How to live before you die

Watch this, just in time to get your new year in order...

Dear Me...

There’s a charity book out just now called “Dear Me” which is full of famous people writing notes of advice to their sixteen year-old self. Which got me thinking...what would I write to my younger self?

Dear Me,

Some advice for you. Ignore it at your peril because as sure as eggs are covered in a thin shell you have become very wise in your young-middle age.

First off, don’t be so freakin’ sensible. Have fun. Chill.

Next, a warning: you won’t always be this skinny. The cakes will catch up with you.

The things that come easy? Work harder at them, then you get a career you enjoy.

Read a lot; write a lot. (I stole this from Stephen King)

Buy black socks only. Saves a lifetime of pairing them up after a wash.

No matter how much you love her, don’t let her talk you into getting your back waxed. (Yeah, you get a hairy back. And there’s more bad news coming about the hair situation)

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Don’t be afraid to watch other people making mistakes. Just don’t laugh in their face. If you do and you get caught, say that you were laughing WITH them.

Don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself.

Going bald (told you) is no biggie. You’ll get used to it very quickly.

It’s nice to be nice. Any number of small acts of kindness are much better than one grand-stage act of generosity. The latter tends to be for show.

When in company and struggling for something to say ask the other person a question about them. If you are interested you become interesting.

When in company and someone talks about nothing else but themselves, develop a pressing need to go to the loo, pretend to faint, choke on a peanut...do anything just get the feck away from them.

Don’t listen to your father. He’s an eejit. Except about that one thing...oh, and that other thing.

He was also right about the dishes. Let them pile up on the draining board. What’s the point in putting them away in a cupboard when you’re just going to use them again?

Never use a screw-driver. A hammer will do the job much quicker. If anything REALLY needs to be taken apart again, you can always move.

Your father was also wrong about the black tape. It doesn’t fix everything. Least of all a broken desk. That’s where the hammer comes in.

99.9% of the problems that grow in your mind until they block everything else out give you ulcers. Then they melt away and never happen. Wasted time, yes?

In general, people are nice. If you treat them the way you would like to be treated, things will go well.

People are bastards. They bash your car door with their car door and drive away without as much as a scribbled apology.

Go to THAT school re-union. You’ll learn perspective. And loads of other stuff.

The boys at school who laughed at you because you had lots of female friends were actually very, very, very envious.

The cool kids at school turned out to be addicts and alkies or they got shit jobs. The nerds, a l’autre main, took over the world.

Lose that frickin’ habit of speaking half in English, half in French. SO annoying.

You WILL lose your virginity. Eventually.

Don’t be so freakin’ shy and don’t wait to be asked.

Don’t pretend that you’re in training to be a priest to get rid of an unwanted advance. It’s not smart, it’s not clever and you look like shit in a dog collar.

Always take your socks off before your trousers. If you happen to be with a woman you’ll look less like a dork.

Women say one thing and mean another. Then once you get used to that approach they go back to meaning exactly what they say. Then they switch back again in the time it takes you to say, ‘What the...?’ It will confuse you. Don’t fight it. That’s. Just. The. Way. It. Is.

The priests were wrong; it IS good for you, you won’t go blind and the only hairs you grow on your hands will be over your knuckles.

Learn to recognise that wee voice that says, ‘that’ll do” and ignore it, ‘cos it never does.

Eat more and exercise less. Oh...wait, it’s the other way round. And don’t worry, this is one thing you’ll never get right.

Don’t eat anything that comes in bright packaging. It’s full of all kinds of chemical shit that will give you a chronic disease and may eventually kill you.

Enjoy a balanced lifestyle. Get your skinny/fat/skinny/fat arse down to the gym 3 or 4 times a week. Then celebrate with some cake.

Embrace your love of cinnamon. Add it to everything. Especially porridge.

Cake. You’ll never get enough cake. With cinnamon.

Get yourself a nice golden (cinnamon) coloured fleece. Women will love it. They will want to touch it.

When someone says “yes, but...” they actually agree with you but they don’t want to listen. They’re so locked in to their own point of view they’ll carry on regardless. They are stuck. While you should give them the “loser” sign and move on.

Keep your opinions to yourself. No one is really that interested. They’re just pretending, dumbass.

There’s no point in being self-conscious. People look at you for like a second, dismiss you and then go back to inhabiting a world with their ego at its centre. Mostly, you don’t mean shit to them.

Walk away from the cheap brandy. It will give you one fucker of a headache.

Don’t be afraid to admit you were wrong. And apologise.

Never go to bed on an argument. Grow a pair, stay up all night and shout yourself hoarse.

You will discover a talent to grow a single, six inch long hair from your earlobe. It will appear overnight. Pluck it, learn to live with it, and be on watch for the next one which will appear just as surely as the world will become obsessed with a pair of tits called Jordan. And keep a pair of tweezers by your shaving mirror.

Never add garlic to an omelette. Sucks big time. Add it to EVERYTHING else.

Brussel Sprouts. The curse of your childhood. You’ll never get over it. Not even garlic will make them palatable. You will continue to barf at the sight of them for the rest of your life.

Be kind to your sister. She knows not what she does. Approach her with fondness and always be prepared to make allowances. It will save you a shit-storm of stomach acid.

Earn enough so you can pay someone to do the jobs you hate; the garden, housework, ironing. This list will increase as you grow older. Your sister will help and it will only take the going rate.

Ignore the adverts; toilet paper that is too soft makes for an ultimately uncomfortable toilet experience. Or if you learn the art of multi-tasking and keep a pair of nail clippers by the paper you could clip while you are, ehm...unloading. A wee hint - leave your toenails for later.

There’s a reason why we love chocolate. It’s because it melts at body temperature. Don’t let anybody, I mean ANYBODY keep it in the fridge.

You will develop a healthy disregard for the celebrity obsessed culture that is coming your way. Try to spread this particular view to as many people as possible. In fact make it your life’s work.

Never. I repeat, never get a credit card. They are the work of Satan.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story/ poem/ blog. You will always write with a touch too much honesty, but it will be heightened, exaggerated, disguised and people will never be quite sure what to believe. This is A Good Thing.

And finally, if your young self is going to pay attention to any of this crap it should be this: ignore everything you’ve just read - the most effective lessons are the ones you learn for yourself.

Laters,

MM

Jump For Joy

Last night in the Market Inn...great stuff. An appreciative audience and some cracking poetry. Rab Wilson was in fine form, as was the divine Miss T (Sheila) or Tequila Shempleton as she is now known. Don’t ask. Ok, do. It’s her Bond villainess name.


There was also a Storyteller there called Colin McAllister. I could have listened to Colin all night. A soft Irish accent, a mind full of stories and a gentle but effective delivery. His stories were of the past and the present and reminded me that there is an art to delivering an anecdote.

The evening, as I mentioned earlier was part of the Mental Health Awareness Film Festival. When I first heard of this I kinda had the chills. No-one wants unremitting gloom and tales of woe, no matter how empathic they are. See me? Dead good at empathy. Not so good at gloom. So, it was a pleasure to hear that the main point of all this was to help people focus on the way out of the mire of poor mental health. Shoving your nose deep into a rose bloom. That kind of thing. Focusing on what makes good mental health. I can do that.

There’s a fascinating book by Martin Seligman called "Authentic Happiness" I would commend to you. His main thrust (imho) is that all the years of psychotherapy hasn’t moved us on that much. His contention is that concentrating on this form of approach means we examine what makes a mind sick. Focusing on the negative, see? Did someone not say that to continue doing the same thing while expecting different results was the definition of insanity? Time for a change, methinks. Seligman's argument is that we should look at what makes us truly happy and turn our minds to that.

Made me think about the time I had a skirmish with this kind of illness. I won’t go into the root cause of it. Basically, shit happens. The doc put me on Prozac. Horrible, horrible stuff. I could almost deal with the body odour. Actually, no I couldn’t. I smelled like I had out-of-date chicken breasts taped to my underarms. Then there were the dreams. WTF was that all about? People getting shot and stabbed in front of me. Graphic violence every time I closed my eyes. I woke up every morning with the worry that if someone put a knife in my hand I’d find a chest to stick it in. Not nice.

Then there was the stomach ache. The doc had to give me pills to counteract the pills. (And that is the one thing about modern medicine that worries me. Side effects. We put all this shite in our systems that cause other shite to happen. Is it just to distract us from our main area of concern? While we have a medical system that relies on drugs to mask and treat symptoms, rather than the cause of the condition I doubt we’re ever going to have truly effective medical care. Anywho, what do I know?)

I lasted 3 weeks on the hateful drug.

Turned instead to 5 visits to the gym per week, a diet low in additives, sugar and wheat, regular meditation, hours of Billy Connolly. Healthy body...and where the body goes the mind soon follows. Or is that too simple? In any case it worked for me. Folks who've have to stay on the bad stuff have my sympathy.

Today, following said MHA event, I’m full of appreciation. When did you last appreciate what you had in your life? Someone once advised that you should imagine that you have lost everything...and then gained it back. How good would you feel?

The sun is shining. The wee fella is trouping about his bedroom, making all those wee contented noises he makes. There’s food in the fridge. I have a pile of unread books. And lint in my belly-button. This is me smiling and thinking...happy days.

(As a footnote to that last paragraph you have no idea how difficult it was to stop myself from listing the things I feel are missing from my life...but that would have defeated the purpose, no?)

How Big is your Smile

A comment from a reader made me think about what I’m doing here. I spew all kinds of stuff from my grey cells and hopefully somebodysomewhere smiles.

‘Cos that’s what it’s all about.

Smiling.

There’s so much Bad Stuff out there. We get it stuffed (pun intended) down our throats everyday in every way and we need to remind ourselves that there’s Good Stuff out there as well.

I’ve blogged about this before: how the purveyor of news have decided that “news” means exclusively “bad news”.

There’s a truism that says whatever you focus on in life is what you get. Ergo, focus on the shit and guess what you end up neck deep in?

Put a black box in front of you. Stare at the black box. Put all your focus on that black box. It grows until the world around it shrinks. There will be nothing but that black box.

Ok – that’s a basic metaphor. I’m tired. Stay with me. Black box/TV/Bad news...see where I’m going with this? But the black box could stand for anything negative that you worry/ focus on...a bullying boss, a spare tyre, the shadows under your eyes, the way you hit your head when you were 18 and all your hair fell out (no, I’m joking. I’m a straightforward case of MPB)...etc etc etc etc etc etc – I’m sure you could give other examples.

The problem, as you are no doubt aware is that by blocking out everything but the black box you block out all the Good Stuff. All the colour and the shine passes you by.

It’s time to change our focus, people. As the song goes, let’s accentuate the positive.

Let’s start an online movement.

And I’m now about to go all Pollyanna on your ass...

Here’s a challenge for you. Tomorrow, the first stranger you see give them a smile.

Or...go out of your way to find something positive in your day. Can you make someone else’s day brighter? Ease someone else’s load even for a second? Another truism – help somebody else and you help yourself.

And do me a favour? Leave a comment later on and tell me how you got on.

I’m now going to post this blog before I’m tempted to go all vanilla and duck back down under the parapet of negativism.

Brown Balls

I have a head like a malteser. After four days of dragging the wee fella up and down the Ayrshire coast in the sunshine, my bald napper has gone a deep brown. The rest of me however, has only edged from enamel-white to vanilla. If you can think of a suitable simile for what this apparition might resemble let me know.

I digress, as is my wont I hear you say. Sue me, is my reply.

See. I can have a conversation all to myself. Any similes for that one?

Talking about having a conversation to yourself – yes we were, keep up - one of my American bloggy friends intrigued me the other day with one of her posts.
Marley talked about how one such version of this ongoing conversation can be quite harmful to a writer. How those internal voices inhibit our writing and stop us from getting on with the work.

We all know this isn’t particular just to writers, don’t we? How many time have you been on the verge of an action and that little voice has pipped in just at the right/ wrong time. The things your internal critic might say can range from...
- Man, that sucks. What are you thinking about?
- Go watch telly, you don’t have to expose yourself to the possibility of failure while doing that.
- Dude, you are basically just crap. Go find a cave and hide.

You can bet your sweet life any entrepreneurs out there don’t allow this voice to stop them getting on.

In this blog Marley opined that she doubted if her poet friend (moi) would allow this voice to interrupt his creative endeavours - I had to consider this for more than a moment. Do I? I certainly used to. What changed?

It’s how you train the internal voice to phrase the question.

I used to walk into Waterstones and think, Holy Book Covers, Batman look at the number of books in here. How the fuck am I going to get published when all of these writers are vying for publishers attentions?
Now I walk in Waterstones and think, Holy Crime Section, Batman, if these guys can get published so can I.

I used to send out poems for publication while thinking, who wants to hear what I have to say? Who’s going to be interested in my sad wee efforts at poetry?

Now I send it off, or read it at public events while thinking that my opinion; my work is as valid as anyone else’s.

I trained my brain to re-frame the question in a way that I would seek positive results. I didn’t arrive at this thought process overnight. It took some work. The first thing I had to work on was “the work”. If I’m going to be sending out work or reading it at public venues it has to be the best I can make it. So I worked on my craft, attended workshops/ conferences; read books on the subject and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. And then wrote some more.

What was key in this process was assessing where I was along the way. Were my poems being received well by the magazines I sent them to? BTW, I remember my first submission to a poetry mag as if it was yesterday. The poems came back with a comment that my subject matter bodes well for the future, but at times my choice of words were clichéd and too everyday. I was fecking furious. Who the feck was he to say this to me? A friend pointed out that most people just get their poems returned without comment. What did this mean, I asked myself? A Good Question. That somewhere there was merit, I just had to dig it out. It was only a while – a long while later I could see that this guy had given me excellent guidance.

The next part in the process was finding someone whose opinion I valued and who was willing to read and give constructive feedback on a regular basis. A First Reader. The crucial part in this process is listening to the feedback – I mean listening to, and considering the feedback while ignoring the whimpering little worm of your ego that is squirming on the skewer of your FR’s opinion - and that ain’t easy. The trick here is to separate the work from the ego. The feedback is ALL about the work. ONLY about the work. The ego should only be allowed access once the poem is accepted for publication and then it can do cartwheels in a tutu. But not in front of my neighbours. Again. And if you decide to ignore the feedback be sure that you’re doing so because you disagree, not because your little ego is hurt and you need to ignore the FR to make yourself feel better. As Stephen King says in On Writing if you hear yourself saying, “yes, but...” to such feedback then really you are trying to defend the indefensible. This is surely a time when you should STFU and take the feedback on the chin.

Next in the process is listening to this horrible little internal chatterbox and asking yourself if what it is saying is valid. If it is voicing a “belief” that is limiting then you should find a way to re-frame the question/ statement as I showed you earlier.
More examples...

Why am I such a failure? Could be changed to ...What will get me what I want?
Why aren’t I better at this? Could be changed to ...What can I do to improve?

Asking yourself the right questions will send the boys and girls in the boiler room (your sub-conscious) off looking for a solution, instead of focusing on the problem. Repeat those last few words a hundred times...looking for a solution, instead of focusing on the problem.

Eeesh, I’m coming over all Life Coach here and that wasn’t my intention with this blog. Still. Its’ relevant. And valid. Do with it what you will. Make the changes, or print this off and wipe your arse with it.

Did I say I had a head like a malteser?