What? No, this isn’t here, just go away

A few nights ago, I had the thought to write some­thing here. I almost fol­lowed up on that thought too, but then sense forced its vice-like grip around my neck and began squeez­ing the air out of my lungs in sharp bursts. At that point, I shelved the ridicu­lous idea. Sense, how­ever, is clearly out on the town this Fri­day night, prob­ably get­ting wasted on cheap, throat-burning alco­hol. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s left me with the keys to the inter­net. Big mis­take, Sense. You’ll regret that oversight.

In truth, I’m scared of this place and will never write here again on a reg­u­lar basis. Yes, you heard: I’m scared of a blog. I’m a fully grown (very fully grown) 41-year-old man who has had a pres­ence on the web, in some form or other, since I was 29 years old — and now I’m scared of it.

I’m also scared of writ­ing. For three years I avoided the naked, nag­ging, wheez­ing orphan-demon in the corner telling me that I should be writ­ing. I did this by read­ing the prose and poetry of oth­ers, choos­ing the few that grabbed hold of my brain and shook it in pleas­ant or alarm­ing ways, edit­ing even fewer of them, and then put­ting them online in a lit­er­ary journal. I was what you might call an ‘editor’, albeit an anonym­ous one until I revealed my iden­tity on the final page of the last issue. I sup­pose I might call it being an ‘editor’ too, but I’m very back­ward at com­ing for­ward. I tend to just shift side­ways in an uncom­fort­able man­ner, look­ing at the ground. Please don’t look at me as I sidle. Thank you.

Any­way, that’s gone now. I got bored. I have a very short atten­tion span. As a res­ult, the naked, nag­ging, wheez­ing orphan-demon has woken up. I’ve been silen­cing the minor irrit­ant by con­cuss­ing him for hours at a time with the help of a sound beat­ing from a 5kg dumb­bell. I am not a viol­ent per­son at heart, but even I will shame­fully con­fess that he’s look­ing sat­is­fy­ingly bruised and bloody.

What else? I am cur­rently unem­ployed (no pity, please, it was my own choice) and as a res­ult I have long peri­ods between job-hunting in which to gaze at my navel — oth­er­wise known as ‘think­ing about what I’m doing with my life’. My life, how­ever — like my navel — is extremely tedi­ous, and to stop myself becom­ing the kind of naus­eat­ing indi­vidual who con­siders such a self-obsessed mat­ter in insuf­fer­able detail, I mete out the same pun­ish­ment I impose on my nemesis and use the afore­men­tioned 5kg dumb­bell to knock myself out for entire nights. Unlike my nemesis, I remain remark­ably injury-free. This is rather disappointing.

So what caused me to begin writ­ing this aim­less bout of pro­lix­ity tonight?

First, I received a reminder from my chosen web host­ing com­pany that it was time to renew both the unreliablewitness.com domain and the host­ing for this site. As with the last time this annual request arrived in my inbox, I con­sidered let­ting both expire so that this site would drift off into the inter­net ether and only remain fully intact on my hard drive. Sen­ti­ment­al­ity is, how­ever, dif­fi­cult to res­ist. Before I’d thought about it, the neces­sary elec­tronic trans­ac­tion was com­plete. As a res­ult, this almost dormant site will remain online for another twelve months. Please kick away the tumble­weed if you hap­pen to pass through.

Second, while car­ry­ing out this piece of tedi­ous admin­is­tra­tion, I was watch­ing the live broad­cast of a con­cert by The Cure. Yes, yes, I know, this isn’t 1989 and I’m no longer sit­ting cross-legged in my teen­age bed­room burn­ing incense, drink­ing cheap cider and mourn­fully think­ing that the band’s Dis­in­teg­ra­tion album is “like, writ­ten just for me, yeah, like, you know what I mean?” But some music from those fool­ish, inno­cent years still car­ries the emo­tional power to make me feel wist­ful, even while the cynic and mis­an­thrope I’ve become can look at the TV and sneer that Robert Smith should act like the 53-year-old man he now is and get a sens­ible hair­cut to clear out the insects almost cer­tainly grow­ing in his sig­na­ture unhygienic mop.

Third, well, as you’ll have noted, this already over­long entry has a much more con­ven­tion­ally con­ver­sa­tional tone than most of the posts you’ll find in the archives. That’s partly because I’m very out of prac­tice with writ­ing, but in this par­tic­u­lar case it’s more due to the fact that I haven’t spoken with any­one face to face — on my own terms and in a relaxed, informal way — in just over three weeks. Except, that is, for my mother, one elec­tri­city meter reader, one post­man and three dif­fer­ent Tesco deliv­ery drivers. This lack of decent con­ver­sa­tion and mean­ing­ful social inter­ac­tion is quite a fre­quent occur­rence for me, and I gen­er­ally cope quite well with these peri­ods of hermit-like exist­ence (with only moment­ary diver­sions into abhor­rent self-pity). How­ever, this recent spell of solitude has found me talk­ing to myself even more than usual and I’ve become rather con­cerned about the bouts of addled jab­ber­ing. Instead, then, I decided to talk to you, my dear old blog.

I still hate that word. Blog. Blog. Blog. As I once observed, it sounds like a small, ugly and par­tic­u­larly hairy mar­supial. No one would want to stroke a blog or own one as a pet. It would undoubtedly be the runt of the lit­ter, the ugly embar­rass­ment in the corner of the cage. I remain very glad that per­sonal blogs have mostly died out. With any luck, we can kill that other scourge of the web, social net­work­ing, next.

I don’t know how to end this tedi­ous screed. I prob­ably shouldn’t have writ­ten it in the first place, should I? (That’s a rhet­or­ical ques­tion, need­less to say.) The last thing the world needs is yet another self-obsessed blog post by someone who thinks they can write. There are enough bad writers, too: we don’t need more of them. If I remem­ber this entry tomor­row morn­ing, rest assured it will be deleted in haste and repen­ted at self-loathing leis­ure. My only worry is that with my ter­rible memory, I might forget.

I hope you enjoyed read­ing this. If I’m hon­est, I didn’t espe­cially enjoy writ­ing it. Don’t hold your breath to read any­thing here again. Not for a long while, any­way. See you around, blog. See you around, writing.

*

Edit 25.08.12: Sur­pris­ingly, I did man­age to remem­ber this post the next day. I came to remove it and found that two kind people had com­men­ted (thank you, two kind people who com­men­ted). I am far too decent to delete a post after it’s received com­ments, so these words will remain here for pos­ter­ity or until the end of the inter­net (whichever arrives sooner). In the mean­time, as if to prove that writ­ing really isn’t my forte any­more, I have just per­formed about thirty-seven small edits on this piece in an attempt to improve the parts that thor­oughly irrit­ated me upon re-reading, even though I actu­ally hate the whole entry.