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Sunday 6 May 2018

A new plan, again: Day 7

Go real easy. I feel flat this morning. Took a long time to fall asleep again, felt scared and confused, every time I started dropping off it was like I was falling into fire. No, it wasn't like that. I can't now remember what it was like. Like spiders' nests, like black ragged wings, like my mind being pulled apart. At one point kept drifting off into work dreams where my room was the pub and I had to check all the doors and set the alarms before I could sleep, but then I'd wake up and realise I was in my room, then I'd be drifting off again and the lamp was a beer line that needed changing, then I'd wake up, then I'd be falling asleep but I had to wake myself up because the fire exits weren't checked, over and over, like bizarre form of torture.

Then finally long, strange dreams not knowing who I was, which way was up, a spectre lost in swirling realms.

Up now. Fran is making her first Instagram account, adding pictures of her dog. The window is open, sunlight streaming in. I felt flat but I got up and did the things, and doing the things made the flatness recede a little.

- - -

We just did a half-hour yoga video. Some of it was good, but it annoyed me as well. Couldn't even sit cross-legged in the first position without knees rising and everything being wobbly, precarious, not remotely grounded. And the video woman kept talking about going into the Krishtana pose or whatever like I was supposed to know what the fuck that was, and saying to breathe through my heart and embody gentle nobility and walk my fingertips up to, like, Uttsafana or something, but I had to sit up and crane my neck to see the screen and try to work out what the hell she was doing, and try to emulate that, but she'd already be moving on to the next thing, which I didn't get either.

Man, I hate being bad at things. It makes me so angry. But that's good I guess. Good to explore that, to be aware of that. Be curious of suffering, approach it with Beginner's Mind, experience it fully. All that fury when I am faced with something that it feels like everyone else can do and I can't do is interesting -- it is interesting that that is my response. How I direct it at someone or something else, e.g. the yoga woman, the concept of yoga itself. Rather than just accepting that I'm learning and taking it slow.

So I guess that's good. Good to recognise that in myself. I'm still angry, but that's OK. Let it be.

- - -

Sat in a square now before work, sunlight on me, the smells of burgers and marijuana and hot English skin wafting through the air. Reading my book. Stag party trampling past, Bonzo and The Beast and Phil "3 Spew" Spencer, cheap white tees, tattooed arms showing the first signs of UV damage. One of them has come unmoored, drifting helplessly in lagered waters, in danger of capsizing, so very lost.

And down through town, past throngs of bank holiday drinkers, men with bottom shirt buttons come undone, their bellies blobbing in the breeze. Women trailing acrid clouds of perfume. Bronzed legs. Muscled shoulders. Spray-on denim shorts. Spit and fists and booze-fuelled venom. Ung. Immolate the lot. Dunno if I can cope with eight hours serving these twats.

- - -

0204, in bed. Finished work, called taxi, slogged upstairs, brushed teeth, now I'm here. Biggest week the pub has ever had, and tomorrow still to go. Left the others having celebratory drink, came home to stretch, drink water, go to bed.

Work was a slog. A war of attrition. Those drunk pricks would fall before we fell. It was close though. Arron looked done. We all looked done.

I'm beat. Broken. Tired through every molecule. Don't know if I can do this again tomorrow. Don't feel I can sleep now. Fuck all this shit.

Seven days without any crap in my system though. A full week. This is all me. Any achievement is me. That feels good. Allow that to feel good.

One more close and snooker is over, and I can rest on Monday. God I need it to be Monday.

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