The life and opinions of Master Kidderminster, Gentlemen
It’s amazing how quickly things can turn around. I’ve been feeling depressed for most of today, and ratty this morning, as I do intend to relate (I might even get around to it), but my mood began to lift a few minutes back. It may have been upon reading a completed e-mail I first drafted on paper for a student a year and a half ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Doing the usual run back from the Woods, a delivery driver in a heavy goods vehicle slams into the back of the minibus. The driver, a Czech, is distraught, talking about how his company has not maintained the vehicles and he knew the braking was not anything like optimal. I comfort him. He knows little English and I interpret for him. I ask someone to roll him a cigarette and a student does so. I say I’ll stay with him and wait for the police. Read the rest of this entry »
Drawing flow charts for reveries and how they come about, and then moving on to brainstorm flow charts for others peculiarities of my personality. It’s Friday night. I realised this after thinking of texting my brother. He will be out somewhere. This led me to reflect on the differences between our lives and to question the extent of my own lapses of empathy for others - do I recognise this social life he has? This led me into a reverie.
Had a meeting after work today and then went to the gym with []. I enjoyed it, but came back completely unable to concentrate. Certainly, I was that after the chili I had on my return.
Today may be a significant day. I have been getting increasingly recently by the rut I have been stuck in for years. I had a go at my psychiatrist last time I was there, on Tuesday, telling him I was just barely keeping above water, and that it was not ok, not in any way tolerable to keep on like that. I became quite animated, finally telling him exactly as I saw it, just as I had in my head numerous times before seeing him. It is intolerable that nothing comes to anything. That I am constantly looping around and around on one project after another, not completing anything. I can’t stand it and, as I told him, it leaves me with no quality of life at all outside of work, which has been going quite well, certainly in relation to my social life and the restless chaos of my free time. Read the rest of this entry »
I found this just now trying to find the last few lines of a poem I began writing a few days ago. An attempt at free verse, essentially, at telling a story in this form as much with the intention of finishing something by not getting bogged down in extraneous detail as anything else. Like much apprentice work, this is truly cringe-inducing, but it is a snapshot of a time, and a desperation. A desperation of not being able to write, and a desperation at not being able to live.
This was addressed to a woman at work who showed me some affection. Someone who had lent me an ear when I needed it and made me feel human. It had been intoxicating. This poem was written before we had an affair. I remember nothing about writing it but it is probably as close to automatic writing as I get, and so it is as true as it is poetically shoddy. It is also incomplete, of course. The central metaphor is robbed from a very famous poem I have read a couple of times but could not track down, a poem which features a man rowing to meet his lover and scratch against her window.
“Depends,” I said, within earshot of one manager in particular, Karen, “on whether you class being shitty and misanthropic as a symptom or not.” I had dropped M____ off in the morning and though I wasn’t feeling too tired (I had gone to bed shortly after ten), I wasn’t at my best, needing a good dose of St John’s Wort still with everything coming down on me with no symptoms so far on the elimination diet and being so self-conscious. “I mean, I for one need no excuse, food-related or otherwise, to get shitty and misanthropic.” Read the rest of this entry »
Sometime in the week I got to reading Driven to Distraction by Ratey and Hallowell, I think, a book about ADD. This had shot up my agenda with my disillusionment with my exclusion diet and with some shock which I can’t now place but which reminded me that I have a seriously destabilising disorder which will have to be diagnosed and medicated. This triggered a series of reveries. Read the rest of this entry »
Again no internet. For a while it was working, and working on the G4 computer I have been using for writing since I ordered it obsessively and impulsively from E-Bay from a graphic design company which was getting rid of old stock (at the time I ordered it and asked for it to be delivered at a time I knew my parents would likely be away, though in the event they were not).