Writing, Thinking, Ranting: March 2013


Your Tireless Correspondent - photo Roman Bonnefoy

WHY? Why am I doing this?

A fair enough question – picture its relevance when attached to 100 metres of rubber with only a teenage bungy master’s breezy assurance that ‘nobody’s died yet’; when sitting the practical examination in Crocodile Wrangling 1; when agreeing to judge Best Bikie Gang tattoo.

Surely, the sedentary sport of blogging is harmless enough: a few words on a page, a generous scattering of wisdom, the odd bon mot, not to forget a splash of paint stripper on the richly deserving. Easy.

Well, here’s the news. YOU MUST BE DREAMING.

Easy is volunteering as a crash test dummy; easy is standing naked in the men's locker room; easy is your first speech for election to office.

I’ve been told that some people would rather lose a digit than speak in public and it seems to me that blogging is a bit like that: full of terrors. Think of the exposure, the humiliation, the ridicule awaiting your every post, your trivial thoughts, your juvenile analysis, your pitiful expectations, in fact, your entire life and work. And it’s so public. Better to just curl up and die.

So, in a tiresome repetition of the question, why blog? Obviously it’s an experiment, or possibly a dare, maybe my half of a diabolical bargain. Rubbish. Clearly it’s the lesser of many unappetising evils and anyway, I might be in the power of a higher authority, a guiding light pointing the way to redemption via blogging. No?

I can dodge and weave no longer, dear suffering reader (if there be such a paragon in the vast halls of blogdom). It’s ‘fess-up time.

I am, in fact, the victim of simple and brutal blackmail. Blog or I’ll fail you. That’s pretty much the short-short version. In my innocence I signed up to do a perfectly amiable course in media stuff only to be ambushed by this smiling fiend.

He ordered me to tell you things - if I lie I’ll be punished.

I’m interested in too much about which I know little and too little about which I know much.

Apart from that, it’s the (here we go again):

writing-authors-books bit;
the my-riveting-travels bit;
the politics-in-minute-doses bit;
the history-especially-maligned-warfare bit;
the quirky-tangential-scatological bit;
the how-do-I-know-until-I-trip-over-it bit;
and the directionless-life-full-of-events-I-don’t-understand bit.

Somehow I think that most of it will be the last two bits.

Thrilling. Where will it lead? Who cares?

Like creative hopefuls everywhere, staring at the stage 1 mess they’ve just produced, I describe my efforts as ‘a work in progress’ and pray to the elusive gods that something worthwhile (maybe even readers) will emerge from my labours.

But what if there’s no-one out there? Tell me I’m not alone.