Absent Minded

It’s been a long time since I wrote a blog, almost a year to the day in fact. Since then I assume I have become immeasurably worse at writing them, so expect me to occasionally lose the thread of what I was do you think Australian people refer to England as ‘up-over’?

But don’t worry, learning to write is like riding a bicycle. It takes you ages to learn, but when you finally do, it’s scary, no-one respects you, and you look stupid doing it. Regardless, I feel that it’s important to practise self-expression, if you can call this self-expression. It forces you to solidify your beliefs, even in small things, because you have to stop and consider what you think well enough to be comfortable storing it in a semi-permanent way, and interpreting it for other people. For example, I realised this morning that one of my eyebrow hairs was roughly an inch long and mostly white. With the privilege of being able to write this blog, I now understand how I feel about that eyebrow hair, which is ‘bad’. Thanks art!

I already feel as though I’ve run out of things to say about self-expression, which I might be able to describe as ironic if I could remember what that meant. I feel like someone who bragged about living in France for a year, then returned a decade later only to find they can’t remember the French for déjà vu. Maybe I don’t vary my writing environment enough, I tend to write in cafes, and while I know there’s a wanky stigma attached to people who do that, I genuinely feel less distracted when I’m not home. Although I am currently being distracted by a guy sitting outside the cafe I’m in, facing the same way as me, so I can see through the window what he’s looking at on his phone. And it turns out he’s come to a cafe so that he can zoom in on pictures of cars on his Instagram feed. But I’m not here to judge. Coming to a cafe to write might seem wanky, but I think it’s much worse to come to a cafe just to drink coffee. At least this guy has a purpose. I mean, he is sitting facing a busy road already, absolutely lousy with cars. If I had come to this cafe to write a blog, only to find that outside the window was a real life version of my blog, already written, I’d feel pretty content to just leave, knowing that my work was done. But still, coming to a cafe with no ulterior motive feels suspicious. Just staring blankly into the middle distance, contemplating the taste of the coffee would make me think you’re a mystery shopper, or a psychopath. I personally see the coffee as a pretext for finding a space to write, like it’s the social contract that I have to adhere to in order to write outside the house, unless I go to a Iibrary. But you know, I don’t wanna.

This has been the least thought through blog post I’ve written. If you’ve ever watched a 100m race on TV, you’ll sometimes see the athletes practise their starts before the race, by bursting out of the blocks, and then quickly decelerating to a jog about twenty metres later. That’s this blog entry. And if it does go up, with this end disclaimer, something’s gone terribly wrong and I’ve been hacked, or died in the meantime and my friends/relatives have decided to try to publish my final masterpiece in its original form as a way of honouring my blogging legacy. Or more likely, I will have put it up as a cautionary tale, as a lesson about how bad it feels to not try your hardest and then have people see your lack of effort out in the sun. That’ll teach me.

Next time on the bandwagon, a history of how Funko Pops replaced the bobble head, by asking the simple question ‘what if it didn’t bobble?’