dave bushe dot net

I’ve got nothing to do, but hang around and get screwed up on you

1:04 pm Thursday, 25 September, 2008

According to my sister, she and my mother have dismissed what I write here as (and I quote) drunken ramblings for the most part. Now I shall not try in anyway to convince you that I’ve written every word here sober, that would be a lie. But still, it’s nice to have so much just dismissed out of hand.

This is, I think, yet another reason to kill off this blog and take it back to something private where I can actually try and work out issues without having to worry about the consequences of readers.

Working with this, I give you a pretty significant posting. I wrote this going on a month ago when I was in Melbourne. I wasn’t sober when I started tpying but I was by no means drunk. I’ve been wary of posting this and I’m still not convinced. I don’t think I should hit publish but I’ve given up. This is unedited.

A month ago(ish)

So now I have a problem. I’ve been thinking about it for a few days now. It’s that age old problem for bloggers of how much to blog.

Since the early 90s I’ve kept a diary in some form or another. Unfortunately it was kind of on and off and while it was mainly on, there are some gaps. Pre blogging I kept it on paper. My old room in my parents still bears the scars where I installed a padlock and chain to stop nosey parents and sisters from snooping. Of course they would have (perhaps even did?) find nothing of major interest, anything that started to get remotely incriminating ended up being written in code and a code that only really made sense to the teenage me.

Sometime in early 2001 I moved to a Blogger site after being introduced to the concept by various people (Dave, Scally, Meg and mainly Iain) that I worked with at the time. I started off aiming for a small quiet anonymous corner of the web. However in a slight misunderstanding said Iain promptly linked to me (thanks Iain!) and that very day I was getting comments in work. This was a bad thing!!

So I killed that blog off and for some reason, which I’m still pissed off about, I don’t have the archives for it. It’s one of the big gaps in my collection.

However I was hooked and I was not going back to pen and paper. So BlogSpot it was and I blogged there for a couple of years with only a few trusted friends getting the link. I was somewhat shocked one day to find my then boss (that would be you Mr White and you never did manage to fire me you fucker!) commenting on an entry. So much for being anonymous. Then again the company was an incestuous little place and secrets did not last for very long…

So I figured at this point what the fuck. I wanted to have more control then BlogSpot offered and I switched to hosting on my own domain. I was less concerned about running into issues in work. Things were going well and I wasn’t going to air any grievances against my boss when I knew he was reading (that would be you again Mr White, not that I had any grievances of course… though I bet I still have something written from that LOTR debacle that never hit the web!!) and this continued for a long time.

So the years passed and I was blogging away. I had signed up to a Live Journal account because I had a significant number of friends who were blogging there and I wanted to read and follow them easily. For a while I’d cross-post between my blog and my LiveJournal but LJ was really just for reading. Then things changed in work and I was pretty unhappy and I didn’t feel comfortable writing so publicly about things that were going on and I began what would be a gradual switch to LJ for one simple reason. Friend Lock. I’ve said before and I’ll say again, within the internet there is a massive unexplored area around controlling who views your content. LJ filled that niche for me for a good while and I have several years of private postings archived there.

So it switched around, I would post to LJ and if it was something that I was comfortable posting knowing that so many people I worked with (at varying levels around me) could read, then it would get put onto my domain too. And so this has been around in a few incarnations for years now.

Then I moved to the US and while I was still posting on LJ, I was more using private and filtered posts to deal with issues I ran into in that process but I was moving a lot general posts back to this domain. In a way it was quite simple. I had a lot more to talk about. I can not accuse my 12 months there of not being interesting!

And then sometime when I was in the US, probably towards the end, I decided fuck it. I’d just drop LJ and post here. So I did, almost anything I post here gets cross-posted automatically to LJ but I’ve not bothered with anything filtered there in a long time (outside of odd drinks to the London folks, it was often a good social contact).

Now when I was no longer working and when I was preparing to go and travel I decided that I would no longer give a fuck who reads whatever drivel I post up here. So I, for the first time, linked to the blog through various profiles I have online (mainly Flickr and Facebook these days) and so word started to get around and I soon knew for a fact (as oppose to my long, possibly paranoid) suspicions) that family and friends were reading along.

And it’s all good.

Or is it?

There is a paradox here for me. I cannot wrap my head around it. The idea of transcribing and posting any of my old diaries horrifies me. Okay, not entirely. I sometimes for my own amusement (and indeed amazement) do a quick rundown of a day in each year that I have a diary handy for and I very much enjoy that. Of course some (lots) of it is simply stupid teenage stuff that has no place in this modern world and so wouldn’t really get posted.

However I simply cannot find any enthusiasm to sit and to type purely for myself. I’ll post this tomorrow (or so) but I’m still not going to have sit down and typed about the things which have brought all of this thinking on because it’s not something that I’m going to post to the web. There are some exceptions of course and probably to my mind some notable exceptions but unless I intend to post something, I don’t write it up.

It’s really odd. Now before anyone (including me) jumps in with shouts of exhibitionism, I’m not convinced that was the case. When I was blogging anonymously and indeed when I was reading my stats under my own name and having no readers, that meant nothing to me. It didn’t matter that no-one knew who I was or that no-one was reading, it just mattered that I had pressed that Publish button.

Like I say, it’s odd. I guess this is the point to jump in with shouts of exhibitionism and I guess I don’t really have anything to say against that. It doesn’t make sense to me so I don’t know how to even start to try and explain it to you.

So that brings me to some of my thinking at the moment. I have not blogged a huge amount lately. There are a few reasons behind that. First and actually here’s a good one, I’m somewhat afraid that I’m Depressed and apathetic. I’ve certainly been both in general terms recently but I’ve been feeling it a bit more than that (capital “D” scarily reminiscent of some of those “good old” working days). So kind of leading from that is second, nothing much has been happening.

But now I type that and I know it’s not true. I’d like to tell you that I had a life-changing experience in recent weeks but that would be just hyperbole (I hope you are impressed by my use of big words today) but I possibly could make a case for it. There have been events recently that will stay with me for the rest of my life and I simply cannot shrug my shoulders and move on from.

And there is the problem. I need to type these out. There is a quote which adorned the side of my blog and then my LJ for years and years and years and it has to my mind defined my diary keeping. It is

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Cecil Day-Lewis

I have throughout the years worked through any number of problems small to large, professional to personal, minor to major by simply sitting down and typing and through that understanding what I think. Sounds simple but sometimes it’s really not and the act of sitting and having my fingers fly over the keys and seeing the words that I’m thinking makes things work better for me.

There have been a number of times where I’ve had problems in work, tricky situations to handle. Everyone has them. Sometimes I’m good at them, sometimes I’m not. When I’m at my very best with them is when I’ve taken that step back and sat down and worked through the problem “on paper”, typically in an email. And sometimes when it’s done and I’ve written this perfect email in response, then I’m through. The problem gets solved and I’ve done well and I’m proud of myself but not for the fact that I solved the problem (most of the type of problems I dealt with were easily solvable) but because of how I solved them and how I worked with the words that would become the emails. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to do that with every email I sent otherwise I’d have been running the company by now. Anyway sometimes, even often, writing things out after the fact help me to understand them.

And so this is where I am. I have things that I need to write down to help me understand but they are not things that I can write down and then click publish for and so I’m less inclined to write them down. Bah.

There’s one option, write with the intent to post. That’s how I started this. I’m straying a bit into “I’m not sure I want to post this territory” but I suspect it’ll make it through. Sharp readers may have noticed there is a chunk missing from the last post. When I was writing it I was slowly realising that it wasn’t going to be posted and so today when I came to past everything in from my desktop, I clipped a bit. It wasn’t significant to the entry (hah) and I think it’s something that I will come back to but as of now, I don’t understand. So it stays locally.

Before I sat down and typed that last entry out I had a plan. It was to be my last entry. I had decided that I was going to stop blogging or at least tell you that I was going to stop. I still may or I may just cut down (even more). I felt like I should stop. I know I’ve been down as of late and I know that I have some things to work out in my head and combined this makes me think that I should just hold fire.

But I strongly suspect (I almost want to say know) that if I do that, then it’ll stop me writing. I’ll end up leaving the rest of trip unwritten and I’d hate that.

I have tried pen and paper. Seriously.

I cannot.

That’s not entirely true but it’s close enough. When I was in Egypt I had a revelation. It was one of those rare sit up in my chair moments. A moment of perfect clarity and I wrote it down. At this point when I say wrote I mean pen and paper. I had not brought my laptop but I had pen and paper just in case I wanted to write. It was a little test of myself, I wanted to see if I could actually write. I could not.

If needs must, I can manage about a page before my hand hurts too much to continue. That’s shocking. In school I use to be able to write three or four pages of foolscap before even noticing any discomfort and usually get up to seven or eight before having to take a break. I use to love it too. But now, I simply cannot write. I have pen and paper with me, in fact I have the same book I took to Egypt.

I have maybe ten pages used in it,and there’s one page that was filled and moved onto the second page and that’s the one. I wrote that because I had to. I understood instantly but it wasn’t until I had the words in front of me that I understood.

I tried writing again early in this trip. When I had secure space to leave my laptop while trekking in the hills of Vietnam (man those were good days, unbelievably good days), I had pen and paper. It didn’t work. I had things to say but I simply didn’t have the ability left to write them by hand.

And so here I am. Here, perhaps, you are too. If so, well done! With luck I shall figure this out and you won’t notice any difference in your reading however if you do then perhaps with a little more luck you’ll understand.

02.09 Melbourne Australia Thursday August 28th.