GREAT GREY MASS

I am just SO very tired…

I don’t know if anyone else gets this, but it’s like there’s a great big ball of something - you might call it fog, you might call it goo – lurking just in the front of my brain and it seems to be preventing me from doing anything very much at all.

Every time I try to think about anything else, about writing, about the idea of work, about my imminent break, it just sucks the energy in like a black hole (only I see it as grey…) and my progress reduces to a crawl.

This is why my wordsmithery appears to be petering out, just in case you had been wondering...

No...?

Fair enough... I suspect that I couldn’t be bothered with me any more either, if I were you.

Stupid! Stupid! Now I’m just feeling sorry for myself, aren’t I...? And that will never do.

Luckily, the “professional” part of my brain, that tiny spark containing the work ethic so drummed into me as a young ’un, does seem to be able to navigate around this shapeless mass and allow me to function, although the price seems to be that it uses up all of the energy and leaves me too drained to do anything much outside those requirements.

Meanwhile, the great grey mass is just there, distracting me, blocking me, and preventing me from doing the several things that I really, really should be getting on with, given the time-sensitive nature of so many of them.

Have you ever been so knackered that even writing out a cheque to pay a bill seems like such bloody hard work…?

Ah well, I guess that it’s just one of those “First World Problems” that you hear about which wouldn’t even be an option if I had top deal with real suffering like so many other people do.

Maybe that’s part of what’s feeding this though. I’ve been feeling pretty low anyway, what with the way that the world seems to be going, so that every bleak little story seems to somehow chip away at me and diminish my optimism – something which, as you all know, there has never been a surfeit of.

But then I realise that even using a phrase like “as you all know” is an utter nonsense as my presence upon this planet seems increasingly tenuous and without meaning anyway.

Sometimes I think that I could just drop off the world and it would barely be noticed for several months. Like one of those desiccated corpses that they sometimes find in apartments that appear to have been abandoned, eventually the world, so busy with getting on with its own lives, might suddenly pause and ask itself “whatever happened to…?” long after it actually ceased to matter any more.

I have become, as the saying goes, irrelevant.

There I go again! Feeling sorry for myself... Again!!! This really will not do.

Meanwhile, I can’t afford to be so listless and melancholy.

The Beloved seems to be having a crisis of confidence of her own, which does, at least, give me purpose, given that I have to look after her and be as supportive as I can… although summoning the necessary energy from somewhere is a struggle.

Still, given that her great grey mass trumps my great grey mass every time, at least on my scale of who’s most important hereabouts, I’d better just try and battle on, eh…?

But, Christ…! I am really just SO very, very tired…