Pins ‘n Needles

I hate waking up with one of my limbs suffering with pins and needles. Last night, or should I say this morning, I awoke to this odd hot and cold sensation when I realised that I was lying on my left arm. My head was a little hazy at first and thought that I’d grown an extra arm or something but then the pins and needles started or that was when I noticed it. I winced and then I grimaced until finally I was biting my pillow and wailing slightly. It wasn’t all pain but feeling fragile around 4am in the morning exacerbated the sensation. Finally after a couple of minutes that warm prickly feeling started to subdue. It didn’t completely go but it was a bit more tolerable so it then left me with the next issue, an arm that did not do much.

It was twisted in a locked position and did not feel part of me. With my right hand I flicked it but could not feel a thing. I pinched it next and still there was nothing. I started to wonder whether I’d slept on it for so long that it was dead and would spend my remaining years hanging and swinging by my left side. Not so, at last after pinching and then twisting the skin I finally felt something. It was faint but at least the worry that it had gone to sleep forever had evaporated.

The next stage was to try and move it. There was no response when I tried to bend it. Instead I just lay there staring at my arm contemptuously because it was depriving me of sleep. I turned my body so I was now on my side and in doing so my arm moved but it was like carrying a dead weight and just slapped my chest before landing on to the bed. I even started to play with it, picking it up by the wrist and then dropping it like they used to do in WWF when the referee was checking to see if Hulk Hogan was still conscious. My arm just flopped on to the bed without emotion. It was almost like playing with a toy. I even pulled it up high and let go causing it to hit the bed then bounce up and slap me on the nose.

It was only when I kept my arm lifted for over thirty seconds that I it started to feel it again. Elated that the thing was finally sorting out its circulation I placed it hanging over my bed thinking that this is what would stimulate the circulation even more so. After a couple of minutes I felt this rush of energy run through my arm and suddenly my fingers were moving and the pins and needles were gone. I sighed in relief to have my arm back, like a friend you hadn’t seen in a while. You want to catch up but after a while the novelty where’s off. And it did for me as sleep finally took over and I closed my eyes making sure to keep in the same position so as not to find myself in the same situation again.

In other news Kerouac’s scroll is in England. It is currently residing in the University of Birmingham and I plan to have a look.

Difference Between Fatigue and Tiredness

This morning, I finally concluded to myself the difference between fatigue and tiredness. I've spent the last week going to bed late and falling asleep later. This is mainly due to having a cold that seems to block my nose only when my head hits the pillow forcing me to breath with my mouth open which means it gets dry and I wake up thirsty every other hour. However, even though I was falling asleep late I would wake up at 7am without fail for no apparent reason. I'm sure if I hit the sack at 6:49am I'd wake up at 7am like a switched on robot. So last night I decided that sleep had caught up with me, like a mobile phone bill forgotten underneath the bed. You think you can get away but it always gets you in the end. So I forced myself to go to bed at 8pm and was asleep by 9 I believe. When I woke up at 7am I was still tired, at first I thought it was because I slept for 10 hours but I didn't get that groggy feeling in my head that reminds me of an ever so slight hangover. I felt achy and still tired. At work I couldn't hold a conversation let alone lash out witty anecdotes that usually gain me kudos over by the water cooler. By 3pm today, I decided that I could only be suffering from fatigue and needed to rest up for a few days and not a few hours here and there. So I'm going to take it easy for a few days and chill out and hope I can get some zest back into my system. However, with the morsels of energy I have left I have written some more progressive prose. To be honest it wasn't tiring to write.

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His eyes notice what he’s holding. His neck cranes down as his interest is drawn to the pistol. The sight of the scratched weapon is the symbolic reminder that this is definitely reality and no dream. Yannish knows exactly where he is. He draws his head back quickly whacking the left side of it against the wall. His index finger runs along the gun feeling the cross stitch texture of the top leading all the way to the tip where curiosity overcomes him and sticks one of his digits into the hole of the gun just to make sure it feels real and to investigate the barrel that could quite easily end life. He feels the rush of anxiety pulsate through his body now like a roller coaster ride going along in his veins, making him question why he’s here. Is there an escape? Can I run now and all will be forgotten?

The room is dark with the light bulb in pieces on the floor with a broken vacuum cleaner lying over the metal railing, it hangs over like an unconscious drunk flopped over a park fence rail on a Saturday night. There are shelves to the right with bottles containing cleaning products. His body is still utterly still but inside the messages to his brain have doubled since he noticed what’s in his hands, the awareness of the situation only becoming more significant to him now. His breathing doubles in its heaviness and intensity panting like he’s just run a couple of miles and is taking some time to recuperate. He starts to walk up to the wall then turn around again, each time he exhales he puts a foot down, thinking what to do next. “Should I move out?” “Is it the right time?” He thinks to himself, running the pistol along the wall so a slight scraping sound could be heard by only the occupant of the utility cupboard. “I can’t run now, I’ve come too far. I’ll have to go through with it” comes the justification from his lips. But the thought of going through with it terrifies him, sure, the consequences of getting caught would ruin his life in a social sense.

Prison would be definite as he’d never plead innocent because he wasn’t and there would be no point trying to tell them the reasons why. They wouldn’t listen, even if they did there wouldn’t be enough time because time in court is precious as it tries to uphold the creaking social laws that are spread through out the country. He could start to explain his reasons, but someone would usher him along considering his point too time consuming and insignificant for the context of the case. In prison, he’d be treated badly, he’s not a fighter, even though he’s fought, he’d much rather live an anonymous life. Inmates would see this, not in the lack of battle scares on his body but by the lack of primal fighting instinct that floats around in the eyes of every brawler. The ones that look for fights, who don’t care who they fight as long as their craving is quenched, by impact or by the spill of blood. They’d see he didn’t have it and would go for him. Constant barrage of beatings and whippings from bars of soap put in pillow cases, his time there would be bloody and strenuous. Should he survive the physicality of what prison would bring he was sure he could endure the mental marathon as well, there was no way he’d accept any invitations from insanity’s open hand that seems to run frivolously through the corridors of her majesty’s many hotels. If he got bored, he’d try and remember the books he read during his lifetime and if he couldn’t remember all of them, then he’d splice another passage from another book to form his own tome made from all the different books that had passed under his nose during time. If he found his head submerged in the toilet water where he’d be forced to suck up the putrid brown liquid through his nostrils be the wing’s hard bastards. He wouldn’t spend the evening curled tightly together and sobbing profusely into his palms thinking why he hadn’t the fighter’s look. Why couldn’t he fight back? Why was he being bullied? No, his capacity for mental torture could endure this, he could survive this sort of mental aggression and come out of it with a slight smirk and a whimsical step in his walk.

Even as he whimsically walks out of prison with a defiant cock of the leg, as he lands he’ll be landing back into society, a society where now he was a criminal. Or by most of the consensus still a criminal. He’d never be able to get a job. He’d try, of course, but no one would employ him. He wouldn’t even be able to get a job in retail with the teenagers as no one would trust him behind a till. Could they be blamed with their suspicious minds about the young man who has just been released from prison? “We’ve got to protect the company’s image”, would be the diplomatic but hollow justification from the proprietors. Pressed a little harder the sympathetic theme would be adapted to justify their decision. “Come on, I’ve got a mortgage, a wife and children, I can’t afford money to go missing. I could get sacked!” So, Yannish wouldn’t be able to get a job and would have to revert to signing-on, receiving government income support. By some it is considered more criminal to stand in a queue and wait the cheque to be handed over to you, than actually walking into a bank and robbing it. Abuse would be hurled as he walked along the path as he held his cheque. “Why don’t you get a fucking job?” would come the bellows from the houses. But all this doesn’t bother him.