Me and My Blog.

There are times when I feel like a car raring to go but the handbrake’s stuck. I want to write a blog post but I can’t think of anything to say.

The night is wild, I’m not in the mood for reading, there’s nothing I want to watch on the TV, I’m fresh out of DVDs, I don't socialise, and I’ve sent an email to the priestess in which I described the state of depression in the form of an allegory. (Which, unsurprisingly, was a little depressing.) I’m also still slightly spooked – and that’s very unusual for me – by Les Dawson’s description of the ghost of Sid James which he saw at the Empire Theatre in Sunderland. And now I want to write a blog post but I can’t think of anything to say.

The process of finding things to say is an interesting one. Sometimes I get frequent glimpses of disparate subjects and they result in a sudden rash of three or four small, unconnected posts in fairly quick succession. At other times I write nothing because my mind is devoid of anything but my issues, my increasing tendency to suffer bouts of anxiety and/or depression, and my dispiriting disappointment at the parlous state of the human condition. And then there are times when I feel compelled to employ different forms of humour, some of which are quite arcane and must be unintelligible to normal people. I read them a few days later and imagine the scratching of heads and people asking ‘Why did he say that? What the hell does it mean?’ I remember the days when I used to write sensible, carefully considered posts on serious issues, but then I grew tired of being earnest and wanted to be silly instead. Unfortunately, I rarely feel silly these days.

I need a spark, but the problem with me is that I naturally aspire to reclusiveness. I need to live alone to maintain my treasured independence, and I find the extended company of the majority of my fellow humans tiresome. But I’m not a complete introvert so I need a certain amount of external stimulus to make me function. Being in touch with the priestess helps, but I feel disinclined to meet her because I don’t relish playing the game of Quasimodo and Esmeralda.

And there’s a problem with sparks: they have to come to me of their own volition. If I seek them out they don’t count. They have to be gifts from the universe because gifts truly mean something, whereas purchases are just purchases and the thrill of acquiring something new wears off very quickly. (I suspect a lot of people haven’t got the hang of that fact yet because the system doesn’t exactly encourage it.) And sparks are about as common as green goldfish at the moment.

So here I am, waiting for midnight so I can have my daily dose of YouTube and whisky before retiring in the sure and certain expectation that I will be miserable when I wake up. Sometimes life’s a pain, but there you are.