ZERO

Disinterest is a strange old beast. It can be read in so many different ways. Disinterest in the minutiae of people’s day-to-day lives does not necessarily mean that you’re disinterested in the fact of whether they live or die. Surely you can still care about people you rarely see without having to know everything about how often they cut their toenails. I’ve lost touch with countless people over the years, but that doesn’t mean I never spend any of my time wondering quite what became of them.

Occasionally, though, these things can catch up with you and when it does, well, it can actually be quite sad. For example, a few years ago, I received a phone call telling me that someone who used to rent a room in the same house I did had died and I was completely unaware that they had even been ill. The phone call itself was the first time I’d spoken to the caller in over five years, and they seemed rather upset (not unnaturally, given the circumstances) not least, I think, because they were breaking a piece of news that they themselves had already had plenty of time to get used to the possibility of, and they had assumed I did too.

I suppose we all kind of think that everyone else is still orbiting each other’s lives so that, if we fall out of circulation, someone else is likely to be maintaining the link. If everyone else thinks someone else is doing it though, that’s how people fall between the cracks. A lost scrap of paper here, or a house move there and those precious little numbers that bind us all together can be lost. I didn’t even get to any of the memorials because I’d lost all those vital contacts and it’s really not the thing to call someone about out of the blue after half a decade, is it? Maybe it’s precisely the sort of thing… This is why I’m so rubbish at these things.

So… After that reflective moment… “Disinterest”. Just why is this nibbling away at my thoughts today?

Cue: ALARM BELLS RING FURIOUSLY! INTROSPECTION ALERT!!

DISCLAIMER: This whole thing of trying to get into the habit of writing something new every day will inevitably lead to me covering much the same territory from time-to-time as the same old thoughts rattle around my mind causing the same old conflicts and consternations, which then lead to me fretting over whether or not I truly am “Boring for Britain” and will send even you loyal few readers scattering to the four winds with your hands over your eyes screaming that you really can’t take any more. Be warned, familiar territory is about to be ploughed over once again… You may wish to look away now.

Some mornings I suppose I just struggle to see the point of rattling away at my knackered old keyboard in a vague attempt to… well, what precisely? Entertain? Amuse? Bore you to tears? It’s not like I should expect the world to be queuing up to find out what me, a slightly humble nobody, might have on his mind this morning…

Heaven forbid.

You’re sane, sensible people with busy lives to lead, places to go, people to meet. It’s just that, well… some days, some pathetic, dark, soggy old mornings, I just like to feel that there really is some point to it all, some reason to be here tapping away. It’s not that I want or indeed expect anyone to hang on to my every word… Really! Honestly! Cross my heart… I think I would find that utterly terrifying if it were to happen, but some days, some… bloody… wretched mornings, when you realise that no one at all has felt even the slightest desire to travel over to these pages and have even cast a swift eye over what’s happening over here even if only by accident, I kind of get a little bit defeated by it all…

Christ! What should I expect? The world’s an unhappy enough place to be at times without me making you gloomier this morning. For some of you who have been unlucky enough over the years to have to tolerate my moods in person on a more than daily basis, the thought of coming here and voluntarily reading even more of it must be one heck of a reach.

So… Should it bother me that these outpourings of my soul are not causing vast ripples and shaking the wibbly-wobbly-web to its very core? Of course not. That’s not what they’re here for. Quite what they ARE here for is anyone’s guess. This would almost certainly be one of life’s stranger diaries if that’s what it was supposed to be. Is it perhaps more of a catalogue of my many madnesses or just a record of what I just happen to be thinking right now… and now… and now…?

Of course the idea of an online diary would be a bizarre one anyway. Diaries are supposed to be secret, (if anyone still grasps that particular concept) and yet anyone who has nothing better to do could read this gibberish if they chose to. No secret yearnings and desires here, just a common-or-garden need to… what? Communicate with my fellow human beings…? Share a few thoughts with people who share the same planet…? Polish up my own ego because nobody else will…? You know that’s what I think some of you really think, even if you don’t… but then, maybe I am just so full of myself these days. I mean I hope I’m not, but it’s so very hard to tell.

Oscar Wilde would have it that not being noticed is worse than being noticed and whilst for the vast bulk of the time I would generally disagree with that as a philosophy, and quite happily crawl back under my rock where I think I belong, those occasional big fat round zeroes can still really hurt. “Nothing you have to say is of any interest to anyone,” they tell me, “nothing you can say or do matters to anyone today”.

The strange thing is, I’ve never really understood the desire to be the centre of attention. Some people I know might well tell you otherwise, but I maintain that through the years I’ve run screaming for cover rather than have to be “up front” with “the talent”. In the Rock Band of life, I’d always have had to be a roadie. On the Starship Enterprise I could only ever aspire to being a “Spock”, because I could never have been a “Kirk”, and in truth would more likely have been assistant engineer fourth class “Grunt” who got zapped before the opening titles of a nondescript mid-season episode in the disappointing final year. If you think I think otherwise, then I genuinely suspect that you’re only transferring your own latent desire for the limelight onto me, which of course you’re fully entitled to do, but I think it’s more of a manifestation of our human inbuilt desire that everyone should be more like ourselves, than a reflection of anything resembling reality. After all, sometimes when someone is being critical of someone else, it tells you more about who they are than the person they’re choosing to criticise…

And yet, here I am, still pounding out my wearisome drivel to you all via my long suffering keyboard which some would say is the epitome of the egotistical (before they’d drunk too much they might…) whereas I will maintain that writing, good or bad, is just something I can’t help doing and I’m now exploring a strange new world in which to do it.

As themes go, I do keep coming back to this one, don’t I? Why do we do this thing? Deep down I really do imagine that I’m faintly embarrassed by it to be brutally honest. I love the process of creating things with words, but I seldom get any joy out of sharing the results with people, despite what others might “reckon” themselves about what they might think they know about my so-called personality. Handing out a script to a group of actors or readers to me is utter torture, and whilst it is always mildly pleasing that they don’t dismiss what I hesitate to call my “work” out of hand, it still feels like I’m having rusty nails shoved into my eyeballs when they’re reading it, and always such a relief when (and if) there’s seldom any out-and-out hatred of it. I still have to escape from the room as soon as possible so that I’m giving them an opportunity in which they can tell each other what rubbish they really think it is. That might be an arrogant assumption, too though, when I think about it; that they’d find it worthy of talking about at all. Other, saner, people might wish to savour the glow of their delight or sit around bestowing their genius upon the adoring multitude, and again, if people think that I work like that, we have to return to the concept that it’s telling us more about them really, isn’t it?

And yet… and yet… Some will tell you how they yearn and crave that people will read their own outpourings, and you could rightly say “Well, what is the point of writing these things if you don’t expect them to be read?” but I don’t have an answer, just a lot more questions, but when those zeroes are taunting me, I always consider jacking it all in and doing something else far less annoying with my time…

Ah! We came close, so close…

A recent Sunday nearly managed to pass by with an actual, official, solid gold undeniable zero interest in my mad mutterings and witterings in this sad and lonely corner of Lesser Blogfordshire, and I was within a nanosecond of deciding that very thing, that the whole sad, sorry exercise in futility really had become the colossal waste of time I always suspected it might, and maybe I really should find that “something else” to do with my time, when Bang! An almighty two pageviews happened at 10 o’clock at night and saved me once more from the nuclear option, the oblivion state, or the armageddon solution and this tiny little blog survived the day.

This time.

Then I try to second-guess you and analyse the guts out of it, which is quite possibly the most pointless thing to be doing over something that matters so very little. Maybe weekends just aren’t “good” for you… Maybe strange pastiches used to explain my persistence don’t strike a chord… Maybe pieces of fiction written from the point of view of a vegetable just aren’t anybody’s bag. No matter. Ultimately I tend to write what I feel like, really. There is no audience as such in my mind, but it’s always interesting to see quite what gets the most looksees, although I’m now totally convinced that nothing much actually gets read when I find that some of the traffic was someone googling “Donkey Jacket” and instead being brought to this rather bizarre and understated little place.

I do worry so that I really don’t understand people at all, and this kind of navel gazing just terrifies you all. I’m kind of guessing that very few of you will have had the persistence to get all the way through this, and so I’m pretty sure I’m all alone now and it’s safe for me to emerge now, because you’ve all gone away.

Time to get the egomaniac suit out.

Victory is mine!!!

Mwahahahahaha!!!