CHRISTMAS HAPPENS...SOMETIME SOON!!!

I don't know. Somewhere over the past couple of days the christmas spirit seems to have leaked out of me, leaving me feeling tired, drained and completely down. It's nothing to do with 'the stresses of christmas' because I'm not a person to get stressed, I'd feel like this without christmas. It's just an all consuming nothingness which is annoying in that I myself can't even define it.

I don't blame you for thinking I sound stupid, in a way I kind of agree. But it's reached some kind of ugly limit today and so naturally I had to vent something somewhere. I gave up discussing any problems of significance with people years ago because, I concluded, it largely either involved them or affected their opinion of me in such a way that it would fundamentally change my relationship with them. Besides, who wants to be known amongst friends and family as 'that depressing guy who complains all the time'? Which is, as a matter of fact, what I would probably be known as if I ever resorted to talking through serious problems with people because once I started, I probably wouldn't stop.

I imagine it's a defensive thing more than anything because, in certain circumstances, I will actually break this rule. If, for example, a friend has just divulged a huge secret to me or told me a lot of their problems and I have tried to help I will sometimes return the revelation or complaint with things of my own. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in the business of discussing my personal feelings on a quid pro quo basis, I don't trade information, I just like to know that we're those sort of friends on that sort of ground before venturing anything. Afterall, it would crush me if a friend turned around and said 'look, I'm just not interested in listening,' and that's no over exagerration. So I don't do it.

Another reason I probably don't do it is that in situations like my current one I don't actually know what it is that's getting me down and I've reasoned that knowing what it is you're talking about is probably a logically starting point in any conversation. So it's not that I choose not to do it, it's that I literally can't. By all means I can try, buy me a few Jack Daniels' and I could name a whole host of sorrows, but none of them would be right. I guess in a way that's what this post is all about. Maybe you can tell me yourself if this draft survives and isn't deleted before I can press the send button.

In fact, in the interest of this being published I'll stop writing now and get to pressing that most inviting of orange buttons at the bottom of my screen. Although first I must make one proclaimation, and that proclaimation is that 'Space Cadets' is an absolutely fantastic program worthy of much more praise than it is currently getting. It's the only TV I watch these days but it is well worthy of my hour. Watch it!