I'll protect you from the hooded claw/Keep the vampires from your door

Hail,
And an overdue post, in at least two senses of the word. But instead of posting I have been kickboxing in the shed, cleaning out the study and staring at the chickens. I have not been down to the beach yet, but for that you can blame the heat.

And the chickens are mighty fine. I went out and gazed at them yesterday, late morning, with the sun already stinging my white marshmallowy body. Days like yesterday I try to check their water twice a day. And they were there, a mixture of pure-bred and mongrel silkies, a pompadoured male, his live-in lover and one ferocious mother hen with chicks. The chicks are small enough to run through the fence, like water through a sieve, and when they do their mother clucks in alarm.

We also have three or four turkeys, the precise size and shape of feathered skittles. Silkies, by the by, have five toes, much like most of my readers. Unlike, I suspect, many of my readers, they are covered in down, and their bones are black.

Anyway, I stood in the shade of the eucalypt tree and gazed at the chooks, and I pottered around the shed, and I found my old copy of Lieh Tzu, and yesterday, after a good few hours of doing other stuff, I managed to become relaxed

I say this as if it was a big thing, and it is. I don't relax easily. And by relax in this sense I mean that deep relaxation, where you can just stand there, unravelling, untangling, feeling things unknit.

Always been a problem for me. But it's doable.

Anyway: today's post, tentatively entitled "I have the best wife in the world".

There may be some of you who have already met Sarah and are already convinced of this, and if so, feel free to stop reading now - go stare at some chooks. But there may be some of you who have met her, or who have yet to meet her, who are yet to be convinced of the truth - for truth it is. Well, read on.

While I was in Clearwater, she visited every day. While I lounged, trying to learn how to think again, she worked.

The unpleasant fact is the things that got me into Clearwater were not just biochemical abnormalities. What I was taught about episodes of mental illness (particularly the mood disorders) was that when someone has an episode of illness you have to look at their personality structure (cognitive habits, ways of dealing with stuff, that kind of thing), and the things going on in your life (which I needn't go into here), and the neurochemistry.

In this, I am no different to anyone else, and I am booked into the first "looking at ways you deal with stuff" session Monday. Somewhere along the line I expect to discuss traits of selfishness and cruelty and stupidity and ego, wrongs I have done and left unrighted. Terrifying.

But anyway, that is the subject of another entry. The thing is, even though a large part of what ended up with me borderline psychotic and unmanningly depressed was my own head, Sarah visited every day she was allowed. And while I lay in bed she got up early to drive my blood relatives to school, and brought me in food (particularly a small plastic tub of dried chilli, bless her)- she scoured the internet for special gifts for me (a DVD of Much Ado about Nothing, another of Cemetery Man, a U2 t-shirt, a hard-to-get - come to think about, most of them were hard to get - documentary on Canadian schoolgirls*). etc.

And she is trustable, and loyal, and loving, and giving, and can navigate her way home drunk and in the dark using only a nineteen seventy six street directory with half the pages missing, while I sing Pogues songs beside her. And she is much more physically beautiful than she thinks she is, still one of the most beautiful people I know, eyes the colour of dark polished wood, skin that feels like silk - that kind of beauty where you get more beautiful as you get older.

I know I don't deserve her. One of my friends (and I don't deserve them, either), said something to the effect that she was someone "most of us would strangle a baby to have", or something. I am the luckiest man in the Galaxy.

Anyway. In the latest stuff U2 stuff (went to the concert the other night, post pending) whoever writes their lyrics seems to be talking about the limitations of romantic versus what he/they sometimes call real love:

I could never take a chance/of losing love to find romance

and so on. I don't know what he meant, obviously, but the reason that lyric works for me is that to me it's about the difference between that short term crush that you get versus "the real thing".

Foilwoman wrote some time back - can't find the post or I'd link to it- on the realisation that those crush feelings, or even those "my God s/he's hot" feelings are not a good guide to how good any relationship between you and Mr/Ms Hotness-Personified would be, how happy you and someone else could be together.

As we all (please God) sooner or later realise, the real thing is different. And the thing is, with Srah, I feel I have emerged into some place, realising that I love and am loved both in the real and the romantic sense.

Anyway, that's my yearly quota of talking about other people - next post will be all about me again.

Thanks for listening,
John

*Do not be alarmed. It is actually a documentary where someone follows these five girls for a year and sees the different ways their lives work out. It's called "talk 16". I am trying to write a superhero comic based on my vague recollections of it.