BLOG NOIR

You may have noticed, if you’ve ever taken the time to, or been on the appropriate type of electronic device, a little caption card at the bottom of the left hand side of these pages containing the details of this particular blog (what it’s called and its web address and so forth) and bearing the legend (alongside an unfortunate photograph of the author) “BLOG NOIR” and I thought that I ought to explain what it is that I mean by it.

Back in the early days of Lesser Blogfordshire, two years ago now at more-or-less this time of that year, the nights were drawing in (as much as the dark mornings were extending) and sometimes my postings tended towards the excessively gloomy (As opposed to the happy-go-lucky jollity you now get each morning… Ahem!), and this did, back in those hope-filled days when the experiment was all shiny and new, rather drive one or two people way with a merry “how very typical of you...” left ringing in my metaphorical cyber-earholes…

A reputation for “darkness” (some might say “being a miserable old so-and-so…) had already made the transefer from my “real self” into the “written self” who was so busily weaving this tangled web that so very few of you read so avidly.

“Ah well…” thought I, “I yam what I yam…” (or perhaps I just thought “Sod them!”) and the darkness and the bleak words just continued to tumble out unfettered and unheeded…

You see, sometimes I genuinely think that it’s healthy to pick up the stone you leave your personality underneath, and examine what you find under there, lurking in the cold and the damp and the darkness. Sometimes I believe that it’s far better to embrace that darkness, or, at the very least, address it, so that it doesn’t get the chance to fester and breed and consume you from within.

But that’s just me. Other people seem to think the “happy-go-lucky” approach is better, as they “Tra-la-la!” their way through life seemingly without a care in the world, even though none of the rest of us are fooled for one second by such demonstrations of their superior control of their lot in life.

Nevertheless, if that is your philosophy, then perhaps “Blog Noir” is not for you…

I’ve also always had a bit of respect for the film genre which is also known as “Film Noir” especially those American and French films from the thirties to the fifties where the world remained a bleak and cynical place full of world-weary no-hopers, deadbeats, and femmes fatale all busily sowing the seeds of their own destruction through greed, ambition or just hopeless naivety and optimism.

Those worlds were the fire in which “Lesser Blogfordshire” was born (or the cauldron in which it brewed) and it seemed precisely the very best place for it to put down its foundations and build for its own doomed future… Anyway, however it was that it came to pass, at some point I decided that it was time to embrace and accept this darker aspect of my musings… and so I coined the term “Blog Noir” (although I’m sure it had very probably already been coined before and elsewhere…) to try and explain the nature of things here in our particularly dark corner of the dark maelstrom of the cyberworld.

I also decided that I was enjoying the process of creating my blog so very much in those days (whatever happened to that feeling….?) that I might want to “promote” it in some small way. I even considered that printing off some kind of card to give to people (“Read this, and if, after doing so, you still want to talk, then we’ll talk...”) might not be the worst thing to do and so that smoky, dark little image that lurks there was born, and has continued to fail to persuade people to visit this little world ever since, and now, because the “powers that be” who control such things have made such embellishments possible, it does now also even adorn my excitingly redesigned TwitPage…

This may, of course, be a mistake. The fine folk who are the Twitterati are seldom pleased to find themselves being compelled to read the random madnesses of one of their fellow microbloggers and are likely to shun me in their dozens, but then, being shunned by the other millions doesn’t ever seem to have stopped me before, so I can’t see it making that much of a difference, to be perfectly honest.

After all, despite its now more than one billion members, my FizzBok presence is virtually nonexistent, and to be frank, any responses I get in TwitWorld are as rare as hen’s teeth, although there are one or two lovely chatty folk (who nowadays rather naturally lurk in the “Lovely Chatty Folk” list) who do still indulge my silly little whimlettes…

But, despite even their persistence, I still regularly consider jacking in my entire web presence (“shut down due to lack of interest” as the saying once went…) simply because the whole thing seems as stalled and as pointless as my “real” life sometimes appears to be (…and so now we begin to understand as we unpeel the blackened onion of another tangled metaphor and discover at least one strand or source of that mysterious “noir” theme that I keep on returning to…)

Perhaps on some ridiculous level I still believe that one day, presumably long after I’ve curled up my toes, someone will come along, trawl through these many pages and perhaps find something that they believe is noteworthy in some way. Perhaps on that far distant dawn, these random jottings from the blackest inkwell of life will be considered worthy of being gathered together into some sort of anthology (or collection of insight) into an otherwise long-forgotten mind…?

However, getting back into the jaws of reality, the disappointment associated with both that kind of shattered “ambition” and my own self-loathing associated with the fact that I even allowed myself to harbour the slightest moment of hope by even having an ambition of sorts (and the positive disgust now associated with having admitted to having had it…) is another facet of the shining diamond rapidly turning to the black coal that makes up the very lifeblood of the kinds of ideas that drive a thing like Blog Noir…

So anyway, for no very good reason other than the fact that I couldn’t think of anything else today, I thought that some kind of explanation of what “Blog Noir” is might be required. More often than not, my musings depend upon (to return to a “Roy Walker” analogy I seem to be very fond of lately…) a “Well known phrase or saying” just popping into my head after I have just woken up and am lying there in the darkness wondering whether I’ll get any more sleep. This I will then wrangle (usually as the kettle’s boiling), into something vaguely readable (I stopped myself from using the word “entertaining” there… Did you notice…?) which possibly explains why the subject matter is usually so very steeped in the darkness that spawned it.

Such things become necessary because, with this exciting new “Twittish” opportunity for new and exciting visitors to come and visit these humble pages (before finding that there’s nothing for them to see here and scurrying away back to wherever it was they came from), people might pop their noses around the door on one of my jollier days and wonder why exactly it dubs itself thus.

After all, these are not pages devoted to the strange cult of vampirism or the weird and wacky world of the Goths or any of those things most usually branded “dark”.

Far from it… (We’ve even been known to share the occasional chuckle...)

These are just a few pages exploring the entire spectrum of life, albeit in a monochrome kind of a way with an emphasis upon the various shades of grey (if that term hasn’t now been totally appropriated to be associated solely with smut…?) that lurk on the boundaries of where pitch black meets nightfall, and where the darkness creeps into every corner in order to conceal the madness lurking therein and let it lurk there to pounce upon the unwary traveller later.

It seems rather appropriate to be considering these things about this time of the year, just as it always did. It is most definitely a very “fatigued” time of the year, and you do sometimes start to wonder whether you’ve actually run out of anything that you thought you might want to say and these are precisely the times when the darkness of the inner mind chooses to leap out and bite you.

I do occasionally consider other options, though. Instead of more explorations of the darkness, you see, I do sometimes think about just trying to write a long (perhaps autobiographical, but I’m really not all that interesting...) piece over a number of days or weeks, but, certainly in my case, I don’t think that I could really expect anyone to have that kind of regularity of patience or commitment or memory or investment or loyalty to something that they often come to either by chance (or occasionally by design) or through their own sheer bad luck and misfortune.

I have even considered the notion of just posting a “page a day” of one of my plays to get me out of that tricky little issue of not having anything new to say about anything, but... Ah, who else could be bothered to read it or keep up with the plot...?

Anyway, I’m so fickle that if I was just focussed upon one thing for a while, I’d get very tired of it very quickly and find that I really wanted to write something else. That sometimes happens during my “themed” sequences which I occasionally churn out and which very quickly become yet another cross to bear that gets in the way of other things which I (and probably only I) consider to be more interesting.

And, of course, more than once recently, I’ve considered just “Thelma and Louise-ing” the whole thing off some kind of metaphorical cliff, and finally finishing it off forever by going out in some kind of literary “blaze of glory” (or - more likely - a squib of the dampest variety...)

Well, you couldn’t get much more “Blog Noir” than that, could you…?