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I think we all know which is my favourite of my own organs. It is of course my brain. I use it nearly all the time and it helped me pass exams, add up stuff and do my job. It's also where I keep my excellent, charming personality. If I have one complaint it would only be that it is incapable of creating visual images. You can't have everything. Is it any kind of life without your own virtual cinema inside you head? I will leave that one to the philosophers. I'll just say that it must be great to be able to see boobs any time you want.
Yet if I ask my local MP to set up somewhere where we can see boobs (maybe a page on the internet), I am treated like a pervert, rather than someone with a serious disability.
This is just like Scope refusing to give me a disabled parking badge because I've only got one ball.
It seems, that even in these woke times, certain disabilities are seen as less serious than others.
Anyway, as long as my brain continues to work in all other regards than 3D boob cinemas, I am reasonably happy. Losing bits of your genitals is one thing, but I'd rather have an Action Man crotch than have my brain get any more broken.
Having witnessed my grandma slowly forget pretty much everything about herself and everyone else (apart from her dad), I am terrified of the same thing happening to me. She had quite a peaceful journey through dementia and remained reasonably happy, but I can never forget the time
we visited her in her home and accidentally got out on the floor below hers. It looked exactly the same as the one she was on, but as we walked through the corridor to where we thought her room was we could hear wails of despair coming from the bedrooms around us. Like some kind of care home version of the Eloi/Morlocks, they kept the happy clueless old folk on the top floor and the angry, unhappy old folk beneath them. The Morlocks were haunted by their pasts or aware of where they were or just confused and upset. It's the way I felt when I'd wake up at 3am after having whisky. I'd lose myself for a couple of hours and feel adrift and bereft and like this horrible state was reality and everything else I experienced was a dream or a facade. I wondered if I was actually in an old folk's home, having lost my grasp on reality and living in a half-remembered past.
So if you were wondering why I stopped drinking...
It still happens very occasionally to a much lesser extent if I eat late or have had spicy food. The stomach has more control over our psyche than we like to admit. In the battle of my organs, the stomach has often proven dominant. The brain might like to think it's in charge, but it's so easily overridden by the organs of our midriff. You know what I am talking about.
My brain always regains authority after I've eaten a family pack of chocolate buttons or orgasmed (or orgasmed whilst eating chocolate buttons), filling me with shame and regret in the hope that I won't act so badly again (though I think the brain must like acting that way a bit, because its chastisement seems to have no effect and the whole cycle continues). It's a complicated arrangement.
What I am trying to say, though I seem to have got distracted, is that retaining control of my brain is the most important thing to me. I am very fearful of losing mental acuity, though I recognise that it's inevitable and is already happening. My memory and instant recall used to be extremely proficient, but I increasingly find myself forgetting names or facts or massive chunks of my post-kids life (or is it my post-owning a smart phone life?). It means I can watch TV shows and films a second time and have pretty much no idea what's going to happen, but that seems a small consolation.
It's obviously not too much of a concern when you find yourself having gone upstairs, but forgotten why you're up there or other such senior moments (I was having these in my twenties for sure). Sometimes though something slips away from you that feels a little more inexplicable.
This morning playing tennis, admittedly still quite tired and not fully woken up, I won a point and declared the score to be love-fifteen and moved across the court. My tennis partner looked confused. I told him I won the point - it had been a mildly unusual point as there had been a let and then a double fault, so I thought he'd not understood. But it wasn't that. I had in fact won the game with that point. In that moment I had totally forgotten the rest of that game of at least five points, even though I was winning. Even now I'd been reminded I couldn't really remember anything about them. I accepted he was right and I'd probably just lost focus for a little while, but it still haunted me a little bit. How could I have wiped all that from my mind. And now I'd been reminded, why was I still unable to remember the points?
It's probably nothing. And I suppose the fact that I remember this incident is a good sign.
I'd ask you to look out for signs of dementia in my blog, but it will be tricky to spot something that looks weird and nonsensical and tangential when that's basically the whole style of this dribbling tap of repetitive, never-ending solipsism.
It's a coincidence that it's gone out on Halloween, but Saltwash is a very creepy read.
Buy it here.
