It's great being a shambles. Just totally peachy. Rather than gliding through a staid, predictable life full of contentment and excitement, you lurch from one mini crisis point to the next, constantly being challenged by your own ineptitude.
One day I'm going to write a ‘24’-style thriller in which the main character is under constant threat, not from terrorism, but himself.
A typical episode would open with him being woken from oversleeping by having his house repossessed because he's forgotten to fill out some forms. It might sound dull at the moment but trust me - once we've layered a pulsing soundtrack over the top you'll need to sprout fingernails at an unnatural rate to keep up with the amount you're chewing off.
I practise incompetence at an Olympian level. It recently took me a week to get round to replacing the lightbulb in my kitchen, which for several days had been blowing one-by-one until finally the whole room was plunged into darkness. For 7 whole days I had to feel my way into the room like a blind man, then prop open the fridge door in order to have enough light to be able to see.
Your eyes get used to it after a while. So does your brain. It became a routine. Opening the fridge felt as natural as flipping the light switch. It took an incident with a cheese grater on the floor and a shoeless foot to nudge me in the direction of the nearest lightbulb stockist, and even then I instinctively used the fridge as an impromptu lamp for another day before re-acclimatising myself to the concept of ceiling-based light sources.
Working in a Call Centre might look like a parade of easy-going giggles from the outside, but on the inside it's an endless treadmill of numbers that eats time like a New York Cop eats doughnuts: in immense, cavernous gulps.
Yesterday I rose at 6am knowing the builders next-door-but-one would start clanging scaffolding poles around like an open-air tribute to the musical ‘Stomp’ at about 7am, so I found some earplugs and wedged one in each lughole.
I tried to sleep. But instead I just laid there with the old Birds Eye Steakhouse Grill song looping endlessly in my head. Hope it's chips, it's chips. We hope it's chips, it's chips. It’s a classic. In between verses I worried that my boiler might malfunction and kill me with carbon monoxide fumes if I fell asleep. I'm not one for keeping up appearances, but even I blanched at the thought of my neighbours seeing my blue, icy cadaver being hauled out on a stretcher.
That's what they'd remember me for.
The fear of this kept me awake until sometime around 6.45am, when my bladder complained that it needed to go to the toilet. I got up, but in my confusion - hope it's chips, it's chips - I attempted to make my way to the loo … and walked smack, bang into the door. Now I was performing slapstick for the benefit of no one. On the way out of the bathroom I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I laughed, then saw myself laughing, and laughed some more. I returned to bed, still giggling, and lay there with the singing Birds Eye workmen driving their van around in my mind. Hope it's chips, it's chips. We hope it's chips, it's chips. I think I even said that out loud at one point.
For a moment, I was genuinely certifiable as clinically insane.
I overslept of course, and awoke at 7.30pm in a state of some confusion, stumbled downstairs and opened the fridge door so I could see the kettle - unnecessary, what with the daylight and all. I drank a coffee, and said to myself I was going to start writing something.
Then I typed the first sentence of this blog post. Then when I got home last night, I wrote the rest. And then you lot (hopefully) read it and laugh out loud at it.
This proves I can, at least, maintain a veneer of efficiency amid the self-inflicted mundane chaos of my daily routine, even if in doing so I end up ever-so slightly wasting your time.
Other bloggers write of glamorous parties and faraway lands, of politics, or romance, despair and elation and the unending mysteries of the human condition. On this blog you find nothing but the fevered hope that it's chips, it's chips, and for that I apologise unreservedly.
Yours, from the funny farm, hoping it’s chips.