Monthly Archives: June 2015

Life threads – so frail?

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This was a draft post from March of this year. I don’t know why it wasn’t posted and, maybe I meant to say more. But I think it stands anyway. So, here it is.

As my regular readers know, a lot of the stuff I post is stuff in my head which bears no resemblance to what I actually do or say nor to what people who don’t read this blog think that I’m thinking. Nor, sometimes, to reality.

For the stuff in my head is intangible and floats and changes depending on the crap that I may be thinking about at the time.

And so, this morning, I wake up with that feeling of dread. Again.

There’s no reason for it. Or, rather, there are reasons but they aren’t real … yet and, quite possibly will never be real. They are, of course, my “nightmares” of the waking hours – as opposed to my nightmares when I am asleep, of which I’ve had plenty just over the last few days. Not the same. All different.

So, this feeling of dread. It’s as if something bad is just about to happen. Like I’m on a knife-edge of a reality where everything starts to go horribly wrong. And, yet, nothing has gone wrong so far.

But the feeling persists. Maybe it’s the recent incidents involving V? After all, the fall from who he was to what he is now (as far as I can tell) spans less than 6 years. Can a normal, ordinary life have so short a thread that is can become unwound in such a short time? Well, yes, of course. And I’ve known that for such a long time too. I remember teaching a guy on a programme called Restart – a government funded programme to get unemployed people into work.

This guy told me how he’s had a good job, wife kids, house, etc. And within a couple of years lost it all simply by being made redundant. He’s been a roadsweeper at one point and told me of having people spit at him. He was a decent guy who wanted to work but then, all those years ago, by the time you were over 50 you were considered “past it” (I was about 25 at the time and I was teaching people how to rewrite their CV, write letters, etc.)

And, of course, from that point it’s not far to be one of those people without a home, no prospect of any type of job and sleeping on the street.

Identity. Crisis?

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Another draft post. Certainly not finished but I as can’t remember what I was trying to say, I’ll just leave it as it is.

From about November 2014.

Identity is quite a strange thing, isn’t it?

And by that, I mean to say, the way that you identify yourself and the way that you project that identity is strange. Of course, it’s “flexible”, as it depends on the situation you’re in or the way that you feel.

If you were asked to list the things by which you identify yourself and in the order which typically classifies that identity, how would you do? I mean, starting at the beginning, what is the one thing that absolutely, critically, makes you “you”?

You might say, “Engineer” or “Retired” or “Teacher” or something like that. But, in reality, this does not make you “you” since there are many other people who could claim the same thing and, in any case, surely what you “do” is not really that significant.

You might wonder what the hell got me to thinking about this? Well, it was yesterday or the day before, when I was thinking that, actually, I don’t feel very much like a “gay” person and I didn’t want to “be” one. Please don’t misinterpret that. It wasn’t that I suddenly wanted to be “straight”, just that I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed into that category. I didn’t want to feel like I had to “dress up” to that image.

And that got me to thinking that, in fact, in general, I don’t follow that line. Being gay is actually not really me at all. Being gay is just a single aspect of me that means I view men as “sexual” partners rather than women (and, I should add – not all men – in fact, few men – just in case you got the wrong idea!). It doesn’t really explain/determine many other aspects of me.

For example, I like the colour blue. It’s my favourite colour. Many of my clothes have some blue involved. I choose many “blue” things over other things that are not blue. Yet we don’t try to define people by what colour is their favourite colour. And, why not? Because it makes not a jot of difference to us …………….