Sunday, Bloody Sunday

It's just after six o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. Late April, so it's still pretty light outside, even though it's been a shitty day (the highlight being when I was out in the yard earlier tidying up all the cans that the local yobbo's chuck over my fence thinking my yard is a rubbish bin). It's been a shitty day generally. I've been flu-ridden all week, managed to recover enough to go to Shaun's party on Friday night (more on that later) yet I have spent today doing a bit of housework (I stress the 'bit' portion of that phrase) and fooling around on the internet and on my Playstation. Doing, in short, nothing constructive whatsoever.

Why?

To be honest with you, I have no fucking idea. Am I depressed? Not massively so. Something happened on Friday night that cheered me up no end. True, light was ched on said events on Saturday which might give me cause to doubt the intentions of what happened, but compared with the sheer mundanity of my life, it was practically a godsend, and when I finally get round to teling you what happened, you might begin to comprehend just how sad my life actually is. I've even had a conceptual breakthrough on 'Bridge End' today, finding the tone of the piece and the central thread, which s a big thing, even if I haven't done any antual honest-to-God writing on it. So whyam I depressed? Is it because that depression is just my natural state of being?

I was out in Newcastle the other weekend because Gilli was up. I hadn't planned on it; I was at work till eleven, but I had such a crappy day that I needed to go out and get drunk. Or at least pissed. So there we were, me and Gilli, and you know us two, we are of very similar temperaments. In fact, were certain circumstances different, I think me and her would make a very good couple. But circumstances aren't and it's no use complaining about it. So me and Gilli, we're both fairly depressive people and we are, as paradoxical as it sounds, happy with that. Both of us are comfortable with not being shiny and happy. And to us, that's not a bad thing. I remember John Brosnan, that late, great sf critic whose personal belief was that being depressed was a natural state of being because happiness, when achieved, was always fleeting, so you would soon return to a state of depression. Of course, John Brosnan essentially drank himself to death and his body was nly found because of the smell it started to produce.

But there is a point there, and it's a very valid one. Happiness doesn't last.

There's also a school of thought which equates depression to intelligence. Now, I don't generally espouse this theory because it makes me sound like a right twat, but I am an intelligent person. I am, somehow (as I'm not even sure myself how it happened) something of an intellectual, especially when it coems to my peers at work. And I'm a thinker. I analyse things. I think. I think too much. I over-analyse. And that's my downfall. Were I less of an intellectual I presume I could quite hapily just bumble through life and not worry about things. For fuck's sake, I started worrying when we were in primary school and my teacher told me that in about thirty years we were going to run out of oil (and that, for those of you keeping score, was twenty years ago, give or take a couple of years). I broached the subject with my sister who essentially told me not to worry about it because we'd have undoubtedly found a substitute by then. So...

I am depressed because I can think about things. It's not that cut and paste, natch, but that's the long and the short of it.

Right, Friday night. Shaun's birthday party. Some of his friends were there, natch, including the oft-mentioned Lauren and Ashley. And seeing as how for a great portion of the night I was Billy No-Mates (Kayleigh and Emma came much later than I did and even then spent a good amount of time off somewhere and Shaun had a family crisis to deal with) I ended up talking to Ashley a lot. It transpired that she was single and had recently split up with her boyfriend. He finished her, I have to say, because it is fairly important to what comes later. Through the course of conversation we somehow manage to establish that I think she's fit and we spend most of the night flirting with each other. She's drinking a fair amount of vodka, but at the time I don't think about it. Towards the end of the night, she drags me up on the dance floor and dances with me. Properly dances with me, holding hands, hugging me and all that, not just wanting someone to share the dance floor with. So I think that maybe she likes me. I try to play it cool and ask her if she fancies going out sometime (not the greatest line ever, but I like it - it's honest and straightforward). She says that she doesn't think she's ready. She had just split up with her boyfriend. So I say okay, she sasks me if that's alright. I say yes, because it is, honestly. I've seen some unpleasent things happen when people rebound off each other. It never ends well. So here I push my luck a little and ask her if she'd like to maybe do something sometime after she's had a chance to get over him. It's not the kind of move that I would usually make. Hell, asking someone out in the first place isn't the kind of move I generally make after barely meeting someone. So yes, I'm pushing my luck but I have to take this chance because you never know, I might never see her again. So she says that I should get her number off Shaun and there we part company.

Well, before I get on with the story there is a little detail that I should add. Right. So we're up on the dance floor and she's getting into it. And I mean really getting into it. Kayleigh referred to it later as dirty dancing and she's not really exaggerating. There's parts of bodies getting rubbed together which send me a fairly strng signal. So I go to kiss her. This is after I've asked her out. She says she's not ready, so we end up not kissing (and this is after all the rubbage) apart from on the cheek. Me, girls and mixed signals. It's a motif.

Later. Me and Shaun are waling home. I ask and he tells me that Ashley and her ex have been split up exactly one day.

Great. I finally meet a single girl who might actually like me and she's just (and by just it might as well have been right that second) split up with her ex. But you know, I think we can do the friend thing, get to know each other, take it slowly. Because me and Alison rushed it and that ended badly. So, the next day, I ask Shaun for her number. Thinking I might ask her out to the pictures or something. He says that he would, but he's going to ring her first to make sure it's okay. According to Shaun, she says that she doesn't know if she wants me to ring her or text her or whatever. And this is when the paranoia sets in. This is when I start to think that she had her vodka-goggles on the night before and in the cold light of day she's thinking to herself 'what the hell did I do last night?' and then I pop into her head and she thinks 'ew, gross' and vows never to see me again. So Shaun's texting her, trying to persuade her to go out with me or whatever, I don't know. He does have a bit of a history of harrassing girls to try and get them to go out with me, which I'm fairly ambivalent about. I'm not a pushy person by nature. Shaun is, and I'm of the opinion that if he keeps hassling them, they're going to be less inclined to be interested in me. It's the old pestering thing. And we all know how that turned out with Natalie.

And then it gets worse. I find out that she usually doesn't get that drunk, that the only reason she was drinking was because she'd just split up with her boyfriend. I start to think that maybe I was the nearest available chunk of manflesh to help her with her self-esteem. After all, thinking back, she was the one who started talking to me. She was very much the pro-active one out of the two of us. But maybe it's just me being paranoid. But then again, as Kurt Cobain once said, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not after you. Or something. She was supposed to be coming over to see the house today, her and Lauren, but Shaun, making one of his usual flying visits (I honestly don't know why he bothered moving out - he's spent one night out of the past five her, the rest he's spent at his mam's) told me that Ashley had to go to her Nan's and that Lauren thought she'd feel a little weird by herself. The truth? Or just a cover-up to try and disguise the fact that Ashley didn't want to see me? It's not exactly out of character of Shaun to try and cover things up. But, like I said, it might just be me being paranoid. I spend far too much of my life at the minute being paranoid. I think he means well, but as the old saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If (or when) I see Ashley again, it might allay some of these fears, but until then, I'm being forced by my own paranoid nature to chalk it up to her being drunk/pissed off about being dumped. Which is not something I want to do. Honestly, she's the first girl in over a year who's shown much interest in me (my abortive thing with Kayleigh doesn't even begin to count - I don't even know what -if anything- we had) and naturally I want her to like me (and I don't want to fuck it up like I somehow manage to fuck most of my prospects up - there's a discussion about self-loathing buriedin here somewhere) and her only talking to me because she's drunk and upset isn't going to do much for my ego.

Peace out.