{"id":1649,"date":"2009-06-11T10:05:43","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T10:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/?p=1649"},"modified":"2009-06-11T11:29:09","modified_gmt":"2009-06-11T11:29:09","slug":"yesterday-my-brain-popped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theothersideofeverything.com\/flip\/2009\/06\/yesterday-my-brain-popped\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday My Brain Popped"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stress has a peculiar way of manifesting in the Whitbread household. No, that is wrong. It actually has several ways of manifesting, depending on the severity and the longevity. I like words ending in “ity” for some reason, there is comfort in my conformity.<\/p>\n

So I’ve been over-working, that much is certain, to the point of not taking a holiday in 14 months which is plain silly. I found my brain had turned to rodent-infested pudding<\/p>\n

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and all my thoughts were the consistency of dough with little nibbly teeth.<\/p>\n

Spike Milligan is one of my heroes. Thank God I don’t suffer like he did from chronic manic-depression but then, I was never in a war. He made pioneering surreal radio programmes, and played the trumpet, but when he was ill he became acutely sensitive to noise. Once he was in a sanitorium in Hornsey, screaming every morning because his window was right next to where they emptied the big, clanging industrial bins.<\/p>\n

I have suffered from recurring internet obsession since 1994. I’ve worked on balancing this tendency over the years, but, left to my own devices<\/em> – and I’ll come back to that clever play on worms – I will migrate with ease towards the terminal of light which is the window on my real world, the world of digital fun, where everyone is equal<\/strong> and click click click clever<\/em>, even after a significant break, like the one I had 13 months ago, when I went to Cyprus for most of the month of April.<\/p>\n

\"08042008196\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I took my Nokia N95 smart-ish phone with me and somehow managed to run up a \u00a3350 bill. Most of that was GPS maps and email, but I was very aware that the small, palm-sized screen was replacing the bigger screen.<\/p>\n

My “sane” lover and I rationed ourselves to one hour per week in a Paphos internet caf\u00e9, during which time I worked as intensely as I could, pretending that I was uploading photos, but actually, I was nagging a lazy bastard to fix my broken website, whilst he lied about not being able to do it knowing I was an international flight away and couldn’t prove him wrong until I got back.<\/p>\n

You see, I was still being obsessive, even when the rest of the holiday was pretty much the mental relaxation it was supposed to be, except when my brain popped a few times, which it did a few times, because of the stress of the preceding months in which I had similarly over worked.<\/p>\n

But during the time when I was away, at least I relaxed enough finally to have worked out that what I REALLY WANT TO DO is write musical theatre. I have tunes. I can see pictures. I have a story to tell.<\/p>\n

So when I got back, I uploaded my photos to Flickr, and for a while, I didn’t worry as much about the internet as I had done, just got on with work and planned the next phases.<\/p>\n

But work being what it is, I then spent most of 2008 and 2009 not really doing\u00a0 what I want to do. Instead, I was<\/p>\n