NOT FADE AWAY

It’s not you, it’s me…

I know it is.

Actually, that’s pretty much the one thing we can be sure of hereabouts because, with all the hand-on-my-heart sincerity I can muster, there really is no-one else that I can hold responsible (i.e. blame) for any of the torrents of strangeness that may emanate from within these boundaries of Lesser Blogfordshire.

I don’t know, sometimes these sorts of thoughts just kind of come to you and there’s really nothing you can do about them except just to tell you and be honest about it and just say what you’re really feeling. Perhaps that’s part of the philosophy I have with these things, or perhaps it’s something more fundamental than that. Is it an inherent need to restore the balance of decency in the world, or just a manifestation of an unattractive deep-seated need to be liked despite all the evidence of self-loathing coming from within…?

I woke up today and suddenly all this stuff, all this introspective nonsense all just seemed like it was kind of pointless, and felt like a massive waste of time, effort and energy. I know, I know and I’m sorry, but today, that’s how it feels. Look. I don’t feel great about saying these things, they don’t make me feel any better about myself and certainly don’t make me a better person, but… I have to tell you… I’ve got to. If I didn’t I’d just be lying to you, to me, to us…

You know what it’s like… Most mornings I get up ridiculously early and squeeze out a few half-baked ideas about a lot of things that the world in general really doesn’t care all that much about. I spout off in an annoying way about all sorts of pointless trivia and pour out the most intimate insights into my obviously troubled psyche and some days I wake up and I genuinely have to ask myself “Why?”

I’m genuinely of the belief that there is an inverse relationship between thought and happiness. The more that you think about things, the less happy you are. Those who go through life without a care in the world, who breeze along without a thought for others can do so precisely because they don’t spare a thought and can be content with things being just as they are. The thinkers, or more accurately the worriers, they are the ones bearing the world upon their shoulders. They are the ones for whom the world is a swamp of fear and loathing and who will find that every once in a while, the weight of the world seems too much and they will lurk in the sanctity of whatever cocoon they can find and sit within it, fretting and cogitating upon the enormous wall of horror that is bound to envelope them and crush them.

Without such thinkers of course, the world would have been deprived of such delights as pre-buttered toast, self-dunking biscuits, ready-mashed potato, factory-peeled apples and vac-packed hot coffee with cream (only some of these are true). Obviously, in terms of the lives we are now living as the human beings currently lurking at the top of the evolutionary tree on this little blue planet awaiting our downfall and inevitable replacement by the next big thing, the act of thinking, coming up with positive thoughts and ideas, has played rather a large part in getting us to where we are now, and is generally considered to be a good thing. All of our philosophy, culture and science has grown out of the simple fact that one day someone sat down and thought about something. But then there are also other kinds of thoughts, dark sinister ones that bring out the worst in people, and can lead to wholesale slaughter on a vast, almost industrial scale, they grew out of the minds of human beings too.

Meanwhile, somewhere in between these extremes lurk idiots like me. I sit here and I rattle on each day and, quite frankly, largely bore a tiny proportion of the world to tears, spewing out my half-baked philosophies and half-informed ideology to anyone who can be bothered to read it. Some mornings I simply choose to tear my soul apart on the altar of… well, what, precisely? Does anything really get achieved by all this soul searching? Does anything really change because of it? Is the human condition any more enlightened because I share the fact with them that I once built plastic spaceships to while away my own particular fleeting cluster of hours upon this sad and lonely planet?

After posting the latest of these electronic messages in a bottle, and if I’m not too busy, I sometimes find myself constantly checking and rechecking up on you, logging in over and over again just in order to see whether anyone else has even turned up, had a quick mooch around and gone away again. On some bleak or empty days, I will do it again and again and again throughout the day when I really should be too busy living some kind of life to be doing that. Instead of filling my leisure hours with joy and laughter, I might very well find myself constantly fretting over whether I’ll miss a comment.

Today, I don’t feel like I want to do that any more. This morning it really does feel like a ridiculous thing for a (sort of) grown man to be doing. Doing this should never have become a stick to beat myself up with. I’m very aware that I have a kind of ‘bipolar’ relationship with all this baring of the soul, and that some days I approach you with a certain amount of dread, fear and loathing, but some days, some hideously self-destructive days, it all seems too much.

I will admit that I put too much pressure on myself and in choosing each day to continue feeding the monster, well, it saps my energy, it starts to feed on me, it begins to devour me. Some days I completely convince myself that the time has come to stop, to grow up and find something else to occupy my time, but then a passing thought will spark off an idea and I’m back on the treadmill again. How could I possibly think I could miss a day, a week or even a year...? Although I know that eventually I will... I must. Then weeks of remorse will inevitably follow. How could I have let myself down like that? Let us both down. This will then be followed by months where the fields of Lesser Blogfordshire remain fallow as I seriously wonder how I used to find the time to do it at all, and wonder how it was that I used to string such vaguely eloquent sentences together when now I can barely grunt a greeting as and when (and indeed if) the telephone rings.

You know I’ll be back. You already knew that. We’ve been down this road before, you and I, and I’m sure we will be back along it again one day soon, but, you must understand, like with any addiction, I need to know that I can just walk away, accept that it doesn’t really matter and that if you’ve got nothing to say, it’s all right to say nothing, and perhaps you should. I’m going now. I’m going to quietly close the door behind me and not look back. There’s a bright new future out there waiting for me and I need to go out and seize it…

Right.

I want to tell you how it’s going to be...

I’m off.

Going now.

But…

Ah! You know I’ll be back, humbly begging your forgiveness, with more ideas tumbling out to vex and taunt you with…

Say you’ll take me back… Say you’ll forgive me… Please… Just… say it...

O blog, I... I... think I... love you...

(Well, love is love and not fade away...)