I am nothing if not a 
creature of habit. In many ways this has its advantages. Things follow a fairly structured and preordained path, I generally know what I should be doing, when and how I should be doing it. Routine is comforting, it keeps me occupied and it gives structure to my otherwise feckless and directionless existence. It does however have its disadvantages. Some of these are obvious: that the routine may lull me into a rut from which I cannot escape, or that should someone decided that it’s high time to have me assassinated the strictly regimented framework of my life will make it a laughably easy thing to achieve. The greatest disadvantage I’ve found to it comes more from personal failing, the times where the routine has holes and gaps, places where it is incomplete. When the weekend finally rolls around and these holes are most abundant, it all tends to go to pieces. At no time is this more evident than it is on a Sunday afternoon.
Author Archives: The Rogue Verbumancer
About The Rogue Verbumancer
Sunday Syndrome
Entirely Justified
There are a great many things i
n life which irritate me. A lot of these are fairly common irritations which are shared by most sane and right thinking people: disingenuous politicians, rising prices, crappy television, wasps, youths. But on top of these I have quite a collection of irrational irritations. Things which you know shouldn’t bother about or even pay any attention to you, but nonetheless they get under your skin, leave you grinding your teeth and seething with a barely contained rage. I have on occasion pottered around a friend’s house meticulously straightening picture frames and spent a good few hours organising a cards (of both the collectible and standard playing variety) simply because they were in what I considered to be “the wrong order.” But perhaps the greatest of these irrational irritations is that of text alignment.
Out With the Old…
So this weekend was Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond Jubilee. Now that you’ve read this blog post’s title I can already sense some of you clenching your backsides. You’re thinking: “Oh fuck it’s going to be a massive rant against privilege and inequity. He’s going to bore us senseless with tirades about democracy and all those other republican wonders. Oh fuck, I’m not political, why am I here? I don’t want to read this.” Well you needn’t worry. I slated this blog post for writing about a fortnight ago. The confluence of these two things is nothing more than a coincidence. I’m here to write about something else entirely.
I recently experienced a bit of a domestic tragedy. One of those little blips in life which makes you hiss through your teeth and mutter things along the lines of “fiddlesticks” or a plain and hearty “bollocks.” These domestic tragedies are not truly sad or terrible, but they get in the way of the smooth and straightforward operation of one’s meat-vessel within one’s functional life-scape. To cut a long story short, my mouse stopped working.
Squeak?
June’s Pictonaut Challenge
So June has finally arrived. Despite the fact that I’ve been operating on British Summer Time since late March, June is, in my distorted world view at least, the first proper month of summer. I was all ready to launch it a vicious and scathing attack on summer. On how it’s hot, sticky and generally uncomfortable. A tirade about how as nice as a bit of sunshine is, excessive amounts cause me to wilt into and exhausted and non-functional jelly. The sort of hellish weather I had to live through over the last few days. But then, at the dawning of June, the hot weather disappeared. It was replaced with a chill and pervading overcast drizzle. This was much more to my liking, but somewhat put-paid to any plans for my original rant. It longer seemed quite so topical. Although I’ve never particularly enjoyed experiencing the heat of the oppressive British summers of recent years I have always enjoyed the aesthetics of the summer. Perhaps it’s one of those lingering relics of a childhood growing up in the rural north. Summer was a time when the grass always looked greener than it ever did at other times of the year, the sky was always bluer, every colour just seemed so much more vibrant, every hue a riot of almost neon proportions. The world always seemed so vivid. It was a world that through its existence prohibited melancholy and sadness. With these memories in mind I picked this picture for June’s Pictonaut Challenge: A Place in the Country.
Starwatcher
There may have been some of you who turned up here on Monday just after the striking of noon expecting a blog post. Some of you may even have been disappointed to see that there wasn’t one. Since we’re all friends here I’m going to be honest, I just couldn’t be bothered to stitch some words together and send a shoddy collection of thoughts shambling into the bright and burning light like a poorly constructed corpse-beast. Necromancy has after all, never really been my forte. Besides, you were going to be getting two blog posts at the end of the week. Three posts in one week seemed a little overkill. I spent much of last weekend and indeed Monday itself, elsewhere. I left the safe confines of the Fortress of Ineptitude (my house) and sallied forth (got a train) to a dark and foreboding place filled with evil and despair (Hampshire) to see my mentors in the ways of the arcane arts (my parents.) What followed was three days of traipsing around a variety of gardens and stately homes which, due to the weather, may as well have been on the surface of the sun. In those three short days my carefully cultivated nerd-pallor of pure alabaster white has been utterly destroyed. Now my exposed flesh has become the colour of orange leather. This is one of many reasons I tend to avoid the outdoors and the sinister privations of the malevolent day-star. On the subject of stars I suppose I should get down to the business of wrapping up May’s Pictonaut Challenge: Starwatcher.
An Ode to Hard Books
Life is never easy. It’s an ongoing battle, a 
struggle. It is cruel and it is cold. Life is hard. It is made ever harder by being filled with hard choices. Choices where the answer is not readily apparent, forever occluded by the uncertainty of the future. Alternatively, in rare cases, the answer is clear and obvious, but through its choosing opens you up to any number of hardships and unpleasant consequences. For me the hardest of choices comes every morning. It is the choice as to whether it’s worth getting out of bed. Should the day finally arrive when I decide that it isn’t, that is when I know that I have lost. It will be the day that I finally throw in the towel and surrender to a genetic predisposition toward sloth-like laziness. To be swallowed by my own crushing personal inertia, an unwillingness to move or do anything. The bottom of an energy well from which no amount of coercion can roust me. But until that day I keep getting up every morning, fuelled by an empire shatteringly unstoppable quantity of spite and a blind, unrelenting, stubbornness that would put most tectonic plates to shame. I do this because it is habit, for I am nothing if not a creature of it. But most importantly I do it because I know that nothing worth doing will ever be easy. If it is easy then it’s probably not worth doing. As it is with life, so it is with books.
Beaten to the Punch
Today is a good day for writing. 
The sun is streaming in through the back windows, across the open expanse of the kitchen and into the front-room. It makes my little cosy world feel spacious and clean. Fresh. A state that belies its true nature. The discarded plates can go unnoticed, the strewn flotsam of rubbish can wait till tomorrow, the strata of filth and grime is something which can be avoided. I’m drinking a big cup of organic white tea (middle-class represent!) out of a big, fat, pint mug. Times like these are one of only two times I can really write, the other being the grey place where afternoon and evening blur together. There is always however a problem with writing, the ever struggling battle for originality, the quest to produce something new and exciting. Naturally this isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The End
All things have a beginning 
and all things have an end. This is one of those inalienable facts of life, existence and creation. Ultimately everything in transitory, forever on a journey between these two markers. It’s a bit grim when you think about it. Depressing. I’ve been having a bit of a mope these last few days, one of those ennuis courting with malaise in a downward spiral of misery. I’m sure if it could be visualised it would look awfully pretty were it not for the fact that it makes me feel so downright awful. So forgive the somewhat maudlin tone on which I’ve began. Of all the bastards and traitors I have ever known my own brain is the greatest amongst them. But that is a matter for another time. This latest plumbing of the depths of my own self-absorbed mopery got me thinking about the aforementioned end of all things, specifically stories, tales, yarns and suchlike. Endings are fantastically important things, if they’re handled badly or poorly executed, then pretty much everything that has come before them is rendered ultimately pointless and irrevocably tainted.
May’s Pictonaut Challenge
So it’s May. The last month of spring. The last month before summer finally arrives and my world begins an inexorable slide into an unpleasant, Stygian heat. The rains of the last month have been a delightful salve to my soul. I like rain. It keeps me cool, it makes me feel clean, it reminds me of a better time. A time when it meant I wouldn’t be dragged outside to play football. May is one of those month’s which fills me with a slight and intangible dread, I’ve always felt that there’s something distinctly suspicious and untrustworthy about it. I’ve chosen not to take a cue for this month’s theme from the month itself, all that would lead to would be thinly veiled phallic symbolism. I’m not sure anyone would enjoy that. So once again I’ve delved into the depths of the Pictonaut image folder in search of something suitably inspiring.
Business as Usual
Business as usual? Ha! How ridiculous that sounds today. The last month has been anything but usual. The writing? It has not gone so well this month. Ordinarily I’ll bash out a couple of hundred words inside the first week, then it’ll sit untouched for a couple of weeks before finally being polished off about a week before the deadline. All of my writing is essentially an elaborately constructed illusion of organisation, determination and skill. It’s all really just a slap-dashed mess, like looking inside the casing of a gleaming, technological marvel only to discover it’s filled with elastic bands and gaffa-tape. At the time of writing my punt at Business as Usual remains unfinished. The usual plan fell to pieces. I was out this weekend, I didn’t get back home until noon on Sunday. I went on a strange and wonderful odyssey that has left me drained and dead and utterly bereft of the usual time I would write in. It’s all gone a bit pear-shaped, but as they say “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”
The Rogue Verbumancer 