Addicted to crap

Despite really appreciating good food and fine dining experiences, despite loving dabbling in the kitchen, despite turning my nose up at people who stuff their shopping trollies with overpriced, crap ready meals, I love crap food.

I have an addiction problem, I think; I easily get hooked on things, be they hobbies (check out how much I blogged when I first started), booze, cigarettes, prescription drugs, people, the internet.  The one that's niggling at me at the moment is crap food.  I love it.

If it's never seen anything green, I'll eat it.  Salty snacks, salty spicy snacks, takeaway food, even Subway sandwiches: I can eat them until they come out of my nose.

I have a constant hankering after burritos.  But in a toss up with hot and sour soup and salt and pepper spare ribs, I'm not sure which I'd choose.  And then there are nachos, with all that lovely salsa and the jalapeños and the cheese and refried beans.  Who wouldn't like that?  An idiot, that's who.

My current agenda for indulgence in crap includes sourcing a hotdog very soon.  A foot long hot dog with onions, mustard and ketchup.  Such a heavenly combination of reclaimed pig and fat and relish, it's never far away from my thoughts.

Since having an excellent burrito in Las Vegas - oh, I'm so cosmopolitan - last time I went - I've been more than once, even more cosmopolitan - I have a yearning for the spicy Mexican snack on at least a weekly basis.  The flavours and textures of beef, beans rice and chilli dance in your mouth while the heat courses through from the first interactions with tastebuds right to the tips of the toes.

Yes, a lovely mixed green salad with avocado, fine olive oil and a dash of lemon juice is divine, the combination of seasonal beef tomatoes with mild salad onions and herbs accompanying grilled sardines can make my heart sing, but it's the crap that really satisfies.

My parents are to blame of course, Mother in particular.  We ate proper meals as we grew up and "crap tea" was so rare that Mum never really got the hang of it.  Despite her being an excellent cook who provided us with delicious meals from around the world, she couldn't do crap tea: her chips were a disaster (fat not hot enough) and her sausages were bland, so when the rare opportunity arose for proper chippy tea, it was such an experience that always left me wanting more.  The cooking fat was at the perfect temperature, the chips heavenly and if curry sauce or gravy was included, it made me the happiest kid alive.

Maybe I'm no different that most people in that I like a treat occasionally.  I rarely act on my desire for pizza, chips, kebabs, hotdogs, burritos, curry, hot and sour soup for fuck's sake, but my mind has been trained to always hanker after these things instead of well, what are their polar opposites:

• Vegetables - boring, just totally boring to the point of them being not food
• Brown rice - Jesus wept, this is a punishment, not a food
• Edamame beans - can't even pronounce the bloody word
• Soya - ick
• Skinless chicken - just what's the point?  Really??

Anyway (:@) I'm supposed to be going for a burrito tomorrow.  I'd love to prepare nachos for tea, but a whole portion is too much even for me.

And that's the thing about being alone, it's difficult to find the motivation to prepare a load of nachos, let alone cook a proper meal.  But I'm getting there, always hopeful of a summer that will put me in the mood for that green salad and those sardines.  In the meantime though, I'll keep on dreaming of, and resisting, the crap - apart from tomorrow of course.

Exercise

I returned to the gym last night.  I'd already decided on a gently reintroduction since my lungs are a bit shit at the moment and all that.  I didn't bank on my session being cut short by an unruly contact lens that left me with the sensation of having a pin stuck in my eyeball.  Is it just me?

It's gettin' better

Being on antidepressants is annoying.  I'm finding it increasingly difficult to mope around the house in silence.  Even when I'm happy, this is one of my favourite activities, but these days, I find myself doing things like watching the TV.  I've even stopped watching Air Crash Investigation because I'm not feeling so morbid, but it's a great programme!  I've been watching drama, getting obsessed with the BBC's  Sherlock and only tutting 5 times during an episode of Casualty instead of every two minutes.

I'm not happy.  I rely on my cynicism and nastiness to get through life and now it's going.  I'm even making plans for this:

Which, up to a couple of weeks ago, looked like this:

There will be flowers and colour.

Of course, my optimism for sunshine is generally cut down to size by living in the rainiest, God awful shithole on the planet, so the chances of being suicidal again by then of August are high.  For now though, I'm looking forward to making plans for my little spot in the sunshine.


Cooking is bad for my naturally calm demeanour
Well, cooking things in my oven is.  It's nice and new and clean and it's barely been used, and cooking in it makes it utterly disgusting and smelly.  There's some belly pork in there at the moment, spitting fat all over the lovely clean interior.  Is the crackling worth it?  You fucking betcha!

It always seems a bit miserable, cooking for yourself.  I'd much rather be doing this to share with somebody special, but my somebody special fucked off with her ex and has consigned herself to a future of Happy Meals instead of proper food.  Their loss, not mine.  Maybe I should see myself as being special and worth it, but it's difficult.

This little diamond of a book has recently come back into my possession after a gap of 20 years.  I'm looking forward to making lots of mess with the recipes it contains.

Lunch with my family
My family met up for a meal yesterday at a pretty nice pub/restaurant. The setting is pleasant and the food is great.  It's the sort of place with open fires and things.  And so the conversation for the two hours was decided: fire.  All fucking afternoon, all they did was go on about the open fucking fire.  It's like they'd never seen flames before.  They all came close to getting stabbed in the head with a fork.

Ug, fire

Pudding

The little dog has it rough in the winter.  His walks are usually restricted to a forty minute pull into the village, with a bit of shouting at shadows the lurk in the darkness.  It's not fun for anybody, but it gives him the chance to have a sniff around, leave a few wee-mails and get as much mud on his paws as possible.

During the summertime and during winter weekends, however, he gets to run off-lead at the local woods. He meets his friends there, sometimes meets the odd weirdo who walks dogless, chases rabbits when he can bothered, rolls in fox poo.  You get to see the same dogs, which is quite nice.  And there's one particular one - a little black one - called "Pudding".  What a great name.  The next dog I have is going to be called sausage.


The butcher of Chesterfield
I used to get my hair cut at a proper salon in Chesterfield.  Sandy, my hairdresser, was lovely, but like most hairdressers, she never listened to a fucking word I said to her about how I wanted my hair to look.

What's wrong with these people?  If I want to look like I did when I was an 18 year old nerdy geek just starting out at university, that is how I want you to cut my fucking hair.  I'm paying you to do as I want, not as you want.  It got to the stage where the best thing about going there was the head massage while the girl was applying the conditioner, the rest of it was just trauma, followed by six week weeks of resentment.

And then there was the bloody conversation that you had to force yourself to endure while she was snipping away at the wrong bits of my thatch.  After attempting to fully engage in conversation for the first year or so, it got to the stage where I just gave up, certain that she must know the answers to her questions before asking them:

"Are you going out tonight?"

"No"

"Oh, I don't think I'm going out tonight, but I'll just stay in and watch Take me out - do you watch that?"

"No"

Anyway, for a number of reasons, I won't be seeing Sandy again.  I'd considered giving "Hair by Thomasina" a go - she's just a few doors down from where I live, but I figured the smells wafting in from the neighbouring chippy might be a little off-putting.  And there's the whole thing of striking up conversations with people who know where you live... which happens to be the house where her daughter used to live before it got repossessed.  The potential resentment from her should she discover this, is just too much of a risk to take; not so much with my hair do, which I'm not particularly precious about, more with having a pair of scissors inserted up my nose.

So, the upshot of this tale is that I let my sister cut my hair last night.  It's actually what I've been wanting for a while, give or take the mullet potential in a few weeks.  Little Con gave me a special sticker for being brave while she snipped away at me.  My sister had cut Con's fringe that night and so the little girl knew the fear I was experiencing first hand.


Back in the kitchen
After not eating for a few weeks, and certainly not cooking anything, I've started to venture back in there. It's not a huge amount of fun when you've nobody to share it with, even vicariously, but it's one step towards getting better.  Unless I don't cook chicken for long enough in which case I'll spend a few days doubled up in agony, but c'est la vie!

Landslide

Things are bad again, and they'll probably be bad for some time.  Life will go on, the sun will shine again - not where I live because it's a rainy shithole - but it will shine and I'll feel its warmth... for maybe an hour or so.  And then I'll curse the dodgy air conditioning system in my car instead of cursing my miserable life.  Once I can start cursing dodgy air conditioning systems, however, I'll know that I'm OK again.

When things go against you, it's difficult not to blame yourself, to see yourself as worthless, one who others think it's OK to cast off and throw away.  Invariably though, it's them.  I just need to avoid people who turn out to be "them" and find those who are decent and honest and faithful I guess.


Medication's what you need
I'm currently on the same combination of drugs that Kerry Katona had after her split with Brian McFadden.   I'm not sure that's true, but antidepressants and sleeping tablets have had the strangest effects on me.  Mercifully, one of them was suppressing my appetite, which can never be a bad thing with a greedy guzzler.  The vivid dreams and restless nights are back though, and I find myself waking up exhausted with an aching jaw and temples from grinding my teeth while I do sleep.

I was prescribed some amazing sleeping tablets by my GP - Zopiclone/Zimovane, or whatever.  Being a geeky nerd, and not being provided with the pills without an information leaflet, I wikid them.  "Can cause sleep walking, sleep eating and sleep driving" and no end of paranoia to boot.  I have to hide my car keys when I think I might take one, but pyjamas aside, I doubt anybody would notice any difference in my driving skills anyway.

They're great though: hide car keys, lock door, do your bathroom stuff, get comfortable in bed, take tablet, wait.  And you wait a few minutes, wait for the drowsiness, but nothing, then beautiful blackness and you're gone.  You wake up feeling like shit and you can't stand up, but you do sleep with them.

Apart from making me feel like I was being hunted by a pack of wolves for the first few days, the antidepressants are OK.  They might be working, who knows?  I feel like shit for so many reasons that any person who doesn't suffer from depression would really struggle with, but they can't be doing any harm... sleepless nights and jaw ache aside.


Rocky and the phantom blackbirds
The little dog has issues with so many things, his latest being blackbirds in the ivy that covers the fence between mine and the neighbours' house.  He's taken to launching himself at the fence and fighting with the ivy because he thinks it's all part of a wider blackbird conspiracy.  I tried to reassure him that it was just leaves by picking him up and showing him.   At that very moment, an amorous couple of the tweeters, decided to descend onto the fence and their tussle made them fall into the yard in front of us.

My dog is very strong.

But he can't fly.

The blackbirds survived again.  As they will forever.


Air crash investigation
What a wonderful TV programme.  It makes me want to work for the NTSB.  But, also being an avid fan of Nothing to Declare,  I want to work for Australian Customs and Immigration.

Maybe I could job share: one day fining people for daring to bring a banana into Australia; the next day piecing together evidence from air disasters, using dry wipe markers and white boards.  I'd be awesome.


Kelly Clarkson
I think I quite like her stuff.  It's probably something to do with being bitter and queer.