Morning.
Days like today provide something of a challenge for those of us tasked with blogging every single day. I say ‘tasked with’ but it’s more like ‘brought it upon myself’ because ultimately I’m my own boss and if I decide not to write anything one day it’s not as if I’m going to fire myself.
There won’t be any pressure worth considering. No round-table podcasts questioning my ambition. No Stewart Robson-esque character on a far-flung TV network castigating me for my efforts (of course the reason he’d be castigating me isn’t so much about what I did or didn’t do, it’d be because there was a personal issue between us that stretched back years and thus clouded his judgement – not to mention that the underlying cause of his anger is not me but a deep sadness that he never made peace with his father before he died and he’s taking it out me as a kind of surrogate).
There’d be no cracked Arseblog logo on the back of a tabloid paper with a headline that just about had some connection with the piece in question. No running gags about how I lacked a little bit the writing sharpness or my keyboard handbrake was on.
So, I can do what I please when I please, and that’s a very nice to place to be in any job. And yet … and yet … there’s a weight of responsibility. People are waiting for a blog and they’re very kind to come here every day to read the blog and if I don’t give them a blog then perhaps I’m getting their Sunday off to a bad start.
What if by not doing it I set off a random sequence of events that proves disastrous? For example, a man somewhere in the world doesn’t read Arseblog so he leaves the house slightly earlier than he would have and as he’s crossing the road a man on a bicycle crashes into him and the two are brought to hospital in an ambulance which skids off the road on a patch of oil and plunges into a river.
Divers are brought to the scene to recover the bodies of the men and the ambulance crew, but while they’re down there they discover the ambulance has dislodged a stone that covered an old cave inside which lived a prehistoric Crocodile/Velocriaptor crossbreed who had survived for hundreds of thousands of years on moss and and bits of river sludge and thus was really hungry and really angry because that’s a long time to spend eating that muck, and he missed the end of that TV series he really liked.
The Crocoraptor then emerges from his lair to lay waste to the local area before army are brought in to take him out with extreme prejudice. A huge battle ensues, there are many victims. Some of them soldiers, some of them innocent people who are stomped on or picked up and hurled at helicopters, but in the end the army prevail.
However, once he’s dead they think that’s it, job done and dusted, but as they drive off the camera pans in and we see loads of tiny little Crocoraptors scuttling off to the water where they will grow large on moss and sludge and eventually return to put an end to humanity as we know it.
And why? Because I didn’t write a blog on a weekend when there was nothing happening and nothing to write about. These things wrestle with my conscience as I sit here with a cup of coffee pondering how it is I’m going to fill the page with words.
Most of me thinks this is ridiculous, that such a scenario is so unlikely as to be almost impossible, but then there’s the word ‘almost’. What if? I mean, stranger things have happened. We’re hurtling around space on a gigantic round rock because one meteorite crashed into another and everything got all jumbled up and then fast forward a few hundred million or billion years and here we are thinking that it’s ok such a thing as Rustler pre-made hamburgers exist. What does that say about us?
A hamburger in a plastic box you can get in a supermarket or a petrol station forecourt which you then heat up in a microwave. If that can happen then what I fear isn’t that ridiculous at all, is it?
All of which is to say that there’s no Arsenal news because of the Interlull and despite my best efforts I’m afraid there won’t be a blog this morning. I know this may bring about the end of the world, but I’m willing to take my chances.
Till tomorrow (if there is one).
