Loss and gain

The housemate is feeling better as the heat lessens for a day or os. The dog had a choking fit. Dog feeling better but my nerves are shredded.

And I have beeen learning to Twitter, to tweet and retweet.

So I can now trim or clip urls and manage to sound incoherent in 140 characters or less. Following Maud Newton, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman and Stephen Fry who tell me each moving and thrilling event of the hour on the hour as they lead their utterly public and unbelievable lives. I must also set up a Tumblir account or Flickr around a teeny bit to get more platform for my presence. Put all my FB acquaintances on hold while I move on upward in social media nowness.

And I need to get more epigrammatic. Sell myself to the world in 140 characters, be pithy and witty and concise. Not doable. Sandmonkey on Twitter keeping me tweeted on Egypt and somebody else has just tweeted about Libya. According to another cryptic tweet, I am about to be published in an e-book anthology unless the e-poublisher comes to his senses and decides to earn a decent living.

No time to drink. No desire to drink. Social media has eaten my soul. So far I have 300 followers, none of whom are showing any interest in getting to know me as a valuable network connection online. They are all following other Twitterers whom I am following because they follow someone who is probably not worth following. Is there life after Twitter or are we doomed to sit gossiping about celebs in Etherland forever?

In my next life I want to become a round-the-world lone sailor. Reid Stowe sailed around the world for three years and came back to find nobody understood what he had been through.

Moitessier would understand. Moitessier, a great inspiration to Reid as a young man, was competing in a race around the world called the Golden Globe in 1968, and he was well in the lead when he decided to change course and simply keep sailing. He explained this in a note, which he flung by slingshot onto the deck of a passing ship, that read in part: “I am continuing non-stop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.” He later wrote that, looking back on his decision, he only regretted the inclusion in the note of the word “perhaps.”

And even alcoholic losers do get remembered from time to time. The English writer and alcoholic Patrick Hamilton has had a blue Heritage plaque put up to him in Chiswick. Hamilton might have been a truly great  writer if he had sobered up and given himself a little longer to write. Always that sense of waste and loss I feel when thinking about creative minds ruined by alcoholism.

He was the laureate of the shabby centre of London, the out-of-the-way corners of Fitzrovia or Earls Court where dipsomaniacs fritter their lives away, trying to pick up barmaids or whores, and failing as miserably in that enterprise as they do in everything else.

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