ok.. where to start... I am part austrian , part english , part dutch a bit of gypsy and maybe some egyption. Kemet is the ancient word for egypt.
Im interested in a lot of things but my main interests are skateboarding music and art. For me they are all kind of intertwined. When I was 10 i got my first skateboard , my first records I bought were a mix of aha, beastie boys,mel and kim and de la soul.. so I guess I had an ok taste of music at an early age, thanks to my mum. My dad wasn't into music but my mum had a real eclectic taste, i grew up listening to a lot of motown, the stones, elvis, simon and garfunkel, a lot of soul and ska, elvis costello etc then when I was 12 my sister got me into the smiths, the cure the undertones, the wedding present , stone roses etc, I still listen to a lot of the same stuff and will cruise around on my skateboard listening to the cure just like i did nearly 20 years ago... damn i sound old when say that!
watching skateboarding movies and reading skate magazines from an early age influenced my music taste hugely , when I was 12 I bought my first skateboard film "streets on fire" the soundtrack is amazing, black flag , pailhead, the descendants! the speed and anger of those old punk bands is something that I identified with immediately and still do today.Nowadays I make music as well. I am really into making drum and bass which for me seems to share similiar speed and aggression to punk but I also like the real soulful stuff too. Today my tastes are even more ecletic from jazz to glitch , im pretty open minded and will listen to almost anything as long as I like it.Skateboarding has had a hugely positive influence on my life,from the friends I have met, the art I have seen , places I have travelled, music I have listened too, to the clothes I have worn and my attitude, It has taught me determination and dedication and not too give up when things are hard. I believe it has saved my life in the way that only positive things like sport and music and art can. Allthough for me skateboarding is different to all these things, it is creative and active, you use your body as a brush on the concrete canvas of a street to paint your own picture in your own style, it is spontaneous and it's fast, its exciting and fun, it's non-competetive, it's a totally personal experience and the sense of achievement you get from landing a trick you have spent days or sometimes years trying is the most satisfying experience ever, when you skate with other people this sense of achievement is multiplied, other skaters go crazy if they see someone land something really hard (or even something not so hard but hard for that particular person) because they can appreciate exactly how hard it is . Skateboarding has shaped who I am. There are only three points in my life when I haven't skated. Once was when I took so many drugs that I gave myself drug psychosis and was too scared to even leave the house let alone skate, another was when I broke my leg and the last time and longest period without skating was when I got M.E.... which brings me up to a point in my life which dramatically changed who I am and the way I think.When I was about 22-23 I moved to holland. I worked with my brother for a while in construction, we got ripped off by a guy that kept promising to pay us and in the end he owed us £1500 each, the guy never payed up and me and my brother fell out over money so I went to stay with a skater friend I knew In den haag holland.
My friends girlfriend was kind enough to put me up for a few months untill i got a job and my own place. Fortunately the next door neighbour was the manager for hollands biggest skateboard distribution company and he got me a job. I worked there for a year , it was fun, my colleagues were great friends and we all shared a love for skateboarding,we worked, skated together and hung out together, I loved it, I thought I would be there forever, I loved holland, I loved the people and the culture, everything was going great then I got M.E.....Ok well you don't just wake up one day and you have full on m.e. , its gradual. I can say roughly when I got it because I just stopped sleeping. I would get just a couple of hours every night. At work I was so tired and every night I still couldnt sleep. It got worse and worse and after a few weeks I felt like shit.. naturally.. anyone would right?? all I wanted was a decent nights sleep it but It didn't come. As the sleepless nights continued symptoms started to appear, my legs started to ache. It's hard to explain the feeling but I guess its like the way they might feel after you had just run a marathon whilst having a real bad flu!! It was unrelentless. 24/7 I would be lying awake with painfull aching legs. Other symptoms started to appear, my joints would ache and my head had a real weird achey headace all the time, I put this down to sleep deprivation. I just felt crap and didnt know what the hell was going on,I bruised my heel skateboarding and it just didnt heal up, it took over 5 years for it too even start feeling better, my body was acting weird and I didnt know why.
Things were getting difficult at work , I was always late and I was just so tired all the time plus I was always sitting down whenever possible because of the pains in my feet and legs. My colleages thought that maybe I had glandular fever because they couldnt understand the tiredness, they would make me endless cups of coffee but nothing seemed to help.
I decided to leave my job and go for a holiday so I went to stay with a friend that lived in australia, I spent a month there before I came home, my time there was miserable ,I was in a beautifull place with good friends I should have been so happy but I felt so ill.
I flew back to holland and moved in with a girl that I had been seeing, things were difficult now because I quit my job. I no longer had health insurance and I had no money. I stayed in holland another year untill my illness became so bad that I had to come back to england. Just visiting a gp in holland was costing about £50 a time and after you have paid to see ten doctors just to hear that they dont know whats wrong then it starts to get really expensive.My girlfriend at the time basically turned into my carer, it was a really difficult time for her too. So I decided to come back to england and see what the good old NHS could do for me.I came back to england in the beginning of 2002 and moved back to colchester. My gp at the time had never heard of m.e. . I had seen some things about it and had noticed my symptoms were similiar, eventually after hassling my geriatric gp to finally do something I was referred to the m.e. specialist at St Barts hospital in London, I was diagnosed as having m.e. after seeing Professor Pinchin who is 1 of 2 proffessors in england that actually know something about m.e. .
So after being diagnosed I was given a bag of drugs, (2 sets of anti-deppressants, sleeping tablets, muscle relaxers! allsorts) and was told these exact words "M.e. is a beastly illness, we don't know exactly what it is or how to cure it but we can help relieve the symptoms", I was reluctant to take them at first but after a while I gave them a try.
The antidepressants to improve my sleep did improve it slightly but I didn't take the anti-deppressants for depression because I wasn't depressed. My main benefit from seeing these specialists was that they taught me how to pace myself. Pacing is a way of controlling the amounts of energy your body uses.
In someone with m.e. they have much less energy and it takes much much longer to recharge there batteries when they run out. For instance I would take a walk round the shops and I would be fucked for 2 weeks so I would have to pace myself and do it to a reasonably strict routine everyday.
So My road to recovery started with pacing, everyday at 10am , 1pm , 3pm , 5pm and 7pm I would lay down in a totally dark, quiet room from 30 minutes to an hour, I would have to arrange my life around this, cooking , eating, seeing people, watching tv etc. After a few months I could feel the improvements, I didn't feel like I was necessarily getting better but I felt better because I was managing my energy better, I was resting before the battery could get to empty and I would burn out.
After a year or so I did feel like I was getting slightly better.. I would miss resting times and instead of burning out completley and feeling totally sick and ill I would just feel pretty tired. obviously I still had to rest but I did feel some significant improvement.5 years on I am still resting but now its not regimented as much, now I rest before Im gonna go out to see friends or maybe after I have been for a day out. My life now is worth living ,I can see friends, watch a film , write , read and even skateboard again . It has been a long very hard road but I am getting there, m.e. (chronic fatigue) is such a strange illness and allthough it is a lot more recognised now there is still a lot of ignorance that surrounds it.Im a firm believer in the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" when I was at my illest I had to leave my friends ,girlfriend and job behind and move to another country. I did feel totally alone and didn't think I would ever get through it and be happy again but I have and I am.I now live in colchester, I still skateboard sometimes, I make music and I paint, hang out with friends and have a cool and sweet dutch girlfriend called Myrna. I still have M.E. but Its managable now and allthough it hasn't gone completley im still kicking its ass!LOVEMYFLASH CODE
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