Monday, June 15, 2009

The horror, the horror

It was a dark and stormy night. Rainclouds the colour of hearses loomed above Nottingham. From the upper room of a gothic slab of architecture (actually a nondescript semi-detached house, but fuck it I’m not in a happy mood and I’m allowing myself a little poetic licence), came the banshee-like blood-curdling howl of …

the blogger.

The blogger was a creature of evil and cunning, a creature that didn’t care about petty rules and whether it was right or wrong to spend a slow afternoon at work composing a 1,500 word article on the ‘Scream’ trilogy – 1,500 words that alternated between incisive film writing and flippant sarcasm; 1,500 words that gave him great pleasure to write. An article he spent the afternoon anticipating uploading to the blogosphere along with a triptych of illustrative material.

An article he swiped from his “My Documents” folder at work and bunged onto a memory stick.

A memory stick that suffered a violent mishap between the dungeon and the crypt (sorry, I mean between work and home). A memory stick which is now as dead as a vampire with a garlic seasoned stake in its heart, a werewolf gut shot by a silver bullet and one in the head for good measure (“ba-da-bing, ya fockin’ lycanthrope mook”) or a zombie shot in the head, burned and had the piss taken out of it by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg for good measure.

All of which wouldn’t be much of a big deal if it were simply a matter of going into work tomorrow, putting the article on the spare memory stick or emailing it to my home account, and posting it on The Agitation of the Mind a day later than scheduled.

Only …

Worried that the powers that be at work might be suspicious of his article-writing activities (our daemon blogger can’t post from work as the company’s server filters internet access to deny, amongst other things, “weblogs and social interaction”), a quick culling of non-work-related material was executed this afternoon.

If, by some deus ex machina, I didn’t send the ‘Scream’ trilogy article to cyberspace purgatory – or I can retrieve it – look out for it tomorrow. Otherwise, a wailing and a gnashing of teeth may be heard from chez Agitation as yours truly vents his spleen, blows his top, throws his toys out of the pram, gets it off his chest then sits down to rework the article from word go.

After all, T.E. Lawrence left the first draft (and his only copy) of ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ on a train and promptly started re-writing that 700-page motherfucker from scratch, so what’s my excuse?

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