Don’t tell me you’re tired unless you’ve run around the world!

I’m tired. I’m so tired that when I blink my eyes stay down and before you can say ‘ga ga’ I’m off with the faeries, dribbling from the mouth and snoring a passable impression of the Flying Scotsman express train steaming through a tunnel.
Nobody wants to feel tired, but there’s good tired and bad tired.
Bad tired is where you feel like the world is against you and you don’t want it with you anyway because it’s a horrible cruel place where the bad people live, and all you want to do is go to bed and sleep and hide.
Interesting: I tried to define ‘bad tired’ and came up with a description of depression!
Whichever way it defines itself, ‘bad tired’, is always accompanied by feelings of frustration or anger, often an oneself. Maybe you’ve failed to meet a personal target, or let down a loved one; whatever it is, you just don’t have the energy to drag your sad sorry arse up and out to make yourself do the necessary.
And then there’s good tired, which is where I am today. Exhausted, yes, but satisfied. However deep down my spirit slumps when I try to remember the last day on which I awoke and had absolutely nothing to do, a proper day off, and even though I know that up ahead there’s still unfinished business; indeed tomorrow I have to sit and fill out my Tax Form 11 and prove once more to the Revenue Commissioners that I have not earned enough money to contribute anything to the nation except my own PRSI contributions, and, of course, my own madness; and the day after that I head off once more to England to spend a few days with my glorious lovely Mum, and then return to start work again; despite all of the above, I know that right now, while I may be tired (I think I mentioned that, didn’t I?) I am happy.
Four days ago I finished the second draft of the novel, which should now be completed by Christmas, hastening, as Sir Alex Ferguson so poetically put it, ‘Squeaky Bum Time’ when I must turn this manuscript into a good book, and then be judged.
The day after I finished the draft I found out that my friends from Melbourne were arriving at Shannon with their two teenage children the following day; the day that was going to be my day off, but no matter, because these folk are precious souls who I have not seen since 1989, so all was good. I raced around like a mole on speed, shopping cleaning and picking up mattresses, whilst also writing what you read in this space last week, so as to free more time with my Ozzy-tralian mates.
So brilliant, emotional and wonderful was it to see them that on both nights of their visit I lay awake insomniacal, brain racing, trying to come down from the fantastically intense work that I had just done on my book; the welcome sight and stories of my lifelong friends, and generally, as ever, needing time alone and awake to process the marvellous yet messy and mixed-up monstrosity that is life.
Rising before dawn on the second morning we all headed up to Knock Airport, whence I returned yesterday, so drained as to be barely able to stand and breathe at the same time.
In that state I knew I had to just keep on keeping on until all the boring necessities of life had been executed, so I made a shepherd’s pie from yesterday’s leftovers, stumbled, did the bins and recycling, dribbled, blinked but opened my eyes just before I fell over, then rushed backwards and forwards from garden to kitchen as I tried to cook whilst simultaneously listening to the most lucid engineer who came round to service the boiler. Then I passed out on the sofa.
So tired, yes, but feeling fulfilled, having reached my goal of the second draft just in time for my mate to fulfil his lifetime goal of returning to Europe to meet the mates he made growing up in the 1970’s.
Glorious stuff indeed, and yet my paltry pathetic tiredness pales into insignificance when I look at the goals that others set themselves.
As regular colyoomistas will know, this scribbler loves a good adventurer, and recently, thanks to the Sunday Times’ Camilla Long, I read of a woman whose story left my jaw dropping so wide and long it has scarcely recovered.
The woman in question is one Rosie Swale-Pope, a 61 year-old resident of Tenby in South Wales, who tragically lost her husband to prostate cancer in 2003. In October of that year she set off to run around the world, and two months ago she made it back home, after having journeyed alone though Europe, Russia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada America, Greenland and Iceland.
Despite searing heat and sub-frozen temperatures, a breast-cancer scare, breaking five ribs and fracturing a hip, Rosie kept on running, raising awareness for Prostate Cancer Charity (www.prostate-cancer.org.uk), whilst dealing with her personal pain and loss.
When the sun shone she could run 30 miles a day, but when conditions deteriorated, she’d sometimes only manage 500 yards.
She explains:
“This is the scenario at -62C .... your hands freeze, and if your hands freeze you cannot undo the zips, so you cannot tend to your feet ... inside the (30 x 60 inch) rig, I would massage my feet, put some oil on them, stick them in the wet sleeping bag, and in the morning wake with eyelashes frozen shut. Every night I’d face bears and wolves ... No one else on the expedition except you, with the howling of the wolves and the blizzards and the storms. It’s extraordinary.”
No Rosie, you are the extraordinary one. She suffered frostbite, lost consciousness after eating raw spaghetti, and in Russia had to eat pasta with reindeer hair in it for days, before nearly starving to death in Alaska.
Worst of all was the business of being alone.
“Loneliness is like a knife wound.” she says,”It started out of cancer, loss, sorrow and heartache and a wish to turn something round. You can always turn things round, and if you can’t, then someone you love can do it for you.”
Tired?
Me?
Nah missis, you won’t catch me whinging about feeling tired while there’s people out there like the thoroughly splendid Rosie Swale-Pope.

It's my last chance to visit the Last Chance Mountains!

Adventures come in all shapes and sizes. You might be heading off to a place you have never been to before, or deciding to face your fear, to stare that which challenges you most in the eye and speet in its face, or kiss its cheek.
There are adventures endowed with mystical quality: the quests, the pilgrimages, searches for holy grails.
Darker and deeper are adventures that take you back to places you lost: places which might dwell solely in the mind, or actually exist in the physical world.
The adventure upon which I'm about to embark may be short in length, but packed into it are all the above ingredients, and hopefully, at the end of it, I will enjoy a sense of achievement.
Best of all, I will know I am alive.
Our story starts in 1995, about a fortnight after I had moved from Connemara to San Francisco.
Lost in a new continent and culture, I began to write a short story. Inspired by the opening shot of Wim Wenders' extraordinary film, 'Paris, Texas', it started with a man walking in a desert.
The first page of this short story was written over and over again. I didn't know who this character was; only that he was obsessed by three photos he had of a woman. Not one of them looked like her, held in its image her essence or presence.
Three years later, living in a tiny Californian town further north, in the heart of the Redwood Empire, I was given some old National Geographic magazines by the quirky old dear who ran the minuscule local library. On top of the pile that she left on my doorstep, the cover of the January 1987 issue promised an article about "California's Desert, A Worldly Wilderness."
At that point of my life, drowning in a vile cocktail of rage and depression, I was completely unaware California even had a desert.
But on the article's map I spied the Last Chance Range, just at the north end of Death Valley, and I immediately knew that this was where my character had been wandering.
Sadly, for the first and please god the last time in my life, my spirit finally broke. Unrecognisable to myself, I went into meltdown, leaving my then wife and life behind to return to Ireland.
A year later, whilst lying early one morning in my bed in my room in the Claddagh, I had a vision. Yes, that's what I said, and no, I wasn't visited by the Virgin, Buddha or any pointy-headed Trogs from Earthworm Land.
Over by my window I saw, in the style of an aerial camera tracking shot, a massive breakers yard lying in a desert. Pinching myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming, I watched as acre after acre of baking hot sand and the rusted remains of hundreds of thousands of vehicles of every description ran past my eyes.
I could almost hear the metal going 'kerrkunnnnnnnnnnggggg' in the heat from the sun.
Inspired afresh, I revisited the short story, and worked on the assumption that my character had been rescued, and ended up working at this massive breakers yard in the desert.
But why a breakers yard in the desert?
Who knew?
I started to explore who my character was; what was his life like as a child?
Who was this woman he had been with?
Gradually over the next few years, whilst living alone in a farmhouse in North Mayo, the short story grew into a mosaical wordy mess of 30,000 inconsistent words.
Then I returned to Galway City and last May I quit my job, and finally took on the task of writing the novel my story had become.
Six months later I had turned that messy muddle of 30,000 words into a full first draft of 300 pages, crammed with more styles and voices than you could shake a schizoid stick at.
Writing fiction is the business of making things up. Even though I have never been an English lesbian living in San Francisco's North Beach back in 1969, I have spent enough time there to imagine, visualise and then create words that might make such a person believable.
I can imagine what the Californian desert and the Last Chance Range might be like, but I simply do not know what it really is like, and so I am going to my mountains.
Using and loving broadband to research the trip, I entered into communication with all sorts of people, and was told something most exciting and illuminating by a landscape photographer who knows the area well.
He was advising me about those wilderness roads.
"There's wrecks everywhere!" he said. "There's so many wrecks that they even hung three of 'em from the top of a signboard to warn folk!"
My eyes bulged with excitement.
"So so so it wouldn't be an impossible or unlikely thing to imagine a massive breakers yard down there? Like, errr, a vast breakers yard in the desert wouldn't be an impossible notion?"
"Hell no, man! Sounds like a good idea. Sure they'd need one."
And so, laden with my past, my pain, my heart soul and body; armed by my spirit and visions and creativity, I am off away on this adventure.
In one day in San Francisco I will try to reclaim the place in which I once lived, loved hard and lost much. It will be a tough day, a good day, releasing me from a long-redundant sense of loss, allowing myself to believe that yes, it did all happen.
At the same time, I will be looking at North Beach through the eyes of my female character, seeing the refuge to which she flees to build a life she loves, in a city that loves her back.
Then, having faced the adventures of mind and heart, I'll hit the road and head off on a thousand mile road trip to the Last Chance Range; to the heart of my story; to the one place I absolutely need to visit in order to be able to finish my book.
This adventure is more about arrival than departure; more about achievement than loss; more about loving life than living it in fear.
This adventure I will enjoy, and yes, I will feel alive.

I'm leaving my job and going back to work!

"Oh you are so lucky!" they say, "You know what you want to do! I have no idea what I want to do!"
Yes, I know what I want to do, but I'm not sure how lucky I feel.
I've always known that I wanted to write, and at times such as this, I know that I need to.
Sounds a tad dramatic, doesn't it, especially in the context of this colyoom. Much as I love writing 'Double Vision', and inflicting upon you my weekly dose of neurotic outpourings, the scribbling of non-fiction does not keep me sane.
Sure, it pays the bills, and the discipline involved within writing a colyoom of a certain length, week in week out, year in year out, has helped me to hone my editing skills, but as regular readers know only too well, I am still prone to plunging into the mental abyss, appearing disturbed, deranged and depressed, whilst producing this 1000 words a week.
No, what keeps me sane is the creation of fiction.
Well, even that is not wholly true, but as is often the case, the converse is an absolute certainty.
If I do not write fiction, I eventually become depressed, and all of the aforementioned 'd's above.
Were I sculptor, (but then again no?) or a man standing at an easel clutching a palette, my apron smeared with the oily colours of the painting rainbow, you might well expect an artistic temperament, but in my experience, writers are somehow perceived as less artistic and more artisanal.
Well, let me tell ya, it makes no difference how you see us, because speaking personally, I know how mad it feels on the inside.
Throughout my adult life I have struggled to balance what we might as well call 'normality' with this preposterous need to create. Given that 'normal' is a pointless and irrelevant definition, I can admit to being able to pass myself off as 'normal' pretty well, for a while anyway.
I can keep the day job going, and make sure all the rent, bills and financial blah-de-blah holes are covered. I can take my two week holiday in Portugal and have a lovely time, appearing to most people as if I am just a regular kind of guy.
Well anyway, that's how it seems to me. Those close to me might tell me that I am deluding myself.
Point is, I can perform all the traditional roles of a functioning and contributing member of society, but alongside that lifestyle there plays an internal game of Chinese Water Torture: within my soul there runs an incessant drip-drip-drip of resentment and confusion, because all the while I'm doing the 'normal' thing, I am denying my own needs.
Hence, you poor colyoomistas had to suffer a long Winter of depression and discontent, until, come the Spring, I realise for the umpteenth time in my life that the writing of fiction is not a luxury item, it is a need; a prerequisite for sanity, and unfortunately here, as they say, is the rub: my creative process is disgustingly fragile.
Hats off to Kafka and T.S. Eliot, who managed to produce works of creative genius whilst holding down day jobs (in insurance and at Lloyds Bank, respectively). I wish I was able to do similar, but I am not.
Hence I am now leaving a most excellent job that I have very much enjoyed working at for 2 years, and choosing to go for broke by working on a fourth novel that has been an elusive work-in-progress for 12 long years.
Why now? Because I realise that I have to.
It is as simple as that.
Since 1985, I have completed three novels and three little plays, each of which was performed and one of which one a prize.
Zippetty-dip!
Prizes are all well and good, but what I seek is far more elusive that external recognition. Even though none of my novels were published, I can happily say with confidence, yet without conceit or bravado, that each of them is good enough.
Of course I will be delighted when my current novel is published, and my back catalogue released thereafter, but I know, as a writer, as an editor and as a reader that their unpublished state is neither a reflection of how well they were written, nor a judgement cast upon my skills, style or abilities.
Having grown up in marketing, I know how fickle are the choices of publishers, agents and their ilk. My first novel, a passionate low-life rant called 'Look Again' was read by the manuscript committee at the estimable publishing house of Faber, and was declined by a vote of 6-7.
Did I feel crushed? Absolutely not.
My only ambition as far as my writing is concerned is to improve: become more skilful, wiser, more able. Each novel, although a complete entity unto itself, is really nothing more than a stepping stone along the path to greater writing.
If all this sounds rather bombastic and melodramatic, so be it. My creative process might have been better served left hidden, but I am excited, and want to share my news.
I am going back to my work, people!
Facing the prospect of penury does not wilt me. Sure, a few weeks hence my lack of money might well surface in this space in a bit of an auld whinge, but right now, I am exhilarated, excited and just a little nervous.
Why? Well, because after all this high fallutin'-rootin'-tootin' rhetoric about creativity, if all I come up with is a big pile of stinky boring prose, I'll deserve whatever punishment is most appropriate.
There have been times when I have had plenty of money and no time.
Looking back at those periods all I can recall is constantly plotting my escape.
Equally, there have been plenty of times when I have been broke and had all the time I needed.
Sometimes these were days of desperation, when I was idle, frustrated and unable to write; at my most wretched.
Most of the time however, given time and peace, I filled those days with the creation of fictional scribbling.
I'll always choose time over cash, and peace over rushing around. There may not be roast beef on the Adley dinner table for a good while, but my soul will feel sustained.

cadley1 at eircom.net

doubledoublevision.blogspot.com

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