Voice recorder found

Surgeons at a London hospital have found a digital voice recorder in a man’s anus. The patient, who had undergone laparoscopic resection of the sigmoid colon for recurrent sigmoid diverticulitis, presented to the hospital because of symptoms of subileus due to a recurrent high-grade anastomotic stenosis. A computed tomography scan revealed an electrical object that was hastily removed and, after consultation, shown to the patient, who claimed no memory of having inserted the device himself. At his request doctors at King’s College Hospital gave the recorder a thorough wash, purchased suitable batteries and played it. They discovered the machine contained more than two hundred hours’ worth of improvisations for a devised theatre show called The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland. 

Instead of writing fiction

I've started documenting my life. Or snippets of it. What happens though is that I send it up. I haven't really been awake since 5am, high and manic on a cocktail of melatonin, antihistamines, travel sickness pills and valium. Though I've thought about getting in that state. What is true is that I walked to poncey Broadway Market, intent on sitting in La Bouche. I planned to have a cappuccino (one pound ninety-five) and an almond croissant (two pounds twenty) and pretend to read my book on trauma while watching all the passersby. La Bouche was full of like-minded and similarly pretentious people so I continued on my nonchalant way to a less trendy and almost empty Middle Eastern cafe whose almond croissants were forty-five pence cheaper. I took a seat and got out my trauma book. Actually made some notes about a psychiatrist called Lenore Terr who proposed that trauma in children took two forms. Type 1 trauma results from a single - often life-threatening - event, and it can be easily remembered in all its detail. Type 2 consists of repeated and predictable trauma, particularly sexual or physical abuse, which a child begins to anticipate and then learns to cope with through psychic numbing or dissociation. Terr's thinking - backed up by some questionable research - is that because of the repetitive nature of this latter kind of abuse it would become a general blur, less easily recalled. Richard J. McNally, however...actually, you probably don't want to know what Richard J. McNally thought. All you want to know is why I'm writing about abuse. 'Was he abused?' you'll be thinking. I don't think I was. Although according to some commentators there are only two kinds of people in this world: those who remember their sexual abuse in childhood and those who do not. I remember, when I was five or six years old, the boy next door lifting up his shirt and showing me his stomach. It was highly erotic and led to other things. But I'm not going to tell you what those other things were because I've been fictionalizing them in Human Waste, the novel that I'm having difficulty finishing. Probably because of this futile and near obsessive documenting of my life. I hold 'Sunshine and daydreams' responsible. He/she left an encouraging comment beneath a former post, telling me this was the most interesting blog he or she had ever read. I don't know who 'Sunshine and daydreams' is. She/he (I suspect a she) left her comment anonymously. She hasn't created a profile, which means I can't reply and thank her. Or complain about the way her positive comment is making me post more rubbish on this blog rather than get on with writing Human Waste.        

Melatonin in Korea

I had some Korean Won left over and popped into Kiehl's in duty free thinking I could buy a bottle of clinically proven - or was it clinically tested - age corrector. Gave up and wandered into a gift shop where I gazed at vitamins on shelves and found some Melatonin. The last time I tried melatonin was in 2005 on the recommendation of Jude Kelly. It gave me vivid nightmares and I stopped. Perhaps I'd give it another go. I knocked one back, attempting to wash it down with water from one of those little fountains outside the gents. As I bent forward to gulp some water the pill shot out. I picked it up and swallowed it and got on the plane. Had an uneventful flight sitting next to two Irish people. A man in his late fifties and a woman, possibly his daughter, in her thirties. He ordered a white wine. She ordered a white wine and a tomato juice and then gave him her white wine. We only spoke when she asked if they could get past me to go to the toilet. Began to watch Hitchcock again. Switched it off after five minutes and watched Silver Linings Playbook for the third time. Knew all the dialogue. Turned that off too. Watched The Master, a very depressing film with an agonizingly twisted performance by Joaquin Phoenix. Fell asleep. That peculiar half-sleep during which a calm descended upon me (I also took a valium) and I could see the solution to my novel. It would contain an abundance of flashbacks to abuse. Everyone would start to have them. They would become ridiculous. I would become ridiculous. Have become ridiculous. I'm not sure if it's the melatonin but since taking it I've become obsessed by porn. Can one blame melatonin for watching porn?