"When things are at their darkest, pal, it's a brave man that can kick back and party"
-- Lt Tuck Pendler (Dennis Quaid), "Inner Space"
I know that sounds completely dodgy, but in this case, the party is an obscure, little known reference to the fact that I've been spending more time than usual in my room due to being sick. The party attendees are me & Donnie, who keeps finding new sources of crack underneath my bookshelf and I don't know how he does it. I've been deeply ensconced in massive duvet action on my bed, with an armful of books and crap VHS tapes that I found in the hallway. My house, which in three weeks will soon be knocked down, turn to dust, is a large rambling place with strange collections of hothouse plants from Spain, books, movies, art, musical instruments, furniture, and oh yeah, people.
Everything went wrong Saturday before last; some of you know exactly what I'm talking about. But sometimes, when life shits in your cornflakes, you've just got to embrace it and run as fast as you can, as far as you can, until your lungs ache, the stitch in your side is screaming and then you remember that this is what it feels like to be alive. Really. It's hard to accept that sometimes it's okay for things to be shit.
Losing a phone is great. Instant holiday! I had to email my work that I was sick TWICE (even if I'd had my phone, they wouldn't have been able to understand my squeak of a voice.) Not being able to unlock my bike (keys were stolen) meant I just rode the bus all week. Being sick provides the perfect excuse for feeling sorry for yourself, the perfect structure - you even have a valid reason for making whimpering noises to yourself: you're no longer in existential pain, you're in REAL physical pain.
I'm telling you, this getting sick business is what everyone needs, especially if you're like me and never relax. Someone recently told me that the best approach to life is just to relax in any given situation; if I'm perfectly honest, I thought he was full of shit. He was younger than me and struck up a conversation with me by telling me he was a foot model. And we were sitting on the floor of an art gallery, half waiting for the next act to come on and half being the art, in a way, but not really. We met on the Saturday before last, before all the bad things happened and before, of course, I got sick. Now I see that he was right. I've sort of made it my mission if not to relax, then to at least remember that relaxing is the best approach to everything.
Anyways, I'm totally getting off the point. I was off sick from work for one day one week and then two days the following week. I watched loads of great movies that I saw probably more than a decade ago, and they they weren't as crap as I thought I'd think they were. "Inner Space" for instance. When Dennis Quaid said that line, he summed up exactly how I've been feeling for months - things have felt shit, and I almost wanted to take down the party and put it all back in the box. It takes a brave person to simply carry on and enjoy things and have fun in the face of massive change and uncertainty and to ride it like a fucking urban cowboy.
My friend Stu over at
feelinglistless has this great technique starting each blog entry with a quote, which I totally love, and since this week has been perfect for quote accumulation, the first place I thought to put them was on the blog. How I feel about the quotes is how I used to feel about commercials when I was a kid. I was a complete tv junkie. My parents gave me free reign of a massively large screen tv and VCR. I didn't have any brothers or sisters. At the end of my complete fixation with tv-watching, and I began to grow bored of the tired cheap plotlines of sitcoms and soap operas and family dramas, that was when I fell in love with commercials. I'd spend hours flicking through the channels, just watching the 1 minute gems.
The silver-lining: after all that angst-ridden period of difficulty, I've definitely had a breakthrough in my thoughts about what I want to do over the next 6 months. I've made some decisions. Discussed plans with family and compared strategies. I also found a flat and it's beautiful and I'm just hoping that nothing hiccups. If all goes to plan, I'll be moving on Friday. My friend Col and her fiancee are planning to give me a hand, and a few other friends have also offered possible help.
I'm hopeful.
Labels: house, illness, moving, mundane life, quotes, rest, tv
