Eternal sunset of the idle mind

An Unre­li­able Wit­ness would like to inter­rupt your read­ing of Far More Inter­est­ing Web­sites Than This One to bring you some idle thoughts from the cut­ting edge of point­less online pub­lish­ing (which all The Kids are appar­ently now call­ing “blog­ging” — no, me neither). Stand by your beds, because you may need to fall into them as your eye­lids become heavy and you even­tu­ally pass out.

1. In one of my many idle moments hav­ing idle thoughts, I have been won­der­ing why, on a cer­tain cold autum­nal Sunday even­ing in Octo­ber 2000, I didn’t choose to do some­thing sens­ible with my time other than go onto what was then a young and thrust­ing medium called “the inter­net”, using my trusty 56k dial-up con­nec­tion, and mess around online. For instance, why didn’t I instead decide to watch Last of the Sum­mer Wine? Ima­gine the immense, long-lasting joy I would have got out of that. Ima­gine the many hours of all-consuming para­noia and feel­ings of inad­equacy I would have saved myself. Oh, hind­sight is a remark­able gift.

2. This morn­ing, some­body sent me an invite to sign up to MySpace. Tra­gic­ally, I spent almost half an hour ser­i­ously con­sid­er­ing it, because I’ve always secretly wanted to be a sixteen-year-old nu metal fan from Milwaukee.

3. I also moment­ar­ily con­sidered sign­ing up to Joe’s Goals, the online habit tracker. It helps you to “achieve your goals” and is “eas­ily shared with friends”. So although many of you are not my friends but instead rather scary vir­tual strangers with odd tastes in pseud­onyms, you would all be able to log on and cast your eyes over the long list of things I had failed to achieve each and every day. How­ever, I recon­sidered Joe’s Goals once it became appar­ent that I would merely skew the res­ults into a state of beam­ing pos­it­iv­ity by includ­ing such utterly real­istic aims as “breathe reg­u­larly” and “indulge in serial blinking”.

4. I received a big, shiny book in the post this morn­ing. It left me speech­less. It also made me sniffle. Sort of. I def­in­itely did not cry, though. Def­in­itely not that. Just thor­oughly manly sniff­ling. Grrr. I am blog­ger, hear me roar.

5. I have now stock­piled a wealth of bad taste one-legged jokes, gathered together dur­ing the idle moments that occured dur­ing my five months in hos­pital (so that’ll be the entire five months, then) and user tested on a suc­ces­sion of increas­ingly shocked nurs­ing staff. “Oh, that’s rub­bish, Sis­ter. You don’t have a leg to stand on. I bet you wouldn’t say such things if the shoe was on the other foot.” Et cet­era, et cet­era, et bleedin’ cet­era. How we laughed. Well, I did; they merely lost con­trol of their jaws. Such a stream of alleged humour is going to make me a hit at all those thirtyso­mething din­ner parties to which I never get invited.

6. I should really be milk­ing the sym­pathy vote for all it’s worth. Regret­tably, I just don’t have the heart, and would undoubtedly end up react­ing to my own self-loathing by copi­ously vomit­ing into a bucket at reg­u­lar inter­vals. As a warn­ing to myself not to go down this path, I have spent some time mak­ing a crudely-written sign on a piece of old brown card. In unequi­vocal terms and black marker pen ink, it bears the simple mes­sage “PITY ME”. I take it out at reg­u­lar inter­vals and laugh. It’s a reminder of the rank-smelling cesspit into which I could so eas­ily tumble had I no stand­ards or mor­als — although such saintly talk of stand­ards and mor­als brings me to my next and decidedly less than saintly idle thought …

7. Faust did it. Blair does it (incis­ive polit­ical com­ment there). Even edu­cated people who know long words and have a degree of self-respect do it. So I too am con­sid­er­ing selling my soul to Beelze­bub. Satan. Old Nick. The Devil. Whatever he’s called. Des­per­ate times call for des­per­ate meas­ures, and all it would prob­ably require is a small web but­ton (in a fetch­ing shade of black, nat­ur­ally) nestled in the side nav­ig­a­tion of these pages, pro­claim­ing that I am indeed one of his min­ions. Or dis­ciples. Or demons. Or whatever they call them these days. Frankly, this soul of mine is begin­ning to look a bit tattered round the edges, and the fiery fur­naces of Hell would be wel­come to incin­er­ate it in exchange for a shiny new soul that is sickened to the core. Maybe this should be the year in which I become evil and mer­cen­ary. Does any­one have Satan’s number?

8. Fur­ther idle thoughts to follow.

9. Except I haven’t had any more. Damn.

10. Er, that’s it.