Innocence, Experience And Why My Feet Hurt

It's Saturday night, it's close to bedtime, I have work tomorrow and the only post I've done any prep for would take far too long to finish. If it wasn't Blaugust, of course, I wouldn't be posting at all. When I broke my lengthy run of daily posts a while ago it was mostly so I wouldn't have to do this any more - come home from work and spend the rest of the evening blogging instead of relaxing.

Not that I don't find writing blog posts relaxing. I do, most of the time. I also perform better to a deadline so that's not really the problem. Mostly it's just that I do get quite tired after a day's work. It's not like I'm carrying bricks up a ladder all day, granted, but working in a large bookshop can be surprisingly physical, as I often feel the need to explain to fey bibliophiles who gush about how wonderful it must be to spend the working day surrounded by books. Try lifting them off a lorry by the crateful and carrying them up four flights of stairs, then tell me how wonderful it is...

My particular role involves much walking across three floors and five storeys, interspersed with long periods of standing in front of a computer screen. It's hard on the legs and actually worse now I only work two days a week because my feet don't quite have time to get used to it the way they did when I worked full time. Well, nearer to full time than I do now. It's been a very long time since I genuinely worked full time.

Added to that, every day now comes with an average of two hours dog walking. The books say twenty minutes twice a day is sufficient for good canine health but we like to give Beryl a lot more outdoor time than that. On a work day it gets cut to just one long walk in the evening but it's still another hour, hour and a half on top of the seven hours I've done already.

All of which leads me to believe it's best if I only post on work days when I have something I really want to say. And since I work mostly at the weekends and, for reasons I've explained, weekends are the last time anyone should post anything that really matters to them, if ever I do have something important to bring to the attention of the world, or the infinitesimal part of it that reads this blog, I'd be well-advised to save it for Monday, anyway.

All of which goes to show two things: 

1) I really can knock out several hundred words about nothing much at all, without even catching a breath

2) Blaugust makes people do things they wouldn't - and quite possibly shouldn't - normally do.

I didn't want to discuss any of that, though. The real reason for the long introduction is simple. When I sat down half an hour ago, with no clue what I was going to write about, I flipped through my Noah's Heart screenshot folder and an idea came to me immediately.  The problem was, the post that ought to have accompanied the screenshots I wanted to use would have needed a lot more thought and time than I was ready to give it just then.

That's how I came to start riffing on how and why I was too tired to write a long post. Next thing I know I've written six hundred words, which is plenty to give the whole thing the look of a real post, not something cobbled together out of need and desperation.

So, what about those screenshots? What was the post going to be about, anyway? Well, I'll tell you, since you asked.

In part, it was going to be yet another attempt to explain why I keep playing this odd game. I was going try to illustrate the variety of characters and storylines that give the whole experience a woozy, off-kilter feel that I really enjoy.

That in itself wouldn't have taken too long. The offputting part was when I realised both the quests I'd chosen to highlight also exemplified a storytelling trope I find almost pathologically appealing, namely the childlike innocent, whose naive commentary reveals the innate flaws in the supposedly mature worldview of the protagonist and by implication the reader, or in this case the player. Especially when they speak in the third person, using their own name. That really gets to me.

I was going to go all  the way back to the Superboy comics I read as a child, where there were sometimes vignettes featuring not just Superman as a boy, the raison d'etre of the title, but also Superboy as a baby; a baby that could barely talk and yet could, by virtue of his Kryptonian heritage, still foil evildoers, whose greed or malice he could barely comprehend yet could still easily recognize.

From there I would have weaved my way through various anthropomorphic animals to paradigm-shifting moments like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, finally concluding with some brief words about Lost Ollie, the Netflix show I'm currently watching.

As you can imagine, all that would have taken quite some time. Certainly a lot longer than the fifty minutes it's taken me to type this. It's now just before ten in the evening and it's going to take me another fifteen or twenty minutes to add the illustrations to the body of the text, think of a title, put in the tags and finally give the whole thing a final edit before hitting publish.

With that in mind, it's time for me say goodnight. I'm sorry I didn't have time to write the full post but I'm sure everyone can fill in the details for themselves. Or be my guest, take the idea and work it up for a post of your own. 

You do all have blogs, don't you?