Grey Monday...

About a year or so back I became very ill with breathing difficulties and was diagnosed as having laryngeal cancer. Only way to deal with it by then was a laryngectomy - so I ended up without a voice - but alive! Most people who have had this operation can now regain a level of speech via a valve inserted into the throat - I was one of those who couldn't speak - had to utilise a voice prosthesis - which always provoked a laugh or two at least as it resembled an elaborate vibrator that I shoved into the side of my face and used to speak like a robot/dalek. Also made interesting noises when passed over the strings of my electric guitar... A good improvisor will always find new ways of making sound!
Recently, at long last, I started to speak via the valve and after almost nine months of relative silence was able to communicate more or less - still getting to grips with it but it gets easier.
I write all of this to get it out the way. I was working in a straight job and have been on indefinite leave since last September. Life has strange compensations... I had been planning on getting my music back on track and now had plenty of time to create. I still have a lot of fatigue and have to pace myself accordingly but the opportunity to play music and participate in the various projects I have planned with my collaborator Murray Ward (see us over at www.plexusmusic.co.uk ) has been a great solace. Also had the time to finish one book (sent of to publisher a while back - still waiting for reply!) and write the guts of another. The end of which has been weird - an aborted double suicide bombing on a concert hall in Paris with one of the perps shot by the French cops - which I wrote the week before the bomb attacks in London and the recent tragic shooting of the Brazilian guy. I had planned the ending months ago - but a week after the actual writing - even though it is set in Paris rather than London - was a bit of eery synchronicity to say the least. In one sense the bombing attempt in my story was at a tangent to the main story - but I realised over the last couple of weeks that we are overshadowed now and probably for a long time by the ongoing war with Islamofascism. I also thought back to William Gibson's last novel 'Pattern Recognition' which is so far the best post 9/11 book I have read. The falling of the towers is in the background of the book but slowly permeates all the way through. The zeitgeist with a vengeance to use an old term. Difficult to escape - and difficult to write about.
These random thoughts - since my illness I keep strange hours woke at 4 A.M. and had a hot drink then as ever started surfing and listening to music - just joined up with an interesting site - Last.fm - which builds a profile of your music choices and when enough tracks have been played creates your own radio station for streaming. Worth a look...
Went back to sleep about 11 A.M. and woke again at 2 P.M. The day will now be fucked maybe - a grey wet day outside - your archetypal Monday for psychotics everywhere. I'm sitting writing this and listening to a stream of Doom Metal from Last.fm - about right for today...
I may go back to the book I was reading - 'The Divine Invasion' by Philip K Dick. Read a lot of his stuff years ago, just coming back to it. Wacky ontological tricks with your head - just what I need today...