I have always generally been my own worst enemy. A great many of my endeavours have been ruined or hampered by my own laziness, chronic inaction, fear or doubt. But generally that has been something I’ve been willing to live with. Such things are after all generally just an accepted fact of being human. But this weekend I found new and exciting ways to bring grief upon myself. For thus weekend I discovered that I must roam this mortal realm forever trapped inside a traitor.
Author Archives: The Rogue Verbumancer
About The Rogue Verbumancer
Treachery
February’s Pictonaut Challenge
January is dead. It’s corpse has been stripped of its clothes, jewellery, money and anything of even tenuous value. It now lies cooling in a shallow grave in the middle of the desert of time. That’s just how time roles. It takes you for everything you have and leaves you dead and forgotten. Time is the bastard’s bastard. Cheery today aren’t I? Things were looking up, things were looking good, but then last night dinner went a bit pear-shaped, though not literally, no pears were involved. The cheese sauce bubbled over, it was very messy, it delayed things, it was massively inconvenient. There were no words in any language living or dead that could adequately convey my profound and abiding sense of anger and sadness. It was, in essence, the human condition. These are the trials I face in my life and I am left the worse for it. I swear it was going to be all sunshine and lollipops, unicorns and gumdrop mountains, but now? Now it’s going to be all grim-dark misery and the palpable despair of life in a universe that is as cruel as it is cold. This month we’re going down the rabbit hole and treading where no man should ever set foot. This month we’re going to the Dead Places.
Plodding On
Down here in my neck of the woods the snow has finally decided to bugger off and leave us well alone. The British weather in its typical mercurial way has rebounded from the cold snap by swinging to heights of frankly terrifying mildness. Despite it being what I would term the depths of winter the temperature rose to an incredible 13 degrees Celsius, forcing me to forgo both jumper and hat. Even the gloves came off, my winter beard now feels entirely extraneous. This unexpected bloom of warmth fits rather nicely with my equally mercurial mood. At the start of the month I was not in the finest of fettles, but now the grim introspection has gone, although the existential dread remains. But I’m okay with that he’s a reasonably okay guy when you get to know him, bit misunderstood and maligned, but always does the washing up and takes his shoes off when he comes through the door. So January’s ending on something approaching a high. I remain gainfully employed, I’m not dead and I have a house with function heating. everything’s coming up rose. Though not literally, give it a few months though.
This Post is not About Snow
Although there is a fair dusting of it about. Believe me, it’s take every fibre of my being to restrain my natural English desire to talk about the weather. I mean look at it! There’s just so much of it. So much weather. Everywhere. Let us just accept that snow has occurred and as always, it has been a divisive issue. I come to you today to talk to you about another matter entirely. For this weekend I did something which could possibly be considered terminally inadvisable. I went onto the Book of Faces and I made a page for the blog. Because that’s what people apparently do these days.
Facebook cares not for the capitalisation of proper nouns.
Ass-backwards
Last week I was bemoaning my writing woes. How I felt like I was basically smashing my head against a brick wall. It was less than fun. It’s not a nice feeling, sitting down to do something and then eight hours later discovering that you’ve managed to achieve the sum total of naff and all. So I came up with the cunning and ingenious scheme of breaking the 5,000+ word novella I’ve promised down into ten tasty, bite-sized chunks of 500 words a piece. I’m now sitting pretty at just a few hundred shy of 2,000. So I’d say it’s been a moderate success, even if only 2 of the 10 slated sections have been done. I’d like to attribute this moderate success to my ingenious plan, but in truth I think it’s because of something else entirely. I think it’s due to the fact that my life is profoundly ass-backwards. That is to say, ludicrously disordered and showing an arrangement grotesquely counter to the conventional.
Breaking it Down
It hasn’t been a good couple of months for me creatively. Which is typical of life really, the one time of the year where I’m more or less getting snowed under with things to write and I more or less lose the ability to do so. I’ve spent literally days staring at my computer screen, trying to bring myself to do some proper writing. (Blogging isn’t really proper writing, it’s basically the writing equivalent of standing in the street shouting at passers-by.) And in that time I have achieved more or less nothing. This isn’t a case of writer’s block, writer’s block I can deal with, that’s just the problem of not knowing what to write. The situation I find myself in is not being able to bring myself to write. Just staring at the empty or half written pages fills me with a profound sense of ennui. That hopeless feeling of “honestly why do I even bother?” It’s hardly an ideal, and as much fun as cranking the stereo volume up to 11, curling up on the sofa with a cup of tea and hoping that the world spontaneously catches fire, it doesn’t really achieve anything.
Photo by Chris van Ryn
January’s Pictonaut Challenge
January the first, two thousand and fucking thirteen. Somehow, against all conceivable odds mankind has yet again managed to drag itself through a whole 365 and a quarter days without wiping itself from existence. If that alone is not cause for some small measure of celebration then I sure as hell don’t know what is.
While you all rise, sleepy and rheumy-eyed from the fug of a hangover for which you have no one else to blame but yourself, I am not with you. By means of ancient and secret manipulations of technology and time itself, I, your benevolent and gracious blogger, am still mired in the last plaintive death rattles of two thousand and fucking twelve. I’m drinking single malt whisky from a cracked glass tumbler that I bought from Marks and Spencer’s 5 years ago. I’m thinking, wondering and generally pondering upon the nature of things. I am, as ever, alone. My sole company is my own thoughts, both my best friend and my greatest nemesis. By rights I have probably had too much to drink, and so do I sidle down into the dark and foetid recesses of sentience while gazing into a fluid the colour of gold. There’s probably a metaphor for avarice and rampant consumerism in there somewhere.
As with the end of any year I find myself looking backward to what has gone before, it’s only natural at such a calendrical milestone. A stock check if you will. In my case I find, once again, that some one’s smashed the big glass window at the front of the store, piled half the stock into a rusty old shopping trolley and done a runner. There are so many things that remain unfinished and incomplete. It’s the nature of things, nothing is ever quite finished, something always slips through the cracks. There’s things which you just never quite manage to sort out completely and/or to the best of your abilities. Things which you’ve left unsaid or opportunities that have been left untaken, things which leave a big yawning hole somewhere deep inside, a hole that no matter how hard you try, you just can’t quite manage to fill. It’s always like this, this is how all years end. Northing is ever finished, not even at the very end of all things, that is just a stop, a big black line under everything. It’s not a finish; finish implies completion. No matter how hard we try, no matter how much we gird ourselves, put on our war-face, arm ourselves to the teeth and threaten to fuck life up something proper there will always be things left undone. All years are a war, the months are campaigns, the weeks are battles and the days are bloody skirmishes. We are nought if not the sum of our mistakes, alloyed with our regrets.
What matters is how a man (or a woman, or non-gender specific entity. Let’s not discriminate here) weathers the assault of the years, how they traverse all the myriad of pitfalls, spike traps, trip-wires and shit-flinging monkeys that life puts in front of us. How against all the odds, no matter how battered and broken we get, we manage to muster up enough strength to raise one single, solitary middle-finger to the world. What matters is how we manage to keep ourselves going, how we keep Plodding On.
Plodding On
Leviathan
Another month down and another 1,000 or so words churned out for the faceless masses of the internet to ignore. As ever the end of the year has been a hectic time for me. The jaunt back to the northern homeland always takes a massive chunk of time out of the schedule and as ever travel over any appreciable distance usually leaves me feeling like someone’s stuck a hosepipe into my soul and siphoned my life essence off into a jerry-can. Add to that all the other writing work I’ve gone and committed myself too: two pieces of anthology work, a short screen-play, a guest blog post, the pictonaut challenge, a new blog project, all my weekly blog posts and then a few odds and ends here and there. Needless to say I’ve been getting a little snowed under. For a little while it even looked like I might not get anything written at all as I sank further and further into a pit of my own ennui. But then I pulled my finger out and managed to crank out about 700 words in a night and all was well. So to business, Leviathan.
Merry Blogmas
T’was the night before blogmas and I 
was back home,
All the way up north where mammoths still roam,
Where it’s sure to be cold with the possibility of snow,
Let’s hope it doesn’t jam up the roads, but we’ll see how we go.
I’m visiting my family and there’s sure to be war,
Shouting and fighting and maybe a lot more,
I’d like to think otherwise, but I know that I’m right,
I’m just vainly hoping I’ll make it through the night.
“But how am I reading this? Is this post here by chance?”
No it is not my friend, it was scheduled in advance,
So while I knuckle under and try my best to stay alive,
To you a very, Merry Blogmas and all that associated seasonal jive. Continue reading
An Unexpected Journey
On Wednesday I got a yearning. A yearning to be somewhere other; a yearning to get the world under my feet and to keep walking until I ran out of road. To get out into the country and lose myself in a place where there was no one else. Even at the height of noon, the sun was a wan and sickly thing, barely punching through the swaddling of fog and ice, the temperature never rising above zero. It was the kind of weather which leeches the colour out of everything and leaves the world a perfect glass twin of itself; another, more perfect world; a world where hedges are draped with a filigree with frozen cobwebs; were fat wood pigeons and collared doves peck at frozen earth and shaggy coated horses nibble at the knife blades of frost coated grass.
