The trouble with keeping a blog

I should write to [someone I love], it's been too long, how can I have let it hang so long? -- oh, but wait. I have nothing to tell her, that's why I haven't written for so long. She knows all my news. It's in the blog.

I have this conversation with myself on a regular, a depressingly regular basis. And then don't write, don't phone, continue to be a lousy correspondent/friend. Because I have nothing to say about myself that people haven't heard already. And then when I meet them in the flesh, I report my newses and they say "Yes, Chaz, we know. We read the blog."

Mind, I was always a poor talker anyway; really all I want to do is listen. I am a passive consumer of other people's lives, it's shocking. But the blog amplifies the condition conspicuously. What do other people do, to avoid this insidious syndrome? Develop strata, presumably, layers of discourse, the public news and the private news and the deep analysis of meaning. But I never wanted to discriminate, to make the blog an artificial voice. That way promo lies.

Ach, there it is. And there is a very annoying car in the street outside that keeps alarming itself and calming itself and alarming itself again. I'm off to the library.

Later...

It's all in the verbs

It was her husband, plummeting to his death.

Plummeting? Too fruity: a cross between plum and punnet. Also, I never have been able to parse deeper than did ever plummet sound.

It was her husband, plunging to his death.

Plunging? Too plumberly. Also I have a friend who wrote a poem once, where he spoke of plunging my hands into the good earth, and ever after his harsher critics would say "A bit of a plunger, that one, Nigel," if they thought he was overdoing the eco-yearning.

It was her husband, tumbling to his death.

Tumbling? Too acrobatic. Hints of jocularity, and laundry.

I may have spent twenty minutes on this sentence. On this word. Twenty minutes so far.

Relentless positivity, interrupted

[/relentless_positivity]

I have produced less than one day's required writing, in the last two days. This is ... sub-optimal. *frowns at self*

Also, said same last two days, I have been feeling almost-constant pins and needles in my left thumb. For those of you unfamiliar with my history, this is a Very Bad Thing, and likely to lead to months of painful and expensive physio on my neck, spine and shoulders. Still,

[relentless_positivity]

it may pass off if I just ignore it for a while. Stranger things have happened.

And I have crumpets for lunch. With bacon and yellow cherry tomatoes and a camembert-and-buttermilk sauce. Worse things have happened, even to me.

Oh, and? If there are perhaps things that should perhaps not be said at full volume in the public street, "I mean, like, I don't swallow or anything, but..." might perhaps be one of them. I mean, it might. Just sayin'...

Sometimes I wish I wouldn't do that

So I've been poking gently at something new in my evenings, we might call it a Secret Project except that too many people know about it already. It is slow and difficult and I do not think I am doing it well, but hey. First drafts are for fixing.

First drafts are for finishing.

Which isn't an issue yet, as I've barely started; but I came back to it just now and found where I'd left off last time:

All he wanted was to sit for a while and watch, while his eyes came back online and hopefully the

Um. Hopefully the what? Would do what? What was I thinking? And, more to the point, what was I thinking? I can't believe I did this to myself. When I was a babywriter, I remember reading that Graham Greene would write two hundred words for the day and then stop, in the middle of a sentence if that's where he was; I remember being gobstruck by the very notion. And then later I remember reading it as advice, "stop in the middle of a sentence so that next day you can get started without pain, because you know just what those first words need to be." Perhaps that's what I was thinking? In which case, hah. Because I don't. I haven't a notion.

'Scuse me while I reinvent.

retail/food substitution

Hey, California people - where would you look for celeriac? In the Bay Area?

And, anyone - failing celeriac, what would you use for substitute?