Monk Quixote

I think I need a bee or an m.  A writ­ing buddy.  Or a men­tor.  Or some form of mechan­i­cal prod­ding.  In fact, make that elet­ri­cal prod­ding.  Pavlov­ian writ­ing.  That might do the trick.  Bzzt.  Hun­dred words.  Bzzt.  Hun­dred words.  Of course the qual­ity aspect might suf­fer.  Par­tic­u­larly as more and more neu­rons in the brain are fried.   Bzzt.  Hun­dred dodos.  Bzzt.  De do doe don’t dey do? Bzzt. What’s a hun­dred?  Etc.  So how to increase my out­put?  How do I get more word-goods to mar­ket?  Who’ll be my role model, now that my role model, has gone, gone, ducked back down the alley and declined any fur­ther men­tion of latte, cake or wii.

Years ago I tried a sys­tem of pub­lish­ing a ‘complete-o-meter’ — some­thing I’ve seen on quite a few live­jour­nals  (yes, I still have an odd fas­ci­na­tion with goths, and like to observe from afar.  Live­jour­nal is like a Goth Zoo.  And Myspace is like, um, a Goth Bear that escaped and had lit­tle runty chid­dlers with some crusties and cre­ated E-mope.  I mean, emo.  I digress).  I don’t know.  Just a lit­tle bit ‘meh’ all round at present.  I saw a young woman in Star­bucks peel­ing the raisins from her fruit toast ear­lier, and I could barely bother to write it my Mole­sk­ine.  Let alone aster­isk it.  Or box it.  Or invent an entire OCD char­ac­ter, cou­pled with rela­tion­ship issues (pun-bingo, dou­ble word score, huz­zah) and a back-story involv­ing a hair­cut that goes wrong and a mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion with scis­sors.  No.  None of the usual behaviour.

Instead, I’m back at home, feel­ing a lit­tle sorry for myself.  I’m tired — look­ing to blame oth­ers for yet again not get­ting on with things.  Wrong kind of air.  Not enough / too many foxes in the gar­den.  Strange aura ema­nat­ing from the over-ripe bananas.  Bananas — one long growth spurt for a herb, short shelf life for com­post.  Also, sud­denly, cricket!  A unique way to speed through life’s lit­tle council-tax-banding annoy­ances by drop­ping in five days’ worth of non­sense.  I mean, cricket makes bi-partisan pol­i­tics look like WWE.

Any­hoo.  As I write, I’m accom­pa­nied on the wire­less by Mel­low Incom­pre­hen­si­ble Bur­bling c/o Test Match Spe­cial.  But fear not, tra­di­tion­al­ists.  Cricket mat­ters. Cricket will save us when the inter­plan­e­tary hyper­galac­tic bees come to colonise the planet as it’s so utterly, utterly, but­terly ridicu­lous that the bees’ heads will explode and it will become an inter­plan­e­tary galac­tic bee grave­yard, where only old, demented and pos­si­bly Swiss, or at least sui­ci­dal, bees come to die.  This in turn will cause minor earth­quakes as they thrash about, anten­nas on leg side, wings at very silly mid-off (look, Punter actu­ally put some­one there in the First Test, so it’s true, it is, you know),  on the ground.  And some old duffer’s voice (not to be con­fused with Grand Old (Imag­i­nary) Duf­fer — the Brook­lyn deity -  will be omnipresent in the ether bur­bling on about tea and cake and how the bee­quakes are affect­ing the shiny side of the ball.  It will prob­a­bly be me at this rate.

Which reminds me of Jeff Noon. And blur­b­verts.  A proper imag­i­na­tion.  Anyway.

Sigh.  Maybe I need to spend a day away from the pooter entirely.  Go and look at some foxes and some bees.  Or read one of the pile of 50 or so books I’ve bought in the past six months.  Or one the short story mag­a­zines that I’ve sub­scribed to for three years with­out even open­ing half of them (mag­a­zines, you can’t open a year, well unless it’s bot­tled).  Or watch some of the 30 DVDs I’ve gob­bled up since Dada replaced Fopp in Chiswick.  Sigh.  It’s like uni­ver­sity all over again — end­less acqui­si­tion of things to make me feel bet­ter.  Sur­round your­self with inspi­ra­tion and some­how, mag­i­cally, the words will march right out of my brain, out the ear canal, slither down my face and oompa-loompa down my arms before turn­ing into elec­tri­cal impulses that con­tract spe­cific fin­ger mus­cles in spe­cific sequences and arrange them­selves into a really rather spiff­ing order on the screen.  Or fail­ing that, poetry.  Sorry, poetry, you drew the short bee’s antenna there..

What do you reckon?  Maybe things will improve next week when I’ve got some­one to talk to dur­ing the day.  It comes as a shock, some­times, hav­ing to speak.  Remem­ber­ing to make noise. Maybe it’s just a duff week.  Duff month.  Duff air.  Duff foxes.  Duff OCD. Duff­MAN.  Mmm.  Sweet, cool, Duff.

This malarkey isn’t easy, you know.  Putting one word in front of another. Buzz.
(with apolo­gies — this post orig­i­nally appeared as some­thing else.  A wing­beat.  Or pro­boscis.  Prog­no­sis — buzz).

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 12:19 pm, is filed under phish and tagged as: balls, bees, duffness, foxes, melancholy, OCD.. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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