Dazed

Dazed ©

By

Michael Casey

I’m wondering what to talk about today but I’m too dazed by pain to think clearly, so let’s see where I end up. Dazed has all kinds of meanings and connotations. You can be dazed when you are punched, or when 2 lads jump you when you are coming home from school with your mates. Like in 1973 maybe when one lad jumped on my back and held my arms while another dropped the nut, before running away. The 3 or 4 friends I was with were too slow to react. I’ve just remembered that story after all those years. I can remember feeling dazed and asking them when they did not intervene. The rubbish secondary school hated us from the grammar school, hence I was a target.

Since then I’m taller and far heavier, but I can remember being dazed and my head throbbing. So nowadays I always watch people’s hands to see what they are doing and to see are they clenched as. I potter about down the street. Taff used to work night shift with us and every night we all had to pass through the really dodgy underpass with Jags in the middle of it. Two bright sparks asked Taff for a light and grabbed his arm as he did so. Unfortunately for then Taff was martial arts trained, so he hit them both before running to the shelter of out building on Smallbrook Queensway. They were the dazed ones.

I have also in my time worked with dazed people who should have had the night off. So I’d make them sit in a corner for a few hours before persuading then to finally do some work. Working night shifts in themselves does make you feel dazed. You also go through a wall rather like the Marathon wall, but in the case of night shifts you are just so tired until you get your 2^nd wind. You also go through the Sillies, you just Laugh at the Silliest of things. If you have never worked over long night shifts you may have never experienced this. Speaking from 14 years of night shifts and a lifetime of the late shifts, maybe 30 years worth I’d say avoid night shifts if you can they are bad for your Health.

On a night shift you wake up again before Shift Handover, your brain I’m talking about, not your body, though I do know that other people can and will be naughty. When you get home you are awake again so you watch a bit of Daytime Tv before going to bed at 9am or so. But when you get up at 5pm you can feel dazed until food. So you have a few hours to yourself, before catching the 10pm bus to town and your computer room. So now after all those years you really are observant, nobody is going to jump you. Besides you have your Lunchbox for protection, or rather your ham and Red Leicester sandwiches in a plastic box. My lunch for a decade.

Now pain does daze too, you cannot think straight or you repeat yourself, or you repeat yourself. Death brings about daze too. I’ve had a lodger die on me when I was 21 or so, I also been the one to hear bad news first when the Police to the door asking for Mr Casey. Then they tell you one of your lodgers has been found dead on the bus, horse riding with a heart condition is never a good idea. I can remember stuttering and repeating myself because I was so unbelieving. Then we had send the body home to Killybegs, I remember all that and its nearly 40 years ago now. That lodger was actually like an Uncle to me.

And on life goes, you finally marry and have kids. You are so happy when you hear you are going to be a dad that you cry in the computer room at SMBC, the lads are embarrassed but you are not. It’s such a great feeling, a dream come true. Though I know for some a birth is a disaster, but not for me. Then the baby is born in the middle of the night and you are tired and happy and dazed. At 3am you go home to tell your Shanghai mother in law she has her first granddaughter. Try doing that in sign language when you don’t speak Chinese.

What else can I say about being dazed, probably more but I really am dazed right now due to all my pains. And my daughter was sick at school this afternoon, so maybe there’s sickness in our house. And no it’s not my writing that makes us all sick, if you say that then I’ll hit you with the mop before I wipe up any sickness.