The Road to Liliput

I spent much of the morning and early afternoon shifting files between drives ready for burning, piling old David Bowie songs onto my mp3 player, and then burning a couple of David B0wie CDs for Heather. In the process of listening through the burns, and a burn of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, I got a powerful sense of nostalgia.

Not nostalgia for an actual time, but for a state of expectation. I remembered there was once a time, which probably ended when I was around 30, when I thought I would be spending my life in some semi-bohemian life in London. It may have started to die when I failed to get a place at the Royal College of Art when I was 22, or it might have started to die when John Shelley went to Japan leaving me no cheap way to visit or live in London.

I remembered that I never wanted an ordinary job, but wanted a life where I made things. The fear of having to work in an office was one of the things that motivated me to produce artwork when nothing else would. A negative motivation, but a motivation none the less.

More and more I'm remembering the person I used to be, before I was flattened by having to conform to the limiting expectations imposed on poor people by what I must call - for want of a better word - the system.

Waiting

At my last medical check-up to help discover the cause of my impotence, which if not the cause of my depression was its trigger, the nurse said "you will have lost this weight in a year - it's not that long to wait".

If I knew that at the end of my wait, at the end of all this sadness, all these tears, all this loneliness, there was something, then I could bear the sadness and the dread a lot more easily.

More than anything it's the waiting without a reason to hope that I'm finding unbearable.

Digging My Grave with My Teeth

On the radio moments ago I heard the story of young woman who took up with a self-harming boyfriend.

I know a formerly homeless man, an ex-heroin addict who used to self-harm and bears the scars on his forearms, who has a girlfriend and a 13 year old daughter to another woman.

I was thinking how could they find love and I couldn't. Then it struck me that they were probably outwardly normal looking men. Women just like men are shallow in their initial attraction to potential partners and lovers.

Given that except for five years between the ages of 18 and 23 I have been morbidly obese since middle childhood, what did - what do - I expect but that women did not - do not - find me attractive and I found it hard to find work?

It's not as if I didn't realise what I was doing as I overate and overate compulsively for decades until my health and prospects were gone.

I have not lived my life, I have been very very slowly committing suicide.

Limit

I can't sleep, I can't concentrate, I can't stop thinking these terrible thoughts. I find it very hard to do even the simple things I have to do, they are so difficult to me now.

I think I have reached my limit of being able to cope with this alone.

Regret

I heard Amy MacDonald's "Mr Rock and Roll" start and I knew it would make me weep. It's not a great song, but it gets the feeling of realising too late in one's life what one should have done, of missed opportunity, of regret, very neatly and accurately.

So-called Mr Rock And Roll
Is dancing on his own again
Talking on his phone again
To someone who tells him that his balance is low
He's got no where to go
He's on his own again

Rock chick of the century
Is acting like she used to be
Dancing like there's no one there
Before she never seemed to care
Now she wouldn't dare
Its so rock and roll to alone

And they'll meet one day
Far way
And say "I wish I was something more"
And they'll meet one day
Far away
And say "I wish I knew you, I wish I knew you before"

He'll say "I wish I knew you, I wish I met you
When time was still on my side"
She'll say " I wish I knew you, I wish I loved you
Before I was his bride".

Sadly for me, I've only ever known half even of that sorrowful equation.

In Your Electronic Arms

I've thought the following for a while, but I've decided to put it here because of something that my cousin said, "nobody was ever cured by email and no one ever will be".

Most communication technology from the invention of writing through to books and newspapers and now to radio, TV, email, facebook, and twitter give us the illusion of company, of social interplay, of friendship, while we remain alone, and with many personalities, such as my own, we retreat into the illusion of contact with others rather than than actual contact.

We come to think that the writers we read, the broadcasters we listen to, the soap characters we follow are somehow our friends or part of our social group, and that emailing or tweeting or facebooking is an equivalent to talking to a friend or loved one.

I've wasted 30 years in this virtual world, from reading newspapers and magazines regularly, to visiting and writing blogs, to having a sex life based almost entirely on the use of pornography and doing most of my communication by letters and emails.

As I type this very line, the following item is being broadcast on the BBC Radio News - I agree with him utterly:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8180115.stm

Hurtling To Earth

I'm presently overwhelmed and almost paralysed by an anxiety that rose up when Heather told me about her daughter not having got a good job she had a chance at, and Heather saying "I've told her she mustn't stop looking".

It brought back the anxiety I felt after college, when for two years I pissed around trying to improve my folio on a false promise of work from one of the partners at the Artist Partners Agency, and discovered afterwards that I had crippled myself in the normal job markets.

Even worse, I'm remembering that I've wasted nearly 20 years between my realisation that even  though I did have talent I wasn't psychologically suited to be any kind of artist. In those years Heather's daughter has gone from birth to young womanhood, that's how many years have gone.

I've thought how I didn't absolutely waste the years - I took night classes to improve my prospects, I enrolled on a part time business computing HND/BSc course which I had to abandon when I got a job, a menial job but a job.

But I didn't make much use of my admittedly limited opportunities, largely out of the feeling I have now, the feeling I've had all my adult life, that nothing will work out for me, immobilised into a sickened passivity by fear for and of my future

The difference I feel between the anxiety I used to feel, in my early twenties to late 30s, is - I imagine - the difference between being in a plane ready to jump and fearing my parachute won't open, and being in freefall and finding my chutes have not opened and the ground is rushing up towards me.

Both Ian and Heather have observed that knowing what is wrong I now need to act, but what to do?