Begin and begin again

And so, cowed, eyes to the floor, shuffling back in ungainly novelty Christmas slippers, I blog once more. It's been a while since I last had the urge to commit any thoughts, anywhere at all really, let alone online. I started this blog as an attempt to poke myself into productivity and perhaps to give me a better understanding of my own, deeply unhelpful subconscious. But it didn't quite work like that. Distractions appeared, waving with shiny excitement for me to come and play. Xbox, weed, and arrival of my housemate Anna ensured that there was always something else to do, something more easy to commit to.

Left to its own devices, my brain cannibalises itself with criticism and insults. I look in the mirror and see a fat, unemployable cunt with no future, and stare blankly into eyes that were once happy. I don't think this is a particularly new thing, I've always seen the hurdles rather than the finishing line, giving up at things before I've even got started. But is the answer not to look in the mirror, to ignore your problems and muddle on? Of course not, if I carry on doing that before I know it I'll be 30, bitter and alone. So I'll write, and I'll earn a living, and I'll leave that miserable bastard of a subconscious behind.

One of the reasons I stopped doing this was because I thought no one at all was reading it, that I was just solipsistically whining to an empty space. But then, on new years, a strange chap called Ryan, in his quaintly aggressive way, said he'd been reading my blog in the past and that he was a little disappointed that it had ground to a halt. He's a charming man, and had recently been bitten in the face by a dog. This came as a surprise and an encouragement, and showed me that even if only one person is reading, no matter how foolish and incomprehensible he is, that's more than enough. So thank you Ryan, you may have saved my life. He hasn't, and that's an overly dramatic thing to say about a drunken conversation, but I felt this paragraph was lacking pep and so I decided to take some artistic licence.

What is true and not an exaggeration is that since Christmas I've lost 7 lbs and am tantalisingly close to dipping under the 15 stone barrier for the first time since I was a teenager. And, I've got a shift coming up at the Doncaster Free Press, a proper, actual newspaper read by genuine people with their fingers and hands. Though it is Doncaster so maybe not the usual quota of fingers, but it's a bloody start, right? It's an opportunity I have to grasp, like any good murderer with tell you, with both hands and not let go. Even if it's only a very short opportunity, it's in the profession I've chosen and not as part of some debilitating, mundane temporary assignment from a job agency.

So here's to new starts and positivity, yeah? Yeah!