The cut and thrust

Sleep, or rather the lack of it, continues to be the principle threat to my sanity.

I’d recently been compelled to ease up on coffee by approximately half because my double espresso filter became somehow welded to my sump – either through persistent overuse or because of the fact I dropped it during a brief hypomagnesemic seizure that followed a huge hit of some high-grade Arabica I’d had smuggled from Colombia in the womb of a limbless mute sex slave – so I was restricted to using only the single-shot filter once I’d force-freed the double one with the aid of some pliers, rendering it both physically deformed, with the household appliance equivalent of a harelip, and practically fucked.

In my altered state I apologised to the filter before making a comfortable space for it in my kitchen cupboard rather than throwing it out. Bestowing anthropomorphic sympathies on inanimate metal receptacles might be an acceptable psychological response if you’re an average developing infant but in an adult these things are, strictly speaking, filed under ‘pathological’*; so, beyond the initial shudder of this realisation, and having ‘filtered’* my behaviour retrospectively, I’ve decided I must have been ‘projecting’* the fear of growing old and ugly and redundant onto my fucked filter. Common garden displacement, in other words. I would do better to take a common garden cucumber, chop it into slices and care for my very real, living, very tired eyes; although then I might find myself feeling sorry for the cucumber, and the cut-and-thrust of analysing that with all of the repercussive phallic anxieties it could dredge up might be enough to put me in a coma.

Which wouldn’t last long because some sandbagging cunt on Tower Hamlets council has posted an army of workmen outside my flat to ‘refurbish’* a railway arch, if you don’t mind. So, after hours of tossing and turning, and thinking and rethinking, and having imaginary arguments with people who have pissed me off, and having picked up my twelfth Oscar, and imagining reasons I could possibly be pissed off with people in hypothetical scenarios in order to corner them into an imaginary argument, and musing over whether masturbation will help me to sleep or just wake me up, when I have resolved for the umpteenth time that I’m going to get one of those Alexis Colby satin eyemasks to block out the morning light, and some earplugs while I’m at it, when I’m finally too exhausted to move and my eyelids feel like they have been shaved on the inside and are trying to regrow the scratchy stumps of extra sets of extra thick lashes there, the grinding cacophony of essential maintenance work begins.

I wish my landlord had been half as proactive as Tower Hamlets council in getting the workmen in. One of our toilets has a fucked flush, has been out of action for more than two months and is in dire need of essential maintenance. To his credit he has brought someone in twice to look at it in the past few weeks – but that’s all they’ve done. I was assisted in my sleep deprivation marathon by their arrival at the flat around lunchtime today - my bedroom is the room nextdoor. I heard numerous unsuccessful attempts to flush the loo and what sounded like a rowdy dialogue, which I think included mention of ‘ballcocks’* and ‘flanges’* – I can’t be sure because I don’t speak Arabic and either way I’d be out of my depth so I stayed in bed and waited for them to leave. Once they had, I went in to see if the loo was fixed. No flush. I found myself beginning to feel sorry for the toilet, all emasculated and hopeless, its flush handle squeaking like a eunuch every time it’s pulled, and I caught my reflection giving an upside down, thin-lipped, nevermind, I feel-for-ya-kid kind of smile to a toilet. And I had to wonder if, when push comes to shove, I’m not more pathetic than my broken shitter.

Let it be a chuffin’ lesson, dear reader.

*Say it with ‘fingers’