What a Load of Rubbish!

To be honest, I'm a bit screwed up at the moment. The confidence has gone, I don't like myself, I'm a nervous wreck and I can't even put the facade in place. All a bit pathetic really. I can't seem to write a blog whilst all this shit is in my head so I guess I need to get a bit out and then I can move on.

I'm getting there , I think. I'm facing things and I'm even allowing myself to accept that I can be less than the perceived standard of perfection to which I feel I must aspire. I'm not sure really why I can't allow myself to be less than perfect? I suppose because I know that I am so far from perfection that it gives me the ideal excuse to punish myself for failing. Why do I need to punish myself? Ah, now there's the €50,829.9 question (dollar conversion rate correct at time of writing).

Some people self-harm but I'm far too much of a coward so I do it mentally. I guess it stems from never being quite good enough in my parent's eyes. The reasons are immaterial but this mental masochism is just sooooo easy. Take tonight for example:

I have several friends on the internet and all seem to have problems of one sort or another, whether it be health, employment, money or supporting Newcastle United . Hopefully, they will all be resolved in time but things seem pretty serious in several cases. Yours truly has (I think) reasonable health, no job worries, no real financial worries but I still moan to them and they offer nothing but care, understanding and support. It's a perfect lose:lose situation for me as not only can I beat myself up for not appreciating what I have but also I can suffer the discomfort of people being nice to me.

Perhaps I need to realise that the people who like me or love me do so for what I am and not what I feel I ought to be? The trouble is; how in God's name do I do that? I know that I won't ever find an answer because, by finding that answer, I'll be unable to feed the problem and I can't imagine being allowed to live a life where my head isn't worrying about 3 million things at any one moment. Still, my friends, thank you sincerely for being my friends.

Moving on, I discovered a great new game the other day.

Every Wednesday, the Council send a nice big yellow bin lorry to take my sacks of rubbish to wherever it goes. I don't have a dustbin as I have no garden so I dutifully place my sacks outside ready for collection (actually, to tell the truth, I wake about 5 am and lay there worrying that I might miss the bin lorry which doesn't actually turn up until 11.30ish). Dimwit, I hear you cry, put it out the night before! Well, actually, I had thought of that but the foxes and seagulls have a competition to see how far they can spread the contents. It can be quite embarrassing seeing my used Tassimo pods scattered across the highway not to mention the catalogues which keep being sent to me. "Wincyette for the Old and Fat" was completely unasked for but it appears regularly through the letterbox. The worst part of having one's rubbish scattered, however, is the fear that there is something there that should have been recycled!

You can almost feel the glares of disapproval as an aluminium ring-pull is spotted among the detritus of Bassett Towers. I shamefacedly shuffle out into the road and pick it up whilst the local drunks seem to get away with lobbing everything from empty Tennants cans to regurgitated McDonalds Winter Specials..........oh, that's not regurgitated? You mean they're meant to look like that? Blimey!


Anyway, as I was saying, I put my sacks out last Wednesday at about 6am (just in case they were a bit early - neurotic? Wassat?). When I peered out at 10, I saw that the seagulls had done their usual trick and a bag had been pecked open although I had inadvertently foiled their little game as I had chucked out some old herbs and spices and they'd had a go at some paprika! Ha, revenge is sweet. The upshot of all this was that after the binmen had gone, I noticed a small plastic bag of stale oregano (which I had also thrown out) left lying on the pavement which I kicked into the gutter as I went out. Later, I found it placed on my step so I once again kicked it into the gutter. After it happened a second time, I suddenly twigged......people were thinking it was a dropped stash! After picking it up and seeing it had a small label annotated 'oregano' in small letters, they had just dropped it again.


I'm afraid I was a bit naughty. I peeled off the label and left the bag prominently in the centre of the pavement when I took my daughter home that evening. Sure enough, 20 minutes later, when I got back, it had gone. Some local lads, wandering homewards after an evening of worship and self-enlightenment at the altar of the great god, Heineken, presumably pounced on it and I had wonderful visions of them desperately trying to get a hit with a Rizla full of stale oregano. Who knows, it might even have worked? Herbie Rides Again (given thyme)?