Day 223: What tills the soil?

Mmm, tired. Been watching Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson discussing the nature of self today, and thinking about that whole bag. What are we, eh? What’s all this? It’s mad. Life is mad. All the LEGO blocks that made us up a little while ago were making up armies in glistening chain mail, or robed Roman statesmen, or plodding dinosaurs. There were really dinosaurs, actual bloody dinosaurs, bumbling about where we now sit and watch YouTube!

And more, when you look down at those LEGO blocks that make us up now, that once made up dinosaurs, you see the blocks are only structures of smaller blocks, and those blocks again are structures of even smaller blocks, and even further until you can’t tell the difference between the block and the structure - until you get wave-particle duality.

And it’s not that we are made of atoms, or quarks, or molecules, or our physical bodies, or our experiential ur-sensation of Mind, or that we’re but cogs in the machine of societies, or planets, or solar systems. On every level you look there is structure manifesting some essential… what?

God? Tao? Reality?

Even after all these years I still catch myself having to lay out existence in really simple terms like this, to try to draw forth its inherent craziness and splendour, make me face up to it, because I know it’s… I guess… something on some level I flat out do not believe.

The part of me that has learned what I am through the bias of language we use, how we interact with one another, commonly held assumptions about life, that part of me wants to be a thing. I want to be the thing. Something solid and meaty and real. But everything we know about quantum mechanics, metaphysics, ontology says that there are no things. Or, rather, everything that is a thing is only a passing form, a temporary manifestation of… whatever does the manifesting. Call it God if you want.

I was thinking earlier that the brain is an interface between Self and Other. Between individual mind and external reality.

Which doesn’t mean there is parity between these two things. The boundary between them isn’t like that between two countries, or even between two sides of a coin. Mind on one side, external reality on the other. It’s more that the self, experience, is something that arises out of underlying reality. It’s like the self is a flower that blossoms upon the plant of reality.

I am not you. I am not this keyboard upon which I type. The flower is not the leaves, the stem, of the plant. OK. But they are not mechanical things, like parts of a car, put together. The flower wasn’t screwed onto the plant. The flower grows from the plant. If you look down carefully at the boundary, the stalk, you find one becoming the other.

Is this the brain? I think so. I mean, my physical body, to an extent that already exists in the realm of reality, of Other, right? I have control over it, but that statement already implies the "it" is separate from the "I" that controls it. It’s like the lower part of that stalk beneath the flower, without which the flower would not exist. This is obvious when part of it gets cut off. If I lose an arm, a finger, a toenail, even. If this happens I haven't lost myself, I've lost something attached to myself. I guess it’s at the boundary, the liminal space, where it’s not wholly Self, and not wholly Other.

And so you have the flower, a unique, exquisite thing, unlike any other flower. And it buds forth from a plant, which is external reality, from which the flower cannot be detached (while it still lives).

And what’s more, this plant, with its leaves of objects out in the world - keyboards and desks and cars and yoghurt pots - is the same plant upon which all other flowers bloom. So I look across at you, and I have no doubt you are a flower, like me, but you’re also part of the plant of Other. You are part of my external reality. And I am part of your external reality.

Wild, man.

So we’re all intimately joined, right? We are flowers brought forth from the same plant, all different, but all manifestations of the same living process.

And that process, the plant, all the objects and physical structures in our universe, is rooted in some underlying soil. (Excuse the “rooted” pun there, which I didn’t make on purpose. And note to myself here, when looking back at these crazed ramblings [because let’s be honest, who else are they for?]: is this a meeting of Chomsky’s universal grammar and of Jungian archetypes, the idea that the concept of “rooted” has some deeper ground (ha!) of meaning that applies to relationships between both plant and soil, and physical and metaphysical; that you can use the same word for both?)

Uhh, what was I saying? So brain is the interface between Self and Other. And the reality that holds both of these is maybe the interface between… process and structure?

Structure, the plant and its flowers, is our world, what the world looks like, how it is formed. It is you, it is me, it is the environment in which we live, from which we arise, to which we in death we retreat.

Process is… the breath that animates us. The spirit forming itself into every rock, every wall, every home. It is the Tao. Mystery of mysteries. It is what someone might call God.

And that word is so loaded with so much rubbish, but the thing is in secular society today we don’t pay a whole lot of attention to this underlying essence from which everything in existence manifests. Which surely we should, because we don’t know anything about it, and it’s fascinating. But I think a lot of us instinctively turn away from thinking about it, because it doesn’t compute with our subconscious assumptions about who we are, which are unfortunately still informed by outmoded concepts of body and soul, matter and spirit, concepts from Greek thought, from medieval beliefs, from the Enlightenment, from Victorian science (which was too dependent on narrow-beam thinking, showing a picture of mechanical, individual things). When thinking evolves it does not necessarily throw out and replace how we used to think, but rather subsumes it, often keeping hold for a long time of elements that are no longer congruous.

I think that has happened with us, and the current views of quantum mechanics and ontology - of modern science, essentially - are actually incompatible with some of the older assumptions about existence we still cling onto in our brains.

And this is scary, because it involves letting go of your entire sense of self, of the rock you cling to in the tempestuous ocean of an uncaring universe. It involves acknowledging that the rock is imaginary, in fact, that it is a mirage.

And suddenly you’re drowning in darkness and everything is coming apart and meaning itself is falling away.

But then you breathe. And you carry on breathing. And you find that if it’s true that the rock doesn’t exist then the rock never existed. So what have you been clinging on to all this time?

You’ve been floating by yourself. Let go. Relax. Everything in you already knows how to live. You are not an object bobbing in the ocean, but the ocean itself. Its storming is your storming. You are alive.

And only I think after we've been honest about this can we seriously debate what we mean by terms like "God", what it is that pulses rhythmically through the central stem of the plant of Other, that rustles the petals of Self; what it is that tills the soil of the ground of existence from which all things grow.

...... 

OK, that's enough late night rambling. Sorry for the waffle. It's what's in my head. I can only put down what is in my head, communicated as clearly as I can manage in the time available, and not worry about where I fall short.

Music: something appropriate. I Never Lose, Never Really, by Belong. Beautiful!

Day 67: Traps

I'm in the bathroom brushing my teeth and looking at myself in the mirror and thinking about how disappointing I am, when it strikes me that it would be possible to not think like this.

What an insight. What a radical thought.

"You know how you always feel awful about yourself?" I think. "Why not try not doing that?"

It obviously wouldn't be easy. I have decades of experience feeling awful about myself. It's second nature.

"And well it should be," the negative voice in my head chimes in. "You are, after all, awful."

Hmm. Hard to argue with that logic. It's so... axiomatic.

But what if I perhaps pretended I wasn't awful? Just for one day. If I pretended that I'm proud of myself, pretended that it doesn't matter that I have no idea what to write for today's blog post, that when I try to do more of those writing prompts there's a wall there, that I'm completely lost and confused and afraid and miserable and...

... OK. That is exactly what I need to not do. Dammit.

So, yeah. If instead of that stuff I just pretend it's all fine. What if I try acting like everything is as it should be? Like it's all right that...

... No. Don't go down into spirals about why it's not all right. Stay here.

And I can hear you yelling, negative voice, I can hear that you want to remind me that all that terrible stuff does matter. I'm not saying it doesn't, OK? Simmer down. But just for today how about we pretend it doesn't, just as a sort of game, just as an experiment, to see how it makes us feel?

"Can you do that?" I ask my inner voice. "Can you be open enough to give that a fair go?"

"No problemo," the inner voice says, cool as a cucumber, swirling a brandy in its non-corporeal hand.

Then I go to put my socks on and the only pairs are hanging on the line and on the way downstairs I instantly forget what I'd just decided and I spend the next two hours feeling awful about myself.

- - -

I remember the plan while walking around Weston Park, and I feel awful about myself for forgetting to not feel awful about myself. Then I see the irony in this, and feel awful about myself for how stupid I am for not immediately seeing the irony in this, which is itself ironic, which...

... I mentally slap myself across the face. STOP IT. Just stop it. Just accept whatever this present moment brings. Decide to feel good about yourself. It's a simple choice. Make it.

I breathe out a long way, and look at the park around me. The sun is shining through the leaves, casting dappled shadows on the ground. The fountain is splashing loudly. The splashing is very matter-of-fact. There is a calmness to it. It is nice. Everything is beautiful.

I walk on a way, then forget what I'm thinking about and start feeling awful about myself again.

- - -

Later, in the trendy coffee shop I've begun frequenting, I see my usual table is taken.

Then I think how weird it is to have a usual table after three visits to a place, that it betrays some unique and fundamental failing on my part, a debilitating need to retreat to safety, an inability to try new experiences, and that everyone can see this in me, that it will be obvious to the staff of the coffee shop. It's good that I have to sit at a different table.

But because I'm caught up in these thoughts, and in how paranoid, not to mention narcissistic, the thoughts are, how much of a mess I am inside my head, I get to a seat and then realise I haven't picked up the wooden block that serves as the table number to which the waitress will bring my coffee.

I go back to get it. But I find I'm hemmed in between the breakfast bar and a customer's seat. There's not enough room. I start to turn around, then turn back. There might be enough room. I look. No. There's not enough room. I could ask the customer to budge in a little, but let's be honest, I'm not doing that. So I turn around again, walk back round the long way, now convinced that I look both weak for not asserting my right to pass the customer, and also utterly insane for walking to the middle of the floor, pivoting wildly on the spot, then looping back to the till.

It would be nice to make a joke about this to the waitress, to make myself look silly for the staff's amusement, to show I don't take myself seriously -- I feel that's what a normal human being would do -- but I'm on that cusp of blushing where everything is heightened and prickling, and the sweat is already running down my forehead from the heat, so I just take the wooden block proffered by the bored waitress and mumble my thanks and clomp back to my seat.

And then I remember I'm not supposed to be feeling awful about myself.

And I feel doubly awful for how awful I've been feeling about myself.

And triply awful for feeling doubly awful about myself.

And quadruply awful...

Ung. Remember the park. It's a simple letting go. A decision. It's... like a Chinese finger trap. The more you struggle, the worse it gets. You just have to relax. You have to accept.

OK. That's all you have to say. OK.

So I'm a fuck up, am I? OK.

I'm the worst person to have ever existed, not just on this planet but on all planets, and in universes not yet even created? OK.

Everyone in this coffee shop thinks I'm a loser? OK.

And then you go from there. Probably everyone in this coffee shop hasn't even noticed me, probably they're far too caught up in their own lives to worry about mine -- but if they have noticed me, and they do think I'm a loser, then OK. The truth is the truth. It cannot be argued with. This moment is already all it will ever be. You can only accept it. The next moment, you can try to change that one, sure -- but that action has to come out of the stillness and acceptance of this present moment, or it will be doomed to failure.

Reality is what it is. I am who I am.

- - -

So I sit there and think about that for a while. I work like that on every negative thought that arises -- and boy do they arise! And I sit in the afternoon sun drinking my coffee and writing, and it is good.

And, yes, eventually I forget, and I start feeling awful about myself again.

But I remembered a few times today. That's more than I remembered yesterday. Maybe I'll remember even more tomorrow.

A Chinese finger trap is the same every time. You can learn to beat it.

Day 54: A quick question

Imagine this: your close friend comes to you and tells you that they've become interested in origami, that they've started creating origami models, but that recently someone has been messaging them saying horrible things, telling them their models are rubbish, that they (the friend) are a joke, that everything they make looks pathetic, that everyone is laughing at them, that it's all a waste of time and the friend should give up before they make an even bigger fool of themselves.

You'd give this friend a big hug, right? You'd give them a big hug and look directly into their eyes and tell them in complete honesty to ignore that prick. You'd say that that stuff all is nonsense. We're all only going to die, we're reaching no final goal apart from that, death, and if we can find something that gives us meaning in the doing of it, for a short while, then that is worth doing.

You'd say that you bet the origami models are not rubbish, that you bet they're really cool. And that even if you did personally think they were rubbish, that still would be only your opinion, that there is no one objective truth about art. That even if there was, and even if your friend somehow ended up making objectively the worst origami models the planet had ever seen, they should just get on with doing that, over and over, that they should love it all, should gather up handfuls of their terrible origami models and set the fuckers alight, torch them, and dance naked over the flames, dance and howl at the moon, spit at the stars -- then put their clothes back on and make a whole load more terrible origami models.

You'd say that we contain no permanent selves. That we are not fixed, there is nothing in us to be a failure, to be not good enough. That we are a flowing dream of a ghost passing through carbon atoms arising and falling on a rock hurtling through infinite space on its way back into the birthing pool of nothingness, and that with all that in mind if they, your friend, want to make origami models then they should bloody well go and make origami models, haters be damned.

Right?

That is what I would say. That is what I truly believe. It would be easy.

And yet when we ourselves are beset by self-doubts over our own endeavours, when that negative voice in our heads is telling us it's all worthless, everything we do is pathetic, that we should give up -- why then do we find it so hard to be similarly kind to ourselves?

If you wouldn't let a stranger say it to your friend, don't let your own head say it to you. Disagree, argue, talk it down. You are deserving of love.

I'm trying to keep this in mind tonight. It's so tough, but I'm trying.

A new plan, again: Day 29

LLLLLLgjgjgjjj. Bugger smooshit grappling cockerel. I gots no words. I'm all out of words. Written them through. Spluttered them out. Sinking the lonesome traveller. Lost yearning crabapple spirals. Crenellated mornings. Ebony feathers. Gentle sways the filigreed blackness of the carburettor dusk.

Stood looking out of my window watching the twilit street. Fat moon yellow glooming through mists of evening, soft footslaps on pavement muffled tread. Car door drams, voices murmur, fading sighing into night. Go back two months and this hand would be holding a beer bottle; you can be lonesome yet sheltered with a beer bottle, a ship at anchor in forgotten cove. Sober you watch the storm lash and get a shiver down your spine that builds and builds.

Pavements tell no tales. These same streets stalked by Roman soldiers and Bronze Age smelters and guttural brontosaurs craning loudly down the hill. Cement, that archetypal symbol of human endeavour, is just old rock and stone and chalk and clay.

How many eyes gone loose and peered achingly in this spot towards distant starlight? Sadness of all beings, lagoonal grief of plaintive hearts. Sadness sensed beneath the knowing, ancient tender wailing world. Sitting in our bodies gazing beyond we are joined in mourning; when we know the least is when we see the best.

Tomorrow it will be 30 days since I last had a drink. One foot in front of the other feels like a futile march of drowsy limbs, yet move only like this to travel round the world. Don't stop. Keep going. Keep tramping doggedly into the curving Earth.

A new plan, again: Day 26

I got depressed again last night. Just after putting up my last post. And you know what? I'm glad it happened.

For a start, it did happen, definitely, so I may as well make peace with that and move on. But more than that, it gave me a chance to do something that turned out to be really powerful, and that ultimately (I think) cut the depression short.

What it allowed me to do was become curious about my suffering.

This is not our usual method in the West. We tend to approach pain as something unwanted and other to be avoided, medicated, zapped into oblivion. Take enough tablets and numb the feeling down, and everything will be OK.

But in getting curious about my suffering I was able to see it in a wildly different light.

Here's what I did.

1. When the suffering, which was depression, a highly negative voice, arose, I looked at it and said to myself, "Now that's interesting."
2. I asked myself what it felt like. What emotions was I feeling? What thoughts was I thinking? Were there any physical sensations? How did they feel?
3. And I let all of that be. I let the thoughts arise, the emotions, the physiological symptoms. Let them do what they would do. And watched them.
4. And in doing so I became more present, more aware. I was not my suffering, or at least not just my suffering. I was also the space in which the suffering manifested. The ability to experience the suffering.

The flame of depression is horrendous, yes, but it cannot sustain itself without an energy that you yourself must feed it. Those ruminations -- I'm so worthless, I'm awful at everything, I can never do anything right -- they keep the flame burning. In becoming curious about your suffering you break that cycle, you turn off the gas.

There is still, of course, the gas that was already fed in. Maybe that is an awful lot. But you watch it, curiously, watch it flicker and dance. "How interesting that I can have a voice like that in my head. How interesting that humans can feel that way. How interesting that I would do this to myself."

You find there's a lot of energy in the flame, when you stop judging it, stop wishing it wasn't so. A lot of lifeforce. It's quite marvellous. Destructive, yes, but marvellous as well.

And eventually, without your identification pumping in more fuel, the flame goes out. And you're back as yourself.

That's what happened last night. And of course the depression will return. The negative voice. In fact I heard it many times today.

But I stayed curious, and the fire never really took hold. And right now I feel pretty good.

What suffering is there in your life? What do you push away and resist? Try being curious about it instead, accepting it and watching it to see precisely what happens. You might be surprised with the results.

A new plan, again: Day 23

Day off today. Sat in my room with the Velux windows pulled wide, writing this and applying warm compresses to my eye. I have this thing with my eyes. There are glands in the eyelids that secrete an oil that mixes with tears to keep your eyes lubricated, and these glands can become clogged, causing the oil to back up and get infected and form into small hard lumps that take months to break down and wash away.

Well, people with skin conditions like acne -- yep, hello -- are more susceptible to the glands clogging, which means not only do I have to deal with breakouts all over my skin but also lumps in my eyes that make my eyelids droop and blur my vision and look horrible and gross.

But, you know, I'm getting into self pity there. We all have our burdens. Moaning about my problems and wishing they weren't so is what the old me was about. The new me is about doing what is in my power to do, and letting go of the rest.

So I'm applying warm compresses to one of my eyelids, in which there is I think a clogged gland in its early stages. I'm massaging the lid gently downwards, as per doctor's instructions, in the hopes of unblocking the debris and encouraging the oil to drain away. There's no lump yet, and hopefully there won't be this time. And if there is, well I'll deal with that when it happens. Maybe it'll be a good opportunity to practice putting less of my sense of self in my physical appearance, to remember that people are beautiful for the grace with which they deal with life, not for having smooth skin and symmetrical features.

- - -

Came across a Twitter thread by the Scottish comedian Limmy today, about his mental health. In particular a bit about people reminding him of the good things in his life when he's gone under:

"When I get in that suicidal way, it feels like a rage, like a fog, but I'm not angry. I just cannae think straight. Saying "But what about your son?" means fuck all when I get like that. It's like I'm unable to feel good, or remember feeling good.

This really strikes a chord with me. Depression is like being in a different brain, it's like moving into a different room from your loved ones. They're still there, in that old room, along with your interests, your hopes, your passions, but you're across the hall in a black room, and you cannot touch them.

People sometimes talk about depression being a dark cloud passing in front of the sun, a thunderous rainstorm, that you should remember that blue skies are still blazing behind the shadow, but this image does not adequately describe the sensation for me. It might be comforting when healthy to imagine mental illness as being a temporary anomaly, but the truth is that when you are inside an episode it is its own reality, its own realm, cold and inert, and it is the warm living realm that feels like the lie.

This thing about loved ones is a good illustration. It isn't that you don't love your family, your spouse, your friends -- as in that you experience love but not specifically for these people -- it is that the whole concept of love is foreign to you. You know logically that you love them, you remember your life in the warm realm and remember that yes, of course you love your family. But in the cold realm there is no love.

If love is the attraction of all particles, depression is the repulsion of those particles. If love is sensing the space between people as somehow alive and tangible, holding us and drawing us together, then depression is sensing only the emptiness between things. It's like the connection between humans and their daemons in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books -- and depression is the severing of that connection, literally like the invisible threads that connect your soul to other souls have been cut with a knife.

When in the warm realm of good mental health you don't have to work out that you love someone, that you enjoy an activity, that food tastes good, you just innately know it, innately feel it -- but in the cold realm of depression all you innately know is that you feel nothing at all.

It is a sensation of horror, except a frozen horror, one that you don't have the depth of feeling to experience. It would be fitting to cry, but tears spring from a well of emotion of which you in this realm are not in possession. What escapes instead is a sort of strangled fatigued yelp.

Reality is only ever a construct, only ever imagined in our heads, and mental illness simply constructs a different reality. From inside it all the rules that made sense in that warmer realm no longer apply. You cling to the frail memory of the other place, though that memory is shorn of feeling, of vibrancy, you cling to its edges anyway, in the hopes of finding your way back across the void.

And you can find your way back. Depression does pass. Methods do work. It's just nothing feels like it works at the time. Part of the journey home, I think, involves recognising that you cannot trust the reality of the depressed realm. What you have to trust is the memories of the living realm, even though you can't presently see or smell or touch what the memories represent. You have to find some way to go outside even though going outside is the hardest worst thing in the world to do. You have to eat a healthy meal even though the idea of vegetables and cooking turns your stomach. You have to start haltingly and awkwardly talking to someone, saying that you are lost at sea, although the words are like chalk in your mouth.

There is another world. If you're struggling now then hear me when I say there is another world. Have faith, and hold to that faith, even when you have absolutely nothing else. Just keep going.

A new plan, again: Day 22

I feel I've regressed today. Feel like I'm slipping backwards. Lots of negative thoughts. No motivation. Brain a big ol' pot of depression soup.

But that's the nature of progress, right? You have some success, you feel yourself improving, then the road becomes muddy, you retreat a little, you doubt yourself, you question the whole endeavour.

Life grows forward in a naturally wary way, and this is all to be expected. But it's a dangerous point, nonetheless. Easy to give up and trudge back to the safety of old routine.

I need to focus on everything I've been thinking of late. It's like a test. And tests only exist to ensure we've learnt the lessons that have been presented. So:

- The point of this isn't to get anywhere, it's to be more present and alert and alive right now, in this moment, the only moment we ever get. I may entertain the dream that by doing this enough I'll stop having any negative thoughts and I'll heal my depression and life will become easy and beautiful and perfect all the time, but that is an illusion. Life will always be thus. Always at times a struggle. I'll have periods not wanting to write, not feeling inspired. I'll always have that voice in my head worrying I'm not doing it right, that I'm uniquely dumb and awkward and broken, that everyone else has been handed an instruction manual that by some accident or design was never passed on to me.

- And that is all right. And there are things to do about that. Don't feed the negative thoughts. Notice them arising, become an expert at recognising their shape, their smell, the emotional valence with which they are felt. As soon as I perceive one having arrived, pause, speak to it. "Ahh, it's you again. Right on time. Come on in, make yourself comfortable, have a cup of tea. Stay as long as you need, for you are welcome in this head, but I am busy, and I don't have time to listen to your dark words. I care deeply for you, for who you are at your core, but I care not at all for the rubbish you spout. I will not be having one of your pamphlets. I will not be engaging in arguments with you. I love you, but I'm going to be firm. Now I'm off. Let yourself out when you're ready."

- Do the things I want to be doing. Just do them. If I have lowered resources, if I'm drained, my mental health is poor, then do only as much as I can handle. An overweight person doesn't immediately run a marathon. They put into place a habit of walking once round the block, every day -- and they stick to it. In yoga you don't contort yourself into an expert's pose first time. You stretch only as far as your body is comfortable (and maybe a touch further). It's not about achieving everything right this second. It's about living the rest of my life.

- Conversely, do not do the things that I know will keep me away from what I want to be doing. We all sense what these things are for each of us. Your heart will tell you. If you want to be making music but you keep getting drunk instead, stop getting drunk. If you want to be planning a travelling trip but you keep smoking weed, put down that bong. If I'm always scrolling aimlessly down Instagram instead of writing a blog post, turn my phone off. These things are distractions. Cut them out and focus on what we truly want.

- And finally, bring focus continually back to the process, not the results. We do not exist in static nouns -- success, victory, achievement -- we exist in the flux of verbs. Living, breathing, doing verbs. The abstract concept of winning a race sounds nice, but if that happens you're still just there, with the gold medal round your neck, sucking down air, adding oxygen to your blood, removing carbon dioxide, passing electro-chemical signals between neurons, thinking about how your feet hurt, you need a wee, which way was the winner's podium, is this enough, this isn't enough, what are you doing next, what is for tea. It all flows. We are not objects dropped in the river of life; we are the river; it flows through us.

So the more you can concentrate on what you're doing as you're doing it, rather that what it might bring, the happier you'll be. Not happy as opposed to sad, because there will be plenty of sadness as well. But happy as opposed to... out-of-sync, maybe? As opposed to... unbalanced? Happy and sad emotions are important, but they must be experienced in fullness as they arise.

- - -

So here I am, typing away, rushing to get this finished before work, swapping out first- and second-person pronouns because I can't decide whether this is advice for me, or advice for you -- perhaps for all of us... and it's not perfect, and I don't know where it's leading, but it's good, it's all right, I'm content again I think to be on this path putting one foot in front of the other, with the sun beating down and the world humming around me, and that is the most you can ask for, I reckon, to be here and to be OK with that.

A new plan, again: Day 20

They're odd things, awards ceremonies. Pretentious circle-jerks for the representatives of companies who have spent enough on advertising to be shortlisted, bored guests sitting around trying to work up enthusiasm to clap for winners they hope will in turn clap when it's their turn on stage, some z-list host wiping the powder from his nose wishing he was young enough to still do the thing that made him just famous enough to be invited to this gig, everyone getting rapidly battered off cheap wine and taking photos of themselves with their own cameras and then going home alone and vomiting in their toilets and secretly hating themselves.

What I'm trying to say is that we didn't win Best Bar.

No, but all cynicism aside, it was a good night. If by "a good night" you mean "the worst way to spend a Thursday since the Hindenburg Disaster".

No, I'm joking, it was actually all right. We got free cake. We clapped Sean from Beer Central (though he didn't win). Mike made a joke at a woman from OHM while we queued for polystyrene trays of potato raclette.

"Is it Ohm, or O-H-M?" someone asked.

"I don't know," the woman said. "I say O-H-M, because customers always go 'ommm' and make jokes and it's like, fuck off."

"I bet there's some resistance to that," Mike said.

The woman carried on talking. I looked at Mike, and Mike looked at me, and then Mike looked at the woman and pretended to be listening. I think I'm in love with Mike.

After the ceremony I made is as far as The Old Workshop and Dev Cat and Wick, getting a contact high off the others, drinking vicariously through them, then when they were heading to the Harley I got Mike in a taxi and took off. Partly because nothing good has ever happened to anyone who's older than 30 in the Harley, and partly because I was working the open today, and also partly because Mike was trying to get cash out from a postbox and it really seemed time to get him home.

- - -

I woke up wishing I'd escaped three or so hours sooner -- I had not had nearly enough sleep, and had flaunted my "in bed by 2am" rule -- but at least I wasn't hungover. I'd felt sadness and isolation in the Wick, as the voices soared and the cacophony set in and the spirits of abandon began to come alive-- felt sobriety was one cold grey afternoon for the rest of eternity and all true life was the flame, the chaos, the lambent liquid glow in the bottom of the bottle when the strange music starts to howl. Christ I wanted a drink. To give myself away to the goddess of booze, incinerate all edges, rise reborn an angel of furious belief...

But shaking the mustiness from my brain and showering and travelling to work I was so glad of my choice, of the quiet path, of not burning up but letting an element steadily heat me for the whole of the week.

- - -

Paint-by-numbers Friday shift, then an Uber to meet Jake. We were off to see Missy's play, starring Dale also, written by Dreads, with stage management and props by Joe. Their little baby, and the fruit of months of hard work.

I wasn't in the mood for am-dram (is anyone, ever?), was tired and knew I had this writing to do. But I wanted to support my friends, so forced myself along. And it actually was fabulous, full of energy and mirth, and in contrast to the awards ceremony created for no reason other than inherent delight. There were some great lines, and Dale and Missy smashed it. A man played the part of a magical door. He made door-related puns. I was in heaven.

And Jake was at his best, on the way to steaming from an afternoon of Stella with Big Steve, now having to hold it together in front of Missy's parents and his grandparents and everyone, but and so just giving himself to love, the thing he does where he gives himself to love, talks to every person, sees them all as his friends, a world of friends either known or ready to be made, a jolly adventure, life nothing but an excuse to feel joy -- his boyish face beaming, unable to hold in the warmth -- And we took our seats and thirty seconds in he was roaring with laughter, the sounds escaping with only maybe the gentlest of nudges, no space for black feelings, for jealousy, for nerves.

That mindset is contagious. Come the interval I'm shocked to find myself weightless, sailing, buoyed by my heart. Who needs perfectionism, cynicism that it isn't Pinter or Beckett? Let it go and remember we're children riding a storm into space. Let it go. Live for a lark. Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.

"It's great, isn't it?" says Jake afterwards, trying to articulate. "They've put on a thing. You know? We haven't put on a thing. They've put on a thing. For us. Isn't that great."

I nod. It is.

Mental Illness: You Or The Universe?

I've been pretty ill this past week. It wasn't an easy time, I was in a lot of pain, but I did what I could -- I sought medical help, took what was prescribed to me, let people know what was going on, accepted support and sympathy where they were offered, didn't blame myself, and took the time needed to heal. It was a tough thing to go through, but I faced it the right way, and it turned out to not be so bad.

I'm talking here about getting shingles, but I could just as easily be referring to a bout of depression. And yet, if my illness had been mental rather than physical, the likelihood is that I would have dealt with it in a very different way.

I tend to isolate myself when I am depressed. I work extra hard to pretend everything is fine. I suffer in silence. I don't ask for help. But, most of all, I really struggle with blame.

Either I blame myself, for being weak, for being pathetic, for being a coward, and suffer the pains of guilt and shame and embarrassment, or else I blame the universe for foisting this misery upon me, and I drown in self-pity.

I doubt these feelings are unique to me. There is still such a taboo against mental illness in our culture, especially among men, emotionally cut-off as we often are, dealing with outmoded concepts of masculinity -- having to be the strong one, the breadwinner, the head of the household -- as we often are.

We're terrified of something unseen affecting our will, our resolve, our sense of self. We feel if something goes wrong with our ability to want, to care, to hope, then something horrendous has gone wrong with us, in a way that we don't when we have a problem with our leg, say, or our liver, or, as is the case with shingles, our skin and nerves.

The thing is, despite decades of knowledge garnered from neuroscience, psychotherapy, quantum mechanics, philosophy, countless other varied disciplines, our common understanding of the relationship between our mind and our body, between our body and the universe, between self and other, is pretty much stuck in the Dark Ages.

Here is my bold statement for this post: There is no point blaming either yourself or the universe for your depression, because in truth you are the universe, and the universe is you.

I'm going to get a bit trippy here, but let's go for it...

Everything in the universe, right, is made of the same stuff. This stuff cannot be seen, or known, because it has no opposite. There is nothing that isn't it with which it can be contrasted. It is all that there is.

Everything that we think of as individual things, including you and me, is simply this universal stuff arranged into different structures.

Bear with me here. Let's say you made, I don't know, a child's fort out of chairs in your dining room. The fort itself wouldn't be an intrinsic thing, it wouldn't be made of "fort", it would simply be an arrangement, a structure, of chairs.

And yet a chair is not an intrinsic thing, either. It is an arrangement, a structure, of smaller things, known as atoms. And atoms are not intrinsic things -- though we thought they were when we discovered them, hence the name, which is Greek for "unable to cut". But atoms are not atomic, they are simply structures of smaller things, of electrons and protons and neutrons. And electrons and protons and neutrons are not things themselves, but structures of quarks and leptons and gluons and the like. And these fizzly bitty little things may have been named "fundamental particles" (rather quixotically, I feel), but what can we expect to find, if we are ever able to peer down inside them, other than more arrangements, more structures?

There is an emptiness going all the way down. In place of substance, of matter, of stuff, we find instead shapes, patterns, space. Relationship. A dance of order and chaos. All of it joined with all of the rest of it.

Or, OK, try this: At the moment of the Big Bang everything occupied the same point in space. All of space, in fact, occupied the same point in space. And then it exploded. Simple structures were formed, and began themselves to form into more complex structures. Atoms arranged themselves into the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium and such.

As these arrangements cooled they formed together into stars. And the immense pressures at the centres of these stars pushed the structures of atoms together with such force that some of the structures were broken or fused together into new patterns. Yet more patterns were created in the supernovae of dying stars. And, in such ways, every single element that makes up our world was created. Carbon, oxygen, magnesium... byzantium... rope... jam. The whole periodic table. There is no difference between any element in existence save the way its electrons, protons, and neutrons are structured -- like different forts all made from the same chairs.

Anyway, some of these structures of atoms, after taking their bloody time about it, eventually arranged themselves together into our Earth. And some of our Earth's structure eventually arranged itself together into a type of energy transfer we call life. Some forms of life evolved structures called brains. Many didn't, such as fungi and jellyfish, and these lifeforms seemed fairly content to be brainless, and survived well. But among the lifeforms that did evolve brains, a tiny minority eventually developed their brains to a level where they could invent chess, and the Sistine Chapel, and poetry, and the Beatles, and cheese on toast, and this was all rather nice.

But every power contains within it its own flaw. To be able to fly, you must run the risk of falling. To be able to float, sometimes you must sink. And for the human brain to be able to care, to dream, to hope, it must run the risk of this hope faltering. To love, it must risk depression.

So this is what I say to you: When you get depressed, you can blame the fucking stars, if you wish -- although remember that the stars are you, are burning outwards through your very eyes. Or you can blame yourself, if you wish -- although remember that you are but a permutation, a unique expression, of the whole vast interconnected universe.

Or, alternatively, you can drop the blame game altogether. Stop beating yourself up for being depressed. Stop beating the universe up for making you depressed. Recognise that depression is just an unfortunate thing that happens, like a breaking a leg, or catching a cold, or getting shingles. It is an obstacle before you, one that you would never have wished for, but one that is here -- and you can face it in a way that helps, or a way that does not help.

Be brave. Reach out. Accept support. I can tell you honestly that there will be people out there who will be there for you, if you look for them. I am there for you. We are all in this together. We all are this together.

Keep going. You are incredible. You can do this.

[A final, brief note: I am aware of a couple of scientific inaccuracies in this piece that I couldn't be bothered to write out. Electrons are not, in fact, of the same order as protons and neutrons, i.e., comprised of quarks held together by gluons, but rather fundamental particles in their own right, of the family of leptons. Also, technically not *all* of the elements of the periodic table were formed in the ways I stated; 26 "man-made" elements were created in nuclear power plants and inside particle accelerators. But as my main thrust is that man him-or-her-self is in fact a function of nature, I didn't figure this required time wasting upon it. But just in case you were worried that I didn't know, I did. Any other errors, however, I have made because I am a nincompoop, and if you find them you can go "nurr-nurr" at me.]

Would You Just... Stop Taking Life So Seriously?

Oh boy, I am tired from work last night. It wasn't even tough, I'm just getting too old for these late nights. I didn't go out afterwards, however, and I didn't drink. So that's grand.

I'm not going to be around this weekend because it is Jake's birthday, and he has the same ideas on size and duration of birthday celebrations as Bilbo Baggins. My next three days are booked solid. I just hope to be the mysterious Gandalf regaling youngsters with stories and fireworks, rather than the cantankerous old hobbit yelling that it's ProudFEET -- although as long as I don't spend the weekend passed out on pipeweed I'll take it as a win.

Anyway, before I put on my wizard's hat and disappear into Middle Earth, aka Jake's flat, I want to write a bit here so I can then go and party guilt-free.

I was thinking about existence a bit over my morning cereal, which I tend to do, so I guess I'll try to scribble out my thoughts now, for wont of anything more organised to say.

It's weird, existence, isn't it? I mean, none of it matters. None of it. There are seven billion of us, all thinking we're the important one, that it's our promotion or degree or car insurance or battles with personal demons that matter. But we're wrong. We're all just going to die. And everyone we've ever met or connected with or given birth to will also die, and every thought about bank accounts or dandruff or office sales leagues will crumble like ephemera torn apart on the breeze.

I, uhh, realise that sounds a little pessimistic. But I don't think it has to.

The thing is, it's so easy to die. OK, yes, that doesn't sound better, but bear with me. It is so easy to die, to stop existing. We're suffocating every instant, and we take a breath to save ourselves only long enough to begin suffocating again in the next instant. We're teetering on the precipice of destruction. It takes so much energy to keep ourselves from falling.

But there's no necessity. It's much more sensible, when you think about it, to not exist. It's the default setting. It's what we'll all be doing soon anyway. It's what we were doing for all of eternity before we were born. I don't remember it being so bad.

We have the biological urge to survive, for sure, but this is only an accident of evolution. Organisms mutated into existence, and some of these organisms mutated in ways that kept them existing, and these passed on their code, and the others were lost. Over millennia this has been hardened through insane amounts of repetition into the will to live, but it's still only an accident. Not a commandment from some God. Not a moralistic duty. Just an accident that we pass on.

So if we don't want to live, it's no big deal. It's hard work, after all, breathing, pumping blood, repairing wounds, remembering PIN numbers, thinking of new and exciting meals to cook every night. And it's hard work that in the end comes to naught.

We're not going anywhere. We're not reaching anything. The point of life isn't to procreate, it's just that procreation keeps life happening. Otherwise it'd be rather like saying the point of watching an episode of a TV show is to get to the next episode.

This is it, then. We bumble about for a few years -- three? fifty? -- and then it's over.

But, Christ, this isn't a bad thing. What it really means is: no pressure. If life is unimportant and meaningless and ending soon, then so are all our worries. If existence itself is not precious, then neither is your university degree that you might fail, or your car that has just broken down, or the fact your friend always looks so sexy in her slinky dresses while you look so misshapen and gross, or the lads in your office saying cruel things about you, or having to stay together for the kids, or having to break up for the kids, or confusion, or illness, or despair. If we're insignificant and temporary, then so is everything that troubles us.

And don't get me wrong, there will still be troubles. Your car will still break down, as will your body, and that will suck. But discomfort and strife are intimately tied to existence. There can be no pleasure, after all, without pain. No up without down. No beauty without Piers Morgan. It's all just part of the experience, the glorious, mysterious, terrifying ride.

You can get off whenever you want. Otherwise just enjoy it.

Or don't. It honestly is up to you.