Two months in the life of miserable old, me: Part 1

Saturday 12th January.

I’m sitting with my wife in the orbit café on what is a very relaxing Saturday afternoon. We finished our coffee a while ago, but she is reading her book, I my newspaper, both of us happily lingering in the genial atmosphere of this café. The bustle of it, the talk of people around us, the music – all of this is very soothing to us, and it’s lovely to come out here and escape from ourselves, our marriage, our loneliness and somehow feel connected to the world.

As well as the ambiance of the café and the buzz of Saturday afternoon, there’s also a mood of freshness in the air, it being the tenth of January. The misery and doom of Christmas and New Year is now over, and really, I have to admit to feeling quite positive and hopeful about life for some reason.

And so I thought I’d take this opportunity to begin writing my ‘story’. I say ‘story’ because I’m not really sure what exactly it’s going to be yet. It may well be a diary. But I don’t know, I just felt like writing something about my life; it was a New Year’s resolution that I promised myself, and feeling unusually energised this afternoon, I thought I’d make a start. I just want to write a bit about my life. Perhaps to try and explain myself, perhaps as a therapeutic device. I’m really not quite sure.

So then my wife and I are sat at our table. To the onlooker, who sees me with my newspaper and her with her book, sitting here ignoring each other, occasionally snappy and short with one another – my wife trying to tell me something, pointing surreptitiously to above her mouth, indicating. I confused, she getting angry. Wondering what on earth she wants, then realising that I obviously have cream on my face and with embarrassment wiping it off – to the onlooker we look like the typical, middles class, ageing, married couple. Frustrated and unhappy with our lives, lonely; yet all the same sensitive and hopeful, come here to the café in the (admittedly vain) hopes of meeting other people, of socialising, of bumping into I don’t know who, who’s going to miraculously wave their magic wand and rescue us, my wife and I, from the treadmill doom of our lives, and give us back that happiness that once seemed, in our youth, our God given right.

My wife and I usually bicker and argue. Today at least out shopping in town, we were both sufficiently happy at heart that it didn’t take a nasty turn. By the time we reached the café, and sat down to have coffee and lunch, our spirits rose and we were able to put aside the quarrel. On other days though it can get really bad. Thankfully not today.

So we came and sat in the café, not saying a single word to each other, ignoring each other, yet somehow eternally bonded, just like the earth and the moon, or the sun and the earth or what you will. We neither of us have many friends, and ironically it is our marriage, our close union, that has led to our profound loneliness. As she reads and I read, we are both secretly hoping that someone else will approach, perhaps a young person, for her a young man, for me a young lady, though I don’t really care, and bowl us over with the spirit of youth; someone positive and radiant, who can listen to all our problems and complaints, listen to our life stories and bring us back into the world of the living. My wife I know………oh what’s this?……She’s asking what on earth I’m doing, scowling at me furtively, as though it’s a crime to write. I think she knows I’m writing some sort of memoir, or analytical thesis of my life, our marriage and our problems. She’s not impressed at all, and scowls, irritated at me, as though to tell me not to embarrass her and the entire world by writing. Anyway as I was saying I know my wife often talks about going to a psychiatrist to talk of her problems. She is, like me, desperately unhappy. She wants more from life, she wants understanding.

Of course in the end, nobody and no solution, miraculously jumps out of the walls of the café, to rescue my wife and I from the misery of our fate. We are alone, in a lonely world, and only have one another. No one will save us, and we are, as someone once said, like two convicts chained together, left on a rudderless dinghy, floating aimlessly through the emptiness of a dark and barren ocean.

Monday 19th January.

I don’t feel like writing at all today but am forcing myself to do it. Ten days have elapsed since I made that last positive entry. Needless to say that positive mood soon deserted me, I felt sick, sad and sulphourous and in no mood to write and so didn’t. Now I’ve decided to force myself, otherwise it’s not going to happen. I have to do something. There has to be some point to life.

All day and as I write now – I’ve been in the house all day! What a mistake! – I have felt infinitely, infinitely doleful: depressed, low and angry. Just dreadful. On a Monday, especially now that I no longer work, I often feel like this. So, so depressed, so that my stomach aches, moody, angry and aggressive. The last thing I want or desire is sympathy. I loathe myself when I’m like this, loathe myself. I am absolutely vile. I feel such pent up anger in my stomach and breast, I feel so low and dispirited….I just can’t explain it.

I am so irritated and could barely sit with my wife through dinner this evening. She served up her favourite, foulest, platter of filth – the starchy, tasteless, disgusting jacket potato and salmon. I wasn’t even hungry in the first place; but to be forced to plough my way through this bland, lumpy, choking food, so hard to swallow that I had to take drink after drink; when a depression, an irritable and bitter anger is rankling within me, chafing the pit of my stomach and making my nerves jangle and tingle with pins and needles like irritation so that I would just love to whack my wife across the face or slaughter her with my knife; to serve me this dry, dry food which is barely swallowable, when she knows, I mean knows, that I detest it and have done for God knows how long; and as I force my way through this gruelling test, struggling to force the filth down me, my spirits sinking – God I was suicidal – oh so, so low – persistently having to stop myself from standing up and screaming bitterly, angrily, pathetically, violently, displaying all my unspoken unhappiness; as I do all this, as I find myself so bile-invested and oven-baked, as a cauldron of sulphur bubbles away in my innards, I find that she is in one of her gormless moods, where she says nothing, where she is withdrawn and anaemic, a ghoul, a corpse, a zombie and so I stare angrily at her, she oblivious, the mirthless, evil look in my eye scouring over her face, her ageing, horrible face, the coarse and fattening skin, the ever more prominent moustache, her dry, stale hair, the sticky out ears – the look of worn out misery makes her face look awful like a half deflated football, you’d like to punch and stamp on; the tarted up face; her make up unable to hide her ageing skin, her dissatisfied spirits; as I see the mankiness of her face and hair, like a dog that’s had its day, recall how her breath is now bad, just like the dog’s, just like my own – when I see and think all this! – God I’d love to kill her. She was actually attractive in her youth. But as she’s gotten older and when she’s unhappy and doesn’t smile; when moods of withdrawal or dissatisfaction infest her, then God she’s an ugly pig.

I’m disgusted with myself for all of this. When I am in one of these moods, there is no positive thought at hand to lift me. Depression in some of its forms may in some ways be healthy. Sometimes its good to feel sad – it shows a sensitive spirit. But when it comes at you like this, mixed up with such pent up rage, hatred, anger and loathing, so that any seine human being can only be yet further depressed by their own inhumanity; when nothing, utterly nothing can lift you, when it is clear as day that there is no God, no meaning, no hope, no nothing; on such a day I don’t know what to do or where to put myself. You just have to ride out the storm, brutal as it may be. Thinking of stabbing my wife through the neck with a knife is not a healthy state of mind to be in; but it is the state that I’m in.

Tuesday 20th January

I’m feeling better today thank God. Perhaps it just being Tuesday has perked me up. Also I went for an early morning walk with my dog; the purity of the morning, the joy of exercise; the sweet smell of the fresh countryside in the morning dew – all of this was so salutary. As well as this my wife has been irritable today, which rather perversely has cheered me up. I don’t know, I guess I just prefer her when she vents her anger on me. I dislike her when she is withdrawn and gormless, I dislike it when she loses all hope that she stops communicating. So it was nice that we argued a bit and she got angry with me: it means she still has hope that her problems can be solved; in complaining about them to me, she is actually showing some far of hope that her life can get better.

This evening lifted yes, but still in a somewhat sombre mood, I spent forty-five minutes looking at myself naked in the full length bathroom mirror (my wife thought I was in the bath). My naked body really depresses me now. I was never like this when young, and never imagined such a shallow thing could affect one like myself, usually so unconcerned about these things. But it is depressing. I guess in the first place I should describe my general appearance. Physically I’m pretty insignificant. I’m small and thin. My looks are plain at best, my skin coarse and porridgey, the legacy of acute acme in my teenage days. I’ve been balding since twenty-one, and my nose is red. My teeth aren’t great either: manky, miscoloured, misshapen. Though I would never have said that my physical appearance ever really perturbed me too much, now as I get older I see that, the morose and uptight, unhappy persuasion that has been mine throughout life, must at least to some extent be attributed to my physical inferiority. I realise this now somewhat. For had I been, like my brothers, taller, stronger and of better physical pedigree, I think I would’ve had a more relaxed and happier approach to life, would’ve been more at home in this world like they. Especially, I acknowledge now, that my small stature, must have had a strong bearing on my moods, my role in life, my character.

But like I say, I feel my looks have indirectly and from a distance been a cause of my moroseness; low and dispirited as I’ve been throughout my life, I never spent ages in front of the mirror, wishing I had better looks as if that were the key to my unhappiness. No, not at all. I always felt that it was simply in my constitution, my genetic make up to be so. I always felt my problems were of the heart, mind and spirit, not of the body.

So never really prone to worry too much about my looks, even now, in clothes I don’t feel overly worried about myself. But the naked human body, the ageing naked body, this is something that profoundly depresses me.

As I stand in front of the mirror I can see my feeble, pathetic, pasty-white insignificant body: the shoulders and chest, so feeble, unmanly, underdeveloped. Why could I not have inherited the broad, beautiful shoulders of my brothers? Mine are so angular, slanting, so weak and puny. So non-existent. My chest also is as if not present. My nipples are there; but the muscle is missing. My chest looks flat and weany. Plus it’s covered in ugly black chest hair which conceals what chest I do have. Worse than this I’m beginning to get deposits of fat in my pecs, so that my chest is getting saggy.

Yet I am even more depressed by my stomach. Had I been a larger, more burly or overweight man, I don’t think it would look so out of place. But on me, on my skinny frame, it is immensely and profoundly demoralising to see my expanding waist. I don’t know, I wouldn’t even say it’s that large. But unsupported by any muscle tension, as I stand in front of the mirror, it sags and bevels to such an alarming degree, almost making me appear, after a meal, pregnant. My body shape is all wrong. On top no shoulders, no chest, no power. And this insipidness of upper body eventually giving way to the unsupported abdomen which bloats out, naturally I have to say, but all the same so unsatisfactorily.

And when I compare my awful body to the fantastic images our society is constantly inundated with, of muscular men with brawny chests and beautiful shoulders tapering down to a slim, toned six pack stomach, the inverse of my body, how can I not feel but depressed? Don’t get me wrong, I know my body is natural. I know my body is the one dished out to the good majority of men. I know the falsity of celebrity image, that behind the façade that these hunks present, their lives are often incredibly miserable, they are just as depressed as me, their bodies are drug-enhanced, and eventually they loose their shape, succumbing to the natural human vices of gourmandizing and slacking off, as well as succumbing to age. It has never bothered me that some brain-dead, infantile Hollywood star with his pecs, abs and macho body should live his life as he does; the facts are there is more to life. I am intelligent and sensitive, in the end the mind and spirit outlasts the body. It is shallow to obsess oneself with one’s looks. Yet for all this I have to confess, at times, and more so as I age, I am profoundly depressed by the state of my body.

The skin gets saggier as well. And mine is so pale and white, so anaemic. It is not pretty. Warts and blotches appear here and there. As I look into the mirror I see my loinal region. It is revolting. My saggy, hanging stomach bevels over the foul coarse hair of my pubis. My small and misshaped penis, hangs over my disproportionally large testicles. My penis looks, and is pathetic. It should be a leader somehow, dominating the testes. Instead the testes appear large and dissatisfied; irritated by the lack of leadership afforded by the feeble penis. My scrotum is saggy. There are some warts on it. Enough.

When I came out of the bathroom, my wife who’d been waiting outside, exchanged a suspicious glance with me. We didn’t say anything but just walked past each other, each of us expressing irritation with the other, in the manner, the close, intimate manner, that has become habitual to us over the past twenty years. I think she knows that I had and have been looking at my body, and that it depresses me, even though we never talk of such things. My wife has not seen my naked body very much over the last ten years. I have only very rarely seen hers in that time. We avoid such things like the plague. As we grow older (and beginning at the point when Joanna, our child, left for university) the mere thought of getting naked with one another, of making love is utterly, utterly nauseous and repulsive. Physically, emotionally and spiritually it would be just unbearable, traumatic. God it would be dreadful. It would open up a Pandora’s box that we are desperate to keep a lid on.

My wife, I know, is incredibly, profoundly depressed by her body. Again she is no shallow person. Not one to be obsessed by celebrity culture. On the contrary she has always been a sensitive, intelligent, decent and kind woman. Yet she is mortified at times over the state of her body. Perhaps as a woman, and perhaps because when younger she was an attractive girl, so that she has been accustomed to linking her looks to her personality – perhaps because of this it is more depressing for her than for me. Certainly in her caring role as a nurse, that she held when younger, her kindness, leadership and the good feeling she infested her charges with, so that the people she cared for were flattered that she cared for them – certainly all of this went hand in glove with her good looks as a young woman. She was something of an angel. And it would’ve been hard to say back then, that that woman could ever be so upset by anything so shallow as her appearance. She seemed so strong and wise you see, and even, in the way she cared for all and sundry, and chose plain old me as her husband, to be disinterested in people’s looks, even to despise good looks. But perhaps that applied to other people and not herself. For herself she liked to be beautiful, it gave her power. It came as something of a surprise to me then, to see that woman so sure of herself, gradually loose her confidence as she aged and lost her looks. As her beauty faded and people thought less of her because of it, she really took it to heart and was acutely aware of her loss of power. And so realising she was less willing to take an interest in other people’s lives, as though she were not wanted anymore; as though it was a bit absurd and embarrassing that an old trout like herself should try and care for other people’s problems. She felt more insignificant, no longer needed. She became more and more withdrawn and deflated, and as a reaction to feeling herself no longer wanted, deliberately huffy with people, uncommunicative. For example, just recently, at a wedding, so many of my family, recalling the spirited, youthful, ever so pleasant Anna of old and seeing the evidence of her physical demise, and feeling sorry for her, made a genuine effort to talk to her. But she answered their questions sparingly and huffily; as though my relatives were just being kind to an old lady. Anyway she is withdrawn and depressed.

And I’ve seen her body. It is, sadly, I have to say, depressing. Her pale skin like mine. The build up of excessive cellulite in the thighs and buttocks. The saggy, bloated stomach; her pear shaped, dumpy body; the old, wrinkling, saggy skin, the coarseness, the warts. The contours of her body tapering hideously around her huge stomach and her huge thighs and finishing at her vagina. The sheer mankiness of the ageing, female genitals, that makes you want to wretch – her pubic area is so misshaped, almost inverted in comparison to that of a fresh, young nymph. Her stomach sags over it from above; her thighs sag onto it from the sides; and the thing itself, surrounded by manky pubic hair, fattened and expanded, saggy and inverted – I cannot express my horror of it.

And in an age of perfect breasts, of unnatural cosmetic breasts, my wife has every reason to feel ashamed and dispirited with hers. Not buxom in youth, it is unclear whether she has any breast left now. Whatever it is that fills her bra, be it fat deposits or breast tissue, lies to the outer edge of each side of her chest; precisely, it is sagging on the west side to her south west, and on the east side to her south east. Two small pockets of breast tissue or fat, miles apart, pointing down and outwards, looking saggy, misshapen and long ago moribund.

This is the fate of most women. It is to indicate that they are past the age of child rearing, to put men off. Go to any of earth’s primitive tribes and you will see women with exactly these breasts. They are utterly natural, but foul and hideous in comparison, with those of a young maiden, and with modern imagery. I do not know what to say. I have seen my wife naked on a few occasions. The feeble saggy breasts, the overhanging stomach, the manky, inverted pubis region – God it is awful. Clothing forms such a profound, profound part of the human condition. Without clothes the human body is by and large dreadful. When I see my naked wife, I think of an ape woman.