NIGHT SHIFTING

I’m sorry if this turns out to be a little bit weird, but I’m too depressed to think of anything else to write about today. I’m suddenly starting to get the slightly paranoid (and possibly completely unfounded) notion that certain aspects of my so-called lifestyle are feeling as if they are turning into a bit of a personal nightmare which is probably mostly made up of the bleakest worries squatting in the darker corners of my own imagination but, nevertheless, this is leading to a significant amount of inner turmoil and the kinds of introspective mullings and musings, which are tending to keep me up at nights and aren’t all that conducive towards considering and creating the calm rendering of rational thought into the kind of reasoned argument and discussion that I would normally expect to achieve whenever I head to my keyboard with a plan to write something at least vaguely interesting.

Well, interesting to me, at least…

I do try and write something every day, not for any real and proper good reason, but just because I want to, even if sometimes that is both very hard and really doesn’t achieve very much of any consequence. Today, however, I should really have had loads more time than I normally would because I had lain awake half the night worrying about work and eventually got up at 4.00 am because I was sick of having all these terrible scenarios spinning around my head and I decided that I would be better off if I just got up and wrote them down. I still don’t really know what is the source of all this angst. Maybe, deep down, it’s just that nagging sense of how quickly things can just fall apart. Somehow, the older I get, the more aware of this I get. I don’t generally think that youth is wasted on the young, although mine obviously was on me, but I do have the growing realisation that no matter what they might think, one day they’ll grow older and find they have just the same doubts and fears that they currently find so worthy of contempt in me.

Sometimes, however, you do have to try and address your inner anger so that you don’t say something stupid to just the wrong person at just the wrong time, and equally, when you analyse these things more rationally instead of just letting them spin wildly out of control in your mind as you desperately try to sleep, you can at least regain a sense of proportion. The irritation might not completely go away, but the knee-jerk reaction of some kind of “armageddon solution” has, at least, been averted for the time being.

“Armageddon? I think armageddon past it…” (Shut up, Groucho…).

By the time I’d done that, of course, it was time to get up anyway and so I was committed to a day of walking around in a daze, drinking far too much coffee, and trying to keep focussed on the things I should be focussing on rather than all the orbiting nonsense that was troubling me so.

You see, despite all the appearances to the contrary, I have been, generally, quite happy with the way I have had my life organised for the past few years. Oh, I know it’s not perfect, and I know that I share my little grumbles with you in these little postings from the dark side, but it could be so much worse. It used to actually be so much worse, to be perfectly honest with you, so, despite its faults, I rather like the way my life is currently set up. Suddenly, though, the sands they are a shifting and it looks as if I’m going to once more quote from the gospel according to Joni and reflect that you really don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

Meanwhile, in far away meeting rooms, dark forces are stirring, and decisions are being made that will directly change my quiet little existence, and I expect them to eventually cost me dearly in terms both financial and temporal, as well as in matters of my general well-being (if I can ever remember where I left it). Sadly, as I am just a tiny cog in the great scheme of things, I don’t really matter all that much and am not really all that important, so I will probably be getting very little input into how these various scenarios will actually play out, and, of course, why should I? I am aware of my tiny place in the great scheme of things after all, although sometimes it is really quite hard to accept that you’re just going to have to do what you are told, and that everyone else’s priorities will have to be put before your own. Ultimately, for any of us, that feels like it is a rather intolerable situation, even though we know we’re going to have to accept it eventually. After all, isn’t that what being an underling is, when it all comes down to it? These days, in the current climate, what other options are there? The alternatives are very grim, especially for an aging exponent of the visual arts working in a sector that mostly depends on the youthful vitality of those exponents.

One of the things is, of course that I am resistant to change. Actually, when it comes down to it, I do rather think that everyone is, but maybe other people are better at hiding it than I am, and I suppose you can adjust to anything given enough time and a certain amount of understanding as you grumpily negotiate the period of transition.

I can learn to lump it, I don’t have to like it, but I will get used to it eventually.