Reach for the stars
I’ll be honest; last year was about as bad as it could have been, short of all the people I like dying and all the people I don’t like suddenly becoming immortal. Even then it would have been a close call. On that basis, I’ve decided to re-evaluate my life and set myself some new goals. Not “lose a bit of weight” or anything trivial like that. No, I mean big stuff that I want to either achieve this year or put a good foundation in place to help happen soon after. Stuff that will make my life more fulfilled and mean that when I look in a mirror I think “yeah Steve, you’re a man who’s going places in the world”. Maybe I’ll wink, make a clicking noise with my tongue and do that making a gun shape/pointing at my own reflection thing. Until I shoot for the stars, I won’t know, will I?
Finish writing a bloody book
It turns out this is actually quite difficult. First off, it take sodding ages to actually do, thanks to books getting longer and the relationship between an author and the thickness of his book being very similar to that between an author and the thickness of his penis. Or vagina, presumably. Not only that, but you’re expected to keep track of who said what, where they said it, how you get from A to B and then on to C and back to A via D, who is dead and all sorts of other niggling details. Best of all, the time you spend not writing is spent crippled with guilt; why aren’t I writing my book? How am I ever going to achieve my dream of writing a book if I don’t take it seriously? Is staring at a flashing cursor and thinking about how much you wish you were at the pub a better use of time than actually being at the pub thinking about how much you wish you had the self-control to sit staring at a flashing cursor until you write something? It’s a giant bloody minefield of angst, increasingly confused notes and a growing desire to scrap the whole thing and start again at the end of every single page. I’m really enjoying it.
Additionally, because it seems like such a monumental task, it’s very easy to put it off on the basis that because you can’t finish the entire thing in one sitting, there’s no point in doing anything at all until you’ve got 3 months completely free and have replaced your heart with a jar of coffee. When you finally do sit down and start writing productively, you discover another problem; there is such a thing as creative overflow. You’ve just written 14 pages of really solid, interesting story. From this, you’ve come up with other ideas, which maybe amount to another 5 pages of fragments and notes for later or earlier in the book. Effectively, you’re preparing the ground for a much easier start to your next writing session. Great, right? Well sort of. The problem is, you’ll also have loads of ideas that don’t fit with your story. The creative juices are flowing so freely that you end up paddling against the current of them as they gush out of your brainhouse and all over your home. A fascinating idea for a character is wonderful, so long as that character belongs in what you’re writing.
To make things even worse, you’re so caught up in the growing enthusiasm of your sudden and long-overdue productivity that even really, really shit ideas seem worth following up. A particular part of your brain starts screaming “quick, you’ve spent weeks pretending to think up a place name and it might be months before you have another idea at all! WRITE EVERYTHING EVER DOWN!“. Sometimes this just means deleting a couple of pages when you come back to it seventeen years later, which is painful but hardly the end of the world. Other times, it means pottering off to write something completely different, hurling words together only to realise that 1) you’ve lost your thread on what you were supposed to be writing and 2) all you’ve done is give form to a literary abortion, which reminds you how terrible every idea you ever have is. Or waking up to find your skin covered in stream-of-consciousness tangential thoughts that you can’t make any sense of (this is how Ulysses was written, I’m sure). I have realised, in recent months, this is what blogs are an outlet for. They are, if nothing else, a wonderful sewage outlet for your creative faculties, allowing you to sit down and write some interesting dialogue without stopping to make notes on something utterly idiotic and childish like space bacon or whatever.
The point being, I want to sit down and actually get more of this thing written. Even when I haven’t looked at the manuscript for weeks, being much too busy flopping about in an apathetic spasm of helplessness and denial, I feel good about where it’s going. I just don’t feel good enough about it to put finger to key and add more to it. So this year I intend to change this. I’m not quite sure how yet, but it needs to be done.
Come up with an impressive fishing story
A lot of people seem to be into fishing, these days. A lot more than I’d ever have imagined before I met them all, anyway. It’s like some sort of quiet pandemic of vicious fish-torturing psychopaths. Anyway, everyone has fishing trip stories and they seem to operate as a kind of social currency. The problem is, to do this means going on fishing trips and catching fish. Not just one fishing trip, mind you. Oh no. To have an impressive fishing story, you need to have actually got good at fishing first. What this actually entails I’m not totally sure, but I’m assuming you have to become immune to rain and come to terms with not doing anything interesting with your weekends for the foreseeable future.
As is probably clear by this point, I don’t really fancy the whole fishing experience. I don’t necessarily mind the idea of spending a couple of nights sleeping in a badly pitched tent on the edge of some farmland owned by a psychotic inbred with an attack dog larger than a horse. I’ve done so on many occasions and had a great time; festivals, camping trips with barbecues and beer, that sort of thing. I once had sex in a tent, albeit a construction tent. It was a very hot day, so when we both emerged looking like we’d just been kick-boxing in a sauna, I really wished that the local football team hadn’t started training in the surrounding field in the time between us starting and us giving up due to heat exhaustion. The girl in question also got dog shit in her hair, but we didn’t discover this until a fellow bus-user was kind enough to point it out. Anyway, my point is this; camping can be fun, so long as you combine it with the right activities.
One of these activities is most certainly not fishing. We have spent tens of thousands of years developing things like food supply chains, home delivery, freezers and many of the other trappings of modern civilisation for a reason. This reason is so that we don’t have to spend the bulk of our spare time next to a filthy pond or river, dangling an expensive stick into it while we catch pneumonia – no fish, just death – due to the fact this country is a constant, miserable squall. All in the hope that you can stab an innocent fish in the face and that the ludicrously small and uncomfortable stool you’re perched (geddit?!) on doesn’t disappear up your arsehole and re-establish itself between your partially defrosted kidneys. Why bother? Of all the reasons I can think of to put myself through that kind of suffering, wanton cruelty is very near the bottom of the list.
So I need to come up with an impressive fishing story without the brain-petrifying boredom and discomfort of actually going fishing. I already have a wax jacket and beer gut, so I’m really halfway there already, if you think about it.
Clown Car Orgy
Now obviously I can’t use real clowns for this, since the vast majority are men and those that aren’t probably draw the line at balloon animals and not, say, a 17-person sexual meatball. The easiest solution to this is to use prostitutes. Now I know what you’re thinking; ‘clown hookers’ is a seriously unpleasant concept. I do admit that there’s something inherently depressing and callous about exploiting people who, probably through no fault of their own, feel there is no better career option open to them than becoming a clown, but no-one else I know habitually drives a tiny car that can still somehow fit dozens of people in it.
But just imagine; a seething, honking mass of caricatured ecstasy, writhing against each other, make-up smeared by sweat and what I imagine would be a not inconsiderable amount of tears. Huge shoes discarded with wild abandon. Not to mention the blissful absence of laughter, which would be a sexual revolution I’d welcome all on its own. There are a couple of downsides, mind. Firstly, you’d have to be very careful that, once you’d painted and dressed all your prostitutes, you didn’t look into their desolate, soulless clown eyes. That would be a right turn-off. Secondly, it would cost a lot; hookers don’t work for free – obviously, as otherwise they’d just be regular sluts rather than trained professionals – and the clown outfits aren’t cheap to hire. Now I don’t know if the cars are actually magic and bigger on the inside or you can just use any old car, but best-case scenario it’d still mean paying the soiling fee on a regular hire car. How much a TARDIS car painted in green with pink and yellow flowers costs to hire, I’ve no idea. A lot, I imagine.
Finally, it’s probably not something you’d want to tell too many people about. There’s not a lot in the way of bragging rights, due to the social stigma surround clowns in general, let alone having sex with them. But you’d know. And that’s what life goals are all about, isn’t it? Doing something for yourself. Something you can treasure. Something you can feel proud of.
So, there are my main ambitions for the year ahead. A roadmap to making myself a better, happier and more mature person by the time 2013 is out of the way. Wish me luck.
FINE RUBY DRINK 