The Big Questions
You know all those Big Questions? What is the purpose of life? Why were we put on this planet? What is reality?* What is the future of the universe?** All those huge searingly intense questions that philosophers*** have exercised their scintillating intellects over for hundreds of years?
They’re barking up the wrong hypothesis. The real question of the, you should forgive the term, ages, is WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?
I know where some of it goes. The staring at a blank screen/piece of paper with fingers poised quiveringly† over a keyboard or clenched white-knuckled on a pen†† engulfs surprising amounts of time. You go into a kind of negative zone and trance out. And when you come back, lo, hours have passed. And the frelling page is still frelling blank.††† Also, in this household, a lot of time goes to organic from-scratch food prep‡ and trying to keep up with a German Wire Haired Pointer.‡‡
But there is definitely time that whistles away through the cracks in my life, and possibly through cracks in reality,‡‡‡ and is never heard from again, let alone productively made use of. Some of that time is the time I’d be writing this blog.§ If I had it. The time.
Oh, right, I’m supposed to be telling you about the new book I’m writing. I seem to have got distracted, which proclivity, the Distraction Proclivity,§§ I also want to write about. But probably not tonight.
I know. I’m supposed to be telling you about the new book I’m writing.§§§ I am a cow. I am a highly distractible cow. Mooo. Another one of those things that doesn’t change.
Onward next post.§§§§
* * *
* Or, as one of my well-worn, beat-up sweatshirts has it, Who am I? Why am I here? What is my fate? Where are the cookies?^
^ Sadly I don’t eat cookies any more, or not anything that anyone else would recognise as cookies. I’ve made reference to my health going kind of kablooey after Peter died+ and as a hope for a way forward I went all drastic on what I eat. I’ve had monster allergies all my blasted life, and stress makes my gut explode, and eating politely does help. I really have no vices left++, which is kind of boring, but at this age, ‘bouncing back’ isn’t really a thing, and if you find something that works, you keep doing it. Hey, I’m still functional enough, for example, that I am more or less keeping up with the resident German Wire Haired Pointer, but even more or less, when applied to a GWHP, counts. But one of those drastic food manoeuvres is that I gave up sugar-all sweeteners, honey, molasses, the lot, barring something to wake the yeast up when I make bread, except that no one would recognise what I call bread any more either, since it’s not merely gluten- but grain-free. To the extent there’s a purpose to this latest extended footnote digression+++ it’s that I’m thinking about some of the things I did on the old blog, and one of them was sharing recipes. Not a plausible option now. Although, dunno, revelation of what I consider food might be a kind of modern ecofreak horror story? HP Lovecraft for the 21st century?++++
I still wear the sweatshirt.
+ ME doesn’t like grief or any of the attendant head states. Its purpose is to make you miserable, and it takes it as a personal affront if anything else tries to challenge its supremacy in this matter. Trust me, you do not want to live with a case of affronted ME.
++ 100% organic chocolate is not a vice. It’s good for you. Look it up.
+++ do I need a purpose? Have I ever acknowledged needing a purpose?
++++ without the racism and the misogyny
** And how many ways can us humans screw it up?
*** Who historically have been male, and have had things like wives and staff, or at least helpful friends, who, recognising that men have their minds on higher things, rally round with the life-support stuff, like casseroles and firewood. And, of course, let us remember charming and precious Cyril Connolly’s^ ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ Philosophers certainly don’t waste their intellects raising children. There’s a bit of a conundrum here however. If somebody didn’t raise the next generation-if someone hadn’t raised the philosophers-there would pretty soon be no humans around to screw up the planet. Possibly even soon enough to save the glaciers and the polar bears. WORTH CONSIDERING.
I was just looking up ‘philosophy’ and was slapped in the face, as by a wet fish, with this quotation: ‘The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.’ Ludwig Wittgentiresomegitstein. SPARE. ME.^^
^ Anybody still read Cyril Connolly? I didn’t think so.
^^ Also, of course, I write fantasy. I depend on the bewitchment of intelligence by means of language.
† Spellcheck just changed this to ‘quaveringly.’ GO. AWAY. At least I caught the freller this time. I’m blaming spellcheck for ‘vocal chords’ in my last post, which fortunately some kindly and sharp-eyed soprano quickly pointed out, so only the early arrivers at the resuscitated+ blog will have seen this before I fixed it. IT WAS SPELLCHECK. REALLY.++ Also that I can’t proofread my own stuff, and it’s amazing I don’t make more really embarrassing errors.
+ We’re TRYING for resuscitated
++ No, it won’t have corrected cords to chords. It probably corrected crods to chords. Or doohickey flimflam to chords.
†† fountain pen. I do have my limits, these are fountain pens that take cartridges, not the kind that you have to refill yourself, getting ink all over the entire town and rendering at least one German Wire Haired Pointer unrecognisable.+ But still. Fountain pens. Which, even with cartridges++, tend to be a trifle capricious, so you can waste a little more time trying to get the nib back in a mood to, you know, write, as in make marks on a page. This would not be an issue of course if I did more writing in the first place, and less staring.
+ Hey! That looks like a German Wire Haired Pointer! Except it’s black as ink!
++ & I can create a surprising amount of black-spotted disorder even with a cartridge. It is possible to insert a cartridge wrong. In fact this is surprisingly easy. I have the mottled fingers to prove it. I like to think this makes me look devoted to my art, but I think it probably only looks like someone dumb enough to put a fresh ink cartridge in her pen wrong.
††† And the nib of your fountain pen has frozen up again.
‡ I tend to say, either self-deprecatingly or rolling-eyed frustratedly, that I don’t really cook, but golly do I do food prep. This is not strictly true-see above, about bread and cookie equivalents-but organic from-scratch does take YONKS AND YONKS of time.
‡‡ On bad days, all that happens in this six-legged family is food, hurtling and staring at a blank page. And probably reading/pretending to read a few chapters of a murder mystery to fill in the hours when I have no brain and no energy.
‡‡‡ Although my life and reality have very little to do with each other. Possibly the one thing they have in common is a propensity for cracks.
§ Yes we COULD get into a discussion of whether or not blog-writing counts as ‘productive’. Let’s not.
§§ including the Footnote Proclivity
§§§ Is there an echo in here?
§§§§ Keep thinking ‘resuscitated.’
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