I forgot to go to bed

I think it has been made clear that I am not a well puppy.

I was working from home the other day. One of my jobs … Well, I have a few. You hustle and shine. You work away. You try to keep ahead of yourself. I don’t know. Could be that I just like to keep busy. I don’t even know if it’s about the money any more or just some kind of sickness.

So, there I am, quietly working away. It’s late. It’s so late it becomes early.

And I am sitting there with my headphones on and quietly typing away. I don’t really get tired. Insomnia, it’s a beautiful thing. Suddenly I hear this odd noise. This weird buzzing noise. I pull the headphones off.

That’s when it hits me.

That’s my alarm.

My “get up in the morning bright and early” signal. It’s set for six thirty in the morning.

That kind of thing really makes me go “oh, for fuck’s sake”. I forgot to go to bed.

How is that even possible? I don’t get tired, or hungry or cold or … well. Some kind of strange gradual desensitization treatment? It kind of works. I mean, up to a certain point it’s all fine and then of course your body will rebel. You get the shakes. You can’t sleep because you’re just too tired. You don’t get hungry. Everything hurts. Eating hurts. Not eating hurts too.

So I look at the time and then I decide that maybe it could be a good plan to go to bed. The rest of the world is up and about so you won’t be getting much sleep. Trucks passing by, the sweet laughter of children (you’d like to silence with a Lee Enfield) and hustle and bustle of city life going on right outside your window… I get up again around lunchtime.

Turn my computer on.

And it’s dead.

Well, that figures. Error message says “Keybord error. Press F1.”

Well. You can press F1 until the cows come home. It’s the typical faulty machine logic that always makes the humanist in me rear up. I know there’s no point in anger, but still, there it is. And it’s pretty viable.

All in all I think it might be time to get a job at the Paper Street Soap Company.

ROL

Colder than a welldigger’s ass

Winter comes riding a pale white horse.

We had snow the other day. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty and all, but invariably the same thing always happens.

Snow falls for an afternoon or so. Temperature goes up and down, people skid about in sneakers and on summer tires. It turns to slush. Grey slush – this is the city after all.

Then comes the starry night with its cold winter fingers and everything turns to ice.

What upset the pattern this time is that normally by now the snow should have melted away leaving only a few ragged grey strands in the deepest shadows and maybe the occasional clump och grey dirty water in the gutters frozen into a popsicle from hell.

Not so this time. The streets are pretty much fine, but the sidewalks are covered in a thin film of black ice that can really mess with your ETA if you’re not careful.

Now, I’m a heavy boots kind of person, so I get a good snicker at the expense of all those who still think loafers and sneakers are a good idea. How they slip and slide. How they roll and ride.

I also snicker at the girls who insist on short skirts and nylons – because a urinary tract infection is just not sexy, ladies. Oh, and the ganster wannabe’s who walk around in oversizes parkas casually slung low on one shoulder are now more or less in full Kenny-mode (South Park Kenny, not Kenny Rogers, okay?).

It gets nippy around here. Seriously. I mean, normally the wind cuts right through you, but then add some humidity and drop the temperature below freezing and you’ve got all the makings of  a night to remember complete with numb fingers, broken bones and a hankering after hot chocolate.

We usually don’t have white Christmases around here. And certainly not white Novembers. It might be a global warming thing, or a cyclical season thing. I don’t know. I just know that for right now I’m enjoying the involountary icecapades going on outside.

And I think I need new boots.

ROL

Holden Caulfield? Really?

Some days are stranger than others.

I’m not getting into how much I’m working right now, or how much that fucks with your perception. I have more interesting stuff on my mind.

Ok. So I have a couple of brothers. Actually there’s a whole pack of us. Not enough to organise a sports team, but enough to cause trouble. So one of my brothers calls me this week. His computer has gone all funny. He has to reinstall someting or other – I forget what. His internet connection isn’t working. There’s a lot of that going around.

And like so many of us he laughs his balls off when the support tells him to just go to their website and download something or other to fix it. You know the conversation.

“-Just log on to our website…

-Yes. And how do you expect me to do that?

-?

-If I could do that do you think I would be calling you?

-?”

And so it goes. So he calls me and asks if he can do the down load thing from my computer. I ask him how he’s planning on transferring the information to his own computer. He goes blank. I tell him I have my USB for that. Ten minutes later he’s at my computer, drinking my coffee and cursing a blue streak. As you do.

Same day – couple of hours later. One of my other brothers sends a slightly freaked out email telling me he needs my help with a project he’s doing for Christmas. I help him out, actually doing that while I’m doing other stuff, which is pretty arrogant, I know, but I can get away with it because right now my mind is in hyperdrive anyway. My response time is about twenty mintues. That’s pretty good all things considered.

And that’s when I get the “you’re my catcher in the rye” line.

I smile. I put that aside.

My brain does that “ahem” thing it somethimes does. Picture a black clad FBI-guy knocking on you mental door and clearing his throat. Polite… and armed.

I go back and examine the thought that got snagged.

Catcher in the rye… Holden Caulfield… Really? Chapman, Hinkley and Bardo carried that book around. And have you read it, by the way? That’s some reference I got there. Well, I guess it sort of makes sense. In a “let’s not go too deep in to that particular patch of the woods” kind of way.

ROL

Work hard, play hard?

Now, you reach a point where the markers become a little too obvious to ignore.

You know you’re working too much, or have been going at it too hard when;

You get up in the morning and realise you forgot to buy coffee. Again. And so there are five miserable grounds at the very bottom of the can and you have absolutely no hope in hell of getting that jolt of caffeine you need to get your blood pumping.

You may or may not have remembered to change you socks. You honestly don’t know.

You go to a party and have a few drinks, talk to some people. Instinct tells you you should be sleepy when you get home, but at one thirty you still awake. Still sober. Still clear eyed.

You wake up the next morning after four hours of sleep and feel no different than when you went to bed. Not sober, not drunk, not tired.

It’s a kind of low grade amnesia. If you can normally log seven things in your short term memory bank you’re down to three by the end of the week. And you start writing things down on your arm just to be sure.

It’s all funny in that “why the hell am I doing this again?” kind of way. Makes for a varied experience of reality. The dominant rhetoric version of reality anyway.

And I know going to some party might not have been the best idea, but when it’s a birthday you can’t really put it off.

Oh, and about the party…

The host and hostess are nice people. Friendly, outgoing… all of that. But they always do this thing – this really annoying thing – where they chink a glass and then lay down the rules. Listing the ingredients in whatever nibbles are being served, tell you where the booze is and if you’re allowed to smoke and in that case how you should act while smoking, and when the party is supposed to end.

It’s the weirdest thing. And I have to tell you, right now I am not in the mood for organised fun. I am not in the mood for having my behaviour regulated, policed and controlled. I get quite enough of that, thank you.

At least there was no all out brawling on my part. I was polite. I was entertaining. I had my drink and left. I don’t remember the names of the people I was introduced to. I’m not even going to try.

I forget to buy coffee, for crying out loud, what do you want from me? Blood?

ROL

Reckless abandon

It’s funny how things go.

When you get what you wish for it always comes in some twisted, fucked-up form, doesn’t it? It’s like this new job I think I have. I mean, I’m not even sure I actually have the job, it is that vague.

I don’t mean to convey I’m not happy about it… well, sort of. But getting handled, I don’t necessarily do that sort of thing well. I try hard to follow instructions and do what I am told, but there’s a reason I was never in the army. I have problems with blind obedience and I really don’t like being a rookie.

Working hard to curb my natural inclinations I now have to work with a degree of precision I haven’t had to bother with for years. It’s just a level of attention to detail I haven’t needed to focus on for years. Generally I tend to go for the bigger picture, the larger contexts, the sweep and swoop of knowledge, information, perspective, whatever. So here I sit mired down in detail.

After a day of that I feel the need to hurl things about with reckless abandon. There’s a book (well, there’s always a book, isn’t there) in which the lead character works as a forensic pathologist. She spends the entire day bent over bones, looking for the slightest minute details and clues. At the end of the day, after being bent over a worktable with a microscope she and her colleagues go to the local bowling alley and hurl things about with reckless abandon. That’s where I got the simile. I guess that’s a good image of how I feel.

It is like being used to covering six pages with text and trying to switch focus so now I have to write haiku. You have to adjust you thinking. Trim down the fat to a degree I had not expected.

Oh, well.

Life is ever changing. You just have to adapt and overcome.

ROL

Under the Big Top tonight!

“Ladies and gentlemen!
Harry’s Harbour Bizarre is proud to present
Under the Big Top tonight
Human Oddities”

Tom Waits

I like Tom Waits. I’m a big Waits fan. And I have the distinct feeling that if I worked a carney I would either be the barker, throw knives or eat fire.

It’s been a loooong month. October, that is. I did the math. I looked at the sorry contents of my fridge. I went through the mail. I checked my answering machine. Nobody loves me. That’s the sad part of technology, you’re so fucking available all the time, people no longer send letters, or postcards, or leave messages on your machine. You come home to bills, junkmail and empty cupboards.

I’ve got battle fatigue. I know the markers. I’ve been here before. I think this is six solid weeks of me working seven days in a row. That’s a lot of work. I’d make better money eating broken glass and let’s face it – I’m just  afew tattoos short of a freak show anyway. I’ll shave my head and buy a leather duster and I’m there. I need to sleep for three days.

So, that begs the question – why do I do this to myself? I’m not getting richer, smarter or younger. I fight the uphill battle every day, in a Sisyfos kind of way – and then try to get on with the business of living. So – why? Well, maybe because as fucked as it is it keeps me out of trouble. Sort of. Or, well, it gets me into the kind of trouble I’m used to, maybe?

Am I working today? Yes of course I am. Did I work yesterday? Yes, of course I did. Will I be working tomorrow? Yes, of course I will. And so it goes. At some point I have to crack, right? And then you’ll see something kind of funny.

Until then I keep up the entertainment.

So, under the Big Top tonight!

“You’ll see Sealo the seal boy who has flippers for arms
You’ll see Johnny Eck, the man born without a body
He walks on his hands
He has his own orchestra and is an excellent pianist”

ROL