Saved by my own obsession

I have become a compulsive diarist. I use a local instance of Apache on my laptop and desktop machines to run a couple of Wikis into which I can rattle away each day about what I have done, felt, seen, imagined, dreamt of. I used to scribble into little notebooks before we had easily-available personal computers. The trouble with those is that they're not so easy to search, and, in my case, also not so easy to read. But I have several large chunks of my past now typed up in the wikis, either from transcriptions of notes and cassette recording collected over the years, or from reconstructions where I have sat back and thought hard about certain times in my life which were critical.

I wasn't always like this of course. I mean, it's not as if I was born recording

B-1 Dear diary: I can tell you, I'm pissed off, whatever it is, I'm not happy. It's now four days since she last ate pickled onions. What's the point in getting me interested in something and then forgetting to eat it? And why is she moving around so much? I'm sure it got suddenly light in here, that hasn't happened before.

B 0 Fuck! You Bitch! Fuck! Did I want that? Did I hell! What's all this row about? I can't even think above it. Tell that dipstick woman to stop that silly noise! Who's slapping me? I'm not a carpet. Bloody hell, couldn't you have let me know in advance? Give me peace. Oh, something to suck? Must I? If it'll keep you all happy and stop you making that bloody row, then I suppose I must. Sigh.

B+1 Dear Diary: I am NOT pleased. Not one bit. What's all this shit thing about? I mean, just how humiliated do you want me to be? It stinks! And who designed me so that the only way I can say I've had enough or need to take a breath and pause for thought is to puke all down my front? What shithead dreamt up this for a life?

And so on.

But, probably fortunately, I didn't bother about the diary thing until much later. That's not to say I haven't got memories. I do actually have one distinct memory from my infancy. I was sitting staring out from inside a car up to a railway bridge high above, and a steam engine is crossing slowly over from left to right. It is a dirty grey colour, and the steam bursting up from the chimney fascinates me.I also know, although I can't see it, that I am in my father's arms, not my mother's.

From talking to her, I would have been about thirteen months old at this time, because from when I was born until I was one year old, we lived in the countryside, and then for just a few weeks moved into a flat in Three Bridge, where there were lots of railway lines running high above the streets, and a few weeks later on. we moved back out into the countryside again. And, yes, my father used to have me tucked inside his jacket when he drove the car and my mother was not there, she scolded him about both taking me out without her being there, and about the risk to me behind the steering wheel.

What really fascinates me about that memory is that, for a long time as a child, I had no "inner vision" faculty. I couldn't understand when people talked about picturing something inside their heads, or seeing something in their mind. I dreamt, of course, and I wondered if that was what they were talking about, but I never see things when I was awake. So when I did finally start to see things in my mind's eye, I spent a lot of time fascinated by this new phenomenon. But that was when I was nearly ten. Up till then, I read, avidly, and stored up descriptions of things in my mind as sets of words and phrases, not as images.

There was another strange thing about myself that I puzzled over; I couldn't feel things about myself. Someone, such as a doctor, would ask me "where does it hurt?", and I couldn't tell them. I didn't know where something actually was inside me that was hurting, I only knew that an arm or a stomach hurt, but exactly where, I didn't know. Again, sometime around ten, all that changed; when I fell backwards only a few feet from a tree and broke my arm. Suddenly I knew exactly where it was hurting, I could put my other hand on the very place. From that day on, I not only knew where my own pains lay, but I could also feel someone else's pain if I saw something happen to them.

So, of course, I now value my sight, both external and internal, and any threat to it is almost a threat to my very core, I do not see how I could be if I could not see, do you see? (Si senor, we see). And I also value my feelings, because I can remember what it was to be unable to really feel with any precision.

(Just re-reading that lot before getting to the point, I am struck by the fact that Little Petal might be right when she says that I am Borderline Autistic. I always thought she simply said that because it was a mummy-thing to say, a way of classifying awkward behaviour into some term or label that she could then say "Oh, that's it!" and then feel that she knew how to deal with me. But even if she is, by some strange fluke, right, it's too late to do anything about it now, isn't it?)

So, then, today, after I had worked three very hard long hours in the morning, carrying large lumps of masonry round from one part of the site to another, and then smashing them up with a sledgehammer to make the hardcore over which we were going to pour concrete, I realised I was starving. I could feel exactly where inside of me the pangs originated from. I was too hungry to think of carrying on for another couple of hours to finish everything and then go back to eat, and so I set off to the nearest garage where I thought I might fill up the car with petrol and fill up myself with some bread and cheese. I set off in the car and reached the nearest garage. They had petrol, but they only sold crisps. I set off for the next garage, which I knew had a shop, and got there to find that half of their pumps were closed off, the concrete was being jack-hammered up, and there was a queue of cars waiting to use the two remaining pumps.

So I roared off home, put the kettle on, put some red kidney beans in a saucepan, emptied a can of chopped tomatoes with olives in on top of the beans, dashed a bit of Thai curry spice over it all, and went to sit at the computer to check emails and read a few blogs.

Something was wrong. I didn't notice it while I was reading the BBC news website, because they only have a few words per line and so there is no need to scan from left to right much, but when I went onto a friend's blog and started to read his posts, I found that the words began to squirm and vanish as I tried to read them. I could read the one or two words immediately in front of me, but as I tried to read further along the line, there was a sensation of something quickly flitting between myself and the words. I took off my glasses, cleaned them, and tried again. It was still the same.

I don't read a word at a time, or read out loud inside my head, I scan whole sentences rapidly and the words are just there inside me. I couldn't make it work when I had to physically move my head along to see each word in turn; although I could read each word, they meant nothing to me. I shook my head, and had several more tries, but I had lost the ability to read and make sense of what I was seeing.

I began to panic, wondering if I had, as a result of the hard physical shocks as I swung the sledgehammer to smash up the bricks and concrete, detached a retina. I can only read with my left eye as a result of a fall down the stairs when I was a baby, and so there was nothing to be gained from covering my left eye and trying to read with just my right eye, the letters and words were just squiggles. I sat there, wondering if I should go up to the hospital, when I smelt the sweet tang of tomatoes. My lunch was ready. I decided to eat it anyway, no matter what I was then going to have to do.

While I was eating it, I had a memory of something earlier in my life, not exactly the same, but similar in a way. I had been riding hard in Norway, crossing the high mountains towards the sea, to a place called Alta. I was riding through the night, but because of the midnight sun it was effectively daylight, and I had decided to press on against the wind and not stop until I reached Alta, because of the bleakness of the landscape I was passing through. I reached Alta just before eight in the morning, and as I wandered through the empty streets, I found that my vision had been flickering, as though my eyes were switching off for just a fraction of a second. I remembered that I had stopped at a garage which was open and bought two packets of biscuits, one digestives, the other shortbread, and had wolfed them both down in less than five minutes, and had then gone back to the garage and bought a bottle of lemonade and guzzled that down in almost one go. I had ridden for too long against the wind without stopping for food or water or a breather. I had drained all my internal reserves.

And as I sat there, the food now eaten, the hot blackcurrant now drunk, I found I could see the letters a little more clearly, and I was able to bring up the wikki in which I keep the notes for my journey tale. I had indeed been shaky and flaky at Alta, and my notes said that about ten minutes after wolfing down the biscuits and lemonade, the flickering had stopped.

So then, my past had confirmed that this was probably just a similar case; I had worked too long at too furious a pace, and when I had stopped for food it was already too late. I had burnt up large amounts of glucose, which is apparently the only food that the brain can use (according to the anti-Atkins diet people), and I was also probably dehydrated from sweating copiously, and the eyes are nearly all water, so I had probably also had the fluid in the lenses thicken or increase in salinity. There was no need to go to the hospital, or even to the doctors for a checkup. I wasn't going to be visually-impaired for the rest of my life. I just had to learn how to take slightly better care of myself. Again. My obsession with keeping notes on myself from times gone by had, once again, stopped me from dashing around in a blind panic.

I am glad that I will still be able to look at things, because so much of the life that I love is intensely visual, despite my love of converting it into words that look or sound or feel somehow appropriate. I would hate to have to live with a little voice in my ears constantly trying to describe to me what was happening out there, outside of me, in the great blue. I would miss things like this video clip, (which I found quite accidentally when I went searching YouTube for a Talking Heads song to use in the Oh Brave New Mobile World (2) post. I couldn't find the song I wanted, and instead happened upon the Al Stewart song from The Year of the Cat, which was far more appropriate anyway.)