Viagra #3

Another little blue pill failed to have any significant effect.

The Ouroboros of Hate

Old ground mostly, from an email to a female friend:

Since talking with a neighbour on Thursday night, a pleasant old irish guy who was a professional footballer ruled out of his career by a severe injury , a self-described drunk and stinking of beer, I've been feeling ever more sad, to the point of choking up and crying again. He said of himself and a friend, who had asked him why they had failed to prosper while other friends made millions in the building industry and football "they took their chances, we didn't take ours"

I dreamt about my Mam last night, and had a conversation with her about what went wrong with me - almost the last thing she said to me in life was "you're as good as anyone here [the doctors and the nurses] I don't know what went wrong".

I found myself thinking of JS, and of other people I've known including you, and I remembered Melanie saying around 1991 that back at college she and you and Lorraine (and Lynn?) had discussed my unattractiveness and Melanie had mentioned it to her mum, and her mum had replied "you're wrong, he's the only attractive man amongst your friends, and you're all too immature to see past his baldness".

I thought of JS, how ordinary he was in looks (OK he had nice hair and could look quite sweet and boyish from one particular angle), how needy he often was in personality and yet how oddly confident he was, insofar as he threw himself into situations, and was convinced even at college that he was talented enough to hawk his writing and illustrations round London publishers. He found himself a crowd when he moved to London, he found himself a crowd in Tokyo. He made himself so attractive to women that he had two pretty wives, three children, and a very successful career.

I suspect if anything it's about being at ease with other people and feeling comfortable and unashamed around them, and so enjoying being with them.

There's a line in the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK" (I shouldn't have to explain this to you, you should know it, given your age and art school background, but I suspect I do).

"Don't know what I want but I know how to get it"

I think that sums up most people, they don't know what they want but know how to get it. You've told me you thought you didn't want children, but it turned out that you did. You thought you didn't want to be bourgeois (I don't use that as a term of condemnation) but it turns out you did. You thought you wanted to teach the underclass illiterate (I know you did because it came up too much in your conversation over the last couple of years, even as a possible option for me) but found out you didn't.

I pretty much knew what I wanted but didn't know how to get it, or couldn't, or felt I couldn't, or all three.

JS knew both.

I know a guy, R, who has more or less got himself a PhD, two MScs, and several BScs, a property portfolio, a sometime job as a professional builder, and had long term relationships, largely, he's told me, because he didn't know what to do with his life.

Rh is strange, she claims to regret the only things that clearly make her happy, like her family, and claims to have always wanted and loved the job that plainly made her feel miserable and resentful, as if she doesn't know what she wants or wanted. But anyway, she knew how to get them.

Most people seem to get the things I wanted by accident and lack of thought, like our Jess, unmarried and expecting a baby at 19, when she was such a bright ambitious child, or my neighbour L, five kids with three dads, a gran and not yet 40, and yet not stupid or lazy, or even promiscuous, my cousin J's ex-husband, who falls in to affair after affair, is paying alimony to two ex-wives, and is now two-timing his present partner.

People seem to be unable to avoid getting the things I wasn't able even to get started on but ached for.

I get trapped in this mental loop of hate. I find myself thinking "I'm better than most people, so I should at least have what they have, so there's something wrong with me, I can't get what these people have, even though I long for it, so I'm less than these people, but they're stupid and thoughtless so I'm better than these people, so I should at least have what they, have so there's something wrong with me, so..." ad infinitum. I have these flashes of blazing white anger where I don't know whether to kill myself or gun down everybody on the Precinct.

I knew what I wanted from my early teens. I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to have a wife and be married, I desperately longed for children, and had no idea what to do to get any of them, and got none of them, even the basic things most people, even the thick ugly manage, a partner and children, which I consider the core of a life lived.

I needed to be amongst people like me, to learn from them, to learn social skills, and life skills, and career paths, and options, and apart from those few years at college, which I consider the only even half-happy time of my adult life, I've been on my own since puberty, pretty much at the bottom of the societal pile.

Having worked with doctors and medical students for ten years, I know they're mostly not extraordinarily bright, but are overwhelmingly middle-class.

Is it any wonder I'm unhappy?

This "mental health worker" said the other week "from the thought diaries I asked you to compile, the underlying things that make you depressed come down to the same very few themes".

It occurred to me only the other day that she thinks that I'm vaguely depressed in mood, that this is some kind of passing mood disorder rather than what I believe it is, a reactive depression that has become long-standing because I have a small core of big problems that are long-standing, and some of them are due to that cliché "circumstances beyond my control", such as that very rare thing, being an unrecognised gifted child brought up in real poverty.

And more than anything that I'm probably past getting anything I wanted and valued. I'm old without ever having been truly young.

International Summat

Some Pacifismists - move along, nothing of interest here

I went for my daily long walk this afternoon, doing my bit for my health and for national security. Afterwards I got bus home. There was a contingent of unconvincing middle-aged docker-in-a-frock trannies on the bus, bad orthodox-jewish granny wigs, dull mumsy clothes, brow-ridges like neanderthals, and hands like bunches of flesh-coloured bananas.

God knows where they were all going in the middle of the day.

I must go now as I am knackered from doing my duty going on the look-out for these international terrorismists. The Guvermint has raised the threat level from them to "Severe" and told us to be extra aware. I only wish the Guvermint had told me what they look like, as earlier this afternoon I kicked in two hari krishnas and a nigerian quaker who later managed to persuade me through the bloodied stumps of their teeth that they were international pacifismists, and now I feel bad.


Rab Martellus
Hammer of International Terrorismistism
or summat

They Took Their Chances

Listening to an item on the Radio about the surprise chart success of a collection of Waltz music, I remembered refusing Heather a waltz at the Arts Ball 30 years ago, and I then remembered missed or refused opportunities one after another until I was weeping at how I'd wasted my chances.

I was talking to a self-described drunk last night, an irish man of about 65 who was telling me he played in the same youth team as George Best and was a good professional footballer for a while until he was badly injured and had to give it up.

He said "I've a few friends who've made their millions and others who are like me - one of my mates was saying how come they're millionaires, we come from the same place, and I said to him there's no use worrying now - all it is is they took their chances and we didn't".

I found myself thinking, given the almost overwhelming strength of my sex drive for most of my adult life, and how much I longed for success, given how powerful the drive, how much stronger must my inhibition have been.

Like Father, Like Son

For some unfathomable reason I've just remembered that in my 20s I used to have a persistent feeling that because my father was 32 when he had me, I had until I was 32 to find a woman, career, have children, and such.

In reality, in the months leading up to my 32nd birthday - the months of my gestation - I fell apart and have stayed fallen apart for the following two decades until now.

I wonder if I felt that I had failed to fit what I expected was his pattern of what my life should be and believed that from that time forward I had demonstrably utterly failed at life.

Aaaaaaarrrrrrrgggghh!

I'm struggling at the moment, eating too much, doing too little, finding it hard to concentrate. My clothes feel tight, not a good sign.

I keep feeling angry with this counselling/therapy - there's no acknowledgement from this therapist, nor was there from the previous one, or the staff at my GP's, that I have actual life and health problems, long-standing problems, some of them decades old, that get in the way of my sustaining a positive outlook. I know people have worse problems, but the problems I have are real, and living with them with little help and pretty much on my own is bloody hard.

I wish they would at least acknowledge this, rather than saying something to me that amounts to a sophisticated version of "don't worry, be happy".

Eek!

I've just been looking at the images that "prove" Lady Gaga is a hermaphrodite (given how small her "penis" would have to be, and how large and meaty her clit and/or inner lips might be, not to mention that she might just literally have her knickers in a twist, one wonders how many men still visualize women having nothing but a featureless white marble smoothness down there) when I noticed her age.

When Lady Gaga (23) was born in 1986 Madonna was already 27. I was 27. That's how bloody old we are.

Depression

You know what I think the difference between a depressive and non-depressive personality is?

Self-blame.

I've noticed most people, when faced with problems in their lives, blame other people for them.

I suspect people with depression mostly blame themselves, assume the fault is all in them, feel guilty or ashamed.

A Self-Made Fish Out of Water

Yet another night with little sleep. I went to bed just before midnight, and woke at 3am, and have been unable to sleep since. It's a quarter to eight in the morning, and my cumulative lack of sleep is making me hallucinate, something I haven't experienced since my late mother had her devastating first heart attack, and I was awake for three whole days and began mistaking dustbins for children. I'm now mistaking the leaves of high weeds blowing in the wind for a helicopter.

I've spent the tired yet wired early hours reading Nick Hornby's "the complete Polysyllabic Spree", which details the books he bought and the books he read (not the same things) between 2003 and 2006.

I've never taken to Hornby or his novels, I don't like his blokishness, I think he has lousy taste in popular music, which seems to be the only music he likes - he rates highly the Clash and Bruce Springsteen, which two I've long classed as posturing mediocrities whose only talent was to sellotape together rock clichés, and I've always classed him as one of those middle class men with an affected interest in football, so affected that even he's forgotten it was affected. Sports fannery is a blind spot of mine, I do not get it at all.

His cultural interests on the evidence of "Polysyllabic Spree" are limited to mainstream fiction and literary biography, rock music, and football. He doesn't so much dismiss science - for instance - as use that common trick of "hmm, very clever, far too clever for me, but it's not important, is it, except to nerds?".

Around the middle of the book Hornby mentions he's read a biography of the dead writer B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe. Hornby finishes his comments by saying that B.S. Johnson had an attitude about himself and others that could be simplified as "don't you know who I am?"

"which in Johnson's case was an even more unfortunate question than it normally is. Nobody knew then, and nobody knows now."

I knew and know who B.S. Johnson was. I read his "House Mother Normal" and "Christie Malry's Own Double Entry" in my late teens 33 years ago. I can't say I ever re-read them, but I can remember them clearly. They made a strong enough impression on me, the first book a depiction of the same non-events in an old peoples' home as seen through the consciousnesses of patients with different depths of senility, the second a depiction of a young clerical worker applying the principles of book-keeping to an escalatingly violent working out of his grudges. I didn't decide toread these because I had read reviews of them in the literary pages of newspapers , I found "House Mother Normal" in a Remainder Bin in my local Woolworths, and borrowed "Christie Malry's Own Double Entry" from my local library because I'd been impressed by the first book.

My friend Heather once called me "a Self-made Fish out of Water" and "an Isolated Intellectual". While I don't think I'm an intellectual and don't want to be, I wonder whether there's a basic truth in what she said; that I am by background very poor uneducated working class and I have suffered the disadvantages of that background, but I am very intelligent, received a middlingly good education, and continued to educate myself. Consequently, still trapped among people of my own background, I have spent 30 years of my adult life having little in common with them except where we come from: few common subjects of interest, few similar goals, few tastes.

I seem to have been interested and attuned to things that people of a similar age and similar intelligence weren't. I very often hear and read cultural commentators in the media failing to understanding references that I understand; these are people who by profession and education should pick up those references.

It sounds a snobbish and arrogant thing to say, but I wonder how many of my troubles come from having been born in the lowest social class with talents and intelligence that suited me for the professional middle class, but few opportunities to make use of them. I needed that insight twenty or thirty years ago, so that I'd have understood the desperate importance of climbing out of my class by any means.

I have only met two people like me in my entire life.

Lard-on

I tried another Viagra yesterday evening - it worked better than the first one in that with a little help from porn and a vicious fantasy on my part it provoked and sustained an erection for five or so minutes, not a long thick erection but enough of one to achieve an effective penetration.

A positive result of sorts, but I had a better one spontaneously on the edge of sleep the other morning. I'm ever more convinced that the lack of sexual desire and excitement I now feel, and my perpetual anxiety and despair, play a big part in my inability to get erections.

Dog's Fanny Hairs

I had a disturbing dream last night in which Heather's dog Hebe had bald skin like a human , except for a triangle of pubic hair. I wish Heather would please oh please refer to Hebe's pubic fur as fur in future, not as "fanny hairs".

Brrrrrrrrr.

Русские женщины - самые красивейшие женщины в мире

Awake too early again. Sat watching Russia Today on Freeview just after 6am. Looking at all the Russian women walking in the snowy streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, it struck me again that so many of the strangers I find attractive in the streets of Greater Manchester turn out to be Russian, Polish, and probably Ukrainian and Belorussian (I hear these women talking or see in their hands a magazine or book with Cyrillic letters or polish on the cover). It also struck me watching all these Russian women on the TV that a big part of what I find attractive is how pale, untanned, and often flawless their skin is, with the only colour the natural rosiness of their cheeks.

I've been trying to figure out why Russia has always fascinated me - it had nothing to do with politics, I think it's sort of like the attraction of Japan - it's often said that for us Japan is the nearest we can get to to an alien planet. Well, I think for me, the attraction of Russia and the Ukraine is that they're the nearest I can get to a parallel universe where European culture descended from Byzantium rather than Rome.