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Saturday 13 April 2019

Day 350: Galactica

Thinking about some things I want in my life. I have liked having cinema in my life more this past week doing film reviews. Spending all my free time watching cinematic art has been better than spending it scrolling on social media, slumping in front of YouTube videos, bingeing mindless Netflix, playing videogames that infantilise you and manipulate your dopaminergic system into thinking you’re making progress simply because invented numbers are going up.

So I want to keep cinema in my life. And literature - I haven’t been reading nearly enough recently. Literature and poetry make me feel alive like almost nothing else. And music. I’ve fallen behind on guitar again, it’s been squeezed out of my life - but practising once a week, not noodling, but practising, directed, making progress, is something I want to do.

I love photography, but I’m spending so much time at the moment taking and editing photos for work, and always feeling behind with it - I need to organise my time better with it.

Writing. Once this year is up I want to redesign my blog, pay someone to create a more professional looking site for me, perhaps, and go to posting twice a week. Work towards those two pieces, an hour after work on pub days, from 9-5 (with breaks) on my days off. And the rest of the time have free - close the document and shut the laptop and forget about it. Go spend time with friends. Visit galleries. Eat out. Not have this albatross of needing to post something every day hanging round my neck.

Is that what the analogy of the albatross is about? Or am I thinking of the Sword of Damocles? It’s not a Gordian knot, I know that. It's not a curate's egg. It’s not Occam’s razor.

I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like the first episode (not the pilot) of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica, where we open in medias res on the titular starship with its crew haggard, unkempt, their eyes ringed and their cheeks stubbled. A clock is ticking down from thirty-three minutes (or something) to zero. The crew are all at their stations making frantic preparations, performing the system checks and calculations needed for a hyperspace jump. They’re a well-oiled machine by now, it has all become a working routine, but clearly high pressure; they're clearly exhausted.

They get done just as the clock hits zero. They wait. Someone says, “Hey, maybe this time they won’t-” and then the antagonist alien race appears with their fleet just off Galactica’s bow. Aliens prime to fire weapons. Galactica crew sigh, captain flicks switch, the ship jumps through hyperspace.

They land in empty space. Blackness. Crew member resets clock to thirty-three minutes. Clock begins ticking down. Crew go back to their stations, start procedures anew.

They don’t know why, but every time they leap somewhere new the alien race find them within thirty-three minutes. They’ll be destroyed if they stay. So they leap away again. But their fuel resources are dwindling. They all have to push themselves to get the ship ready to jump in time. They might have a spy on board. They need to figure out the mystery, win their freedom, but every thirty-three minutes, wherever they go, the aliens find them. Over and over. They can’t give up. But they don’t know how long they can maintain this for, either.

And that is what this goddamn blog has felt like. Feel the day ticking away. Have no idea what to write. Go through the procedure. Make notes. Arrive on some subject or idea. Dodge the anxiety, the feelings of inadequacy, the panic that this time I’ll simply have nothing to write, that this time I’ll fail. Get something written. Find a way to end it, to close it off. Tidy it up. Make it as neat as possible. Copy it to Blogger. Post it up. Share it to Facebook. 2am. Sigh. Collapse.

And then reset the clock.

The clock is ticking.

Begin again.

1 comment:

  1. In a really bizarre twist of the universe I was writing about the BSG 33 minute countdown and mental health last night.

    Guve yourself permission to write less if you need to. What you write is brilliant but don't do it at the expense of yourself. I'm reading so much more these days there is some fabulous stuff out there.

    You are amazingly inspirational.

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