Adrift
I have been sitting in the dark with the faint glow of the laptop screen painted across my fingers for the last fifteen minutes. Rather than write anything I have messed around with fonts, and minimal text editors. There is probably something to learn from such behaviour, but I'm not entirely sure what it might beperhaps that given any opportunity at all to procrastinate, I will.
I wonder if there are levels of procrastination? If there are, I must be some kind of professionallook at this paragraph for example; writing about my capacity to waste time, having drifted from my original aim (and lets be honest, I had no original aim really). Recursive procrastination. It must be like combinatorial mathematicsthe top of the treethe height of stupidity.
Maybe one day I will write a great novel about doing nothing. We already have such weighty tomes as “In the heart of darkness”, so perhaps “At the height of stupidity” would better fit? It could be titled in line with mountaineering books; “Adventure on the north face of inconsequential”.
I did set out to write something of consequence, and it's only just come back to me. Giving a final direction to this post would would seem a shame nowit would ruin the fairly consisten level of aimless ineptitude.
Friends.
Or rather, lack of friends.
A good friend (ironically enough) posted a message on Facebook earlier todayor was it last night?apologising for being such a rubbish friend. While attempting to steer her band of young charges through life, school, christmas, clubs, and 1001 other distractions, she remarked that she had lost sight of herself. I think we're all guilty of it to a degreeor at least those of us with children are.
John Bishop remarked on stage about the childless couples you see out on a weekend; the ones sitting in a restaurant laughing uproariously with their friends for no good reason while your “fine idea” for dinner out turns into a running nightmare of “I'm hungry”, “she pushed me”, “they're not sharing”, “I need to go to the toilet”, and the daddy of them all”I'm bored”.
While swimming against the tide for months or years on end, struggling to keep your heads above waterto keep your boat pointing in vaguely the right direction, or at least a direction that won't cause too many stares from strangers, you lose sight of yourself.
You forget that you used to be somebodythat you used to have friends, that you used to go out, that those stories you sometimes recount kind of abruptly stopped six or seven years ago, and you really have no more stories other than ones about poo, sick, teachers, schools, or Sunday mornings standing in freezing cold sports fields to share.
You find yourself sitting up late at night, pretending you're still somebody, emptying your head into the swirling morass of the internet, and searching for like minded wanderers to waste a little time with.
Perhaps it's not “wasting” time. Perhaps it's an investment of sorts. An investment in ourselves. Or perhaps it's just another means of delaying the arrival of tomorrow, and the resumption of breakfast time hostilities with little people.