Over 1 Americans Every Year

Listening to Music in 12 Parts – Part 1

Some undefined sense of sadness has been in my mind for days now. I sometimes feel that anything that takes me out of normal routine creates issues in my mind that are suppressed and come to the surface only when I have returned to some sort of routine. This then creates the sense of delight in misery. For ages I thought I might have had Aspergers (without the accompanying intelligence and ability with maths of course) because of what I am certain is a certain degree of Obsessive Compulsive behavior. In my teens I went through a phase of waking up and worrying about whether the taps were off in the bathroom and this accelerated until at its worst when I was living alone, I was up and down the stairs before I could sleep, checking sockets and gas taps. This mixes with the feelings I mentioned at the start where instead of worrying about something terrible happening because I DON’T check something, I welcome the chance for the pain of something terrible happening as a release from the depression. All this is irrational and never bubbles up into anything I would consider dangerous. The feelings are fleeting at their strongest during the day though at night they can be dark and overpowering. I read something recently about why we are not supposed to remember dreams. I have had the notion that dreams are just the tape rewinding from the previous day but now it seems like they are actually designed to be reviewed in downtime and then forgotten, a bit like checking every bit of paper before you throw it into the waste bin. It’s just a bit worrying to wake up in the middle of some of them where the images are so unrelated to what they refer to, that it is difficult to get away from this idea that they are just cathartic archiving. A blog will never be able to serve this purpose as it all gets remembered, though some of the random Fridays may be just brain dumps.

Is that the confessional over for today? I shouldn’t be worried as things seem to be falling out quite nicely at the moment. When I was a kid right up until I had left college, things never worried me in the long term. It was during the first gulf war when I started to extend my worrying beyond the next week. I was convinced that I was going to get called up, as I thought the country was going to need a stream of aggressive young men to pour into the Middle East. In fact some of my older colleagues pandered to this worry by suggesting it was possible. I am still not sure whether they were winding me up as I was just about beginning to realize that not everyone older than myself was cleverer (or had more common sense) than me. Maybe they really believed it. As one on my colleagues says about himself, I am a devout coward and would now take great pleasure in being sent to chop wood after declaring myself a conscientious objector (way to go Oliver). A relative of mine was a CO during WWII and I have to say very brave to be. While we can see forgiveness on the part of troops who served - sailors who go to the reunions of the enemies who sank their ships – even the meetings between the IRA man who planted the Brighton bomb and one of the victims – there were some terrible atrocities carried out by people we now like to call civilized. In the gap between this and the previous sentence, I have been caught by a terrible sense of not wanting to go along this line. There are too many bad things still happening (I have just set Word to flag up bad style as well as grammar so why has it not underlined that last sentence as cliché?)

Who cares? Not me!