Without words or direction
When I sat here a few moments ago (shortly before the “A” key started acting up, and I ripped it from the keyboard, and then realising that perhaps I shouldn't have done that, because it didn't seem to want to re-attach itself any longer), I was entertaining thoughts of writing some long winded think-piece about my internal struggles with writing online. A lack of words. A lack of opinions, and thoughts that might be shared with the online world.
Perhaps the problem is having something to write about. Something that other's might be remotely interested in. A story to tell. The cold reality I face is a rather boring life, trudging from day to day on pretty much the same schedule as countless millions of others. Take today for instance;
Up at 7am, make breakfasts, make packed lunches, shower, dressed, feed chickens, head off to work
Cycle through maniac traffic to work, narrowly avoiding the same nature of accidents I narrowly avoid every morning.
Sit for several hours in a freezing cold office (the heating wasn't working today), taking turns to make cups of hot tea with the wonderful girl that sits behind me, purely so we can sit and hold the hot cups. We may or may not have eaten two thirds of a box of chocolates between us while doing so.
Cycle home in the dark, avoiding accidents in the dark, lighting my way with quite possibly the most pathetic bike light ever.
Arrive home, wash up, wash up again, wash up a bit more, then sit down to write this.
The only real changes to the routine happen on days like tomorrow, when I don't do the death-defying bicycle journey, and either work at far flung clients, or work from home (tomorrow is from home).
It's hardly enthusing, is it.
The challenge tomorrow will be to get any work done, rather than watch downloaded Anime movies, or a thousand and one other pursuits that will seem infinitely more interesting than the programming I should be working on. It doesn't help that I started reading “Ready Player One” again while waiting for our middle daughter to finish Rugby practice at the weekend. I must have made quite an interesting spectacle; sat in a camping chair at the edge of the rugby pitch with a Kindle held in motorbike gloves to defeat the cold, absorbed in a book while other parents made small-talk, stamped their feet, and puffed out clouds of steam.
Ready Player One unlocks a significant chunk of me that usually gets deliberately ignored. The part of me that secretly loves Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Zork, and a hundred other virtual worlds that most people decry as childish, retro, obsolete, nerdy, or geeky beyond belief. I grew up playing Infocom's text adventures, and waiting for screeching tapes in a darkened bedroom while drawing pixels on graph paper. Ready Player One taps directly into my adolescence, and recalls what it felt like to immerse yourself in the mysterious world of silicon, electricity, transistors, and projected images.
I remember the first time I connected to a bulletin board with a modem (years before the internet became popular through the world wide web). I remember the menus flashing on the screen, evoking WOPR from War Games. I remember sending my first email, making new friends in this curious digital world, and discovering a universe of information that only existed if you knew how to access it – if you held the keys.
So yes... tomorrow I need to get work done. I need to avoid IRC, Jabber, KIK, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and the thousand other distractions that sit quietly in the bookmarks bar, whispering into my brain. I'm too good at procrastinating to ignore them.