blog I am beginning to wish that alcohol had never been invented. Why would people purposely blunt their consciousness for a few hours of silliness? People argue that you need to relieve the mind of its stressful seriousness but there are many more interesting ways to do this, surely? What about the three esses? Scrabble, psychotherapy, and cinema.
Saturdays are a day of indolence and retail therapy for me. I do nothing of any import. I let the world take care of itself. The idea is that I will be recuperated from the indignity of labour. In the past it worked like a charm, but I’m starting to find that I need to do the same on Sunday as well. Sunday, from being a day of plotting and conniving against a cruel world, is now turning into another day of bone idle nothingness. Mainly due to alcohol (I am an man of extremes and alcohol is such a mediocre drug).
Talking of extremes, we bought some new curtains yesterday. I had been worried that the amount of light let in by the last pair was disrupting my sleep. When it comes to sleep, the darker the better. The new curtains are much better, but light still creeps in around the sides. It is not good enough. I want to have curtains that make the room seem like a void – a pitch black nothingness to wake up to in the morning. Still, I think my quest for a good night’s sleep is paying off: I can happily say that I now feel almost human.
20 Apr 2008
blog Had a golf lesson today, my first ever after over 20 years of play. All of my golfing knowledge having been cobbled together from various people, observing professionals and guess work. Autodidacts are often knowledgeable in odd ways, but such knowledge conceals huge deserts of ignorance.
Alas, I am too old to have my swing reconstructed from scratch, but I did receive some very good – immediately useful – advice. I have to close my grip and use my index finger as a kind of trigger. He also advised me to make the arc of my swing much more open (so that I look like one of those old duffers who strike the ball miles). Just 2 pieces of advice (alongside the 6 or so things I tell myself anyway) added to my store of knowledge – but what a difference it made to my swing.
Playing golf is pure being. It is one of the most flighty uplifting experiences in the world. I felt exalted, lighter than air after playing a good shot. All anxieties and traumas fade away. It is bliss.
I have an ambition to get my handicap down to 18 within the next few years. Given that I only play about 4 times a year, this would seem to be a stretch too far, but perhaps not if I can sustain the form I showed today.
19 Apr 2008
blog Yesterday, with the penicillin doing its good work, I felt vaguely human for the first time in a week. In the morning I mainly watched the third season of the US version of the Office whilst drifting in and out of sleep. My appetite returned, though there was nothing in the house worth eating. I look on most food with suspicion these days. Perhaps I need a change of diet.
In the afternoon, I had a bath and began reading Joe Stretch’s repellent debut novel, Friction. Whether its repellency is a good thing or not, I’m not sure. It can be interesting to challenge your prejudices occasionally – confronting the sentimental spectacle-obsessed mind with some raw, urgent, disgusting depictions of the curdled imaginations of Mancunians, but ultimately the book feels flimsy, fake and insubstantial.
Stretch has been compared to Michel Houellebecq by many, but it is Houellebecq without the ideas, the intellect, the sadness or the cool reality. It is similar only in the sense that they are both somewhat lubricious.
After reading the book for a while, though, I understood something of the interest that people have taken in it. It is interesting to think contemporary sexual mores, however inaccurate this depiction feels to me. It could be interesting to think about where sex is going to take us. Thing is, though, for satire to work it has to feel prescient. From where I’m sitting the lapdancing/porn/dildo business look comparatively innocent compared to what is going on online (the book doesn’t seem very attuned to the internet age, despite vaguely mentioning the contents of the protagonist’s sexual experimentation site, newsex.biz . If you click on that site what you get is Stretch’s band’s website, which isn’t much use to anyone, is it?).
There are so many other things crying out for satirical treatment that Friction left me limp.
12 Apr 2008
blog When your temperature approaches 41 degrees centigrade, it is not surprising that your perceptions change. You are chemically very different, the hypothalamus is off, all those cells are denatured. For me, being ill has been quite interesting in this respect. I feel like I am on drugs half the time. The doors of perception have opened wide and I thought it appropriate to note down my findings.
- Serenity
When my temperature was at its highest, everything seem unnaturally quiet. There was a serenity in Glasgow that is rarely if ever seen. THe sky was filled with thick clouds, which made the early evening dusk all the more quiet. I wonder if the body does the same thing when you die, to relax you into the next life.
- Weird shapes
All the familiar objects in my flat became unfamiliar. That which had gone unnoticed suddenly appeared strange.
- Saltiness
For some reason I became preternaturally sensitive to salt. This may be due to the fact that I attempted to eat a pizza which contained almost my entire day’s RDA.
- Tentativeness
When you’re ill, it is difficult to trust yourself. You wonder whether you might become dizzy and fall, or be sick. Steps are taken lightly. Food is eaten slowly. You suspect everything.
- Inertia
The gap between the urge to drink a glass of water and the actual drinking of the water sometimes reached the quarter hour mark. I am quite a lazy man, but that was shocking.
Thing is, I had been talking to my girlfriend about how I wanted to break out of my routines and look at the world afresh. This was not quite what I had in mind.
10 Apr 2008
blog I’m never sure whether diaries should be written at the start or the end of each day. I suppose it depends what the purpose of the diary is – whether it is to record what happened or, as in my case, to compel me into the writing habit. As such, it makes sense to write it at the beginning of the day about the day before (if that can be remembered). This will also avoid the destructive self-recrimination you often get at the end of a disappointing day. The morning after should also give your diary the perspective it needs to avoid becoming the mere jotting down of your current state (not that that is necessarily uninteresting – my sense of liberation at not being at work, bringing back cool memories of being a full-time freelancer, is deeply interesting to me.) Anyhow, here is yesterday.
Norman Cousins apparently cured himself of cancer by watching comedy films. His positivity and happiness was better for the body than all the chemotherapy and drugs, showing – to a legion of self-help authors – the power of the mind. I am rarely ill, so until now I have never had the chance to fully test out the Cousins hypothesis. For the purpose of my study I used Curb Your Enthusiasm and Meet the Parents, both of which have their laugh out loud moments. The results? No significant improvement until the following morning when my fever had all-but-abated.
After Meet the Parents, I watched a documentary about a real Elephant Man, a young Chinese bloke whose face is a mass of hideous tumours. Like John Merrick, he was a sensitive chap who enjoyed each day as it came. It was very sad and unfair. After that I watched another documentary by Rageeh Omar on immigration. It was, mainly, about the irony that settled immigrants are now racist against new immigrants – subjecting them to the same abuses that they themselves suffered. Personally, I feel the world is over-populated and that human life is being devalued. We need to find a humane (prophylactic?) way of reducing human numbers to around, say, 1 billion. Civilization is not improved by more human beings, it is diluted.
The question that always gets me when I start writing regularly is: to what end? What is the purpose of these sputterings into the ether? Hopefully, by forcing me to write everyday, they will increase my writing muscles – improving my sentence construction and sentience quotient.
08 Apr 2008
blog It’s interesting to be ill. Not pleasant, per se, but interesting nonetheless. When you’re ill the barrier between mind and body is dissolved as an illusion – a wizard of oz behind the curtain. Irregular tingles, feelings of dizziness, all taking place in the mind but not consciously chosen.
My chest occasionally explodes with husky thick coughs. My brain pulsates with strange sensations. On arriving home I discover that I have a fever of 39 degrees. On learning this kind of information, I always remember biology lessons about how at certain temperatures the cells become denatured. The body is no longer efficient, it strains to continue the processes.
Of course, it would be a shame to die. I think about trying to get my affairs in order, weighing up what I have achieved in life – whether disappointment is something rational or just a state of perspective.
It always amazes me that people are so good at living. The heart, lungs, liver, kidney, stomach, brain – they all carry out their work unceasingly. This tremulous consciousness seems so pitifully weak in comparison – worrying about this and that when the body labours uncomplainingly.
07 Apr 2008
blog I often spend the whole day (with breaks for breakfast, lunch and dinner) wrestling with the meaning of life. Inertia sets in, I crawl under the duvet and lie on my side waiting for an answer. When it doesn’t come, I have a bath or go for a walk. During these walks, I think about evolution and the future of the species. I imagine our immortal robotic successors sneering at our petty lives. Then I smile at the thought of the death of the universe and how even the robots will eventually be snuffed out. It doesn’t matter how many billions of years away such an eventuality is – the end exists as a permanent reminder of finitude.
‘Ah!’, you might say, ‘we may not even get to the point of making the robots – we could be extinguished or at the very least severely humbled long before that. Possibly even this century.’ We could be selling sex for rats (a la Threads) in the next ten years. Imagine if these were the glory days of the race!
You might argue that I have lost my sense of perspective – that ultimate meaning is a waste of breath, that I should live in the moment (or at least the next hundred years). Perhaps even the next 10,000 years would be somewhat more manageable. But I insist on the full 13 billion.
Under the covers stray thoughts occur . . . maybe I’m just tired and irritable. I was chiding the ghost of Angus Fairhurst only last week and now look at me, ready to do myself away. Oh, and didn’t I solve the meaning of life years ago. Ah yes, I discovered that meaning was a projection from the subject, not an object to be pursued. But that which satisfied then, satisfies no one now.
I get out of bed, procrastinate on the internet watching Simon Munnery on Youtube and read about Samuel Beckett, and then suddenly have an epiphany: I’m wasting my life – I ought to do something – anything – rather than sit here. By constantly thinking about meaning, life is drained of meaning. What a terrible curse for the sensitive and thoughtful gentleman this is! And so I resolve to write a daily diary. Every day. Online.
This is it.
06 Apr 2008