F*king awful

Last night I slept badly again. I’ve slept badly for the past four nights in a row. I’ve slept badly for the last twenty-three years give or take. It doesn’t matter to anyone. It’s not something you can really describe or convey anyway. When I went to the doctor once again for it, same old farce. This Dr. Khoshkoo was a child and didn’t know how to interact. He didn’t understand life. I subordinated my rage. I had to stay for half an hour debating, going through the motions. I hated to put myself, yet again, in a situation where a person had zero understanding of what was going on in me, or if he did, he presented that removed, impassive, forced good-natured way of not ever going into anything that might be difficult or challenging and it was like I was supposed to talk about a theoretical Simon who we both had no real interest in helping.

It is hard to describe what it feels like. My head at this very moment is brickish. I want to let it loll forward or back and it is an effort to keep it up as I type. There is a tension in my neck but it runs all the way down my shoulders and arms. The shoulders are bearing the brunt, I think. If someone approached me from the back and massaged them and down my back for a few minutes, I imagine that I would feel much better. So it feels like there is this muscle tension that can be dispelled. My head is throbbing in general. I have lain down on the couch twice to try and get that few minutes of sleep that when I get them manage to get this heaviness to pass. It’s not so easy thought. It’s like slotting a piece of puzzle into its place. It doesn’t always fit and I just lie there without the sleep bit. It’s hard to know exactly where the throbbing is. All I know is that the tiniest stimulus sets me off in a rage. If the cat moves an inch, I scream at it.

I have things to do, I can’t sit here in stasis. I have things to do but the only thing I want to do, or can bear doing is write. I always sneered when people talked about writing as being therapeutic. I hated that patronising dismissal as if the only thing your writing was good for was a ‘dear diary’, for your own eyes only, certainly not of any value or interest to the outside world. I don’t want to have to write to get it out and make myself feel better. I want to write for recognition. But the only thing that I really have an urge for is sitting here and writing, writing what is really happening, feeling that every time I get close and closer to a truth, that things surprisingly clear up and come into focus, that the physical is displaced, that my life is suddenly again valuable, that I have worth and even a power, that I am not in the slightest wasting my time, that the only thing that moves anything and transmutes it is this writing.

But I have things to do. I haven’t worked for about five months and I need to get a job. I haven’t made money. Well I’ve rented out the second room in my flat and done nothing to earn it. I need to finish my website. I need to finish off my backgammon book - what a drag. I need to push the teaching recruiters to give me work, I need to chase them up. I need to edit the bits of this so-called novel I’ve already written if I’m ever going to have the chance of presenting myself as a serious writer rather than fall back on the safety blanket of AbcTales and its cherries. I need to stop borrowing money from my mother. I need to borrow even more for a car. I need to reduce the mounting mortgage arrears. I need to pay my service charge and my overdue electricity bill. I probably need to sell my flat, get rid of the cats and move to Thailand.

But with this elastic in my neck and head, with this short temper, with these eyes or something in front of them that want to close all the bloody time, with this heavy fucking head, I don’t want to do anything but write or lie back down on the couch and try to get that few minutes of sleep which somehow manage to revive me and flick the light switch back on.

Today when everyone is out doing their jobs I am inside with this time and opportunity to write. I am warm and safe and I have the luxury of my own discretion. I am not contributing but I’m able to choose how I contribute to some degree.

Then there are so many of these bullshit quick-fix videos on YouTube. One of the other things I labour under is getting up about four times in the night to piss. That’s actually on the rare occasion that I sleep well. How can I get angry; but the promise of the quick-fix thumbnails, and then the worthless obvious claptrap the so-called expert trots out when you click and nothing ever helps or works.

I am so fucking tired all the time. I just want to be able to sit at the computer and edit my website and concentrate for long enough to click on the right part of the screen, muster up the energy to move the cursor into the spot I need to move it to, and not be so easily deterred and distracted. I just want my body not to ache, I hanker after that anaesthetic feeling you get after a good sleep, where you actually feel good in your body, where you can move your arms and your hands and your fingers without this horrible effort, where it feels good just to be.

I might even start to think about other people in a good way then. I might even get in contact to find out how you all are.

When I think of getting up at seven in the morning to go to some smelly state school in Harrow on the Met line, the prospect is unbearable. I can spend the day like a zombie in my flat, fine, I can write as a zombie, I can try to get the heaviness to pass by lying down in my own time, but if I go into society with the other grouches who had to get up and haven’t slept, then I’ll just end up going silent and not properly interacting, receding into nothingness, I’ll be invisible for the whole day, desperate to go back and lie on the couch, my body screaming and hurting, crying out in pain. Is it any surprise then that I don’t chase up the recruiters?

I’ll go and lie down on the couch again now to try to get that restorative sleep but it’s probably not going to work.