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Wake Up at eight thirty or so, a little bit of a nap as she gets ready. I had taken my running gear to her place the two days before, hoping to go for a run in the morning if the opportunity arose. I had written for much of the day Friday. The evening then was our anniversary, six months, postponed a day because she had been working. We went to a Pizzeria. There I of course automatically broke the no drinking rule I had imposed on myself a couple of days before having come back from Cesky Raj, Czech Paradise, having drank a bottle of vodka over the few days we were there. I have been thinking recently that I really need to follow up the research on nutrician I began in earnest a few years ago and which helped me so much to concentrate, but which became too much to juggle, with the attempts to write that it was to facilitate, reading and learning French and the rest of it; don’t drink was the first rule in one of the books that helped me so much, and one thing expressed as self-evident by the woman in the Study Support Centre I went to see in the months I stayed as a recluse in my house in my university town to do nothing but write, take an occasional run, and research my disorder in the Medical Library at the university, a period which in many ways, is the only extended period of time in my life where I have been able to concentrate on what is important to me without distraction. We then watched Amelie, one of her favorite films, albeit first in French with Czech subtitles, which only made me angry because the subtitles were so fast even she didn’t sometimes catch them, flicking from the screen in a fraction of a second and absent for some inexplicable reason for what seemed longer period than they were present, before the next, and then in Czech with Czech subtitles, which was less confusing, since it did not lead me to listen to the French and try to process two languages I do not understand well, knowing French, despite my desultory efforts, less well than Czech, which I have studied hard at and picked up extraordinarily well in the little time I’ve been here; still, I didn’t understand it so well, and M____ was maybe a little disappointed that I didn’t love it, just as I was when we began to watch the Life of Brian maybe four months ago, and she began to distract me from it, as indeed I did her at the end of Amelie. I also ate pasta, which I usually avoid. Talked about how I would run in the morning. I had said so last time when she was recovering from tonsilitus, that I would rather stay at mine so I could take a run in the morning. We hadn’t been together for a while and so she wasn’t happy about it. Eventually her friend told me. “Neser”

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I am pretty tired now. Got little sleep, trying to write an essay. Finished it off today and handed it in 50% over the word limit, unsure about it.

Saw a couple of girls and a couple of guys I should know a little; got paranoid [wrong word as this is fairly objective]. Once again, they see me either as exceptionally geeky and awkward, or just plain weird. One was the girl from down the road. Once more then into a cycle I so don’t need.

 Louise was talking the other day about how glad she was that Tristram didn’t say anything about gays the other day. She had spoken to Rowean a couple of times about him, in Rowena’s way. They do buy a lot of platitudes and it can bug me. It is wrong in every case to be judgemental etc. and the word can get thrown in your face. It is also always wrong to point out differences such as between gays and straight guys. Anyway, Jayne says here that bigots bug her.

 She was talking about Nietzche the other day and she says how we shouldn’t pay any attention to him as hec was mental. ‘Depressed’ and all kinds of stuff. I felt trapped. I couldn’t tackle it indirectly because I thought she so clearly hadn’t understood it and was suffereing some uncritical liberal kneejerk in the way both she and Naomi do – and I hate this – and they got this view of me as good at philosophy. I just couldn’t asrgue my case here, and she wasn’t listening. She was watching some bad tv in that way that always gets to me. I guess I had one of my many Holden Caulfield moments. Just like today with my own solicicisms once again becoming ubiquitous. It’s like electric shocks shoot from me towards anyone I could get close to or care about; some deep insight into my twisted psyche revealed in some stuttering, stupid phrase, some non-sequiter, some rehearsed insouciant remark, frightened glance or movement.

 And I can’t convey these feelings to anyone for fear of being a crazy Nietzche even to those who believe themselves so enlightened (so much more so than I could ever be to their platitudinous, doctrinaire, unthinking minds).

 Slip back into that comfortable facetiousness, come out when I analyse that I should be angry or such.

 She’s so out of my league. And she isn’t alone.

A non-day. Woke up to an as-ever ambitious alarm clock – dialled in with the same speciously calculated air that I give to the two teaspoons of coffee I shake in to a cup in measured iterations - extremely hungover. Assumed dressing gown. Pissed. Collapsed into bed once more. Ouch.

 Another house party last night. Can congratulate myself a little more than usual on my extra-special brand of quasi-autistic socialising which was not quite as egregious as it has previously been in my various paranoid and vigilent-self-conscious states. Had a laugh.

 I’m not writing at all, though I have at least recognised it as a problem that I would like to rectify [and I am now looking at this as an interesting document. Oh dear, must my innocence be lost so soon? – and yawn, as I write this I think you pretentious wanker! 04.10.01]. I am willing a recrudescenbce of my writerly ambitions. For what else do I want to be? This lack of a specific ambition could easily be seen as a problem, as it is by so many people, but why not take a shot at writing itself, rather than driving myself consciously into some tangential cul de sac before I even fail miserably? And why must that failure be miserable rather than honourable? Is it not entirely ignoble to compromise myself? I have ideas and I must develop them. I can write, I know it. My will power is pathetic and I am conscious of this, but I need only to plan myself into my writing more than I do, just as I have only recently started to plan my essays in this way [I am procrastinating now from doing just that as I an essay due in for Tuesday.]

 I have got a first (76) for an essay I thought to be abysmal and incoherent. I think I must concentrate less on this work, free myself a little from my concerns over time and efficiency, my disorded world and trying to do my best all the time. I need to read more novels, let myself relax into a life I wish to live.

 I am obsessing once more over a girl down the road. Over all my putative inadequacies. A stuck record.

 Ps. If this still is or needs to be a mood diary, I have been great for a long while. I feel both normal and happy/contented and can conclusively reveal that it is most certainly worth it. I’m not ‘up’ now and I’m good. I am healthy.

Mood +5 feel normal, haven’t gotten down at all today. possibly some prodromes of hypo-mania.

 Went down Birmingham to sort out a few things for a trip to Snowdon this weekend. Decided just to go, try and make something of the holiday whilst I’m not working and am still waiting on a few jobs etc. Bought a lot of stuff that I should use again. It felt rational enough and I am not so strapped for cash.

 Got a fleece, waterproof, scarf etc. Managed to prevent myself from buying the complete Arden Shakespeare, though it was only &25, and Anthony Clare’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair III despite the fact that it had Tony Benn and Kay Redfield Jamison, among others in it. I have been reading one of his with Ken Dodd – who I saw and who appeared to be an interesting eccentric on a TV interview recently – and R. D. Laing, probab;y why I got the book [from interest in his case rather than belief in his ideas, which even years back were not compelling to me in the least, or, certainly, I stood aloof from them, thinking his 10 day psychosis or whatever it was, where he mentioned a man who believed he could influence others and that he didn’t feel qualified to comment on the truth of such a statement, was similar to the under-reasoning of mine when manic at the Goile and at Shawn Avenue – 04.10.01]. It also had Clare Rainer in it which was interesting. Anyway, I am constantly watching out for myself in bookshops now, and had to laugh when, intrigued, I read of Kay Redfield Jamison having once bought many copies of Penguin books one time so as to make a colony. I must have been feeling sanguine. Anyway, I convinced myself out of buying these, and Noam Chomsky due to the fact that I would go to the library and because I have more than enough to read, have a book of Chomsky’s from the library which I have barely started and, because I had already had my debit card ask for authorisation due perhaps to the amount of spending that day and due to having dipped into my overdraft. (They asked for my telephone number and postcode etc., and I wasn’t prepared to wait or coinvinced that I was in such need of the books that I should get some money out and return.)

 I have been designing cameras and bikes. Decided that cameras should have two roles of film in, at the top and bottom, perpendicular to the lens rather than behind the mirror, and that Mountain bikes would be far less fiddly if they only were driven by a shaft and enclosed gearbox rather than the proven mess of a chain. I was thinking about this last night, aware, of course that it was ludicrous, but what if? There is a place for such eccentricity, of course, [retro. 19.11.00 I still know there to be, and I can’t scorn myself for this, however bizarre a time it was. I can perhaps even romanticise it. [here, Salinger style, and in a purely ironic fashion are some parenthesis. No, I was going to say, I can romanticise it but don’t. I simply think it valuable and infinitely morally superior to laziness and a lack of effort. – 04.10.01]] there is just that dilemma about whether the price is worth paying; that “dilemma” that keeps us on the wrong side of the tracks.

 I had decided to do something about that. Ordered not only the Kay Redfield Jamison autobiography that I had stoppped short of one-click oredering beforehand but also a guide to sex and the artist’s and writer’s yearbook. If I don’t go mad, I’ll get a shag, and if I can’t do that then I’ll write a barely worthwhile radio play. But seriously, I think I was thinking (here goes the retrospective rationalisation) that me, like B_____ faling asleep on Karen at Jayne’s party, will be just too naïve if ever I try to catch up on what I have missed, on what everyone else is forever at. Right now I want none of it. [retro. 19.11.00 And right now of course I’m desperate once again for someone to hold, share moments with, fuck.] I have heard that Jayne has met some guy in Ireland and I wasn’t that pleased to hear that. It just seems so superficial, she was there for a long weekend. They are texting each other. I’d be mad not to want to be mad. Who’d want to be sane amidst such insanity? I really am out of step with the world, and at times – and I believe I mean my more objectively lucid moments – I think I prefer the way I am. I have long known that I have missed out. I have been a virgin for too long and am too romantic. What I wanted was to meet someone – some ONE – that I care about, then have a caring relationship in which sex is one important but in many ways peripheral part. And dealing with abstruse (in terms of my empathy) sexual and emotional histories is not what I want. To be seen as inadequate because inexperienced, and to accept that when my worldview is different. To apologise for it or make excuses, that would be too much to repudiate in myself, and far too much of a compromise. Jayne had had sex with one guy, perhaps now two, I don’t know nor understand, and these figures, I hate to say it, don’t seem to be for want of trying. [retro. 19.11.00 I am of course being grossly unfair and I know it, though perhaps was unaware as I wrote here, but I was upset, disillusioned and perhaps hurt.] Who’d have ‘em. Fickle. From Andrew Marvell’s coy mistress to this. And prefering my state by far than those destined only to be facetious, ironic, drunk, one of the lads.

I went to Jayne’s party down South over the weekend. I am sometimes too quiet. I find it hard a lot of the time to talk even to people I care about or are fairly close to, finding it at one particular point impossible even to say anything to Jayne as I walked past when she was washing up. I had a good time on occasions. Said a few funny things. Her mates are fairly cool. I sometimes can feel embarrassed about B_____ – he is very like me, I guess – but I didn’t there. I was getting on well with Rowena, and most people there.

 I did get jealous, though, about Jayne. For the first time, I think, I actually started to get anxious in sme way about her constantly being on the look out for some man or another. I had found her to be quite superficial in terms of men before. She is constantly discussing various men, and never of course their personalities. I think I had always considered her just as a friend. It was cool that we were getting close. I have always liked having close female friends, getting away from the boys once in a while – perhaps more. And I always felt comfortable around her. I was wondering the other day whether girls being affectionate towards me whilst being openly interested in other men brings out the worst of my emotional baggage – it is hard to tell whether that is psycho-babble or not. I like her. That much is fairly simple. I like the attention, the affection. But more from her than from other girls. And it is good, I feel, not to have a clearly demarcated line where friendship ends and more emotionally involved relationships or reactions begin. I think it is fairly healthy. And I guess it would be nice. People had always said that there was something going on there. I had always dismissed it, but maybe there was something there. On the other hand, and of course there is always an other hand, she might well see me as fairly asexual and therefore a little sweet. She is fairly affectionate to her many gay friends, although even then I’m sure not quite to the same extent. She wasn’t put off when I held her as she sat on my lap. And she gave me a very warm hug when she met me at hers – or rather Naomi’s – holding her arms far apart as she ran acoss the road to me. She even asked me to massage her ankles, making the disclaimer “what are friends for” as if dismissing raised eye-brows. And she has pulled a lot of her male friends. She does have a thing for guys who work out, and has said so to me. I think I have convinced myself that I should make a move. She would be great in bed also, I’m sure, and you have to take these things into consideration. [Retro. I hope to God this came from nowhere and that I was trying to write wittily, or that I can claim insanity. I just can’t see her in that way now. I certainly didn’t when I first met her, and I really didn’t think I ever had. She was like scratching athlete’s foot. I don’t know, but I can’t see it now. I can’t for the moment see anything good in her at all. 4.10.01]

 There has been a thread of narrative in my head for months, if not years now, about my virginity and chastity, my distance from women. Is it due to a conviction that I must find the right woman? Is it due to me gauche stupidity and alienation from the world, my depression and fear of people in my formative years that I later tried to rationalise but which has stymied any attempt to grow up in the normal way – making that early compromise on any ideals of love to get laid then finding it at least potentially lush and progressing through a number of bad relationships. Am I afraid that people would not understand me? Am I oversocialised, masochistically altruistic to the extent that my conceptions of love – built on the emotional needs of my diseased mind and background – mean that I cannot commit as I would be placing demands on a woman I love who would have to live with me when I need her because I cannot adequately live with myself. Am I as independent as I would often like to believe, even if at other times I see this as a way of avoiding the truth? The only thing that is of course clear is that I think far too much, even if I really do find this necessary to avoid going too impulsive and to avoid solecisms [my thoughts on this have recently altered to a certain extent. I may be fairly perspicacious, but the inevitability of understeer and oversteer and of concretising false assumptions, however educated – or over-thought - they may be can lead to as many problems and solecisms as thinking not at all. 4.10.01]. Or does thinking too much only exacerbate those solecisms as I feared it did the other day, only a couple opf days after Jayne’s party when I convinced myself I had thought everything through and should call her as I was wasting time and would only continue to think things through wasting the critical moments when I should ring. An overwrought stupidity sometimes impells me to do things I have thought through far too much.[ahh, should have read on. I am condescending to my old self again, wily old devil. There are no new ‘cognitions’, what a depressing cognition! 04.10.01]

 I’ve gotten down a little now and again, convincing myself I am more or less lunatic. Picked myself up again, popping the remains of the anti-depressants I stopped going to the doctor for – at first accidently and then through a determination not to be satisfied with being so fobbed off, or a conviction to stand on my own two feet for a while.

 I’ve not been sleeping that great at times but I’m not too bad. I’ve tried to set myself to reading a little, down the gym, riding and the like. The worst is in thoughts of the future and I constantly fear the future. I just try to convince myself each time that it will be alright, that I won’t be constantly alone, that I won’t perpetually frighten people away by inhuman solecisms, and that I will find fulfillment and happiness without necessarily having to plan every moment to get it.

 Sometimes maybe I forget that I am still young. (retrospective Thursday, 27, July 2000 : do I? Was that a glib, confected staement from me? Am I too self-conscious in trying to write. Doubtless I am, please bear it in mind.)

Depressed and suicidal ideation. Don’t think I’ll ever be able to write, think I see the reality over Sal – that I will never be with her, as I would never be with Rach. (retrospective20.7.00 All or nothing thinking) That I have had too much. That suicide, if I could express the reasons for it, would be the best decision. That I will never be loved. Nothing is catharsis. (Retrospective20.7.00 The future from that point has not been so bleak.)

I was looking at straight edge sites today, but I don’t think I could even pull that off. I’m down. I had been promised a job at the Harvester, I went to train on Tuesday and I guess I must have done a bad job. I had tried to be upbeat on walking away, I guess positive thoughts and all that, but they didn’t ring me as they said they would. I felt humiliated and perhaps angry, and so much the archetypal loser standing with Richard and Tim and Nick and co. in the Harvester yesterday, others serving me in the job I didn’t fucking get. I rang them, feeling angry and foolish sitting at the desk with an open telephone directory and a phone perched in front of me as I tried to get the words together, tried to grasp the right tone and vocabulary and preempt the response, would it be sheepish (as it was) or had they simply forgotten. I threw the phone at the door. I can’t believe I can make a mess of even that. Have to waste more time looking. (retrospective: who gives a shit? I am better than them, objectively. I am better than a lot of people that I at times envy and look up to for the virtues that come to most so easily. I work at them and the successes I have mean so much more, especially against the frequent battles I win, and the tiomes they let themselves down. I make excuses for others and yet whatever is good about me I put down to my illness, hatever women sometimes see as good in me; anything.)

 Desperate, I wanted catharsis. I wanted to go for a ride. Anything. Please God grant me something. Just something. I thought I had something so slight, and I didn’t. And I want to let someone know, that it isn’t just the job. I’m not getting stressed over nothing. The sky is falling in. (Retro20.7.2000 and the future has been fine, no less than that of many people. Perhaps more.) The very sky. The responsibility on my shoulders to stay sane in some way. To not let down my housemates. My friends. Just people I know. (Retro20.7.00 how unnecessary is this self-flaggelation; I am not even crazy yet. I have not let myself down. Far from it. And I am beating myself up about the future, letting down others. And they might even understand.) To be gauche, stupid, distant, quiet, unresponsive, aloof with no dispensation, no disclaimers, no forgiveness and no sympathy. I can’t do anything but read the newspapers, try to read novels. I never have had a clear head in my life. What is it like? (Retro20.7.00 I could tell you now but you never know when it is there as you don’t think like this, you don’t analyse everything while it is there.)

 Having to lie on the e-mail. To remember my personality on the telephone to friends I really am not that close to. I’m scared. It’s back. I’m desperate. I don’t see a future. I just want to cry. But I want somebody to cry to.

 Note the pejoritive adjectives ascribed to the jobcentre, and the defensive adjectives applied to myself “not that bad”.. Automatic thoughts here apprehended.

What do I want? I don’t think that I know. I haven’t settled into any routine of writing, and this was initially the whole idea of University life. I am enjoying myself more, I think. I am getting into playing sport, I have a fairly healthy outlook. I think I need to watch out about falling into a whole trap of getting complacent. That is probably the rational worry now. I am ill. I should try to accept this, as difficult as it is to be sanguine about such an abreaction(?).

 I have some good ideas which I must develop. I must look into them and not be as scared as I have been about being less than excellent to start off with. I need to relax into it more. I have something I can build on, of that I should be certain.

 Sal: she’s a sweetheart, of course, and as with all other times I can’t be sure of what to do. Do I pursure her more, what do I say to her etc etc. All things I never learned the hard way as most people do. Maybe (maybe!!!) that is something I need to settle before I can get into any other kind of routine. I am too perrennially restless right now. Too unsettled. It worries me.

 I try to develop my will power but I don’t think it is something I can really trust.

 I spend a lot of time following politics. I am passionate about it but I can’t know that it is healthy to do this.

 I tried to give blood yesterday and they didn’t want it. I went for a run and I enjoyed it. (retrospective, I cannot remember this run but I suspected as I read it that I was trying to put a positive spin on things. Maybe I went with B_____ and “enjoyed” it in the way I tell myself I do when I feel as if I have willed myself to do something, but enjoyment is often absent when I run. It is something else altogether, not necessarily less valuable, perhaps far more so, but enjoyment is, I would suspect, with the detatchment I often feel from my past selves, disengenuous or euphemistic. I don’t say I fault it, however, if I was writing this, although it is not directly true of now as I write on the 20^th July, 2000, I may have been down or worried about my illness.)

I haven’t got much work done over the holidays though. I know most people haven’t but they don’t spend so long trying; yes, maybe that is the problem, of course, but I can’t decide how seriously to take the possibility that I am ADHD. Who knows? I think there is a certain certainty about it that I don’t want to face up to. Tourette’s, ADHD, anxiety and nervous disorders, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania, depression, speech disorders, obsessional character. Maybe I should try to see a shrink. - - - - - - The antidepressants have been good in a lot of ways but I have heard too many horror stories to rationally apprehend that I am on to something good.

 I should leave off the coffee I think.

 Retrospective: Reading this I look at the last line, the constant trawl of slipping will power and realisations I have had so many times before and I think whaty would life be without this. I can only wryly smile. I am alive in what may even be the best possible way – though again I may be trying valiently to put an optimistic spin on it – I am aware of what life can and should be, and maybe it will not slip me by.