A Sort of Creative Boredom.

Today was one of those pointless days when everything you do is just an excuse for actually doing nothing at all. And now it’s approaching midnight, at which moment this pointless day will cease to be.

I can hear the washing machine in the kitchen next to my office. It’s humming and splashing and whining, and every so often it goes quiet as though it’s listening for any sound which might come from my office next to the kitchen. Sometimes the latest housefly to take up residence in my abode flies past the window which sits impassively between the office and the kitchen, but it doesn’t appear to notice me.

I just looked at the tall cupboard which sits, also impassively, in the corner of my office. In all the years I’ve lived here I’ve never seen it move, which is possibly why it suddenly didn’t seem real. I wondered whether anything is real. I wondered whether today was always destined to be pointless, or whether it just happened by accident.

I’ve nearly finished reading Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman. It’s reached the point where the heroine, Natalie Waite, is finally losing her mind. Or so the reviewers and critics and sundry other self-styled doyens of the literary cognoscenti believe. I don’t think she’s losing her mind at all. I think she’s only finding an alternative version of it, which might be dangerous or it might not. I understand Natalie Waite, you see, as I understand all Shirley Jackson’s heroines. And that’s probably not as strange as it sounds, because it probably means that I understand Shirley Jackson.

One thing I have noticed is that my posts are becoming stranger lately. Well, that’s OK. Tomorrow I might lose my new mind and go back to my old one. And then maybe I’ll find something to complain about, or even write a silly ditty.

Bits of me hurt and the housefly has found me and wishes to pay its respects.

The washing machine has finished its work, and the LED display behind the little window says END.