G. Michael Vasey's Blog: The Wacky World of Dr. Vasey, page 92

Where Is My Enthusiasm?

From time-to-time, we lose our way a bit. Distractions or pure bloody laziness are usually to blame. For the last several weeks, it has been the latter for me. I can’t be bothered to meditate I really can’t. I feel flat – not down – but flat, lacking in excitement and with no zest at all for anything. It’s a strange feeling. A bit like treading water or something. Is it the weather, the time of year, my age???? Who knows? In a couple of weeks or so, we move back to Brno and I am hoping that a change of scenery makes the difference and rekindles the fires.

What is missing is enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm has always been my driving force. The fuel for my engine. My inner fire. Enthusiasm is similar to desire but it supports desire in the sense that it feeds and drives the desire to action and hopefully results. My enthusiasm has gone. But where the hell did it go and why? I have been looking for it around the house but to be honest, I don’t really know what it looks like and so I haven’t found it. How do you get enthusiasm back? Does anyone know? If you happen to see my enthusiasm somewhere, please chase it back.

Thanks!

I wrote a poem many years ago that seems to fit my mood. It’s called Gone again and it appeared in my first book of poetry – Weird Tales. Here it is…

Gone Again

Gone again

Hardly a moment to spare

I don’t know where life is leading

And I don’t really care

Gone again

Was I ever really there?

Slot machine bingo

Maniacal stares

Readily unfolding

In front of me

Unzip and down to flesh again

Automatic eyes

Lasered to see

Pull another cocktail

Molotov type

Shoving it down inside

Deep inside

Dilation and comforting sensation

Try me

I am on your side

Gone again

Not a moment to spare

God only knows what I am doing

And he doesn’t care

Gone again

Was I ever really there?

Tagged: Happiness, Poems for the little room, Poetry, Weird Tales

Customer Service East of the Rhine….

I love living in the Czech Republic I really do. It is beautiful, relatively inexpensive (outside of Prague), full of very nice people and has great beer and food. One thing it lacks however is an understanding of what customer service is.

When you live somewhere like the Czech Republic you really do begin to yearn for the American customer service experience. I say American because to be honest, British customer service isn’t all that great either…. but, its not this bad!

Let me give you a small example. In an earlier post, I mentioned a bill for natural gas. The company in question is RWE, a major German energy company. You would think then that customer service would be high on the agenda of a company supplying energy to customers right?

For the last 4 months, our apartment in Brno has been empty. Apart from a couple of nights when we have stayed there in sleeping bags, the heating is set to minimum. What this means is that it only comes on at close to freezing temperatures. Now, I would say that this winter that may have occurred for a month or so – not much more as it has been a remarkably warm winter – today March 12th, it is 14C! So, you can imagine my shock and consternation when I got a bill for three-months for more than $500 equivalent right?

The first thing I did was call RWE. There was an English language option that dumped you into voicemail. I left 2 or 3 voicemails over the last few days and no one has yet called me back. I also sent an email to the email address provided asking how could this be?

After 2-days I got a short email back saying that we should check the meter reading ourselves and that we could also, for a fee, have the meter’s accuracy checked. Super! How? Well, it didn’t say. So I replied. I asked a few additional questions such as what tariff are we on? How long is the contract? Could it be possible that the gas is also being used by someone else in our building? Would RWE be able to offer us some efficiency advice? Two days later, I got the reply….

1. We are on a standard tariff. If you want a different one, visit the RWE shop in Prague and deal with them,

2. RWE is not a gas service company so if you want to check if others are using the gas you should look in the phone book and call someone,

3. No, RWE does not offer any advice on energy efficiency.

By the way, at no point was I given any phone number or contact person so … I wrote back saying, please call me.

I got a call surprisingly quickly.

She asked me what I needed. I explained the issue. So what do you want, she asked. I would like someone to check the meter and by the way, the hall always has a gas smell, says I. Oh, you should contact our emergency service, in fact, I will put you through…… she was gone!

Emergency services answer…. Do you speak English, says I? No. OK, here is the address in Brno…… Wait, he says (in English), this is Prague, we don’t cover Brno. You need to call them. click!

I don’t know what to say……… but where is the customer service in any of this? RWE plainly could care less.

Luckily, there are other providers here and I am looking up their numbers now.

Tagged: Failure and success, Rants

An Experiment

I have blogged for years – actually since about 2004 – always using my own hosted custom site. I originally started out using Drupal but about 3-years ago or so, I switched to WordPress. Now I am experimenting with something equally dramatic….. moving from my own hosted custom site to a blog hosted on wordpress.com.

I have always avoided wordpress.com as it stops you from running any advertising. The truth is, I have made about $300 in those ten years blogging from ads maximum and so I have come to the conclusion it simply doesn’t work. Still, I write books and I use amazon ads for my books and that won’t fly here….. There are ways around that issue however which is to direct people interested in buying my books to my book review site – strange book reviews – a site I and a friend own and host and where I can still get a commission…..please do buy your occult books there and do buy mine there… royalties are small so an extra bit on top in the way of an Amazon commission is nice.

What brings me here is community. I am hoping there will be more interaction with other bloggers and more readers of this blog. We will see. I will preserve my existing blog for a while and may switch back. But, for now, lets see how it goes.

One real drawback is that all my google links now lead to the old site….. and when that goes away, to a black hole….

Ah well….

What do you all think? Comments please as I seek to see if this is a good idea.

Take Our Poll

I will also eventually bring over the url and get rid of the wordpress.com bit…. but only after I am sure this is the right way to go.

Tagged: Announcements, Books, writing

Sometimes Everything Just Goes Tits Up….

This last few weeks has been pretty interesting. Its not so much that we have a had a run of bad luck but that things just appear to be testing and frustrating us.

First off, we have a had a string of unexpected bills. First we got a fine for having no car insurance last year for a few days – it just arrived in the mail saying we notice you had no car insurance and here is your fine, signed the Czech Government. They are correct actually as the car was leased and insurance included and I forgot to get new insurance when the lease ran out (and no one wrote from said insurance company saying would you like to keep your insurance going)…

Next, we got a gas bill from RWE for our unoccupied apartment in Brno. Its not been a cold winter by any standards and yes, the heating is on but set at minimum just to keep anything from freezing. My expectation of the bill was that it would be negligible but let’s just say it initially looked like I had expected until I counted the zeroes and saw an extra one included. Now this is daylight robbery and I am trying to get RWE o talk to me but emails and voicemails have so far elicited no response whatsoever.

As if unexpected bills (and that is just two out of several) where not enough, the IRS inexplicably denied my daughter a TIN (Tax ID). This after the embassy denied her a social security number. Now this makes my blood boil as it simply means that I cannot get a tax deduction for my own daughter! Of course, the only way to move this forward is to call the 800 number rumoured to connect to the IRS, wait hours while listening to dreary music and an infuriating voice telling me my call will be answered in the order it was received….

Funnily enough, I need to call the IRS anyway because out of the blue and without any explanation I got a tax refund check from them two weeks ago. Ahhh, I hear you say, a change in fortune? Maybe…. maybe…. but neither my accountant nor I can figure out why I got a refund as according to our calculations I owed them! It’s just more aggravation.

There has been quite a lot more aggro from destiny this last week or so including my fight with a TOMTOM upgrade for the car in which I ended up losing everything on the disk and had to purchase a new map! That was 4 hours not well spent…

I don’t quite know what is going on but at the moment is does feel as if I am forcing my way through jelly to get anywhere and my limited financial resources are being overly strained…

Is there some astrological event going on I am not aware of or what?

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Is Truth Relative?

The truth.

We hear these two little words quite often. Two very important little words they are too. There are all types of truths and many of us spend our lives seeking truth.

I once wrote, and indeed use it on my Facebook page, that the older I get the less I think I know about anything. Another way to say this would be that the older I get, the less I am certain of any truth – at least in the absolute sense. I don’t know what I am, nor what my purpose is. I don’t know what the Universe is nor its purpose – if there even is one. If there was, would I comprehend? These are the questions that I ask and the answers I seek in vain. Perhaps we all do?

In recent years, due mostly to social media, I have come to understand that people do not share truth rather they all have their own versions of it. For conspiracy theorists, as one extreme, there is version of the truth and I think for religious zealots who will happily blow themselves and others up, there plainly is a version of the truth too. I think people mostly see what they want to see and are blind to the broader truth.

I often wonder if, in fact, people’s truths are reality. What if we all shared a framework of a Universe in which multiple shades of overlapping reality were possible depending on the observer’s outlook? In fact, there are a lot of much brighter people than me in the scientific community who suggest that we live in a hologram or computer program. The substrate of this hologram is created by the observer’s expectations and thoughts. Yes, you have heard it from me before – we create our own reality. What I am saying is that truth, if there truly is any such thing, is part of our expectations and mindset. It is therefore surely something we ourselves create and why could it not be that our truths are all true to some degree because we make them so? Perhaps there isn’t one reality here but a multitude of marginally overlapping realities that we are cognisant of depending on how we wish to see the world?

What this would mean is that the conspiracy theorist is right and so am I when I think he is nuts for seeing conspiracy everywhere.

It would also mean that how I think and how I chose to see things is critically important. The ‘Know thyself’ aspect of magic and the seeking of balance then becomes a compass that points to truth – perhaps absolute truth. If we never understand ourselves and never perceive balance then truth is always relative and relative only to us. The magician then is a true seeker of truth as opposed to the religious person who is essentially setting their compass to point to someone else’s version of the truth so that it becomes a shared but still relative, truth.

These ponderings made me check out where the word truth actually comes from. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the word TRUTH derives from the word true. In turn the word true originates from the proto-German for having good faith. To quote from Wikipedia “thus, ‘truth’ involves both the quality of “faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, sincerity, veracity”,[5] and that of “agreement with fact or reality”, in Anglo-Saxon expressed by sōþ (Modern English sooth)”.

I rest my case.

For those who may be interested. This is a derivation of the theme I explore in my novel The Last Observer available from all good online book stores.

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Moving Back

At the end of this month, we will be moving back to Brno. Its just a couple of hundred kilometers down the D1 (main highway in the Czech Republic). We’ll be moving back into our place which means we might finally finish it. I will miss Prague mainly because of its open spaces. Behind us is a huge valley that goes on for miles and in front of us a huge park. Of course, there is the old city and the castle and …. well I could go on for a long time about Prague and how beautiful it is. But its also quite a big city and getting places takes time and is often inconvenient.

Brno on the other hand is considerably smaller and to be honest, uglier. Its more industrial and hasn’t had the same level of investment that Prague has had. However, I can walk from our flat into the center in 5 minutes. In 5 minutes by car, we are clear of the city altogether and in the Moravian countryside – which is truly beautiful. Not only that but I do have quite a few friends in Brno that I am looking forward to seeing. The architecture in Brno is also quite good and very interesting in certain areas.

Perhaps the most important thing is simply going back to our own place. We had bought it, spent time and money renovating it and then … moved to Prague! (as you do). It will also be nice to get re-involved with the Brno ExPats group that I and a friend started several years ago.

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Book Stuff

Periodically, but with decreasing frequency, I have another shot at promoting my novel The Last Observer. I ran out of ideas a while ago on how to promote it to be honest. I was hoping it would do quite well and maybe drag a few of my other books along with it but I am forced to conclude that I need to start writing eroticism to make a break through. My best sellers remain my business books and my very best selling book has now sold more then 1,700 copies. It doesn’t sound a lot does it but to be honest I am amazed. There were 300 give away copies of that book too so there are actually 2,000 of them floating around. I wouldn’t ever have believed there were 2,000 people in the ETRM software world to be honest!

Though a tad disappointed with sales of The Last Observer its the lack of interest in poetry that really gets me. I have three poetry books out and although I am no Shakespeare I do think they have some merit and at 99cents for Kindle version, you would think some one might try them out…..

Not one to give up though certainly one to become despondent and develop masses of self-doubt, I am engaged in writing The Lord of the Elements – the prequel to The Last Observer. I will almost certainly self publish when its ready though as this really does give more flexibility. I am also working with my colleague on the next version of the CTRM book discussed above. So there will be more from me.

The Last Observer got some really good reviews and quite a few of them. It also got three really bad reviews and nothing much in the middle. Depending on who you happen to believe, either the story is excellent or my writing is so incredibly bad, its unreadable. The bad reviews smack a bit too much of lecturing for me to take too seriously and I parodied them here recently because of it. Every one to their own. If you don’t like the book fine, say so, but please don’t start telling me things like I should read more (I read avidly) or the book should have been edited (it was edited by the publisher) because that is not a review. Also, if you review the book please don’t start by saying you didn’t actually read it!

Talking of bad reviews there do seem to be people out there who delight in writing what are essentially character assassinations as reviews. They hide behind alter egos mostly so that they cannot be identified and they ridicule and taunt and bait. Go look at any author and any book on Amazon and read the reviews….no one is immune to these review nazi’s. And don’t dare try to engage them in any debate…. oh boy no.

At the end of the day, its a fun world when you can write and publish a book or two. Maybe only a few people ever pick up the book and read it but someone does. That makes everything worthwhile – even the attention of the review nazi’s.

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Wonderful Memories

There are some nights when finding myself alone I end up walking the pages of Youtube. Its a veritable memory lane really and it brings back such powerful and emotional memories.

There is the video of Sandie Shaw that reminds me of our black and white TV with curtains in the small living room of the two up two down that was home in Westlands Road, Hull. I would sneek down to watch Top of the Pops and I do remember how I hated the Rolling Stones but adored Ms. Shaw. Cuddled in beside my Mum on the sofa watching the black and white box in the corner. How innocent I was… we all seemed to be back in the 1960s.

Later we moved to Willerby…. it was a ‘posh’ neighbourhood on the outskirts of Hull. We had a huge backyard with veggie patch and a lawn we could play football on. I actually had my own room – you could barely swing a cat in it but it was mine…..

I grew up in the 70′s and what a time that was…. TRextasy swept me up and I can still remember buying used singles for 50p in the market and then playing them in the front room over and over and over again until my poor parents were ready to scream. I really liked Jeepster among the singles but it was usually the B-sides that captivated me – Jitterbug Love, Sunken Rags, Thunderwing and more…. My first LP was Ride A White Swan, a compilation of T.Rex. When others moved on to Slade and The Sweet, I stayed loyal…. T. Rex all the way. I was gutted when Marc Bolan died in 1978 just a few months after I decided not to go to Hornsea to see him because I would have plenty of time…..

Of course, my tastes did change…. I was in awe of David Bowie and The Spiders From Mars (who were actually, like me, from Hull…. though to some folk, that is more or less Mars). The Jean Genie – what a song! I listen to that and I am instantly transported to that era when singles sold by the thousands a day and dreams were real.

Back then, I was in a band. We met every thursday night and strummed acoustic guitars and dreamed while playing records….. when we got a little older my Dad would furnish his home brew and lemonade and make sure his ear plugs were in because we had gone electric… Our name was NEMO – not like the fish but like Captain Nemo. We thought it was funny that Nemo was no one in latin…. No one in concert! I wrote our biggest song – Norma Jean – and we recorded it in the local studio. I will never forget my Dad and how impressed he was and how he got us on Radio Humberside.

Of course, the local tarot lady told me back then I had a choice…. books or guitar. If I chose guitar I would enjoy only mediocre success on the other hand books would get me my dreams… I listened. I wonder why. Guitar would have been so much more fun.

But its impossible to capture the magic of the 70′s. Next I got urned on to the Quo. It was a Frenchman that did it but thats another story.

Of course, our generation lucked out again with punk. I mean I was right there when the Pistols, Clash, Cure, Blondie, the list is endless, exploded on the scene. As stage manager at Aston University I actually got to meet many of them including the Police, Wreckless Eric, Lene Lovitch and I snogged Rachel Sweet…Can’t be bad now can it. The Police asked me to join them. That story appears elsewhere on this blog and I said NO…. why?

Back in those days I hitched everywhere. I recall my Dad dropping me off on the M1 so I could hitch back to Aston on a Sunday night! Back in Birmingham, a young lady by the name of Paula waited for me in a warm place….. she knitted me gloves for Xmas complete with fingers. My Mum said she must love me…LOL!

In time Paula went by the wayside but the first true love always has a place….

By this time, I was getting cocky along with the music… I recall meeting an absolute doll the night I graduated. She asked me how I did, I told her I got a first and the next thing I know … well probably best not said…. Life was dangerous and edgy just like the music.

Leaving Aston I was lucky enough to get a PhD topic that involved flying to North America for fieldwork -Nova Scotia. I arrived in the summer of 1978 looking like a copy of Sting. White T-Shirt with safety pins, black leather trousers, sneakers, spikey blonde hair and not an inch of fat anywhere… It took me all of two days to hook up with the town belle who thought she had found a pop star…. what fun! Of course, by then I was listening to Bryan Adams….

Memories. What a life.

I took my eldest son to Wembley to see Mr. Adams when he was what 4? Wonder if he remembers….

Me, I’m off to bed recalling what a lucky sod I have been….with a tear in my eye.

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The One Star

The one star

What does that mean?

Is it a teacher’s kiss

Or are you being mean?

A one star

Signals more than dislike

It’s a slap in the face

For even trying to write

Single solitary star

Twinkling not so bright

Certainly no hexagram

You must think its pure shite

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That Time of The Year

Usually, as the cold leaden skies of February march onwards and inexorably towards spring, I find myself at the doctors. It could be a chest infection, some non-specific but painful ache or indeed any number of ailments. I know this because last year, my doctor noticed it. Every year, around March time, there is a spike in doctor visits from me. His diagnosis was that I suffer from SAD. Yep – Seasonal Affective Disorder….. otherwise known as seasonal depression.

At first, I was a bit taken aback by this diagnosis but there it was right in front of me as the Doctor showed me how I am rarely if ever at the Doctor at all until the February-April period and then I am there frequently moaning about something. By the end of April, my mood improves and I am OK again. I need sunlight apparently and I am not alone. SAD is an epidemic.

So its no surprise that suddenly I feel down. I mean really down. I don’t want to go out, can’t be bothered to do anything or see anybody. I have no interest in anything at all. I feel tired.. no, exhausted and I just want to sleep. Its SAD and I know its SAD this year so I am pleased that the weather is warmer and even sunnier than most years. Perhaps, that will help and lessen the effects.

If I get SAD after seeing less of the Sun during the winter months I wonder can I get a form of SAD on Mondays too? I think a lot of people hate Mondays and come to loathe them unable to sleep on a Sunday night and not really knowing why. I shall call this syndrome MAD from now. It strikes me that there may even be MAD and SAD people out there that barely function on February Mondays…..

For now, I’m going to dream of the beach and summer……

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