Time.

'About six more weeks until I leave this job,' I commented to someone when pressed upon my future prospects. My tone of voice intended to convey that six weeks was an insignificant amount of time - hell, six weeks, two months, it's not going to be too long before I'm away.

The thought later struck me: I am decrying six weeks as neither here nor there, but I never got to spend more than a fortnight with the person referred to in any number of these pages.

Humans have a strange relationship with time. I already touched upon this when I mentioned anniversaries. Birthdays are of a similar ilk - regular punctuations in the musical score of our lives, ineluctable and shining brightly in the temporal distance.

Such events are signposts for the destination marked 'the rest of your life.' When considered independently of that life, they are stripped of their meaning, akin to the real signposts pointing north on the motorway. Keep travelling through Yorkshire, through Cumbria, up to Scotland, and still you will find signs directing you to The North. Before you know it, you've gone so far north that you've missed it, and instead you exist precariously on the edge of nothing and nowhere.

Realise, then, that your temporal roadsigns must be taken in context if they are not to become pointers to a destination that can never exist. The two-week bursts with my soulmate were lessons in relinquishing fear and misery - even if sometimes I am sure I have not learned those lessons, even if sometimes I howl with loneliness because she recedes a little more with every passing day.

A teacher has only ever finished teaching once the intellectual crutch she provides can be happily removed, such is the confidence and poise now apparent in her pupil. The roadsigns are not only understood, and understood well, but the pupil is able to see the road below them, and even appreciate the point of setting out in the first place.

When a really outstanding student emerges, he or she even takes joy in their painful limbs after a tough day of travelling. At that point the teacher, like the pacemaker in a long race, can be discarded. Better students still take her along with them for the remainder. This we call unconditional love - knowing where we are headed, yet unsure if we'll ever get there. We know, though, that failing with such a woman beside us is preferable to failing alone.

Is failing alongside this woman better than succeeding alone? This we call romance, and some of us are intoxicated by it. Others are but pretend not to be.

We have unconsciously just established a boundary between romance and unconditional love. Unconditional love states that I am happy to fall short of what I set out to do, so long as you are with me at the moment of my humiliation: falling flat on my arse in the road from fatigue, and miles from anywhere.

Romance states: I am well able to reach the end of the journey, but I'd prefer to stay here than do so if you are not in lockstep with me. Romance is the abolition of wishes and passion for the wish and passion of another person.

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Accusation.

Before accusing another person of having been bitten by the inductive bug, it is an idea to look into the mirror and realise that its teeth have perforated your own skin.


That my ex-girlfriend suffers throughout the duration of January is an unsurprising as the fact that your author struggles during the middle period of July. They mark significant anniversaries of unpleasant events, the tendrils of which pass effortlessly through the years, and shake the present from its foundation.


Unpleasant events become the paradigm by which we judge their anniversaries, and so it follows (in the mind of the depressive) that if this day ten years ago was unbearable for whatever reason, then this day in 2008, like the ones every year since, must also be unbearable.

We make it thus, or I do, at any rate. The carrying out of particular rituals at appropriate times - derived from religious ceremonies and war commemorations (dressing in black, holding silences of a particular duration) seem as logical to me as they seem unhinged and irrational to anyone else.

It is, then, already decided that the middle of July or the whole of January is to be spent in stasis. What a rehearsed, formluaic mourning this is! The ripening of the heart throughout the course of the year, and the predictable windfall from the height of being, followed by the harvesting of peculiar, distant misery.

Thus emerges the obsession with dates and times alluded to in the last entry. There is an internal countdown within the obsessive which states, for example: "In two weeks, three days, 11 hours and 37 minutes, the sixth anniversary of event x will be upon me." Reading that last line is akin to something out of a comic book, but its imminence - and its distance - are considered with undue seriousness.


When the anniversary itself arrives - measured in terms of minutes if not seconds - there is no feeling of relief, or happiness, or sadness. Just the acceptance that it is here, and a proliferation of empty gestures related to the moment eight, nine, ten years ago when the planet seemed to shudder on its axis because of a private, everday event.

Induction.

Two consecutive Januarys (what is the plural of January? Is it Januarys or Januaries? I think we should be told, or that I should at least find out) and the principle of induction did for my partner and I.

That I lost a girlfriend because of it is hardly of the greatest interest, but it does illustrate the inductive principle that is at the heart of all our lives.

The inductive principle extrapolates from the particular case to the general in the following way: if every cat I have ever seen is black-and-white, then every cat in the universe is black-and-white. It is used as a predictive tool, a heuristic by which we make decisions and judgements.

It is used even unconsciously: I can plan to go out on Saturday night because I'm more than hopeful that I'll still be alive then. This stems from the fact that I have woken up every morning without fail for the past 29 years. Repetition of the same event increases my belief that the event will persist.

Before I continue, a note about the pessimism inherent in people who suffer with depression, or who are in some way weighed down by the misery of merely existing. It is an obvious point, but one which is relevant to the rest of this piece.

A single negative event in a day of otherwise unqualified success and happiness renders everything that has gone before it irrelevant. And blame is apportioned asymetrically: the cosmos is responsible for all positive outcomes, and the depressive for those which are undesireable.

The method by which one negative event subsumes its positive predecessors is the root of the inductive principle in depressive or unhappy people: if I did something so stupid as to lock my keys inside the car after such a positive and uplifting day in general (an example, not based in my own personal reality) then the inductive principle states that every positive, happy day will terminate with a trivial event which deflates it.

And because the cosmos, and not the person, is responsible for the completion of positive events, no predictive power can be applied to it. Conversely, as I and only I am responsible for the propagation of undesireable consequences, the inductive idea has some merit. I predict - a self-fulfilling prophecy - that something unwished for will occur.

When something unwished for does occur, it sets in motion a chain of reasoning that results in an obsession with dates and times, and causes girlfriends to disappear from lives.

To be continued....

Excuses.

Appeals to confidence are regularly bandied about in the public sphere.

Sports teams win or lose because they either have confidence in abundance or are low on it; prime ministers lose their jobs because of it; statisticians estimate it and their suppositions then form policy in health, education and science.

The latter meaning is an artefact of not being able to predict the outcomes of chaotic systems with absolute precision - far more often than not, a molecule of drug x will bind to its specific and intended neuroreceptor, and antagonise in the prescribed manner. We can't predict specific cases on an ad-hoc basis, but 95 per cent of the time, it's expected to do so.

This is confidence in a technical and specific sense. Its everyday useage is more interesting and accessible to your author.

What does it mean for the prime minister to be denounced in a vote of no confidence? The cabinet and backbench of the ruling party are in effect saying; "At some point in the past, you were able to carry out your duties to an acceptable level. That point has been and gone. You are now inept, incompetent and cumbersome."

'Everyday confidence' is therefore the ability to carry out what is expected of you. In my own mind, and in the minds of those around me, I am able to do whatever is required of me. We are dealing with a euphemism that is also an excuse  - the team failing to win because they lack confidence equates to them being unable to perform the tasks required of them due to incomptence, boredom, lack of concentration, mutiny etc.

Confidence is ultimately chimerical, and melts away into a list of tasks to be either completed or not once subjected to a sustained period of thought. I'm not confident that this blog entry will be up to the standards I wish for, because I lack the technical, linguistic and intellectual tools to make it so.

Until those challenges are overcome, I can make the excuse that I lack confidence ad nauseum.
If I lack the motivation, interest or talent to acquire them, then whatever 'confidence' remains will plummet until there is none left.

Incidentally, what abacus is used for measuring the amount of confidence left in the body? A 5.5/10 at this very moment might equate to a 3/10 when I am in an unhappy state of mind, or laid low with a virus, and a 7/10 when the sun is reflecting off the  newly-opened cage of my mind, where thoughts dance randomly, untethered.

Again, once subjected to too much thought, the whole concept crumbles to dust, and we are left with one single aphorism: either do or do not.

Religion.

Just before nine o'clock [last] Saturday morning, I was stopped by a man as I came out of the station after alighting from my train.

I thought straightaway that something was amiss. It was too early in the day for my would-be interrogator to be asking about toothpaste or coffee preferences, and his choice of dress meant that he was unlikely to be one of the train company staff.

All suddenly became clear when he addressed me thus: "I think most of us would agree that the world is in a pretty bad way...." and handed me a pamphlet which warned of GLOBAL WARMING in huge, threatening letters on one page, and petitioned GOD on the next.

I asked him if his answer to the world being pretty bad was to appeal to God, and he mumbled an affimative under his breath. It was at that point when I walked away from him, stating that I didn't believe and would never believe.

Actually, I did more than state. I moved backwards down the street, my voice becoming progressively louder as the distance between the man and I increased. I don't believe! It is impossible! I'll think more of your God when He tears the clouds apart like a pair of flimsy curtains and metes out the justice you've been promising for millennia!

Two questions spring to mind, retrospectively, about the above event: If I'd returned to the man, genuflecting, and asked to be appraised of how God would in fact halt global warming, would this cleansing of the apostate have in any way validated my interlocuter's belief in either a deity, or the deity's probability of stemming global warming?

Secondly, what is the outright rejection of religious belief (mine) but a symptom of (anti) religious belief? The certainty that there is no God (without evidence to support the assertion) is as militant a stance to take as the certainty that such exists (without evidence to support the assertion.)

I'll try to answer such questions later - if I ever get around to consistently updating this thing again!

Mortality.

At the age of 29, the truth of my certain death is, in normal circumstances, an idea which is still to be fully formed.

Yet earlier this week, I felt the breeze from its sad, effortless wings against my face; the slow bird which has all of us eventually came momentarily into view. No sooner had I registered its presence than it had disappeared again, leaving behind the untouched perimeter of my mind.

Two photographs on the front of the newspaper: one to mark the passing of the singer Isaac Hayes; one to illustrate the Olympic gold medal of the British cyclist Nicola Cooke. It occurred to me that each of the images contains two timing devices, referring respectively to the subject of the photograph, and the reader.

Consider the devices to be egg-timers or stopwatches or whatever other conceptual tool you might choose. In the case of Isaac Hayes, the timing device which refers to him has run its course. The adjacent one - mine - ticks on or drops grains of sand inexorably. In the case of Nicola Cooke, both timers continue to eat away at the seconds, minutes and hours.

As conceptual devices go, I hardly astonish with the force of my explanation. Yet nevertheless, the realisation startled me, and caused the dark wing of eternity to cast its long shadow. All other things being equal, someone - even if it is not Nicola Cooke - will read about the demise of the mediocre blogger Nogomet, and anxiously check their own watch.

They'll presumably do so in the early morning, on their way to work, when they are least able to cope with linking my demise to their inevitable own. An obituary referring to Blogomet, the painful symbiosis of man and word, and how he met his end flying through a windscreen, or during copulation. Christ, they'll realise, I'm going to die too!

For the next few minutes they'll mourn - not for the stillness of Blogomet, but for predictively for themselves. This is the purpose of an obituary - it permits the anterior mourning of the self, and asks us to reflect on time elapsed versus time remaining.

Larceny!

An incident in my workplace earlier this week that illustrates the utter banality of being employed.

In order to progress at work, we strenuously deny that we are there solely for the remuneration - no, manager, I am here because of my stellar ambition and my wish to shape the future of the organisation.

This assertion is so often repeated, out loud in conversation, and to oneself, that it becomes the truth. The ethos of the Communist Party is present at such times. Take a statement which is not true, and by threat of something unpleasant, cause it to be real.

Initially, we utter the words out loud whilst feeling the falsehood in our hearts and minds. At this point, if we think we can get away with it, we might smile or raise our eyebrows at someone who is equally complicit in the act. Eventually, though, it becomes second nature to recite the lie without flinching or eliciting outward signs of not being genuine.

Even then, the falsehood propagates throughout the mind and communicates with the heart. When there is no longer a falsehood, this is the spirit of Communism. It is equivalent to saying 'I love you,' untruthfully so many times that the word becomes the deed. Out of the empty anti-sentiment grows its antithesis. Like the madman, we lie without knowing we are lying, and keep secrets from ourselves.
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I arrived at work on Wednesday to be confronted by the upset face of my manager.

Looking at him, I assumed that we were all about to lose our employment after the company share price took a downward jolt too many, and that he had not yet managed to compose himself sufficiently to impart the information.

It transpired - this is the truth - that his chocolate bar had disappeared from the office refrigerator overnight, and he had not yet managed to find the culprit. I merely stated that I'd had nothing to do with this grand larceny (I didn't say 'grand larceny' - again, the internal censor takes over)  and started to perform the mediocre tasks required of me.

In such a trivial event (the disappearance of a bar of chocolate) is imbued the greater ambition of the business world (to treat every event within working hours as being entirely significant.) If a workforce can be made to believe the latter upon presentation of the former, then the visit of a director, change in share price, or whatever else, is more important still.

Once trivialities are no longer fought over, the company has lost its battle for the souls of its individual workers. When a missing piece of chocolate can send a roomful of people into (mock but genuine) panic and concern, then the machinery is working fine, and we can look into our hearts and see only what is required to be seen.

Adequate.

I read today about Miranda Hodgson, a one-time ambitious career woman who anticipated she would spend most of her life repeatedly spinning on the wheel of aspiration:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/04/healthandwellbeing.familyandrelationships

Despite academic and professional success, Hodgson nevertheless felt an absence, a hole which no amount of plaudits could fill.

As you are capable of reading, the absence was removed - not filled, but removed - by Hodgson training to become a Zen Buddhist.

Your author wishes to also clamber down from the wheel of aspiration by descending the steps of himself, and look upon the world from his low trajectory. Therefore your author has already failed the first test, in that he wishes for anything at all.

The realisation dawned on your author long ago that there is no way of unpinning yourself from the perpetually-spinning circle of want. If a way exists of lifting the pressure and misery imposed on humans by the fairground ride onto which we are flung at a very early age, a ride whose apex is marked 'destiny,' then people such as Miranda Hodgson have found it.

There is a need to douse the flame of competitiveness, and to simply exist for the sake of time; time unpunctuated by success, failure, or eventfulness. Time passing, unhurried, and a human in its parentheses, with no desire to search for meaning, or challenge, or elevation. Time referring to nothing, a mind no longer seeking to wrap itself around an idea or cause.

I wish for the removal of everything bar the ticking of bare seconds, one after the other, falling inexorably out of existence. Seconds which confirm an immutability, in your author and in the universe, a cold expanse which is devoid of significance.