Foning It In
Hello. Thank you for calling The Blank Page Free Range, All Organic Blog Farm. We here at Blank Page value your continued support of our fledgling, little business and apologise for not being in to help you at the moment. Please leave a message after the beep and one of our highly trained, expert blog harvesters will get back to you as soon as they can.
(The Beep)
Hi, everyone, it’s me. Sorry. I know, I know. I should be there now and this week’s blog probably should’ve been in by now, but I’ve been busy. Not world shattering, life coming to a stop business. I'll admit that. I've just been run off my feet. Life's a little different off the farm. I've been distracted by the dross and the droolers all week. Trust me, you're lucky that you don't have to deal with the daily inertia I have to face. It can wear you out. Okay, I know it's not easy for you. You’re all working out in the fields every day. Keeping an eye on the blog herds. Taking care of the younger blogs. Putting down the older ones when they can't cope anymore. Keeping the blog poachers away. I think we only had one breach in over a year, which is great. You’re all doing valuable work out there. Valuable work. Which is great. I'm proud of you. Okay, no one else is really paying much attention to our little farm at the moment, but that's just how it goes sometimes. You don't get out of bed in the morning expecting a round of applause, do you? Still, someone has to leave the farm five days a week. Go out into the real world to stop the bank taking good old Blank Page Towers away from us. I can’t always get back in time to get this done without a rush. We all know that. I mean, come on, I’ve been wrangling one of these a week for eighteen months now. That’s whilst I’ve written a novel and got some other stories out there. I feel like I’m trapped in the middle of a steep, hard climb at the minute. There’s no doubting I’ve gotten off the ground, but there’s absolutely no guarantee I’m getting to the top. Not a lot of people get up to the top.
I’m sorry. I don’t mean to snap at you. It’s been another hard week. For no good reason. If it was the week when I finally managed to find a better desk to sit at or finally sorted out all the issues that surround my current, wage monkey enclosure, then it’d be something. I'd have achieved something worth being tired for. Hell, if we could get to the end of a week without me feeling like a fraud it'd be a start.
The sickening thing, of course, is this farm is basically so close to what I want to be doing every day. I’m not saying I only want to farm blogs. Of course not. I set up those fields for short stories, novels and poems. I know you all think I’m mad, by the way. I’ve heard you snickering at me whenever I get up to the farm. Well, let’s not forget, that little waste of fields as you call it, is the reason you’ve got a farm at all. The Blank Page is just one part of what I want to be doing every single week of my life. It’s just that I’m not allowed right now. I made some really lazy choices over the years and now I’ve been backed into a corner of bills, desks and boredom. Such is life.
I took a coward’s way to getting this far. I’ll admit it. I’ll hold my hands up. And, yes, there have been some successes. Okay, maybe success isn’t the right word. There have been some achievements, of a sort. Only they’ll never get me away from a desk, as things stand. So, you know, it’s been a hard week and this heatwave we're going through has not helped.
Listening to people talk about the temperature. Watching them debate about opening or closing the windows. Turning the air conditioning on and off. It’s just so much white noise stress. Once it gets cold, there’s a very similar conversation they can all go run through. Over and over again. Just like every other year. Or maybe we could talk about football. Or talk about how we’re not going to talk about football. Or the fact some people are going on holiday while some people are not. Or that some people have come back with their skin cooked to a different colour. Or drank too much. Or didn't drink enough. It really does feel like they're reading this crap off cue cards sometimes.
Seriously, I need to know, the people who are getting near the top: they don’t have to listen to this sort of stuff anymore do they? This stops, right? I need it to stop. The endless, spiralling patterns of repeating conversations every single week of my life. The Monday morning strains. Hump Day celebrations. The weekend countdowns and plans. The Friday desperation pity parties. The spoilt baby people, prancing past, telling you to cheer up. It could be worse. A smile takes less muscles than a frown. It’s nearly the weekend.
As if there isn’t another week right around the corner. As if they’re chirpy presence isn’t making me long for silence. For the hour and a bit of peace I get when I clamber out of bed every morning and wander to the keyboard.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I guess what I’m trying to say is there really isn’t a blog this week. I know you’re all busy back there. I know it’s my commitment as the name on the door to get one ready for the public market every week. I know I should be writing one about the book launch, that’s less than a month away now. And I will. I promise I will write something like that soon. It’s just that this has been another week of being acutely aware that I’m still not where I want to be in life. In my one go at existing on this planet.
Anyway, that’s my problem. Not yours. Here’s what I think we should do. Take this message and edit it down. Make something great of it. I know you can. You're the experts, after all. Then I’ll try and get myself into a better place to write you something next week.
Also, for the record, this answer machine lets you leave some pretty long messages. I’m genuinely surprised that it hasn’t–
End of message.