Introspection on the Eve of the Year-Death

It's that time of year again folks, the time when I wake up in a cold sweat after weeks of partying and realise that another year is about to die and that I'm not sure if I've achieved anything, or bettered the world in any way possible. Y'know, that lovely ould feeling of mortality that conspires to make you feel like as worthless as a flea-ridden badger pelt.


I love that feeling. It's ace.


The past weeks have, if I'm honest, been a bit of a blur. Company xmas party (where I danced for 5 hours in a tuxedo and a fez), team xmas party (where we dressed up as medieval sorts and attended a wench-served banquetting hall) and the endless succession of festive catch-ups with friends and loved ones.

Then there was christmas itself: christmas eve, christmas day, and Boxing Day...all accompanied by food and drink...copious amounts of drink. I took the missus home with me to spend the holiday with my family, and now she's considering entering rehab. It was a lot of fun, but now I'm just about ready for a massive spell of detox and rest.

So now it's NYE, and I'm sitting in my boxers watching my (slightly insane) girlfriend dance around listening to 90's dance music while she gets ready. She's like a demented toddler, on crack, but the song is good for the end of the year.

SO, introspection. What was good, and what was shite about this year?

BAD

1. Social retreat (from almost everyone I hold dear) and the loss of huge swathes of memory.
2. Physical deterioration (I gradually became a big huge fat fucker, topping at 15st 8 - #fatcunt)
3. Near-perpetual money worries.
4. Horrendously neglecting, and forgetting how to blog (three posts in a year! woohoo!!).
5. Doing nothing to move away from a job I realise I seriously dislike. 
6. Procrastination in writing, the thing I actually want to do for a living.
7. Drinking too much, sleeping too little, taking my health for granted and waking up on the floor of my living room a few too many time.
8. Psycho-fucking-therapy.
9. My best mate moving away from London.
10. Not finishing writing the novel I promised myself I'd complete, in spite of having loads of time to do it in.
11. Finding out last week that one of my best friends was knocked over in a hit and run collision, and is now lying in hospital in Belfast. The cunt driving the car hasn't been found, and Stephen is in an induced come, though showing signs of stability and improvement.

So that all sounds pretty shite, eh? But there were a few great times as well...


GOOD

1. A holiday I took with the Missus to Italy in September. (The pasta!! The wine!! The PIZZA!!) and another not-so-good (but fun) trip to Egypt in April.
2. Paying off my debts with my annual bonus.
3. Writing a pilot drama script for a Channel 4 screenwriting competition. I didn't win, but I  completed the fucker in two days and was really pleased with it. It gave me a bit of confidence that I could do this for a living, in spite of the rejection and mad, murderous doubts.
4. Finally figuring out what I want to do with my life, and coming up with a rough plan for the next year. (It involves a lot of writing).
5. Getting back into boxing and exercise and shifting some of the blubber I'd accumulated. Much more to do there.
6. Running the Dublin marathon on 29th October and finishing, despite twisting my knee. 
7. The trip to Dublin for the marathon; meeting my best mates, staying in my first 5 star hotel, and going on some epic Dublin pub crawls.
8. Xmas with the Missus and my crazy family.

On the whole, it seems this year had more bad times than good, but I'm quietly optimistic for the new year. I'll be 26 in a few weeks, and I'm spending my holiday abroad...in India! Plus, I've got a few resolutions that I'll be trying my best to stick to, and which might make me a bit happier in my life.

So I think that's enough introspection for now, although I sadly realise that all these good and bad points could have made a separate blog entry, so I'll have to stop being such a lazy bastard.

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you have a lovely evening, and you all have a wonderful 2013.

x

How Proud We Are

So I've been a fight fan for about 10 years, and there's nothing better than seeing an Irish boxer doing well.

At this Olympics, our tiny country won 4 medals. That's almost 1 per every million. Basically our fighters are 1 in a million.

I cried my eyes out when Katie Taylor won her gold. She blasted the glass ceiling off the world of fucking boxing, and I love her.

Who inspires you?

Love,
Con

'The Cave Dweller', or 'Whatever happened to the last few Years?'

 Harumph.

So I haven't blogged in a while, a long while. Yesterday, I happened to click into my bookmarked pages, and this bloggo came up, and I shamefacedly had a look.

Nothing. Nothing happening at all. It was about as much fun as a 'Make a Wish' daytrip to Chernobyl, and not even half as entertaining. I looked over at the section marked 'The Past' and was surprised to see:
2011 (3)
2010 (42)
2009 (78)

Not even a single post from 2012 - how terrible.

My little blog had gone from being a (hopefully) funny and well-written online journal, to a dirty, festering, stinking, lethargic pile of shite; lazy and insignificantly dull.

In the last two years, I more or less gave up on the whole blogosphere heart-on-sleeve approach to writing, and tried to write a book. Also, I got a girlfriend, a real life one this time, and the relationship soon surpassed my previous record of 9 weeks. I soon got involved in the trivial and wonderful aspects of having a lady-woman to report to, part of which probably meant quitting from divulging my shameful, drunken antics to internet strangers, and I 'settled down'. Yuck.

Anyway, I'm still with the lovely woman (she's a mad Jewess with curly hair and a wicked sense of humour) in our little cave that we share in Fulham, and I'm still writing my book, which is about a crazy man, but I'm happy to return to the Pizza Box and pick up where I left off.

One reason for this turnaround is that I have no memories from the past two years, and very few from the past three or four other than the ones I can glean from Facebook, the photos saved to my harddrive, and past posts here. Seriously, hardly any at all!

I lived in a bit of an insomniac, drunken haze since I moved back to Ireland from the USA, and I stayed in my little shadow world thereafter, until a few weeks ago when I had a sudden moment of awakening and found to my horror that I was 25, and sleepwalking through my life. I had ballooned in weight, was seeing a shrink, had taken to sleeping all day during the weekend, and went for days at a time without speaking. When I did speak, it was either to snap or bark at someone, or rasp sarcastically. I had gone from being a cheerful sort of chap to becoming a bit of a cunt. I'd even fucked my career up! I was supposed to be a lawyer, remember? But I can definitely recall being invited not to continue my career with the firm I was supposed to work with. Good job, Conbot.

Years had passed, and I had lost the way of myself a bit and woke up to the great hangover of the truth that I had missed at least four years of my life. My personality had completely changed, and I had no idea who I was. I'm sure there are people I knew when I was younger who wouldn't even recognise me.

It's bizarre, I rummage through my bureau in my room, and find the manuscript to a novel I've been writing and it's 60,000 words. I have only vague memories of writing a lot of it, and have had to rediscover the characters and the plot.

Other things are harder. I saw a picture of a friend of mine on Facebook, a girl from University. She and I were 'rather close' then, and I can barely remember more than a few glimpses. Not even the bad stuff, which I'm sure was abundant (if she was hanging out with me!)

So I contacted a load of my friends and gave them the skinny. I had fallen off the radar and plummeted headfirst into a large quagmire of shite and doubt, changing from a happy scamp into a hairy recluse man. I asked those friends I could remember to help me by loaning me some of their memories, and that's why I'm back.

Over the next few weeks and months, I'll post what these friends reply to me with, and try to add my own memories of what they mean to me. It'll be as new to me as it will be to any of you suckers who stick around to read.

At best, I might get some memories back and maybe rebuild my blog. At worst, I'll chase what remaining followers I have into the ocean.

We'll see.
C