Normally, I greet Sunday morning with a blog post clenched in my hand. It might need
a bit of tidying but it’s pretty much there. I grab a mug of tea and I set to
work making it passable.
It’s Sunday morning now (checks computer clock), it's 09.55, and I’ve got nothing,
zilch, nada. Not a word, not a thought, beyond the (checks computer word count)
65 or so words I have written thus far.
I had a thing written but it’s not good enough to post. There has to be
some quality control, even if it sometimes doesn’t seem that way. There has to
be some line drawn in the sand that says, ‘this far on poor quality and no further’.
I drew the line this morning with my toe on the carpet. I argued with myself, “but
only a handful of people read it anyway. Who would know? Who would care.” That’s
easy to answer. I would know. I would care. The day I stop will be the day I
stop, if you catch my drift.
So then I concluded I would write nothing today. I actually deserve a
day off. I finished a first draft of a play yesterday and it was a bit of a push
to get it over that ‘shit line’ I described loosely in the paragraph above. It’s
left me a little drained, writing wise. I tend to forget that writing is work.
It takes energy to do, it burns fuel. I love doing it so much that I tend to
completely discount this but whenever I do a good chunk of it I can end up feeling
fairly weary. So, yeah, I can take a day off. Nobody’s hanging to see my latest
post and I got nothing anyway. So why not brew up some good coffee and read my
book and have a long walk and do Tesco and generally have a nice Sunday?
Why not?
Why sit here and type something that has no beginning no middle and
absolutely no sign of an end? (I still have no idea where I’m going, in case
you’re wondering).
There are a couple of reasons, none of them very sensible.
Here’s one. I will feel bad if I don’t write a blog post today. It’s
part of my regime and, if I don’t do it when I’m supposed to do it, I will feel
like I failed a tiny bit and let myself down a tiny bit and have taken a step towards
not being a writer a tiny bit and all those tiny bits can add up and become
quite a big bit, if you’re not careful, and sometimes when you’re just writing
crap the sentences become quite long and you don’t know where to stop them.
There. Stop there.
So, yeah (I type that a lot, don’t I?) another reason that I’m still typing is this. I really like the
cumulative result of my 10+ years of weekend scribbling on the blog. I think I’ve
said it before but it’s like a mosaic. Each individual tile may be pretty average
and even quite mundane but the overall effect gives an odd ‘magic eye’ effect
if you stare at it for a while. It’s an image of a life, and it’s my life. I
like that I’ve used my words to create an impression of my life. Does that
sound pretentious? (Reads back) Is that how you spell ‘pretentious’ (checks). It’s
not meant to be pretentious. Who would I be trying to impress? There’s nobody
here but me and a few good mates who give me a bit of support. This is my life
here. There’s very little guile in it any more.
Another reason? Okay. I hate to let things go. I won’t replace my shoes
until the old ones literally fall off my feet. I cling to my old jacket. To let
something go is to lose it. I don’t want to let this thing go. The honest
impression I get is that it’s well past its sell-by date. Like the old house in
the song ‘This Old House’ this place once rang with laughter, this place heard
many a shout. The blog is hanging in tatters on my feet but I don’t want to let
it go. So here I am typing random words into the void.
Wouldn’t it be better to type nothing at all? Too many shit tiles and
the mosaic will be completely devalued.
True… true…
But is something intrinsically without value just because it presents as free form and
unplanned? (Are they both the same thing? Checks (Doesn’t check)). Does the
true insight into someone not lie in these free writing exercises? Are they not
the Rorschach of the written word? That’s probably giving too much weight and
importance to what is really nothing
more than a desperate attempt to generate content on a Sunday morning as my tea slowly cools in the mug.
(As an aside, I’ve got a random playlist going on my Spotify as I type
and I just had a thought that a bit of Bob Dylan might be nice and then he came
up, next song, an outside track from ‘New Morning’. That’s weird, right? But
not too weird, not enough to get a whole blog post off so carry on.)
I’m blank again now. What was I saying? More to the point, haven’t I said
all this at least one time before, back there in the blog post archive? I bet I
did. I bet I said it better than this or, worse still, maybe I said it exactly
the same. Wouldn’t that be awful, to be a stuck record, playing the same phrase
over and over again and demanding that people listen. I’d need a nudge, to get
me out of that groove, to play the next part of the track…
(An advert just played. Damn. I should have kept my Spotify subscription.)
I just had a look on Spotify. If you type ‘Soundtrack’ in, a lot of
links come up to ‘A Star is Born’. I guess somebody is paying somebody
something for that. It reminds me that I couldn’t sleep at 3.00 am this morning so I got up
and ‘A Star is Born’ was on the telly. The one with Kris and Barbra’. I watched
it for a while with the sound too low to hear clearly. Nothing really
seemed to happen so I went back to bed. I don’t mind the odd late night sit up.
I don’t let it stress me, though it’s easier to do it on weekends because you know
you can sleep in the next day although you never ever do.
So that’s me. I have nothing to say to you today so I just typed
randomly for a while and now I’m going to stick it up on the blog. It’s most
likely just a load of shite but it’s true and it’s straight from the horse’s
mouth so - who the hell knows? - maybe the innermost working of my mind is right there,
between the random Dylan track and the sleeplessness.
I can’t say. I’m a bit tired and I’m stuck for a necessary second beat
to complete this sentence pleasingly.
Also I need to get to Tesco.