... but I stopped. Now I'm a dad, and may blog again...

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

572: Brain slugs and sippy cups

Sometimes there is a piece missing from my brain; a feeling, a thought, an ability to move. It might last a day or two and then it seems to come back from where ever it has been. The same place the odd socks go to before they get to rejoin their lost partner, or meet a new one, back in the sock drawer. I don't know where that is. If I did I would have many more socks than I have; more than I need. More than I could ever eat. Or wear, in a single lifetime. Maybe a hat fashioned from tin foil, perhaps with a cosy lining of cling film, will keep everything in and/or out. In place/space. I'm not deranging, just re-exploring the way thoughts translate into written words. I barely wrote a thousand words in the last week and feel like Hannibal has sautéd away with capers and lemon, mmm, lobotomised.

I want to describe the way in which I have subjects I wish to blog about (such as the artist Liz West, the Laibach concert, the arrest I saw part of outside the petrol station 'round the corner), but how I just can't string together the required thoughts in order to build a short narrative. All I keep getting is awful cliched metaphor about not being able to grasp hold of threads; little metaphorical threads of something. I just can't grasp those threads. Syphillis? Book worm? Brain slugs? Let's all go to the Brain Slug Planet! Then after every couple of sentences written, I stop, stare at the screen, glaze over, wonder where I am, snap out of it, forget what I have just written, remember I have forgotten what I have just written, go back and read again what I have just written, glaze over a bit more, repeat the forgetting/remembering/re-readin cylce. Then and only then am I able to eek out a couple more sentences. Like these ones.

Then what happened? Well then I just kept on writing more of whatever it is that I am about to write: This Liebfraumilch is like juice. When I was little it was a joke product, like Lada and Skoda were. I can't remember if it was a Lada or a Skoda that my granddad used to drive. Probably a Skoda, but it may have been the other one; the Lada one; I just don't remember. I remember being unnecessarily embarrased to be in it. I was a little weiner. I also used to get embarrassed going into Oxfam in case one of the little prats at school saw me and called me a scratter. I feel sorry for my kids, what with all the scratting for second-hand books they will be caught doing. My kids are scratters. They will drink Liebfraumilch. And Blue Nun. In Tommy Tippy sippy cups.

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