I Ration My Pleasure

On the dark days, and I’m not speaking of whether or not the sun, so capricious in the far off foreign land to which I fled before anyone in the solar system imagined there could be such a thing as President Donald J. Trump, comparable delight and despair tussle for dominance as I wake. There is no more comfortable place on earth than my little bed, of which a little drawing accompanies the word cozy in the dictionary. Therein, the delight. The despair springs from the realization that there’s no good reason for me to abandon the sublime warmth of my bed. I have no commitments, and nothing to do, nothing for which I will be paid either in treasure or attention.

I will make myself some tea and some porridge and return upstairs to my desk, where I will hope there’s something in the news that infuriates or amuses me enough to satirize it. Not that anything I write will be read by very many. I’ve been writing with all my might for around eight months now, and can’t get the needle to budge. Sugar-rush one-trick pony political commentators who demonstrate their displeasure with the Turd Reich by using “fuck”, or some variation thereon, every fifth syllable have 20 times as many readers as I. It’s rare for anything I write to be officially…liked by more than 10 people.

I remind myself of the days in which I’d have been thrilled to have 10 readers, let alone likers, and try not to think too much about the time when I had tens of thousands. I throw myself at the day’s essay, which I commonly enjoy writing, as I’m enjoying writing this. But I must ration my pleasure, and force myself to wander every few sentences — to recheck my email 45 seconds after my last audit of it, to read the Wikipedia entry on a 35-year-old song I’ve just remembered. To do anything but finish.

Once I’ve finished the day’s essay, I will have nothing else to do, and my boredom will turn into depression, and my whole life will ache.

Last Friday, though, was an exception. I had an appointment — to have the National Health Service help me with my hearing aids. Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling) recently threatened to hit me over the head with a rolling pin if I didn’t get my hearing tested, this after months of my insisting that she turn on the subtitles when we watch TV, and we watch a great deal of TV. My hearing test revealed that, as is typical for dilapidated old has-beens, I no longer hear high frequencies. The hearing aids they gave me made the world sound brittle, but that was the less bad news. They screeched, unnervingly.

The audiologist I took them back to rolled his eyes, shook his head, and explained that the little fuckers were feeding back because not pushed in far enough. That evening, I pushed so hard I thought Righty might come out my left ear. No soap.

Are you getting a sense of how boring I’ve become? (Typical subscriber: “What do you mean, ‘become’?”)

On the long bus ride to Queen Mary’s Hospital in fucking Roehampton, I find little pleasure in the first Hunter Davies book I’ve read since his authorized Beatles biography. I found his writing pretty ordinary in 1968, and his memoir of widowerhood hasn’t changed my mind. A. A. Gill he ain’t, but of course neither am I.

I call Mrs. M from the first of the two buses that will take me home, and she agrees to meet me 2100 steps (mine not hers, her famous legs being shorter than my own) from our home, just across comically narrow major throughfare Richmond Road from what I enjoy calling the Docs and Fuck, and she, like our neighbours, the Fox and Duck.

It has become our practice, like that of the tiny, ancient couple I encountered daily in Salobreña in 2019 when I spent several weeks there hiding from the boredom, to walk together every afternoon. I put my arm around her shoulders, and she, as she rarely fails to do, put her own arm around my lower back. I feel loved. I glow.

But then I’m back upstairs in my little study, and here comes the blues, born of my feeling of complete impotence again. I have nothing to do, nothing for which I’ll be paid, nothing for which I’m likely to be admired. I endure my life, rather than live it, all the while knowing very well that I probably haven’t much of it left, and that if I’m wrong about that, and I live several more years, they’ll be in ever greater physical pain. And the shame I feel about the countless times in my younger days that I was the perfect bastard is unabated.

“Building the Perfect Bastard” ©2018 John Mendelsohn. All rights reserved.

Half an hour on the exercycle, watching Downton Abbey on Netflix, gets me through mid- and late afternoon, after which there is the relief of having to make dinner. (God, how I love feeling purposeful!) After dinner I’ll study Spanish for a while (learning a language is said to be awful for those hoping for dementia), and then return downstairs to join Mrs. M on the sofa. After the evening’s viewing, a pipeful of cannabis, which on a good night will make me feel serene and on a bad one make me agonize about the imminence of my departure.

And then the sweet relief of unconsciousness.

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https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/unrelievable-suffering-be-upon-him?r=7yu5q

https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/i-was-a-teenaged-racist?r=7yu5q

https://johnmendelssohn.substack.com/p/the-donald-g-trump-center-for-the?r=7yu5q