Count Backwards from Ten

I really need to be putting Boo touches to As You Like It don’t I? I’ve got Julius Caesar to watch this evening and if I don’t get a move on we’ll have a Shakespearean bottle neck, and that would never do.  I expect it would look more like a ruff or something, probably in the shape of a mobius strip, but it would be scratchy, like a bad school vest, and devoutly not to be wished.  I don’t know quite where I was going with that simile frankly. I was getting a bit Metaphysical there for a moment.

I had great plans for today.  They involved being shiny, efficient, competent and optimistic.  This did not work out, as I will later testify to.   I have made a new plan though, re: the driving of doom.  It is to limit the amount of hours per week I am driving, so that I don’t want to kill myself every day, maybe just every other day.  I am also limiting the number of cars and people that I drive with.  This should definitely help.  The next step is to find someone who can hypnotize the living shit out of me so that I am a somnambulant (but competent) chicken behind the wheel and all will be well.

This last step might prove a bit challenging, as I feel about hypnotherapy only slightly less terrified than I do about driving. The only good things to be said in hypnotherapy’s favour is that I won’t crash into an articulated lorry or kill all the children.  I’m not in the slightest bit worried about doing the chicken dance, or being regressed to the point where I realise that I have been harbouring a murderer in the bosom of the family for the last twenty years.  I know I won’t wake up having bitten into  a nice, juicy onion or anything or wearing a tutu fashioned from loon pants.  But I did once have a reasonably horrific experience with a hypnotherapist in my early teens and it has wigged the living daylights out of me ever since.  The fact that I am seriously prepared to go down this route will show you how fucking anihilating driving is for me.

The other thing about hypnotherapy is that the Unsuitable Ex is an NLP Trainer extraordinaire and took up this hobby, most of which revolves around the extensive use of hypnotherapy techniques, when we were first together and then developed it into a highly successful business.  He actually knows Paul McKenna in real life (not as impressive as it might sounds. Trust me on this. Sorry Paul love.) and travels all over the world training people in the arcane arts of belief change, quantum reality streaming and whatever other tricks he has up his sleeve.  I used to run his business for him.  I am in fact a qualified NLP practitioner myself.  I had to be to run the company.  Yes people. If I want to, I can climb into your minds.  Be afraid. Be very afraid.

It has never floated my boat.  I see that it can do great things for people, but it has never really done it for me.  I find most of it strangely troubling and being married to a man who spent six months trying to hypnotise the cats into not scratching the sofa, and then two years trying to hypnotise his daughters into submission, both of which he failed spectacularly to do, did not endear me to it.  Nor did him constantly spending his free time and our free money travelling the world to do more and wondrous strange things while I sat at home waiting for him to pay for a sofa we could sit on without all the legs falling off and a front door you couldn’t open by breathing on it.

He has walked on fire with Anthony Robbins.  He has spent weekends learning to flirt.  He has taught people how to date strippers and pole dancers and find their inner sex god and bring it out for a cup of tea and a bun.  He has discovered his inner spirit animal (a bloody big bull) and come to terms with his rampant manliness getting naked in the woods and hitting things with sticks.  He has rebirthed in flotation tanks, faced his demons in sweat lodges (in Finchley. Who knew?) and pondered world religions with monks on retreat. He has spent days howling on the bathroom floor following Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson’s precepts of energised meditation.  He has signed up to Far Right Wing publications and Far Left Wing publications in order to understand extremes of behaviour, which probably means that I am still on CIA watch lists every time I buy something from Amazon.  He has fasted and chanted and had his blood assessed and his aura cleansed. His chakras have been boiled so many times they’re the size of pinheads.  He once drank so much carrot juice he turned his skin orange and nearly killed himself.  There is very little in the way of self development and out there practices that he has not done at one time or another.

It was one of our biggest bones of contention that when the children came along I refused to pack up the entire household and transfer them to a yurt on top of a pole on Mount Kilimanjaro, or let him cash in the children’s savings bonds to invest in psychotropic mushroom farms that would make our fortune, or forsake the devil that was wheat/sweetcorn/television/Pampers baby wipes etc.  Apparently I wasn’t being a team player and was definitely not being a supportive wife.  Hooray for me.

One of the biggest issues was my refusal to let him ‘fix’ me hypnotically.  Even then I didn’t trust him not to lull me into a false sense of security only for me to come to my senses twenty years later working in a brothel/salt mine/Osho mind fuck hotel thinking ‘what happened?’ and ‘Where is my cake?’

So. I am a little apprehensive.

This time though, he will not have any input at all. Nor will I have to seek his approval.  I am going to find someone, interview them thoroughly, think it through wisely and if I have any doubts at all, I shall not touch them with a ten foot pole.  My first question will be ‘Do you know unsuitable ex?’ If the answer is yes then I can move serenely on and find someone else.