gut feeling

This was the script for this morning's torture session.

And after doing that four times through, there was this verbal instruction: Plank. Pushup. Jump your feet to your hands and back again. Plank. Two pushups, two jumps, plank, three pushups, three jumps - and so on. Then two side planks, each one held for 45 seconds. It's core work, and now that I'm in my bed I'm feeling it, in the band of muscle around the middle of my body, in such a way that promises it'll feel a whole lot worse tomorrow. And yet, expert with three months' experience at this business that I am, I think 'core' is a misnomer because there is another space within my body, right at its centre, which is never activated by all of this elaborately strategised and controlled violence.

I know the shape of that middle space through a variety of experiences. When elevated levels of progesterone in my system will not allow me to feel the lightness or emptiness that I like in there, my whole self feels correspondingly turgid and heavy. If I drink wine or whisky on an empty stomach I can feel the delicious glowing warmth and liquidity of drunkenness spreading outwards from there, sometimes so fast that I actually have the sense that I'm sinking or maybe melting. And sometimes this place, the pit of my stomach, is the site of tremors of agitation that are so insistent and vivid that it seems ridiculous to call them 'butterflies.' I have an adequate grasp of the physiology of these sensations but what I cannot understand is why butterflies in particular make it so difficult to keep rational thoughts in my head, to approach challenges and questions calmly and without self-deception - and so forth.

You know, I didn't read philosophy and critical theory anywhere near as systematically as I should have done, considering how much time I spent on acquiring the tools of my trade, and so I don't really know what I'm supposed to think about the mind-body problem. What I can say is, it feels very much not only as if there is a distinct separation and qualitative differences, but also that in my head there's a little white hippy sort of person dressed in white robes who tells me what's what and gives me good advice, but in a most unfortunate thin droning nasally voice which is sort of indistinct, whereas in my stomach there is a little red shiny person wearing not much who doesn't really say anything but somehow tempts and urges me to do what the fuck I want at all times without ever thinking about anything except how to bring about this doing of whatever the fuck it is that I want.

Yeah, well. After training I went home and instead of getting straight on my bike and going to work, I got back in bed in my sweaty exercise clothes and went back to sleep - a rare instance of combining the aims of the red person and the white, because it felt pretty much orgasmically great to just dissolve into the total relaxation of my bed, wallowing in my filth, but also I had the day off work to hang with Len, so prolonging the sleeping part of the day meant shortening the time available for playing Pokemon etc. We got up late, went out for breakfast, I took him to have his hair cut and then we went to the zoo which was definitely Leonard's idea and not mine.

I do all these normal things and sometimes I feel intensely agitated inside and sometimes I feel oblivious and serene. That in itself isn't a problem, it's just what happens from being alive: you feel things. My difficulty is that I know I have got to think carefully, and be careful, right now, but when I swing my mind around and point it at the issue, oops! there goes the gut, rolling over like the barrel they drew the National Service birthdates out of, and making about as much sense of the jumble of things inside.

I could save a considerable chunk of my time and yours, I guess, by just writing 'I'm a dill and in my life I have made many decisions that in hindsight I haven't found to be easily defensible, and here I am now again at the moment of making another such decision, and what I'm wondering is, In what sense does this situation I am looking at actually present me with a choice?'


Lenny enjoys having his hair cut because the first time I took him to my salon, they complimented him on his taste in music - sincerely, I believe - they asked him what he likes and he told them he likes Lykke Li. My hairdresser is the most beautiful woman I know and I could have watched her all day, being so delightfully kind and gentle to my boy.

On the coffee table in the salon there was a book of photographs of what was described as the 'indie scene' in Britain in the 1980s. I tried to look at these pictures without instantly setting them into some kind of relation with myself and thus closing them down, but it wasn't working for me.


The salon apprentice, who had gone to school with the young woman murdered in the park, told me that today the police arrested someone for the vandalism of the grass next to the clusters of candles and flowers.

At the zoo we went first to the butterfly enclosure. This was the first of two reasons Leonard was determined to go there today in the bleakness and the cold wind. I failed to capture the longed-for moment when a butterfly landed on his outstretched hand but I did get the Before and the After   

The other thing Lenny wanted to do was make a comic book of drawings of animals. It turned out that by this he meant I would draw the animal and he would write its name.












This highly inequitable division of labour does not represent the truth of our relationship.