Once upon a time, in a very lonely period of my life, I felt the answer to that loneliness lay in a relationship. Inspired by Disney, I yearned for a woman with whom to share my life. Although earlier relationships had ended in heartbreak, failure and bitterness, I had not given up on the couple as an ideal model for happiness. They do say that homo sapiens sapiens’ capacity to learn sets it apart from other animals (but do they know?).

For some reason, I thought sharing life with a partner would bring happiness. That’s what friends/acquaintances did, and their relationships seemed perfect through envy-tinted spectacles. I had been alone for some time and wasn’t happy. Solitude was therefore something to flee from. Meanwhile, other models of relationship didn’t even occur to me.

Hollywood (and Bollywood) have been a cause of much unhappiness. Idealisation of beauty (the young, the slim, the muscular, the tanned), disdain of age, the good and the bad guys, the cult of image, etc. It’s easy to pretend I’m not taken in, that my principles and values are mighty and I am not morally affected by an army of good guys beating the shit out of and killing the insignificant, faceless soldiers of the bad guys. Not true. But who cares while the dosh is rolling in?

So, my intelligent, beautiful ideal woman would have both a good body and a sense of humour that was compatible with mine. To her I would be irresistibly attractive, witty, fascinating; someone to be admired and defended against verbal attack and slander (any physical assault would have to be sorted out by me, Mr Rambo). Lonely, I yearned and searched.

Then one morning my silver screen-prompted dreams were realised. As I sat at the table of a bar in a quiet square in Barcelona, I spied what I thought must be a mirage. But no, ‘twas a true goddess whose beauty knew no bounds. Her step was light and graceful and her dark, shiny hair blew in the spring breeze. She had a noble face that suggested both inner strength and delicate sensitivity, while her aura-like beauty seemed to brighten the space that acted as a backdrop to her graceful movements.

My princess walked straight up to me and asked if she could sit down at my table. She gave me no chance to switch into auto-thrash mode, to wallow in self-pity or silently and prematurely to bemoan that such a goddess would not deign even to allow me to gather up the scraps from under her table.

We began to talk. And we talked and talked. While she listened to me she kept up eye contact. She didn’t let her gaze and attention wander and seek the first excuse she could find to be away. Her carefree laugh prompted me to pour out my life to this kindred soul, whom I felt I had known for thousands of years.

The morning turned into afternoon, which turned into evening and then night. Inseparable, we woke up naked together on a lumpy single bed in a cupboard-sized room that looks onto the brick wall of the Social Security building. Social security had never been so romantic. I praised the welfare state. This goddess had been sent down from heaven with a B27/6 to mend my torn and lonely soul.

We spent the following day together, except for an interminable twelve and a half minutes when she visited her sister’s house and I waited outside. The same happened the day after and the day after that.

Unfortunately, satisfaction is rarely lasting. Addicts often testify that what they crave for eventually becomes their poison. No wonder Disney never made a "Dracula" or a "Faust". I’m not saying my princess was my poison, but neither was she a goddess. ("He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!"). When initial satisfaction wears off, the addictive search for sensorial pleasure and pain avoidance appears again. Just as third or fourth helpings of a tasty dish can produce nausea, so reliving the same experiences can give rise to hollow stagnation.

My former princess has now heard my stories thousands of times. When I retell them, her gaze and attention wanders and seeks the first excuse she can find to be away. I have informed her on countless occasions that I don’t like gravy on my potatoes, yet that is precisely where she pours it. She has learned to live with or ignore my obsessive quirkiness while I do the same with hers.

But most painful of all, I love her.

Start of term examination.

Answer the following questions. Take all the time you need. You may start writing/talking/thinking now.


1. Imagine you have just been born, not as a baby but with all the sensory and mental faculties and knowledge/experience/wisdom/foolishness you have now. Human lives last for exactly ten years and then people die. What will you do with your life?

2. You receive a letter that includes a cheque for the amount of 200,000 pounds (sterling). Great Aunt Regina, of whose existence you have hitherto been unaware, gave instructions in her will that the cheque should be sent to you after her death. However, she also instructed that there were only two ways in which you could use the money. These are:

a) buying a holiday home in Britsville on the Costa Blanca near Alicante in Spain

b) donating the money to a well-building project in Meribara, a small village near Kadugli in Sudan, where villagers (average life span 45 years) presently suffer from a host of waterborne diseases, many of which could be combated with the construction of the wells.

You may also tear the cheque up.

3. Write your obituary (no more than 150 words). It should NOT read like a CV.

4. The partner of your cousin, with whom you have had no contact for nearly ten years, arrives on your doorstep. She is in a desperate state because of her relationship with your cousin, who has a worsening problem of heroin addiction. She is calling for your help because the other members of his and her families have either turned their backs or do not want to get involved. Do you help? If so, how and to what extent?

5. What do you really need?

(Hobby) Horsey Horsey don’t you stop or Cada loco con su tema

Place the following items on a scale of 0 to 10 according to whether you consider them to be BAD or GOOD. (0 = extremely bad and 10 = the canine’s testicles)

Happy
Sad
Beautiful
Ugly
Delicious
Disgusting
Mean
Generous
Helpful
Selfish
Cuddly Andrex (Scottex in Spain) Golden Retriever puppy
Cockroach
White
Black
Alive
Dead

We all need an identity, even if it’s a negative one.

Children perceive who they are and learn to create and assimilate their identity on the basis of interaction, initially with a parent (figure) and thereafter with siblings, relatives, other children, teachers, classmates, workmates, and bosses, etc.

They see themselves as intelligent, stupid, pretty, ugly, an angel or a devil and then hang on to that identity in order to feel secure. It is better to be "ugly" (a culturally determined characteristic) than not to be anything at all. Not being anything means occupying the psychological and emotional limbo of non-existence.

Then comes a search for confirmation of that identity in other relationships, transference and so forth and the tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again. This involves an unconscious selling of the self and image. I therefore hanker after your endorsement of my identity. e.g. I think I am an ugly bastard and so manipulate you into overtly or covertly telling or suggesting to me that I am indeed an ugly bastard. Should you contradict me and tell me I am beautiful, I criticise your judgement and assume that it and, therefore, you lack validity.

The Spanish expression Cada loco con su tema means that people have their own obsessive hobby horses, lines of conversation, thought pattern loops and favourite subjects of conversation.

When I was a teenager, Great Uncle Stan once cornered me at a large family get-together and talked for a long time about chimney flues, with which he had worked for the greater part of his life. I was not interested however and so escaped and went to do something else. Later on, he got hold of me again and renewed his banging on about flues. What confirmation was he seeking? What do I look for?

The positive side is that identity can be deconstructed and a person with a supposedly negative personality trait (an aggressive person, for example) can, with enough self-awareness (and that’s the tricky part), actually choose whether or not to be aggressive.

Although identity is very complicated and its roots may lurk in the depths of the unconscious, simple acceptance that I am- or anyone else is - an ugly bastard (or even an incredibly attractive one for that matter), in the knowledge that this identity is like leaves on a tree and not the life-force of the tree itself, is just a cop-out.

Knackered today. Little One’s sick. She needed tending last night. The police were round at the building again at 3 in the morning to sort out another fight. This time it was in the 2nd floor flat, which is shared by about 20 or so people who are charged a fortune by someone who knows they haven’t got papers. That’s what El Plodo (Guillermo el viejo) told Maria (5th floor), who told Carmen (3rd floor), who told Monica (6th floor), who told Wifey. Coexistence is never easy.

The floor plan of Maslow Towers (continued)

As a teenager I had a hunch that things were not inherently satisfying. Sex always seemed as if it would be (and continues to appear that way as long as it is an uncontrollable behaviour-driving force, i.e. I am ruled by my dick – how else would the world’s animal population keep renewing itself?) until orgasm, the starting point for post-coital depression.

Disappointed and increasingly suffocated by nihilism, I grew depressed. However, despite any feelings of hopelessness, I must have had an inkling of optimism because I escaped, blamed my environment for my dull sense of desperation and went off to other countries seeking misfortune; either running away from nihilism or looking abroad for something whose identity was lost to me.

Sadly, despite all the interesting people I met and fascinating things I saw, I confirmed my earlier hunch and came back.

Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Perhaps the answer lay neither in Serengeti nor the Birmingham Bullring, but was to be found internally. But can meaning be found internally without first establishing what the “self”, “I” or “ego” is or is that like kneading water into a baguette shape?

Fine, but there is no doubt that I (and, I assume, other beings) have needs. I have heard my 3 year-old nephew tell his mother that he needs an ice-cream. She replies, “You don’t need an ice-cream, you want one!”. Doesn’t that mean the Maslow Building should be a bungalow?

From a physical and genetic perspective, my birth was the result of interaction between my mother’s ovule and father’s sperm. My parents’ births were, in turn, the consequence of their parents’ sexual interaction, and so on. This applies to all animals the sexual reproduction of which involves a male and a female of the species. Beyond that, my hermaphrodite and earlier unicellular ancestors probably go back to the warm, humid squelchiness that was the beginning of life, unless life originated at more than one time.

For this process to continue, I need to eat food, which has been grown (farmer, soil maintenance, fertilisers, seeds, agricultural equipment) prepared and cooked (chefs, gas, electricity, pots and pans, metallurgy, furnaces, extrusion, etc.) packaged (cardboard, trees, petrochemicals, oil wells, tankers) and transported (shipping, vehicles, motorways, logistics, offices) by other people and has involved innumerable factors. If I eat meat, I consume another being, which also has an ancestral chain and an environment upon which it has depended. In other words I am only a tiny spec in the whole picture (a spec whose sense of I preconditions its universe). Food is just an example. There are also clothes, medicine, education, housing and an infinite host of other areas and the endless number of people and factors involved.

I, me, mine and my therefore all depend on an infinite number of interdependent factors.

So, finding an “intrinsic” meaning of life and a notion of a sharp-around-the-edges self is as tail-chasing an endeavour as finding extrinsic meaning in a football match. However, that does not mean there is no meaning. It just means I can’t find it, very probably because it inevitably defies being encountered.

Anyway, I need to stop and head down to the basement of Maslow Towers to hacer mis necesidades, or “do my needs”, as they might say in Spanish.

Existential stuff

I felt awkward on Friday and Saturday. Public holidays. Weather warm and humid. No breeze. Bare bones days. Uncomfortable with existence. I wasn’t at work. Schools and the shops were closed. Wifey and Little One were listless. Like sailing on a breezeless day. A disconcerting lack of external stimuli intensified the uncomfortable and even scary feeling of just being. I knew I was near the top of the Maslow Building.

Telly, cinema, work, sport, theme parks, travel (tourism), alcohol and snout are all cravings, the mythical satisfaction of which lies in the pot at the end of the rainbow. They are all temporary fixes that heighten addiction to sensorial experience – just to make sure I’m really here, just checking.

Millions of organisms have existed since life began at one minute to midnight on the earth’s clock. My ego fills the (my?) universe and squeezes out everything else. Inherited anthropocentric values abound but am I really any more important (despite a greater physical and mental complexity) than the Blattella germanica that come out at night in the cupboard under the kitchen sink?

Keep focused. Although I no longer rainbow-chase after the meaning of life, I do want some sort of meaning in my life. That’s not a problem for a person who is starving or whose life is threatened by violence. Life’s meaning then is getting a crust of bread or hanging on to existence itself (are suicides therefore schizophrenics?).

But I did say we were near the top floor.

Here’s a list (not in order) of things that take up time, energy and attention.

Relationships
Sex
Money
Health
Leisure
Work
Eating and drinking
Sleep

The list continues but I don’t think there’s any point of going on as there are enough examples here.

To some extent all these things give it meaning but on their own are not meaningful. For example, without relationships the other things on the list completely meaningless. The deliciousness of a meal may depend on the company or lack of it (and lack implies a notion of company and therefore an implied presence) and certainly depends on something. Imagine eating the meal, suspended on the end of an elastic rope in space. Imagine you are the only being that has ever existed, that exists now and that will ever exist.

It’s impossible to imagine. It’s a bit like saying “let’s practice not breathing for several minutes”. So, no being can exist without relationships. But then there are no relationships without food or sleep, no food without money (although here in the city I could rummage in bins), no leisure without work, and no work without a need to feed myself and have a roof over my head.

(To be continued...)

Gun-running

I just read an article about the Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition, which was held in London last week. According to organisers it was a showcase for “disaster relief, humanitarian and peacekeeping” equipment.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that selling military equipment sooner or later leads to victims and death or to see the connection between arms sales and terrorism.

Today’s friends (figurative, I'm not referring to mine who are thin on the ground) are tomorrow’s enemies (Mujahideen groups in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet invasion who were given US$2 billion worth of light weapons by the CIA between 1979 and 1989, for example) and yesterday’s enemies are today’s friends (Gaddafi). What about tomorrow?

Apparently, (I know “apparently” often means there is no source to back up what's coming next) 12% of the UK workforce is directly or indirectly involved in making weapons. Although indirectly may mean working in a shop that sells sandwiches to a company that supplies plastic grommets to a missile manufacturer, figures on arms sales over GDP suggest the percentage is high.

Back in Sudan (Don’t worry. I have El Codger’s arm behind his back) I was approached three times by dodgy characters who were recruiting gun runners. I thank my parents for having brought me up in such a way that I would never have considered trading arms or drugs, etc.

According to Nathaniel Branden (psychotherapist and self-esteem/romatic love guru) in his website essay on What self-esteem is and is not, a healthy self-esteem requires “the practice of personal integrity: living with congruence between what we know, what we profess, and what we do; telling the truth, honouring our commitments, exemplifying in action the values we profess to admire”.

Not being a hypocrite? Government, political party, council, and employer etc. hypocrisy is blatant. “Living consciously”, which is what Branden suggests we should do, can neverthless also reveal the disparity between what we as individuals (OK, I!) say and do. However, by doing the opposite and not living consciously, one may end up with a Trident missile up one’s arse.

Language and sex

I work as a freelance translator (written texts)/interpreter (saying what other people have said) to earn a living. I convert Spanish, Catalan and English into each other.

When I first arrived in Barcelona I thought the city would be just another stopover on a roam around the world that was becoming my way of life. But no, and the reason I stayed here was for sex.

Three years in Sudan (the Codger in me stirs but the anti-Codgerlike behaviour squad wave their imaginery truncheons menacingly) was an extremely dry period to say the least. Fear of castration or murder by angry male relatives (who, in the area in which I lived, virtually considered their sisters/daughters/wives as chattels) was one reason to dissuade me from non-masturbatory, coital sex. Then there was also was typhoid, malaria, hepatitis, dysentery and sand fly bites, all of which dulled my appetite.

Two years later, after an emotionally barren and lonely few months in Birmingham, I arrived in Barcelona with renewed strength and a body that no longer looked like Mahatma Gandhi’s before he took up body building (like Gandhi, I do yoga every morning).

All of a sudden, a glut of sexual opportunity appeared. Women (I’m hetro) appeared everywhere in my life and my ego expanded like a round bag often inflated with hot air or gas to make it rise in the air.

At that time I considered the ego inflation to be a sign of improvements in thitherto dragged-along-the-floor self-esteem. Now I know better. Healthy self-esteem does not require outside stimulus or approval for it to remain healthy.

God I digress so much!

I learnt Spanish (the thread) fairly quickly. It’s easy to learn another language when highly motivated by sex and the desire to ligar (rough translation: score/get off with s.o.).

Regular sex meant my appearance as a bloke desperate for a shag gradually changed and I became more relaxed. In turn, I was easier to be with and therefore more shaggable (always the same old story). However, despite my new-found popularity, something snapped and I grew restless again; perhaps it was fear of emotional attachment.

Then one day I met Wifey. At the time she was doing intensive psychoanalysis and was therefore equipped with the skills to show me I was scared of just about any contact. I had built my own bunker from which I emerged when it suited me (e.g. for sex) but shut up shop sharpish after short ventures outside.

Wifey also taught me to speak Catalan, which comes in very handy here to earn a living.

Back to the thread.

So, I charge people to convert what they say in Spanish or Catalan into English. Written words I charge per word and spoken words I charge by time (not how long it takes to say them -pheeeeeeennnnnnnooooooooommmmmmmmeeeeeeennnnnnnooooonnn- but per day, half-day, or however long I spend on the premises of whoever's employing me).

Learning SSP (Spanish for Sexual Purposes) was great fun. Using language to make a living is not so entertaining and has turned me into a linguistic mercenary and the inventor of the Handy Word-o-Meter (which sits on the table in front of me, never short of batteries).

However, the other day an opportunity arose for me to put my skills to non-recompensatory use.

An English woman (sixtyish) was leaning out of a second floor window talking (shouting) to a man in a boiler suit (from the gas company), who was at street level. They didn’t understand each other so I offered to help.

"Dile que vamos a cortar el gas mañana por la mañana, hasta la una"
"Tell her we’ll be cutting the gas off tomorrow morning till one o’clock" said the gas man.
I told her.

"Ask him if I have to be at home all the morning!"
I asked him. She continued.
"Tell him it’s my last day tomorrow and I want to go to the beach so if they can finish by 11 that would be great".
I told him.

"Pregúntale porque va a la playa. Hace demasiado frío. ¡Cogerá una pulmonía!"
"Ask her why she’s going to the beach. It’s too cold, she’ll catch her death"

(I agreed but kept my opinions to myself as I do in professional situations - otherwise I would lose most of the work I come across and I do have a strapping 10-year old to keep in extra-curricular activities).

I asked her and translated her reply.
"She wants to go back to England with some colour on her skin. The weather here’s been crap the last week and she’s very disappointed. If she’d known it was going to be like this she’d have stayed in Staleybridge".

"Pregúntale si una de las otras personas que viven en el piso estará. Es su hijo ¿verdad? O la chica argentina que debe ser su novia y que esta muy buena por cierto".
"Ask her if one of the other people who live in the flat will be there. It’s her son, isn’t it? Or the Argentinean woman who must be his girlfriend and who is really phwwoooooar by the way"
"Do you want me to tell her the last bit?"
"Which bit’s that?"
"The bit about his girlfriend being really phwwoooooar"
"No, no. Just tell her to make sure someone’s in the flat!"

On and on it went but afterwards I gave myself a pat on the back for my good turn and got the gas man's card for potential future paid interpreting work.

Opium of the Masses?

I haven’t replaced my bike’s buckled front wheel and so I took the metro to work today. Rush hour. Hustle and bustle. 20-minute journey with a change from the yellow to the purple line.

Television screens that show a mixture of advertising and light news items hang over the station platform. Passengers’ eyes (mine too) are inevitably sucked towards the moving images. A series of ads, one an advert for mortgages. A dream house in the country appears on the screen. It is inhabited by a model shiny-toothed disease-free family (fit, successful, handsome father, fit, good-looking, successful young-looking mother, happy complex-free kids). On the drive is a sleek black 4x4. Their large lawn looks more like a billiard table than a stretch of grass. In the background is a swimming pool and a friendly dog wags its tail. I want. I want. Me. Me. Me. Desire.

A far cry from our insect-infested, falling-to-bits building where the police are called regularly because the folk on the second floor are on the verge of killing each other. Two suicides in three years and a higher number of alcoholics and God knows what other addictions. The lift spends more time out of order than in it. When it does work it smells of belched garlic and stale black tobacco. Cigarette ends lie smouldering on the lift floor, next to the pools of yellowish green spit and mucus. The inhabitants complain about their jobs, their husbands, their wives, the neighbours, taxes, dirt, the council, the government. And this is the "First World"! Undesirable. I don’t want. I don’t want. Me. Me. Poor me. Poor me! Aversion.

Advertising, the telly, the media. I think the whole world, beginning with myself, is living in a state of denial. Projections of a world that either doesn’t exist or, if it does, is just a tiny part of the whole (probably infinite) picture.

I am happy and fortunate to be alive, to love and to feel loved. I am happy to inhale and then to exhale and then inhale again.

Lice
Little One has got Pediculus humanus capitis, or head lice. Yet again! Wifey says she’s got them too. Little One is now a specialist. It is about her tenth time in the last four or five years. My head itched as well but I think it was only a show of solidarity.

Until January this year, Little One regularly sheared my hair with a clipping machine. She charged me 5 euros a shot. Extortion I know, but to encourage her entrepreneurial spirit I coughed up. At the start of the year she upped the rate to 10 euros and since then I haven’t used Little One’s coiffeur services.
While I seem to be immune to lice, Wifey is at the end of her tether. We have tried all the available treatments at the chemist's, in addition to vinegar, alcohol and several "old spouses' " methods.

Last night Little One went to bed with a silicon swimming cap on her head, after her bonce had been doused liberally with 96º alcohol. The swimming cap (Wifey’s idea) supposedly creates an anaerobic environment in which the lice cannot breathe. They thus die by suffocation. I am very sceptical. However, I had no better suggestion and withheld my usual pedantry. ("The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life"). My mouth remained fastened by a device of two flexible strips with interlocking projections closed or opened by pulling a slide.

"Time for bed Little One! Don’t forget to put your swimming cap on!"

Of course head lice are nothing compared to some of the 3000 known species of wingless parasitic insects, most of which infested me at some time when I was in Sudan.

"Oh, don’t start you boring old codger!"

"OK, OK. Enough said" (though Pediculus humanus humanus can be a stickler when it gets between your shoulder blades. What on earth could God have been playing at when she came up with that one?)

Geographical me

Born: Edinburgh.
Childhood/adolescence: Otley (West Yorkshire)
Student: Nottingham
Work: Leeds
Packed in work: a few months in India
Returned to UK: twiddled thumbs
Went to Sudan: work
Birmingham (UK): a few months
Barcelona
Brussels
Edinburgh
Barcelona

... and that’s where I’ve been since 1991, + or – since I met Spouse (hereinafter to be referred to as Wifey to avoid any possible future cases of libel against me or charges brought on the grounds of breach of the Data Protection Act or similar). My daughter shall be referred to as Little One. She was small for several years before she grew into the strapping lass she is now. As I said in the other post, I am stuck in the past.

Wifey would have gone beyond her threshold of tolerance after the first couple of places mentioned on the list. Information is not her forte and the mere whiff of data is enough to bring on a migraine. She neither likes reading maps nor using computers. I tend to avoid conversations involving temporal/spatial/data matters as they inevitably lead to bickering.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with bickering. In fact, several years of intense disagreements with Wifey taught me a lot about my own relationship with conflict; that I just couldn’t cope with it. Overt conflict was taboo in my family of origin (parents and siblings, etc.). Anger and the object of anger were neither acknowledged nor named. Anger was just bottled up and evil Bogie people arose.

In close relationships it is often loved ones who get the brunt of a person's of anger (in my case my anger), precisely because there is a denial of rage and its real object. Wifey (and/or conflict herwith) has enabled me to acknowledge a lot of repressed anger and other feelings and, to a large extent, overcome fear of the other's displeasure with me. Thank you Wifey.

Yesterday evening, after a hard day’s ruminating in the office during which I had convinced myself I didn’t exist, I fell off my bike in heavy traffic in the rush hour.

Cars' engines were revving at the traffic lights, their drivers eager to get through the subsequent lights before they turned red. The lights changed to green, I stepped up out of the saddle to make a quick getaway. As I changed down into 23rd gear, the chain came off and my face hit the tarmac.

"Ouch! I am for real!" I cried.

However, the car behind did try and put an end to my existence lark. Its driver had left a sensible few millimetres between me and his vehicle. Fortunately he only drove into me and not over me and somehow I came out unscathed, except for the swelling on my wrist.

Bloody cyclists!

It’s not easy to say who I am.

Which characteristics should I choose first? Physical traits (external or internal “ I’ve a lovely pair of kidneys?) and if so, as these features are now, or when I was a child/adolescent? Perhaps I should describe my job, my family (now or of origin?) the flat I live in, the food/music/books I Iike, the clothes I wear, my daily routine, a history of my life, or what I feel about things?

Unfortunately these are all labels and don’t define the real me (if there is one). When I was at school adolescents wrote the name of their favourite groups on their school bags so that peers could immediately scan the bags, compartmentalise the information and define the bag-owner as friend, foe or someone they just couldn’t give a shit about. An efficient system that forwent introductory niceties. The Schoolbag Syndrome is just a crude example of what all people do every moment of every day – compartmentalisation, judgement, prejudice. I do it. By extrapolation and talking to others I assume other people do it too.

In the beginning there was the Word and thereupon appeared discrimination, flattery, idealisation, collecting things, addiction, refuse, indifference, sarcasm, oneuppersonship, snooty and exclusive behaviour, manipulation, exclusivity and the term “deluxe”. Luckily, I don’t think there was a beginning and if there was, then the Word (or the Label/Ticket) certainly wasn’t around.

What of impermanence? When I started writing this I wasn’t aware that I needed to go for a piss, but now I am.

The Oxford Shortish dictionary defines I:
n. (the I) Metaphysics the ego; the subject or object of self-consciousness.

and need:
3 v. intr. archaic be necessary. (not that the Oxford is necessarily any more reliable than I am at coming up with definitions).

Is the need to go for a piss part of me or am I just a channel for this need, i.e. does it have an inherent existence that is other than me? If the i.e. is true, then I am also only a channel for blond/black/brown/grey hairness/baldness/fingernailness and thoughts and feelings. If not, then who is the "I" that needs the piss? I inhale and exhale. I need the air to oxygenate the blood. But is the air in my lungs me? Maslow’s pyramid of needs is fine but who does the needing? It's interesting that in some languages (Spanish amd Arabic, for example) the subject "I" and the verb "need" are squashed up into one word.

This may sound like a load of mental masturbation but I remember having feelings like these when I was a child and an adolescent (feelings that I could not have possibly expressed then. Even now the expression is not totally accurate but is an attempt more or less to "get there") and suspect they have influenced me a lot. A lack of ambition in many areas, something I once thought to be a problem but am now convinced is a gift, is an example.

A lot of the psychotherapy I have done (I am no expert) seems to have been geared to either deconstructing the ailing, pathological, destructive "self" and reconstructing a positive notion of the "self" (i.e. it’s perfectly healthy and acceptable to be a total wanker- laughs!). Little dips into oriental philosophy and epistemology, on the other hand, appear to question the very idea of the "self".

These questions are probably unanswerable. Anyway, this undefinable I still gets a sore arse after a long cycle ride and feels it needs to get angry, sad, afraid and to feel affection.

So I have to start somewhere. Fear dictates that I’ll start by postponing the description/definition until the next post.

Question: "Who cares who you are?"
Possible answer: "Who or what is the who who cares or doesn’t care and what is the who caring or not caring about?"

In the next post I may tell you who my favourite football team is or perhaps I'll explain why you are me.