Me against the music

I've always had a different sort of approach to music from those around me. Over the years, people close to me have found it helpful to share their favourite pieces of music with me, hoping to share an intimate, personal connection, and it's been something I've almost always completely taken wrongly. One reader in particular I know will utterly cringe at the memory of me pompously telling her off for trying to use 'borrowed words', written by someone else to express what she felt inside instead of putting it in her own way. It's just something that I've never quite got invested in in the same way as 'normal people' seem to, and it still persists to this day.

My top most played song on iTunes is a Ukrainian-language one that was available in English, but I preferred in its native tongue. I've been unbearably smug at being ahead of the curve on some of the very few European pop songs that have escaped into the wild of the UK charts – I was aware of Tatu before they hit it big with All the Things She Said, for example, and I still prefer the original Russian; I'd heard of the Turkish Eurovision band before this year's contest, and I know that a different reader than the one I mentioned before (because I have MORE THAN ONE FRIEND, ha, don't I rule) will always say that the song she associates me most with is a Moldovan one that more than just escaped into the wild of the UK pop scene, but went global via a fat guy dancing on webcam to it on the internet. In fact, maybe I should be slightly concerned or insulted that she associates that with me? Talking of song association, I've mentioned before about the bridges that I was helping rebuild with this blog, but I'm a bit concerned that the revelation that there is one poor soul who shall forever be linked with the Lonely Island song “Jizz in my Pants” might pour another barrel full of gasoline on the newly built foundations. Let's just hope none of the construction crew are smokers!

Were I somehow capable of being even MORE pretentious than I already am, I might suggest that I have a similar approach to music as Kurt Cobain, that I appreciate his approach of using the voice as just another instrument instead of insisting that music has to be its own form of art, conveying messages through lyrics and emotional investment. It's entirely possible that that wasn't remotely his views at all, but I think I read it once somewhere and it stuck with me. If any of my readers want to correct and educate me on what a misunderstood modern genius REALLY intended to get across with his art – I really, really don't care, sorry.

It's for those reasons though that my favourite genres of music are classical, dance and rap – slightly eclectic to say the least, but in a very superficial way I like to be proud of that and how 'quirky' it makes me. Like most aspects of my life, the only issue tempering just how far I take my pretentiousness is effort, in that truly caring deeply about it in any sort of way would just not add anything more to what I get out of it. Plus trying too hard would betray my radiating ennui that just makes me too, too cool. Irony. Malaise.

I know I'm being unbearably smug, but so long as I draw attention to the fact that I'm aware of that it makes it ok. It's roughly the equivalent to answering every question in a debate with another question, that way when you get called out on your bullshit you can claim hey, I'm not invested in this in any way, I'm just playing devil's advocate here! Either way, I'm too cool for it to affect me. Beautiful unique snowflake, etc.

Anyway, reappearing from my spelunking expedition up my own arse, I've come around to the 15 year old 'quoting lyrics out of context' deal, in an ironic way of course. Stylistically, cutting and pasting chunks of feeling out of songs devoid of their original context appeals to me in the sort of sense of a ransom note, cut and pasted out of magazine and newspaper headlines and all the more threatening for it. Picking a single line from a song charges it with all that intent, all the weight of the emotional investment that its original context provided it with, but leaving the littlest remnants of doubt over the reasons and motivations of what parts exactly were snipped out with the line itself, and what parts were intended to hang unsaid in the air along with it. It really is quite sinister, I just can't bear to risk that the intricate subtleties put into it would be missed, I demand recognition of how great I am for noticing and pointing it out!

No, I don't have a corgi / I had a hamster but it died cos I ignored it.

Now that it's raining more than ever... I'll hit you with an umbrella.

Seven days, seven entries, seven followers. There's a nice symmetry to that. But on the other hand... that's not very good. Don't you know who I am, internet?! I am a beautiful and unique snowflake, pay attention to me! Maybe this whole blog thing would have gone a bit better if I actually had friends to bribe – or at least minions. I'm down to a single minion and she's pretty overworked as it is.

I thought it was meant to be summer? It's rained non stop for the last couple of days, really not sure that trading watering for sunshine was a great deal now. However, in those extra three minutes for Pokémonning, I did manage to hatch an uber-skilled Togepi, so maybe it will have balanced out if he wins me a couple of battles. The dogs still need walked in it though, so I'd better hope we get a break from the deluge before the day's out or I'm going to get soaked, again. I'm running out of clothes after that last escapade, I already had to spend the day freezing cold in my shorts so if THEY go... well, I'm just glad I had my OT appointment this morning instead of tomorrow. That one could have been awkward otherwise.

Last time I took the dogs out, I carried a big stick. If anyone asked, I was going to claim that I was pretending to be the legendary Sumerian warrior, Enkidu. But no-one asked.

As an aside, I'm amused that my spell check has suggested changing the words “pokémonning” to “poisoning”, and to change “uber-skilled” to “semi-skilled”. It wasn't keen on Enkidu or Togepi either, but that's not as funny so I'll just ignore that. Digitized utility stumbles slightly over proper nouns, it's not the richest vein to mine comedy from.

At least we've had some mild chaos keeping me amused. For what feels like about the 8^th time, a family member rescued another dog! Maybe we have some sort of magnetic anomaly under the house that attracts runaways? Or maybe we all just smell of chum. This time it was a sheepdog that had somehow managed to get itself lost, and had made its way across several fields and a moor to come and sit at my dad's feet. Last time it was me that did the heroic rescuing I got a tin of biscuits, so I was cursing my luck at being too slow with the lasso. When it inevitably happens again we'll have a fight on our hands to go and play the hero. I'll probably get bitten.

The Way I Am

I'm still not entirely sure on what the point of this blog was, or who I'm writing it for. So far I've tried to write as though I'm explaining things to an 'outsider', to someone living a perfectly normal life and drawing attention to the ways that make me and what I'm going through different. Really though, the type of people likely to be reading this are those who are in the same or similar positions. All my friends and contacts now that I've built up over the years are people in the same situation, linked together by a shared empathy and understanding that we've all had limitations placed on us and trying to find ways to express ourselves that let us break free of our shackles.

There are a million blogs like that out there, so what do I really think I'm doing differently? I'm an identical drop of water in the endless ocean, convinced that I can be a beautiful and unique snowflake. Maybe there was no real point to this at all, just an empty void to throw my thoughts out there into, tossing them into the abyss under the delusion that my echo will answer me back and we'll strike up a meaningful conversation.

Something I've noticed though with all the other blogs like this out there is just how defined by the illness they all seem to be. I was watching an episode of House the other day where one of the characters wondered, how would you introduce me? As a doctor, as black, as a car thief? I suppose I'm in the same boat – no matter what I might strive for or try to be or achieve, its almost always going to have to include this as a caveat. If someone asks, what does your brother/son/friend do, the fact that my illness is the reason for it is always going to have to come up within the first two lines. I don't have a job, I'm not at college, because... .The fact is that its not normal and that it needs an explanation for why my 'scenic' path as I've described it is the one that I'm travelling down, always pointing out that its not by choice and that really of course I'd rather be on a different one.

So I've pointed it all out, but what for, what have I really achieved by laying it out like that? I've not come to any conclusions, just made myself look smarter by drawing attention to the fact that I've noticed it instead of working on fixing it. Its a good technique, especially for debating or arguing – set out all your points in the form of a question, that way if you're proved wrong then you were only being wise and spurring on a thoughtful debate!

In the end though, who we are boils down to the sum of our experiences, and for anyone else out there like me who's travelling down a path that they can insist they didn't choose, it still doesn't change the fact that they're sauntering their way slowly along it anyway. This path I'm on has influenced everything about me, even down to my looks - I have long hair mainly because there was a period of time where I wasn't able to get out to the barbers, so had to just let it grow. I happen to quite like the person that I've become now (and my extremely cool hair) – I'm fully aware that its not 'the same as other people', but for the moment I've convinced myself I'm that snowflake floating down from the sky, waiting to change the world when I finally land. Everyone in the world will have changed and grown as a person over the last decade of their life, if I tried to rebel against an imaginary construct of 'the illness' and discard everything that its influenced me into becoming, then I'd just end up with the mind of the 13 year old that I was, playing Pokémon and wanting to push girls into the mud.

Oh, wait a minute...

Welcome to my life

My name is David, and for a little while now I've felt that I might have some sort of story to tell.

When you're little, there are certain aspects of your world that are just... indisputable. They make up the fabric of your everyday life, and its impossible to conceive that some people live their lives in a different way. Maybe you go on holiday every year to Spain. Or Blackpool, or Florida, or in a caravan. Maybe you have no dad, a mum and dad, or two dads. A dog, a cat, a budgie, a thousand tiny lizards, but however it is there are just some aspects that you never challenge, they're how you live your life and its hard for your little brain to comprehend the vastness of the diversity out there. Sometimes you get a shock when you go to stay with your friend and they eat macaroni. But we never eat macaroni! The whole way they live their lives, it just... blows your mind. Then once you get older, you realise that there are no rules, that you can live however you want. The whole world opens up in front of you, with a billion paths to choose from, all under your own control. Some people go backpacking across Africa. Some hit the pubs, get to drinking and drugs and having a good time. And to some, all those paths that open up so readily for everyone else stay just out of reach, inconceivable to you, while you sit at your computer for 16 hours a day, make friends with local hedgehogs and talk to your sandwiches to amuse yourself. I'll let you guess what kind of life it is I'm leading.

I'm 23 now, and I've semi-joked for a long time that I've felt like I was having a mid life crisis. For the past decade, I've been standing still. I fell ill with ME when I was 13, developed agoraphobia that I've had to deal with to varying degrees of severity over the years, and pretty much dropped out of society when I had to drop out of school after my exams at 16. With failing health and about a 2% attendance record for my final 6 months I managed to ace the lot of them with straight As across the board, but the effort involved knocked my health back to a place where I've never quite managed to climb out of. So I've set about instead setting up a few cushions and attempting to make my stay here as comfortable as possible while I very slowly try and build myself a life raft to get off the island. Or a ladder to get out of the hole. I forgot which metaphor I was using. Either way, the 'setting up a few metaphorical cushions' tends to provide those around me with endless amusement, as my somewhat stunted teenage rebellion completely bypasses the ability to go out and get drunk and has to settle on ever so slightly minor things like putting on a welsh accent and telling a telemarketer that their call displeases me.

In the grand scheme of things, I dont really know what this will accomplish. In 20 years from now when we're accessing the neural network on our ocular implants, I might stumble across this old archive of what my life was like then and be proud of how far I've come, or reminisce about the good old days before the Oil Wars and how lucky I really was then. Maybe I'll get a few laughs. A few followers, maybe some new friends will find this and approve of the way that I'm attempting to go about things. Maybe I'll touch some poor, lost soul on a deep, spiritual level, showing them how life can keep going on no matter how many paths life blocks off in front of you.

If I touch that one, single soul... then this will all have been a gigantic waste of yours and my time. I'm hoping for a book deal out of this.

Welcome to my life. We'll be taking the scenic route. Enjoy the ride!