As I pointed out in a past entry, I am the World’s Worst E-Mail Responder. The reason for this is simple; I always want to write a novel when a line or two will do. I am verbose but I am also lazy and seemingly always pressed for time; thus I have a backlog of messages all crying out for responses but I am seemingly incapable of typing even the most meagre of replies.
The same could be said for these entries. A strict reading of which would indicate that I lead a life of dreary monotony with the occasional spike of frantic tension and bad craziness. While there is a certain truth to this view, the reality (or at least, my reality) is that events in my life maintain a constant roar that, only on rare occasion diminishes slightly: as if the voltage were turned down to 120 from 240
Since, try as I might, I am unable to crawl inside anyone’s head, I’m assuming that the background radiation of my life is pretty much normal. With the exception of my partner, I have encountered very few people who are able to really relax without powerful drugs. I’m not sure what her secret is but on beach holidays, while I cover myself with sun block, huddle beneath any available shade and pray desperately for an unexpected cloudburst, she reads, bakes in the heat and glows.
This can go on for days and soon falls into a basic, almost primitive routine of waking, eating, sunning, swimming, eating, drinking sleeping. It should come as a surprise to no one that after the first thirty seconds of this ritual, I am bored enough to gnaw my fists off.
When I’m on holiday I want to do something: explore, climb, tumble, take pictures, go on a road trip, investigate every cheese shop in Paris, watch couples publicly grope in the streets of Rome, or try and find an open restaurant in Munich on a Sunday (and other recreational impossibilities). I don’t know how to do nothing and never thought that was the point anyway.
To be fair, my partner is game-on to do all of the above-mentioned activities; it’s just that she has an OFF switch installed that was not a factory option on my model. At night, she is pleasantly gurgling in her sleep ten minutes after her bedside light goes off. I, on the other hand, have to read myself into unconsciousness or I will spend hours staring into the darkness, mind racing, cursing whatever faulty gene I have that prevents me from simply settling into the pillow and drifting off. As for my sleeping on planes, trains and automobiles, I’d have better luck knocking a six-inch nail through a two-by-four with my penis (thank you, Real Genius).
Hotel rooms are another challenge. It doesn’t matter what super soundproofed suite I’ve managed to get myself booked into, there is always some purring air conditioner, buzzing refrigerator or busy street outside my window which prevents me, no matter that I stuff my ears with plugs and pile pillows over my head, from sleeping through the night.
At this very moment I am in the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna listening to a woman scream, shriek and bray in Italian to some luckless bastard on the other end of her phone. This has been going on for over four hours now and there would appear to be no end in sight. I escaped to the gym for an hour but when I returned it was as if she hadn’t even paused for breath. I’m hoping that eventually she will simply starve to death: unable to get food in past the bile that keeps spewing out.
I’ve been this way as far back as I can remember. Any noise when I am trying to sleep, write, study or read instantly prevents me from doing any of the above. If it weren’t for earplugs I would never have graduated from college, read anything more involved than a baseball box score or slept longer than a few seconds at a stretch. I kid you not: I wear earplugs in the library; I keep boxes of them hidden in my luggage and clothes. I once was forced to leave a three-day hippie-dippy camp-out, music, drugs, fuck-fest because I had forgotten my earplugs and the incessant sound of the drum circle was driving me psychotic.
Oh dear God! There seems to be whale sounds emanating from the room next door. I wonder if I give her a few tons of baleen she will go away?
Right. All that was a bit of a diversion considering I began this entry with the idea to keep it short and, for once, on-topic. I still have a good lorry-load of recent events to write about including: my month-long holiday in California, the funding for my project being pulled which greatly increases the possibility that I’ll be camped out on a street-corner near you with a sign that says, “Will network your office for food” and the recent news that my mum is responding very well to chemo.
I have no idea what made me think of this but for the last seven years I have not had a cat, a landline telephone or a microwave oven. The only thing I miss is the cat.
