REASONS TO BE SOMETHING (PART THREE)

It has not gone unnoticed, at least by me if nobody else, that the activity in this particular Dark Corner of Lesser Blogfordshire has been less active lately, although, perversely, because it seems to have turned out that I am a bit of an old word-natterer after all, this has meant that my chatting in the strange world of FizzBok has been more so…

Not that I'm any good at that… The wry, sarcastic aside doesn't seem to work very well in cold hard type and without context, and I seem to keep on getting myself into all sorts of trouble [WINK, SMILEY FACE].

Still, with one spectre from my darkest past having briefly reappeared upon my shoulder before flittering away, requiring me to at least appear to be having more fun than I really am, and other, perhaps more vocal and friendlier voices finally appearing there, it's been an entertaining summer, mostly involving, on my part at least, an excessive amount of cloud-spotting, about which there will probably be more if I ever get around to writing about it.

Meanwhile, the reasons for a diminishment of the Lesser Blogfordshire experience have been many and varied (I nearly said "manifold" there, but I didn't want to exhaust you with hyperbole…) not least because I have been struggling with my own relevance lately as I have come to feel ever more invisible as I vanish into that decade of invisibility known as "my fifties", and, after a pause such as this one, I had also begun to seriously doubt if I even knew how to write a blog posting that was at least vaguely diverting any more (or, indeed, if I ever did).

And, of course, sometimes there's really just not much going on.

I mean, I know that this didn't used to stop me, but lately it has given me pause for thought. After all, if you have nothing to say, perhaps it is better to say nothing, not least because at least you're only going to be boring yourself to death.

Perhaps interestingly (or perhaps not), engaging with FizzBok might have revealed more about how my blog writing process actually works as various thoughts hop across my mind as I work it through, and this is usually how these pieces come to be formed, albeit usually in a more "private" space.

But then...

"Oh yes!" they say. "Write your blog!" they say. But when I eventually do, still no bugger comes along and bothers to take the time to read it… (if they ever did…)

Not, of course, that this should bother me, as I've frequently been told.

These things are done for their own sake, and not for any other… although it is nice to occasionally discover that they do actually serve some purpose other than merely keeping me entertained and occupied by a bit typing to pass the time, because even an infinite monkey could do that eventually.

But these words can come from many places, or, more often than not nowadays, they fail to come at all, which leads us to the state I was explaining during our opening dilemma today.

Of course, when you find yourself wide awake at three o'clock in the morning, nursing the last vestiges of the migraine that knocked you out eight or nine hours earlier, you do find yourself either pondering upon the many things that, once again, you have failed to do, or, if you are me (which, be grateful you are not), you start mentally composing words that you will have then forgotten by the time you actually get up, but which remain distracting enough to prevent you from getting back to sleep.

So, in the end, it's the words that win, and once the words start doing that, then I've little choice other than to start to feed the monster again, even if the meals become a little less regular, and the words that were dancing around the lightning in my mind have already vanished forever to be replaced with duller, more mundane ones.

Migraines, eh...? I never know what triggers 'em. Could have been the weather, or that piece of chocolate I nibbled mid-afternoon. Perhaps it was from spending far too much time staring at a little, tiny screen annoying the world (or the bit of it I engage with anyway), or maybe it was all just a reaction to my disappointment at losing my day out.

Whatever it was, it came out of nowhere and hit me hard, and I headed in to another working week already feeling dazed and confused, and in need of a lie down. You see, the old migraine does tend to do something chemically weird to my brain leaving me feeling fatigued, more than a little woozy, still nursing a nagging (but slight) headache, and, ultimately, feeling stupendously melancholic.

All-in-all, not the most promising start for this faltering and spluttering return to Blogfordshire, is it…?