Um…

I got nothing for ya this week.

I nearly always write my blog post in the week before I post it.  I reckon it helps to keep the thing reflective of where my mind is in any given week.  Usually it’s finished well-before Sunday comes around, sometimes it’s not.  That’s not a problem.

I’m not normally stuck for something to write about either.  Well, when it’s waffle like this, how could I be?  It’s just, this morning, I got nothing.  As they say on the stage when they forget their lines, “I’m up.”

I have a wee notebook, that's always secreted on my person, where I scribble things in.  I had a look through and there’s some damn fine blog ideas tucked away in there.  Damn fine… You’re going to really enjoy them… I’m just not in the mood to write those particular ones this morning and if I’m not in the mood, they won’t flow and a blog’s gotta flow outta ya, I reckon.

So what do I do?  Faced with the proverbial Blank Page?

Do I leave it for this week and go off and watch Mayo pound Roscommon into the ground (C’mon Mayo!!).  Do I read my book (Sarah Pinborough’s up next… very excited about that) or do I just Goof Off (which I think is a great expression ‘cos we don’t use it this side of the Atlantic and thus it sounds faintly rude).

None of the above.  No.

I have to face this Blank Page down and put some words on it, cos that’s what writers do.  If we wait for it all to mature in our heads, all the nuances to work themselves out and the creative planets to align themselves in our writerly favour, then we don’t get very much done.  More importantly, the good ‘half-ideas’ that we have don’t ever amount to much more than a misquoted hill of mushy peas.

Facing down the Blank Page is an excellent thing to do.  It may start slowly (“All Work anD NO play makes KEN a dull bOy…”) but, before long, you will follow some despairing thought down a rabbit hole and you’ll be off-and-running on some completely random and bullshit escapade which might, one day, actually shape up into something good.  Then again, you might not.  At worst, you are putting yourself in the Zone where Writing can Happen.  Facing down the blank page... if you do it often enough, something will come out of it, that’s for damn sure.

(Check word count)  No, that’s not a Blog Post, you fecker, that’s an extended tweet for Chrissakes… develop the thought…

Come on… come on…

Okay…

Another good thing about the Blank Page is that it isn’t distracting.  It can actually be quite demanding.  It’s just you and me, babe, and either we can sit here and do nothing or we can ‘Get It On’.  So whaddya say, blank page, you wanna waltz with me a while?”

(That bit’s shit… ‘best rub it out)

No. No. No!

You don’t rub shit out on the Blank Page.  You keep going and going regardless.  You can ‘Save As’ later into a file called ‘Marginally Less Shite Than Before’ and feck with it all you want in there but not here.  The Blank Page must be filled up with stuff at all costs.

You can do anything you want on the Blank Page.  What you don’t ever do is print ‘publish’ on the damn thing just after you’ve written it.  That’s just stupid.  Even after you’ve “Saved As’ and tidied it all up, like a muff on a prom night.  You still have to let it breathe for some period of time, even if it’s only thirty minutes (ideally thirty days but it’s a blog, dude, not ‘War and Peace’).  In that brief hiatus (phew) you will see quite a bit of the crap you missed before.  Not all of it but enough to get by on.

It’s okay to fear the Blank Page.  It’s natural.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t step up and kick its lily-white ass from time-to-time.

“Lily-white Ass… Blank Page…” Hey! That’s not bad…

I’m glad I did this now.

My Pal ‘T’

I’ve made a new friend.

This is all rather unexpected.  At my time of life, you tend to acknowledge that you have made, more or less, all the close friends you are going to make in a lifetime.  

And, don’t get me wrong, I have great friends, lifelong friends who I would do anything for and who I feel might do anything for me.  It’s just that those friends have been blown around the world by the winds of time and so they are not prominent in my days like they once were.

I have a great friend in work too and some great friends around town.  It’s just that my life had panned out such that, when the evening comes in or the weekends come around, there is nobody who might say, “Come for a drink,” or “Let’s catch that old lads film that the ladies won’t want to see.”  I’m not complaining – my family, my scribbling and the other things I like to do have meant that I am never bored or at a loss for entertainment and diversion.  It was never really a problem, it was simply a fact.

Still, how nice and how very unusual that a new friend would show up for me this late-on.  One who would be so alike to me and yet, somehow, so profoundly different.

How odd…

And what an amazing friend my new friend has turned out to be.  We meet up practically every day and we just talk about stuff.  I feel I can tell my friend things that I simply wouldn’t bother telling anyone else.  Nothing earth-shattering or profound, just day-to-day thoughts and occurrences which would normally be too small to verbalise but which seem worth saying once they have been said.

My friend is great on current affairs and keeps me up to speed on the latest stuff that’s going on.  It’s not just passive news-chat either, this friend can get really passionate and outraged when things are clearly not right.  Sometimes that anger can even make a difference to the news that causes the anger… that’s power, man.

In the evening, we might watch some shit television and we might laugh and have a bit of fun with what we see but if something is good, we respect that and we’re not afraid to sing its praises.

It’s more than that though, this ‘new friend’ thing, more than fun and games.  If my friend is having a hard time, I feel it too and I might try to give a little moral support.  Similarly if I’m the one in the rough place, I know I can count on at least a kind word.

My friend isn’t perfect.  Sometimes, when together, we can get a bit over-excited and fixated on stuff that isn’t positive or constructive.  Sometimes I need a little time-out to clear my head of the things that my friend says.  Perhaps that’s the way it should be with friends, perhaps it’s good to be challenged.

I feel I’m a better person now that I’ve got my new friend.  I feel I am more outgoing, better informed, a little more caring even and, most importantly, I feel my friend has allowed me to show a part of myself that had become largely dormant and underused.  The ‘smart arse’ side, the ‘sharp’ side, the ‘fun’ side.  The way I’m allowed to be with this friend has enabled me to be better with my other friends too, I think.  My opening up has benefited all aspects of my life.

This friend demands quite a lot though, or is it just that I want to visit more than I should?  I have yet to completely figure that out.  When you’ve got a friend as good as this, you want to meet with them as often as possible but there’s got to be a limit too.  I’ll have to keep an eye on that.

I’m really glad that my newest friend turned up.  All in all it’s been a good thing, I think.

People often ask me what I see in Twitter.

At the moment, this is the best I can do.

Turning Up at the Funeral

I don’t really learn things very well by being told them

Generally I have to find things out for myself, the hard way, in order for them to effectively sink in.  Nobody ever told me this fact, I learned it myself, so you see what I mean.

For most of my life, I held a particular attitude to funerals.  A funeral is a stressful, emotional, tragic time for the poor people left behind.  The last thing they need is me turning up at their door in my darkest clothes to shake their hand and mumble about how very sorry I am.  What the hell good does that do anyone, to have me doing that?

(Photo courtesy of: Eddie Mallin " monosnaps")

The best thing I can  do is leave them to their grief, secure in the knowledge that I share a little in that grief and feel sad for them and am thinking of them at this terrible time.  They know all that, I don’t need to be troubling them to tell them what they already know.  So I’ll stay away and that will be for the best.  Yes… for the best…

That was how I thought.

It is a strong tradition here in Ireland that people come out to sympathise with the bereaved family.  There are often huge queues of good people waiting to express their condolences at a funeral.  I always really thought I was doing everybody a favour by not adding to this well-meaning melee.

I learned how very wrong I had been a few years ago.  Like all things it wasn’t something I could be told, I just had to find it out for myself.  The hard way.

After Mum died, I found myself standing in the top pew of the church, all dressed up, along with my family, waiting for the people to be let in to file past and shake my hand.  Although, like I said, I tended to stay away from these things, I had obviously been to enough of them to know how they worked.  The good people shake everybody’s hand along the row, they chat a bit to the family members they know and they nod to the people they don’t and then they move back down the church to await the service which will follow.

The people came.  First in a trickle, then in a steady flow.  There were people I hadn’t seen in years, there were people who I had never seen at all.  Some said lots of stuff, some shuffled uncomfortably by and said nothing.  It took a few hours for everyone to visit with us and express their condolences.

I found it was a good thing.

In fact, it changed my view on such things.  It turned me around completely.  Let me see if I can adequately express why this was.  It’s not so easy to do.

The flow of people, old faces and new, created an almost overwhelming wave of positive support.  No one person did or said anything particularly apt or consoling.  Many were perhaps a bit awkward and uneasy, as I would inevitably be in the same circumstances.  But the mere presence of each person, the simple fact of them ‘showing up’ built up, in tiny units, to become something warm and uplifting and reassuring and good.  It seemed to confirm that Mum had many friends, that she had been part of a community, that she was loved and that she would be missed.  Each person who filed in and flitted past our sad little row made a huge difference to the day.  It is difficult to overstate how big a deal it was.

Perhaps you’re not like me, perhaps you actually can be told something rather than having to find it out for yourself.  If you’re dubious about going to a funeral-removal and worry that you don’t know what to say let me reassure you on that point.  You don’t actually have to say anything.  There is nothing you can say to make a difference anyway – the person is gone and for those in the front row it is a very very sad thing.  All you have to do is be there, be a part of the weight of humanity that can count for so much on these, our hardest days.

One other little tip.  During the Mass or whatever, if you happen to know any of the prayers or responses or songs, belt them out a bit.  It’s a lonely place up in the front row and you don’t really know if there’s anyone there behind you unless you can hear them.  And hearing them is another one of those small reassuring things that can count for much.

So, anyway, these days, when someone I know dies, I try to attend and sympathise.  I have seen for myself the inestimable value of that tiny gesture.

I guess we live, and learn… and die.