A full day yesterday. We started off with a busy day. Loads of staff away. Our blacksmith, who is either undiagnosed aspergic or has just never learnt in life to choose his battles and just rages and rages on until he burns himself out, has burnt himself out with his vendetta against our leading loon (a nice but extravagently irrational woman who likely as not makes her own clothes and wears them exceptionally badly). Others are on holiday – booked before they were taken on – or ill. All of which means we have to fill up the places, either by sticking students where they don’t want to go with tutors who don’t want them, or by extemporising outings and the like. I was told I would be helping out in drama, assisting the new teaching assistant who has by now had a couple of classes with the drama tutor who is persistently away ill despite only working a couple of days a week. She is an attractive young girl, one of many the borderline ADHD head of drama, Kennie, has amassed around him in the past weeks and months.
I helped out, and found myself leading the class of three, one of whom, a confident young woman with all the goth apparel, has made an allegation against another, a grimy son of a one-time binman who has been getting himself into terrible difficulties with his inability to recognise boundaries with women, and with his compulsive lying and denial.
Sticky at times, but it was an enjoyable session. The assistant’s warm-up session was fey, throwing round an imaginary ball accompanied with noises, but I threw myself into it, and then took over, improvising a game involving acting out jobs and having the others guess them.
From that to brainstorming a situation in which these various characters could meet and acting out a scenario in which some of the people with the various jobs could meet up with the others, including those with the jobs that were some of the more wildly innacurate guesses, such as graffiti artist (which one lad managed to guess over and over in earnest whether it was a dentist or a tooth fairy being acted out).
Suffice to say it was something different from a normal morning for me. It was an hour and three quarters of trying to work with the students together and gee them up, and though it fell flat at times, it also worked pretty well, and I think the assistant was pretty satisfied with how I handled it.
There followed a couple of free hours. Free that is to do my usual job of mopping up problems. And then back with the teaching assistant, Lucy. This time into town with our five students and a little bit of money.
This was a more difficult group and I couldn’t see how it could work in the same way as had the morning. Indeed, it certainly wouldn’t have. We walked down the canal and on the way one of the third years who used to cause us a lot of problems last year, and who, since he so obviously behaves much worse after milk, is diagnosed as “lactose intolerant” (something I regard as a mistaken diagnosis) and since his doctor, as he once recalled, has told him he should not eat pasta (presumeably he said more than this), would almost certainly benefit from a C/F G/F diet, decided to start on another.
In any case we went in and first did a few chores like sorting out bus passes and putting in cheques and the like, and then we went to play pool. Going in I was a little worried. There had already by this time been other tensions showing which we had resolved by keeping certain of the students apart, but also upstairs there were lots of very loud students of indian and pakistani origin watching the cricket surrounding a huge plasma screen, and completely (and very ignorantly) blocking entrance to the place. Since the one lad – a big guy – tends to swear and shout very loudly and aggressively when he feels overwhelmed, and since our students can be either racist or have a tendency to say the wrong thing, I was a little worried at this.
But it was ok. Lucy can play pool very well and ended up hustling the one cocky first year who had promised to rout us, and we managed to involve even the two students who had stood aside saying they didn’t like pool. Meanwhile, I tried to lose to Shaun, the big sweary lad who is fairly dyspraxic (clumsy) and was getting angry at every difficult shot I pulled off. (I amused myself by rehearsing excuses in my head for the benefit of Lucy who by the end of this game had settled down to watch as I intentionally missed a few, thinking how pathetic I would sound if I tried to explain the necessity of giving him a chance or letting him win.)
Afterwards she even said she had enjoyed the day. I think I started to think that it wasn’t over with women, and that it is even not beyond the realms of possibility for attractive and intellignt British women to exist: she was nice, pleasant and intelligent, and the strap from her handbag crossed her chest and accentuated her curves delightfully as we were walking into town and back. What with the other women around the place at the moment that set me thinking. For a long time I haven’t really had reason to consider how women think of me or to worry about such things, but the way she answered my gratitude for helping out during the day seemed to be open to interpretation in ways that women are usually careful to avoid.. (aren’t they? Or am I imagining it? Surely it was nothing more than a pleasantry? This of course would be the future were I single, a tinnitus, an ADD, a labotomy of idiotic questions with no answer except the reality of a stinking rotten corpse of a Schroedinger’s cat or a purringly loveable puss once you convince yourself to open the box and pluck up the courage to make a pass, which people like me don’t because they’re too busy waiting for that sign which isn’t remotely ambiguous, the sign which won’t come because nobody needs to open themselves up to that. The grass is not greener.)
Like every time though, it was a promising start, but I become more and more selfconscious and find it harder and harder then to maintain anything. So many faux pas follow on. Stupid things like finding eye contact difficult throughout the day, in lunch clubs and the like. Dilemmas as to whether to greet or not in a crowd. Soon enough many of the women begin to see me as strange.
I forced myself to go to the gym. I have been doing so of late. Forced myself because I enjoy it, but hate taking the time out of my day. It stresses me out. A short session begun on the treadmill, which was pleasant enough until Mr Lynx Africa stepped up next to me stinking like the school changing rooms when I was fourteen. A stink that gets into your throat and fucks up your athletic performance worse than the tobacco smoke that drifted over from the reception the first time I was on the rower in the same gym some years ago (a rower they have now got rid off with some idiotic graphical display of a stick man rowing down the river).
From there in my kit, self-conscious, to Tesco and then back to cook a little haddock. It was a rush, because I had agreed on Friday to see Pak Choi and his girlfriend before she goes back to Poland. I always agree to such things with enthusiasm, thinking, yeah it will be great to see x or y, but when the time comes I am much more grudging, thinking only of making up for lost time with writing and my blogs – god, my blogs – and my Russian and all the rest of it. Not long back we had a long heart to heart about our respective relationships and how they arent really panning out and how neither of us can see ourselves having children and yadayadayada. (I’ve left M____ today completely after being fractious and difficult at the supermarket and especially when cooking after two packs of coconut macaroons), and this when she was particularly upset after the death of her gran, with her mum being sad, and having returned from back home. I had a dream the other day about breaking up with her.)
Some steamed veg, some roast veg, with too much in the way of crushed mustard seeds as it turned out, and the haddock poached in rice milk with bay leaves and a little corainder (probably for no other reason but that my plant was dying and had a few leaves left).
M____ came back with a friend and, to be honest, annoyed me a little as I wanted to spread out and read some Russian with the little time I had. I’ve always had the impression she is one of these that thinks I’m strange and none too likeable, and don’t doubt that M____ has complained about me to her countless times and so I found it something of an imposition. I cooked and started to eat on my own while M____ showed her some photos from Prague on my Ibook.
The steamed veg was a little overdone. I’m not good with timings. I don’t in fact time anything at all but in my head, and so I left the steamer on while I was eating in case I remained hungry after my first serving as often I do, but also for lunch for today.
I was a little annoyed with M____ too because, as always she hadn’t answered her phone when I rang that I was going to the gym so I could know what her plans were, and hadn’t answered, I don’t think, while I was in Tesco so I had to second guess what she would want, if anything. And now, too, here she had brought back her friend to try on some clothes when we had arranged to go out for seven thirty, and it was already past that we we left to drop her friend back to the other side of town.
There, at the supermarket car park we turned round in, M____’s mum texted.
“Sad.” She wrote. And that was it. Some people’s mothers would pretend to be ok for their kids, she said, and they would make an effort. But not mine. She doesn’t make an effort. It is as if she wants to be sad. I felt a twinge of irritation with her too then, thinking she sometimes doesn’t try herself. I would think it myself later in the night.
I was angry too with myself. Here I was trying to learn Russian and even my Czech was terrible. Other people could barely understand me, and I was struggling with her friend’s Czech. I have done so little work with it for so long and learned nothing, not even completing the one fantastic book, My Deti ze Stanice Zoo that she gave me at Christmas, let alone the tens of others I have! Nor have I done any grammar from any of my books for literally years. Talk about a lack of consistency, shfting of priorities. Whatever. Thinking about it again I am thinking of how it would be much better for me to be single.
We went to pick up Pak Choi and girlfriend and took them to a pub. I decided on []’s pub not far from his place. It was quiet, and we sat together a little overly politely. M____ silent, and me with my tap water!
Conversation was slow and polite. Only at one point they asked how my writing was going and I told them about the offer that had been made by my mum and dad, and I realised I hadn’t told M____ at all two weeks on! She came back from the toilet and I sheepishly told her too. It was clearly a shock, and may have added to her impression that…
[Just apprehended a reverie that has gone on for a few minutes now, of putting up an ad at work for a room to let ‘reclusive irritable humourless writer with consciencious objection to almost all cleaning utensils seeks beautiful intelligent female housemate.. please form orderly queue.’ This leading to reverie of living with Lucy, purely platonic, and trying to explain my cooking her a lasagne and leaving it as a gift with a note to her friend, by saying that I enjoy cooking and she does all the cleaning, so it seems only fair, oh, and that I am useless with relationships.]
…that I tell her nothing (I don’t know if that is what I intended to say.)
(As ever too much from a single day, from a single evening to write up. There is always too much to write up realtime, let alone in less than realtime, and so here I am abandining M____ and still I won’t be sated, still I have a backlog only from the blog, with so much I want to communicate to so few readers: Ahoj E, are you still there?!)
Maybe I meant to say that it contributed to MY impression that she wasn’t making an effort. That she was sat there as she so often does after taking half an hour to choose her drink, saying nothing, and not participating in the conversation. Drifting off into herself and her own thoughts (God, we’re a pair!) My irritation that followed that text from her Mum and her comment on it.
The conversation in any case took a couple of turns. Pak’s girl was talking about the masters she is going home to finish in Psychology and how she has to pick a subject. She had always been interested in serious mental illness but would now find it too depressing. She had considered a topic of how in contemporary life we often don’t know who we are, and she would like to examine this. How we need to know where we have been, where we are now and where we are going to have a sense of self and our identity.
Pak disagreed in a sense. She had made a joke of him because she had used him as an example of someone who does not know who he is. A zen master would say, he said, that we are nothingness. (I paraphrase.)
I am not my body, because I am not my lungs or my liver.
I have my thoughts, but my thoughts change, so I am not my thoughts.
I have my emotions, but my emotions change. I am not my anger. I am not my jealousy, and so on.
So a zen master would say he has no identity. He lives in the present.
He talked of how it is difficult to reconcile this with the real world, because the more one experiences this and then comes back into the real world, the more anxious one can be there that you don’t know who you are.
I said I find zen comforting but depressing. I need to drive myself forward and I find zazen much like dope, in that it numbs everything but I want to experience that edge, that drive, even that frustration. I didn’t say it but it is like the quote Godard used from Faulkner in Breathless: I would rather have grief than nothing.
Soon though, as some cokeheads behind us started to really piss us off, we got onto another topic. I don’t know how we got onto it but suspect it may have been from my discussion of my diets and the logical errors people fall into and the errors doctors make in, for example, dismissing intolerance to gluten by talking of having tested for Coeliac disease (so for the IGg[] antibody in the blood), as they indeed did with him. The topic was ‘monatomic gold’.
I was with Pak a couple of weeks back when we had this chat about our girlfriends, and we stumbled upon a friend of his. A painter. (I assumed in a painter and decorator sort of way, but no, he actually paints, though I think Pak has spoke about him before and he is one of the dole scroungers he knows who smoke too much dope.) This guy, who at the time walking about town was wearing a white t-shirt stained with paint, hates the place I work for because he once did some work for Kennie, who he says ripped off his ideas and claimed them for himself, as well as paying him no money. Anyway, he and his girlfriend, who I think is also one of the dole scroungers he talks about and also a painter – I think one I once met in the town’s ‘bohemian’ café, and who also used to work at our place – have got into something called ‘monatomic gold’. They both talked enthusiastically about this stuff, Pak telling his girlfriend to tell me about it because she understands more of the ‘science’. And saying too that he would be interested to hear what I think about it because I know a little about science myself.
Monatomic gold, they said, is something that was only recently discovered, and which the government is keeping hushed up, possibly because of pharmaceutical firms and yadayada. It is a different form of gold which it is believed was once taken by the Ancient Egyptians and which has unbelievable healing properties, making people live longer and, when sprinkled over a patch of soil in which vegetables are growing, even if in badly lit soil, will encourage growth to a staggering degree.
This is nonsense, I thought to myself, but, at least perhaps I can write about it and regain something from the evening.
It got worse. The guy who writes about it is into nano technology and quantum mechanics and quantum physics – of course, what is always being used to justify buddhism and esoteric mungo jumbo (except in our training sessions in which sub-atomic particles are given comical names and said to be more palatable and believable if they are said to be dancing rather than moving chaotically). And monatomic gold, which can be made at home by heating sea salt, it seems, can be placed on the periodic table. At this point I couldn’t hold back, and despite damning myself as I do a mllion times a day for not knowing as much as I should about a range of things, and here, the periodic table and science as a whole (it really does gall me that I don’t know enough about it!*), I launched off on a demolition job about how it is possible to tell where the planets are only relatively imprecisely by judging the orbital paths of currently know planets and hazarding a guess at further ones, but that it is much easier and much more precise a task to conjecture about missing elements which should fit into a certain place in the periodic table given their number of neutrons or protons and so forth.
I was picturing in my mind the kind of dope-smoking slackers who would be easy prey to such a nonsense as this.
He went on. They were at a shamanic weekend a little while back taking all manner of potions and mushrooms and seeing this that and other. But that’s not connected.
We came back to mine. I plucked a beer out of the bin out that back that has been there since our house warming barbecue when M____’s mum was over last and her friend who was taking her cast offs earlier in the day didn’t show meaning we wasted meat and her mum was left on her own surrounded by English, and we settled down to chat. Not before I discovered that I had, of course, left the steamer on. The cauliflower had turned brown and the whole kitchen stank of it. It was a good job I had left enough water in, and that we had came back rather than going to another pub as we could well have done.
They told me how they would try and find a book on blood groups and diets for me. I pulled out the weakest chapter of Patrick Holford’s The Optimum Food Bible and told them what it tells me I – rare, charismatic and mysterious – should eat.
I took down my dogs from upstairs. The one giant fluffy dog I sleep with every night, and other small one M____ once gave me when I was upset that I was out with her and her friends and hadn’t understood a word because they had been talking so quick (how little we must have understood each other back in those early days!)
We talked too about how crazy the place we worked at is. It’s strange but me and Pak end up talking shop quite often together because there is so much going on. His girlfriend does the same because she has just finished working there herself.
He left saying he used to pride himself on being open minded, but now, referring to the supreme leader’s speech among other things, and the cult-like meetings they have at seven o’clock on Saturdays (so reminiscent of David B’s Epilepsy, which has the place down so well), he is glad he does not.
They left, late. I am a creature of habit and find even half past eleven to be late – I felt it today. And I ran up while M___ was in the shower to look up this monatomic gold rubbish. Of course, I dag up articles on David Icke’s website with essays by the former leader of the Troggs, somebody I remember hearing about from maybe a TOTP2 (Top of the Pops 2) factfile or such place, who spends his time looking into crop circles!
And so, another interaction with the real world of people that leaves me wanting to live in my own mind, to live alone, and to dedicate myself to thought. I had reveries following it, perhaps while brushing my teeth, of talking to [G], asking how aspergic he is and how difficult he finds it to turn himself off not from friend’s bad taste but their illogical thinking. I can do it quite well a lot of the time, but things like that disturb me all the same, and make me feel I am wasting my life stuck out here not using my mind, and not being intellectually stimulated in any way.
* this is the exact kind of thing that often throws off my priorities as such things can really not wait any longer, so reintroducing such half read books as even Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything or Richard Feynman’s Six Easy pieces up my priorities list.