I haven’t written anything for over a month. I haven’t been able to bring myself to express or create. I have encountered and am enduring the type of vicissitudes that do not reduce my pleasure in using the word, vicissitudes. But they have left me incapable or indeed unwilling to leave my own head. A week ago, I deleted all the computer games from my PC. Last night I moved my desk and changed my chair. This is what I have been reduced to. Today I am lapsing into a ‘woe-is-me’ blogpost in the hope it might shake me from this ennui. I need to escape this enervating malaise. I am hoping that using words like ennui and enervating will remind me of the simple joy there is in words.
I have even tried journaling. Pen and paper to unload the thoughts that are building and becoming more confused. The emotions that need to be expressed. The frustrations that need safe passage. But it turns out that writing is writing and I haven’t been able to write.
I write because I wish to engage with the world. Engage so that I might better understand it, understand my place in it and ultimately to shape both it and me so that we better fit each other. And I write because I am an ego with a beard who must be read. In this instance it may be my fathomless ego that might rescue me from this rut. I miss being read a near imperceptibly amount less than I miss writing. And it is an itch that can be easily scratched. One has to merely write and someone will read it, even if it is only my wife who will unavoidably see the words as she proofs this post.
I merely have to write. The words are there. The desire is there. All that prevents me from transferring that will into action is an inescapable feeling that the more I seek to understand the world the more I wish to disengage from it. Retreat from its blistering stupidity, viciousness and the inevitable disaster that is our species. It’s not a very original thought, having one’s curiosity met with a handful of slime, but it’s new to me. I see in myself so many of the stereotypes one associates with men my age. I get increasingly frustrated with the petty stupidities; the poorly parked car, the cyclist without high-viz, the pedestrian on a country road at night, deranged buffoons with nuclear weapons and homeopathy. I begin to doubt the merit in trying to know more when there is all this nonsense to swim through.
But that stupidity has always been there. We are an incredibly stupid species. What has changed, is me. I am older, my knees hurt more, my hearing isn’t what it once was, I think about death less as an abstract phenomenon but as my inevitable future, I’m a bit more cynical and I worry about how little I really am and how big the stupid really is. And I’m feeling sorry for myself. Middle aged straight white man who simply wants everyone to see the world as he sees it so that we may all enjoy paradise.
I’m feeling sorry for myself and it is difficult to engage with the world when one is feeling sorry for oneself. I am feeling sorry for myself because I am old. I am feeling sorry for myself because I do not like my station in life. I am feeling sorry for myself because I remember a time when I was optimistic. And I am feeling sorry for myself because I don’t know if I’ve lost that optimism or have temporarily misplaced it. I am feeling sorry for myself because I am feeling sorry for myself and I am reduced to writing about how sorry I am for myself. And I am feeling sorry for myself because my ego demands that I be read so I am writing about how sorry I am feeling for myself. And I am feeling sorry for myself because you are reading this. But I am writing and you are reading. So, there’s that.
