Lukewarm Turkey and an Ode to the Single-Bed

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

– William Gibson

It’s good that, isn’t it; I love that sentiment. Saw it on a t-shirt the other week and looked it up. Not familiar with William Gibson, but from scanning his wikipedia entry he sounds interesting. I think Rickerby told me about him, back in the day.

Anyway, it was with this thought in mind that I decided to radically cut down on the little white pills proffered by a long line of GPs with an angle on going straight. None of them have ever been able to adequately explain what is ‘wrong’ with me anyway; and, oddly, most seem to lambaste my desire to find a label, calling them ‘unhelpful’.

Well the countless boxes of various SSRIs I’ve naively gobbled my way through over the past four years or so have plenty of labels – and warnings. I just wanted answers; but as Tesla/Bowie said in The Prestige: “Exact science… is not an exact science.” Hey ho.

My decision has nothing to do with my move from Middlesbrough to Edinburgh. I expect there to be plenty of arseholes up here but equally, there will be greater opportunities.

How nice the place you live in never had any bearing on its arsehole quota anyway. Money doesn’t make people kinder, nor does sunshine or a kinder society make people more empathic. I’ll go out on a limb here and say Portsmouth was a shit-hole when I were a lad and so it came as no surprise when drunken townies would try to kill me for having long hair.

Thing is, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, Denmark is the world’s happiest country. A good friend of mine prefers living on its streets rather than returning to the welfare bosom of the UK; but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its fair share of arseholes.

Surprisingly enough I was badly stomped in Aarhus and due to the concussion can’t remember whose fault it was. I would love to know what it was I said to a stranger living in the happiest land in the world that would inspire him to leave a bootprint on my face that took a week to fade and almost crack my skull.

I’m just an arsehole, I guess.

I digress. So I’ve cut down from 150mg to 50mg and haven’t noticed too much of a difference in my brainthing yet, although the main side-effect – the double edged sword of arousal disorder – appears to be abating with quite some ferocity.

Stay with me – I am going somewhere with this.

Last quote: “Heroin had robbed Renton of his sex drive, but now it returned with a vengeance.” From this city’s own Trainspotting. And here I’ve been, waking up of a morning with an engorged bedfellow all throbbing and uncomfortably large.

I guess the drugs are wearing off; not that it’ll matter, as the only action I envision it seeing is the rumbling of the Xbox controller every god damn time some shrieking fucking urchin riddles me with bullets three seconds after I spawn.

Well, I guess I’ve painted quite the image for you now, my apologies; but if you’re still reading I’ll get back to the subject of single beds.

I’m new in town but even so, I didn’t expect to be sleeping in a single bed at my age. During a course of rationalisation and denial I came to the following conclusions as to the benefits of a small bunk; with your permission I will share these now:

1. Half as many sheets to wash.
2. Nurtures intimacy / grumbled embraces with your sleeping partner.
3. Encourages creativity during sexual congress if all participants are to achieve satisfaction.
4. Equality, in that any fluid affected areas must be shared.
5. Violent reprisals for snoring and/or hogging of sheets is easier to blame on sleep myoclonus.
6. If, unlike me, you have the space for a double bed but instead prefer a single and have optimised that free space for Scalextric and Lego, save your breath berating your farting partner for the crime of having a body allergic to the very vices that keep them alive and kick their stinky arse down onto the pointy spaceship and garage.
7. Morning wood becomes everyone’s problem.

That’s all I got.