Earlier this week I was moaning about my boring life and of course I have since been reminded by others that it’s far from boring; I really need to learn to pay attention. I guess I’m torn between spending my time obsessing about how I can lose yet more weight in order that I can get down to size zero. And before you get the wrong idea, we’re talking the UK zero, not this wishy washy American size zero which is really a size 4. OK, I let you off with not bothering with half the letters in words but numbers are a fundamental. Anyway, I’m either doing that or thinking of committing suicide due to my colleagues constantly bullying me into making them tea and coffee. It’s really starting to wear me down, I’m just not sure how much more of this I can take before I break.

So yes, as you can see, I’m far too busy to notice if my life is interesting or not. I do however have a ‘friend’ who told me a rather amusing story of what happened to him a few weeks ago. I’ve just cut and pasted his email so I don’t have to type it out again, I’d only spoil it by leaving something out.

So, you wouldn’t believe the night I had about three weeks ago! I was off work and spent the day at home trying to ignore the throbbing in my jaw and the stabbing pain in my ankle, pottered around killing time until I had to go out to a work soirée to say au revoir to a colleague. I’d decided upon a book that I thought he’d like and remembered that a few weeks ago, when I was cleaning out the cupboard, I’d found a few sheets of black wrapping paper. I figured that would be perfect and reminded myself to get a sheet. So I have lunch, pop a couple of painkillers, smoke some organic tobacco and read a book. Lose track of time completely and then end up in a mad rush to get showered and shaved and out the door, after getting dressed of course! So, instantly I turn into Daley Thomson, minus the moustache, as I sprint, shower, clean, dress, eat in record time I congratulate myself with some more organic tobacco and go look for that sheet of black wrapping paper, I’m only about 10mins behind schedule.

I go to the box which holds all that remains of three black rubbish bags worth of ‘crap’ Hmm… no black wrapping paper? I go to the cupboard and have a rummage…Nope, not here. Where did I see I wonder?? I go back to the living room, I open drawers, I pull out papers and books, retracing every step I had made in the last 2 weeks, and probably adding a few more as the effects of the organic produce reached my memory recall dept. I basically turn the flat upside down in about 5mins and suddenly find myself looking at the scene from a Taz cartoon!! OK, I’m now starting to wonder if there ever really existed any black wrapping paper and decide that I’ll give up the search. But fuck! What am I going to wrap the damn book in?! Newspaper?? Nah, not sure even I could try that one. A quick check of my recycling box discovers that the brown DVD mailers HMV send are perfect I quickly grabbed my ipod, a quick puff and out the door I went. Only about 30mins behind schedule by now, get on tube and change lines at Finsbury Park. Getting off the train I suddenly become aware that I’m not holding the book! I glance back in the carriage, it’s not there. Fuck! I must have left it on the bus, depending on the efficiency of the bus driver, the book was either trundling between Walthamstow Central and London Bridge, or was in the process of being blown up for masquerading as a suspicious package.

I started to wonder if the day could get any better and pondered just going home for fear that the next misfortune would be to trip and end up head first on the live rail. But the reality was my head was busy trying to run thru events leading up to leaving the house. Ipod…check, keys…check, wallet…check, jacket…check, turn off computer…check, close curtains…check, pick up book…, I said pick up book… The movie in my head rewound in lighting speed, there was the book!! On the kitchen table!! All is not lost, back on tube, back on bus, race home, grab book, and eventually arrive in Boho 90mins behind schedule. The surroundings suddenly come into focus as I venture out of my head and realise the pub that I have ‘auto-pilot’ walked to in the belief that it was the Horse and Cart turns out to be the Wine House…How the fuck did that happen?! A frantic text informs me it is in Covenant Garden and I race there. Thankfully the remainder of the night passed without incident and I returned home and spent nearly 2hours cleaning up the mess I made looking for the black wrapping paper.

Yesterday I went to the bedroom to put some shoes away in a box and when I opened the box to put the shoes in, there were two fucking sheets of black wrapping paper waving at me!!

I’ve already passed on my advice to my friend that he keep a diary of his life for a year, I’m sure he could publish it. I’d buy a copy as I’m sure it would be worth a read. Maybe I’ll get him to write a blog, he likes free things

I thought musically, it would be appropriate to think of my friends event portrayed on the big screen in some Tarantino-esque sort of way and so I thought I’d acknowledge him in this entries soundtrack.

You possibly don’t recognise the performer but you’ll recognise the song. It’s The Statler Brothers performing Flowers On The Wall…LIVE!! Don’t say I don’t spoil you! Don’t know about you but that song makes me wanna drink =)

Starting Kitty: $310

Well, no roulette played today. Came home after work and took advantage of a few hours light to work in the garden. That sad reality that it won’t be usable in the summer if I don’t start tidying it up now!

However I can report back that the $200 I used to credit my account and gain the $200 bonus was credited to my bank account. I actually made a profit of £0.79 due to changes in the currency rate, that 79p is more than the bank pays me at the end of the month!

I’ve been doing some reading of various ‘systems’, most are just variations on the one I’m using and looking back over the results of the many thousand wheels spins I’ve noted, the system I’m using IS the most profitable. Some of the ‘hints’ they give do make sense. They suggest changing the table every now and then and the suggestion is that you should leave some money in your account rather than cashing it all in. So on that basis I’ve decided that I will leave $500 in the account and anything over that I’ll cash in, probably in units of $200.

Well, that’s the plan, we’ll see how that goes.

Ending Kitty: $310

I’ve been giving Paul Weller’s Stanley Road album a lot of ‘ipod time’, it’s an album I liked as soon as I heard the opening bars of the first track back in 1996. With each playing it became my album of choice. I remember it wasn’t particularly a great time. I was back in Glasgow, working in a nightclub. It was a very fucking cold winter and I lived in a one bedroomed council flat on the 14th floor of a block of high rise flats that overlooked the local ‘Orange Lodge’ if you have no idea what is I’ll just explain that the have a ‘marching season’ which starts around June or something. I found out about it one Saturday morning, I returned home from work at about 6am, collapsed into bed and drifted off into a deep slumber. My dreams were chaotic, I vaguely recall a university marching brass band and baton twirling cheerleaders, all the stuff from American’s lore then I realised it wasn’t a dream, I opened my eyes, they were stinging through lack of sleep, it was just after 8am. My marching band and scantily clad cheerleaders turned out to be the Lodge’s band warming up and they proceeded to warm up until about noon, helping my sleep immensely. After about 15 minutes the real fun started, residents in the tower blocks took to the windows to either shout abuse or praise on the band and I will never forget the sight of one guy holding up his infant, who could have been no more than 18months old, dressed in a Glasgow Celtic football strip, hurling abuse at the band and his neighbours who were dressed in their Glasgow Rangers strips. Anyway, Stanley Road got me through that period. I would stick it on when I woke up and it was what I fell asleep to, I listened to it on the way to work and I listened to it on the way home, bleary eyed at 6am longing for my bed, aware that everyone was waking as I returned home to sleep. Working nights can be quite lonely as you seldom have friends outside ‘the industry’ who keep the same hours as you do. C’est la vie!

I had dinner with Sarah, a friend I met in June 2001, tonight in Kingston. I had never been to Kingston before and whilst it was a bit late to see any of the sights after dinner, I did find the walk to the station along the waterfront quite relaxing. It’s nice to think that this spot exists in London, even if I am unlikely to venture there often. I may just have to make a point of going to prove myself wrong!

Sarah, I’m afraid, is another of those friends I have who I had strong feelings for and I failed miserably in conveying them to her. Actually I think she must have know as she one day announced that we would never speak again and it seemed like my life imploded. I was struggling at the time to wean myself off of the ‘recreational’ drugs I had been filling my body with, in an attempt at helping to bury those pesky feelings that kept trying to surface. I can still remember the day we met, it was Green Park tube, I was on the lookout for a girl in a turquoise green cardigan. I remember arriving early and walking about, pretending I was going somewhere so no one would notice me looking nervous as hell in the corner. Out of the corner of my eye I spied a girl exiting the barriers with a turquoise green cardigan, was that her? I looked again, this girl was stunningly beautiful, she looked up and walked past me. I remember smiling to myself and saying, “Don’t be stupid Marc, she’s far too pretty for you!” I went back to my post and started at the barriers and my watch… perhaps she wasn’t coming I thought to myself? I was aware of a voice behind me, I turned, it was Sarah; the girl in the turquoise cardigan. I say turquoise, perhaps it was just green, I should ask Sarah but until recently I never liked to talk to her about those days. My regret is calling her sometimes, whilst high and just talking random gibberish. It was no wonder she couldn’t be bothered with me, I was talking, my mouth was moving, words were leaving my mouth but I wasn’t saying anything.

I decided not to bother stopping drugs, what was the point of living a drug free existence I thought to myself? It was a safer world I inhabited, I didn’t get hurt because I didn’t allow anyone close enough to hurt me. It seemed that going drug free didn’t make things easier, it just made them harder, or so it seemed at the time, but then what do you expect? narcotics fuck with your mind!

After a month or two of wallowing in self pity I gave myself a kick up the arse, Sarah would have given me a telling off if she had seen me I’m sure and that’s primarily what motivated me. I’ve obviously never broached the subject with Sarah, at dinner I bored her to tears by going on about Mae. I say bored to tears, Sarah said I was, “Candid” which she found, “engaging and very refreshing” I think we’ll agree to disagree So I’ll never know if she knew at the time I was mad about her, as opposed to just mad. Discussing the subject tonight she said that being told that someone had strong feelings for you could be interpreted as a compliment but if the feelings were still there then perhaps it’s not such a good thing. I find that all very puzzling.

Is it not possible to have had strong feelings for someone and to still have those feelings yet not act upon them and indeed live comfortably suppressing them? Perhaps its the recipient who receives this news who finds the thought more difficult to cope with; that a friend ‘likes them’ in a way that will never be reciprocated. Will they then always look at that friend suspiciously, as if their every word or action is somehow an attempt at ingratiating themselves. I think it’s the fear of this reaction that has always stopped me telling anyone how I feel about them.

As always, I could write more but I’ll finish up now and leave you with a song, thankfully not one I’m singing! It was never going to be easy selecting a track from Stanley Road so it’s very likely that over the coming month or two a few more will sneak in This however is the first one and NOT my favourite. It’s Paul Weller’s Broken Stones

Starting Kitty: $263

So, I settled down to play for 60 minutes. To be honest I wasn’t in the mood and my attention was wandering all over the place so it was an erratic 60 minutes however it was a profitable 60 as I increased the kitty to $310, with only a few scary moments along the way during the 183 spins of the wheel.

Time for bed!

Ending Kitty: $310

As each day passes into years I usually have never bothered to look back at what happened in them. Sure I’ve often stopped to remember particular incidents, usually they fall into either ‘good memories’ and ‘bad memories’ but how many of those happen in a year? For a relatively boring son of a bitch like me, not many.

Or at least not many that I pay any attention to and I think I should explain this, just in case you ever meet me, or indeed if you already know me (I know who you are!) A lot of the things that happen to me I don’t really think about as being anything out of the ordinary. To my closest friends I often lament how boring and dull my life is; a mountain of debt, no significant other combined with the daily grind of finding the money to pay the bills, putting up with work when you know you would rather do something else but no real idea what and no sign that things will change any time soon. If anything I really do walk around in a bit of a vacuum, my head is usually filled with thousand and one questions that I’m asking myself that I don’t tend to think that most of the things that happen to me are unusual.

A number of years ago, while I was giving my usual, “Oh my life is so fucking boring!” rant, close friends advised me to write a diary of what happened to me over the course of a year. They assured me it would be a best seller, the sort of thing they’d make a TV programme out of. I wish I had listened to them, when I look at what Biographies are selling on Amazon. It seems any non-entity can publish their ‘memoirs’ and people will read them, at least my memories have some life in them. And then the other day I downloaded a BBC show called Ideal about a small time drug dealer who never seems to leave the house and has friends called ‘cartoon head’ and ‘Psycho Paul’, his drug supplier is a local cop who is also shagging his girlfriend, his brother lives in the airing cupboard and as far as I can make out there have been 2 people killed in the flat and no one seems to give a shit! I actually think my life is more interesting than that and I’m sure the dope heads that the BBC has spent license payers money on creating this garbage for would prefer their mind numbing entertainment to at least have better looking characters than Jack Vegas! He’s hardly a role model unless they’re subliminally sending out the message, “Kids, don’t take drugs or you’ll end up like this (very rich) fat bastard”

Anyway, taking all that into account back to my original train of thought, which was recalling the past. I’m guilty of trying to block out those things that I so desperately want to remember. Like my grand father, I don’t remember him much now and I struggle to recall the good times I had with him before he died. For the rest of the family there were few good memories, he was a violent drunk and although I witnessed it, I was too young to remember. I only really got to know him in perhaps the last 8 or 9 years of his life when he was just an old man whose life revolved around working in order to have a drink at the end of the day. In those days I can only remember the times with him as being fun times, so it’s hard when everyone else in the family remembers him with such malice. Of course I’m not happy that he beat my Gran and my mum but it’s also hard to feel real anger for something that happened before you were born, or maybe I really am a cold hearted son of a bitch? I really don’t think I am. I sometimes think of my grandfather and usually when I do I cry and I hate myself because I never cried at his funeral while everyone who claimed to hate him wept buckets.

I logged onto a forum I was quite active in a while ago. Whilst having a look at the threads I noticed the profile of a friend who I haven’t spoken to in a number of years, she had a link to photos of her son. I can’t begin to describe the mix of emotions I felt watching the slide show, especially when she appeared in one of them. I cried and decided there was no point trying to stop, so I let the tears flow as I realised I had been a stubborn fool who, having discovered he had no idea about his feelings, decided the best thing to do was try and lose them by blocking them out and the best way to do that was just not to stay in touch with her. Then when she met a new guy and fell in love there was no point keeping those feelings but for some reason I couldn’t get rid of them so I ignored them. Then of course there was the birth of her son; How do you tell a woman that the happiest moment in her life also happens to be one of the worst in yours? You have the elation of knowing that a treasure has just been born to someone and it’s a horrible jealousy that stops you feeling the way you want to feel because a tiny bit of you wants that treasure to have been shared between you and her, not her and the ‘other guy’.

I wonder sometimes if I don’t use his name when I talk to her if she’d notice? Yes, that’s right, in the last month or so we have started to chat again. The boss came round month or so ago with forms for us to update our ‘death in service’ benefit. I had originally named her as my beneficiary and I thought to myself that it was good I hadn’t died in the last year or so as she had moved to Hull and I didn’t trust work to try and track her down! Trying to forget about her is like trying to forget to breathe. I can’t do it, no matter how hard I try, so I have to learn to deal with it. Of course if I hadn’t spent so long with the shrink I probably still wouldn’t know this and instead would be busy torturing myself from the inside out.

I will now refer to time as BS (before shrink) and AS (after shrink). BS I think I was afraid to look back as I didn’t know what to do with all the feelings I had inside me. Now, AS I’m preparing to deal with them, be they good or bad. I think, however mundane it might sound, that this will be exciting =)

Today’s song is called Forever Young by an Australian band called Youth Group Whenever I hear it I always think about Maryke. I sometimes wonder if she ever thought about me back when we weren’t in contact but you know if you ask people will always say yes, even if they mean no.