Faced with writing a week of Blog entries today, it made me weight up the pros and cons of doing this at all. Because I’ve lost my computer, my laptop computer, I can’t write Pathetic Lot when away from home and therefore even a short trip away leads to backlog of about 6,000 words.
It would be lovely if I wasn’t so anal and autistic as to be able to let a few days go, but I have a nerd collector brain, and everything needs to be complete. I know for a fact that if I missed a single day, I would completely loose faith in the whole thing and would stop immediately. It’s wrong, isn’t it? I can’t believe the readership is as high as it is, because even I don’t find it entertaining half the time and it’s all about me, but I don’t for a second think that anyone would particularly miss it if I stopped, but there is no chance of that because of my obsessive nature.
But bearing in mind it will have to stop one day, in theory, I know I could only stop clean on an August the 2nd, to make another complete year. Is this an illness or is it common? So at the very least there’s going to be another 10 months of this nonsense and if I’m going to be as busy as I hope, that’s just a real pain. The other option is to stop after exactly 1,000 days, which I suppose would be about 2.7 years. And seeing as I write about 1,000 words a day, I’d quite like it to work out as exactly 1,000 words a day on average, so exactly one million words in all, and purposefully construct the final few months so that it meets this target. I am insane.
Not that I’m being down about it, Pathetic Lot has given me loads of ideas, but I wish it didn’t take up so much of my time that should be spent on proper projects.
I suppose in three years time when I look back at it, I’ll be glad I kept it up, and I’ll probably have a lot of stuff to draw on for stand-up work and scripts and what have you, but if I begin to think how much time I’ve wasted doing it, I’ll break out in a cold sweat and probably cry.
It would also be a relief if I could just write really short entries for days that I can’t really remember much about, or in which very little occurred, but I think if one entry was only about 100 words, I wouldn’t consider it a proper entry and therefore give up on the whole thing in exactly the same way as would had I missed a day entirely. So I am trapped into coming up with 1,000 words a day no matter how much time this wastes, or how little there is to report on. It is a prison sentence, but a prison sentence of the most banal kind, and entirely of my own making.
The other thing is that I don’t really find it hard to natter away for 1,000 words about nothing, as I’m doing here, so it’s not even that I’ve conquered some massive challenge. It would be a challenge if every entry had to be funny, or contain stuff that could transfer to stand-up, but as you know this is rarely the case, and so I’m just treading water for half an hour a day.
It’s good when it’s up to date, and I just have to write about something that happened the day before when I sit down at my computer in the morning, but on days like today I have to put several hours aside, then get tired doing it, then get annoyed that I’ve not achieved anything, and then try and reschedule deadlines because, and how’s this for an excuse to people, ‘I was writing my diary’.
As you know, the person who inspired this project in the first place is the comedian Richard Herring, who has written his Warming Up Blog for almost four years without a day missed. At the start of this year he went through his resolutions and told his massive readership that Warming Up might stop being daily, for precisely the reasons I have outlined above, that it’s too time consuming. Richard has not missed a day so far this year. This is the problem, you have to obsessively do it.
Saying “I wrote a diary, every day, for five years� sounds impressive. Saying “I wrote a diary, every day, for five years, except a couple of days one February because I couldn’t be arsed� sounds very less impressive.
So what happened today anyway? Wrote this. Went for cocktails at Room on Castle Street. Jasmine the barmaid served me a fantastic Mai Tai, the classic Tiki drink. I’ve never known a Tiki drink made so well outside of a Tiki bar. I told her that I’ve long harboured plans for a Tiki bar in Liverpool, and she, like everyone who’s Tiki-savvy, thinks it’s a tip-top idea. God, it would be a hit.
When I got home I downloaded a mini-golf game onto my iPod. I started to play it and to my amazement and untold joy… it’s only bloody Tiki themed, isn’t it?! It’s set in this weird Tiki land, and when you play it listening though ear phones, you’re treated to authentic exotica sounds too! It’s amazing! I love it!
And that friends, was the highlight of my day.
941 words…. Should I go right up to 1,000?
Nah, I’m breaking free from this spell. I’m sticking my finger up at the Blog Gods and not meeting my 1,000 word brief today. I am fine with that. It’s cool. It is. Really.
Although I might have to make it up tomorrow and write a few extra words to keep the average up? Would that make it okay?
Oh, 1009 words now.
I am sick.
1015.
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derek in ottawa, canada wrote...
There are worse things you could do with your time than write this blog. Imagine if you spent an equivalent amount of time each day watching the shopping channel. After a year you would have nothing to show for your efforts except for a bunch of exercise equipment and some quirky kitchen appliances.
This blog makes me want to go watch stand-up comedy, visit Liverpool, experience a tiki-bar, shop at Spar, ride a train and upgrade to first class, go on a canal boat, try listening to Morrisey, and all sorts of other things that I never would have thought of. It also causes to me to say things are "ace" and overuse the word "idiot".
I really enjoy it, and I look forward to it each day when it pops up in my RSS feed.
I know this is part of the Echo website, so you might be limited in what you can do, but maybe you should consider putting some Google Adsense advertisements on the sidebars (or something like that) so that you could get paid a few cents every time someone reads your blog. It might cheapen it for you, or make you feel shallow and dirty, but it might make the exercise more rewarding to know that you were being paid.
Posted by: derek in ottawa, canada | September 28, 2006 9:32 PM