Author: iainthomas

I have trouble saying my own name and yet no trouble saying yours.

I would call things and people by different names, we all would, if we could.

We all do when we’re inside ourselves.

I never really learnt how to say it and

whenever I give my name to the pizza place there’s always a question mark at the end of it

I am expecting them to say, “What?”

But I still brush my teeth every morning because I want to be a better person.

(We all measure happiness in displacement, by what gaps the things that leave us, leave)

(Try to try more times than you fail)

There’re so many stupid conferences you can go to

to learn how to sell stupid things to stupid people.

Everyone’s profile picture is just them with a shit-eating-grin

I don’t know what else it should be.

Maybe a picture of themselves with the thing that hurt them

so often the thing that hurts you is the thing that makes you human.

As you get older you miss people you didn’t think you would

that one popular kid from high school has had a child

(we were all kids once)

and you think, “Good for him.”

The guy who made my iPhone probably killed himself

I wonder if his ghost listens to my calls.

If he sends morse code messages over

the static on the line

if the call drops

he probably just doesn’t like what I’m saying.

None of us are so brave anymore.

Not because misery loves company

but because misery is so comfortable.

They’re building cars that drive themselves

one day a car will shoot itself in the bonnet

it’ll send a text to your smartwatch that says

“I’m so sorry, goodbye.

Love, Audi.”

There was nothing to do.

So I jumped through a plate-glass window while we were playing follow-the-leader because I thought, “No one will ever follow me through this.” I got twelve stitches across my head.

There was nothing to do.

So we built a bike track in the valley, defined it with stones, and we crashed through the dirt all summer long, long before the rangers would stop and ask us if we’d been attacked.

There was nothing to do.

So I jumped on the roof of the car and held on and we drove real fast until I fell off (and I told mom and dad that I fell of a skateboard). I am still so proud of these scars.

There was nothing to do.

So we built traps by putting newspaper over holes in the backyard, covering them in dirt, and tried to lure people into walking over them. No one ever got hurt.

There was nothing to do.

So I built chlorine bombs in the backyard and nearly killed us all so many times. If you tried to do the same, you’d wind up on a watch list.

There was nothing to do.

So we kissed girls outside the church every Sunday when the pastor wasn’t looking.

There was nothing to do.

I jumped into bed and missed. Five more stitches.

There was nothing to do.

I fell out of a tree and branch caught my arm on the way down. Eighteen stitches.

There was nothing to do.

I slid down a telephone pole and a nail tore open my leg. Eight more stitches.

There was nothing to do.

My foot slipped between the bed and the cupboard where dad kept his razor blades. Twenty-five more stitches.

There was nothing to do.

And I would kill for nothing to do, and the energy and the ignorance, to do it. Regardless of the stitches.

You just take the human heart and you click back the cover.

Underneath the cover, next to the battery is a tiny hole the size of the universe.

You take a paperclip and you straighten it out, like someone you love would help straighten you out.

You push it through your soul first and remember that you’re piercing it to remind yourself to feel.

Then you push the paperclip into the tiny hole the size of the universe.

You wait until all the stars blink three times.

You keep holding it all in and holding it all down until you hear a beep.

And that’s how you reset the human heart.

I had this dream that we somehow evolved without vocal chords
And the only way we could talk to each other was by touching our own or each other’s skin
And entire books were written entirely in hugs and hand holding and letting go of each other
And we’d hold and touch and let go of each other in all these different ways to say all these different things
And when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon he just put his hand over his heart and held it there with his other hand and it said everything to everyone watching at home
And the news presenter did the same and so did everyone else
And there are museums you can go to, in my dream, where they have a set of mechanical hands and you put them against your heart and you can hear his exact words as he said them
And when people got married everyone just held each other’s hands in a circle and cried and all the funerals in my dream looked exactly the same
And the people with the lightest fingers spoke so softly
And fishermen and workers had low gravelly voices
And I dreamed this dream for so long, I learned how to speak entirely in touch
And I write poetry on my wife’s back every evening before she sleeps
And her skin and her nerve endings are a kind of paper than only remembers the ink written on it for a moment
And while it loses something in my terrible translation, my favourite work goes

“Shoulder, shoulder, slow, slow, neck, arm, back, curve, slow, slow, shoulder, shoulder, slow, slow, neck, arm, back, curve, slow, slow”

And it is so much more eloquent than anything I’ve ever said and so much more beautiful than anything I’ve ever written, with words.

—

PS. Please come and say hello to me this Friday night in Los Angeles.

There’s this kind of electronic day dream that I know I fall victim to, where I switch between twitter, facebook and reddit or something else, continuously, eating the world in tiny bite sized chunks of information and if you are in that kind of electronic day dream now, here are the important things, you can then return to the vicious cycle of gifs, updates, pictures and dramatic news:

1.

The reading in Vancouver went very well and I met a bunch of people on the other side of this screen, briefly, but there was enough time to sit down and talk about what different things meant to each of us, and that felt good to me.

2.

The venues and dates for the San Francisco and LA readings have been confirmed and you can indicate your willingness to join me at those readings on facebook.

If you hate facebook, here are those details.

Sunday September 14 — 11am-3pm
Barnes & Noble, Hillsdale
Hillsdale Shopping Center
11 West Hillsdale Blvd
San Mateo, CA

Friday October 10 – 7pm until they throw us out
Bookstar, Barnes & Noble Book Sellers
12136 Ventura Blvd
Studio City
Los Angeles, CA

3.

Tomorrow (roughly 23 hours or so from now), I will be doing a reddit.com/r/iama where you’ll be able to ask me questions and I will have to answer them.

4.

There are incredibly limited number of singed copies of I Wrote This For You available from my publisher, you can email her at michelle at centralavenuepublishing dot com.

__

You may now return to the previously mentioned vicious cycle, waiting slowly for the next interesting thing to happen.

If on the other hand, you have some time, here’s some more things that have fallen out of my head.

I’ve been traveling from Vancouver, slowly, down what I consider the sensual neck of America, towards Southern California. If I could freeze the light falling down on the old cars scattered across the farmland we passed and bottle it, I would keep it to myself. Pictures never do a place justice. No one ever parked their cars on the side of a lake and set out a picnic to look at pictures of fireworks. There are fireworks in the giant Redwood forests, explosions of green and brown, all happening in slow motion, over hundreds and thousands of years, and they make me feel so small and so big at the same time.

I hate to say it, and never use this as an excuse not to travel, but I understand why you wouldn’t travel – there are different worlds here, hidden in small towns and under benches in big cities (Although the chain stores do start to make the different cities look like everyone’s playing Sim City and everyone has the same building blocks, just in a different order).

Let me talk about Vancouver.

I met Michelle, our publisher, for the first time. She’s wonderful and kind and everything else the years of working together with her have suggested she is. We met at a Tim Hortons the day we were leaving Vancouver, on the side of a freeway, and we sat down amongst truckers and people on their way to work and I signed a whole bunch of books, very quickly. Someone out there will get my real signature, not my author signature, because I was signing things so quickly I wasn’t thinking. The real one is just a circle. The author one kind of looks like my name.

The people at Y’s Book Shop in Vancouver were amazing, both the people listening to me read and the people who own the store. It stopped being a reading at some point and just started being a giant conversation. Every reading I’ve ever done has been different and I love that. This was really intimate and relaxed and real.

Someone asked me who I’d love to listen to, if I can hear them read, I said:

David Foster Wallace
Kurt Vonnegut
Joey Comeau
Walt Witman
Charles Bukowski

After thinking about it, I’d also add:

Pablo Neruda
Richard Siken

Only two of these people are alive. I explained that the problem with writers is that quite often, we want to fight each other, physically, because we don’t believe that anyone else can do what we do, or that they’ve paid whatever we paid to be able to do it and it’s only after they’re dead that we can really admire each other, because we no longer pose a threat. I went on to explain that if Shakespear had a blog today, his sales would probably be better.

Someone asked me what the most useful emotion was, I said:

Sadness is the most productive emotion but happiness and contentment is where you find the best work.

I said a lot more than that but now I have the luxury of writing things down and making myself sound far more perfect than I ever really am. I also want to have to something to talk about when I’m in front of people later this month.

If you’d like to hear me in all my un-retouched glory, without the benefit of a delete key, I hope I see you in San Francisco or LA, and we can tell each other about the different things that make us feel afraid, or alive.

Thank you, we’ll speak soon,

Me

If only we could say, “We must fight the bad guy. We must find him, wherever he is, and end him. Kill him. Look at these dead woman and children. Look at these atrocities committed in the name of THEIR god and THEIR government. As a matter of survival, not just of vengeance, we must destroy their ability to act.”

If only we could say, “Even though you look similar to the ones who have done this, or you hold a similar book sacred, or you come from the same patch of earth, I know this is not you and I love you because you are a human, just like me. Because if I hate you without knowing you, I only hate myself.”

If only we could say, “You are asking me to pick a side and so you are not on mine. I am on the no-side, side. You may call it cowardly but I will not be a part of something that I don’t agree with, simply because you insist your side is ‘less-worse’ than the other.”

If only we could say, “Anyone who would kill children, is not on my side. Anyone who would put children in the way of violence, is not on my side. Anyone who would trade bullets for words, is not on my side. Anyone who would blow up buildings, shoot down planes and leave family homes as ashes, is not on my side.”

If only we could say, “I am on the side of the children who have not yet died. I am on the side of the people they can still become. I am on the side of the mothers and fathers cowering in fear, trying to be brave. I am on the side of the old who believe that once again, they are being hunted because of what they believe. I am on the side of anyone who actually takes them time to think about all the things we could possibly say, and actually says them.”

If only we could say.

My grandparents would phone us from England
Down here somewhere on the tip of Africa

On Birthdays, on Christmas, on special occasions

And my parents would call us to come to the phone
To speak quickly because the calls were expensive
And every second and every word mattered

Because they’d go through these cables under the sea
Across deserts and through cities I’d never visit

If people put their heads to the pipe, maybe they could hear them
Whizzing by, sounds and vowels skipping across the dirt

And they’d say “happy birthday, we love you, put your father back on,”
And I’d say “thank you, I love you, here he is.”

And maybe there was a kind god nearby
And he froze time for everyone onboard
And there are families who will forever be going on
And coming home from holidays
And there are people in business class
And they’ll never disembark
And doctors are excited because they know the cure for AIDS
And two dogs are on the greatest adventure of their lives
And all these toys falling from the sky will always belong
To happy children
And all these appointments will always be kept.

Write poetry.

Because even the worst, most obliviously sentimental and sincere poem by a love-sick 13 year old is more beautiful than the best tax return ever filed.

Because even if it’s horrible, it’s still poetry.

Write poetry.

Because it is an excellent way to capitalise on your overwhelming feelings of alienation and isolation.

Because poetry makes way more than money, poetry makes life.

Write poetry.

Because poetry will capture the moments you truly live with the accuracy that only words have and the depth and vibrant, explosive colours that seep from your heart.

Because poetry keeps better time than your father’s watch.

Write poetry.

Because everyone else will roll their eyes at it and will do their best to not bring it up in polite conversation.

Because no one else is writing poetry.

Write poetry.

Because when those same people lose loved ones or go to war, they will need things to whisper over the soil or engrave on their zippos.

Because poetry is love, war, tragedy and strength.

Write poetry.

Then write more poetry.

I grew a beard

So I see your face every now and again in the mirror 

I haven’t started talking to it yet but 

Every time I fix a scratch on my car, I find another one 

And I like to think you’d say 

“Well that’s life isn’t it, might as well be happy” 

Because that’s the sort of stupid, warm, heartfelt thing you’d just say.