Eccentric Flower:201004/Less and Less

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: As soon as I published this entry my mood improved.

But I still am not sure a lot of my thoughts recently need to be shared with the world in any way.

One of the hardest-learned lessons in my life is that discretion is the better part of valor. I don't say I have mastered it even now. But, even with my thick skull, if you hit me with the same bat often enough, I begin to take notice.

My past history, as long-term and even short-term readers will be aware, is that of firing off some ill-intended set of words and then later repenting or retracting them or both. Actually I retract very little and I repent quite a lot.

These days I am mostly avoiding a step and censoring in advance, rather than retroactively.

I'm not writing about all the things that annoy me, most of which are trivial and ridiculous, because you will either agree with me silently, which is no fun, or disagree with me silently, which is also no fun and makes me worry, or disagree with me publicly in a way that makes me think you were taking it personally and are actually offended and then I regret having had my opinions in the first place.

I'm not writing fiction, because the cost/benefit statement does not work out in my favor.

I'm not writing about my observations of the world, because see "things that annoy me." I have very few positive observations of the world at this time.

I'm not interested anymore in annoying anyone or pissing them off because it always misfires. The people I want to piss off never see it; and the people I am desperately afraid of annoying or offending always see it and get annoyed or offended, and then I have a fit of panic.

I'm not doing big infodumps on any topic (e.g. like past efforts on booze, Chinese, toilets, holidays, etc) because the profit/loss statement there's kinda grim too.

I don't write about pop culture because I barely experience any these days.

I'm getting old and I'm retreating inwards as I go - and I was never all that outgoing in the first place. I realize this isn't necessarily a good thing - but ...

It just seems to me like the less said, the better. One thing about Twitter is that I can spout there all day because it is ephemeral and many of you ignore it. It's too short and too transient to get me into any trouble. And it carries less ego shock: When no one goes to anything I link or reads anything I say, I can tell myself that's because, unlike me, they don't constantly keep up to date on their entire Twitter feed, so if it's three days after I post it when they finally check in, it's gone gone gone. And that's good.

I am tired of, by my lights, having made approximately ten thousand feeble attempts to make a dent in the consciousness of the world. I'm tired of building houses of words and having nobody visit. I'm tired of pissing off the handful of people who have had the stamina to stay close to me, when I really want to piss off total strangers who richly deserve it. I'm tired of a zillion people with less writing ability than I have becoming Minor Internet Celebrities through accidents of publicity.

I am coming to the conclusion that if I can't be genuinely significant then the next best thing is to be as insignificant as possible, and try to anesthetize the solitude that results with things like computer games, where I am still judged the least competent person in the room, but it doesn't sting as badly because the fun-to-effort ratio, on balance, works out in favor of fun.

Of course, computer games leave me creatively unfulfilled even under the best circumstances - they're like eating air - and right now they're at an especially low point (one of the two I play regularly has reached the point where the difficulty curve is getting to the "nothing is fun" point, and the other is fun but very, very lonely). That's where the real problem is right now: My escape mechanism is failing me.

Fortunately, better weather is coming and soon I'll be able to take long walks any time I need to, where I can breathe real air and compose unpublishable fantasies in my head. (You'll notice I had an upswing during the false spring a few weeks back. If you didn't notice the upswing, that's probably because I don't write much when I'm in a good mood.)

But today it is cold and rainy again, and it's taking an effort of will not to delete this instead of posting it. Because right now, frankly, everything in the world seems like a bad idea.