Full Circle?

As is becoming usual, I'm not even going to attempt to play catch up. Around five full months have passed since I last posted to this blog. This is disappointing to me, as the main reason for this blog was to keep me writing while the umpteen novels swirling around in my brain coalesced into something I could actually commit to paper (or electronic document of some form). So far, that part of the plan has been a pretty dismal failure. I have more notes, certainly, and maybe even a better grasp of the characters... but the stories themselves are still entirely nebulous, and every attempt to sit down and write them - even the little vignettes, related to yet separable from the main narratives - have thusfar been impossible to flesh out. That doesn't mean I'm giving up, just that I have to acknowledge that, perhaps, the time isn't right.

I've been having similar troubles with my other blogs... I have posts that are taking weeks to complete because I can't focus on them, and I'm struggling to maintain interest in the face of some ongoing and stressful real-world situations.

I've no doubt written about the shoddy state of the roof of my flat and my landlord's reluctance to do anything about it. I'm currently involved in a legal process which is set to conclude with me giving him a large sum of money. Voluntarily, I might add. Gladly, even, given what the expenditure grants me. Nothing shady. I am therefore quite baffled at his reluctance to accept my money, when he spent several years making demands for smaller sums (excessive though they were in the context), ostensibly for the upkeep of the building, only to continually neglect the upkeep of the building. Here is a man who has actually expressed the belief that being a landlord is a profit-making enterprise... and yet here I am (figuratively speaking) shouting "Shut up and take my money!" while shaking a fist containing what's left of my savings plus a generous donation from my family.

Then there's work. When I accepted a full-time position in a small company, I thought I was ready to go back into the perilous office environment. My 11 year stint in one company proved I could handle it, while the following three years of temping left me wanting a bit more security. More fool me, then, for taking a job in the very sort of small office environment that left me in need of a shrink around 20 years ago. Small companies might seem to offer a 'family environment', but one should carefully consider the darker aspects of family life, the suffocating, claustrophobic smallness of it - both physically and psychologically - and the bubbling, brooding tension of it before pining after a workplace with a 'family environment'. Small companies have to make tough decisions on a daily basis, and frequently make choices that seem nonsensical to an outsider. Small companies also invariably give rise to tin-pot dictators who feel inclined to exert control where it's neither wanted nor beneficial, and who get away with claiming expertise because no-one else in the upper echelons knows any damned better.

I'm also at a point in my life where I find myself reflecting on the (for the most part profoundly stupid) choices I've made over the years. I have much to be happy for, to be sure, but I can't help thinking I'd be in a better place if I'd gone left instead of right, zagged instead of zigged, dived instead of ducked.

So. Forgive me, gentle reader, if I have spared you my nigh-limitless font of opinions on the movies and TV shows I've seen over the last few months. It's not that I don't want to write about them (with the possible exceptions of the utterly dire Suicide Squad or the staggeringly predictable The Girl on the Train), it's just that my mind is elsewhere, and what little bile might rise on the subject is most often eased in conversations with my girlfriend when I get home from the cinema or when we switch off the TV.

That, in fact, is one small part of the most significant change in my life to precipitate the trailing-off of this blog. Living with another person seven days a week, 52 weeks a year for over two years so far has been a pretty big deal. In many ways, it's something I wish I'd written about more... but it feels somehow too private, too personal for this blog... which has always been about me, singular. Partnership never really entered into it.

And so, ten years after the first post, it feels again like The End, and yet The Beginning. I may well post here again in future, but I suspect I won't. As an ongoing project, //ƒuƶƶy[løgic] feels like it has run its course. If I look back on old posts, I don't even recognise myself as the writer most of the time.

It may well be that I start another blog, but I really don't feel like writing about personal stuff at present. If I thought I'd have the time and the inclination, I might consider a blog wholly devoted to the movies and TV shows I'm watching. Many people have told me I should be a critic... if only anyone could pin down a subject matter, since I can generally form an opinion on anything.

As ever, it's a case of "watch this space"...Only, not necessarily this specific space...

It's been real...