Stick Your Face In Something

A straw man takes off his straw hat, and conducts a straw pole vault. You can't argue with that. You can't argue with him. He broke the world record and the camel's back.

We could spend another two hours editing and honing that little vignette, but there are more important issues to consider.

More important than the straw hat, and whether he might take off the hat, and then "take off" in a jumping sense. More important than whether the camel was being used in place of a crash mat. More important than whether conducting a straw pole vault would require a straw pole or a straw baton.

There are bigger fish to fry. Don't get bogged down in the minutiae. It will only keep you from what's truly important. The poll has been conducted. The minutiaes are out of luck. The minutiNAYs have it.

Right. Those paragraphs should have weeded out a few readers. To have made it this far, you must have an iron constitution. Sometimes I'll begin a blog post with my most oblique writing, just as a test. I don't want anyone reading this who might be afraid of imaginative and linguistic experimentation.

Some people will come here thinking "I like blogs; I like reading about events and opinions". If that's what you like, you've come to the wrong place. Events don't interest me and I don't have any opinions. Events are like shredded carrot at the bottom of a pre-packed supermarket pasta salad snack. They fill up a lot of space, but nobody wants them.

Opinions are like the little collapsible compact black plastic fork you get in a pre-packed supermarket pasta salad snack. Everyone feels obliged to use them, but you'd be much better off just sticking your face in there and snuffling around like a pig.

This blog has no events and no opinions. It's 100% snuffle. And if you're too precious or too cowardly to stick your face in something, there's no place for you here.

My writing is a journey to the unknown. You have to be willing to take risks. You have to wander not just off the beaten track, but into an alternative dimension where nothing is beaten and tracks are extinct.

You need to be willing to follow me, even when I'm making no sense. For AGES.

Each blog post I write is a training exercise. They are training you to think in different ways, and to commit to things that no-one could possibly find useful. I'm pushing you in mental directions that don't show up on any compass.

I'm literally changing the shape of your brain.

That's why you're feeling so nauseous right now.

***

I'm back from lunch. I had proper salad bar salad. I didn't have any shredded carrot (though it was available) and I ate it with a full-sized metal fork.

Pretty standard, all in all. Pretty standard.

Beauty isn't always dewy tulips and Tea Leoni. Sometimes it can be found in the banal. The beauty of repetition, the beauty of the drudge, the beauty of the default, the plain, the nothing.

The beauty of slowly getting older, like a leaf unfurling, almost imperceptibly, into a urinal.

The beauty of a blog post, sagging further and further down the screen like

an

old

man's

eye

bags.

You just need to know where to look. It's everywhere.

The thing is, gentle reader, when I came back from lunch, I re-read that stuff at the beginning and resolved to be a bit more normal. I thought I'd counterbalance the opening nonsense with something that made sense. I thought I'd write like a normal person writes.

But it didn't pan out that way. I still seem to be the same person I was before lunch. I thought I might have had my madness pickled out of me by thousand island dressing, but apparently not.

I want to be coherent. I do. I want to be a member of society. I want to deal in events and opinions. I want to eat with a little plastic fork. But desire cannot change my course.

All of this is genetic. It's the fault of my DNA. 

The same DNA is going to force me to publish this, even though there aren't any good bits in it. Even the straw man thing at the beginning doesn't work. I wouldn't even tweet it - that's how bad it is.

But I've spent so much time writing that I can't afford to delete it all.

We've been here before. I'm covering old ground. That's what I do.

Who am I kidding? This isn't an anomaly. I should stop apologising for what I am.

I'm a person who writes whatever my brain tells me to. I always have done.

For me to claim that this is all "weird" or "unexpected" or "incoherent" is missing the point. It is me.

I can't disown this. It would be like Eagle-Eye Cherry disowning 'Save Tonight'. You can't throw your essence on the fire without getting charred.

I need to accept that this blog - the blog called Headscissors - is its own animal.

Cut its chains. Let it roam free. Put down a dish of water in case it gets thirsty.

AND STOP BEING EMBARRASSED BY IT.

Yes, it is naked. But animals should be naked.

Cats in jackets make me sick.