Life Is Shit

I haven't been able to get out hunting for a while now, things haven't been easy and for the first time in years I've been quite sick, I'm feeling fucked physically, mentally and emotionally, my wife's conditon is getting progressively worse and it's hard to witness. She now has an indwelling tube inserted by her right lung and this is having to be drained between 3 to 4 times a week. The nurses are removing about a litre at a time, this has been going on for weeks and there doesn't appear to be any relief. The lung is totally wrecked and she really can't breathe very well at all, it seems to be getting worse as the weeks go by, the hospitals and doctors are close to useless and I have zero faith in any of them. 

People Born Happy Don't Get It 

To me, life has always felt totally meaningless, even more so now, I can't help feeling this way, I always have, even when I was really young at play-school I remember looking around at the other kids and thinking 'I don't fucking belong here' and 48 years later I look around at society and still feel exactly the same way. Don't get me wrong, not because I feel like I'm better than anyone, far from it, I just genuinely don't see the point of existence. The reason for me being alive was to play drums and make music but after beating myself up for over 35 years trying to make that happen my brain broke and I very nearly didn't recover, I wanted to be dead. It's precarious to talk about mental health in this day and age because it almost appears trendy to think you've got a problem - it ain't.  

It's now been 17 years since I had a mental breakdown and all I've been doing since has been hanging on trying not to drown amongst the monotony and the nothingness of the everyday. Come next year I would've been heavily medicated for 18 years with no hope of ever coming off the junk that I'm on. There will come a day where both my body and mind won't be able to sustain the fucked juxtaposition I exist in. Things went way too far and the invisible conditions I've been left with are irreparable, it's all very complicated and something that can't be explained in any sort of blog post, get back to me when you haven't slept one wink for 10 weeks, maybe then we can talk. 

Some Of Us Distort More Than Others 

The drugs I take make me feel like total shit, they're sedatives that knock the soul out of me and if I gave into them I'd spend my days just sitting staring at a wall feeling completely content. When I open my eyes every morning to a new day my first thought is 'here we fucking go again'. I have to drink 3 mugs of coffee just to be able to muster enough energy and enthusiasm to get off the couch. There's no escaping the way I feel, everything I do is simply a distraction, I find little to no joy in anything, my slight peace can be found in the warmth of my local pub whilst I quietly drink and ferociously try and 'write away' all the shit that I'm feeling inside me.

However, this can be a slippery slope because I have this compelling need to drink myself into oblivion in the hope my, already dumbed down soul can be anaesthetized even more. As I sit looking out the pub window I see a world that's regressing at an alarming rate, the 'not so smart phone' has an awful lot to answer for. I can't be bothered to engage in conversation because people bore the shit out of me, I find relief in silence and my writing. For me the next line, sentence, poem etc is all that really matters, I care not for material garbage to create the illusion of completeness, I crave to open my head up and write about the world that I see and feel. I couldn't care who reads my words just as long as I get them out in a way that is true to me. Should I Be Mixing Alcohol And Medication? ..... I really don't care. 

In regards to my metal detecting, the circus that it's become has ruined it, social media and the ego have pretty much fucked up everything. On a positive note, I managed to pick up a Tesoro Golden Sabre in pretty good condition, it will be interesting to see how it performs in the iron on the Thames. It's got a similar vibe to the Eldorado, I've been messing about with it above the ground and it demonstrates almost identical performance. What Do I Mean By This? it's terrible at any kind of 3D unmasking, this is something I've mentioned before, a number of my older metal box Tesoro detectors fail miserably at above ground 3D unmasking. BUT! they perform exceptionally well down on the river when hunting in the actual ground, I've got countless examples on my river videos of these specific machines pulling small non-ferrous out of the iron at all levels, depths and angles. That's why, when Tesoro's are involved I really couldn't give a flying fuck how they perform above the ground in air. 

Old But Gold

To be honest the same can be said about all of my machines, I don't care how they perform above the ground, I make these types of videos because people want to watch them and find them interesting but for me, I couldn't give a shit. I only care about getting out and hunting in real world conditions and working to understand all my detectors to the best of my ability. For me, drumming was/is a very sensory experience, it was always about communicating and feeling, I approach metal detecting in the exact same way. When I hold a machine I visualise it as an extension of myself and 'through sound' I know it's going to tell me everything I need to know, the only thing that stands in the way of this is the limitations of your own understanding - there is no limitation to understanding other than laziness.

20' DD "L" Series

Regarding my Nexus detectors I decided to order the new 20' DD "L" coil, I've stated many times that the 20' DD is my favourite coil to use. I had the first generation one which was made out of carbon fibre, because of this, when the ground was wet it was crazy sensitive. This meant that I had to tune the coil down to be able to run it smoothly. The new 20' DD is a totally different ballgame, it doesn't get affected if the ground is wet which means I'm going to be using it a hell of a lot. Now that we're seeing more rain I do plan to get back out into my fields, I don't tend to visit them during the summer months because I don't want to be wrecking the pasture.