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After the unpleasantness of a fortnight ago I made my first foray back into the stone clearing arena and recorded
a new chapter this morning (to be fair, I’d done a bit of tidying up on other dog walks between then and now). Hopefully this won’t become a regular feature of the experience, but it doesn’t really matter. I am never going to clear the stones, so it doesn’t matter if I have to clear the same ones over and over again. In many senses that’s an even more meaningful experience. Life is futile and everything you do is as pointless as clearing stones from a field, that someone else then throws back on again.
You are the same as I.
I didn’t have too much joy with work today, though I did a lot of thinking about stuff. I wondered about writing something based on that idea that just as a shadow is us in two (or three including time) dimensions then maybe we are the three (or four) dimensional shadow of beings from a fifth dimension. It would be pretty hard to get it to work, though I like the idea of our world being basically a brain dump of all the bad ideas that the fifth dimensional versions of us have ejected from their realm. So we are just shadows of the stupid thoughts that the more spiritual beings have, which would explain why our world is so fucked up. Maybe occasionally they come to watch us fight over nonsense for sport. I know I’ll never get round to writing it. It sounds like the kind of crap idea that a fifth dimensional being would flush down their ethereal toilet to fill the sewer we live in.
But there might be something in one of us giving a spirited defence of some of the seemingly good ideas that exist on earth, amongst all the terrible ones. Even if it’s just an episode of 1960s Star Trek (which will be difficult to make due to the unavailability of most of the cast).
Someone else has probably done this idea to be fair. I don’t read all that much sci-fi and have never read any Terry Pratchett (and don’t really even know anything about his books) but I still wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what his stuff was about.
It’s OK, as a writer, to have a thinking day/week/month. There are lots of potential projects vying for my attention and my mind is flitting between them all. I have a hankering to try and write my failed 2014 play “I Killed Rasputin†as a movie, though that would largely be for my own satisfaction as I can’t see anyone falling over themselves to make it. I am also trying to work out what I am going to write about my bollock (a stand up show, a book, a podcast and a major plot line of Relativity are the first thoughts). And I am still keen to get a move on with Everything Happens For No Reason, which got a bit sidelined last year, but which is a bit of a monumental project which is always likely to come second to paid work (or me just dicking around with puppets).
Having too many ideas is probably worse than having none, as you can hit a bit of paralysis, not being able to get on with anything. At least if you have no ideas, you might have an idea. If you have loads of ideas, then you also might have another idea and that just makes things worse.
At 30 you think, ah well, there’s loads of time to get it all done, but at 53, with death taking a bite out of my gonads and maybe liking the taste and thinking about what he’s going to eat next, time feels limited. Hopefully the bollock tasted horrible and death will leave me alone, but it’s hard to forget that he bit me. And death probably likes things tasting nasty and being difficult to chew. He’s a bit of a dick by all accounts.
Nice to still have a teeming brain and nicer still to have lived over twice as long as Keats who worried about the same thing (with, as it turned out, good reason). Arguably Keats did better with his 25 years than I’ve done with my (almost) 54. I got some of the stuff from my brain down on paper. It mainly turned out to be worse than an unshared thought.
It should all be an incentive to crack on with it, but the mind moves at its own pace and these annoying days and weeks of languor are part of it. As you will know if you’ve read this blog for a while.
If only I was able to sit down and just write something down every day. Imagine what wonderful stuff I could have created if only I had the resolve to do something like that.
