I should know better than to trust my instincts.
The last time I did so resulted in a near-death experience: confronted with a brown snake on the side of the road, I hurtled screaming into oncoming traffic. My instincts had clearly said to pick the car over the snake, even though the former was 3000 times more likely to kill me. It's possible my instincts don't like me very much.
Regardless, I am inclined to trust my instincts on the matter of this column. And they say it's time to quit. After almost 300,000 words and about 4208 deadlines shared among five different newspapers, my brain is completely purged. It's time to top it up again with some new life experience, some fresh perspective, and one just can't do that while staring at a computer screen in their pyjamas (and more's the pity).
The world will, of course, be no poorer for having one less opinion trumpeted ad nauseum. The latest figures (already hopelessly out of date by the time I finish typing this sentence) tell us that there are now 126 million blogs located on the internet, 27.3 million tweets Twittered each day, and 350 million people using Facebook. That's a lot of opinion flying about.
That's more than enough, frankly. I'm off to find a less crowded paddock.
I shall miss very much the repartee established with regular readers. I remain amazed and often humbled that busy people take time out of their day to email a stranger and tell them they love them/hate them/look forward to them/want them dead. (Sadly no-one has ever wanted to engage simply in a tawdry exchange of lust-filled fantasies.)
Let me tell you the real reason why this gig has to stop: I HATE this desk. I hate the dilapidated printer hanging off its side, the writhing pile of electrical snakes under my feet, the glass-blown paper weight to my left (paper! pfft) and the beautifully embossed leather-bound "Great Australian Novel" notebook mocking me at my right (eight years old and still groaning with emptiness).
I hate everything about my work space because it has come to define me. (A confession: my desk sits at the end of my bed. I am always on the job.) I never get home from work because I never leave it. Not really. When I get up for a drink of water at 3am, it takes ALL my willpower not to check my emails. I can't have a single profound dream without imagining how it might translate into an interesting column.
Working from home may well be the aspiration of the modern worker but trust me, it's fraught. There's no reward in stealing your own stationery. Slinking off to a midday movie is a hollow victory. You've only got yourself to crack onto at the office Christmas party.
There are only so many Orbital Tummy Crunchers you can write off as a tax deduction simply because you bought it on work time and wrote about it (see, Mr Auditor? How I just wrote about it?) and only so many excuses you can make about not using the Orbital Tummy Cruncher because you're too busy writing a column about positive body image.
One may well choose writing over, say, law because it's not all about the money. But guess what? It's all about the money. No-one pays you squat when they know you're probably sitting on your couch watching Days Of Our Lives on their dime (and guess what? I am! Right now!).
Sincerely, though, thanks for reading. Thanks for continuing to buy your local newspaper (and to hell with this fly-by-night internet lark). Thanks for your emails and your sighs and your guffaws and your raised fists and your happiness and your anger. It's all good.
Just saying.
carrieon@bigpond.com
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