WHAT AM I THINKING ABOUT TODAY?

You don’t want to know… No, really, you don’t.

To be honest with you, things are starting to stumble and falter. My daily postings are starting to feel a little bland and samey, and this strange task that I have set myself is starting to feel just a little impossible to complete and nothing like as stimulating as it once was. Equally, it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that whatever opinions I might have on all sorts of trivial matters really don’t matter very much. Everybody has an opinion on just about everything and, whilst it usually becomes increasingly obvious when someone is talking a lot of nonsense, only a small percentage of us actually take the trouble to sit down and formulate some kind of written justification of that nonsensical point of view and try to share it with our fellow human beings

Back in the day such people maybe just wrote to the local paper and were either ignored or berated by other writers in the next week’s letters column. Failing that they might have a discussion in the pub and find out very quickly how ridiculous their ideas are thought to be. Nowadays, of course, this is no longer the case, and pretty much anyone with access to a keyboard and a little bit of knowledge can tell the waiting world what they think about anything, and the waiting world can either choose to ignore it or pitch in with their own thoughts leading to either justification for the ridiculous or bonkers lunacy being spouted to the few that might still be wondering quite why they are still reading this stuff.

Then there are the “trolls” (as I believe they are known). Sinister folk who lurk around on the periphery of various discussion groups just waiting to throw some outrageous suggestion into the mix and fight a dirty war of words that just manages to get a lot of people upset and angry which seems to give them some strange satisfaction that they would never achieve or get away with if they actually tried such things in a real human environment.

Strangely enough, the longer this little project of mine has gone on, the less relevant it has become and less and less discussion seems to be happening. The theory is that momentum builds over time and the more you do, the more debate you’ll be able to engage in. Sadly, as with many of the things I happen to attempt in life, I seem to be quite capable of starting at around zero and grinding things down to much less than that.

All I ever really wanted to do was make a few people stop and think about what I happen to think about something or other, in a way that I always seem to fail to manage to do if I’m actually talking to someone. Somehow, in those “real world” situations, I will either babble ridiculously, or fail utterly to make my point or even open my mouth to speak at all. I sometimes worry that perhaps my own thoughts are borderline trollish in themselves and I’m better off sitting here all alone in the dark, wittering away to myself where there’s no harm to be done.

This, of course, might very well be the point.

But then, days start to dawn where the thoughts won’t come at all, and those days can then link to other days and suddenly I start to imagine myself incapable of any kind of thought at all. My default reaction under these circumstances has usually been to try to just witter on about whatever’s in my head right now and wonder whether that gives me any insight into what it is I’m trying to achieve. After all, I like to believe that, after nine solid months of (almost) daily postings, there must have been some purpose to it all, although that purpose seems to be just to get the thoughts out of my head and into some real and tangible form so that I can look back upon them later and wonder what the hell it was I thought I was thinking.

So, instead, I find myself setting ridiculous standards and goals that I am bound to fail at achieving and focusing on them instead of doing the things that I really ought to be getting on with. The all-consuming focus and worry that really doesn’t matter all that much to anyone else and really won’t make one jot of difference in the great scheme of things but yet, somehow, still manages to keep me almost obsessively occupied until I can set another, even less tangible goal to fail at achieving.

Then, sometimes it becomes necessary to just get back to basics and consider addressing the “log” part of this little exercise in futility, and write up an electronic diary recording my thoughts and words and deeds as they are right now as I sit writing these words on a morning probably a fair number of days before I can bring myself to hit that “publish post” button and share these things with the world.

I read a  thread over in Twitworld a few weeks ago prompted by the very company that hosts this little site of ours asking what the most important thing was when it came to blogging and one of the suggestions was “pictures… always!” My own suggestion, that you just keep on doing it, didn’t seem to hold much water for the great and the good of blogworld, but it remains a philosophy, even if the content and the subject matter is becoming ever more vague as the days pass by.

So what am I actually thinking about today? Well, giving up, frankly. Going off and doing something less boring instead as the kid’s TV in my day might have suggested. I won’t, though. There’s too much invested now, and my own sense of failure at not achieving whichever of those personal milestones I’ve targeted would make me a very sad little bunny indeed if I fell at the last hurdle.

Or is it just the first…?

God, I’m so tired…