NEVER SHUTTING UP

Okay, here’s the thing… Really nobody has the time any more, least of all me… We’ve broken through the barrier and we’re rather surprised to find ourselves on the other side, still finding stuff to say, stuff to do, despite the fact that we really don’t have even the remotest hope of keeping it up (oo-er, missus!) which is probably to do with great age, and with great age comes great lack of responsibility and all that this entails and so on, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

So… A deal was struck inside the mind of me. A nice round and almost perfect number was aimed for and then, rather unexpectedly reached with a certain amount of indifference and “what next?” attached to it. I thought, perhaps, that the best thing to do would be to simply cease and desist, but then the words carried on pointlessly tumbling out of my head and had to find somewhere to go to. I thought long and hard about crossing the rubicon before typing those fateful words that meant number 401 had been triggered and the treadmill was turning again, and so on, and so on…

I briefly considered starting again and launching “The Alternative”. Indeed, there it sits, all dressed up and with not a word attached to its sorry hide, but I thought, and thought again, and decided that enough was truly not enough at all and so I’m back (from outer space) with that same old look upon my… mind and really, really had to wonder where it is that we go from here…?

And truly, I don’t know. I don’t want to promise anything, do you see? Especially, and most importantly of all, to myself. Those personal goals, the “year”, the “400”, well, they were all well and good, but… they were also a stick to beat myself with, a millstone around my neck… Basically, they became a law unto themselves and something that occasionally meant setting myself ridiculous levels of commitment to slice up my tiny loaves and fishes into increasingly small portions just so that I could attempt to feed a growing crowd of mental demons. We all, after all, have our breaking point, our limitations, our personal point of no return.

But then, this desire to communicate with nobody in particular, well, it simply will not go away. You might not believe this, but, even though I swore an oath of allegiance to myself that I really would just stop, it seems that I can’t, or won’t, or shan’t. Suffice it to say that this strange world that I seem to have created hereabouts appears to be stuck with me and, whilst I am absolutely and definitely going to pledge right here and right now that continuing daily morsels are very much off the table in terms of commitments and promises, I am going to turn up from time-to-time and damn well rattle off a few thoughts and words and deeds just perhaps with not quite the same amount of gusto and enthusiasm and slavery to the blessed calendar as I once did.

I don’t want to alarm you or anything, but floating around on my hard drive is a Word document, and this particular Word document now has 215 pages of things that I once thought that I might like to write about in these pages, but never quite got around to expanding upon.

Every so often, I think that I’m pretty much at the end of possibly having anything new to say here, and it might be time to haul up the anchor and sail away over the horizon to strange undiscovered lands, and yet there it sits, a positive (or negative… I’m never truly sure…) plethora of possibilities.

Considering the general banality of some of the things that I have chosen to share over these past few months, you’d think I would spend more time trawling through those pages trying to find something interesting to say, but no. Instead I will let whatever is in my mind in the here and now pour out whether it’s of any real interest at all.

Granted, some of those ideas don’t exactly leap off the page at me, and I would struggle to string enough cohesive thought about any of them to make them even vaguely entertaining.

Some of them are no longer relevant because time has marched on. Others represent such an obscure train of thought that even I would struggle to understand quite what it was I was thinking at that time.

Because, in many ways, we are fighting a bloody war to the death, these pages and I. I will set myself goals. I promise I’ll stop after a year, or maybe at a suitably pleasing number, and I really have tried and yet, here we are, facing up to the possibility that I have an addiction, a need to get my “fix”, or perhaps just to clear my head of all the verbal diarrhoea and pour it out of me into the general cesspit of the world.

Granted some days I struggle to string any words together, and sometimes it will be utter rubbish that I concoct, and I know that sometimes I will venture into the dark places of the mind where few wish to travel, and other times, like today perhaps, I will only feel that I can talk about the writing itself as it starts to consume itself and begin a process of futile self-justification or, even worse, a treatise on its own irrelevance when all those loyal readers evaporate again, and I truly am just churning out nonsense for no-one else’s benefit and truly talking to myself .

Again.