NADA

I’m sorry but I really have nothing for you today. The cupboard (as they say) is bare. The empty desert stretches ahead of us to the distant horizon without even the remotest hint of an oasis. There really is nothing to see here. Move along, move along…

Zip, nyet, nothing, nicht, nada…

It was all so different when I woke up this morning and a billion blues lyrics flooded my mind…

“Woke up this morning…”

No, not really…

You see? We’re already struggling. This is how desperate things have got…

Actually when I got up this morning at an hour that even the ungodly might think a little too ungodly, I thought that I had a “witty” little skit on a popular pop tune that I’d like to get down on paper and share with the world, but it faded away in the harsh reality of another morning and I realised that it wasn’t half as funny as it had seemed to be when I was lying in my bed, mulling the thought over as I lay there, half-awake and wondering quite what the day was likely to bring.

You see, every so often, I do actually wake up and wonder whether today is actually the day when I might actually manage to be funny, and not just in a peculiar way, but in an absolute chucklesome, belly-laugh kind of a way. It’s just one of those vague hopes and dreams which I still manage to harbour in the face of adversity, apathy and so much evidence to the contrary that the judge was already having his black cloth dry-cleaned before the defence had even coughed slightly before giving its opening statement. Hell, it was probably already a fait accompli before the Chuckle Police even showed up at the scene of whatever crime against humour I was allegedly committing was even a notion.

But I, as ever, have managed to digress, which isn’t that bad an achievement for someone claiming to have nothing to say...

I sometimes head up to this keyboard utterly convinced that I have it. That today is indeed the day that I will finally get to tickle someone’s funny bone and raise more than a contemptuous smile. Then the so-called “joke” will whither on the vine and become leaden and dour as the sentences unfold, and suddenly we’re treading that tired and familiar old path towards dreary familiarity with that same old lack of sparkle that one or two of you have come to know and, well, not “love” exactly, but you know what I mean.

The problem is that I’m not all that good at being “funny”, the truth be told, as anyone who’s ever suffered one of my “amusing” comments on FizzBok or my “hilarious” TwitWorldings would be able to tell you. Sometimes I think that they are, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t go to all the trouble of typing them out, honing them to imperfection and clicking “send” but then afterwards, when I really think about my hastiness to do so, I will fret and worry about them and realise that there was precious little to find amusing about them in the first place.

All this from the idiot who, just a few short weeks ago, really thought that he could write a sitcom...

The funny thing is... those things that I say... the ones that I seem to think might be funny... well, they do  always seem funny to me, otherwise I really wouldn’t have bothered now, would I? Well, at least at first they do, until I’ve had that chance to think them over again. This is why I always head home from any of my rare nights out really, really full of self-loathing and embarrassment absolutely wishing that, just for once, I could learn to shut up and stop trying to engage anyone in any kind of banter at all.

I used to think this was why I did so much better in BlogWorld. Here, at least, I can give myself time to really think about what I’m writing and go over it with a fine-tooth comb before I’m actually stupid enough to actually publish it and put it out there, but, sadly, even that is proving to be less of a sure thing than I would like it to be.

Still, I suppose, in the end, this very morning, I haven’t done too badly in managing to write what I might have called “A short essay about nothing” if I could have been bothered to write that out in full like I, er, just... did...

Crikey! It’s tough this extemporising, isn’t it...? I think that I’d better just shut up now and hope that the “elves of inspiration” will sprinkle their “ideas dust” on my sleeping form tonight, so that I can write something much more, probably about something much less as, with any luck, another bleary morning dawns.