It's not even that I haven't known what to write, but I have no idea how to actually get it done. There have been myriad ideas, but I'm not going to tell you what they were. I'm not about to tip my hand like that. That's how people like you steal ideas.
Yes, you. Specifically you.
Outlines have been scribbled down in various notebooks that are scattered about solely to catch a turned phrase, and the stories are there. It's just the closest I've come to writing anything would be some brief "reviews", if you can even call them that....which....yeah, I think I am calling them that, but with quotation marks to give me some wiggle room.
What did I think of Geostorm?
"This beautiful film. The Citizen Kane of films that have Gerard Butler futilely trying to punch clouds in their stupid cloud faces. Rosebud in this instance is an exploding satellite from which Charles Foster Kane falls, leaving him with massive brain injuries."
Thoughts on A Quiet Place?
"I farted myself awake a few nights ago.
Throughout this film I couldn't shake the idea that this is how I would have died. The dread was only exacerbated by my futile attempts to stealthily eat crisps at the back of the screen.
More tense than a first date with someone who clicks at a waiter."
Fast Times At Ridgemont High?
"This film reminds me a lot of my first relationship.
I spent the entirety fantasising about Phoebe Cates."
Hey, Deebs, how did you feel about Garden State?
"Having
lost my virginity to the opening 3-4 seconds of a Damien Rice album, I
figured that my second sexual experience playing out with the soundtrack
to this film in the background would be an improvement.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to achieve orgasm when you're picturing Zach Braff's mopey face? Actually, sadly, not difficult enough. Really unpleasant musical accompaniment to lying on a soiled mattress beside a crying woman.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, I brought a friend to see this on a whim just after his mother had died. It was a bad decision."
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Mostly, I choose to compare films to past relationships. Films tend to cry less.
Anyway, I suppose that getting back into writing involves embracing the basics. What are my basics? I was born, I guess. It's not as if I can remember that part but, I exist so it's a reasonable deduction. In retrospect, that whole being born thing was regrettable for all involved, but I'm too tall to send back. Let's hit some bullet points on life since then:
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to achieve orgasm when you're picturing Zach Braff's mopey face? Actually, sadly, not difficult enough. Really unpleasant musical accompaniment to lying on a soiled mattress beside a crying woman.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, I brought a friend to see this on a whim just after his mother had died. It was a bad decision."
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Mostly, I choose to compare films to past relationships. Films tend to cry less.
Anyway, I suppose that getting back into writing involves embracing the basics. What are my basics? I was born, I guess. It's not as if I can remember that part but, I exist so it's a reasonable deduction. In retrospect, that whole being born thing was regrettable for all involved, but I'm too tall to send back. Let's hit some bullet points on life since then:
- Wrote stories.
- Played football.
- Watched films.
- Worked in a bank.
- Studied journalism.
- Worked in a bank again.
- Worked at a film festival.
- Watched a lot more films.
- Worked at a fringe festival.
- Worked at THE fringe festival.
- Wrote a bunch.
- Worked in a theatre.
- Worked in a different theatre.
Wrote things about working in a theatre.
What? No, never.
I won't bore you by writing about unusual people leaving their comically large bras behind in the theatre. Why would they take that off? How could they forget they weren't wearing it? Could I fit my head in it, hypothetically? Probably, but that would be weird.
It was weird.
This isn't helping me write.
When I started this blog, it was on the back of incessant peer pressure. Friends wanted me to write scripts and story ideas, and my girlfriend told me I was wasting my life. Then those friends pushed for me to at least start writing a blog as an outlet, and my girlfriend told me I was wasting my life. Then that relationship ended, so I tried to use this thing as a diary to get some feelings out.
My ex girlfriend told me I was wasting my life.
One of those friends starting championing the writing of another guy, and I damn well wasn't about to let someone else find any sort of happiness in doing the thing that I couldn't commit to doing myself. Now, I'd done some stupid things in my life up to that point.
Just going to pause here to let your shocked gasps pass.
As it turned out, I was right in the middle of a beautifully stupid period in my life where I would continue to get into bizarre scenarios.
Gasp break.
It made for some great pub chat, so I set about bringing my follies from pub to page. I put out a steady stream of stories about festivals, fuck ups, and....I'd like to say "females" to keep the alliteration flowing but, a certain subgroup of subhumans that populate the internet have utterly ruined that word.
It all seemed so easy then. I had a substantial back catalogue of personal failings to call upon, and frequent festivals to replenish my repertoire. When I left Dublin for Edinburgh, there was a definite shift in the things I wrote about. This page had really always been a way for me to chronicle my own life, and so I wrote more about day to day things in a new city.
Sometimes I wrote about accidentally slapping small children off their scooters in the street in broad daylight. I said day to day but, I didn't necessarily mean mundane.
Part of the pull of Edinburgh was that it was a festival city. The abridged version I tell is as follows:
"Came to Edinburgh to work the Fringe, got drunk, stayed,"
Clearly it's a longer, more nuanced story than that. I came to Edinburgh to work the Fringe, got drunk, got paid, stayed. So, not much longer. Still, I migrated from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to a couple of stints at the Edinburgh International Festival to keep the good times rolling, and then stopped the rolling.
The first proper fight Miriam and I ever had was on the way back from my first visit to Orkney. We got the ferry back to mainland Scotland at 6am, and arrived in the physical manifestation of hopelessness, Thurso, at about 8am. The only thing open on that freezing, rain soaked morning was a little cafe that did a decent breakfast. Being only mildly defeated by the squalid misery of Thurso, I doubled down on my Irishness with a breakfast baked potato. Somehow, Thurso infected our breakfasts with sorrow, and before long we were arguing about the things I'd written in the past, and how it cast others in a negative light. I'd always considered myself the idiot around whom otherwise regular folk orbited in my tales. Thurso and its airborne pathogens of dread had drawn my blog, and my relationship into its mire of passive fury. It darkened our moods and led to five and a half hours of uncomfortable silences getting lashed on in Thurso, an eternity in a peculiarly stocked Thurso newsagent, and a further forever in what passed for Thurso's museum.
I'm not sure that the profound level of my hatred for Thurso is translating in text, so let me illuminate it further. In that museum were a pair of rope spun slippers. The sign attached to that exhibit read:
"These slippers may have been made by a fisherman's wife while she was bored waiting for her husband to return from sea."
They could offer no certainties on one of the few things contained in their own museum, yet even they were reasonably certain that it would have to have been a product of somebody's intense boredom.
I loathe Thurso. Nobody lives in Thurso, they just exist there in a state of perpetual near-death.
My life is split into two parts- before Thurso, and after Thurso. And after I-swear-to-fuck-I'll-stop-mentioning-Thurso everything I wrote was noticeably bleaker.
When I wrote about my mum's dementia, people complimented me on being able to write so honestly and with humour about a shitty situation. Shameless self-plug for writing about sad stuff:
http://fooltide.blogspot.com/2014/11/mrs-doyle.html
That response was genuinely lovely, and entirely unexpected. It's never seemed difficult to write about things that are happening, because, save for some hyperbole and artistic license in the wording here and there, the facts speak for themselves far louder than fiction. I have tried and thus far failed to commit to writing fiction in the last couple of years. The ideas are there, but that feels like more soul being bared than actually just talking about real life. It doesn't matter if anyone judges me for the way I've written about my experiences, but they sure can judge my attempts at building a story from scratch.
There's a typewriter gathering dust in my flat.
So, I've stuck to writing the day to days. There have been fewer drunken fuck ups to break up the occasional sad stories. I've been in an excellent relationship with a brilliant woman for about six years. She will absolutely hate to read the part calling her "brilliant", and the part where I suggest we're in a relationship. It just seems cruel to remind her of that. While that's an admitted positive, it has cut down on the farcical misunderstandings that made up the majority of my posts. What I'm saying is that this is clearly all her fault.
In the absence of alternatives, I tried to write about working in a theatre once. It went over well. These missives I post usually get 100-300 views, this clocked in at 3000.
https://fooltide.blogspot.com/2016/09/how-to-talk-to-box-office-staff.html
Inspired and emboldened at the relative success of that post, I decided to never write about theatre ever again. I didn't set up a Facebook page. Its non-existence meant that it could never build up a steady following in Ireland, the UK, and Australia. It continued to not exist after a year of not existing. I do not have a zipper folder of its contents.
Then there was nothing. Further nothing? Actual nothing though.
Can't write. Feel guilty for not writing, and then get struck by that middle of the night burst of creativity that comes with trying to sleep. The longer I waited without writing, the more difficult it became. I grew apprehensive at the merest thought of typing anything. I'm even shite at responding to messages from friends now. A state of perpetual apprehension, which is in essence the literary equivalent of Thurso.
I've restricted any hints of creativity to social media posts ("This is Deebs, he's funny....on Facebook."), and work based emails about football. I was uncomfortable to hear some very positive responses from work colleagues to things I've written. Not because I didn't appreciate it, but because I didn't feel I deserved it. I can't understand people who tell me I'm a good write, because....well, I don't write (someone just pointed out to me that I misspelled "writer", which speaks for itself, so I'm leaving it in. Thanks Henderson). I really do appreciate kind words, and advice given, but I don't feel they've been earned.
My latest, burgeoning plan is to trick myself into writing. This is the beginning of that very plan, as I look to get the creative juices flowing (Note: the phrase "creative juices" births some unceasingly grim imagery). I've "commissioned" (asked very nicely) Miriam to get her artistic skills back up and flourishing by painting a piece inspired by Big Trouble in Little China. Partly, I just want to proudly hang this work of art on the walls of our flat (the early progress looks excellent). As a side benefit, I'm harking back to that jealous little need to make sure nobody else succeeds nearby when I feel I should be doing likewise. If she is getting back into the swing of things, I'm hoping for that petty little voice urging me on to do the same. I've really missed that adrenaline rush that comes from finishing a story, I do have a couple of ideas that have been on the back burner for some time:
Specifically, an odd encounter with a woman named JoJo (2 years ago), and a whole diatribe about hair. In related news, below is the picture that made me realise I was going bald. You're welcome.
And here we are, with me writing about being unable to write. It's a start. A restart.
It's the blogging equivalent of a pair of rope spun slippers.
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