We're on the road to nowhen

Well, I knew the day would come but I didn't think it would happen in the first week. I can think of nothing to say. Nothing up my sleeve... Hey PRESTO!! ... an elbow.

But I promised myself I would write an entry every day and so I shall.

Today was productive. I coloured a few drawings. Cleaned the kitchen. Posted a rather disturbing caricature of myself on this blog. Not a bad stint as far as long term unemployed days go. Certainly a lot more than I would usually do than when I was back working in pubs. It would be quite an accomplishment to return home at all in those days. Alas, and thank god (or Whomever the strange humoured entity is that thinks it's in charge of all this), I shall no longer be working in the wonderful realm of fermented beverage serviture. 'Tis known not to mix well with my Alcoholism (or too well, as the case may be). I shall miss the bar in some respects. The exhiliration to the ego of turfing some tosser out the door. The hob nobbing with the permanently inebriated. The smell of the urinal cakes, the roar of the bouncers.

So it is that I shall wrap up another short entry. My neck has decided it wishes to get off at the next stop and I'm having a hard time trying to convince it that it's rather essential to the job of keeping my head attached to my body (...I have a headache), so until next time kiddies, remember:

Out of all the millions of people in the world, past and present, you're the only one that's you. So you're doing pretty well straight off the bat.

Your host for this evening... 

The Great and Noble Memory

Oh ye, what a day. A wonderful and glorious day.

I have no recollection of what I did today. I surmise that my apparent lack of recall has something to do with the scrumptious meal that ZuckerBaby and I just whipped up. I have plates the size of garbage tin lids (probably not a very tasty simile), so the servings tend to be extravagant, if not painful. We made up a wonderful potato salad and a bean salad and Baby had some pre-made (by her very own hand no less) vegan patties. I just kept serving it up until the plates were full. So here I sit, blood surging to my hidden and no doubt rather complicated digestive system, leaving my poor cranium to function on very little oxygen.

So I remember helping cook. So let's work back from there. Before that I was at Miss ZuckerBaby's pad. There we discussed the current affairs of the Empire over Indian Tea and cucumber sandwiches. Well something like that anyway. Ahh thats right, we were busily working on my applications to prospective employers. Oh the joy. I'm afraid to say I'm not a very good resume writer. I tend to try and be humourous. From previous experience (no matter what they tell you) I can honestly say that funny CV's are not welcomed. Ahh well.

Before that I seem to remember some kind of domestic chore. Maybe washing or the like. I must remember to start remembering things. Tomorrow I shall do just that.

Maybe I'll write myself a note.

Thoughtful discordantly

I think a lot.

I'd like to point out that doing so does not denote intelligence. Forthwith I shall give you a small example which shall illustrate that, unlike the thinking of greater men, I am not a thinker of great and practical intent.

The human face has a myriad of different shapes and forms that it can morph into in order to emote the feeling of the user. Strangely though, it seems that the human brain has yet to catch up, and in a great deal of circumstances the onlooker can be perplexed as to what the faces user is trying to say... Without saying it. I blame language. Before the advent of "One, Two, Lots of Woolly Mammoths!" our pre-verbalite ancestors could just look at a fellow colleague and he would instantly know to double back, grab a big pointy stick, and throw it at the big kitty cat with the long teeth. Preferably pointy end first. And preferably at its bottom. Yet, now in this age of information technology, one could stand in an elevator and try with silent intent to tell the lady next to you that her skirt is firmly wedged into her underwear, using only rolling eyes and subtle twitching of the lips, and get absolutely nowhere. Yet send her a text message saying "UR DRESS IN PANTS :)" and it's all clear.

These things keep me up at night. If left in a room by myself I have been known to stare blankly at a chair, deep in thought, arm poised half way into a jacket sleeve. When asked what I'm thinking about I will be unlikely to answer. Not because of a lack of manners or a fear of stumbling through a sentence. Nay. I cannot answer because I do not know. I know only that I have been thinking. What about, is between my neurons and my subconscious and seemingly not me. So I thought I'd just share that with you.

I've been thinking about it.

Anthropomorphic muscularity.

Not unlike prison, the currency of a rehab centre is cigarettes. So, having very little in the way of hard cash for purchasing of said coffin nails I decided to prostitute my modest abilities in the field of caricature. Things went well for a while and I found myself without withdrawal for most of the first week. Then one of the inmates asked if I could draw one of the mascots from a footy team. Now here is where things go pear shaped. I said yes. Not something one would foresee as being a tremendous fault but its with this little word that all other pain and suffering comes from. For instance:

"Should we go to war?"

"Yes."

"Would you like to join our cult?"

"Yes."

"Can you draw a very muscular man wearing football shorts with the head of a dragon?'

"Yes."

"Can you now draw the other fourteen mascots from the other teams and then colour them and put a football in the background and then I'm gunna sell em on t-shirts?"

"...... oooookay."

Hence I have been busily drawing said figures for going on three weeks now. I shouldn't really complain, I do quite enjoy doing them but I just kick myself that I never see these things coming. I seem to have a blind spot for Stupidly Obvious Foreseeable Events.

I hear some enquiring minds asking "But you're no longer there, why keep doing them?". And I must admit that on more than one occasion I've asked myself the same question. I'll tell you why I'm still scribbling away at these steriod enhanced rejects from Dr Moreau.

"Can I have your mobile phone number so I can call you and see how they're going?"

"Yes."

That and, to be perfectly honest, I really want to start finishing things. I am a wonderful starter of things. Top notch starting. Uber starter as it were. Finishing, though, is when I tend to let down the home team. I'm not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with my attention span. "Span" being a bit of an over statement. Ledge maybe. Attention precipice. That sounds about right. Look upon a project and then "Whoomph" hurtling into an empty canyon yodelling like a Disney character all the way down until I hit with a distant cloud of dust.

What was I talking about...

28 days later... on

Day One

"Day One of what?" I hear you ponder. Distantly. Probably.

Well, it's "Day One" of the outside world for me. That's right folks, for the last four weeks I have been a guest at the funny farm. Well, not really. I have been in rehab. Had myself a wee battle with the Booze you see. It won. On many occasions. Left me with a scar on my hand, three pissed off ex-girlfriends and a memory with the catching ability of a colander made entirely of smoke. Wasn't so much your everyday drinker. More your "Start drinkin' and don't stop until sweet blissful unconsciousness lays me down in discreet bramble bush or the money runs out" kinda drinker. So when I once again woke up with half a kebab in my bed, a hangover that professional torturers would care to study, and only snippets of recollections regarding the previous nights debauchery, I decided I may need a bit of a hand. And off to rehabilitation therapy I trotted, skipped, trudged, and sauntered (blended together this walk actually turns out determined).

Rehab is like going to school camp. With all the fun bits taken out. But the food's the same. What I found most daunting about the whole experience was not really the classes or the abstinence but the socialization. Upon first arriving I was greeted by three men that looked as though they had been made from six. Huge fellas with tattoos and muscles and that look in the eye that says "Just try me! Grrr." Well, maybe not the Grrr. But still. When the ward started filling up with more and more people I came to the realization that we were all so diverse. Our only common link was that we couldn't control our habit(s) of choice. That and smoking. Cigarette smoking I mean. Although some of the gang there would have smoked a deck chair given the opportunity. But I digress.

Obviously what goes on in these places holds a rather sturdy confidentiality clause (not in the form of a written contract but from the more ironclad "Well, you were there too" basis of legal non-disclosure) so I will not go into details of my experience. I just felt like getting it out there. To lay it out for the world to see (or the three people who fell into this site accidentally) so I need not feel as though I hold to my chest a dark secret. Well, not this dark secret anyway. But alas it now occurs to me that some might think this blog a droning parable of a man's battle with addiction. I do not intend this to be so. I was Tobbë before the booze and I am still Tobbë after it. In fact I was still Tobbë during it, just with a goofier look on my face. So this will not be a day to day account of my battles with demons nigh. Sure, it may happen time to time. I would imagine that something would be terribly wrong with me if I found myself happy and docile on a 24 hour basis. Some kind of hippie bug perhaps but I certainly don't want to be labeled "The Alcoholic" because there is so much more to me than that. Plenty more...

Heaps more....

....

cornucopia of interesting um.. things...


Let me get back to you.

Strange beginnings

So here I am. A Blogger.

For reasons best left to professionals in psychiatric fields I did not think it would come to this. True, as a child, I wrote fervently in a diary with the express purpose of someone finding it and having the gall, nay the impudence! to read it. But alas my hiding place under my bed was too mainstream for my family. I kept it in my school bag and surreptitiously dropped it into the middle of a gaggles of girls. Still no luck. Once I even left it on the coffee table and hid behind the couch and watched with anticipation for someone, anyone in my family to read it. I would then leap out and admonish them for their horrendous invation of my privacy. After they had read all 114 pages of course.

But still my battered little exercise book that held all my dreams and thoughts remained unopened by another's hand. I was devastated. How on earth could I be praised and coddled when no one knew of my inner angst and my supernatural ability to spell words that had yet to be discovered. So I finally accepted the awesome truth that nobody wanted to read my diary and in fact, when I asked my little sister to do so, were quite horrified at the thought.
"What use is a diary if no one reads it?' I pleaded with my sis.
She quietly, and somewhat nervously, explained to me that a diary was something one wrote for one's self. I was perplexed.
"I wrote it! It holds no surprises for me!" (At this young stage of my life I had recently discovered the exclamation mark and was determined to get as much use from it as possible, even in speech, as though there where a limited number allocated to planet earth).
"It's for you to look back on in the future. To know you yourself as you are now from the observation of your future self", subtly implied my sister.
After this sentence there was a small hiss and pop from a region deep within my brain. Just behind my left ear. The tangy smell of fried neurons drifted through the room.
"What!!" I said (noting my clever use of two exclamation marks with the small price of just one word.)

To cut a long, and altogether embarrassing, story to an overdue close, I never did catch on. Whatever lonely and sporadic brain cells that did perish that fateful day, they held the key to understanding the riddle of an unread diary. Some people just don't get clogs. I don't get diaries that I can't read. So here I am, many years later, and thanks to modern technology I can do what I always dreamed of. Write a diary for someone else to read.

Granted, once again I may be hiding behind my sofa waiting with baited breath for a "hit" (the interwebs equivalent of Mum stopping the vacuuming to thumb through an exercise book that looks like it once belonged to an Alsatian with an oral fixation), but I think I can handle the suspense.

Anyway, I could always call my sister and ask her to look.