A friend, now probably a former friend, described me as mean spirited. As it happens, I’m generally not, or I try not to be. It’s a thing, like the other parts of identity, simply to be worked through and understood, and, possibly banished to interactions with people who don’t matter, or people who deserve it.
Rarely, but pungently, I allow my mind to wander into abstractions of nastiness – to write and say something calculated to upset or shock. As it happens, notwithstanding my intellectual limitations and gaps in cultural and general knowledge, I am sometimes really good at it. Then, when I’ve come up with it, I put it to use. My objective, almost always, is to come up with something which is, in the end, rounded and amusing – to establish through a mix of sharp unpleasantness and self-deprecation a comment within which my readers and I can join in a smirk about how awful it is to come out and say such things. It’s a part of who I am.
Sometimes, hopefully more rarely, through clumsiness in writing rather than design, the disc of my sense of humour herniates, leaving the article lopsided and lacking the integrity with which I sought to have it imbued. The piece which would probably be quite amusing if it were not for the flitting will-o’-the-wisp of my mean spiritedness singeing it, is bollocksed.
And so, a previous article for this site was today withdrawn, because it did something it was never consciously intended to do. It was intended to amuse one person, and the person was not amused. It was mostly because my poor writing gave it a sorry birth, but more likely because it was misconceived in the first place. I should have followed my first instinct and aborted it.
