I have been asked a lot recently if I’m okay.

As some of you may have noticed I haven’t blogged for a good long while and there are several very good reasons for this.  The main one is that I am suffering with depression.  It’s not easy for me to say that as it sounds lame when you tell people and I know a lot of folk that really don’t see it as an ailment and say things like ‘man up’ or ‘stop being a girl’.

You guys that say that are dicks and not good friends to anyone.

When you add the depression to a bubbling stew of anxiety/panic attacks, a handful of paranoia, a good dash of insomnia and a half a cup of stress you have a recipe for disaster.

A lot has gone on in my life in the last few months that have sent my already damaged and heavily scared brain into this giant spiral of manic downheartedness.

This is kind of an open letter to anyone that actually gives a fuck I guess; my way of getting it off my chest without having to tell each and every person the same story over and over again.

Seriously, the more times I have to tell it, the more I think about it and I’m back to square one.

So where do we start?

Early last year I started to get stress pains in my chest (due to cocaine abuse) and I started to suffer with insomnia as a result; then the dark thoughts came crashing down on me… mostly at night… mostly.

I would wake up suddenly from a stress dream and the first thing I would think of was my own death.  It was very much the same when I went to bed.  I’d lay there for hours just thinking of how pointless everything was/is and a strange sinking feeling would rumble through my insides.

Sometimes I would cry.

This was every day for about a year.

Next up, just before Christmas I was made redundant from a job I had been doing (on and off) for 4 years.  It came as a bit of a blow as the process was quick yet stressful and it left the majority of the people that worked there in the shit for a while.

This led me to becoming heavily in dept., something of which I am still struggling with and one of the main causes of my stress.

So I became a little introverted when I was at home and I closed myself off from people for a while.  It was then that I made the decision to try to write full time, a folly as I wasn’t getting the sort of support from my girlfriend (of nearly 11 years) as I had given her with her career choice.  It seemed to me that she didn’t take me seriously and found it all a little pie in the sky.

Doesn’t really matter now as she left me on the Easter bank holiday weekend.  I guess I had just become a little too hard to live with due to me getting angry at everything.  I put the anger down to a combination of frustration with my situation and with myself for letting me get in that situation.

So, now that she has moved out I’ve had to get a new agreement with the landlord and try to keep a roof over my head which now looks like I’m failing to do so.  My ex is sorting out all the hand over with the landlord yet telling me nothing so I’m stuck in the middle and in complete darkness as to what’s going on.

We have remained friendly throughout but it’s getting harder to maintain that with all that’s going on and I find myself snapping at her where she’s trying to help me.  I guess that’s another reason why she left.

I have already resigned myself to the fact that I’m probably going to be homeless at the end of the month and I’m going to lose all my stuff.  Again, quite a stressful thing to have to deal with.

It might not come down to this (fingers crossed) but I’m expecting the worst here, if anything happens other than that it’s a bit of a bonus, if you see what I mean.

Fuck man what am I doing.

I’m a great believer in the saying ‘don’t air your dirty laundry in public’ and here I am pouring all this bile out on to the internet.

Fuck it, in for a penny, in for a pound.

So that’s pretty much my downward spiral in a nutshell, I guess it could be worst, there are hundreds of thousands of people going through a lot worse.  At least that’s what I’m told by people on a daily basis.

Well fuck other people; they don’t give a fuck about my troubles so why should I give a fuck about theirs.  I understand that millions live in poverty but that doesn’t help me, that doesn’t call up my landlord and sort anything out.  It doesn’t help me with my mounting depts.  It doesn’t get me a job or make peace with my estranged woman.

So please, don’t recite that little nugget of wisdom.

And please don’t tell me that there are ‘plenty of fish in the sea’, at fist that’s what I though and then I took a look at my life and thought ‘this is the last thing I need’.

Before I can even think about any kind of companionship I have to get my life together, a task that is looking like quite the uphill struggle.

But I have to keep my chin up right?   Look on the Brightside, every cloud has a silver lining, two sides to the coin and all that shit, right?

But it’s okay I don’t think I’m at my tipping pint just yet and I have far too much going for me at the moment to want to end it all so again, please don’t think anything like that.  For someone so depressed I actually can find a lot of positive stuff to help me through this.  Sure the nights are the hardest especially being alone but I’m sure that the doldrums will pass in time.

So…

I have been asked a lot recently if I’m okay.

A question that I always answer the same way as a raise a glass to my lying lips and choke out the words like my lungs have filled with vinegar, yet I do this with a smile on my face.

“Yeah, I’m doing okay.”

Physical jerks

I have often referred to smoking and drinking as “simple pleasures of the working classes” but recently I have had to retract that statement a little.

We were sitting in a bar having a few beers and we started on the subject of the class system and how it has changed over the years.

One thing that I came up with is that if you drink and have a job that is minimum wage you are going to have an expensive night.  The average bloke necks one pint every half hour and at roughly £3.50 a pint that’s more than what you’d earn on minimum wage.

And don’t even get me started on the rip off that is smoking.

Then you get some miserable non-smoker telling you that if you smoke you don’t deserve any treatment on the NHS… really?

I’ve been paying 300 to 400 percent tax on my tobacco for the last 20 years so don’t tell me I don’t have a right to any health care.  A smoker will pay almost twice the amount of tax as a non-smoker in their lifetime so you can drop that smug bullshit for a kick off.

Go ahead, don’t smoke, your still going to die like the rest of us.

And then we got on to the fact that the working class sport of football is no longer the game of the common man.  The players are on extortionate wages and if you want to watch most top flight matches you have to pay for satellite telly or mortgage off your house for a ticket to the game.

And they used to say that rugby was a posh boy’s sport.  The players are all on wage caps, the turnstile prices are a third for premiere league matches compared to football and the majority of the games are on free on the BBC and ITV channels.

Now that is a working class sport.

And when someone gets tackled in rugby they don’t hold their ankle and roll around like someone’s fucking shot the prick.  Bear in mind that a rugby tackle is performed by a nineteen stone wrecking machine and not some slim lesbian impressionist with more money than manners.

And when was the last time there was a rugby player in the paper for racism or punching their wives?  Sure you get the odd drinking binge in a French hotel or the occasional dwarf tossing scandal but then they do get hit in the head a lot.

Darts and snooker are where it’s at when it comes to working class sports.  Most pubs have a dart board and it’s cheap as shit to become a member of a good snooker club.  For the price of a good pair of football boots you could buy a sturdy cue, a set of darts, play snooker for two hours then have a pint and throw some arrows in the club bar and all without breaking into a sweat.

These lads at the snooker hall have been humping bricks about or stripping back old plaster or flipping up scaffold poles all week, the last thing they want to do on the weekend is get all sweaty and chase a fucking ball around.

Saying that though some do, and I will never understand any of you; a pack of body conscious sweat fiends the lot of you.

That also goes for people that have a physical job and still manage to hit the gym four times a week.  Sure your physique looks like it’s carved from oak but fuck sake do you ever relax?

I’m not slagging going to the gym off, heavens know that I would love to have the dedication to be able to get all shredded up but that’s just the thing… I just can’t be fucked.

I get regular exercise in the form of walking everywhere and I am talking at least four miles a day minimum and I have been to the gym quite a few times in recent months but the level of dedication to be able to get that chiselled or strong just isn’t in me.  Believe me when I say that I would kill for prober abdominal muscles but I just can’t be fucked to do the crunches.  It might also have something to do with the smoking and drinking knocking the shit out of my metabolism and stamina.

If anything I admire the dedication of some of these guys and gals that get buff as fuck, well played you lot but my time is better spent sat in the dark doing research.  I’d like to think that my brain is getting quite a nice six pack and can bench like a Spartan.

But if you look at the World’s Strongest Man contests most of the guys there are from working class background, especially the UK entrants.  Watching some massive farm-hand that flips tractor tyres over for a living lifting a barrel the weight of a family car over his head on the telly; good honest family entertainment.

I remember watching this year’s competition around Christmas and thinking just how much training I would have to put myself through just to get to that sort of strength level.  I’d probably die before I even got to the atlas stones… that or I’d shit my guts out trying to pull a truck fifty yards with my head.

But anyway… all this talk of physical exertion and sports that I will never play myself unless it’s in a pub type environment has gotten me hungry.  Think I’ll have a cup of tea and a slice of cake and watch the snooker.

Pleasant dreams everyone.