Everything sucks. Again.

Today, I did the hardest thing in the world. I cut the strongest connection I have ever forged with another human being aside from my parents.

And now it has got really messy.

Life is so continuously wretched.

Dear February 2010, please be the start of better times. Can't face much more of this.

One small aside, I am a tiny weeny bit encouraged to find a photo of me I actually like for once. Full respect to Angrycanine Lovestick. Taken at January's Sega Vs Nintendo Judder.

People are... SUCH a mystery...

I am on the cusp of falling really low again.

I am so, SO exhausted. Work => sleep => worry about money => feel lonely => crack a dumb joke to hide it all => rinse => repeat. As a work flow, it's becoming really tiring.

I enjoy the trappings of modern life. Music, film, internet, gadgets. Yes, I want an iPad. I've wanted a new laptop for a while but hate my work desktop so much I will never buy another PC if I can help it. The limited word processing on the iPad will do me perfectly until I'm home and can write properly. It fits the bill of what I want, and will cost me about half the price of a Mac laptop. Swish.

But do I REALLY need it? Not really. It's just another thing to keep me working, scrabbling for money and never wondering what really matters. How can any of us ever truly finish putting ourselves together - let alone reassembling ourselves after a trauma - when modern society is designed to keep us fighting just to survive.

It feels really hippy dippy to say it but this morning I awoke and wanted something new. I want a tiny little cottage somewhere that is mine and mine alone. Hell, give me some land and sometime and I'll have a damn good go at building one myself. I LOVED building the shop interior and many of those skills can be scaled UP.

Take me off the national grid. I'll use dynamo powered small appliances, solar power - steam power if I have to. Give me space to grow my own crops, raise my own animals, keep my own pets. Give me a computer for entertainment and I'll concede to pay some corporate ass for a phone line. After that, be gone.

I want to opt out of this rat-race. It's the clarion call of the Sixties and Seventies counter-culture movement in my head.

If I have to live alone, I want to be truly alone. I want to make a fort in the woods and live or die at my behest, not the shrill ding of the almighty dollar and it's muted, brain-dead sterling cousin.

Then if anyone wants to be my friend - and not just feed off me and lie to me and make demands of me and resent me when I make demands of them, taking my love without giving back and hate me when I can't be that person any more - then they can come to me. They can walk up the path and stay for a while. For a short while or a long while.*

Human social interaction is addictive. I like it. I have an addictive personality. And to cure yourself of an addiction sometimes you have to go completely cold turkey.

* = yes this sounds a little resentful and mental, hence why I have fudged the punctuation. Because - fuck it - pain isn't organised and carefully worded. Except when you are writing a pretentious and self indulgent blog entry.

All this has happened before and all this will happen again...

Finally getting chance to blog about this. Here's a piece of entertainment news that caught my eye over Christmas:

Michael McIntyre Breaks Peter Kay DVD Record

Michael McIntyre's DVD - 'Michael McIntyre Hello Wembley!' has broken the Peter Kay record for the fastest selling UK stand-up DVD of all time by reaching 1,091,000 sales surpassing Peter's record of 1,080,000 copies for his 2003 release of 'Peter Kay Live At The Bolton Albert Halls'. Already holding the number 1 spot in the total DVD chart across all genres, 'Michael McIntyre Hello Wembley!' is set to become the UK's number 1 DVD on Christmas Day.

This is pretty amazing isn't it? Love him or hate him, McIntyre has pretty much become the definition of overnight success.

Back in 2007, I remember showing friends and Swin City customers some of his stuff, notably from the Royal Variety Performance. Virtually none of the people I showed had heard of him before, but everyone like his stuff.

Wind on to present day and McIntyre is now tipped to take over from Jonathon Ross on the Friday Night With... show. His DVDs are massive sellers and his arena tours are sell outs.

Why has McIntyre become such a hit? It took many of his great comedian peers years to achieve such success. Evans. Izzard. Bailey. Noble. All took a lot longer to get to sell out arena tours. Does McIntyre have some Faustian pact raising his profile?

Hardly. The truth is much simpler.

In the time between me showing people his stuff on YouTube in 2007 and receiving a copy of his best selling new DVD for Christmas 2009, the world's economy has jumped in the toilet.

Life is harder, and people are struggling. People need entertainment. In the Great Depression of the 1920s, vaudeville entertainment was big business. It was an era dubbed the 'Roaring Twenties'. No one had any money, things were grim. So people needed to laugh and enjoy themselves more than ever. All this has happened before and all this will happen again.

I suspect the rise of McIntyre can be attributed to the same. I could wax lyric about his broad demographic appeal, but I won't bother. It's obvious to anyone with half a brain. McIntyre even plays up to this in his act with jokes referencing the way his face looks a little Chinese and that he comes across as being slightly camp.

It's been a hard few years. But it is always darkest before the dawn.

Only a few years ago, McIntyre was broke. Debt collectors were coming round. The ever reliable Wikipedia (!) tells me that he recently cancelled a gig in November 2009 with only half an hour's notice because he found out it was a corporate event for a room full of debt collectors.

The man has some principals. Wonderful!

And skipping IS magnificent.

Wondering about the colour status thing on Facebook?

Here's the transcript of a wonderful internet altercation I had yesterday. I present it here without editorial at this time other than to say I lost all four grandparents to cancer effectively, so let's assume my card is marked.

Cancer is no laughing matter, but being English I cope with many things using humour. Often inappropriate humour.

However I will mention that another friend suggested we use the Bristol Stool Scale and simply post status saying "Ben is a 4", etc. By the end of the day yesterday 4 or 5 male friends were joining in.

Right here we go, the names have been edited to protect the innocent.

Adie Knits-A-Lot
What's with all these colour status'? Colour me confused!
Yesterday at 14:31

Matt Evil (no relation)
It's a secret girl thing where they're disclosing their bra colours for breast cancer awareness or something.
Yesterday at 14:32

Adie Knits-A-Lot
Why do you know secret girl things b4 I do?
Yesterday at 14:37

Benneth
Yeah, nothing raises awareness like alienating a whole gender. "Shhh, don't tell the boys. Tee hee." Grow up, it's fucking schoolyard.
I'm all for raising breast cancer awareness and all cancer awareness. But the 'secret girl thing' aspect of this is juvenile.
Boys, to raise awareness of prostate cancer lets secretly tell each other the consistency of our morning bowel movements...
Yesterday at 14:39

Matt Evil (no relation)
I used a combination of my eyes and the colours that girls were posting to establish a visible correlation and extended it from there.
Yesterday at 14:45

Adie Knits-A-Lot
Ah, I finally got my message from "the girls" explaining what's going on!
Yesterday at 20:34

Shrill Hairdo Bond
Ben, I do feel you totally went over the line with that comment. This MIGHT have something to do with breast cancer awareness, I don't know, but this was all done in fun. If anyone is being juvenile it's you. It seems you have gotten all bent out of shape because you were not invited to join. If you would like to be invited then let me send you an ... See Moreemail. Cussing at us and trying to put us down for having fun and maybe bring awareness to someone about their body was inappropriate and made me embarrassed for you.
Yesterday at 21:19

Benneth
Erm, because it was secret, how the hell would I have known who to email in the first place?
Get your head out of you rear. I have raised money and awareness by supporting several friends who have done the Moonwalk.
Frankly anything that is designed to confuse others is elitist and immature.
Yesterday at 21:36

Shrill Hairdo Bond
"Erm", you obviously didnt read my comment very well. I said I would send YOU an invite since you got so bent out of shape for not being involved.....sometimes you just cant fix stupid.
Yesterday at 21:48

Benneth
Melody, we have never met. But feel free to make a sweeping judgement. I should know better than to rise to abuse on the internet. People say things they would never say in real life. My original comments were aimed at no specific person, merely the superiority concept involved in excluding men. Farewell and good night. I'm still a 4 by the way...
Yesterday at 21:56

Catching up

Long time, no blog.

Christmas time at retail is always manic, so that kept me busy. Plus it was the first Christmas without Mum, so it was pretty hard.

Dad and I did quite well. I made the roast dinner Christmas Day which kept me busy and Dad travelled down to Cheltenham.

The picture shows Dad, amazed at the size of his roast dinner. I went all out. I had a lot of help in the preceding months prepping for that with practise Sunday roast dinners. Many thanks to Lex for all her invaluable help.

It was nice to get away from the old family home, which was even more empty over Christmas. We headed back in the late afternoon so as not to leave Khan (my 17 year old cat who still lives at my parents' house) on his own and watch Doctor Who.

Mini review of The End Of Time. The writing was shambolic and messy. Tennant, Cribbins, Dalton and Simm all excelled at wringing great performances out of the bad script. RTD showed moments of his old flair, I loved the cafe scene in part one and the goodbyes to the companions in part two was lovely. In fact, everything from the point where the Time Lords had vanished and Wilf knocks on the glass was pretty damn good.

I have no faults with the regeneration. The Tenth Doctor gave his life to save one wonderful man. And radiation poisoning takes time to kill. He would have had time to visit those old friends before the end if you ask me. The extra energy released that destroyed the console room could be explained as The Doctor's body expelling that radiation to enable him to regenerate.

And Matt Smith? I take back any criticism. Though I suspect Geronimo may grate as a catchphrase for me. The trailer for the new season looks awesome, particularly the lighting - very film like.

Right, what else? Oh, snowmageddon. I can't believe the county has ground to a halt from some snow. In the Eighties, the councils would listen to the weather reports and grit in advance of snow doing the roads and the pavements. Kids would be kept at school till the end of the day giving the councils time to make things safer and allow life to go on as usual.

This is barely any snow compared to some places in the world that deal with this every day. I have friends in Colorado who can drive in blizzards! Man up UK!

That said, I did cancel some plans last night after swimming as I wanted to go home, warm up and generally feel sorry for myself. The snow and ice of last year caused Mum to slip and crack her hip. It was the beginning of the end. Read back through my blogs for more. I'm tired of going over it, sorry.

I have stated I need to be more selfish in 2010. I spent 2009 trying to save all my friends, putting their needs first, hoping that would somehow make me a good person and life would magically reward me. It doesn't work like that. I've had some difficult conversations, explaining feelings I'd kept partly under wraps and extricated myself from some compromising situations. I should have done that a long time ago, but you can only do what you feel is right at the time and attempt to fix it later if you realise you were wrong.

You can't save everyone. And you can't save anyone when you aren't on an even keel yourself. I'm still perservering with Heroes and it did reward me with one line of dialogue this week that really resonated with me.

"He's empathetic beyond his years, but now it's his time to grieve and he has absolutely no idea how to go about it. He needs a shoulder to lean on. Yours."

I need to spend more time working out what I want, what makes me happy and finding away to combat the self loathing. I'm getting better. I do like who I am. Occasionally, I love who I am. But only occasionally.

I can't rely on anyone to do that for me. Not because I don't have friends. I have wonderful friends. But this needs to come from me.

I've got a new sofa and I need to spend more time sat on it learning to enjoy my own company again. When I moved to Cheltenham all I did was work alone and sit in my living room alone and retreat back to Swindon. Now Cheltenham feels like home, in part because of the kindness of some wonderful people. I need to find the balance between social time and me time.

I watched a DVD last night. Ironically it was My Name Is Bruce. The irony will be lost on most of you, so I won't go into it. But it was good fun and just what I needed.

Work in progress.