Day 1,601.

Time, time and time again . . . recurring, until . . . End. Stop!

It feels lately as if I’m constantly drowning in a constant Tsunami of time. A raging Tinnitus of tick, tick, ticking time. A dirty bomb of spinning, jagged physics that never quite goes off.

Weekends flash by. Mondays loom like dark and imposing monoliths, constant reminders that our lives-lived have already been archived into the universal library, awaiting the next entry.

Weeks and months come around so fast. I seem to buy my weekly travel ticket, daily. In the morning I sit on the bus and wonder: how many heartbeats do I have left? How can I put the final one off for a little longer? Now that I’m being good, can I have some fun first? Am I wearing pants? These morbid and strange thoughts are still very new to me. I don’t like it, but I do. But I don’t. But I do.

I don’t like this new way of thinking because there is way too much thinking to think about at any given time to think. New thinking thoughts are hard.

But I do like this new way of thinking because now, I actually do think!

There were thirteen years when rational, cognitive thought processes were as rare as rocking-horse crap. Time stood still. A swirling black hole of constant nothing.

I’ve now created my own personal mind gym inside my head. I’m happy with the décor and the people inside seem nice. I read, I write, I listen to music and I work. I’m falling in love with my old passion, Philosophy.

We all dodge the existential tornadoes, waves, and lightning bolts of life whilst running through the killing fields of time. We exist because time exists. Time has, and always will be. It happens with or without us, whether we breathe or eventually become plant food.

I had a sure-fire, failsafe way of slowing down time to a crawl. If you ever follow these posts, you will know it’s not recommended. My key to bending the universal laws of physics that all light and life depend? Alcohol.

Back in the day, time simply idled around, sloshing here and there in no particular direction. It oozed over me like boiling tar, as feathers fell like rain. Nothing much mattered. The higher the alcohol content of my blood, the more time hung like the peeling 1970’s wallpaper of a grotty hotel that nobody can be bothered to cover up or take down. Way too much effort.

The internet, phones, computers, in fact technology in general, are not the alcoholic’s friend.

A couple of lines of a Facebook post would take me most of the day to write. The work of staggering genius that I’d drunkenly composed (and post) would turn out to be the most meaningless, shambles. What I thought was taking me minutes to write was actually wasting most of my day. Hours of squinting at the screen through alcohol-fogged eyes, only to produce a few meagre and embarrassing sentences. All would eventually have to be deleted.

Time was my silent drinking partner. I was barely aware of it. I could watch the same music video on YouTube all night, because by the end of it I would have nodded off. I rapidly developed Goldfish brain. I was Dory from Finding Nemo: just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming. The swimming turned into drowning.

Online, I was pathetic and worryiong, bizarre and self-pitying. I was always the last person to know. I would be pulled aside and ‘informed’ by others the next day. It was never good news. Alcohol anaesthetises your morals, for a while. Thankfully I was never nasty or aggressive. I existed in a tear-soaked, foggy world of pain and shame. Nothing mattered. I didn’t care.

That was my life in that time.

But now things matter and I very much care.

I literally care – it’s my job. I get paid for the privilege. I now care for adults with learning disabilities. Before that, I cared for people like myself, addicts at every stage of their recovery.

It took a lot of clean blood, mind-work, perseverance, friendship and help to get to the stage where I could even begin to care about myself, let alone others.

I now care about writing, art, literature, and music. I care about family and loyal friends. I care about the state of the country and the world. Although I dislike the monarchy, I even cared about the death of our Queen. I care about poverty, abuse, and discrimination.

Now I care, and it all matters!

But now that I’m finally here, there never seems like enough time. It’s racing, roaring and flying by. The blurring isn’t caused by alcohol but the speed of life. My life, your life, everybody’s life. Life’s life.

My son is now almost twenty-years old. How the hell did that happen? We are 250 miles apart but we still connect. I’m still here and he’s still there. It could have been so much different. He now has the best version of me that he’s ever had. My son was the only exception to the I don’t care – nothing matters of my addicted days. With him, I always cared, I still do care, and I always will care – heart-burstingly so.

The only thing that will stop that?

When time stops. When the heartbeats stop. When the blood in the veins dry up. When all thoughts finally stop. When (my) time stops. Maybe not even then. Love is full of surprises.

What do I know anyway? I’m only a pinprick in the vast and endless darkness of the universe.

As the author (not the comedian) says in his novel, Cloud Atlas: ‘My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?’

Time to go. Until next time . . . recurring, until . . . End.

Stop!

Take care, everyone xx