Warming Up

What have other people who’ve got to 18,888 days done to celebrate? I am worried that people will combine presents with Christmas, which isn’t really fair.

I felt a bit better today - or leastways managed to work on and off until about 4.30pm before mental exhaustion took over and then I was screwed. But thanks to this bizarre writing system of preparing in advance and working out what will happen in each scene, I was still about a third of the way through by then. It seemed possible I might get it done in the two working days I have before Christmas, but my producer (possibly having just ben visited by three ghosts overnight) told me not to kill myself and rush it and I think I might have until the early part of next year to get this done. 

So I am going to try and do as much as I can by the original deadline, but yeah, fuck it, break out the booze and Quality Street. With a bit of luck Christmas will kill me and I will have received half the fee for something I never completed. 

But if I survive I am going on a proper health kick for 2019. I am finding it very hard to accept that I am 51 and also that I am not immortal. As much as I talk about death and am afraid of it, I don’t actually believe it’s going to happen to me. Even losing some contemporary friends and having others having to fight properly scary illnesses the penny isn’t dropping. Not properly. 

Because I am the star of this film and so a) can’t die before the end and b) need to triumph in my life first. And I don’t think winning House of Games was what my life was leading to.

For the rest of you I know that life is random and that you might well pop off having achieved nothing or in the middle of some adventure. But I am me and thus special and I have to at least life the last stone on to my six foot high wall before dying at the age of 147. That’s just logic.

But my body keeps trying to remind me that in spite of it holding up pretty well against the diet of sugar and booze that I feed it, it is getting too knackered to cope. I have pulled a muscle or trapped a nerve or something in my shoulder and it hurts every time I reach for something. It happened around the time I started stone-clearing but I don’t think it’s actually anything to do with that. In fact I think it’s happened because I tend to sleep on that arm. But the joke’s on my body as I am just sleeping on the other arm instead now. In the past I’ve just waited for my body to heal itself when stuff like this happens, even when I really badly twisted my ankle in my early 20s and it swelled up and I couldn’t walk. I just waited til I could walk (it was a mistake - it still hurts every now and again 30 years later). 

So after three months of this (and it’s weird cos I can do loads of things without it hurting at all, but then something quite innocuous is agony) I reckon I am going to have to go to a doctor or sports therapist of some kind. Because my body can’t be arsed to fix itself any more. And I can’t blame it. If I don’t respect it, why should it respect ourselves.

Even though this is the only ship that I have the option of traveling in, at least until they can transfer my consciousness into a young robot version of myself (actually make it me at about 38 - I was a mess when I was young too), I don’t seem keen to take care of it. And all that has to change. Once I’ve had a Christmas fortnight of abusing it even more badly. If I was my body I’d pack up now just to show me. But my body, sadly for it, is saddled to me and that can only achieve a Pyrrhic victory.

I’m on a waterslide to the grave, but I want to do the last bit whilst still conscious and not miss out on the remaining tiny bit of fun that is due to me, because I am just a cadaver floating on a tide of its own excrement and then ending up in a excrement filled grave. I want to be alive to experience that.

We’ve been here before a few times right.

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