cirque d’insecurite
Is my life really this dull? A couple of one-line postings about a trip to the cirque du soleil, various recountings of dreams (and – really – is there anything more tedious than a complete stranger recounting their unconscious fantasies? Especially when those fantasies seem to revolve around 50 year old kidnappers singing dancers), pointless conversations with a man who’s paid to spend time with me (did I mention Hookers in that post), and then silence…
Makes me wonder: Why did I begin blogging? Because I started reading other people’s blogs, and their lives were so cool and eventful and filled with great stuff, and I wanted that? Is that why? Maybe.
Because, in the run-up to one of the single most important days in my life, I wanted a way to get my shit together, to try to make sense of where I’d come from, and where I was going to? There was that, too. A great deal of that, to be honest.
As a way of recording that wonderful wedding day, and the heady summer days leading up to, and following on from it? At the time, most definitely; I really hadn’t considered what I’d do when life got quiet and there was less to talk about.
Because, despite my culture-snobbery, I wanted to be part of the ‘look ma, I’m famous’ generation that was spawned in 1992’s “MTV’s The Real Life,” suckled in the early “Big Brother’s,” and “Wife Swaps,” and has come to maturity with an entire schedule of T.V. shows, magazines, newspaper columns, and, yes, blogs, filled with normal people – the sort who’d once have been referred to as boringly normal people – flinging open the doors to their normal boring lives, allowing, as the genre has developed, the editors to edit out much of what makes them boring and normal, so that everyone is, nowadays, a freak. A famous Freak. A “Look Ma, I’m Famous” famous freak.
Did I want to be Kerry Katona Crazy in Love? Was that it? And if I did, and I’d bothered to set up a counter, would I be destroyed to discover that nobody ever comes here? That, after all, I’m not famous, or very widely read, but that I am, in fact, whistling into the wind, some latter-day Lear’s Fool, but with less funny jokes (and if you’ve ever been obliged to read some of Lear’s Fool’s jokes, you’ll know how bad that is!)
It’s in there, somewhere: The reason I started blogging. Because, yes, I wanted to be part of the gang: Any gang, but especially one filled with people who wrote stuff, who were funny, who I thought I’d fit in with because I, too, wrote. Because I wanted to understand what had gotten me from there to here, and more importantly, to put it down in words, so I could hopefully make some others understand. Because I wanted to record the unmitigated joy I felt at having our families and friends together to celebrate our love, and I wanted to shut up – for once and for all – the voices that used to remind me how I was, really, a disappointment to so many people, to silence Carrie’s mother with her “They’re all gonna laugh at you!”
But more importantly, I think – a real driving force behind the whole desire to open a blog and fill it with words - is the fact that, try as I might, I can’t kill the urge to write. To tell stories. To turn the base metal of stuff - boring and normal stuff – into the gold that makes people say “And? What happened next?” To make sense of my life, my world, by putting it down in writing – sometimes mundane, sometimes bizarre, but collated, in one place.
Except it’s not. Collated. In one place, that is. There’s stuff in my life that doesn’t go here. Doesn’t fit. Doesn’t really get shared with a wide open world. It’s private (says the boy who’s just done the whole ‘ere, ‘ave a look at my insecurities. Luvverly, aint they bit, in the style of a Victorian freak show hawker.
Family arguments. Painful screaming matches. Not here. Because they were painful, and I chose not to splash all that stuff on the web. A new job that left me in a rather lengthy depression for the past few months. A depression caused by the fear that I’d made a terrible mistake, that I was in over my head, that,“They’re all gonna laugh at you!” Ooh look, there they go again – luverly insecurities, aint they?
Baseless fears, as it happens: They, by and large, seem happy with what I’m doing. I, by and large, have learned to stop worrying about the scale and the scope and the size and all the little things I’m not doing at any given moment, and focus on what I am doing, on what I am achieving, and on enjoying the ride I’m on instead of stressing about the whole theme park I’m in the middle of.
Death and sickness and the stress of friends. So much of it around me of late, from people who are in my life every week to friends-of-friends, to health scares for family members who I still love deeply, to friends unjustly accused of breaking work rules and threatened with career ruin. All the shit that, really, brings me down or up or flips me over and leaves me feeling a little bewildered. But not on here, because, frankly, it’s not my pain to share with a wide open world. Which, I guess, makes me a little different, if not better, than some of the “Look Ma, I’m Famous” freaks.
Also not on here: A lodger who stayed with us for, roughly, the six months that I was settling into the new job, having my little crisis of faith, and not blogging. And so many stories could have come from him and his presence. So many have, in fact; they’re just scribbled in my note book, not on here. Not yet.
A holiday to Florida with the in-laws and our god children that turned out to be the most fun in a very long time – despite the fact that (a) I’d dreaded going somewhere to stand on lines for over an hour for a thirty second rollercoaster ride (untrue: we didn’t queue for more than ten minutes for anything. Fantastic!), (b) the food, in Orlando, is some of the worst I have ever come across. Especially when the presence of two exhausted-from-a-day-at-the-parks kids and four exhausted-from-a-day-at-the-parks adults precludes what the Americans like to call Fine Dining, but which most people refer to as Anything where the vegetable selection doesn’t consist of Fries, Home Fries, Bland over processed carrot stix or Fried over processed carrot sticks. Except the Wolfgang Puck Express at Downtown Disney, which had decent, fresh, tasty, fast food. And broccoli. And a meatloaf to make the angels weep. (I have the recipe. I just don’t have an excuse to fill my arteries with that much furring right now.)
A trip that brought me the realisation that, despite several teary moments over the past few years, and a nagging fear that I was losing out, I am so NOT ready for kids. God kids, yes. Friends kids, sure. But kids of my own? All day? All the time? Little people whose welfare you have to spend almost every minute of the day conscious of – from the did they have breakfast? Through the where did they go? They were here a minute ago? Panic, and on to the Are they getting enough food/sleep/exercise? Worry. I don’t know how people can find the time to do it all and not go insane. Whatever, I’m not sure I’d be good for kids – I have more than enough love to give, that’s for sure, but the organisation? The culture shock would possibly kill me. But then, when kids come along, I guess things change. Still, unless one of my pre-D one night stands turns out to have been female and knocked up (Hey, I was frequently just this side of too drunk to f—), I don’t think we need to worry.
So I can let go of another sadness I like to pick at when in my cups. Although perhaps not entirely. Come on!! You can poke me insecurities wiv a sharp stick for a tanner!!
And here we are. Which is where, exactly?
With my insecurities, with the everyday details of my life (albeit vaguely sketched this time), with the bits I won’t share on an open forum.
The weekend past consisted of Cirque’s Delirium, a genius car crash of a Pink Floyd show and a Maurice Binder James Bond Title Sequence; Rock music, two or three boys you’d crawl across broken glass for – hmmm wonder if crawling across broken glass is a skill Cirque is interested in – and an amazing troupe of entertainers in a sort-of site specific – it’s designed only for arenas with their vast stages art performance piece. Which the reviewers (and possibly, from the muted applause, some of the audience) just didn’t get; House cleaning (you want mundane? You got it! You want Freakery – I strip naked to do the shower), gym (a really great hour where I managed to ‘get’ the clean jerks that Bruno’s been trying to get me to do properly for three weeks), a trip to the tanning salon (I am a homosexual. Shoot me.) A look over a story I put to one side a lifetime ago, and which I have decided is actually good, and worthy of completion. Two ideas for new stories – one that came to me whilst walking around the supermarket grocery shopping, one of which came to me on Sunday when I drank too much wine whilst cooking a weeks worth of lunches), the aforementioned cooking marathon (which was heavily photographed and will be blogged), a trip to buy a couple of new business suits (required as I’ve toned up, gone down two waist sizes and because I have an upcoming Big Client conference © which will require me to schmooze half of Europe and the Middle East, and I want to do it knowing I look fierce. I repeat: I’m a homosexual. Shoot me), and the consumption of way too much wine, which was a little disappointing and managed to let some of the demons out (‘Ere they come! A whole troupe of insecurities. Watch them dance! Sing! Perform acrobatics!! It’s the Cirque de friggin Insecurite!!!’).
We’re left with the fact that – although life’s getting busy, at work, and out of it – I still love to write. Want to write. Maybe even need to write, to tell my stories. To leave, as someone once said, a stain on the silence. So I’ll still be here. Trying to figure out what my blogging is for, who my audience is, where I go from here.
And, hopefully, bringing you (if you’re out there) along for the ride.
See you soon….
Dx
Tags: big brother, blogging, cirque du soleil, crazy in love, fame, gay wedding, insecurity, kerry katona, king lear, the real world, wife swap, work, writing