Andy's Blog

I want to write something.  I’ve been promising a few people that I will write something.  It’s not that I don’t want to put proverbial pen-to-paper, it’s just that although the desire is there – the words are not.

It is HUGELY frustrating and more than a little worrying.  There are things afoot which could be the cause of this frustrating blankness but I am not entirely sure that this is, or I fervently hope it’s not,  the root cause.

There’s been enough happening in the last few months that deserve a mention; Black belts, technology, Cancer, garage dojo, work, children growing up and the usual idiocy of me interacting with my peers.

Let’s face it, I am not actually that good enough to suffer from the fabled “Writers block”.  Stupidity? Yes.  Idiocy?  Almost certainly and admitted to on a daily basis.

There was a new years resolution mulling around the head, although not verbalised, of putting at least one posting on here per week to drive the creative juices…. but the juices are dry :¬\

I shall try, I really really will try, however should you see me any time soon, please feel free to see whether a kick up the proverbials will help jumpstart this whole process off!  It can’t hurt…

…well actually it can, but you know what I mean.

A new month is upon us and.. oh my tis gonna be a full adventure packed one this year!  June, it has to be said, definitely had quite a few more downs than ups and really took a nose-dive as it approached its ultimate whimper.  The blog, as ever, suffered from a lack of updates but sometimes life is very rude in its attention grabbing; and these really weren’t things I could ignore.

So I start the new month off looking for some ‘new adventures’… let’s leave it at that for the moment, and contemplating a month of pain(s)…. of various unique flavours.

The little buggerage that is cancer is having the local quackery peek, poke and “hmmmm” at it first thing with a view to finally giving it its marching orders;  scalpel and eye-watering equipment at the ready!

Before one can even clench one’s but-tocks at that thought I shall be throwing myself, and number one sprog, into the competitive art of funny poses and grunting in a japanese accent.  I would call it Karate, but that really is doing the fair martial art a disservice… at least on my part.

What’s more worrying is that I shall be pitting my questionable skills against a large number of other practitioners, with some very VERY dark coloured belts, all in the name of becoming world champeeen!

Get that over and done with and I will age an extra year almost immediately… literally!  Nope, not in some abstract sense of the word, I will actually have aged another year.  That is if I haven’t already aged prematurely when number one sprog officially enters his teenagedom the week before.

There’s a bit more to tap out into this post, but I can’t seem to compose the correct combinations of letters and punctuation marks into something vaguely coherent.

Ah well, cometh the end of July and I’ll be pretty much offline for a few weeks; no on-line presence, no work, no karate, no updates, no cancerous lumps bumps ‘n other stuff? no idea… we’ll cross that bridge when we get there though.

First day of the month!

I am looking at a blank screen, an amusing cartoon picture of myself smiling like the idiot I am, Black Stone Cherry playing in the background, an overused backspace key whimpering on my keyboard and a headful of nothing which is successfully making an appearance on this blog.

This post started off life as some form of apology for the sometimes teasing, sometimes sarcastic comments I tend to come out with, morphed to an amusing story about double glazing salesmen, light-hearted texts and then double-backed to the perils of playing with words.  Somewhere in the middle of all of that it became a little darker and whinier…. and I now find myself gravitating that way again!

I really should stop trying to write a blog post when I really don’t know what I want to write and begin to just splurge on the page, the results are somewhat more navel gazing than I am comfortable with.

If I’m honest I think, deep down, I’m still a little scared about the whole Cancer thing even though I put the whole happy face on (as ugly an image as that is), and the upcoming visit to the quacks in July for the latest prognosis.  Also, this post has also got an awful lot of sentences beginning with “I”, which is both very lazy and a little “me me me”.

I’m (there I go again) also worrying about my next grading, whether my karate is sufficient for the task or whether I can actually *make* the next grading.  As I said “dark thoughts indeed” and not something I am overly comfortable with.

I think I need to change the track…. in all senses of the word.

Well apparently my last post was a “little too much information” for some people, and I have the sore ear to prove this, although I think it still serves as a good reference point for all budding future male karate do practitioners… go figure!

That apart I have the uncomfortable feeling that I really haven’t moved any further forward from where I was a few weeks back, I may have even moved backwards on a few items, which is a buggarage and all of which is making me even less fun company to be with than usual.

Introspection is all well and good for a hormone overdosed teenager, who feels the whole world is against them, but for a forty *cough* year old it can be a little ridiculous, but here we are.  Turn up, do what’s expected of you; smile, laugh, practise, teach, drink, chat …. leave quietly.   All without actually being there in mind or spirit.

I am missing not having a motorbike at the moment, taking very long, very fast rides to nowhere.  In my mispent youthdom, when in the same type of mood (when it wasn’t a ridiculous age to be as introspective) this was my favourite form of escape… at least for a little while.

Now I have a blog, a large music collection and a hidy-hole where I can be anti-social to my heart’s content.  I think that’s progress?

……also I do worry that Creed, 3 Doors Down, Daughtry, Theory Of A Deadman, Seether and Stone Sour are not the sort of tunes to help my teenage regression… but DAMN! There’s some damn fine lyrics in there and is at least helping me to figure out some future blog post titles.

To be honest, and let’s face it it’d be rude not to be, it’s been an “interesting” year so far.  As I sat here in front of a blank screen, wondering what words to type into this post, Crowded House’s song from which this particular blog post takes its title started up – which seemed apt.

The broad range of emotions, in what would otherwise have been an average two days, did swoop and peak somewhat alarmingly between the hours when my feet hit the floor in the morning and the hours that I got reminded of “life’s certainties” in no uncertain terms.

Ah well, ones metal is defined when the path of your life is strewn with cowpats from the Devil’s own Satanic herd.. to paraphrase Blackadder just a wee bit.

This will probably break all kinds of ‘blogging ethics’, but I can’t actually be arsed to put down in words what has gone down, for a number of vague, and quite franky lame, reasons.

Primary amongst these is just the plain fact that I am uncomfortable around raw emotions, whatever those may be.  It’s easier for me to just carry on regardless and deal with issues and/or problems in my own slightly abstracted way.

Secondly, I think it actually makes for a more interesting post.  Rather than get bogged down in the minutiae of detail around the how, what, why, when, etc… the more interesting detail is what we do about what’s thrown at us.  That, and the mostly cos of the primary reason noted above!

So don’t ask, as I won’t tell.. and yes probably won’t overly think about the matter at hand either.  Time to put some things on the back burner for a while and concentrate on the mundane, as well as some longer term goals which are starting to look like they may actually be possible!

I am not entirely sure whether this comes across as ignoring the issues, it’s not, but to each their own mechanisms for dealing with the “cowpats” strewn on their particular paths… this is mine.

It’s also given me a damn good excuse to use rather a lot of the fine cartoons that plognark has done for me, as they cover the “range” I was speaking of earlier in a rather better way than I can communicate in words.

….and also to put a cartoon picture of what I’d look like as a pirate, cos let’s face it, that’s something each of us would like to know!

I think it’s time I try to put into practise what I learn in karate every week, and try to kick something; namely my own arse and actually commit to updating this blog at least once a week, no matter how boring that could actually get… for the reader!  Rather alarmingly I found out on Monday that someone actually reads this thing, which is always nice, but the posts are somewhat few and far between.

So there’s the promise; I shall henceforth attempt to put keyboard to screen and write something on this thing at least once a week – now that may be at the beginning, mid, or end of the week, but it shall be updated.

As for this week, I have mostly been leaving bits of me all over the UK; my stomach’s still in a hotel conference room in Wolverhampton, my co-ordination has been left at a karate seminar in Coventry, my heart’s in Scotland, my brain is still in bed and my common sense has been AWOL for more years than I care to admit to.

I’m not entirely sure I’ll ever be able to collect all these parts any time soon but I’ll give it a whirl and hopefully at least get the brain engaged before the next post is due.  Till then….

Safer with a computerless keyboard?

There is a certain laziness that creeps in when riffing off a quick comment. Unfortunately this laziness when armed with a keyboard is where trouble lurks, awaiting its chance to bite you on the unmentionables.

It seems that my writing skills, and its slovenly attributes, change dependant on where I visit when armed with the aforementioned keyboard;

• Blogging: For some reason I can never seem to post a small snippet of what I am upto quite like the talented Mr Fitchett is able to.  A veritable torrent of letters, words, sentences, bullet points and paragraphs gets splurged onto the computer and then gets edited, re-edited, moved around, edited some more, updated, deleted, polished and buffed to within an inch of its life.

The end result is no more eloquent than when it began, but it does probably reflect more what I was trying to get over in my own unique way… most of the time. There being some notable exceptions apparently.

• Twitter: …and in what can only be considered the extreme opposite end of the scale; being forced to voice an experience or thought in 140 characters or less gets you to consider VERY carefully what you want to say and the best way in which to say it.  Of course, as with all things, this can go somewhat awry.

It seems to be in the ‘little’ area between those two extremes that I come unstuck.  The quick reply often done without thought is where unmentionables get the nibble I spoke about at the beginning of this post (way, way back – I did say I tended to splurge on a bit).

Unfortunately, to a greater extent than I should really be doing, you rely on the person reading these unthought out replies to understand what it is you were trying to get across.  Hence, what you thought was a critique of yourself becomes criticism of another which is on the perverse spectrum of where you wanted to be.

Sometimes when a sentence begins with the word “I”, that is where the heart of the sentence lies.

Time to be less flippant online methinks and begin watching, not so much my P’s and Q’s, but my Q’s and M’s and all the combination of letters between the two (look down at your keyboard to understand).

Never blog an hour or so before you decide to throw up and get a bad case of the vertigos.  Not that it was a conscious decision, but the resultant blog post was a lot more depressing than I had originally anticipated or meant.

Ah well, I shall leave the original blog post up for posterity’s sake, no censorship here… and now if you don’t mind I am off to go and call for Ralph and Huey down the large white telephone.

I find myself uninspired this morning, and late yesterday afternoon in fact.  This little post has had several titles and even more first paragraphs, and still I can’t quite find the words to type!  I *was* going to put something about the new design, etc., and how this will allow me to put new stuff on the blog, but after the twentieth edit and rewriting… I kinda gave up!

Forgot tea bags for work this morning, and the gym session was spoiled by having to take upto 30 minutes to park the car in the works multi-storey car park (strange mutterings were heard from my car regarding the car parking monkies who were not exactly doing a sterling job in getting the traffic flowing).

On the good news front, I have finally found the P45 from my previous employers so I should hopefully stop being strangled by the taxman on my next wage packet – woohoo!  I have also remembered to bring my Christmas pressie, a copy of the book “Bringing nothing to the party: true confessions of a new media whore” by Paul Carr which I blogged about earlier.

I shall give you a review of the book when it has been consumed.

Apart from that, I can’t think what to type.. as I said, completely uninspired!

Do you know, one day I will actually remember to update this thing on a more regular basis!  I suppose the underlying issues that I have are;

• An inability to write good prose
• A very hum-drum life
• An inate laziness, which is becoming more ‘inatier’ (I love creating new words!)
• …Zzzzzz