Recovering from a holiday takes time. Recovering from interviews takes time, as does preparing for them. Recovering from anything takes time. The last week and a bit have been all of those things and none of them in the aftermath of the ridiculous France/Spain trip. It's maddening and deadening, as is worrying for someone far far away. At least that's done with for now.
An interview looms, and a presentation needs to be written after stalling for a week, but instead... instead perhaps it's time to clear the head. A long time ago, in another land far far away, bad things happened. The effects linger on, and it is only with time for reflection that you realise that those ripples just never go away. It's fascinating, and just a little ridiculous, how the ripples go in and out with the tides. The stresses of life and pent up emotions can get all bottled up, the world gets all the more abstract, and before you know what's going on everything's grey at the edges! It's one of the grand perils of solitude, that greyness, that slightly singed feeling that somehow chimes with that smokey powdery smell of a paperback that's been around a bit too long, undusted.
Solitude is grand and wonderful for the effete and standoffish, but it does have perils. You become more influenced by books, and films, and radio, and television than many other people would be. Lessons from life experience are drawn from fiction and biography, and emotional outlets occur behind a closed door while waving giant pencils in air conducting practice. The influences become legion, and then become forgotten, unless you happen to get brave and reopen a box. As a poet said, probably it was me, never said it was a good poet, "Sometimes you just gotta let it out! Or you will for lifetime badly pout!" Ouch, that hurt for a couplet made up on the spot. Go ahead, reopen the box, even if it is from before the land far far away. Join up the dots.
If our humanity is a measure of how we react, then what does it need to be prompted to react at all? I have no idea, and I am human, and sometimes need prompting. Well, sometimes I'm an air conductor or a writer of insane things that no-one ever gets to read, but mostly human. Except on Sunday afternoons. To feel is something special, and to find things that can help that is valuable beyond all hope of knowing, and those things form the Bizarre Hodgepodge of Influences. Sadly there's not a great acronym to go with that, but it does have a scruffy little bush for a logo. The bush grows.
The Hodgepodge expands slowly. I just watched The fifth season of 'Community' on DVD and there were moments that sank into the bush as if they'd never been anywhere else. That show is amazing, and heartfelt, and just a little clinically insane. Awesome. Sadly on a season-by-season basis you can never tell what's going to happen but tears and joy will pop in sometimes (except Season 4, which has a troubled backstory, not involving llamas). 'Parks and Recreation' is also good, but I mainly watch for the mighty and touching Ron Swanson doing what only he can do (see end of Season 6 opening two-parter). Steven Moffat can make you jump in the air and do cartwheels with some of his 'Doctor Who' endings, a miraculous performer.
Is it possible that there is a romantic at work somewhere inside this writer? The writer that is me? Surely not! If not, then why be moved by the 'Star Trek' novel 'First Frontier' or Columbo smashing that weight on Leonard Nimoy's desk, or the end of 'A Tale Of Two Cities' where poor self-ruined Carton finds himself in his own sacrifice. What does it all mean anyway if not romanticism? Madness? Or is it all just ripples in the fabric of who we all are? Some people feel the ripples and others fake it or try to make it. What does it mean to be moved by Woody getting the girl at the end of 'Condorman'? Terminal sappiness? That's probably not so bad.
Sunday, it was a Sunday evening when I wrote this, after an oddball couple of days. In a moment all focus will have to get back to presentation writing but for now lets just relax and feel the ripples. If there are ripples then at least the world's still moving out there somewhere. Ain't it nice?
O.
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