Reveries 4 April, 2010

I have been meaning for years to regularly attempt to write down some of my reveries. This is part of what I had always intended with what I call The Unforgiving Minutes, trying to get down the “minutes”, that is, the verbatim chatter, of my daydreams. It is an ambition that is doomed to failure, since in any unfilled minute of any day, and oftentimes, in every filled minute of every day, so much is spinning out in my head that it would take thousands of words to begin to get down even the background, which tends to be based upon other landmarks in my mindscape such that nobody could possibly hope to have any access to them. Of course, if I begin to attempt to adumbrate any of it, my lack of concentration kicks in once again and I am thinking of something else entirely even while I try to remember the old reveries, which have in any case, not been laid down in my memory so well. At best I could only ever give a glimpse of a vanishingly small fraction of any such daydream. Still, without this attempt, I am failing utterly to communicate what is the most remarkable, and most substantial, aspect of my consciousness, the most of my life and character, which is invisible to all.

Doing so shoots up the priorities list once in a while, only to falter when the drain on my time of doing so seems to be so much, for something which seems so unproductive. Once again it has done so because of my upcoming consultation with a shrink who is supposed to know what he is about.

Today I was cleaning the hotel I work at, as I do most days. And, as happens on most days, an involved reverie began to unravel in my mind.

This time I was disciplining and throwing out some unruly customers. They had turned up, a group from Microsoft, demanding to be treated with some respect as befitting their status as representatives of a world-renowned business. In the evening, however, they turned up drunk and began to be noisy and exceptionally inconsiderate to other guests. This has become quite a feature in some of my reveries, with guests from office outings having to be disciplined for being inappropriate behaviour towards groups of young school girls over and over again. On this occasion it was a little different. These guys wanted to go out of their way to be boorish and to make work for myself and the others at the hotel. Most often¹ they put their fingers down their throat to throw up, intentially, over the floor. Such willful ignorance is, of course, calculated to anger me.

Cats among the Pigeons time

The following was sent to my psychiatrist, a number of people at Dudley PCT (some of them, admittedly, addressed only as ‘The Big Cheese’, ‘Deputy to the Big Cheese’, ‘Deputy Arse Licker to the Big Cheese’ etc., to my MP, and GP. It is an angry letter with numerous errors of grammar etc. No doubt it is impenetrable in places. But it got written. I have tried to write this letter before and it didn’t get written. I sent it at around 1:30 last night.

Gav Belcher

The University of Gav

The Ever-so-slightly-Uglier House

Capel Curig

LL24 0EL

Dear Dr Cretenne II,

You have my as yet undiagnosed (or was it my now diagnosed, without my knowledge), certainly untreated attention deficit disorder to thank for my not having written to you sooner. Were I not now so determined to get your attention and that of your peers, superiors and other miscellaneous contiguous culprits, I have no doubt that you could rely on the very same for years to come – such a tenacity as mine and a capacity to fight you have not encountered in your whole life so far, believe me, without it I would not have come as far as I have come and got this far with the casual (or lazy) observer able to tell me how well I am coping. I have been ringing your office and been passed through the Kafkaesque switchboards of the Dudley Primary Care Trust over the last month or so with the plaint that I have been seeing somebody at High Strung House for the last 18 months to 2 years with absolutely no diagnosis or coherent treatment. As you perhaps know and have perhaps had cause to celebrate that I did not, it has been longer by a factor of two; such is the way my life is slipping away in a confused blur. I found an appointment card today for August 2006! It was by no means the first. Ben Jonson had it that a just anger puts life in man. There’s a lot of life in me right now as there has been a lot of misdirected life in me for years and years just waiting to get out. It may not be professional to say so, but to hell with it, I’ve got to get this letter out now or it will stall on me, and besides, I’m not a professional and may never now be despite my intelligence, so here it is: I’ve been fighting for years and years, more than anybody will ever know, and if I have to turn my fight on to you good people to stop fighting so hard so much – fighting with my head every minute of every day – then you are going to have to find out exactly how hard I have had to fight to turn up at your door in a state which enables you to fob me off with a few fatuous perfunctory statements about how well I am coping.

Pendulums

[One of those posts that starts as one thing and becomes another, and then jumbled a little more by the fact it was dictated via Dragon Natural Voice and corrected only after a few days, by which time I had doubtlessly forgotten in many instances what I had originally said. Nevertheless, it is a post which certainly gets to the heart of some of the problems I face, and, indeed, for that matter, states perhaps more clearly than I have yet stated elsewhere, what this website is about, so here it is.]

I got up at something like a 12:15 today after the most formless day yesterday when I had been on the computer most of the day, with the computer plugged into the Internet (never a good idea). I had been ill yesterday in the morning, lacking in energy still and had managed little but to read some of the story, Sham, that had stalled, by the looks of it on Boxing Day. I last worked on it on Christmas Day knowing what happens when I have a break of anything more than a day on a story. But then my brother was up visiting and I never manage to write when he’s here, and then I was ill (the jury is out on whether I caught something or got a bad bout of die off symptoms after letting my diet slide on Christmas Day with bread and cakes and milk and alcohol).

The procrastinatory resistance I get every time one project stalls is nightmarish. I feel ill, depressed, as I did for a long while after Christmas, I’ll do anything to avoid going back to it and try to fill my mind with it once again when so many other things have taken its place in the intervening moments. My days fill with the myriad non-overlapping projects, manias, maxims from days gone by, any of which is for this time preferable even if taken to extreme.

Last night I wrote to a woman at Charles University asking about the possibilities of studying there. I looked into volunteering at organic farms in the Czech Republic. I looked at gluten and dairy free cafes to see if I can apply for jobs there. Caught up in a few new manias.

It’s horrible now and not knowing how ‘authentic’ all this is when I know my tendency is to centrifugal enthusiasms when the most proximate project stalls on me.

And then you look back and see this constant repetition of shifting maxims which are intended to rule your life. Czech hurtles up. Revision of Liquid Loves with it. Call Them Soldiers is up there hovering around the third spot five, six months on from when it last made an appearance. With these so many other things. Belcher gastronomique, candida, French, guitar, all vying for position. Running is doing well. The whole online dating nonsense being the only thing that is more or less given up its place so that all of the others are hunched up hurtling around the track.

Other things are introduced through more straightforwardly external factors. I get an e-mail from Paul at the Dark Mountain Project and want to send something, perhaps some poetry, an essay.

Fragment: The Enthusiast

It breaks my heart, but I’m still writing fragments, getting two thirds or less into any given story before moving on to something else. My head just can’t maintain an interest in any one story for long enough to get through it. Here’s one I was trying to write into a blog that never got off the ground, doing so in the hope that writing it up in this way may mean that people oversaw what I was doing and kept me on track. It didn’t work. I found this in its present state yesterday, a year and a half (and a long, long, year and a half) after making a start on it. The story would have been rich. I would have lived it. I know I did. The characters fully alive. And then, a few cursory notes at the bottom is hardly enough to bring it back. That goes for a fragment a year and a half old, but also, as I have recently discovered, for stories abandoned, stalled, only weeks ago. My mind changes its climate and entire focus so quickly. It breaks my heart. Make of it what you will:

The Enthusiast

- Thanks for sticking it out, I said. It was one of the first things I had said like that and meant it.

- It’s ok, she said.

- I’ll finally be able to lose this gut, I said, grabbing at my stomach and shaking it up and down under my untucked shirt. I had always been a streak of piss, and big into my running, until the restaurant opened, after which, if I wasn’t there, I was necking back a pint or three, often in the casino with the guys and girls. I hadn’t had a decent, unrushed meal in eighteen months.

Karen was my sous chef, a tough girl who had run away from the back of beyond, somewhere in North Wales to be precise, where her Mum and Dad had gone to run a B & B after a hard life in Sheffield. Her Mum had come down with ME when she was thirteen getting shit from the locals at school for being English – the idea of settling down into the towns they had spent most of their lives hating didn’t go down too well – and staying at home to cook and help out had seemed like a much better option than going in to school to have them switch to Welsh when she came near, the bastards. But when her mum and dad started having problems she turned up back in Sheffield to seek out a few old friends. The few who were left, and who didn’t have kids, didn’t want to know, but she found herself a job in the kitchen of a pub ands worked all hours and got herself a place, worked hard and got herself through catering college in the evenings, until she moved down to the midlands with an ex, only to be unceremoniously dumped for some slapper he met at a karaoke bar when she was working one Saturday night.

She’s a grafter.