An Interruption In Proceedings: A Eulogy

Here I am, sitting alone at my computer, without my socks. Trying to do a media essay. Trying trying trying. It is trying. Nothing like what it seems in my head, a stress, a wall, an anxiety, all that pervades my consciousness and festers away in the back of my mind; seething and jabbing through torpid fits. Lost and tainting through the abandonment of art and liquor and people and sex. Famously I said that university is an inconvenience to life, desperately avoiding the notion that it has become my life. I hadn’t the heart for some of those posts, where I defamed university and its nauseating hold on my time. I had to wait until that cycle of intensity in that particular emotion came around again. And it has, but only as lightening strikes twice in the same spot. Feelings are getting harder to catch the faster you move.
I have fallen into pseudo-blogging once more. Doing impractical things of habit that lack all the things one needs in order to complete them: getting ahead of myself making a long list of new titles down the bottom of a page with 8 unfinished entries, actually podcasting but avoiding the editing, tapping into my phone at train stations, absorbing and thinking and writing all with that idealised air of immortalising it in art.

But this is my last blog.
For a while, for an age, for ever; who knows. But this is the end of an era.

I prepared a poem, in honour of this occasion, more formulaic than it is substantial, but all true. It probably expresses all I wanted to say about my reasons for this, better than I could in many less words and in a more engaging way.

I Started Blogging Because

I lost her
Was the friend, were the muse
I started blogging to replace the letters
Were the blogging, was the letters
I started blogging because of her
I lost the letters
Were the blogging, was her
I started blogging to replace a friend
Was her, were the blog
I started blogging because of the letters
I lost a muse
Was the dream, were the friend
I started blogging because of Amanda
Was the blog, were the songs
I started blogging to replace her, but
Lost was Amanda
Was the friend, were the blog
I started blogging to replace Amanda
Was the muse, were her
I started blogging because of the blog
I lost the songs
Was the muse, were the friend
I started blogging to replace a dream
Was the songs, were the muse
I started blogging because of the songs
I lost a dream
Was a muse, were the songs
I started blogging because of a dream
Was Amanda, were the blog
I started blogging to replace a muse but
I lost the blog
I started blogging to replace a song
Was the letters, were her
I started blogging because of a muse
Was the dream, were the friend


The material and appreciation of scholarly expression, the comfort and resonance of unconditional and true friendship, and the mad personal and cathartic ravings of a diary – were all things missing from my life, that I sought in the blog. And the all things I would have normally expressed in those situations, I had somehow commandeered and deemed appropriate only for the blog, and which have been the property of the blog for so long now, I had almost forgot where, in the past, other people had gained that rapport.
I do not mean to say that blogging indicates a deficiency, I do not mean to say goodbye. I do not mean to think that blogging was just a surrogate, or that the position it once took is now filled. But I cannot go on seeking those things in this way.
In this current climate, the stifling expectations and workload of university, the new life, my complete lack of purpose, dreams, desire and drive, the utter and undeniable newness and intensity of it all – I see no use in continuing. I defy it to find purpose. This cannot become my life’s work. I feel I am carrying it around like a guilty weight. A huge and looming shadow, a reminder of all the past I have to relive for abreaction I convinced myself I need, and yet no longer do.
The events of my life back then, during most of the blog, were so thin on the ground that I had time to live them twice. Filling in what was left to make my life full with words on the little I had to talk about.

And sure closing off this channel of expression means a period of readjustment, where I will go on divulging long jabberings too heavy on the psychoanalysis, tangents and past for my friends; writing essays that read like blogs and continuing in unpublished navel-gazing diaries; and I will miss my blog for that. Maybe I will go back to writing songs, or sculpture, or drawing… just art without expectation and catharsis. Something new. I have a finite amount of creative energy and expression; and I am not prone to repetition as I am cycles.
I feel this blog has served its purpose. And seeing as it never had one to begin with, this is quite a feat.
I could go on about all the wonderful things it has done for me, all the noble and unexpected lessons, the great creative outlet it has been, the mateship, the joy and tears, the legacy I suppose it carved out for itself… But it is not fair to mythologise.
I know not why I write this as I do. It has not so much broken down that fourth wall in a gushing forth of reality, so much as tunnelled under when no-one was paying attention.
Amelie, I will see you on Facebook. I am glad that we became friends through all of this. I am sorry to disappoint you and leave a certain vacancy there. I know that you were eager to hear more. I am flattered and grateful to this very day for your praise, interest, replies and above all your friendship. I look forward to chatting outside of the blog like two everyday people. It has been fun.


And I will still be here, forever, anytime you want me, playing out those stories, my stories, over and over again, living and dying once more, through the podcasts and the text.


Goodnight and good luck.



☆Anika☆