The End of the Beginning

I have noticed that I am most often gripped by a desire to write when I am feeling moody, and after a bit of thought, I propose that this is true for the general population.  It seems natural that you are more pensive when in a state of depression, because the depression forces you to stop activity and pay attention to thoughts.  For the same reason, I think it would make the depressed more likely to hypothesize, theorize, and speculate, perhaps about the injustice that first caused the depression, or, more commonly (at least for me), about the nature of the world, existential questions, the meaning of it all, etc., etc.  Maybe the opportunity to write generally presents itself more readily when you’re depressed.  Depression, whether causally or correlatedly, seems to happen when you’re in your room with your computer screen and keyboard sitting right there, already on and ready to go.

I have also realized that those subjects (existentialism, meaning of it all, nature of the world) can veer dangerous close to the territory of whinging, especially when the ponderer is doing so through a lens with a negative hue.  So I have decided to beat my urge to write while in those states.  Or beat those states when I have an urge to write.  Whichever is easier.  

The Beginning of the Beginning

I generate an idea once in a while.  These days I frequently find myself sitting in my small room in London just thinking, especially when the room is oppressively untidy with the tiny bit of workspace it has piled high with stacks of paper, packets of digestive biscuits, and pocketfuls of electronics.  And often this is when I’ll mull.  These ideas, when they have just been conjured in my head by something I read or saw, start out like a little blobs of water that have been splashed onto paper, and slowly seep into it – first they’re nice, well-formed and discrete, but after a little seeping, all that’s left of each is a bit of crinkle.  I have wanted to record them, perhaps even share them with others, but I’ve never really been able to.  If a blob of water already seems insignificant and forgettable, by the time it gets to be a crinkle, having lost its original form, it’s just too difficult to tease out what it had been and why it was splashed there to begin with.  So this blog is intended to allow me a quick, easy method of capturing my little beads of insignificant thoughts before I neglect them and can no longer remember why I had decided to label them as ideas.