Aidan.

An article has been long overdue. My pages are like the sheets I procrastinate in, white and filled only by a shell. My co-editor once called me a “scalpel”, and sometimes I feel like we’re scraping the barrel. But there’s so much to write about, I feel at a certain point all we’re offering is formulations and applications of thoughts we inherited. Its in the constant churning and regurgitation of these ideas that they evolve – nothing is ever ‘new’ per se. We’re torchbearers in a bin fire, a pyromaniac orgy, it doesn’t really matter anymore. 

My thoughts disorganised.
My writings decomposed.
My ideas are smoke.

I spend everyday submerged in thought, it appears that I am only ever above water when I try to write it down. Everything I write is written and neurotically rewritten, rearranged and reconfigured. As soon as I grasp one thought I have lost the former, I run in circles, constantly eating my own tail. I spend so long eating from the fruit, “I suppose now I must cook something”.

“Some girls wander by mistake, into the mess that scalpels make.”

Leonard Cohen, 1967.

It’s almost like the currents of thought are going too fast to grasp. Like schools of fish I’m trying to grasp with my hands. I was taught once that sometimes when we try to grasp the most, is when we need to let go. Otherwise you risk shredding yourself on the hooks that were meant for fish.

In a sea of currents, a world that’s already spinning without you, it’s easy to think that movement doesn’t matter anymore. But just because you’re not the centre of the earth’s rotation, doesn’t mean you can’t move. By virtue of being born in a bin fire, we have no choice but to carry a torch – when we understand this, we can allow ourselves the freedom to choose how to bear it. The world is shaped by the collective action of all those within it, and we are within it. 

But let’s not talk of love or chains and things we cannot untie, because this is no way to say goodbye. 

---

Morgan.

Resurfacing, it’s a fine art. First there’s the acknowledgement, then the apology, followed by the guttural yearning that things could be different this time.

Years ago, on the plains of North America, there weren’t no rules about nothing and you could pay a guy to get his horse to stomp you on the head. Even in 1991, you could simply abandon your yellow Datsun in the Lake Mead Recreational Area and get on with your life (sort of). These days, life is not so easy for one with a tendency to go ex-directory.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t tell you the last time I felt a slither of guilt. There was a time when I’d kit out my Sunday best and linger outside the house of the Lord, missing a fry up and an argument. But those days are behind me now and I live in the spirit of the moment. And the spirit of anything is usually better than the thing itself.

Anyway, I started out on dole money but soon hit the harder stuff. My endless excesses and the thousand daily blows they deliver upon my CNS soon became too much to handle. I was blown out on the trail.

When my co-conspirator and I first started putting out our articles some six months ago, I would sit in the same place I am now, looking out of the window, far beyond the sparse dead hedgerow that met my eye. These days, the hedge is tall and green, bucolic even (a term I used for years without knowing quite what it meant), and I can hardly see the great wild yonder that lay afore. As this point trails off, I realise it holds all the hallmarks of a metaphor, but I’ll let you project that for yourselves.

On Oasis, Liam Gallagher had this to say – “Oasis was like a Ferrari, great to look at, great to drive, and it’d fucking spin out of control now and again.” Evidently, The Postliminary is no different.

We’ll save you the most severely debauched details for the unauthorised biographies of years to come, God help us. At the present moment, our balls are rolling, to say the least, and the hill, it is steep.

“I’ll write you a letter tomorrow, tonight I can’t hold a pen. Someone’s got a stamp that I can borrow, I promise not to blow the address again.”

Paul Westerberg, 1987