Making It Count

Waking up this morning seemed to be an imposition. Went aquacising with a bitch and a grumble and generally misanthropic approach to the experience. Went gymming with a complete lack of purpose and a desperation to give up and cry and go home.

Went home, and slept on the couch for several hours, waking up again with a thumping headache, but a sense of finally being properly awake.

Most of this afternoon was taken up with watching James Cameron's Titanic on the big screen for the first time, in 3D.

That was raw.

I know, of course, that Titanic was a Hollywood movie, with a romance woven through the reality of the tragedy that started to define the culture shock of the early 20th century. But it was still raw. Seeing it on the big screen, in 3D, brought the heartbreaking reality of the thing punching through all the day-to-day bullshit that we see around us. People got on a ship...and that was all. Their lives either changed forever, or, in the case of the vast majority, ended in screaming and drowning and silence, and from here, a hundred years down the line, they're thought of as "Titanic victims" - their whole lives encapsulated in the moment of their ending. Much, I suppose, like those who die in wars, especially huge wars, where the numbers of the dead fill ranks and ranks, till they become a phenomenon, rather than individuals, when seen from this remove in history.

I think what Cameron did most successfully in his telling of the tragedy - apart from all the rigorous research and the respect paid to the dead (Julian Fellowes, please take lessons!) - was that he wedged one item of philosophy into the thing that gave the tragedy scope, and if not meaning, then a moral, a lesson to take away even today.

It's the moral by which fictional wandering sketch-artist Jack Dawson lives, and the moral he passes on to Rose, that "saves her, in every way a person can be saved" - Make It Count.

Every day, do whatever you can and whatever you like, but Make The Day Count.
It's a weird experience to be humbled by an entirely fictional character, but that, I suppose, is the underlying power of fiction. I've had many a day recently either lost to pointlessness, or more often and more likely given up to it voluntarily. Enough of that. Enough of excuses, and enough of bullshit. Time to start Making It Count again.

Don't misunderstand me - this is no road to Damascus. I'm still gonna whinge and bitch and moan, and undoubtedly, there will still be days when I duck out of what I plan to do or need to do, and piss the day away.

But fewer.
A lot fewer. Strikes me that a) the reason I started doing all this was to have more days in my life, to share and enjoy with my wife, my friends, and the people who will be in my life who I have yet to meet, and b) the doing of the Disappearing, Part 1, was only achieved by bloody hard work over time. A degree of success has really blunted that focus - just, I think, as a degree of success as a journalist has blunted the focus of my days when it comes to my writing. Time to get the focus back. Time to stake a claim to the future I want to achieve, and start working bloody hard towards it again - day in, day out. The day is nearly over, but tomorrow is a new day, with walking and biking and screwing down neurosis and writing all packed into it somewhere.

It's time.