Laziness, procrastination, doubt, fear and loathing

I've been subscribing to Richard Herring's blog Warming Up lately, possibly in the hope that it might inspire me to post here more often (FAIL) but partly because he seems to be very busy lately. He's got a series of short programmes on Radio 4 called Bad Habits, investigating such phenomena as Workaholism, Laziness and Procrastination. This week's was laziness and the "sickie", featuring an inevitable contribution from Tom Hodgkinson of The Idler. I've been working in spite of a heavy cold this week, unable to take time off due to one reason and another and it's been just one more thing about work that has been weighing me down... Suffice to say that Hodgkinson's tactic of "reclaiming dignity from your slavery" is all being well when you're working for a big company who take advantage of you, but what happens if you're working for yourself? Or indeed if said company just assumes that all sick leave is swinging the lead and introduces quotas and targets? I seem to have lost any grammatical ability or the indeed skills needed to type or use punctuation. I'm starting to wonder if it's some kind of psychosomatic condition... I'm banging my head against the desk rather too regularly lately. I need to find something else. Some way to get paid and live and not be sitting here staring into the void all day.
Anyway. Boring.

Displacement activity is much more stimulating. I generally rely on radio for this -
Ed Reardon's Week which is indeed mostly about a writer's displacement activity and Mark Lamarr's exemplary Shake, Rattle & Roll 1950s show. (This is ever more important since it's now impossible to enjoy 6Music properly due to G***** L***)

I've been reading Hunter S. Thompson's early letters in The Proud Highway, which covers 1955-67, before he became the Gonzo monster that most readers will know from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. It's about being someone for whom writing is more important than anything else, and the struggles of scraping a living as a freelance. There's a moment during the writing of Hell's Angels when HST realises he'd go further if his journalism was more like his letters and his work gets increasingly irreverent and off balance, edging towards the substance-fueled and occasionally mercurial stuff with which he made his name. He also emerges as someone who knew he was never going to live a straight life. In one of his letters he advises a friend to "Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life." Reading him as a young man, his eventual fate becomes something he foresaw very early on. No Compromise.

I'm pausing before embarking on the next volume, Fear & Loathing In America, because reading a lot of HST tends to make me jumpy and aggressive, I wish I was able to write like that. And Gonzo the Movie is also forthcoming... More on that later if I get to see it. Selah