Liv­ing in the future

I’m in a funk.

There’s noth­ing to write, I’m bored and frus­trated because of the noth­ing to write, I’m cranky because of the bore­dom and frus­tra­tion, I’m slightly sleepy because of the crank­i­ness, and this sleep­i­ness has lead me into the afore­men­tioned funk.

I can blame it on many things. I have a cold (or a spe­cific form of demonic pos­ses­sion in which mal­efi­cent agents of Beelze­bub crawl into my sinuses and per­form hor­rible ablu­tions — med­ical opin­ion is divided), and maybe that’s it. My study is painted dark red and has no proper win­dow, my mobile phone has con­trac­ted faint­ing sick­ness, Naomi Rob­son exists — all these are dis­tress­ing to vary­ing degrees.

But it’s not any of this, and I know it. There is one reason alone for the funk, and it is this: I’m liv­ing in the future.

Read­ers of the pre­vi­ous post will know that I recently received a piece of tan­tal­ising news, namely a very pos­it­ive report of my novel Here Be Dust Bun­nies from a pub­lisher in Lon­don. It is now in the hands of the man who will decide if he wishes to pub­lish my book or not, which decision he will make some time in the next few weeks.

So I’m clock watch­ing. Ideas lan­guish, cruelly neg­lected, on my white­boards; a film script about feud­ing uni­ver­sity pro­fess­ors which I began a few weeks ago and which was start­ing to look quite prom­ising has slipped down the back of my men­tal couch cush­ions and van­ished from sight. How can I pos­sibly write until I hear from London?

I asked my friend Oscar about this prob­lem at a café yes­ter­day. He told me that since he had bought a house sev­eral months ago, he had found him­self obsess­ing about mort­gage pay­ments, put­ting off little pur­chases and pleas­ures for an ima­gin­ary day when his fin­an­cial pres­sures would abate.

He found him­self, he told me, liv­ing in the future.

“What do you mean?”

He ordered another cof­fee. “You know about liv­ing in the past? When you can’t stop think­ing about some trau­matic or embar­rass­ing thing from years ago, so it occu­pies your life now and stops you get­ting on with things?”

“I’m famil­iar with the concept,” I said.

“Well, this is exactly like that, and just as unhealthy, except instead of the past, it’s the future that stops you get­ting on with things right now.”

I con­sidered this. “How are you deal­ing with it?”

Oscar drained his cof­fee. “I order another cof­fee whenever I feel like it, for a start.”

He did.

“And that makes you feel more con­nec­ted with the here and now?”

“Well, the more cof­fee I drink the more impuls­ive I become and the more cof­fee I order,” explained Oscar, “so by late morn­ing I tend to feel con­nec­ted to the here and now, the ghost of Samuel Taylor Col­eridge and a quasar at the edge of the known uni­verse I’ve decided to call Ian.”

“I’ll get the bill,” I said.

He’s right, of course. I can’t write any­thing now because I’m obsessed with an email I might receive next week, or six weeks from now. Or never. Whenever I start work on, say, my script, instead of inspir­ing myself with com­ical prat­falls and mis­un­der­stand­ings over an over­sized mar­ital aid, I’m think­ing: “Is this the right pro­ject to work on next, career-wise?”.

So screw it. I’m going to take Oscar’s advice, con­nect to the here and now and write my script, because that’s what I feel like.

I’ll just quickly check my email first.