Paul Schiernecker

Category: Other

  • The Push.

    I’ve been with my girlfriend for a year and a half now and I’m beginning to get the push. That’s the term I’m going to use to describe it. It covers occasions where friends and family say things along the lines of ‘so errr….you’ve been together for quite a while now…errrrr when are you errrr gonna pop you know, the errr, the question’. It first came up at my cousins bar mitzvah when me and Kate had been dating for less than six months and my mothers cousin (oh, bless him) asked if we were engaged. What a question. Oh brother. It meant that we had to have a chat about it, to work out what we both thought of his ridiculous outburst and what it meant. Luckily for me Kate is very much on the same page as me for most things but I imagine there are a number of young men who do get engaged because people keep asking them when they are going to do it, after a while if you’re of a particular mindset/temperament/thin skin then those things start to burrow and grow.

    I don’t have any issues with getting engaged or the sanctity of marriage, one day I would love to get wrapped up in all that but for the time being I still feel very young and I’m not going to let other people influence when I change my life. I have friends who are happily engaged or even married who orchestrated the thing entirely under their own steam and not as a result of the push and it seems to be working for them. The important thing to remember is that like most things there is a choice, and for the time being I am perfectly happy with what I’ve got going on.

  • Tupac from the dead.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’ve watched the footage of Dre and Snoop at Coachella this weekend with a hologram version of their old playmate Tupac (who was shot dead in 1996) and it is absolutely incredible that something like that is possible but my fear is what it is leading to. There’s something a little unholy about it. I completely understand what a buzz it must have been to be there, to see an artist that you obviously never thought you would be able to see, ‘singing’ ‘onstage’. My problem is that it stinks of the kind of defamation that Kurt Cobain being computer-generated and forced to sing Bon Jovi and the like as part of the Guitar Hero franchise did. It’s essentially a step above making a marionette of a corpse right?

    I understand that the show had the complete support of the Shakur family but there’s just something uncomfortable about it. Then again we search high and low for footage of Cobain, Morrison, Vicious, Hendrix and anyone else who was taken before their time so is this anything different. I wonder how long it will be before another singer is drafted back to the staff through the power of technology. My money is on Elvis.

  • Frustrated.

    I can’t help the feeling that I waste an awful lot of time, and I don’t mean that in the terrible habit of procrastination sense. What I mean is that there are around twelve hours every week day when I am out of the house and unable to work. This is because I am at my job, which I must tell you is far different to my work. My work is writing, something I’ve wanted to do since I was about five years old, and have done with guiltless abandon since. My job is a different matter altogether.

    When I was at university I wondered where I would end up, how I’d earn my way in the world, how I’d start paying back those damn student loan cats and here we are, I work in an office in London. It’s a far cry from the boy who wanted to be C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien. I know it has to be done, I know we all do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t think it’s fair and that it just seems to detract from what I want to do and what I now appreciate I am capable of doing. I know writing will probably never be stable enough for me to rely on it as a steady form of income but I know I’ll keep doing it as long as I’ve got ink and fingers (and even if either of those should go I’ll find a way).

    The fun of writing is therefore restrained to weekends, a time when I can’t really face doing anything a lot of the time because I’m trying to get over my job. Oh woe is me, stop it this instant, you’ve got a job, you’ve just finished your first novel, you’re young and in love and there’s plenty more of all that (wherever it came from).

    I’m sorry, sometimes it is just hard to remember the track you are on, and you have to just scream into the abyss.

  • We need more Sundays.

    It’s such an underrated day, anything can happen on a Sunday. Today I’m going to visit my Mum to watch some home videos of when I was five that I haven’t seen forever and then me and the girlf are going to hers to see her cousin (and her baby) and then I’m going to see my friends from Improv perform, what a mixed bag of a day, no other day could get that combination going on.

    The important thing to remember is you can do anything today. Go.

  • Why they were right all along.

    I went for a bike ride at lunchtime today. I think it’s the first time I’ve ridden a bike since approximately August 2005, they were right, it isn’t something you forget. That wasn’t even the point I was trying to make, that was just (possibly) a fact. The thing that I’ve realised they were right about all along is the benefit of fresh air and exercise.

    I have found (since I started my fairly laissez-faire routine) that I breathe deeper and clearer, that my posture is better, that my eyes seem bluer for fucks sake, and it’s all down to the fact that I managed to quit smoking, cut back on my drinking and get out and do something. It’s such a basic thing to do but the benefits are really impressive. I feel brighter. I’m more focused, it’s like everything that Ritalin promises but it’s a natural high. Isn’t that a kicker!

    What I’d say is put down the remote control/controller/pipe and go out in the sun for a bit, it’s better than spending five minutes contracting cancer in a UV booth in a pair of paper knickers.

    Written in my garden.

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  • Redrafts are hard.

    Straight up. Simple as that. I could just not write anymore. The statement alone does it all. I won’t stop there though, because you’re already hanging on my every word.

    I’ve established the reason I don’t ever redraft anything is that you’re basically accepting that you didn’t get it right initially. I’m one of those incredibly annoying trivial people who like to be right about everything (and to be right in the first instance). I hope there’s a bit of that in you as well or you will have already been turned irreversibly from me.

    Last night I started redrafting my novel, a task I have simultaneously put off myself and been told to put on hold by others. Everyone says you should give it some space before you start in on it again but I can’t sit still. In the three weeks since I finished my novel I have drafted no less than five short stories for a compilation due by the end of the year, in the words of Led Zeppelin: ‘I gotta roll, can’t stand still, got a flaming heart, can’t get my fill’ – yeah, that works quite nicely.

    It turns out that an appropriate amount of time has passed because in the four pages (of one hundred and sixty eight) I managed to read through last night there were bits that jarred or just should have and could have been written better, and that’s just what the process is for, I know it’s going to cause me many a sleepless night but the whole thing is a true labour of love, and therefore something I want to get exactly right.

    For those asking when they can read it start an orderly queue outside your local bookstore, I’ll be right with you.

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  • I miss you.

    I keep getting to thinking about the people I’ve lost in the last couple of years, it’s a process which I’ve been nobly informed is called ‘reality checking’ where you think of something you want to tell the person and then remember that unfortunately it isn’t a possibility, that they aren’t there to be told, and that really hurts. I think that’s when I miss them most of all.

    After finishing the first draft of my novel there were five people I immediately wanted to tell and three of those aren’t with me anymore. It upsets me that they never got to see me finally get my act together and ‘finish it already’ as my dear Grandma put it, I know they’re all watching over and that’s all well and good but it doesn’t change the fact that not a day goes by where I don’t have to reality check.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is never leave a room on bad terms, always tell people you love them and hold them forever.

  • I’ve lost today’s blog

    I’m really annoyed. I started a post this morning about why we should legalise weed and it’s decided to delete itself before I could finish it. Curses.

  • Why being a quarter of a century didn’t destroy me

    I turned 25 last month, an age I previously would have referred to as being adult. At eighteen I assumed that by twenty-five I’d be set in my ways, have my own place, maybe even be married, silly little eighteen year old me.

    The state of play as I see it id that I’m twenty five, living at home, in love but with no intentions on getting married any time soon and just beginning to lay those first tentative steps on the way towards my chosen vocation. There are a number of reasons that I’m behind on the assumed goals, some are/were outside of my control but I was blocking myself for quite some time.

    A lot of the problem was that I was obsessed with the 27 Club, a group of artists and musicians who died at that age, I’m sure you’re aware of that stigma. That obsession turned into me believing I would expire at twenty seven as well, and that I needed to get everything done before then. It turns out that there is nothing that inhibits me quite like a mortal deadline. Once I got over that, and started thinking about the outrageous range of jumpers with elbow patches I could enjoy well into old age it lifted that blockade and made writing a lot simpler, because I was doing it for me, not to be idolised and thought of as a tortured genius, but in the hope that my love of writing could provide for me. It has been deeply refreshing.

    This means that I am only a third of the way through my life, everything I have done so far I could do again twice. That’s not something to balk at, it’s something to embrace, that’s a long time to get things done, and something that I can’t help but cherish.

    I was recently talking to one of my friends about the pair of us ‘getting old’ and both agreeing that it only felt like it had happened recently, the truth is I know I will never grow up, especially with friends like him around. I hope I am still laughing at felt tipped custard creams at fifty, sixty, seventy….

  • You’ve got to try.

    I was on a bus this morning (because I’m a sucker for sharing my travel time with twisted broke fuckers) and spotted an old school friend who I haven’t seen in a while. We had a bit of a catch up on the way to our mutual destination and he asked what I had been up to.
    ‘I finished my novel’ I said. It still fills me with pride to be able to say that, despite the fact I know the hard part comes next.

    I told my friend that I had been in touch with a girl from our school year who had her first novel published last year to ask if she had any advice, she did; she was very helpful. It’s annoying because I am jealous of her, as we should be because she’s done it, she’s got to the goal that I can’t get out of my head, she tried and she got there and a lot of the time that is all it takes, a point proven by our continuing conversation on the bus this morning.

    My friend said to me ‘did you know [boy we were at school with] just bought an Aston Martin?’
    ‘Oh wow’, I replied, ‘that’s awesome. I’d love to be in that position one day’.
    ‘Yeah’ my friend replied, ‘it makes you wonder what you’ve done in your life to not have deserved an Aston Martin’.
    I couldn’t help but dwell on that statement. Firstly there is nothing to say that our fortunate school friend deserves that, he may be excellent within his field (which I’m sure is the case) but he could be killing people for money, or worse still, be working in banking. What matters is that he tried, and this may be a point that some of you disagree with me on because it’s quite a new concept to myself. I wonder if my friend (the first friend mentioned, the one on the bus) has tried to be in a position where he could own an Aston Martin, if he has given it his all, because as humans that’s all we can do really, just give it a shot. I know that’s what I am doing, there’s no guarantee that anyone beyond my close friends will ever read my novel but I’m going to try and make that happen and maintain that nobody deserves anything.