Night Thoughts

Random Thought after midnight.
I am food obsessed. I already know this. My wife, after nearly 4 years of marriage, now knows this. I have yet to find a way to block the neural pathways constantly bombarding my central command deck with orders to eat more. What thought has popped into my head worth blogging about? I may have found the answer to the holy grail of my solutions.
I think about food a lot less, and there are fewer “eat more” orders, when I watch lots of TV documentaries that send me into distant lands of abstract thoughts. This also seems to be the case when I am writing, more specifically when I am blogging. Maybe the only way to counter the need to feed more junk into my body is to feed all of the junk within me out into the real world? I may benefit tremendously form this, as will my gut, but I don’t know if the world will be able to take it.
I will ponder this idea as I wander the well manicured exotic gardens at Kew tomorrow morning, no doubt nursing a dream hangover, something I will explain in a later blog entry.
On another note, and one that you may find more interesting, I am off to see David Simon speak at Book Slam tomorrow evening. I am a little nervous that I may bump into him at the bar and suddenly start dribbling and foaming at the mouth whilst my limbs are frozen in awe of his talent and achievements. What could I ask him or say to him if I did meet him? I won’t ask him if he has ready any good books lately or even if he comes here often. I could ask him if he thinks Kingston-Upon-Thames would inspire a series as fascinating and broad as The Wire? He did say once in another lecture that every town has many fascinating stories and he was sick of TV being filled with stories only from LA or New York. I think Kingston has many intriguing stories lurking underneath the well polished facade of Royal Borough status that defies its true multiculturalism and evolving uniqueness. It does have the first Bentall’s for starters. And the largest number of Koreans outside of Korea. South Korea that is. Important distinction to make, especially these days.
Speaking of International issues Kingston also has a large Tamil Population. And the Mosque even has a minaret these days, which must gnaw away at the council estate people living opposite who used to come and spit in the mosque. I can see them running to their nearest BNP candidate, who will tell them that he is not racist, as all the BNP people interviewed on the news yesterday were pointing out, he just hates anyone who doesn’t come from his race, whatever that race really is. The idea does pop into my head of sending a video of the new BBC 2 series, The Human Journey, to BNP headquarters. According to the programme, and the Thesis it is based on, all human beings outside of Africa descended from from one tribe who left East Africa over 70,000 years ago. That means that we are all in fact African by descent. I would be interested to see them watch that. Not that they’re racist. They just hate foreigners.

Pace

I am always in a hurry. That seems to be the case with most people who live in big cities and if you, and the people around you, do something for long enough it becomes the norm. The problem is, for me at least, living this fast paced life is anything but normal.
My natural pace is a much slower, calm, smooth set of waves gradually breaking over the shallow slope of a smooth, soft, sandy beach. I do not like rushing. I love the city and could never see myself living in the middle of an empty green hill with no broadband connection to the internet, much as I like nature and the unspoilt English countryside. The problem is that large cities with intricate transport infrastructures and a melting multitude of diverse communities colliding together need us rush. If we all went at my natural pace no one would ever get anywhere. At least not soon enough. That makes my current lifestyle even more surprising.
I never did like rushing and no matter how much I do it I never get used to it. It seems that everybody else does get used to it, or through apathy and resigned submission they just accept their lot in life and stop thinking about it. I can’t. I need to fight this rapid pace. I have been told to do this by a wide variety of experts from career coaches to cognitive behavioural therapists to weight watchers leaders. They can offer useful insights and advice and they may have some of the answers but they can’t come and actually implement the suggestions they recommend to help me slow down and chill out. My mind is always rushing around and full of too much inner conflict and fuzzy noise. That should no longer surprise me, but it does.
Sitting here in my tiny claustrophobic excuse for a study on a sunny spring afternoon I should be taking advantage of by going for a walk in the park, I am instead scratching my head and going red in the face. I am overwhelmed by mountains of paperwork and ragged brown envelops from various tax offices. They all seem to be telling me that I have missed the payment deadlines for some form of tax I forgot existed. The business that I set up is not trading, and I plan to wind it down, and even though I owe them nothing I fear the wrath of the taxman just as much as that age old Beatles song from what could well be their best album.
There are many different forms of tax. And for each type of different tax there are different forms to fill and different offices to send these different forms to. I have no job. I started a business to help a family member pursue another wild and wacky business scheme. The company has been set up but is not trading. I don’t have time to run a company. I also don’t have the scruples. I barely have the energy to even get up in the morning. I am still struggling to improve my health, battle the ill health demons and make permanent, positive changes in my life that will bear fruit over the coming years. I did not take this time out of paid employment to chase confusing tax forms and finally realise that it is the Income Tax and PAYE office who are harassing me with Correspondence demons and not the Corporation Tax Office. I better stop phoning them then. Who even knows where the VAT office forms are!
Running a business, just from the admin point of view is not easy. It would be easier if I didn’t have such a fragmented life. You may have noticed that this blog is somewhat fragmented in its composition and the thought process of its author. That is because my life is a continuing series of diverse and often conflicting tasks. That is why I am always rushing. Stop rushing, my psychologist told me. Slow down, close your eyes, take a deep breath, think of slow running streams and silt mountains. What happens when the train comes rushing through the tunnel being bored in the mountainside? I can hear the chugging of its iron wheels on the cold, hard tracks as it speeds up hurtling towards me. I may slow down, but life speeds up.
The clock is ticking as I have a doctor’s appointment in half an hour, to get my monthly dose of Vitamin B12, to power me up super hero style to face the increasingly demanding world bearing down upon me. I wasted 20 minutes on the phone to the tax office and hung up when I realised no one would answer and I could supposedly do it all online. The problem is I need a reference number that I cannot find if I am to go online and use the power of cyberspace in my battle with the mountains of multi-coloured tax forms. I have no idea where that number is. There are lots of numbers in front of me, and confusingly, they all claim to be reference numbers. References to whom and for what? I need an accountant to figure it all out. I am an accountant, Yes but I am a Management accountant not a tax accountant. Even if I were a tax accountant I would need to be a personal tax accountant, not a corporation tax accountant, or a VAT accountant.
I take a few deep breaths and go for a swim in the lake of serenity implanted in my mind by my therapists. It does not work. No matter how many deep breaths I take and distractions I try to conjure up, life just gets more confusing.
On that note, you would have thought that it would be easier to compose and put up a blog than start a business. It may be for most people, but when I tried to set up my new blog last night, this blog, and pasted my first entry I was “greeted” by a nasty corporate auto-message telling me that big brother had identified my blog as a possible spam blog, whatever that is. Therefore, no one could see my pearls of wisdom, posted at 3.00am in the early hours of a post-bank holiday morning. Nothing, it seems, is ever easy. No matter how simple I try to make it, something new comes along to make whatever I am attempting to do, just that little bit harder.
Anyway I better continue the rush and alleviate myself of the current swirling IBS pain in my lower gut before rushing off to the doctors to get energised for another bout of mundane soul destroying suburban life tasks.

Too Many Thoughts

I like to call myself a writer. According to the book I am reading, “How to write a Novel” a writer is someone who actually writes, not someone who thinks about writing. I do write for a large percentage of my waking hours, much of the time writing in my head, trying in vain desperation to get fragments of dialogue or character developments and plot twists down on the notes application of my handy I-Phone or writing on toilet paper and scraps of paper usually reserved for the shopping list by my recycling obsessed environmentally friendly wife. I write fictions novels that add in exaggerated parts of my own life or are completely fantasised concoctions wrenched from the dark depths of my ever swirling imagination. The factory within me is working overtime and I seem to be absorbing so much information of late that I need to get as much of it out as efficiently as possible before I burn out with information and thought overload.

This is why I have decided to start a new blog. This is blog number 3. I think. When starting a blog one has to ask oneself a very simple question. Why am I writing a blog? Then another question arises from the detritus sifting in my stuffy mind. Who am I writing it for? I am not a journalist or a well respected political commentator. I am not famous or rich. I am not a celebrity, be they A List or Z List. In my mind the fact that I am none of those things merely strengthens my decision to write a blog.

I have no specific affiliation to any political party but I am highly politicised in my views. I care about things. I care about too much it seems. I also have this strange and painful habit of thinking too much. It is not good for my health. So I thought it would be handy to use the internet as an outlet for some of these thoughts, in the effort to clear my head of all the different voices and inner gremlins vying for the diminishing resources of my increasingly frazzled brain. My neurones have struggled for years and if they do not get some breathing space soon they will all burnt out and leave me as a vegetable, consigned to the armchair watching mind numbing daytime TV programmes like Loose Women or inane game shows where people answer ridiculous questions decided by gimmicky fancy balls travelling along shiny, winding, cheap metal rollers on their journey to overpaid, snotty TV presenters.

What am I going on about? Are you bored already? OK, so am I.

Well how about this then for a change in direction. I just watched an excellent Storyville Documentary about the Vietnam War. It was called “Vietnam: How the War Was Lost.” It was 11.30pm at night and I have been trying to shrug off a permanent man flu cold that never seems to leave me, but that got worse over the weekend. I have not be particularly upbeat of late so I thought a little late night war documentary action would obviously help pick my mood up. This after I had just finished watching another War documentary on Channel 4 entitled “Churchill’s Darkest Decision”, about Winston Churchill’s decision to capture and sink the French Naval Fleet in 1940, after France had been occupied by Nazi Germany. Easy going happy evening viewing it was not. It was, however, nothing compared to the heart wrenching power of the Storyville documentary that I might have so easily missed had I not been flicking through the Guardian Guide because I was too exhausted to do anything else, after a day spent sneezing my way through 3 boxes of Kleenex Balsam tissues.

No matter how many programmes I watch about Vietnam I always learn something new. This documentary was beautifully filmed, edited and gave such a wide ranging and powerful selection of viewpoints that I could not help but be overawed by its impact. Even my wife, who had just been passing by the TV room in her usual pre bedtime routine of doing ten thousand chores all at once, was slowly drawn in by the fascinating tale and she ended up staying until the end. She was thoroughly depressed after it but was left enlightened and thoughtful, as was I.

I don’t want to present any plot spoilers and I think anyone who can should try and watch it but the basic premise is that there were 2 key events in late 1967 that the documentary filmmakers see as the turning point of the war. The first was a battle in Vietnam itself and the other was a student demonstration that was violently repressed by the police in the University of Wisconsin in the USA,. The stories of these 2 events and the effect it had on the people involved has left a mark so powerful on me that I had to start up this blog to write about it. It is a torrent of ideas and emotions and feelings that I had no space for even before all the events of the last year of my life. I certainly have little space for more internal conflict and confusion these insomnia ridden nights. So I am attempting to seek an outlet for my voices in the form of a simple blog in cyber space, without any of the luxuries or fanciful dressings of a novel or short story ,where I can hide behind fictional characters and dream like prose. This is me, raw, unadulterated, unedited me. And it hurts.

The image of the stone faced Madison City Police man who beat up unarmed students, peacefully demonstrating, as is their right and democratic duty, justifying his actions because he feels that anyone who does not obey authority and the orders and ideas of the President of the United States (POTUS) is a traitor, un patriotic or an anarchist, well that just astounds me. How anyone can turn away from facing their responsibilities and duty to challenge authority and their own representatives when they see images of the bodies of children burned by napalm also smacks me deep in the weakest part of my gut. The ignorance of tyranny and the tyranny of ignorance cannot be ignored. The Vietnam war is over but the struggle to make people who live in democracies realise their duty to not blindly follow authority and to continually challenge and question their so called representatives – albeit in a peaceful, civilised manner – is as urgent now as it was in 1967. Apathy cannot be excused, and life will not excuse it. From MPs morally corrupt abuse of their expenses to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from greedy Bankers still making money even after their recklessness lays waste to many lives and opportunities, to the revival of religion and blind faith in exploitative authorities and ideas that cannot be backed up with rational, logical evidence, the battles people with independent, thinking minds face are as real today as they have ever been. Yet I often feel it is a losing battle. One in which the first victim is myself. Ridden with stress, frustration, disillusionment and the physical somatisation of those inner psychological turmoil’s, what is all my procrastinating worth? If people are happy in ignorance and are so blind that they only cry when the tyranny gets so bad, as all tyranny eventually does, that it comes to harm them and their loved ones, then who am I to trouble myself an m y simple soul about it all?

I hope some people watch that documentary on Vietnam and are as shocked by the fact that even a few of the people in it who still see challenging the views of a government or authority as on the same level as anarchy. Not only is that illogical and pure, simple minded idiocy, it is a very dangerous idea and viewpoint in and of itself.

The greatest lie ever told to humanity is that challenging authority or anyone who challenges authority is building a road to anarchy. The truth is that without the demonstrators, thinkers, writers, agitators and Gandhi’s of this world the road of blind obedience leads to tyranny.