HUMDRUM

For some strange reason, when I woke up today, I wanted to write something bland, something banal, something that summed up the sense of the mundane and the humdrum that I feel has been infecting Lesser Blogfordshire during these past few weeks.

“Aha!” you may be thinking “So, no change there then!” and, if you did have that spiteful thought, I forgive you. After all, it’s nothing other than an absolute truth…

You see, I woke up once again and the mental cupboard was bare. It was with a heavy heart and a sense of impending dread that I dragged my weary but wakeful carcass towards the keyboard, dragging my feet reluctantly across the carpet and hitting that button that brings another day of life to the computer that I dance my merry word dance with each morning.

“Today” I thought, “I shall fail you…”

For the mind could not detect a spark. As I was lying awake in the darkness just before the dawn I did think that I had something which I remember mentally moulding into some form of coherent structure, but I think that I must have dozed off again because when I next resurfaced from the realm of morpheus, there was nothing there. That string of thought had slipped from between my fingers and there was only a slightly disconcerting sense of having had a lost thought which I might never find again…

“It’ll come to me…” I thought, “Just as soon as I hit that keyboard I’ll find the loose end of that thread and pull it…” but it didn’t, so I can’t.

I did, however, find a note which I had written to myself recently. A reminder. A topic. A trigger for some more dazzling literary brilliance perhaps or, as is more usually the case, another set of desperate ramblings spewed out to keep the dreaded “block” at bay…

The note just said one word: “Humdrum” and I don’t know what it was that I was thinking about when I wrote it down to mull over later.

It is just possible that I had come to the conclusion that everything in my life was pretty humdrum, that it was an act of ridiculous arrogance to even consider that anything I did was even remotely interesting enough to be able to write something about each and every day and I should just accept the inevitable conclusion that my life is humdrum, my words are humdrum and, indeed, so am I…

Perhaps I wrote it down during a particularly monotonous morning at work when I was allowing my life to drift beyond the four walls of the concrete box and I had a revelation that life within those walls seemed very mundane in comparison…? Maybe it was just a random doodle, a scribble made as I was talking on the telephone or just the tiniest bit of reality creeping into my subconscious bucketful of wishful thinking.

Inevitably it was back to my own words that I drifted upon finding that ever-so-slightly damning one-word condemnation of my entire existence. When I compare and contrast my own outpourings with the flights of fantasy and imagination of others, I always find them wanting, and always, upon making that comparison I find myself feeling humdrum and the words themselves no longer seem worthy of flagging up to others as a possible source of interest.

After all, whilst I may have found a way of automating the scheduling of my words so that I don’t have to be actually be here to publish them, I can’t find a way of doing the same when I add the links to them in TwitWorld or FizzBok. Such self-publicity requires a more direct and manual approach and sometimes – more often than not to be perfectly honest with you - I read through them and think that they are not worthy of being exposed to such ridicule, and I decide not to bother.

Then I usually think “What the hell…?” and change my mind and “publish and be damned” anyway. Except when I don’t, of course, which is usually a symptomatic clue that another cloud of darkness is about to encompass me and the sheer pointlessness of talking about things that are so very banal and humdrum is going to strike me once more and a whole new internal dance of the “What’s the bloody point?” Tango is about to unfold inside me.

So it was this morning, when the nothingness started to overwhelm the somethingness. I genuinely believed that I really couldn’t see the point of it all again, but, luckily, something else was already written and had already been published and all that I really had to do was post the links on the external “social networking” sites and I could go away and not think about it any more.

That’s when I found out that, after years of avoiding the option, my FizzBok account had finally been selected to be “Timelined” and suddenly I found that I had something to do. Suddenly it was imperative that I waded through two years of my nonsense and removed all of the frippery and pointlessness and less than wise comments from my personal history, so that kept me busy, and, incidentally, inspired this particular posting.

After all, if you really want to find out how humdrum your life has been, there’s no better eye-opener than looking through your Timeline over a couple of years on Fizzbook to confirm it.