Thunder Monday

Middle of the day, Monday. In the office. Rain outside but there is a breeze about that is pushing the clouds through the sky at pace, letting in the possibility of the odd blue patch. Don't usually blog from the office but since I have managed a couple of posts in the last few days I thought what the hell. Might as well give it a try. Don't worry about it being too constrictive. Work is OK today at the moment, no major crises as far as I can work out, no huge unexpected bills to pay that have suddenly landed on my desk or anything like. But you can never be too sure. Everyone seems in reasonably good humour as well which is good considering it is a Monday.

Went up to my folks yesterday and gave my dad his bottle of whiskey and pork pie. Think it went down well. He didn't have a bottle of that particular malt in his collection so that was good. He was a bit down as he was shaking off a nasty chest cold, my mum was fine however, and that was mainly because she's been dosing herself up with this anti-flu herbal medicine. Something Tamdin recommended to her apparently. The parents are both in their early 70s now and generally they are in pretty good shape. Way things are going with longevity and all that I don't see any reason why they won't be able to stick around for another 20 years or so. Hope so anyway. Funny ain't it? Here I am 45 this year and still with healthy folks alive. Wasn't so long ago that the life expectancy for anyone was barely 40 years. How far we have come! How easy it is in these times to keep on living...so long as bad luck don't befall ya and you don't engage in anything too over the top, like drinking 10 cans of lager and smoking 40 fags a day. Yeah, if ya stay on the straight an' narrow as far as yer 'abits are concerned then there ain't no reason why ya won't just keep rockin' on for decades and decades.

Think I need to buy some moisturiser for my face. Not to put to fine a point on it, but sometimes when I look in the mirror all I see staring back at me is a spotty faced git. Don't why it is like it is. Me old mush that is. Must something to do with my diet. Tamdin always has a go at me for not drinking enough water so maybe it is something to do with that. Anyway whatever it is it's a bit of a pisser since like I said in the paragraph above I'm nearly 45 and surely a bit old to still be worrying about zits. Seems to have got worse since coming back from India this time around. Problem is that over there you can end up taking in a lot of sugar what with the ultra sweet Indian sweets and the frequent cups of hot chai and hot sweet coffee. That and maybe the stress of just being over there I suppose. Forcing my way through the heat and ever growing scenes of unforgetability that comprise the India experience. The fact is that when you are in one of the big Indian cities everything can seem like one big battle to make sure the gods don't deal ya a sucker punch. It only takes a couple of rolls of the dice to go against you in India and you can quite pretty damn agitated and wound up that is certainly for sure.

I had one of those Indian incidents this year when I had to make the transfer from Delhi International airport to the Delhi Domestic. Coming out of the Int I went out the wrong entrance and missed the place where you're supposed to wait for the transfer bus. I immediately got angry as I then had to fight my way back into the airport and past a couple of guards who were unwilling to let me back in because as far as they were concerned I had left the airport despite the fact that I had only walked out the entrance as matter of seconds before. Eventually common sense prevailed and I was allowed back to find out where it was I was supposed to go but by then my feathers were ruffled. When I got to the place I was originally supposed to go I found out that the next bus over to the domestic wasn't going to be for another 40 mins. That was too long for me. I didn't have the patience to wait for that so I stormed back out again and got a taxi. Sent my head spinning that, the whole little episode. But that is what can happen in India so damn quickly if you let down your guard. Your guard against lack of self-awareness that is. After all, who was there to blame for the whole thing but myself? In my eagerness to get out of the international and make it over to the domestic I had not seen the signs I was supposed to be looking and from that point on I was lost.

Evenin' now. What was wrote above was done in the office in the day so maybe what I write now will have a different feel to it. Just waiting for my food to cook, then I'll eat and come back to this later. Feelin' a bit tired but not too bad. Just done the best part of an hour meditation which was good, sometimes it can take you by surprise. I had been feeling angry and irritated before I went up to sit so in a way I was reluctant to go, fearing the negative mood I was in would dominate the session. But as it turned out the negativity provided the energy I needed to gain a bit of focus and attention and after a while things seemed to move along quite nicely. Guess it always important to remember how unpredictable things can be. Don't assume things are always going to turn out the way you think they will, the mind is unreliable, especially when it comes to seeing things in a less than positive light.

Think a lot of the anger and irritation I felt at the end of the afternoon was down to the fact we had a letter from the landlord pushed through the letterbox at work demanding that a bill from January be paid immediately with interest. Ironic that, considering that I began this blog by saying how stress free things were at the moment in department. Spoke too fucking soon as far as that was concerned.

Fact of the matter is I didn't see the original invoice because when it came in I was away in India. It just pissed me off that despite the fact we have been tenants for the last 7 1/2 years and always without fail paid our rent on time the landlord should still see fit to charge us interest on something that was only days overdue. Landlords and tenants...the whole lousy stinkin' deal goes right back to the middle ages and beyond... and at the end of the day it is still just as feudal as it ever was. Feudal and futile in the fact that landlord and tenant can never be friends.

All this is amplified by the fact that under the terms of our lease we have to replace our boiler at work because the old has packed up. If the landlord had their way they would charge us a hell of a lot of money to fit the replacement boiler that is for sure, irrespective of the fact that we are unlikely to be there more than another 2 & half years. It has been like a kick in the teeth since we found out what shit we were in. All the work we have done day in day out is all going to be for nothing... someone can come along and take it all away from you in the flick of an eye.

Maybe the point is this though - the real point of my anger and frustration - that the fact the job I do is only worth so much and when compared to people such as our landlord it is clearly worth not very much at all. I just have never got it together to acquire any valuable skills to make my labours a precious commodity in the eyes of others. And so this is the result: working away day after day for hours and hours just to put clothes onto someone else's back. It is sad, it is pathetic but no matter how much I rage about it I really do have only myself to blame.

I have no skills that either are worth paying that much money for or are capable of earning a decent amount of money. That is the fact. Simple as that. The kind of problems that I will only ever be called to solve are going to be relatively simple ones which any fucker with half a brain between their ears will be able to figure out.

There ain't nothing I got that would take very much time to pass on to someone else. No great skills, no in depth knowledge...of anything. OK I might not have to wear a suit to work and to really answer to anyone, and we all might have a laugh in our own cocoon like worlds as we sit there day after day in the office, but that is as far as it goes. I really have not got that much in terms of real value in the capitalist labour market economy that we exist in. Some people such as our landlord exist and thrive, we merely exist. They have done the groundwork, they have ensured that they are well protected.

And no matter how we might rant and rave about it and think the landlord is being a total bastard it simply is not going to make a blind bit of different. We might console ourselves with some vain attempt at feeling a moral superiority by saying to ourselves that we would never behave in the way that our landlord is behaving but that is a load of old bullshit because the fact of the matter is that we just have not had the opportunity. And never will. We are what we are and in this context what we are is just a small little book company trying our best to sell a few books and take our cut from it, anything more than that and we are simply at the mercy of forces that we cannot control. That is a fact. There is no use getting angry with other people about it.

When something comes along that might call our whole existence as a small book company into question it is nothing personal. People are just doing what they have to do with the means they have before them. In this case the landlord knows that under the lease we have to replace the boiler and as far as they are concerned replace the the boiler we will. No favours necessary, it is all there in black and white. Protected by law. Rage and frustration on my part is more to do with seething irritation over my impotence to effect things of any weight in this world. I should get over it, take what comes with dignity and do whatever it is I have to do to ensure that I do not end up behaving in way I might think is perfectly justified and correct at the time but which years later will only stand as something over which I will feel little more than acute embarrassment and regret.