"Blue As Folk"💗 +MIXTAPE

Confessional: Unsettling Cancer Scare - 2 Week Pathway - Melancholic Mixtape (to cheer me up and suits the mood) PLUS: My first FULL rough draft 'Short' Story (FICTION) called All That Hope Forgot.

Oct 21, 2024

If you like your newsletters without politics or preconceptions or seeking a break from the norm you may have just found your new hangout

Monday - 21 October 2024 to 22 October 2024

Tonight’s Mood Music: Blue As Folk Mixtape (2019) by Chasey Delaney

1×

0:00

-1:02:11

Dear Chasers💗

Good Evening everyone! It’s another last minute write tonight but far from a rushed job at all. The reason being is that I have no right (or reason) for being here with you this evening. I’ve already decided to try to take any pressure off for the extra-nervous two weeks ahead (as shown in the screenshot above). Yeah. How’s that for a blow to the gut. It was not so long ago where I’d been joking about my unexpected weight loss being rooted in some life-threatening cause and nothing at all to do with all my poor empty pockets to by food with or when I do eat making better choices for a healthy lifestyle! LOL I have also been ‘taking it in my stride’ how a week ago, I was almost at death’s door in terms of sickness, pain, vomiting and other nasty ‘virus-style’ obstacle course which kept me retired to bed and locked in constant sleep. I had been saying how I just wanted to get checked out about the chest pain after recovering from being so poorly. It’s looking now, sadly that all the shit my body went through, could be just the beginning of the end for me. An untimely demise.

That’s not why I am here tonight. Not to say a few last final words. I couldn’t be profound if I fucking tried. SEE! You can take the girl out of crazy situations but you can’t take the situation of a crazy girl out of Chase. (That’s a shit saying!) Anyway, I am here because I can’t stop moaning.. yes, you’re nodding in agreement but I’m only half-joking. I just can’t not be writing in this moment. I have tried to do other things like reach out to distant relatives, long lost friends, ex-teachers and probation officers, colleagues and dead pets.. NO! Sorry. I’m at it again. I have spoken to a few people but ended up messaging in ways something a little less sensational than sending out fucking invitations to my own funeral! Making morbid Spotify (my new-to-me ‘place’ for ‘collecting’ music) Playlists, eating copious amounts of bread and other shit foods. Drinking my usual target of a ‘tonne’ or so of coffee, and exercising strenuously - by that I mean pacing back and forth between the kitchen and the back door, smoking (of all bastard activities to do during a Cancer crisis).

Fortunately, I have had the full love and support expected from my partner, and mum (and those who my news has effected after being stowed upon them out of the blue). I know it’s only early doors but nothing felt right enough or helped in the slightest in taking my mind of my present situation, the limbo of half-knowing, knowing nothing at all, or thinking that I know too much already. I have been inundated with loads of kind thoughts and that’s enough to do the trick so far. I feel like I am back on form so here we are right now. It’s already just turned midnight so this will go out in the early hours of my (UK-BST) morning.

I hope this letter finds you well and brings some sign of resilience in yourself, with a little raised eyebrow at my ‘daft jokes and puns’ - I hope that in hearing this shit what’s happening to me reminds you that you still have good health and whatever is going on beyond that, can be fixed or helped. My Mum is convinced that:

“If you are broken - they will mend it. Whatever it is that is breaking you. Can and will get fixed - that’s what I am keeping in my head throughout all of this.”

Quote from My Mum.

Taken at 00:13 on 22 October 2024 - looking bit ‘dapper’ for a dead-woman-walking <3 xxxx

Unbeknown to me, that my poo sample results would come in bad, I sat down to type a night or two before tonight. This is the story that started as the beginning of a new project to write a ‘book’ but for some reason I just got stuck where this finishes. Its about 1622 words which counts as a very short story. Anything from 1000-10000 words is classed as a short story, below 1000 is flash fiction, 6000 novella (I think) and whatever for a novel depending on genre. Well, already I figured, even before I found I that my dying could be a rapid descent coming into force ASAP; that I am incapable of maintaining the amount of interest in on subject for as long as it would take to write a full fucking novel. So, that plan is out of the window now. Live or die - it’s a NO from me. I am interested in writing more of these ‘stories’ or musings (eventually - or at least a couple before I pop me clogs maybe) then do a bind up book collection of short stories, musings, thoughts like these. A bit like that Rollins dude did with his series of Black Coffee Blues trilogy. I’m not sure. Anyway, Here:

ALL THAT HOPE FORGOT

by Chasey Delaney [19 October 2024]

“Dismal Weathered Unmeasured Existential Matters of The Heart”.

There is no cold, no such blazing sensational cold as the icy solitude evaporating as the soul’s slumber has ceased, in order to greet the morning breeze. Frost biting at your cheeks in the city streets, so busy, so buzzing with heavy heated feet that that have been warmed in heated houses, not far from where their passengers have recently retreated; leaving breakfast bowls unattended, TV shows un-watched, disregarded duvet covers, dressing gowns and socks.

I torture myself at thoughts of shiny white and blue, hazy with warmth, inviting empty bathrooms with hot water waiting readily in the pipes to fill the tub with liquid life. I digress yet am startled in regret for the drifting reverie where I almost forget the cold set in bones that know the snow. Hardly do I feel it or sense it or notice snow. I am one with all these fluffy frozen balls but lukewarm lights of indication that yes, it is now heading into Winter and yes, as it falls on the ground around you, the temperature is evident. I am not only cold.

The cold is always in me… What I do not know is what else of me there is. If I couldn’t be this now. I might not know that I still exist. No cold lingers in your limbs, stings, fizzing when they have been exposed to those types of elements for so long. I choose not to recall both those seasons before. All I will allow from memory on this Sunday (I know the day from the newspapers I am lying on) is that a whole week has gone, let alone, only one night like this. I am living life like this through no choice of my own but that’s how we gauge time, between waking and sleep.

It might be better this evening with weekend papers to sleep on, they’re thicker and come with magazines, better for insulating me from the deepening grooves of small gravel ground moulding itself through whatever I lay down. My weight becomes as dead as my mind when my eyes are closed. I am not afraid of the night ahead, I am afraid of what may happen if I allow my eyelids to join me in rest. Always sleep with both eyes open. Eyes that are looking, searching, watching, lurking open even when they’re closed. It has to be like this. I kind of like it - staves off nightmares, emotions and bouts of hope that do you no good in the long run. Hope is just another something special that can be stolen, lost or abused.

I am an addict after all but not to drugs or alcohol. I am addicted to life and that’s why suicide has no place in my mind. I do rejoice in thoughts of it from time to time to keep me company. That and hope have fed me at my most desperate times. I like to say I am recovering, I wish I had it in me to give up the fix for wanting to live. If that ever does occur and if i get to share some last final words. I will share with you this; I am a man who has resisted urges to set my body on fire just to win the beastly battle of, not just being a man, a wild animal, but feeling like this. I am nothing but this.

The cold that creeps into the psyche as you feel your breath creaking next to the concrete bed beneath you. Earthy smells could mean victory for some, but for those who become what I have and have done what I have almost done, will have come too far too mistake, it’s obvious fragrance. A feral sensation to inhale fear in the form of failing, acrid as the world around us is, we can read far too much into this. There sometimes is no meaning. Life just sometimes ‘is’.

Have you ever been so freezing, any liquid burns like acid, and any vapour rising can be recognised as the caked in dirt on your own damp scalp’s curtain, or the residue of spit and even shit around the collar of the coat you’re wearing, which has some rich gentleman’s initials embroidered into it. Cost you a mild fortune to claim it from the charitable donations at the yard. Have you even ignored the breaking of your heart to descend back into plain consciousness?

All that you are or have ever been is now up for your protection, drenched in condensation, piss stains, smoke marks. I guess you can’t begin to dust yourself off when the cold sets in. This immaculate feeling of dying at the height of living like you never have in your life before. Nothing is for anything. What’s yours is yours. So take it as it is intending to destroy you from within. Ice sweat, numbness of limbs, blurred vision of all beautiful things, is your beginning.

Thus signifying the loss of All That Hope Forgot that’s gathered like foam, from the mouth to the throat. If you wake up in vain wild-eyed, honing in on the sublime culture situated within my live-in sidewalk sleeping quarters, and everything we were born to believe in. We don’t always need to be moving. Keeping action limited to a smoothness of ultra-concentrated, subconsciously restrained, pattern of pregnant pauses amidst the usual breathing.

If I huddle closer to myself I can become more put together with to face the outside, as in beyond this outside outlive situation, and see past the harsh terrain of this cold corner of a world, A microcosm of anguish and pain brought me here to this icicle of desolation. I find myself now, to be grateful for having eaten within a seventy-two hour stretch of isolation.

I mean, even the half-devoured, store-bought sandwich staring back at me in front of my filthy feet, thinning harboured in old NIke trainers which at one time might have been beige, the unappetising sandwich offers comfort against the shame of the conditions I push my feet in. I love the crust of compassion cusps in the fashion of a source of life which could or should have been created by hands that been touched by love, having held onto gifts from their gods, stroked and petted cat’s and dogs, nursed secret crushes, pressed buttons with force and all these hands can do for me is handover the packet their eyes smiling politely. I have been loved. It’s just food, as I said before another source vital for life.

Love and I have run its course so, for some reason, I am not going to try to eat it anymore, not even out of pure sympathy; or to just put it out of its misery (oh how much had I hoped somebody would afford me such a similar sympathy!) before all this when I was adored, and everyone else believed in me, those days where I would eat peacefully, yet now is the time for me let the only chance of substance, nutritious relief from starvation, and not only because everything and the remaining contents was already fucked and saturated in yesterday’s rain.

The reason I slowly stand myself up and even more slowly walk away is because I am cold. I have had enough of this good fight. Is it me or could it be the universe suggesting conflicting interest in how we as human beings, addicts, lovers, loners, homemakers, try to fight back at life because nothing is as cold as waking with drizzle sticking in eyelids after night surveillance as you dare to ease the tiredness exhausted too much to let go of sleep. Until the time of need depletes, you will BE sleep.

Colder than the loneliness is the knowing that this is another day beginning the same. Grateful to see the dawn sunlight still afraid to repeat the pain. The only heat is hunger. Bile and it’s acidy taste a craving controlling you from stomach to brain empowering your emancipated frame to crunch those cold, wet bones into an upright foetal position, clutching at the cuffs of a colder coat and clinging onto the hope that today will be the beginning of beating this affliction, getting away from the situation and solving the mysteries of how to mend a broken soul.

Where to start would be inevitable. Confession, admission and finally absolution. Say after me, scream at the wind, shout at the clouds or whisper it to your heart’s content within the boundaries of flesh. The only thing we know that’s right… is that, THIS TYPE OF COLD and I ALONE, both cannot be matched or ever compared. We can’t be loved because we were never really there which is, I guess, will be quite fine by nighttime?

IN our moment of musing this freezing morn of blissful awakening is remembered. May you choose to forget it when I am long out of mind out of sight. Love, hardship, hunger, longing, nostalgia, melancholy, unrequited everything exists as cold as crisp ice neglect, and abandoned self-respect. Our last wish is that we did not discover all of this, because without it, we’re all in a world where we cannot co-exist with our own mental shit. I admit, and suggest that I am correct, I shall die by tonight so goodbye from all that was or could have been known to me as Me, to my body as Myself, and to my soul it is I who knows, what it means to be old, what it feels to be cold; and incompatible with life.