Snippets #3: on narcissism...

the thought occurred to me as i walked through the rain this evening, my worn old boots clumping on the pavement, that blogging has to be one of the most narcissistic endeavours accessible to the average citizen in the current milieu. it goes beyond the basic greed, pride and vanity that you used to see on the streets and pubs and clubs when you decided to head out on the town. it's a quiet whimper expressed by the hopeless and condemned, a desperate need for recognition, a misguided belief that there are people out there who truly love them for the delicate, utterly (banal) unique (mass-produced, Macdonalds-engorged) snowflake they are and want to know what they had for lunch today, what music they're currently ignoring and what their goals and aspirations are for the weekend. it's the one thing i can think of which out-ranks Selection Criteria writing in terms of pure self-serving self-indulgence.

and it's addictive. it's the safe scream into the abyss for people who are too terrified to leave the sanctity of their troglodytic minds and realise their own insignificance. it's easy - you can do it from your bedroom, your office, your fucking car when you're stopped at the lights if you can comprehend it. it's for people who don't realise that the rest of the world cares as little for them as they do for the lad serving their dinner who studied for his Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Bangkok and now works as a barman and cook at the local chinese restaurant because no fucker will give him a better job in this country (even though his english is almost as good as theirs), not that he cares much since he earns a better wage doing that in Sydney than he would as an accountant in Thailand... but i digress. it's as accessible as typing "blogging site" into google, waving your finger blindly at the screen and picking whatever it lands on. you can set one up in under 5 minutes and get stuck straight into what a whore the checkout bitch at the supermarket was who kept staring at your boyfriend's nipple piercings and I'M SO FUCKING SPECIAL BECAUSE MARYLIN MANSON'S "ANTICHRIST SUPERSTAR" MAKES ME FEEL THAT WAY AND ANYWAY I LOVE HIM SOO MUCK AND I WANTS TO HAVE HIS BABNIES!1!

and before you start screaming "hypocrite", i'd like to give you a travel brochure for a wonderful holiday destination called Hell. i suggest you go there. i was as bad as the rest of them, back in the day. i had a blog back before Live Journal was famous and by the time i finally lost the spark i'd written a small book's worth of words (over 260,000), freely accessible to young and old. i had a look through a few pages of what i produced a couple of months ago and i was surprised - partly because it reminded me of some of the insignificant events that occurred and how they effected me at the time, as well as how fucking horrible my prose was.

and the only reason i'm back is because a nice lady asked me to. i could have written emails and spammed them out to a mailing list, but the request was to "start a new blog" and so... well, she asked politely and i'm loathe to refuse a reasonable polite request like that. it may amuse you to know that i don't actually get any readership statistics from this site. i turned off all the options which would make my site come up on google or any google-related aggregators. i can't prevent yahoo from finding it, but i guess you can't win them all. i assume that there are people who read it because every now and then i get a comment from someone saying as much. i'm not sure whether i'd stop now that i'm started again. certainly, if i knew for sure that no one was reading i'd take it offline. i'd be able to write more freely, for a start, and not have to filter the content so that people don't get upset when i give them a serve.

that all said, i AM glad that i've been given the impetus to start writing again though. i used to enjoy it and i need the practice. i just wish it didn't make me One Of Them, that's all...

a defence mechanism and a reconstructive behavioral disorder...

i've been a bit pissed off and depressed of late - for no reason in particular, just a general malaise which has come over me quietly like fog falls silently over a sleeping city. by monday it was starting to really knock me around when an idea popped into my head... not a solution per se, more a distraction: i was going to fix things.

i do that. i like fixing things. i've been accused in the past of fixing things as a defence mechanism - a way of making people like me. superficially this is somewhat accurate. past that it's really more that i like to make things work that once were broken, and it's something i've found i'm good at which gives me a buzz. since monday morning i've been fixing things like nobody's business. first i got stuck into some problems at work which a bunch of other techs had tried to fix and failed and proceeded to kick the shit out of them. i've started fixing Lou's bike - that's going to be a long-haul project, but we've made a good start of it. i spent an hour writing some little scripts to keep my music and photos synchronised between my computers. i dropped in on Matt and Jules where i got to meet Marcus (who's a touch over 2 weeks old) and wound up fixing M's computer... then took his MP3 player away so that i could fix it tonight. this evening i did a bodge job on my bike that'll have to hold until a replacement part comes in before sitting down at the coffee table and stripping M's little Creative Zen down and putting it back together again.

i get paid a fairly obscene quantity of money to make broken things work. you'd think that i'd want no part of it when i got home - well you thought wrong. you see, it seems that i can't build anything worth a damn, but REbuilding? that i can do...

it's all a distraction though. i'm not sure what i'm waiting for, but i know i'm just marking time. i'm putting one foot in front of another while i trudge towards what looks like a featureless horizon, cramming books into my brain, rebuilding machinery and making computers sing. filling the gaps in my life with activities that make me believe, for a fleeting, happy moment, that my breathing in and out isn't wasting someone else's oxygen.

hanging with Shadow has been good though. he seems to have worked out that i'm happiest when i have something to make work or make better, so he's always coming up with little tasks i can complete for him. they're always useful and sometimes they're even a challenge, but i always wind up getting to do something constructive and walking out the door with a smile on my face. good friends will pick you up when you fall down. great friends, on the other hand, will make it feel like you managed it all on your own...

Snippets #2: on leadership...

anyone who's been paying attention would have seen aphorisms here and there about how some people are great, and some have greatness thrust upon them, but greatness isn't what i'm talking about here so put that out of your head. i just find it interesting that when you have a group of people working together on some task, great or small, that when there's no one person in the group with the assigned task of leading, someone will tend to assume the role. personally i've never REALLY sought it out, regardless of what some of my detractors may say. it's just that i get so pissed off that no one else will step up that i've got into the habit and have wound up taking the reins in one way or another again and again and again.

sometimes it's been out of boredom, othertimes frustration. over the last couple of weeks i've gone and started coordinating the guys i work with in a general attempt to stop everyone from tripping over their own feet, and a hope that i can get them working as an actual team rather than a 50/50 split of workaholics and slackers, with me sitting in the middle just trying to get through my days. it's worth noting that this is not what i signed up for here. i just wanted to sit around the office and fix things for a few months while my days trickled away and my savings account waxed quietly in the corner.

it kinda makes me wonder a little whether there's not something more to it - that i might actually be a closet control-freak and glory-hound. i wonder how much it actually matters one way or the other.

oh well. i'm having fun with it at the moment and i seem to be making some positive changes around the place. morale's on the up, and the team's working more cohesively than it was a month ago so i think i'll keep nudging things along until i get sick of the idea or i leave... the worst that can really happen is that someone gives me some actual responsibility and makes me actually attend meetings or something. now that would get awkward - i've got in the habit of putting my feet up on my desk while i'm working and that can look bad on the boardroom table...

at some point, though, i think i'm going to have to take an honest-to-gods Team Leader job so that i can crash and burn and prove once and for all that i'm not cut out for it. heaven-forbid that i somehow do WELL - if that happened i'd get completely incorrigible and there'd be no stopping me...

antipathy for all in its totality...

i am not in the mood, and it's getting late so i will be brief. actually brief, unlike when Brother Whatever His Name Was in high school (i went to a Christian Brothers high school, but escaped from the experience vaguely normal you'll be pleased to hear) would say those 5 words and everyone would get comfortable and try to get some sleep in the ensuing half-hour's boredom. many things happened yesterday. most of them were good. a couple of them i am cleared to discuss below:

• Marcus Alan Michael K was born at 4:52PM, a little over 2 weeks late, but healthy nonetheless. Jules is recovering from the (emergency) C-section in hospital with Matt sleeping on a fold-out in the room. i went to visit them today and spent the 20 minutes we waited around on the other side of a curtain (there was privacy required), so i've not actually seen the sprog, but i HAVE seen photos and he looks... well, like they all look really. the corruption officially begins as soon as he's old enough to tell one end of a comic book from the other and hold a console controller.
  
• Rick and Kandace have (finally) gotten engaged after... um... something like 8 years. awwww...
  
• on the day once of my friends is giving birth, Ctrl+Alt+Del published a comic where once of the characters miscarries. how's that for unfortunate timing? Tim Buckley's credit, he carried the strip off spectacularly.
  

other things happened yesterday too. i went to work as an example, and once again completely failed to be killed on the roads. i ate, drank, slept and did the usual sorts of things one might consider doing in the hours they're awake. this is more or less what i've been doing for the last fortnight, interspersed with the watching of Stanley Kubrik movies (i finally got around to watching Dr Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket), Battlestar Galactica and the reading of various literature... most of it comics.

i've been tired, often irritated with the world in general, and generally apathetic towards anything that might be considered to be constructive. still, i'm saving cash at above the projected rate and this is a reason for cheer. at some point soon i'll be spending far too much of it on the likes of flights to and from Melbourne and Perth, and perhaps even frivolities such as socks and trousers.

otherwise i'm keeping busy doing the "work" thing and not dying on my way to or from same, which is better than i can say for the occupants of the 5 cars crushed front-to-back on Hindmarsh Drive today. judging by the wreckage it looked like there was a good likelihood that someone wasn't going home tonight, although hopefully i'm mistaken. people just do not take enough care in the wet, and obviously don't pay enough attention at the best of times. still, with luck the ones at the back were all insured and it'll all end well... well, except for the insurance companies and (who matters) no one really cares about them.

meanwhile, i'm going to sleep.

unscheduled downtime...

this is what i get for having a nap in the afternoon - my mind running on overdrive while the rest of my head tries to gear down for the night. i'd sincerely love to explain what's going on in there, but by the time i start to recognise what's bubbled to the surface it's gone and something else's appeared. i wound up having a nap because, as has become common for me lately, i spent most of last night waking up/passing out over and over and over and when my phone rang at 7:36AM i took it as an opportunity to advise the office that they wouldn't be seeing me today. i was productive in the end, for certain values of productive. yes, i spent 2 hours in the waiting room at the quack's, but this gave me plenty of time to read my book, and now i'm off to get an MRI on my injured knee. that's ok, it's not as if i had plans for those 315 dollars. here's hoping that the MRI says that i WON'T have to spent 10-20 times that having my knee rebuilt... but we'll deal with that if/as it comes. by the time i got back to the flat i was wrecked and ended up passing out for 2-3 hours, which i actually slept all the way through. now i just need to work out how to achieve that result at night. 2-3 hours straight would be awesome right now.

as the lyrics of that Bob Dylan song go: "i can't get no relief". oh, i do so love a double-negative. the thing is that it's accurate. the only thing i've got at the moment that stills my mind are my night-rides when the cold air is flooding through the open visor of my helmet and i'm firing myself through corners like i've got something to prove. somehow it seems to be the only thing i find myself able to connect with, and this worries me a little. i have the feeling that i should be doing something, but nothing i try to do will hold my attention so i've wound up pottering around, fiddling around the edges. my little world seems to be holding its breath while we wait for the other shoe to drop. i figure that it'll either come to me sooner or later, at which point i should be able to figure out what to do with it, or it'll hit me in the back of the head and knock me in the right direction anyway.

at least the anti-inflammatories i've started taking today (the latest addition in the growing number of pharmaceuticals that doctors seem to think i need to take on a daily basis so that i can continue breathing through the next week) have taken the edge off my goddamn knee. that said, it seems that my quiet dreams of one day learning parkour and capoeira can now be filed under "Things That Will Now Never Happen". it's a disappointment i'm sure i'll learn to live with. meanwhile i'm going to play another round of the game i've come to call "i Wonder If i'll Sleep Through Tonight Or End Up Screaming In My Skull While i Stare At The Fucking Walls For The Eigth Time Tonight".

happiness is a warm exhaust...

and once again, i'm carless. no more driving around with the roof off, stereo blazing, getting sunburned. no more taxi service. then again, no more rego, no more bills, no more upgrades, no second mouth to fill with petrol. it's headed for the Tender Loving Care of The Boy who has assured me that he'll take all due care of it. it's possible that the car's departure could have come at a worse time, being as it's winter and my knee is still being cantankerous, but then that's how these things happen some times.

i got back on the bike last wednesday and spent the rest of the working week forcing my right leg to bend up onto the peg and operate my rear-brake, and apart from occasionally having to let my leg dangle while i rode until the stabbing pain subsided things were all good. by tuesday of this week i was starting to be able to grip with my knees so that my weight wasn't on my wrists anymore. then, of course, on tuesday night i twisted my knee again, the night before my car was put on a truck which will take it to the other side of the country.

while i stood in the car park of the depot waiting for the guy inspected the car, taking note of all scratches and dings, i had some major pangs of regret - the time, the effort, etc etc etc, the joy of driving the damn thing. when Shadow drove me away and back to work i felt a little lost and empty. fast-forward 30 hours and i was in the middle of one of the most major highs i've had in months. it didn't take long before i forgot how i managed to live for 3 years without the joys of car ownership. sure, i borrowed them here and there when i really needed 4 wheels but that was exceptionally rare. suddenly the lack of car meant that a trip to the supermarket meant... well, riding and before i knew it i was hammering down the night-time streets of belconnen in a pair of jeans, hoodie, helmet and gloves and it was magic. the cold, pre-winter air was brisk, not freezing, and for a brief moment i was That Guy You've All Seen Before, screaming through the night in not-enough protective gear. i forgot about my knee aching and hung off around the bend while passing that hotted up Commodore on the outside, before buzzing the P-plater who tried to play silly-buggers in front of me.

unfortunately, one way or another, the car had to go. it's something i can live without, and it's something which would do me no good rotting in someone's lockup or garage for however long i'm Abroad. i still haven't decided what i'm going to do with my bike. if someone taps me on the shoulder and offers me ~$4000 for the thing and can stand to wait until October for it then i guess i'll sell it. otherwise i've been quietly scouting secure locations where i can stash it. the car, on the other hand... well, i can always get another car when i get back (maybe one of those nice 3-litre Subaru Liberty's that came out a couple of years ago...), The Boy needs one now and i need the money he's sending me for it. suddenly we have a match made in heaven... or hell as our mother seems to think it's going to be. she seems to think it's going to be overpowered for the poor lad. it may be, but that's between him and the gods.

meanwhile, i get to hold my head up high again and pronounce loudly "what are you talking about? i don't even own a car! riding through winter isn't too cold you fucking pussy, grow a pair!"... or something like that. more likely i'll just laugh. slowly, but surely, i'm finding myself with less and less stuff, and less and less interest in its acquisition. i've tried to do some retail therapy, and wind up buying more stuff for other people than i do for myself. i can't seem to find anything that i want... isn't that strange? sure, i'm going to miss the car. still, arriving at work in the car was never as life-affirming as carefully unfolding myself off the bike and having a chuckle as i work the stiffness out of my leg while i limp into the office.

it's not the loss of the car that's hitting me, though. it's more that it's a big, obvious giveaway that i'm Going Away Soon. it makes it all seem intensely Real in a way that buying the tickets didn't. this makes it feel like i'm leaving in the next week, not 5 months from now. i'm doing what i can to not think about the Future right now, for the fear that it'll get in the way of my enjoying the Now. i still have plenty to pack into the coming months and worrying about October will just get in the way so i'm just going to put it down right there.

... the interraction of opposing forces...

i've been staring at the screen for the last half an hour and after general frustration kicked in went and deleted the drivel i'd eked out on the page. i don't seem to have the words today. i think i've been more pissed off with myself than anything else. i always get most frustrated when there are things i can't do anything about, or things i can't control.

last night i reacted to my inability to articulate my meaning by throwing my phone across the room and spending the following 20 minutes beating at the inside of my skull in utter frustration, after which i had yet another of what has become my typical sleep patterns:

fall asleep.
wake up in the wee hours convinced i'm somewhere else.
spent the following quarter hour or so tossing and turning, reacquainting myself with reality.
finall wake up properly.
fall asleep again and enjoy peaceful, rest until my alarm goes off.

today i woke up in a lobotomised daze. becoming insanely hungry by 10AM didn't help. i'm hungy a lot lately. my weight's back down below 100kg again and every time that happens i wind up having to graze otherwise i stop being able to concentrate unless i eat every 3 bloody hours. now THAT is pissing me off. delaying eating once i start feeling hungry leaves me braindead and i'll sit there on the couch staring at the wall until i manage to get up the willpower to move and find food.

that doesn't explain last night... although i didn't have much for tea last night so it might. i'm losing grip on myself and my self-control has been chipped away over the last few weeks so i'm having more and more difficulty reigning myself in at the moment. i think i know what i have to do about that, but of course i won't be discussing it here. let's just say i'm lucky enough that for once the course of action i'd consider the "easy" is also the one most likely to result in my preferred outcome.

meanwhile, there's work this week so i'm going to see if i can get the halucinations and waking dreams out of the way early so that i can get a decent amount of real sleep.

oh, and it's entirely likely that you'll never know explicitly what the hell i'm talking about here. if i wanted to talk about it i would have already.

how long can i keep this up?

a month ago i was riding the needle on the gauge from tired through to weary. 5 weeks later and it's starting to nudge the red-line of "exhausted". for no sensible reason i can discern i'm pushing myself too hard again and it's getting to the point where i'm starting to lose my cool. no in the "getting hot under the collar and losing my temper" sort of way but in the "it's difficult to be cool, calm and collected when you're swaying on your feet with the blood draining out of your face trying desperately to not pass out until you get home... which won't be for another hour or so" variety.

on the surface of things i can say that
"there's a lot i want to get done" and
"i've made promises that i intend to honour" and
"there never are enough hours in the day"
but if you scratch that surface you'll find
"i've over-extended and over-committed myself" and
"i can't seem to put anything down" and
"i've injured myself, healing is taking a lot of energy and i've not allowed myself the time or physical resources to recover and while i'm completely cognisant of this i'm going to keep burning energy i don't have."

when i noticed that one it no longer surprised me that while i've been eating far more than i usually would over the last week and done very little real exercise i've managed to LOSE weight. ok, the result is good, but really, this means that the chemical energy i need to... you know, heal myself, is coming from what little fat reserves i have left rather than the food i've been cramming down my through which has, instead, been used to keep me moving.

yesterday was a little different. after weather a few nights which have involved a lack of sleep in the last week or so i decided that i'd go out and wear myself out. Rapunzel and i went out for a nice day together - a visit to the Art Gallery, then some shopping in Civic. 4 hours, most of them on my feet. i had to exhaust myself - tire myself out so that i could be sure that i'd sleep. unfortunately this also meant 4 hours of near-constant agony as my knee, leg and lower back protested the abuse. i was about ready for bed by 9PM and when i did finally fall asleep i slept for 7 hours straight. motherfucker did it hurt though.

today i've alternated between "fine" and "falling over". the exercise helped to loosen up my knee, and i'm spending more time walking unaided than with the cane, but i've found that i have a decent energy boost for an hour or so after i eat, then i'm spent again. part of this is the lack of low-GI food in my daytime diet at present, but a lot of it has to do with how quickly i'm burning through the fuel.

meanwhile i'm still running around like a mad chook. i have a 3-day weekend ahead of me which won't include my favourite distraction, so i might actually spend some time bumming around doing very little. the week i spent between jobs came and went too fast. a long weekend won't be enough, but hopefully it'll stave off the eventual collapse. hmm... i'm going to have to tell Work that i'm not going to participate in this weekend's Overtime. it was tempting to say yes, but i have the feeling that it'll just be tooo much.

what i really need to do is say "no" when someone asks whether i want to do something. i managed to bail on going to the pub with the boys. i didn't want to - a couple of beers with M and T would have been great, but half an hour or so out and i knew that one beer and i'd be passing out at the table. i'll have to make it up to them. i seem to have some sort of complex where if i CAN do something... build a computer, chisel the the tiles off a floor, set up a home network... i'll instantly agree and go off and do it... as if the ability to do some thing compells me to do said thing. if i say that i can do something then OBVIOUSLY i have to continually prove it to myself on request.

interestingly, even when i'm dead on my feet i have some sort of compulsion which forces me to keep trying to stand straight and pretend i'm not. it's a little disturbing that after a month and a half i've found that around Rapunzel i'm managing to force myself to stop, shut up and let myself fall over a little. in the three years (on and off) with my previous employer i never really managed that. perhaps that has something to do with Capability - i don't think the previous could have held me up. seriously this girl continues to freak me the fuck out.

of course, come tomorrow i'll be back out there forcing myself to believe that i am in fact unstoppable and in the process grind myself further into the dirt to prove it to myself. either i'll start sleeping properly again and slow down enough to recover, or in another month or so i'll find myself keeled over face first on the floor with a 5'11" form standing over me saying

"You know how you thought you could keep that pace up? Well it turns out: not so much..."

demolitioned man...

it's been a week since my knee decided it didn't want to play any more. on week of near-constant pain and i'm demolished. completely fucking wrecked. last night it all got a bit much and at 5AM i sent an email into work politely advising that due to extreme lack of sleep (why the fuck else do you think i was up at 5 in the fucking morning?) i wouldn't be attending. nice work - a sickie in my first two weeks after starting a new job does NOT look good. still, i'm playing by the philosophy of "well, you've SEEN me hobbling around on my goddamn walking stick all week so you can't really think that i'm faking it or something. i'll have to take that day unpaid? whatever. watch me care."

today's been one of the worst. it's not so much the knee which is hurting anymore. the swelling's way down and i'm starting to get flexibility back. around 40degrees at this time. granted, it's usually closer to 160degrees but WTF? it's a start. it's more the muscles around the knee which have been compensating and are now heartily sick of it. add that the a night where i spent far more time awake than asleep and... i'm in pieces.

i'd actually managed to forget what it was like to live in constant pain. when i was at uni i went for years. YEARS. my back was a shambles and there were times where i couldn't walk more than 50 metres without having to stop and sit down for a minute or so. eventually a nice chinese man fixed it in about 2 hours with needles and electrodes and hot cups (no, seriously - 7 years of back pain gone in 2 visits to the accupuncturist. nice little guy who operates out of Nedlands, Perth. if you're in perth and you need help see this man.) after that sort of thing i would have thought that i could handle a week, but no. i've turned into a fucking pussy. "ooh, my knee hurts! i'm limping around the place!" and so on. my Pain Management just hasn't coped the way it used to. i can't really explain how my Pain Management works. i didn't even know i was doing it until i realised that when i get tired or hungry whatever it is that's broken hurts more than it did earlier. it seems to drain my energy reserves and in return it handles the severity of the sensation.

today, after a night of no sleep it had nothing to draw upon, which is part of the reason i've been so screwed today. on the plus side, i've also been sedentary as hell this week and i've lost half a belt-size. the problem is that i have reasonably little to lose and those reserves are going to be gone awfully soon.

i'm recovering though. i have a lot more strength in my right knee than i did even 2-3 days ago. i can walk unaided, although i'm only doing this around the house at present. i can drive without being in constant agony and i was able to hobble around the shopping centre for about an hour earlier today before i lost the ability to speak English and my communication devolved into tonal grunts. another week and i reckon i'll be back to something vaguely resembling normalcy, although it'll be a month or so before i'll sign off on anything involving extended walking. life and its challenges, i suppose. at least i can now be reasonably certain that it'll all be well and truly good by October...

snippets #1 (those allergic to incoherence should turn back now...)

i'm trying to get more of these idle thoughts down - those ideas which come to you in the middle of night when sleep beckons and the concerns of the day fade into inconsequence and the quiet voices in the back of your head can briefly be heard. or maybe that's just me.

my head's been fairly quiet of late, i've been noticing. it's the quiet that you notice when you've become accustomed to the constant chatter of the office, or the hum of the airconditioning, or the vibration of the ship's engines to the point where you stop noticing it's there... until it's gone... and somehow you find that it's more disconcerting than when you got used to it in the first place. the noise has died down and i'm finding myself deafened by the harshness of the signal without the softening effects of interference. the distractions are there, like when i notice the scent wafting from my shirt which suddenly makes me desperately wish i was somewhere else (in this case, a place which is less geography and more proximity), or when i fall asleep while planning what i'll be doing tomorrow, or that kind of thing. sometimes, on the other hand, the silence is so deafening that i start to think that if i beat my head against the wall enough it'll come back.

it's at about this point that i realise that the way i'd always thought about insanity was somewhat arse-about. i'm seriously considering the idea that instead of madness being the LACK of sanity, it's the other way around and that it's taking the madness away that leaves you terrifyingly sane. i'm not sure i'm entirely happy with this. this means that something's raped my mind and ripped that comforting random psychosis from my living brain. sure, it's generally easier for me to sleep at night at the moment, but AT WHAT COST?????

hmm. i'm going to have to ponder this more... another night.

on the bench due to injury...

i used to have a reputation (of sorts) for being accident-prone. this was mostly when i was a kid and i got overly exuberant and my reach overstretched my grasp. no, strike that. my reach has ALWAY overstretched my grasp. it's just that when i was a kid it tended to lead to bloodletting. usually mine. it's led me to a fairly blase attitude towards injuring myself. a lot of the time i just don't care. "it's only pain," has become my common response, "it doesn't really hurt that much." every once in a while i'll get called on it - "You just went dead-white. Go sit down!" was what I got yesterday, at which point my walking stick and i were sent packing back to the couch.

yeah, it's true. in my late twenties i've become the proud owner of a walking stick. it's been a long time coming, and i should have gotten one the last time i did myself an injury which prevented me from walking unaided. i had alternatives available to me at time (previous involvement in martial arts means I have an impressive collection of long sticks i can lean on when necessary) and i healed up before it got too bad.

it's my own damn fault, although in my defence: i DID land on what was, 2 seconds previously, my GOOD leg. unfortunately my right knee decided it was sick of being the Good Knee and grabbed the title of Bad Knee quite conclusively. the point i'm refusing to, in any rush, get to is that since lunch time on friday my world has been a symphony of pain and agony, with occasional sets played by Karnivool and Bloc Party. i landed on it poorly, and it bent to the right rather than back. this sucked, and instead of hitting the floor and staying there i rolled, came back up onto feet which would no longer support me and landed back on my face. oh well...

still, due to the wonders of the 21st century i have a neoprene knee brace which keeps everything where it should be, and a stick which assists me with... well, walking, but also with retrieving small objects from up to 2 metres away. it's hurt like buggery, and attempts to drive have been... comical. yesterday i had to reach down and move my right leg left and right so that i could shift from accelerator to brake. it made driving cumbersome, but also entertaining... just not in the good way. it's a lot better today... or at least this afternoon. i've been able to move around and shift position without receiving jolts of stabbing pain, and because i've not had to hobble quite so much my back and other leg muscles aren't suffering so much. i have a far better range of movement and this gives me hope for the morrow... or at least, improves my chances of getting to work.

i must admit that i've not been the best patient while out of play. i copped a bit of flak from one of my housemates over the last couple of days for having the audacity to get up and make the tea, or to get myself some water. i have this philosophy that if i can get up and to to the toilet on my own then i can get my own water. it's one of the few areas where i allow hypocricy into my life - if someone else's sick/injured i'll kick them (metaphorically usually) if they don't lie there and get looked after. i, on the other hand, can't sit still and want to keep getting up to help or make the tea or whatever. i'm ok with this. i'm fiercely independent unless i have absolutely no other choice. if i'm so completely fucked that i can't move then i'll accept that i need to be nursed. if i can actually stand then i will do so. this is who i am - i'll accept it if i need it. if i don't need it then i'll get by, and thanks anyway. yes, my arm's quivering and my grip's so tight my knuckles have gone as white as my face and i look like i'm about to collapse but until i do i'm going doing SOMETHING so that i don't feel so fucking useless. i refuse to wallow in my own fucking misery when i could be doing something to take my mind off it for another 5 minutes. if i'm going to put up with excruciating pain either way i might as well be busy rather than sitting around like a lump.

either way, i'm just going to have to be careful for the next little while, and if people piss me off at least i can hit them with my walking stick. it's important to remember that pain is fleeting, just like joy. it might hurt like hell, but it won't kill you in and of itself. i've lived with worse than this, and for longer, and soon enough it'll all be a bad memory. fuck it - it's only pain. deal with it and move on. give me a couple of days or a week or so and i'll be limping, but otherwise right as rain and if that's the case then it can't possibly be all that bad now, can it?

too fast just isn't fast enough...

every once in a while, when i'm left with a quiet moment in my own mind, where i find that i have a doubt. most recently it's been from my riding. i ride a motorcycle. it's big and fast and a few years old now which dates it back around the time when design philosophy dictated that fast bikes HAD to be big - before manufacturers worked out how to make fast small. it's not the prettiest bike, but it's mine and i love it like i've loved most of my girlfriends over the years (which means, more or less, that i service it as regularly as clockwork, but generally mistreat it otherwise).

the problem here is that after a few years of riding i'm getting pretty good at it, and by good i mean fast. this is what i do: i develop an interest in an activity, be it motorcycle riding, or martial arts, or 2142 Battlefield, and after a little while i find myself pushing myself to get better and better at it. i'm not particularly competitive. not with other people, anyway. what i do is i push myself to be better at it than i was yesterday and on a bike my metric is speed. how fast can i go around that corner? how low can i make it lean? how much of my tyres am i actually using? in management circles this is referred to "continuous improvement" and "benchmarking".

now i'm starting to wonder if i'm taking this just a little bit too far. my new job has a 23 kilometre commute. i'm making it in around 23 minutes which means that i'm averaging 60kph, including a 4km section which slows to 40kph or less. i'm finding that i don't have to slow down for... oh, corners, other road users, traffic jams... that sort of thing, and somehow i don't feel like i'm going fast anymore. when 120kph through suburbia DOESN'T FEEL FAST ANYMORE there has to be something wrong. it's little things - i don't need as much of a gap between the cars for me to make a pass. passing between two cars on a dual-carriageway just... you know, doesn't have the feeling of danger to it that once it did.

i actually scared myself when i was out for a blat a couple of weeks ago. not because i did something which made me fear for my safety, but because what i'd been doing HADN'T. motorcycles are inherently dangerous creatures. you're more vulnerable to start with, which raises the stakes, but when your rear tyre sliding out when going around a corner doesn't raise your heart-rate anymore, or when you barely think twice about lane-splitting at license-revoking speeds... let's just say that i'm starting to wonder how much further i'm going to wind up taking this.

it actually makes me glad that i have an older bike - for a not insurmountable quantity of money i could have myself one of the last year or so's models which tend to be 20 kilo's lighter and 30BHP more powerful... but then i'd wind up learning how to use all that extra power and find myself going faster and harder than before and into the territory where death isn't just a possibility, it's inevitable.

maybe it's a good thing that the likelihood of my going near motorcycles while abroad is fairly low. it'll give me a break to reassess my life and how long i actually want it to be because, and i'm being completely sober and serious here: if i fuck up out there with the way i'm riding at the moment then i am going to fucking die. jokes about 9 lives and my seeming invulnerability to date, i'm getting to my own ragged edge and the abyss is currently staring straight back at me.

i'm going to need to slow down. i just have no idea how this is to be accomplished because once i'm out of the driveway i'm not thinking about taking it easy. i'm not thinking at all. anything less than 100% concentration and i get bored and stop paying any. with that level of focus i'm not thinking about threats because i've already reacted to them, and now i've gone and convinced myself that faster is safer there's no bloody hope.

i never worry when i'm out there. it's only after i've stopped and reflected on it. this is, i'm afraid, not a behavior-changing thought process...

this is the life...

my holiday seems to be going pretty well. 8 hours of sleep a night is, in my book, a luxury enjoyed by the extremely fortunate. right now i'm feeling like the luckiest motherfucker in this excuse for a city.

i ran around yesterday getting things done until i wore myself out, then proceeded to play Mass Effect on the Xbox. for 5 and a half hours of game-time. today... you know, i offered to cook for the (new) household in part because they're always cooking for me and i should return the favour... especially since i'm bumming around doing squat at the moment but also, i think, to give me a reason to leave the flat.

i'm cooking again on friday, but that's a whole other matter.

i'm getting a new rear-tyre on my bike tomorrow (the old one's started de-laminating down the middle and looks... distressing). on thursday i have absolutely no plans. today, until i head off to the shops in a few hours, i'm playing Xbox. i have my coffee, i have games, i'm going to relax godsdammit.