There's very little point in me trying to explain why I haven't written anything up here for nine months. I was at Uni, doing the first year of an English degree, and because of all the free time I became even lazier and more negligent than before. Every thought I had about putting something up here was immediately followed by another, far bigger thought: why bother? I'm sure you recognise this thought; not just as a pair of words, a common little phrase used by everyone in the English-speaking world when faced with a small, pointless, unnecessary task that can be deferred or abandoned entirely without much loss or injury to anyone involved; I'm sure you also recognise the thought as a great mental obstacle that is rarely surmounted, rarely even attempted, or maybe as an equally great mental precipice, that stops dead any course of action as suddenly and decisively as a CIA sniper bullet stops a political dissident while he's striding to the podium amid wild cheers, ready to deliver the speech of his life and change the world for the better. All good intentions snuffed out on the very threshold. No, the vast canyon of Why Bother? won’t let you across, no matter how long your run-up to the edge. It is an impossibly deep hole in the human brain shaped like a fucking question mark, and there's nothing it won't try to swallow.
For a long time I did not bother, and now I will try to bother again. As I already stated, there's very little point in trying to explain why. I blame Ulysses. After I got a fair way through it, words started to seem dumb, flimsy and too easily manipulable. I wrote sentences, looked at them and thought "Oh why the Fiddler's Fuck have I just written that?!" Years ago I would write a sentence and then try to improve it by rearranging it around its axes, sort of like free improvisation with a Meccano set: as much freedom as there seemed to be, nuts were nuts, bolts were bolts, and struts were struts. They had their own functions and they ultimately looked the same regardless of whatever bizarre structure they formed part of. Now it's more difficult; language as a gift of infinite blank jigsaw pieces. Put them together how you fucking like - draw something on top of it later. Where can you start with that? And what kind of awful bollocks will it look like whenever you decide, quite arbitrarily, that it's 'done'?
So I suppose it was less that I didn’t bother and more that I didn’t feel I could. There’s very little point in trying to explain why. It might seem ridiculous – after all, I ‘could’ before. Writing informal bits and pieces about music/film/life doesn’t look like much of a challenge to whoever is reading those bits and pieces. (Go ahead: read my bits and pieces. They aren’t challenging.) But then I encountered the dreaded pit of Why Bother? opening up like at the end of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. It was the informality itself that had stopped me, the very same convenience that had previously allowed me to switch off most of my analytical functions and write just like I was talking, y’know, just talking to you about something I thought was valuable enough to be worth talking about. Or maybe not just, y’know, writing like I was talking, but maybe writing like I was writing about what I’d more often just, y’know, talk about. And with the power of hyperlinks, writing about and then showing you what I’d previously only been able to just… you know… talk about. Before coming up to the edge of the valley and knowing only that I must capitulate, it really had been that simple.
It could be simple once again. I can write at more than one register, and the sooner I start the better. I wasn’t overwhelmed by the first year at Uni or anything like that, although I probably should have tried harder to be. It was just laziness. I’m up to nine or ten hours sleep as standard now. It’s fucking disgraceful. All I’ve done today is clean out the filter in the hoover, pay the rent, and this. I haven’t even eaten yet and it’s almost half seven. I really want to go to Metal Monday at the Green Door Store tonight, but I might be too skint. I’ll probably have a shit soon. This entry was only going to be a load of screencaps from the last.fm comments boards and me taking the piss out of people. I told you I could write at more than one register, I just can’t necessarily separate them all out from each other. It’s a skill I should really learn, although as I said, there’s very little point in trying to explain why.
