You might be surprised to learn, that a great deal of thought goes into what I write about each week.
I know this blog may seem like the cobbled-together ramblings of a man who is slowly losing his grip on reality, thanks in no small part to the fact his children are taking it in turns to behave like fucking idiots, but in actual fact, I have developed a rigorous thought-process for sifting through all the random shit that ricochets around my head on a daily basis, so that only the finest ideas get published.
I know what you’re thinking, and yes, blog entries about school runs in the snow, weird people I met at Alton Towers, and why Masterchef sometimes pisses me off, really are the best ideas I have some weeks, but if you could only see the material that didn’t make the final cut, I’m sure you would understand.
So, whilst some readers may see what I write about as a ‘brain fart’ (I believe that’s the popular vernacular, that all the cool kids are using these days), by which I mean some entries could be construed as a sudden lapse of all conscious reason, with the result my thoughts are simply ‘farted’ onto the page, I prefer to see my finished entries as ‘brain sperm’, as only the very best make it through to fertilisation.
Yes, you read that correctly, my head is full of sperm, with millions of predominantly useless little ideas all happily swimming around, and only the strongest ever survive to claim the ultimate prize of creation.
Sometimes, a few of the little critters successfully make it to the creative egg in my brain (this is all a metaphor, by the way), but rather than publish multiple entries that week (like literary twins, or even triplets), I simply hold all but one idea back for later on.
In other weeks, however, it can be hard to see the wood for all the spermy little trees, and it can get rather distracting, having numerous random (and frequently obscure) thoughts dancing around my head.
Let me give you an example.
The other day, as I sat in traffic on my commute to work, my brain suddenly chose that precise moment in time, to cancel all other rational thought processes (with the exception of how to safely drive a car, I am pleased to report), to present me with this conundrum: when did we start putting an asterisk at either end of a word, to indicate that we are doing something? Like if you accidentally imagine Ann Widdecombe in a bikini *shudders* (come on, we’ve all done it), or if someone tells you the reason they voted for Brexit, was to ‘get our country back.’ *eye roll*
Have we always done this, and I just didn’t know about it until recently, or did someone suddenly decide to adopt the double-asterisk method, and it caught on? If so, I do hope they patented the idea, otherwise they will never get the credit they deserve.
Can you patent things like that though, or is patenting solely reserved for inventions? Because that’s not really an invention, is it? It’s just using an asterisk for a slightly different purpose that for what it was originally intended. Unless, that was always the original intention for the use of asterisks? Who even came up with the asterisk anyway, and did they patent that idea? Is it even patent? Perhaps it’s copyright, as you would always usually adopt them in print?…
At which point, I drove into the car in front of me.
Ok, I didn’t, but you can see how my mind often wanders off on a tangent, and my thoughts become embroiled in so much mental flotsam, that I am almost stuck in a trance of my own inherent weirdness.
Strangely, this often happens when my wife is talking to me. I will still be actively engaged in the discussion we are (she is) having, and I apparently provide actual responses, but I then have no recollection of the conversation taking place – or, more importantly, what I have agreed to – later on, when she brings the subject up again. She claims that I just don’t listen to her, but I think it’s because she simply doesn’t understand or appreciate my genius, and needs to recognise when I have achieved a higher state of cerebral consciousness, above and beyond the level her tiny human brain can comprehend.
Of course, I don’t say this to her. *eye roll*
Speaking of my wife (and she hates it when I do), when she suggests an evening of ‘Masterchef and chocolate’, why does this not mean the same as ‘Netflix and chill’? I’ve lost count of the number of times I have already got down to my underwear, and half-way up the stairs, before I realise that she actually just wants to watch Masterchef and eat chocolate.
See, I’ve done it again. Whilst it feels good to get some of these thoughts out into the open, they would never form the basis of an entire blog entry (unless it was a very short one), so I have to immediately dismiss them as ‘useless sperm’. And, just like actual sperm, the vast majority of my thoughts are exactly that – useless. I guess silly little ideas and musings, like the ones I often have, are what Twitter was ultimately designed for. Maybe I’ll tweet some of them later. In fact, I think I finally understand the purpose of Twitter: it’s a home for discarded sperm – the birth control of social media, if you will.
Of course, you might think that some of the ideas which have made it into one of my blog entries, were pretty useless to begin with, and should never have been fertilised at all, but they can’t all be winners. After all, how many actual fertilised sperm turn out to be a waste of human life? Without crap sperm accidentally making it to the finish line, we would have mostly empty prisons; the BNP, and ‘Britain First’ would have no followers whatsoever (and, in fact, would never have existed in the first place); and all Burnley matches would be attended by away fans only. Sadly, the reality is that shit sperm sometimes sneak through.
I also find that, since I started blogging, and now allow my more obscure thoughts greater attention than they probably deserve, one rogue sperm can lead me away from the egg. Then, once it has swum its course and expired, I have become so distracted that I immediately start following the path of a similar sperm. Ultimately, I end up so far away from the egg, that my brain has become over-crowded, and I need a complete sperm clear-out in order to start again (I realise, at this point, that the metaphor has become somewhat distasteful, and you have my apologies).
For example, when I thought about myself in just my underwear earlier (which is something I, and the vast majority of women, prefer not to do), that got me distracted thinking about clothing, so that once the original thought had passed, I started wondering about my socks.
About a year ago, I bought a pack of socks with seven pairs, each pair with a day of the week on, which I thought (quite rightly) would make it easier to match them after washing.
Naturally, I can only wear these socks on the correct days of the week (thanks to my OCD), and, largely speaking, I have worn them all equally ever since. Which begs the question, what the hell have I been doing on Mondays, to make that pair perish so much faster than the others?
And, while we’re on the topic of clothing, if you audibly tell a pair of jeans to ‘fuck off’ (rather than just think it), because one leg is inside out when you’re trying to put them on in a hurry, does this mean you have anger management issues? After all, the clothing cannot possibly be offended, so there is no actual victim, but does that excuse becoming so verbally aggressive towards denim?
Actually, forget that. I’m still thinking about the socks, and wondering whether it would be unnecessarily obsessive-compulsive of me to bin the remaining six (largely fully-functional) pairs, because I can’t bear the thought of having a day of the week missing.
Maybe I could use some of my birthday money to buy some, as I don’t know what else to spend it on, and my birthday was at the start of February, so it’s getting ridiculous now. How long after your birthday, can you legitimately spend ‘birthday money’, before you have to accept that it has simply been swallowed up by ‘shit I had to pay for’? And can you really justify spending birthday money, on something as monotonous and everyday as socks? It’s not like you could ever tell the person, that you spent their kind gift on something for your feet (that wasn’t shoes).
See, off I go again. Look, if you think it’s annoying, imagine having to live with this kind of crap flying around your head all day, stopping you from doing more important things like your job, or being an active part of a conversation with your wife.
So, that’s how my thought processes work, and an insight into how these blog entries come to fruition. To be honest, I’m just glad that I’m terrible at public speaking, because if I had to give a regular presentation about my experiences in life, just imagine all the useless sperm that would find themselves swimming around inside my mouth.
*shudders*
Confessions of a Middle-Raged Dad 