unrelated: the knot in my chest will spring from my mouth and rip out my guts

i have alexithymia. basically i spent most of my early life feeling desperately anxious without really knowing it. just learned to ignore the signals my body sends. i often don’t eat until late in the day. i would probably die of thirst if it wasn’t for the fact i need caffeine to motivate me to do anything in the morning. but eventually the stress breaks through in a way even i notice and i enter burn out. i was getting close to that point when i wrote this line.

have you ever suffered from burn out? are you burned out right now?

I wonder if being kidnapped by my mum‘s best friend as a child had a lasting effect?

this did happen but it wasn’t actually traumatic. i’m not entirely sure if F was really mum’s BEST friend. but a friend of long standing anyway. anyway, F just collected me from primary school and took me swimming. i think i had fun. but it did spell the end of that friendship for my mum. and was probably a symptom in the unwinding of F’s marriage.

i’m not good at swimming. i don’t think i could have swam without arm bands when this happened. i’m still crap at swimming. i hate cold water.

can you convince me to join the cult of ice cold water?

ebitdata scientists don’t budget for trauma: / cutting teeth. immersed in the pain pearlescent

i consider myself to be good with numbers and knowledgeable about business type stuff. i know about politics, law, finance, accountancy, tax. and i’ve read quite a lot of self help re self-management. absolutely useless at telling people what to do. panic and nasusea at the idea of writing my own to-do list on a monday and never plan more than like three days ahead. but nonetheless, confident that i understand business generally. and anytime i see ‘ebitda’ i wince. you may as well be telling me turnover. it’s an irrelevant metric. it means ‘earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation’ – but so what? apple computer’s ebitda may be 100 billion dollars. but it can’t achieve that without paying taxes, paying interest on its debt, replacing out of date hardware (depreciation) and developing new intellectual property (amortisation). apple needs to keep incurring all those costs or it will go bust.

do you suffer from executive dysfunction? how do you cope?

our reunion was a salty affair, trolling agents and sellers

my love got back from her sister’s and we ran across town to view flats and eat the best pizza. it was a very salty evening. she ended up buying one of the flats, so it was nice that i was there. i didn’t go to that many of her viewings. one of the estate agents we met mentioned he was training for a half marathon and we casually told him our pbs, which were quite a bit faster than what he was aiming for. hopefully we inspired him to try a bit harder. its not like we are in the olympics or something.

what are you training for this year?

credit for debit, the difference solo temporal / evolve the revolving door, better round than in

it was never part of the plan, but on one of my many diversions around life i happened to learn double entry bookkeeping. it took an afternoon or so with a textbook. i was on holiday, sitting by the pool. credit this, debit that. i remember wondering: if there is a debit for every credit, how does anyone make a profit or a loss? well. i read the textbook. so now i know. and there are lots of ‘timing differences’ in accountancy. i definitely prefer poetry to accountancy, but there is a poetry about numbers too. i quite enjoy bookkeeping once i get going. but the inertia is hard to overcome.

do you find poetry in numbers?

sometimes i feel like i’m not a real person—a lack i’ve sought in others

well this was quite an autistic line. i felt quite a lot of shame about writing it down at the time. and for what it says about the company i keep. but now i know i am neurodivergent i feel a bit safer in saying it. i am trying to learn to live on my own terms. to embrace my inherent weirdness. to understand myself a bit better and to judge myself from a perspective of generosity. and to extend that same courtesy to everyone else.

and in fact, i’m sure a lot of the people i love are neurodivergent too, although not all are or would want to be diagnosied. and do you know i even love some neurotypical people!

what are your atypical traits?

i react first with emotion, the weight takes a while to settle / i’m let down and i let down / there is no reasoning with the passions.

i was going through a process of self-understanding. a bit late, to be honest. i guess i’ve known for a while that it takes me a lot of effort to react well to things. i now know that i’m autistic, and a highly sensitive person. i panic when i’m surprised, i hate criticism, i don’t even like compliments much. a few deep breaths. ok maybe this email is just an invitation to a seminar that i can accept or not and there is no underlying passive aggressive message to be offended by.

we want what we want because we want it. to some extent. not much more advanced than a flower turning towards the sun. but because we have so many complicated ways of expressing our desires, and because it can be quite hard to be sure what our desires are (am i hungry or am i anxious?) we can trick ourselves into believing that the ‘me’ from the internal monologue is running the whole show from a place of reason. when actually its just a chatbot that calms you down or riles you up or whatever.

i guess what i mean is that reason gets us what we want, if we use it well. but passions aren’t rational. hunger and horniness can neither be summoned or subdued with reason alone. (food and sex will do it though)

how do you take criticism?

in the wet, warm drink i sip the spirit water, and ponder

i spend a lot of time in the bath. at least once a week but ideally more. i’m always sort of faffing about, never quite relaxing, reading with the radio on while starting out the windows and rubbing my eyes. so i like a hot wet environment to sort of slow me down every couple of days. immobilised in the bath, i have a tendency to be quite creative. so much of the poem is written in the bath. i wonder how many creative works were conceived of in a hot bath. how many bars of music and novels that only exist due to the miracle of modern plumbing.

where do you find inspiration?

and i listen to cohen again and wonder if i’m obsessive

ah the march 2024 playlist was very solid. xtc, blur, leonard cohen, george harrison, the divine comedy. but the cohen album, songs of love and hate, was giving me a lot of pleasure clearly. and i have often been told i am obsessive but i never see myself this way. there’s always someone else who seems much more obsessed that i am… on the bulletin board/ sub reddit/ newsgroup or whatever other cultish forum i’ve found myself in. although this love epochal project is maybe a new level for me. hope you like it.

are you obsessive? what about, if not everything?

giletdonism – variation on the occasion of a cycling holiday

exhausted by the tyranny of choice, unable to sleep
four alarmed hours, panic, mile-high boredom
bad pizza is still good (pizza)
parched stroll less so
cacti burrito, visage of a village in the mirage,
reinforcements parachuting in
petulant torrents of surf, energía de la patata grande
pumice piss, a curtain of cliffs
scattered sand past the chain-gang (squared)
by fag ash straits of jagged lava, literal poetry in motion
el grifo, aquapark abandonado de los muertos
pizza tres quesos, no blue, snide salad
fall asleep in my clothes fresh from the waffle shop boys
sick in the loo at midnight, gracias, los waffle shop boys

wrap up warm for the gilet years
two big lumps then an evening of beers
it’s like 10 thousand spoons when all you need is bus fare to partick
ah well, i suppose we’ll get there in the end

lizard pulse pathos and egrets on the gravel cut
a ring around the thing regrets declined burrata
fact checked carbon turned up archaeomagnetic dating
prohibito biciclette, celestial waves lapping, rusty mounds
baps boobing a breasty boundary around the emphysema cowboy country
take a magic carpet ride on the greenback camel trail
and bury my radar at wounded knee
boquerone bocadillo on the lounger, agree to be fleeced for a taxi
nintendo cheesecake or deep fried mars bar
waitress genuinely surprised by everything we order
tiramisu, creamy goo,
live laugh love like death from above
trigger habit, sunny meditation
they sent a bus to pick us up! (call back to the pilot episode)
a man pigeon marshalls a hall of endless queues
lost laptop tizzy dash
fined for excess baggage (bang to rights)

hold on tight for the gilet years
keep it strong and stable on two round wheels
unique to the animal kingdom is the migratory mamil
i guess we’ll know when if we get there in the end

n.n. benn, february 2025