Stalling

I am, supposedly, working on a project proposal today. More accurately, trying to work through what the project amounts to. When I have a clear enough idea of how everything will work, it should be easy -- albeit rather tedious -- to propose. It's been simmering away for a couple of weeks now, and I thought I had a handle on where I wanted to go with it, but now the more I think about it the more dithery and indecisive I become about its scope and capabilities and whether it's a good idea in the first place. Whether some bits are even possible, for that matter.

This stuff is a lot easier when I'm just implementing someone else's stupid ideas rather than having to come up with some of my own.

As I've stated before, I've made a career of working on worthless tripe that no-one needs or wants. I know the terrain pretty well. I'm good at it. I've got that whole bitter, contemptuous, self-hating, client-hating, everyone-hating persona down pat. I know how to create stuff without believing in it. Which is just as well, because I don't believe. I don't believe in anything.

Unfortunately, for various reasons, this project really needs to be instigated and defined by me. And without it, or something like it, I will likely become pretty much surplus to requirements before long. Cast out of the halls of worthlessness, unnecessary even among the unnecessary. How ignominious is that?

So, a project proposal. At one level there's probably no need to believe in this either. But I'm inconsistent: I never have faith in the product, but I need to believe in my contribution to it. However crap the result may be, I have to be able to tell myself I did my best. I don't mind producing shite -- ok, that's a lie, I do mind, I hate it, it makes me feel corrupt and soiled, it makes me despise myself -- but I don't mind it so much as long as it's not my fault. As long as they asked for shite.

Now, I'm not inventing this project out nothing. It fits into a wider scheme of things. Still, if it happens, I will be largely responsible for what it becomes. If it's shite, it will be my fault. If it can't be done -- if I can't do it -- it will be my fault. If it takes years and costs millions of lives, it will be my fault.

Is it any fucking wonder I'm dithering?

On a completely different note, it's the YMCA Christmas Party tonight.

In the last few years the whole School Disco thing has become an unfathomable success. Personally, I harbour no nostalgia for that period of my life, and find the idea of wilfully recreating the utter wretchedness of those experiences, however parodically, both baffling and repugnant. But each to their own. Clearly many people yearn for those days: on any weekend evening in London you'll see marauding bands of grown men and women dressed as prefects and games mistresses and extras from Grange Hill, off to dance drunkenly to the pop songs of their youth.

Be all that as it may, the YMCA Christmas Party is, on past form, the closest thing to a genuine school disco I've encountered in adult life. No dressing up as Gripper Stebson required. It takes place in a gym, for a start. It starts early and ends early. It's full of people who share an institutional space on a regular basis but don't really know each other. Everyone is in little cliques. The staff -- the teachers -- run it. It is, typically, an evening of profound awkwardness.

It is also, not coincidentally, an evening of profound drunkenness.

Still, there will be various friends there. It would be churlish not to attend.

Also, Ian is away tonight, so I have no-one to keep me away. And no-one to keep me under control. No-one to make sure I go to bed at a sensible hour.

I'd say the prospects for some rambling, incoherent, bleary and frankly ill-advised blog posting later are good :)
Posted by matt at December 10, 2003 05:29 PM