I had a pretty messed up dream last night. It was quite long and I’ve been trying to remember the details. It was quite atmospheric. I am also slightly stoned.

I had a look at myself, and the image was of someone like the kid who makes his hands bleed through too much playing of musical instruments, like I am obsessed with becoming the greatest at some skill that is ephemeral and hard to define. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just to be ‘cool’. I don’t think so though. I think it was something I thought I was good at, but never got around to practicing. There was a ton of stuff that I was good at in school, being cool wasn’t one of them though.

So I inhabit this amazing school, that I attend only at night. I walk around. It is not as though around me is a void, like there is nothing there at all (like there are no forms), but everything is framed as though lit with moonlight. All  the shapes are grey or dark blue, with edges a slightly lighter colour. I can see long corridors with doors all along the sides, and cheap looking tables, and blackboards with metallic plastic rims. They are all dark and hard to make out visually, but I know it is all there.

At some point I come to a huge banner with a Renaissance design on it. There are shapes in the image that remind me of two armies meeting and resolving an argument. The predominent colour is red. It is the red of a red dwarf sun, caught in plastic. It is red paint, I think the red of the paints I wanted to use at school to make banners for my miniatures, but I never got around to doing anything with them.

I don’t know, it was a fucking dream.

Later on, I have this secret area of the school. It’s hidden in the walls. Somehow I am surrounded by acquaintances. They are all friends of mine. We are locked in with the chairs and tables from the exam hall. They make a forest and a black horizon around us. I look at myself and the others over the furniture, lit in gloom for a second. I feel safe. I have no idea who any of these people are. I can just about make out the shape of faces in the gloom. They are all people I feel relaxed with.

We are all staring at a square of light in front of us. The nearest I can come to what it feels like is watching someone else watching a film on a laptop in the dark, or watching someone else play a computer game from the nineties at a distance and in darkness.  I can’t see any forms or movement in the square, but I know the others are watching whatever is going on on the screen. We are all distracted by this magnetic square of light.

At the same time as I experience the dream about the people in the walls and the square of light in front of them, I feel other presences running through the school. They are dark presences; alien, gangly limbed, no facial features except mouths, extremely quick. They have skin like grey wetsuit rubber. They are very quick and I have anxious thoughts about them occasionally. I don’t let it show to the others though. We are all still watching the square of light in front of us.

There is also a paladin walking around the moonlit school. He comes from the banner with all the red and the armies making up their differences. I suppose he must have a sword, but I don’t see it. He is wandering around in a dull metal coif, and a grey cloak, looking for this secret space in the walls. I suspect he wants to break up the gathering, or kill everybody in the space. He pauses before a set of double doors and I know he has found us, but I am not worried. It was inevitable.

The paladin has an army of presences with him as well – they are similar to the dark ones, but are shapes of solid blackness.

I wait for something to happen. The paladin enters the space and there is a feeling of panic as the whole group disperses. We all aim for hiding spaces or tunnels in the forest of tables and chairs around us. I head for a grate to unlock and then crawl through, but a pair of clawed grey hands thrusts out from the opening and an abrupt hissing sound violently warns me away.

While the dark ones surround the others, I crawl on hands and knees to the double doors, make it through them, and then come face to face with two great knights; one of the paladin’s army, and one of the army of the dark ones.

The two great knights face off. The dark one wins. As I watch, the paladin calmly advances through the double doors and faces the dark one as well, but loses. The paladin is destroyed and there is nothing left. There is nothing left of the paladin but a small swatch of cloth that slowly floats away as though it were a piece of ash caught in a cold summer breeze. There is a smaller image of the red banner on it.

The dark one disappears.

Then I woke up. I don’t know what it means. I think the paladin may be the old age version of me, and the dark ones are depressed thoughts. I was probably supposed to resolve something last night. I think I did actually. Please help.

 

 

I had a huge load of streaky, orange snot come out of my nose this morning. The kitchen towel I blew the snot into probably thought Christmas had come in May. Although I have no idea what the kitchen towel thought when I dumped it on the pile of them, like it was a used tissue. Probably some variation on fuck you I would imagine.

Then after that, I was sneezing out clear, glue-like spraying splat-threads of snot all day, sometimes loaded with globes of yellow, once another huge green slug shot out of my nostril accompanied by a sound like a blocked coffee filter trying to come to life a few times but failing.

The whole experience wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but I seemed to develop a kind of faint pink, hairy scaling on my top lip which I didn’t like, also a sort of light red coloration around the circles of my nostrils, which made me look as I though I had an addiction to cocaine. I’ve never touched drugs in my life. And anyway it isn’t the sort of look one aims for when dressing for work.

It was just a chest infection. I had no idea that I had a chest infection until I started sneezing multi-coloured meteors with clear trails into hand towels, but there you go. Such is life. I usually get chest infections in the winter months. What usually happens is I go to bed one night in December, forget to wrap up warm, don’t fully realise how cold the night is while I am asleep and then wake up with bubbles of dull yellow at my nostrils. The bubbles don’t go away for about a month.

Chest infections take a lot longer to shift than colds. I was taking hayfever tabs and Sudofed anyway, just because I know that I don’t respond to pollen well. It was probably the arrival of a good cloud of pollen over night that has done it. The pollen overwhelmed my strengthened defenses and clogged up everything, like fat nodules glomerating around the heart of an excessively fat person. It makes breathing while walking harder.

Anyway I have been taking these hayfever tablets, the ones in the supermarket, but they don’t do much good until you have taken two of them, then another two in the middle of the day when the first two wear off. In addition to the two Sudofeds that are supposed to stop mucus build up. The box says you are only supposed to take ‘one a day’ of the hayfever tabs, but that is a joke the packagers are playing on the consumers. I’ve been taking two every morning for a week now and nothing happens, except I eventually feel like I’ve taken too many pills.

The other thing the hayfever tablets do is mess up when I actually need to go to the toilet. I’ve had this before. I don’t feel particularly rancid for days, particularly, then suddenly – out of the blue – I literally have to go to the toilet, it’s like it is a sudden mad imperative to lay a cable otherwise I will fucking shit myself.

I’ve never actually shat myself when I get like that, but I can remember two close calls, one last year and the other probably a couple of years before that. The earlier occasion I had to collect some post bags in the morning from another building down the road from the one where I work, and I was trundling this trolley full of post bags up the hill and suddenly, when I was just about half way back, I had an urgent, liquid need in my arse to spray some brown cement, right now. I made it back, just about anyway.

The second occasion was nothing like as unpleasant as the first – I was talking to someone else, basically going over a photocopying job that I’d agreed to do earlier in the day, and then suddenly, out of the tubular firmament, there was this sort of internal rumbling and and a quick, desperate panicked feeling in my lower stomach. I made the the rescue, obviously, but it was a close call.

Anyway supermarket hayfever tablets are the absolute shit, and I mean that.

 

Gosh.

I must have a rant now.

Probably won’t even be that amusing.

I had to buy a new hard drive recently, because the one I was using had ceased to function at all.

It had a lot to do with the upgrade to Windows 10 that I unfortunately inflicted upon it. I am not entirely sure what happened, but I quite eagerly clicked on the upgrade button one Saturday lunchtime. I got to have a go at Windows 10 for a bit, for the rest of that Saturday anyway. But then, apparently, the computer restarted overnight. That meant that when I switched the computer on again, on Sunday, it got to one of the start screens, but no further. I didn’t even see a way to get into Safe Mode. I was able to run all the HP diagnostic scans and all of that, but the problem didn’t actually seem to be anything that any of that stuff could deal with.

So my best guess now is that there was something wrong with one of the drivers, probably the Texas Multi-USB Controller, because there was definitely something wrong with that driver before the problems started, and doing research I found that Windows 10 has reacted badly to crappy drivers. Something like that. I’m not that experienced with the dissecting of the innards of Windows.

As it happened, the Monday after that weekend was a Bank Holiday anyway, so other than imploding the time available on that Monday, while I went to buy a new computer and spend an hour putting it all together, there was no lasting problems because I’d luckily saved all the PDFs and Word docs onto external hard drives, which appear to still be working.

I later realised that I do appear to have lost a copy of Adobe Dream Weaver (that I got as an execute file when I was doing a website design course), and a load of Audible audio-books that were still on the hard drive. I wasn’t likely to ever make use of that stuff though. So in a sense the problems caused by the Windows 10 upgrade merely reminded me that I had already wasted money, rather than being the cause of the loss of money. I had already cancelled my subscription to Audible anyway.

So that whole mess has soured me a bit on Windows 10. My memory of actually playing around with it is of something that is clearly designed for these touch pad devices, like I’m using a mouse pointer to do something that a finger tip is meant to do, and also a kind of speaking element called ‘Cortana’, that reminds people of meetings they have missed, and looks up how to get to the auditorium or the conference room for you. I guess they’ve taken the name Cortana from the ‘Halo’ series of computer games.

When I looked at what I used that hard drive for, it was mainly the Internet and occasionally reading PDFs on Acrobat Reader. The old hard drive was actually supposed to be used to play games on; it was at the expensive end of the personal computer range, and I had in fact sprung for what was the newest graphics card at the time, but I wouldn’t really describe it as a ‘gaming computer’ as such. So the new computer I bought was only about two thirds of the cost of the old one, because I didn’t really intend to play games on it, or do anything particularly RAM consuming on there.

The new computer has Windows 8 on it.

Now the first thing to note is that the new computer with Windows 8 on it does not appear to implode when I do a restart, or hasn’t yet. It also has by far the less redundant icons on the desktop, just by virtue of being a new machine.

Something I have noticed however is that the new computer seems to really take its time loading web pages, and has a huge problem loading more than about two Youtube pages. I don’t know why anyone would need to load more than one web page at a time, but the fact is, the new computer does have a problem with it. It also needs to do upgrades quite often which is slightly annoying.

Anyway. I started off wanting to rant, then I finished the bit about Windows 10, then I had a shave, and now I’ve lost momentum. It just seems like Windows has shat the bed somehow. The old computer had Windows 7 on it, and that worked fine.

 

 

 

I’ve decided to start blogging on WordPress again.