Electric love...

Winter has hit Melbourne and it has hit hard. I find it very difficult to get up in the morning now, partly because I’m up late writing, but mainly because it is so damn freezing upon my first futile attempts at breaking into the waking world. I’m so thankful on these mornings for my little ball of fluff, Sandy, who serves as a living foot warmer by perching upon my feet. I think David Attenborough would call that a symbiotic relationship.

Lumbering, confused and chilly, from the bed to the shower: that is the hard part. No, breaking my inertia and removing the dead weight that is my frame from under the blankets, that is the truly hard part. I sleep naked. I’m not trying to arouse anyone – least of all myself – by stating that fact. I simply mention that because it contributes to how cold I get. I have always slept in either boxers or nothing – anything else feels claustrophobic.

These cold mornings make me think of a past love of mine.

Once upon a distant moon I had an electric blankey. I loved my electric blankey: it kept me warm through cold nights; it was a friend and companion, always reliably waiting for me when I returned to it; cold and looking for a warm embrace. This relationship went on for many a year and proved to be a far more satisfactory one than many of the tragicomic relationships that I have had with flesh and blood members of the human race. The blanket waited for me, warm and without complaint, and I always returned to the blanket. If governmental statute had allowed it I’d have married old Miss Blankey.

Unfortunately, our blissful love was not to last (nothing new!), and a rift would soon darken our night time interludes, a rift that would tear us apart forever. One night I had stumbled home drunk, longing for my beautiful warm blankey. Did I just use the word drunk? Better to use the more apt and detailed sentence: ROARINGLY, DISGUSTINGLY; DROOL ON MYSELF AND HOWL AT THE MOON; PISSED! And, like all disgustingly drunken men, I was looking for my mistress…

To cut a long story, or post if you will, short – in my bleary-eyed state I accidentally switched the blankey to the highest setting: ‘4’. Normally, our lovemaking lasted approximately ½ an hour (average for a man, or so I’ve heard!), after which I would be sufficiently warm to switch my baby off and drift into post-coital (post bed-warmed!) slumber. Anything past an hour and you were pushing the limits of the relationship and running the risk of dehydrating yourself badly.

On this night I fell asleep without turning it off.

As you can imagine, the dawning day did not greet a healthy Don Quixote. Rather, it greeted a skeleton, a wraith, a shriveled thing-that-should-not-be. The combination of alcohol and extreme heat had evaporated most of the life giving liquid from me that a human needs to survive. My brain felt as if it was host to an electrical storm, a storm that saw lightning bolts traversing my neural pathways. My eyeballs felt like they had retracted back into my skull. My beloved blankey had betrayed me (another typical manly assertion, for in reality had I not betrayed the blankey?) and our differences were henceforth irreconcilable.

A time capsule

My top 10 films of all time, in no particular order, are:

1) Lost in translation
2) A clockwork orange
3) Citizen Kane
4) Apocalypse now
5) City of God
6) Y Mumma Tambien
7) Three colors: Red, White & Blue
8) Dr Strangelove
9) The dark crystal
10) Paris Texas

My top 10 albums of all time, in no particular order, are:

1) Beck - Mutations
2) Beck – Sea change
3) Air – Moon safari
4) Bjork - Post
5) Mr Bungle - California
6) The Doors – The Doors
7) Guns n’ Roses – Appetite for destruction
8) Elliott Smith– Figure 8
9) Radiohead – Kid A
10) Nirvana – Unplugged in NY

It will be very interesting to come back and read this list in 10 years time.

I was going to include books and authors, however that will require a significant amount of contemplation.

I have a devil sitting on my shoulder

6 Months have passed and I've managed to avoid the excesses to which I'm predisposed. A semblance of normalcy was being achieved in my sensitive (and often misfiring!) brain. I wouldn't describe the last couple of months as 'happy', but I had definitely obtained a level of tranquility (evenness?) of late.

Last night I fell off of the wagon.

I don't know why... I have wracked my brains looking for the reason... The only answer that I can come up with is that I have a devil sitting on my shoulder. He whispers in my ear; things like: "go on, you can take one. You deserve it!" The problem with me, and the problem that I have always had, is that 'one' is never enough. So I'm home now and feeling like a prune... Well, maybe not a prune as a prune holds far more juice than I feel I can currently lay claim to - perhaps, rather, a dried date more adequately describes the way I feel.

Devils aside - I wonder at the real roots of my self destructive tendency. Am I bored? Unfulfilled? Unhappy? Yes, however, taking drugs and escaping off into Neverland for a night does nothing to reduce those three unfortunate states of being, in the long term. When do I take the lesson that my body and mind so mercilessly try to teach me every time I have one of these little relapses? When something really bad happens? I hope not.

And so it is back to the path of sobriety for me - hopefully this has been a one off; a glitch; an aberration on my intended pathway towards happier days.

Hopefully.

Sweet dreams are made of this?

It is cold in those frozen lands - those islands between this world and the next. Somewhere, between Japan and Russia, is the place; the dark place, the light place; the end of things place. I know that the frigid frozen north will reveal a land where the time of man will end. This is clear to me. Crystal clear. Clear as the cold skies under which I travel.
How this information came to me, and at whose behest I travel, is a mystery. Those details are irrelevant. All I know is that I'm travelling along a secret path; a path known only to those with universal knowledge; a path that provides a direct route under the ocean and under the sky - a path that will bring me in to conflict with him.
What do I know about him? Nothing. He's as faceless as a long dead ancestor, and as with the ancestor I know he is real but I have no link to his visage, no tangible proof of existence. What I do know is that he must be stopped, that if he succeeds in his mandate all will cease to be. As I travel through the Arctic wastes my thoughts are made clear and laid bare by searing cold: the burning chill of my frozen dream.
I awoke from slumber with the recollection of this dream today... When one wakes up from such a dream one is left to contemplate the reasons for such synaptic firing. What issue would Freud say that I am trying to resolve? What spiritual conflict would the soothsayer allude to?
I have heard on more than one occasion that we only dream in black and white. If this is true, I wonder is our subconscious cleverly places the false memory of colour into our waking remembrance of our dreams. I wonder this because the blue of the sky in my dream last night was as pure, cold, and unforgiving, as the heavenly blue used in devotional paintings from the Renaissance era.