“OF COURSE IT ISN’T!”
He bellowed.
“Ah yes!” I could now imply, “It was all just my little
‘joke’”
But, of course, it wasn’t.
At the time I was in deadly earnest.
At the time I simply couldn’t imagine going on.
At the time… Well, at the time I said what I meant and I
meant what I said. The world and I were really not getting on, so I decided
that it was better if I got off the world instead of allowing the world to get
on top of me.
Instead, I just spent a month talking to myself in “The
Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” that’s all, not that anyone else really knows
what “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” is, I suppose, but nevertheless, it
sits there, out there somewhere, full of all sorts of introspective nonsense
written whilst I was trying to make some kind of sense out of my own sense of
futility and despair at the ongoing pointlessness of what I was doing and my
almost constant addiction to whether what I was doing did anything for anyone
else...
However, when you consider the alternative... Well I went
off and wrote the “Alternative”, even though I didn’t like it all that much.
Turning the magnifying glass back upon yourself for a while can be a truly
humbling and hugely disappointing experience. Unless you’re inclined towards
narcissism of course, then I’m sure it’s great. Although the true narcissist
would, I suspect, need everyone else to know how ruddy marvellous they thought
they were, too…
Food for thought and things to ponder upon. Still, when it
comes to the “Alternative” I know exactly where it is, and I’m not saying, and
nobody else does.
Which is fair enough. I can’t really blame anyone but
myself for that because I’ve not only not said all that much about it to anyone else apart from the old regulars (until today at any rate) but the
problem is that there’s very little of what I wrote over there that was
actually any good, and there’s certainly an awful lot of it that I probably
wouldn’t want anyone else to read anyway, so it’s likely to sit there
mouldering away until doomsday…
Not unlike myself, I suspect.
Anyway, the truth is that, after “giving up” blogging, I
then spent a month not “giving up” blogging at all. Instead I merely continued
doing it but more purposelessly. One or
two of the least worst of them may emerge ever so slightly transformed over here
eventually, but most of it needs to be forgotten by everyone else except me
whenever I need a swift slice of humble pie.
Does any of that make any sense at all…?
Thought not…
But there I go again, already doing precisely the kind of
thing that I promised myself that I wouldn’t; talking about this blog as if it
deserved to be referred to as being somehow “important” in some way when it
patently, absolutely is not.
How arrogant.
How utterly ridiculous.
How stupid…
So, with as little fanfare as is possible, and with as
much humbleness as I can muster, and obviously in direct contrast to the mighty
Bob Hale, I suppose that I should go into the cellar and whisper quietly into a
small receptacle I keep there for just such a requirement: “Lesser
Blogfordshire is back…”
Meanwhile, if you can bear to read just a little more
introspection, there are still one or two things that I feel that I need to
explain. You do, after all, deserve that, dear reader, assuming that you would
still want to hear it and indeed are around to do so…
To be honest, towards the end of May I had kind of hit the
buffers when it came to my online life, and, I’d also got the impression that
the feeling was mutual. I was spending far too long looking for responses that
never came, reactions that didn’t happen and expressions of interest where
there were few, if any. I had rather stupidly allowed my expectations to exceed
the actual reality of my own situation and my place in the great scheme of
things. My so-called digital life had become a source of depression and
irritation and was doing little to bolster my self-esteem, which is always
something sadly lacking in me at the best of times, and these were, most
certainly, not feeling like the best of times… I staggered on for as long as I could bear to and then, when the time felt right... Well, you know...
Still, despite all that, there were one or two bits of pieces that poured
out of me during my exile with which I am more pleased, so I might go and have
a rummage about in the dirt and see if I can pull out the odd potato or two and
display my wares to you, if I can actually be bothered.
Actually, in that regard at least, the “Alternative” has
proved to be rather a useful “filter” if you like, a rather handy way of
getting the worst of the rants out of my mind without me then sitting around
fretting that I’ve somehow managed to upset anyone. After all, despite what you
might suspect about me, going around upsetting people isn’t one of the things
that I most enjoy doing.
Really. It isn’t.
Perhaps the most depressing thing for me was, apart from
that initial flurry of worry hereabouts (for which I remain grateful, even
if my expressions of gratitude themselves never seemed to appear…), in the great big wide world at large, nobody seemed
to notice that I’d gone. Now that’s fine in the whole electronic mish-mashery,
I suppose, after all if one light goes out at the fair, do we even notice it?
The problem is that it made me think about my real life and how one day I’m going
to turn up dead and it’ll only be when the atmosphere starts to get really ripe
that anyone will try to work out what’s happened.
And somehow considering how to avoid having that as my
ultimate fate seems to matter far more to me now than whether or not I choose
to tell the world my latest woes on a semi-regular basis.
So yes, I am a selfish bugger and no, nobody can rely on
me to turn up regularly in BlogWorld any more, and we do have a huge mountain
to climb to restore our faith in each other, assuming, of course, that anyone
is still there, but, for the time-being... Well, as the great petunia bowl once put it…
“Oh no! Not again!”
