Monday 10 August 2009

Protocol

Right now I'm wondering how this is going to work. By suggestion of the web layout, I should have categories and (I've just seen the automatic draft updater and am very impressed. If this were Microsoft Word I would transfer all my writing immediately to be online.) find something clever to put under the post heading. THAT, says me, would be the way a highly organised mind would work. As you may have noticed by the interruption halfway through the first line, I'm a bit moggy in the head and my thoughts are cantankerously erratic. I don't mind, most of the time. I reason that I will think a certain number of things every day and as long as I'm not disarming a bomb it doesn't really matter what order I think them in.

Given the above explanation, I have decided that this blog will grow in the same way as a jumping castle. Have you ever seen a jumping castle getting the air blown into it? It's comparable to a number of perverse things I would rather not name on this site. For now, just sit in front of the luminous screen and let my soothing words take you back to your distant childhood before perverse analogies infested your mind.

Can you see yourself? A shrimpy kid with stringy hair lying flat against your forehead? Good.
You are probably holding a slice of Birthday cake (Birthday always seems to need capital letters, like Christmas or Judgement Day), unless like me you do not like Birthday cake and have opted to fill your pockets with jelly beans. You feel... sticky. And itchy, too.

You are outside on a garden lawn of a house you have never been to before now. The birthday girl, a kid too young to have a solid clique, has opted to invite the whole class to come over for a Birthday party . There are multiple glass bowls filled with sweets set up on a table with a plastic sheet protecting it. If you're lucky, there are individual squares of Top Deck chocolate lying in a dish half-melted, which the kids run back and forth to as if it were heroine . There may be a pool, and you might be wearing a swimming costume. Regardless, your legs itch like psychosis because you've been sitting on the grass, chasing other kids, laughing, falling over countless times.

On the sideline is the proverbial Big Top - not a clown, those freaks went out of fashion years ago - a Jumping Castle. Dads and uncles (the 90's didn't leave adequate room for feminism) are laying it out flat. Someone plugs it in and the turbines kick up a cacophony that is mellow compared to the screaming of kids. You decide to watch as the air kicks the castle into motion. At first it sort of hovers close to the ground... then a turret pops up like a balloon and the patchwork giant is given a semblance of structure. It wobbles, unstable, if someone turned off the generator it would crash in a heap and that would be the end of it. But, for as long as the parents feed those essential kilowatts into the generator, the party continues. The kids will bounce around, get sticky, belly flop, and make memories which they'll half dredge up on a blog site a decade later simply to illustrate the essential notion behind a jumping castle.

I think a blog must be a little like a holocaust survivor. The mind, as the natural centre for concentration, is the concentration camp (or death camp to get technical). I've been constantly gunning down my own ideas under the belief that they are weak and will never succeed in moving anyone further than out of the room to get away from my god-awful writing. It's only by fighting constantly against one's inner gauntlet that any idea can ever see daylight. Which reminds me of one of my favourite sayings, which I read back in the day off a Mirrodin(TM) Magic: The Gathering(TM) card:

"Murder of the living is tragic;  murder of the idea? Unforgivable." -Janus, speaker of the synod.

Paraphrased, of course.

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