Monk Quixote

Reg­u­lar read­ers, or for those who can’t be arsed, you can pop back one entry, will know that I suf­fer from the Friends TOAST episode  (The One About Self-indulgent Thoughts).  Well, my toast was well and truly but­tered last night.  Despite me not being but­tered.  Or bat­tered.  Or bet­tered, for that matter.

I had one of those catholic night’s sleep were there is a lot of Angst and Faffage.  Top­ics for angst ranged from:

• how do you make a brioche crouton?
• do all my short sto­ries need to be so sad?  They’re all very grim — though sadly not Grimm — and um, short.  And more often than not about a dys­func­tional child-parent rela­tion­ship.  Hmm.  And hmm again.
• why do I read so lit­tle nowa­days? I’ve just bought a sub­scrip­tion to Salt Pub­lish­ing ‘story bank’.   Will these just form another pile with my sub­scrip­tions to Crime­wave,  Inter­zone and Black Sta­tic?  I used to read reli­giously. Vora­ciously and serendip­i­tously.  Now I spend my time hit­ting Apple+R, or F5.  Or knee-deep in misery-porn.  Or The Inde­pen­dent, as oth­ers know it.
• Emo­tional tourettes.  Or just plain tourettes.  Ok.  The need to shout ‘Tin­sel tits’ loudly every now and then.  Because it’s a lovely phrase.  It’s the allit­er­a­tion on the ‘t’s, but I doubt that was upper­most in the creator’s mind.  It’s the same as Ulrika-ka-ka.  But bet­ter.  Because it’s work­ing class.   I didn’t watch Boys from the Black Stuff to go all soft on youse now, did I?
• Seri­ously, how do you make a brioche crouton?
• Plans to save the web and mak­ing my day­light hours more enjoy­able #468 in an ongo­ing series.  Cen­sored, to pro­tect the innocent.
• Plans to save my day­light hours and make the web more enjoy­able #1789 in a never-ending series (I dis­cov­ered a file on my lap­top yes­ter­day mys­te­ri­ously named ‘nonsense.xls’  (or what­ever the NeoOf­fice spread­sheet for­mat is).  Intrigued, I opened it up to dis­cover that it was an attempt at fore­cast­ing how much I would need to charge an hour (over var­i­ous work­ing pat­terns) to main­tain my cur­rent income.  My wife help­fully added a new for­mula for ‘hol­i­days and sick pay’, which I had not fac­tored in.  I guess I’d always thought that if I were writ­ing for a liv­ing I would never be sick and never want a day off.  Or else I was going to work 14 hours solid and then lounge around on the sofa watch­ing the same 8 episodes of Columbo over and over until I stick a pen­cil in my eye­lid like that odd kid in Swe­den (was it Swe­den?  There always doing odd things there — it’s the wel­fare sys­tem.  Or the sun­light.  Or that fuck­ing tin­sel tits Wal­lan­der.) so that I too could solve cases by look­ing in two direc­tions at once.  One of the two.  Just one more thing…
• Ways to improve some copy at work.  At home I am read­ing a book on copy writ­ing in toilet-sized breaks.  Too.  Much.  Infor­ma­tion.  How­ever, the book is very good.  It’s called ‘Write to Sell’ and is really good at keep­ing your sen­tences short.  And snappy.
• I mean.  Do you toast the whole brioche?  Do you cut it before or after toast­ing?  What’s the best size for these crou­tons? And should they be pre-loaded with goo, or rel­ish then goo.

I think we can all agree that the planet is safe in my hands at night, any­way.  As long as that planet is not shaped like a brioche.  Which, last time I checked, none were.  In fact, if there is one thing I can rely on, it is that Greek and Roman astronomers did not spend their time nam­ing con­stel­la­tions and plan­e­toids after types of bread.

Any­hoo.  I was suf­fer­ing from the Sun­day Night Angsts and Faffage.  And so on and so forth (wor­ry­ing about absolute non­sense (although not nonsense.xls, well, not directly any­way) until I started hal­lu­ci­nat­ing.  I know I was hal­lu­ci­nat­ing because I couldn’t spell.  And even in dreams I can spell.  I was float­ing through some cowboy-style dou­ble doors that had let­ters on them that were flick­ing open to reveal a brand name.  With poor spelling.

I guess now that I think about it I was hav­ing some kind of Copy-writing based Advent Cal­en­dar night­mare.  On bread.

And now I am so tired that I can barely spell my own name on some Very Impor­tant Pur­chase Order Bread Req­ui­si­tion Forms.  Or some­thing.  And I have also lost my point.

But twas ever thus, eh reader?  How­ever, I have learnt some­thing about sad­ness.  And by exten­sion — hap­pi­ness.  Although my sad­ness is short-lived as regards to crouton-making, my hap­pi­ness at dis­cov­er­ing said method will out­weigh the sadness.

There­fore.  This is a happy post.  A bientot.

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