SoC #1

This is not to be read by anybody, including me.  I'm going to just type stuff without reading it back and have no intention of ever reading it again in the future.

How long that will hold, I don't know.

So, pure random.  Choice at random.  First thing into head.

John Mann

What do we know about John Mann?

- He was born in 1960.
- He supports Leeds Utd.
- He is the Labour MP for Bassetlaw.

These things are known about John Mann; they are all facts within the public domain.

I wonder what other things - things not in the public domain - are known about John Mann?


[Edit @ 23/09/2016:  Now this is getting a bit mad again.  I think I was upset with him at the time, but even so.]

Need to do stuff.

Any stuff, really.

Now I'm more under control, I recognise why I was making myself so isolated and weird (part selfishness, part fear and all counter-productive is the short answer to that) but I'm not sure why it seems so difficult to resume normal life. I suppose I've let myself get into this comfort zone and I'm reluctant to disrupt it. But I need to see people again. Got to make the effort.

It's guilt, of course, I still feel like I let everyone down, even though there's no real reason to think it, but hey, it's one of my things. I'm apprehensive how people will react, I suppose. And everything's changed so much; the stuff that used to define my life to a large extent is no longer there. I suppose it's inevitable really; more than half my waking hours for the last twenty years or so have been in one way or another devoted to work, and now they're not. It's a wrench, that's for sure. There's certainly a new sense of freedom, sometimes even of optimism, but you wonder where the time goes. And of course, being me, I feel guilty for not using all this time more constructively. Guilt guilt guilt.

Anyway, I'm going to have to change as before I know it I'll be into another self-absorbed, unhealthy rut. So I'm determined to see people this week. I'm a bit apprehensive about it - everyone's going to be so understanding and nice that I could well burst out crying - but I'll just have to handle whatever comes. I think I'm on top of it enough now.

Fingers crossed...


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  Now this is the sort of thing that I meant to write when I started this, but got sidetracked]

2 weeks on...

...and how things have changed.

For the better, I should add. Even though I knew it was only pride and stubbornness that was stopping me getting help, it was still impossible to actually overcome these (irrational) things alone. I'm sure that everyone else could probably see what was going on too (I'm lucky to have people around who will take notice of such things) and of course in the end it was an outside intervention that pretty much forced me to take action.

Now I'm on the road, it seems pointless to fight it, I might as well embrace whatever it brings along; there might be some interesting new experiences to be had. And (the initial couple of days aside) it's been good so far. Much less edge. It'll be interesting to appraise the situation once the course is through; as I think it's been pretty effective so far, I would imagine I'll be getting a repeat prescription but maybe with a tapering-off. We'll see.

The thing I'm most glad about is that despite being pretty off it for the three months April-May-June (whilst deluding myself to the nth degree that I was 100% with it), I don't seem to have harmed my memory or capacity to think at all, which - given that I wasn't eating or sleeping properly either, especially towards the end - is a fuck of a relief. The couple of days after the 4th July, I wasn't sure what was going to happen to be honest; there were still elements of the real and not-real getting mixed up. But that all passed. I can look back on the whole scene with remarkable clarity now and separate pretty clearly the real bits from the hallucinatory bits.

I will come back to this again and again, I'm sure, because the hallucinatory bits were very interesting indeed and not necessarily just absurdist crap. There were two definite states of consciousness that I was able to move freely between on that night - call them "real" and "dream" - and I realise that some of the "dream" stuff was tempered by the outside influence of the "real" stuff, but some of the things I saw (and realised) were big, about as big as they come. Big Ideas.

Trouble is, some of these ideas were a bit too big for me to grasp at the time, so although I can recall certain aspects perfectly, I've only got a vague notion of some of the other concepts that were flying around at the time. And I'm sure some parts of it have either gone for good; there was a lot going on that night and even at the time I realised that - at best - I was only tenuously aware of some of the bigger concepts. I could feel things slipping and sliding in the memory even as they were happening, so I'm guessing my recall might not be completely accurate.

It's not like I entered an altered state and saw the face of God or encountered some sort of universal truth or anything, but the ideas I was having and the things I was seeing did seem to represent the whole of everything; all that had gone before, all that is now and all that will happen in the future - all of that formed a kind of continuum: analogous to the electromagnetic spectrum rather than a timeline. I think that was the crux of it anyway, that all past, present and future events, people, things, all co-exist and are actually part of a larger body, one of whose dimensions is time. When I wrote earlier of having the sensation of being able to move between two different states, it was as though I could alter the physical properties of my body to shift between the "real" and the "dream"...I know, it doesn't make much sense and I'm describing it incredibly badly. I'll have another go one day, maybe I can get it down a bit more clearly, given a bit more processing time.

So...yeah.

Well, that was unexpected.

I suppose I should write something about it.

But it's going to be brief. Maybe to be expanded upon later (maybe not).

Those three months (from the start of April until the start of July) which I thought were surely helping me to get better; seems they were just an interlude. The 4th July, I can pretty conclusively say, was the actual nadir.

Details...maybe another time. I can never forget some of the stuff I saw that night though.

It was enough of a jolt to actually get some medical help, though. I can't deny that I've been quite forcibly resisting medicalisation in general (and medication in particular) for this but fuck that, I was wrong.

Can't deny that the first three or four days were a nightmare - racing thoughts, nausea, no appetite, almost impossible to sleep - but those side-effects passed and it just somehow works. I can't say I'm never depressed anymore, and that's a good thing - I don't want to be excessively controlled - but I'm getting there. I'm getting to a place where not everything has to be shite (but haven't lost my critical faculty; I still recognise that 99% of what goes on in the world is shite, it's just that I don't necessarily need to be part of it anymore).

Clear as mud, there. Better explanation when I'm ready, whenever that might be.


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  This probably represents the peak of my madness and it's not as bad as I thought, which is a relief!]

...And back in the room

Been awhile.

Don't know if that's good or bad really. Bad I think, have had some bad days the last week for some reason; I've been avoiding writing.

Which of course defeats the purpose of this thing in the beginning (if indeed that was it).

I tell myself I'm avoiding putting the whole thing down because I want it to be coherent, but that's never going to work. Although every day I can identify maybe one or two things that point to something, they're often vague and offer no clue as to where they might fit in (considering the mind as analogous to a jigsaw), it's not like there's ever going to be a time when I understand it all.

Part of it is because even now, even after all this time, I'm sure there's things I'm not admitting to myself, or not allowing myself to know. It's a bit like the brain has put a superinjunction on certain things; I know that they're there but I can't access them (and to stretch the analogy, there could be a level above that, like when a separate superinjunction is taken out to stop the reporting of the existence of the original superinjunction; I would be completely unaware of these, of course).

Some of it is just because I'm ashamed to admit it. I spent such a long time suppressing everything and not showing emotion that it's still difficult to express things, certainly in public. This is public, right? Rhetorical question, it's public only in the sense that it's possible for people other than me to see it, but as nobody knows who is writing it, and I haven't told anyone, then I think it probably occupies a space somewhere between private and public.

Sometimes I think I might be holding back from writing things simply because of the fact that other people can see it (whether by accident or design) and might guess who's writing. This is so unlikely that I don't even know why I consider it (or for that matter, why it would be a Bad Thing if it happened).

In any case, it would have been easy just to set up this sort of thing and just not publish it, or keep it readable only to myself, but I don't think that would have satisfied whatever need it is that I have to...express...something.

It's not the first time I've written this, but I'm sure some of these entries are going to make a lot more sense to me at some point in the future.

Full disclosure

I think I realised today that I'm holding too much back. 

When I started this thing, it was just to have somewhere to write down random stuff. I thought it might be interesting - if embarrassing - to read back at a later date. Plus of course, I find it really difficult to talk to people I know about personal things (oh, I don't know, another hang-up from god knows where) and thought that it would be more easily written in some sort of anonymous form. But I really need to be honest for that to have any value and there's a lot of stuff I've not mentioned.

That's not to say that I will; I might have said before that nothing can happen until you actually admit it to yourself (or something) and I'm not sure I have admitted everything yet. Thing is, I don't think I know what "everything" is yet. I know I need to talk to someone but I...can't at the moment.

None of that made much sense, but that's half the point I suppose; I made a vow (or was it a pledge, or lock?) to pretty much just write what comes naturally and edit only minimally, so I might as well stick to it. I've been guilty of over-thinking and over-editing things in the past, often to end up just deleting them, so I'll leave this one.

The Chessboard And The Rice

When I was about eight or nine...

...I had one of those childhood illnesses - couldn't tell you which one, German measles I think - that can cause fever and delirium. Anyway, I think this is my only really clear memory of being delirious to the point of genuinely believing that something really bad is happening (even though it obviously isn't).

My dad was always into maths as a sort of hobby and one of the maths-related stories he told me was the one about the chessboard and the rice. It's a well-known fable and although details differ between versions, the one I remember goes broadly like this:

There is an Emperor of some empire or other (obviously) and an inventor. The inventor invents something so amazing - possibly the game of chess itself? - that the Emperor wants to give him a huge reward and asks the inventor what he would like. Effectively he is saying "name your price".

But instead of asking for a huge sum of money, or for lands, the inventor says that he would like his reward to take the form of grains of rice, arranged on a chessboard. On square 1 would be 1 grain of rice, square 2 would have 2 grains, square 3 would have 4 grains, square 4 = 8 grains, square 5 has 16 grains, i.e. doubling each time up to the 64th square. The Emperor laughs and asks the inventor why he is requesting such a paltry prize. "No," says the inventor, "this is actually many times more rice than the Empire can produce in a hundred years."

He was of course demonstrating to the Emperor how counter-intuitive a geometric progression can be. The actual amount of grains of rice (r) he would receive (were it possible) would be:

r = 2^0 + 2^1 + 2^2 + 2^3 + ... 2^62 + 2^63, so multiplying both sides by 2:

2r = 2^1 + 2^2 + 2^3 + ... 2^63 + 2^64, or in other words:

2r - r = (2^1 + 2^2 + 2^3 + ... 2^63 + 2^64) - (2^0 + 2^1 + 2^2 + 2^3 + ... 2^62 + 2^63)

r = 2^64 - 2^0

r = (2^64)-1

r = 18,446,744,073,551,615

which is a lot of grains of rice (according to Wikipedia, it would weigh a total of 461,168,602,000 metric tonnes and would make a pile the size of Mount Everest, which seems to assume that there are forty grains of rice to a metric gramme, which sounds about right). Whatever, it's something like a thousand times more rice than is produced in a typical year (these days, not in the times of this Empire - who knows, they might have been really mad on rice and everyone would be cultivating rice all the time - but the principle stands).

It's such a basic principle that it has innumerable real-life applications but that's not why I typed all that stuff about it, even though it was all very interesting and that and suchlike.

Nah, it was because when I had this childhood illness or whatever it was, I have this really clear memory of being in bed, recuperating I suppose, when I was suddenly convinced that the chessboard was real and it was right there and the grains of rice were being counted onto it RIGHT THERE AND THEN. I remember running downstairs in a panic because I had to tell someone that there was this existential threat - everyone was going to be suffocated! - and no-one was doing anything to stop it...

I don't recall what happened after that but on checking, no Mount Everest-sized piles of rice were reported in the northeast of England in the late 1970s or early 1980s, so I think it can be assumed that somebody must have calmed me down and told me it was all a dream. But I perceived it as very real at the time.

It actually ties into one of my genuine fears (I can honestly say I don't have many rational fears) but I've written enough bollocks for now. And anyway, I want to do a whole "thing" about it because it's such a fascinating subject that it deserves its own "thing". But not today.

Another meander down Solipsism Lane

Mental illness can be funny.

Both funny peculiar and funny ha-ha (I love that expression). I've long had an interest in it and went through a period at university when aberrant psychology absolutely fascinated me (given that I was studying medicine at the time, with a particular interest in forensics, there's an obvious direction that could have gone, but it didn't).

I think before you experience mental illness for yourself, it is a pretty interesting area, if you're into learning about things that is. The continued success (deserved too) of popular books about psychology - things like 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" and "The Power of Introverts" rather than stuff like "Think Yourself Thin!" and the rest of the self-help crap - is testament to this. But I guess while I'm here, why slag off self-help books, hell if the placebo works, don't knock it. Ah, you know what I mean.

Anyway as everyone says, the first step to treating depression is recognising that you have it. I'd always assumed this to be a cliche, but it is true (or at least it is for me). And that took a hell of a long time. So I'm past that bit now, which I guess has to be a relief. What next though? Fuck knows.

I suppose the mention of solipsism is because I've - at points during this...whatever it is - had moments where I can seem to be completely self-knowing. What I mean is that I can be on a train of thought that I know stems somehow from a mental aberration and even carry out actions according to those thoughts, even if they don't seem to make much sense at the time, whilst being completely aware that what I'm thinking and doing is part of the illness I've got. It's a very strange feeling, but not necessarily "wrong"; no, it can feel wrong but it's always logical. It's like studying your thoughts from the inside, if that makes any sense. I don't think it does really.

Christ, mental illness, you're a hard one to pin down, I'll give you that one.

Must get this place cleared up

I've always had a bit of a "thing" about keeping things.

Not in a weird Secret Hoarder way or anything, I'm not that mad.  But I do hang onto things "just in case" they might once again become useful.  It's not unusual, loads of folk are like this.  And sometimes it's justified, especially with old PCs, because of their largely modular architecture.  In fact, the machine I'm typing this on has definitely got some bits of the old ones in it somewhere - memory modules I think - but in the main it's just clutter.

There must be at least five old TVs up in the top room (most of this stuff hangs out up there), at least as many old monitors (I mean, why the fuck have I still got two - not one, but two - massive old CRT monitors with tiny 14 inch screens?), god knows how many empty boxes and boxes inside boxes (which may contain further stuff).  Then there's all the boxes of audio and video tapes, pieces of old furniture, appliances (lamps, kettles, toasters etc.) that don't work any more and so on.

Obviously the easiest thing to do would be to just get someone to clear it out and take it all away. But there's stuff there that I really do want to hold onto mixed up in it all somewhere.  I mean, I've got a collection of NMEs going back almost continually to about 1990, which apart from being historically fascinating to a nerd like me, would be worth a few hundred quid to someone, going by the prices on Ebay (and far more if sold piecemeal).  I'd be a fool to chuck them out, wouldn't I?  And I'd never chuck my original 48K Spectrum (which still works, 32 years on) or C64. Or the Amiga. Or the Speak & Spell machine etc. etc.

Ah, I'll get to it eventually.  It's a work in progress, let's say.

This behaviour extends as far as data, of course; even when I was programming stuff on the Spectrum and everything had to be stored on audio tape (I can't recall if solid-state storage was available for the Speccy in 1986, but if it was it would've been far too expensive for me), I very rarely taped over anything, because I thought I might need the old versions as backups (come to think of it, this is now regarded as best practise, so well done me).

But now (2015 I think it is) data storage is - if you make best use of cloud storage - effectively free. Even if you want an actual physical storage device, 3 terabyte hard drives only cost about fifty quid these days and as for 500Gb drives, I think they come free in cereal packets these days. That's my justification for keeping absolutely everything, anyway.  Including all my old emails, both sent and received, since 1997. That is a bit odd, isn't it? I don't know anyone else who does that.  But hell, they take up almost no physical space, so why not?  Why, it would be a fool not to follow my lead.

Falling apart at the seams

Sometimes...

...I think that I'm just out of step with the times. And sometimes I think I'm ahead of the times.  But then again, I'm not so sure of trusting anything I think anymore.

The last election is a good example, I think. Now, maybe my critical faculty is going but I read through the manifestos of both the Conservative and Labour parties and I could barely detect a difference.  Navy Blue vs Blue, say.  There was the odd difference, sure, but it was the same broad outline.

But all the media had it as "a real choice".  "A real difference". Labour are "anti-business"! Only the Conservatives know how to run the economy!  Labour won't let the NHS be privatised (let's ignore the PFI contracts that were set up under Labour for now)! The Tories will sell your granny's kidneys to rich oligarchs for spares! etc.

Were they right?  If Labour had been elected, would everything have changed?  Would anyone have really even noticed?

I suppose I just wanted a quiet life.

So, to continue from wherever I was last time,

I was earning more money than I could spend (well, within my very strictured conventions (I reckon I could be described as - to use the immortal words of The Great Leader - "prudent" - with money) but had no time to spend it. The whole thing just seemed pointless as an exercise.  I've no kids, it's not like I've people depending on me for money after I'm dead.  I'd sooner trade the money for the time.

OK, I did that in a pretty drastic way and still have no idea where it's going.

But at least that's exciting and I'm out of the rut.

Were I to act the pessimist I'd say "out of one rut and into another" but that's not yet been proved. At least I think I might be glimpsing that thing people call "fun" again, even if I'm not actually doing it right now.

This is going to be interesting to read back in a few years' time...

From the outside, it was a stupid decision.

Who, in this economic and political climate,

would deliberately give up a well-paid job with no idea at all of what to do next?  A fucking idiot, that's who.  Oh, and this job, it was no ordinary job, it was one I'd worked at for sixteen years, right from the start of the company.  Just two people, the owner and me.  For about the first twelve years I didn't exactly make a lot of money (I remember one month it was £200 - before tax) but that really was because we couldn't afford to take money out of the business.

But we got there in the end and for the last three years or so, we finally decided we were in a position to take a decent-ish (and I'm not even talking big money, about £30K/year) salary out of it.  So why quit now, of all times?  It makes no sense.

Did I do the right thing?  What even is the right thing?  What will I do next?  Will it be the right thing?  Will I recognise it when I see it?  I don't know and as I've mentioned, I don't edit much either so I'm sure I'll contradict myself plenty as I go across this thing again and again until everyone's either stopped reading or dropped dead.  That's why there's so much rubbish in this.  So many wasted words.  Why, just one of those words, to choose one at random, let's say "fucking", that word, that could fucking feed an African child for a year, that could.

Oh I don't know.

I'll go as far as to say that I think if I hadn't stopped when I did, I'd not only have fucked myself up even more but could have potentially fucked the whole company.


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  I think this is where things start to go a bit awry.  The intention of the whole thing was to attempt to document what the fuck was going to happen to me - certainly that's true - but more to the point it's possibly where some of the posts could be described as "feeling sorry for myself", which is never a good look.]

So here we are.

The line about being cryptic in the opening post is going to prove prophetic.

This thing's going to be very episodic and rely on information that hasn't been (and may never be) revealed. Events might seem to happen in the wrong order, or things might not be remembered properly, but I guess that's the nature of the beast.

Some of it's going to border on stream-of-consciousness stuff, too, which I can never be bothered to edit at the time of writing.  Maybe I'll go back and try to organise it later but for the moment, it just needs to be somewhere.

I know, that only makes it more cryptic.


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  I think this was an attempt to explain to myself why I was doing this whole thing]

Went a bit peculiar there for a bit.

It seems right to start off with some sort of explanation.

But I'm not going to, because I'm an awkward bugger and anyway, I don't think I can fully get my head round it yet. Not enough to explain it properly (or in a way that anyone else would understand), so that's going to have to wait a bit. It'll emerge in pieces, I reckon, like making a jigsaw, it'll be fun, trust me, but not all the pieces are there yet, so I can't do it now.  To stretch the tenuous analogy to absurdity, I know where all the pieces are but I don't have them all yet, and even if I did, I'm not sure I'd know which way round they would go.  Or which way up for that matter.

Occasionally in the middle of the night everything seems to fit together but these must be dreams, because nothing fits in the morning.  But at least all the bits are still there.  My biggest fear (actually not my biggest fear, that comes later) is that there would be at least one bit missing and probably several.

This is very cryptic, isn't it?  Even if you knew who was typing it, it would make scant sense.  I suppose I better start at the start and see where this thing goes...


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  Interestingly, this is nowhere near as mad as I remember it]