Please Don't Read This

When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, "what will I be?"
And she said "what the fuck do you think I am? Psychic? Now fuck off outside & play. Mummy's got one of her wine headaches coming on".(*)

Ha ha ha.

You remember how, when you were a kid, people were, like, almost obsessed with what you wanted to be when you grew up? It seemed as though you'd get asked that question on almost a daily bloody basis. There you'd be, minding your own business, for some reason drawing a picture of a clothesline heavy with underpants, and people would start getting all up in your grill (or 'face' as it used to be known in the olden days; faces were like grills, except not so popular amongst the rappers) about where you think you're headed, and you're all "mate, I'm 4 years old. I'm still not entirely convinced the people on telly can't actually see me. I'm clearly an idiot. What are you asking me for?" I mean, you personally might have said something else, like "astronaut" or "call centre operator" or something. I don't know, I wasn't there.

Anyway.

I had all sorts of different futures in mind for myself when I was little. Mostly based on whatever, with hindsight, wildly age inappropriate TV show I was obsessed with at the time. For example, whilst watching LA Law at age 7, or thereabouts, I was determined to become a Californian lawyer because it meant I might get to meet Amanda Donohoe. And Amanda Donohoe made my tummy feel all funny....ahem yes well. That's not for here. Moving on.

But the one thing I wanted, more than anything else, was to be an author. I wanted to write stories & get money for them & live by the sea in a lighthouse.

I wrote nearly all the time. At primary school I would often negotiate my way out of having to learn anything, you know, useful, like maths or joined up handwriting, by offering instead to write a 25 page epic about a hot air balloon that ran on laughter. I developed a fierce literary dispute with a boy in my class over whether every story needed a happy ending (it will surprise you, I am certain, to discover that I was firmly in the downbeat camp). I would spend hours crafting palaces & sea lairs & vampire discos on paper. Poems, short stories, existentialist essays, you name it I'd write it. My output very probably exceeded that of Barbara Cartland. And was just as fucking awful.

So that was my secret dream. To go on writing & writing & writing until all the stupid crap that kept me awake all night was written down for other people to have to endure. And I had this dream right up until the age of 10.

And then;


I stopped having any dreams.


Wow.
Pretty dramatic right? Yeah. You see exactly how I have robbed the literary establishment by abandoning my writerly dreams. What with my amazing ability to craft tension, and my masterful use of commas(**), I would have taken the world by storm. Yeah, you get it. You totally get it.

"But sonofajoiner! What could possibly have happened to you to make you abandon your deeply held desire to make a modest living from peddling your nonsense to the public?" absolutely no one cries.

Well, to be strictly truthful, my dream didn't disappear overnight at age ten. It was, however, dealt a blow that would eventually prove fatal..

When I was ten, I foolishly agreed to accompany my mum & dad to a school parents' evening. See, I was one of those obnoxious little child shits who fucking loved school & who never turned down an opportunity to hear how awesome I was doing at the whole business of learning.(***) Also, my teacher was a pleasant enough woman who kept a prayer card with a faintly terrifying image of a crucified Christ right there on her desk. My mum, on the other hand, was one of those murderous atheists that have been in the news a fair bit lately for bombing all the Christians to death by making them be polite to gay people in public. And in my childish way, I thought I really ought to be present to keep the peace, just in case my mum took it upon herself to headbutt some secularism into my teacher, or attempt to openly piss on her prayer card.

Now, I am aware that human memory is a notoriously unreliable thing. So in the interests of balance I have provided my parents' recollections about what transpired on this particular parents' evening as well as my own, in the hopes that somewhere in the middle, the truth may be found.

My memory of the evening goes as follows:

Mrs Teacher - "Here are some things that came from the amazing imagination of your child proving that she clearly is amazing & we must start ringing around publishers immediately"

Parents look at one another with WTF faces (although in the olden days such faces were known as 'confused' & were marginally less sarcastic than their modern day counterpart).

Parents laugh so hard they catch on fire.

I secretly vow to have my revenge on them both by never writing another word ever, ever again.

My mum's memory of the evening is as follows:

"For the last bloody time, I have no idea what you are on about"

My dad's memory of the evening is as follows:

"I'm sorry, which one are you again?"

Obviously, I am exaggerating a little bit.
My teacher didn't use those exact words, but that was the general gist.
And I don't really think my parents fell off their chairs in hysterics & crawled out of the classroom hyperventilating at the very notion that their daughter might possess a talent(****).
But they did look at the proffered poems & laugh.
And my teacher did look sad that they laughed.
And she did ask them to at least consider what she had said to them.
And they did chuckle about it on the drive home.
And they did refer to my teacher as 'nuts'.
And they did stress, repeatedly, to me that I was really not good enough to make a living as a writer, because hardly anybody was.
And I did go home that night & cry until I fell asleep.
And I did wake up the next day knowing I could never let anybody read anything I wrote ever again because if my own parents thought my writing was laughable rubbish, well then, it must be laughable rubbish.

I did keep writing though, in secret, for myself, for a little while. But it had stopped being fun. I became my most ferocious critic. I would have what initially seemed like good story ideas but I gradually became terrified about writing them down. I couldn't bear the thought that someone might read my thoughts, and then never stop laughing. And eventually the ideas stopped coming altogether. By my teens the only shit I was able to drag out of my brain onto paper was the worst kind of angst-ridden, death-fixated, deadly, deadly serious poetry that still produces teeth-grinding embarrassment in me every time I stumble across it.

Then one day I realised, I was no longer anything approaching a writer. But, also, I wasn't anything else instead. And that's how things have remained.

Little pieces of my dream obviously still float about in my head. I sometimes catch the thud thud thud of a vampire disco somewhere in the back of my brain but I don't think I will ever find my way back to it. The roads leading to my imagination are almost entirely sealed. On odd occasions things still manage to slip out, but a lack of confidence means I hesitate to write them down and then my inner censor gets in on the act & the whole thing is usually over before it starts.

And sometimes I manage a blog post that doesn't go anywhere. But I make sure I do it late at night, when no one's looking, so no one knows I wrote it & I won't know that you're laughing.

(*) My fictitious lawyers have asked me to point out that such an event never took place. My mum drank gin exclusively.
(**) Grammar, punctuation & how to count accurately are just 2 of the many things I was never taught because from age 6 I could apparently out-manouvere grown fucking adults.
(***) Don't worry though, secondary school educated that right the way out of me. By age 13 I had absolutely no curiosity about the world left in me whatsoever.
(****) I do really think that.

Shut Up A Minute

I am not what you could call a "people person".
In actual fact I believe I was born coated, not in your usual womb juices, but in actual people repellent.
I have the social skills of a damp face-cloth. Actually, a damp face-cloth quite probably has better social skills, evidenced by its occasional contact with an actual human face.
Small talk is beyond me. I'm not baffled by it or anything like that, I just can't do it. I can never think of a single thing to say. Nothing. This is particularly strange to me as my brain usually teems with the sort of inconsequential nonsense perfect for such situations all the live long day. In fact, my mind probably most closely resembles a busy ring-road heaving with tiny inanity & trivia stuffed vehicles going about their idiotic business. This road is so horrendously jammed with this flow of stupid traffic that any possibly intelligent or deep thoughts that may also come into being lie trapped beyond it, with no way out other than to chuck themselves in front of the juggernauts of dumb. And that is where nosebleeds come from. Or something. What am I? A fucking doctor?

What were we talking about?

Oh yes. I can't talk to people. So I don't have any friends. Oh, I managed to snag me a boyfriend some 126 years ago and it was such a relief to have done so that I have doggedly held onto him despite...well...let's just leave it at despite. Mostly my hanging on for dear life meant I didn't have to go through that whole awful meeting-and-talking-to-lots-of-different-people-until-you-find-someone-with-whom-you-think-you-could-discuss-mortgages-without-wanting-to-weep-at-the-loss-of-your-youth-before-turning-the-gun-on-yourself. Because that's a thing people look for in potential partners isn't it? But he is a rare exception. Mostly I have passed through life making no impression on anyone. If, for example, I was the focus of It's a Wonderful Life, Clarence would amble up to me as I clung on to the bridge, simply shrug and say "s'up to you mate".

And I have been at peace with this for quite some time.

But recently...I don't know. Not so much.

It's not that I'm lonely as such, more, soul-blackeningly bored and, thanks to that terrible, beautiful thing known as the internet, more aware than ever of how utterly without merit my existence is.

I may have mentioned that thing called the twitter? And that people go on there and they type out the contents of their heads and their stomachs and, quite often, their underwear? And that I have gone on there and tried to do the same? And because that's what everyone's doing, it should be a total piece of piss to join in and witter endlessly on about tits and ConDems fucking everything up and how much you hate the tv show you're watching? And that people will just read whatever shit your fingers fart out via the medium of keyboard and think you are awesome and chat to you and all that?

Except.

Except I go on that there twitter and am still somehow identifiably covered in people repellent.
I try being funny. I try being weird. I try being melancholy. I try listing stuff I like. I generously retweet other peoples' opinions that I think I would quite like to have had myself (if I could be remotely arsed to form opinions on anything whatsoever anymore. But that's a whole other load of old wank). And am pretty roundly ignored.

And I have stared to realize that the reason why, in the offline world, no one has ever really liked me or wished to be seen in public with me, the reason why people turn off the lights and pretend to be dead when I drop by isn't that I am some uniquely 'ungettable' specimen of humanity, that I am a dodecahedron of awesomeness forced into the round hole of humdrum existence. No. It is simply this.

I am a boring twat with nothing to say.
I am a boring twat with absolutely nothing to offer the universe.
I am a boring twat who lacks even the merest hint of a talent or skill.
I am a boring twat who has made it a point never to try because that way I can never, ever fail.
I am a boring twat who is paralyzed with terror at the thought of someone seeing me for who I am or, even worse, who I fervently dream of being.
I am a boring twat who has no idea who they actually are, other than being a boring twat.
I am a boring twat who writes interminable, self-pitying, blog posts analyzing all the reasons why I am a boring, friendless, twat.
I am a boring twat who can't even furnish their blog post with a conclusion.

I'm Making A Note Here, Huge Success

Still alive.*
Just.

Now where were we?
When we left our hero she was hanging off Big Bens' minute hand with the stolen microfilm stuffed into her bra. The Nazi spy pursuing her had put away his Luger and was simply waiting for the clock to tick its way from the horizontal safety of quarter to the hour and towards the certain vertical death of midnight...

No. No, wait...No, I remember now. That was a dream. I was the Nazi. The part of me was played by Russ Abbot, the part of Big Ben was played by the talking clock from Beauty & the Beast.

No. When we last spoke I was whinging on about showing myself up for a shallow, callous, moron on Twitter.

Yeah. So.

You know that episode of Futurama where Bender starts going out with Planet Express Ship? Yeah, you do. And there's this montage of Bender singing Daisy Daisy to it. Her. Whatever. Here it is.

http://youtu.be/mu_9gADvmyg (Can't embed for some reason)

And then Bender walks into a room and is all

"Well, I'm sick of her"

Yeah. That's pretty much me and Twitter.

Actually, that's pretty much me and being alive at the minute.

End of Act II

*I haven't, however, been doing any science. Except for not tidying the bathroom to see how long it'll take for someone else to clean it. That's like an experiment or something isn't it? In which case, I've totally been doing science.

Increasing The Amount Of Nothingness

I have no idea what the fuck's gone wrong with me lately. I mean, I was fairly wrong to start with, what with the chronic misanthropy, my crippling lifelong terror at being alive and my shocking ability to not only miss, but actively destroy opportunities. But, recently, I've started to feel, well, even more wronger.

Sadly, for me at least, being the inarticulate, talent-free, borderline moron that I am, I can't really put these odd feelings of 'more wrongity' into proper, recognizably English, words. The weirdness I'm experiencing is, at least in part, an actual physical sensation; a sort of tense, ticklish feeling at the front of my brain, the sort of feeling you get when you're sure you've forgotten something important. I've been living with this for months. So either I have forgotten something SUPREMELY important, or, I've got a brain tumour. Maybe I've forgotten that I have a brain tumour.

Aside from that it's all boredom, ennui, tedium and 'mono no aware' (I just put that last one in to look smart. I've been reading me some Murakami lately). I'm not sure if this is some sort of new variant on the vague feelings of sadness I've lived with since the age of, ooh, 4 or if this is an entirely new not quite mental illness I'm now experiencing. To be honest, I don't have the energy to find out.

In other news: I am on the Twitter. I have become one of the sickening, brevity indulging tweeters I previously claimed to despise. Turns out that, like the internet generally, Twitter is both terrible and awesome and that the average of these two things equals 'ok' (maths is hard). So, you know, fuck you old (by which I mean slightly younger) sonofajoiner, you square.