Why am I even?

posting my indiegogo project here:

http://igg.me/p/257095?a=1636811

why? maybe it will increase ranking traffic something something, eh.

anyway, click it.

click it, click it, click it, click it.


and then fund it.

How Reality Should Be

Dogs should live forever.

aaand we're back...

...to feeling shit all the time.

Partner has moved out, so cold my damn toes blistered last night. Going to sleep as the sun comes up, waking for a single meal a day, sleeping after sitting staring at a computer all night.

Not working, same things just buzzing around my head constantly, yeah i guess it's all pretty shit.

BUT HEY I'M NOT GAMBLING!!

An Exciting Story that Everyone Should Read!

Post was originally titled "A Boring Piece of Shit That No-One Will Ever Read" but decided to make the minor adjustments in keeping with my new found optimism. So let's talk about that.

Lately I've been getting up at 8:30am each day and going to sleep around 10pm which is incredibly bizarre for me, I don't recall EVER doing that for more than 1-2 days in a row. I am also catching myself sinking into depression more and being able to avert it sometimes, and if it does take a hold I'm able to tell myself that it will pass and I'll feel better. Why haven't you tried doing that before?

For awhile I was getting worse, was thinking about suicide more often and for longer periods, I suppose I could now be in one of those rebound states mentioned above, ready to plummet into despair any day now, hopefully not.

Interestingly all this has happened since I've stopped taking my anti-depressants.

Anyway there's some words for whoever, hopefully they'll mean something to someone.

is all gone

last few times....  free chips... won a fair bit, i mean, it doesn't mean anything anymore.. but more than a few weeks average wages.. winning.. but then losing, and even when winning is losing... i need to lose, i need to fail. it's not a good thing. anyway i hope you have a nice day.

I look in the mirror and all I see

is;
someone who craves losing more than happiness.
someone who shuns the nicest people they meet.
someone who just can't think of a reason.
someone who still thinks they're important even though they're posting to a blog that literally no-one reads.
someone who doesn't give a fuck if by reading that last point you've disproved it.

i look in the mirror and all i see is the same old face staring back at me.

that might be a quote, i don't know, i don't care- fuck you, fuck you all.

Changes

Had my first dream about gambling where I didn't win last night.

I love my girlfriend

I hope she comes back soon.

Gambling online with PayPal

After you've exhausted your lines of credit and locked yourself out of your accounts you may decide to turn to using your Paypal account to gamble.

In all but a handful of countries this is against their ToS but for a seasoned gambling addict there are ways around it.

Most of these involve transferring from your PP to a different eWallet or currency, such as uKash, however a word of warning if you decide to go this route;

Do not.

No reputable business will trade Paypal for anything without at least a 7 day cooling off period. If you DO find somewhere that offers instant conversions, it is a scam. I would list sites here that are scams but it's easier for me to list the ones that aren't scams:

1. None.

They will "process" your order, there will then be some problem with processing, they'll make something up, and they will tell you to file a Paypal Claim to get your money back.

Sounds fair enough right?

Nope, As soon as you file a claim and tell Paypal it was for a non-tangible (virtual) item, they will side with the seller, as the PP buyer protection policy does not cover these goods.

So if you have still done this and find yourself reading this, file an Unauthorized Transaction dispute instead.

Reason why casinos are bastards # 22194

When you tell them you want to close your account they will do anything they can to stop you, including offering bonuses or deposit limits which are useless (see my next update on why).

Life is shit.

So is this blog.

I've quit gambling.

Today I went to the bank with my girlfriend and closed my bank account which was the last method available to me to gamble (aside from cash which I never get).

So although I should be feeling good, I'm feeling really shitty.

Maybe in a few weeks/months once I stop feeling shitty I'll post something worthwhile.

Uh, yeah.

I bought a pack of cigarettes.

I think I need to change this blog back to having some kind of story instead of just saying what happens to me each day, as that is far too depressing.

If anyone has any suggestions feel free to comment, I've never had a comment...

Ocsoberfest

My dog wants me to quit smoking.

I usually smoke perhaps a pack every two months, lately it's about a pack a week..
Since moving out and with various other stresses- gambling rehab, the come-down from the pills, the pills not helping with work, work, relationship difficulties, it's obviously increased.

The idea of a month without them isn't so bad, but having three left in the pack is difficult, like walking away from a pokie with $3 left in it, or ignoring the half a bottle of vodka in the glove box of my car.

Speaking of the vodka I've had some near misses lately, things could have gone worse, so I feel karma demands a degree of restraint on my behalf.

But going for the trifecta is never easy... I'm unsure whether to attempt it, which sounds like I won't.. but it's probably best to not fall back in to all three vices for want of a few cigarettes now and then.

But then...

I have a blog?

Oh yeah, this thing...

So the original idea here was that I'd spit out a bunch of "chapters" and eventually end up with a book I could sell on eBay for $1.99 a pop, but it turns out that the only person reading the posts was my partner and eBay can go fornicate themselves, another matter entirely.

The point being that this blog will now probably become more like your standard mundane blog, less like a story and more like someone crapping on about their day and you can basically pick any random post and it'll all be the same junk.

So for those of you who care (hi honey); Yes, the rumors you've heard in the tabloids are true, I've been kicked out of my partners house. Originally it wasn't to do with gambling, but then it somehow became about gambling and now I'm in one of those hellish periods where I have to attend soul-crushingly bleak meetings three times a week with various people who'd rather be somewhere else.

In addition to this I've gone on amphetamines lately, on account of not being able to focus on my work at all. They don't seem to help, just keep me up until the wee hours of the morning but in terms of focus, concentration and motivation- nada.

Basically at this point I'm finding life to be like this blog: very difficult to bother with or to ascertain the point of it's existence.

 So for all my adoring fans out there, thanks for tuning in but the story (now of recovery) is about to get boring.

Chapter 9 – And Now for Something Completely the Same

While glancing over my cliff notes I noticed an annotation from my editor (me) that I wanted more information on my life “Pre-morbid” – a delightful term I picked up from one of the various letters that doctors have written about me and sent to other doctors at various stages of my life.

I also would like to depart from stories of my latter gambling and booze fuelled life to something a bit earlier…

Around the age of 8, as best my memory recollects, I noticed I had a talent for most things creative- I started doing paintings that didn’t end up on the fridge but hung in a nice frame on the wall of not only my house, but relatives houses, I played piano for a long time and then guitar when I had to switch to a cooler instrument for high school, and I’m even writing this book- the first thing over a few hundred words I’ve ever tried writing.

I attribute most of this to a few attributes- relatively high intelligence, good observational skills, reading a lot and a long standing major depressive disorder. There’s nothing that makes it easier to take yourself seriously than being totally self-absorbed, and like I would always say when painting with pastels, it’s easiest to work from black.

Around the age I was old enough to realise my parents were not only regular human beings with their own lives and faults each locked into a loveless and often spiteful marriage I started drinking quite heavily, I was around 14 and became something of a legend, or a spectacle, amongst my friends- a Hodge podge of the not-cool-enough for the cool group and too cool for the nerds (this was before nerds were the new cool).

We borrowed a row boat from somewhere, probably someone’s cool uncle, and freighted two cartons of beer (this is Australian beer, 32 standard drinks to a carton), a bottle of gin, a bottle of Midori and several tanks of nitrous oxide over to a small island on the river. There were about 8 of us at most but I somehow managed to drink an entire carton plus another 4 beers from the second carton and half the gin.

I didn’t vomit, I didn’t even have a hangover. It’s one of those stories that no-one believed except my friends and myself, and I even doubt it myself somehow- despite being there and remembering it in pretty vivid detail (at one point I fell face first into the river, which I noticed the next morning was filled with rocks covered in oysters).

Now as liberal as Australia is with its liquor regulation there’s not a venue in the country that would let a 14 year old into the gaming room, and indeed as I mentioned near the beginning of this story I didn’t start until I was 18. But they have something to cater for the young gambler-to-be: The Skill Tester.

For those who know them by a different name, these are the claw machines filled with stuffed animals or watches or candy. You put in a dollar (20 cents back then) and move the claw into position over your intended prey where it then descends and gently caresses your desired item before moving back to drop the thin air it’s grasped down the chute.

I’d wag school to go play these things, I’d play them in the lunch break at work while I was working in my father’s pharmacy, sometimes I’d throw in some fishing line with a hook and bypass the troublesome claw and niggling requirement for fresh 20c pieces until I eventually had bags full of these toys which I would then take home and blow the crap out of with magnesium and deodorant cans.

My long term memory has never been particularly good, my short term is fine- my girlfriend is endlessly asking me where she left her mobile phone or keys and I can usually tell her where I last saw them, not that I’m looking or that she ever leaves them in the same place- I just recall visual data well, for short periods.

Memories of my childhood were vague even when I was still a child, like cheerios floating around in a bowl of milk. After ten years of dedicating my life to the routine of getting up hung over, going to work late, gambling, drinking, passing out and repeating until the weekend when I’d usually sleep for 40 hours straight the cheerios are now mostly soggy ruins sitting at the bottom of the bowl. But here are a few things I do remember well:

The cheat codes for Wonderboy III: The Dragon’s Trap.

My mother was very keen to get away from the house when she could and loved horses, or horse clubs at least, she was able to rope my brother (older than me by two years) into going to pony club (I went when I was young but gave up after a horse decided it would be easier for me to clear the jumps if it threw me over them) which eventually became full time Equestrian, Cross-Country, Show Jumping and whatever else required being somewhere else with a bunch of horses and no husband. I didn’t mind at the time- I assumed I was just too boring because all I wanted to do was play video games, and I still don’t mind now knowing that she just wanted out of the marriage but wouldn’t put my brother and I through that until we were out of the house.

I bagged and sold horse crap for more money than I’d make in my first few “real” jobs. We had a four-wheeled motorbike for carting the horse crap down to the highway to put on a trailer for $2 a bag. Sometimes we’d tie a sheet of corrugated iron to the back of the bike and call it “The Sled”. Some hapless passenger would then lie on the sheet of iron (don’t forget the safety goggles!) and be hurled around one of the flatter paddocks, usually through as many piles of horse and cow shit as I could swing them through.
We had to put an end to that when my friend Shane came off and caught his wrist on a corner of The Sled, opening one of the veins and getting quite a lot of blood on the bike.

The second time the bike tasted blood was when I was watching my brother practicing show jumping one day. The horse threw him while going over a jump, he landed in front of the horse and then the horse landed on him, crushing his spleen. I had to race him to the highway on the bike to meet the ambulance (the ambulance driver later told me he thought he was going to have to take two people to hospital the way I was driving) whereupon he was taken to hospital. His veins collapsed and he was turning blue- he survived but sans spleen which kept him from joining the army which was going to be his escape from the horse business (he had now well and truly thrown in the towel for that particular vocation), he joined the police force instead- within two years he’d written off three police vehicles and beaten up a bunch of people so I guess he’s happy.

The next soggy cheerio that I can dredge up from the bottom of the bowl is the day I was at home by myself and ignored the sound of one of the horses galloping around a paddock for 5 or 10 minutes. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I may even have been masturbating (I was at that age where it was done frantically every time you had the house to yourself) which makes me feel even more guilty. Several minutes after the galloping stopped I noticed something felt wrong, I don’t know why the galloping didn’t peak my interest but the silence did. I walked outside and the silence seemed even louder- no dogs or cows or even insects as I recall, and noticed Nida who I will always remember as the horse my brother punched in the nose when it was acting up one day, standing at the top corner of her paddock looking at me.

She was holding her front leg off the ground and as I neared I saw it was not being held so much as dangling, it had been snapped and was held in place only by the twisted skin around the bone. She must have hit a rabbit hole while bolting around the paddock. The fetlock had also been torn and was hanging limp and useless with blood flowing over it and falling onto the grass. I picked some grass for her to chew on which she obliged for me while we waited for the vet to come and put a bullet in her brain.

There are other things I recall: my father lifting my dog Gilby from the back of his truck, he’d been hit by a car, never buy your kid a beagle, they wander too much. And the time I took a gun to school in my guitar case.

You’ve probably noticed most of my memories are miserable, I’d like to say that there’s some good ones, or that I’m probably only remembering the bad ones, but I know I’m not. Because even to this day I have difficulty feeling any kind of positive emotions- I can be playing a video game, watching a movie, getting a blow job, drunk or winning a thousand dollars and all I can think, at best, is “I should be happy”. It’s as if the emotion just doesn’t exist for me anymore, if it ever did.

There was more I wanted to say but this chapter has gone on too long already.

Chapter 8 – The Night Before

I’m not an ugly person.

Many people think of the problem gambler or anyone with an addiction as being shifty, dirty and generally unattractive. Probably it has a lot to do with the way anyone with these issues is portrayed in popular media. The Disney world, as I call it, has little to do with actual life, girls are weaned on romantic comedies and boys on our science fiction and war movies. When the little girls grow up they find out that everyone isn’t like Hugh Grant (not even Hugh Grant), and the boys just get pissed off and take it out on everyone, including themselves, before going off to mediocrity in some nine to five or getting half their face blown off in some arbitrary war.

Anyway the point I’m making, and it’s a little laboured tonight as I’ve had a few drinks- is that I am not all that ugly.

So it is inevitable that over the past ten odd years I’ve been in a few relationships and on a few dates, it was one of the latter that begun the precipitous shit storm that saw me leaving Sydney and my job of 7 years.

The date was with a girl whose name I don’t recall, it was setup online through one of those websites that must make ungodly amounts of cash from desperate, sad lonely people- which probably summed me up nicely.

Now I say I’m not that unattractive but as soon as the girl I was meeting for the date walked into the cinema lobby I knew I was woefully outclassed. Fortunately it was one of those fancy expensive cinemas where they serve booze so I set about getting sloshed while we made small talk- I don’t remember much about her other than that she was stunning, had close cropped hair and owned over 60 pairs of shoes.

Also I have a bad habit of brutally frank honesty on first dates, I always confess and methodically list each and every one of my faults, including gambling, drinking, drug use, depression and not calling my mother as much as I should.

Anyhow the date was an unmitigated disaster. I don’t care what everyone thinks- I hated The Dark Knight, the whole Heath Ledger thing struck me sourly; I don’t know if it’s because I was jealous of someone achieving such fame simply for being a drug addict who pushed it just a little too far or if I was simply bummed about the date which although she hadn’t said as much, was no surprise when she said she’d just like to be friends at the end of the night.

Either way it didn’t matter- now I had my excuse to hit the pubs.

The problem turned out to be that the date had occurred in Chatswood, which was over the opposite side of the harbour from my house. Now since I’d had a couple of bottles of wine with the movie I didn’t particularly give a fuck about this but when I was taking an off-ramp onto the freeway at 140km/h at four in the morning after half a dozen beers and a good portion of a bottle of vodka I began to start giving more of a fuck.

Particularly when the car started slaloming into the concrete dividing wall of a near-90 degree turn the amount of a fuck I was giving peaked. I spun to a stop and immediately restarted the car, it wasn’t the first time I’d pranged a car drunk and I knew I’d be in shit if I were caught and I had to be at work tomorrow.

I made it perhaps 2 kilometres before I noticed a lot of steam and smoke coming from somewhere nearby, it seemed likely that it was emanating from my car as the temperature gauge was redlining and I also couldn’t see much else past the bonnet of my car. I pulled over halfway across the harbour bridge even though there’s actually nowhere to pull over, so I suppose I just stopped and stumbled out of the car.

What it reminded me of was the last time I’d done this to my car, I was a fair bit younger but it was the same mistake; I’d tried to make a turn onto the highway from the pub at over 100km/h, this was a dead 90 degree turn and I had no chance, I ended up going across the highway, backwards, at 100km/h and into a tree. I’d immediately restarted the car and tried to drive but it hadn’t moved. I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw what I thought was a branch on the back window so had given it more gas, thinking I was tangled up in a shrub or something, the car had started to swerve side to side, but still not forward and smoke was coming from the back but then eventually it edged forward and I was on my merry way home. I parked the car in the garage and fell into bed. I almost forgot about it until the next morning when I opened the garage and realized that it wasn’t a branch I’d seen in the rear-view mirror but the spiderweb of shattered glass on account of my entire back end being wrapped around a tree. The car was a write-off. I was lucky I’d hit the tree as it was standing on an embankment which descended into a dam.

So I wasn’t entirely surprised when I saw that the extent of the damage to my vehicle this time was more than anticipated, the front end was smashed in, one tyre was shredded on account of the wheel arch gouging it and the radiator was somewhere back in Chatswood.

This was a problem, there are signs all over the harbour bridge telling you to stay put in case of breakdown as the bridge is constantly monitored with cameras and to top it all off I was absolutely blind rotten drunk.

I threw the empty cans out of my car and poured the remains of the open beer I had onto the engine (I wasn’t ready to part with the remains of the vodka yet), it evaporated almost instantly in a hiss. For some reason I snapped a photo on my phone, I have it to this day, it’s almost unrecognizable as to what you are looking at unless you know, I suppose it has served as a reminder as I haven’t ever driven drunk since.

I was able to restart the car and drive very slowly, having to stop every 500 meters or so to let the car cool down, in addition to the smoke and steam there were now sparks coming from the front right wheel and it was getting almost impossible to steer with any degree of accuracy.

It was around then that I had the bright idea (along the same vein as wearing pants on your head I imagine) of driving to work instead of home- they were both about the same distance and I knew that I would never get to work tomorrow if I went home, with what would undoubtedly prove to be a record-breaking hangover and no vehicle to speak of it seemed logical that I camp out in the work parking lot for the night and finish the rest of the vodka while I weighed up my options.

My options turned out to be almost freezing to death in the car and calling my mother, hysterically, I don’t recall anything I said and she didn’t understand any of it either, but it was the final nail in a coffin which was now so brimming with nails it looked like a porcupine. Once you’ve called your mother in that state it’s all over.

I don’t recall anything else about that night and I’m glad of that at least, one of the worst nights of my life so far and I hadn’t even gambled.

Chapter 7 – The Woodpecker

It seems natural here that when I flap my arms quite hard I achieve an ungainly type of upward lift, reminiscent of the awkward way a chicken may fly just long enough to almost clear a fence before crashing back down to earth in a cloud of feathers. I recall quite some time ago I used to be able to effortlessly swoop about, so high the land would look like something in Google earth and I would get scared before falling back to earth. I’d often have trouble finding my way back to the place I took off from, which was almost always the farm in Valla where I spent perhaps five years of my life between the ages 13 and 18. My memory of back then is very poor but I’m almost certain I couldn’t fly and so that means that this is a dream, not an unpleasant one, I can fly in all my good dreams- albeit in a rather ungainly chicken-like manner.

Another recurring motif in my dreams is planes crashing, I don’t recall if this occurred prior to 9/11 (which would have occurred around the time I was leaving Valla), but the sound of engines whining overhead in a dream will soon be followed by a large plane emerging over the trees and then arcing into the ground, usually into a paddock on the farm at Valla.

That isn’t happening in this dream though, and since I know it’s a dream I know I only have a few seconds before my mind wakes me up and there’s something distant telling me that I’m going to wish it hadn’t.

In this dream a gun is pushed into my back as I’m being shoved into a small walk in freezer, there’s ice sludge on the floor, I can’t feel my feet and for some reason there’s a woodpecker in the freezer tapping away at a frozen box and every time he taps there’s a resounding thud in my head.

The dream is giving way to reality, I seem to be upside down, in a car- the seatbelt digging painfully into my back, with my pants on my head and John from work standing outside my window and for a moment the reality seems distinctly less real than the dream.

Then I notice the headache and things become very painfully real. I’m in my car for some reason, it’s very cold, the windows are iced over with small water droplets and I can indeed see John from work outside the window, tapping, as he sees that I’m awake he moves away.

I flip over and so does my stomach as I grope for the door handle, my pants falling off my head, I remember something now- how apparently most of the heat escapes your body from your head, so I should put my pants on my head. Why I would have been not only thinking such nonsense but believing and acting upon it may have something to do with the empty cans spilling out with me from the back seat of the car and into my work’s parking lot. Before I have time to recall anything else I’m hunched over the drain grate in the middle of the car park feeling that acidy vomit that comes from too much booze and not enough food forcing its way up my throat, out my mouth and down the drain, filling up my sinuses as it goes.

I’m starting to wish I’d stayed in the freezer with the woodpecker.

I glance, slowly, still down on my hands and knees, around the car park. Once it stops spinning I see that there’s almost no cars, it’s very early, earlier than I’ve ever been in to work for sure, normally I show up sometime around midday, not even the boss is in yet, John must be getting an early start.

There’s a faint memory rising out of the sludge, the Harbour Bridge? I was driving over it, very late and very slow… it seemed to take me about 30 minutes to get across it. It’s a big bridge sure, but why did it take so long? My car, something was wrong with my car, it was overheating.

What was I doing crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge last night on a work night? It’s a fair way out of my way… I turn as I stand up and see my car, the car park starts spinning again as I crash to my knees and miss the drain entirely this time, not that I was paying attention because when I’d turned I’d seen my car.

And I’d remembered.

Chapter 6 – Wiggle Room

There was a discussion with my girlfriend and I, wherein I was somewhat cornered into agreeing to some goals and making a few concessions, basically on the understanding that if these weren’t done within a month she’d break up with me (she calls it spending some time apart but knowing what state I’d be in after that rejection she would not be wanting to take me back anytime soon). Two weeks later she informed me that I was not living up to my end of the deal (which she prefers not to call a deal, or an arrangement, I’m not sure exactly what it was, an ultimatum?) and this set off the old gamble fuse, when it starts burning you know you’re about to gamble, maybe in a few hours or maybe in two or three days at the outside if you’re able to distract yourself. I reasoned to myself that if she was still going to leave me regardless of whether I was gambling or not (as I hadn’t in those two weeks) then hell, I may as well gamble, right?

So I gambled, I lost an undisclosed amount (it’s pointless trying to take some strange kind of pride in the amount you’ve lost because there’s always someone out there losing more) and then stayed in bed for four or five days, deeply depressed.

The outcome was of course another agreement, or deal, or whatever you like to call it.

This time I need to see a councillor once a week and write in this book once a day, since I’ve been feeling nauseated and lethargic (such a better word than lazy!) all day I thought I’d wriggle out of today’s memoire by simply writing about why I’m writing.

Which is what I just did.

Chapter 5 - Friends in low places

SCENE MISSING (Please skip to next chapter)

MY NOTES: About Dave and John. Change the title though.