TO LINK OR NOT TO LINK

This is a tricky one. Oh, not for you of course, but for me. One of those rather tricky, rather pointless little decisions that mean nothing at all in the great scheme of things and are more than likely to be totally irrelevant but nonetheless, but it’s been rather playing upon my mind lately.

I’ve been a bit sulky of late. You might very well have noticed, but you probably did not. I’m not even sure any more whether there are any of you there at all to even be aware of such subtleties. Nevertheless, I made a kind of rational choice last week as a sort of pathetic attempt at a kind of small social experiment (or possibly more of an antisocial experiment, I suppose…). I rather rashly decided that I would no longer put links to these bits of thoughts onto such socially networkable places like I used to, thinking, I reasoned, that those of you who regularly pop round to see what I’m blathering on about would probably do so anyway and wouldn’t need reminding…

Meanwhile of course, there is the perpetual ‘Sword of Damocles’ that I’m always dangling above your heads that I’m going to stop all this nonsense and go out and play in the sunshine instead, so there is the possibility that you’ll think “Fair enough” and assume that I have indeed finally, and as so often times threatened, sodded off for the last time and so you wouldn’t know that I was still here, still pouring out my spite and bile, but yet I am still here, still limping along, still trying to find purpose in my daily purposelessness.

This also meant that the dubious delights of my latest “masterworks” (I hope you’ll note the ironic quotes thereabouts), all the introspective nonsense and mildly controversial observations recently have almost universally failed to find any kind of an audience as your kindly gaze has lot looked upon them. You see, even if I say it myself (and why not? I suspect nobody else will…) I still think that there’s some pretty readable stuff hereabouts that is worthy of your time, even if very few others seem to think so. Eventually, I folded as I realised that the only way to get anyone to read this stuff was to tell them it was here, instead of just relying on their good taste and good judgement to bring them back to it. There’s no other reason, it took me all this time to realise, although I did hold on to the slender and diminishing hope that the reason people popped around was because they found something to like and enjoy and not because I bludgeoned them into it.

You see, I have become the thing I most despised when I witnessed it as a child. I have become desperate. When I was growing up, my parent’s social life (and therefore my own) revolved mostly around the church they attended, but (and this is the interesting bit – trust me on this) like any small community like a school, a university, a rugby club or a theatre group, there will always be the lynchpins, the cornerstones, the social spindles around which everything turns. These are the “golden” people, those whom other people gravitate towards and around whom much of that pocket universe just happens to revolve. These are the people who will bellow “Party!” and the guests will flock towards in their hundreds, these are the people about whom all the details of their lives are known. They shine like the rays of the sun. People telephone them and just drop in and they spend their lives in the confident knowledge that they matter, that they are loved and are never really alone.

Then there are the rest of us, those of us deemed unimportant or insignificant, who can merely vanish one day, month, year or decade and no-one will even notice we’ve gone. You may very well mention that you’ve been away and get a dismissive “Have you? I didn’t realise…” in response. My parents used to try to buck this trend by organising their own social events, and long, awkward, desperate afternoons would follow as their open days would remain mostly unattended because people found better things to do, or more exciting places to be, usually round at the houses of the chosen ones which, later on, they would hear glowing reports of the delights of, whilst we sat around listening to the clock tick our lives away and hoping against all hope that the doorbell would ring and all the prepared party food would not go to waste.

Once upon a time I lived amongst a tight circle of people on the outskirts of the inner city but never felt like a vital cog in their machine. I felt more like that extra piece you find in the box once you’ve put the wardrobe together. I was there, but nobody quite knew what I was for. Having finally got sick and tired of constantly and rather desperately ringing up when I was feeling a bit lonely and almost bludgeoning them into inviting me over, I once tried an experiment to see how long it would be before I heard from any of them, but after six wretched weeks alone and forgotten in my own rancid little world I cracked, and rang them, and life got back on its usual path, albeit with a huge chip lurking around my shoulder blade.

Interestingly, once I moved away about thirteen miles, after a few months of trying to keep the lines of communication open and a few assurances that visits would be forthcoming, everything ground to a halt in those relationships. I know it was my fault. I could have rung any of them at any time, but…

Don’t you see? Sometimes you get tired of having to be the one to make all the effort. Sometimes, just occasionally, you’d like it if someone just remembered you for a change. I also realised that there were about a dozen of them, all with telephones and only one of me with mine. There seemed to be a disparity, an imbalance in the work being done to sustain those relationships, and it all seemed pretty one-sided to me. Ultimately I was only moving in those circles because the social glue keeping me there was due my being invited into that group by one of the “golden” people, and once they dropped out of the frame, I was “one step removed” and my role as the spare part became apparent and, like all the rest of the garbage, off to the tip I went.

You may not understand this, but unlike a lot of people, I find it more and more difficult to just drop in to people’s lives after any significant time has passed. Oh, I know people who can do it, and pretty effortlessly, but I really do find it hugely difficult. There’s too much that might have changed, too much social awkwardness, too much fear of saying just the wrong thing and being taken the wrong way. If I do see people who I’ve not seen for a while, I tend to develop a veneer of over-ebullient bonhomie which usually sickens me to my stomach when I look back on it as I head home later.

FizzBok still manages to depress me every time I pull back the curtain a tad and take even the slightest of peeks. Each and every time I’ll just catch a glimpse of some nonsense and my spirits will plummet at the strange emptiness and soullessness of it all. It’s nobody else’s fault of course, I just have that kind of a mind, I guess. It’s the same reason I find myself railing at the some of the harmless banalities of television news or find myself throwing the local paper aside in horror at the sheer unimaginative blandness on display. That need the whole thing seems to have to reassure the world that the tidiness and safety of living a life of utter conformity is the way to go, but somehow they don’t seem to be talking to me any more.

I can no longer comprehend that ridiculous need to celebrate the mundane or state the bleedin’ obvious as if you’re the first person to ever think of it, and yet here I am, waking up every morning and doing precisely the same thing. Apart from that, of course, I’ve not really got the hang of TwitWorld either… The subtlety and vagueness of how that is supposed to work seems to escape me and my crass dabblings therein have proved to have become that dubious horror, the ‘social minefield’ and I don’t seem to really understand what it is for or how you are supposed to make it work. Once again, I’m on the outside looking in and feeling bewildered by it all. I sometimes wish I’d found a ‘life mentor’ to take me under their wing and show me how things work, but I suspect that it’s rather too late for that now.

I guess I’m destined to end up as one of the forgotten people, a ‘low impact’ kind of a guy, whose bloated corpse will be found alone in a dark room weeks after I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil because the neighbours have started to complain about the smell and the postman (should there be any left by then) can’t manage cram any more junk through the letterbox, or perhaps can’t even get to the letterbox due to the accumulation of milk bottles.

Ah, well, at least they’ll finally be paying attention.