The last weeks’ chaos has abated a little or at least hasn’t got worse. They got our names spelled wrongly on the council tax bill but that’s the worst of it. Broadband looks set to be installed on Wednesday after two failed attempts. And Dawn is digging up the garden with a mini-digger, preparing the base for a new studio. There are 4 big bags of subbase and sand in the back. Loads need to be done to the house and Dawn wants to do it all at once but I’ve talked her back from that. There’s only so much you can do at once.
Perhaps you have this problem, dealing with someone who has ambitions that are impossible to live up to, which in turn leads to a lot of stress. Dawn takes on too much, especially since I had the stroke. I’ve told her to take things easy but she doesn’t listen and typically is doing three things at once, while worrying about a fourth, fifth and sixth.
The consequence of all this is the business has taken a bit of a back seat. We intend to do something about this soon but life has really got in the way in the last weeks. I can hardly believe on Friday we’ll have been here a month already. Life goes so fast now, remember when a month lasted forever?
Here’s the funny thing though, I haven’t missed the records at all. Not even my Ten Years After records. In fact in every way except literally, they’re still with me. All my lists and databases still exist and I could easily have them up in the attic. Perhaps it’s a lesson that the important thing is the metaphysical not the material. I’m just as interested as I ever was and don’t really think the records are in Andy’s shop and dozens have already sold. It is odd as they meant so much to me for so long…or I thought they did anyway, maybe I was fooling myself.
Or maybe, following the stroke, it's given me a different take on life. The important stuff doesn’t seem to be possessions. When you’ve faced your own mortality, ‘things’ seem less important. Incidentally, it has also convinced me that death is just ‘lights out’ not going towards the light or anything more holy. I gave up my consciousness in a heartbeat and had no choice to even decide to. One minute they’d strapped me to a chair and took me to the ambulance, the next I briefly came to in a hospital lift on a gurney and I thought I’d been abducted by aliens as they fitted a catheter to drain me of my seed. You're welcome, I can spare it. Then I was out again for hours before I resurfaced in the ICU. Where my consciousness was, I have no idea. So I’m sure when you go, you just fade to black. I’d like to think otherwise but the ease with which I separated from everyday life leads me to think otherwise. The great mystery is no mystery at all, you just power down and everything that was you just fades away.
Is that a relief or depressing? I’ve long thought life is essentially about living in the moment until it stops. Nothing really matters. We come and we go. Billions of us, all the time, every day.
The lesson here was given to us 50 years ago by rock n roll; Don’t Fear The Reaper
