FLATLINING

Sometimes, things that are going on in your life start to flatline. There’s nothing you can do to stop it happening, they just do, and for one or two things in my life this is indeed now the case.

I should, of course, count myself to be very lucky. These things that are flatlining are very trivial things of precious little importance to anyone except me and my admittedly fragile ego. Nobody that I care about, at least nobody I know about at the time of writing, is literally flatlining on a surgical gurney somewhere, although I must keep in mind that somewhere somebody actually is, and so my trivial metaphors are likely to become very crass very quickly if I’m not very careful.

We must always tread carefully when it comes to the possibility of upsetting complete strangers. Less so with those who know us well, but even so we should proceed with caution.

As an aside, but nevertheless something that has struck me as I write these things, when it comes to matters of flatlining, we ought to consider this week of the 60th anniversary of the succession of our monarch. It has struck me a number of times across the years that, whilst the nation sees this as a cause for celebration, for the person themselves it marks the anniversary of the death of a parent, and so it must always be a bittersweet moment, and I can think of very few jobs that you can only get in life because your father or mother dies so that you can take over, and where the takeover is so very public.

Suddenly, my own ponderings upon flatlining seem very trivial indeed, and I am tempted to stop here instead of continuing to dig the hole I so obviously am for myself this morning.

“If you’re in a hole, stop digging...”

But this is me, and you know that I can never do that...

Anyway, I do worry that things like these writings have a tendency to flatline, almost as much as the numbers of people reading them. You see, I told you that it was such a trivial matter, but then I led you on, making you think that perhaps I had a more pertinent point to make, even though I hadn’t. I am, as ever, mulling over the pointlessness of these witterings whilst simultaneously proving their pointlessness as I do so. But it does still bother me far too much, both my own lack of inspiration and the paucity of those returning to have their imagination stimulated.

Thankfully, recently I’ve been able to focus on other things...

I have, for example, been working on a script. This is, of course, a bit of an achievement nowadays as I was pretty much convinced that my script-writing days were far behind me, and yet, a reason to write one cropped up and somehow I have managed to stitch together a few hours to do so. Granted, as ever, I doubt that it’s actually any good, certainly not in a “life changing” way, but it’s nice to revisit the form and prove to myself that I can still do it, even if it’s ultimately another of my pointless exercises.

I’ve also been working on a bit of design work, filling up more of those precious free hours with a bit of the kind of thing I am supposed to be “best” at… A follow up to the summer time poster that I did was required, to cover the other half of the year, and an opportunity came “out of the blue” to create a new logo, and, whilst these are never things I ever make a penny out of doing, it’s very nice to find that the world still thinks of me and believes that I can do such things, even though I have my doubts that I really can and, to try and save face, I constantly have to remind everyone how rare and precious those “free” (in so many ways) hours can be.

I’ve also been working on the bizarre world of Blog tag, now firmly established in the uncharted waters of the once defunct Writers’ Group blog and being popularly ignored over there. Creating an ongoing narrative, however bizarrely plotted, using the technique of a kind of game of literary “ping-pong” (or “whiff-waff” if you prefer) is proving fascinating, even if it does tend to chew up even more of those few free hours that I used to use for “better” things. There are, after all, only so many words that make some kind of sense, or nonsense, that you can successfully churn out in any one day...

Consequently, what I’ve not been doing is spending much time in Lesser Blogfordshire, but then, neither has anyone much else been either, hence our topic today of “flatlining”. This is not, I suppose, a bad thing. Granted, from a personal sense of self-worth, it’s not been a good thing either, but, as the wise man once uttered (presumably somewhere in the South Bronx), “Them’s da breaks, kiddo, them’s da breaks!”

So where do we go from here...? Do we try and resuscitate the ailing patient or just let him slip away into the big sleep, drift away towards the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns...? I need to learn to focus, to put all my energies in one direction instead of letting myself be dragged off on all these ever-so-tempting tangents that keep my mind stimulated away from its dreadful tendency to have a far-too-low boredom threshold and far, far too easily distracted....

But, oh hang on, what’s this? Is there life in the old dog yet...? I’m sure I saw a blip just then... Do you see it...? No...? Well, I’m sure I did... Nurse...? NURSE!!!