Book-keeping

B. S. Johnson had unfortunate initials for an experimental novelist, but some of his stuff is quite good fun in a dark sort of way. A few years back I read Christie Malry's Own Double Entry, in which the eponymous hero comes up with a sort of cosmic book-keeping system of his life debits and credits. He's noticed a certain amount of imbalance in the bad and good things which happen to him, so he starts a record so he can make them balance out. It gets a little out of hand. I can't quite remember the details, but it's something like the debit side starts getting things in it like "Woman on bus sneezed near me" or "Bad tempered newsagent frowned as he handed me change" while the credit side is increasingly focussed on the very bad things he does to try to get stuff to balance out, like major thefts and occasional murders of the annoying.

Now I'd prefer not to spiral into murder and all that, so my version is unbalanced in the other way. There's a lot of very very bad things out there. Komodo dragons, for example. I can actually get quite upset about these, and that's just one species of lizard on a few islands a long long way away. Any serious unmediated engagement with the world is just going to make me gibber. So my theory is that you have to count the positive things extra on the positive side. For example, the combining diacritics in the Junicode font; the sunlight on Trinity Avenue in the spring; you have to let these things make you happy. An important happy-making thing at the moment is Neil Gaiman. He writes very well; he is excellently geeky; and his blog is very readable.
I'm not saying these little things make up for the rubbishness of life, but if you suck all the joy possible from them it makes it easier to tackle or at least know about the bad stuff. I admit that it helps that I'm lucky really and don't to have to deal with anything very bad. Nonetheless I fear that as time goes on I get more and more fey and whimsical, and that eventually I will end up like Madeleine Bassett, believing that the stars are God's daisy chain, and that 'every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born'. Heigh ho.