It Feels Good When I Stop

"Why do you bang your head against the wall?"
"It feels good when I stop".

I always got this joke, even as a very young child, when infants like myself were aghast at the concept of self-inflicted pain and couldn't move past the mental-patient image to the punchline beyond. It was mostly fun being a savvy seven year old, but other times, my schadenfreude would cause concern among adults.

"Miss, he's saying horrible things!" whinged and whimpered a young classmate to the useless Australian replacement teacher. "He says he'll put pins in my head and scratch my brain!"

The teacher was often just as shocked by the details of the warped suggestions I was making as I tested the power of words almost randomly - certainly with no malice - on the subjects of my experimentation.

Once I was taken out of class and found myself facing the Headmistress, who was a lovely woman. She seemed tired as she looked across at me, standing on the other side of her desk, keeping my face bland so as not to appear too pleased with myself.

She interrogated me gently to probe the reasons for my shocking language, and I feigned innocence. I did not intend to harm their delicate psyches, Miss. I was only joking.

"Not everyone shares your sense of humour, Deek," she said, frowning, wondering what adult environment I was being exposed to which would produce such a variety of colourful and unpleasant scenes I was conjuring up to play across the ever-ready TV screen minds of my young colleagues.

I didn't know enough at that stage to refer her to my medical notes and reassure her that this was not early-stage psychosis, but actually post-traumatic stress disorder from my parents' divorce, with the added crunch of real adult brainkiller drugs.

All children go through phases where they test the boundaries of their power; early on I realised mine would never be in brute strength or physical performance, but words it was going to be.

For my own amusement, I would think of the most excruciating thing I could, tortures, situations of pain and terror, and then find the words to quickly impart the information to my unwilling, unsuspecting victims. I avoided being punched by appearing to be offering them a secret thrill. Some girls (particularly girls, who being more advanced would appreciate all the more) having received the sick shock, squirmed and cringed, ran off to try to rid themselves of the evil thought that now had a hold of their mind, would return with friends, to observe them as I spoke the disruptive magic formulae.



I was immune, of course. I had stopped banging my head, and it felt wonderful.

Back in March 2007, I wrote:

I've not been able to write much recently... how many blog posts start like that? Not Blog of Funk, which has managed a consistent 3.26 posts per week since June 2004, and that average doesn't take into account the other blogs I've written along the way. Not that I am blowing my own prolific trumpet. I have on several occasions wondered why the hell I am still blogging... what pleasure do I still get from this activity, which once provided me with such reward?

I used to feel connected through blogging; to myself, as I checked into my journal, reviewing and remarking upon things present and past; to others, as reactions came in to something I had written. But as podcasting and blogging have become more central to work, the freedoms of expression and to simply be able to speak my mind and be myself have diminished, and these have been replaced by a growing sense of responsibility which runs counter to art, and to maintain verbal output comes to seem a necessity rather than a natural product of my interests and enquiries into the substance of life. Leaving it alone for a while is always an option.

Someone once defined Web 2.0 as internet which relies on Google, and when I deconstructed that, actually it is scarily true, and I do not feel good about it at all.

In the words of Spike Milligan, just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they are not after me. Google is far more insidious than you think and this is not a joke - just like the Borg, they will assimilate you. They don't just want to own ideas (Google Books), mechanisms of income (AdWords, Checkout) and the planet we inhabit (Google Earth) our streets and homes (Street View) - they want to own our future. With Chrome, they even released a web browser which de facto owned your intellectual property. For similar reasons, I resisted Microsoft as broadly and as consistently as possible ever since starting to use computers, to my great benefit.

So in the same way that I fear not telling you this short tale of a childhood long since departed, because I am not seeking approval or attempting to comfort you, I not only know that I am going to stop writing this blog, but I now have a clear vision and reason for stopping, which has been nagging away at me over the past two years.

With our collective future in general hanging precariously in the balance, I've decided to do things differently. I am not going to disappear, at least not in that "where's he gone?" way, I'm just changing my modus operandum.

This is going to be fun.