The Surprise Supporter

It should be perfectly obvious to most people by now that I don't write this blog to conquer the literary world. Way back in the very beginning, I said something like 'There will be rants, there will be bitching. Come along for the ride if you like and let's see what happens.'

The thing is, I'm - and I'm about to lay a technical PR industry phrase on your asses, to hold onto something - entirely bollock useless at promoting what I write. I haven't updated my website for months on end, which means there's a pile of geeky articles probably as tall as I am that need to go on, and that probably never achieved their full potential in terms of eyeballs and brand-growth. Likewise, I tend to only tag a small handful of people into entries of this blog that I'm fairly confident will read and enjoy them, or at least read them to know what the hell I've been upto on any given day, shoudl they want to catch up.

So it was a bit of a mystery to me, a couple of weeks ago when a pal of mine from waaaaaay back - we're talking first year of comprehensive school, when both of us had hair and I had a different surname altogether - suggested to me via Facebook that I should put the first year of the blog together as an e-book, and fling it out into the wilds of Amazon, to at least allow me to say I had something out there.

I'll be honest, the idea was mostly intriguing because I've done what most people would think of as 'the hard bit' - the blogs are written for conspicuously longer than that first, successful year.

Naturally though, I've taken every opportunity in the meantime not to take the idea seriously because - well, again, bollock useless at taking myself seriously.

Imagine my surprise then to get a message out of the blue late last night from someone I didn't know, a friend of Tania, the Starbucker who I promise I'll stop calling the Christmas Elf any minute now, honestly. This friend was enormously complimentary, and, bless her, appears to have read the whole freaking thing. A full year of every-day entries, followed by four years of more sporadic entries, false starts, restarts and fundamental failures. I'm not even sure I've read the whole frekaing thing, because as you can probably tell, most of it is entirely stream of consciousness.

Won't share her actual review as I've somehow managed to get to nearly 8pm today without having the forethought to ask her if I could (I mentioned the bollock useless thing, right?), but suffice it to say, it was more than enough to put a spring in my step, both in terms of pushing on with this attempt to Disappear again and in the potential idea of packaging up the blog entries as an actual book-like...thing. Ha - Year 1: The Disappearing Man. Years 2-4 - The Reappearing Man. Year 5, goddammit, the Return of the Disappearing Man!

Just a lovely moment in life, to get a note through from someone who's actually read the thing and found some worth in it.

Right - enough sentiment. There are bikes to jump on and sweat to be shed. Catch you tomorrow, Disappearers.

The Lone Potato Gambit

Garfield - essentially me with more fur.

Another Sunday, another 'Proper Dinner' - though this time at a local buffet that we found a handful of weeks ago, rather than with my mother and her insane Valleys generosity. Left to our own devices, both d and I chose to build a dinner that was mostly vegetables and meat, feeling less bloated as a result and hopefully not scuppering this week's Disappearing, as I like to delude myself that Sunday dinner did (in isolation, as I did nothing nothing nothing else wrong whatsoever, na-uh) last week.

In fact, I ended up having just carrots, peas, brocolli and meat with gravy, and two lonely potatoes. Then, halfway through, for some unknown reason, I handed one off to d's plate - where it sat equally ignored. Flipping my natural carbophile instincts on their head, I left the potato till the end, and eventually couldn't be bothered to be as full as I'd have been if I'd eaten it. So it remained, a lone, forgotten potato, a testament to my instincts that say a meal's not a meal without carb, and the new behaviour with which I'm trying to replace them, that say it has to be.

No walking round the local lake today, but this afternoon I did a session as Mr Shifter - Ma is moving, some time later this year, in to a new bungalow (I'd like to think it's only my mother who can buy a bungalow for its simplicity annnnnd then decide she wants an upstairs), so there are boxes to fill and hike from one part of the three-storey house in which she currently lives to another, either for eventual transportation to the new place, transportation to a charity shop, or transportation to the local recycling centre.  So I did that for a while, then came home and did a half-hour of biking - as I say, it's a little odd, but at the moment, it's not willingness or energy that stops me biking more, it's time, which needs to be filled with other things.

Back to the early morning walking tomorrow though, as the Disappearing Ripples continue to surprise me.

I love carbs. In the immortal words of Garfield, I never met a carbohydrate I didn't like. And so far, while temptation has been very weak compared to normal, and indeed compared I'm sure to what it will become as this process goes on, it's been savoury carb-heavy dishes, rather than sweet ones, that have spoken to me and threatened to lure me from my resolve. Pizza seems to be a big thing at the moment, though I'm still not far enough into this thing for it to be of any consequence.

But that sad, lone potato gave me nothing but a shrug. I do realise that Disappearing messes with your brain chemistry, but right at this moment, I don't care if I ever eat another potato. It's just one of those things - you never know quite how a diet plan or a change of lifestyle is going to affect you,  and maybe I'll wake up tomorrow craving nothing but spuds all day long. But right now, this fels like a break-up with the world's most versatile and friendly tuber.

Let's see if that becomes a 'thing' or if I'm just talking out of my ass. And if it does become a thing, let's see what else is in store - never had the urge to swear off potatoes before, even at my most Disappearing crazy, so who knows. Another day, another Disappearing Ripple.

The Disappearing Ripples

Ripples are cool.

Clothes Maketh The Man. Tidy Desk, Tidy Mind. Fake It Till You Make it.

Gotta love a good aphorism.

They’re worth of course precisely as much as we invest in them – if they mean nothing to us, if we invest nothing in them, the world turns and nobody gives a damn.

On the Tidy Desk principle though, I've got one of my own: Disappearing Body, Disappearing Life - the more lean the body grows, the leaner, the more productive, the more focused grows everything else in my life. It works (for me, because I invest in it) on a kind of Disappearing Ripple principle.

I’m starting to feel the ripples of being the Disappearing Man again. I’ve been doing it now for, what? All of nine spectacular days – hardly enough to effect a particular life-change, you might think, and indeed you might be right. But just as when a rusted wheel first tries to turn again, there’s sloth and screeching, but the more it turns, the less noticeable the complaining noise becomes, so with Disappearing – nine days of following a routine of sorts, a rhythm, an image of how the personal world looks now, and I’m less inclined to see it as ‘a thing,’ as something where every tiny triumph or massive personal disaster (it seems to be entirely within my nature to magnify the drama of potential failure) needs to be trumpeted to the world. This might, just conceivably, make for even duller blog entries going forward. With any luck for the reader, they may also get significantly shorter.

Nevertheless though, the ripples are fun when they start, and they're also good fun when they start to bubble. 

‘Wow,’ said d this morning when I went in to kiss her goodbye for the day before beggaring off to walk around the lake. ‘Good outfit choice. You’ve gone from blah-’ She held her hands out wide. ‘-to schlung,’ she said, pulling her hands closer and bringing them down relatively straight.

She was referring to a mistake I’d made some months before. I’d bought a T-shirt with a slogan on it (no, really – I’m 43), but rather gloriously (glorious in that such a thing was still possible) overestimated my size, so it looks essentially like a nightshirt on me. What’s more, it pulls a particular con trick on the eye – because it’s so big, there’s a sense that I need it to be that big, and so it cons the brain into thinking I am that big. I’d worn it yesterday, changing today into an older but plainer and smaller black T-shirt, which, with black trousers, almost has a stealth effect – it’s no secret that bigger people wear a lot of black to minimize the effect of their size on the eye. So she’d noticed the difference between the ‘mu-mu shirt’ and the ‘big human shirt’, and suddenly I’d lost a bit of bulge, and assumed a better shape.

This in itself is not a Disappearing Ripple – I’m actually at least 14 lbs away from the effect of the Disappearing Ripple that makes me, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, ‘be at charges for a looking glass, and entertain some score or two of tailors, to study fashions to adorn my body’ – in other words, before I start being able to look at myself in the mirror and think of clothes as things that might apply to me beyond the Comic Book Guy style of slogan shirts. But I felt the familiar memory of that ripple in my reaction to her comment – a bit of a spring in the step, and a bit of grit in the step as I went around, and around, and around the lake to burn a breakfast’sworth of calories. It's not yet a ripple, but it's the bubble that will eventually rise to the surface of my life and cause the ripple.

There are other Disappearing Ripples too. They all work like dominos lined up and ready to fall. I have a number of projects that have been idling, and today, more than at any point in recent months, I’ve felt them sink into my bones and become part of me. There are To Do Lists, and Sub-To Do Lists, but more than that, the Disappearing discipline is beginning to spread through my veins and my brain. To achieve C, I’m putting A into action, and setting up B to follow. 

In a way, as I’ve mentioned before, the Disappearing Me is a rather less amiable, less pleasant human being, the open-handed bonhomie of my nature shrivels somewhat under the constraints of discipline, but on the other hand, the hippie in my brain rather burns away too – I begin to stop thinking ‘Some day, I’ll get my shit together…’ and actually begin to get my shit together, lining up the dominos between me and achievement. Which, on reflection is probably just as well – we’re already almost a third of the way through 2015, and I have a lot of stuff to do, to achieve, to be a part of. The Disappearing Ripples in my brain have just about begun to warm me up, to oil the engine of my potential, and to start me back on a path where things don’t slide beyond me on a river of enjoyably contented days.

So – I can hear you from here – what’ve you done, Disappearing-Boy?

As yet, very little: the sensation’s just beginning, the first drops of oil dripping onto the wheels in my brain. But I can feel them nourishing me. The rhythms are becoming normalized, so it’s less of a ‘thing’, less of a struggle to get out of bed at a time I previously would have balked at, less of a pain in the butt to exercise at that time, to get a start on the day. Less of a hardship to not have the things I would previously have wanted. Less of a burn of wanting them in the first place. I always said, the first time I did this, and I maintain this time, that I didn’t feel like I was really Disappearing till I’d got beneath the 18st barrier, till I saw my first 17. Readers will know of course, I’m still significantly higher than that, so I haven’t exactly had that superhero movie moment of ‘Game on, now we’re serious, let’s kick some supervillain ass’ that launches the hard rockin’ third act. But in terms of my mindset, I’m beginning to feel already as though the Disappearing Man is emerging, coming through, breaking out. I’m not by any stretch there yet, but my Clark Kent has I think taken off his glasses. My Tony Stark has made his kickass billionaire witticism, my Peter Parker’s Spidey Sense is tingling.

The Disappearing Ripples are the unexpected effects that the act of Disappearing will eventually have in my life and the lives of those around me – dynamic subsidiary changes that come from increased social inclusion and rising confidence. They’re not by any means here yet – but for the first time, today, I can feel them bubbling up inside, waiting their cue.

Feels good.