Valley of the Trolley Dollies

On Sunday, whilst reaching for a tray in the 250 degree oven, wearing only a tight guess jeans short sleeved shirt (the better to display both my rapidly diminishing love handles and slowly increasing triceps - the biceps, by common consent, will require saline implants at this stage) I placed my right arm squarely down on the open and pre-heated door.

Cue a set of burns that would make Simon Weston look like Audrey Hepburn (pardon the burn pun).

This morning, arrive at work. Try to open the six foot tall refrigerator to get a carton of milk. It won’t budge. By a combination of bizarre judgement calls, end up holdoing the wrong point of the monolith as I yank the door open and slash my left wrist open like a disgraced Roman senator. The ancient ones; one suspects a modern disgrace would get a reality show.and a gallery - rather than vein - opening.

Cue blood, fainting, and filling in of the cafe nostras accident book.

So, after 6 months of hard - but, like drug addiction, surprisingly ennervating slog, I am beginning to have a body I like. There’s muscle there. And, thanks to 4 weeks of a virtually alcohol free diet, it’s no longer buried beneath a layer of blubber.

I can feel my own body for the first time in ages - the pleasant ache of day-after muscles, even the whisper of the lining of my trousers over my thighs as I walked to the office today.

And I like what I feel. I like how I look. I look like an almost 40 year old (sub)urban professional who takes care of himself.

Except for the arms, which, with their slashings and burnings and thick dark hair, have quite clearly been transplanted from a manic depressive anorexic self-harming teenage girl. Who still bit her nails from time to time.

Right up til the moment she went WOO on that roller coaster, cue expiration from exsanguination, and me getting my lovely new appendages.

You’ll never be younger than you are right now. Prettier, maybe, but never younger.

Living in the now is important; equally important is making the now as liveable as possible.

Life is prosaic. Dreams are poetic. At the risk of being too ‘lifelike,’ fuck the prose; live the poetry.

‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’ is almost as dumb a concept as ‘From each according to their means, to each according to their needs.’ Human nature. Look it up.

You know Enya, right?

Well, who d’you reckon’d win in a no-holds barred grudge fight between her and Bjork?

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