And so, as another weekend burns in the furnaces of history and I drag my weary body towards the start of yet another working week I’m already at a loss as to quite what happened to the actual days that made it up. Those precious pauses, those peaceful pairs of days are supposed to punctuate our lives with experiences that enhance the humdrum nature of the life of the wage slave, but, at the risk of boring you to death (although why shouldn’t I? I frequently bore myself to death after all…) somehow they keep on passing by and achieving nothing except the maintenance of the status quo and the passage of the fires of time and I’m never really all that sure quite what became of them. Stuff did (or more often than not) did not happen, hours passed, many hearts kept beating and before you know it, Monday was upon us with all its promise of irritation and drudgery and a gnawing sense of having wasted yet another weekend instead of actually living it.
Friday evening remains a void in my memory. I remember getting home, my mind full of the upcoming upheavals to my established work routine and feeling more than a tad tetchy about it. I recall probably being more ranty than might seem healthy about these things and telling myself to shut up but still babbling anyway, but eventually we arrived home and parked ‘Blinky’ up at the side of the road – the old days of a regular niche of off-road parking now being lost forever to me it would appear – and headed indoors. It might have been raining, or there may have been just the prospect of rain, its hard to tell, but, as they used to say “the weekend starts here” although, apart from remembering that I dozed off during “Gardeners’ World” and went to bed shortly afterwards, which somehow seemed to trigger an electronic brainstorm in the DVR, the sleepy two or three hours from slamming that door to waking up and seeing Monty Don digging is all a bit of a blur.
My mother may have rung, because I do recall a brief snatch of conversation of the “I thought you’d be out at the station at this time…” “So why did you ring then?” variety, although that might have been Thursday evening, and there may very well have been fish for tea and washing up to be done. I probably threw myself up at the keyboard to disappoint myself at the less-than-great statistics hereabouts once again, such is my need for self-punishment, and, whilst I have no memories of actually doing that, I should reflect upon the fact that doing this sort of thing with my evenings and early mornings is precisely what led to the both the sense of fatigue that was pervading my existence, and my sense of it becoming ever more pointless when hours of writing are only seen by single digit numbers. I shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t have any sexiness to sell, or any tittle-tattle about the great and the not-so-good to intrigue the wide world with. Christ! I barely leave the wretched house... So why should I be remotely surprised by this? And yet I constantly am…
That might also have been the moment that I briefly crossed the threshold of FizzBok for the first time in a while, although I remember it being slightly earlier on in the day than that. I’ve not been dropping in much lately after far too many depression spirals had been triggered by a word, phrase or saying which is also why I didn’t notice it was your birthday, if you choose to advertise the fact, whenever it might have been. Luckily the “share” buttons on this site mean that you don’t have to venture into that site itself to “slam-dunk” your links down, but this does mean that I seldom see the bigger picture and those occasional messages can just pass me by unnoticed. I suppose that I should randomly apologise for whatever slights that this might have caused if it wouldn’t sound so pathetic, but then they are so very rare that I doubt anyone’s even noticed yet.
I don’t know what actually drew me in there last week, but I think I thought I’d accidentally made a double posting and so went in to delete it. This was when I discovered purely by chance and via a third party that a tragedy had unfolded for someone I once knew long, long ago which made all this daily rattling out of nonsense by “yours truly” seem even more pointless and meaningless than usual. Who cares about things like crappy old TV shows and mind-bogglingly unoriginal observations upon the end of the world when real people are experiencing genuine heartbreak?
I wouldn’t usually, but I was so numb with the sort of momentary shock we all get when real life and the big world outside ourselves momentarily intrudes into our own little lives that I butted in and actually commented. Later on, in someone else’s noble display of trying to rally people around, an email address popped in to my account, offering me the opportunity to pass on condolences and I tried to, I really did. Sentences have been forming, moulding and restructuring for much of the weekend but this so-called self-styled “master wordsmith” just doesn’t know where to start. Oh it’s easy enough to abstractly burble on about religion and politics in a way that is rightly banished from the social scene, or tell the world about bad TV that it truly doesn’t really care about, but sending an email out of the blue after fifteen or more years from someone you worked with for a while, and which starts with something along the lines of “I was so sorry to hear about…” just doesn’t seem quite the right way to handle the sheer bloody tragedy of the big important, life-changing events that happen to those you know and try to care about.
So, I failed to write anything, and I’m sorry that I failed to write anything, but I really, really struggled with quite what to write. Every time I put my fingers to the keyboard, everything seemed so bloody trite and meaningless. I’ve never been very good at the raw emotional stuff. Somehow it always comes out sounding wrong whenever I try and so often I’ve decided that I’d rather not try at all than to risk getting it so catastrophically wrong. I know that it’s a bloody miracle whenever any of us manages to find someone who fits us so well and wants to share our lives with us; I know that when we do find that someone they somehow complete us and make us want to be better people because of who they are; and I know that it’s a privilege that we get the time that we do get to share and spend with those we consider to be our “other shoe” if we’re lucky enough to find them at all; and that we miss them when we lose them. I also know, deep, deep down that I resent bitterly the fact that, to paraphrase the words of John Lennon “there’d be days like these”, but actually saying those things directly to someone in great pain…? Such a simple act of kindness just seems impossible for me to do.
Instead, the weekend rolled along as it has a tendency to. Saturday dawned and the world failed to end. I commented jovially to a perplexed and bewildered neighbour that I wondered whether there was enough time for me to actually do this job as I headed out to strim the grass in the sunshine before the rains (and the apocalypse) came, and after this I spent some time scraping some of the ever-expanding weeds off the cobbles on the access road. This may very well have been the sum of my achievement this weekend as the rest seems to have vanished in a sleepy blur of old movies, meals, a trip to the supermarket, washing up and beating myself up with guilt trips. Of such banalities are the jigsaws of our lives made, and time passes by and, with the words of that poet John Lennon coming to mind again, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. (You just know that I’m going to be listening to some of those songs today now, don’t you…?).
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