Tales from the Good Egg

Title of this blog post comes from Mel informing me that I am a Good Egg. I like it, it's my new favourite blog name if I ever change the name of this blog, replacing my previous favourite, The Venerable Nicholas Presents.

For the last couple of weeks one of my coping mechanisms, or more accurately numbing mechanisms, for my non-specific anxiety has been to watch five seasons of The Sopranos on DVD. I've never seen it before, but have gotten into it quite a lot. Complete TV series on DVD are a great numbing mechanism, you can avoid thinking about anything much for eight hours. But ever since, everything I see takes on Mafia overtones, everything is vig and shy and wack jobs. I'm not sure if that's relevant to anything or not. Context, maybe. I'm feeling a little less anxious, anyway.

I had my family Christmas party on the weekend. It's always been early, a legacy of being a child of parents with previous families.

I played with my nephew quite a bit. He's two and great. He's strong on nouns at the moment. We spent a lot of time spotting boats, birds, fishies and spidies. He loved the spidy, kept pointing to it all day and saying "Spidy!".

The Christmas crackers were the worst ever. I say that every year, but this year topped all previous christmas crackers. The party hats were too small and nobody wore them because they cut off all circulation to the head. There were only three different varieties of cracker. The novelties in them were bizarre, practical and un-novel. Red hats seemed to predominate, and all the red ones had the same lame joke and factoid, and the novelties in them were tweezers. I mean, for god's sake, what sort of a novelty is tweezers? There were tweezers all over the place.

It was a nice day though. My uncle has taken up circus performance since he retired, and he gave a performance on the grass for all the children. He did balancing acts on my brother, which was a sight. There were no arguments, which was remarkable, as there used to be an informal betting pool on who the first fight of the day would be between. Often the fights would involve the customary jobs of everybody, and other people impinging on people's pre-assigned turf. My sister origamies the napkins. I make the salads. My younger brother moves the furniture. You can see the potential for conflict.

One of the interesting things about my family Christmas gathering is that my family crosses the socio-economic and political spectrums quite a bit. You'd think family would be more unified than one's peer group, but it isn't the case, and I'm always a little suprised to remember that there are people who vote liberal, people who discuss what television commercials they like best. It reminds me of something I heard Tim say at a party a while back, one of those Tim-esque utterances that come out of nowhere and floor everybody. Somebody was talking about people they know who know other people they know, wild coindence, blah blah blah, we live in such a large city and who would have thunk it. "But we don't live in a large city," Tim said. "We live in about three small towns, and we never leave them." I'm probably mis-quoting him, but it was sure great when he said it - everybody immediately shut up, and assumed thoughtful expressions.

My father was OK, though mostly he sat in a chair and held court like Don Corleone. There you go! Relevance!

At work today it was windy outside, the books kept blowing down the street. I made half-puns to myself about the flight of the Penguins. Random passers-by on the street stopped and picked them up, put them back in the racks, and kept walking, and that made me feel good about humanity.

I had a strange dream last night. Now normally I’m the first to start fidgeting when people start telling their dreams. “I was back in primary school, except I was the age I am now, and the teacher was Brittney Spears. And for some reason there was a boat in the classroom. And then the boat turned into a giant candelabra, and we were trying to light it, but it wouldn’t light. Then we were in a garage, and Kevin Rudd was asking us for advice on how to improve his popularity rating. And YOU were there! Only you had an afro.” You know what I mean? Other people’s dreams are usually dull and non-sequeteurious. But I’ll tell this one anyway.

A Freudian would have a lot of fun with this. I dreamed that my father had, this year, been selling second hand books on the internet. I discovered this while at his place, on his computer. He had hired other people to do his cataloguing, had catalogued more books this year than Plup has, and was making more money. He said he had just used old books he owned, and books people had given him, and he hadn’t found any of it difficult at all. This was really upsetting to me, partially because he had misled me, but mostly, I think, because it rended my own efforts meaningless and small.

I don’t think I need a Freudian explanation for it, I think I know what it’s about, and it has nothing to do with my father. I haven’t written much about work on here, although it is a regrettably large part of my life, but I think it’s time I addressed the issue, explained what the hell I’m doing.

The explanation is this: on my list of achievements for this year there’s only one thing, really, and it’s something I’m not remotely proud of. This year we added six thousand more titles to our database of books we have for sale. It doesn’t sound like much. One of the reasons it doesn’t sound like much is that as we go on entropy sets in: the more we catalogue, the more we sell, the harder it is to make the numbers go up, the more work is required just to maintain an equilibrium. It doesn't sound like much, particularly as a sole achievement, yet to achieve it I’ve worked almost every day, with the drain and distortion upon my emotions that full-time work produces.

I’ve talked to friends about this, creative friends, and it seems universal. Full-time work distorts your mind; it takes over your thinking and your self-perception. This is why people get so caught up in office politics, even in a job they began with the intention of it only being a source of income to enable them to do other things. You begin to care what your co-workers think, what your boss is doing to you, and it takes over even your out of work time. It draws energy from the part of your mind that is creative.

There is a reason I’m doing this, a logical and white-hot goal that is now five months off (people keep saying to me only five months, and I take their point, but that qualifier is hard to see sometimes in my head). When my lease runs out I will pack up our internet stock and move it to my storage unit, sell off whatever is left in the store at bargain basement prices, close the shop, and turn my attention from trying to relentlessly increase the number of books we have for sale to just trying to replenish what we sell and gradually improve the overall quality of the stock. And there should be a number of things that come from this that are good, and important to me. I will have a regular income that meets my needs, which is a pretty big problem in life to have taken care of; if not forever, then at least for a long time. And the income should not require a great deal of work to maintain, which will free me up to write, and give me the empty alone time my head needs to function creatively. Furthermore, it can be adjusted as need be - I can put the books off and on the internet with the click of a few buttons, so I can actually adjust my need for money against my need for time, which is kind of important for somebody whose mood is as erratic as mine is.

I have this goal, and it's important, and it makes sense. But I've given up a lot for it over the past couple of years, and particularly the last year. I've written erratically, or not at all - and I knew it would be like this! I avoided full-time work for years for this very reason, I knew it would do this to me. I've felt boring, and it has made me uncommunicative, made me avoid people at times. I've felt tired, and that has also made me avoid people. For a long time I didn't feel much like myself, and I had to learn ways of avoiding thinking about work, and was eventually succesful with that - but that made me apathetic about work, and the shop has suffered somewhat of late because of my inattention.

I know I've written some of this on here before, and god knows I've badgered my friends enough with it. But I wanted to write it more clearly, maybe for others, maybe for myself.

The thing is I just want to get to the end of it and find myself not wrecked by it - the goal only works if there is a life to live from then on, and my plans from that point are tenuous at best. Sometimes I feel like a hunched form from some classic horror novel - I don't know which - slouching about the place. Sometimes I feel soulesss and wonder why anybody cares about me. I sometimes feel like I don't cast a shadow on the world or impact on people's lives; mechanical, numb. I hope I'm more than a shell at the end of all this, hope that in the process of securing my future I haven't lost the thing I was working to secure.

But then there are people in the world doing horrible things for eighteen hours a day to buy a cup of rice, and of course I shouldn't complain. No doubt those people also find it difficult to indulge the creative side of their personalities, and they don't get to do something else in five months time, either. It's not that I don't have a global perspective, and I don't expect sympathy. There is a purpose, and I know what it is, I just need to remind myself of it sometimes.

I used the phrase "que sera" today, apropos of nothing important. A few years ago it was a catchphrase of mine. I even snuck it into Suburban Aliens. I don't know why it was a catchphrase, I don't have a que sera personality - or maybe that's why it was a catchphrase.

This began as three different blog entries, but they got merged. Still looking for that thing, that quicksilver way back to what I could once do easily. Consider this a work in progress.

posted by Nicholas @ 12:49 PM