Dr David Coddingsteine's Anxiety & Mild Distaste

In The Words of Inspiral Carpets and Mark E. Smith: "No One Ever Said It Was Gonna Be Easy"

The words used to fall out of me like Pic 'n Mix from the pockets of an over-avaricious shoplifter. Now they must be hauled out like swords (or blood?) from stones, children from toy shops, or fish from lakes. Yeah, I think that I like the fish one best; throw in your line and wait for something to work. Yes, that'll do. 

Hi. How are you? 

Me? Swinging violently from possibly okay, to utterly despondent, to terrified, then back to possibly okay again. It doesn't help that I have set myself this goal of keeping up with some sort of regular blogging. This has never been a regular blog, either schedule or content-wise, and I cannot quite fathom what I was thinking when I proposed that it might become so. It feels akin to a man who rarely engages in physical activity of any kind, experiencing a heart attack, surviving, and then pledging to swim the English Channel every Saturday morning. 

There we go, back into familiar territory. I am nothing if not a fount of forced, flawed, and occasionally nonsensical metaphor. The self prescribed undertaking of writing clearly, sensibly, and regularly, has illuminated something that I suppose I had always suspected – I'm not particularly motivated when it comes to writing like this. I'm not an extrovert, even less an exhibitionist. I do enjoy writing, and I find that it helps my psychological situation immeasurably. Yet, it cannot be forced. And if it is to be directly about me (who ever came up with that doomed idea?), I will resist at every turn. Certainly, I want to write about me. I do, after all, have an ego big enough to dwarf many. But I am also mired in enough pretension and conceit to feel crass, coarse, and a little embarrassed, when the only topic of any substance being dealt with in a piece is me and all of my personal thrashing, writhing, and histrionic attempts to come to terms with the world beyond the end of my nose. There is good reason that most of my more detailed tales and adventures have been set out as works of fiction, and told from a third-person narrative: it is easier for me to talk of others, despite being my own favourite topic for examination.

This is, as is customary on these pages, an unnecessarily long preamble to me declaring that I have a strong suspicion that the blog is about to swing back to what it once was. Or, as Steven Novella might say, “we are likely to observe a regression toward the mean."

Don't worry, I do think that the poetry is done, for now at least. Perhaps, after all these years of hiding, I may even attempt some real fiction. No, that seems far too much like hard work; all of that character building and plot structuring. I'll probably just continue to write semi-autobiographically and simply change the names to protect the guilty.

No Opposition

I had considered writing a rebuttal to yesterday’s high-grade-gibberish about sport news, to include all of the obvious* reasons why what I had written was nonsense. Then I realised that it wasn’t really an actual argument, and that therefore, offering up all of my opposing viewpoints would be a bit like trying to punch the wind. No. I will just let it sit there, all silly by itself. 

That is tough for me. I don’t like leaving arguments unfinished, rants unopposed, harangues unharried. I will always take the opposition. This is primarily why I have spent most of my life without an opinion on many topics, and why my few remaining friends won’t talk to me when I‘m drunk. No, that’s not true – I don’t have any friends. It’s also (I think) one of the reasons that my mother-in-law once said that I should be a politician. This was after she had wearied of my refusal to back down in an argument about Russell Brand, of all things. 

Now, only having (or being able to express) an opinion when presented with an existing opinion or argument to bounce off could be considered a healthy trait to possess. For one thing, it saves you from the constant stress, disappointment, and ego bruises which always accompany the taking of positions on things. On the flipside, it also makes it rather difficult to write interesting blog posts. By the time that I have untangled myself from all of the various lines of reasoning, there is very little left from which to construct any sort of banner worth rallying behind.

…all arguments are wrong from a certain angle… yada-yada-yada... we all do what is required of us… blah blah blah… ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are illusory concepts which do not actually have any direct relation to the real world… dum-de-dum-de-dum... modern world built upon Positivism and necessary illusions… *yawn*

In light of this, please consider all statements resembling opinion found on this blog as intended for educational/entertainment purposes only and under no circumstances to be viewed as any part of a personal philosophy and/or personality.

Well, that was a rather unnecessarily long response to a bit of nonsense that I blurted out while waiting for Skyrim to load. What? Why are you still reading this? There’s much better stuff on this here internet, you know? They’ve got pictures of naked people and everything. Go on, off you pop…

 

*Possibly not.

 

SportsCrimeWeatherWar

If you are anything like me (and I really hope that you are not, as that would bring down my market value considerably), you will have an appreciation for how much better you feel about yourself when you’ve made the effort to keep up with what is going on in the news. This is not to say that you feel good generally when you do this, which you can also feel good about yourself for, since the news is, invariably, a seemingly (and literally) endless stream of depressing and disappointing stories about just how degenerate, dull, depraved, dumb, and dissolute* the human race is. But that’s fine. What is, was, and probably always will be true of us ‘people’, is that we have a fantastic capability for biting off more than we can chew. This has led to some of the most fantastic feats – splitting the atom, landing humans on the moon (and returning them safely), climbing the highest mountains, plumbing the deepest oceans, confirming the existence of the Higgs Boson... er, soon, maybe, we'll get back to you on that.

Unfortunately, the human condition does not always lend itself to the most noteworthy of endeavours, and we actually spend most of our (generally unreported/unreportable) lives eking out an existence of simple survival and personal expression/gratification. The news does not like this. The news knows that it must be sold, therefore, it must be exciting, intoxicating, unmissable, full of such gut-wrenching turmoil and tragedy that the general public would clamber over ruined cities and burned-out glass factories in order to watch it. But humans have an admirable ability to become inured to the worst that this world can throw at them. This is actually quite a useful skill, as it has enabled us, throughout our history, to come to terms with, and live through, some of the most appalling situations, and come out on top.

Wars cannot be fought by the squeamish - but the squeamish that go into war, tend to come out somewhat less squeamish. There is only so much horror that the mind can take before it has to either reconsider its definition of 'normal' or else curl up into a ball and wait to die.

This is all an intolerably protracted way of saying that the news has come to resemble a horror movie and/or the daily announcement of deaths in a war which was never actually declared. Which is why I have never quite understood the ever present spectre of Sports News. Taking up, as it does, an inordinately large portion of the news space. Day in, day out. There is no escaping it:

 “...and now here's Tom/Carol/Chris/Juliet/Steven with all of the Sport”

People like sport, I get it. But ten minutes of every hour? Really? The weather doesn't even get that much exposure. And I know for a fact that the weather is going to be effecting my day. Unlike sport, which only ever impedes my ability to hear what is going on in the world, which might actually have some impact on the way our lives turn out. I know, I know... People like sport. I understand that. But it is a very rare occasion upon which twenty-two men kicking a ball around as part of what really is a child's game has any major impact upon the greater population, other than making them slightly more happy/sad depending upon which geographical area they have chosen to place their emotional well-being.

Sport is there in the news due to it being in the greater public interest (I use the term interest to mean 'what the public is interested in', rather than 'what is actually good for the public'). It gets eyeballs onto screens, it gets ears to radios, it gets clicks onto websites. Sport sells. It does it well.

I think that I may have just ranted my way into my own answer. Bad news sells. Sport sells. News programs/networks need to attract the highest ratings that they can, in order to justify their existence. Ergo: today the BBC was reporting that Jay-Z has released a song about his newly born daughter within hours of her birth. Do we need to know? Probably not. Do we care? Fuck yes.

Henry Rollins (bless ever his bulging neck muscles) released a spoken word album in 1996 called 'Everything'. It was audio version of his book 'Eye Scream', read over a bed of jazz music, and was largely influenced by the shooting death of his best friend and roadie. Within this album, Rollins' coins a mantra, by which I have come to understand modern 'news' reporting,

“Sports, crime, weather, war.”

SportsCrimeWeatherWarSportsCrimeWeatherWarSportsCrimeWeatherWar

Sure, he was talking about 1990's Los Angeles, but it's hard to tell the difference in this 'post-noughties' UK, where every day brings ever more stories of tragedy, horror, rain, and missed penalties.

If there is any point which I am trying to get to (which is doubtful)... We can pay as much or as little attention to these stories of gruesome intrigue as we want. We can simply tune-out the stuff we don't like**. We can change the channel, we can talk to a loved one, we can go into another room, we can (Heaven forfend!) turn off the television/radio. But where does that get us if we don't look for anything else? This media is around us, above us, below us, in us. This media is us. It is ours to control. But we must never let it control us, lest we come to turn on the BBC News Channel, and find that it has become wall-to-wall goals. Unless, of course, goals are what you are really into. In which case: please disregard all of the above.

 

*When time travel is invented, I plan to find my way onto the fourth series of QI.

**I have an inability to tune-out anything.

 

 

Hey! Look at me, I'm like... some sort of blogger.

Come on. This is supposed to be a regular thing now. Pull your finger out, it will be good for you.

 Uurrgh...

This week has been pretty awful. Having had, what could easily be described as, 'a bit too much' to drink on New Years eve (because: yes, I am an idiot the same as everyone else), I spent my last two days before going back to work feeling like I had only just got out of the hospital.

On Wednesday morning, I allowed Lucy's encouragement and my own damned drive/vanity to get the better of me and tried to have a bit of a run on a treadmill at the gym. What followed was about 48 hours of near panic, believing that the pain in my neck and shoulder was a re-occurrence of the arterial damage which had led to this whole sorry affair.

Lucy, being as awesome as she always is, decided that if I was so concerned with the possibility that I had suffered a further injury and/or damage to the problematic artery, perhaps we should try to have a word with somebody who might have some knowledge, insight, and training with regards to diagnosing these sorts of things.

A day later (yesterday), we were sat in the Day Unit of ward 21 at the Leeds General Infirmary, not-so-patiently waiting to be granted an audience with the head neurologist*. When my brief window finally opened, I was given a cursory examination, told that it was probably nothing but we won't really know what is going on until my second MRI scan in two weeks time.

I don't know what I was hoping to hear, but I did not find this in any way comforting. It amounted to little more than a visit to a GP who tells you to simply go home, calm down, and take a paracetamol.

With any luck it was, and is, nothing. My neck still hurts. I am still nervous when the pain sharpens. My progress, with regards to my coordination, cognition, and memory feels like a case of '2 steps forward and 10 steps back'. I am increasingly feeling like a man who has learned how to sail but not swim, and who now finds his boat crippled and sinking in deep, open water. His one remaining hope: to drown before the sharks smell him.

Well, balls to this nonsense. Self-pity will get me nowhere but down. I'm off out for a walk while I still can. I wish you all a happy weekend.

 

*Name removed so as to avoid appearing on any Google searches for him. He does fine work, I am sure, and always presents himself with a very calm and encouraging demeanour, despite being one of the busiest medical professionals I have ever met.

The Elephant In The Room (And/Or My Skull)

In light of this now being an actual blog, it is mandatory that I publish some sort of '2011: Year in Review' nonsense. Which is precisely why I am not going to do that. I am instead going to finally write about the biggest, most annoying, scary, and above all educational experience of my 2011.

...and so, I guess, we must come to talk of strokes...

I have considered laying it all out like a story, detailing every little detail, every moment from the days before it happened, through my encounters with the good people of the NHS, and finally to explain any lingering symptoms and great lessons which I may have learned from my experiences.

I am not doing this.

For one thing, it's dull. Plus, I have been over it all in my head so many times that it already feels like someone else's story. But most of all, I can only get excited about writing things which I would be interested in reading. Before I had my strokes, I would not have had much interest In reading one person's long-winded detailing of their own personal stroke experiences:

“...and then they did a blood test, and then I went for a brain scan, and then the doctor told me that I would have to stay in the hospital for a bit longer, and then I had turkey and gravy for dinner, and then I managed to walk to the toilet, and then I had a bit of a sleep, and then my wife visited me again...”

What I would have liked to have read before having a stroke is an explanation of what a stroke actually feels like. Most of us will have seen the public information ads:

F.A.S.T. - Face, Arms, Speech, Time http://www.nhs.uk/actfast/Pages/stroke.aspx

But this information is really just aimed at the friends, relatives, and colleagues of the person who was going to have the stroke, intended to help them better recognise, and react to, a stroke which was occurring in someone else's brain.

When I had my first stroke, I didn't even think that it was one. A couple of hours later, when I had my second, I managed to crawl onto the bed and found myself calling to Lucy “What does a stroke feel like?” I was having one, and I wasn't even sure of what it was.

I am assuming that most of you have not had a stroke. I am also assuming that you don't have much of an idea as to what they feel like. This is likely due to the fact (as I have since discovered) that due to the nature of what a stroke actually is, each stroke feels different to the person experiencing it. I shall, therefore, simply try to explain what mine felt like...

Tingly. There you go. All of the thesauruses and dictionaries compiled over the centuries, I have no use for you. Tingly.

It didn't hurt, that was a surprise. Somewhere in my mind I had always sort of assumed that having a stroke was much like having a heart attack in your brain, and it has been extensively documented and disseminated that heart attacks hurt like a mother fucker.

No, it didn't hurt, but it was weird and scary. It was like having pins and needles... in my brain. I also seem to remember a sort of buzzing, which I wasn't so much hearing as feeling in the part of my mind which would normally process sound. The first one was like this. I was driving at the time. I am glad that I was not driving during the second one as I was unable to stand or even support myself with my arms. It was at this point that Lucy jumped onto the NHS Direct website, and started keying in symptoms.

“It says here that we should call an ambulance immediately.”

“Hmm... perhaps we should pop down to the hospital.”

The third stroke was as unexpected as it was devastating. One minute I was sat up in my hospital bed, trying to eat what I had been assured was 'chicken curry and rice', the next minute I was vomiting vastly and continuously. I was overwhelmed by an intense sensation, best described as the worst case of motion sickness imaginable. I was only able to avoid being sick by laying flat on my bed and not moving my eyes, let alone my head.

This lasted for about twenty four hours. After which, I discovered that I could no longer walk, use my left arm with any subtlety, or sit up without feeling horrendously nauseous.

The physiotherapist, whom I got to speak to for about five minutes, later explained that my symptoms were most likely caused by damage to my vestibular system and/or the neuronal connections to said system. If you don't know what the vestibular system is (I didn't), I shall give you a clue: balance.

Thankfully, my symptoms started to slowly relent as the rest of my brain managed to pick up the slack. Or, as somebody may have said to me at some point: “The brain is very good at finding new pathways to the same places.”

Well... this has gone on a bit longer than I had intended and I've barely scratched the surface. I only really had one point to make and I think that I made it a while back.

Stay tuned, and next time I might even tell you all about the wonders of aphasia. If I can find the words to do it that is (a little aphasia joke for the better informed out there).

So that, at least, is something to look forward to in the new year.

Must we?

Time check: 00:43 – Sunday – 25/12/11 

...and so we must talk of Christmas... 

Culturally, Christmas is acceptable enough. Unfortunately, if you happen to not be utterly cock-a-hoop about Christmas, living in England during December is comparable to living in Germany in the early 1940s and thinking that the whole Poland invasion thing was a bit much.

You will make very few friends saying that you 'don't really do Christmas.' This is the phraseology which I have chosen to adopt this year. At least, it was until the crest-fallen faces of my colleagues became too much for even my reality-calloused sensibilities to bear.

I have come to understand the reality of the materialist, secular, 'magical' Christmas as being depressingly similar to a fancy dress party. If everyone at the party is in fancy dress, everybody is excused from feeling a bit silly. Yet, if one person happens to turn up in plain clothes, the illusion is broken, the grown adults can no longer avoid the reality that they are, in fact, dressed in silly costumes, trying their hardest to not feel silly.

I suppose that the above analogy will either stand or fall based upon your own personal view of the schizophrenic, cultural shit-storm that we are currently up to our necks in. I make no apologies and ask for no favours in this. Do as you will, I'm certainly planning to. Above all, please think about why you do the things that you do. That is all.

I don't know about you, but I have reached the age of 34 with few material wants still to fulfil. Those which I still harbour are far beyond the financial (or ethical) means of my nearest and dearest. I realise now that my childhood love of Christmas was almost entirely materialistically based. I wanted stuff which I was, due to my meagre years and lack of effective financial income, unable to source for myself. I now have a job which pays enough to sustain my relatively cheap tastes, and a wife who earns enough to put us comfortably in the black, even in these toughened economic times. Given the above, plus the fact that I do not worship Jesus, Christmas feels a lot like a village fete set up to glorify the toothfairy, but at which the villagers ignore the burning toothfairy efigy in order to give their full attention to the whack-a-mole and ring toss games being offered to them by gap-toothed salesmen.

Happy Sunday you lovely swine-bags. Please forgive this inelegance, but it is now 01:43 on Jesus' official birthday and I have been at the Dutch fluid.

I wish you all a fantastic time. Hopefully affording you the chance to visit with friends, relatives, and any other creatures which may embolden you to chase your potential.

Be excellent to each other.

Back to basics... sort of

Sounds of horror and screaming and police sirens are pouring out of the living room. Lucy must be watching another episode of The Bill. At least it's no longer that show about the two young dancing boys Chris and Wes. Not so much a show, more a sorrowful whimper of where a thinly spread budget, a need to fill airspace, an economic lust to sell advertising time, and absolutely no intent of creating edifying programming will get us all.

Hello.

This used to be my blog. It has, of recent times, become an outlet for my various creative writing experiments. Anybody reading through the last few months worth of entries will likely notice that I was, back in September, befallen of an horrendous catastrophe. To wit, a series of strokes, seemingly caused by an arterial dissection.

As you might have guessed: not fun.

The past few months have been somewhat tumultuous. Learning how to walk again was something of a tiresome novelty. My mood has been not so much 'in the toilet' as 'in the toilet, round the u-bend, into the sewer, and flushed out to sea'.

At times I have been bordering the barren wastelands of insanity. Not the fun, crazy, 'I don't care' insanity, more the 'life is a pitiful joke and the only way to make it better is to stop it' sort of insanity. I am, as yet, still not fully convinced that this last bit is not true.

Anyway, having failed to produce much more than deeply disturbing diary entries (which shall be seen by nobody except myself, my wife, and possibly a mental health professional at some later date), I have decided that I need to relax a little and use this blog for its originally intended purpose, i.e. keeping me sane. I figure that this will be a way to keep me writing, and allow me to work on some other stuff offline, without feeling the need to immediately post everything that I write.

I have just read back through that last bit and realised that I almost completely disagree with it. You will find that this is an issue that I often come across when trying to write honestly and straightforwardly. What I am actually trying to do is just start writing again, and figure that getting back to basics and treating this like a regular blog might be a fun and satisfying way to do it. This is not, by any means, to say that the grand salutes to self-indulgent, third-person-narrative diary entries and nonsense poetry are off the table. Far from it. My wish is simply to learn to write again.

Who knows, by this time tomorrow I may have completely changed my mind and decided to once again shroud myself in clouds of gibberish. If so, c'est la vie.

In the words of Fat Mike:

“I'm not here to amuse you

I'm here to abuse my body

I'm here because old habits die hard

And seriously, what else am I supposed to do?

This isn't my job, my hobby, my habit

It's sad, but this is my life.”

Fire In The Sky

As the sun sets over Calverley, I head up the road to buy a six-pack of Guinness since I have no other ideas. The pumpkins are rotting on my neighbour's front step and the night will soon be alive with the hollow spectacle of corner store fireworks.

Back at the house, I feed the cats and then set up position in the 'sunroom' to watch the last glorious glow of light die slowly in the west. I watch the horizon turn from orange, to red, to purple, and finally to a deep grey-blue. Why do sunsets move me/us so much? I don't think they are romantic. Not to me anyway. They make me feel like The Universe is telling me a bedtime story, kissing me on the forehead, and then quietly turning out the light. I don't sleep, I just lay there feeling the slowly fading sadness of a necessary separation. “I'll see you tomorrow, sleep tight.”

The guy with the white beard who lives in the bungalow down the hill at the back of our house is building his annual pile of wood and other miscellaneous combustibles. It is already much taller than him, and he just keeps building. That thing's gonna burn up real pretty later tonight.

Now he is walking back to the house. The light is fading fast and I guess that he might be done. Will he have a set time to ignite? Or will he just wait for darkness and a Right kind of feeling?

I picture him sat in his living room, still wearing his padded blue body warmer. Staring at the wall, twitchy, alert, waiting. His wife walks into the room, “now?”

“No. Not yet.”

“When?”

“Soon. Just... not yet.”

“How will you know?”

“I'll know.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“I'm waiting for it to be... Right.”

Meanwhile, I sit here, listening to Counting Crows and quietly anticipating an evening of flames licking at the sky and fools sending up cheap, pathetic rockets and bangers.

And now he's lit the bugger!

And there it goes. Flames, taller than my house. Sparks drift overhead and towards me. I see him, standing in the dark shadows on the edge of firelight. Circling. Watching. Perhaps imagining to govern. The spectacle is enthralling. The energy being released is intoxicating. Creation and destruction. Like a slow motion choice. The consequences. Unstoppable. Raw. Visceral. By some coincidence, another neighbour or kid in the street sets off a pitiful fizz-pop of a banger, perfectly juxtaposed to this flaming, continuing majesty. Like throwing a spear at an atom bomb.

It is 17:46 and the night is already almost perfect.

34.

And then one day you wake up and you're 34 years old, you've had three strokes, it is weeks since you last drank coffee, you sort of have a job as a writer, you have a beard, the house is full of cats, and the smell of the things which come out of cats, it's Autumn and what the trees are doing feels right, post comes through the door and adds things to your 'to-do' list, you don't watch television but not for lack of trying, you feel as if you are accomplishing nothing yet everyone keeps telling you that you need to take it easy, you have a wife whom is either asleep or at work, the cats are hungry, water is important, sleep is occasional and short, the boy dressed as a farmer behind the meat stall at the deli market has a facial piercing, everybody on Facebook is complaining or having children or complaining about their children, and you have no children, the emails are backing up, the washing machine needs emptying, the clocks have changed yet keep tick-tick-ticking, when you get drunk you cry, and when you cry you laugh, everyone is out and you choose to stay in, the lights are off and you make do, you are waiting for nothing yet something is missing, all of your arguments have been made before, you are useless and not improving, survival seems a pitiful excuse for patience, music is too broad a medium to consider, the books remain unread, it's half past two on a Sunday afternoon and you are still wearing your dressing gown.

34. Just 34. You never planned for this and have no idea what to do. You have no desire for making children or raising children or being in the company of children. Your useful years are fading fast. If you don't start to win a few races it's going to be hard to justify all of this feed.

You never planned to be 34.

You never planned to be 24.

You are still in your dressing gown.

The Supply Chain

The brutal honesty of a cat

killing a mouse

 

For food

for play

for a token of love or respect

 

Here I sit

craving distraction

hacking at keys of plastic

made of petrochemicals

from a far off land

 

My comfort and ease

built by the lowest bidder

is fed by the exploitation

of those no less deserving

than me

 

We want bigger televisions

bigger penises

faster internet

more free texts

better celebrities

bigger tits and smaller waists

 

We crave love and adulation

but offer us honest reality and you can fuck off

 

We argue over the right

to murder our burglars

Never considering the homeless

on our own streets

 

We search supermarkets

for the cheapest meat

Never imagining that it was once

as alive as us

 

we flee

the brutal honesty of a cat

killing a mouse

 

Our smiles and fat arses

fed and inflated

engorged with blood

 

My television is big

my internet is fast

my heroes are dead

there is little to be done about my penis

We are all the end of a supply chain

 

and cats don't smile