Month: September 2007

I appear to spend half my time on this blog writing as if I were a junk mail bot. Which may well be a more lucrative outlet than Monk Quixote. I should read a biography of Lewis Carroll, I guess. He more or less invented nonsense. Before Alice, there was only gruel and romans. Oh and Victorian fifteen part tomes on the sex life of a ping-pong ball (or was that the standard essay set by all prefects in catholic boys’ schools).

I have that nagging thoughtpecker in my head that is nag, nag, nagging away at me because I am pro, pro, procrastinating about pi. Ok. Not about a numerical constant. About literal non-constants. Badum-pi.

Of all the eggs I have known, this one took the biscuit. Covered in almond sugar and laced with caramel, it was the third egg that the Beaujolais Weaver bird had laid that week, each one accompanied by some light jazz. It favoured the earlier work of Fredi Feelgood Banana-Joe. The first egg had appeared shortly after an alto sax solo, shortly after a spectacular paradiddle on the Swiss cymbals.

I fried the egg, as is my custom. It tasted sweet, but the smell was off-putting. Sickly, with notes of burnt cherry. It put me off my soldiers.

In other news. I am annoyed. Really, rather spectacularly annoyed. A dimmer switch of my acquaintance – let’s call him Andrew – fizzed and spluttered earlier in the night and my reactions were to slow from preventing him from committing spectacular interior electrics suicide. Bastard. I mean, obviously, my inner catholic is delighted that some of the four gillion halogen lights in the house are out of action, but the way it happened – that little window of opportunity when I had the chance to react ‘perfectly’ and save the wiring – has made me very cross. With Andrew. Myself. Philips. And whichever idiot wired the house.

Minor rage. It’s a bit like a Morris Minor. But it has a smaller carburretor. I think Rhianna should write a song about her carburettor – maybe the Metro and Lite hacks would then write black and white sonnets, I mean gobbets, of wisdom about the correlation between increases in congestion charging and the presence of a song in the charts.

Pants. The grouch that laid the frayed-wire egg.

Don’t you just hate it when you wake up at 4am all excited about an idea, spend an hour working it up, decide to email people about it and then, at the last minute, you decide to google it and you discover that someone has stolen the name you want to use….

And don’t you just hate sentences with lots of ‘ands’ in them? I mean, it’s not like they are ampersands or something posh. Simple, plain old conjunctions. You don’t see many of them nowadays. It’s all fields of commas and parentheses where I live nowadays.

Sigh. I never thought I’d see the day. I was attempting to make a joke about punctuation. Oh how the mighty (colons) have fallen. I also caught myself earlier today laughing at a math-geek flame-war on Slashdot. Which probably means it’s time for a holiday. Or at least an ellipsis.

There has been an influx of readers lately from Fetcheveryone, and I can’t figure out why. And the can’t being able to figure out why actually outweighs the small satisfaction of more people reading this bilge. Which again, probably says something about me.

And that something is that it is 5.20 am and I can have another 70 mins sleep if I stop typi

So the wheels have started turning again. I feel the itch to connect with my fictional chums who sit waiting like old toys in boxes for me to re-discover my inner chiddler. I put part of the blame down to Martin O’Brien and his Jacquot novels, plus An Interpretation of Murder, by Jed Rubenfeld. And part down to stuff going on at work that I really don’t want to blog about.

I’ve been having really strange dreams. I’m used to having ultra-realistic dreams, whereas recently I’ve been having ‘odd’ dreams that are directly related to day to day stuff going on. A new member of staff, naked except for tiger tattoos; exploring a new house – discovering water damage everywhere a la Dark Water, mitigated by discovering a cinema screen and horror pinball arcade; dreams in cartoon, a la Family Guy; escaping the Nazis; the list goes on. Thinking about it, I frequently dream of my youngest brother when exploring new houses. Although the reference point is a building site, and gorillas. Hmm. Curiouser and curiouser.

It is just beginning to feel like the time. You know. After all, Jonathan Ross won’t be around to interview me forever. One has to update the Commitments every now and again.

Been quiet. Apologies to my reader.

A very odd week. Involved in filming, reporting, attending, criticising and reviewing things around mass collaboration, web technologies, ex-somethings, people, philosophies, running and cava. I have perhaps been an island too long and too often, yet some behaviours simply can’t be unlearnt overnight, no matter how much of a super-social ape one may be, and no matter how much of a shit-eating grin one may have (I don’t, for the record. I have the grump that keeps on giving, instead). And I ain’t no ape. I’m a badger.

Anyhoo. Funny how scale affects everyone. I’ve been running to and from work recently – not every day, but often enough for it to become a ‘thing’. It feels strangely liberating to be exercising for a purpose other than rote, for once. I even like the fact that I have yet to run past anyone else with a rucksack (I get passed at least once per trip) and that I’m constantly on the verge of pavement rage in the more populated parts of my run. It feels a bit like belonging to a different species. I run for a little over an hour. Some people think this is admirable – mad even – but I am acutely aware, thanks to Fetcheveryone, how puny my efforts really are. Which naturally, appeals to the side of me addicted to futility.

Which brings me to belonging. There are some social constructs that I now see as vital to my happiness, and to an indeterminate effect, my future ‘success’ in life. But increasingly I find myself at odds with what I perceive to be the philosophy of many aspects of my ‘work’. Or more accurately I guess, the application of that philosopy. Inherently, I like the idea of connectivity, networks, meta-spheres and any number of social aspects of the digital age. And to a lesser extent, innovation. But I find it difficult to engage with the relative importance placed on them.

No man is an island. I like the idea that bridges can be built between my island and your island. Or the world. Or a world. Or Mars. But I don’t like the idea that building them should be any sort of focus. Perhaps I’m being Cnutian. Or, I don’t know, Mohammedan. But I’ve always been at ease with my own company. I may be missing out on endless riches or opportunities (emotional or otherwise) but….

But.

My isolation, in some regards, keeps me innocent. And I really value innocence. I measure importance in very specific ways. I’m as naive as I am arrogant. Wistfully, he recognises they may be related. But. You see. I look at things and I am Yosser Hughes. I can do that. Or, occasionally, Eyeore. Or Marvin.

I will always be an outsider. Not in a bad way. Or a good way. Just in an ‘is’ way. The world will always be as I see it. And, thankfully, that will change on an almost daily basis. Which helps me in some ways and makes other (achievement) things more troublesome.

It’s a question of scale. And my very own, characteristic, idealistic, non-virtual, bona-fide island.