Oh hey, you. I’ve been slepping. That’s like sleeping, but lighter, when you were so tired last night you couldn’t get to sleep, your brain kept scrunching everything up tight yelling “Get to sleep! You have to get to sleep!” - and in the end you drifted off about six, then your alarm is piercing the emptiness of your room two hours later, a muddy daze of shower and walk in rain and bus and work, mind twanging in and out of focus, useless all day, then you finally come home and your legs are throbbing, your eyes are diodes, too zonked to eat tea, sit in your office chair for a while and then go fall in bed, and there you are slepping, in and out of consciousness, knowing you can’t be properly asleep, that you have to do the day’s blog before you can rest, but you’re not getting up yet, another ten minutes, another fifteen, on right through evening into another time - not night… the reverse side of night, with the phantasms howling and dark spectres creeping down your spine.
And it’s in this time when the negative voices start up. They’ve been looking for an in for a few days now, since you kicked them out, and in this clockless time with your basic consciousness too tired to switch off but higher awareness fizzling and sputtering out of focus, this is when they make their play.
“You know, it’s only reasonable,” they say. “You’re just a failure, aren’t you? We’re not being cruel, it’s just facing the facts, isn’t it. Look at the facts. We’ll go through them, together, sensibly…”
And then they list everything you dislike about yourself, every secret shameful gesture, memory, moment. All your weaknesses. All your fears. One after the other, a litany of loathing, an entreaty to broken ego.
AND THAT’S WHEN YOU TELL THE VOICES TO GO SUCK IT.
Not a chance, you pesky mutts. Goddamned voices. Not happening. You shake yourself awake and go make a Lady Grey, eat a banana and satsuma while kettle boils, and you go write your blog post, not being despairing or angry or anhedonic, but hopeful and content. This is your life. These voices are your voices. But they are such a small part. They’re echoes of past trauma, no longer holding any but the faintest residual power, so long as you don’t bestow them with more. And that is your choice. Sit through the voices - you gotta do that. You force them down and they just come back out another opening when you’re not looking. You gotta sit through them. But believe them? Naw, man. To hell with that.
MUSIC: Saint Huck, Nick Cave. What the hell put Nick Cave in my head? Where did he come from? I don’t know, but he arrived, from some other place, clanging and crashing cymbals and wailing into the void. Saint Huck is a song about Huckleberry Finn, recounted by a mechanical spider vomiting up its metallic innards after some bad lysergic acid. Jagged, piercing, and spasmodic, it is made for nights like this.
Friday 30 November 2018
Thursday 29 November 2018
Day 215: Asloop
Phlarph. That’s the noise my brain is making as it tries to think right now. It’s like trying to run an electrical current through a bag of wet cement. Nothing doing.
Writing till 5am last night, head a throbbing mess lying in bed, too blasted to sleep. Then was asloop - that’s a layer deeper than regular asleep, a layer deeper yet somehow less rejuvenating - was asloop until this afternoon. Got up and ate fruit in a daze, showered, went to work, somehow got through a terrible shift, just the worst, so busy and grim, now here I am, with my soggy cement head, just trying to find any words to fill this space so I can go back to bed and sleep - or sloop, probably - for six hours before I have to get up for the open again.
Woe is me, etc.
Maybe I’ll take the posts from the last two days and expand them - or rethink and condense them - at some point in the future. Certainly a lot in there that’s been on my mind of late, though I don’t know if I said anything that wasn’t completely obvious in my late night ramblings. Ahh well, there’s a limit to how astute you can be at 3 in the morning. I did my best. Got it all down to explore more another day.
That’s it. That’s all I got.
Music, though! Tonight: Xtal by Aphex Twin. Somehow I didn’t know this, although I like ambient/IDM. This is the opening track from his first full-length album, Selected Ambient Works 85-92, and makes me feel like I’m in a taxi with my head resting against the glass speeding through the early morning drizzle back from a scuzzy warehouse rave a decade or more ago. All energy and commotion over, the morning sky expanding, a gentle beat and a gently clenching jaw guiding the way home.
Writing till 5am last night, head a throbbing mess lying in bed, too blasted to sleep. Then was asloop - that’s a layer deeper than regular asleep, a layer deeper yet somehow less rejuvenating - was asloop until this afternoon. Got up and ate fruit in a daze, showered, went to work, somehow got through a terrible shift, just the worst, so busy and grim, now here I am, with my soggy cement head, just trying to find any words to fill this space so I can go back to bed and sleep - or sloop, probably - for six hours before I have to get up for the open again.
Woe is me, etc.
Maybe I’ll take the posts from the last two days and expand them - or rethink and condense them - at some point in the future. Certainly a lot in there that’s been on my mind of late, though I don’t know if I said anything that wasn’t completely obvious in my late night ramblings. Ahh well, there’s a limit to how astute you can be at 3 in the morning. I did my best. Got it all down to explore more another day.
That’s it. That’s all I got.
Music, though! Tonight: Xtal by Aphex Twin. Somehow I didn’t know this, although I like ambient/IDM. This is the opening track from his first full-length album, Selected Ambient Works 85-92, and makes me feel like I’m in a taxi with my head resting against the glass speeding through the early morning drizzle back from a scuzzy warehouse rave a decade or more ago. All energy and commotion over, the morning sky expanding, a gentle beat and a gently clenching jaw guiding the way home.
Wednesday 28 November 2018
Day 214: The binge mechanism
01:03 and home from work. Got a few hours writing in before my shift, but now I’m left with a lot of disjointed notes, a broad subject to which I want to do justice, and a brain coming apart at the seams. Apologies how rough this will be.
So yesterday I was thinking about the world of blogging a decade ago, and how we went online back then, the way we consumed information on the Internet. How much this has changed. No one blogs anymore. For a time people used Tumblr, but that too is dead now. Medium is a nice idea, popular among the left-leaning, Atlantic-reading intelligentsia, but without a wide enough reach.
The noise, today, is all on Youtube. The frenzy of web-based effort for this generation’s thinkers and creators is channeled through the big red app.
Is this such a bad thing? For me, sure, because I don’t want to get a stylist and create a look for myself and buy a camera and lighting equipment and convert my bedroom into a minimalist studio and write scripts and rehearse them and film and edit and upload them. I didn’t grow up wanting to be an MTV presenter; I wanted to be Kieron Gillen.
But I think it’s a bad thing for all of us as well, for our collective intellectual health - both because writing itself serves a different purpose to video content, one that we desperately need, and because the structure of YouTube, as with the structure of Facebook and Instagram, inherently discourages healthy consumption of informed ideas.
But how did we get here? Why has the world changed?
Two-fold. Firstly the apps have changed with the times, and the ones that remained easy to use were the ones that survived. Everyone is now online on their phones rather than their PCs (over 95% of the traffic to my blog comes from Facebook mobile rather than the desktop site).
It’s fiddly to open multiple tabs on your phone, to switch between them. You don’t have a large screen on which numerous different windows are open. You can’t have a long page of text visible at once.
Thus apps have evolved to present us with small chunks of information - a single image on Instagram that fills the screen, the Facebook Feed that gives you a meme, then a pet video, then an inspirational quote, then a click-bait news article, then an advert, one after the other after the other. And YouTube, which to be honest still isn’t ideal for a phone, but will play a video in fullscreen, then autoplay something similar, and on, for the rest of your life.
Phones are not comfortable to use. They don’t hold themselves up, in place. You have to hunch over them, grapple them up in front of your face. And mostly you’re not doing this for two hours in an office chair in your study after work, you’re doing it for five minutes on the bus, two minutes on your fag break, ten seconds while waiting for your friend to return from the loo.
So partly it’s necessity. Something small and discrete and able to be consumed all at once is more likely to be clicked on by a phone user than something long and thorny that links to many different places and points continually outside of itself. Which is precisely what made blogging such a strong tool for debate. Thus apps have evolved to favour pictures and Vine-like videos, and to disfavour longform writing.
But partly, as well, it is that the apps themselves are predatory, hungry, and benefit financially from their users viewing rubbish rather than worthwhile content.
Put simply, apps today offer us a surplus buffet of snacks that our animal brains instinctively snatch for, rather than the healthier meals that our human brains need. This is in the content curated on the apps, but also in the very structures built into using the apps - the little dings of likes, comments, shares, each a tiny dopamine buzz tricking our deep neural mechanisms into thinking we deserve a reward for doing something that has kept us alive. “I got a like, I’m popular, I will survive another day,” your lizard brain purrs. And it likes that feeling, so it opens the app again, and again, and again, going back for more of that sweet reward.
And the content of the Feeds works in the same way. Of course you can find healthy vegetables on the apps - Ted talks (though even they are short and sexy, pre-cut vegetables sprinkled with sweet sauce), investigations by The Guardian, video-series teaching you how to speak Spanish, links to my blog (cheesy-grinning-emoji) - but surrounding these you will find hundreds of cute cat videos (which by the way never show the cat old and incontinent and the owner cleaning up diarrhea for the fifth time that day and finally deciding it is time the poor creature, their loved companion, was put to death, and the sobbing in the car down to the vets, and more diarrhea in the basket, and an injection, and a cold biting heartache tearing your world in two - cute cat videos are bullshit, I’m saying, they’re saccharine, sugar-coated, lying nonsense - the animals being gorgeous is what you get from your bond with them and your agreement to spend a life with them, to see them through all the awful times, to truly know them, and love them, in all aspects - it shouldn’t be something you decoct from the surrounding pain and bottle and sell online as video clips to give people a quick hit of unearned pleasure. Face fucking life, I’m saying, stop hiding in a social media realm of forced cheer. Though I’m one to talk).
But yes, this is the content on our phones, the information we choose to consume all day every day. Cute cat videos. Memes, in-jokes continuously re-presenting the icons of our culture, designed to arouse a “heh”, and then to be forgotten. Inspirational, misattributed quotes. Videos of people playing videogames you yourself don’t have the energy to play. Not informed critique of games, just dumb people playing, saying things like “Ooh I don’t know why but I’m really enjoying this game right now, it’s, like, really cool, if you think it’s cool too then remember to like, comment and subscribe, by the way immigrants aren’t really people.”
I’ll come back to that.
But my point is that our apps are filled with junk food. And we can’t help but snack.
Our brains have a binging mechanic built into them. When our ancestors stumbled across a fresh kill in the wild, a grove of mango trees, it was important for them to want to chow down and gobble everything up, because who knew when the next good meal would come along? In the wild this binging had natural checks, in that food is generally scarce, there don’t exist unlimited supplies, and physical food physically fills us up - once we eat enough our stomachs become stuffed and our appetites are sated.
Fail compilation videos on YouTube, on the other hand, can never fill us up. There’s always room for one more. And the supply is endless. The Feed falls down and down and down.
So - sorry, I am so repugnantly tired right now, and my eyes are going. Apps provide junk food buffets that flick us into binge mode, and we stay there, rapaciously guzzling, grabbing at whatever we can find, while never filling up, becoming more and more unhappy, more and more dazed, brains melting out of ears, hooked into some mainline, unable to unplug, finger jerking forever on. And for the apps, that is exactly where they want us to be. Because the longer we stay in that zone, the more adverts we can have pumped at us, and the more advertising money the apps can make. It’s simple.
So there’s all that, which certainly existed a decade ago, but is so much worse now.
OK. Last bit. Drrrrr. Come on brain. About YouTubers themselves, how video production for an app that is structured in the way I just laid out encourages its creators to be a certain way.
In the days of blogging you had something you wanted to say and you wrote it down, and made it as strong and compelling an argument as you could, and you posted it up. And people read it, thought about what you’d said, and responded.
That can happen on YouTube. But video production is so time and energy consuming, it’s hard to have much left for thinking through what you actually want to say. And where a decade ago people would happily sit at their desk reading for an hour, today you’re lucky if someone will watch your video for longer than a few minutes. Again, not an incentive for informed, intellectual content.
And then you have YouTube’s algorithm that suggests new videos. The app is unwieldy, as I said, on mobile, and searching out worthwhile videos is a pain. Mostly you’re just watching in fullscreen, and relying on the algorithm to fill that tiny list of what to watch next. And the way that algorithm works means creators are incentivised to post lots of regular - and thus less considered - videos, rather than fewer, more thoughtful ones. Some creators turn away from this, accept that they’ll have an order of magnitude fewer followers, but that they’ll be proud of what they put out. But most simply upload mindless drivel continuously, cleverly packaged to appear professional, with clickbaity thumbnails and descriptions, and reap the rewards.
I could do a whole article on this. But look at Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, one of the most popular creators on YouTube, as an example. He posts all the time, it’s all slick, he’s got a colour palette, a theme, a vibe, he’s always on-brand, he does everything necessary to stay at the top of his game. But what’s he actually saying? Bugger all. Simple reviews of aspirational products, this phone is good, this phone is good, these headphones are good, this phone is good. A few positives, a few negatives, a summary. It’s got all the beats of a review, and none of the thought. Like the way all the food in our supermarkets is ultra processed. Loaves of bread look like bread, we think of them as bread, but they’re full of additives and high-speed mixers, relaxants, tighteners.
And MKBHD is one of the better ones. These kids are all encouraged to put up rushed content, to throw themselves ever forwards saying any old shit, but looking good while saying it.
It’s a system in which ideas have been replaced by ego. And into this sorry landscape, without the white blood cells of critical thought, the tumours of anti-intellectualism, misogyny, and fascism have taken root, and, carried through the veins of unwitting creators, metastasised throughout the body.
I started yesterday talking about gaming, which is the scene I know the best, and I’ll finish tonight with it. In the (huge) corner of YouTube dedicated to videogames, there’s very little room for reasoned debate. The people who care, Mark Brown from Game Maker’s Toolkit, Matt Lees, Chris Bratt, put out videos every few months, and despite being industry veterans and putting forward the wisest, most perspicacious ideas, they have relatively few subscribers. The creators with all the followers are the ones blabbering about nothing over footage of them arsing around in Fortnite. Publishers see these follower numbers, and lavish the creators with gifts, send them advance copies of their new games, and the creators dutifully play the games, talk about how much fun they’re having, never consider that they’ve become not critics but cheap advertisers for the products they should be reviewing.
Or maybe they know, and don’t care. Because they’re not journalists, they’re just kids having fun, and they’re getting insanely rich while doing it. They become multi-millionaires, the companies get their games seen by players, and the audience get fun little videos to watch while lounging in bed. Everyone wins.
Except the environment gets filled with junk food, and the landscape pushes the audience towards the junk food, and it becomes way harder for kids to discern the difference between the McDonald’s hamburgers and the joints of beef. And the types of videos propagating fascist views, repulsive views, the kinds of things that would exist in little contained bubbles in the blogosphere, end up spreading into the mainstream.
I would posit - and holy shit it is late - but I would posit that the alt-right on Youtube would get nowhere if they were writing essays. But soundbyte videos, watched by kids with lessened critical abilities, with minds fatigued by mental junk food, catch like wildfire.
OK. I have to stop here. Writing is, I think, the antidote to this evil. Writing does not engage the binge mechanism. Writing must be digested slowly, while paying close attention to every mouthful you eat. Writing improves memory and concentration. It lowers anxiety and stress. It forms and strengthens connections in the brain, engages the imagination, decreases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
Scrolling social media and snacking on YouTube in about every regard does the exact opposite of this.
So writing is the antidote. But how do we deliver the dose? How do we get it round the system? How do we bring people back from the edge. After years with endless buffets of McDonald’s, Subway, Taco Bell, Baskin Robbins, how do you plonk a cauliflower down in front of someone and expect them to eat it?
I don’t know. But I want to find out.
So yesterday I was thinking about the world of blogging a decade ago, and how we went online back then, the way we consumed information on the Internet. How much this has changed. No one blogs anymore. For a time people used Tumblr, but that too is dead now. Medium is a nice idea, popular among the left-leaning, Atlantic-reading intelligentsia, but without a wide enough reach.
The noise, today, is all on Youtube. The frenzy of web-based effort for this generation’s thinkers and creators is channeled through the big red app.
Is this such a bad thing? For me, sure, because I don’t want to get a stylist and create a look for myself and buy a camera and lighting equipment and convert my bedroom into a minimalist studio and write scripts and rehearse them and film and edit and upload them. I didn’t grow up wanting to be an MTV presenter; I wanted to be Kieron Gillen.
But I think it’s a bad thing for all of us as well, for our collective intellectual health - both because writing itself serves a different purpose to video content, one that we desperately need, and because the structure of YouTube, as with the structure of Facebook and Instagram, inherently discourages healthy consumption of informed ideas.
But how did we get here? Why has the world changed?
Two-fold. Firstly the apps have changed with the times, and the ones that remained easy to use were the ones that survived. Everyone is now online on their phones rather than their PCs (over 95% of the traffic to my blog comes from Facebook mobile rather than the desktop site).
It’s fiddly to open multiple tabs on your phone, to switch between them. You don’t have a large screen on which numerous different windows are open. You can’t have a long page of text visible at once.
Thus apps have evolved to present us with small chunks of information - a single image on Instagram that fills the screen, the Facebook Feed that gives you a meme, then a pet video, then an inspirational quote, then a click-bait news article, then an advert, one after the other after the other. And YouTube, which to be honest still isn’t ideal for a phone, but will play a video in fullscreen, then autoplay something similar, and on, for the rest of your life.
Phones are not comfortable to use. They don’t hold themselves up, in place. You have to hunch over them, grapple them up in front of your face. And mostly you’re not doing this for two hours in an office chair in your study after work, you’re doing it for five minutes on the bus, two minutes on your fag break, ten seconds while waiting for your friend to return from the loo.
So partly it’s necessity. Something small and discrete and able to be consumed all at once is more likely to be clicked on by a phone user than something long and thorny that links to many different places and points continually outside of itself. Which is precisely what made blogging such a strong tool for debate. Thus apps have evolved to favour pictures and Vine-like videos, and to disfavour longform writing.
But partly, as well, it is that the apps themselves are predatory, hungry, and benefit financially from their users viewing rubbish rather than worthwhile content.
Put simply, apps today offer us a surplus buffet of snacks that our animal brains instinctively snatch for, rather than the healthier meals that our human brains need. This is in the content curated on the apps, but also in the very structures built into using the apps - the little dings of likes, comments, shares, each a tiny dopamine buzz tricking our deep neural mechanisms into thinking we deserve a reward for doing something that has kept us alive. “I got a like, I’m popular, I will survive another day,” your lizard brain purrs. And it likes that feeling, so it opens the app again, and again, and again, going back for more of that sweet reward.
And the content of the Feeds works in the same way. Of course you can find healthy vegetables on the apps - Ted talks (though even they are short and sexy, pre-cut vegetables sprinkled with sweet sauce), investigations by The Guardian, video-series teaching you how to speak Spanish, links to my blog (cheesy-grinning-emoji) - but surrounding these you will find hundreds of cute cat videos (which by the way never show the cat old and incontinent and the owner cleaning up diarrhea for the fifth time that day and finally deciding it is time the poor creature, their loved companion, was put to death, and the sobbing in the car down to the vets, and more diarrhea in the basket, and an injection, and a cold biting heartache tearing your world in two - cute cat videos are bullshit, I’m saying, they’re saccharine, sugar-coated, lying nonsense - the animals being gorgeous is what you get from your bond with them and your agreement to spend a life with them, to see them through all the awful times, to truly know them, and love them, in all aspects - it shouldn’t be something you decoct from the surrounding pain and bottle and sell online as video clips to give people a quick hit of unearned pleasure. Face fucking life, I’m saying, stop hiding in a social media realm of forced cheer. Though I’m one to talk).
But yes, this is the content on our phones, the information we choose to consume all day every day. Cute cat videos. Memes, in-jokes continuously re-presenting the icons of our culture, designed to arouse a “heh”, and then to be forgotten. Inspirational, misattributed quotes. Videos of people playing videogames you yourself don’t have the energy to play. Not informed critique of games, just dumb people playing, saying things like “Ooh I don’t know why but I’m really enjoying this game right now, it’s, like, really cool, if you think it’s cool too then remember to like, comment and subscribe, by the way immigrants aren’t really people.”
I’ll come back to that.
But my point is that our apps are filled with junk food. And we can’t help but snack.
Our brains have a binging mechanic built into them. When our ancestors stumbled across a fresh kill in the wild, a grove of mango trees, it was important for them to want to chow down and gobble everything up, because who knew when the next good meal would come along? In the wild this binging had natural checks, in that food is generally scarce, there don’t exist unlimited supplies, and physical food physically fills us up - once we eat enough our stomachs become stuffed and our appetites are sated.
Fail compilation videos on YouTube, on the other hand, can never fill us up. There’s always room for one more. And the supply is endless. The Feed falls down and down and down.
So - sorry, I am so repugnantly tired right now, and my eyes are going. Apps provide junk food buffets that flick us into binge mode, and we stay there, rapaciously guzzling, grabbing at whatever we can find, while never filling up, becoming more and more unhappy, more and more dazed, brains melting out of ears, hooked into some mainline, unable to unplug, finger jerking forever on. And for the apps, that is exactly where they want us to be. Because the longer we stay in that zone, the more adverts we can have pumped at us, and the more advertising money the apps can make. It’s simple.
So there’s all that, which certainly existed a decade ago, but is so much worse now.
OK. Last bit. Drrrrr. Come on brain. About YouTubers themselves, how video production for an app that is structured in the way I just laid out encourages its creators to be a certain way.
In the days of blogging you had something you wanted to say and you wrote it down, and made it as strong and compelling an argument as you could, and you posted it up. And people read it, thought about what you’d said, and responded.
That can happen on YouTube. But video production is so time and energy consuming, it’s hard to have much left for thinking through what you actually want to say. And where a decade ago people would happily sit at their desk reading for an hour, today you’re lucky if someone will watch your video for longer than a few minutes. Again, not an incentive for informed, intellectual content.
And then you have YouTube’s algorithm that suggests new videos. The app is unwieldy, as I said, on mobile, and searching out worthwhile videos is a pain. Mostly you’re just watching in fullscreen, and relying on the algorithm to fill that tiny list of what to watch next. And the way that algorithm works means creators are incentivised to post lots of regular - and thus less considered - videos, rather than fewer, more thoughtful ones. Some creators turn away from this, accept that they’ll have an order of magnitude fewer followers, but that they’ll be proud of what they put out. But most simply upload mindless drivel continuously, cleverly packaged to appear professional, with clickbaity thumbnails and descriptions, and reap the rewards.
I could do a whole article on this. But look at Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, one of the most popular creators on YouTube, as an example. He posts all the time, it’s all slick, he’s got a colour palette, a theme, a vibe, he’s always on-brand, he does everything necessary to stay at the top of his game. But what’s he actually saying? Bugger all. Simple reviews of aspirational products, this phone is good, this phone is good, these headphones are good, this phone is good. A few positives, a few negatives, a summary. It’s got all the beats of a review, and none of the thought. Like the way all the food in our supermarkets is ultra processed. Loaves of bread look like bread, we think of them as bread, but they’re full of additives and high-speed mixers, relaxants, tighteners.
And MKBHD is one of the better ones. These kids are all encouraged to put up rushed content, to throw themselves ever forwards saying any old shit, but looking good while saying it.
It’s a system in which ideas have been replaced by ego. And into this sorry landscape, without the white blood cells of critical thought, the tumours of anti-intellectualism, misogyny, and fascism have taken root, and, carried through the veins of unwitting creators, metastasised throughout the body.
I started yesterday talking about gaming, which is the scene I know the best, and I’ll finish tonight with it. In the (huge) corner of YouTube dedicated to videogames, there’s very little room for reasoned debate. The people who care, Mark Brown from Game Maker’s Toolkit, Matt Lees, Chris Bratt, put out videos every few months, and despite being industry veterans and putting forward the wisest, most perspicacious ideas, they have relatively few subscribers. The creators with all the followers are the ones blabbering about nothing over footage of them arsing around in Fortnite. Publishers see these follower numbers, and lavish the creators with gifts, send them advance copies of their new games, and the creators dutifully play the games, talk about how much fun they’re having, never consider that they’ve become not critics but cheap advertisers for the products they should be reviewing.
Or maybe they know, and don’t care. Because they’re not journalists, they’re just kids having fun, and they’re getting insanely rich while doing it. They become multi-millionaires, the companies get their games seen by players, and the audience get fun little videos to watch while lounging in bed. Everyone wins.
Except the environment gets filled with junk food, and the landscape pushes the audience towards the junk food, and it becomes way harder for kids to discern the difference between the McDonald’s hamburgers and the joints of beef. And the types of videos propagating fascist views, repulsive views, the kinds of things that would exist in little contained bubbles in the blogosphere, end up spreading into the mainstream.
I would posit - and holy shit it is late - but I would posit that the alt-right on Youtube would get nowhere if they were writing essays. But soundbyte videos, watched by kids with lessened critical abilities, with minds fatigued by mental junk food, catch like wildfire.
OK. I have to stop here. Writing is, I think, the antidote to this evil. Writing does not engage the binge mechanism. Writing must be digested slowly, while paying close attention to every mouthful you eat. Writing improves memory and concentration. It lowers anxiety and stress. It forms and strengthens connections in the brain, engages the imagination, decreases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
Scrolling social media and snacking on YouTube in about every regard does the exact opposite of this.
So writing is the antidote. But how do we deliver the dose? How do we get it round the system? How do we bring people back from the edge. After years with endless buffets of McDonald’s, Subway, Taco Bell, Baskin Robbins, how do you plonk a cauliflower down in front of someone and expect them to eat it?
I don’t know. But I want to find out.
......
Music today is We Come from the Same Place, by Allo Darlin', as suggested by a lovely reader. Bouncy indie-folk-pop, like a less frantic Los Campesinos (maybe? I'm tired), with sumptuous lyrics. "It seems crazy I know, but I've got this feeling we've met before / And we come from the same place." I dig it.
Monday 26 November 2018
Day 213: Where have all the good blogs gone?
Got a load of stuff I’ve been thinking about, going to spew it out here pretty much as it comes out of my head…
Around 2010 I used to be involved in videogame blogging. It was the first time I’d felt I belonged anywhere, even if I only ever existed on the peripheries of the scene. The scene was a collection of earnest intellectual gamers mostly in their 20s and 30s, all with their own blogs and amateur websites, sitting just underneath the larger independent and mainstream sites, for whom the better writers would end up working.
It felt like we were all involved in this enormous conversation about where games were going, what they could be. You sat in your bedroom and lashed your theories, your critiques, your memories, together into a blog post, you uploaded it, and the next day you might find a writer from a major publication, or maybe a designer of one of the games you’d been discussing, had Tweeted you, emailed you, shared your post.
Blogs were a wonderful longform back-and-forth, a shared debate - regardless of the subject. Videogaming had its little corner, but the principles held true for any media, for politics, for comedy, for social issues, for housekeeping, mental health, surviving adult life.
Yes, some worried that amateur opinion was replacing journalistic integrity, but I think in the best cases it was more like a robust ecosystem with room for both. At the top level you had the exhaustively fact-checked, researched, professional journalism of the newspapers’ digital editions and the mainstream websites of every field. And from them stories would trickle down into the blogosphere, be disseminated, discussed, explored. And any interesting noise from the blogosphere would find its way back up, and out into the major publications.
I saw this happen first hand. I’d write crazed posts about the future of videogames as a medium, those posts would be reblogged on larger sites, and next thing major game designers would be discussing my thoughts on Twitter. Ideas were king, and if your ideas were good then you could bet on them finding their way to people who mattered. Blogging was a great leveler, and a great way of sharing ideas up and down the chain.
But blogging is now dead. It is decidedly uncool. In a fit of nostalgia the other night I went back through my old stomping grounds, my bookmarks folder for gaming, and one after another I found dead links, abandoned websites, blogs last updated in 2011. The town squares were deserted, a cold wind blowing through.
Of course some of this is that the earnest young bloggers from 2010 have graduated from their amateur post-uni online escapades. They’ve become comic book writers and game designers and YouTube commentators, and I’m not au fait with the next crop of upcoming writers.
But at the same time the landscape of the Internet has changed, and probably not for the better.
Picture how we used to go online. We’d come home from work or school, from phones that we used for sending 160-character messages and nothing else, switch on our computers or open our laptops, and spend a couple of hours in front of a monitor opening tabs, following hyperlinks, listening to new music, bookmarking articles, building a web of information about us.
What happens now? We spend all day online, but on minuscule screens on our phones, with clumsy touch controls, an environment that lends itself to scrolling down linear feeds of content, focused on only one tab or program, on one app, at once. And where a decade ago the Internet was a Wild West of voices, a town square of debate, that has now been paved into the cities and strip malls of Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
What I’m saying is we don’t go out and explore the Internet. We sit in gated communities scrolling down and down and down. We are presented with not differing opinions, lively debate, but simply more of what an algorithm thinks we like, echoing round and round.
… And by “like”, there, I mean “what we will be compelled to click on.” Whether we click, find nothing of worth, click back, and feel bad about ourselves, the algorithm cares not. It is a machine that offers us continual junk food, because we grab at junk food more than we grab at a cauliflower. And the apps don’t want us to eat healthily, they want us simply to sit fat and dazed so the advertising can do its thing.
Also: attention. We’re usually on our phones in stolen, distracted, interrupted moments while living our lives. We increasingly do not demarcate time to specifically pay attention, on purpose, to what we find online, because it is interesting and worthy. Instead we flip up Facebook in a cafe without realising we are doing so, because what our friend is saying right beside us doesn’t seem immediately relevant, and we lose ourselves mindlessly scrolling for thirty seconds, a minute, before snapping back. And we do this hundreds of times a day. And that is our experience of existing online.
……
So blogs, the idea of following debate through multiple blogs, all open at once, is less compatible with cramped phone screens and swipe controls, and the major apps aggressively work to coral users inside their spaces, rather than encouraging links to external sites. The result: no one blogs anymore.
So where has the conversation gone?
The short answer: YouTube. But I’d argue this migration has had a hugely detrimental effect on the discussion prevalent within our society, that it has stifled voices and harmed our collective intellectual health - even so far as to provide breeding grounds where ideologies of the far-right, of inherently anti-intellectual fascists, can flourish.
Will continue this tomorrow. Stay tuned.
……
AND, bonus paragraphs: gonna try out posting a few words about a different song every day, to get back into music - I stopped listening completely in the depths of my depression, I couldn’t even hear the music, it was just sound, and I’m completely out of the loop now. Any suggestions for songs, wing them this way.
Adore | Savages | 2016 - fitting for the theme of nostalgia today, found this at the top of a "tracks of 2016" list by Kieron Gillen, the man who made me believe writing about videogames could be a worthwhile pursuit. He’s now an acclaimed scribe for Marvel comics, and his own series, The Wicked & The Divine.
Song is gorgeous lilting, rising post-punk/noise rock; crunching guitar, doleful lyrics straining yet with hope. “Maybe I will die maybe tomorrow,” lead singer Jehnny Beth howls, “So I need to say / I adore life.” Walks the line between gloomy and transcendent. Magical.
Around 2010 I used to be involved in videogame blogging. It was the first time I’d felt I belonged anywhere, even if I only ever existed on the peripheries of the scene. The scene was a collection of earnest intellectual gamers mostly in their 20s and 30s, all with their own blogs and amateur websites, sitting just underneath the larger independent and mainstream sites, for whom the better writers would end up working.
It felt like we were all involved in this enormous conversation about where games were going, what they could be. You sat in your bedroom and lashed your theories, your critiques, your memories, together into a blog post, you uploaded it, and the next day you might find a writer from a major publication, or maybe a designer of one of the games you’d been discussing, had Tweeted you, emailed you, shared your post.
Blogs were a wonderful longform back-and-forth, a shared debate - regardless of the subject. Videogaming had its little corner, but the principles held true for any media, for politics, for comedy, for social issues, for housekeeping, mental health, surviving adult life.
Yes, some worried that amateur opinion was replacing journalistic integrity, but I think in the best cases it was more like a robust ecosystem with room for both. At the top level you had the exhaustively fact-checked, researched, professional journalism of the newspapers’ digital editions and the mainstream websites of every field. And from them stories would trickle down into the blogosphere, be disseminated, discussed, explored. And any interesting noise from the blogosphere would find its way back up, and out into the major publications.
I saw this happen first hand. I’d write crazed posts about the future of videogames as a medium, those posts would be reblogged on larger sites, and next thing major game designers would be discussing my thoughts on Twitter. Ideas were king, and if your ideas were good then you could bet on them finding their way to people who mattered. Blogging was a great leveler, and a great way of sharing ideas up and down the chain.
But blogging is now dead. It is decidedly uncool. In a fit of nostalgia the other night I went back through my old stomping grounds, my bookmarks folder for gaming, and one after another I found dead links, abandoned websites, blogs last updated in 2011. The town squares were deserted, a cold wind blowing through.
Of course some of this is that the earnest young bloggers from 2010 have graduated from their amateur post-uni online escapades. They’ve become comic book writers and game designers and YouTube commentators, and I’m not au fait with the next crop of upcoming writers.
But at the same time the landscape of the Internet has changed, and probably not for the better.
Picture how we used to go online. We’d come home from work or school, from phones that we used for sending 160-character messages and nothing else, switch on our computers or open our laptops, and spend a couple of hours in front of a monitor opening tabs, following hyperlinks, listening to new music, bookmarking articles, building a web of information about us.
What happens now? We spend all day online, but on minuscule screens on our phones, with clumsy touch controls, an environment that lends itself to scrolling down linear feeds of content, focused on only one tab or program, on one app, at once. And where a decade ago the Internet was a Wild West of voices, a town square of debate, that has now been paved into the cities and strip malls of Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
What I’m saying is we don’t go out and explore the Internet. We sit in gated communities scrolling down and down and down. We are presented with not differing opinions, lively debate, but simply more of what an algorithm thinks we like, echoing round and round.
… And by “like”, there, I mean “what we will be compelled to click on.” Whether we click, find nothing of worth, click back, and feel bad about ourselves, the algorithm cares not. It is a machine that offers us continual junk food, because we grab at junk food more than we grab at a cauliflower. And the apps don’t want us to eat healthily, they want us simply to sit fat and dazed so the advertising can do its thing.
Also: attention. We’re usually on our phones in stolen, distracted, interrupted moments while living our lives. We increasingly do not demarcate time to specifically pay attention, on purpose, to what we find online, because it is interesting and worthy. Instead we flip up Facebook in a cafe without realising we are doing so, because what our friend is saying right beside us doesn’t seem immediately relevant, and we lose ourselves mindlessly scrolling for thirty seconds, a minute, before snapping back. And we do this hundreds of times a day. And that is our experience of existing online.
……
So blogs, the idea of following debate through multiple blogs, all open at once, is less compatible with cramped phone screens and swipe controls, and the major apps aggressively work to coral users inside their spaces, rather than encouraging links to external sites. The result: no one blogs anymore.
So where has the conversation gone?
The short answer: YouTube. But I’d argue this migration has had a hugely detrimental effect on the discussion prevalent within our society, that it has stifled voices and harmed our collective intellectual health - even so far as to provide breeding grounds where ideologies of the far-right, of inherently anti-intellectual fascists, can flourish.
Will continue this tomorrow. Stay tuned.
……
AND, bonus paragraphs: gonna try out posting a few words about a different song every day, to get back into music - I stopped listening completely in the depths of my depression, I couldn’t even hear the music, it was just sound, and I’m completely out of the loop now. Any suggestions for songs, wing them this way.
Adore | Savages | 2016 - fitting for the theme of nostalgia today, found this at the top of a "tracks of 2016" list by Kieron Gillen, the man who made me believe writing about videogames could be a worthwhile pursuit. He’s now an acclaimed scribe for Marvel comics, and his own series, The Wicked & The Divine.
Song is gorgeous lilting, rising post-punk/noise rock; crunching guitar, doleful lyrics straining yet with hope. “Maybe I will die maybe tomorrow,” lead singer Jehnny Beth howls, “So I need to say / I adore life.” Walks the line between gloomy and transcendent. Magical.
Edit: Ung. Song was used in Peaky Blinders. Figures.
Day 212: Wonky art
Wotcha. I’m just home from work. I’ve not got much to say tonight, I did a load of writing this afternoon, but it was more the first delicately reaching fingers of a hand palpating a subject, feeling for the size, the shape, whether there’s anything there to necessitate further action. Maybe the words I wrote will coalesce into something later down the line. Maybe not.
But I can come here and just write this, and see what happens. I know eventually something will come out, because I’ve got my mojo back.
I had a confrontation with the negative voices in my head the other night, shined the light of awareness directly on them after a long time of them bubbling away in the dark, and they hissed and fled, and suddenly I was alone, myself, free to laugh and think and write again.
And, Christ, does it make a difference, believing in yourself! Who cares if this all is pathetic? It’s aflame for me right now. I’m where I want to be. Who cares if no one reads it? Write for the stars and the moon - and if the stars and the moon whisper that you’re a loser, give them the finger and write what you wanted anyway.
… Uhh, not that I’m bragging, by the way. About having my mojo back.
Why would that be bragging? Why would I be ashamed about having my mojo back? It isn’t shameful to feel good.
So why do I feel ashamed?
Because those negative voices haven’t truly fled. They’re just on the periphery of the light, looking for a way back in.
But not today, you pesky buggers.
I’ve got a lifetime of experience squishing myself up really tight, and trying really hard, and using stress and self-loathing and perfectionism to try to sort of trick people into thinking I have talent. Like if I obsess over a piece of writing for months then, provided it doesn’t implode under the weight, I can make it read pretty well.
But the secret to creating things is to just do them naturally, and badly, and not worry that they’re bad, but love that they’re natural, and encourage that natural element, the organic, artistic element - foster it, nourish it, and let it slowly develop and grow. And only when this instinctive joyful chaotic process inside you has parity with that squished-tight, try-hard process, that voice that criticises and frets - only when the two are equally powerful can you have a fruitful creative life.
The try-hard process hones and shapes. But it is the chaotic process that spews the clay initially that may then be honed and shaped. Be overly critical and the clay well will dry up (that’s a weird metaphor, but screw it!), and you’ll be left criticising an empty hole, and then, eventually, yourself.
So no more of that. No no. I’ve done that for so long. But I’ve also got 212 days practice just chucking out whatever clay I can find. The clay well got clogged (I’m not letting this metaphor drop) recently, but all it took was hauling out the clay blockage and slapping it into some sort of shape and saying, Hey, I made this wonky clay thing, and it might not be a Grecian urn, but it came from me, and that’s good enough - all it took was that, making a concerted effort to accept myself, and the clay was flowing once again, the beautifully flowing clay well… or maybe fountain... maybe this metaphor works better with the clay coming from a fountain, because wells don’t flow, do they? They just sit and wait for you to dip your bucket in them.
Do wells flow? Fountains flow. Or spray. Can wells be fountains? It’s too late at night and concepts have stopped making sense to me.
I don’t know. But I do know you should go away and make something, and love whatever it is you make, and when those negative voices come out to tell you that the thing you made is wonky and disgusting, well, tell them it does not matter.
Your wonky art is wonky because it’s true. And I believe Keats had a little something to say about what is true, whether Grecian urn or no.
So get to it.
But I can come here and just write this, and see what happens. I know eventually something will come out, because I’ve got my mojo back.
I had a confrontation with the negative voices in my head the other night, shined the light of awareness directly on them after a long time of them bubbling away in the dark, and they hissed and fled, and suddenly I was alone, myself, free to laugh and think and write again.
And, Christ, does it make a difference, believing in yourself! Who cares if this all is pathetic? It’s aflame for me right now. I’m where I want to be. Who cares if no one reads it? Write for the stars and the moon - and if the stars and the moon whisper that you’re a loser, give them the finger and write what you wanted anyway.
… Uhh, not that I’m bragging, by the way. About having my mojo back.
Why would that be bragging? Why would I be ashamed about having my mojo back? It isn’t shameful to feel good.
So why do I feel ashamed?
Because those negative voices haven’t truly fled. They’re just on the periphery of the light, looking for a way back in.
But not today, you pesky buggers.
I’ve got a lifetime of experience squishing myself up really tight, and trying really hard, and using stress and self-loathing and perfectionism to try to sort of trick people into thinking I have talent. Like if I obsess over a piece of writing for months then, provided it doesn’t implode under the weight, I can make it read pretty well.
But the secret to creating things is to just do them naturally, and badly, and not worry that they’re bad, but love that they’re natural, and encourage that natural element, the organic, artistic element - foster it, nourish it, and let it slowly develop and grow. And only when this instinctive joyful chaotic process inside you has parity with that squished-tight, try-hard process, that voice that criticises and frets - only when the two are equally powerful can you have a fruitful creative life.
The try-hard process hones and shapes. But it is the chaotic process that spews the clay initially that may then be honed and shaped. Be overly critical and the clay well will dry up (that’s a weird metaphor, but screw it!), and you’ll be left criticising an empty hole, and then, eventually, yourself.
So no more of that. No no. I’ve done that for so long. But I’ve also got 212 days practice just chucking out whatever clay I can find. The clay well got clogged (I’m not letting this metaphor drop) recently, but all it took was hauling out the clay blockage and slapping it into some sort of shape and saying, Hey, I made this wonky clay thing, and it might not be a Grecian urn, but it came from me, and that’s good enough - all it took was that, making a concerted effort to accept myself, and the clay was flowing once again, the beautifully flowing clay well… or maybe fountain... maybe this metaphor works better with the clay coming from a fountain, because wells don’t flow, do they? They just sit and wait for you to dip your bucket in them.
Do wells flow? Fountains flow. Or spray. Can wells be fountains? It’s too late at night and concepts have stopped making sense to me.
I don’t know. But I do know you should go away and make something, and love whatever it is you make, and when those negative voices come out to tell you that the thing you made is wonky and disgusting, well, tell them it does not matter.
Your wonky art is wonky because it’s true. And I believe Keats had a little something to say about what is true, whether Grecian urn or no.
So get to it.
Saturday 24 November 2018
Day 211: Still shiny
Despite how the point of writing yesterday's blog post was to vicariously experience the thrill of buying a new gaming PC without actually having to buy one, I still came incredibly close to actually buying a new gaming PC.
I just needed someone to tip me over the edge.
I asked my friend Mike what he thought, and he said that if I bought one I’d be miserable, and if I didn’t buy one I’d be miserable, so I might as well be miserable without one and save £800.
I didn’t like that answer, so I asked my friend Steve, and he said that the deals were probably all companies getting rid of old stock now that the next generation of CPUs and GPUs had been released, and I said well still it would be an investment, and Steve said that a gaming PC wasn't an investment it was a depreciating asset, and I didn’t know what that meant so I stopped talking to Steve.
Then I asked my mum whether I should buy one, and she said Absolutely not, that I shouldn’t spend large amounts of money when I was in a bad place emotionally, and I was like, aaaaahhh, Muuuum, if I shouldn’t spend large amounts of money when I’m in a bad place emotionally then that means I’ll never be able to spend large amounts of money! And she didn’t see the funny side of that.
So I went away in a huff and watched comparison videos on YouTube of the two graphics cards that the gaming PC I wanted offered as options, and I muttered darkly to myself.
“They don’t understand us, New Gaming PC. They're trying to keep us apart. It’s just you and me, New Gaming PC, it's just you and me. We’ll show them. We’ll show them all.”
And I got the tab back up of the deal I’d been looking at, and plugged in all my configuration choices, the graphics card that looked better, the upgraded SSD, and I stared at the price, and I stared at the picture of the completed rig, with the blue LEDs shining so tastefully… and then I changed channels on my TV and went to play the Witcher 3 on my PlayStation.
The Witcher 3, on console. A game that would look demonstrably stunning on my new gaming PC, but that on console was rendered with visual settings comparable to the low-to-medium preset on the PC. With a framerate targeting a meagre 30 frames-per-second, and struggling even to hit that. The Witcher 3 on console, looking like a pile of garbage, like a muddy pixelated piece of goddamned trash. I might as well just mash shards of glass and rusted knives into my eyeballs and be done with it. How dare everyone deny me the pleasure of The Witcher 3 on my new gaming PC? How dare they presume to know what is best for me? I know what’s best for me. I know what I need, and what I need is a brand new gami-
-and that was when I glanced at the time.
Past midnight. The deals would all have finished.
Oh thank Christ! A new gaming PC? What was I thinking? I can’t afford a new gaming PC. I can't afford lunch, let alone a new gaming PC! Madness. Utter madness.
At least some part of me had the sense to take the ball, which in this analogy represents my debit card number, and run it to the other team’s corner flag, which represents The Witcher 3 on PlayStation, and wait out the final whistle, which was midnight.
And so that’s how you be an adult. You grab the decision making part of your brain, which obviously makes terrible decisions, just the worst, and you fucking RUN away with it and keep it away until there’s no longer any possibility of making the terrible decision any more.
And you just do that every day, I guess, until you die. Or something.
OK, I've finished this post now. This post is done. Go away.
Friday 23 November 2018
Day 210: Shiny Thing
I’m debating whether to buy a new gaming PC in the sales.
I know I shouldn’t. I know that Black Friday is a lie, that consumerism is rotten all the way through to the centre of its shrivelled heart, that “we buy new stuff to conceal from ourselves our disappointment about the failings of the old stuff.”
I know all this. But on the other hand, I really, really want a Shiny Thing!
Imagine what life will be like with a new gaming PC. I’ll come home from work jubilant and excited, primed to undertake important writing and photo editing, the smile on my face illuminated by the elegant glow of the machine’s tasteful blue LEDs. Within seconds Windows will have booted from the secondary 500GB solid-state harddrive, and a world of buttery smooth computing will be at my fingertips. The 16GB RAM will handle tabbing between multiple programs without breaking a sweat. The Intel Core i5 processor will chomp through data at a rate of knots. And once the work is done, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card will bring stunning videogame worlds into stark, ultra-high-setting detail at framerates of which my hoary old Sony PlayStation 4 can but dream.
There’ll be no more turning my computer on and then going to make breakfast while it loads up. What a slog. What squalor. What debasement.
There’ll be no crashes to desktop. No Blue Screens of Death. No hard resets. I’ll press a button and the sleeping giant will roar to life, instantly ready to transport me to wherever in the digital world I require to go.
There’ll be no more sadness. No depression. No world hunger. Only whirring, purring machinery, the clicky-clack of keyboard keys, the softest gentlest glow from those comforting blue LEDs.
And what’s money? It is but a concept. Grubby bits of paper, lines on a bank ledger, imbued with only the meaning we choose to bestow upon it.
An abstract, whimsical thing, money, of little note. Far better to convert that whishy-washy idea into thrumming, corporeal silicon. Glass-windowed casing. The primal twitching coils of internal SATA cables. You can’t lick the concept of money, can you? But you can lick a motherboard (although perhaps you shouldn’t). The concept of money can’t keep you warm, but a 600 watt bronze-rated power supply will heat the home all the way through the icy months of winter.
And what of the Nintendo Switch I recently bought, sitting sniffling in the corner? A paltry creature, dull and lifeless. No one cares about Nintendo Switches anymore. It’s all about new gaming PCs. That’s where the future lies. Beautiful gaming PCs, big and bold, bristling with features.
Hear the voice calling. The silken voice of the Shiny Thing, whispering in your ear. “You’re nothing. You’re empty. You’re a husk. But I’ll take away your suffering, I’ll burn it apart in the coruscating gleam of the Shine. Buy me. Buy me, and together we will ascend.”
… Hmm. On second thoughts maybe I should leave it for now. Mike dropped some homemade soup off on his way to work. I’ll eat the homemade soup, ladle it out, mop it up with my leftover brown bread roll, and let another day pass.
Consumerism is a lie. Soup is truth. Lovely, lovely soup.
I know I shouldn’t. I know that Black Friday is a lie, that consumerism is rotten all the way through to the centre of its shrivelled heart, that “we buy new stuff to conceal from ourselves our disappointment about the failings of the old stuff.”
I know all this. But on the other hand, I really, really want a Shiny Thing!
Imagine what life will be like with a new gaming PC. I’ll come home from work jubilant and excited, primed to undertake important writing and photo editing, the smile on my face illuminated by the elegant glow of the machine’s tasteful blue LEDs. Within seconds Windows will have booted from the secondary 500GB solid-state harddrive, and a world of buttery smooth computing will be at my fingertips. The 16GB RAM will handle tabbing between multiple programs without breaking a sweat. The Intel Core i5 processor will chomp through data at a rate of knots. And once the work is done, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card will bring stunning videogame worlds into stark, ultra-high-setting detail at framerates of which my hoary old Sony PlayStation 4 can but dream.
There’ll be no more turning my computer on and then going to make breakfast while it loads up. What a slog. What squalor. What debasement.
There’ll be no crashes to desktop. No Blue Screens of Death. No hard resets. I’ll press a button and the sleeping giant will roar to life, instantly ready to transport me to wherever in the digital world I require to go.
There’ll be no more sadness. No depression. No world hunger. Only whirring, purring machinery, the clicky-clack of keyboard keys, the softest gentlest glow from those comforting blue LEDs.
And what’s money? It is but a concept. Grubby bits of paper, lines on a bank ledger, imbued with only the meaning we choose to bestow upon it.
An abstract, whimsical thing, money, of little note. Far better to convert that whishy-washy idea into thrumming, corporeal silicon. Glass-windowed casing. The primal twitching coils of internal SATA cables. You can’t lick the concept of money, can you? But you can lick a motherboard (although perhaps you shouldn’t). The concept of money can’t keep you warm, but a 600 watt bronze-rated power supply will heat the home all the way through the icy months of winter.
And what of the Nintendo Switch I recently bought, sitting sniffling in the corner? A paltry creature, dull and lifeless. No one cares about Nintendo Switches anymore. It’s all about new gaming PCs. That’s where the future lies. Beautiful gaming PCs, big and bold, bristling with features.
Hear the voice calling. The silken voice of the Shiny Thing, whispering in your ear. “You’re nothing. You’re empty. You’re a husk. But I’ll take away your suffering, I’ll burn it apart in the coruscating gleam of the Shine. Buy me. Buy me, and together we will ascend.”
… Hmm. On second thoughts maybe I should leave it for now. Mike dropped some homemade soup off on his way to work. I’ll eat the homemade soup, ladle it out, mop it up with my leftover brown bread roll, and let another day pass.
Consumerism is a lie. Soup is truth. Lovely, lovely soup.
Day 209: Present
Voice of negativity has been howling of late, stomping its feet, threatening to blow down all my houses of cards. "Blog is pathetic," it screams. "You're a heap of dirt. You're grosser than the matter you find collected under the nail of a big toe."
The voice wants me to give everything up, crawl back under the covers, slink away to where it's dark and silent and safe.
Yeah, it's been howling. And in fact it turned up just then. "How many times have you written this exact post? How many times have you thought you had something interesting to say, but you never learn, you never move on. You should just admit that you're making a fool of yourself, and quit this blogging nonsense once and for all."
But it's good to hear that voice. Good to be present as it attacks. Because normally it sneaks in the back entrance, slinks up the stairs, and before I know it there it is in the control room of my brain manoeuvring me around without me ever giving permission.
I'll be distracted, lost in this or that, and then from the depths of my mind a thought arrives, like I'm figuring something out, finally recognising, that, for example, everything I create is worthless - and there's no arguing, because it doesn't feel like an opinion with which you can argue. It's more that I myself have finally noticed, or perhaps admitted, something that has always been present in reality. I have always been pathetic. Every word I write has always been atrocious. Yes, I am like that sad hopeful in every season of X-Factor, shuffling into the audition room certain of their secret ability to sing, but they can't, they can't sing, and it's clear to everyone else, and they're not the freak show or the star they're just another nobody, filled with delusions, to be summarily dismissed halfway through a long day with the judges thinking only of how long they still have to wait before they can break for lunch.
And there's always the sense of shame and despair in recognising that to be true, the feeling of all the energy seeping out of my muscles, and the voice becomes self-loathing, gathers momentum, spirals, and soon I'm actively searching out every example in my life that proves the initial thought to be true.
But it's not true. It's not reality. It is an interpretation of reality. An opinion about reality.
And, like the voice of a smoker screaming that they have to have a cigarette, that they cannot cope through the day without one, the voice of negativity has a motive. Addiction wants the smoker to smoke, and will tell any lie, warp reality in any way, to make it happen. But if the smoker doesn't take up the impulse, if they watch the craving, then the craving will rise, and peak, and fall back, and the person will be left, still there, like a beautiful blue sky after a storm.
And so it is with depression, with that voice of negativity. It wants me to give up writing, because writing is scary, and leads into unknown places. It wants me to stay small, and beaten, and not make a fuss. And so it twists truth until it has ammunition to use against me, and it deploys it, in a voice engineered to be effective. It explains, beseeches, begs, or shouts, depending on what works best. It doesn't want discussion, ambiguity, consideration of alternatives. It wants to take control, and to have its way, and everything it says works to further those aims.
But smokers do give up smoking, although the urges always stay with them. And I will give up depression, although that voice will always remain.
I'm getting better at catching the voice. Standing here, in the light of awareness, and watching the creature creep up the stairs, settle into position, clear its throat.
I'm getting better at staying present as it speaks. Hearing how what it says is not reality, but the same old voice spouting the same old warped interpretations of reality.
The creature turns malicious, thunders, threatens to smash apart the world. And I'm getting better at remaining still, giving the voice space, and letting it thunder out of steam, falter, fall silent. I stay present, and the creature sighs, retreats, slinks back into the dark.
Until, of course, thirty seconds later, when it returns for its next attack. But it has only a few strategies, it's all bluster and no bite. My approach need never alter. Be mindful. Be here. Be awake to watch the voice arriving, to not react, to let it exhaust its bag of tricks.
Negative voices can do nothing without our permission. We need only be alert enough to ensure we do not give it.
The voice wants me to give everything up, crawl back under the covers, slink away to where it's dark and silent and safe.
Yeah, it's been howling. And in fact it turned up just then. "How many times have you written this exact post? How many times have you thought you had something interesting to say, but you never learn, you never move on. You should just admit that you're making a fool of yourself, and quit this blogging nonsense once and for all."
But it's good to hear that voice. Good to be present as it attacks. Because normally it sneaks in the back entrance, slinks up the stairs, and before I know it there it is in the control room of my brain manoeuvring me around without me ever giving permission.
I'll be distracted, lost in this or that, and then from the depths of my mind a thought arrives, like I'm figuring something out, finally recognising, that, for example, everything I create is worthless - and there's no arguing, because it doesn't feel like an opinion with which you can argue. It's more that I myself have finally noticed, or perhaps admitted, something that has always been present in reality. I have always been pathetic. Every word I write has always been atrocious. Yes, I am like that sad hopeful in every season of X-Factor, shuffling into the audition room certain of their secret ability to sing, but they can't, they can't sing, and it's clear to everyone else, and they're not the freak show or the star they're just another nobody, filled with delusions, to be summarily dismissed halfway through a long day with the judges thinking only of how long they still have to wait before they can break for lunch.
And there's always the sense of shame and despair in recognising that to be true, the feeling of all the energy seeping out of my muscles, and the voice becomes self-loathing, gathers momentum, spirals, and soon I'm actively searching out every example in my life that proves the initial thought to be true.
But it's not true. It's not reality. It is an interpretation of reality. An opinion about reality.
And, like the voice of a smoker screaming that they have to have a cigarette, that they cannot cope through the day without one, the voice of negativity has a motive. Addiction wants the smoker to smoke, and will tell any lie, warp reality in any way, to make it happen. But if the smoker doesn't take up the impulse, if they watch the craving, then the craving will rise, and peak, and fall back, and the person will be left, still there, like a beautiful blue sky after a storm.
And so it is with depression, with that voice of negativity. It wants me to give up writing, because writing is scary, and leads into unknown places. It wants me to stay small, and beaten, and not make a fuss. And so it twists truth until it has ammunition to use against me, and it deploys it, in a voice engineered to be effective. It explains, beseeches, begs, or shouts, depending on what works best. It doesn't want discussion, ambiguity, consideration of alternatives. It wants to take control, and to have its way, and everything it says works to further those aims.
But smokers do give up smoking, although the urges always stay with them. And I will give up depression, although that voice will always remain.
I'm getting better at catching the voice. Standing here, in the light of awareness, and watching the creature creep up the stairs, settle into position, clear its throat.
I'm getting better at staying present as it speaks. Hearing how what it says is not reality, but the same old voice spouting the same old warped interpretations of reality.
The creature turns malicious, thunders, threatens to smash apart the world. And I'm getting better at remaining still, giving the voice space, and letting it thunder out of steam, falter, fall silent. I stay present, and the creature sighs, retreats, slinks back into the dark.
Until, of course, thirty seconds later, when it returns for its next attack. But it has only a few strategies, it's all bluster and no bite. My approach need never alter. Be mindful. Be here. Be awake to watch the voice arriving, to not react, to let it exhaust its bag of tricks.
Negative voices can do nothing without our permission. We need only be alert enough to ensure we do not give it.
Thursday 22 November 2018
Day 208: Haircut
I’ve had my hair cut. It’s good getting your hair cut. You feel good. I mean, obviously you’re still fundamentally compromised as a human being, and utterly incapable of giving or receiving love, but you’ve got shorter hair on the sides of your head, and your fringe is insouciantly curled, and just for a moment you can believe that you’re not going to die alone. You will. You will die alone. But just for the briefest fleeting instant it’s so nice to believe.
You think about buying some new clothes to match your new haircut. Something grown up, smart, appropriate for your age; no more of these grungy threads you wear to cling on to your truthfully long since faded youth. You think how you might meet someone in the John Lewis clothes department, your eyes locking in the reflection of an all steel espresso coffee maker nestled in the department across the aisle. You’ll go for cake, an honest conversation, you’ll walk in the winter air together as workers rush home with their coats done all the way up, the trees above gently shaking off the last of their yellowing leaves.
You’ll admit that you’ve never truly tried at anything, you’ve never known who you were, you’ve sabotaged every relationship you’ve had because deep down you didn’t feel you were worth being with. You’ll wonder at the vulnerability you’re showing, but know it’s time, know that you’re ready to break apart the old you and start afresh.
After six months of dating you’ll move in together. A tumble down cottage with an open fire and plenty of room for books. And you’ll finally write that concerto you’ve been putting off, and start giving piano lessons in your spare time, and become a more active voice in your community. You’ll join the Labour Party. You’ll learn to cook seafood meuniere. You’ll spend weekends bike riding round the coast with your friend from work.
You’ll have children, and know how to raise them, and they’ll go to esteemed universities and during their holidays bring you breakfast in bed. Your children will have children, and you’ll hold your grandchildren, and looking into their newborn faces you’ll see the whole cosmos shimmering in the depths of their eyes.
The wonders you and your new haircut will be able to achieve will know no bounds.
Or… well… You blink, now, and glance again in the mirror. You look a bit stupid actually. Why is your skull such a weird shape? And your fringe doesn't appear so insouciant now you're out of the barbers.
No. You will die alone. Might as well roll another spliff, and you and your new haircut can settle in to a Brooklyn Nine-Nine marathon on Netlix together.
You think about buying some new clothes to match your new haircut. Something grown up, smart, appropriate for your age; no more of these grungy threads you wear to cling on to your truthfully long since faded youth. You think how you might meet someone in the John Lewis clothes department, your eyes locking in the reflection of an all steel espresso coffee maker nestled in the department across the aisle. You’ll go for cake, an honest conversation, you’ll walk in the winter air together as workers rush home with their coats done all the way up, the trees above gently shaking off the last of their yellowing leaves.
You’ll admit that you’ve never truly tried at anything, you’ve never known who you were, you’ve sabotaged every relationship you’ve had because deep down you didn’t feel you were worth being with. You’ll wonder at the vulnerability you’re showing, but know it’s time, know that you’re ready to break apart the old you and start afresh.
After six months of dating you’ll move in together. A tumble down cottage with an open fire and plenty of room for books. And you’ll finally write that concerto you’ve been putting off, and start giving piano lessons in your spare time, and become a more active voice in your community. You’ll join the Labour Party. You’ll learn to cook seafood meuniere. You’ll spend weekends bike riding round the coast with your friend from work.
You’ll have children, and know how to raise them, and they’ll go to esteemed universities and during their holidays bring you breakfast in bed. Your children will have children, and you’ll hold your grandchildren, and looking into their newborn faces you’ll see the whole cosmos shimmering in the depths of their eyes.
The wonders you and your new haircut will be able to achieve will know no bounds.
Or… well… You blink, now, and glance again in the mirror. You look a bit stupid actually. Why is your skull such a weird shape? And your fringe doesn't appear so insouciant now you're out of the barbers.
No. You will die alone. Might as well roll another spliff, and you and your new haircut can settle in to a Brooklyn Nine-Nine marathon on Netlix together.
Tuesday 20 November 2018
Day 207: Remember
Been off work with a sick bug today, spent last night throwing up, today huddled in blankets eating soup and fruit and watching Netflix.
Not feeling as down on myself though. The world is difficult and painful enough, there's no need to heap more suffering on my shoulders in the form of self-loathing.
The old negative voices have been seeping back in steadily for a while now. Been falling back into unhealthy habits, sleeping all day, staying up all night, eating junk food and staring at Youtube and scrolling down social media, squeezing out a few meaningless words onto the blog last thing before bed, feeling the pressure of depression forcing me down as a voice of shame whispers that I'm 33 and I just work in a bar, I can't drive, I'm going nowhere with this blogging and I've got no forward momentum and I've saved up no money and my skin is awful and I've utterly failed at life.
But you know what? That voice can get fucked. Can get itself directly to fuck.
I've heard that voice so many times before, and dealt with it so many times before. I know how to deal with that voice. I know what to do. I've forgotten to do it of late, because I've been tired and stressed, and worried about breaking up with Fran, but I do know what to do.
It's like meditation. You bring your attention to your breath, you forget, you bring your attention back, you forget again. Over and over. You don't fail because you forget. The forgetting is part of the meditation. It is training.
Well, here I am remembering. Bringing my attention back.
I know the steps. Be mindful of the negative voices. Hear them, acknowledge them, bring them out into the light. Then challenge them. Find alternative interpretations for reality. Keep working. Keep taking baby steps. Focus on the positives. Accept help. Accept praise. Work on feeling worthy of love.
I've learnt how to do this and then forgotten again a thousand times before. That just means that remembering is easier than ever.
I can do this.
Not feeling as down on myself though. The world is difficult and painful enough, there's no need to heap more suffering on my shoulders in the form of self-loathing.
The old negative voices have been seeping back in steadily for a while now. Been falling back into unhealthy habits, sleeping all day, staying up all night, eating junk food and staring at Youtube and scrolling down social media, squeezing out a few meaningless words onto the blog last thing before bed, feeling the pressure of depression forcing me down as a voice of shame whispers that I'm 33 and I just work in a bar, I can't drive, I'm going nowhere with this blogging and I've got no forward momentum and I've saved up no money and my skin is awful and I've utterly failed at life.
But you know what? That voice can get fucked. Can get itself directly to fuck.
I've heard that voice so many times before, and dealt with it so many times before. I know how to deal with that voice. I know what to do. I've forgotten to do it of late, because I've been tired and stressed, and worried about breaking up with Fran, but I do know what to do.
It's like meditation. You bring your attention to your breath, you forget, you bring your attention back, you forget again. Over and over. You don't fail because you forget. The forgetting is part of the meditation. It is training.
Well, here I am remembering. Bringing my attention back.
I know the steps. Be mindful of the negative voices. Hear them, acknowledge them, bring them out into the light. Then challenge them. Find alternative interpretations for reality. Keep working. Keep taking baby steps. Focus on the positives. Accept help. Accept praise. Work on feeling worthy of love.
I've learnt how to do this and then forgotten again a thousand times before. That just means that remembering is easier than ever.
I can do this.
Day 206: Binge
Haven’t wanted to do anything today. I’ve sat in baggy clothes and eaten rubbish, binge watched Big Mouth, felt empty and flat. Really don’t want to have to come here and write this, got no words, no energy. My skin is bad. My eye is gammy.
I’ve literally not got anything else to say. Big Mouth is OK. It’s good. Uhh. I ate a satsuma today. My cheek hurts from where there’s a huge spot growing deep under the surface of the skin. I thought the stye in my eye was getting better, but it looks worse again today, and the eye has been watering.
I tried to play videogames for something to do, but I couldn’t find the motivation to play anything. To run a character around, pick up coins, shoot enemies, whatever. It felt like so much effort, and so pointless.
So I watched Big Mouth.
Definite step backwards. Well. I’m aware of it. I’m recognising it. That’s as much as I can do right now.
I’ve literally not got anything else to say. Big Mouth is OK. It’s good. Uhh. I ate a satsuma today. My cheek hurts from where there’s a huge spot growing deep under the surface of the skin. I thought the stye in my eye was getting better, but it looks worse again today, and the eye has been watering.
I tried to play videogames for something to do, but I couldn’t find the motivation to play anything. To run a character around, pick up coins, shoot enemies, whatever. It felt like so much effort, and so pointless.
So I watched Big Mouth.
Definite step backwards. Well. I’m aware of it. I’m recognising it. That’s as much as I can do right now.
Monday 19 November 2018
Day 205: Drool
Gorgeous walk in the Cotswolds today, the pale autumn sunlight splayed across the gentle hills, lines of crops growing in the tilled fields, the golden needles from larch trees bunched on the ground. Shadows from the trees dark on the forest floor, the sky empty overhead, the air hazing to nothing off at the horizon.
Woodland cafe with the family, lunchtime meals and cups of coffee, everyone checking their phones. Baby Cleo blowing little bubbles with her drool.
Back home now. Evening feeling sad. Went out and bought Ben & Jerry’s chocolate fudge ice cream, cocooned myself in my room watching Netflix. Still feeling sad, only now I have a Ben & Jerry’s headache as well.
Been watching Big Mouth, the latest beyond-the-pale adult animated show after South Park and Family Guy and Rick n Morty and the rest. It’s OK. Premise is that it’s about a bunch of high school kids who are just starting to go through puberty, with their raging hormones manifested as winged and hoofed demons who follow them around, yell inappropriate comments in their ears. Lots of plotlines about bodily secretions, nocturnal emissions, fears about sexuality, sleepovers fraught with a thousand dangers.
Refreshing for it to deal with these things so openly, and I can only see it being a good thing to watch if you’re of that age, to have your worst internal doubts and secret voices brought into the open and seen as pretty mundane after all, the same as everyone else’s internal doubts and secret voices. But beneath the initial shock of the subject matter it’s lightweight, breezy, interested only in easy jokes and easy resolutions.
Passes the time when you’re feeling crap though, which is basically the point of all of television.
Gonna put on some rain sounds and lie in bed now, see if I can sleep. Tomorrow is another day.
Woodland cafe with the family, lunchtime meals and cups of coffee, everyone checking their phones. Baby Cleo blowing little bubbles with her drool.
Back home now. Evening feeling sad. Went out and bought Ben & Jerry’s chocolate fudge ice cream, cocooned myself in my room watching Netflix. Still feeling sad, only now I have a Ben & Jerry’s headache as well.
Been watching Big Mouth, the latest beyond-the-pale adult animated show after South Park and Family Guy and Rick n Morty and the rest. It’s OK. Premise is that it’s about a bunch of high school kids who are just starting to go through puberty, with their raging hormones manifested as winged and hoofed demons who follow them around, yell inappropriate comments in their ears. Lots of plotlines about bodily secretions, nocturnal emissions, fears about sexuality, sleepovers fraught with a thousand dangers.
Refreshing for it to deal with these things so openly, and I can only see it being a good thing to watch if you’re of that age, to have your worst internal doubts and secret voices brought into the open and seen as pretty mundane after all, the same as everyone else’s internal doubts and secret voices. But beneath the initial shock of the subject matter it’s lightweight, breezy, interested only in easy jokes and easy resolutions.
Passes the time when you’re feeling crap though, which is basically the point of all of television.
Gonna put on some rain sounds and lie in bed now, see if I can sleep. Tomorrow is another day.
Saturday 17 November 2018
Day 204: Loft
In an airbnb in sleepy Charlbury, outside Oxford. A loft room behind the village pub, with a little kettle, wooden beams, DVDs of Mamma Mia and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Devil Wears Prada. If you had to ask me what DVDs a loft airbnb with wooden beams in a middle class village had in its collection, I'd have said those.
Down for my uncle's 60th, but ducked out of the party early because I had two hours sleep last night and my mind is so frayed and the others were starting to get drunk and I've got nothing more in me for socialising, just nothing.
Spent all yesterday before work compiling a list of my favourite posts from the last 200 days, worked till 2am, came home and wrote until 5am. Then so tired brain had forgotten how to sleep.
I'm ground down to the nib today. That's not an expression, is it? I'm running on fumes. I'm not running. I'm spluttering and breaking down.
Mental health always worse when I'm fatigued. Feel such a failure next to all my family, feel so wretched and broken. And missed Fran tonight, missed having a partner to stick with at the party, introduce to people, come back and collapse next to. Airbnbs are lonely by yourself. But more than the generic, I missed Fran, specifically, missed being with her. I miss her.
It sucks. I've been trying to stay distracted and swallow it down, as I always do, but it sucks. It really sucks.
Just gotta get through it. Sleep helps. Sleep now. Good sleep. X
Day 203: Clip Show Special #2
Yesterday I compiled a list of my favourite comedy posts that have come out of this daily blogging challenge I've been undertaking. Here is a compilation of everything else:
Serious Stuff
Mental health, especially my own struggles with depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and recurring negative thoughts, has been a huge subject in my writing. About one in twenty days I seem to be trying something silly or fun or creative, and the other nineteen I'm worrying sincerely that I'm a worthless failure and everything in life is irreparably broken. There's strength to be taken from writing about all this though, in helping me get through it, and hopefully helping others who may feel similar things. Here are some of my faves:
Day 12 - an early post about blogging as Zen painting.
Day 13 - being hit by waves of self-loathing, thinking back on an adolescence growing up suffering from acne. Painful, but helpful.
Day 25 - another early one, about dealing with my gammy eyes and what it actually feels like to be depressed. I used to be incredibly self-conscious when writing about my own depression. Guess I got over that.
Day 30 - to celebrate reaching my original goal of a month of sober blogging I wrote the most intimately I have yet done about having acne. It felt gross to write, and still feels gross now, but, hey, you gotta write that real stuff, or what's the point?
Commitment - a nice post about writing-as-relationship, about accepting the hard times.
Passion - a day finding beauty, or at least the briefest reflected glimmer of beauty, in the mundane, the quotidian.
Still - yet another attack of depression, but forcing myself to write through it, to get something down. To have come here on the hardest, worst, most futile days, and still to have hammered words out, is perhaps the achievement of which I’m most proud.
Friends with bicycles - a post about being socially anxious in a coffee shop, as is my wont.
Things I like - a nice dose of positivity. The bit about vision is cool, it’s something I think about a lot. Vision is weird.
Unwrapped - about going to the zero-waste food shop round the corner from my house. I still go. You should go. Just go!
Echoes - from when I did some manual labour with my friend and learnt all about being a man. Half silly, half sincere, as usual.
Storm - another post about feeling depression, I remember the effort it took to not rise to the negative thoughts, to accept them, watch them, write them out honestly, and let them go. At the time it felt like turning a corner, and though of course I’ve retreated back round the corner many times since then, I’ve also been able to retrace my steps forwards a few times as well. It’s slow going, but it’s progress.
Unique - at my sister’s in London, trying to fathom the scale and complexity of the world. I can’t. It’s unfathomable!
Triviality - a post in which you can hear me standing up to the negative voices that are continuously rattling around my head. The more I do this, the more power I have. If you have negative thoughts, try to do this. Shine the light of awareness upon them, bring them out, analyse them, and pick apart their faulty logic. They will dissolve under the flame of attention. Then they’ll come right back. But you’ll know what to do.
Windscreen - an analogy comparing depression to having faulty windscreen wipers on your car, explaining why it’s so hard to get yourself out of low moods.
Arty Stuff
I’m the most self-conscious about my writing when it is overtly attempting to be literature or poetry. Masking your clumsy attempts at fiction under the guise of an overblown Mad Max parody, or a vignette about ghost ships, is one thing; standing in front of everyone saying “I made this thing that wants to be serious art” is another. Sincerity is scary. But I’ve made a few faltering attempts over these past six months...
Flavours - I spent a few weeks trying some fiction writing prompts. This one, involving writing a scene around a bunch of flavours, came out like a young-adult story. It was fun.
Penny for your thoughts - another writing prompt, about an executive and a homeless man.
Photographs - loose, ramshackle word streams inspired by the photographs of Steve McCurry. Why aren’t I doing this every day, as a way to unclog the clay from my mind and get the words flowing?
Mirror - a day exploring Bradford with my family.
Interstices - similar to other posts about looking for the sublime in the ordinary, but more focused on the feel and flow of the words than on an argument for the intellect.
Bollard - the last day working with my friend, a post about the sadness of endings.
Solemn - a bit of writing about the flickering joys, and dangers, of being drunk. I like some of the lines in here.
Howling - a sketch of what it feels like to work a busy weekend bar shift. I was angry when I wrote it. You can tell.
Reviews/Articles/Other
And here’s a list of the stuff that doesn’t fit into the categories above. Mostly articles about films and videogames, and the odd thought piece.
Re-Bourne - a sort of draft of a review of The Bourne Identity. Man I love this film.
Story structure - notes on the hero’s journey, the monomyth, story circles, all that good stuff.
Switch impressions - as a reward for sober blogging for 90 days I bought myself a Nintendo Switch. Wrote lots about it. Here’s one such piece.
Blade Runner, the sequel, parts 1 and 2, the original, parts 1 and 2 - lots of words about Blade Running. My love for the first film knows no bounds. The second? I can take it or leave it.
Red Dead Redissonance - wrote a few posts recently about Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. Some praising the beauty of the game’s world; this one was critical of the ludonarrative dissonance at the game’s heart, and touched on what it is we want videogames to provide for us: gritty art, or a warm bath? And can we have both?
Let’s have an argument about Apu - I tried to write an article that essentially argued the opposite of what all my friends felt about the news that Apu might be written out of the Simpsons, while avoiding any ego or aggression. I wanted to try to change people’s minds, or at least provide a fresh perspective. I think it worked well actually.
OK. It’s 4am, as usual, and I cannot write any more on this. Compiling this list today and yesterday has shown me how far I’ve come. Yes, every piece has been a rushed first draft, ragged and unfinished, often starting as one thing and becoming another halfway through. Many times I’ve had a brainwave as to how I should have written the post at the point at which I’ve posted it, and it’s continuously frustrating to have to put up work I know I could make better with time, but not having any time, already being stressed that I’ve stayed up too late and eaten into my energy and resources for the next day’s post. As has happened today.
But there’s been a lot of snatches of good writing within the greater haze of words. There have been many, many words, and a not-insignificant amount of them have been good.
Drop that desire for perfection, and suddenly it’s so lovely that I’ve gone and done the work every day for 203 days now, and that that work has even momentarily helped people, made them laugh, given them pause for thought - and of course kept me from throwing myself under a bus as well.
Writing is the best. It really is.
Serious Stuff
Mental health, especially my own struggles with depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and recurring negative thoughts, has been a huge subject in my writing. About one in twenty days I seem to be trying something silly or fun or creative, and the other nineteen I'm worrying sincerely that I'm a worthless failure and everything in life is irreparably broken. There's strength to be taken from writing about all this though, in helping me get through it, and hopefully helping others who may feel similar things. Here are some of my faves:
Day 12 - an early post about blogging as Zen painting.
Day 13 - being hit by waves of self-loathing, thinking back on an adolescence growing up suffering from acne. Painful, but helpful.
Day 25 - another early one, about dealing with my gammy eyes and what it actually feels like to be depressed. I used to be incredibly self-conscious when writing about my own depression. Guess I got over that.
Day 30 - to celebrate reaching my original goal of a month of sober blogging I wrote the most intimately I have yet done about having acne. It felt gross to write, and still feels gross now, but, hey, you gotta write that real stuff, or what's the point?
Commitment - a nice post about writing-as-relationship, about accepting the hard times.
Passion - a day finding beauty, or at least the briefest reflected glimmer of beauty, in the mundane, the quotidian.
Still - yet another attack of depression, but forcing myself to write through it, to get something down. To have come here on the hardest, worst, most futile days, and still to have hammered words out, is perhaps the achievement of which I’m most proud.
Friends with bicycles - a post about being socially anxious in a coffee shop, as is my wont.
Things I like - a nice dose of positivity. The bit about vision is cool, it’s something I think about a lot. Vision is weird.
Unwrapped - about going to the zero-waste food shop round the corner from my house. I still go. You should go. Just go!
Echoes - from when I did some manual labour with my friend and learnt all about being a man. Half silly, half sincere, as usual.
Storm - another post about feeling depression, I remember the effort it took to not rise to the negative thoughts, to accept them, watch them, write them out honestly, and let them go. At the time it felt like turning a corner, and though of course I’ve retreated back round the corner many times since then, I’ve also been able to retrace my steps forwards a few times as well. It’s slow going, but it’s progress.
Unique - at my sister’s in London, trying to fathom the scale and complexity of the world. I can’t. It’s unfathomable!
Triviality - a post in which you can hear me standing up to the negative voices that are continuously rattling around my head. The more I do this, the more power I have. If you have negative thoughts, try to do this. Shine the light of awareness upon them, bring them out, analyse them, and pick apart their faulty logic. They will dissolve under the flame of attention. Then they’ll come right back. But you’ll know what to do.
Windscreen - an analogy comparing depression to having faulty windscreen wipers on your car, explaining why it’s so hard to get yourself out of low moods.
Arty Stuff
I’m the most self-conscious about my writing when it is overtly attempting to be literature or poetry. Masking your clumsy attempts at fiction under the guise of an overblown Mad Max parody, or a vignette about ghost ships, is one thing; standing in front of everyone saying “I made this thing that wants to be serious art” is another. Sincerity is scary. But I’ve made a few faltering attempts over these past six months...
Flavours - I spent a few weeks trying some fiction writing prompts. This one, involving writing a scene around a bunch of flavours, came out like a young-adult story. It was fun.
Penny for your thoughts - another writing prompt, about an executive and a homeless man.
Photographs - loose, ramshackle word streams inspired by the photographs of Steve McCurry. Why aren’t I doing this every day, as a way to unclog the clay from my mind and get the words flowing?
Mirror - a day exploring Bradford with my family.
Interstices - similar to other posts about looking for the sublime in the ordinary, but more focused on the feel and flow of the words than on an argument for the intellect.
Bollard - the last day working with my friend, a post about the sadness of endings.
Solemn - a bit of writing about the flickering joys, and dangers, of being drunk. I like some of the lines in here.
Howling - a sketch of what it feels like to work a busy weekend bar shift. I was angry when I wrote it. You can tell.
Reviews/Articles/Other
And here’s a list of the stuff that doesn’t fit into the categories above. Mostly articles about films and videogames, and the odd thought piece.
Re-Bourne - a sort of draft of a review of The Bourne Identity. Man I love this film.
Story structure - notes on the hero’s journey, the monomyth, story circles, all that good stuff.
Switch impressions - as a reward for sober blogging for 90 days I bought myself a Nintendo Switch. Wrote lots about it. Here’s one such piece.
Blade Runner, the sequel, parts 1 and 2, the original, parts 1 and 2 - lots of words about Blade Running. My love for the first film knows no bounds. The second? I can take it or leave it.
Red Dead Redissonance - wrote a few posts recently about Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. Some praising the beauty of the game’s world; this one was critical of the ludonarrative dissonance at the game’s heart, and touched on what it is we want videogames to provide for us: gritty art, or a warm bath? And can we have both?
Let’s have an argument about Apu - I tried to write an article that essentially argued the opposite of what all my friends felt about the news that Apu might be written out of the Simpsons, while avoiding any ego or aggression. I wanted to try to change people’s minds, or at least provide a fresh perspective. I think it worked well actually.
OK. It’s 4am, as usual, and I cannot write any more on this. Compiling this list today and yesterday has shown me how far I’ve come. Yes, every piece has been a rushed first draft, ragged and unfinished, often starting as one thing and becoming another halfway through. Many times I’ve had a brainwave as to how I should have written the post at the point at which I’ve posted it, and it’s continuously frustrating to have to put up work I know I could make better with time, but not having any time, already being stressed that I’ve stayed up too late and eaten into my energy and resources for the next day’s post. As has happened today.
But there’s been a lot of snatches of good writing within the greater haze of words. There have been many, many words, and a not-insignificant amount of them have been good.
Drop that desire for perfection, and suddenly it’s so lovely that I’ve gone and done the work every day for 203 days now, and that that work has even momentarily helped people, made them laugh, given them pause for thought - and of course kept me from throwing myself under a bus as well.
Writing is the best. It really is.
Friday 16 November 2018
Day 202: Clip Show Special #1
I've been writing a blog post every day for over 200 days now. More than half a year.
Seems like a good opportunity to pause and look back at what I've done, and to collect up some of the better pieces here. Because even I have to admit that, after flinging mud at a wall 202 times, some of it is bound to have stuck.
Really getting the hang of this self-promotion these days, don't know if you can tell.
Dumb Stuff
I've written a lot of dumb stuff. And I don't mean that to be disparaging at all. I love dumb stuff. I like to think that if I wasn't so depressed all the time, all my blog posts would be touched with at least a dash of this kind of silliness and sense of fun. But the truth is I'm probably just not that creative. Anyway, here are my favourite dumb posts:
How to gain mainstream appeal - a list article about the cliches of being a bartender that totally doesn't turn into an eldritch horror story halfway through.
Bank holiday fun - in which I imagine, roguish scamp that I am, that a bank holiday is when all our banks go on holiday to visit their families the Caymen Island banks, and without our banks' watchful gazes keeping us in check we descend into a Purge-style weekend of orgiastic abandonment. And then I spend the rest of the post making fun of being working class, because I'm an awful person.
How not to cook an aubergine - a post detailing my attempts, at 8pm, after a tiring day fighting depression, to cook a ragoût. I still don't know what a ragoût is. That might give you a clue as to how it went.
A weekend in the village parts 1, 2, and 3 - three days relaxing in the countryside near Holmfirth that totally doesn't turn into an eldritch horror story. There's no through-line to it, annoyingly, you can see me considering an idea in the first, not managing to develop it in the second, then doing something different in a rush in the third. But still, it makes me laugh.
Making small talk - my friend Mike and I went to a live podcast recording, then talked to a woman in the bar afterwards. And you won't believe what happened next! Actually you will. I pretty obviously got socially anxious.
Miffed Matt parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 - a parody of Mad Max about an irradiated desolate wasteland, called Worksop, the heinous overseer Timmartin who presides over the only business left after the Great Divide, the bar turned barter fortress, Spoon Town, and the plucky hero Miffed Matt, who I gave no discernible characteristics to at all. I like the Wetherspoons/Brexit stuff, less so the Thunderdome parody "fives" that I included because the initial inspiration came from a cryptic crossword I was finishing on the bus with Mike. Mostly I think I just wanted to prove I knew how to format a script correctly. I also still need to write the final part, which I will do someday, God, quit hassling me.
Stroopwafel - I've written a lot of posts where I had nothing at all to write and I was out of time and any old gibberish just came out of my fingers onto the page. This post about ghost ships is a good example of that.
Just when you think you're out - Just a regular day in the life of the actor Ray Winstone. If you've not seen the film Sexy Beast then this post will make no sense to you. But you should have seen the film Sexy Beast. You really should.
It came from under the boardwalk - a wholesome song about what exactly you might find under the boardwalk. Totally doesn't turn into an eldritch horror story.
Who taught you meteorology - along with the bartender post and Miffed Matt, one of the most fun to write. No idea what I was on, I was just trying to make myself laugh. My friend Mike came up with some of the scenarios in here. Which ones? The better ones? I'll never tell.
...I'll cut here because I've got a banging migraine coming on and I can't focus on the screen any more. Tomorrow I'll collect up my favourites of the more serious pieces, the posts about mental health, mindfulness, films and games and storytelling, all of that. Toodles!
Seems like a good opportunity to pause and look back at what I've done, and to collect up some of the better pieces here. Because even I have to admit that, after flinging mud at a wall 202 times, some of it is bound to have stuck.
Really getting the hang of this self-promotion these days, don't know if you can tell.
Dumb Stuff
I've written a lot of dumb stuff. And I don't mean that to be disparaging at all. I love dumb stuff. I like to think that if I wasn't so depressed all the time, all my blog posts would be touched with at least a dash of this kind of silliness and sense of fun. But the truth is I'm probably just not that creative. Anyway, here are my favourite dumb posts:
How to gain mainstream appeal - a list article about the cliches of being a bartender that totally doesn't turn into an eldritch horror story halfway through.
Bank holiday fun - in which I imagine, roguish scamp that I am, that a bank holiday is when all our banks go on holiday to visit their families the Caymen Island banks, and without our banks' watchful gazes keeping us in check we descend into a Purge-style weekend of orgiastic abandonment. And then I spend the rest of the post making fun of being working class, because I'm an awful person.
How not to cook an aubergine - a post detailing my attempts, at 8pm, after a tiring day fighting depression, to cook a ragoût. I still don't know what a ragoût is. That might give you a clue as to how it went.
A weekend in the village parts 1, 2, and 3 - three days relaxing in the countryside near Holmfirth that totally doesn't turn into an eldritch horror story. There's no through-line to it, annoyingly, you can see me considering an idea in the first, not managing to develop it in the second, then doing something different in a rush in the third. But still, it makes me laugh.
Making small talk - my friend Mike and I went to a live podcast recording, then talked to a woman in the bar afterwards. And you won't believe what happened next! Actually you will. I pretty obviously got socially anxious.
Miffed Matt parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 - a parody of Mad Max about an irradiated desolate wasteland, called Worksop, the heinous overseer Timmartin who presides over the only business left after the Great Divide, the bar turned barter fortress, Spoon Town, and the plucky hero Miffed Matt, who I gave no discernible characteristics to at all. I like the Wetherspoons/Brexit stuff, less so the Thunderdome parody "fives" that I included because the initial inspiration came from a cryptic crossword I was finishing on the bus with Mike. Mostly I think I just wanted to prove I knew how to format a script correctly. I also still need to write the final part, which I will do someday, God, quit hassling me.
Stroopwafel - I've written a lot of posts where I had nothing at all to write and I was out of time and any old gibberish just came out of my fingers onto the page. This post about ghost ships is a good example of that.
Just when you think you're out - Just a regular day in the life of the actor Ray Winstone. If you've not seen the film Sexy Beast then this post will make no sense to you. But you should have seen the film Sexy Beast. You really should.
It came from under the boardwalk - a wholesome song about what exactly you might find under the boardwalk. Totally doesn't turn into an eldritch horror story.
Who taught you meteorology - along with the bartender post and Miffed Matt, one of the most fun to write. No idea what I was on, I was just trying to make myself laugh. My friend Mike came up with some of the scenarios in here. Which ones? The better ones? I'll never tell.
...I'll cut here because I've got a banging migraine coming on and I can't focus on the screen any more. Tomorrow I'll collect up my favourites of the more serious pieces, the posts about mental health, mindfulness, films and games and storytelling, all of that. Toodles!
Wednesday 14 November 2018
Day 201: Breaking
Fran and I are breaking up. It feels so awful writing those words, as if typing them out makes it all suddenly more true.
I don’t know how much I want to say. How much it is fair to Fran to say. I love her, and she is one of the most precious people in my life, and I want to always know her and always try to make her feel good, but we’ve become more like close friends as our relationship has developed, and for a long time now we’ve been coasting, pretending something was there when it wasn’t.
I think we both agree on this. I think I agree on this. I don’t know. Life is so messy and hard, and the right path in such important decisions is never clear. We have tried over recent weeks to work at it, to find what wasn’t there, but it hasn’t worked, and neither of us wants to stay together and end up resenting the other for the rest of our lives. I don’t want that.
But the alternative is this, which sucks so hard.
“I wish one of us had been a twat and was obviously in the wrong and the other could get angry and storm out,” Fran said. “It would make this all so much easier.”
She’s right. It’s good that the decision is mutual, that there’s no ill-will, no animosity. But it doesn’t make it easier. It just means there’s no anger or indignation to distract from the heartbreak.
There is so much heartbreak.
I’ve had this document open in front of me for hours now, and I’ve still got nothing. I can hear myself putting on a writer’s tone. Making it all sound tragic and sad, but distant, explained, written out, because that’s what I do, that’s how I cope. But it’s bullshit.
I don’t want to write it out now. I want to go and feel it.
I don’t know how much I want to say. How much it is fair to Fran to say. I love her, and she is one of the most precious people in my life, and I want to always know her and always try to make her feel good, but we’ve become more like close friends as our relationship has developed, and for a long time now we’ve been coasting, pretending something was there when it wasn’t.
I think we both agree on this. I think I agree on this. I don’t know. Life is so messy and hard, and the right path in such important decisions is never clear. We have tried over recent weeks to work at it, to find what wasn’t there, but it hasn’t worked, and neither of us wants to stay together and end up resenting the other for the rest of our lives. I don’t want that.
But the alternative is this, which sucks so hard.
“I wish one of us had been a twat and was obviously in the wrong and the other could get angry and storm out,” Fran said. “It would make this all so much easier.”
She’s right. It’s good that the decision is mutual, that there’s no ill-will, no animosity. But it doesn’t make it easier. It just means there’s no anger or indignation to distract from the heartbreak.
There is so much heartbreak.
I’ve had this document open in front of me for hours now, and I’ve still got nothing. I can hear myself putting on a writer’s tone. Making it all sound tragic and sad, but distant, explained, written out, because that’s what I do, that’s how I cope. But it’s bullshit.
I don’t want to write it out now. I want to go and feel it.
Day 200: Socks
Having a bad time, not got anything for today. But I’ll still come here and write this, I’ll still at least check in.
Day 200 as well. I’d planned to do a recap post collecting some of the better posts of the last 200 days. I've done some of it. Maybe I’ll finish that tomorrow, or the day after. I can't now.
For now I’m going to bed. Got the delivery to be in for first thing tomorrow. Need sleep.
Day 200 as well. I’d planned to do a recap post collecting some of the better posts of the last 200 days. I've done some of it. Maybe I’ll finish that tomorrow, or the day after. I can't now.
For now I’m going to bed. Got the delivery to be in for first thing tomorrow. Need sleep.
I washed some socks today. At least I did that.
Tuesday 13 November 2018
Day 199: On being LOST
Home from another dull, interminable Monday close. Serve customers, sort breaks, post social media events, count the tills, take out the bins. On and on it swirls. The back of the bin store, reaching for bags wedged between the taps of the outdoor bar shoved in there because there’s nowhere else for it to go. The bin bag catching on the tap, tearing, disgorging its soggy viscera slopping onto the floor. The warm, vegetal aroma hitting the back of my nose...
I straighten. Haven’t I been here before? Wasn’t I just doing this?
I always take out the bins, but there are always bins needing to be taken out. I always count the tills, but the tills are never counted.
Why is it always nighttime?
Why are these customers always asking for the same three drinks, wearing the same slack-jawed expressions, making the same one and only joke they seem to know?
How long have I worked in this bar? Now I think about it, I can’t remember a time I didn’t work in this bar.
Has it always been like this?
FLASHBACK!
I’m dressed in an expensive suit, working at a law firm in the city. Everything is smart and well-lit. My partner, whose name is probably Jason, or Brett, wants me to come in on a scheme he has been cooking up to embezzle funds from a charity drive we have been overseeing. I know the scheme is morally wrong, but I’ve got my kid to look after, and he’s going to be kicked out of school if I can’t make payments on his education fees...
END FLASHBACK!
OK, I know this. I know what’s going on.
“I know what’s going on,” I shout. “I’ve figured it out.”
The scene pauses. Customers freeze, glasses halfway to lips. The young bartender, leaning back on a stool in boredom, stops in midair, hovering on two stool legs completely still.
A man dressed all in white, with a neat beard, looking avuncular, wise, steps out from behind a bottle display.
“We’ve been waiting for you to arrive,” he says. “We’ve been waiting a long time.”
“I’m here now.”
“So you’ve figured it out?”
“I think so. It took me a while, but I think I know, now. I’m... “
“Yes?”
“I’m trapped in a long-running glossy American television series, aren’t I? One where the characters find themselves in some sort of non-denominational purgatory after a terrible disaster in the first episode, and in which they now must spend each subsequent episode with their backstories explored in flashback as we learn of the emotional baggage they carry, while they simultaneously deal with parallel plots in the present day that draw out that emotional baggage and allow some minor closure to be found while still providing enough of a resetting of status quo to keep the show running for six to ten seasons. That’s why everything around here is so SYMBOLIC and METAPHORICAL. Why I always see the same recurring faces week after week. Why that smoke monster has been chasing me around the cellar for the past three years.”
“Well,” the man in white says. “No. Actually we’re here to clean the extractor fans in the kitchen.”
His two colleagues, also in white overalls, step out from the corridor. They’re carrying bags of cleaning supplies.
“We’ve been waiting ages for you to let us into the kitchen,” one of them says.
“Oh,” I say. “But… what about the smoke monster?”
“That’ll be the extractor fans, I expect. We’ve not been down to do ‘em in yonks.”
“And everyone freezing?”
“Ahem,” the customer nearest me says. “We were just a bit shocked, is all. You shouting that you knew what was going on like that. It really was rather loud.”
“Oh. Right. I see.
I let the workmen into the kitchen. I show them around. And then, in back of the storeroom, I find a strange hatch, sealed shut, with some sort of bizarre code scratched into the…
“That’ll be the fuse box,” one of the workmen shouts.
Dammit. I just cannot catch a break round here.
I straighten. Haven’t I been here before? Wasn’t I just doing this?
I always take out the bins, but there are always bins needing to be taken out. I always count the tills, but the tills are never counted.
Why is it always nighttime?
Why are these customers always asking for the same three drinks, wearing the same slack-jawed expressions, making the same one and only joke they seem to know?
How long have I worked in this bar? Now I think about it, I can’t remember a time I didn’t work in this bar.
Has it always been like this?
FLASHBACK!
I’m dressed in an expensive suit, working at a law firm in the city. Everything is smart and well-lit. My partner, whose name is probably Jason, or Brett, wants me to come in on a scheme he has been cooking up to embezzle funds from a charity drive we have been overseeing. I know the scheme is morally wrong, but I’ve got my kid to look after, and he’s going to be kicked out of school if I can’t make payments on his education fees...
END FLASHBACK!
OK, I know this. I know what’s going on.
“I know what’s going on,” I shout. “I’ve figured it out.”
The scene pauses. Customers freeze, glasses halfway to lips. The young bartender, leaning back on a stool in boredom, stops in midair, hovering on two stool legs completely still.
A man dressed all in white, with a neat beard, looking avuncular, wise, steps out from behind a bottle display.
“We’ve been waiting for you to arrive,” he says. “We’ve been waiting a long time.”
“I’m here now.”
“So you’ve figured it out?”
“I think so. It took me a while, but I think I know, now. I’m... “
“Yes?”
“I’m trapped in a long-running glossy American television series, aren’t I? One where the characters find themselves in some sort of non-denominational purgatory after a terrible disaster in the first episode, and in which they now must spend each subsequent episode with their backstories explored in flashback as we learn of the emotional baggage they carry, while they simultaneously deal with parallel plots in the present day that draw out that emotional baggage and allow some minor closure to be found while still providing enough of a resetting of status quo to keep the show running for six to ten seasons. That’s why everything around here is so SYMBOLIC and METAPHORICAL. Why I always see the same recurring faces week after week. Why that smoke monster has been chasing me around the cellar for the past three years.”
“Well,” the man in white says. “No. Actually we’re here to clean the extractor fans in the kitchen.”
His two colleagues, also in white overalls, step out from the corridor. They’re carrying bags of cleaning supplies.
“We’ve been waiting ages for you to let us into the kitchen,” one of them says.
“Oh,” I say. “But… what about the smoke monster?”
“That’ll be the extractor fans, I expect. We’ve not been down to do ‘em in yonks.”
“And everyone freezing?”
“Ahem,” the customer nearest me says. “We were just a bit shocked, is all. You shouting that you knew what was going on like that. It really was rather loud.”
“Oh. Right. I see.
I let the workmen into the kitchen. I show them around. And then, in back of the storeroom, I find a strange hatch, sealed shut, with some sort of bizarre code scratched into the…
“That’ll be the fuse box,” one of the workmen shouts.
Dammit. I just cannot catch a break round here.
Monday 12 November 2018
Day 198: Carrots
Home from a dull, interminable Sunday close, another shift tomorrow night the same. Serve customers, count the tills, do the bins. On and on it swirls. Only time of day I feel alive are these moonlit minutes, this moment snatched from the jaws of sleep, a steaming mug of tea by my side, my lamp blaring an amber glow out into the darkness of this lonely room perched at the top of this house.
The Uber driver was from Leeds, smiled apologetically. "I from not here. I know only sat-nav, or way you tell me." I said that the sat-nav would do fine, put my head back down, let the wheels roll on.
The bin bags were heavy and a wet thickness within slopped against my legs as I carried them out. Some of the bags had been pierced by cocktail sticks, still poking from the stretched polyethylene, or by bits of glass, and were leaking unidentified juice onto the mudied floor. I felt the warm, vegetal aroma hitting my nostrils, exhaled, picked up the bags, hoisted them dripping onto the street.
Fran's leg was coiled under her on the sofa as I left this afternoon. She had a chopping board balanced on the pouffe and was chopping carrots and onions for the evening stew. The tug of familial feelings as I left, memories of weekend evenings long gone, my father peeling potatoes on his lap in front of the football scores on Ceefax, the light outside failing, the pages scrolling into the weeds of the lower Scottish leagues, the rounded, lyrical team names - Airdrieonians, Dumbarton, Stenhousemuir - comforting me, signalling the drawing in of the day. Now, twenty-five years later, lost, confused, wanting only to stay in this warm front room with the television blaring and Fran and Chris and the dog for company. But instead turning, pulling up my coat collar, sloping off alone into the night.
The Uber driver was from Leeds, smiled apologetically. "I from not here. I know only sat-nav, or way you tell me." I said that the sat-nav would do fine, put my head back down, let the wheels roll on.
The bin bags were heavy and a wet thickness within slopped against my legs as I carried them out. Some of the bags had been pierced by cocktail sticks, still poking from the stretched polyethylene, or by bits of glass, and were leaking unidentified juice onto the mudied floor. I felt the warm, vegetal aroma hitting my nostrils, exhaled, picked up the bags, hoisted them dripping onto the street.
Fran's leg was coiled under her on the sofa as I left this afternoon. She had a chopping board balanced on the pouffe and was chopping carrots and onions for the evening stew. The tug of familial feelings as I left, memories of weekend evenings long gone, my father peeling potatoes on his lap in front of the football scores on Ceefax, the light outside failing, the pages scrolling into the weeds of the lower Scottish leagues, the rounded, lyrical team names - Airdrieonians, Dumbarton, Stenhousemuir - comforting me, signalling the drawing in of the day. Now, twenty-five years later, lost, confused, wanting only to stay in this warm front room with the television blaring and Fran and Chris and the dog for company. But instead turning, pulling up my coat collar, sloping off alone into the night.
Saturday 10 November 2018
Day 197: Blade Runner's nuts and bolts
There's some great nuts and bolts filmmaking, simple elegance in the deployment of the film's grammar and punctuation, that I can't help but appreciate.
While the plot itself is hokey in ways - that opening where Bryant has Deckard "arrested" because he wouldn't have just come if asked; Deckard finding the snake scale and the photographs in Leon's apartment; doing that zoom and enhance on one of the photos to somehow pivot round into an area that shouldn't be visible; finding Zhora from the snake scale and talking his way into her changing room... it's hackneyed gumshoe stuff - but it's also only the frame upon which the more important emotional themes of the film may be entwined to blossom and to grow.
And while the plot beats aren't super exciting, the way Ridley Scott visualises them, the way he tells his story through the medium of film, is masterly.
Let's pick the transition between two scenes as an example. In the first scene Deckard, who has been tasked with chasing down a group of rogue replicants, is searching the apartment of Leon, the replicant who shot the detective first assigned to the case in the film's opening scene. In the next scene Roy Batty, the leader of the rogue replicants, is taking Leon to break into Eye World, a laboratory that manufactures synthetic eyes, on a quest to "meet his maker" and to demand a longer lifespan.
How Scott moves between these scenes, and the information he manages to impart, is a lesson in the fundamentals of mainstream narrative filmmaking.
So we're with Deckard in Leon's apartment as Deckard hunts for clues. The POV is firmly with Deckard, who has been established as the film's protagonist. The story unfolds through him.
But now we cut to an external shot of the street outside, the camera high, as if we're hovering at the apartment window, looking down. A subtle pan as we follow a figure on the street, who we recognise as Leon - the only of the replicants we've yet met, and the resident of this apartment - who stops and skulks in a doorway, staring up.
Do we assume Deckard has spotted Leon? We were with Deckard's POV, so strictly speaking that's what we'd think. But there's no reverse shot of Deckard by the window, no reaction, and next we see of Deckard he's still busy; he doesn't know he's being watched.
POV in film is sticky, the audience wants to emotionally attach to a character, and once attached we imprint, we're glued, and it takes some filmmaking skill to pry us off.
Scott does this delicately. Our perspective moves in physical space only a few steps from Deckard, to show us Leon in the long shot watching him. We realise we're being treated to information our protagonist does not have - the prey our hero is hunting is himself watching our hero from the shadows - and this creates suspense.
Then we're back to Deckard to finish his scene, as he finds the clue he's been looking for, a stack of photographs hidden in a drawer of clothes. Scott signifies this clue's importance with a change of soundtrack, the score becomes mysterious and enticing - and is in fact the Moroccan-inspired theme used for the Arabic district and the club in which Zhora dances later in the film. A thematic bond is created.
And now we're opening the next scene with an establishing shot of a different street - a different place, later, the shot a kind of palette cleanser to help separate us from Deckard's POV. We were momentarily distanced from Deckard with the insert of Leon, and now we're fully severed and brought to the POV of a new character.
... A clenched hand. A few lines of dramatic monologue. And we see the hand belongs to Roy Batty, who we've only seen before as a mug-shot in Deckard's briefing from his captain, but now he is living and positively radiating power and charisma in a phone booth on this street.
Batty comes out of the phone booth to greet Leon, who has walked up, we can infer from his previous place outside the apartment, spying on Deckard. The two have an exchange, and then walk together down the street, to the entrance to Eye World, to begin the scene.
Batty is the chief antagonist, the shadow self to Deckard's hero, the yin to his yang (or the yang to his yin?). But Scott doesn't simply cut from hero to villain. He uses Leon as a bridge. We're with Deckard, then hovering just away from him, noticing Leon, then we're with Batty as Leon shuffles up to report to him.
Notice we're not with Leon shuffling up to Batty. We're with Batty as Leon shuffles up. Leon, as the instrument of transition, is seen only in long shot from Deckard's POV (though Deckard himself doesn't notice), and then seen arriving from the POV of Batty. Leon is less important; it is Deckard and Batty who stand in prime importance facing one another.
Of course there is so much else that works to tell us this. The score, the performances, how Batty interrogates Leon, how Leon is deferential, Batty's terse, controlling tone ("Men? Policemen?"). But the simple building of shots, and who they favour, lays so much groundwork upon which the rest is built.
And all this is really only the transition into the Eye World scene, which is a scene filled with tension and malice, propelling the plot forwards, a scene you initially notice far more consciously than the passage moment that leads into it. And it's no coincidence that it comes right after the scene in the apartment. In the first the protagonist finds a vital clue (the photographs). In the second the antagonist finds a vital clue (the name J.F. Sebastian). There is an intended symmetry, and the two men are set up as equally important, their journeys running parallel, with the character of Leon used to transition from one to the other.
In contrast, the Eye World scene ends much more abruptly, with a close shot on Batty's glowing face as he intones to the technician freezing to death off-screen: "Now... where... would we find... this... J... F... Sebastian?" And we cut away.
The apartment and the Eye World scenes are linked together in meaning via their transition, and at the end of the second scene this storytelling moment has come to a close. We've been introduced to the antagonist, we've learnt of his goal, we are in no doubt as to his next step, and we're now free to return POV to Deckard, and continue his story, knowing that later on we'll see the replicants finding J.F. Sebastian, and all that that entails.
Like I said, it's not glamourous stuff. It's the bread and butter of filmmaking. But Scott does it so well, he shunts the audience exactly where he needs them to go, in a way that is a little different to the norm, and looks great, and has not one frame more than is necessary.
Blade Runner is a film about high-minded concepts - what it means to be conscious, etc etc, blah blah blah - but that stuff can only arise if the basic building blocks are firmly in place. Pulling POV from the protagonist and then back again is like the foundations upon which glittering spires of atmosphere and theme may rest - and these basics have, I think, an unvarnished, structural beauty of their own, one of girders and beams and supports, and I love getting right down into the guts of a film and shining a light on them.
The girders in Blade Runner are more beautiful than most.
Day 196: Blade Runner
Film is gorgeous, though. Every frame resonates beauty, the delicate play of light and shadow, depth, texture, colour, contrast. From the first moments you fall forwards into the celluloid dreamscape, drawn in by Vangelis' neon-lullaby of a score. Everything works to evoke the strangeness and sadness and madness of being alive, this sort of ur-emotion of what it is to be human and conscious in the world.
So many of the important moments are the interstitial ones - hovercar rides and snoozes in apartments and late night sighs on balconies staring out at the pulsing city below. The film sits in these moments, rests in them, allows them to develop and to breathe. Light is constantly glimmering, coruscating, being scattered and spread across the scene. Darkness pools, glowers, clutches to the sides of characters' faces. There is a preternatural beauty, larger than life, that provides the landscape from which similarly bold emotions may arise.
Look at Deckard's hero's journey, from the status quo of a cynical, world-weary detective archetype, into a realm of shifting forms, of compassion and searing sadness and love, manifested in Rachel and, in a different way, the killer replicant Roy Batty. Look at the electricity in Deckard and Rachel's relationship, how the capable and confident secretary so quickly becomes the vulnerable young girl, how she's flirting with Deckard probably before she realises, and he's drawn to her despite himself. The dynamic is problematic today, no question - him grabbing her to stop her from leaving, forcing her to kiss him - but within the context of this one narrative, not including the subconscious assumptions it puts onto relationships in the real world - for just these two characters, it makes sense. Deckard is pretty much taking advantage of a grieving and dying and lost young woman, but they are lost together, they have only each other, and ... I don't know, it's problematic, I can't say it's not. But it's big and powerful and emotionally charged.
Look at the violence, shocking, distressing, sometimes elegant, a dance of choreography and blaster fire across the screen. Zhora dying badly yet exquisitely through all those sheets of glass. Triss convulsing wildly against the wall like a thrashing spider beast.
And look at Roy Batty, growing from primitive hunter-wolf to empathetic human in the space of the film's final act. Breaking Deckard's fingers then telling him he'll give him a headstart, a carnivore enjoying the play of the chase. Hearing Deckard scream as he snaps his fingers back into place, Batty pausing for a moment, perhaps as the two men's shared existence occurs to him for the first time, blinking, and then letting forth a guttural moon-howl in reply. Finally on the rooftop darting an arm out with his dying lifeforce to rescue Deckard from falling, a primordial cry of "kinship" escaping his failing lips.
It's embarrassing and lame to spell out this stuff, of course, to say it in plodding linear words. They did it with the added voice-over in the theatrical cut, and it was horrendous. Which is why in this intended Final Cut the film reverts to saying it in flickering light, in billowing smoke, in framing and camera movement and in that transcendent score. Or, rather, it uses these things to weave its spell, to put you into the right mindstate, one in which these truisms are no longer thought of as hoary, but simply felt to be true.
This is the biggest departure from the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is far more complex and uncertain and thorny and difficult in the ideas it presents. Blade Runner, the film, puts forward simple, universal themes, in an emotive way, which is perhaps the biggest strength of cinema as a medium. It is like an opera, with more emphasis on the visual. A song of light and shadow. A cry across neo-noir rooftops, like Batty, howling out into the night. Emotions that are simple to state, yet far more resonant to be actually felt.
And that's about all I've got for now. Take care, loves yas, and I'll be back tomorrow. Bye bye bye x
Friday 9 November 2018
Day 195: Pretty good
I was going to write something about the Jim Acosta story, but I only got a few notes down before work, and then I was at work, and now it’s 2am and I’m just home and I’m buggered if I’m doing anything more than a simple paragraph here and then knocking off to bed. Maybe tomorrow.
Everything is good. Stye has gone right down, got the day off tomorrow, drinking a mug of Lady Grey right now; life is sweet. I mean, it could be better, yes, but it could always be better. When could it not be better? It always could! So might as well not worry about that. And so, accepting that it could be better, what have we got? A pretty sweet mug of Lady Grey, aforementioned, and that other stuff that I already said. Got... two pretty good lungs right here. A pumpy heart. Fingernails. They’re important for… cleaning out the dirt from under your other fingernails. That’s a simple pleasure in this world, isn’t it? Seeing some dirt under your fingernail and getting in there and getting it out. Wonderful. I’ve got eyes to see this wonderful and elegant mechanical keyboard, which is so wonderful to type upon. Ergonomic management keyboard. Oh yeah. We’ve got Peep Show, every episode of every series, on 4OD or whatever they’re calling it now. An advert every six seconds, and always the same one, for bladdy Fosters, mate, but still. Umm… I’ve got.... a family who love me. Friends who I barely make an effort with because I’m always bogged down in my own shit, but who are nevertheless always there when I need them. Flatmates who bring me tea in bed with chunks of grapefruit in, and buy me 80% cocoa dark chocolate from the shops. And a girlfriend who knows exactly how ridiculous and bizarre I secretly am (not so secretly) at like every single moment of the day, and yet still draws me cute cartoons and sends me pictures of her snuggling with her dog when she’s not with me.
And did I mention that I’ve got the day off tomorrow.
Life could be better. But it’s also pretty good.
Everything is good. Stye has gone right down, got the day off tomorrow, drinking a mug of Lady Grey right now; life is sweet. I mean, it could be better, yes, but it could always be better. When could it not be better? It always could! So might as well not worry about that. And so, accepting that it could be better, what have we got? A pretty sweet mug of Lady Grey, aforementioned, and that other stuff that I already said. Got... two pretty good lungs right here. A pumpy heart. Fingernails. They’re important for… cleaning out the dirt from under your other fingernails. That’s a simple pleasure in this world, isn’t it? Seeing some dirt under your fingernail and getting in there and getting it out. Wonderful. I’ve got eyes to see this wonderful and elegant mechanical keyboard, which is so wonderful to type upon. Ergonomic management keyboard. Oh yeah. We’ve got Peep Show, every episode of every series, on 4OD or whatever they’re calling it now. An advert every six seconds, and always the same one, for bladdy Fosters, mate, but still. Umm… I’ve got.... a family who love me. Friends who I barely make an effort with because I’m always bogged down in my own shit, but who are nevertheless always there when I need them. Flatmates who bring me tea in bed with chunks of grapefruit in, and buy me 80% cocoa dark chocolate from the shops. And a girlfriend who knows exactly how ridiculous and bizarre I secretly am (not so secretly) at like every single moment of the day, and yet still draws me cute cartoons and sends me pictures of her snuggling with her dog when she’s not with me.
And did I mention that I’ve got the day off tomorrow.
Life could be better. But it’s also pretty good.
Thursday 8 November 2018
Day 194: Memories
Blog once a day? Stuuuuupid! I don’t wanna. Nope nope nope. I wanna lounge in bed with South Park on in the background and fiddle with photographs on my phone and browse indie games on my Switch and roll over and go to sleep. I’m too tired for this.
Ooof. OK. My eye is falling out. My eye is a putrid lumpy mess. My eye is… I have a stye. That’s what’s happened. I have a stye. There’s nothing to do but put warm compresses on it and wait for it to go down. Work today was grim though, I felt self-conscious, took me right back to days of my acne being bad. Struggling to make eye contact, scanning the faces of everyone with whom I interacted, noticing them noticing, fighting the constant desire to hide away. I told myself at the beginning of the day that I wasn’t bothered, although I’d woken up with the stye huge and inflamed and poking into my eye with a big whitehead on top of it, I’d said to myself that these things happen, I’m too old to care what people think, and mostly they don’t notice, people don’t; you’re the centre of your own world but to everyone else you’re just passing through, you barely register, if at all, and your embarrassments are tiny and external and distant to them.
But immediately once at work I was back into that mindset of the spotty kid shamefaced and looking down at the ground, keeping my head turned away from people, pretending to be distracted and avoiding conversations and closeness.
I spent years doing that growing up. Years and years. It’s no wonder I’m so screwed up now. It’s no wonder I have issues with confidence and intimacy.
My skin was always bad, so I always had to deal with the low-level anxiety and misery of knowing people could see, knowing it lowered you in their eyes, even if they felt compassionate you were still below them, knowing my pain and shame was right there plastered across my face for everyone to stare at and there was not a thing I could do about it. And I just plodded through it, tried to ignore it, tried to reframe my thoughts. But it was always there in the background gnawing away.
And then there were the times my skin got really bad, covered in pus-filled nodules and red raw and disfigured, painful to smile, worrying I would burst spots and spew yellow juice everywhere if I frowned or laughed or chewed food. And then the voices of shame ramped up into top gear, and I would do anything to get away from other people, from social events, from school, uni, work.
Part of the shame was not being able to talk about the shame, so I couldn’t just say “I don’t want to go to the party because I feel like a monster.” So I made up excuses. And friends came to know me as flaky, disappointing, a let-down. And I knew they felt that, and I knew I couldn’t say anything, and I hid in my room alone and festered.
… Hard memories tonight. My skin has been far better since going on Roaccutane when I was 25. These days the breakouts, regular though they are, are mild enough that I would have killed for them a decade ago. Yet still sometimes it’ll be a bit worse, or I’ll get a stye, or a rash, or something, and it’ll trigger that social anxiety response, and I’ll be right back there again, an ashamed and awkward creature, wanting to scuttle away along the sea floor and hide under a rock.
Our issues never truly leave us. Some scars go all the way down. I guess we just have to be as honest with ourselves as we can be, as caring, and treat ourselves with kindness on the bad days. We can’t help being the way we are.
Ooof. OK. My eye is falling out. My eye is a putrid lumpy mess. My eye is… I have a stye. That’s what’s happened. I have a stye. There’s nothing to do but put warm compresses on it and wait for it to go down. Work today was grim though, I felt self-conscious, took me right back to days of my acne being bad. Struggling to make eye contact, scanning the faces of everyone with whom I interacted, noticing them noticing, fighting the constant desire to hide away. I told myself at the beginning of the day that I wasn’t bothered, although I’d woken up with the stye huge and inflamed and poking into my eye with a big whitehead on top of it, I’d said to myself that these things happen, I’m too old to care what people think, and mostly they don’t notice, people don’t; you’re the centre of your own world but to everyone else you’re just passing through, you barely register, if at all, and your embarrassments are tiny and external and distant to them.
But immediately once at work I was back into that mindset of the spotty kid shamefaced and looking down at the ground, keeping my head turned away from people, pretending to be distracted and avoiding conversations and closeness.
I spent years doing that growing up. Years and years. It’s no wonder I’m so screwed up now. It’s no wonder I have issues with confidence and intimacy.
My skin was always bad, so I always had to deal with the low-level anxiety and misery of knowing people could see, knowing it lowered you in their eyes, even if they felt compassionate you were still below them, knowing my pain and shame was right there plastered across my face for everyone to stare at and there was not a thing I could do about it. And I just plodded through it, tried to ignore it, tried to reframe my thoughts. But it was always there in the background gnawing away.
And then there were the times my skin got really bad, covered in pus-filled nodules and red raw and disfigured, painful to smile, worrying I would burst spots and spew yellow juice everywhere if I frowned or laughed or chewed food. And then the voices of shame ramped up into top gear, and I would do anything to get away from other people, from social events, from school, uni, work.
Part of the shame was not being able to talk about the shame, so I couldn’t just say “I don’t want to go to the party because I feel like a monster.” So I made up excuses. And friends came to know me as flaky, disappointing, a let-down. And I knew they felt that, and I knew I couldn’t say anything, and I hid in my room alone and festered.
… Hard memories tonight. My skin has been far better since going on Roaccutane when I was 25. These days the breakouts, regular though they are, are mild enough that I would have killed for them a decade ago. Yet still sometimes it’ll be a bit worse, or I’ll get a stye, or a rash, or something, and it’ll trigger that social anxiety response, and I’ll be right back there again, an ashamed and awkward creature, wanting to scuttle away along the sea floor and hide under a rock.
Our issues never truly leave us. Some scars go all the way down. I guess we just have to be as honest with ourselves as we can be, as caring, and treat ourselves with kindness on the bad days. We can’t help being the way we are.
And remember that other people seriously do not give a shit about the ways we think we're ugly. They are far too concerned with their own massively important pains and woes, of which we know little, if anything. And on it goes...
Tuesday 6 November 2018
Day 193: Gammy
Maah maah maah. Don’t want to do my writing today. My chores. My stupid chores. Whose idea was it to write one of these every nobbing day? What an idiot. Let’s fire that guy. Bring back the guy who let us sleep all day.
In fairness I have been sleeping for at least some of today. Worked the close last night, then home to finish my post, then back up for a staff meeting at 9am. Came home later and snoozed in bed, did social media for work, and just been sitting around since then. Soaking my eye, which has got infected and gammy, maybe from splashing line cleaner in it last week, maybe from rubbing it because of the line cleaner. While applying the warm compresses I’ve been watching South Park online, of which show I’ve only seen odd episodes over the past probably five years. I’ve never watched it religiously, I’m not especially drawn to it, although I always find something to appreciate when I do watch it. Anyway, I’ve been binging season 20, where they lampoon the last presidential election and gender wars and online trolling and franchise reboots cashing in on easy nostalgia. It all swirls together so cleverly, after twenty years on TV by this point it’s astounding how much energy they find to keep constantly refreshing it.
Going to have another cup of tea, do my eye again, maybe check in on Red Dead, and then get to bed, rest before a 7am delivery shift tomorrow.
Not even going to bother saying it’s OK that some days I only have the energy for this. That’s obviously true. I’m pushing myself as hard as my tired, lazy arse can handle. It’s all good.
In fairness I have been sleeping for at least some of today. Worked the close last night, then home to finish my post, then back up for a staff meeting at 9am. Came home later and snoozed in bed, did social media for work, and just been sitting around since then. Soaking my eye, which has got infected and gammy, maybe from splashing line cleaner in it last week, maybe from rubbing it because of the line cleaner. While applying the warm compresses I’ve been watching South Park online, of which show I’ve only seen odd episodes over the past probably five years. I’ve never watched it religiously, I’m not especially drawn to it, although I always find something to appreciate when I do watch it. Anyway, I’ve been binging season 20, where they lampoon the last presidential election and gender wars and online trolling and franchise reboots cashing in on easy nostalgia. It all swirls together so cleverly, after twenty years on TV by this point it’s astounding how much energy they find to keep constantly refreshing it.
Going to have another cup of tea, do my eye again, maybe check in on Red Dead, and then get to bed, rest before a 7am delivery shift tomorrow.
Not even going to bother saying it’s OK that some days I only have the energy for this. That’s obviously true. I’m pushing myself as hard as my tired, lazy arse can handle. It’s all good.
Day 192: Brand
I’ve been reading No Logo by Naomi Klein recently, inching forwards with it a few pages on the bus one day, a couple of paragraphs in bed a day or two later. No Logo is one of those books that was always on my radar, that I almost felt I didn’t need to read because it’d be preaching so obviously to the choir. I could say “Oh, like No Logo by Naomi Klein?” in a conversation with another member of the liberal intelligentsia, and they’d nod and I’d nod, and we’d both know how erudite and sophisticated we both were. And really, what’s the point of books if not to deploy their titles as reference points proving that you’re better than other people?
But I finally did pick up the book, and boy am I glad. It is a thoroughly dispiriting and depressing affair, making me burn with indignation about three times a paragraph, and this is of course the other point of reading - to become so sickened by the state of the world that you barely have the energy to finish your cup of espresso and turn on your PlayStation that day.
Here’s the thrust of the book, as I understand it, thus far:
Since the 80s companies have been far less concerned with the actual manufacture of goods, which is a dour, mucky, low-class affair, and far more concerned with branding, which involves creating a mythos around your organisation and tying the owning of your goods to a spiritual, aspirational state of being, which is something that essentially soulless CEOs and marketing executives like the idea of an awful lot.
Thus, Nike don’t sell trainers, but the very concept of human perfection achieved through sporting excellence. Apple don’t make iPhones with very fast CPUs and lots of RAM, they turn the use of computer equipment into an act of religious enlightenment. Starbucks don’t brew the best coffees, but engender environments that provide modern versions of the Greek agora or Roman forum for today’s hip youth.
This shift in conceptual focus for companies is borne out in their spending budgets. Branding, in which you foster the notion that people lead better lives because they use your, for example, garbage Lynx bodyspray, accounts for far more of companies’ marketing spend than traditional advertising, wherein you might say, Hey, buy our garbage Lynx bodyspray because it smells the best, and it’s really good value.
Maybe you pay YouTubers, who should be independent cultural critics, to be spies for you, to find our what your young key demographic are into. They say that kids are all playing this videogame called Fortnite, which includes a dance known as “flossing”. Therefore you put someone flossing in your next advert, and your audience see it and believe your brand to be part of their world, despite the fact the game, and the dance, have not a single thing to do with the product you actually sell.
Further, marketing in general accounts for far more of these companies’ overall budgets, so they have far less to spend on making the things they sell. So they close all their factories in their own countries, sack all the workers, and contract out manufacture to people in Bangladesh or China or the Philippines, who promise to fulfil orders on the cheap by erecting makeshift factories in zones to all intents outside of local jurisdictions, in which impoverished workers labour in the most horrendous conditions for paltry wages, and the big companies can say, Hey, it’s nothing to do with us, we just ask for x number of trainers to be made, for y price, and someone goes away and does it. That x trainers can only feasibly be made for y price by using essentially slave labour is something the companies don’t feel like considering.
And these trainers, made by young girls miles from their families and home villages, are utterly generic, the same as all other trainers, until that special white Swoosh gets stitched onto them, and they get put in the Nike box, and sold at the Nike megastore.
And at this end of the process, the sale of the goods, the companies all also want to spend less, so they have more left over for brainstorming cultural resonance sessions or what the fuck ever. So they cultivate the idea that retail jobs, working in Starbucks, Gap, the Apple Store, aren’t really jobs. They’re for students, for young people about to go travelling, for kids looking for some extra spending money. And as such they can pay minimum wage, offer no benefits, no job security, zero-hour contracts, forcibly discourage unionisation, treat their workers like complete pieces of shit, because none of it is that serious.
Except by the 90s, when No Logo was written, retail work had risen to account for 75% of all employment in the United States. The factories have all been closed down! There’s nowhere else for huge numbers of the population to work than in shops. The average age of service sector workers has risen, the length of time they’re spending in job roles has risen - and public sector professions are being axed all over the place, education is more expensive than ever, the cost of living is enormous, property prices are insane...
Yet, still, the big brands pretend their McJobs are more about life experience than a career, and they wash their hands of all responsibility.
They’ve fucked the developing world at the manufacturing end, they’ve fucked their own world at the retail end, and there’s nothing they can do about it, they say, because they need the money for branding exercises, for basically working really hard to create the illusion, the lie - let's call it what it is - that wearing Nike shoes makes your life any different to wearing any other black sneakers. That Lush soap is any different to any other surfactant that emulsifies oils so they can be washed away with water.
You want to know why the world is fucked? And this, admittedly is me extrapolating out my own conclusions. But the world is fucked because greedy organisations use slaves in the developing world to make tat that they trick us into buying at marked up prices, sold by members of our own society who aren’t paid nearly enough, under the pretence that the brand will make us happier, which it doesn’t. All the factories are closed. The shops pay nothing. The goods are too expensive. Everyone is struggling.
And then some loud demagogue comes along, some Trump or Farage or Bolsonaro, and yells that everyone is struggling, and it’s the fault of… the immigrants. Or the EU. Or the liberals. Or the Millenials. Or the lecturers. Or the scientists. Just as they said it was the fault of the Jews and the gypsies and the cripples in the 30s.
It never was then, and it isn’t now. It’s the fault of the private companies, the executives, the bankers. The Bullingdon Club politicians with their filthy hands down the pants of big business. It’s the fucking fault of the people with all the money! They’ve taken it! They’ve stolen it out from under us, and now they desperately need someone weak to blame.
Don't fucking buy their shit. Don't buy their lies, don't buy their brands, don't buy any of it. Reclaim your mind, your life, your world. Fight back.
It's going to get really important, really soon. Be on the right side of this.
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