Continuing the Subject

Sorry there was no entry last week: I’ve been writing a novel. Or should I say, I started to write a novel. Over the course of a few days, I wrote an industrious seven thousand words or so, most of them brutally honest and downright worrying. It of course isn’t my place to reveal other people’s secrets, and I have no intention of doing so. However, I don’t think I am quite ready yet to totally discharge my own hidden-away, personal treasures.
Sometimes it really is just better to shut up than say anything at all. But on the other hand, if you keep pressing a point, you will receive dividends. There is a degree of overkill on this matter when you are writing anything autobiographical. There are a few events which need explaining, but I am not sure if I even really want to write about it.
The problem with writing about recent life events is that most of them haven’t reach a satisfactory conclusion yey, so you don’t know how things are going to pan out. What angle of approach do you adopt to something which unresolved and possibly volatile? Maybe at the time, actions and events seem quite sensible, almost witty. But in the dry aftermath, I find myself slightly nervous about the forthcoming reaction to my intentions.
Up until the actual point of execution, you felt quite confident about matters. But if you left the scene open, then you feel unready and uneasy about committing it to paper.
In relation to this (in a way), don’t you just hate reading articles by people who feel sorry for themselves? I refuse to let this blog become just another whinging exercise. Having read too many newspaper columns written by bloated fools who bemoan the supposed pressures of urban living (would I be too Thatcherite in saying they never had it so good?), I simply refuse to fall into that trap. But this is the eternal dilemma of the blogger: how personal and prying do they let they blog become? Do you really want every intricacy of your private life to be whored over the World Wide Web? My answer to that would have to be a pretty definite ‘no’, yet here I am hinting at something which obviously means quite a lot to me. And I’m willing to publicly dissect it for the entertainment of passing strangers. There’s something quite disgusting and voyeuristic about that, don’t you think?
So why the hell am I writing this? Perhaps this blog is merely a cathartic exercise for me to be comfortable with existentialist karma. To be honest, part of me quite enjoys the challenge to come up with five hundred words every week which I can release out here. It doesn’t sound much compared to quite a number of writers (I’m thinking Proust here), but hey, this is my little corner of the internet and I’ll damn well display it how I see fit. These are the kind of defensive thoughts that go through one’s head when you are trying to write a blog entry sometimes, and really I know I’m just rambling into the ether…

Writing A Novel

It certainly isn’t everyday you wake up and discover that your bed sheets, or maybe even you, smell like strawberry trifle. The scent isn’t unwelcome, it fact, it’s quite pleasant, You might lie there for a few minutes just so you can fully appreciate the sweet, deliciousness aroma which is wafting around your place of slumber. And then you wonder, how on earth do I smell like this. It isn’t the custard of the cream that concerns you the most, but the pungency of the fruit jelly. Almost as if you had slept in a bowl of the stuff. This definitely isn’t the type of smell that you would usually except to find in the bedroom of a single male in his mid-twenties.
Maybe it’s the half-drunk glass of fruit juice you left on your bedside cabinet the night before. You remember however that the juice distinctly tasted of blackcurrants, and what you are experiencing now is most definitely strawberry scented. You get up, do your stretches and exercised and allow the phenomena to go unexplained.
Then, later on in the same day, maybe just after lunch, you go to the mirror in the downstairs toilet, to nuzzle a little piece of food out from between your front teeth. You are staring at the row of nearly white teeth dropping down from your maxilla, grateful that, if not pearly white, then at least they are aligned perfectly straight.
But it is then you notice another peculiar smell. It reminds you of candy rock, the old style big sticks of seaside rock from your childhood holidays to God-forsaken beaches, where shingles took the place of sand and every tourist was a horrifying, pasty-white sight, formidable against young eyes.
Your nose lingers on the smell. It seems to be coming from your lips. Yes, it’s right under your nostrils. You didn’t eat anything sweet for luncheon. Nor have you used any fruit-scented lip balm, and you did not kiss anyone who might have neither. This perturbs you for a few minutes, as you stand in front of the mirror, pressing your lips together, and then rinsing your mouth out with cold water. You are ready to resign yourself to this nasal curiosity, when you remember that you want to write a novel, and this oddity is just the sort of event that you want your man character to experience. For the protagonist is a man, much like yourself, who is trying to make sense of life, and peculiar, unexplained scents are ambrosia for portraying existential angst. Then you stop and think that, no, really, that might not be the type of thing you are looking for exactly. So you decide to write a love a story instead, and hope that life will become less of a mystery once you’ve retraced the last four months of your life and inscribed them into some form of a novella. Let me tell you, it probably won’t, and you’ll end up causing more trouble than you intended, with more unresolved problems floating around your already weary head. Because it other people’s stories you are telling, not just your own. But damn it, it’s the only chance of writing a novel that you’ve got, and there’s something inside you which wants to prove to yourself that yes, you can actually maintain one idea for so long as to write 20,000 words out of it, at least.

Learning What You Don't Need

It’s been quite an eventful week in the world of current affairs. I’m not going to make mention of the Royal Wedding, the Pope’s funeral, the Grand National, the forthcoming General Election, or even the fact that the football team I support for my sins, Milton Keynes Dons (when they play badly, we called them the MK Donkeys) have gone eleven games unbeaten. Although the majority of those matches have been 1-1 draws.
Instead, I’m interested in the little things at the moment. I’m looking at the potential reduction of life, moving away from the big picture, and concentrating on deriving the most possible pleasure from everyday existence. Yes, I’m only twenty-five, and already I’m striving for simplicity. The massive complications of modern urban living have just become a little too complex and convoluted for me recently. It’s only two weeks after pay day, and everyone I know is already skint. Something is obviously wrong here; some cosmic force is out of balance or off kilter. How is it possible for one’s wage to seep away so easily? I looked at my bank balance the other day, and was absolutely convinced that someone had cloned my ATM card somehow and was making withdrawals without my knowledge. I steeled myself to go up to the bank and ask them to freeze the account for the time being and send me out a new card and PIN number. Then I traced my steps back through the weekend. Yes, it was horribly true: I had actually spent that much money.
So maybe the true reason for my shift of perspective is due to fiscal reasons. Nevertheless, at the moment, I am withdrawing my delight from a quite delicious book, Tim Burton’s ‘The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories’. It’s not as glum as it sounds, but if you could eat the poetry and drawings contain within, the book would taste like toffee-coated charcoal sticks. I was just wandering through HMV for a short cut when I noticed a book sale. And despite the plethora of unread books I have collected over the years, my appetite for requiring new reading material is still not satisfied.
Yet I’m teaching to teach myself that I don’t really need any more material goods. I’ve bought enough CDs which haven’t been fully listened to yet. The entertainment gained from scanning through throwaway magazines no longer shines so brightly. A few nice casual shirts might be nice, but I’m beginning not to trust myself these days when it comes to sartorial decisions. There’s a great line in Willy Mason’s song, ‘Oxygen’, which goes, “We can be richer than industry / As long as we know that there's things that we don't really need.” The trick is learning to know the difference between what we really need or want from life, and what’s just there to fill the void until we find it. I think, I hope, I’m taking a step towards learning to tell between the two.

Living Through the Springtime

It’s a great spring day. The sky is blue, really blue, like a San Franciscan wash over the downtown hotel I stayed in when I was eleven. When I first really noticed and appreciated the sheer enormity and totality that a one-colour sky can hold, sweeping over everything without a whisper of faint white betraying its clarity. I love days like this. When you can go to the park and notice the daffodils coming out to bloom around the edges of the grass. When the city air actually feels clean for once, and you are grateful to take a deep breath and know that this feels good. And when you have the company of a close friend to sit down with and eat lunch together, while idly chatting away over nothing in particular, when then, that’s the ingredients for a damn-near great day. It’s just a shame that it happens that we are only on our lunch break, and work is another half hour away in returning. I don’t want to go back to the office. I want to stay out in the park, where I use to run and play frisbee, and soak in the simple pleasure of this moment. For a little while, I forget the wretchedness of my hangover and smile. All thoughts of exertion and stress escape, and I guess this is what Seneca means when he refers to the importance of leisure. True leisure does not mean having to work hard in order to feel free. It is a nature, spontaneous gift which should be treasured in the too rare snatches of time that we hold back for ourselves. We catch brief glimpses of these moments, and lock them away in our minds, and smile to ourselves when we recall such instances. We are happy that these little instances can form part of our past and are there for our recollection.
Our return to work has not crushed these minutes. Rather, they lie still as a highlight between artificial lights and computer screens. If I look out the window now, I can see that the monochromatic sky has passed, leaving the day with a betrayal of cloud cover. The sun beats down a pale yellow around the edges of the clouds as they drift slowly across the top of buildings as the afternoon forgets that it was once unblemished. Soon, our daylight will dull, and night will visit, marking the end of another existence. Yet the beautiful fact will remain that people are free to pick and choose their experiences, and decide which ones they want to cherish. There is a maxim that haunts modernity: life is short. Seneca argues that life is long if you know how to use it. Our lives should be concerned with filling our time with happiness and love. For in the words of Kahlil Gibran', in his poem, ‘On Friendship’:

"In the sweetness of friendship, let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things, the heart finds its morning and is refreshed."