EPISODE 80: AFTER THE AFTERMATH

Welcome to my blog which this time a week ago was nervously advertising on the radio for an event which had filled my mind for over a year. In truth the event didn’t go very well with lack of staffing leading to disorganization and lack of punters to keep us all on our toes. In the end I’ve lost so much money that I don’t know how to manage. Of course I’d always foreseen some loss but this was quite spectacular because as low as I had imagined the numbers to be, the reality was lower still. And yet, as I indicated last week, the original vision (bar the people coming) was more or less achieved. Maybe I should have been more determined to include income in the vision although I always assumed, and hoped, that someone would donate to what I thought was a good cause.

What I have noticed, throughout, is a lack of interest with no responses to my articles, no surprising interventions from anyone with influence and most often not even a reply from charities or spiritual groups who should have been interested. Equally, although my name appeared alongside articles on the festival, still no-one got in touch either to support or condemn. So to feel that with better PR we would have been more successful, as some do, is not really evidenced. Even now that it is over, very few of the participants, the talkers and performers for example, have given feedback. 

Because of the dramatic moments with Copperdollar at the Market Cross and the upliftment of the party, we were, on Sunday morning tending to call the day ‘a success despite the things which didn’t quite work’. On Monday I was in tears because I was so awed by the achievement of getting from conception to completion. By Wednesday the self-congratulation was fading and now I feel, as often I do, like a drunk looking back on an alcoholic evening, sadly aware that all the drama and excitement was just the drug whereas the cold morning reality is a broken nose accompanied by mental and emotional deflation.

Naturally there have been comments about ‘next year’. A band has already volunteered itself to perform, Jo wants to do the food again, and we can all see how to do everything better. Of course I’m not going to use any of my own money again but even so I don’t know how interested I would be in producing it another time. Yes there is the temptation to perfect and to show the mistakes weren’t in the thinking, just in finding enough people to execute and manifest the thinking, however, when I reflect on the last few months, little was really enjoyable and, of more importance, I’m not sure at all that there is really any point, any purpose, in doing it.

By which I mean, what? A creation doesn’t have to have a purpose or, as in this case, it can have various purposes. This creation was hinged on the belief that getting people to think and talk about death and dying is ‘useful’ and could result in betterment for the terminally ill and their families. I don’t know whether I personally hold this belief or not but certainly a number do. During the last few months I have tried to be passionate about this view but maybe the fact that it is a borrowed belief means that I have gone as far with it as I can. While I couldn’t take this part out of the vision, or the day, the satisfaction for me, I now know, is in the spectacular.

Meanwhile, in desperation for money, I have remembered my pornographic comedy about Sad Sam, the book that Chris Somebodyorrather twice promised to publish as en e-book. The last two days have been spent fathoming the intricacies of deformatting my haphazard Microsoft Word document and reformatting it to be crunched into a kindle manifestation. This learning process has some way to go.

 Now the Dead Day is over, I have had to begin addressing the matter of what happened to the original purpose of this novel which was stated clearly in the original title, "I'S NOVEL ABOUT HOW THE WORLD'S YOUNGEST BEST-SELLING AUTHOR (FAILED) ACHIEVED REDEMPTION AND MODERATE SUCCESS AT THE AGE OF 60 - HE BLOODY HOPES"!  With just five or so weeks to go, well, it hardly needs saying. The unanswerable question is why did I let myself get so diverted at such a cost?

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Last night I went up the road and hung out with friends smoking and chatting and, in their case, drinking. It seems an inordinately long time since I last had such an evening. I suppose the main reason for that is that my main hanging-out friends Terry, Phil, John, and Crispin, died and I got out of the habit. There were attempts to steer me around to talk about the GDD but I was unwilling and wanted to be discussing philosophy and the illusion of self

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I read a stack of books this week, the best being ‘Measuring the World’ by Daniel Kehlman and the worst, by far, being ‘Magic Seeds’ by V.S. Naipaul. I suppose once a modern author has achieved the Novel Prize for Literature, it’d be a little insulting to turn down the next few offerings, especially if you expect them to sell, but this book can’t be worth the £17 the publishers tried to get from it. Give me his contract and let him attempt to make a living as an unknown on kindle.
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Now is Monday morning; the radio is blathering on about the BBC which is under attack because of its handling of the 'Jimmy Saville child abuse case'. As with many things in the UK thesedays, such as parliament, an old-fashioned way of doing things by nods and winks is being replaced by a lack of ambivalence which is more transparent but less in tune with reality. It is the same sort of thinking that turned the british into Americans, all black and white with no grey areas, fox news rather than the BBC, right-wing capatalism instead of negotiated justice. So it goes.