MONDAY NIGHT BLUES

It’s a Monday evening. It’s tearing down with rain, the wind is howling around the slates and I’m sitting here feeling a little blue, by which I don’t, of course, mean a small blue elephant who found his mother’s fountain pen and broke it in two. I find myself wondering whether anyone else would even remember that tiny and obscure nugget of children’s television, but I cannot bring myself to launch the software that would make it so easy to find out. It suffices for now for me to know that I remember it, alongside Crystal Tips and Alistair, Jamie and the Magic Torch, Evil Edna of Willo the Wisp, Barbapapa and a flying egg that may or may not have been called Otto.

I could, of course, engage in some kind of trivial banter by asking a question of the social networkers but I can’t be bothered, and they have more vital topics to engage them which would make my own enquiries seem trivial and pointless or, worse still, not worthy of engaging back with at all. Would they even care..? Is this trivial banality too trivial even to brave that crucible of banality…?

I think that’s perhaps what hurts the most. The emptiness. The total lack of response. The godawful pain of simply trying – I was always the wretched hope that finally did you in, wasn’t it? - followed by the crushing defeat of failure. The attempts at extending the olive branch which then gets cruelly neglected, ignored or not worthy of response. 44 people “like” this, “That’s bloody brilliant!” or “Genius!” when whatever it is undeserving of the label, but you live in hope and tentatively try to engage by casting your own small crumbs out onto the water, but not even the sticklebacks are biting today, or worse, you are misunderstood, or even worse, you are perfectly understood.

The modern commonalities of such unfathomable amusements labeled things like “X-Factor” and “Strictly” are top of the social agenda now and I don’t involve myself in these things and so I remain a distant, cold satellite, orbiting the mysterious worlds of acquaintanceship but seldom being visited, watching from afar with my frozen, unseeing eye, aware of everything but understanding nothing as they laugh and joke and exchange their banter, oblivious of the cold and lonely soul that flies above them, endlessly and invisibly crossing the skies far above their heads, locked in the eternal darkness.

You blast out an message to a face you consider friendly and they reply, or they don’t, but then you follow it up with another and another, but there is a law of diminishing returns or a price to pay for showing far too much enthusiasm, or criticism, or advice, or opinion. Later on you throw what’s left of your dignity and self-respect aside and return to the fray, once more attempting to stimulate some kind of retort to your daily ravings, to remind the world that you are still here, convincing yourself, however futile the task might seem, that there are new additions to the list that know nothing of your nocturnal literary pursuits who might be remotely intrigued enough to take the sneakiest of peeks – or piques - at what you’re doing, but then they don’t, but you do still keep on trying in the face of total disinterest, but it’s all to no avail, and things remain as stagnant as before, and once more you fade away into the shadows.

By now, things are getting so desperate for you and you find that you are positively screaming in the darkness, the most blatant of cries for help, but almost nobody comes, and those that do you’re too ashamed to admit the full truth of the darknesses of your life to, and so the world ticks on, because the “X-Factor” is on, or the dancers, and the little blue elephant turns into a car wash and nobody remembers the bath or the broken fountain pen any more, and time passes, and the memory fades further, and there are so few of us left now, and those of us who are left aren’t sure what it is that we do remember, whether the “Inigo Pipkin” that pre-dated “Pipkins” is just something you imagined during those long forgotten lonely summer lunchtimes, and somebody in Russia seeks out some pornography, but instead they find you again and again and again, but it’s not you that they really want and they move along, unsatiated, to find a better solution to their needful lusts and  sordid baser desires.

And still the rain is beating down on the roof slates, and it’s still a Monday – but not a blue Monday because it’s turned a deepest darkest black - and nothing’s changed, the song remains the same, the indifference terminal, the entropy increasing.

But of course, I know that you can’t really make anybody show any desire to explore anything unless they really want to, or care to, or just are too afraid of the alternative to not do. The best that you can ever do is, like a hopeful costermonger, put your wares out there and hope that somebody notices them as they pass by, flash them a hopeful grin and hope they’ll be intrigued enough to venture in and explore the bizarre bazaar… and yet, these are real lives being really lived today. We share one unique yet tiny sliver of the whole of history and it is only now, at this very moment, that the we, those of us alive together right now, remain clamped to the surface of this unforgiving spinning rock. The universe might blink and miss us completely so we really should take the time and explore the possibilities and the opportunities offered by those around us as they all sit trapped inside their own heads, thinking their own thoughts and ticking the time away towards oblivion…

I don’t like Mondays…

“Tell me why…?”.

Especially cold, damp, dark, grey and miserably blue ones…