Post 466 - 8 Years.

Blogs. A good blog is like a good friendship. Sometimes with even your closest friends you just lose touch, and you can go weeks, months, years without seeing each other. But when you do, you fall back into conversation as naturally as though you saw each other yesterday (even if it is still just finding new ways of calling each other gay). This blog is a similar thing for me. 8 years now I’ve been scribbling down my thoughts on this blog (or others very like it), and it can be a long long time between posts. But even now when admitting to having a personal blog carries a stigma similar to that of beating down a primary school door dressed as Gary Glitter, I like to fire this bad boy up from time to time and inflict my thoughts on a largely uninterested world. Sometimes I feel guilty when I don’t write in my blog for a while. Like it’s just sitting their patiently in its little corner of cyberspace, sad because I haven’t bothered to write in it for 6 months, feeling hurt, tearful and wondering what it did to deserve being abandoned. Though I usually remember that it’s just a website and it doesn’t have feelings, and that usually gets rid of the guilt. But still, when I log onto blogger and see its gaudy blue and orange homepage, it’s like it welcomes me back with open arms. “Come in, sit down, where have you been, great to have you back!” I find writing therapeutic, it gives me the chance to use what I consider to be one of my few skills, and I get lost in it when I get started. I’m under no delusions that I’m the next Ernest Hemingway or Oscar Wilde, some master of the noble art whose every word will be celebrated for hundreds of years after his death. I will never be a professional writer of any capacity – unless someone heavily under the influence of some psychotropic drugs likes and signs up my tawdry sit-com idea which I’ve never actually committed to paper yet (it’s set in a record shop and features a lot of toilet humour and some lesbian sex). In fact, with work, family, girlfriend, bands, hobbies, socialising and an Xbox 360 all taking up the vast majority of my time, writing has been shuffled down to something I do only on a very rare occasion – sort of like cleaning the bath, or cutting my toenails – although I do get a bit more enjoyment out of the writing.

My other problem with keeping a blog afloat, or even having a crack at any other form of creative writing, has always been finding something to write about. It’s easy to start scribbling furiously when you’ve got a topic – it’s coming up with the topic that always leaves me staring at a blank page. Whether it be my lack of imagination (which my dad, the writer, pointed out to me when I told him I’d enrolled in a writing course at Aberdeen College at age 18, not realising how much he hurt my feelings in the process), or just lack of anything remotely interesting happening on a day to day basis to provide inspiration, I’ve just never been very good at it. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop. Even if it’s only once every 6 months, and even if it’s only me that ever reads it. I like going back through my old posts and re-reading them. It brings back some great memories and it’s fun to remember to get a reminder of what I used to do, say and think in 2003 in my very own words (though I could probably pick any date at random in 2003 and it would say “missed uni. Masturbated. Worried about money. Played pool in the evening”. Or at least it does in the old version of Elwood’s Odyssey I still have. You people get the neutered PG version that just says “missed uni. Worried about money. Played pool in the evening”).

So with all that said, I’m not going to make the same old promise that I’ve made so many times before – “Elwood’s back baby!” – we all know how that turns out. 5 half-hearted blogs and then back to silence. No. I’ll just say it’s been fun writing this, and I hope it’s just as fun when I’m reading it in 2017 - provided the internet still exists then and hasn’t collapsed under the weight of all the porn and self-obsessed blogs.

Until next time

Lucky / Elwood

Song currently stuck in my head – “Christmas Don’t Be Late” by Alvin & The Chipmunks
ireallyhatelucky@googlemail.com