Where Did The Old Me Get To?

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT this morning. Matran wasn't hurting Laundretta yesterday btw. I wouldn't have laughed about it if that was so. She is up and about this morning. Quite sober and together: especially for her. He is being very quiet. He's a quiet guy. I woke up not thinking of drugs this morning. I'm pondering over and over more and more what am I going to do with my life these days. As I've stated before, the days are long gone when I ever wake up thinking, "What am I going to do with this day?" What will I put right? Attain? Achieve? Those days, which were a big part of my old life, have well and truly flown the nest. The way grown-up children inevitably do. But I want them back. The grown-up version of Creative me. Creative people by necessity do create. Their actions preceed them. I am not creative. O yes I am potentially so. I have the potential to be an extremely creative guy. But I'm not. I create nothing. I do nothing: except lumber lugubriously from day to dismal day. And I want out of that morass. This isn't even (merely) down to drugs. It's due to laziness and melancholy and the inexorable result of years lived never for tomorrow, always just to solve the problem of today. The drugs problem. The problem of getting enough drugs to fix up not to be sick. That has been my life. My only wonder has been that it has not lead me into far more trouble than it actually did do.

The old me decided to go to Thailand and took up learning not only to speak but to read and write Thai. Long story but I ended up in India: don't ask. Story of my life. The old me saw a job going for a clubbing correspondent in a music magazine. I was clubbing every week at the time and knew the "marketplace". What do I need for noisy nightclubs where a dictaphone will pick up more background noise than speech? I definitely need shorthand. And so I'd learnt the basics in a week and given up smoking at the same time. (I used the shorthand pad to make endless doodles every time my hands wanted to reach for cigrettes.) The twin goal-setting worked really well. Although I never got the job I did stay off cigarettes -- completely -- long enough to go all summer and through New Year's Eve not touching the dreaded tobacco. Now I'm smoking so heavily the inside of my front teeth are black. What my lungs look like I hate to consider. Though I've never been the type to jump up and down proclaiming "what I'm going to do", I did used to seize opportunities, set goals and actually (after a fashion) attain them. I don't set any goals now. I don't think about them. A couple of years into this drug addiction I stopped myself one afternoon realizing: I don't daydream anymore. I used to spend my entire life planning on what to do next. As an addict I knew what to do next. Make money. Spend it on heroin. Take heroin. Make more money. And so on. So simple I never needed to consider anything more than where the money was to be made and who I'd ring once I had it ...

Maybe this is what growing up in Britain does to you, but I remember a few years ago telling a friend that if you wanted to be successful (and why would you want that, he probably asked himself) the key was to set goals. He looked at me wide-eyed and queried: "REALLY?" This was a new concept to him. I couldn't have survived without having set goals day to day. Another thing I learnt was that life is fulfilled day by day by day. Not by lunging into things quickly and getting them over with though of course there's always a time and a place for that approach. But a little of the same thing every day mounts up. Books are written. Languages learned. Money saved. Et cetera.

I want the old me back!!

PS I suppose I have indeed created something lately: I've created this blog.