In Strop Action

So I found a way to kick my own arse: get angry with myself. All my life I have been getting angry with other people and it wasn't they who were the problem. I have known many who rage against objects. Folks who swear at machines as if to direct enough emotional venom toward an inanimate artifact will suddenly imbue it with at least the capacity for shame, if not reformation and rehabilitation. Objects don't do those things and shouting at them doesn't improve the atmosphere.

I just don't get angry at myself. If I get hurt, stub my toe for example, I just feel idiotic (and how insular is that - etymology so often forces me into Freudian exposures ... careful dear, your slip is showing!) I will curse my stupidity for failing to remember the obstruction my foot collided with but I won't do anything else about it.

My former partner once dropped a whole plateful of spaghetti bolognese on the carpet. The plate was hot and he was burning his fingers. He was six feet from a table he could have placed it on before waving his hands about and giving in to the pain. I chastised him royally ... no wonder he ran away with a woman he met on the net.

By contrast I soak up pain rather than to spoil a moment or waste effort. On Christmas morning I stubbed my toe on the table leg as I brought breakfast to it; my Mum and I were sharing the day together. The pain was sharp, instant and had the immediate association in my mind with broken bones. I have cracked enough over five decades of clumsiness to know these things. Naturally enough I instantly felt remorse for choosing to go barefoot. On the other hand the scrambled eggs were just perfect; the exact degree of creamy sog that I like (there was a very generous amount of double cream in there ... as well as a lot of expensive Normandy butter) and the mounds of smoked salmon wouldn't long remain at a cool 5°C for long, the radiators were smoking and the breakfastplates were warm. The homemade wholemeal toast wouldn't remain warm and crunchy for long enough for me to have a fit of self-pity ... and anyway hopping about holding a hurting foot is more likely to result in additional and maybe worse injuries. And besides ... hopping mad is such cliché.

We ate breakfast without a word about feet.

After breakfast as we raced each other to the bottom of the cafetiere and argued aimiably enough about whose job it was to load the plates into the dishwasher, the pain in my toe seemed remote and irrelevant. It was only later that it was observed that I was limping. I explained the cause and we laughed about my stoicism. I limped until my sister's birthday in early February. It was easier than going to the hospital and, likely, to have a cast ... I'd have to limp then!

So why do I choose now to write about it, I have to ask myself ... mostly because I have for the moment lost the plot and this is the keyboard equivalent of woolgathering. In part I have to write about something. It isn't in my nature to make resolutions and still less to keep them. However I desire strongly to make an effort to write more often. So this has to be it, for today, anyway.

Another element that has been jostling at the back of the unruly mob of ideas at the stage door of my mind's theatre of the ridiculous is the whole question of why blog or journal. Those of us who try it and fail are not likely to have a ready answer. Too many of those who do and who then get published seemed only to be in the art form for the purpose of fame. I do not really subscribe to the concept of accidental celebrity. God knows I could use some money right now. A lot of it. But this blog isn't for sale and it wouldn't be if it was getting hundreds of hits per day, although I would fill up a column of screen real estate with some advertising. Advertisers and their money are always willing to be parted if the demographics fit.

The whole why blog issue is a subject that has had me winding up slowly into a high gear since I plopped down a long-winded comment on the general subject as a comment to a post Sharon made. The post was titled "An Open Letter" and I commented via Haloscan.

At the time I wrote that item I was quite animated and it felt good. I was only expressing exactly what I am instinctively drawn towards but the strength of the feeling took me by surpise. I can get angry about kinds of issues that relate, eventually, to a person or persons known or unknown. I knew that already! But using that ire to catalyse my thinking hadn't actually occurred to me before. But then I have always described myself as a slow learner. Thinking back, all of my best creative efforts have come from a strong emotional antipathy toward some aspect of the world around me. I've even succeeded at writing tender emotional dialogue, mostly by hating one of the characters for having the other all to herself.

Beside I really do believe that we can all tell when a writer is writing for glory or just for the hell of it. The latter is always better. I have looked at some of my posts and frankly I am not sure. How the hell can we judge ourselves? (I mostly try to avoid query marks with rhetoric but I really do not require an answer.)

So, strictly for myself then .... I enjoyed being told by a website test (a few days ago) that I am a "Word Warrior". It is what I like best to do. My vocabulary isn't huge but it is pretty capacious and I just feel pretty damn fine when I add a new word or five. Even greater is the pleasure of piling up some words and juggling them about and then leaning back in my carret and taking a gloating moment of pleasure over the arrangement: Look what I just did! It's a command only to myself. Of course I bask in the warmth of the praise of others. I am only human. Well I was the last time I checked. But it isn't for the reward of being told that I make others happy by writing well that I hit the keyboard. I am writing now only to make myself happy and if anyone gets splashed in the backwash and shares a little of the fun that I'm having I can only say that I understand exactly how you feel. It is why I have your blogs listed in that column over there on the right.

Maybe I chould add a few more blogs to that list but time is my greatest enemy. I could easily spend most of every day just reading, everything from blogs to colour supps to the Solzhenitsyn that I keep by the toilet for those occasions when I have weakened and bought in white bread instead of making my own wholemeal. Any more and I would never find time to write!