Barriers to Blogging

This post should begin with me sneezing.

I plan to put some pictures up on the blog to make it more colourful (not of me sneezing) but sounds may be more appropriate. The sounds of my perma-cold/ possible dust allergy/ actually diagnosed as hay fever symptons are battling with the sound of the voices in my head dictating the blog entries I am so desperately trying to get posted, but failing miserably to do so. I also have the melodic pop sounds of the new Florence and The Machine song vying for space in my throbbing head.

I am struggling to complete the blog entries I start as I keep getting interrupted. It is one thing to have to stop blogging half way to go and vote in the European elections, or go to a doctor’s appointment to find out why I couldn’t breathe last night and felt like I was being strangled. It is another when i get interrupted twice just trying to type this short mini blog entry! I am surrounded by too many people in my life who use my precious resources of time, thought and head space. I need to lock myself away. Like that Hermit guy doing a project for the University of Manchester. This is the Guardian article about him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/may/26/hermit-manchester-museum-artist

His name is Ansuman Biswas. He is an artist. I lock myself away for hours in a small room but no one calls me an artist. They call me unemployed.

Anyway I think he has a blog. I will find it and link to it below.

Hmm, well it seems I can’t find his blog. There are lots of blogs by other people blogging about the fact that he will be writing a blog whilst locked away from humanity. Not one of them has a link to his supposed blog though.

This is the official website for his endeavours though:

http://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/themanchesterhermit/

Anyway, back to my blog barrier. I keep getting interrupted. I have only a few hours until I travel to Central London and the bastion of great Imperial Majesty, the British Museum. I am going to see the Exhibition: Shah ‘Abbas, The Remaking of Iran. Shah ‘Abbas ruled Iran from 1587 to 1629 and was a major figure in the history of that nation and indeed world events.

I digress. The point is I need to get my anti-Hay fever inhaler, shower, have a low points WeightWatchers lunch, complete my Career Coach Career Change Programme exercises, and try and finish editing at least one of my blog entries. The one I am working on is too long. It is about avoidance versus reality. I run away from life a lot. Not physically, that would be very difficult to conceive. I mean psychologically. We all do it. Immersing ourselves in escapism, be it TV, Films, Art, Books, Fantasies or online role playing games. I seem to do it too much. Moderation in everything we do is the key to a balanced, happy life. That is what I was told growing up, by people who were anything but stable, happy and balanced.

My efforts to blog about the journey’s I have taken into the worlds of WeightWatchers, Culinary adventuring, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Career Coaching, Novel writing, unemployment and fatherhood have been scuttled by constant interruptions, badly typed overlong prose that requires hours of editing, and my ever hectic lifestyle. And I don’t even have a job.

I need to bring down these barriers, before I lose the thoughts and concepts flittering to and from my impaired memory, and you get bored of a blog that never gets updated. I need to either download my thoughts using some fantastic geeky device dreamt up by Philip K Dick is one of his drug induced paranoid Sci Fi short stories or find another method, in addition to typed blogging.

I think I have found a short term solution. A bridge between my lack of time to blog as fast as I think and actually posting something that makes sense onto the binary super highway that is my new Zen Garden. I have discovered this great new I Phone application that lets you use the I Phone as a Dictaphone. Actually my genius friend discovered it. This is a link to his article on the top 10 I Phone apps at the time:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/12/top-10-apple-iphone-applications

The app is called Quick Voice and I have been more successful in filling up my I Phone’s memory banks with blog words, albeit peppered with violent coughing and sneezing, than posting the entries I am still working on. These range from regaling the story of my trip to Book Slam last week, when Denny and I saw “The Wire” Creator David Simon read from his 2 books, and I fell of the Weightwatchers Wagon by gorging on a large, freshly made juicy classic beef burger with chunky oil encrusted chips that I smothered with creamy white mayonnaise at 11pm in a tiny Gourmet Burger Kitchen on Portobello Road, to my actually achieving something in my fragmented life by hitting the 10% Weight Loss Goal set for me by my Weight watchers Leader (yes Leader, and No Weight Watchers is not affront for some strange new Christian Cult).

Anyway the I Phone rules and I am committing all my surreal, morally conflicted, inner turmoil thoughts and stories to the memory banks of my I Phone, so if I should be taken from this world before my time to shine has come, find my I Phone and listen to what the Quick Voice app has to say.

It is not easy walking around with all these voices and multiple identities in crisis, especially when you can’t eat as many burgers as you want.
Anyway I better go off and complete my Skills Audit or else I will never find a job.

A question for you, however, before I depart.

Is it strange that I need a blog to make sense of my life?
Answers on a postcard please.