Overcoming.

I am thirty years old, and have still never learned how to overcome myself.

It reduces me to a creature of habit, a creature of immediacy; one without purpose or duration.

Overcoming is the delaying of tiredness when the vessel of the body begs for rest; repudiation when the puny cry of hunger demands attention; ignorance when the weak left calf says that it is no longer capable of running.

I give into this petulance as an incompetent parent submits to a toddler, cursing angrily and resignedly even at the very moment of my defeat.

To overcome is to rise above this background noise; to persist - with whatever it might be - in a state of adversity.

The body is the enemy of the body, the enemy of doing anything all. It promotes going to bed late, getting up late, and filling the space in between with an infinity of impulse-decisions. Eat this, unlearn that, procrastinate now.

Only when the whole of this vast boulder is unrolled from the self, allowing its substance to slam against the impossible and the unknowable.... only then is the pitiful sliver of the self apprehended.

And even upon the apprehension, we dangle precariously an inch from its event horizon, waiting to be sucked back in again.

Discontinuity.

The (more-or-less) imminent meeting of L and I has, understandably, been occupying the thoughts of the two of us in recent days and weeks.

We spoke the other night about the possible scenarios which might unfold when she alights the train, and I mentioned that it was a not dissimilar enumeration to Raymond Queneau's diversionary - yet profound - Exercises In Style, where the same scene is described in 99 different ways. In this instance, though, the two of us were finding 99 ways to punctuate the same scene with subtle differences, graduating towards infinitely different.

You can never step twice into the same river. On this occasion, the train doors open half-a-second earlier than they would have done in previous copies of our scenario, thus taking me completely by surprise, and meaning that the first impression L ever has is a look of powerless astonishment.

I earlier described to her how she might be sworn at by a team of jugglers who spit out their irritation at one of their group falling over her and spilling their consignment of balls, as I rush naked down the platform with an array of irrelevant signs written on pieces of card: one reading 'BLANCMANGE!' another 'IT'S RAINING CHIPBOARD!'

Somewhere between the banal and the absurd lies the one true description of the moment L alights from the train. I ask myself tonight how well-prepared the human mind is for the separating-out of a billion possibilities, or a trillion, and the realisation of one and only one.

I contend that we are adept at dreaming, or at dealing with reality, but we struggle at the discontinuity where that which is dreamed of becomes real. It takes time for the brain to process that its dream-states are now its real ones. This is the machine that I alluded to before, carrying out calculations outside of itself. They are met with incredulity.

For months, I have thought of L. Now, as the days to her arrival tick down, I don't know what to do with myself. The calculator observes itself with a detached wonder.

Violated.

It was when I saw the gate flying open at the back of the house that I realised something wasn't right.

In fact, I heard it before I saw it, crashing against the outside wall - the flapping of a particularly immodest tongue.

I looked around for my keys (it took forever, as I'm particularly disorganised. If there were ever a fire, I'd be burned to ash) and after that long hiatus, swung the back door open.

The footprint halfway up, just below the glass, made it obvious that somebody had been trying to get in. They'd tried, failed, and gone away again, leaving me with a broken door and the sense of not being as secure as when I woke up.

Not as secure, that's true, but I haven't yet been struck by the panic and fear which I'd always imagined such an attempt would bring. Your author is the type of man who'd hand over his phone, keys, card, cash, anything, to a would-be assailant in the hope of escaping without any physical injuries - but for some reason I don't feel particularly threatened.

Material things don't matter too much, anyway - I say this with some uncertainty, it being that I own all the trappings of a 21st-century existence. I've sometimes wondered what it would be like to live without any of them; no phone, no internet, stripping away all the frippery until I'm living like Jozef Stawinoga, who spent fifty years on the grass verge next to the ring road in Wolverhampton.

Material things might not matter, but what price security? We go back to the old political equation where every unit of freedom taken away - another affront to civil liberties - is understood to be another unit of security given. If I had fifty iron gates, a thousand attack dogs, a moat, gun-toting security men ringing the property and the most sophisticated CCTV system known to humanity, is the price of such security worth paying in terms of the effect on my own mind?

When one adopts such extreme measures, it frames everyone else as a potential threat, a potential kicker-in of doors, a potential assailant. How long would it be before I was hiring another team of security guards to vet and monitor the first lot; until I had brought in CCTV cameras to train on the operators of my CCTV cameras?

The risk of violation is always there, but the shadow it casts tells us that we are human. To perfect every calculation is to exist in a world of robots.

Machine.

I often compare my internal processes to those of a machine - God, it's taking me some time to boot up this morning; the wheels in my head are turning; I wish I could switch off.

I take input from the world, process it, and output simple existence-statements which I am later able to elaborate on: I'm hungry, I'm sad, I'm content, I don't feel anything at all.

This causes me to wonder what would happen if my machine were not self-regulating or self-correcting; if there were code being executed outside the boundaries of my architecture.

The composite existence-statement output by such a situation might be: it looks for all the world as though I am unhappy, but I feel weightless, full of joy and energetic. Only the dial of my face, which takes its cue from outside itself, dares to suggest otherwise.

It means that we can never accurately answer the question: "How do you feel?" when all signifiers do not co-incide. It means that we can never be sure of the validity of the answer to the question: "How do you feel?" when we ask it of someone else, either.

Stages.

There are stages involved in the processing of emotions such as grief - denial followed by anger followed by acceptance, for instance.

The stages exist to ease the transition between a semi-permanent state of mind (old) and a permanent state of mind (new).

With people such as parents or grandparents, we are suspended between the dissonance that they will live forever, yet they must die sometime. Such is the reluctance to accept the latter premise that we compromise and accept both at the same time. I contend that the working-through of this duality is part of the reason for denial and anger when the inevitable eventually happens.

Is the idea of a striated process - because to be smashed across the consciousness with the whole reality at once is overwhelming - a useful one when thinking about emotions other than grief? What about love?

I feel that I have experienced something along those lines since December 20, when L and I 'met' for the first time. To begin with, I denied the feelings which I underwent - they were the manifestation of an internet fantasy, and she was too far away away to do anything about those feelings anyway, even if she wanted to.

It took a little while to come to terms with that - but online relationships being what they are, there are still more obstacles to clear. There is the inevitable supposition that emotions experienced online are somehow displaced or diluted compared to 'real' feelings.

And there are the manifestations which affect more conventional partnerships; question of validation and beauty and connection. A state of denial, then, leads to a state of doubt. Only longevity can prevent the denials and doubts becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. With longevity comes the love-equivalent of anger: repudiation.

I tried to repudiate Bluefish, and she withstood me. The act is completed, but the task of processing it takes an unspecified amount of time. I woke up yesterday morning, and it was done. The outcome is a fresh love which overwhelms without scaring, which does not scorch with its intensity but instead affirms, for which there is hunger instead of repudiation.

Jealousy.

L and I were discussing jealousy earlier, when she stated that I'm not the type of person to ever feel jealous anyway.

A few hours later, as I muse about her remark, I can't make my mind up whether or not it is something I should feel proud of.

I consider jealousy to be the painful twist of the flesh which proves you are alive; the recoil of the gun which is powerful enough to kick you to the floor and lodge the bullet metres from where it would otherwise have landed.

If the wellspring of protectionism and worry fails to trigger when your loved one is contemplated, then when shall I feel anything at all?

In life itself, there are levels of necessity. When everything else is stripped away, I must still breathe, I must still drink water. Beyond that, some food and protection from the elements is a good idea. Further still, something to distract me from the drudgery of existence is wished for.

So too is it with love. First of all, the gun must recoil. Then one would hope for physical attraction, shared interests, something to talk about; greater still is the need for unity, intimacy and love. Without the shocking kick of jealousy, though, the higher aspirations are no more than the turning of a deluded mind.

The excesses of jealous behaviour require the most shame-faced apologies, but these are a price worth paying for the absence of torpor. Foolish indeed is the man who dies for his religion or for his country - abstract, shifting machines of contradiction - but it's preferable to believing in nothing at all.

Insulation.

What is the worst thing in the world?

I can name you a number of things which must come close, but the answer to the question has changed as I've grown older.

When I was a child, it was the though of losing Skippy, the big female cat who made the ordinary pussy with nine lives look like a mere beginner. Skippy had a squillion lives, and so she would never die.

When I was a teenager it was spiders, chemistry lessons, and the thought of kissing someone badly.

In recent years, it has been: the thought of having to face life without ever hearing from a particular person again and, once I had relinquished her, the thought of ever hearing from her again. Later still, the prospect of unemployment was the worst thing I could think of.

At some stage or other, all of the life-ending catastrophes I listed above have indeed come about - the most recent being a message from the woman from whom I least wanted to hear. Yet the world didn't cease to turn.

I ask, then, what purpose such fears serve? How many times am I to be liberated upon their realisation before it occurs to me that I am repeatedly falling a thousand feet off a cliff, only to make a soft landing every time? I don't know of anyone who isn't bound tightly to their fears; to the thought of the worst-case scenario unfolding.

Many of our behaviours are designed to hold off or lessen the effect of The Worst Thing In The World, yet when it comes around it is often anything but. We still remain yoked to our miserable, small-time frighteners, though - and there's no doubt that it's in the interests of any number of people that we remain so - but being able to cast them off, once and for all, is the key to liberation.

We can, in general, only shed them by experiencing them, and appreciating that their vastly-inflated something is little more than nothing.

Insulation.

I went into the off-licence earlier, seeking some alcoholic insulation should Barnsley succumb to relegation on the last day of the season tomorrow.

Only once since January have I bothered myself with alcohol – to join in with and comfort my best friend as the news that his work colleague had died was being absorbed.

So I’m far from an expert when it comes to drinking in order to get drunk. I have in the past been wiped out by a bottle of vodka, and whisky brought me to my knees the last time Barnsley fell through the trapdoor. What is it to be today?

My eye glanced across the rows and rows of knock-me-outs, and I knew without further hesitation that I had found my solution. The game where my football club’s fate rests is away to Plymouth, so it could be none other than a bottle of Plymouth gin.

Only if we tumble will I allow myself to touch it. The genie can otherwise remain where it is. It’s not as though I can even go to the game – I have to work, and surreptitiously listen to the radio. I compare it to ending a relationship by text message; indirect, impersonal and far removed from reality, but the outcome is the same.

I remember reading about how Pavlov set up an ingenious experiment with his famous dogs. There’d be a single dog in the first chamber, and its paws would be given small electric shocks depending on where it moved within its compartment.

Eventually, the dog would learn where it was safe to tread and thus avoid the electrified zones. That is to say it had control over its own destiny.

In another chamber, there would be a second dog. Its destiny was out of its hands – or paws. When the first dog stepped on an electrified area, both dogs got a shock. When the first dog moved away to safety, the shocks ceased. The second dog, then, soon learns to behave as a victim. All the second animal could do was hope his compatriot didn’t move, or alternatively yelp in pain when the inevitable happened.

I am the second dog, anxious in my chamber and fearing the worst. At least the gin will staunch the shocks should the worst come to the worst. Otherwise I’m helpless – praying to gods that don’t exist, setting up obsessive-compulsive tasks which, if failed, mean relegation, and wondering if the sight of particular breeds of bird, the arrangement of twigs upon the ground and the slow passing of clouds across the sky are good or bad portents for the day ahead.