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.

Threads and Drugs and Rock and Roll

Drugs

It's surprisingly easy to drink all the time. 

It's also surprisingly easy to not drink all the time.

I just can't find a middle ground.

I drank every day for months. I seem to have to do it until my body disgusts me. Belly oozing over belt, belt down a notch and still too tight. Saggy-middle, flabby, atrophying muscle. Ghastly.

I had my last drink on New Year's Eve. I had a Baileys: the guilty pleasure of many!

I've been alcohol free all week. I can already feel the benefits. Stomach no longer bloated, toileting (I won't - you'll be thankful to know - go into details) easier, concentration marred by cold on back-burner, but less hazy brain due to alcohol-freedom. 

Marvellous.

Here are my opinions (and I have many strong ones on multiple subjects as I'm sure you're aware) on some common drugs:

Beer: tastes so wonderful - myriad flavours - easy, complex, bitter, smooth, fruity, malty, hoppy, dry. The drug that tastes nicest of all. What a quantity a pint is! The perfect measure: 0.568261 of a litre.

Cannabis: any drug that makes it okay to watch the same episode of Neighbours twice in one day has to be bad for you. Disgusting sickly smell. The stuff kids smoke today is like heroin compared to the rabbit poo of yore.

Cocaine: have you ever met anybody who took cocaine who didn't turn into an arrogant arsehole? Overpriced (like Champagne) for city and media types to make them feel special about themselves. A drug to bolster one's low-self-esteem. Not to mention the cost in human lives.

Champagne: the most overrated drink of all time. Tastes like ass unless you spend upwards of £50 a bottle. People eat oysters, caviar, smoke cigars and eat other stuff that has the texture of snot and tastes of rock-pools as it's traditionally what the aristocracy gorged themselves on, so it's more about aspiration - 'eating-up' in other words - rather than imbibing it because you actually like it.

'Never go ass to mouth.' - Marilyn Manson

Cigarettes: leant a friend £20 to buy some cigarettes. The change was in coins - less than a fiver - for a packet of 20. For years you see people outside offices standing in the rain to 'enjoy' a fag. I last smoked 21 years ago. I'd given up for years and taken it back up. I still have dreams where I'm smoking. Shit drug - way too expensive and makes you a social exile. 

And if you’re a bloke it shrinks your weenus. 

Threads

I'm still trying to work out what Threads is. It's a bit like a free app version of Twitter/X (if you had to pay for it). Less toxic, fewer features and rather anodyne in its content.

Like Facebook with strangers?

My feed is oddly full of middle-aged women whose entire content is selfies: cleavage selfies, butt selfies, driving selfies and big hair selfies. 

Their posts often read like this: 'Successful Lawyer, humanitarian, nature-lover, athlete, vegan, art connoisseur, mom of 4 super-smart kids.'

If that wasn't enough their post is just full of pictures of them. Is it boasting or is it a deep-seated insecurity that yearns for our approval? 

What have we become in the 21st century?

I understand people are looking to boost their low self esteem but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Keep demanding love and receiving positive affirmations and you quickly develop a need and eventually an addiction for other people's approval...

Ultimately I don’t think Threads knows what it is. You can’t really define yourself by saying this is what you're not.

I’ll await a proper definition. 

How to alienate your electorate

So I look online and see lots of footage of Trump supporters being ridiculed and made fun of. And it is unbelievable. 

Yes they have bypassed any form of half-decent education, they are ineloquent at best, but their vote counts as much as anyones’. Surely the liberals need to appeal to them instead of berating them all the time for being dim?

After all, if I called you 'stupid', or where you come from 'a shithole' would you vote for me? The chances are certainly lessened.

This is one reason the MAGA crowd hate metropolitan liberals - it's their painfully aloof intellectual arrogance. We have a similar thing in the UK between town and country but to a much lesser extent. A mistrust, as though the 2 sides share the same language but an entirely different culture. The countryside being socially conservative, and the townies being socially liberal, but illiberal to the socially conservative. 

Social media gave us anonymity in towers of judgement where we yell expletives and insult and threaten people who disagree with us. There is no serious debate on social media. You pick your binary side (woke and anti-woke) and that's it.

The Rock and Roll bit

Not been listening to music recently, although I did see a marvellous clip of the wonderful Dick Cavett chatting with the great Oscar Peterson, which I then I watched again with Mum and Dad.

These days I do secrete myself away in my man-cave for most of the day as I can't abide what they watch. And I'd be too embarrassed to attempt to watch The Boys for instance, with them. So it's great when we can watch something we will all enjoy (and I won't feel embarrassed about).

Not rock and roll, but just great, great music.