StrangeReality

Tired of writing about pet subjects - my apparent obsessions with the times of day, with the local supermarket, with the local supermarket checkout girls, with buses of course (mustn’t forget buses), and with the state of my own alleged ‘mind’ all add up, I think, to a mental illness in-and-of-itself - I am delving deep for something fresh to write about, something I have never written about before. There is nothing going on currently that I have not written about before, so I have looked into my past. They do say (whoever they are) that the past shapes the present. I do not believe this myself, holding firm to the esoteric view that there is no such thing as the past, only a perpetually changing present moment that can be thought about in different ways, just one of many possible ways being in terms of a continuum called ‘time’. (I have written previously about this world-shaking truth, this completely objective, entirely rational truth that only seems outlandish and/or plain silly because it is contrary to our habitual ways of thinking about reality - so I won‘t bang on about it again.)

Thinking about the past bores me, though, both for the reason above and for the fact that I started this piece not really wanting to write about anything, and have just decided that I will finish it that way too.

[And tBlog is down again. Is there a more unreliable site anywhere on the Internet? I doubt that there could be. I am soon going to up and move to another site. If I could just recover the pre-April 2004 archives, of course

For about four to five months now I have been an habitual absentee from my job. It all started back at the end of September (cue the screen-shimmering fadeout, fading into an autumnal scene). I have suffered from anxiety in various forms for a decade, and on that Monday morning back in September the bus I was sitting on began to fill up with early morning commuters. And I mean fill up: the previous bus never turned up, so this one was taking twice the load. I had a seat at the back, as usual (never sit where anyone can get behind you, said Robert Heinlein in one of his novels). After just a few stops it was standing room only. Before long I was hemmed in on all sides by people’s shoulders, thighs, backs, and buttocks. The aroma of so many people in so small a place is perhaps familiar to you, from school changing rooms if from nowhere else, and perhaps it is as objectionable to you as it is to me. Of course, this distaste is but a secondary symptom of whatever original claustrophobia and/or social phobias that I have, but just knowing this does not help.

I was wearing my winter coat without really needing to. Although it was the last week in September, the temperature was more springlike. Anyway: I started to feel anxious, and then I started to feel anxious that I might have a panic attack, and then I got off the bus in the middle of nowhere and walked around for a bit before calling into work sick and going home. Hmm. I have just realised that I am tired of talking about buses and anxiety and all my other favourite pet topics. Is there nothing new under the sun? The Dadaists said so, but where are they now? (The Dadaists were a radical bunch of 1920s artists who practised total nihilism in all of their actions. One pair of Dadaists tried to blow up the Eiffel Tower - not because they wanted to protest against nationalism or civic pride or anything, but because the lights that beamed out from the tower’s summit at night were keeping them awake in their rooftop apartment. There is a very good book about Dadaism and all of its offshoots - including the more contemporary punk rock phenomenon, the Sex Pistols, and so on - called ‘Lipstick Traces’ by Greil Marcus.)

I woke up at 6 a.m. today thanks to my four alarm clocks, and I lay in bed for a few minutes, thinking. I had to get up, wash, iron a shirt, dress, and catch the bus into town at 6:40. I got up and switched on the light. Then I climbed back into bed, shivering. I rolled around under the blankets until the sides of my body had ‘pinched’ both sides of the blankets and I was cocooned. I had a good long think. There is no question at all that the bosses at work have either run out of patience with me already, or soon will run out of patience. My good record with the company for 3 years will have counted for something at the start of this phase, but that stock of reputation is all but used up, I think.

I got out of bed and picked up a coin from my pile of loose change on the table. It was a new, bright, shiny 10p coin. Heads I go to work, I thought, tails I get back into bed. I flipped the coin onto the bed and looked, knowing what the result would be. Usually I never ‘win’ coin-tosses: and this one had come up heads. You will go to work, said the coin. I smiled, there in my bedroom, to myself. I went downstairs and made the greasiest, tastiest, most fat-dripping sausage and egg sandwich you ever saw in your life. I ate it with gusto, and carried a mug of tea back upstairs. Back in my bed, I switched on the reading lamp and opened the good book I’m reading: The Empty Mirror, by Janwillem van de Wetering. It is a very interesting, and very funny, account of his two years spent in a Japanese Zen monastery. I have read it before, several years ago, and am reading it again.

When the time got to 8:00 I called into work. My manager wasn’t there and I left a message with a colleague. I will probably be back at work, I said, tomorrow or Friday. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” said my colleague with a laugh. I laughed back, and returned to my book.

It is as if I am bound by an invisible tether to this room, to this chair, to this keyboard. I look down at the letters, at the familiar QWERTYness of it, and I understand that amongst its permutations there is a destiny that I have missed. I got up out of bed, ate toast, drank tea, smoked a couple of cigarettes, and wandered the streets in the immediate area of my house.

It has been a foul couple of days weather-wise, with blowing winds and driving rain, and a permanently slate-grey sky with high scudding dark clouds. In literature there is a conceit that modern critics call the ‘pathetic fallacy’. Writers deployed the weather as a device to signal their characters’ moods: i.e., a gloomy character’s mood would be manifested in a sudden thunderstorm, and likewise a cheerful character would gambol among the rolling dales of a springtime afternoon. These days, the ‘pathetic fallacy', so beloved of the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Melville et al, has fallen into serious disrepute, although film-makers still like to make use of it (cheap exposition), often without any irony that I can detect.

For about a week now I haven’t strayed more than a few hundred yards away from my house. There was a bus parked at the stop outside the supermarket. Obeying an impulse, I stepped aboard the bus. I would test myself. I walked to the back seat and sat down. The driver was reading a newspaper: we were not going anywhere for the moment. I looked out of the window for a minute. Then I stood up, walked to the front of the bus, and got off.

I went into the supermarket. I noticed that Red Square vodka is selling for a very reasonable £7:99 a bottle. I resisted, but it was very tempting; and at the time I type, the supermarket will remain open for 2 hours and 48 minutes… I picked up two bags of Cadbury’s Mini Eggs. I have come to love these over the past week, munching my way through a bag a day. For some reason Cadbury’s only make these for the four months of every year prior to Easter, but I believe, strongly, that they should make them all year round.

Back at home I powered up the X-box I bought a week or two before Christmas, and played a few matches in FIFA 2005. I won the first match 2-1, lost the second 0-1. My team plunged to 6^th in the table. It’s OK, is FIFA 2005, but not a patch on Pro Evolution Soccer. I have played the latter so much, though, that I can win every game 5-0 with my eyes shut, on the hardest difficulty setting. So I am taking a break from it.

Coming up to the present moment, I made more tea and settled down in this chair. I typed this entry for strangereality, and then remembered my tea - it was cold. The wind is battering at the window, and I can hear the workmen over the road calling to each other as they tie everything down for the night. Life has a strange purpose, I read in a book about Zen Buddhism the night before last, but the human mind cannot properly conceive the question, let alone the answer.

Making yourself laugh when there is no real reason for it is one of the healthiest things you can do. Again I was lying in bed trying to sleep and feeling wide awake. The pattern of lights projected onto the ceiling and the wall by the street lighting outside is now as familiar to me as the map of the world. But I do not succumb to the various temptations that sleeplessness brings (shall I power up the PC, the PS2, the TV? perhaps a large drink or two will help? that kind of thing). After a good long while, entertained only by the occasional splash of bright white lights sweeping the ceiling as a car passed in the road, I burst out laughing. I could not stop myself laughing for about half a minute. The thought had come to me that, in so many ways, and irrevocably, I am completely fucked. There is no way back for me now, no way back to anything that I recognise, no way forward to anything that I want to get out of life, no way even to stay still and enjoy the moment. Out loud I said quietly: “I am completely fucked.” And I started laughing again. It was really very funny.

[Note: This entry was written on Saturday January 8^th. tBlog had the grace to be down all day.]

My sleep patterns are all over the place, which is not a new development, to be honest; but recently, for many reasons, they have been more all over the place than usual. The night before last, the night of my panicked hospital visit, I was awake until 6 a.m., and got up a scant three hours later at 9:00 a.m. As a result, I assumed that I would have little difficulty sleeping last night. But it was around 5 a.m. that I eventually dropped off, after several hours spent staring at the darkened ceiling and listening to the howling gale outside. There were many ominous rumbling and clanking sounds from the construction site opposite my house, where in recent days a skeleton of scaffolding has appeared where the workmen have spent the last couple of months digging and smoothing and generally preparing things. I switched on the TV for half an hour and watched the news. I smoked a couple of cigarettes, joylessly (late night cigarettes are never the same without a drink), and I played a couple of rounds of Scrabble on my pocket PC. I am not very good at Scrabble and within minutes the computer player was 100 points ahead of me, insultingly deploying such words as ‘boxier’ and ‘adze’. At some point I did fall asleep, and then the next thing I knew it was 2:00 p.m. today and I was awake again.

I went for a walk in what remained of the bright winter sun. As I rounded a streetcorner on my way back from my walk, at the furthest point away from my house and the comparative safety of this room, I thought: ‘I hope I don’t have a panic attack here.’ Straightaway I felt my breathing alter and my heart rate speed up. I broke into a jog, hoping to distract myself with some simple physical effort. I got to the road and stopped and looked both ways. A police van, moving slowly and obviously on the lookout for wrong-doers, rolled past. I felt surprise that they didn’t stop to question me: perhaps it is an urban myth, but I understood that the police automatically suspect anyone they see running in the street. I walked across the road. By now my knees were starting to shake, and I thought: Just make it to the library. The library was in the next street, just around the corner. I got to the entrance and walked inside. My heart was beating as fast as if I had just done 50 push-ups, and it seemed I was about to completely lose control of my breathing. I thought: If I have a full-on, in-your-face, no-holds-barred panic attack in here, at least it’s a library and the meek librarians can be counted on to render assistance, and to not steal my wallet. I wandered amongst the books at random. Somebody nearby was reading a story to a child in a quiet voice. I sat down on a chair and pulled a book from the nearest shelf. It was a big, thick edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. I was leaning forward on the chair, struggling to contain my breathing, feeling my heart race almost continuously. The all-encompassing, overwhelming fear that I fear more than anything else was about to burst upon me with a vengeance. I reached into my coat pocket for my mobile phone, thinking to call the ambulance now before I perhaps lost consciousness. (I have never lost consciousness during a panic attack, but I fear that one day I will do so, and in a public place to boot.) As my fingers closed around the phone, I noticed that I was breathing more normally. My heart still pounded, but with my breathing slowing, I recognised that I was coming out of it, out of the near-episode of panic. I replaced the book, good old Roget’s Thesaurus, and left the library.

Outside, it was as though nothing had happened. I felt completely normal. I thought: You know what that was all about, don’t you? You need a drink…. I went to the supermarket and picked up some cans of Guinness, a bottle of whisky, a bottle of soda water to mix with the whisky, and some miscellaneous groceries - to line my stomach. At the checkout I had to wait five minutes while the store manager fixed some problem with the scanning device. As I waited, I had a good old think about things. When I got to be served I pushed the Guinness, the whisky, and the soda water to one side. “Sorry, I don’t want these after all,” I said, and the checkout girl nodded and scanned my other goods, and I paid and left.

If the world ever does come to an end, whether by fire or by flood or by sheer inanition, and somehow I get to mention the subject in this here blog (which is very unlikely, as perhaps the first casualty of the end of the world would be the oh-so-fragile-really InterWeb thing, but go with me here), then I would probably deal with the Mother of all News Events, the very Apocalypse, something like this:

That kind of thing. Yesterday for me was a very exceptional day, but in a similar vein I intend now (after this paragraph) to talk about nothing (relatively speaking) instead. I suffer from general anxiety that occasionally spills over into good old-fashioned panic attacks of the type that are increasingly common: breathlessness, palpitations, dizziness, a strange sense of ‘depersonalisation’, and overwhelming fear. Yesterday, in the throes of one such panic attack, I took a trip to hospital, where they tested my heart, listened to my breathing, took my blood pressure, gave me a Valium to chew on, and looked at me crossly for being a time-waster amongst all the truly ill people. This kind of thing has happened to me before, and been talked about here more than once, so I will not go over old ground. Before rudely leaving the subject, I must lament the loss of my own favourite blog, the one where I described the time, back in March 2004 I think it was, that I went to the local doctor’s surgery for a scheduled ECG test on my heart. After tBlog was on one of its numerous down-sessions, it came back up minus all of the archives from before April 2004. I have seen postings on the ‘community forums’ complaining about this over and over, but no answers to the complaints. So it would seem that my favourite blog, the one where I think I captured the essence of an event better than any other, is lost forever. A shame, I think un-modestly.

I got home from the hospital at about 7 o’clock last night, and went straight to bed. I slept until around 10 o’clock, when the Valium allowed me to wake. I pottered around the house for a couple of hours until midnight, ate dinner, avoided the PC and my PlayStation (the doctors having told me, through gritted teeth, that I had better take it easy for a day or two), and went back to bed. I have this anglepoise reading lamp that I have never really used, as I have more or less given up reading in the past year. It is a tall monster, this anglepoise lamp, about 4 feet high when fully extended; it sits on the desk here next to my PC, and gathers dust. But last night I put it to its intended use, and lay in bed with the blazing light floating over my shoulder, warming my brow.

I was reading Seneca’s Letters From A Stoic, but my attention kept drifting. I blame the Internet. Whenever I come across a large chunk of text on the Internet, which happens frequently, I have got into the bad habit of either skimming or trying to speed-read it. Either I read the first few words of each paragraph, just to get the gist; or I read all the words at top speed, which is if anything worse than just reading a few sentences of the thing. This has been going on for months, so it is no wonder that my book-reading skills have similarly degraded. It depends on the book, of course: a really engrossing book that finds me without any other outside distractions still has the power to totally absorb my attention, just like in the old days (the good old days). Unfortunately for the long-dead Seneca, I had plenty going on inside my own head to distract me from his ancient scribblings. I got through about four of his Letters (with great enjoyment, such as it was), and then I laid the book aside.

I stared at the ceiling, at the walls, at the bookshelves, at my own raised knees under the blanket. I smoked a cigarette thoughtfully, meditatively even, watching blue-grey smoke curl away from me in the air. The weather has been very blustery for a day or two. Outside, I could hear a gale blowing, and a stronger-than-gentle breeze was passing through the room. (I always keep the window open, even just a little, whatever the weather.) The cigarette smoke swooped up, and around, and back on itself, and looped various loops on its way upward to invisibility. I reached out for my mobile phone and spent a few minutes playing a simple puzzle game: 19 randomly distributed blocks had to be rearranged into order. I got 1 to 5 and then gave up. I sent a text message from my mobile phone, then set the alarm for 9:00 a.m. I switched off the light and lay there thinking about things, in that all-pervading way that you do when trying to get to sleep and failing.

On my way back home from the supermarket, carrying in one hand a frozen lasagne, and in the other hand a packet of cigarettes, it started to rain. The time was late afternoon, and the day was just starting to get dark. The sky was mainly a sort of blue-black colour. High wisps of cirrus, glowing red and violet and pink, hung on to the setting sun. The rain fell in feeble drops that barely wet my scalp as I turned down the footpath leading to my front door. I got out my key, transferring the frozen lasagne in my right hand to my left hand as I did so, and inserted it into the lock. Then I remembered: I had forgotten to buy the potatoes. I like to have potatoes - the canned variety - when I have lasagne for dinner. Canned new potatoes are delicious when boiled in olive oil and garlic sauce, and served with a knob of real butter. Lasagne and potatoes was to be my dinner, later tonight, and here I had forgotten one of the key items of that hoped-for feast. I finished unlocking the door, and opened it. I carefully placed the frozen lasagne on the floor just inside, then stepped back out and relocked the door. The rain had stopped abruptly - almost as if it saw me opening the door, and decided that there was no point in continuing to rain, as I was now indoors. I have fooled the rain, I thought. I trekked back to the supermarket, and lifted a can of new potatoes from its shelf, and stood in line at the checkout behind 7 people who all had bulging shopping baskets. Sometimes they will look back at you, with your one single item, and gesture towards the checkout girl, and say: “You go ahead as you’ve only got that” - but not today. The checkout girl was the one I have developed an odd crush on over the past months. She isn’t startlingly attractive. She could even be described, accurately, as plain. But she has a certain something. I don’t know what it is. For the past week she has had on her left cheek a set of unsightly, livid-red scars, four lines in a row, as if she got into a vicious fight over the Christmas period against somebody with really long, sharp nails. Alternatively, she might have been scratched by a cat, but I think the fight explanation is most likely. The scars are too long, too widely-spaced, to be anything other than the work of a human hand, I feel. Unless the checkout girl ran into one of those Big Cats that are said to prowl the countryside? This, however, is unlikely, so I feel comfortable in settling upon the fight theory as the cause of her facial scars. The first couple of days, when the scars looked at their worst, she used her shoulder-length brown hair as a loose screen to conceal the damage as much as possible. But they were still shockingly evident. Many times - well, once or twice - I considered starting a conversation with her on the subject. “What happened to your cheek?” I would say. “I was in a fight,” she would say with a rueful smile, as she scanned my purchases, whatever they might be. I never did start this conversation, though. For one thing there is the inappropriateness of drawing attention to what must be an embarrassing disfigurement for her, albeit a temporary one. For another thing I would bet all the money in my wallet right now (seventy quid: I just looked) that other supermarket patrons, less circumspect than I, will have already bombarded the poor girl with questions, comments, and teasing on the subject.

I got to the front of the queue, and handed over the money for the potatoes. (I feel hungry now, just thinking about the dinner to come.) As she gave me my change, the checkout girl glanced up at me, directly into my eyes. She caught me looking at the scars on her face, which are now faded almost to nothing, so that you would not know they had ever been there unless you had seen them from the start. I flicked my eyes back to hers just as she was looking toward the next customer and saying “Thank you” in a bored, mechanical kind of way. I left the supermarket and walked home. The rain had started again. I opened the front door and stepped inside, narrowly avoiding stepping on the frozen lasagne on the ground.

I could very easily become insane, I think. It would not require much work. Certainly there would be no actual effort involved. Just a few short steps in any mental direction from where I am now. That’s all it would take. My mind, such as it is, already boasts many of the features associated with mental illness. There is my worldview, for one thing. By ‘worldview’ I mean the totality of my socio-politico-cultural beliefs. They are outlined below, in interminable and repetitive detail, for anybody who cares to investigate. For another thing, there is my solitude, as icy and all-pervading as it has ever been at any other time of my life. What other people can do is to distract you from yourself, quenching maudlin and morbid trains of thought - distracting you, in other words. I could very easily become insane. I don’t know what form the insanity would take. I would not like to have any of the manias or depressions that traditionally come with mental illnesses. If I ever get to that point, I will know what I have to do. But I have this feeling that if I do become insane then it will be in a form unique to me. Perhaps this is a desperate hope (what? is that a hope that I will not go mad, or is it a hope that I will not only go mad but will do so in a hitherto unprecedented fashion? Hm. My vanity finds strange regions in which to manifest itself). I was thinking, a few days ago, about what the ideal way of life for me would be, and I couldn’t think of one. I went through the usual scenarios in my mind. The villa on the French Riviera. The cottage in the Scottish Highlands. The ramshackle hut on the desert island. Many more. All involving various permutations of society and solitude. I ended that train of thought realising only one thing: there is no ideal way of life for me, and I am looking - or I am waiting - for something that I cannot even imagine. This is an impossible bind to be in. So it would be very easy for me to become insane.