I wrote two blogs in draft recently. One was about how Taylor Swift shouldn’t agree to demands from her fans to speak up about Gaza; the other was a commentary on coffee cake not actually tasting anything like coffee.
Sort of sums everything up. I mean absurd and pompously opinionated. Sometimes I just think I’m writing thoughts into the void, to distract myself from the fact that nothing interesting has happened to me. I mean coffee cake. Come on, Matt.
The Taylor Swift thing was about how people are simultaneously polarised and tribalised. To belong, I suggested, was the pinnacle of modern desire, and yet along with it comes the need to conform - to whatever is left, right, Republican, Democrat, Palestine, Israel, Laurel, Yanny. I called it tyranny. It rips people to pieces. But who am I to comment on it? All these blog posts just slip down the page and then drop off into some archive even I can’t be bothered to read. What difference can I make?
Perhaps I just need to focus on real life.
Alright. I’m on a train, it’s approaching Culham. An automated voice has just told me to mind the gap between the train and the platform. I’d like to think it’s human kindness that announcement, but deep down I know it’s just a legal cover, a sort of ‘well we did tell you’ defence in court for anyone unfortunate enough to slip between the two. There you go. Now green fields are flashing by, under grey evening clouds.
You can disagree with me about coffee cake. I’d argue that we’ve all convinced ourselves that that taste is ‘coffee’ when it actuality it’s not even close. Same for tomato soup. Same for carrot cake. Same for strawberry pop. I’m literally boring myself.
But what should I be blogging about? Should I be blogging at all? If I can’t pontificate about things that I can’t change, if I can’t be silly, and my humour turns out to be about as funny as a class detention, I’m not sure what that leaves me with, other than trains and fields and telegraph poles.
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