Strangest Thing

"Sometimes when I go to exertin' myself I use up all the air nearby and grown men faint from suffocation. Stand back" – McMurphy.

After a back splittingly painful week there's a sign of remission. Is it the effect of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? I doubt it – this week's session did away with the therapy and we talked about getting a job. Perhaps a little cognitive manoeuvring was thrown in under the radar, but basically it was a practical process. Somewhere, psychiatrist RD Lang explained how he chatted convivially with a patient for a whole session, only to call time for the patient to say, "Hey doc! We never talked about my problems!" "Well, have a think about that before next session, hey," he replied. Perhaps living is a decent enough management technique, when such a thing can be done. Alas for me, the next CBT session will have us back to simplified cause-effect analysis, and how to interpret supposed irrational thoughts.

But over our pleasant chat I realised that going to China for a year isn't going to ruin my life, that I can't sign up to a course this September anyway, so leaving it another year is no biggy... things like that. My therapist gave me career advice, such as answering my question – "Is it OK for someone with mental health problems to work in mental health?"

"It's the wood hiding among the trees," she said with a laugh. "Join the club."

Today, a few insurmountables reached conquering distance. A CRB check is in the mail, the TEFL qualification is almost done.

But the real shift is noticeable because of a certain kind of consumption. For about 6 months or longer I've been on a diet of minimal everything. I shuffle around the house like a hedgehog, somewhat scared to open a cupboard to get a glass lest one not be there, fearful of turning on the TV lest I can't find the remote, panicking when I have more than two windows open on the computer, blaming an cruel world when I realise I've run out of cornflakes. 

I generally drink endless water, partly to avoid caffeine and partly because the appetite for tasty drinks has vanished. But today, whilst reading One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, I fancied a coffee. I got out the grinder, opened up a pack of Zapatista grown coffee beans from Chiapas, Mexico, and ground them down into a fine dust. Then I threw that into the cafetiere and drank it down in the sunny garden. One whole coffee. After that I played an Aphex Twin record on the record player and wrote this. 

Why grind coffee when there's instant nearby? Because it's better. Why play a record when YouTube is right there? Because it's better. Caring about that stuff is new. Apart from YouTube being a terrible service, with irritating adverts and intermittent buffering, and shithead twats writing crap underneath the videos which become more compelling than the videos themselves, music lost all of its charm of late, as if my head can only take so much sound before it starts to overspill, taking floating parts of porous brain with it. Today, no telling why, the peril of information was distilled into a soothing whiskey, and for the first time in a long time, I felt the groove.