Friday Night

It’s Friday night and I’m not feeling good. A terrible job interview today and I am beating myself up about it. Accusing myself of self sabotage.

Then I reach out to you on WhatsApp and you don’t answer. The lack of an answer spins my head out. The paranoia is right there under my heart, a knot in my stomach I am sitting here thinking you have gone back to him. Another mend in the constant cycle of break and mend, each one an arrow through my heart.

I was watching Gentleman Jack, a British TV show, and the main character, a lesbian, is seducing a young woman and I imagine doing the same; kissing the back of your hand, then the palm of your hand, then your cheek, and then your mouth, your full, soft lips. I imagine folding you up in my arms, wrapping myself around you, holding you close.

Sometimes I look at you and the yearning for touch becomes visceral, a temptation, an almost irresistible impulse. The urge rises for me to reach out and take your hand. Just that, nothing more, reach out and take your hand. I could reach out but even if a did your hand is miles and miles away even when you sit across a cafe table. But if you reach out, my hand is right there next to yours.

I spend too much time when people that love me are not right here. Too far away, too hard to see and too hard to for me to hold. Life is desperately lonely and how I feel for you is twisting a knife in the open wound.

How long do I have to wait before someone truly loves me? How long before a lover’s kiss?

Alone. Weeping. Again.

Mood Poem

on one of those days

one of those days when mood darkens
mood darkens like a late afternoon
a late afternoon when the storm comes
the storm comes and the day wanes

mood darkens and you want to be six
six years old so you can curl up
curl up in a lap to hear a tale
a tale that’s warm and bright

one of those days that gets hard
gets hard like finding your way
finding your way in a strange town
a town with unremembered lanes

gets hard and you want to be twenty
twenty so life is real and clean
real and clean to have a love
a love that’s strong and right

one of those days when

Boredom

I’m currently locked in for COVID so boredom is a real factor in my mental health right now.

When you’re as overprivileged as I am then boredom is not a lack of choices. Just in media I have about a thousand movies, four and a half thousand episodes of TV, and somewhere between five hundred and a thousand books in my network storage. I know how to get more, indeed I collected 500Gb more media over the last two days. (I wanted all five series of ‘Fringe’ in 1080p and picked up ‘Line of Duty’, an English cop show.)

Let me tell you a tale of how I came to feel bored. This break from work was meant to be dedicated to two things, organising my stuff, and building Lego. I’m not that strong with the COVID so I’m not sure how much organising will get done.

I started building my Lego Ferrari 488 Corse, around seventeen hundred pieces. I got as far as half way through the first bag when I found I couldn’t find a particular piece, I found three but I needed four. The likeliest reason for the absence is that I accidentally dropped the piece and it is somewhere on my floor. I did a good search that included darkening the room and searching with a torch (you might be surprised how successful it can be).

The final step in the search was to log in to ebay and buy the piece. Still no piece has ben found and I am waiting for the piece to turn up some time next week.

My thoughts then turned to a clone kit, Wildflowers. One of the problems you find in clone kits is that the fine tolerances of Lego are not found. You can get a kit with sloppy fit, fine fit, or tight fit. Wildflowers had extremely tight fit so I can only work on it for a few minutes at a time before my fingers give up.

The final attempt was at a second-hand Ferrari F40, not the Speed Classic one but a larger Creator model. I don’t have the instructions for it but that’s no problem, Lego will give you a PDF of the instructions for any kit released in the last fifty years, and maybe even beyond.

Since it’s second-hand it comes as a box full of unsorted pieces, some still connected to each other. I can work on that for longer at a time, sorting pieces into large bunches before I narrow down the size of each bunch with a sub-sort.

That’s going well, I think one more session and that will be ready for sub-sorting. Pulling pieces apart still hurts my fingers, perhaps not so badly.

Then there is the media. I spend an incredibly long time flicking through various pots of film and TV without settling on anything. I even have three streaming services, the SBS, and ABC to flick through. Most of the time I start a few new films, watch for ten minutes, then move on before deciding to watch something I’ve watched before.

The other variable at the moment is the effect of the medication I’m taking. The largest contributor to that is the large dose of prednisone, a steroid, every morning. It gives me a hot flush a couple of hours after taking it, leaving me with jittery shakes and slightly hyperactive. Luckily my asthma is pretty good so I’m not taking Salbutamol (Ventolin, except I buy generic to save the dollar) which makes those symptoms stronger, last for more of the day, and amp up the anxiety.

Therefore the boredom isn’t a lack of choices, it’s hyperactivity and an inability to decide.

Books, Books, Beautiful Books

I just saw a picture of my brother’s first grandchild, Teddy, with a pile of books entirely coverering his lap. It was part of a message from his Mum announcing that she has decided to become an Usborne sales consultant.

The picture reminded me of the important place books held in my childhood and the place they hold, thanks to me, in my daughter’s life.

When I was a small child I suffered from constant, chronic asthma. I was always missing school and my Mum often had to take me along to Uni lectures and tutorials as she juggled a sick child with study.

My family are all big readers. Mum swears I taught myself to read on summer vacation in Surfer’s Paradise almost out of boredom. Mum would buy my brother and I magazines and books to keep us occupied while she and my Dad read on the beach. My father wasn’t as big a reader as the rest of the family but on vacation he read Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carré. I would flick through picture books and picture magazines (Treasure was my favourite, Graeme had Look & Learn that had less pictures and more text). So one vacation, when I was a little over three and a half, while flicking through Treasure on the beach I apparently managed to connect the pictures and words in “Treasure” well enough to start reading.

Some Notes On “Blade Runner 2049”

(This was written because Paul asked nicely and written before I read his article in The Iris.)

Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert! Do not read further if you have not seen the movie.

Hiding From The Heat

Here are some notes from two days hiding from the heat in shopping centres.

First, bigger shopping centres have better air conditioning and better food courts. Marrickville Metro might have free parking but Broadway is a better hiding spot. It also has more stores for “window shopping”. The Australia Post outlet at Broadway is open 7 days, which is why I went there today.

Talking of parking, the man punching tickets at Hoyts will let you sneak in and get your parking ticket stamped for an extra free hour even if you haven’t seen a movie if your cool about it. I had my parking ticket in my hand and said “Excuse me, I just need to get my ticket stamped” and he let me walk the few feet to the machine. Oh, and I did it before I had my bags of shopping. I guess he doesn’t care if I’m scamming a few bucks off the parking company.

Am I About To Have Another?

‘At Eternity’s Gate’ by Vincent Van Gogh (Wikipedia)

Last night was bad again. The black dog well and truly had me in his jaws and was giving me a good shake. The noises in my mind are getting bad again and the anxiety levels are rising.

The worst thing with the anxiety is that it becomes a vicious circle, one cause of anxiety is the rising anxiety level. It’s true that my anxiety levels rose steeply before my last mental breakdown and my anxiety levels are rising steeply at the moment. Mostly I’m anxious about increasing symptoms of another breakdown and anxious about it becoming a self fulfilling prophecy.

Ten Minutes To Tell Of Love

My Filco Keyboard

So today’s daily prompt is another exhortation to write whatever comes to mind for ten minutes.

Our weekly free-write is back: take ten minutes — no pauses! — to write about anything, unfiltered and unedited. You can then publish the post as-is, or edit a bit first — your call.

(I’m not going to do an edit. Just fix spelling and egregious grammatical errors.)

Fiction For Me

Books, books, books

Today’s Daily Prompt is:

When reading for fun, do you usually choose fiction or non-fiction? Do you have an idea why you prefer one over the other?

I read both, I enjoy both. I write mainly non-fiction (for some reason I just can’t manage plot) but when it comes to fun I read fiction.

Spaghetti Bolognese

Spaghetti Bolognese

So Today’s assignment from Writing 101:

Tell us about your favorite childhood meal — the one that was always a treat, that meant “celebration,” — or that comforted you and has deep roots in your memory.

Spaghetti Bolognese! I have memories from even an early age of eating Spaghetti Bolognese.

The sauce cooking in the old, square, stainless steel electric frypan, the big black controller sticking out with the knob on top to adjust the heat. The battered lid that only just fit (and at that, not terribly tightly).

The smells come back so strongly as I sit here writing forty to fifty years after that cooking. First the strong, stringent smell of onions being chopped. Tomatoes being chopped, or canned ones opened, don’t have a smell that lingers through the years. Onions, green capsicum and beef mince searing on the hot frypan, those I remember. The colour of the onion changing as it softens, the capsicum curling with the heat before the pink mince hits the sizzling pan and is quickly broken up by the wooden spoon as the colour changes to dark brown.