Andy's Blog

There’s a mental image running around my head that would speak far more volumes than any number of words could convey in how things are at the moment.  Sometimes, and only sometimes, words are easy

…but not enough.. or way too much.

I’ve spoken before about how a song, a snippet of lyrics taken out of context, an image, or some other medium, provide a far more accurate and personal reflection of self at a point in time.

I won’t try and put into words what the mental image is, inoffensive as it is, as that seems counter intuitive. Maybe later, when I have some personal time, I will search for something that matches it on the big, bad, t’interweb… or, god forbid, put my artistic abilities to the test and actually translate from mental image to physical medium.

Until then I’ll share one of the ‘lyrics out of context’, that I mentioned earlier.  It’s from a song by Madness and perversely it’s probably the one bit that makes the song sound darker than it’s actual intent – which is exactly the opposite;

Standing up in the falling down
In so much rain I could almost drown.

If I ever do manage to scribble the image down I’ll make sure to add it to the blog… maybe.  However now seems a perfect time to plug in some headphones, hit ‘random’ on the playlist, and see if I can either create some new audible monuments or just lose self in the moment.

…not a unique sentiment at the moment!

Safer with a computerless keyboard?

There is a certain laziness that creeps in when riffing off a quick comment. Unfortunately this laziness when armed with a keyboard is where trouble lurks, awaiting its chance to bite you on the unmentionables.

It seems that my writing skills, and its slovenly attributes, change dependant on where I visit when armed with the aforementioned keyboard;

• Blogging: For some reason I can never seem to post a small snippet of what I am upto quite like the talented Mr Fitchett is able to.  A veritable torrent of letters, words, sentences, bullet points and paragraphs gets splurged onto the computer and then gets edited, re-edited, moved around, edited some more, updated, deleted, polished and buffed to within an inch of its life.

The end result is no more eloquent than when it began, but it does probably reflect more what I was trying to get over in my own unique way… most of the time. There being some notable exceptions apparently.

• Twitter: …and in what can only be considered the extreme opposite end of the scale; being forced to voice an experience or thought in 140 characters or less gets you to consider VERY carefully what you want to say and the best way in which to say it.  Of course, as with all things, this can go somewhat awry.

It seems to be in the ‘little’ area between those two extremes that I come unstuck.  The quick reply often done without thought is where unmentionables get the nibble I spoke about at the beginning of this post (way, way back – I did say I tended to splurge on a bit).

Unfortunately, to a greater extent than I should really be doing, you rely on the person reading these unthought out replies to understand what it is you were trying to get across.  Hence, what you thought was a critique of yourself becomes criticism of another which is on the perverse spectrum of where you wanted to be.

Sometimes when a sentence begins with the word “I”, that is where the heart of the sentence lies.

Time to be less flippant online methinks and begin watching, not so much my P’s and Q’s, but my Q’s and M’s and all the combination of letters between the two (look down at your keyboard to understand).

I am very definitely a Winter person.

There is something deeply satisfying to me when the fogs of December come rolling in, especially in the early evenings, and the street lights flicker into life and cast the scenery with eerie punctuations of light and shadow.

I am also at my most reflective during these shadowed evenings, especially with all the dramas of life at the moment.  Sometimes just stopping by Abington Park, after karate, pumping up the mood music, opening the doors and taking a calm moment before continuing the journey, is required.

There’s probably a hundred reasons why it’s not a good idea, but there’s just as many as to why it is.  I think next time I try it I’ll source a good cup of java from somewhere.

A trip up to Scotland, especially at this time of year, has been too long a time coming and my batteries are in sore need of some recharging.

In a particularly low point at the moment, so have decided to wallow in some self pity and retrospective angst.  I think I’m turning into a Goth, or worse, my sister when she was a teenager!  (..that particular joke will have some severe repercussions).

My karate, as with other things, has stalled.  Despite putting in what I feel is 100%, the execution seems to fall far short of the expected standard and the appearance of going backwards more than forwards is somewhat disheartening.

Maybe it’s just a recurrence of what a good friend once called “Blue belt blues”.

T’would seem my old managers favourite dictum, muttered every pay and bonus review time, has come back to haunt; “Remember, Andy, that 100% of nothing is still nothing”.

Wallowing, angst and other inglorious forms of self pity will of course be accompanied by some very loud music, in the Marilyn Mansun and Iron Maiden flavours methinks, and occassionally interspersed with some comedy genius.

…buggar!  Still not sorted this out either!

Tis always the case, I start listening to a new album and my next few blog posts contain references, links and other sundry musings based on the content of that.

Postings have been a little thin on the ground lately, largely due to me being in a kind of cruise control;  I go to work, I come home, I go to Karate (and generally get battered; my right hand thumb is somewhat suspect at the moment), I eat, I sleep and re-start the process the next day.

Not the most exciting post you’d ever read, not that I am suggesting that any of my previous blog posts could be categorised as such, but you get the picture.

Now this track by Nickelback, music and lyrics below, has gotten me wondering and cogitating on the question it poses.  I don’t have a full answer as yet, or nothing that could fill a blog post, but I think at some point I will have to answer it and try and kickstart life a little.

…and very possibly ‘develop some’ as my trusty Glaswegian friend has told me on many an occassion.

Continue reading

“You have to do a blog post when you get home!”

Unfortunately, and almost bizarrely,  NOTHING had happened at the point of exiting my usual Tuesday visit to Senior Karate Class.  There has been a couple of Incidents within the carpark, after the Senior class had finished, which almost makes me sound like some kind of pervert hanging around dark car parks at night.. not helped by the fact that both incidents seemed to involve at least two female colleagues from Karate.

“Tart” as a friend called me, and no matter how much you protest your innocence; it only seems to make you seem more.. more… something-or-other!

However, it was incident free.  Nothing extraordinary had happened, apart from me not making some kind of arse of myself as usual, and no unintended double-entendre’s had been uttered.  How uneventful.

I was just musing on how quickly a holiday can fade into memory, and even more on how much you get out of shape during said hols!!  The evidence m’learned colleages;

• First karate lesson after coming back from hols and I managed to completely destroy my hard man of karate persona (self delusion is a wonderful thing); Shouting Ichi! Ni! San! Shi!… and then squeaking like mickey mouse on helium “Go”, “Roku”…
• The Alfa Romeo has decided to act all Alfa Romeo’y and decide it wanted 450 of my finest english pounds to be spent on its lower regions (brakes, disks and bearings)
• My sunburnt head has now turned to a peeling head.. I look like a “shoulda used head-n-shoulders” disaster advert.
• 563 work emails on the first day back is never a fun thing to behold.
• The holidays are not even a week old and I feel like I need another one.

Ah well, there was always Senior Karate?  Unfortunately I was bloody awful!  I felt like somebody had strapped lead weights to the ends of my arms, which wasn’t clever as Sensei was not in a very forgiving mood today.  I think I caused at least one of the press-ups that were metered out as punishments, but not all the others.  I was sweating, heaving and panting by the end of the lesson.  Nice!

I wouldn’t mind all that, but it didn’t look like I had even BEEN on holiday.  I stood next to Libs and looked all wan and pale next to her gorgeously tanned self.. Even Sarah looked more tanned than me, and as far as I am aware she spent the past two weeks in rainy England.  *sigh*

Chewy condom anyone?

..and then to top it all off, as I stand in line at a BP Station to purchase some much needed cold beverage to throw down my parched throat, I hear from the two young teenage girls standing behind me; “Eeeerrgh! You’d think he’d be too old to need those!”.  I look down at the pack of chewing gum I have also decided to impulse buy.

I look up at the two girls, who look back at me like I’m the perv as described in the first paragraph of this blog post.

“Whoah, hang on…”

But it’s too late, they wander off.  So now it’s official, I am now too old for chewing gum, or worse.  I woulda given them a reverse shuto to the heads, but I was feeling my age and couldn’t even if I wanted to.

*double sigh* time to check the calendar and figure out when the next holiday is…

Apparently the short one-liner of a post yesterday is better suited to twitter and not a blog post, I wasn’t aware that netiquette had developed to such a degree.

As to an explanation….

..Somewhat more difficult.  I am sat here, in front of the keyboard, with a  thousand words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs running around my head refusing to attach themselves in any permanent form to the screen.  The backspace key is getting worn out and I’m afraid that the artificial intelligence within WordPress will just get tired of the relentless type-delete-retype-delete cycle and just publish anyways.

Where to begin and how to word this post without the spitted teeth embedding themselves into the paragraphs?

I dunno.

I value honesty above all else, and always ask friends to be frank and honest with me.  I have a particularly thick skin and most things will be taken as they are meant – I always thought it particularly stupid to seek someones honesty and then repay that with hurt pride after they have taken a difficult leap to provide you with that feedback.  Take it, deal with it, move on.

However the stream of ‘truth’ that came through over the Bank Holiday was a little too much, even for one as thick skinned and dense as myself.  Whilst I recognised some of what was said, and sheepishly say “guilty as charged” to others, the rest just seemed pure anger and nothing that I recognised.  The shutting of virtual doors afterwards leaves no room for response, and to be frank I don’t think I want to rattle those ‘doors’ to see if that’s even a possibility.

There comes a point in time when you think this is happening too often and I just don’t have the energy to weather this anymore.

I took it, the “dealing with” is being exorcised here, and now it’s time to move on, however sadly…

This week I am taking a ‘timeout’ from pretty much everything, including work.  The battery’s are drained from far too much that is currently going on, although Karate is not part of that timeout; everybody needs an outlet, somewhere to let off steam.

To be honest, one of the reasons that facebook was removed, apart from those stated in a previous post, was to retreat into the background rather than have a potential train wreck in a very public forum.  That, and just being plain tired and finding it difficult to maintain some necessary deceptions.

Blogging will continue as normal, this isn’t a full retreat into my shell after all, whilst trying to maintain some air of mystery.  Next challenge is to try and put on an air of normality at Senior Karate Class this Tuesday, which’ll be hard as some there are a better judge of mood than is sometimes comfortable!

I am tired today;

• Tired of ribs that still ache.
• Tired of not being able to breath properly, and having to take deep breaths.
• Tired of everyone thinking I am sighing all the time (see above).
• Tired from not being able to sleep at night and looking up at the ceiling.
• Tired of not being challenged at work.
• Tired of not being able to help those I really want to help.
• Tired of maintaining the status quo.

..and more importantly, tired of feeling sorry for myself!