pros and cons

Today, I will do something productive. Yes: today, I may even get out of bed, which is something I didn’t manage till about 4 o’clock yesterday. Extremely tired, after a weekend of early mornings and late nights and much sport. Also, couldn’t see any reason: all the things I wanted to do – watch a movie, write, edit, play Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, relax – were just as easily and comfortably undertaken there. That’s the thing with living in a one-room flat: the bed makes perfect sense. The bed, in reality, is the ultimate chair.

Unfortunately, the deadline for my project has been extended by three days: so I get a little bit looser with that.

I’m so loose sometimes I wonder if I’ll make the finish line.

Meanwhile, life is odd. My girlfriend buzzes around and I wonder about her. Maybe make a list of pros and cons. Sometimes I really like her and sometimes I don’t. Pros: she tolerates me and doesn’t give me hassles and laughs at all my stupid japes and enjoys sex and isn’t demanding and is good at cooking and has a fit body and does her own thing and when we talk seriously we talk really well and easily and on the whole we’ve a ton of harmony and she’s a pretty happy soul. Cons: I find her boring and we don’t have much to talk about and certain things annoy me, like she’s always playing with her hair or saying “sorry?” even when she’s heard perfectly well what I’ve said. Sometimes she gets in a funk and I don’t find myself much bothered about helping her out of it and I guess I don’t care about her that much. Not sure I love her or am in love and actually I know I’m not. I get no joy from looking at her face and the sex isn’t that great for me (nothing she’s doing wrong, I just don’t feel it).

Pros: she doesn’t drink or take drugs and believes in loads of the hippy things that I live myself by.

Cons: she believes in it too much. She goes on about carbon – while meanwhile driving seventy miles a day – and loads about permaculture too, which as far as I can tell is just gardening, like old blokes on allotments have been doing for eons.

Pros: when she’s away, I miss her, so I guess I like having her around.

Cons: when she’s here, I kind of wish I was on my own.

Pros: she doesn’t get too naggerty when I’m out playing all my sport.

Cons: she gets a bit naggerty when I’m out playing all my sport. She wants me around more but when I am around we can’t think of much to do besides eat a quick meal and watch a movie. We don’t do very much together. Probably that’s my fault: I don’t do very much when I’m on my own either. Doing stuff, other than playing sport, seems to have lost its appeal. Like going to town, for example: why? I can’t imagine a reason to do it. Or going to watch music: it gets me dull. Pubs and friends and chatter I can’t find the energy for. Boardgames and other kinds of games, though: yes.

Julia called me up the other night. Was emotional and drunk and just finishing off yet another destructive relationship that she once thought promised so much. She’s had a lot of those. And now she was saying that she’s realised she wants to be with me. That kiss we had last year. Something changing for her, after all those years I was after her (14-26). What to say about that? Julia, who I feel strongly for – some weird emotional connection always present, even after all these years. And a great kiss. And maybe it’s just sex I want from her. But I also feel caring and love. But –

Cons: her life is so chaotic, so full of drama and craziness and so different from how I live. Drinking nearly every night. Dogs and cats running everywhere. Tears and excitement and children and television. All of it, I suppose, an outward expression of her inner psychology, twisted out of shape practically her whole life. Even at sixteen I knew it was more than I could handle: and now, even more so…

Pros: the feelings, the connection, the wanting, the…dare I say it? Love. That thing it’s supposed to be all about. That thing I’ve tried to dismiss as make-believe. That thing I’ve said over and over that I don’t know what it is and picked apart with the analyst’s dissective coldness and held up in my hands a bloody mess, attractive to no one. Ay, love. Feeling. Emotion. Caring. Compassion. Tears. But –

Cons: she’s a mess. She talks endlessly. There’s not much room for me to be myself. I would get washed away. And our lifestyles – the noise! – are so different it’s hard to imagine how they would fit together. Money. Space. All that kind of thing.

Main thing is – wow! how weird! all these years and now suddenly out of the blue I’m getting drunken midnight calls saying I’m wanted a hundred miles away and I’m the one – like Eve sometimes does – and I guess it’s a bit of a thrill in this bedridden life.

And nothing any clearer in my search for a woman. Nicky perfect in tons of ways but my feeling quite absent. Laura always hovering on the scene, and much feeling and perfection there too. And always then the thought of Grace and what if I do actually see her in Colorado this summer? Plus adulterous desires to test out the devious waters of Andrea and Monica down in London and see how it feels, whether I could live with it and keep it secret.

Nothing clearer at all.

Meantime, I used to want to be a writer and I get worse and worse at it all the time. Now all I want to be is…

A tree. A football referee. A primitive man Mexican canyon dweller. A meditating monk. A disappearing act. A football coach and manager. A buy who grows old in a bed playing computer games. A young again inspiration around campus living the dream life of sports and free time. An admin worker in the sports office organising teams and tournaments. A crazy mad adventurer who writes his life story and leaves it to the world, warts and all.

Husband and father? Not really. That was last year. Every reality and dream passes and fades. You pick them up and look at them: they fall through your fingers like sand.

Every reality passes and fades. Is this what life is? Merely the desiring and trying on of different ways of being, and then letting them go? All the things I’ve thought I wanted to be…and everything fades. Now it’s what I’ve said above – but tomorrow? But the day after I’ve done all those things? More sand arises to present itself, masquerading in the form of castles. But the tide is ceaseless: the castles will fall – and you couldn’t live in them anyway. They’re not suited to our form.

Once upon a time there was none of this – jobs and mortgages and technology and hobbies – but a man was still a man and he could still live a fulfilled life and achieve his purpose, if the purpose had something to do with his body and his mind and his soul. And it does, doesn’t it?