LAZY DAYS AND SUNDAYS

Saturday turned out to be a pretty lazy day. Apart from opening the door to bring in the milk bottles and again later on to put out the bin bags, I never put a foot outside the door. Instead, after a couple of pointless hours stringing together my thoughts for nobody to read, I spent an awful lot of the day slouching on the couch catching up with the accumulated recordings of the week, “The Mentalist”, “CSI” and “Law and Order”, and sorting through the mountain of shredding I’ve accumulated since I burned out the old shredder and then watching my new “Doctor Who” DVD (“The Ark” a 1965 story with the legendary Mr. William Hartnell) before spending the evening watching the surprisingly entertaining “Iron Man” (which we recorded weeks ago) and most of the dreary “Batman Begins” until relatively late. I’m not proud of any of this, but, the truth is, that’s my life, that’s what I do, and, to a certain extent with a few obvious variations on content, that’s pretty much what I’ve done with my weekends for decades. What a waste of a life. What a waste of time.

It was the surprisingly rather good (for a post-Grissom one) “CSI” episode – about a compulsive hoarder - that got me attacking the shredding, but the problem is that I’ve had so little home time where I wasn’t either utterly exhausted or emotionally drained for the better part of three months now, that everything’s started falling apart on the domestic front, the structural front and possibly even on the emotional health front. For a while I found that rattling my thoughts out in this place and engaging in a little banter helped to keep my spirits up, but even that has started to fail in the last couple of weeks and I’ve been finding the mental cliff face of recording something approaching rational thought getting steeper and steeper and harder and harder to negotiate. The tiny crumbs of happiness I got from doing even that have been becoming ever more rare and it seems that, in all honesty, I truly feel that I may have nothing much left to give.

Then I saw a couple of adverts on TV yesterday which gave me a “Road to Damascus” moment (or whatever its polar opposite might be) and they made me realise that I lived in a society with which I had nothing much in common and to which I had nothing much to say anyway. Culturally, the bombardment of pointless advertising selling us the dream or the nightmare (delete as applicable) which we weave around the annual international sick bag of “Valentine’s Day” just mentally ripped me to pieces. Look, if you love somebody, just go and tell them so every once in a while. You don’t need to make a ruddy great spectacle of it once a year just because some marketing departments tell you you should. If we all end up needing to be playing to the gallery to get some idea of how special we are, and to let everyone else know how special someone else thinks we are, then nobody’s really all that special at all.  The self-aggrandising, self-indulgent, self-absorbed society we’ve built for ourselves and then choose to publicly show to the world to prove how decadent we’ve become is just horrifying...

[CONTINUING ANGRY RANT DELETED*]

Of course, as another song (almost) goes, “Lazy days and Sundays always get me down…” which is probably why I found myself writing this:

I think the time has come for me to admit that I just don’t do very well with dealing with people. I have tried, I have genuinely tried, but, somehow, I’m just going to have to admit it to myself that I really don’t know how the world works. I see the world going by and I’ve even been known to interact with it on occasion but when it comes to the crunch it really is to no avail. Now I know that anyone who reads this will think I’m - once again - suffering from a bit of wallowing introspection, but I have now realised that there’s much more to it than that. The bigger picture tells me a lot more about the world, my place in it, and how I relate to it, and, frankly, I think I’ve got to come to terms with the fact that apart from a handful of vital people who I’m clinging on to for dear life, I...

[INTROSPECTIVE SELF-INDULGENT RANT DELETED*]

* Deleted Rants will be available in the Box Set of “The Complete Lesser Blogfordshire” which will be available one year as the imperfect Valentine’s Gift from none of your usual outlets I’m sure...