Hola bloggeros, sup?
You see what I did there? I incorporated a mixture of continental and modern within the space of three little words. Skill. The continental part speaks for itself and requires no further explanation, whilst the achingly modern “sup” is an abbreviation of “what, in actual fact, is up?” Oh yes it is, back off. It’s exhausting being this brilliant. (You wouldn’t know.)
This needed something amazingly uplifting to start with, however, because the rest is going to be monumentally dreary and self-pitying. It’s been a while since I indulged in self-pity and drear – my last post was almost a week ago now – so I feel I deserve some slack.
But honest to Mary it’s been a very bad start to the year. Plus, it was a very bad end to the last one. Not just bad, but bad bad. Shocking bad, dark bad, hopeless bad and scary - it called for a full retreat. And drugs. Lots of drugs. Legal drugs, I mean, the kind of drugs that well meaning doctors with competent eyes and needlessly dramatic shoes – so out of place, I feel, these dramatic shoes, you sort of hope your doctor will wear something safe down there, something uncontroversial – dispense with an unthinking flourish. Here, stick these in your face every morning and you’ll soon enough stop all this whining.
Actually, I’ve just realised, I have no interest in talking about this whatsoever. Interesting. I’d whipped myself into a frenzy to go at this thing with relish, but now I’ll need to think of something else. A mid-blog crisis. Who would have thunk it? I like to write these things in one go, never stopping, hitting publish before I’ve had a chance to say “I didn’t mean it”. This approach is the reason my writing is so widely admired in my own head, I feel. No deleting, no going back, one word after the other. That’s how simple it is. And yet here we all are, quite stuck.
The trick now, I suppose, would be to change the subject without making it seem too clanky or contrived.
Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen....
(Ludwig Wittgenstein: 1889-1951)
Or, I could simply stop writing for a while and go looking for a diversionary quotation in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Yes, that’s what I ended up doing. I knew exactly what I was looking for – most attractive people do - I just couldn’t remember how to spell it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but relentlessly happy people give me the creeps. Do they not see?
Vous l’avez voulu, Meester ‘Appy, vous l’avez voulu.
Skill.
The trouble with putting something like that there, of course – something that may or may not make sense – is that it becomes extraordinarily hard to continue logically and round things off to a conclusion. People tend to like conclusions. A point. I’ve seen many get angry without one. But I’ve only got seven words left.
Bonus
