Facebook Wednesday Professional

dead.

Like I Need This?

Today I called 2/3 of the Audit Board to rally support to oust the BoD.

I also did a speak at Toast Masters, How To Say It. This is the 4th Speech in the first workbook entitled Competent Communicator. I did not pre-present my speech to a live person as is my routine but used three poems to prepare and fill time. It was a cheap trick but it worked. The poems highlighted the need for



were and prepared my introduction for Jerzy, who will be giving his speech tomorrow and which I will be the evaluator and introduce him.

The Putch’s Putsh Putch

dinner
the founding fee
the yahoo email
the lawyer
the meeting

Some Nazty Business

So, another blank page and another 1,000 words objective today. And, typically, I think I have nothing to relate, express, articulate or say. This must be some dangerous, jive psychological template I have been handed to me because in every other situation I have lots to say – just ask anyone I have bored to tears. Just ask Martha who despises anything I say so much that reverse psychology is ineffective and I have learnt to be Silent George. But now that I have to deliver, I go all shy and blank like a coy schoolgirl. Is this what a writer’s block is – or is this more Sloth? Either way, the debate fixes nothing and only serves to prolong the agony of what I must do. Well, I can at least write another diary entry.

No-one is going to read this stuff anyway.

Dear Internet,

This nasty business not writing every day makes me feel lazy and annoyingly dirty. It has been a long few weeks of emotional struggle with few rewards and I hate to have to admit that I do nothing when it is my own accomplishment at stake. I want to write every day, just like I want to complete my first Toastmaster certificate. So how big a task is this? Let me recount it.

I tried to overcome my paralyzing disempowerment with good, old-fashioned consumerism. Nothing can easily change my psychology of despair, in my experience, like the expectation from a shopping trip. I am not saying I like to leave my home but eBay is such a friend. Not only do I not have to leave my home, but the goods arrive at some half-expected near future time. Fuck this running to nowhere or eating a tub of ice cream to biologically change my psychology. Anyone who talks to me about those other remedies does not know me. And how odd can I be in this regard? Promise me the mere opportunity to get laid and I clean the whole house, quickly and efficiently. Am I the only man ever to find my second wind this way? What does the medical profession do to so emasculate a doctor’s thinking? Get out and run for an hour? Why? Where am I going? What’s chasing me? Of course, these days I need much more than the simple promise of something to get my juices flowing. And living with Martha means I have less juice to flow. So, making use of my resource, Martha is part of my solution here. I do not have much money to spend but if I find some I can spend it like I am living at home again.

I am the man searching for the boy inside to revive his own manhood. I suppose that is an elegant way to say mid-life crisis though I really do not connect Martha with my mid-life expect by chronology.

Shopping, like eating ice cream, does have its drawbacks. I have picked up some new DVDs:. Shogun: the mini-series, Masada, the complete epic mini-series, and The Seven Per Cent Solution. I prize these, especially as I turn my focus to writing. The writing in these films is quite good in my opinion though I watch them a little more critically than when I first watched them. But just watching them again and re-experiencing how they influenced my early creativity does restore a little bit of myself to me: like a vaccine’s booster shot re-immunizing me. What was it I wrote about writers being daydreamers? Yet I have to say that my plan has partially backfired. I am still awaiting two shipments and this is an added weight on my mind. Yay they finally arrive after I am plagued by the fermenting notion that my money is stolen for so long is a definite unnecessary burden on an already troubled mind. I waited for Dragon Age: Origins to arrive for so long that the great expectation to play it out before I started this Blog is now devolved into the fear of diversion and is a battle in its own right. The seller was in communication with me so I did not experience the problem of fear of loss, as I am doing with another merchant at present. This other merchant is long past due to send me 25 DVDs and CDs, which I bought for a great sum of money, and has sent me more troubles.

Martha is angry that I spent my money on myself, and she was an instrumental block to me in regards to this other merchant, which she secretly relishes while I anguish. To be fair to myself I did try to assuage her with some Christmas gifts I bought with this same money but she is insatiable. On one hand, she harbors an indignation any moron can understand while on the other hand she refuses any advice I can give to her to help her situation. Full steam ahead Martha, and I (and everyone else) can pay for it. Well, I do not feel too bad about shopping for myself, ungrateful though I may be.

Martha understands my shopping as self-medication for a broken spirit so problems with that medicine is an opportunity for her to lord it over me. I threw away money hurts me enough but that dagger goes with a twist for Martha! I disrespected her! She could have had that money instead! Now I am not eager for the countdown until my gifts arrive but anxiously counting the days since the gifts should have arrived but have not. Please hurt me. Here is the razor, and it is both arteries that get slashed: guilt and fear.

Did I really pay for this sadomasochism? I realise that the great many women enjoy exploiting these situations on men. Women are the worst emotional bullies by way of explanation of their ever-tragic her-story under the evil Patriarchy of Paters and Godlike Christ-figures. They share their endless suffering to make the world a more egalitarian hell. But I have to ask myself with this eBay purchase, did I really just accomplish the diametrical opposite of my objective to make myself feel better and pay out my own money for it too? It just adds to the negativity of my situation.

But the last few weeks have not been as easy on me as my eBay dilemma. That anxiety goes away if I can just lay down in bed and wait for the inevitable to pass like a kidney stone. The rest I have had to deal with does not allow me to rest from the recoil of my bleeding fear and guilt. And Martha is there to exploit this too. Martha gets her money’s worth from me.

Before I turned my focus onto writing as a last hope, I had created a group from about 100 business leaders from whom I hoped to find work. My thinking was to get a steady income started so I can leave Martha, and Martha knows this. So there is this stasis in our relationship between me not earning any money and my not providing any money. She can complain about it both ways while she subtly sabotages the equation. It is very rewarding for her to play the victim against me the failure. Maybe I do not seem so ungrateful and misogynic now as the underdog in this end game.

The best thing for her, she tells me, is that I leave her. And the best thing for me is to do the same. But I cannot. I think she truly believes I am too lazy and that the odds are too long for me to succeed as a writer. She must believe this because how she speaks to me about staying home all day and the constant telephone calls about nothing (I feel lonely, some asshole said something to me, I am tired) that punctuate the hours of my day like the shelling of Bagdad is tiring. Worse is that I fear she may be right.

I have thought about adopting her belief that someone else – a new woman for example – whisks me away to a utopia Neverland. I get a reality check when I hear this philosophy blatantly sold from Martha’s mouth, a Mouth of Sauron. Then I am snapped back to my center of consciousness, renewed like the Sword of Elendil slicing through the bullshit.



The Mouth Of Sauron Speaks To Me Daily

On personal reflection I am satisfied with myself. I can conclude that, before taking this perilous path of penmanship, I have tried everything other than becoming a writer first, and I do appreciate how much I have achieved before the results of my effort (in the direction I had aimed) revealed failure. How many abject failures surviving off the avails of a woman can claim they started a semi-successful non-profit association for CEOs? How many resigned to such a fate would even find the energy? My efforts have gathered a group of local business leaders around me to whom I have almost single-handedly fed 4-course dinners for the last 18-months, providing not only the food but also the venue and entertainment. Again, to succeed in such monumental tasks yet fail to find simple gainful employment from said tasks executed competently leaves me looking at the glaring snake-eyes of destiny manifest. It is possible to seek modest revenue from them in the form of an annual membership fee from their company. But to do that I need to establish this group as a legal non-profit entity and open a bank account. On this path I need a Board of Directors.

That is where the tale takes a turn for the worse. Maybe if I write it all down I will understand my role in this mess better. Martha feverishly portrays me as the victim – usually the first sign that I bear some responsibility that I can fix. Think about that sympathy for a moment and you will see why I want to look at this situation a little harder, though I believe it is as hopeless as a 3-Stooge movie. In fact, the whole 4-man Steering Committee needs to be sent to the lions, and this is my task next Thursday.



This disaster movie features Moe Hailstone playing the part of Nicholas “the stall it’s my fault” Lawyer. Field Marshal Curly Gallstone presents the role of Chris “the covert operations concrete” Mixer, and Larry Pebble is Ashim Numbers, fugitive from Russian prostitution mafia. Shemp makes a guest appearance too, in the person of Paul “I never got the memo” Membership. As ineffectual a group as you ever care to meet.

Except this is serious nazty business instigated by clever guys designed to hurt me. Recall I started this post about my psychology needing a boost? Well, to move this group into the status of a recognised non-profit association catering to senior executives is a pretty big accomplishment. I may be a total washout but, at least, I could hold my head up high as the founder of such an association while I write from home. No one will believe I could have gone so far in my current position, and I have a Steering Committee looking to block me.

With friends like these, who needs enemies? And, truly, I hand picked these guys. FAIL. It is moments like this I recall Dale Carnegie’s observation from How To Win Friends And Influence Others: Andrew Carnegie told him that his success was based upon the people whom he surrounded himself. Well, surround yourself with The Stooges and suffer the consequences. Of course, I thought they were friends at the time.

When the story began in mid-August 2009, a meeting was held with Moe, Curly and Larry in Moe’s offices. This meeting set the date for a founders meeting to occurr at 13:00 on 28 August and outlined the Letters of Association to be drawn up. I gathered the fifteen residents, important CEOs, to sign the Letters of Association, which Moe had not even written. In fact, Moe was completely unprepared and hid the majority of the time leaving me to chair an empty meeting. Hamish, you’re a comedy fuckmuppet if ever there was, school tie and all.

Between that time and October 2009, nothing was done. In October, I put on another quarterly dinner for the group providing the business address on branding myself. By this time I had also accomplished another major step forward by attracting the CEO of a website company to design and implement a website for the group. It was at this meeting I had planned/hoped to announce an annual membership fee for members charged to their companies, but nothing had been accomplished by Moe. As a result, no bank account existed.

Yes, that’s right. All these guys got jobs and I do not - going on 10-years.

The next dinner was set for last Tuesday , 16 February. In the interim, I organised the guest speaker for the dinner and found myself a piece of work – my only piece of work for the whole year – during 8 days in December. No doubt you were wondering the origin of my eBay money all this time. My health problems flared up and on Christmas Eve I found myself taken by ambulance to the hospital. About this incident I will say that I know beyond any doubt what real pain is now.

After Christmas and during the holiday, I asked the individuals of the Steering Committee for their help. We needed a venue and catering for the dinner. The speaker and presentation were a lock with that groundwork having been done in November. The Steering Committee would do nothing except tell me the dinner should be postponed indefinitely. So I went ahead and spent more of my eBay money at a member’s restaurant to buy the venue and catering. This means I put together the whole deal in a very short time and not in the best of health. As I was so busy it slipped my mind to invite the Steering Committee.

The dinner was not a roaring success but it got done. A small group under 10 had dinner together and the presentation was successful. Moreover the group has not missed one dinner since I founded it.

Paper Back

A funny thing about writers of my acquaintance; a character observation based upon nothing more substantiated than my own observation and suppressed experience as a young wannabe auteur. I recognise writers to be affable gadabouts with an eloquent silver slipperiness plied more in the service of avoiding common work than in anything close to articulating the human condition - unless it is their own, of course. The verisimilitude extends to simile: surrendering the bar to an alcoholic to receive an expert opinion of what's on tap comparative to asking the daydreamer to pronounce life's meaning. Even given my experience as a middle-aged adult, I am still confident that in the everyday world an alcoholic would be turned out were he to use such an obvious trope. Yet writers, a group in the main comprised of middling talents like myself, use this trope with great success. This personal observation accounts for both my decision to pursue a career other than writing as a young man and my aversion to stake my financial well being now as a matured man on the notion that the pen is mightier than a general accounting course. Yet here I am publishing my own daydreams on the most irresponsible and pornographic medium ever created, The Internet.

Sloth

Most people would think that I live the life of Reiley were I not so wretched to speak the truth. As far as my immediate situation is concerned, and as far as it has been concerned for the last 9 years, it hasn't meant a toss to my destiny what I do during the day. In fact, working hard when I first arrived in this country landed me in the hospital for infectious diseases for three days, and continuing to work like a slave put me into the direct path of Martha who arrived with food for my empty fridge and money to pay a doctor to visit me for over exhaustion, yet again. It is commonly understood that I would have nothing to do with Martha were it not for the issue of money and a decisive lack of self-sufficiency in my life. I am not ungrateful to Martha but there is only so much gratitude I can display given my situation to meet her expectations. This sucks us into a repetitive and violent vortex where my powerlessness assuages her personal insecurities while breeding contempt for my powerlessness at the same stroke. This goes beyond a case of someone capricious and unable to decide whether the glass is half empty or half full. It travels into dangerous, dark psychological territory. I do not like to play the role of George but I see no other option, as I am no longer my own man. The more I soldier on, the worse things get; sort of a macabre grotesque of a complementary relationship. George challenges Martha with how much of her he can take before he snaps. It is a ghastly co-dependency wherein I have nowhere else to go/run.

I only have this little inviolate space on The Internet. And even this place must compete with Martha’s expansive sphere of insecurity as well as my poor time management. Moreover, I am insouciantly lazy. It would be wholly unfair for someone other than myself who is familiar with me to categorize me as lazy. Yet, that is the definition of my situation now. It was not always the case. The lesson that no matter what I do the treadmill bears me back is a poignant lesson in abject futility. I will not lower myself to compare my situation to Sisyphus for I believe myself neither living in Hades nor meriting the badge of a legendary figure outside of my own mind/travails. I leave such comparisons for Martha to make as she often browbeats the world, me and troubles deaf Heaven with her bootless cries.

The fact that Albee wrote about my situation so well is purely a case of precognitive art imitating life I can assure you. I used to have a difficult time suspending my belief when watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? until I awoke to the reality of myself lying in my bed next to the leading female character. Even my writing this private journal here is a lesson in emotional and intellectual skullduggery, betrayal and guilt. The question is: how do I cope? And the simple answer is: badly.

And the hopelessness that often overwhelms me is the prime lever of Sloth. I try to work my life around these Blog entries as a means of throwing off this cute little demon spawn. It is hard to do when the energy level is below functional normal and the opportunities for detour from the path of industry is so great. Almost anything connected with a normal life can be a trigger. Masturbation is one example.

Nothing is more destructive to my productive day than enjoying a good wank in the morning, and nothing is more compelling to fill the void of an endless day. Masturbation proffers a deceptive promise of fulfillment, which is as bogus as its guarantee of a quick practicality. In actuality, it is the satisfying effect of fulfillment that is premature and the detrimental affect of the practice that is long lasting on me.

The allure of sex, for me, is about primal control. On the one hand, being the male counterpart, I first need to exact more control on my person than my female counterpart exacts on her body otherwise the whole activity prematurely concludes. On the other hand, my partner needs to lose her control and inhibition to me. Masturbation imbalances this equation with only one hand to fulfill the whole action, as I have no counterpart but myself, and it requires my failure on that hand to exert self-control. The bodily process of sexual activity is about this sweaty-sweet struggle that concludes in a mutually satisfying climax in my definition. The fulfilling process of fucking means I master myself and I must also master my partner. To put it euphemistically, my goal is to send my female counterpart into orbit before I blast off. But when this bodily process functions as a standard procedure of mechanical release, it affectively destroys the alluring component of control as it simply empties my vessel. I then become this emptied vessel when I am seduced by my own adult desire, reducing the scope of my manhood to a daily grind of wanking myself to exhaustion accompanied by nothing more authentic than my own hand, my imagination and a choice selection of lesbian pornography.

And once that is done, I have nothing more I want to accomplish than cuddle Narcissus and go to sleep.

Sadly, this is one accomplishment I can achieve everyday in the last 9 years I have lived where I do now. Habits are hard to form in the best of circumstances. It is difficult for me to habitually write everyday, or even be routinely disciplined about other matters, and I always have a variety of excuses from a big black duffle bag of my own conscious and subconscious experience. Masturbation is much easier a habit to form since its reward is at once pleasingly illusionary and essentially need fulfilling at the most base level.

But that little sloth sure fucks up my day. No pun intended.

And Martha…? Well, it seems weird to me that anyone might not understand but a shrill, screaming, childlike and dangerous harpy-shrew is not alluring to me in bed. She is good looking and otherwise that might be alluring on it own – more so than a stack of lesbian pornography. But beauty alone is not adequate to tip the scales of my masculinity when so much else weighs so heavy on emasculating me.

To find the boy to become the man, I look to my writing. Is it a right of passage? Passage to where?

O-Bloody, Ob-La-Da

I awoke about 7am, by the time the sun had already arisen. My Benefactrix, to whom I will henceforth refer as Martha, was just pulling her shimmy over her head in the routine preparation to face the impending workday. This is a weekday ritual that is, for me as a spectator, something akin to watching boys dress in a locker room. Once upon a time, I was a boy in a locker room gearing up to face the competition outside and privy to the systematic pre-game skeining ritual. I vaguely recall now there was a spiritual sacredness to the operation incanting a vibration inside an invisible, infinite stone sanctuary. Thoughts within this sanctuary banished concerns from the outside world with each piece of gear, assembled outer layers to sheath us at the center of a mental onion. The best of us invested ourselves in stoic silence as we donned our armour raiment and looked forward to the events on the field where we would meet and shape our destiny. As a boy, I did this unconsciously. I played the position of centreman in ice hockey and turned over in my mind inventive ways to win the draw, and visualized moments of potential glory. I remember that I was a very good centreman, controlling the puck more times than losing it. I hated losing and took out my frustration abusively on my hockey stick at the end of a poorly played game. I remember being fiercely committed to taking the puck away from my opponent by attacking his initiative. I also recall my concern for personal safety. I was a small build, weighing about 60 pounds (27 Kg) at the time, so I thought of ways to avoid body checks and inflict physical damage on my would be tormentors. Preparing to address the coming challenges through dressing the soul is a symbolic as well as a practical matter to me, and quiet moments I took into my later life as an adult. Mulling over what my day ahead might look like would begin as I openned my eyes in the hot shower and carry though as I garbed myself. Of course, I do not have to do that now as a kept man but I do have my lapses when I fall back into old habits. As I watched Martha dress in her careless manner I could see that 7am was the time the game had ended with a loss for her team in the lockers.

Sometimes I am awake for this part of the ritual and sometimes I am not. Generally the whole practice goes unnoticed by me. I cart myself over to the computer, fire it up, pad to the toilet, and then see Martha off like a faithful pet. I have foregone my morning pattern to shower these days, preferring to dry from the greasiness of night sweats until afternoon or return to bed, sometimes going whole days without either a shower or a shave.

I shave once a week now, on the day I go to Toastmasters. Toastmaster meetings are a recent addition to my life's siesta, and I do expect to be halfway through my first certificate in 3 months - a rapid pace for this region of the world where telephones that are answered after the caller has forgotten the purpose of his call but just before he hangs up are considered speedy.

Blogging The Block

So I have monkeyed around with this site's eye candy compiling the widget things for a total of one whole morning. Hurray for me. The Internet proves once again that it is better than carrying an empty file folder around the office and it is just as meaningful. No wonder it is an army invention.

Alas, I find myself with time remaining in the day and no pressing engagements while Ms. Benefactrix is out making the money. Moreover I have the vitality to write more meaningless, never-to-be-read, purple prose. If I remain true to form, I shall tire shortly if inspiration continues to drive me so harshly. Nothing beats practice like lazy I can attest.

I have been living cloistered in a foreign country serving what amounts to a 10-year sentence sequestered in seclusion with the appearance of freedom. Clearly this was my choice mitigated by experience and opportunity. This won't stop me from railing against my prison but the realisation does suggest some wisdom is waiting for me around the corner. I just hope it is the next corner. Ten years ago is a long time to rehash a diary entry so I will make the conscious effort to live today forward rather than backward. My one regret is that I did not follow the creative writer's path earlier when I had the chance 24 years ago. I cannot be entirely sincere in this rueful reminiscence as a mother cannot completely regret her child. I did follow a different path and that easily suggests it was not all that bad.

Still my time with this backward culture and its people have taught me the power of being an author. Perpetually unemployed, unless it is the spiritually crushing spurts that position me like some exhibit at the English language zoo, I have ample time to romanticize from my chair behind this side of The Internet about being a published author and the economic freedom that would provide for me. In my daydream, I carelessly spend imaginary earnings from Bangor to Bombay and travel without worry as I once did as a child. This, alongside my daily realisation that my apprehension of the English language mechanics remained relegated to the native speaker darkness, is the intellectual legacy of my arrival here at the turn of the century.

Ironically, I have improved my English with the locals while any facility with the locals' language has gone undeveloped. So much for the power of native speakers is my wry observation when, in truth, language comes to me with some difficulty. If it were not the case, I would have become a writer a quarter century ago. Living by my wits, I have honed my perspicacity to sharpen my strengths and avoid falling prey to my weakness. However, this culture does not value my strengths and this leaves me operating in an upside-down world.

I have tried to bring my strengths to bear on my destiny over the last near decade but to no avail. For the last 4 years, Ms. Benefactrix has been my sole economy to pay for food, shelter, and clothing as well as the occasional doctors' fee and cup of coffee. It is not a role I enjoy in this upside-down world I live but it is what it is - and the relationship is eerily akin to Albee's George and Martha, their child being the aborted economy Benefactrix holds over me. Snap go the dragons indeed!



When I was a teenager, I had this fantasy to be married to a woman who would earn the money that would allow me to stay home and write. I was writing at that time. Now I find writing to be a tedious exercise and it is like running: something that takes routine and practice before it can become enjoyable. I do not like running either but that is the comparison I make from what runners have told me. I have resisted running much better than I have resisted writing all these years but fate has now granted me my childhood fantasy it seems; and the only way I can recover my manhood is by finding that boy within me and his capacity to write.


I mean it is not as like I am running to do anything else at this point...

The Author-Da-Fé

What is an author-da-fé?
It is a faith I have in my own inability to continue my procrastination in regards achieving my creative writing goals. I am a heretical author: a writer who has not written anything in a good many years. My God is Paul Varjak. I take some comfort in knowing I am one of a great throng worshiping him in the bars, cafés and bus stops all over the word wherever a pretty girl can be chatted up. This religion is a haven for mediocrity within the arts that is second only to the main branch that serves the many waiters/actors and porn stars. I would say the no talents but that would be imprecise because many of us sadly have the talent but all of us lack the impetus. We are what Casanova would have been were he castrated.

My goal, you may inquisit, is to become a heretic of this faith. Yes, I intend today to actually stop loitering in the room where the women come and go talking of Michelangelo and actually create something. God knows what because Paul Varjak knows not. Perhaps I just wish to create anything; to give but one simple worship to the Tempter as I am led by the spirit onto the heights of penmanship after a very long creative fast.

Or perhaps this will be a short lived burst of pretentious crap? If so, it does not matter. Paul Varjak does not mind. He will welcome me back to the throng in his worship with his affable indifference.

Every charlatan knows that a writer must write. So this blog is to aid me in that - to give me some proof positive. It is not to be a coherent running essay on a topic. It is not to be a novel. In fact, I take a certain perverse delight in designing this blog's appellation so that no one will read it except me. I do have two stories imprisoned in my mind but I have not written a meaningful word about either, as is my habit. Since my habits are hard to break, this is an electronic place for those unmeaningful words to gather in practice waiting for the day when meaningful words take their place on a printed page. I am sure this will be a tedious everyday eventuality.

My current situation mirrors Paul Varjak in the most key way: Mrs. Failenson. In my particular case, my little Benefactrix is a Ms. and lives with me in a contemptuous parasitic love affair that threatens to auto asphyxiate us. Thus, proving once again we can die by it, if not live by love. And if unfit for tomb or hearse our legend be, it will be fit for verse. And if no piece of chronicle we prove, we'll build in sonnets pretty rooms. So much for my education. Well, what's Donne is done.

If this experiment is successful, I will be writing everyday. If I am not writing to become an author on paper then I will be writing electronically here to test the limits of my procrastination. Whereas I will be writing creatively for paper, I will be writing as close to the truth here as possible so that it serves a purpose for me in reading it backwards.

My Benefactrix makes keeping a personal diary anywhere else but on the anonymous Web an impossible achievement. Parasites, regarding their own self interest, do not mean to harm the host but they often do. It is in their nature I suppose.