Blogging The Block

So I have monkeyed around with this site's eye candy compiling the widget things for a total of one whole morning. Hurray for me. The Internet proves once again that it is better than carrying an empty file folder around the office and it is just as meaningful. No wonder it is an army invention.

Alas, I find myself with time remaining in the day and no pressing engagements while Ms. Benefactrix is out making the money. Moreover I have the vitality to write more meaningless, never-to-be-read, purple prose. If I remain true to form, I shall tire shortly if inspiration continues to drive me so harshly. Nothing beats practice like lazy I can attest.

I have been living cloistered in a foreign country serving what amounts to a 10-year sentence sequestered in seclusion with the appearance of freedom. Clearly this was my choice mitigated by experience and opportunity. This won't stop me from railing against my prison but the realisation does suggest some wisdom is waiting for me around the corner. I just hope it is the next corner. Ten years ago is a long time to rehash a diary entry so I will make the conscious effort to live today forward rather than backward. My one regret is that I did not follow the creative writer's path earlier when I had the chance 24 years ago. I cannot be entirely sincere in this rueful reminiscence as a mother cannot completely regret her child. I did follow a different path and that easily suggests it was not all that bad.

Still my time with this backward culture and its people have taught me the power of being an author. Perpetually unemployed, unless it is the spiritually crushing spurts that position me like some exhibit at the English language zoo, I have ample time to romanticize from my chair behind this side of The Internet about being a published author and the economic freedom that would provide for me. In my daydream, I carelessly spend imaginary earnings from Bangor to Bombay and travel without worry as I once did as a child. This, alongside my daily realisation that my apprehension of the English language mechanics remained relegated to the native speaker darkness, is the intellectual legacy of my arrival here at the turn of the century.

Ironically, I have improved my English with the locals while any facility with the locals' language has gone undeveloped. So much for the power of native speakers is my wry observation when, in truth, language comes to me with some difficulty. If it were not the case, I would have become a writer a quarter century ago. Living by my wits, I have honed my perspicacity to sharpen my strengths and avoid falling prey to my weakness. However, this culture does not value my strengths and this leaves me operating in an upside-down world.

I have tried to bring my strengths to bear on my destiny over the last near decade but to no avail. For the last 4 years, Ms. Benefactrix has been my sole economy to pay for food, shelter, and clothing as well as the occasional doctors' fee and cup of coffee. It is not a role I enjoy in this upside-down world I live but it is what it is - and the relationship is eerily akin to Albee's George and Martha, their child being the aborted economy Benefactrix holds over me. Snap go the dragons indeed!



When I was a teenager, I had this fantasy to be married to a woman who would earn the money that would allow me to stay home and write. I was writing at that time. Now I find writing to be a tedious exercise and it is like running: something that takes routine and practice before it can become enjoyable. I do not like running either but that is the comparison I make from what runners have told me. I have resisted running much better than I have resisted writing all these years but fate has now granted me my childhood fantasy it seems; and the only way I can recover my manhood is by finding that boy within me and his capacity to write.


I mean it is not as like I am running to do anything else at this point...