THE LONG DARK TEATIME OF THE SOUL

My dear perceptive reader, I have a confession to make. I can only hope that you, in you infinite wisdom and grace, are not too hasty to judge me. It has so chanced that yours truly has hit something of a writers block. That part of my brain, if indeed such a distinction holds any meaning, which contributes to my artistic side, my creative touch, that part which manipulates thoughts with a nonchalant wrist-flip akin to that an engineer would demonstrate on a slide rule has, it seems, gone into an indefinite lockdown. So, my dear reader, I implore you to forgive me if, by virtue of the perception I seem to oh-so-freely assume you are in possession of, you find this post lacking literary éclat in any form, let alone a consistent cadence. I am in no doubt that this, like many others of its kind, perhaps more so, will pass into that hell of mediocrity we strive so hard to transcend. Forgive me if this lacks the ardor and soaring wings of a precise Flaubert or a magnificent Tolstoy or Fitzgerald. Those are the ideals we aspire to, self-deluded as it may seem, those are the greats that summon us into their incomparable circles, and we, in our utter arrogance, seek to respond. I have no excuse except a cliché so ancient, that merely to demonstrate it as one has slipped into a state of being a cliché in its own right, and that is merely this, I am lacking in inspiration. ( I know, I know…….hereby I leave my self bared to scorn and ridicule, if not outright condemnation, but flimsy as it may be, it holds within itself a truth incontrovertible)

It is an irony bordering on downright amusing. In my utter and complete confidence in myself, an illusion, I must add, I had believed myself immune to this favorite excuse of the artist, and yet it comes up to claim me with an inevitability that seems to laugh in my face. Here, I must tender another apology to Douglas Adams aficionados, who, like myself, have seen the title phrase used to the death, but it describes the stupor which currently envelopes me so accurately and precisely, it seemed to me to border on criminal to neglect it. To those among you who aren’t familiar with the phrase, this is how Douglas Adams uses it:

“Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was- indeed, is-one of the Universe’s very small number of immortal beings.

Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.

Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light jazz on the ship’s stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn’t been Sunday afternoons, he really could have done.

To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”
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Forgive the length of the quote; but I felt it was both justified and required, to illustrate the point without compromising on the genius of Douglas Adams. But now, my dear reader, I’m certain (or at any rate, hopeful) that you both understand and sympathize. What stimulus does an artist have, pray, as I mentioned not too long ago to a pleasantly weird friend of mine, whilst sitting in a temperature controlled room, conversing to aforementioned weird friend, all the time gorging on vanilla ice cream with rich chocolate syrup, and slipping into the soft embrace of the magical voice of Frank Sinatra? None at all.(The circumstances leading up to this, and more or less causing, this sorry state do not warrant inspection here and now, I believe) Inspiration needn’t take the form of a scantily clad beautiful maiden arising from a loch tucked away somewhere amongst the soaring majesty of the Alps (though I daresay it would suffice), rather a flux, a driving force, so to speak. Pressure, as aforementioned friend aptly put it, is a prerequisite for art in any form, and indeed it has proven so in the case of yours truly.

With that, I shall bid you farewell, my dear reader. I thank you for bearing with me, and would gladly welcome any suggestions to overcome this listlessness and stupor that seems to engulf my brain.