SHUT UP AND SHUT DOWN

I may have to shut down for a while.

Not only is the cruellest month upon us, but it has brought with it a wave of misery and depression of the sort that usually finds me floundering around in exhaustion when trying to find anything at all in terms of words to put down in a vaguely coherent string, and overwhelmed by utter hopelessness when it comes to finding anything positive (or indeed, anything at all) to say about the world around us that I still find myself deeply embedded in.

Still I find myself staggering along exhausted, constantly woken by the audio commentary that my own quisling brain insists upon sharing with me throughout the night and which it then tricks my mouth into repeating when there are actual people about to hear the stuff that it spews out, regardless of whether even I am convinced that it’s true or not.

After dropping whatever hand-grenade into the room that it has decided is least appropriate, it slinks away leaving me to explain myself or, as is more usual, run away and plunge myself into an ocean of despair so wracked with self-loathing and doubt that I sometimes wonder whether I will ever have the gumption to resurface and face the world again.

Ah, “gumption” now there’s a word you don’t hear all that often any more. I think that I like it… It’s kind of old-fashioned enough and confusing enough to anyone young enough to not know what it means to prove mildly satisfying. Not satisfying enough to provide even the merest hint of a silver lining, of course. Oh no, that ship has definitely sailed, struck an iceberg, and sunk with all hands, but satisfying enough because I know that it’ll annoy the hell out of anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot if I choose to say it out loud.

“Gumption… Gumption!” Yes, I already loathe that guy for allowing me to hear him using it, and seeing as that guy actually turned out to be me, the world of this blog and – by extrapolation – the world at large is truly eating itself as I predicted long, long ago, and so I can go down in flames knowing full well that I told you so, which would, of course, be mildly satisfying if it didn’t actually require me to go down in flames, and if I actually thought that anyone actually gave a rat’s kidney about anything I thought about anything.

My work appears to be in the doldrums and I feel as if I have become the world’s errand boy and not to be trusted with anything important. Perhaps this is because that brain of mine is sabotaging every conversation I have by making all those unpopular opinions public. I’ve done my best to reduce all of that irksome interaction with the faceless throngs of the human race and switched off the appearance of the conversations of random people whom I may, or may not, know from my limited interactivity because I find it all so irritatingly banal and most probably none of my business anyway.

You scored what in what round of utter pointlessness? ZAP!! You “reckon” what about which news story? ZAP!!! You actually think something so mind-wrenchingly mundane is “Brilliant!”…? TREBLE WORD ZAP WITH ADDED ZAP ON!!!

Ah, you know the drill by now…

But it seems I was “wrong” about that because it’s not the way everyone else goes about dealing with the world, and I must become a sheep, follow the herd (Oh no, that’s cows isn’t it… damn those mixed-up farmyard analogies), and learn to love everyone else’s banalities, despite the fact that I thought I was doing both the world and myself a great big favour and opting out, and hiding my own useless opinions otherwhere where they struggle to be uncovered, whilst finding my own way of using these terrible networks (Like, I don’t know, finding out about stuff that I'm actually at least vaguely interested in) to wade through the bilge and slurry of daily life.

“Join ussssss! JOIN USSSSSSSS!!!!”

Even Charlie Brooker has let me down recently. I’ve been enjoying reading some of his back catalogue recently, and finding some tiny nuggets of joy in the fact that it might not be just me after all, and that there were like minds out there in the big, bad, wild and ker-razee world after all, but further research has revealed that, despite everything he once said, he has actually joined the ranks of the loathsome parentalists and is therefore, by definition, as mad as a box of snakes after all.

Everyone, it seems, sells out to life’s big ol’ lie in the end it appears.

Shut up! Just… SHUT UP!!!!!

Have you seen the date...?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

(Christ! Even for me, that's lame...)