BEYOND THE BRINK

Do you think that we are far enough beyond the brink now for me to finally accept and admit that I do seem to have been continuing with this little folly, and that I might, just might, even seem to have found myself, for good or ill, to be carrying on with it? The demons have been fought, the horrors and doubts have been temporarily locked back into their respective vaults and the pointless goals have been attained, but still these regular trawls through the more obscure recesses of what I still like to think of as my mind seem to be popping up from far outside the realms of reason for you to mull over, digest and spit out into the great spittoon of history (or whatever other receptacle might be available to you).

So, you probably aren’t really wondering, what was the purpose of my series of postcards published across the last 12 days, then? Well, on a rather mundane and practical level, those twelve slices of life, they were little more than a vague attempt to try and give me a bit of breathing space, of course, but they were also an opportunity to experiment (with limited success admittedly) with some text and image juxtapositions and see what came out of that. If I was trying to suggest that I had a clever plan that I know that I didn’t really have, I could, however, imply that there will be a very special “No-prize” for the first person who can work out the secret clues hidden in the twelve postcards and work out where the treasure is hidden, but that would just be wicked of me, and you wouldn’t want me to be wicked now, would you…?

Would you?

Thought not… (Sigh!).

Perhaps they were meant as postcards to myself from the darker slivers of my inner being. I did wonder whether perhaps they were actually a coded message from my subconscious trying to tell me something or other, but the best that I could come up with was “Crispy Egyptian Goose with a tower of glazed bluebottles, a trunk of moon stone monitors the chilled sky” which might have worked as a prog rock lyric forty years ago, but it’s pretty meaningless today…

Unless…

Hmmm… Perhaps we’d better leave that one for a therapist to ponder over as I doze off on their couch at a ridiculously hourly rate. Mind you, if I did get to sleep, then that would be a result well worthy of the investment. I could make claims about discovering some deep insights into my own psyche if, of course, I hadn't merely taken the time once or twice to simply mention a couple of places and things that I simply quite liked which probably looked like some kind of failed marketing ploy rather than anything of artistic merit. Perhaps on a more fundamental level I was exploring how one of my own psychological cycles chooses to manifest itself. From the bright fluffy-bunnied happiness of to the pits of despair in less than twelve easy steps...

Yes, I can start to easily persuade myself that this indeed was the case, and twelve illustrated slivers of random thought coupled with twelve random images from my past and present, then attached to some random dialogue dug up from within my unfettered mind were somehow deeply significant, but I doubt it. Maybe I just thought they looked nice and people might like them…?

What the postcards did give me was the breathing space to reconsider and ponder upon a few things during a particularly busy time during which I was finding stringing words together very difficult to do. Here we are now well into the second half of November and, in all truth, this has not been a great month for me in wordsmithery terms, which is odd because it’s not as if there’s been nothing going on inspiration-wise, but somehow I’ve found it difficult to comment upon. I was probably too busy being a curmudgeonly old git at work and spouting off my nonsense there to pay enough attention to my long-suffering reader over here on the dark side.

I mean, topic-wise, it’s potentially been a rather golden month for the social commentator observing world events, events and great moments in history that have passed unremarked upon by the pages of Lesser Blogfordshire. These include near misses with vast asteroids, the passing of the late, great Sir Jimmy Saville, a fiscal meltdown in Greece and then Italy and all of the fallout from that, the Michael Jackson unlawful death trial (“Do you want to be starting something…?” because my opinions on that are a doozy) and my own increasing obsession with the checking of statistics.

Instead I have remained silent, preferring perhaps to explore my own flights of whimsy and look through my own photographic files and find some notions to share with little or no real success. However, the more mundane truth that I simply will have to ’fess up to is that I have now realised that, for large chunks of November, I wrote absolutely nothing at all and that half-baked series of images and  text was simply a quick way of papering over the huge yawning gap that was being created by that omission...

I let you down, guys, and, perhaps more importantly, I let myself down too.

Fun while it lasted, though.

If by “fun” you mean...

I’ll get my coat.