Friday 8 June 2012



















He didn't sleep much, not very often, not any more. Instead, he would lie wide awake at night. 

He didn't have any problems he thought, with some concern. He didn't have any real problems, serious problems like a troubled childhood he couldn't outgrow, or a terminal disease, or a career taking a turn for the worst. He didn't have a job to hate. He didn't need to make ends meet, he wasn't struggling to put food on the table. He didn't have any deadlines or exams or assignments. 

Everybody else had better problems than him, and that kept him up at night. 

He couldn't get any sleep, he would just think about everybody he had ever met and about their problems and if he started running out of people, he'd start to think about characters in films and books he'd read and seen (respectively - wait, no, not) and what their problems were. He'd usually start with that Scotsman who needed a horse and by the time the sun was rising he’d have realised that even Winnie the freakin Poo had bigger problems, more serious, more interesting, than he did. Winnie the Poo had friends with major depressive disorder and lived surrounded by potentially dangerous wild animals. One day he's just a depressed tiger or a friendly pig and the other day they're chasing after you with a killer glint in their eye and all their teeth on show. You never know with wild animals. He'd seen a program once, at four in the morning, about tamed lions. Anything, you never know what, could trigger the hunting machine back on. Anything could trigger the Tigger.

He wished he was Winnie the Poo sometimes, so that he could worry about his best friends hunting him down. He couldn't even go to a shrink. He had a good friend who was a great shrink, she might not even charge him a penny, but what would he say? 

"I wish I was Winnie the Poo sometimes"? 

Sure, that'd make an impression on her. She'd ask how his childhood had been, he'd say it had been just fine. She'd ask about his sexlife and he'd say it was okay. It had had better days of course, but who hadn't? She'd ask about traumas, phobias, obsessions. He didn't have any. Not one interesting fetish. Not anything even the tinyest bit Freudian. He wondered if she could make a case study about him. The symptomeless syndrom, medicine's final great mystery. Could he be sick of not being sick? 

Was there a name for something like that? Maybe she would name a condition after him. She'd probably name it after herself of course, they always do that, Doctors do. They let the patient do all the suffering, but they take all the credit and go ahead and name the disease after themselves. He knew pretty well none of those kidnapped kids was called Stockholm. 

Winnie the Poo, for Christ's sake. He was almost as lame as the teletubbies. He wondered if the teletubbies had any problems of their own, and if they hadn't, if it kept them up at night, the whole night through, night after night after night?

(-Sanity is away at the moment, can I help you or would you rather leave a note?)



No comments:

Post a Comment