My Metro column today was about
not wasting a second of your precious life, which was ironic because I spent most of my day failing to work and looking for ways to procrastinate. Indeed I wrote (or compiled in this case) three Metro columns in a day two weeks ago so I could get on with my script without distraction. But now all three have been printed and I've got hardly anywhere with the sit-com. I hate myself and all I stand for. Though I do admire myself in a sense as I've managed to turn many of my procrastinational activities (this blog is one of them) into actual work that I indirectly get paid for. In fact my efforts to avoid working have probably proved more creative than my actual work over the last ten years.
Last Friday evening, frustrated with my lack of progress with the script I decided to have a couple of beers and see if that got the creative juices flowing and in a couple of hours I wrote more than I had managed in the previous three weeks. It wasn't necessarily all gold, but I got some stuff down. I think this worked because the alcohol relaxed me and made me feel a bit skittish and silly and stopped me worrying about whether what I was writing was good enough. In sober day to day life I find it hard to knuckle down partly because I feel what I am writing is not good enough. I am stymied by my own quality control and end up with nothing. All logic dictates that I should just write anything that comes into my head and then go back and edit - this would certainly be better than doing nothing at all - but it's not a logical process and my internal self-critic is too judgemental and austere. Get him pissed though and he loses all his faculties. He also usually takes a back seat when I am blogging because he doesn't consider this proper work - though occasionally he will work his stultifying magic with the blog - it took me about three hours to come up with a satisfactory topic for yesterday's blog.
But I can't get drunk all day long, can I? I mean I could and the short-term results might be helpful, but the impact on my life might be less so.
But anyway, today was one of those days where my brain or my subconscious or the aliens who beam this stuff into my head did not want to play ball, so I took part in another of my favourite time wasting activities and elected to tidy up my office. Despite all previous evidence to the contrary I still believed that if I could get my work space organised all else would follow - and this time there was at least a good reason for it as the room is full of boxes and junk stored here during the renovations. But of course the room just looked more messy by the time I had spent a couple of hours on it. And it wouldn't make any difference even if everything was in place - within 48 hours I'd make it into a tip again.
I had done the same thing yesterday and weirdly on both occasions part way through the job, whilst not doing anything particularly energetic, my wedding ring flew off my finger and rolled across the floor. The ring is occasionally a touch too loose, but it usually only falls off when I have wet and soapy hands or am swimming. My hands were super dry - it was not particularly hot or cold. It was a bit dusty I suppose, but surely dust does not act as a lubricant - the opposite. Weight lifters put powder on their hands to prevent slippage don't they? And I haven't lost weight since I got married - or at least I've pretty much put on the weight I did lose, so my fingers haven't got thinner (certainly not the fingers on my left hand which are not subject to the same rigorous exercise routine that the ones on the right are forced to partake in).
The only reasonable explanations were that a) there was a jealous poltergeist living in my attic who wanted to marry me and was furious that my wife had beaten her (or him) to it or b) that like Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense (spoiler alert) I myself was dead without knowing it and it was only now that I saw my wedding ring rolling along the floor that I would realise it. It had to be one of those two. Surely science couldn't come up with an alternate explanation.
@ukcameraman came up with quite a believable hypothesis, "Dust dries the moisture on the fingers, making it easier for ring to drop off. Certain types of dust can also be explosive..." I don't know if he or she thought that the dust had literally exploded the ring off my finger, but that would be an exciting possibility. Others claimed that by being high up the gravitational pull of the earth would be weaker (or stronger, I wasn't really paying attention) thus somehow affecting the size of my fingers. Scientific people just make up any old shit don't they? It's much more likely that I am dead but have failed to notice it. I hope I notice soon, because it would be very annoying to only find out once I've finished the script.... though maybe there's a sitcom in that - Ghost Writer, a dead unsuccessful writer who doesn't know he is dead is tricked into writing scripts for a living writer who has run out of ideas and ambition.
Yeah stop fucking around with removing rings from my people's fingers poltergeists. Get on your fucking typewriters.
