Month: December 2018

Barking.

I’ve been having patches of anxiety and such for a while. Then out of the blue I’ve been slammed by a really nasty bout of loony-ness. Depression. I’ve had several attacks of random loony in the past, I was expecting that again. Where I fixate on one trigger event or concept (the local kid’s ball, – I still get uneasy at the sound of a ball bouncing –, or prior to that, Death and Time) which is horrible and scary. But no, just depression. In our family that’s at best passé. It’s been a few weeks now. On the bright side, it’s not constant, I keep having good days. They other day I was having an episode of sane and I convinced myself I was just imagining it, that it was just feeling blue with a large dose of self pity. I was driving along, concentrating on the road and my Russian ‘tapes’, when suddenly it hit me full force. Utterly crushed me. More than I thought I could endure. I’m not imagining it. And the self pity is hard earned. As I say, in my family my little bout of nuttiness is embarrassingly minor. I’m the guy with the plaster on his blister telling someone in a full body cast how much it hurts. But when it washes over me it takes everything away. I can’t get excited, or make plans, or do anything. The bad bits feel literally unbearable. The weird thing is; whilst I know consciously that bouts usually last three months and that it will probably go again in a day or so, when it hits I can’t believe I will ever be right again. I’ve had a good day today, hence being able to blog. I’ve not done any training for about a fortnight, totally not been able to face going out to my swim lessons. On the bright side, I’ve been constructive in my avoidance. I’ve built a really spiffy and sturdy back gate to replace the shoddy fence-panel-on-hinges thing I put up originally. For some reason the wind funnels across our house. At the front we’ve had to bungee cord the bins to stop them from flying away, I have to park my motorbike on the pavement because it’s been blown over twice out front, and the back gate gets blown off it’s hinges. I’m totally on top of that now. Also, I’ve returned to the saxophone.  And I’m flying through some really good books. Also I’ve found a brilliant vegan cookery site https://minimalistbaker.com/ and I’ve been cooking loads. I was after veggie fare, to be honest, but that came up on a search for fried rice. Some gorgeous food. Best damn veggie burger I’ve ever tasted. The stir fry rice is delicious. And, amazingly, vegan. It was only a few weeks ago I was telling someone on Twitter that the only good thing (in my experience) about vegan food was it took the sting out of the fear of death. It must […]

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