Feeling down again

Over the weekend, my girlfriend and I helped my father clean out a garden pond. Notable for the lack of fish turning up as the water drained. Since the tradition of building ponds in the garden started, the heron population must have exploded.

Feeling low again today. It started when I woke up too late in the morning. Then a form I was waiting for did not arrive. Tried to fill in the rough of an application form, but just got into a downer. It’s the realisation that in six years of work, because you couldn’t move out of the department, you are at a disadvantage before you start. Because I couldn’t be allowed in contact with the till counters, no matter how well I did with the customers, if they asked me questions. Maybe they were right and I couldn’t have managed it. But all I wanted was just one chance to show it. They knew that I was loyal and willing to work hard, could they at least have tried it with me?

It’s not just the lack of progress in my last job that’s the problem, it’s also that there was a yearlong gap between jobs, which doesn’t help.

It just feels like after nearly nine years of working, I haven’t managed to get anything approaching a career and it is now too late to find one.

This is why I keep thinking that I should find a way to work for myself, as I am too unskilled to get anywhere. But I can’t see anything that I can do. I did think last night, “why don’t I design T-shirts and sell them on the internet?” Then I realised, I can’t do designs, where would I get the materials and who would give the start of funds and would I really make that much money anyway?

I am returning to the pattern of hoping that everything can get sorted out after an appointment this week, so that on Monday, I can establish some sort of routine and that thing can feel normal. But then there is the fear of what if it isn’t? What if I still can’t make myself wake up early?

I know this kind of downward spiral thinking doesn’t help. I want to be able to stop doing it. But it’s just become such a deep part of my mind that when it takes over all I can do is wait for myself to rise out of it again.

The nostalgia of debt

Read about someone who was on the programme ‘Benefit Busters’ on Channel 4 Thursday night. Apparently they had managed to run up debts of £75000, on their credit cards. People like this hold a strange fascination for me. On one hand, there is the question of when did these people think they would be prepared to pay it all back. On the other, there is the sense of what it must be like to run up debts like that and not worry about the consequences. I know that I would never ever be as stupidly reckless as that. Yet it’s the lure of being able to have what you want right now and to be able to block the consequences of the debt out.

Yet every time these sort of high profile spenders turn up on TV, on programmes like ‘Spendaholics’, the total gains of these debts always seem so little. Nights out, shoes, handbags, designer label gear, electronic goods. Admittedly, to the person who spent so much on them, it doesn’t feel that way. Of course this may be completely academic now. All these stories about ordinary people who ran up fortunes in debts on credit cards, feel like the product of a more optimistic time, even though they weren’t really. It’s like people stuck in the Great Depression, remembering all the great parties they had in the roaring twenties.

Did some reading about Prostate cancer as my father is going to have to undergo surgery for it. Found the web address of a charity, but it’s no good giving that to him. He refuses to even look at computers. As far as he is concerned, the answering machine is technology gone mad.

Bank loan letters, wargames minatures

It is notable that in this time of economic hardship and job uncertainty, one thing still is able to carry on. Yes, I still get letters asking me if I want a loan or a new credit card. Has this ever worked? Was the credit crunch in fact caused by people who had been on carefully maintained budgets, but then felt the need after getting a letter to suddenly get a twenty-five thousand pound loan?

I’m considering starting to paint my old Warhammer fantasy battle gaming miniatures again. This would probably just be to get them all painted, not actually play games with them. When I did, I lost so often that a lot of the fun went out of it. I did win more when I changed my army, although still not very often. But then the other main problem still continued. I would take my army out and bits of them would have fallen off in transit. When you’ve spend several hours painting something and then it’s hands fall off when you want to use it on the gaming table, it does put a downer on the evening.

Zombies, Sushi and Beyond’, Lost Worlds

There was a report on the BBC News website, that researchers from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University had been calculating the effects of a zombie attack. They have been working from the ‘traditional’ film version of the zombie. Slow shambling, but one bite turns you into them. Apparently if not stopped quickly, they would overwhelm the human race.
The work was intended as a model for the spread of infectious diseases.

This does illustrate the zombie has become the all-purpose face of monsterdom (they could have used vampires or werewolves or body snatcher style aliens). But I do think that zombies are starting to lose their effectiveness. The popular image of them is that they are the walking dead, who move about and eat the living. But still manage to turn the living into zombies with one bite to swell their numbers. So really, what seems to happen is that they bite the living a bit, decide they don’t like the taste for some reason and leave the victims to rise up as zombies to do the same thing. But you can get rid of them, by going for the head. And they don’t tend to speak. They are in danger of losing their ability to be scary. There is the potential shock value of hordes of them pushing through doors and crowding the cities. But this imagery, popularised by George Romero, is becoming a cliché as well.

Finished reading ‘Sushi and Beyond’ by Michael Booth. An interesting culinary tour of Japan, containing much information on the country and its culture. Makes you want to try some of the foods mentioned, only to realise that they are not usually available at the supermarket.

Since I heard about the genre of steampunk, I’ve wanted to try a story in that vein. Thinking of retro science-fiction, I keep coming up with the idea of the ‘Lost World’ type of story. The drawback is that these tend not to get very far, beyond “oh look dinosaurs”. The last major work in this line ‘Jurassic Park’ did popularise some species but could be most notable for moaning up not trusting computers and using chaos theory as another to moan “we’re all doomed”.

Organisation and depression

Woke up at 9.00am, which I don’t regard as a good thing. I do think it is a bit harder to get going after that.

Started trying to organise the cuttings I’ve saved for future research material. This is the sort of thing that can get more depressing then you expect. As in “I have all this material, why I haven’t I done more with it?” This problem is highlighted by the amount of notes I have turned up form my depressed phrase. One of the things that I have established from this and from my father’s own spell of depression, is that recovery from this is slow. It’s about trying to change a mental outlook, which doesn’t happen overnight. I also think that there can be some triggers that can remain in your head which cause you to start feeling down again. These can fade away over a couple of hours, the trick is trying to distract your mind away from them.

Another reason why this may be getting me down, is that it reminds me of all the story ideas that I had and I haven’t followed though. This means that they build up; waiting to get out and I feel guilty because I haven’t done them yet. Because I don’t know how I can make them work and so on. This is a very good example of the trigger thinking above, really.

In attempt to be cheerful, I got hold of a copy of the graphic novel ‘Freakangels: Volume 2’ by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, published by Avatar Press. This is the story of 11 twenty-somethings with various mental powers, such as telepathy and telekinesis, defending Whitechapel in a post-apocalypse England. It is building into an exciting science-fiction narrative with a theme about taking responsibility for your actions.

Over today, I have been getting the urge to try and organise my CD collection. Either this is just my mind looking for a source of distraction. Alternatively, it might be the belief that if you can impose a final definite sort of order on everything you own, all books, CD’s and DVD’s, you will be able to have a better existence. I admit that I love the idea of this, but I can spot the flaws in it. Firstly, it might mean you spend the best part of a month doing it. Secondly it relies on you never acquiring anything new after this, because if you did that, it would have to catalogued into the new system and what if it didn’t fit? Thirdly, what if you had to move? Then would you have to do it all again? Fourthly, you could just end sitting around, too neurotic to take out anything to read or watch, in case it disrupted the established order.

Mr Toppit and the pond

Finished reading ‘Mr Toppit’ by Charles Elton. It’s a about a family dealing with the death of their father and the aftermath of the children’s books he wrote, becoming famous. It did start well, but once the action moves to Los Angles in the second have the book loses momentum. It feels as if it’s going for a bunch of easy targets. Also it starts to build up to revelations that once revealed are not that much of a shock.

Sometime this week, I’m going to have to help my parents clean out a pond and put a new liner in. Now there are two types of garden pond. There are the ones with the nice clear water, where the Koi Carp swim, where you can see the bottom of the pond. Then there are the ponds which have gone feral. The greenery is covering the surface of the water and is starting to creep out of it. The bottom is covered with black slime that smells as if an abattoir and sewage plant were sharing the same room. Guess which one is in our garden?

First day of redundancy and it already feels as if there are a thousand things I need to do and want to do. Still I suppose that’s a good thing. This morning I was able to wake up at 7.00am. Take it from me, when it is usually 5 – 5.30am, that counts as an improvement.

Redundancy

There is a fear that haunts everybody who is made redundant, I think. By everybody I mean me. Yes I have yet another part of the growing jobless statistics on the news. The 1980’s revival, not just in music.

The fear is as follows. You’ll wake up, make your way to the living room in your dressing gown and sit then down in front of the TV. Then you will fuse with the sofa to become something that sits, for day after day, watching television. As you watch, your waistline will swell, your pyjamas will fuse to your skin, as they haven’t been taken off, and you will lose all critical faculties. You become a blob, without the ability to evolve into something better.

This is ridiculous I realise. The drawback is that it gets replaced by the fear that you are not be trying finding work hard enough.