The words used to fall out of me like Pic 'n Mix from the pockets of an over-avaricious shoplifter. Now they must be hauled out like swords (or blood?) from stones, children from toy shops, or fish from lakes. Yeah, I think that I like the fish one best; throw in your line and wait for something to work. Yes, that'll do.
Hi. How are you?
Me? Swinging violently from possibly okay, to utterly despondent, to terrified, then back to possibly okay again. It doesn't help that I have set myself this goal of keeping up with some sort of regular blogging. This has never been a regular blog, either schedule or content-wise, and I cannot quite fathom what I was thinking when I proposed that it might become so. It feels akin to a man who rarely engages in physical activity of any kind, experiencing a heart attack, surviving, and then pledging to swim the English Channel every Saturday morning.
There we go, back into familiar territory. I am nothing if not a fount of forced, flawed, and occasionally nonsensical metaphor. The self prescribed undertaking of writing clearly, sensibly, and regularly, has illuminated something that I suppose I had always suspected – I'm not particularly motivated when it comes to writing like this. I'm not an extrovert, even less an exhibitionist. I do enjoy writing, and I find that it helps my psychological situation immeasurably. Yet, it cannot be forced. And if it is to be directly about me (who ever came up with that doomed idea?), I will resist at every turn. Certainly, I want to write about me. I do, after all, have an ego big enough to dwarf many. But I am also mired in enough pretension and conceit to feel crass, coarse, and a little embarrassed, when the only topic of any substance being dealt with in a piece is me and all of my personal thrashing, writhing, and histrionic attempts to come to terms with the world beyond the end of my nose. There is good reason that most of my more detailed tales and adventures have been set out as works of fiction, and told from a third-person narrative: it is easier for me to talk of others, despite being my own favourite topic for examination.
This is, as is customary on these pages, an unnecessarily long preamble to me declaring that I have a strong suspicion that the blog is about to swing back to what it once was. Or, as Steven Novella might say, “we are likely to observe a regression toward the mean."
Don't worry, I do think that the poetry is done, for now at least. Perhaps, after all these years of hiding, I may even attempt some real fiction. No, that seems far too much like hard work; all of that character building and plot structuring. I'll probably just continue to write semi-autobiographically and simply change the names to protect the guilty.
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