unhappy and I met Shari who was also alone and miserable and unhappy, five years older than me, who liked nothing better than drinking and working and having her fucked up dog who'd been kicked by a horse and was all fucked up and was living alone and what, I met her at some music gig with trapeze artists and I went out with her a time or two, maybe I slept with her yes and then she said she'd wait for me while I fucked off to Poland, regretting that I'd left Prague where I was fully established just to be with that stupid psycho Alexandra who I came all the way back to be with only to find out she was fucked and was going to move to SF anyway because that is where her twin brother lived....

So married Shari for some reason, yes, because I was sick of breaking up with girls because of their imperfections and yes, I remember once Alexandra calling you after blowing you off time and time again after she'd moved to SF and that's why I was miserable so it was a good day when she called and I could tell her sorry, too late, I'm married now.  So it was a good fuck you for screwing me but it was cruel and almost inhuman.  I like fucking people over when they've broken my heart apparently - I did that in a way to Silvana the symbolic love of my life who after who knows twenty or thirty years after intially having my heart broken by her, I met back with her for a few trysts in Bilboa Spain and then a strange weekend in Rosario Argentina, her home town after you guessed it, Kattia had acted yet again like an asshole in Buenos Aires and the two of us fucked off because Kattia was safe with her family and left me alone in the flat to fuck off so naturally I got drunk after being on detox and I called Silvana and then I fucked right off to Rosario by bus and when I think about that, forget the tryst with Silvana, just this incessant history of fighting with Kattia with her unreasonable behaviour and demands and moody moodshift bullshit and taking her shit out on me and it is stupid that we are still together and we are only together because I am terrified apparently of being alone, jesus, how pathetic am I?

Not all the bouncing around was due to birds of course.  I have always wanted or had always wanted to get the fuck out of America;