Every beginning has a beginning

This is terrifying. I've written web-based-content with my own name before, but somewhere between my pubescent music blog Terrorists Love Carbombs and today, I've lost the eagerness I once possessed for people to read my work. It must, then, seem a little odd to find yourself reading something that the author has just said he doesn't want you reading, like I just left my TOTALLY TOP SECRET DIARY open on a table in front, and you try not to look but you just glanced and the subject matter is premature ejaculation and, really, who could resist. For the past few months I've been writing fiction, submitting it to a tumblr, not telling anyone, and hoping a fanclub would blossom out of thin air. I'm keeping the fiction a secret, it's out there to find but I won't point you there, but I need to have you - you, people scum - read something, because what is writership without a readership?

I know it's easy to look back on the past and think that who you were before was naive and deluded, and you can understand why you were teased and why you never got pussy, and now that you've got a bit more sussed and can confirm that you minus six years was a fucktard, but does comprehension spawn extermination? Am I somehow less of a fucktard, knowing that I always used to be one. I don't know where I was going with this sentence. Oh that's it, self confidence was the point, and my lack of it, though clearly not lacking enough to think that I shouldn't be a writer and that you shouldn't be thoroughly entertained by this self-centred guff (the plan for this blog is social commentary, but I've been reading High Fidelity and it's a very self-interested narrative so far, so it's rubbing off on me, or maybe I'm rubbing off on it - projecting my own foibles onto the protagonist so that I feel better about myself - either/or this isn't the point; someone's rubbed someone off), and when did this self-confidence, or lack thereof, become an issue? It wasn't at school, there I was disliked for a lack of conformity - whether they knew it or not - looking like a girl in an all-boy's school, speaking up in class rather than sulking that school ain't cool - my rose-coloured retrospection suggests I welcomed all the bad will that came my way there, whether that really was the case or not - my memory is hazy.

Maybe the self-confidence is Cooper's fault, or Rains' fault - it's definitely my own fault, maybe a natural development. Certainly my own concept of what I was like - back when the boys called me Britney but I didn't care because I had a blog championing alternative music and believed my facebook friends gave a hoot about my musical opinion - has grown cynical over the past six years. Which is for the best, I was heavily deluded by my mother into thinking that I was the sun, not just her son, so why wouldn't a post on the new Interpol album peak absolutely everyone's interests? When I blame the prior mentioned ex's, I'm not trying to blame them as much as pay homage to the depressing state of affairs I succumbed to in the wake of these relationships. I'm terrified this attempt at some Hornsby-esque blame-gaming will be misconstrued as a hang up. Shit I'm worried this whole blog will be considered the rupturing of a whole aneurysm of hang up's. The past is the past, this won't be High Fidelity, I shan't let it; but the past does leak into the present - call it "baggage", call it "not having as hazy a memory as you say you have", I'm not raking up the past to say woe is me - but I may rake it up to discursively unravel puzzles and perplexities, that I seek to understand so as to better know who I am, and what I stand for. Surprisingly enough, this isn't about you, it's mine dammit!

"I think they get it, sir."

It's all so terrifying because I'm just as self-involved as I ever was, but I'm now aware of it. But beyond self-involved, I'm self-congratulating. By the end of this entries' second sentence I've assumed that no one could resist the pull of me writing about my own ejaculate. I amaze myself.

There was also the travel blog I started when I moved to Alabama, but that was more to keep my family and friends informed as to what I was up to, across a pond - there I could smarm away, uncensored, since they all knew I was a smarmy shit but they loved me anyway. I can't do that here - if I'm to end up as some columnist for a sunday supplement, then I need to be more likeable. That blog quickly fell into abandonment when I used the excuse that university in America isn't vastly different from university in England, obscuring the truth that a month in to my time there I'd ingratiated myself firmly into two social circles - once again feeling like the centre of the universe, and now with a noticeable accent to boot, also: class and junk. Shit.. I was on top of worlds when I used to write those blogs - maybe it really was all Cooper and Rains' fault... no.. that's unfair and untrue - hell some of this doesn't even make chronological sense, well you don't know that so fuck it, I'm embellishing my tits off - it's my own stupidity (admittedly stirred with a spoon made of other people's shit), it has to be because I've always been too self-involved to.. wait.. I was going to say 'too self-involved to let other people affect me' but that would be bull, too.

I've always been quite sensitive to the opinions others have of me, that's part of my own self-involvement - demonstrating that my internal minister of external propaganda was never as good at his job as the internal minister for internal propaganda, who just left 'Walking on Sunshine' on repeat and stepped out years ago. Planet-Alex, that's how I described it to a friend one-teary night way down in Dixie; she missed her boyfriend back in Germany, I missed the days when I was less aware of how self-centred I was. I'm still as self-centred, but now half the time I spend on myself is telling myself to stop being so selfish, leaving me less time to make it with my reflection. Which is a shame, I miss him. Again I've lost my trail of thought, I'm trying to splurge out as much about us as I can as a form of introduction, I'm hoping by now that you've got that I'm a touch self-centred, and maybe you've picked up on a contradiction already. No doubt there is one, my memory is hazy and I'm not the kind to stay stubborn. I don't see contradicting yourself as such a bad thing, most of the time. Often it's because the context that invited an opinion has changed, and I'm not a yes-or-no sort of guy, I'm much more about meddling in the grey area (see: any conclusion I've ever written to a history paper) and it's this opinion on changing opinions that I lean on when I muffle that 'meat is murder', I'm muffling because there is a wedge of steak in my mouth.

So I was going to say I'm fearful that people that know me, but maybe don't like me, will see this and take it as proof that I am as as they always believed I was. But now that I've exemplified how I am the worst thing I consider myself to be - bar the obvious straight-white-male-destroyer-of-worlds - I feel like I should feel liberated. Do I? Maybe when I publish it I will, but hell no one will read this thing anyway and I'll just refer back to feeling useless again. I've been in a pretty useless funk ever since I graduated in the summer, with a Desmond in that most useful of degrees 'American Studies'. I hope to vindicate my degree choice by putting my extended knowledge and outlook on Western culture and society to use in written form. There are other reasons: the sanctimonious idea that I might alter opinions and make the world a better place, because I first got laid by telling Cooper that I was a writer, because my dad fears I will fall into the same nine-to-five monotony that kills spirits and nearly drove him mad if I don't do something more worthwhile (and dad was doing something worthwhile, but got no enjoyment out of his social work, and rarely any grattitude), and because I want a legacy without the responsibility of possessing offspring (a more honest answer than citing overpopulation and earth resources and such and such: watch Doug Stanhope stand-up if you're looking to be made to feel bad for wanting a little you running around). When I say Western culture and society, the society is the impetus - cuz I ain't gonna get into the observer talking 'bout sports anytime soon - and all this introductory self-appraisal bullshit is intended to set the scene, as I will be using my own body to exemplify problems and conflicts I experience growing up as that smuggest of all predators, the straight white male, wrestling with the morality of equality, fighting my natural bigotries and hoping not to come off as a guy who enjoys the smell of his own farts.. too much.

I had begun trying to write this guff down on paper, the idea being that I'd edit it and publish it when I'd matured further still, but it's been brought to my attention that I keep too much of my own work for myself and a portfolio of redactions won't get me far. I asked Cooper about this, partly I was seeking permission, partly seeking the advice of someone who for years wrote brutally honest diary entries and who got very upset when I once tried to read them. Given our archived closeness, the subject matter we talked about was less to do with self-involvement, or Western society, more to do with the point that at-times in the blogs to follow, I will be going into cringe-worthy detail about my love life. It shouldn't be as scathing as it was when I spoke to a close friend in a private conversation, but Cooper identified that the emphasis of dissecting past relationships to make conclusions of the present as, basically, ripping off High Fidelity. For fear of being sued, I'm writing this autobiographically rather than changing my name to Kenneth; since I fear being sued, I probably shouldn't have started reading the bastard book. But hell, if it ends up mirroring that text, consider it homage, an artistic experiment; please. don't. sue.

The original idea stems from reading another piece of anti-romantic fiction, The Good Soldier, which I read soon after starting my relationship with the previously unmentioned Button and nearly left me in a state of baffled paranoia that she, this sweet thing I barely knew, would at some time in our proceeding lives succumb to the call of nature and cheat on my ass. Paired with a viewing of Chasing Amy and a history of being jilted by cheaters, I found it hard not to think about being cheated on, past, present and future, but this can be properly examined in another entry. Scratch that, it will be the focus of our next entry. She deserves a proper introduction, and so does Ford Madox Ford and Kevin Smith, it's about time this place respected it's peers. This next entry will be written on Tuesday, there shall be an entry written every Tuesday, forever and ever and ever. Now that I've said it, I can't take it back. And since it's on the internet, it has to come true. ABRUPT EXIT.

So they know what you're currently reading right?

Check.

Even if they missed that subtle musical reference from the novel and screen adaptation?

Oh yes.

And you've explained, clearly and succinctly, what you're doing here?

Ummmmm.. kinda.. sure!

And they'll like you, won't they Al? You haven't spent the whole time telling them how you're a tool, right?