Three Things: Tim Key Poetry Edition

I've been in tremendous amounts of pain recently. My nerve pain is triggered by stress and cold and I have been (if you'll forgive my phrasing) balls-deep in cold, and if not, stress.

I have to get on top of this at least a little bit because the nerve pain is absolutely outrageous. At my worst, I can't eat or speak, and the worst is becoming more and more frequent. I've reached out to my GP and various charities/support groups, but the problem with Trigeminal Neuralgia is that there's only a certain amount of options available other than chopping half of your own face off, which I don't really fancy doing.

I made a list of things that make me feel better when I feel shit in my mind as well as my face. Not scrolling on my phone, which is the comfort thing I reach to when I can't be arsed to look after myself properly but want to bombard my brain with noise instead. These are helpful activities that make me feel more peaceful. They include, but are not limited, to:

• A gentle yoga session
• Doodling
• Practicing chords on my guitar/trying to learn new embroidery stitches
• Cooking something in our fake Le Creuset pot (for some reason using this specific pot unlocks a hidden reserve of satisfaction I didn't know I had access to)
• Watching old comedy shows
• Walks, on warm days
• Reading funny poems

The last point is quite specific (along with the Le Creuset thing), but it does make sense. Laughter is the best medicine, etc. Comedy shows are the best thing, but some of the laugh-out-loud factor is the unexpected element of the gags themselves, which you obviously lose after the first viewing. I remember when Chris introduced me to Red Dwarf. We watched quite a few episodes before I got into it. It was okay, I supposed. It was fine. And then I heard this conversation:

Kryten: The poor devil must've scrawled it in his death throes using a combination of his own blood and even his own intestines.
Rimmer: Who would do that?
Lister: (Earnestly) Someone who badly needed a pen.

And that line got me. I did a kind of weirdly loud, militant laugh that I've never heard myself do before. HAHAHAHA. And I think it's partly because I was caught off guard. From that point on I warmed to the whole thing completely. (Until the later seasons but we won't talk about those.)

Not that I don't laugh when I rewatch things. I've been working my way through The Day Today again, and quite a lot of that still gets me despite seeing it so many times before. ('Can you describe the pain to me?' 'Yes, it feels like I've been shot with a big knife.') There are stand-out moments in all the comedies I love. 'Should Traffic Wardens Be Armed?' for example, genuinely makes me cackle with laughter despite often looking it up on YouTube just to cheer me up a bit.

📖 Book: The Incomplete Tim Key by Tim Key

Chris bought me The Incomplete Tim Key one Christmas. I read most of it in the bath in one evening. Then I got out of the bath, threw myself onto the bed next to Chris, and read a bunch of the poems aloud to him which he didn't ask for, necessarily, but he did appreciate (I think).

Tim Key's poetry hits my sense of humour because I never quite know where it's going to go. Literally anything could happen. It's absurd and ridiculous and joyful. The Incomplete Tim Key covers categories like 'Sociopoetry', 'War and Peace and Religion and Shopping', 'Poems Set on Locations Outside the UK', and 'Wooing, Screwing, and Chewing'. There's no point in trying to anticipate what might happen. You just have to go with the flow.

Poem #522 'The Change'

Aaren Woogle
Went down the deed poll office.
'I don't want to be called Woogle any more!' he declared.
'Ha! Fair play - what are you changing to?'
Aaren Woogle hadn't thought it through that far.
He panicked.
'Winky Turban!' he blurted.
On his way home he bumped into his barber.
'Hey, Woogle!'
Winky Turban corrected him and then broke down in tears.

~ Tim Key, The Incomplete Tim Key

I don't know what more I need to do to make you buy this book really. It just should live on your shelf for moments when you really need it.

📖 Book: He Used Thought as a Wife by Tim Key

Tim Key's book of escalatingly insane lockdown poetry, He Used Thought As A Wife, is one of my favourite things to come out of Covid-19 alongside Bo Burnham's Inside. In this book, Key is isolating alone in his flat in the first UK lockdown. He starts like we all did - with optimism and fear and a bit of curiosity - and then slowly starts to lose it. Tim himself is obviously fragile but stubbornly in denial about it. We get to read his conversations on the phone, or from his balcony with his mates passing by, or with the Amazon delivery man as he delivers more and more boxes of nonsense to keep himself entertained. His despair slowly grows.

Bloody Masks

I took off my mask.
No mouth!
I put my mask back on.
I was gutted.
The old mouth was gone ...
"Fucking 2020," I wanted to say.

~ Tim Key, He Used Thought As A Wife

There's a lot of UK-specific piss-taking poems here. It's the first thing I read that actually poked fun at the lockdowns, at the sentiment, at the way everybody collectively lost their minds.

📖 Book: Chapters by Tim Key

I took this on the train to London last year. I did so because it was small enough to fit in my handbag. I can't decide if it was a mistake or not. It made me laugh quite a bit, which in a public space is quite embarrassing. Also, it didn't help that sitting on the table opposite us was a man with a stare I can only describe as unnerving. Every time I laughed, he snapped his head in my direction like I'd directly insulted him.

Like the others, Chapters is brilliant. Funny enough to distract me from the scary man on the train. Which is saying something, because he really was quite frightening.

The Happy Couple.

The best man didn't prepare a speech as such.
He decided he'd just see "what came to mind".
In the event, nothing really did.
He was largely silent.
Once or twice he'd look over at the bride and groom and say,
"There they are."

~ Tim Key, Chapters

The thing is with Key's poetry is that it is always a little but unexpected; the surprise factor is definitely a thing. But whenever I pick them up again, I laugh like I'm reading it for the first time all over again.

You have to learn coping mechanisms if you have a chronic pain condition because there will be moments that are almost comically awful. Your whole life shifts. Your new life can be measured in highs and lows, corresponding with waves of pain and waves of blissful relief. The bad days will come, and they'll bring with them anxiety, sadness, and a kind of black mood that is hard to live with.

There's also this relentless pressure to be upbeat. The most inspiring people are the ones that can live with all sorts of shit and are somehow happy, calm, and sort of zen, as though they've unlocked a new level of appreciation for life that normies don't have access to. And I don't feel like that most of the time. Maybe sometimes I'll be all philosophical about it, but it's rare. I don't want to fake it, because what's the point of that? When I'm in pain I am a wounded animal. I just want to be left alone in my misery.

But there are things that help. To me, comedy is one of those lifelines that can completely turn my day around in a bad pain moment. What a remarkable gift to be able to give to someone: to lift someone's spirits by being silly.