Personal Exorcism

Originally written sometime in the middle of Saturday night.

I have not updated my blog recently. There are many reasons for this, which range from inebriation and laziness to just a general lack of funny. As David Mitchell said, it is hard to make a joke out of people getting machine-gunned in Syria.

Anyone who knows me relatively well - no, not you, drunk guy in the pub - will know that recently I've fallen on hard times. To be more accurate, hard times have fallen on me. I won't go into specifics. Specifics are boring, self indulgent and pretty bleak from where I'm standing. Suffice to say, I'm currently writing this on a notepad, sat on an unmade bed illuminated by a heat-lamp in my roommates VIV.

Soon my pet. Soon I will feed you the world.

In order to cope with the recent 'shit rolls downhill' events of the past two weeks, I have embarked on a purge of all the crap that has hung around me like thrice cursed albatross.

It has almost been emotional. Almost soul cleansing.

Get the Hell off me, bird.

I'm clearing my 'this stuff might be important later in life' file of all the random detritus it has accumulated in preparation for some serious abuse of the shredder at work tomorrow. It is a testament to the amount of crap a human being can accumulate in just seven years of adulthood. There are five year old phone bills addressed to my sister from a company I no longer use for a phone that no longer exists in this universe or any parallel planes of existence. There are papers from a union I am no longer in, and there is guidebook to a small ruined abbey in southern Ireland. And thousands upon thousands of bank statements.

There are scraps of stuff I wrote years ago and never finished. A welcome pack to a job I haven't done in years. There is a pamphlet on how to pay your TV license, how to fill in your tax returns for financial year 06-07, a stack of A4 envelopes. There is also letter to my university POLIS department telling them that I had reached mental terminal velocity, understood perfectly the dark face of humanity, and had to take some time off my course with an unfortunate bout of reality induced insanity that crushes the human soul.

There are also cards.  Christmas cards, Birthday cards, Valentines Day cards, Good Luck cards, Get Well cards, Happy Anniversary Cards - why do they sound like Happy Adversity cards? - Sorry You're Leaving cards and We-Are-Unbelievably-Sorry-We-Inadvertently-Crushed-Your-Youthful-Exuberance-And-I-Hope-The-Mind-Snapping-Horror-Of-The-Human-Condition-Is-Bearable-And-The-Drugs-Work cards. I've kept them because, well, everyone knows that cards are special. They hold memories, and without memory, where would we be?

I was going to go into them. The initial draft turned rapidly into a vortex of despair, though, whereby I start apologising to well-wishers I haven't seen in years for not living up to their throwaway cardboard crucifixes. And besides, they're my memories, not yours. So I won't write the last one-hundred words of this blog how they appear in my notepad.

If you're looking for the humour, I'm afraid it's gallows humour for today. And if you're looking for a conclusion, here it is. Its 3am. I have two stacks of paper on my bedroom floor. Tomorrow, or rather, today, one of them will be forced into the whirling blades of forgetfulness courtesy of work. The rest will stay, in case I need them. And you always have a reason to keep something, right? That little thing you just casually chucked in the bin is definitely going to bite you in the ass one day, so hang on to it.

It's always the little things that catch you out. Like the noticing, for no particular reason, that only the cards from one person are addressed to Stevie. No one calls me Stevie. And only one person I know in the entire world dots her I's with a tiny circle instead of a period.