Wednesday 14 October 2009

How did it come to this?

Sometimes there's a moment of realisation. Some days there are more than one, and one of today's was a sudden onset of clarity, in which I came suddenly to the understanding that it is not exactly normal to be sat in a wood-panelled, neoclassical work of indulgent architectural decadence, sipping Côtes du Rhône Villages out of the bottle, trying desperately to avoid reading Sophocles and waiting for my friends to get home so we can all play a video game where we have to shoot guys who are either terrorists or counter-terrorists, preferably in the head.

It is not a game that attempts any discourse on the directions in which modern warfare is heading, neither is it a child of the War on Terror in the way that many US cultural products of the Cold War are the children of McCarthy. Whether you are a terrorist or a counter-terrorist is a matter of personal choice at most, and at the very least a randomly chosen feature determined by an algorithm within the game itself. There are no sociopolitical lessons to be learnt here.

This set of circumstances (in particular, I must add, the Côtes du Rhône Villages), prompted me to ask not 'why is this odd?', or 'I know this is not normal, but why not?' (believe me, there is a subtle difference), but 'how did my life come to this?'. At 20, melodramatic? Yes. But there is something to be said for the fact that it was in that form that the realisation came to me, and none other. And so I plan to go on from here.

Since, a few months ago, I committed the unspeakably emo act of deleting my livejournal, there has been an ineffable but definite void in my productive life. It turns out that there are certain arguments, subjects and considerations that do not fit into the neat 140 characters of a Twitter post, and are either too personal or too irrelevant to be worthy of a Facebook post. The trouble with livejournal, with the relationship I had with it and the specific account I was using and the people I knew through it - people who were fundamentally important to my formative years, but whose company, for whatever reason, I now no longer keep - was that there was too much backstory, too much history, too much of an attempt to keep a community feel. And so, feeling I had nothing left I wanted to say in that particular persona which I had invented c.2003 and tried, failingly, to maintain for five or six years during a period of life that is characterised by its ephemera and transience, I did the big emo and let it go.

Lately, though, I have missed a space to write that is neither poetry not fiction, that has no constraints on length or content, that is not automatically viewed by everyone whose aunt's cat I have ever met and yet can be accessed by anyone, known or unknown to me.

Welcome to the blogosphere.

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