Day 65 - Why Bother?

Here's a thing. It's quite an anally-retentive, nerdy thing, but a thing nevertheless.

I've been writing an average of 353 words per entry on this blog. If I continue to write at the same rate for the entire 253 days between 01/05/06 (the date of my first entry) and 07/01/07 (the projected due date), I will have written 89,309 words. That's really quite a lot of words. I wish I could get my head down and write so many on my stalled novel (which is finished at about 120,000 words, but requires quite a lot of rewriting)!

It's made me think about why I'm doing this. Not getting K___ pregnant. I know why I've done that. No, I mean this blog. Ninety thousand words is an awful lot of words to write just for the sake of my ego. And please don't think I'm not grateful for you for bothering to read all this - because I really am and it certainly helps keep me writing to know that there are people who for some reason find this stuff interesting enough to stick me in their RSS readers - but I'm not really doing it for you wonderful people on the Interwebulator either.

I can't actually remember when I first had the notion. I know I was walking and it was a good few years ago. Walking seems to be a good way to get my creative juices flowing. It's always worked for me. I suspect I was wandering up the hill from the station on my way home from work in the Big Smoke. All I know for certain is that this little idea popped up in my head and said, 'if you ever have children, it'd be kind of cool to write a diary sort of thing every day about what the whole 'having a kid' thing meant to you.' I don't think K___ and I had even met at that point. It just popped, unbidden, into my head. And I undoubtedly thought, 'Yeah, you're right. That would be kind of cool,' turned up my road and looked forward to having a cup of coffee. However, that little thought was something of a tenacious little beggar. Some while later, I had it again and I thought, 'Yeah, I remember having this thought before and thinking it was a good idea then.' At this point, I turned up my road and looked forward to having a cup of tea.

I kept having that little thought over the months and years and now I have carried it through to fruition. There was another part to that little thought. It said, '...and when your kid reaches 16 or whatever, you can give it that diary and it'd be kind of cool.'

Now I think about that in the cold light of day, I'm not so sure. It is the thought that is behind my writing every day, but now the practicalities kick in a bit. What if I write an entry that says, 'I am worried about what drugs may get offered to my child when it gets a bit older,' and then try and make some weasely argument that when I smoked a bit of hash or did acid it was somehow different than if my kid did it? I mean, call me Chief Hypocrite of the Hypocrite Tribe, but I don't want to be giving a 16 year old something that essentially says, 'your dad did a few drugs when he was young, and he's okay'. If my kid were in a situation where drugs were being offered, I'm not sure that it's very responsible parenting to have essentially said, 'Yeah, go ahead...'

I'm not naïve. The chances are that society won't change that much in the time it takes junior to reach 16 years old. It will change precisely enough so that all of my opinions seem like unbearably pathetic dad-things to say. (16 years won't make me any less cool, fortunately. I don't do cool. I had a cool bypass operation at birth.) Where was I? Oh yes... but it's highly unlikely that it will change so much that 16 year old kids never get offered drugs. I don't say this is a good thing, you understand, but I do understand that much as I did, there's a reasonable chance my kid will at least get offered and may well try drugs. Maybe once, maybe a few times. Hopefully no more. The overwhelming likelihood is that such an experience will do them no harm whatsoever but even so, I still don't want to be suggesting it as a decent option for what to do at the weekend.

So now I'm thinking, giving it to the kid at 16 is not such a bright idea.

There is an alternative option, I do know that. I could just not write about drugs and things like that. But if I do edit what I say in that manner, I might as well not bother. If this isn't an honest account, what's the point in doing it?

So, here's my compromise. I'm going to wait until my child gets to an age where s/he won't be freaked out/ likely to commit a crime/ be terribly disappointed about what goes on in Dad's head and what he got up to in his youth and then hand it over.

The current ETA is about Junior's 75th birthday.

P.S. In writing such a long entry today, I have raised the projected total word count to 93,223.