I have ground to a halt again again today. My mood is sort of neutral. I have been hit with an attack of the beige’s or the off white’s or magnolias. At Stone towers a quiet day with useful musical things done mostly but with no great urgency occurring. Nothing much to report.
The washing machine heating element and controller circuit need fixing as suspected so it wont get fixed for a day or two or three. The parts on order from tomorrow but I suspect it wont be fixed until the end of the week.

Here is my most recent song.

A few things are getting under my skin today a bit as the day has progressed. Just life generally a little bit to be honest, not one thing but many small things. I need a Guru, a Yogi, a Sage, a wise man or women to make it make sense…

Facebook asked what is on my mind? You really don’t want to know would be my honest answer right now. A lot of irritating things are going wrong at present and its all getting a bit hard work to deal with the latest thing being the washing machine packing up.

On a another tack entirely I note a huge increase in Ai generated music now on one of the streaming platforms I use to distribute my own works. I listened to a kind of pleasant Latin flavoured pop/easy listening song and it turned out that the guy was singing on the track but the rest was Ai. It sounded quite good but it just makes me think what’s the point anymore in one sense.

Everything just seems F****d now.

The worlds gone a bit weird. Trump siding with Putin and also trying to start another war in the middle east by the look of it. All of it seems like some form of collective insanity really from here.

Yes it really did. And it stopped raining too. I am still tired though.

Its weird to be honest. I have sort of zoned out the last few days after my anxiety thing on Wednesday night. I feel sort odd mentally. It was a bit cathartic as it brought into focus that I have mentally been pushing myself a bit too hard. Basically doing lots of doing is good on one level for mental health but not when it becomes a source of anxiety of its own.

last night I did work on some music and my sister Beverley rang in the middle of it. Rather than say I was busy I talked to with her for an hour then went back to what I was doing. It may well have worked better in musical terms for taking a break before carrying on. I have a frantic drive to finish things and sometimes perhaps it is detrimental to the finished product.

I think it may stem from things like having my art portfolio destroyed at school just before the exam so maybe subconsciously I am trying to “do it before they can stop me”? Today I went back to a song I have already released and did a remastered version. I have tended not to revisit things. There is a certain psychological thing making me go at everything like a bull in a China shop maybe?

I got some very nice feedback on an old song recently from a Facebook buddy so I listened to it again and decided it was actually a fairly decent piece of work and better than I remembered and that is always encouraging and up lifting. I am not sure how to rebalance my life but I do need to a bit as I live a lot in my head at times and for me perhaps now a trifle too much introspection is not a good thing and I am thinking slightly morbid thoughts a lot recently.

I have hit a brick wall of sorts now.

Old age fucking or just fucking old age, chance would be a fine thing No ones safe when grandma discos on the rampage… “I’ll fight the army and the navy, just give me my gin” If I knew 40 years ago what I know now, I would have got myself in such a fine mess. Hallelujah. Oh my lord. Everyday I feel like I am turning more and more into cartoon character.

Valentines day has passed and I am recording stuff. its slowly coming together Ok. My energy is kind of elbow low though. That’s not helping. Tea break maybe? Other distractions may also be available.

I felt mildly anxious before I went out to Redbourn Folk last night, but really enjoyed the evening. Came home, then bang out of nowhere. Massive anxiety attack last night. But that’s how it happens as you might well know if you are similarly afflicted. Heart racing for about an hour. I had a great evening out at the folk club, got home then suddenly shaking so much I couldn’t get the key in the door. Full on panic ensued and a pulse of 128. I ended up having to get up out of bed and pace for about 30 minutes to fix it. Horrible but classic anxiety attack. Annoying that even regular exercise cant fix this as its not body its mind. Shaking like car with busted engine mountings. I have not had one like that for many years years.

Sometimes a little make-believe doesn’t hurt

I wrote this blog originally in 2014.

“I was thinking about the fact that having struggled with various mental and behavioural problems related to them for many years, in fact most of my life.
My first visit to an education psychologist was at the age of 8 and then followed several years until I was about 14 when I opted out as I did not seem to be getting anywhere being a professional patient almost by that time. The reason I was sent initially was for a formal assessment as I was doing very badly at school. I had a formal IQ test and I think they were expecting me to be what in those days was referred to as ESN. The test results contradicted this and as I had an of of 136 but I was dyslexic and also was dyscalculic. That’s another story.
From that point I was just tagged as lazy. For a lot of my life I did mentally non-challenging jobs, as I had low self-esteem, no formal education and was also somewhat dyslexic and not too good at maths either. This was compounded by depressive illness which hit at at puberty and has carried on to some extent ever since. In my twenty’s I often had severe anxiety attacks, which caused me to wake up around 03.00 with a rapidly pounding heart and a major sense of dread. Then I would be awake for an hour or so until it all calmed down. Getting up the next morning I would often be quite tired due to broken sleep.
I had a couple of brief Camelot moments when things looked up for a few months and it seemed there might be happy every afters including one job when I was 17 working at Hammersmith Odeon (Now the Apollo, in those days run by Rank Theatres) which had I been able to stay in it would possibly have given me a good career. In those days it was still showing films as well as having live music. They had a grand piano, which was the first time I had ever seen one close up, or attempted to play one. I did see a lot of very good bands then though. Unfortunately due to being bullied by some NF teenagers (who had also gained inspiration and nicked some ideas from the then recently released Clockwork Orange) and getting stalked and attacked on the way home I eventually lost that job. After this incident which involved going to court, my confidence was at an all time low. I don’t think it ever really recovered from that. I also had a particular drug experience which caused a permanent change (I had something put in a drink and ended up being dumped on the doorstep frothing at the mouth). My father seemed to think that I had brought all this on myself. I had too older sisters and he seemed to think that my behaviour did not match up to his standards.
Briefly before my father died at the age of 63 from cancer, we almost resolved our differences, but he was a product of his time or possibly a hangover from an even earlier time in many of his attitudes. More time passed and I joined the Home Office and worked in various parts of the Criminal Justice system, for 13 years during which time I had more depressive illness and two major occurrences. I got more med’s and managed to keep working through it though. I got in to IT by accident and started writing code and developing stuff, and made a very rapid rise from the bottom grade to a middle-manager. This pissed a lot of people off, particularly the graduates and some folks got a bit funny about it. Although I was capable of doing the work, my mental health continued to be an issue, and finally after starting to crack around the edges for the 5 time I resigned. One of the reasons for this was that I knew that I was not going to be able to keep it together much longer and I might well start seriously messing things up. In truth I didn’t think things through and made a very hard landing. I did manage to do some part time IT related work, but at very low rates as I could not concentrate on complex stuff for too long. At the same time I was getting paid work as a musician, though this was very small amount compared to what I had previously earned. I these days I don’t pursue IT jobs as I can’t spend that long writing code and most jobs require hours of work*, and my concentration span can only deal with short compressed bursts of concentration. *Ironically now with Ai I would hardly ever need to write code just do a few edits and past stuff together So I am stuck really, I can just about get by from month to month but at 57 with on-going mental problems its not that easy. Recently having felt so low, I thought I would go back to the Dr’s but on reflection its always just med’s or CBT. Well CBT works to an extent, but my mood go’s where it will, so you have good days and bad days. The biggest problem is irritability though, and a certain amount of mild paranoia.”

Not sure much has changed since then really.