200 months

by 201monthsblog

The last nine months have been among the worst of my life so far.

My long-term partner came into some money and chose that moment to end our relationship and move a short distance away with our two children. The business we created together over the last 120 months is stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare and in a few months I will find out if all our hard work was for nothing. The singer in my band left at the end of the wedding season and it looked my whole world was trying to disappear into a singularity.

Which is why I took a few weeks off in September, to go and see some old friends. Which is when I had the realisation that I only had 201 months to make the most of my life before I hit 65.

So, here’s what I did with my first month.

I spent half a month recording tutorial videos for a new youtube channel. Over the next 84 months, I’m going to focus on music and I recorded the videos to establish some credibility in that area.

I spent several days on the edge of depression. In my mind’s eye, I found myself approaching the brim of a black vortex and it felt very easy to just fall in. I’ve never had depression before – if this is what it was – and the idea of allowing myself to fall into depression was quite appealing. But I realised it would be very hard to get back out, so I didn’t go further. I don’t know what happened, but the feeling went away – and the first band practice with the new singer pulled me back into positive territory. The first confirmed booking for the band next year also cheered me up.

One thing that may not be helping my overall state of mind is that I’m drinking a lot of alcohol and smoking quite a lot of weed. These things have been a consistent part of my life for over 320 months and I’m going to try and take a complete break in January. The most I’ve ever managed before is 10 days, so we’ll see how that plan pans out…

I’ve started putting a couple of new work ideas into place. I’ve created some ads and started placing them around the area. One is for teaching music. The other involves websites.

I’ve also been doing some gardening work, which has been helping to keep me and my family fed and sheltered for the last few dozen months. And I’ve put the word out through Facebook that I’m back in the market for doing some of the highly paid corporate work I walked away from to come and live here, exactly 100 months ago today.

World news

Over the last month, the UK has started bombing Syria (which was already being bombed by the USA, France and Russia, with several countries lending military support). This is allegedly in response to last month’s attacks in Paris (future search: Bataclan theatre attack), although looks more like a way of gaining popularity for the Prime Minister and showing off the weapons that are one of the UK’s leading exports.

There was yet another global summit to help curb the catastrophic effects of global warming (future search: COP21). This has been hailed a success, although this may be to do with the amount of money that will be funnelled towards efforts to mitigate global warming, which the governments will get their hands on and – if they follow form – use to fill the pockets of their friends and supporters. My view is that far more effort should have been made to counter the warming, far sooner. There were opportunities in 2007, 2010 and 2012 that were missed. And much of this coming crisis was suspected in the 1970s or before. There are some very great people dedicated to this effort to avoid our species’ self extinction and I wish them all the luck in the world.

And now, the weather

It’s an El Nino year and unseasonable weather has been reported globally. Speaking for myself, I am sitting in Western Europe, in a T-Shirt, with the outside temperature reading 16C. I haven’t seen weather this warm on December 18th before, and only time will tell how hot things will get.

PS Seeing as this is a new blog, I have no idea how the formatting will go. I may write several times in a normal month, but there may be months I miss altogether. If I stop writing completely, you can safely assume that I am dead. (Which is not something I intend to do for another 500 or so months.)

If I’m not back before December 25th, Merry Christmas.