THE TIME HAS COME

The time has finally come, I think, to draw a line, to disappear, to give up, withdraw and sail away to pastures new, to pack up my keyboard, put down my pens, and set aside my camera. To admit defeat, accept that there is no reason to carry on, and to simply fade away.

And whilst I’d like to be able to say that “It’s been fun” as the saying goes, you know that you’d have to just take my word that there’d be a grain of truth in that statement alongside a whopping great lie.

I know that my regular few readers will recognise the signs and know that my regular cycle of defeatism has come around once more. They’ll tip their hats (or whatever else it is people tip these days) knowledgeably, knowing full well that they’ve heard it all before, that the same old topic comes around every so often when the gremlins get into my works, and that I’ll bounce back the next day when the stoppage in the pipeworks frees itself and the words start to flow freely again.

But this time it feels different. This time I’m really not too sure.

I spent a long afternoon recently sitting in front of a keyboard when I should have been outside doing other things. I had “Test Match Special” on because it was a summer Sunday, and outside the sun was beating down on one of the smattering of fine days that we get in any given year, and instead of doing what other people do, I was sitting here for hour after hour not writing one word that was useful, insightful, witty or honest.

Not one.

This was because I was going through one of those “phases” where I realise that every word I put down, every thought I publish does not resonate with the broadest spectrum of this species we call humanity, with whom I increasingly have less and less in common with.

The more I read, the more I realised that I had nothing to contribute to this society which I spend my much of my life in a high orbit, circling around. All those tales of barbeques, and parties, and alcohol mean less and less to me as I start to have less and less relevance to the world around me. I stand bewildered in supermarkets at the sound of the tannoy talking about “your summer party” as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, which the mythical “everyone” will be doing in this country full of sheep I live in, and yet it belongs to a world I would gladly avoid. I look at the appalling lack of pride in personal appearance being displayed around me, the guts, the tats, the shorts, and accept that everything has already gone to hell in that handcart, but that nobody else seems to mind.

Which means that it really is just me, but as the world really doesn’t give a flying monkey’s about what I think (and, after all, why should it ? It is, after all, a very busy place…) and the fact that I spend my days utterly confused by the things that everyone else I see seems to find perfectly acceptable, perfectly okay (or maybe it’s just that I spend much of my life just being “disappointed” with people...?).

 

The Olympics, Jubilee Parties, TV talent shows, soap operas, football, personal wealth, personal ambition, gadgets, gizmos, celebrities that I don’t recognise, celebrity crushes that I don’t understand, people who don’t seem to get it when I suggest that just because you’re “only” being unfaithful in the mind still means that you’re being unfaithful, people walking around displaying such a lack of imagination that they may as well be wearing a badge saying “walking cliché”, cheap booze, holidays spent on the beach, where being considered a “MILF” is worn as a badge of honour instead of being thought of as a term of abuse, family outings, school idiocies, parental responsibilities “because you have to when you’ve got kids...” All of those things which it almost seems compulsory to be involved with, and of which very few of actually mean anything to me. Just as little, I suspect, as anything that I might have to say about such things are irrelevant to them. So, I might as well just shut up about everything and let the world get on with all of it without me.

It’s my own fault, of course. Instead of thinking of my own things to say, I got distracted by the words of others and felt that awful need to “join in” and throw what “I reckoned” into whatever bucketfuls of nonsense I was reading.

I “joined the conversation” and made an ass of myself with my allegedly witty asides to people who didn’t really care, and all of which sank like a lead dirigible. I read nonsense on networking sites with people who are such distant “friends” that I haven’t seen them in years but I can still find that they manage to annoy me so much and so regularly that I can stand it no longer, and I unclick their “show in news feed” link, and they finally vanish whilst still being there, taunting me with their trite “likes”…

There are simply too many people in the world these days mouthing off about nothing in particular and I’m just another one of them, so, if I object to the maelstrom, the only thing that I can do is to make a stand by withdrawing from it myself to make my point.

Otherwise I’m just the hypocrite that I always suspected that I am.

So, it seems the time has come. Far too many hours have been spent stringing these words together for no real reason and to no real avail, and perhaps it is best to accept that it is simply time to just stop, give up, hang my hat up behind the door, sit on the porch and watch the rest of the world go by. It’ll be easier that way, and, after all, there is a very old and very wise saying that resonates so truly simply because there’s a lot of truth in it:

“Silence is golden.”

The rest is silence.