Trying to make this blog a more regular thing was maybe not the best idea I ever had. I forgot my own advice: "make sure you've got something to say first" was supposed to be the mantra of this journal but my unquenchable thirst for writing has found some sort of release here and it's quickly becoming an addiction.
That would be OK if I wasn't once again being reminded of the enormity of the challenge of writing something that I would be comfortable with publishing. Eventually my need to write will break through the quality control systems and I will put something out there but it will be half-cryptic. In one way, it'll be something like the letters that TV serial killers occasionally send to the fictional detectives who are hunting them down: there will be clues in there to what I'm really thinking but you'd have to be me to know they're even clues, never mind decipher them. On the other hand, it'll be something like a valentines card or letter from a secret admirer: a missive packed wall to wall with lies that cry out to be exposed and picked apart until the truth within is found, a thin veil over what it is that I want to say but can't.
I suppose, if you wanted to place a lot of significance on that type of thing, it would tell you a lot about my mind that those two types of communique come together for me.
Not a lot happens around me that's worthy of note, never mind publication on the world-wide web, but alongside the odd cryptic messages and writings about writing that I post, I'll try to make sure there's always some philosophical musings or news and views, so that there seems like there's actually a point to this exercise.
In that spirit, I'll take a moment to reflect on something a bit deeper.
I'm capable of deeper thought, even if my writing's a bit shallow, and one of the things I've mused on since at least the age of six is: was I born at the right time?
I'm such a temporal anomaly, I always like to say I'm child of the sixties and that the fact of being born in 1990 is merely an inconvenient technicality. It's most noticeable in my musical tastes, which most definitely lie in the period around the 60s and 70s - my formative years if I'd been born 3 decades earlier. Admittedly, my generation is much more open to our musical past than were the teenagers and young adults of the 90s, but I always feel out of place with modern popular music. It's important, too, because music is such a big part of who we are. The cultural groups we split into - mod and rocker, chav, goth, emo and hipster - have clearly defined musical boundaries, hence our music informs our labels and sense of identity.
The main reason I used to believe I was born in the wrong time is because of the age discrepancies in my family, for example, my grandmother on my dad's side is the same age as my great-grandmother on my mother's side and my dad is the same age as my great-aunt from my mother's side, so I always feel generationally askew, and my liking for old music and fashions just reinforces the feeling that I'm out of my time. My romanticised view of the past and generally pessimistic view of the future both comes from and reinforces this feeling.
Modern society does not interest me at all, in a world where the norm seems to be over-indulgence (in as many things as possible, but mostly alcohol and sex) I lead a fairly plain life, which would be branded boring by most of my contemporaries, but in which I have created a peace for myself, a lagoon of tranquillity in a sea of madness. This is not to say that modern society is all about gluttony and hedonism, not at all, but such traits are perhaps the most prominent ones in our society that have very little counter-culture. The issue is not the over-indulgence, more it is the general acceptance of it, even by those who do not engage in it.
As for modern technology, I won't deny that it has its advantages but every advance brings about a whole new set of problems for us, both ethical and practical. The only useful technological advance for me would be the invention of a time machine. If someone offered me a one-way trip back to 1969, I wouldn't even stop to pack. The one consolation of living in the time I do is the good friends I've made along the way, but once again I am headed for a turning point where I suspect I will lose many friends who mean more to me than I do to them. Is this difference in value to do with the different times we come from? Perhaps, although mostly it's because of my refusal to engage with modern society, which places me firmly in the margins of other people's life stories, or in a footnote, if I'm lucky.
Good God, I get maudlin at night, must be the Irish in me. I'm gonna have to start writing these things in the daytime, hopefully I won't be so depressive next time.
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