Читать книгу Validate Me - Charly Cox - Страница 8

Are you the friend that takes sweet secret gratification in others’ failures? Do you like to indulge in delicious disastrous irony? How about oxymorons? Do you have a few moments to spare to flick through a book that warrants no need for more attention than a glance at your phone? Or perhaps – here’s the clincher – are you a person that has a 4G connection and is currently alive on this here planet?

If you answered yes to any of the above, please take a seat whilst you sign away a few precious cells of your brain to the validation of my mental breakdown. A little scribble of thought with the tiny Argos pen you stole in your childhood is all I need. With that too take your own validation, you’re a climate change warrior, that could’ve been single use. Can I get you anything? A dog meme? An old photo of Paul Danan off his tits? A Trump tweet to make you question what is left of this already heavy and futile opinion on life? Well, get up and get it yourself because I am currently circling around Praed Street, Paddington, London, dictating this into my phone having just strolled out of Accident and Emergency with little but an offer of self-sectioning and a plastic festival-like wristband with my name and date of birth on it as a keepsake. I am busy and now you are too, so Lady Gaga and Piers Morgan can wait, we have got a lot to try and decipher about how it got this far.

Nothing riles me more [this is a lie as you’re about to read a book which is essentially a long list of things that rile me to the point of medication punctuated only by rhyme and the rare smatter of hope] than an introduction whereby the writer refers to the infancy of the book’s process. It leaves me with a bored, bourgeois sour taste of someone else’s self-importance, but as I’ve been hailed as an #instapoet I fear I owe it to some sanctimonious troll to exceed a slither of expectation. So let us suck the soured serotonin out of my life lemon.

I pre-empted this. I knew almost so certainly I was on the cusp of complete digital burnout that I pitched this collection thinking I was saving myself from it. Charly from the past, all omniscient, and evidently omnipotent, cackled her way through a Google doc, tripping over a cocktail of www.woes that she knew were exhausting but perhaps important and valid and witty, and hit send. Charly from the past but a few weeks later delighted at the idea of being able to use poetic licence for the first time in her sad, sad life. What fun! You need not sell the last fragment of your young and underdeveloped soul and past trauma! You can use FORESIGHT! And now Charly in the present is furiously walking to Marylebone station at 5am because her contactless card doesn’t work so she can’t get the tube and is desperately aware that everyone is staring at her in the night before’s party dress, mascara on her chin and a hospital bracelet. She’s also talking into her phone in third person, so I need not break this to tell you how far away from the grand dreams of poetic licence she is. This collection, albeit caricatured, is true. Some of it was written on grand spanking highs in expensive hotels in Los Angeles where I (ever the optimist in irony) searched for physical validation, a boyfriend, stardom and a good Instagram opportunity; some of it in bed wheezy on Venlafaxine, Propranolol and an algorithm that hates my content; some of it in Ubers and on trains; some of it to the soundtrack of the men in my local, little countryside pub; some of it leaving a hospital working out if I shouldn’t have run away from it. But all of it was written on my phone and all of it is because of the curse of exactly that.

There. That’s how we got here. This thing in my hand that stole all of my smarts so it could preface its own name with them.

Hello, my name is Charly Cox and I am code-dependent. So would you please, please just validate me.

My rhetoric is changing

My need for love confused

I’ve lost my inner monologue

And sold it all for views.