Wednesday 30 January 2013

Sguiggle squiggle smash

When you're writing a blog, and you have no idea what's about to emerge from your fingertips, there can be some twinges of nerves. Perhaps it's not going to work this time? Perhaps you've used up your limited stock of creativity and are now a walking, talking waste of space? Maybe you've done too much mathematics? It's nerve-inducing. In these cases you do, as I am doing now, a little exercise and just type.

'How are you doing today?', 'That's a nice hat.', 'Are you glad to not be in New York?' and 'My head is too wide, please bring one with a bigger hole.' are all perfectly serviceable comments and questions for small talk and even general shopping but are they good content for a blog? What is 'good'? For information on this question, or no information at all, I refer you to the 'Complete Prose' of Woody Allen, one of my all time favourite books. It has also been a major inspiration to parts of my writing and work. Woody Allen is one of the most divisive comedic figures you can possibly imagine. By turns hilarious and incomprehensible it's hard to find material of his which is indisputably funny, and the 'Complete Prose' is definitely one of those. I refer you to 'What if the Impressionists were dentists?' and leave it at that.

Looming out at Aberystwyth from my office window, requiring as it does some dangerous acrobatics and cranking of the neck on the fourth floor, it is beginning to seem real that I'm back and maybe even will be successful in some endeavours. This is alarming. Even now clouds of self-sabotage are amassing on the horizon, vying to bring me back down to Earth. Will this downfall take the form of the dreaded Papanastasiou Regularisation? I hope not. Will the LLB condition finally break all my work down to its elementary constituents and blow it out to the seas? It's a terrible thought. Might a bubble function erupt from the firmament of FreeFEM++ and sweep me away into the gloom of mediocrity? It's possible.

Putting aside all the doubts of madness, mathematics, and giant space faring alien lemons, things are finally working.

<Waits for piano to fall>

<Nothing>

It can't last. The hideous lambasting of Heinz on Film Bin will come back to haunt me. Five kinds of torment will shriek down when organising Internet for the new flat. My mouse mat will turn out to be defective and made of cheese! And 'Night Trials' will never come to an end but continue on as an endless shlock science fiction serial. Images of 50s horror hostess Vampira will haunt me despite her looking kind of silly and not scary at all. Doom!

Oooh, I should write another 'Night Trials'. Good idea. That's the thing to take from this post. Well, that and the fact that it's really not that hard to write a few paragraphs and post it in the modern age. Well done, Internet!

Oliver.

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