mia culpa...so shoot me

I want to say this simply, so please for once grant me the power to be clear.

I wrote something on Sunday which I looked at afterwards and felt so ashamed of I had to remove it, like looking at a side of oneself that you don't recognise or worse, that you do recognise but don’t like..

What I wanted to write about was how lucky I am. To wake up to the very epitome of glorious autumn, a crisp day bathed in late summer sunshine. The snuffle scruffle bum walk and stretch and cold nose in the ear from a Charlie, and a Toffee who loves nothing more than to drape his neck across yours, (if you've been silly, or drunk enough to leave your bedroom door open). To roll over and find the half a bottle of Taittinger, that you managed to smuggle out of the night club and all the way home on the tube, on your bedside table. A hairy hug, a sip of champagne, a piping hot shower, aspirin and scrambled eggs - what could be better. what more could a man want?

Nothing, really.

You see, we get to do pretty much anything we like whenever we want to. Of course I have to work but that's just about the only thing that gets in the way of sheer hedonism. We walk, we laugh, we are as tidy (or not) as we want to be, as punctual, shy, selfish or gregarious as our mood takes - sometimes we go out for a whole Sunday, lunch and all, without even taking a bath or brushing our teeth.

It's an agreement. A trade.

Because there are other things that we don't do anymore. In short we don't look for happiness beyond that which we can generate and sustain for ourselves. There are no external influences, nothing beyond this tiny, compact, introspective microcosm that has any impact on our (my) selfish existence.

Now that’s where it starts to go wrong, that sounds maudlin, regretful, but it’s not supposed to, that’s certainly not how I feel.
My only reservation is an inkling, a small persuasive voice that’s muttering that there ought to be a point. More point. Is a beautiful day still beautiful if you don’t share it? Of course it is? The Pearl Fisher’s duet is a small parcel of bliss that could stop yor heart, as evocative as the top of a baby’s head. A thrown stick and a puddle, the smell of new cut grass on a warm breeze.
Is it wrong then to want your world to shine? That’s not to walk through life oblivious to the mundane or the ugliness, but not to settle for less, in…anything.

What joy, what bliss, what ho, what's the point. You don’t find what shines by collecting lots of things that don’t.

And it's no big deal. That's the mistake I made on Sunday when I thought I might write something that might help me to understand. The mistake being of course that there is nothing to understand after all.

It really is a matter of 'so what'. Who actually gives a jaundiced squirrel? Once in these past three years I have made the ridiculous mistake of imagining that the hand that touched my face might stay there, but she was simply a friend of a friend caught up in a moment and doubtless too much tequila....gone in 60 seconds, a butterfly touch whipped away on the chilly night air, so transient that it was just my imagination. Stupid, stupid. Sex, important? No. The hand on your face, the fingers in your hair....or lack of them.
That's the knack of it.