Half-filled watering can

It's been a long time since writing on here. Did you notice? Thought not. After quitting Facebook today I felt a little liberated to write about things again, to once more address my tiny readership of one. That 'one', if you're interested, is me. And long may it remain me, for I believe it was Paolo Coelho who said, "writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in pubic," and I can scarcely turn my gaze towards a mirror even when fully clothed, let alone shrivel under the torment of another's judging gaze. Shrivel indeed, and those who noticed the not too subtle allusion to a penis under pressure may draw their Freudian interpretations now.

I used to write bits of whatever. Not any more. It's better when there's no purpose to it. It's therapeutic that way. I wrote reviews for theatre and music. I wrote political polemics for high minded university journals. Eventually I started my own art-lit duo. For that I'm still writing a series of books for self-publishing, but the zest of the project has turned bitter. It's probably not the project itself that's at fault. Such bitterness follows all memories, all endeavours, to the extent that each event, in some small manner, has been part of the long and vacuous process of transporting me here, into some form of bleak hell which lacks so much as a spark to get the river of fire alight.

So for a while I will maybe try and explore why the wish to write surfaces, submerges, and sometimes surfaces again. A writer's curse is not knowing if and when the pot of inspiration will dry up. The sense of 'channelling' something is something I relate to, but I'd stop short of labelling myself a writer, anymore than someone who buys clothes can be called a 'shopper'. For me, just the impulse, the lack of inertia is enough to get the little engine of words whirring, and then it doesn't matter if the words are good or shit, read or unread, for after a while a tiny endorphin has poked its scared face out from behind a rock in my skull, and tentatively stepped out into Blood River.

Besides that, maybe I'll dwell a bit on anxiety, joblessness, aimlessness, hopelessness, phonelessness, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, travelling in Taiwan, learning Chinese, idle ways of wasting time, screwing everything up, screwing people over, and screwing people.