I did toy with just copying and pasting the actual list itself in all its abstract glory and letting you make of it what you will. You should be grateful of course that it is a typed list which, even though it remains uncorrected and typographically challenged (yes, even more so than my own less than perfectly grammatical and error-strewn other contributions to wasting your life away for you…), it is still a preferable alternative to the handwritten notes and scrawls that I occasionally try to decipher and make sense of after a sudden and unexpected thread of an idea has struck me at an inopportune moment. Usually at these times I desperately try to keep that thought at the forefront of my mind as other ones cascade in and try to nudge it away into oblivion and that strange and irritating void in my memory where I know that I had a decent thought but it has somehow managed to flit away from me like a butterfly on a summer’s evening, and I am unable ever to find it again.
On occasion, I have managed to grab the Post-it note pad of doom (other self adhesive note pads are available…) and the propelling pencil of reason and brought them together in an abstract symphony as I try to remember that passing thought or phrase as it attempts to scurry away to a forgotten corner of the mind. Sometimes it’s merely a petrol receipt that comes to hand to write on and, if the shock of being reminded of the cost of a tank of fuel doesn’t obliterate any other thoughts I might be trying to hold in the forefront of my consciousness, a two or three word scribble in my best doctor’s hieroglyphics will ensure that that notion is captured for posterity to bamboozle and banjax me later on when I try to work out what the hell it was that I was thinking about.
I’m not actually a doctor, of course, although I reckon my handwriting is bad enough that I might just have scraped through the entrance exams, although it is rumoured that if even one word is legible, you’ll be disqualified, so maybe I’d have made a mess of that too (or should that be ‘made a tidy of’…?).
It’s those middle of the night thoughts that are the most insidious. The ones that come to you just as you’re trying to drift off and which bring the conscious mind back from the brink of oblivion to gnaw away at the hours of sleep as you desperately try to compose some kind of fevered mnemonic to ensure that you’ll remember it in the morning. That’s when, of course, another wave of other ideas will start to scratch away at the edges of your mind and pretty soon you’re staggering around in the dark, bumping into the furniture and trying not to awaken the household whilst you are trying to find a pencil, something unwaxed to write on and possibly even a torch to attempt to illuminate the process of preserving yet another pointless train of thought from disappearing into a tunnel from which it is unlikely to emerge.
Sometimes, in order to avert some kind of derailment I will think “To hell with it” and stagger off into the darkness to where the computer lurks formulating its own plans for world domination. I will interrupt its machinations by rebooting it at an ungodly hour and it will respond by making its ‘startup fanfare’ as loud as it possibly can. Then I will wait an extraordinarily long time for the various bits of software to wake from their slumbers and organise themselves into some kind of order after their unexpected alarm call and, shortly afterwards, I will find myself tappity-tapping away and trying to make sense of a half-forgotten thought that is already fading and starting to make less and less sense the more that I think about it. Sometimes that one line will lead to another, and another, and, if I’m not too careful, half the night can have vanished and, when I yawnfully do manage to return to the bedchamber, the first fingers of dawn might be creeping into the skyline and with those very fingers, another weary day will already be beckoning me towards it, with the prospect of much grumpiness from my own exhausted self and anyone else also disturbed by my nocturnal perambulations.
Solutions to these issues have been mooted and acted upon. I have a digital voice recorder that I can mutter into if the thoughts come. I might even manage to talk into it without waking anyone up if I ever got myself organised enough to actually manage to keep its batteries fresh. I have tried having a notebook and pencil by the bedside although switching on the lights in the middle of the night is never the most popular of pastimes, and any notes I have attempted to write in the pitch darkness have seldom made much sense the next day.
So there you are then. Yet another few paragraphs about nothing in particular successfully negotiated and committed to posterity. Douglas Adams once said that he had a particular problem when he was trying to kick-start the second episode of “The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” after having shoved his heroes out of an airlock at the end of part one, shortly after having blown up the entire world. Whatever solution he came up with would have to be pretty improbable and so, by having the simple ingenious notion of making the problem itself be part of the solution, the “Infinite Improbability Drive” was born and literary history was allowed to continue upon its intended path.
There is a theory that goes something along the lines of ‘If you can’t think of anything to say, you’re better off saying nothing at all’ (Actually, the phrase might be ‘something nice to say’ but that completely changes the meaning and ruins the thrust of this thought, so I’ll most probably just ignore it) but, sometimes, even when you can’t think of anything to say, saying something, even if its nothing, sometimes leads to something more substantial than the nothing you thought it would be.
Or something.
You should try the Felt tip pen of inspiration. Writes on practically anything- including bed sheets.
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