LOOSE ENDS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

It’s that time of year again. From September to January, it’s the best time of year. And I consider the loose ends I’ve created alongside the loose ends I’ve tied off. What’s gone? Tied off? Can I be sure?

   I feel my cable war is over. For the YouTube channel, I’ve rearranged the microphone system. It’s amazing, how casual I make that sound. I rearranged it…’twas nothing. This is a lie. I took out the tiny USB hub and added one with a longer cable, allowing it to reach the computer housed inside a devil’s den.

   With the computer moved to the left, the USB cables struggled to reach their targets – cameras, microphone, and that second TV monitor on the far side of the Bookcase Mountains. Adding the new longer USB hub solved that problem, once I’d clambered through a nest of cables to connect everything.

   It all hangs by a well-connected thread. The loosest of loose ends…tied off. I knew I was in trouble when I counted four USB connections, forgot a fifth, and then gradually deduced that I’d flat-out ignored a sixth. It’s all better now.

   That’s that. No more cables. Sorted. Except that one of the cables might be on the way out. This is a technical term. I’ll look into it.

*

Yes. I removed a flickery USB cable from the recipe, and it all tastes so much better without that bogus length of electrical liquorice.

   Other loose ends?

   For once, another loose end that I tie off regularly…that stirred trouble.

   It fell apart and floated away, and my system collapsed.

   Regularly, I kneel on the floor. This is important. There’s a table in front of the letterbox. And almost everything that comes through that letterbox lands on the table. Occasionally, a thing slips between the letterbox and the table and falls to the carpet. It’s almost always easy to see the thing that falls, as it remains wedged upright and highly visible.

   Today I watched the postie push parcels through the letterbox. Everything landed on the table and all was right with the world. And yet, with business carrying me away for a few days, I felt I might have missed something.

   So I went back and looked more closely, kneeling in the usual manner. And there it was. The dreaded red card declaring that a parcel was waiting for me at the depot. I could type in the serial number and arrange for redelivery.

   No serial number.

   This annoyed me. I’d just come from the depot to pay off the hostage tax for a parcel from the Americas. Now I’d have to arrange another depot visit and buy cinnamon buns as I wandered the town.

   You can’t let that go. It’s the law.

   Needless to say, I retrieved the parcel that was too wide for the letterbox. I opened it to find MOSTLY PADDING. They should’ve packed it in a smaller box. But then…if they’d done that…I wouldn’t have had my excuse to go and buy cinnamon buns.

   You need no excuse to buy cinnamon buns. Unless you want to use coffee as an excuse, and that’s perfectly legal.

   Cinnamon buns happened.

*

The updated archive is still lying around in bits and pieces, with unsorted bones and derelict cogwheels scattered across the landscape. This fix proved to be a big one. It’s a pile of loose ends. Once I tidy the mess away, believe me…it’s done.

   Reorganising that is a one-off. Until the next time, of course. There’s a spectre at the feast. When I transferred the music archive from LAST COMPUTER to THIS COMPUTER, I thought everything came across. There are gaps I discover only when I have a hankering for a particular movie soundtrack or TV score.

   This leads me to wonder what’s not there. Checking that is a very difficult task…a large loose end that flails across the deck and risks knocking the crew overboard. I suspect I’m dealing with a problem amidships…

   Early music purchases are intact. And all the very latest stuff is accounted for. But how vast is the soggy middle of that rain-drenched burger? We’ll never know. I’m not going to keep detailed records of the quest to fix things.

   Instead, I’ll just stare at music and fix things. I’m not here to map out loose ends. As long as the ends are tied off and they still work when tied…that’s a result I won’t lose sleep over.

*

Since I shifted this blog from weekly to monthly, I haven’t missed a monthly post. And that’s why I am posting this now. Before the month of October ends in spooky masks and premature bonfires.

   I was busy. Yes, I stared at another loose end. Bookshelfia. The bookshelves. They are, as I’ve often remarked, a writer’s bookshelves. Books are arranged on those shelves by that strange measure, the space available.

   No, nothing is alphabetical there. You’d think with everything crammed in everywhere that there’s nowhere else to shift things to. But I’ve been staring at the bookshelves and muttering about reorganising a few stacks.

   I can cram more things in if I shift a tome here or nudge a volume there. Volume is the problem with volumes. I could digitise the entire archive and store it in a pocket. If I could digitise the physical archive.

   And that I cannot do. The shelves now compete with one another to house bulky physical object with low levels of reading to them: boardgames for my video channel. The board is designed to hold all the playing pieces, and to fold into a quarter its size to fit inside an industry-standard box.

   My books are crammed in there and could do with a touch of redistribution, it is true. The boxed boardgames, though, benefit far more from shuffling around and squeezing in. It’s another task ahead of me. And there’s no alphabetisation in sight, thankfully.

   Sadly, there’s no end in sight – even though my boardgame purchasing levels are far below those of large professional boardgame channels. When in doubt, climb high. Build up. The other day I turned a bookcase sideways and it changed everything…

   For now. It means, shock-horror, that I could fit one more bookcase in there, atop overburdened floorboards. And I was convinced that I’d never fit another bookcase in there again. When fitting bookcases into rooms, follow rabbinical advice: measure twice, cut once.

*

Aside from consolidating piles of boardgames and magically gaining space on shelves by stacking boxes higher and higher, I’ve been busy with other things. Suddenly, it’s more than three weeks into the month and there’s no blog post.

   I could’ve published within the first few days, but I felt like writing at least a thousand words on a topic. Loose ends. And the topic itself was a loose end that flailed around week after week.

   The world doesn’t stop rolling if I stop posting a blog or when I am away from Twitter. Admittedly, it would be strange to come back to social media to hear news of the world suddenly slowing down.

   If we all float away, let us float away with coffee and cake. This reminds me that I am bound by law to go hunting the wild coffee and untamed cake. The penalty for not having coffee is having coffee. And that’s as neat a law as you’ll find on the caffeine-stained statute books.

*

And now I find myself preparing next month’s blog post. I say that, but the preparation is in the thinking stage rather than the typing stage. You need never type anything of world-shattering importance…

   This isn’t a NEWS blog. It’s a blog about whatever I feel like blogging about, even if I don’t feel like blogging about anything. Come the next blog, the untamed cake will be no more than a memory referenced in a digital archive.

   I plan to take my trusty spear to that untamed cake. It’s a multi-pronged approach. In short, my spear is a fork. I’d call it a spork, but that seat’s taken. The same is true of a fork-spear when attempting to call it a fear.

   Legally, I am required to type this between bites of coffee and sips of cake. The food is quadruple chocolate cake – which is a level of chocolate reached by eating triple chocolate cake and throwing a small bar of chocolate onto the plate.

   This is what slows my blogging pace: chocolate cake and coffee and the savouring of chocolate cake and coffee. Oh, and all the things that kept me busy, whether rearranging shelves or the mere contemplation of the rearranging of shelves.

   It is the season of loose ends. Leaves curl, brown, and yellow, and redden. Rain falls sideways. Streetlights switch on two hours before they should, when heavy clouds roll in and the landscape resembles Mordor.

   Wind deadens the face. Gloves and boots are in, and boots are in puddles. Frost threatens. I tie shoelaces and scan bookcases. The hunt is on for cake, and coffee supplies remain high. This whole blog post is one giant loose end. And there’s nothing wrong in that.