Hardly Earth-Shattering

At the risk of fading further into obscurity that even I don't recognise me any more, I've stopped putting things here. Mostly, the reason for this has been some kind of amalgamation of getting on with life too much, consuming varying amounts of alcohol, sleeping and generally being a bit of a lazy arse in regards to remembering the fact that I wanted to keep this space regularly updated in the hope that it would keep me writing.

Over the last week or so, though, I've unashamedly, or very ashamedly (I'm not quite sure how to feel about it to be honest), been coasting. My work towards the most important year of my University course has seemed fairly lacklustre. That is when I look at my own work. I've simultaneously managed to worry and possibly belittle others on my course by workshopping (i.e. editing) their work with an overly critical mind, an inflated sense of self and a red Biro. The point at which hypocrisy hits is when I struggle to come up with original work of my own for my peers to scribble over and point at.

In stark contrast, my efforts in short fiction were recently commended during the currently ongoing Manchester Literature Festival. The University puts together a compilation of short stories annually and it just so happens that something I did managed to make it into the top half of all of them, thus making it to print. It's hardly Earth-shattering but the event did kill an afternoon, get me moderately light-headed on a glass of red and result in minor embarrassment dealt in the form of my parents' attendance. As of the time of typing this, my father's phone contains a however-long video clip of me stumbling over a short extract in the vicinity of a microphone and my mother currently possesses around six copies of the limited print-run anthology bearing signatures of myself and, in some cases, several of the other participants at the event as if we're rockstars, so that she can pass them on to whatever friends or family members she can coax into feigning interest.

So if I haven't been working to the fullest of my potential, what the heck have I been doing all this time? Well, drinking seems to make up most of that response. Why, in fact, that aforementioned vino at the anthology launch proved to be something of a "gateway drink" into what ended up being an afternoon and evening in a student bar in the middle of Manchester, during which certain amounts of money were exchanged for cocktail pitchers and the occasional thimble-sized plastic beaker of Goldschläger (which, by the way, in proper German should be pronounced "gold-sh-lay-ger" as opposed to its more popular Anglicised form "gold-sh-lah-ger", that kind of thing pisses me off ever so, you know).

Even tonight, after I've done this and finally dressed properly, I'm supposed to be joining my studently comrades for a good ol' binging session which will undoubtedly render me catatonic until tomorrow's early afternoon, by which point I should, in theory, be attending a seminar I should've prepared well in advance for. And by the same time on Friday I'll need some kind of original work to exist, at least in some kind of draft form, ready for other people to judge my writing ability which, quite frankly, feels to have dwindled since I've not been typing anything here for weeks at a time. Once everything goes to crap and I've stopped clutching the sides of my skull in despair, I may feel up to drowning my sorrows once more with that fresh bottle of Honey-infused Jack Daniels I bought yesterday.

More to do than can ever be done. More to find than can ever be found. It's the circle, the circle of life.