Category: Personal (Page 1 of 13)

Over the last few weeks I have been spending a lot of time alone – mostly in the mornings. Being the sleepy boy that I am, I have to have my own ways to wake up (I’ve noticed that if I don’t I will simply skip entire mornings). Following a tip from a friend, I’ve found the best way to do so is to talk myself awake.

I’m aware, when I monologue in the mornings, that nobody but God is listening. There’s no response, and no feedback. If I’m talking to an invisible audience, then I fully know that they’re not there, but then I’ve always done that. It’s something I do, and it helps me wake up. So I’m talking to the audience and hoping they are listening. Best I can do, really.

If I’m on my own, I can talk about things I wouldn’t mention in mixed company. For the past few mornings I’ve been talking about how and why I started ILB. Where the name came from, the process I went through to register, what little of a plan I had, what the main inspiration was (Adam Kay, it was you, if you’re reading this!). I talk about the adventures I’ve had (I’m particularly fond of the time I left my house at 4am in order to get to Eroticon 2012 in time for breakfast), and those yet to come.

I’ll talk about soft porn and occasionally sing along to the music in my head. Maybe I’m reviewing something I like or raging about Emmanuelle. Quite often I’m rehearsing an introductory speech to the Erotic Independent Film Club (which doesn’t exist, but it’s nice to think about). In my quieter moments, I make lists of the sex bloggers I know in my head. How many do I know? How many of them are still around? Who are they? Where are they?

How many of them had sex last night?

Is this very silly? Perhaps. I’ve been in a massive creative slump since I came out of hospital. So much as thinking about updating my blog is nothing short of scary; I have neither the will nor the inclination to do any of the other creative project I do in February. The other day I did write one page of the story I’ve been meaning to start, but a little voice in my head serves to consistently remind me that I don’t know where I’m going with it.

So, yes. Maybe it is silly. There isn’t anyone to listen when I tell my stories. The only person who gets to hear them is me.

But it’s very nice to pretend.

Worn down by strangers
All you need’s a friend
You’ve been worn down by strangers
This is not the end
This is the end

This weekend just gone, I spent some time travelling to and from Manchester. The reason I did so is relatively immaterial (although if you follow me on social media you may have seen an explanatory picture), but (rationale behind it notwithstanding) I was in Manchester, at least for a day, bookended by travels.

Maybe it’s kinder to breeze over the main leg of the journey (a train’s a train; neither were as comfortable as other journeys have been, but they would do), but getting through London was much more of an adventure – even though it looked very simple as the crow flies.

I’ve done this before, even when dragging a wheeled suitcase with me (as I was on Friday). Get on the Weaver line, transfer to the Victoria and up the escalator at Euston. It’s simple. It looks simple and it feels simple. Hell, I’ve been to Manchester enough times to know that it is simple. But it quickly became apparent to me that it is, suddenly, no longer simple.

Getting onto the train on the Weaver line required no less than three strangers offering me hands to push/pull me over the gap and onto the train. I was one inch from falling into the gap one is advised to mind on the Victoria line before a kindly stranger offered to take my case for me. No less than three times did I drop said case, once down an entire flight of stairs I was taking due to a broken escalator, and once on an escalator itself. Yet another stranger caught it deftly.

I even managed to injure my leg at one point by walking into something I really should have seen.

I got to Euston by a miracle, feeling a huge and uncomfortable combination of grateful and guilty. For the first time since diagnosis I genuinely felt ashamed of my disability, whether or not it inconvenienced a kindly stranger. Meeting my wife and continuing on our travails was fine, but for the entire time I was abundantly aware that I had been beholden to other citizens of London to have made my journey. They didn’t fail to do so, of course – around ever corner there was somebody ready to hold something, point a way, steady my balance, or offer generic, well-meaning help.

And if they hadn’t, I may well have seriously hurt myself. I certainly felt close to doing so more than a fair few times, and the way back from Manchester was particularly unpleasant, having to do most of this in reverse having picked up cramp and IBS pains along the way.

This is a new and unexpected complication. Up until now I have been rather blasé about having myotonic dystrophy. No longer being able to play a full-size guitar is something I am struggling with coming to terms with, but I can do that. Fine, the lift at work is broken; it’s painful getting up the stairs, but I can do that. Okay, I drop things a lot, including my mobility aid; my body screams in pain when I bend down to retrieve them, but I can do that.

But I am going to have to accept that, strangers or not being present, there are some things I can not do.

And I’m going to think about this.

It is a sad fact that my alarm goes off at half past six in the morning, and even more so that I set three more – six forty-five, seven o’clock and a “you’re late!” sort of mockery at ten past. It’s my reminder to get up, pick up the first clothes that I see, make some sort of assemblage of myself and then go to join the milieu of drudging humanity.

As I was saying to my pretty colleague the other day, that’s the hard part. Once you’ve done that, the rest is easy.

I am, of course, awake well before those alarms go off. I’m not a good sleeper, as we all know, and I wake up with the slightest of disturbances. Sometimes this is for a good reason – midnight sex is always welcome, as is a 4am departure for a cross-country sojourn to Eroticon 2012 – but, sadly, the majority of times it is not. I merely wake up and then find it impossible to go back to sleep.

I’ve also been finding it difficult to be horny for the past few weeks. It’s been happening, of course (this is, after all, me we are talking about), but at the most inopportune of moments – while in the general mess of human society to which I am tethered, for example, or while in conversation with others, or at my table at work attempting to battle off the sleep that evaded me the previous night. It’s much less easy, for example, to suddenly be struck by arousal when sitting in my computer chair in an otherwise-empty flat. In that situation, as one can imagine, the blinds go down while bits of me go up, and there’s a rather efficacious conclusion to events.

But that’s not been happening either.

I’ve been getting horny in the early mornings. If I’m awake at five, or six, I’ll inevitably be doing so with a very noticeable version of morning wood (despite the fact that it is not, yet, the morning). I’m even finding it easier to remember the dreams which are getting me there – not exactly the traditional ‘wet dream’ (although I’ve had one of those in the past year, which only ever happened once in my teenage years), but close enough to. They’re not my usual rambunctious, plot-driven rollicking adventure stories either: just a short vignette with mainly sex.

It’s so unfair.

Do I sound ungrateful? Perhaps. In a way, I should be a little relieved that this happens; it shows that the important bits of me are functional and that I remain the sexual being I worked hard to become. It’s also possible that I shouldn’t be worrying about this in my late thirties and focusing more on such priorities as “getting the fuck back to sleep”.

But in the early mornings, what can I really do? I have excess horn and I can’t really deal with it. I’m not enough of a dick to wake my wife up to show her my penis, nor am I brave enough to venture out of bed (into the cold – and my flat, I’m finding, is very cold), get onto my computer, masturbate to orgasm and then return to my bed for slumber. The logistics of doing all this, alone, would be a knightmare. I’d probably end up halfway through Scandal: Sex@Students.edu when my alarm goes off, and that’s my cue to stop doing everything else and scream.

I have no other choice. I listen to what my body says and jeopardise everything else for a cheap and dirty orgasm (or several), or I wait with my throbbing erection until my alarm shocks me back to reality.

As I scrabble around to make myself presentable, I remind myself of why I’m doing this. My co-workers are waiting for me. My clients rely on me. Even my pretty colleague is probably stocking up on coconut milk so we can make our coffees at the same time in the morning.

Where does my horn go?

I genuinely have no idea. But, by the time I’ve left and vanished into the amorphous mass of British urban throng, it too has gone its way.