CLOSE TO THE EDGE

This blog has been travelling dangerously close to the edge over the past few weeks, and been in danger of plunging over the precipice at any moment, perhaps due to the fact that the driver hasn’t had quite as much time to pre-prepare his little nuggets of dubious wisdom as he would ordinarily have liked, but has, instead, been producing his postings a mere 24 hours ahead of publication instead of the with the usual weeks or months of careful and meticulous planning that ought to have been self-evident by the masterful word-wrangling which used to be on display in these pages.

Well, it ought to have been masterful, but it seldom was…

And the forward planning was never all that great, if we’re being totally honest here…

Would I ever be otherwise…? How could you possibly doubt my sincerity…? I quail at the very notion…

Of course, I was always cheating. The very definition of a “weblog” I imagine is that it ought to be in the “right now”: but I’ve seldom been brave enough to risk the obvious derision that would be forthcoming if I ever attempted such a thing…

“Sitting at a keyboard feeling more sleepy than ought to be possibly and trying to dredge and original thought from the bucket of swill that passes for my brain…”

“Later… Still sitting at a keyboard, hoping that the chances of being hit by a ball of inspiration slightly exceed those of being struck by a meteorite…”

“Later still… Have decided that the art of writing really is staring at a screen until your forehead bleeds… In the meantime, I had a cup of coffee…”

Rivetting stuff, yes…?

Then again. From a philosophical point of view, what is “now” anyway…? By the very nature of it, it’s already “then” before the words even get out of my head, onto the page and out unaccompanied into the big wide world…

Interestingly (and, by the way, do you notice how very often in life, sentences which start “interestingly” seldom really are…?), when this blog staggered back to life from the brink of oblivion last month, I did notice that more people seemed to be reading it when I wasn’t writing it than when I returned to it. So much so, in fact, that a month in which I wrote nothing for a good two weeks still managed a solid and respectable fourth place on the “all time viewings” list, whereas this month, when I am making the effort, is struggling to shuffle past the point of being awarded the wooden spoon.

There is, perhaps, something to be learned from all this; If I finally stepped away from my keyboard, maybe I would finally achieve that elusive “popularity” I must so obviously crave.

Sounds utterly ghastly, doesn’t it…?

After all this time, how little you still know me…

Mind you, I have tried that old “disappearing makes you more popular, absence makes the heart grow fonder” ploy before, in other “real life” aspects of my miserable existence…

“Really? And how did that work out for you, then…?”