First draft of The Crazy Gravy Train

Sometimes I have panic attacks in the supermarket because I can't find real, true food to feed my family with, 

It's all just sell, sell, sell and E numbers and additives.

And extra salt and extra sugar and pass the doughnuts please, darling, 

flick, flick, flick through the food adverts to the next TV reality Prince Charming.

And then I think how shallow it is when I am surrounded by choice, to be panicking,  

This sweat and fear and needing to leave is not damaging,

It's just option paralysis, a rich Western neurosis; we are paying the price,

Instead of having nothing to eat we deliberate over a hundred different brands of rice.

Part of the problem is our constant reliance on big pharma prescription chemicals,

Being told that it's good to numb your feelings makes me polemical,

This laughable contemporary plague is a self-perpetuating myth of us,

Chasing our own tail like a crazy dog, like Oroborus.

But we're so numb now there aren't even 'best bits', our 'TV highlights',

We've got no creativity, no elation, we're lacking insight.

We're creaking wearily toward a mono-future of calm self-destruction,

Controlled by the companies that feed us our feeling interruption.

(This isn't finished yet.  Or even a little bit sorted but I'm posting it anyhow. I've got a lot else to write in it about anti-depressants and society).

Communal creation

I've just been reading about a beautiful project which maps the centre of Toronto using hand drawn maps done by people who were asked for directions.

I think there's something hauntingly beautiful about the idea of all the individual drawn directions coming together to create the whole picture, as if somehow the citizens of Toronto created their own space just by drawing it.

http://www.futurefarmers.com/survey/collaborativemap.php

I can't even begin to tell you. The people who know couldn't tell you. No-one can tell you because it's not our story, and it's not fair.

Ssssh.

Jesus God how do you switch your writing brain off when it's on again?

I remember now why I liked Facebook, all the numb zombie-like scrolling down and refreshing, thinking about other people's lunches was what was replacing this constant, annoying chatter which is filling my brain and trying to get out of my hand.

STAND FIRM, STRIKE HARD.

At the hospital this morning I see a young couple in the main entrance. He is clearly a soldier, he's got that young, hunky squaddie look, really cropped hair and is in a wheelchair. She's wearing a jacket that has print on the back which reads:

STAND FIRM
STRIKE HARD

I am intrigued and a little bit nosey and casually manoeuvre myself into place to see what it says on the front. Worcester Foresters...something something...regiment.

I look it up on the Internet and its an army regiment. I suppose if you are a forester then standing firm and striking hard is the ideal thing to do, and I can see how that has also been adopted as the motto for this army regiment. It's a strong image.

So the soldier is just wheeling his chair along casually and talking to his partner when all of a sudden we get out the revolving door and he launches into a brilliant series of tricks and wheel spins in his chair, all the while carrying on talking. He's like a kid with a BMX, doing tidy mini-wheelies as he goes along, tipping the chair right back, stopping, starting. Spinning. It's brilliant.

Then they get to the car park and they get in the lift and because they don't have to pay and we do they are quicker than us and they are gone.

And I think:

STAND FIRM
STRIKE HARD

And if none of that works, learn how to do nifty, little wheelies in your wheelchair.

On not being spam.

Apparently, I am spam. I'm not sure I believe this, in particular as I'm far to vain to be such a boring thing. However, more than one person has said this so whilst I deplore the idea of being assigned the 'so dull as not worth bothering' tag by a random computer programme I must accept that it is somehow true and that sadly I have not been identified as in any way special. In some email clients you can mark people as 'NOT JUNK' which I like because almost all the people I actually want to correspond with are not junk at all, else I wouldn't be corresponding.

I feel offended. In my inbox everyday there are emails from people with far more unlikely email addresses than mine, most of them spam. My email client doesn't seem to distinguish between good, bad, rubbish or just plain ludicrous; 'You are due a tax rebate of £3,562. Click here to enter your details for payment.' This is ludicrous because I haven't earned enough to even pay that much tax in a very long time, let alone be due it as a rebate. They really should check the income status of the people they send those emails to, otherwise it's a big waste of everyone's time, theirs and mine. In fact if I was an Internet crook I'd definitely try and target my spam more carefully, perhaps even do a little market research.

But then you see sending things out into the Internet isn't my style at all, I'm far more picky than that. So if you ever get an email from me you should count yourself very lucky indeed. And also somehow let your email client know that I'm a little more important than spam.

On (un)recklessness

She thinks she might give up being reckless. It's very under-appreciated and it takes a lot of work, a lot of time and commitment for, lately, what seems to be very little reward.

It's not something that she is by nature anyway; she really has to try to be it. And is being un-reckless really that dreadful? Would she definitely end up in a job she hates, sitting on the sofa in the evenings, in front of the TV, with limited interaction?

She's seriously considering changing it all. A return to her uninteresting, sensible self, innocuous and dull, instead of living this ludicrously painful, excruciatingly worrying attempt at life on the edge.

Time doesn't heal any fucking wounds. It just makes me a little less likely to want to stab someone.

A lack of divinity

I don't believe in God and I have no particular allegiance to the idea of Divinity. I went to church when I was a little girl but that was really just for the social life - the Sunday school teacher made really good flapjacks and was motherly, at a time when my Mother had become bedridden for a few years with depression.

I've done a lot of drugs and have had mystical experiences with the best of them, just like the rest of them. I've been there with the one consciousness and I've spent my time in a sweat lodge. Been there with the spirit animal. Done that.


But since my Father died and nothing happened I decided that there clearly wasn't anything interesting in the 'other side' because if there was he would have done his utter damnedest to make sure I knew.

NOTHING HAPPENED.

He died, this man, this man who was obviously crucially important to me. He was an atheist who knew he was going to the earth and that was it when he died. So if he was wrong....and then he went somewhere else he would have DEFINITELY made a big deal about it. And yet still nothing happened.

No ghosts. No weirdness. No falling objects, no lights going on and off. No crazy messages written in blood on the wall. No letters from the grave. No coldness. No spooky feelings. Nothing. Not a damn thing.

NO. THING.

So I am a non-believer. It's not really rational, not in a SCIENCE FACT kind of way, although I am far more inclined to believe in a wormy old carcass than some kind of guiding light. It would just take a lot to convince me that there was any kind of after-life; I would have to have my own near death experience, because yours just wouldn't be enough. Not now. Not then. Not ever.

I'm telling you this because today I watched two brilliant TED talks that got me thinking about the idea of oneness. These TED talks both ended with standing ovations, and were both real life stories, told by women. In places they are uncomfortable for me, as I say, 'Divinity' is not something I recognise. But in the first instance the story of the poet being 'chased' by a poem is moving and special, and in the second story I align myself with this lady of science, a brain scientist who experienced something so remarkable it reduced her to tears on a stage in front of her audience.

I want people to watch them both. Don't just watch one and not the other - find the time to watch them together.

And then?

I don't know.

Lets talk about it.



http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html



http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Derby rosters

So I didn't make the roster for the Manchester game and I know it's because I'm injured and everything, I know that. But I can't help feeling gutted anyway. And the worst part is, of course I know how important it is for us to field a strong team and a weak injured link does not a strong team make, and I wouldn't want to be rostered anyway when we have so many brilliant skaters now.

My rational brain knows this. But still.

Sob.

The derby love.

There is a sort of desire I have for skating which is unstoppable.

Even though each time I do it I know my knee will end up all swollen and hurting I still can't not skate.

My rational brain knows that I shouldn't be doing it but emotionally I am completely compelled. It's like an illicit lover, obsessive and all consuming and really fucking dangerous, but you just can't stop doing it anyway even though you know it's hopelessly bad for you and will end in many, many tears.

Writing not to you.

I just want to make it clear here that I'm not writing about you. For instance, if I write about the fact that a random man bit me for no reason at all in a nightclub once and you did that; that was you and you recall it, well then yes, that bit clearly is about you.

But most of this isn't about you, it's not about anyone, not even me. It's just writing.

Except when it isn't, and I'm writing to you, but you'll know that won't you?

Because you did it.

...

....

.....

I've got the blackest pile of slimy gloom hanging over my head, dripping down into my eyes and burying me.

48 ways

I keep writing beginnings. I keep starting things, making notes and jotting down the ideas of things, spawning little tiny projects that remain unfulfilled. I can't stop it. I'm not sure why it's happening, maybe it's the beginning of writing again after a long break, I don't know.

But I want them to grow. I want to send them off out into the Universe and have them return full and complete and ready for the world.

Instead I've got a notebook full of strange little two word notes that say things like:

48 ways.

New beginnings.

Everyone has written everything. There is nothing left to write. All the words are used and I am casting about for topics left write about. Every time I think of something it immediately sounds trite and cliched. Yeah I can't sleep - so can't half the world and they've all already written about how each dark second becomes a lonely hour. They've written about longing, and wishing and hoping, waiting and worrying into the dawn. They've told all the tales of sitting, working, drunk with exhaustion from the night before.

They've used up all the words and there are none left for me that haven't already been chewed over millions of times before.