Too much real life

‘Blog­ging is all about real life.’ Dis­cuss this state­ment point­lessly, mak­ing detailed ref­er­ences to your own drab exist­ence. Sharp imple­ments may not be used. Write in blunt crayon only, please.

My favour­ite people — those I call friends, some whom I call con­fid­ants — all pos­sess an uncanny skill of mak­ing a seem­ingly innoc­u­ous state­ment worm its way into a corner of my mind and take up res­id­ence there for days, maybe even weeks.

“Why am I not blog­ging?” I wondered. “I have all this time on my hands, malinger­ing impa­tiently — if you’ll excuse the pun — on a hos­pital ward. Why can’t I blog? Why can’t I write about this major event that has happened to me?”

Take Cheer­ful One, for instance. She’s one of those people. One of those people I men­tioned. Very wise, she is; some­times too wise for me. And that’s why, at first, the fol­low­ing obser­va­tion — delivered in the middle of eat­ing a takeaway onion bhaji — seemed to fly straight over my head and dis­ap­pear into the nearest bush.

“Some­times, you find that you’ve just got too much real life going on for blogging.”

It’s true, too. Yes, I may have spent far too many hours mind­lessly star­ing at whatever happened to be enga­ging my pea­nut brain at that moment whilst con­tem­plat­ing my own frus­tra­tion and bore­dom — time that I could have spent writ­ing down my thoughts and doc­u­ment­ing these new exper­i­ences — but that tor­por was an integ­ral part of the sud­den deluge of real life that had been showered upon me. Too much real life for blogging.

‘Blog­ging is all about real life.’ No, it isn’t. Really, it isn’t. Don’t go on kid­ding your­self. It’s only about the care­fully selec­ted bits and pieces of your daily grind that you want to show to the world. And I, for one, remain etern­ally grate­ful for that, because life veers far too reck­lessly between bor­ing and over­whelm­ing to be com­pletely con­tained — let alone under­stood — on a mere web page.

I hope you approve of my arti­fice, then.