the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The first and most important thing to bear in mind about me is that I am not a nice person.

Admittedly my friends might disagree with that statement. They would say that I could be both witty and generous and, on occasion, loyal. Whether I chose to be, or not depended on my mood at that exact moment. But as I have only a few friends left, that isn’t saying much about me. (How I lost the rest of my friends will be a subject I will return to. Frequently).

Just to be clear about things; I put the ‘me’ into mean. It will help you no end, if when reading the words that follow, that you are not fooled into thinking I am a nice person.

The second thing to know about me is that I don’t enjoy living. I realise that that statement might require some clarification. Not enjoying living is not the same thing as wanting to be dead. As John Cougar Mellencamp’s song ‘Jack and Diane’ has it, “Oh yeah, life goes on / long after the thrill of living is gone.”

Not enjoying living is a somewhat unpalatable fact to have in one’s head all the time. Sometimes right at the front, sometimes edged out of to the middle or the back, but always there, like a spot in-between your shoulder blades, which you can’t get to and a friend has to squeeze, and when they do, you know it will return.

Which it does.

Life in itself is a problematic word, given that I don’t consider myself to have one. An existence, certainly. But life? Strictly speaking, yes I have one inasmuch as life is the interval between when you are born and when you die. But what transpires during that interval is what most people would consider life.

Given that I am a citizen of one of the top ten wealthiest countries in the world, with a functioning democracy, independent judiciary and rule of law, and all the benefits that that accrues, not to mention the benefits I now subsist on, I can’t grumble. I am fortunate to have been born here when I consider I could have been in Afghanistan, Somalia or America.

But I do grumble.

To quote the French philosopher, Jacque Liverot “ An optimist sees half a pint of milk. He says it is half full. A pessimist sees half a pint of milk. He says it is half empty. I see half a pint of milk. I say it is sour.”

This blog will be about the ‘sour milk’ of existence. It will also try to be entertaining and sometimes funny. It will be original and you may well, on occasion, disagree with what I write. If you didn’t, and agreed with everything I write, then you would share my rather jaundiced view of things, which would be a pretty sad indictment of your character. So what, you may well ask, is the reason for wasting your time reading (and hopefully continuing to read) my blog?

Well, some time ago I suffered – what was to me at any rate – a life ending brain injury. I went out for the evening and woke up, some weeks later, from a medically induced coma, during which time my vital organs had seized on this opportunity, afforded them by my tardiness, to pack up one by one.

I awoke to a radically changed me; a me that no one ever took the time to explain exactly what had happened to me and, more importantly, what it might mean. Although, as I soon grasped, what it meant, was that my vague dreams had suddenly become an all too real living nightmare. My ability to walk, to talk, seemingly gone. I had to become outwardly nice. Despite thinking that Sartre was right, when he said “Hell is other people”, circumstance prevailed over conviction. It has to, if you depend on others. But inwardly…. This blog will be about my reversal of fortune and my ability (or more often not) to cope with it. It will also contain my thoughts on what I find both irritating, inane or both about modern life. Suffice to say, there won’t be a shortage of the latter…..