Solecisms

It was perhaps six, seven years ago that I settled down to my computer to try and write an article about what I called my solecisms, these slips of social etiquette, real clumsy encounters, which left me reeling for weeks or months. At the time I believed myself manic depressive, and there was much evidence to suggest that I was right. The solecisms in question would be such that avoiding people was not a question of paranoia or overwraught embarrassment of the kind found in the advice columns of magazines for young girls, they were such that people wrote you off, saw you from that moment as not only strange, tactless or gauche, but mentally ill, or unforgivably malicious; and people wouldn’t just ignore you, but talk about you, warn others off from you. One such could turn a close knit community, such as a university, or a university department can be, against you, more than one would certainly ramp up the stress and ensure that the symptoms of any mentall illness, whatever it might be, would be exacerbated to such a degree that the social elements of it, and people’s reaction would become far worse than any of the symptoms themselves (this I believe to be the case with most such illnesses).

Today I was walking back from dropping off my plate. I managed to leave it on the side, scrape it, possibly say thank you, and then begin to walk back without any problems. I then stopped. Somebody was coming the other way and I wanted to let them through, but I didn’t glance at them - I find this difficult still at certain moments. She was trying to let me through, and said “come on, or are you going to wait there all day.” I got moving, muttering something about yeah, how I was just loitering, this, thinking about it, being one of the to-hand phrases I use with more regularity than I would like to admit.

Yesterday I had given a student an old-fashioned broom to clean up after himself. A guy came along, a bit of a joker, and coming up close, said do you reckon we ought to get this back to ___, a woman sometimes seen as a bit of a battleaxe. I asked him to repeat it twice before getting the joke, that he was comparing her to a witch.

It’s things like this. Eye contact. Conversation, and especially small talk. I was glad to read recently a quote about Dr Johnson, that he could talk on any subject but would never initiate any. I am much the same. I wait for others to start. Jokes I sometimes hate too, because though I can find them funny, I sometimes feel I can’t emulate the facial expression. I have never understood anyone describing a book as laugh out loud funny, because such a response would never come to me when I am on my own, I have to force it, though the laughter, internally, is there. And often too I don’t see the joke, I have to click on into it.

Still, as solecisms go, these take seconds, minutes, at most hours to shrug off. I had to write this up today to ensure I didn’t forget about it. Those years ago, they took months, even years. I remember, I escaped to Prague and still had on my mind something that happened a couple of years before. And it certainly wasn’t because I was thin-skinned. No, I once compared myself to a man in Turgeniev’s Diary of a Nobody who carried around a fox in his tunic as it eat out his guts to disguise the shame (I can no longer recall the context). At college I had to teach myself to survive, to see out all manner of hatred, suspicion and revilement so I could get somewhere. This is the purpose of the diet, and there is such a difference from even a year ago. It really puts in perspective the irritation of the fact that nobody understands what I am trying to do and the motivations of my diet and the fact, again, that the majority of people believe the exact inversion of the truth, that I am fussy or precious, or a killjoy.

However silly it is, the natural response to such a situation as occurred today, or yesterday, is to beat oneself up about it. I was glad that didn’t happen. I remembered how far I had come.

No Coffee! No Tea! No alcohol.

Breakfast: Tabouleh

Vitamin B6, Zinc

11:00 two flapjacks!!

Lunch: Veg chile, with white rice

13:00 two flapjacks

Dinner: Chicken breast with cabbage, leak and potatoes

Farting still but no ill effects.

ps. Just noticed I have been taking for granted that I have not been drinking. Of course, that has done me immeasurable good.

Chocolate

Almost slipped and had coffee today. I had had quite a few cups on our jaunt away - when I cannot conform to the diet in one way I often just write it off and enjoy myself - and on coming back stepped down my intake gradually, and did so by buying some nice coffee grounds. My brother was up today still and made some nice coffee. I managed to say no, that I didn’t want any, but seeing some left in the percolator pot, later warmed it up by switching the percolator on. Fortunately it wasn’t particularly warm, and didn’t taste particularly nice with rice milk, so I chucked it after a single sip instead of warming it up further in the microwave (unfortunately, of course you find over and over again that there will be numerous steps involved, just like this, in denying yourself something you enjoy but know to be bad for you). More

Flatulance and frustration

After a busy few days at work - we’re a few men down having reformed so we’ve each had a few extra students to handle and a few more hours to work - I woke up today utterly knackered, aching all over. Still I got up and sat in front of a DVD on the Nazis eating my breakfast, and then in front of a programme on lizards and snakes in the desert in the US before by brother and his girlfriend turned up having travelled up from London. Time to be sociable.

I lasted through a light lunch and sat round the table only moderately restless until I had to run for the wah wah pedal I haven’t dug out for a while and started playing the guitar.

After lunch we went for a walk in a park about half an hour away by car. It was my mum’s idea and when M____ got back from work I tried to persuade her we could opt out, but she said it would be rude. I suggested staying back and cooking but M____ said I would go.

We walked around a large lake and for a while I managed to control myself, watching the ducks and the remote-controlled boats on the lake, trying to find stones for skimming (there were none), walking on the walls and balance on the pointed little fences set a few feet off the floor, and running after my brother with burdock or whatever it is that those sticky plants are that you can stick on people’s clothing, but then, I was bored and nervous, and not at all happy when on getting back to the car, and climbing away from the group on one of these little walls, I was asked if I wanted to stay and walk around. I said no, but M____, not understanding what the options were, said we would stay in the cafe and wait for my brother and his girlfriend to walk around a bit.

I wasn’t happy at this. I wanted to get back to my guitar - I had started to learn fingerstyle guitar from www.justinguitar.com and needed to get something from this day. Momentarily it seemed ok, because my bro said something about them having pitch and putt and I understood this as meaning Crazy Golf, which would at least have passed some time in some activity, but it wasn’t to be.

I had a flapjack and some water and we sat down. The cafe wasn’t the nicest and after twenty minutes or so, M____ finishing a hot chocolate she was far from happy with - it was simply made with water and not hot milk - we went to sit on a bench.

I sat and started rocking back and forwards and bashing my empty bottle against the seat, and then curled up and lay on M____’s lap. Likely lads in BMWs rolled by, a pitbull-ish dog ran up and jumped straight up on the bench seconds after being unleashed to lick my face, a Dodge (was it?) truck done up as an exact replica of the A-Team truck rolled by, but still I was completely unable to relax, and was making M_____ nervous herself. Finally they came.

It’s not so much food, I don’t think, though the banana smoothies I have taken to having with Spirulina (it doesn’t mix easily with drinks otherwise) may be too high GI for me, and I have had a lot of flapjacks over the last week. I think I will always struggle with unstructured, unproductive time.

Still, I have come to realise that the fart I unleashed in the car in the way back - a pretty small one I thought would be safe to squeeze out - was the result of these flapjacks I have taken too so much.

So, I stop coffee finally and then let something else in. C’est la vie.

Modern Malnutrition

I took my food into the lounge today at my folks’ to watch a documentary, The Nazis, a warning from history. I am signed up on one of these rental schemes at the moment and they keep sending my DVDs I don’t have time to watch - I am always trying to fit too much into my days! Anyway, on turning on the TV or on turning the DVD off, I saw an interview with a young anorexic girl and her mother. She and her mother were talking about her behaviour when she was not eating sufficiently. They talked about how she behaved awfully because she was not getting enough vitamins. Now, I am constantly amazed that people do not make this connection more often, because so much is made of modern manners and chav culture and the rest of it, but it is so seldom that I see a link explicitly made between the culture of food in this culture (or lack of it) and the way people act.

When I was living in Nottingham in a terraced house next to a family from hell whose screaming was constantly audible through the walls - screaming directed for the most part at a tiny little girl, and often such things as “if you don’t eat it ‘ll shit in it and make you eat it” - I constantly observed how my own behaviour was affected by my food and how my ability to deal with stress was equally dependant upon what I was eating. Now, give anybody the amount of stress these families see, and then give them their diet, and they would behave much the same, I am certain of it.

Gone to Ground

So, I have been MIA for a couple of weeks or so, not that anyone out there would have noticed. The reason being that the whole routemaster convoy project is so radical that some elements of “the establishment” view us as subversive and dangerous, whilst others are encouraging us as far as possible - usually of course with one eye to the cameras. Occasionally, as our supreme leader explained to me as he bundled me onto his own bus, it proves necessary to break up the whole outfit and pack it off in different directions, and to different ends of the country, or even to different countries entirely, and curtailing usual educational methods and redirecting it all into subsisting together in completely arbitrary groups; and in this I do not exagerate, since SL’s educational hero considered the best grouping of students, or even human beings as a whole to be attained by the writing down of names and pulling them out of a hat.

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Valerian rage

morning: green tea, shepherd’s pie

Lunch: green tea sausages, mash

snack: 2 x flapjack!!

dinner: tagine with polenta

late supper: tagine with polenta, valerian

This is one of those reactions I have had before and forgotten about. I have had valerian before and remember only the good effects, but I’ve just had it and it is making me jumpy and angry. Tired, it has woke me up, making me spiked. I am still mentally exhausted, but angry, and physically it is having an effect on me I am finding hard to describe. When falling asleep I keep on having snatches in my leg that wake me, restless leg syndrome, but also elsewhere. It is as if I can’t get comfortable no matter what I do. I was really irritating M____ by snatching at this and that, tossing and turning.

I can’t take any more of this! I seem to be having reactions to everything right now. My morale is very low and I am consistently angry. I have been thinking about my novel again, too, and puzzling over the pros and cons of a multiple-narrator approach. I thought of away of taking this on today which made the novel pretty baroque. It was attractive though. I had been puzzling it over and unable to think of anything else or shut down. This may have been a factor in my taking valerian.

I have been reading up on the herb now. Nothing much, though I have found the following:
“One study found that valerian tends to sedate the agitated person and stimulate the fatigued person, bringing about a balancing effect on the system.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_%28herb%29

Blog rage

I am feeling furious and unfulfilled.

All day I have been absolutely exhausted. I got up late having eaten Weetabix last night and slept very shallowly. I have been feeling completely exhausted, like I do sometimes, with a heavy, tingly tiredness in my legs that feels like I have run a marathon. I get this sometimes. A feeling completely disproportionate to the amount of exercise I have been doing.

I have been able to do nothing since I got back from work. I read a little, but barely a chapter or so, and managed to write no more than a paragraph. I am angry with the amount of time I get for writing. I can’t deal with it. And now for the last hour or so I have been on the computer, writing a little of my blog, which is still consigned to Bebo. I have been trying to rectify that, by looking into why on earth a second domain has disappeared on my host, but I am completely lost in the system, unable to make head nor tale of the control panel system, and getting lost with submitted requests for help having disappeared in the system now irretrievable, and unanswered. I cannot install Wordpress on the second domain I hope to put my blog on with some drafts of short stories and the like. I have forgotten my password to one of the log-ins and it is none of my normal ones. That or it doesn’t tally with the log-in name I am using perhaps in error. This kind of problem should be easily rectified in the system but it isn’t.

Anyway, the main thing to report is my absolute bloody tiredness. I’m fed up with it.

Morning: green tea and Weetabix again, because I got up so late, having left my mobile phone downstairs last night (in part I think I wanted to do some writing,  though I can’t remember what I was doing, but then I got tied into some porn because I had been having many many sexual fantasies and thought it would contribute to my not sleeping. I was up for another half hour or so then finding porn and looking again for ADDerall.)

So, yes, my morale is pretty low and I know I will find little time for cooking. My priorities have cycled round again. I come back home to play guitar, and to write. And I am still dreading moving into this house. I Am feeling like I need complete freedom from everything right now. I need shot of all responsibilities.

Deja Vu

I’m getting more angry about my relationship to food. I seem to be doing so much but getting nowhere with it. I picked M____ up and was going through the whole squinting when someone speaks at me thing, which is never attractive or likely to endear you to anyone. Apparently I had left my phone in my coat or something and she had rang twice. Plus. I hadn’t written, and I hadn’t bid on a jumper she wants on e-bay for. So, altogether, not in her good books. She didn’t much talk to me on the way back. Our relationship is breaking down rapidly. I hardly see her and do a lot to avoid  spending time with her. I am very aspergic!

Of course she says well, I should never have had any sugar. I say I need to write down some evidence for this dietician when I see him, but of course I should have picked that up as a rationalisation when I was grabbing two flapjacks and a snickers at Tesco! I had to go for a brisk walk, listening to my MP3.

I feel terrible. There’s no way I will be able to sleep.

We were talking about some of the people at work earlier, me and Jaffa, and the mad diets they have. I didn’t want to be associated with the flakey types and didn’t say no to much of anything, not bread, not coffee, not shandy, later, when Jaffa said he normally doesn’t but that he fancied a Coke, and offered to buy me something. I felt I had got on ok down with him in the woodlands and didn’t want to lose any of that. And it’s so easy to. It sounds so pathetic but it is so true. It’s not peer pressure. Pressure I can stand up to, but it is true that people are not fair or rational or consistent in their judgements  about people and you have to cater for that. You want to come over as a normal person sometimes. I find it hard to explain.

Anyway, I feel terrible, I’m in the doghouse, and there’s no sympathy for me. Quite the opposite. And tomorrow I will want nothing else but to write.

Oh, yes, and when she accused me today of not writing - texting - I heartily agreed and began to talk at cross purposes about how I  have no time to write. That’s the only thing on my mind, ever. I am very aspergic. And she hears it all the time. She’s finding it hard here, and she’s telling me, and all I say is…

I’m not good for her.

And here’s me, visiting the house today after work and trying to be enthusiastic. Dad’s made an amazing effort on the house. And I don’t want it. I don’t know what I would rather have, but…

I’m impossible. But what can I do? I remember at uni, and perhaps before and after, thinking about suicide, and thinking how all the hurt I am causing people, with my behaviour, with my being so brittle, being so lacking in social skills, so stubborn, so lost, so intelligent but so incapable, so depressed, so out of control, is all awful, but worse than that is knowing that it is what I can achieve when I strain day after day at the height of my powers. Knowing that I have to put my shoulder to the wheel to acheive solecisms that burned themselves into my soul, embarrassment that ached through me and had a half life so much longer than the time between such fuck ups as most can achieve only once in their lives. I hurt others by trying so hard and to them it looks like I’m not trying at all, that I’m not thinking of others at all. But the only alternative would be suicide. They don’t know that, but its true. Because this is the best I can do.

And that’s why I’m fucked off with it all at the moment. Food. Struggling and being employed and not writing and moving forward towards family, almost, when I’m not sure I want it. To home owning, when I never wanted it at all, but just ignored things as they went on around me, were organised for me.

I can do my fire act and forget about things for a while. Forget about the world. I can even teach it and enjoy that contact with people but I ca’t deal with my life right now. I’m constantly trying as hard as i can, and constantly on the edge. It’s not the food, it’s the fact it has to be the number one priority every single day, and I can’t do that, because I need my writing, and because I can’t be that consistent in anything. I need to take some time off.

Pink noise

Real pins and needles of the head now. I can feel it. I’m playing guitar and it’s all I can do.

Binge

Took the chance today and yesterday to work with Jaffa down his pet project, a community based on woodlands not too far away from where we’ve been set up for the last couple of weeks. Now I’ve barely spoken to the guy and though I like him, I always figured he had me down as one who hasn’t paid his dues - an easy enough assumption to make when I cover up so much about my past and had to adopt this neutral, non-suspicious persona for so long. Anyway, it turns out Dasha has been speaking to him, letting him know I’m one of her trusted few, so he comes over and tells me about the place. He’s one who has to be won over like that, one way or another. Offers to take me down for a bit of wood chopping and such. Offered, too, at a time the police were turning up to give us grief so it was perfect timing. I think he knew it.

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