The Meaning of Life, or Some Shite

What’s it all about? I sometimes wonder as I scramble pathetically for the next word. Why are we here?

I started writing on Medium about a month after I found out that I had a tumour up my arse. I told a few people I wanted to put a sort of cancer diary together to put on the Internet and they all looked very solemn and understanding.

That’ll be good for you. That will help your mental health.

Actually, honestly, I just had a few funny anus jokes that I wanted to inflict upon strangers.

I soon realised two important facts. Firstly, you need to write pretty regularly on here if you want to build any sort of audience. And secondly, a fight against cancer consists of fuck all happening almost all of the time.

So within a few weeks, I started fleshing out my account by writing a bit of fiction; just a couple of little ideas that were floating around the echoey chasms in my mind.

Then I wrote a few non-cancerous non-fiction pieces. Mostly I was just describing my little girl’s antics and how much of a pain in the arse she is. It's strange how much of my writing involves the various pains in my arse.

Now, I don’t have cancer anymore, and so have a lot less to write about as apparently, the only thing more tedious than having a tumour is recovering from one.

My little girl is still a little fucker, but there are only so many ways to describe her emptying her toybox all over the floor and the many new swearwords we’ve taught her.

Which brings us to the fiction. I’m still plugging away with that. I go through phases. One month I’ll try to be funny, the next I’ll try to be scary.

To let you in on a secret, my method for writing horror is literally just to scan around the room for an inanimate which I could say is somehow capable of eating an unnamed protagonist.

It’s not a highly fulfilling artistic pursuit but I’m a wildly unimaginative person and it's the best I can do.

So, again, what are we doing here?

I used to think I was writing for the money. My lofty ambition was to earn enough to pay my gas and electric bill each month and, for a few brief, beautiful weeks this seemed realistic but that dream is again drifting further and further away.

Apparently, they want people to engage with each other, but not too much. And they like content in certain genres, but they won’t say which ones. And they’ll continuously recalibrate the earnings metrics to make sure it's fair, but they won’t say how.

So that’s good.

And all the while I’m sat here in bed looking around the room thinking ‘What about a wardrobe? Wardrobes are scary’.

I was actually hoping to have an answer to my opening question by the time I got to this point but it is somehow eluding me.

Maybe the answer is that there is no answer.

No, that’s definitely not it but, if you don’t think too hard, it sort of sounds good in a pretentious, wanky sort of way.

That will have to do.

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