Monday 29 August 2011

Ah, you're drunk, you're drunk, you silly old fool...

I'm not drunk, but I am drinking. I have 3 bottles of lager with a total volume of about 2 litres, and an alcohol content of about 5%. A total of 10 units. I'm just finishing the first bottle now.

As to why I'm doing this, I'm not sure I can say.

Please note, "I'm not sure I can say" is not the same as "I don't know".

This isn't about dishonesty or being deliberately obtuse. It's something more complicated.

Take the recent post I did about story arcs on television. It contains the following statement:

I really struggle with stories on the telly, from soaps to sitcoms. I can't switch off the analysing part of me and simply enjoy it for what it is.
Presumably you took this at face value. I certainly wrote it at face value. Yet it begs the question, "Why?" And while I was pedalling away earlier, I did some thinking about this question.

I'd spent some time prior to my ride watching the telly - A film called The Runaway Bride, starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. It was a perfectly watchable tale, and it was obvious right from the start that Gere was the hero, Roberts was the heroine, and the climax of the film would be that they finally got together and lived happily ever after. Plotting a graph for it on Vonnegut's G-I axis would be simple enough. It's actually the emotional side of things that I'm not comfortable with.

Stories manipulate emotions. They make you laugh and cry and love and hate. The good ones do anyway.

So when I say, "I don't do television" what I'm really saying is "I don't do emotion".

The most insightful of the counsellors and mental health experts I've encountered have been aware of this. Only once, and then only briefly, one of them broke throught the walls I've built and made me cry. I love and respect her for doing it. Another explained to me that "You've lost touch with your emotions".

Why the walls exist, I can't say (see earlier statement)

It was hard to write what I wrote above. Part of the reason I'm drinking tonight is because I wanted to be able to write it.


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