A perverse passion for the ill-advised

The horror! The horror!

It struck me a couple of days ago that, in reality, I might not actually be able to pursue something that I have wanted to pursue for a fair while. Loyal readers will know (if they exist) that I referred to this minor tragedy obliquely on the day, bandying hefty terms around, paraphrasing Plato and Neil Young, making out I didn't mind too much, when really my arrogant little bubble had burst all over the place and had left me feeling particularly lousy. The suburbs do not look kindly on a young man who consoles himself with a Will Self novel and old television footage on Youtube, when the only future which seems to await him is a return to working in a bookshop and, perhaps, in time, a postgradraduate correspondence course in Shelving Science. In all honesty, I was gutted, and, yesterday, I walked along the canal towpath beside my parents' bungalow sunk deep in gloom...*

It was actually my melodramatic misery which saved me, I've come up with a way to subvert the current difficulties; well, not much so much 'have come up with' as 'continued to do just as I bloody well want to do and always do', which involves, as it usually does, a fervent denial of anything that approaches the look of something vaguely like a legitimate difficulty with any course of action whatsoever. More importantly, I have also come up with an apologetic for all of us who continue to do just as we like in the face of every form of opposition- part-time degrees, unscheduled jaunts to Inverness, the whole shebang:

We, the lovers of the ill-advised will not be swayed by anything as mind-numbingly boring as a comfortable life spent pursuing sensible activities and having realistic goals. For, to quote Thatcher: 'No, no, no', and, to quote me: 'BORING! BORING! BORING!'

Roll on ruination, I'll probably be able to make a good cautionary novel out of it, after all.

*The kind of gloom to which the term followed by a mere ellipsis cannot really do justice!