An Elephant of One's Own

 He'd gone to bed with too much on his mind, as usual, had slept a bit, and was now awake again: it was awkwardly the middle of the night, the wrong time to be awake, but he soon realized he wasn't going to fix that easily. It took him a few minutes to realise that the dream he'd just had was the dream all old men have, with only a few minor details to individualise it. In the dream, it was generally known (at least by the scruffy layabouts who hung around the landings in his tenement building) that his wife was sleeping with his son. Everyone seemed OK with this, and expected him to be, but there was something about the arrangement he didn't particularly care for. He couldn't feel any animosity towards his son - given that the boy, or young man, was pretty much a copy of him, only with the genetic defects and limitations more openly on display, less plastered-over - or towards his wife, naturally, but he felt sad and discontented all the same. He decided to approac...

 Dear Blog, sorry I haven´t really "been here for you" lately. I'll be brutally honest: Twitter is more fun than you, as well as younger and sexier. It's more fun because on Twitter there is a reasonable expectation that anything you write will be read by at least three people, which isn't a lot but it's three more readers than you are likely to get for anything posted here, let´s be frank. Admittedly, Twitter does offer a perverse system of incentives that Blogger doesn't.  While any blog post of mine is destined to get 0 views regardless of whether it is (comparatively) well written or absolute crap, I have long since discovered that on Twitter, likes are inversely proportional to quality, such that anything cogent or profound will inevitably get 0 likes whereas a stupid, frivolous throwaway remark will get 3 likes, and if it's exceptionally poorly expressed the number may even rise to 15 or 20. So, like a nicotine addict, you end up carefully regula...

Found this in "drafts". Posting as is, unfinished, with abrupt ending mid-bullet-point, since it´s unlikely I´ll ever have an incentive to finish writing a post that is likely to be read by nobody at all. The question of why I continue to post stuff that, unfinished or not, nobody reads, is one that undoubtedly deserves its own unfinished discussion further down the line. Ahem. "Sorry, I don´t hate anyone"  (Not even myself, these days. Haven't the energy.) I've talked about hate elsewhere. For me, it's an exotic emotion, so rare than when it bubbles up momentarily (usually a few metres away from a Ford Explorer driver) I want to hang on to it, to calm it down and study it before it wriggles free and escapes.  But it never lasts longer than a few minutes; and I can honestly and thoughtfully say I have never acted or spoken under its influence (other than perhaps accelerating a bit faster than a careful driver would). Consequently, I find it hard to tak...