Writing – a funny buzzing in the fingers

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).

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