Lobotomy

 The date is the 19th of October 2012. The starting pistol is fired high into the air, simultaneously I spring forward athletically from my  braced crouching position, beginning my sprint down the long metaphorical road. My two fingers (because despite being of the new supposedly technology savvy generation, I never mastered touch typing and can still only competently type with two digits) dance swiftly across the keyboard, each aggressive tap of a key imprinting a pixel articulation of my thoughts onto the blank white screen before me.

 The clock ticks precious seconds away and as the ultimate countdown commences, to my relief I see that the end line, the deadline, lies just meters from my exhausted self. With a final burst of energy I propel myself forwards, the remaining few paragraphs flowing onto the page in a jumbled flood of words. The time is eleven fifty nine. Relieved I have made it, I click the beautifully vibrant button labeled "Publish". Feeling victorious, I close my eyes, I have successfully written and posted another bog within the day. Then as I open my tired eyes to look back onto the screen, a sudden ice age envelopes my heart and the exhausted yawn meets an untimely end half way up my throat. The red box stating "you are only allowed a maximum of twenty labels" lies smugly across the top of the page.

 Hurriedly I delete the one extra offensive treacherous miscreant of a label that now threatens to ruin everything I have worked towards. I frantically click "publish" again, the time is midnight, in the distance a clock presumably strikes twelve and I imagine for the few seconds it takes to load my online publication, the deep resonating mournful rings of the ominous metal bell. I grit my teeth in frustration and cast my eyes onto the screen in vain hope that blogger counts midnight, the barren no man's land between two days, to be the territory of the merciful today as opposed to under the occupation of the tyrannical tomorrow.

 I let out a slow sobbing sigh, the post is labeled as "20th of October".

 It has finally happened, on my last post, I failed to meet the deadline. I'm sure there is a meaning to the term "deadline". Presumably if you go past the deadline you become dead in some way, but as far as I know in most every day situations people aren't killed for late paperwork, unless there exists some evil organization skilfully covering up every unpunctual excel sheet or mildly tardy report related murder (Perhaps entitled League of Uncompromising Beaurocratic Employers or LUBE for short).

Therefore if you miss a deadline, you must be dead in some other slightly more subtle way. Perhaps you become dead to whoever set you the deadline. So as soon as you fail to meet the deadline, your employer or immediate superior or whoever it was that told you to hand in that file by six o'clock in the morning sharp, no longer looks at you with the level of burning passionate friendship that they used to. Instead your employer stares coldly at you, a certain emotional distance appearing between superior and subordinate, an invisible wall suddenly erected to severe the bond of mutual trust that had grown so strong between the two of you before that fateful six o'clock in the morning blunt.

 But in this instance I had set the personal deadline of one blog post a day for myself to keep and as much as I might try, it really is rather difficult to keep an emotional distance from yourself. Hence, if I want to become emotionally disconnected from myself, the only possible solution is to become generally emotionally unreceptive as a human being, this may perhaps be achieved by undergoing the great medical process of lobotomy.

 Goodbye dear meager wavering mirage of a readership whose existence is more than a little doubtful, the next time we meet, I may have become an empty emotionless husk of a human being but at least I would be a punctual empty emotionless husk.

Mental Health

 I'm sure you have walked down the street one wind swept evening, shoes squelching wetly in the light drizzle, to see the ghostly pale form of a plastic bag, mutilated by some hungry urban fox somewhere, half drifting half rolling miserably across the road. Perhaps you, upon seeing it, put aside such environmental concerns as the biodegradability of plastic and stopped to look at the bag in order to briefly wonder what an apt metaphor for a tired and downcast state of mind the plastic bag could be. In which case I take this opportunity to humbly apologize to you for stealing your metaphor.
 However recently I had been feeling a little empty, lacking in confidence and an absence of general happiness, in short, I felt like a torn plastic bag. Of course I still had a certain amount of class and dignity in so far as being a torn plastic bag from Waitrose, not from Sainsbury's or Tesco's but my days of being a bag from Fortnum and Mason felt well and truly behind me.
 I'd been assaulted by a sudden torrent of doubts, I got the feeling that I wasn't as full of offensive witticism or snide remarks as I used to be, that I had become generally less amusing. Where was that verbose abusive flare with which I used to articulate statements designed only to irritate and upset? Where was the mind with which I had taken every opportunity to weave the most inappropriate and emotionally scarring of jokes into the conversation? Is this a mid-life crisis? In which case does that mean I only have sixteen more years to live? To put plainly, I felt like some spark that had burnt stubbornly in me for the last ten years or so had quite suddenly given up and vanished with a tired sigh, leaving behind only a fast dispersing smoke-like remnant of vaguely amusing cynicism.
 Even in the darkest of times however, there is light. On the very hour I was feeling least confident about myself, almost as if by fate, my school held a lunch time assembly on "Mental Health". An assembly there to cover lack of confidence, depression and other symptoms of teenage pubescent angst. With as much hope as someone mildly dejected can muster, I was, along with everyone else in my year group, shepherded into the assembly. Perhaps, just perhaps the talk would improve my mental health.
 As the chatter dies down, I wait in anticipation as the talk begins. The two women in charge walk onto the stage, armed with an optimistically colored power point behind them and a presumably helpful speech in their grasp. They open their mouths in preparation, I assume, of great enlightening words that will open my mind to the wonders of psychiatric treatment.
 "Hello," the first woman, let us call her Messiah One, announces while the second woman, Messiah Two, fiddles with the power point presentation, "We're here to talk to you about mental health. Do you know," a healthy pause as the power point changes slides, "That we all have different personality types."
 By which she of course means human beings are all, believe it or not, different and individual... my eyes are opened, not to new and enlightening facts about psychiatry as I had hoped but to the now painfully apparent fact that this talk is an irritatingly patronizing game of State the Obvious. With that comes the realization that I might as well replace the two women, Messiah one and two, with some suitably wizened looking bearded homeless man off the streets and he would fulfill the role of Messiah far better than the two on stage both in terms of appearance and genuine ability to enlighten.
 At that moment, fueled by vexation, my motivational spark rekindled and roared into a full blaze. And like the fallen warrior rising from amongst the corpse littered battle field to face the oncoming enemy or the limp fighter rising from amongst the graying bushes with the aid of Viagra to face the on coming...... I slowly raised my hand high into the air to make a contribution: an intelligent, malicious, needless, spiteful, cynical, provocative, irritating, misanthropic contribution to be articulated confidently and verbosely with a facetious grin across my lips.