Daily Archives: June 7, 2015

Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if I went one day without a complaint…Oh, it would be wondermous to have a day without complaint. Bottling things up isn’t my style so whine and cheese it is.

My skin feels too tight today. It happens sometimes. Almost like the skin of someone shorter and thinner has been stretched and pulled and forced over my bones. Every inch of my skin feels like it is sunburned and bruised. The fact it’s humid as hell and reaching up toward ninety degrees before noon only intensifies the sensation. It’s gotta be psychological or age or something, makes no sense otherwise.

Last night I hit my wall and I granted myself permission to hit that wall. I was exhausted. So cryptify, with spawn, around 6:30 pm. Watched a special on the Winchester Mystery House (amazing what passes as rich eccentricity and yet for poor people, it’s mental illness).  Spook would not wind down and my headache hadn’t died down, so it seemed an eternity before I could doze off. And every time I did, she woke me with some complaint. (Must be genetic, though my complaints are rarely physical whereas she gets a hangnail and demands to be taking to the hospital.) Eventually we both slept. I kept waking up, which has gotten very old. Fortunately, I don’t remember any dreams. I know I had them, nothing stuck. Must have been that extra Xanax I snuck in to ensure falling asleep before 1 a.m.

Today is proving a challenge from the get go. But I am less exhausted so I’ve started the Mt Vesuvius of laundry and done the dishes. Sunday school people didn’t come for Spook or even email or call to warn me so she’s pissed at me. Like I can give information if I don’t have it. She’s been on tirade after tirade. Wanting ice cream for breakfast. “Grandma lets me!” “You lied to me about Sunday school!” “The sun is too bright, I don’t want to play outside.” “I have nothing to do.” “Mommy, mama, mommy mommy mama…” Soundtrack of my life. It’s grueling for someone so sensitive to noise.

I feel off. Not depressed or particularly anxious. Just this darkness tugging at me, making me uninterested in everything. TV,  books, games, everything. Hell, I’m reading three different books simultaneously because none of them are keeping my interest. Is it me or are they all that boring? I tried Orange Is The New Black yesterday. One point five eps in, done. Meh. Then I watched three eps of the new show Bosch, which is based on the Harry Bosch novels I really love. It’s pretty good, but with a noisy child and other distractions, a little hard to follow.

I’ve moved onto the movie Coma my sister told me about. It’s based on a R0bin Cook novel which I read over 20 years ago. Even says so in the promos. My sister, when I said, “Oh, yeah that was a great book…” She gives me this blank look. “I thought it was just a movie, I didn’t know it was a book.” Yep. Because that’s been the biggest difference our whole lives. She was busy living the bubblehead life while I was indoors reading. Bad me. Preferring books to mindless social activities.

But in an effort to prove I DO have a sense of humor and am not 100% immersed in negativity…A video from youtube that I find fucking hysterical. There’s part one and two, but three is my absolute favorite as it mocks Siri and Sugar Ray. Just remember….PICTURES OF SPAGHETTI.

Show me an out-in-the-sunshine cyclist who dares to ride in lycra who has not fantasised about winning mountain stages in the Grand Tours, or charging over the line first in the sprint finish on the Champs Elysee. Well, O.K. there must be lots of them. Show me an amateur club cyclist rising along the banks of a windswept velodrome who has not dreamt of glory over 1km.

I can show you a cyclist who whose weight approaches that of his steel – frame tourer and who rides a staggering 3 miles to the station and back 3 mornings a week. I can show you a cyclist who is so anxious about the prospect that he will get a puncture on a ride home from the shops, that he doesn’t take a puncture repair kit with him for fear that he would struggle – and fail – to mend it on the pavement in front of all those passing folk on the high street, bike mechanics every last one …..

These dreams of glory are never far away. The fact that I live half way up the fearsome, iconic Tour de France climb, the Mont Ventoux, helps with that.

Confused, dear reader? If you’re wondering where this is going you would be right. Some of us do achieve great honours, lasting respect and admiration. Some of us do act as an inspiration to others.

I have noticed a contemporary trend that some mental health advocates, researchers and others have of naming famous people (mainly men) who have or had Bi Polar Disorder. Amongst them, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Isaac Newton, Florence Nightingale,  Friedrich Nietzsche ….. I would really like to see Beethoven’s medical records, talk to his psychiatrist. Time and time again it is not medical ‘experts’ who are making these post mortem psychiatric judgements, but historians. I’m looking forward to reading Dr Sigmund Freud’s work on the Hundred Years War …..

O.K., now I have got that off my chest, I have to concede that there is a formidable list of folks who have seen a head – shrinker and received a career – enhancing diagnosis. And that just adds to my sorry realisation that the nearest I am going to get to leading the peloton, with the yellow jersey on my shoulders, past the memorial to Tom Simpson on that moonscape mountain on which he died, is crunching the gears on the hill – the hill!!! – upon which I live.

We are not all brilliant. We are not all talented, we are not all full of potential, on the cusp of world – wide recognition. And our dreams of greatness, of messiah – like powers, crumble away with the first thinning of the mists in the Alps, the Pyrenees. And then the rapid descent, our hopes aerodynamic, all the way past the excitable crowds, who know nothing of the wind chilling the sweat on our chests.

I return from my mountain – top finish on the mighty Galabier – and turn in to my street. I free wheel to a stop. I fiddle about with my keys. I open the garage door, and restore my bike to its rightful place among the assortment of cycling odds and ends and random pieces of long – unused furniture. Then I open my front door, enter, and I go and do a wee.

Did I mention that I have won the Nobel Prize in Literature every year since, since, well …. forever?

Kubla Khan

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)

Show me an out-in-the-sunshine cyclist who dares to ride in lycra who has not fantasised about winning mountain stages in the Grand Tours, or charging over the line first in the sprint finish on the Champs Elysee. Well, O.K. there must be lots of them. Show me an amateur club cyclist rising along the banks of a windswept velodrome who has not dreamt of glory over 1km.

I can show you a cyclist who whose weight approaches that of his steel – frame tourer and who rides a staggering 3 miles to the station and back 3 mornings a week. I can show you a cyclist who is so anxious about the prospect that he will get a puncture on a ride home from the shops, that he doesn’t take a puncture repair kit with him for fear that he would struggle – and fail – to mend it on the pavement in front of all those passing folk on the high street, bike mechanics every last one …..

These dreams of glory are never far away. The fact that I live half way up the fearsome, iconic Tour de France climb, the Mont Ventoux, helps with that.

Confused, dear reader? If you’re wondering where this is going you would be right. Some of us do achieve great honours, lasting respect and admiration. Some of us do act as an inspiration to others.

I have noticed a contemporary trend that some mental health advocates, researchers and others have of naming famous people (mainly men) who have or had Bi Polar Disorder. Amongst them, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Isaac Newton, Florence Nightingale,  Friedrich Nietzsche ….. I would really like to see Beethoven’s medical records, talk to his psychiatrist. Time and time again it is not medical ‘experts’ who are making these post mortem psychiatric judgements, but historians. I’m looking forward to reading Dr Sigmund Freud’s work on the Hundred Years War …..

O.K., now I have got that off my chest, I have to concede that there is a formidable list of folks who have seen a head – shrinker and received a career – enhancing diagnosis. And that just adds to my sorry realisation that the nearest I am going to get to leading the peloton, with the yellow jersey on my shoulders, past the memorial to Tom Simpson on that moonscape mountain on which he died, is crunching the gears on the hill – the hill!!! – upon which I live.

We are not all brilliant. We are not all talented, we are not all full of potential, on the cusp of world – wide recognition. And our dreams of greatness, of messiah – like powers, crumble away with the first thinning of the mists in the Alps, the Pyrenees. And then the rapid descent, our hopes aerodynamic, all the way past the excitable crowds, who know nothing of the wind chilling the sweat on our chests.

I return from my mountain – top finish on the mighty Galabier – and turn in to my street. I free wheel to a stop. I fiddle about with my keys. I open the garage door, and restore my bike to its rightful place among the assortment of cycling odds and ends and random pieces of long – unused furniture. Then I open my front door, enter, and I go and do a wee.

Did I mention that I have won the Nobel Prize in Literature every year since, since, well …. forever?

Kubla Khan

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)