30 August 2009

This week I'll be mostly not saying anything

Iwazaru
Erm, hello. Again.

There was some research done last year that concluded that blogging is good for your health. The most well adjusted people - so the research said - are the ones with blogs. I considered writing a witty piece of commentary about how blogging is bad for your health; how the stress of coming up with something to say, week in week out, might cause one to become acutely unhinged.

Instead, I said nothing.

A few weeks later my head was full up with stuff to say but I wasn't getting round to writing any of it down. I considered writing a witty piece of commentary about how not blogging is bad for your health; how the stress of saying nothing, week in week out, might cause a more chronic unhingedness than the acute unhingedness of having to come up with stuff all the time.

Instead, I said nothing.

As the weeks went by, I continued to fail to come up with anything to say. Anything I did say got half-written, but remained unfinished. I considered writing a witty piece of commentary about how not actually blogging is bad for your health; how the stress of coming up with stuff to say, but not actually coherently saying it anywhere or to anyone, might cause a combination of acute and chronic unhingedness that is worse for your health than either coming up with a weekly trickle of drivel, or just keeping it all bottled up.

Instead, I said nothing.

Half a year went by. I resolved instead to write about a particularly interesting display of topiary I had seen at the local garden centre. I wrote one sentence on that. You just read it. Three sentences ago. I had some thoughts about being carbon neutral. I didn't even write them down. (Writing them down wasn't carbon neutral, so would've defeated the point.)

Instead, I said nothing.

I was, it turned out, becoming quite unhinged. Rather than passively saying nothing, I decided the only remedy to my unhingedness was to actively say nothing. I deactivated my Facebook account, popped back into HooToo just to get my coat, and deliberately mislaid the passwords to Blogger and Flickr and YouTube. I stopped taking photos, and videos. I stopped kidding myself that there was any merit in writing, researching, reporting, photographing, videoing, editing, composing, (social) networking, etc, etc.

In short, I stopped saying anything to anyone about anything at all.


I'd like to think there was some kind of conclusion to all of this. Some kind of real reason why I've reactivated my Facebook account, and am considering a return to some of those other online places.

There isn't a conclusion. I'm just going to give it another go. Try it out and see what happens. "We're starting again, Timmy."