Don't Believe a Word

mirrors_2, ze1, 2003

I've always taken exception to the idea that you should do something you enjoy professionally. If I was to work as a freelance writer, for instance, I would have starved to death long ago even if I set my own deadlines. I could invoke that old Douglas Adams' quote again, but I wouldn't want to look like I'm trying to boost the word count - even though I just have without quoting it. I specifically put a 'Scheduled Posts' gadget on the blog to try and hold myself to my own weak promises and perhaps, I hoped, the Russian web crawlers that read this blog so often might demand that the Buffy The Vampire Slayer post I've been putting off and on for four years now actually turn up in January 2012 like I said on the 31st of last month. Surely that's why they keep viewing that post fifteen times a day, to communicate in the only way they can? I can't imagine it's because they like what I wrote - it's a bloody list of songs I liked last year.

Without needlessly repeating myself for a higher word count, writing this blog can be a torturous hassle. By that I mean, the act of writing - via the keyboard or scribbling a paragraph on a bit of paper at night - is writer's block for me. As I've mentioned before somewhere, I have no trouble writing posts for this blog. I can be in the shower, or trying to fall asleep and I'll end up thinking this very post; which I did last night in an annoyingly recursive manner in which I remark that I'm writing this on the verge of sleep which I can't do because my mind is thinking this very post. Sometimes I believe what I've written here is only a fraction of what I've casually discussed with someone to the point I've considered recording conversations in the hope of transcribing my entire intent. In so many ways it would probably be much more convenient for me to appear in front of a camera or even just a microphone, but I absolutely hate being filmed and cannot raise my voice in an empty room. Online text is a medium I've become comfortable and, I think, adept with as I approach ten years of publishing ramblings on the internet.

At this point you probably don't believe what you've read is the result of trying to write an introduction to a post about Buffy. It in fact comes close to being a post I've mulled for a few years in the vein of Orwell's Why I Write. His four points ring true, and it's most likely the 'sheer egoism' he identifies as point one that makes me believe his main observation also applies to me (excepting the fact I haven't fought in some modern equivalent of the Spanish Civil War):

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

Yeah, I know I only published a short-lived pseudo-samizdat anarchist anti-manifesto in school. I hereby non-committally promise more serious work. Believe me when I say, I am working on a two thousand word follow-up political essay. And seeing as I've passed my target five hundred END.

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