THE RHETORIC OF FAILURE

On the whole, I can’t say that this feels as if it’s turning out to be a particularly successful year for me as we head towards the halfway point. Not least, of course, because we are heading towards that halfway point and I really don’t feel as if I’ve achieved all that much. Granted, we had the builders in and had both the kitchen and the living room upgraded, and that did, of course, involve us successfully clearing those rooms in anticipation. After this, we were then living a slightly bizarre troglodyte-like existence for the duration and being relieved of several mugs and knives during the daily tidying up process. Since then, however, somehow everything seems to have stalled again as we fail to return the plethora of things from the boxes to their rooms. Instead the boxes remain stubbornly “there” and “in the way” and, once again, we tiptoe around them as we come to terms with the fact that the work itself seems to have completed to a more disappointing degree than the relief at getting the house back first suggested.

Of course, one of my bigger failures this year has been in my writing. Not only have I almost completely neglected to add to this blog – for the very good reasons (I felt) that it was becoming increasingly irrelevant and nobody cared all that much any more whether I continued or didn’t or what I “reckoned” about anything very much – but I have also failed, for the first time in about a decade, to complete (or even begin) anything for the latest Bruntwood Playwriting Competition on the simple grounds that I really cannot see the point any more as I have proven, quite conclusively, that I cannot write for toffee, at least in that medium. Strangely, though, my writing output has continued in the increasingly pointless world of Twitter where my daily contributions to word games have managed to consume hours of my time without, in any real terms, achieving any noticeable responses at all. I fear that, like everything else that I briefly obsess about, this too shall pass.

Other notable failures include my continuing lack of ability to want to engage with the world in general, preferring instead to cultivate my “hermit-like” existence and avoid any contact with “people” as much as is possible. Oh, I know that I still go to work every day and find new ways, I’m sure, of being as annoying as possible to everyone I meet, but apart from necessary retail exchanges, and the odd encounter with the Beloved’s family, my social interactions have reduced to virtually nil, and I find that this bothers me both far less and far more than it ought to. Far less because I really can’t be bothered. Far more because, in my mind, it appears that nobody else who’s ever known me is all that bothered either.

There has been one positive result of such a process, though, and that is that I have learned to avoid the knee-jerk response when someone irritates me online, which they have been known to do, of course, all the time. Instead of raging about the rampant sycophancy or self-obsessed “me-me” brigade, I simply choose not to respond and leave the raging to my inner self. This has had the added benefit that I no longer write long responses answering every point made in idiotic articles that people post (I may still compose them mentally, but I then discard them), and don’t respond to messages that appear from out of the blue and cause emotional earthquakes when bits of my (admittedly less than colourful) past rear up and try to bite me. Again, I could have answered at length, but the stupidity of doing so struck me far harder once I’d realised just how stupid opening that particular box might prove to be.

I have, of course, successfully managed to get “Frozen Shoulder” (hurrah!) which, as I’m reminded by my physiotherapist, is just down to sheer bad luck, but that doesn’t stop the endless pain, the sleepless nights, and the slight fact that I now have to have things like “procedures” and do things like “physical therapy” – neither of which come easily to someone who’d quite possibly avoid all human interaction if he possibly could.

Once again I failed to pick the winner of the latest election which, to an old-fashioned socialist like me, (I know! Who’d have thought it?) did prove to be a very disappointing stain upon this year. That said, I know that I should never discuss politics in public simply because it just gets everyone irritated, but I did feel very motivated and analytical for about eight days afterwards, before forgetting all about that sort of thing and knuckling down to getting used to the next five years of living amongst a nation of self-centred fools. I comfort myself with the small sense of satisfaction that at least we didn’t go too Nazi this time around, and the cathartic process of spending a hateful Saturday morning in the M&S near to Poshtown watching the words “Tory” and “UKIP” popping up above people’s heads like the whole world had become some slightly bizarre version of an episode of “Sherlock”.

I have also squandered – perhaps “wasted” – far too many hours listening to England play cricket which, whilst I still find it entertaining to a certain extent, does seem to be perfectly in tune with my own need to have my hopes dashed and to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory. That said, events over the past few days have even managed to mess around with that particular theory, with that team going against the (average) trends of the past thirty years, and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. This, of course, only serves to add a glimmer of hope to what was very likely to be a devastatingly disappointing summer and sucks me right in again. Last time Australia toured, however, the most over-confident of pundits were pointing out that the then-struggling Australia could lose both back-to-back series “ten-nil” (and look how that turned out), so maybe (just maybe) all this talk of them winning “five-nil” might also turn out to be so much balderdash. Time, of course, will tell, but I’ll still be spending far, far too many hours this summer getting far too worked up about something that is simply a game.

“Failure” is, of course, a relative term. There are those who believe that simply by being born where I was I must, by definition, be “successful”, but such things are difficult to quantify. Little of what I might have hoped for has ever come to pass, but this is mostly due to my own lack of self-belief and an inherent laziness coupled with a strange sense that I really do not “get” people at all, and probably never did, and perhaps, just perhaps, some of us really were never meant to “grow up” because so-called “adult” life basically sucks.

Nevertheless, and despite every fibre of my being telling me that it is a complete and utter waste of time, I find myself this morning failing in my conviction to discontinue with this blogging malarkey. (Wow! Double negatives are truly “me” in a nutshell!) This may simply be because I didn’t want this year’s Eurovision Scorecard to be the thing that sat there unloved for the next few months. Still, there may be more of this sort of thing in the fullness of time (perhaps) but for now (and again) I think that the well has been drained again. See you.