2018 #21

Up one place since her last album! If the unbelievably talented Brighton-based pianist/multi-instrumentalist continues on at this rate, and with a similar schedule between albums, then she’s going to place #1 sometime around Necessary Evil 2081! Will we all be dead by then. No. You will, obviously, but I’m never going to die. And neither will my pet Pomsky, Zeus Bertha Pepper, I wuv hm sooo muuuuuuch! But, erm, yes, you’ll all be dead. Zeus Bertha Pepper will have likely killed you, he has quite the bloodlust. Have you read that 2018 review though? Yeah, I loved the album muchly – I even suggest she score the recently released movie Bumblebee, which is of course meant as a compliment, how could it not be? – but I seem like I was in a pretty bad place on that particular day, doesn’t it? Three years on, has my brain’s general countenance improved? Today, absolutely. These past few months, definitely. This past year… weeeeeeeeeeeeell, there was a bit of a struggle that I invited it into.

I’ve touched on how toxic and damaging my 2020/21 marriage was, and how it left my self-belief, my mental comfort and my dang desire for life in the absolute toilet. Well, this post is going to be the final reckoning, the complete and total exorcism, the slicing open of old wounds so that they can bleed completely out and not poison me again. Starting on the 14th December 2020 I started keeping a diary of how much the marriage was hurting me, it ran until abruptly stopping on the 29th January, likely because my illness became too much to leave time for such pathetically solipsistic concerns. There were thirty three entries.. I think this was in response to my wife showing disbelief that I could be feeling that way, or perhaps she had challenged me to name instances in which I was hurt and my decrepit old brain struggled to give precise details when called up on it. Whatever. I started writing them down and put them in a password and fingerprint secured OneNote file. I never showed or even mentioned them to my wife, and before recently I hadn’t looked at them myself in months. It was actually reminding myself what I said about Poppy last time around that convinced me to dig them up. I couldn’t remember the password and had to keep guessing until about three in the morning, but I got in! And here the entries are.

Now, I don’t want to make this feel like I’m piling on my ex-wife – she wasn’t right for me I wasn’t right for her, but she otherwise deserves all the love in the world. I don’t come out of these records looking great either, please just take this all as evidence of how incredibly awful the relationship was. Oh, and I’m sure there’s roughly a dozen trigger warnings I should be offering here, so maybe just don’t read any further if you’re having anything like a decent day that you don’t want ruining, or if dark depictions of mental states or terrible relationships are likely to set in motion grim and traumatic thoughts of your own, then get out now! Seriously, not many jokes on this one…