I still find it weird looking at the man in the mirror.  Most of the time I grin at him, and hope that distracts him enough to leave me alone.  Sometimes I’ll watch him pretend to sing, posing flawlessly while imprisoned in a cell of glass that prevents him from uttering a note.  Very rarely do we look at each other.  We don’t deal well without distractions, me and the man in the mirror.  Even when we’re left to ourselves, we try to find ways of filling the time that take us away from ourselves.

Secretly, the man in the mirror and I would like to spend a month living on a mountain, getting to know each other.  Cold air promotes clarity and isolation more than anything except silence, which just so happens to be available at the top of a mountain.

I don’t have a mountain, nor is it cold enough.  But I do have a week of living on my own, due to university field trips taking the lady of the house off to foreign parts.  So far I’ve managed to get a great many items off the to do list.  Admittedly they’re the more mundane cleaning based ones, but at least I don’t have to worry about them any more.

Next up if looking at the man in the mirror.

Ran a fitness assessment today.  VERY humbling.

Bleep test – 9.3

Press ups – 40

Chin ups – 8

Well that sucks.  Best get on with fixing that methinks.

When I started blogging I also used my blog to essentially keep all of the URLs I regularly used in one place.  It’s a habit that stayed with me through various other blogs, posting pages, my own personal website, even this place.  However, the advent of the google reader slapped everything around the face and dumped it in the trash, and I haven’t used the links here for a while now.  In fact, I don’t think I’ve even looked at my actual blog for the best part of a year (before today).  I’ve just posted every so often.  So I’ve seen the dashboard pages, but not much else.

The point I’m failing to get around to is this.  Over the last decade, the number of web things I routinely look at has got smaller and smaller and smaller.  Out of the whole internet, about 6 websites regularly get visited by me.

How the fuck has everything got that boring and predictable!?  Dammit!  7 billion people exist in this world (roughly).  Take out the 6 billion who are too old, too young, too poor, too busy or too stupid to bother listening to, that still leaves a billion or so souls with their wit and wisdom wafting through cyberspace.  Yet I pay attention to maybe 10 of you.  Something is not right here.

Where the hell are ya?  I’m looking for you lot now, you interesting bastards you.  I’m gonna find ya, then I’m gonna value and respect your opinions and add them to my own life.  Just you bloody watch me.  I’ll use all the time I usually spend reading about football.

Feels like I just woke up.  All the words up there don’t fit together very well.  More like a childs attempt at lego than a written version of the Sistine Chapel.  But you know what?  I don’t care.  I’m back, I’m angry, and I’m awesome.  Boo ya

P.S. 6 days without smoking.  In your face lack of willpower.  I will own your ass.  Ha.

I have not been awesome.  I have frequently slipped on my quest to be awesome.  So I’ve been doing some deep thinking.  Or what passes for deep thinking for me.

You see, I’m a pretender.  An atheist at the altar of greatness.  A collective organisation of misplaced potential and good beginnings.  None of which means anything when it comes to what Brian aptly named ‘Stomping the Elephant’.  (You can get a badge for that:)

Stomp The Elephant

My elephant has reared up and kicked me repeatedly in the balls.  Or perhaps that should be the lungs.  I don’t know.  At any rate the elephant is winning.  Rationalising the decision to smoke is something I’ve got very good at doing of late.  I do it because I’m bored.  I do it because I’m annoyed.  It helps break the actual mediocre seconds of my existence go by a little faster.  Nikki Sixx once described drugs as ‘something more fun to put up my nose than air’.  I think I may well be adopting a similar approach to smoking.  It’s just something to do.

Over the last few days I haven’t smoked at all.  Giving me a big fancy caption, like so:

Days Without A Cigarette ~ 3

What’s been different?  No idea.  But the lack of carcinogen wafting through my bronchial tubes gives me a vague feeling of accomplishment, which isn’t to be sneered at, and I started to think new smoking related thoughts.

I know smoking will kill me.  Rationally, I mean.  I know that the toxins, tar, addictive gunk and other chemical nastiness contained within those little cardboard tubes will make me smell bad, reduce my lung capacity, narrow the blood vessels in some of my favourite body parts and eventually lead to me breathing through a hole in my throat as the meat machine becomes crippled and destroyed by cancer.  I know all this.  Yet I still smoke.  Ergo I must want to die.

Is this just a very slow form of suicide?  Or am I literally terminally bored on occasion?

Questions I really can’t answer without going very deep into the polluted cesspool that houses my psyche.  A study for another time and not one to be displayed on the internet.  These are my mental bugbears thank you very much.  Still, let’s end on a positive:

Days Without A Cigarette ~ 3

Oh, and Brian.  Quitting is truly awesome.  You wrote today, that you haven’t given him that much for his birthday.

You’ve taken, and continue to take, a step that means they won’t have to watch you breathe through a hole in your windpipe.  That’s a pretty cool present.

Anyway.  I was born.  In Newport, a grotty town in Wales just outside Cardiff, with an even grottier reputation.  They even write songs about it.  At some point in the next three years we moved to Gloucester, which can’t have been that much fun, as we moved again a few weeks after my sister was born.  At some point along the way I developed enough of a functioning cerebral cortex to form a couple of memories.  Small ones, but memories none the less.  In the event of my memory being wiped and reprogrammed Flash Gordon style, these will the last things to appear on the video screen.

Memory one

I’m with my dad, and we’re in the house that I ended up spending most of my life failing to grow up in.  As far as I can tell, we don’t own it yet, or if we do we don’t have any furniture.  We’re eating lunch, which somewhere along the line involved yoghurt (I think peach flavour.  One of those white gloopy things which all look the same, no matter the flavour).  I’m sitting at a strange brown plastic table, really low down, with square legs that are detatchable.  There are other memories in my head that feature the table, but only very few, and all very early in my life.  I remember enough to know that I’m in the dining room, but I can’t but any of the details into the picture.  Just yoghurt on the table, and my dad sitting down with his knees somewhere near his ears, because the table is so high.  After speaking to my dad, this is probably about June 1984, and I’ve been seconded to my dad while my mum gets on with dealing with my 6 week old sister.  I’m guessing I was a bit of a pain to deal with at this point.

Memory two

I’m in a swimming pool.  Parental opinion says this has to be after we moved from Gloucester, but I’m not entirely sure.  One because I don’t think we ever went swimming as a family in Leighton Buzzard until I was able to swim, which was at the age of 9.  Secondly, where was my sister at this point?

In any case, I’m not happy and I’m complaining loudly about it.  One parent (I think dad) passes my to the other one, but it doesn’t make a difference.  They’re both chest high (roughly) in the water, and away from the edge.  I can’t remember the details of the pool, and when I try to my brain just fills in a splodge of features from various swimming pools I’ve been in.  I wonder where I was?

So that’s it.  3 years.  That’s 26,280 hours.  All I can remember is maybe 10 seconds of blurry video, a mish mash of images and sounds and the taste of peach yoghurt.  Why did my brain decide that these were the bits worth keeping?

Brian, of Cheek of God fame, has decided to timeline his life.  Which is such a good idea that I’m going to steal it.  At the very least that gives me thirty posts to put together.  Given how long I take between entries, probably more like 32.

First one will be up sometime in the next week.  I’m guessing it will be fairly brief, simply because on a personal level, not much happened except bowel movements and eating.

1)Bus drivers are going to have a cattleprod pressed to their scrotums and activated every time they drive down an empty road at 25 miles an hour.  The speed limit is 30, you feckless morons, and I have no wish to spend my precious hours of existence sat on the bus.  Go faster, or I’ll electro-zap your swimmers until your hair uncurls.

2)People who get on the bus and only start looking for their wallet after getting a ticket will be nailed to the sides of the bus until they have found it, thus speeding up journey times by a third.  A similar principle will be applied to anybody who keeps their cash at the bottom of their bag, and doesn’t think to find it when queueing to use a shop checkout.  By similar principle, I mean you’ll be beaten repeatedly over the head with your own severed arm, until you realise that I have no wish to stand in a line and watch you fumble piles of pathetic shit all over the counter when I want to buy stuff and go somewhere else.

All call centre workers will have to pass a basic test where at least 95% of the people they speak to can actually understand them.  I care not where you are from, and I am totally in awe of you managing to use your second language to make a living, particularly as I’m monolinguistic myself.  However, if your accent makes you completely incomprehensible, and I’m trying to sort out my car insurance, then I hate you.  I will hunt you down and wear your skull as a hat.  Car insurance is boring, and you (plus your waiting times) are dragging out the boredom.

More changes to follow, once your new ruler has calmed down enough to ungrit his teeth and eat something

Just the terminators, wolf scouts, landraider, two dreadnoughts and commander to go….

Had the realisation yesterday that I have at best 70 years to go before I’m worm food.

So doing nothing is a really stupid idea.  With that in mind, I’m off to do something.