Do I feel better? Well, kind of . . .

It's Sunday night, 10:30. The weekend has been a mixture of the usual humdrum non-events that make up life's rich (ho hum) tapestry -- a visit to the library, a stroll round Longton and a cuppa in Tescos, playing Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, going MFI for stuff to furnish Heather's room, having the siblings down for tea (Saturday), going to Mum's for tea (tonight), a bit of reading and writing . . . all much of a muchness but it does help to wind down. It's familiar. It's comforting. Above all it's numbing. I don't feel the stress I know will inevitably arise the moment I step out of the door into pitch blackness tomorrow morning. It's like weekends put a little good cheer in the bottle and Monday mornings drain it. By Tuesday I'll probably have blundered into another lamp post or fell over a bag of plaster at work and will be truly pissed off with my lot again. It's beginning to dawn on me that the main problem is trying to work at the same speed that I always have done. This is the curse of piecework. Run around like a blue-arsed fly and thou will get a reasonable wage; slacken off just slightly and watch thy gross pay tumble. Maybe I should slow down so I don't feel like my eyes are out on stalks. I'm sure it's the effort of concentrating on where I'm putting my size 12s -- something other people can take for granted -- that makes me so tired all the time.

Long time, no post

I've been seriously down just lately. So down I had no desire to be putting my feelings/thoughts up here. Things crystallised yesterday when walking to work in the dark. I collided with a lamp post. Haha, except it hurt more than just my face and kneecap, or even my pride for that matter. It honed all my anxieties of an uncertain future. There will be a day, not far off now, when it won't need to be dark for that lamp post to spring out in front of me. I've been aware of the ramifications of my eye disease for many years now, but it's always taken a backseat, because I've told it to: Get back there and SHUT UP! Now though, or just lately anyway, the spectre of blindness (Cliches R Us!) is riding shotgun and will not be silenced. "See him, he's 45. You'll have about 40% of your vision when you're his age. What are you going to do? Certainly not doing what you are now. How long d'you think you can keep working for? 3 years? 4? Maybe now is the time to pack it in and try and retrain? But what about the money? Who will support the family? How can you live with being blind? You'd be better off dead! 25% when you're 50 and total darkness at 60: that doesn't seem so far away, does it?"

It's a bastard, and no mistake.

Escape Pod

I haven't mentioned it for a while, so here's a plug for the podcast, Escape Pod. SF and Fantasy stories free to download as mp3s. Play 'em while you work, drive or walk. Brilliant. They aren't just amateur hacks they're broadcasting, y'know? Last week's offering was the World Fantasy Award winning 'Don Ysidro' by Bruce Holland Rogers. Or was it Bruce Roger Holland? Roger Bruce Holland? Doh! I forget, but click on the link to the right of the screen and find out for yourself.

Heavy

I haven't felt like updating the blog for a few days. But then, I haven't felt like doing much of owt this week. Hardly written anything, bar a little revision of a couple of stories. Done a bit of gaming, deciding that -- after an hour or so of playing the demo version -- the new FPS game F.E.A.R. isn't for me. Reading The Borribles by Michael de Larrabeiti, but not particularly keen. Listened to an Iain Rankin audio book, 'Broken Hearts' written under the pseudonym Jack Harvey, and found it all pretty lacklustre. Watched the movie 'Paycheck', and a waste of nearly two hours that was. Had a couple of stories rejected; the better kind of rejections, the ones that say they enjoyed the story BUT they don't feel it fits the theme of their book/magazine et ctera . . . . but a rejection is always a blow. Dear, dear. Oh wait, watched 'Sin City' and yep, I thought that was okay; more than okay in fact, it was pretty darned good. And, completely unrelated, but while I'm looking for positive things, Helen and Mark got the keys to their new house, so that's pretty nice; I know Helen's been dead excited waiting for the 'completion date'.

Carry on Doughnuts

I got the results to a blood test I took a couple of weeks ago, and everything's normal. There had been concerns about sugar levels, but apparently sugar levels in the blood do fluctuate quite a lot, so the previous test I took - indicating high blood suger - was probably just a spike and not representative of my overall blood suger levels.

Still on a medical front, my little buddy (I bet he loves me saying that) Chris Hall, came out of hospital today after his operation. I think he's got something like three or four months off work now. Plenty of time for him to whip the BADASS anthology into shape, yes?

The Motorcycle Diaries (part 4)

My fourth bike was a Yamaha XS250C, the C denoting 'custom'. Custom here meant a nod to Harley Davidson-styling with glossy black paintwork, a stars-and-stripes badge and lots of shiny bits hanging off it. The engine was very basic under all the glitz: a four-stroke, air-cooled parallel twin, and mine wouldn't even run properly. I took it to the local bikeshop to get the carbs balanced, as I'd read that the carbs went out of synch and caused poor performance. They charged me a(cliched) princely sum for the service, but the bike still ran no better. I still had my 125 at this stage and that would easily outrun the XS, even two-up! The XS was a heavy, ugly pile of crap.

So I started to customise it further. The halogen spotlight conversion for the crappy original headlight was a sensible modification (and indicative of my failing night vision), but alas, the only sensible mod I made. There followed a new badass seat (wider and more stepped), spiky, chrome-plated nuts and bolts here and there and a silver eagle mounted on the headlamp dish.Oh, dear. It must have looked like something the biker out of the Village People would have fancied. Christ, I had a near-miss there.

My brother Steve took a look to find out why the bike was so underpowered and found one of the carbs had a split diaphragm. A replacement rubber and wey-hey -- it was still a heavy pile of crap, but at least it had two lungs. And yeah, so much for the carb-balancing service of the local bikeshop. Huh.

I slid off the XS a few hundred yards from my mum and dad's house.. Nothing on the road to fetch me off, no warning wriggles from the bike, it just gently dropped to the ground spilling me and several hundreds pounds worth of photography equipment I was carrying. I wasn't hurt but the way it just low-sided at a moderate lean angle made me distrust the XS even more. Time to sell it and move on to bike number five.