Daytrip To Potsdam

We caught the train from Berlin to Potsdam
Half confused in the snow
We walked from the station
To the park
Tim with his scarf over his head like an old lady
Wrapped up against the cold

His mood was bleak and desperate, unhappy with his life
Before the revelation of Prozac and found self knowledge

But to me the day was magic
As we walked in the park it snowed so hard
We could hardly see the path
Like being lost in a bag of flour
‘It reminds me of that film’ I said

And then the snow stopped
And in its place was a palace
‘It reminds me of that film’ I said

Fazzle

Finding a good name for something can help in life and I have now decided to name what I have previously called 'special effects' (the sensory effects of mild psychosis) 'fazzle'. I didn't consciously think of the name, it just popped into my head, but if I do some retro reasoning I'm going to say it's a combination of fucked up, fazed and dazzle - fazzle. 'I went for a walk and it calmed the fazzle right down', 'I drank too much coffee and the fazzle came on really strong'. I can feel an Urban Dictionary entry coming on...

Things to moan about 2: mild psychosis

‘Mild’ psychosis, it doesn’t feel mild but, as I never become completely delusional, I’ll use that prefix. It would probably annoy psychiatrists - and that has got to be a good thing.

I’ll divide my description up into 2 parts, the sensory and the mental.

The main sensory effect I get is visual, a changing in the intensity of the way I see. Details seem too, well, detailed. Faces become somehow too real, hyper real. Colours too vivid, bright colours seeming to vibrate . And the sky, just too big. Everything has been turned up a little too much. Sometimes quite a lot too much.

It’s years since I’ve smoked spliff but I would describe the effect as been a bit like smoking a really strong skunk joint. Except you haven’t, and though those effects might be sort after by some, but I don’t want them. They make me uneasy and frightened.

When I initially flipped out in July 2008, displaying hypo-manic symptoms, one of the first changes was an increased sensitivity to colour. At the time, during The Time Of Blakean Joy, I quite enjoyed the effects. They have long since lost there appeal.

Are there any triggers for this? It happens most days, often seemingly unprompted. Though stress and anxiety, especially ‘life worry’ and when I get worked up about tinnitus, make it more likely to happen. Alcohol could temporarily calm it down, but in the long term made it a lot worse.

And the mental? There’s definitely and element of paranoia and conspiracy that creeps into my mind - usually based around tinnitus, a feeling that I might be cursed, a tendency to wander into magical thinking. The fact that the tinnitus was triggered by a medication, and that it often seems the worse possible thing that could of happened to me, the fact that it led to me starting drinking again (2 months and 7 days on the wagon, let’s count our blessings) after over a decade sober - sometimes makes me feel cursed. Like someone or something has decided to torture me. ‘Oi, Matt, watch out, we are really going to fuck with your brain.’

A teacher of mine with long term mental health problems (he had a very public breakdown while teaching me, I rather liked him) died 3 months before I flipped out - was his madness passed on to me after his death? Is there a certain degree of madness in the world that needs to be passed around? And has now been passed on to me?

And sometime I feels like something has been left to rot in my brain, leaving an unpleasant taste I can’t get rid of. I really don’t like that feeling.

Depression and suicidal thoughts are more of a problem than delusional thoughts, especially in the morning. And of course everything is aggravated by the head sound - that’s what pushes the suicide agenda to the fore relentlessly. I need to start to have strategies to deal with this. I’ve been watching the re-run of The World At War on the Yesterday channel, that might help me come up with some ideas.

Things to moan about 1: chronic tinnitus

I think today might be more misery memoir than shooting the breeze. Yes, I’m having a moan. Again.

I suffer from chronic tinnitus (as written about previously here). I spend a lot of time been driven ragged by the multi-toned noises in my head. But a quick rant about its horrors may prove useful; better out than in, lets break the circle of thought through self-expression etc. So here’s a quick attempt to catalogue ‘the things that drive me mad about chronic tinnitus’.

First off there’s the morning, the fact that on waking it’s the first thing I hear. My first awareness is always ‘what’s that sound in my ear, o....it’s that sound. The bloody sound(s) which are always in my ear.’ The day starts with anxiety and frustration. Another day of this. Another day of constant distraction from the moment.

And that’s the second thing that riles me, this inability to be in the moment. The noise constantly magnifies the self, making it hard to be absorbed in anything. My focus is repeatedly brought back to the noise, to an upset self, thousands of times a day. Whatever I do takes place in a sonic fog, though fog seems the wrong word for the multiple high pitched tones. More like the interference on a badly tuned old school analog television, a constant distortion (for some reason this analogy works better than that of a badly tuned radio).

In Alcoholic’s Anonymous they sometimes have a phrase on the wall, ‘This too will pass’. The problem with the tinnitus is that it probably won’t pass, it’s been like this for nearly 3 years now. It used to depress me when I went to those meetings. The craving for alcohol may go away, but the sounds in my ear won’t every go away (and it was the sound in my ear which made me pick up the bottle again). Whatever happens - love, bereavement, success and failure, death - will take place under this constant sonic attack.

And it has effected two of what were formerly great pleasures, reading and walking in the mountains. I do still read (though at one point I gave up entirely), but it is a battle, my focus is constantly distracted - I feel like I’m only skimming the surface of the words. Absorbing a small percentage of what I once did. And the problem with the hills ? They're quite, away from the noise of traffic, the distraction of radio and television - just that sound, dominating everything.

Is there anything positive I can say? When I’m with people, I notice it less. If I’m writing something, expressing rather than absorbing, it bothers me less. I keep on using that word, absorb. Maybe that’s the thing, chronic tinnitus makes it harder to absorb the world, to relate and empathise. It makes it harder to be a human being.

Moan over. And do I feel any better? A little. Next up, the pain in the arse which is mild psychosis.

America In My Brain

Where did the United States come from, when did it first form in my mind? It’s the country whose culture I have consumed more than any other: films, music, TV, books, they’ve been a cornerstone of my self and worldview. Can I imagine a world in which the dominant culture wasn’t American? Certainly not – in fact I find the thought of it quite frightening.

The first time I remember forming an idea of America (let’s call it that, though I know there’s some imperialism implicit in the phrase) is with the book Little House In The Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. My Dad claims it was earlier, watching Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book at the cinema. He said I was very frightened by the experience. Having never seen moving images before (we didn’t have a television at the time) the whole experience must have been a bit overwhelming.

But I don’t remember that, and the Jungle Book isn’t about America the place (however you might deconstruct it, though I guess it might be about imperialism? I don’t really remember). My first experience of that is with the second ‘proper’ book I ever read, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House In The Big Woods.

For decades I’ve had an interest in American conservatism, going back to Ollie North and the Iran-Contra Affair. I used to come back from a day working on a building sites in the summer of 1987, full of dust and nicotine, and enjoy watching Ollie’s endless parade of his rightness; his sheer belief in himself and his cause. I’m a person full of self-doubt, and at times self-hatred, I couldn’t help but be impressed. He was talking nonsense, but he seemed happy about it. Happiness is appealing. I guess that’s how the Nazis did so well in Germany in the 30s, they made a lot of people feel very happy. Then made them kill people.

Perhaps the origin of this interest was Wilder’s back to basics frontierswomen attitude - tinged with a racial fear of the native American - which first prompted me to be curious about this political otherness (my parents are atheist liberals, with a bit of an anarchist bent from my father). Curiously Wilder’s daughter, and thought buy some to be co-author, became one of the leading lights of American libertarianism – often mentioned in the same breath as Ayn Rand in terms of her influence.

This post could become very long….I’ll stop it there and maybe come up with a part 2.

The Booze Hotel

(Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago but was too embarrassed to put it up while still struggling with the booze. I'm now firmly back on the wagon.)

I’ve been struggling with the booze again (though currently sober – honest!) – and this time I have really frightened myself. I realise I could quite easily kill myself on the drink. I’ve got some savings, they might last me a couple of years on a bottle of vodka a day. But a bottle probably is not enough in the long term, that’s what I can do now – it’s bound to go up.

I look back to The Vale of Pragmatism with some nostalgia, though I’ve no one but myself to blame. I scored some Valium off the doctor – part of me going ‘This could be useful if you ever try and come off Olanzapine, I’ll store it up’ the other part of me going ‘do not get any, it’ll only trigger substance use’. I knew in my heart of hearts that the latter voice spoke the truth. I couldn’t resist taking the Diazepam in excess and after I’d taken about 30 mg couldn’t resist starting to drink. I fucked a period of relative stability. I fucked the narrative of life being sort of okay.

So what’s this period called,? ‘Matt goes to AA to stop drowning in a sea of vodka (it’s all about the vodka with me)’, ‘Matt upsets and lies (‘I’m on the wagon *well I have been for two hours, and I drank half a bottle of vodka in an hour so I am still pissed*’) to his family and friends.’

What does the booze do? There’s part of that which gives me temporary rest from mental health problems and tinnitus, but much bigger is the madness of drinking when you are an alcoholic . I will end up in the gutter with bleeding insides if I continue to drink. And I don’t think it will take that long.

A reoccurring fantasy in this madness is that of ‘The Booze Hotel’ (which I imagine is the Holiday Inn at Old Street) – where I can go and drink myself to death. This is a sort of utopianism, a fantasy of a world without consequences – apart from one’s own death. It’s a place where the pain one would cause one’s family and friends by killing yourself aren’t there. Where there’s free wi-fi and 24 hour cable (I guess this is possible) and a Sainsbury’s round the corner for cheap Smirnoff (I’m brand loyal. Is Smirnoff Russian? Probably not, probably originally from Scunthorpe).

I also worry about the room being cleaned. Won’t it disturb my every waking moments drinking? My triple vodka for breakfast? I like drinking in bed rather than pubs, will I be forced to go to the pub while they change my sheets and towels? That could prove expensive and the whole point of The Booze Hotel is that you only have to booze, watch 24 hour BBC news, science fiction and police procedurals on the TV.

The Booze Hotel is a lie. I need to face up to this.

Fear of music and music re-found

The Vale Of Pragmatism is being spread a bit thin – life seems a bit too much at the moment, something at best to be endured. This hasn’t been helped by a miserable virus, a dodgy shin (I currently walk with a limp) and a nasty acid stomach. And my wrist hurts.

But rather than dwell on this I’ll try and look to one of the positives of recent months, my rediscovery of listening to music.

One of the saddest things to occur during The 26 Months Of Hell is that I found music, once such a cause of pleasure, very difficult to listen to. *

Music seemed to laugh and scorn me, ‘this music was made by people better than you, its existence shows you up to be the little shit you surely are, listen and feel belittled.’ I also developed a fear of Damon Albarn, he became a signifier of all who were better than me – with his talent, his one time relationship with Justine Frishmann, his internationally respected status, his monkey opera. A bit bizarre, I’ve never liked his music.



Music that reminded me of hedonism was out, as I feared such activity might have contributed to my psychosis and depression, so no house or techno. Apart from when I fell of the wagon and headed down Vauxhall way…but that’s sort of another story.

Music that was overtly sexual made no sense; my libido had gone for a walk and forgotten to come home. Anything that talked about love seemed irrelevant, seemingly written for another species, one with a capacity for emotion I could no longer comprehend. Without love and sex, or at least the fantasy of them, much of the world presented to me didn’t make sense.

The result of this was that I stopped listening to music out of choice for 2 years.

The first inklings that music could one day be part of my life again was coming across - someone played it in the office at work - what has to be one of the least ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ albums of all time piece, music that seemed unable to trigger negative thought and was devoid of signifiers of my inadequacy. It was a 1955 jazz album titled Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh. Lee plays alto sax, Warne tenor.



I guess it belongs to the West Coast cool school of jazz. It is certainly devoid of the intensity of much bee-bop – though there is a Charlie Parker cover. It does swing, but is mellow and easy throughout and is probably the lease sinister album I’ve ever heard. Look at how happy they are on the album cover.

This was some months ago and slowly music has crept back in, though it’s a fairly regulated diet. Jazz features heavily, though nothing too way out or atonal. Ravi Shakar is good, and more and more classical - especially Debussy and Ravel. I like things to be more gentle and contained, or maybe just more subtle. I find most rock guitar based music un-listenable and I’m not really keen on anything with words in it. Apart from Stevie Wonder and Daryl Hall/John Oates.

But it’s good to be able to listen to music again, and maybe it’s middle age – I don’t want things to be harsh anymore. Life seems harsh enough.

Whatever, better a life with music than without.

*Just as a point of interest, during The Time Of Blakean Joy I especially enjoyed listening to The Fiery Furnaces and Afro Beat.