I Feel It In The Air

Here comes the cold.

See... you may go through this blog, every December, and see at least one post wherein I am being a total Grinch. Which is just... accurate. I am. I'm not good at Christmas. Never have been.

There's supplementary reasons. Like. It's not just me being obnoxious.

Seasonal Affective Disorder for one thing. Everything going dark so early kills my mood so hard. The idea of waking up in the dark and going to bed in the dark just chills me to the absolute bone. It really carves away at any mental fortitude I previously possessed. It not being light enough to read by, just at random points in the day? Hatred. Hate that. So, so much.

Another thing. The moment the weather turns cold and damp consistently... all of my joints start to ache.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a hell of a thing. And cold, and damp, makes it worse. When I first went to get it checked out, because you know having this constant pain in my joints shouldn't happen, I was told that it was because I was overweight, it meant my joints had to deal with more, and suffered as a result.

"Fair enough," I reply. "But, like, the worst of it is in my knuckles."

As I didn't walk on my hands, that proved to be a bit of a stumper.

So throughout most of the winter I just have this added extra layer of ouch, both mentally and physically. Which is why the song "The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year" makes it hard for me to follow the philosophy of not wanting to yuck anyone's yum.

And that's before we even get into this year, this particular year, and the challenges it has put at our feet.

It's been hard. We've lost people. We've had to isolate ourselves so we don't lose more, and even those of us who are actually better at coping with isolation are suffering for it. It's throwing the nature of how our society works in our faces - every selfish act, every act of government cronyism and populist cruelty. It's inescapable, and it keeps taking.

That's before anything else goes wrong. Before the economy starts to tank, before the everyday bullshit issues that are going to spring up between now and... whenever.

It's just hard, at times. It's okay to acknowledge that.

But if I'm not so jolly, that's why.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

Butts In Seats

I know I tread this ground quite a lot, but - I'm ill. I have various conditions that make doing things difficult or impossible. I feel like I talk about it often, but like, it's literally my life, so - my apologies. If me talking about my chronic illness is liable to upset you, feel free to check this out - it's a blog I did on Secret of Mana and video games in general.

It means that some days, my mobility is terrible, and getting out of the house is nigh on impossible. Can't usually predict which one of those days I am going to have, either; though sometimes I will wake up and the lack of mobility is obvious. Like, if you told me that there was a fifty pound note on the other side of my bedroom - there's days (and more of them than I'd like, like several a month) wherein I would probably have to just leave it there.

One of the downsides of this is that, well, doing stuff that isn't work becomes difficult. If I can't get out of the house, doing EVERYTHING becomes difficult; and even on a good day I have to be aware of energy levels, of how much what I am about to do will hurt after an hour, two hours, half a day.

This sucks, because I like doing things. Especially watching movies in the cinema.

I mean, you know I like them movies. I talk about them often enough. I do wish I could catch every release - there's so many movies in the past five years that I just haven't been able to see when they came out, so I've had to wait until they get a home or streaming release.

Or something.

It isn't even just those days wherein I can barely make it to the bathroom. At the end of a work day, I just don't have the energy to do much aside from get home again. It sucks. That's a big chunk of hours that are basically not usable for anything specific. After a decent week's work the weekend is kind of a waste; I spend most of it willing my joints to operate properly again, and that's all before the actual physical work of getting to the movies and being able to sit in a cinema seat for three hours without the subsequent pain and discomfort fucking the movie up.

So yeah. I missed a bunch.

More than a few of those movies, I wasn't too hard-bitten about. Like. Midway? I already know how that ends. Turned out to be a great film when I finally got to watch it, but there's nothing to ruin there, nothing to give away.

Sure, I know people are annoyed about spoiler culture and anti spoiler culture, but this is one of the big ones.

I really enjoy the new Star Wars movies; and thus, I was hyped to watch Rise Of Skywalker when it came out.

Except I didn't get to.

I spent Christmas basically crippled. I couldn't get out of the house; my knee literally wouldn't support my weight, and I had a chest infection that felt like I was dying slowly. It was pretty killer. Not much fun to be had. No opportunities came up to catch it. The few days I made it into work or was fit enough to walk around and do things while it was out, I got the things done I had to, and that was it. I was wiped out for the day. Sometimes barely even that - at one point I almost didn't make it home.

So I never saw it. It slipped out of movie theatres. I was still ill. Then I start pulling myself back together again, and then along comes pandemic season and everything is fucked again.

Not to mention the arthritis having another shot at me as the stay-at-home orders were signed, but that's another story.

The point is that there were certain large plot points in the movie that, after a certain point, just got talked about in public or hinted at strongly enough that anyone could piece them together. I don't want to crucify people that give out spoilers, but at the same time - I'm really hoping that the movie can tell me the story, rather than someone obliquely referring to a bit of it and outing that chunk so that when it comes along when I DO watch it, I just go "oh yeah that's what happens now".

I'm pretty sure that the crew that made the movie are a better storyteller than "angry man in front of greenscreen on youtube".

But that's just the way it is, right? You can't catch the movie when it comes out, then - well, get fucked, right? "It's been [arbitrary amount of time], you should have seen it already if you care so much about it," is often a defence for spoiler-friendly folks. Which. You know. Whatever. Perhaps there's a reason that a person hasn't seen a movie yet. Like, you know.

Imagine me gesturing at my body in general.

Just the way it is, though - but does it have to be?

Well, Universal didn't think so.

Yeah, see I'm not a fan of the franchise, BUT...

So one thing that is coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic is many wings of society are accidentally revealing that they can actually be more accessible than they currently are. The sheer amount of businesses that have made the shock discovery that many of their employees can actually work from home is astounding. Businesses providing contact-free or kerbside delivery. Sure, it's all being done in a very bootstrappy fashion and because there's no other option, but - for some of their consumers and employees, there already was no other option.

It seems that the movie market has caught on, too, because Universal decided that Trolls World Tour should be released on rental on-demand at the same time as its US cinematic release, seeing as the world was trying to stay indoors as much as possible. It isn't just Trolls either - several of their other releases saw a similar plan. It isn't a new idea, either; the Chinese cinema industry took several similar measures two months prior, allowing a bunch of movies to be released day-and-date at the same time in both theatres and at home. It also isn't the first time Universal has done this - it did the same thing with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

They aren't the only business cashing in on the pandemic, either deliberately or accident of timing. Disney+ and Netflix have both had significant gains, and Disney+ has engaged directly in pandemic advertising; and lets face it, Animal Crossing came out at exactly the right time to get half the gaming world hooked just when they can't go to work.

Well - the Trolls thing seemed to work. It took $40 million in its opening weekend, in the onset of a pandemic. Sure, that doesn't cover the cost of production, but that is an opening weekend when people literally aren't allowed to go outside and cinemas are literally closed.

Like, that isn't shabby.

And nothing quite shows that you have succeeded at doing something that vaguely disrupts the status quo than...

The full article is here.

Of course there will be kickback. The model has worked this way for a long, LONG time, and people don't want to have to adjust to a different model - or a deviation from the current model. Just keep pouring the money in our pockets! Why do you have to make us think about things!? Just pay us and shut up!

The relevant section:

“This policy is not aimed solely at Universal out of pique or to be punitive in any way, it also extends to any movie maker who unilaterally abandons current windowing practices absent good faith negotiations between us, so that they as distributor and we as exhibitor both benefit and neither are hurt from such changes,” AMC chairman Adam Aron write in the letter. “Currently, with the press comment today, Universal is the only studio contemplating a wholesale change to the status quo. Hence, this immediate communication in response.”

Now... here's the thing.

When I was sat at home the entire time my knee was busted, I wasn't putting any money in the pockets of either my local cinema (which isn't a chain, it's mostly indie) OR Lucasfilm/Disney. It just wasn't happening, because I couldn't go to the movies, and I couldn't make the choice to pay on demand.

You know how free-market plebs often say that the market responds to demand? Well, it seems that Universal did that, without asking nicely; which is kind of a dick move, but at the same time, it showed that it can be done - and showed that it can rake in funds.

If the cinema chains are clever, and careful, then they can get a slice of the pie that companies like Universal are going to bake. If people act in good faith then this could be good for all of us, because I know that there is demand for such a service. From people like me, for one.

And there's so much cross-marketing that could be going on via the medium of a website. You want to watch a movie on release day? You click through to your local cinema, and from there, to their on-demand one-viewing rental website. You pay for a midnight viewing, which becomes available immediately after midnight. There could be reviews available, professional and user-based. A magazine section, to check out upcoming releases and read articles about the industry. Adverts for local food delivery places, that offer a slight discount on a click-through, as a partnership promotion. Synchronised viewing links so you can watch a movie at the same time as someone else, or "Viewing Rooms" like Twitch.

People have more and more complicated media setups at home; huge TVs, PCs and laptops with incredible screen resolutions and headsets with vast fidelity. I know it isn't the same as a big screen, but you know how it's better? You don't have to view it from the bottom corner, and you don't have to deal with that mob of teenagers throwing popcorn and being obnoxious, and the only person you need to move for is you. And even if they don't - Jesus Christ, I just want to see the movie. Don't give me shit because I can't afford a 4K TV. We've managed to watch films on VHS before the heady days of DVD and BluRay, I daresay I can enjoy one on a cheap laptop.

Imagine how good that could be. Imagine how good it would be, right now, to be able to have that, in this time when we have to stay inside; now imagine that all the time, for the people that find going to the movies difficult or impossible for whatever reason. Imagine having that available to you, and knowing that the money you pay for the viewing is going back to the industry, paying those that made the film you are watching. Knowing that if you stream Movie A, that it will be counted as the take for Movie A for the opening weekend, to prove that it performed better than Movie B.

Of course there's a million and one reasons it won't happen; and there's even more reasons why, if it happens, it will fuck someone over. We can't ever have a thing just work out. At a guess, if it does become an industry practice, then the cinema chains are going to suffer a lot for it and will start having to tighten their belts, which will lead to talk of the death of cinema - and who knows, from there?

And that's the sad, shit thing. With every potential innovation, with every method of making life easier or better, comes the innevitable question:

How will Capitalism make it awful?

People ask me why I'm a cynic.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Back On The Shelf

When I was asked when I was five years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said with full confidence that I wanted to be a robot.

It didn't take long for that to become wanting to be an astronaut, I think maybe because I realised when I was about six that robots get built and people get born and I was in the latter section of society. I don't remember being that upset about the revelation. I mean, today - if I was fully of the belief that in several years I would be contained in the chassis of an immortal machine, then told today that it wasn't going to happen, I'd be livid.

Other, more feasible dreams followed.

Being wealthy and happy after an indeterminate period of time, because all you had to do was live that long. Being a rock star. Being a professional writer. Being a rock star again. Being a writer again. That kind of calibre of aspiration, running at that kind of level of want or need. It was joined with a variety of other dreams, like travelling the entire world, living in California (I was young enough that I couldn't really differentiate different bits of an albeit huge state), owning a Lamborghini, owning a private jet.

I can tell you the approximate moment in my life when depression really started to kick in, and that was when I was thirteen years old, because my dreams and aspirations started to change.

Now, a lot of folks - the kind of folks who like to use terms like "never did me any harm" or "back in my day" or "that's just the way it is suck it up" - would point out that this is just part of growing up. You put your childish dreams away, and you start having adult ones. Right?

Well, my dreams and aspirations started to include getting through a school day without being verbally abused or physically assaulted.

Dreams of getting out of school and having a job, and maybe owning a record store, and having a flat that was near the shops. Of living near a railway line so I could hear the trains rattling through the night. Of being able to open my windows and hear the world existing outside them, without having to be out in it. Things became a lot more prosaic.

Around about 15, when I had to put down the groundwork for the rest of my educational life, I had dreams that I'd be successful. That I'd have an office in a legal firm, and a bowl on my desk which I would fill with cherry tomatoes, and eat throughout the day. ...I mean, I had no idea what a career in law actually entailed but I had to pick something, and the panic attack I had during the careers meeting didn't help much. Those dreams included waking up and wanting to do the things that I had to do that day, which was steadily becoming more and more unlikely - but the vague dreams of travel, of seeing things that interested me, of seeing the bands I loved, still remained.

Funny how things change.

When you're a teenager you never conceive of having a medical condition that could literally stop you doing things you want to do. Physical OR mental. It happens to other people you know, but you never really consider what it means, let alone what it is like to have it happen to you. That is, in fairness, partly because of society's habit to assume that every illness or condition can be prevented as long as you do the right thing. If you ever need evidence of that, ask people with chronic health conditions the advice they have been given by people without those conditions. (I have some stories, I tell you.)

So life happens to you - life in the boundary of the world as it stands today, here and now. Life in the expanding gulf between rich and poor, wherein all the things that you were promised as a child of the seventies, eighties or nineties becomes the purview of a thinner and thinner slice of society.

It can feel like calcification. Like a million doors that were previously open are closing one at a time, even if now and then a new one opens.

That's why it's important to grab onto the ones that are left, where you can.

It is easy to spend one's life staring at the aspirations on the shelf that we can't reach for any more. I understand that. The mentality of it - how hard it can be to reach for the new thing, when the old things we wanted so badly are unreachable. We have to find the things to reach for that we can grasp. We need to find our victories where we can, rather than pine for win conditions that no longer exist. It's the only way we can keep going. And if those win conditions are as simple as having a day end wherein you actually look forward to waking up tomorrow, then draw your plans and march your troops.

Everyone needs something to strive for.

I don't think there is some overarching point to this ramble. It's something that has been occupying my thoughts recently, after I was asked what I wanted to be when I was a kid, and I had the most incredible wave of nostalgia wash over me as I remembered the one thing I really, really wanted to be was a robot.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Legs Twelve

Remember this blog right here, wherein I talked about the pair of ulcers I had on my legs?

Time for an update - and it's good news.

Sheldon (the painful, annoying blemish on my inner right ankle) has been closed and healed for a long while. The leg still bears the scar - it was a savage wound after all. Now, though, the primary discomfort that leg causes me is through the arthritis in the joints.

Lefty, though; Lefty, who I have had since almost 2010 - Lefty has been a constant source of piss-off and pain. Draining. Ugly. Requiring constant wrapping and pressure.

Up until earlier this week.

Lefty isn't an ulcer, now. He's not a wound. Now, he is considered a Previous Wound Site.

This means that, in a couple weeks, my left leg won't need to be bandaged up to the knee; it will have removable compression, the kind that comes off whenever I like.

It is a very, very odd feeling to think that something that has affected me for so long will soon be technically over. It will feel alien, I know, to lay in bed and not feel the sheets cling to compression bandaging. To be able to reach down and touch the back of my calf, without feeling elastic and cotton in the way.

The day I am told that I no longer need that compression, I may just break down in tears.

I can't even tell you how much better this will make my life.

It's all thanks to the NHS. Without them I would be in serious and severe debt or worse - just ignoring the problem until it goes away. I've seen what happens if you ignore a venous ulcer. It spreads. Then you get sepsis and they take off your leg.

I can't thank the medical staff who have treated me enough. First at Garfield Surgery, now sadly closed - then at Tower House Surgery. The many doctors and even more nurses that have helped me not only with Lefty and Sheldon, but also with the various and sundry other conditions I suffer from.

Onwards and upwards, right?

I'll post a picture sooner or later.

I Am Sometimes Someone Else

"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry," said Bruce Banner, and he was right.

Note: Bruce Banner said that. Not the Hulk. Not the raging alter-ego, the Hyde to his Jeckyll. The separation is distinct, one put there deliberately and constantly.

Those who know me, know I suffer from a variety of health issues. Pain, discomfort, a lot of frustrating bullshit. It's not ideal but I try and keep my shit together most of the time - and I like to think that, most of the time, I succeed.

There are times, though...

My dad had a hell of a temper. When he got angry he was truly a sight to behold. It didn't happen often - I mean he had his moments of frustration, but the true meltdowns of epic rage, those were once-a-decade visions of disasterous glory. He never hit me or my mother, never threatened to - but by god, did he have the potential to get angry.

His anger scared me as a kid. Like, it gave me an aversion to conflict that caused me trouble throughout the entirety of my childhood, way into my teenage years, until the age of 16 when I finally realised that - every now and then, a line needs to be drawn.

Even so. Anger, frustration, drama, overt hostility - I am still averse to it. It's why soap operas bother me, and reality television - half of the content is just people being shit to each other. That bothers me, because they're not doing it for any good reason. They're not standing up for anyone's rights, or putting anyone in their right place, or correcting a wrong. They're just being assholes.

I don't like who I am when I don't have my shit together.

One of the reasons I like music is that it lets me feel all the stuff that one needs to feel, without becoming a slave to it. Like you put on the album and you feel it all. It runs through your entire body and you are a slave to it...and then it stops and you put it away and you can get on with your day.

Personally speaking, I hate the feeling of being angry for a wide cornucopia of reasons.

For one thing I hold myself to quite a high standard of being in control of myself and my things. Knowing where my stuff is, when my appointments are, where I am meant to be and when, what I should be doing at any time. I absolutely detest when I lose something or when I forget something. Being angry makes it easy to lose hold of this kind of stuff.

I also dislike how easy it is for me to get really, really hostile and hurtful when I am angry. Like engaging in a bit of banter is okay, it's like a witty sparring match. When my blood gets hot though - the banter goes. The claws come out. I do not like myself, at all, when I am in that mood - because anyone is a fair target for me.

A third thing I dislike is how angry I get at myself for being angry, which is, yes, a very dumb thing to feel but - hey, anger is irrational. I also feel guilt. Like immediately afterwards, guilt. Sometimes enough that I feel nauseous. I know I am doing something that I am not cool with, and I am not cool with that. Not one bit.

Unfortunately...being ill makes the anger thing happen a lot more than if I wasn't. And for that, I believe I owe pretty much everyone an apology.

I try not to be an asshole unless someone deserves it, but I am painfully aware of the fact that, sometimes, the asshole comes out anyway. I overthink these things for days after the fact, and wonder if I could have just been a little less tired and a little more serene, shit would have been okay.

So I am going on record here:

If I am an asshole to you, I am sorry. I'm not going to make excuses. They are reasons, not excuses. I am sorry for losing my temper, for getting snide, for not wanting to participate or for not getting into the spirit of things.

I try to be cool. I swear. It just doesn't always work.

But that isn't the real me. That's my Hulk, my Wolfman.That's the side of me that is altered, changed.

The real me is actually kinda cool, sometimes.

Promise.

Legs Eleven

WARNING: What follows is a one-man discussion of medical matters, pertaining to me. There are pictures and the pictures are kind of gross.

I'm ill.

I have several things wrong with me. One is a fairly early onset of rheumatoid arthritis, which is essentially one's own immune system attacking one's joint tissue, identifying the tissue as an invasive force. Another is idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which is significant scarring of my lungs (in particular the left), which makes it hard to breathe at the best of times and leaves my heart working twice as hard.

These aren't really visible, per se. They're not what one would call visible illnesses. I do HAVE some visible conditions, mind - side effects of the other two.

This is the reason I don't wear shorts.

Those are my legs, clad in the compression bandages that I have on 7 days a week.

The reason they are in compression? Well, there's two reasons; Lefty and Sheldon.

This is Lefty. Lefty is a venous ulcer that sits on the outside of my left ankle. Lefty happened when I had pleurisy, around about 2010.

Leg ulcers like Lefty happen, often, due to high blood pressure. The vein wall gets stretched, allowing some degree of plasma into the tissue of the leg, which increases the chance of blisters, infections and all sorts of other nastiness. (It happens so much more in the lower parts of the leg because of gravity - the g-forces in a roller coaster really hit you as you reach the bottom of the slope and swing back up.)

Lefty has been my constant companion for six years, and he hurts. He hurts quite a lot. He's only exposed for about five minutes twice a week, when the dressing is changed. The picture was taken as aforementioned dressing-change was occuring. He hurts when I have been standing up long enough, when pressure has been put on him, when the air pressure is weird, when I have walked a lot, when I have been sat down too long, when I sneeze, when I crap, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all.

Lefty is a bastard. Lefty, however, looks a lot less problematic than Sheldon.

Sheldon looks like Patient Zero of a zombie outbreak. Sheldon looks like the land mass of the evil continent in a fantasy realm. Sheldon hurts even more than Lefty.

Sheldon has been with me for a lot less time than Lefty has; when you get one ulcer, there is perhaps an 80% chance that you will get another, in the same way as getting a chest infection will almost guarantee you will get another. I have had Sheldon for about six months. He's a lot more superficial than Lefty, which is why he hurts so damn much.

See, while Lefty hurts a lot of the time, it is a rather bearable pain, most of the time. It's a low pulsing throb, like the vague headache you have four days after going to see Slayer - unless agitated. Sheldon, however, still has all his nerve endings - and so Sheldon is a little ball of agony at the slightest provocation. I can take my blood pressure from Sheldon's pulsing, on a bad day.

Sheldon is healing faster, if only because he's more superficial. This contributes to the pain factor, as well. It looks grody, and that grodiness is overgranulation. The skin is healing a little too fast. That is both good and bad, because if it doesn't heal properly, it may lead to further ulcers in the future.

The compression bandages do several things. One is they keep the wounds covered and clean, so they don't get infected. They also provide a minor amount of bump and scrape protection. They absorb any moisture that the ulcers kick out. The primary thing they do, however, is force any plasma and such out of my tissue and back into my venal system, so it can be processed properly. (My piss smells a bit weird because of this.)

So if I grimace a bit, or shift my weight seemingly at random from foot to foot, or lean down to seemingly adjust my socks, then this is why. These two bastards, and the effect they have on my life.

They were dressed a little differently, recently; the dressing was a touch more loose than usual, and because of that, I have slept less in the past four days than most people have in the last 24 hours. I've seen the last three 3ams, and each of them has been a shitty time to be awake and alive.

Right now, though; right now I am feeling a lot better.

I am doing a lot better than I was, and that is down to the nurses, doctors and medical practicitioners that I've seen over the years. Their help has been beyond indispensible. They've been incredible.

The big question though...why Sheldon?

Well, he causes me discomfort; he's consistently not funny; he's abrasive; and he always seems to knock when not wanted. Also it complains when something is in its spot.

Treatment continues.

What Doesn't Kill Me

Fair warning, folks; what follows deals with mental health issues - specifically my own. Yet more specifically, depression, anxiety, and suicide. If these things upset you, or if they make you uncomfortable - either due to their nature or their relevance in my life - then I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

Here would be a good start. It's pretty awesome.

Everyone still reading...we okay? We okay to get real serious?

Okay, now...

For full disclosure: when I was in college at age 18, way back in 2001, I tried to kill myself.

It didn't take, obviously. Partway through the process I ruined a couple of perfectly good towels and called an ambulance.

There's a few reasons I did this. None of them were good enough. None of them are justifications. At the time, though - at the time they were all that mattered. That's how it always seems, when you're at that point. Nothing else is visible. Your world becomes a very dark tunnel.

It took a long time to recover. Not physically - now I have two very fine scars that are basically invisible unless you know what to look for. Mentally. I had suffered from significant anxiety problems beforehand, and they only got worse; for years, I pretty much sequestered myself away in my room, only emerging briefly every now and then. To compliment this, for as long as I knew how to assess myself and my feelings, I have suffered from depression.

The accepted wisdom is that if you think of committing suicide, then you really ought to get help immediately. I confide in you, dear reader, that this would be impossible for me; because however briefly, ever since I did it once, I have thought about it regularly.

Does this affect how I live my life day-to-day? Well no, not especially. Nowhere near as much as my physical health (which long-time readers will know is pretty fucked, and not just because I'm fat). It's just a thing, that pops up in the back of my skull every now and then. For me it's as much a part of life as that urge to slap someone for being rude, or to shout at someone for doing something stupid, or to buy something I clearly can't really afford just because it looks neat.

Human beings are animals, and animals have urges. One way in which we can be better people is to not give in to the urges we feel. The urge to immediately strike back when wronged, or to hurt others when we are hurt, or to pursue a brief insubstantial high in exchange for a long-term low. I'm not saying that the life of an ascetic is a good one - but as I often say, moderation in all things (including moderation).

If you look at life this way...then the call to end it, no matter how soft, is another harmful urge to be controlled. We all face shadows and darkness, and we all have mechanisms to cope with it. Some mechanisms are better than others - harmful in and of their own right - but the important thing is that we don't give in.

Here's where I could spout any number of insipid platitudes that I've seen all across social media, but honestly - that's not very me, is it? That's not very me at all.

In truth the reason it is important is simply because life is here to be lived. There's no purpose outside of that which we give ourselves - and my purpose is to keep going. Happiness happens. I have felt it, I have seen it, and I believe in it. Happiness makes it worthwhile. Some days are easy, and some days are hard - but I never regret surviving the day I almost didn't.

Between then and now I have grown so much. I've seen so much of the good (and bad) side of life. I've met people that have changed me, almost always for the better. I've seen things, read things, heard things that have made every day worth it. I've seen my favourite bands play live, I've seen the sun rise over mountains and the stars over a desert. The days that have seemed the worst have ended up containing moments of utter joy, crystalline and near-perfect, embedded in the shit of mediocrity.

It's hard to remember that. A lot of the time. I only see it right now because I am making the deliberate and concerted effort; that doesn't mean it isn't there, always there, waiting in between the shadows.

All of this was prompted because a friend of mine posted something the other night; a picture that stated simply, "I am glad that you survived".

I'm glad I survived, too.

Feeling Strangely Fine

I'm sorry to disappoint anyone misled by the title, but this blog post isn't about Semisonic's second album.

The following disclaimer can probably apply to every entry I put into this blog but I feel it deserves repeating anyway: this entire thing is going to be from a very personal perspective. If I generalise, please understand that I am really only speaking for me. I wouldn't presume to speak for anyone else - but if you see yourself in what I write, then know that we understand each other, at least a little.

Everyone knows at least one hypochondriac, although they may not self-identify as such.

You know the type. They are sure they are sick most of the time. Either they go to the doctor once a week with a new complaint, or they never ever go to the doctor and self-diagnose instead. Either way, whenever you haven't seen them for a few days, the next time you speak to them - there's something new wrong with them.

I'm not going to say they aren't sick, or there isn't something wrong. That's not for me to say, and it's none of my business.

Here's the contrast, though; I have noticed that people with a chronic or ongoing condition, almost universally, respond to questions about their general health with a neutral or vague-positive answer. "How Are You" is replied to with terms like "Fine," or "Not Bad", or "Okay" - most of the time.

There's exceptions of course. Once you're past that moment in the street, sat down somewhere and talking and get onto actual conversational topics, and words like "In Yourself" and "Really" get tabbed onto the end of the original question - that is when more pointed answers come out.

If we went out the night before and drank enough liquor to stun a platoon of Royal Marines, then we'll happily talk about how we now have the hangover from Hades. Broken arm? Yep, look at this cast, yes I chose pink fuck off I like it. Fatigue? Arthritis? Anything chronic or perpetual? ...yeah, fine, not bad.

In my case at least, there's a lot of reasons for this.

One of those is that I'm hyper-aware of the depressing effect of hearing that one of your friends, colleagues or associates is suffering, especially if there's nothing you can do about it. I'm usually reluctant to lay that on someone. Another is a kind of insecurity; talk about how shit you feel but try to put a brave face on it and you come across as something of a martyr, whereas the lack of brave face can come across as being very moany. Again, two things I don't want to lay on anyone.

(All this is in my own head of course. Anyone else talking to me about things they are going through, I would never think that they were moaning excessively, or nailing themselves to a cross. I'm just bad at taking my own advice.)

Another factor that influences the answer to the How Are You - the scales are different. If in general a person is okay, and isn't in much pain, and doesn't find anything difficult, then their knee joint being particularly painful of a morning is going to warrant explanation or exclamation. I, however, have a very odd relationship with pain. It's worthy of comment when my joints DON'T hurt - or when they hurt enough to stop me doing my already-reduced average daily allotment of doing things.

It becomes the new normal. At first you rail against it, hate it, loathe it, want nothing more than for it to not be happening...but over days, weeks, months, years, it becomes life. It is something you work with and around rather than something you mindlessly defy. You get zen about it, or you go a little crazy.

That doesn't mean to say that you should try second-guessing people if you know they're ill and they say they're fine, because there's another reason why we say as such: some of us don't like a fuss made of us, or the attention that a full and frank explanation of our condition and its current effect on us might draw.

I'm the kind of guy that deals with sickness pretty much alone. If I have the flu, or a cold, or anything like that - I retreat into a little cave and stay there until I'm better. People bugging me doesn't help me, and in my experience, keeping your head straight helps you heal. Psychosomatics and all. So if one applies that to a condition that is not only life-altering but also totally ongoing, then, well...who wants a barrage of questions every time you get asked if you're doing okay?

It's a shitty thing to have to manage. If we look at it like a car, then it would feature numerous structural problems that make it awkward and ungainly to handle, but taking it to a garage sometimes makes it worse. Drive that for two years, and you'll stop bitching about the stiff gearstick real fast. Sooner or later, even the desperately uncomfortable seat becomes a background annoyance rather than a bane of one's existence, if you can't change it.

In the end, it is what it is. Keeping your head straight is the most important thing - it is easy to lose hope and become demoralised, even easier to focus on the debilitating effect of one's condition rather than...well...anything else, really. Some days it can feel a lot bigger than you, a lot bigger than the rest of the world even.

One way of preventing that - one way of looking illness in the eye and letting it know that it isn't all that big a deal after all - is saying that we're fine. Saying we're okay. A dismissal. Sure, most joints I have from the neck down feel like they're filled with broken glass, and my lungs are half-filled with scar tissue - but you know what? I'm fine. Can do. Can deal. Can cope. I am London circa 1941, and the illness is the Luftwaffe. Fuck you mate. I'm alright. Coventrate my fat ass.

So...yeah. I'm fine, I guess.