My brain is numb

 Sertraline

Can't live with it; can't live without it.

It's the reason I don't get angry anymore. It's also the reason I don't get sad anymore. I still enjoy things. I feel bad for people who are suffering. 

But it was Mat's funeral the other day. And I didn't feel overwhelmingly sad.

I wanted to feel. But that part of my brain is just...inaccessible.

I've always found funerals odd. When my friend Jon passed away 30 years ago I didn't cry. It all just felt, unreal. That he's no longer there - that he's just gone.

I looked at the wicker coffin knowing Mat's body was in there. So tangible, feet away. 

Just wake him up. 

He can't be gone!

I was moved by Suzy's eulogy, and felt for brave Freya as she did her reading then came back and collapsed in tears on the pew. 

While Sertraline stops my anger, it also shuts down emotions I want to have - to be able to share that sense of grief with others. 

To feel pain.

I know it's in there. 

This is the down-side of the drugs. They top and tail your emotions so only a thinnish line in middle is available.

A single layer of lasagne with a thin coating of ragu and no béchamel sauce.

I daren't come off the stuff though as the flip side is insta-rage. 

It would just be nice to have the odd window.

The odd window

"Cranky-Pants! Cranky-Pants! Cranky-Pants!"

I have a cold. Don't come near me, not because I will spray you with mucus but because I will bite your head off. 

Actually, it's very minor, but these days we all have to isolate when we have colds don't we? Back in the day you just went to work and got on with it. 

When I worked as a banker mason in a workshop I got paid by the hour. 

Don't turn up: don't get paid.

It took me years to get over that mentality. When I worked at the BBC I couldn't believe how many days people had off ill, and it was never questioned. They'd be off one day - back the next with no discernible thing wrong with them.

Probably all the BAD drugs people did back then.

The worst part of me having a cold is how horrible I become. I bite the heads off of medium-sized dogs, and bark at people in the service industry as I can no longer understand or speak their language.

So I just stay in nowadays lest I get into a massive ding-dong with a sabre-toothed librarian or 16 year old cashier-ninja.

A woman I worked with many years ago used to call me "cranky pants" whenever I was grumpy, which was most of the time.

I'm not like that anymore due to all the GOOD drugs I take.

I'm bendigedig me.

The world is rubbish

Just watched Margaret Atwood talking about The Handmaid's Tale. 

She quoted William Gibson by saying the future is here but it's not evenly distributed. She wrote the Handmaid's Tale not as a science fiction but as a portentous work like 1984. 

I wrongly believed 1984 was Orwell's prediction of Britain's future, but it was an allegory of the Soviet Union and was just 1948 backwards - the year he completed it. 

So a lot of those sci-fi tales or fables take something prevalent in the NOW and then crank it up and place it in a seemingly utopian setting, which then reveals itself to be utterly dystopian.

Oh god, I'm starting to sound like a bloody art student.

I still can't understand why it's still neck and neck in the US elections. 

I don't understand why anyone thinking what Putin has done in Ukraine is justifiable.

Ditto with Israel carpet-bombing Gaza.

I know the world is a complex place, a mess of geopolitics, vested interests and bare-faced greed, but some things are just plain wrong.

As usual, I'll just blame the internet.

"You got to look it up." They say, as though everything on the internet justifies their version of events.

Information is not knowledge.

And it all contributes to me swearing very loudly, basket in hand, at the terrible pizza selection in Tescos.

As you were.