Asking The Earth

I'm gonna have to move out soon, as conditions here are getting worse. I currently have 3 leaks, including the boiler which nearly blew up last night as the pressure was too high. The hot water came out so hot that I think I would probably have suffered burns if I put my hand under it. In addition to this, the electrics are still not safe as the landlord didn't bother to call an electrician. It's going from bad to worse, and I now accept that I'll have to be re-housed. Due to my abiding weirdness I wouldn't last 5 minutes on a housing estate, so that isn't really an option. What I'd like to do is borrow enough money to put down a deposit and pay as many weeks rent in advance on a non-benefits place until the benefit money starts coming through (I'd pay the landlord out of my own pocket, and cover my own costs with the benefits). But I can't borrow from the social until September at the earliest, and borrowing from anywhere else would saddle me with debt I couldn't afford.

So it looks as though I'm gonna have to face the only realistic option that I have...to accept that I can't cope on my own, ask for help, and get taken in to residential accommodation for the mentally ill. I would imagine that places are at a premium, so even that wouldn't be straightforward. But the truth is that I can't cope on my own any more. I can't even travel because my head's all over the place, so what chance do I have with moving? And even if I were to find a nice place on my own, why would a landlord take me in if my mental state is all too obvious? At least in a residential place I'd be with "people like me", which is so badly lacking in my life right now. If the only people like me are mentally ill, then perhaps that's who I need to be with. And if the only way I'm going to move is to do it with help, then perhaps that's what I need to do. Because I'm not dying here, that's for sure. My life isn't worth much, but it's worth a damn sight more than my landlord's negligence.

Bizarrely, while all this is going on, I'm going to be writing some erotica for an escort's website. I contacted her with the idea, as I wanted to do something a little bit different to conventional adult blogging, and she seemed enthusiastic enough. So then I sent her a sample of my prose based on a couple of images she sent me, and I didn't hear anything back. Now she clearly states on her website that she replies to emails promptly and daily, and so I assumed that the lack of a prompt reply meant that I wouldn't be getting a reply. I also assumed that this lack of reply was on the grounds of "taste" (ie, she's tasteful and I'm not!), so I sent her a somewhat drunken email defending myself against my own assumptions. (I'll take any opportunity I can get to attack the laws of taste). But as so often is the case, the assumptions were wrong. It wasn't just the assumptions themselves that were wrong, but the urge to make those assumptions was also wrong. When will I learn? Turns out she was just being professional and dealing with me the same way she deals with professionals who contact her on a daily basis. Which comes as something of a relief because I was worried she was comparing me with time-wasters who send her dirty emails. Professionalism isn't a concept I find easy to get my head around, so that's why I make these mistakes sometimes.

I don't know. Erotic writing. Conducting. Mental illness. Homelessness. There's too many strands, aren't there? Too many strands pulling in too many different directions, with too many different states of mind required for each one. It undermines my credibility, and I'm sure you the reader are as aware of this as I the writer am. And of course it undermines my health too. So I've started to meditate, but even that requires another strand and another state of mind, with tenuous links to the others. But I'm getting into nature-based approaches to life, because I figure that if I'm asking the earth then I may as well ask the earth. Seems appropriate, and I'm aware that appropriate is good even though I don't always fully realise it.

Defragmenting The Mind

Had a good walk today, which I'm always pleased about. Struggled a bit at first, but eventually found a nice constant frame of mind that wasn't too stressful and, crucially, found the discipline to stick with it. I'm not getting out much these days because mentally it's so exhausting, so it always feels like a genuine achievement when I come back in one piece. I do wish I didn't have to be "on" all the time, continually checking my state of mind to ensure that I'm not getting distracted. And it's especially hard when I get tense and distressed, because "getting distracted" and thinking from somewhere else is always my automatic response to danger. But fortunately I managed to keep a lid on everything today, so that's always good.

Yesterday I defragmented my hard drive as my computer's running slow. Didn't seem to make much difference though...pages are still loading slowly, and images are an absolute nightmare to load. I suspect that the problem might be the processor, which is a pain in the ass because I can't afford any computer repairs or upgrades til September at the earliest.

Anyway, I'm interested in the process of defragmentation because I'm wondering if it can yield any clues about how to "defragment the mind". It all seems a little complicated, but the jist of it seems to be that the defragmentation process compresses files to clear up free disk space. This is from the Wikipedia entry:

"A defragmentation program must move files around within the free space available to undo fragmentation. This is a memory intensive operation and cannot be performed on a file system with no free space. The reorganization involved in defragmentation does not change logical location of the files (defined as their location within the directory structure)."

Interesting. It seems that the key here is organization. Now I do like to be organized within my daily life, and for the most part I think I am pretty organized. But at the same time the artist and erstwhile class warrior in me has an innate mistrust of those who preach the virtues of organization, as I've always harbored the suspicion that what they're really preaching is little more than middle-class values. Organization is for everyone, but the creed of organization is strictly for the middle classes, as they will always use that creed as a justification to whip the rest of us into line. But as I type this, I am well aware that it might be little more than childish paranoia. And I'm mainly going by how it is here in the UK, where the remnants of the class system are still very much in place. It may be completely different in America and the rest of the world. But if there's one thing that separates the middle and working classes in this country, then I think it's this creed of organization. The working classes are just as capable of organizing themselves in a practical sense. But the middle classes have been better educated in the importance of organization, and consequently they value it more.

Anyway, my inner class warrior's distracting me. So is organization the key to defragmenting the mind? Well I would imagine it has a part to play...out of chaos comes order and all that. But the trouble with too much organization is that it creates too many things to worry about, and too many checklists to tick. One of the biggest problems that I have is that for every strategy, I have an opposite and equal counter-strategy. You know..."if this then do this, if that then do that". I just want to not have to think about this stuff!