Final Word: Is there anybody out there?

Opinion

This is going to sound a tad wanky no matter how I put it, so I'm going to just spit it out, get it over and done with: yes, I do read my own columns. Every week, I get my Canvas magazine and turn to the back to see if I'm still here. This is partly writer insecurity and a need to validate myself, as it were; and partly to remind myself (and my increasingly failing memory) what the hell it was I wrote about all those days ago.

It was only last week, however, that I realised just how at the back of Canvas I really am. I am separated, I became acutely aware, from everyone else not by one or even two, but by five pages of advertisements. What message are they sending me here?

Now I have nothing against advertisements, let me make that perfectly clear here and now. I fully understand the need for advertising to pay for stuff — like me, for example. I'm even one of those people who, when someone grumps to me about how television would be much better without ads, say that I quite like the ads because it gives you a chance to go to the toilet or pour another glass of wine and sometimes they even advertise things you'd quite like to buy.

But five pages of ads between all the other non-advertorial content of Canvas and me? How did that happen? Is this some kind of journalistic quarantine? Did I say something wrong to someone powerful at the last Canvas Christmas party? Is it any wonder I am edgy and paranoid with the realisation of my alienation?

If I was to attempt to put a cool spin on it, it might be that I am considered too edgy and dangerous to play with the other kids in the body of this magazine. Maybe those at Canvas who know more about the magazine game than me (which is to say everyone who works at Canvas) think that if I come into close proximity with the others that I will infect them with my edginess, like some kind of swine flu of craziness.

Which is odd, because I am the least crazy (as in "zany" not as in "disturbed", because that's a whole different story) person I know — and all those who know me will testify to this fact.

So maybe my banishment to the hinterlands is the total opposite; it is because I might induce some kind of narcolepsy among the readership if they strike my waffly prose too early on in their reading experience. Even now, there might be people reading these words and nodding off and craning down into their toast and getting peanut butter on their forehead. No one warned me I have this effect on people, so they were trying to be polite when they parked me down the back.

It's not that I'm ungrateful at having this column, it's just that I'm going through one of those phases where you question your place in the world. And mine seems to be at the back, after the ads and above the houses.

I wonder if, in all the years I've been writing this column, anyone has ever turned to the back to read me and ended up buying one of the houses instead. If so, where was my kickback from the real estate agent?

Maybe I should view my position at the arse-end of things as an honour. Maybe the fact that my turangawaewae happens to be standing as far away from everyone else as possible without ending up on the back cover, is actually a good thing. It is a sign of my mana.

Okay, I'm not too sure how that would work, but you must understand that I'm grasping at straws, out here on Pluto, past the pictures of pretty models in the fashion section, past the wine and the books, past the advertising belt, in the furthest reaches of magazine space, making my wobbly old orbit around the sun that is the cover of Canvas. As a great man once said, "it gets lonely out in space".

At least when you're all on your own, in the nether regions, it gives you time to think. You have the room to ponder the nature of many things, in your own peculiar way, with no one around to distract or disturb you. Serenity. That's it, that's the good thing about being here.

But enough of the introspective nonsense. There are columns to be written, space to be filled — out here on the final frontier.