Google Belle

The still-quite-recent fiasco whereby AOL search records were released on to ye internette has made me think about my own compromised history of internet searches. I’m sure I’m not the only one to look up crazy kink on google solely to see what’s out there (by which I mean I don’t often click on the links, although I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t believe me), or to mess around with apparently innocuous search terms to see in what combinations they reveal the internet’s wealth of dodginess. The Guardian article alludes to but doesn’t pick up directly on the question of how many people use internet search engines while drinking or drunk. (It’s probably a sign of my vestigial hyper-nerdiness that, with time on my hands and a bottle at my table, I browse not google but wikipedia, following links from something I’m interested in to see how far afield I can go.)

In more genteel narratives, the first blossoms are out here, and the forget-me-nots too, and with them comes a city-wide lifting of spirits. I am feeling lighter on my feet, despite seeing an unsettling excerpt of myself teaching on a student video late last week. (Do I really boom and gesticulate quite so theatrically?) I’m hoping that my relatively-new routine of rising an hour earlier to walk the dogs before the day proper begins and the traffic volume rises might spill over into more disciplined habits concerning my own writing. I’m still paring back my involvement in almost every other part of life save the core of dogs, friends, books and film, and yet the manuscript still doesn’t have the grace or good manners to complete itself.

I would get on better with my writing if I stopped interrogating the process quite so continually. I suppose it’s having been in the woods so long without publishing something, but at the same time I don’t want to divert my attention from my main project to crank out a short story, for example, since there’s no guarantee of course that anywhere would pick it up. My plot is small but my project is big; in many ways it demands the totality, if not of my attention then of something more abstract: dedication? Devotion? And I keep returning to the thought that the form to which I’m trying to apprentice myself is fewer than three hundred years old, a trifling period of time.

What I’m trying to effect at the moment is a shift in my way of living more generally, from extended periods of downtime interspersed with shorter periods of frenetic activity, to something more sedate and livable. The daily walking of the dogs, the pile of books and lists of films to chip away at, housework and very occasional gardening like daily meditations: couldn’t I write small amounts everyday in this fashion? Those years of thesis-writing spoiled me in the sense that we were all in love with our own bohemia and worked to maintain its image: late rising, binge drinking, endless extended conversations. (Even the most sobrietous of my friends was rarely in bed before two in the morning or up by midday, and what he lacked in dedication to drinking he made up for in a well-organised sports betting syndicate.) We were going for the big goal and letting the details slide, and that’s what I can’t afford to do here.

I never thought I’d feel like I wanted my writing habits to match the minutiae and the rhythms of domestic life, but it’s surely that that’ll keep me on task and not futzing round on the internet (situational irony of which I’m aware, gentle reader). The needs of the dogs, which are stable, give character and shape to the day and the demands of my job–manageable, for the moment–delineate when I have free time. I’m hopeful that I’m in the final stages of a transition from a grand but unfulfilled sort of life to one in which I really do follow myself from moment to moment, and in which I get finished, to my true satisfaction, the project which matters most to me.

If I’m honest, a lot of my adult life and the humourless teenage years before it, has been about throwing obstacles in the way of that goal, of finding things I thought I wanted to do more, which eventually I disavowed because the fit wasn’t right. The hours of music practice on which I skimped at a more advanced level made me only a so-so orchestral and chamber player, and such short-cut taking similarly made me a middling conductor and organist. I still have only half my MusB and half my LRSM–I passed the theory but failed the vocational. My memory over the last decade has been permeated with the minutiae of all kinds of pop and trash culture, but hasn’t held on to the subjunctive in French or the Chinese characters I was beginning to recognise. I’ve chased high competence in all sorts of things but really, lastingly wanted it only in one or two: writing and its adjunct in my life, teaching.

My thought this weekend has been that at present I’m a better teacher than a writer, and that I know what I have to do to remedy this. My life’s hardly ascetic but it’s certainly lived small, with a purpose which I’ve yet to realise (in the sense of fulfil, not figure out; that part I hope is done). Work not harder but more regularly. Think not more grandly but more clearly. Finish the damn book. It’s a small story but it deserves the best realisation I can give it. If caches and cookies and time on my hands mean I’ve made a strange history for myself on the internet, then it’s up to me to create something more enticing, more distracting, out of this manuscript.