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Saturday, 08 March 2008
An interminably long intellectual blog of no interest to people whose homes have a number plate, and whose family tree is all on one branch
Quitting. That's what I need to do.
Been saying it since before Christmas, but the trouble is I don't know what to quit.
Quitting is not admired. Think of all those maxims. "Nobody likes a quitter." Well, actually, that's the only one I can think of off-hand, but you know what I mean. Winning is all. Winning… well, wins.
Now, me, I believe in quitting. I come form a long line of quitters, although most of them would deny it. My mother's family in particular – quitters to a man.
None of them did conventional jobs, although they all dabbled at them. My grandfather was a trumpet-player and a wide-boy, dealing in dodgy goods on the side and black marketeering during the war. He bought and sold at auction, repaired clocks and watches, and generally spivved his way through life. He always knew someone who knew someone who could get you what you needed. Or he'd die trying.
My grandmother was a florist, with a bent for everything artistic. Their sons variously ran away from home (to Australia, no less, disappearing for nigh on 30 years), took up joinery and forestry work, travelled, lived on obscure Scottish islands and, eventually, also took off for Australia, where one of them built roads across its untarred wilderness then bought a motor home with the proceeds and drove around in the outback for a year.
My mother, for her part, gave up being a seamstress, a tax inspector and, twice, teaching. My mother could quit for Europe. In fact, she 'injured her back' finally and has lived on sickness benefit ever since.
Wasters? Not a bit of it. Every one of them has had an endless facility for making money and getting what they needed. When my parents divorced guess who got the money? And the car? And the second home?
Yep, mum every time. My father couldn't possibly best such an efficient quitter, eye always on the main chance. (He was crap at quitting anyway. Preferred never trying.)
You see, quitting is a much-maligned and misunderstood force for progress. People think it means giving up in defeat, retiring to your corner, crushed and ruined. On the contrary, it means the opposite. It means getting what you really want, not what society says you should have, or others dictate you 'need'.
Quitting means retiring to Belize at thirty-three. Quitting means giving up banking to became a dancer. Quitting means dumping the family/friend/lover for a life of excess and indulgence – or Spartan meditation. Whatever lights your fire.
And I need to quit.
I've needed it for a long time.
I had someone recently (on MySpace) complaining, very backhandedly of course, that my blog (on His Heathness) was too long.
You know, because you've heard me say it often enough, that I don't get this. Too long to hold your interest? Then don't read it.
Apparently, however, that's too avant garde a notion. Apparently, they have a mechanism in their heads that prevents them from simply stopping and moving on to something else; the same mechanism that leads them to leave comments (taking up more time) to point out to me that they were bored/baffled/irritated or just perplexed (poor dears) by the length of my blog.
Well, you just added another ten or fifteen minutes wasted time right there. And I assumed you had something to do, too.
This 'criticism' – which, oddly, always seems to have a thinly-veiled resentment under it – is pissing in the wind of truly epic proportions.
Think of this for a moment. How many people do you think there are on the internet right now blogging about the most banal, puerile drivel? Millions, right? How many of them only run to one paragraph before they see a dust ball on the floor and run off to chase it? Tens of millions, right? So why – why, God, why? – given this abundance of short, snappy, Janet & John blogs, are these 'readers' wasting time even looking at mine, never mind reading it? The titles of my blogs, never mind the content, should tell you all you need to know. I haven't yet written about my pet, or X-box, or why Lex Luthor making out with Harry Potter isn't 'canon' (don't worry about it – it isn't interesting, trust me).
Which takes me back to quitting. Should I quit blogging, writing at all? Is it not really me? Am I an anachronism left over from another age? Should I really have been a Georgian essayist? (Can you just see me effing and blinding my way through a critique of Doctor Johnston?) Should I do more writing, write somewhere else, lots of places?
Should I quit the web, go back to magazines, demand huge fees? Should I write non-fiction books?
Hell, if they want me to be shorter, should I go longer, weave epic works on epic subjects?
Should I drop everything and go to America, blag my way into TV? How would I fare in the writing room of the OC? (Well, I'd be all by myself since the show's finished, but you know what I mean.)
Should it be Hollywood and movies? Europe and movies? Where would my strange perverted attraction to men really fit in in that bizarre world where one half of the population has been 'disappeared' and heterosexual means tits & ass? Hell, where sex means tits & ass.
Is it up to me to fight for it? Am I too tired to fight for it? (Yes.)
Should I stop publicising DANNY? Or at least stop worrying about publicising DANNY?
If the world's not ready for DANNY then how far do I let it go? Do I finish it quietly, docilely, like the Jane Austen of cocksucking, and resign myself to being ignored – or do I get extra specially strident and demand to be heard?
What part of my life is it I need to quit?
You see, this is the really important thing about quitting – you never get anywhere without it. Never. In order to move on, move forward, you have to leave something behind. Every step in the right direction, or the wrong, involves a step away from something. Quitting, in fact.
I'm stuck and have been for quite a while, but in order to move on I NEED TO QUIT!
If only I knew what……………
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Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
21:35 Posted in Blog , Books , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Email this
Comments
Don't quit DANNY. DANNY's good for everyone, even the ones who don't know it yet.
Posted by: Jodie | Thursday, 13 March 2008
Quit DANNY?
I wish.
Posted by: Chancery Stone | Thursday, 13 March 2008
Good, that was getting me worried, thought I'd have to plan a dawn raid on your files.
Posted by: Jodie | Thursday, 13 March 2008