Day 307: February in blogging

Hiya. Home from hotels and tool displays and pots of paint and heavy work boots, and ready to collect up the better stuff from the blog from the past month, before I go and pass out.

It’s been a steady month, writing-wise. I don’t think I’ve written a single piece I’ve loved, but there’s been plenty that was sufficient. 

... There I go with that wild self promotion again. Best make sure I keep that in check.

No, but it really hasn’t been a wonderful month. I’ve not had any serious depressive episodes, but I’ve felt about a foot underground, happiness wise, all month. Just been plodding along, doing my best to get words out, to do everything required of me at work, more recently to be on the road with Steve, and not to collapse or fall inside myself at all. If you’re going through hell, keep going. That’s been my mantra these past weeks.

Also, I turned 34 in February. That hit me pretty hard. I’ve achieved so little. But I’m still here. And I’m not giving up. It’s a long road, through hell, but I’m walking it. Step by step by step.

Here are the highlights of this month’s posts:

Day 283: The strange man - A fairly true little tale about a strange man on a bus. I liked this.

Day 284: Gesticulating - And another few paragraphs about a bus journey. I’m sitting on buses lost in thought a lot of late. The stuff about you in there and me in here is something I wanted to get right, will attempt again at some point. It’s something I think about a lot.

Day 288: Tenacity - About ingraining habits and staying positive. Hey, how I was feeling before writing that is how I am feeling now! Listen to me back then, me now! Me back then had some sensible things to say. Pay attention, me now. And that Rory Gallagher sure knew how to play blues guitar, too.

Day 290: Radicals - Some words about 90s punk rock, the thrill of freedom and grunginess and crunchy power chords and love.

Day 293: Facing your weaknesses - Starts off about picking the guitar up again, turns into thoughts on blogging and pushing yourself and overcoming weaknesses. Got a nice ending, this one.

Day 296: Decay - Nice descriptions of inner city dilapidation and decay, if a touch reliant on the rhythms of alliteration. But it was my birthday and I was tired, and it’s nice to just throw pretty words out, even if they’re a bit clumsy and gauche. That’s the exact sketchbook feel I wanted when starting this blogging challenge.

Day 298: Skin - A post about suffering from acne. I hate writing about this, and thus I must do it. I want to get to the same place with my skin as I am with my mental health - something that used to be hard to write about and now is easy as anything. Don’t look back! Keep going! Courage!

Day 304: Inchoate - I like the paragraphs about the early morning light in here. There have been more posts this month where I’ve written descriptively, perhaps a little floridly, about the external world, and I’ve enjoyed every one. More of this, then!

Wednesday Reviews - I’m going to link all four from this month. I’m enjoying writing these more than anything else at the moment. It’s becoming a wonderful weekly ritual, choosing a worthwhile film carefully, sitting down by myself with the lights low and a cup of Earl Grey steaming, and submerging myself in a world of cinema. And then spending a few hours at my desk, or in a coffee shop, gathering my thoughts, typing them out, communicating them as effectively as I can in the time available. In a period of my life when I’m otherwise struggling to switch off, when there’s much difficulty and anxiety and self-doubt, when I don’t have alcohol or drugs to assuage the psychic pain, it’s been so important to be able to concentrate on this. Distraction, but positive distraction. Losing yourself in something that matters to you. It’s what it’s all about.

• The Killing of a Sacred Deer

• Annihilation

• Green Book

• The Lobster

OK. Lovely. Read any of that if you want. I don’t know if the links work when you’re looking at this through Facebook’s browser, if not you can open it in Chrome. Phones and apps hate blogs. I might as well be writing these on scraps of paper and slipping them in bottles and dropping them in the ocean. But why not? That sounds like a marvellous thing to do.

Going to bed now.

Hugs x

Day 306: Wednesday Reviews - The Lobster

Well, I've predictably found no time for this until now. I'm currently sat on the bed in my hotel room after a day working with Steve, dog-tired, aching, flecked with paint. But I've got a cup of Douwe Egberts instant coffee, a Chromebook on full charge, and an hour or so free in which to gather my thoughts about The Lobster.

I liked it! Yorgos Lanthimos' English language debut, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, it was a surreal parable about dating and the strangling need to find a mate, told through the conceit of a near-future world in which anyone not in a relationship in The City is sent to a coastal hotel to spend 45 days attempting to pair with one of the other guests, after which time, if unsuccessful, they are turned into an animal. Singletons who refuse to comply run away to live in The Woods and dance alone to electronic music on portable Discmans (Discmen?), and are routinely hunted by hotel guests on excursions with dart rifles, who earn extra days at The Hotel for every singleton they capture.

Colin Farrell plays David, a podgy and taciturn middle-aged man recently broken up with, who must enter The Hotel along with his pet dog, who is actually his brother, who undertook and failed the programme a few years previously.

The animals don’t talk. They don’t have human features. They’re just animals. They’re not a major part of the narrative. Occasionally one wanders through a shot, looking non-plussed, disinterested.

As with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos blends the surreal and the real, the dreamlike and the mundane, in a way that draws out the former from the latter, and reminds you how the latter is always infused with the former. His tone can be Lynchian, at its best is even reminiscent of Kafka, but always is distinctly his own.

Dialogue is clipped, monotone, matter-of-fact. Shorn of their regular context, everyday objects and scenes become profoundly unsettling, the hotel corridors, the tangles of forest, the rows of discount store products in the City suddenly pointing not to their usual rich soup of meaning but standing only as themselves, objects of intense attention and uncanny creepiness. Echoes of Sartre’s nausea. In a way you can never place it all makes your skin crawl.

Yet it is funny, too. Uncanniness and humour can nestle so closely to one another, as with Lynch. Colin Farrell is hilarious in deadpan, but also lost and panicked and relatable, Lanthimos drawing depths out of him that we’ve seen before, but never as consistently. Rachel Weisz is good, too, as a forest loner to whom David is inexorably drawn. She also is here far more serious and honest than anything else I’ve seen her in, her face lined, her hair scraggly, the prim affectations of her late 90s period thankfully left far behind.

Her character is nearsighted. David also has trouble with his vision. This is important in the world of The Lobster. The potential validity of relationships is frequently measured by shared damage. Not just by authority figures but also by characters themselves. It matters to them that if, for example, they get nosebleeds, their partner also gets nosebleeds. They all tacitly understand this to be so.

There’s something childlike and naive about everyone here. As happens with its physical world, the distant tone separates behaviours and mores from the context in which we usually find them, showing them to be absurd and tragicomic. Desiring a partner to be broken in the ways in which you yourself are broken, or falling into petulant rage because of jealousy, or deciding to pretend to love someone for a lifetime rather than risk being alone - the patterns we play out in our heads day after day - here can be seen as ridiculous and fascinating, and unavoidable.

One more consequence of this measured detachment - I found the film to be shockingly violent. Lanthimos has an obsession with things-as-they-are, with looking at the world as a detached observer, and violence is an aspect of this. It is interesting and horrifying to Lanthimos’ lens that we are corporeal as well as mental, intangible beings, that we have physical biological form, and that we frequently enact violence and destruction upon the biological form of others.

Just as bottles of bleach, hotel corridors, trappings of ego become discrete subjects of attention, so too does violence. It is just there. We just see it. Take it in. And yet, without the cathartic role of surrounding emotion and context, we are denied the journey to process this violence, to understand it, deal with it, ultimately let it go. It stays there, stark, monolithic, terrible.

The Lobster is not a gratuitous or gory film, and yet in many places it made me squirm, churned my stomach, unsettled me on a visceral level.

It is, however, gorgeous. Dark and moody, with sumptuous, velvety textures and glassy black folds of water and the intricate play of shadow through trees, and filmed regularly in slow-motion, it provides a sensuality contrasting boldly with the deadpan emotional detachment of the tone.

Yet the film is not without its faults. As most critics have noted, it severely loses pace halfway through. The initial premise feels so full of potential, and yet it never really moves beyond this early promise, never develops out into much more than it first posits. Or, rather, the development falls back to being only an extrapolation of and investigation into the ramifications of the plot, a working through of the narrative tangle, rather than speaking to anything further and deeper in ourselves. The ending is exceptional, perfectly judged, but from the halfway point to these final scenes the film really sags, feeling drained of meaning. I think the worth of the thing is actually a story 45 minutes in length, and stretching it to two hours has left it thin in the middle.

Apart from this, however, it is a dazzling success. As an exploration of selfishness and self-sacrifice in romantic relationships, whether these two opposites are inherent in our natures, whether they are at odds, or compatible, it is perspicacious, troubling, and profound. As an impenetrable Kafkaesque vision rising from depths beyond logic and sense it is fittingly obscure. And as a piece of cinema it is mesmerising.

Day 305: Marriott

Hullo. Currently sprawled on a plump bed in a Marriott hotel in Kent, Steve laid out on the bed across from me, an old episode of Porridge playing on the room's TV by the wall. Hotel foyer a cross between The Great Northern from Twin Peaks and the Next Generation era starship Enterprise. 80s carpets and walls of royal yellow. Hummus with crudités and bowls of nachos in the bar with Steve and Big Steve and John, me on Pepsi, the others on pints of Stella and Becks.

Long drive down in the MPV with Steve, talking Grad happenings, videogames, not a whole lot. Roadworks. Traffic cones snaking. Car pointed into the night. Lonely illuminated warehouses looming from the darkness at the side of the road. Lanes of haulage trucks, quiet cars with their drivers half hidden in shadow. Tunnels, airports, streetlights, cat's eyes. Soft jazz on the radio.

Day spent writing before Steve picked me up, trying to get tomorrow's review drafted out. Went wandering down to Broomhill in the sun looking for a well-lighted place in which to work, ended up in what looked from the outside like a hipster coffee shop, but once through the door resolved into a Vietnamese-inspired cafe, replete with families sitting cross-legged in front of low tables on the floor. It was too late to back out, so I kicked my shoes off and got comfy. And it turned out to be perfect. Hanging paper lanterns, squishy cushions, strong black coffee, students sauntering by outside. I'll have that every day, please.

But first man work. Then pub work. Then more man work. More pub work. Then in seven days I have a day off. I will return to that cafe, kick off my shoes, submerge myself back into a world of words. Now though: sleep.

Day 304: Inchoate

Greetings! I write to you from my brand new (refurbished) Asus Chromebook Flip, which device is perched snugly on my lap, which lap and connected buttocks are in turn roosted insouciantly upon the soft and inviting sofa in my living room.

I’m downstairs, is what I’m saying. I’m writing this from downstairs.

Not exactly straining at the boundaries of the potential for portability there, but it makes a change from sitting in my room. And it’s a shorter trip to the kettle, for Earl Grey related endeavours, so that’s another bonus.

Indeed. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll even venture as far as the kitchen to do my writing. Only a lazy arm’s extension for the tea bags then.

No. Further afield. I shall be on the road with Stevie tomorrow, doing man things such as: discussing the relative merits of duct-tape, guesstimating how many two-be-fours our appointed job will require, shouting at Radio 2 presenters while undertaking on the M1, and eating forlorn pizzas in Holiday Inn restaurants just inside the London Orbital.

So that’ll be nice. Mmm. Do I have anything else to say? The light was good this morning. It was a good light. The day, with a new menu launch, absolute bare bones staffing, and all the usual Monday woes, promised quotidian strife and despair, but for that three minute stretch from the bus stop to the doors of the pub, I was in heaven. The sun was low, piercing the morning mist and caressing the city’s brick with a gentle hand of gold. Further off, a celestial javelin of shattering white reflected from the canyons of glass, brought arms of hurrying humans up to shield groggy eyes, as the obliterating beam burned away the mind’s inchoate architectures and left the soul unshielded and new. Outside the little florist’s on Surrey Street pink and red flowers stood; snipped from their roots they pulsed with the last gasp bursts of their living joy. A delivery driver in ankle-length shorts whistled as he walked. The air was a vibrant haze. Cars shone in grace. Our mother star sang out across the firmament, and the vast Earthbound fold danced to the beat of another day.

Then I got to work and found the compliance diary needed filling out with interminable bureaucratic checks for the upcoming month, and a dark cloud passed across my vision for the rest of the shift. But I had those three minutes. Those three minutes were mine.

Mm. Just read all that back before posting, and I have one thing I’d like to amend. Steve does not undertake. He will definitely say, “Bobby, I do not undertake!” if he reads this post. And he’s right. That was poetic license on my part, conjuring archetype when Steve is nothing if not iconoclastic.

He does eat forlorn pizzas though. I’ve got him bang to rights there.

Day 303: Unspooling

Well I was beat when I got in this evening, but I went for a nap, got up and walked to the shop for some fiery carrot and coriander and ginger soup, and now I feel right as rain. Sorts you out nicely, a nap and some fiery soup. I am revitalised. Coming back upstairs my room does smell predominantly of feet, but that can be sorted by cracking a window onto this cool February night.

Frost on the cars as I pace in trussed-up hoodie to the shop, despite the radiant golden sun shining through haze all day. Two students sat smoking with the homeless man under the cash machine, the homeless man’s legs wrapped in a blanket scratchy and red. In the shop girl pulling stock from the groaning cavern of the back. “No more!” she huffs to her colleague out of shot, then yanks the cage over the threshold, back into the fluorescent store.

Houses with curtains open, spasmodic firing from television sets washing blue pools up and down living room walls. Houses with curtains closed, the generous creamy folds snugly securing the sleeping humans within.

The sky a shimmering rockpool of fluid grey, the day’s haze still stretching down the hill. Clanking traffic muffled by distance. A solitary passerby with head downcast, his breath visible in rhythmic puffs.

The world stretching, unspooling into or out of (I’m unsure which) this central spot. Further out the rockpool, and beyond that, all the rest.

Day 302: How shall any bar withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?

Greetings. Just home from my Saturday shift. If you want to know what it’s like working in a pub across the road from a weekend performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Lyceum, I invite you to picture the Battle for Helm’s Deep from The Lord of the Rings, except with all the orcs wearing fishnet stockings. In fact I would say that Helm’s Deep would be preferable to serving in a pub across the road from Rocky Horror, because at least at Helm’s Deep you would probably die, and could then rest. At the pub you just serve on, and on, and on.

But what’s this? Gandalf cresting the hill come first light on the fifth day, Eomer and a company of Rohirrim at his back, the sun’s nascent rays glinting off Shadowfax’s glistening mane?

Nah, it’s just James down with another case of tonic waters. That blond hair of his sure is luxurious when the light catches it right though. Oh well, best get back to it, the enemy are scaling the bar, breaking through the defences, and they’re snarling for pink gin.

And it looks like they’ve brought a cave troll.

OK, that’s all my words for tonight. I’ve swapped with Chris so I’m on the open tomorrow, so I have to be up in four and a half hours from now. I think it’s time for bed.

Farewell.

P.S. I know Gandalf brought Erkenbrand from the Fords of Isen in the book, not Eomer. If you also know that, just know that I also also know that. You’re not better than me. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then don’t worry. You probably are better than me.

Day 301: Yorgos

Hullo. Just a quick one before I watch The Lobster on Netflix for next Wednesday's review - I'm working 11 days on the trot now, both at the pub and on the road building convention displays with my mate Steve. I'm away on Wednesday so I'll have to do the review before then, and I need to sort out my February in Blogging round-up for the day after as well.

I'd very much like to switch the world off for a week and sleep solidly, take baths, drink coffee, watch waves lap a rugged shore, shuffle down under blankets with a tome of classic literature as lambent flames leap and crackle in an open fire... but, alas, looks like I'll be serving pink gin to screeching customers and hefting wooden cabinets above my head for a week instead.

Such is life. Best not worry about it now. It's not happening now. What is happening now is steaming Earl Grey tea, a belly full of tomato and chilli pasta, and two hours of phantasmagorical cinematic storytelling courtesy of your friend and mine, Greek surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos.

I just love saying that name. Yorgos Lanthimos. Everyone should say that name at least once a day. It's great.

OK. Bye. I'm going now. Bye.

Day 300: Float

Ung, stayed up half the night browsing for cheap laptops - I need something for writing on the go, my old laptop got stepped on by my ex’s dog. I could get the screen replaced, but it’s looking like £100-£200 to fix, and it’s a huge and cumbersome laptop anyway, it doesn’t even fit in my normal bag, I need to take it in a separate one, which kinda ruins the portability aspect. So the other option is to save that laptop for when my desktop dies - they’re similarly specced - and connect my keyboard and mouse and monitor to it when that happens, run it as a desktop for a good number of years before having to upgrade my main machine - and meanwhile buy a little cheap thing for typing on the go before then. I’m on the road working with Steve next week, and it was a nightmare trying to type up posts on my phone last time. But if I was doing that what would I go for? A Chromebook, with paltry specs, but running the lightweight Chrome OS, with access only to web applications? A Microsoft Surface Go tablet with the connected keyboard, with a nicer screen, and Windows 10, but expensive for what it is? A bargain basement, no-frills HP laptop? One of the 2-in-1 tablet/laptop combos for a little bit more, but with far more functionality? But then if I’m spending more would it be better to put it on the RAM and SSD of a basic laptop rather than a touchscreen and a reversible hinged keyboard?

The models and numbers swim before me. I should go to bed. But I have to write my blog first, and I’m too tired to write my blog, so I click one more page on the PC World website, watch a couple more product reviews on YouTube, float in the gentle sea of specifications a while longer.

Day 299: Wednesday Reviews - Green Book

Green Book is a film deeply rooted in formula, but this is no bad thing.

Loosely based on true events, it stars Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip, a fast-talking Italian American bouncer, fixer, family man, and local hot-dog eating legend, who, in need of rent money in New York in 1962, takes a job driving a sophisticated African American musician on his tour of the heavily segregated Deep South. The musician, jazz pianist Don Shirley, has had his people ask around, and Lip is the name that comes back as someone who can handle whatever is thrown at him, which Shirley knows will be important for the tour. Lip is racist - casually, and not so casually - but he is a professional, in loose terms, when the money is right, and for this one the money is decidedly right.

Cue a road trip in the company of the two, with Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali, as the apollonion picture of reserve, restraint, elegance, and logic, and Lip the dionysian "bullshit artist" chomping down fast food, smoking, belching, telling crude jokes - and protecting Shirley from local rednecks who object to what they see as an uppity negro with ideas above his station.

Odd couple buddy pic, road movie, journey of redemption, feel-good comedy - the film aims for familiar grooves, but it rolls right into these grooves nicely, hitting every cue where it needs to. There's a reason formulas become codified. Like jazz standards, they provide the framework within which artists can experiment. Like driving trips, they offer a roadmap showing the destination, the route you'll be taking, the structure allowing you to have fun along the way.

Green Book is bags of fun. Director Peter Farrelly, better known as half of the Farrelly brothers, the duo behind raucous 90s gross-out comedies Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary et al, here brings colour and verve to the picture, breaking out from an opening that feels more 60s pastiche (if your first scene involves a fight between mafia hoodlums on a lively night at the Copa, let's be honest, you're only ever inviting unfavourable comparisons to Goodfellas) to eventually feel more embedded, and embodied.

Farrelly's comedic pedigree means the gentle humour, which could easily have fallen as a clumsy attempt to lighten the mood, here is baked into the piece, giving the film a confident tone - primarily dramatic rather than comedic, but with comedy and warmth, or at least their memory, always evident, even in the darkest scenes.

So Farrelly is a conductor, directing proceedings with an assured yet light touch. But it is the two leads who truly shine. Mortensen has a grand time with Lip, his obscene gut hanging out over his belt, his gait uninhibited yet purposeful, one hand perennially raising the end of a fag to his mouth while the other bums more smokes, or caresses a steering wheel, or clenches into a fist. The performance, treading close to pitfalls of caricature, ends up more nuanced, more whole - affectionate, yes, and big and broad, but full of depth.

Mahershala Ali, so great in everything in which I've seen him, has the quieter part here, but one with no less impact. He plays Don Shirley with the poise and principle and self-control befitting a world-renowned musician, every action deliberate, every movement seemingly drilled through long and disciplined training. Ali's Shirley is educated, erudite, perhaps a genius in his field. And yet he is lonely, his efforts separating him from his fellow man, his discipline distancing him from the simple pleasures of the world that the crude and coarse Lip has no problem enjoying daily.

And Shirley is black. Through herculean effort, and by playing the entertainer for affluent white audiences, he has won a renown that allows him in some way to transcend the barriers of race of the age. In one scene a row of poor black field workers stand and stare, amazed, at the broken down Cadillac that pulls into the side of the road and disgorges an overweight white guy in rolled up sleeves to work on the engine as, cool and calm in the back, a nattily dressed black man waits with legs crossed for the journey to resume.

And yet he is black. And this simple fact alone means that, despite every other fact about him, he cannot stay in the same hotels as his chauffeur, use the same toilets, eat in the same restaurants. In fact he must take a guidebook with him - the Green Book of the title - that offers tips on how to travel the southern states as a negro.

How Shirley approaches such gargantuan inequalities, whether all the poise in the world means a damn in the face of such endemic racism, provides a major theme for the film.

As a comment on racial injustice it is an unsubtle, albeit effective, piece of rhetoric. But I guess we need rhetoric for just causes, because heaven knows there is enough whispering to us for unjust ones. Stories let you step into the shoes of a person other than yourself and walk around for a while, experience another's joys, wince at the evils enacted upon them. There is no better way to engender empathy than with stories. And there are still so many people in the world who need more empathy. It is the accumulation of simple yet relatable stories, about people who on the surface appear different from us, and yet are not, that slowly changes the world.

So I can't fault Green Book for being broad, unsubtle. And what could have been mere didacticism, worthy yet uninspiring, through the strength of the two main performances grows into something warmer and richer. Within Farrelly's world, Ali's Shirley and Mortensen's Lip come to life, you feel them bond, you grow to love them, and you believe in them. More than black and white, African and Italian, the two characters end up as simply human: two flawed yet intriguing melodies, at first playing in different keys, slowly beginning to align.

Yes, as with a musical standard, we have heard the melodies, the overall tune, before. But it's difficult to not appreciate notes played with such gusto. As with Apollo and Dionysus, it is through the enjoining of the two sides of the dichotomy that a fullness of life is reached. You hear two individual voices, and then the space between the two lines up, and there is harmony.

Kurt Vonnegut once said that it is a plausible mission of artists to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I feel that the makers of Green Book would agree.

Day 298: Skin

My acne has been worse again recently. Not bad enough to make me anxious, but enough to chip away at the edges of my self-esteem. 

It’s a weird one with acne. There’s a very clear point at which it transitions from annoying to actually traumatic. It’s like string bending on guitar (I’ve been playing guitar a lot today): you are playing one note, which you are bending upwards, and upwards, but it feels like the same sound, albeit modified - and then suddenly the pitch rolls over, and it becomes a new note entirely.

I don’t mind having a few spots. I always have a few, at the corners of my lips, under my beard, around my temples. Blotchy cheeks where I sleep against my pillow. Smatterings on my forehead if I have the audacity to wear a hat for even the half hour walk to work. I don’t love it - like a string bend, you can feel the note, in this case your sense of physical self, being stretched, becoming taut - but it holds. You don’t want a picture of yourself on a billboard fifty feet high, you get nervous when people stand right in your personal space, but mostly you’re fine.

But then the acne accumulates past a certain threshold, or you get a breakout of large swollen spots, or a nodule right on the end of your nose, and suddenly you’re in new territory. Suddenly it’s difficult to look people in the eye. Suddenly you sense the world noticing, you walk down the street and you have warning signals flashing in your head, you feel on edge, you sense that you stand out from the crowd. You get on a bus and you feel strangers doing almost imperceptible double-takes, or more likely holding themselves just slightly more composed than usual - the same tension you yourself feel when you have an interaction with someone who has a stammer, or a burn down their face, or a congenital hand deformity, or the like. Some straining in the present moment between you and them, some information you are both aware of and yet cannot state. This is what you feel from everyone when your acne is bad enough, that your skin stands revolting and seeping and pustulating out there in the space between the two of you, that it is a wall that blocks off even the gentle intimacy that may otherwise arise between strangers.

Or else you imagine this, from past traumatic experiences, from moments of adolescent social failure; you assume people notice more than they do. Certainly you yourself only pay brief attention to people you see with deformities, before going back to thinking about yourself. It’s safe to assume others are the same. But you can’t help that stress, that jaggedness. You tell yourself anything you want, it’s still there when you set off out of your house. 

When my skin is bad enough there’s no pep talk I have yet found that can make me confident in facing the world.

Perhaps it is something unique to acne. There are far worse deformities, to be sure, but they tend to be fixed. You are born deformed, and have a fixed image of yourself, or else you become deformed, and you readjust. Like putting a capo on your guitar and playing two frets up. The change is permanent.

Of course every deformity brings its own struggles, obstacles, suffering, pain. But the thing with acne is that your image of self becomes a note bent up and down continuously, the string pulled out of shape, sometimes close to one note, sometimes another, then back down to near where it started, then back up again. It is ever shifting. You adjust, and it changes, and you adjust, and it changes again. Maybe the best analogy I can think of is if you go to bed slim and healthy, and then you wake up having put on fifty pounds in the night. That weight falls slowly off you over the next two or three weeks, until you're back around where you were, and then another day you're ten pounds heavier, then twenty the next day, then forty the next, until a week later when you're severely obese. You stay that way for a week, then it falls right off, and you're back to being relatively thin - until a month later, when you balloon again.

Imagine that happening consistently from adolescence into your thirties.

My skin isn’t terrible at the moment, but it’s far from perfect. I’ve spent close to 20 years struggling with acne, I’ve tried every cream, wash, pill, and diet. It looks to be something that isn’t going away. I will be pushed into that altered state of anxiety by it again in the future. So I guess what I should focus on is getting better at talking about it, being more open about it, bringing the suffering out into the light - and in that way attempt to decrease its power over me.

......

Music: Crosscut Saw, by Albert King. I'm all about that classic blues at the moment. Just listen to that guitar. Sumptuous.

Day 297: Capsicum

Dammit I wanted to write a quick post and go and have an evening in which to spread, relax, but I didn’t know what to write and so I procrastinated because I didn’t have any words, and then the evening crumbled away, and now it’s 1am and I still don’t have anything, and I’ve not done anything useful with my evening, and it’s even harder than ever to write. Procrastination never helps. But I really don’t have any words today. Pipsqueak. Topsy turvy. Onomatopoeic. Circumference. Didgeridoo. There are some words. I did play guitar tonight, both important practice exercises and also just messing around enjoying making noises, which also is important, and so that’s not such a waste. And I cleaned and hoovered earlier, and went out to the cinema and for a meal with my mum. Wrote my gratitude list. Wrote some bits and bobs. All worthwhile stuff.

OK. Do I gots any more words? Filibuster. Capsicum. Engendered. Tumultuous. Nothing more. Time for bed. Tomorrow another day.

Day 296: Decay

Off the 52 bus, walking to the board game cafe with Mike, past what once were warehouses and cutlery works, later auto parts dealers, now old husks waiting to be converted into coffee shops and art spaces and board game cafes. The decay is beautiful, the texture, the play of structure and chaos, so rich, so varied. Paint peeling in chips like petals, an imperfect palimpsest revealing in layers the lives lived below. Sullied red bricks arrayed in multi-toned tumble-down walls, sagging in the middle, leaning against their neighbours like men shuffling home from the dogs. Dented steel shutters. Buckling window frames. Panes of glass cracked and slivered, crisp packets and faded lager cans shoved down between the glass. Stains. Rust. Pock marks. Pot holes. Puddles and peeling pipes, grubby weeds sprouting through interstices in rotting wooden pallets. And splashed along alleyways, winding up and down walls, bubblegum graffiti, the yogurt pot fonts blending with crinkling splodges of lichen, life in myriad forms reclaiming the decay with colour and pattern and dogged, unrelenting vigour. The city blooms anew.

Day 295: Porcelain

I fell asleep after work. The sheets were buttery. The light was low. I couldn't remember who I was. 

Now I am here. Just need to write some thing or other, then fall back into that waiting sack. Very sleepy. It’s my birthday now. I am older.

I have one more year and a shorter beard and no empty beer bottles around my bed. I have a few clothes and a few books and soft jazz playing in this room. A to-do list that I add to more than tick off. Pell mell head with helter skelter thoughts. Phone on charge. Bank account filling up at a rate almost imperceivably faster than I can drain it. Sensitive skin moisturiser. Old worn sneakers. Old worn denim. Capacious plaid shirts that swallow me nicely whole. Not much poetry but some poetry, distant music in a room on a far off street.

I am all cracked and chipped and dusty, but where there are cracks you get to see the porcelain; it feels good when you run your hand over the ridges of coarse kilned clay. There's nothing to clay but stuff of the Earth, hardened in incandescent flame.

The wind also gets in the cracks, but it resonates beautifully, and the breeze is fine as it sweeps on through.

Eventually everything inside and outside us sweeps on through.

I must sleep now. I am no spring chicken, and those buttery sheets await.

Day 294: New gods

Go to work, keep busy, do what’s in front of me to the best of my ability (or the best of my motivation and energy, which is part of ability), feel good about that. Take photographs. Post photographs to social media. Finish work. Go for a haircut. Ignore neurotic thoughts about how out of place and shambling and strange I feel among the kids with their muscles and fade cuts and tattoos at the barbers’. Get my beard cut shorter for the first time in years, just to try something different. Go home, stop at the shop on the way to buy moisturiser to soothe the skin around my neck, the back of my head, my cheeks, the areas that always get spotty and irritated and inflamed after being shaved. Ignore thoughts about how alien and ugly my skin is; just do what I have to do. Get in the house, do press-ups, run the shower, get in the shower, get out, pat my skin dry gently. Apply moisturiser. Get dressed. Drink water. Reheat a portion of the vegetable curry I made and tubbed up for myself yesterday. Play guitar. Run through the exercises I’m currently working on. Begin learning the notes on the stave on sheet music, where to find the notes on the guitar. Change away from and back to chords with which I have difficulty. Learn a few simple blues licks. Ignore the voice roaring that after all these years owning a guitar I’m still a complete novice. Switch from guitar work to writing work. Do some free-writing. Write my blog post. Ignore the voice roaring that I haven’t had any poetry in me, haven’t been able to write anything of beauty, for as long as I can remember. Ignore the voice roaring that I gave the writer thing a try but I don’t have what it takes, that I should quit and stop fooling myself. Brush my teeth. Drink more water. Get into bed. Ignore the voice roaring that I will never get to sleep, that I can’t do any of this any more, that it’s so goddamned hard and it hurts so much and I have no idea who I am or where I’m going or what any of this is for.

Ignore all that. Those are the old gods. I have new gods now. Perseverance, patience, humility, compassion.

Every day there are ten thousand opportunities to worship old or new gods. Every day there are ten thousand opportunities to improve.

Head down. Keep going. The grooves of good habit will wear themselves in.

......

Music: It's My Own Fault, by B.B. King. 

Day 293: Facing your weaknesses

Day recharging, sipping coffee, playing guitar.

It's interesting coming back to the guitar after years away, seeing with more perspective the areas in which I am competent, and the areas in which I definitely am not.

I've owned a guitar for something like 18 years, but only spent a few of those really playing. And the majority of even those years was not spent productively, but mostly thrashing around with the same old power chords and palm-muted rhythms I could run through without thinking.

I learnt that punk stuff early, found a comfort zone, and stayed there. I picked up technique: plucking, fretting, forming chords, strumming rhythmic patterns, bends and vibrato, hammer-ons and pull-offs - anything I could acquire through rote learning, practice absentmindedly while watching boxed sets or waiting for World of Warcraft groups to form. Running chromatic exercises up and down the neck, chugging through the same 1-4-5 chord progressions, was an outlet for nervous energy, an idling routine, a way to pass the time. Like cruising the streets on Grand Theft Auto. Like rolling a spliff.

But I was always naturally inept when it came to musicality. I can't sing a note. I never studied music theory. I didn't have much sense of rhythm. That whole side of things was a foreign language I fundamentally did not understand.

So when it came to transcribing songs, knowing the chords you can play in a key, understanding chord progressions, playing to a backing track, playing with another guitarist, any of the actual useful skills, I didn't have a clue. I could follow tabs and drill instructions into my fingers, deploy them robotically, but I didn't know how to feel the music, flow with it, play it. If music is a language, a form of communication, then I had memorised the letters of the alphabet, some simple words, but I didn't know how to speak.

And I was aware of this. And I hated it. Sensing that there was a skill that you had to feel your way through, that you couldn't pick up from a book, a skill some people seemed to just innately have, and I evidently did not, filled me with feelings of inadequacy. I have always had trouble processing inadequacy. Even as a pipsqueak child I was a perfectionist - I held myself to impossibly high standards; if I was good at something I was not good enough, and if I was bad at something then it was the end of the world.

I'm not sure exactly what it was, slight ADHD or OCD tendencies, anger management issues, executive function problems, neuroticism, the early seeds of depression - but when I was young if things didn't go my way, if I felt myself to be lacking at all, I would fly off the handle, fill with rage, fall into the depths of despondency. I threw tantrums a lot, felt an exquisite wounding from the world, had a heightened sensitivity to injustice. "It's not fair!" I would yell, ten years old, flinging my paints across the room after a picture hadn't turned out the way I wanted. "It's not fair! I can't do it!"

And although as I grew I learnt not to vocalise my frustrations, they would still arise when I picked up the guitar. And so rather than face the areas in which I was weak and work out how to improve, I instead put them in a room that I refused to enter, and went off to play Basket Case with the gain turned all the way up once again.

* * *

What I'm starting to comprehend about this year of daily blogging is that much of it is about altering my automatic responses to life. Through genes, through development, responses to life events, myriad factors, I have built up many responses to life that are incredibly harmful. Procrastination, addiction, learned helplessness, perfectionism, rumination.

But none of these behaviours are set in stone. They are automatic because they were learnt, and then left to run beneath the level of conscious attention. Like bad habits on the guitar, racing through scales out of time, holding tension in the fingers, pressing too hard on the strings, they may have seemed right or easy at one time, and then through repetition become ingrained into routine.

But they can be altered. How? Just as with the guitar, you slow right down, you break it into manageable tasks, you get those right, and you repeat, in small amounts, day after day after day after day.

And the areas in which you particularly struggle? These aren't to be avoided. They're to be welcomed. Faced. Embraced. Again, you find the smallest thing that you can learn to do - hear the difference between major and minor chords, write a paragraph in your diary, walk your overweight arse to the front door and back - whatever your personal fight is - and you do that again and again. And build slowly up.

You don't have to be anyone but yourself. The demons of the world attack each of us in unique ways. All you have to do is go to bed having gone to that area inside yourself that you fear to tread, and having pushed yourself an inch further than you did yesterday. Make this into a habit and you will be surprised where you end up.

It is in accepting our weaknesses that we overcome them. Along with acceptance of our strengths, which can be equally difficult. And it is here, in a process never completed, that we begin to become ourselves.

Day 292: Wednesday Reviews - Annihilation

Alex Garland writes, and more recently also directs, solid four-star films. By this I mean he makes genre pictures that aspire to transcend their genres, fresher and more experimental than films in the middle of the pack, yet never quite reaching the heights of true cinematic art.

His better works - 28 Days Later, Ex Machina - nudge enthusiastically at the boundary between commercial escapism and intriguing art house, while his less successful pieces - Sunshine, Dredd - fall clumsily between the two.

I wanted to like Annihilation, Garland’s recently written-and-directed addition to the straight-to-Netflix film library, but unfortunately it was another one that was too odd for mainstream enjoyment and too simplistic as a work of art.

It is an existential sci-fi horror film starring Natalie Portman as Lena, a scientist who joins a research expedition into a mysterious zone that has arisen around a meteor crash. Within this zone strange phenomena occur, the usual rules of biology are warped, and every team that has previously entered has vanished without a trace.

A central problem for me is the similarity here with Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 meditative masterpiece Stalker. Annihilation, mirroring its protagonists, wades clumsily into territory marked out by that beautiful film, and then falls back on ungainly and simplistic techniques to make it through.

It is a film exploring themes of structure and mutation in nature, of the delicate balance between order and chaos in which life on Earth exists, and the ego’s fear at being housed within impermanent and disintegrating houses of flesh. The sense of unease that it wants to develop would benefit I think from a surreal or dreamlike filmmaking technique - and Garland provides moments of this - but on the whole the film is stolid and workmanlike where it should be unnerving and otherworldly.

The script is heavy on exposition, always directly telling us what we should know rather than showing us the way to figure out ourselves. Dialogue is clunky, inelegant, forcing the characters to spell out what would be better hinted at - “We’re all damaged goods here”; “You’re saying we get out by going deeper in?” - dictating the tone rather than engendering it.

The central relationship is between Lena and her husband, a soldier, played by Oscar Isaac, who was sent into the zone on the last expedition. Portman and Isaac don’t have much chemistry, unfortunately, and the dynamic between the two of them, though it aims for a blending of the personal and cosmic, in a similar way to Interstellar, never quite ties the whole together. I didn’t like Interstellar either, by the way, but at least you knew, you felt how much Matthew McConaughey’s character loved his daughter. Like all of Nolan’s films it fitted together like an intricately carved puzzle, even if it was schmaltzy and ludicrous.

Annihilation doesn’t coalesce in the same way. It’s a prosaic sci-fi horror, most reminiscent, unfortunately, of Ridley Scott’s lacklustre Alien Covenant and Prometheus - for all the cerebral ambition it still clings limpet-like to hoary genre tropes - exposition told through video logs from previous teams, side characters picked off one by one, an ending that inexpertly visualises the protagonist’s struggle as an action scene featuring a trick with a grenade.

There are moments of tension and unease. The sound design is excellent. It looks sporadically good, with splodges of neon fungal growths and shimmering lights contrasting with verdant foliage and desolate beaches - though it often puts you in mind more of expensive television than cinema. Portman and the rest of the team of female scientists are strong.

It touches on some frightening truths, and I wouldn’t like to watch it if I was feeling particularly on-edge or isolated - the body horror successfully gives out to more existential horror as it goes on - but in essence I found the impersonal and disconcerting atmosphere undermined by the leaden plot beats and dialogue.

It isn’t bad, but for a film about mutation and chaos it is all a touch too staid. Reportedly offloaded to Netflix after test-audiences found the film too “intellectual” and “complicated”, I in fact thought it didn’t go anywhere near far enough in these directions. But maybe that’s the problem - too complicated for the mainstream, yet too simple for art house. At one pole you’ve got the schlocky unbridled joy of Aliens, at the other the contemplative meandering of Stalker. Annihilation can’t decide which direction to go in, so eventually ends up shooting for both, and scoring direct hits on neither.

Worth a watch if you're low on Netflix inspiration, but not essential viewing. 

Day 291: Cook off

Been a busy old day today. Down to the station this morning for a train to Leeds for the cook-off for the new menu, clumsy shuffling me taking photos of the dishes for the spec sheets, someone has obviously mistaken me for a competent photographer - so day in Headingley trying to remember to take my lens cap off, not to set fire to my camera, also eating all the burgers and pizzas and mac ‘n’ cheese, then a quick stop in the Leeds city centre site, then a rammed rush-hour train back to Sheffield to go and work the close in our pub.

I am spangled now. I was doing all right and then I went up to the cellar at half ten and found three beers that needed cleaning, a load of empties that needed taking out before the delivery in the morning, a lift with the previous morning’s delivery that hadn’t been unloaded, and more empties in the lift room downstairs. And I hadn’t brought up the Belgian crates from downstairs yet, like I’d promised. And then cleaning one of the lines I splashed line cleaner all up my new jumper, bleaching the colour out of the wool and ruining it. I’d so liked that jumper the only two times I’d worn it.

And now tomorrow I need to spend a couple of hours of my day off editing the photos to send them across, which isn’t ideal. But on the other hand I’m being paid for it, and I wanted to do it, and said I would, and I got some nice shots of the bar for their and our social media, and as much free food as I could eat, and a day away in Leeds.

OK, maybe it’s tough being grateful for spending a day in Leeds. But the rest of it is all good.

Going bed now. Just realised it’s Wednesday tomorrow and I haven’t watched a film to review yet or done any work for it or even found a film that is available somewhere to watch.

That’s fine. Not a problem. I got this. I always got this.

...... 

Peter Brady, by Screeching Weasel. Perfect pop punk: wry, wild, and raw. BOY, I've really learned a lot today. One: You act your age. Two: Don't try to be something you're not. Three: You find out in advance what restaurant your mom and dad are going to, and go someplace else!

Day 290: Radicals

Uhhh. Any words? I mean. No. Not really. What about these? These are words. I feel all gummed up. That’s fine. Be gummed then buddy. You be good and gummed. What’s true is right. What’s right is true.

Sat at the top of this empty house listening to punk rock, Social Distortion, Screeching Weasel, Rancid; all lightly crunching treble-heavy guitar and rigid mohawks, the promise of California. Faded black denim, the rhythmic thunk of skateboard wheels spinning on their bearings. Tattoos old as time. Party piercings. Taco stands and tartan. Snarling masculinity swirling into vulnerable femininity. Docs pointed inwards. Les Pauls slung way low. The unrefined energy, loose, ricocheting off crumbling apartment walls, in those endless summer years before the archetypes were honed, processed, packaged and sold, before people with haircuts who work in advertising and don’t know how to love figured the code to translate the scene into money. Before Tom and Mark. Before New Found Glory. Before I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare. Before the skin was stripped and the meat scooped out and the carcass flung in the bushes to rot. And out came the wolves.

But those riffs spat from the 90s still whisper something beneath their distortion to me, something about freedom and authenticity and joy. On cold nights sat at the top of an empty house sometimes all you want is three chords and the truth.

With the music execution and the talk of revolution, it bleeds in me, and it goes...

......

Music: Roots Radicals, Rancid.

Day 289: Middling

Day has been fine. Fair. Middling. Absolutely acceptable. Head was gooped up and mushy this morning, but slurped coffee and slouched around until I came awake. Played a bit of a new free-to-play PlayStation shooter that everyone is raving about with Alex and Mike, we got shot accurately and often, which was impressive to say how much the three of us were flailing around madly. I imagine it was like having to hit a gaggle of burning piglets. Charging every which way, bumping into walls, flinging ourselves off ledges. Still, the enemy players managed to repeatedly make short work of us. Well done, enemy players, well done.

Spent the evening editing photos for work’s social media, after filling my camera with shots over quiet shifts last week. I put my kit lens back on, mostly at 18-24mm ish, after months shooting with only my 50mm prime, and it was great to experiment with the wider angles. My camera, as I think with all DSLRs cheaper than about a grand, is a cropped sensor, so it only captures the centre of the image - so with a 50mm lens you’re really zoomed in. It’s great for a can of beer at work, a close-up of someone’s face, but for anything wider you have to stand down the other end of the pub, which isn’t ideal. There were some nice pictures came out of it all, and it’s always good to know I’ve got the next week or so’s posts lined up. It’s just another stress when everything is getting on top of me to know I’m going to have to take time out of an already busy shift to figure out something to photograph, line it up, edit it, fiddle with computers and phones. Everyone in the company, friends of bar staff, have been saying how good the pics are, but how my brain takes that is now there’s an expectation that I have to consistently live up to, which expectation is obviously unfounded and it’s only a matter of time before they all discover what a revolting fraud I am.

Idiot brain. But anyway, good to have a load of pics on my Google Drive and for that pressure to recede for a week or two.

Other than that, had a day of chores, washing and the like. Played guitar, did the exercises I am currently working on, little 1-2-3. 2-3-4 patterns up and down the major scale, outside and inside string picking, strumming specific numbers of strings, that sort of thing. Basic, boring stuff, but it’s my homework, so I’m doing it. And then a bit of improvising over a blues shuffle with the minor pentatonic in positions one and two, which I’m too embarrassed to do with the amp on lest my neighbours hear how much of a beginner I am, but it’s still lots of fun.

Work early tomorrow, best get off now. Ta ra.

……

Music: Nothing’s Real but Love, by Rebecca Ferguson. You know what, I didn’t know this was a song by an X-Factor finalist. That’s because I’m not a complete loser, like you are. I don’t waste my time with that rubbish. I just play videogames inexpertly against teenagers and work in a pub. But this song is good! Nothing is real but love. Cups. Shoes. Payment protection insurance. It’s all made up. In our heads. But love is what moves the cosmos beneath its shifting illusory forms. Maybe a shame it takes a reality television star to remind us of that, but whatever. Take grace where you find it, I say. Byeee!

Day 288: Tenacity

Woah pickle. Let’s just pause a second. It’s 2am and I’m just home from work, run down, grumpy, feeling broken. But let’s just pause. This is my two-hundred-and-eighty-eighth day consecutively posting on this blog. What’s that in months? 288, divide by 12, times by 31, minus a leap year, carry the BODMAS...

It’s quite a few months.

I keep catching myself feeling worthless because the quality of the posts isn’t anywhere near where I want them to be. Occasionally I write something that I’m proud of, and it feels great, but mostly it’s just some random words scraped off the inside of my brain at 2am, some squidgy residue, gimpy and festering, scraped off and slung online, not sounding writerly, not saying anything vital, not being honest or poetic or entertaining, just doing it, doing something, doing anything.

But even that, if I pause, if I judge it the way I’d judge it if a friend was doing it, someone I cared about… Even that is incredible.

It’s setting down a habit. Ingraining the routine. It’s personifying diligence and perseverance, tenacity. These are not traits commonly associated with me. Not for so many years lost in the wilderness, assuaging pain with drink or drugs, feeling overwhelmed, procrastinating, giving up.

It was that learned helplessness stuff of depression that I wrote about before. That stuff is so hard to come back from. It infects everything.

And this is not that. For 288 days I have quietly and steadily fought against that, one little post at a time. I have come here and I have said to that inner critic “I am doing this”, over and over again.

Even if every single post was shit - and they’re not, not nearly - but even if they were it would still be such an achievement, if I was able to see it that way. And I can see it that way. I just have to turn away from the ways the old me would have viewed the situation, the negatives he would have picked out, like finding the worms in a field of roses - I just have to turn away from that and turn towards another way of thinking, another way of being. There are roses everywhere, and there are always going to be worms, too. It’s just changing your perception to not get caught up focusing on the worms, honing in on them, staring at them until you can’t see anything else. Because the roses really are everywhere. And if you stop to look, you will notice them more and more.

OK. Good. That’s all very rambling, but good. Going sleep now. Bubyeeee.

……

Music: Send Me a Postcard by Shocking Blue. Oh yeaaaah. Late 60s Dutch psychedelic rock. I mean, just look at that album cover. If you had to invent the album cover for a late 60s Dutch psychedelic rock outfit, you'd come up with exactly that. I love it. It's Jefferson Airplane but even more so. Awesome.

Day 287: Jostling

Woke up out of suffocating stress dreams with the mother of all migraines today. Thought I was going to vomit swinging myself up out of bed, the pain rolling around in my head like cannonballs in a ship’s hull on stormy seas. Get these headaches in the morning sometimes, usually I can rise through them, they recede after drinking water and splashing my face and making coffee (maybe caffeine withdrawal if I’m late getting up is starting in?). But I did all these things today and the migraine only got worse. Showered and dressed. Migraine got worse. Ate. Migraine worse. Couldn’t see. Thoughts were heavy objects, crowding my mind, jostling, churning my stomach. Eventually had to take paracetamol and codeine and lie back in bed. Even that - codeine is normally the only thing that’ll cut through a migraine for me - but even that barely worked. After hours in bed I could get up and gingerly plod through my day off - I’d wanted a rest day, which I guess this was, but not in the way I’d hoped - and even now the migraine is hovering off in the background somewhere.

Stupid brain. I think my brain was just set up too tightly at the factory. I could do with a replacement. A new body would be great as well.

So yes, not had a productive day. Played guitar a little later on, I’ve got blisters on my first and third fingers coming up already, so mostly ran through some picking hand exercises and some beginner one-finger solo things, tested myself on notes on the neck.

Headache is coming back concentrating on this screen, better go. At work on the close tomorrow, so at least I get a lie in. Cool.

……

Music: Off the Handle by Rory Gallagher.

Day 286: Strings

Restrung my electric guitar tonight, my old Strat, old ramshackle Fat Strat, humbuckered and notched and dusty between the machine heads. My fingers rusty and ungainly. Remembering clunky bits of riffs, old C and G and D, old A minor, old chugging power chords, not a lot else.

At 15 I wanted to sound like Billie Joe Armstrong and Tom DeLonge. Memorised some tabs, ingrained them deep, till they were chiselled roads. But no avenues between them, no knowledge of landscape, no room for musical life to build and develop. I was not naturally talented and it made me feel like a failure and so, after years getting nowhere, I gave up.

But trying at things at which we are not naturally talented is often where we meet ourselves, where we transform ourselves. Methodically practising at weaknesses can be so rewarding. I picked the guitar back up a few years ago, went through an online beginner’s course, and though much of it seemed so simple to be unworthy of my attention, plenty of it was not, and I did it all anyway, forced myself not to skip whatever was either boring or hard.

There’s a correct pace at which everything happens. You could call it the Tao of the universe. I didn’t want to go at that pace at 15, I wanted to leap to chugging punk rhythms and lightning riffs, to get the reward without the effort. Learning notes on the neck and lackadaisical country western strumming patterns and arcane modal shapes was too dull, too uncool. So I skipped what I hated, avoided what I couldn’t do, and instead laid down these fragile thin roads of knowledge that linked to nothing - roads over which I could run back and forth, but from which I could never deviate.

I fell away from guitar again after the beginner’s course a few years ago. But I think I’d like to get back into it now. When I’m not working or writing it’s a nice hobby, learning a new skill, that does not come easily to me, and thus is probably worthwhile. Going slowly, assiduously, enjoying the difficulty and the glacial sense of progress, enjoying it for its own sake. And it sure beats videogames, YouTube videos, phone scrolling, as something to add structure to an evening.

……

Music: Strange Brew, by Cream. Bit of psychedelic blues rock, just what my guitar-awoken ears are craving. Oh yes.

Day 285: Wednesday Reviews - The Killing of a Sacred Deer

The atmosphere is so taut in The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Yorgos Lanthimos’ most recent film before his current award-magnet The Favourite - that it is like a metal cable stretched through the narrative, yowling under the tension, threatening to snap and tear the picture in two at any moment.

Filmed in eerie and sometimes fish-eyed perspectives that push subjects into the distance, or into the depths inside us, this modern day thriller is at times deadpan suburban drama, at others otherworldly psychological fable.

Colin Farrell, star of Lanthimos’ previous hit Lobster, here plays Steven, a heart surgeon with his life carefully structured, clinically empty. Nicole Kidman is his wife Anna. They have a teenage daughter, a younger son, live in an expansive, and expensive house, exquisite, perfectly tended. They are the vision of order. Praising her son’s long hair, Anna turns to her daughter. “You have lovely hair, too. We all have lovely hair.”

At work Steven cuts away at revoltingly realised hearts that pulse and squirm, their corporeal fleshiness standing in shocking contrast to the lugubrious corridors and polished dining tables that make up the meat, so to speak, of the film’s images. But after surgery Steven strips off his blood-stained gloves and discards them, back to tidiness, in a move that is mirrored in his stripping of Anna’s underwear at night, as she poses perfectly still on their bed in an act of marital roleplay they term “general anaesthetic”.

Sex, desire, craving (Steven, we learn, is an ex-alcoholic), all are overt in the opening by way of their lack - the film is shaped out of the negative space carved by their absence. Dialogue is colourless and flat. Colours are cold. The camera moves as smooth as a hearse. Steven and Anna’s life is controlled, staged, unnerving.

But into this order comes Martin, played in a standout performance by the young Barry Keoghan. Steven meets regularly with Martin in a diner, drives out with him in his car, buys him an expensive watch. Martin feels a bond, and a debt, to the teenage boy, although we are not immediately sure why. As the answer forms, Steven’s tidy life begins to unravel.

The film initially feels like a classic thriller, Martin ingratiating himself into a family in which he doesn’t belong, at first charming, then increasingly dangerous. But there is much more to it than this.

Lanthimos, with scriptwriter Efthymis Filippou, blends, crosses at will between, the real and surreal; Steven’s son and daughter begin to fall strangely ill, apparently due to a curse Martin is invoking. Or is the kid merely unhinged? Are there rational explanations? Are we within Steven’s disintegrating mind? That Lanthimos refuses to provide answers, plays all avenues at once, will no doubt confound and frustrate some, but I found it to be a powerful approach.

Our lives are filled with secrets, regrets, hidden horrors, that, like our bodily organs, beat and thrash beneath the surface. Steven has crafted an existence out of carefully excising the aspects that do not align, arranging his surface reality to mask what he cannot control - and Martin represents the dark forces rising up between the cracks to reclaim what they have been denied.

It is a disquieting, deeply unsettling tale. It looks incredible, rich folds in fabric, thick texture, Kubrick-esque corridors - emptily expressive artifice, and the wailing, screeching soundtrack is ominous, brooding, and jarring. Farrell and Kidman are powerhouses, and Keoghan is a creepy, malevolent, awkward, and unfathomable presence throughout.

Rather than look for literal meaning, it is best to feel your way through the themes. The Killing of a Sacred Deer speaks of sacrifice, yes, and revenge, but also guilt, loss, love, masculinity, not to mention our relationship with the subconscious.

It is dense, complex, yet surprisingly approachable; desolate yet invigorating. I appreciated it a great deal.

Day 284: Gesticulating

Waiting at the bus stop in the evening fog, the line of commuters weaving ahead and behind. Heads bobbing. Weight shifting from one foot to the next. Breath in puffs in a long line.

The bus pulls in and the line wobbles, lurches to life. Front few swallowed, further back heads crane behind from experience, watching for the second bus, the later bus, that could arrive any time, the adjustments and optimisations of the accomplished commuter, a professional peel from mid-queue and dart onto the empty deck, bench to yourself, pulling away while the earlier arrival remains bogged down by the masses. A last minute win, after a day of drudgery.

But no second bus tonight. We all press forwards, are swallowed into the steamy maw. The driver slumped in some unremarked suffering, eyes the colour of wet cardboard, sliding back into his skull, collar too tight, dumpy and acne scarred and skewered in his seat. He grimaces, prods his ticket machine, stares through us towards the end of his shift.

We hustle into seats, squeeze in next to one another, sweltering in the many-bodied heat. Gloves come off. Scarves are unwound. Bags are opened, breakfast bars come out, left over from lunch. Books. Headphones. Screens. A corner that is mine in the crowded din.

We inch through traffic. Pavements bathed in neon pass by behind clouded glass. Kebab shops and discount offies reflected in the shimmer of traffic. Store fronts repeat.

People sigh, lean back, cough once or three times. We can’t cope one more second. We must wrench up seats and riot. This quotidian pain. These coats and bags and flasks and sandwich boxes. This fucking life. Oh, but oh. Swallow misery, sigh again, let eyes go glazed.

We pass an ambulance driver gesticulating in front of hospital side doors. A wave goodbye? A problem? A game? There is too much distance between us, selves separated by skull and glass and empty air and skull again. The central impossibility of comprehending another life. All these lives, the breadth and depth, all rich and convoluted and labyrinthine. How can you be in there and me in here? My self is made up of your other. My other is made up of your self.

The bus climbs forwards. My lids start to drop. I conserve my energy. There is a long journey ahead.

Day 283: The strange man

There was a strange man got on our bus. The bus was loud but the strange man was louder. He was swaying at the bus stop, he swayed up the step, in water, in whisky, in dance. He was singing to Irish music on his phone. He had on an old waxed cotton jacket, smelling of fishing boats and cigarettes and rope. He tried to take a seat but he fell down and he didn't seem concerned and he pulled himself up and adjusted his threadbare hat and carried right on singing.

No one paid attention. We looked out of the windows. We were tired from offices and libraries and long shifts shouldering burdens and we thought, collectively, Go right on. Be that way. We don't care.

The strange man looked around, he asked some people how they were doing, they nodded and turned away. He looked at two girls, and we clenched our teeth, but he told them only It's a good night, then his eyes went roving on.

He talked to himself. We were tired from long shifts and we mostly looked at phones, out of windows, but we half watched when someone new got on the bus, the vague sport of what would happen. Everyone new was being tested; everyone sitting down was the old guard. We wanted to see the moment the new people discovered, whether they would sit beside him without realising, how that would play out. We were tired but we half watched for this.

Or we half watched the strange man himself, squinted a little, tutted just a little, silently to ourselves. We were doing badly, we were lonely and disappointed and lost, but we weren't the strange man. We all had at least that.

The strange man coughed a hacking cough and swayed and sang to his Irish song. The bus moved on up the hill. A middle-aged couple in matching felt coats and scarves sat down opposite the strange man. The strange man watched the couple a long time, started talking, and the couple stared ahead.

The bus got full and the strange man stood up to offer a woman his seat. The woman said No, don't be, and the strange man said Hey, it was, all was, come, all come - he said some strange thing, the woman said some flushed thing, moved off to stand down the bus. The strange man shook his head, shook in offence or disbelief, sat himself back in his swaying lagoonal glow.

We looked at phones, out of windows.

I'm sorry. That's what the strange man said to the couple. I'm sorry it's like this. I've lost... my. I've lost my... son. How do you carry on. How do you carry on when you've lost your son.

He said more, but we couldn't hear, no one could hear save the couple, and they weren't in the mood for talking. The bus moved on.

Day 282: Tightrope

Hullo. I’ve been feeling bleak as a barrow today. So that’s good!

No, I’m OK. Just been a bit hollow and sluggish, a creaky old ship with the wind howling through my timbers, but I’ve been sailing on through. Spending recent days trying to let go instead of grasping at negative thoughts, trying to relax away from the swirling vortex of rumination, has been tiring. It brings them all on worse. It’s frightening, in a way, an act of faith - I guess there’s something of a defense mechanism at play - you get a negative thought smashing in from nowhere and it’s like you’re being attacked, and you tighten yourself all up, tense yourself, get prepared for battle. The rumination is like analysing the attack from every angle, replaying it over and over and over, without being able to diffuse it.

So to practise the art of yielding, of nodding when a negative thought arises, ungrasping, unclasping, and moving on, is distinctly bizarre. It’s counter-intuitive, you feel dizzy, worried you’re making yourself vulnerable.

And the negative thoughts come thick and fast. They have been today, yesterday, the day before. But I’m telling myself this is because they’re worried, they’re doubling their efforts, hitting me with all they’ve got, because they sense me breaking away from them.

So I’m trying to walk the line, to do the things, to go to work, do the work, go food shopping, cook vegetable chilli, portion the chilli out for the next three days, write my blog, sleep, get up, keep on going.

Trying not to wobble. Trying not to look down. Just go, step at a time, over that chasm.

So I guess I’m not really feeling bleak. There is a lot of bleakness. But I’ve got a tightrope strung out across it. And I’m walking.

...... 

Music: I Forgot to Be Your Lover, by William Bell. What better way to soothe those tempestuous mental waters than with a classic slice of sensual sixties soul? Oh man, this is just, stone cold, the sound of healing. Wait? Did I do this song already? This all seems familiar. After all these days, who the hell knows? And who's counting? Ta raaaaaa.

Day 281: According to

Pooped tonight. Bushed. Beat. Tuckered all the way out. Gonna crawl into bed with my book and get enough sleep to be refreshed for the open tomorrow.

I’m reading Underworld by Don DeLillo. I’ve been reading Underworld by Don DeLillo for about three years now. I started it what feels like an aeon ago, fell away from it, picked it back up last month, and am currently struggling through the verbiage, a sluggish paragraph at a time.

I sort of love it. But it sort of leaves me entirely cold. I can tell he’s an exemplary writer, and there’s so much nuance and exploration of subtle truths in there. But maybe I don’t think he’s a good writer at all - this is the second book of his that I’ve appreciated from afar, or maybe felt I should appreciate, without any of it connecting with me on an emotional level.

Not that his prose isn’t suffused with beauty:

“The rim clouds took on a chromium edge and the high sky was still an easy noonish blue. But the pit went dark in a hurry, the vast plastic liner wind-lapped and making the eeriest sort of music, just outside the wave-fold of nature, and the surface was indigo now, still faintly sky-streaked, washed by gradations of shade and motion. We stood a moment watching and then went back to the car.”

And his dialogue is taut, sizzling, low-key exhilarating. But I’m not really following what’s going on, or why it’s important. There’s someone who works for a waste-disposal agency, and a lot of musing about how waste, trash, excrement, points to something profound and corporeal and hidden in plain view about us all and our place in the world. There’s a baseball that was hit to win the World Series in 1951 that is followed through the novel, a kid grabbing it during the game, his father taking it off him, a collector searching for it in the 90s, something in the 70s - and lots of subtext about sports and achievement and collecting and owning and wanting and What it Means to Be American, which American writers are always trying to answer, which is far less interesting when you’re not yourself American and don’t see why they always have to bang on about themselves so much. There are about fifty more characters who I’ve been introduced to in vignettes so far unattached to anything else, and subsequently forgotten. And there’s someone cruising down freeways murdering people in his car.

That actually all sounds like the kind of novel I would adore. But something about it is so theoretical, so distanced. It’s long, and it requires effort to read - every passage begins in medias res, with characters you can’t remember, pursuing needs that aren’t at all obvious, and after a ponderous few pages you cut away again, unsure of what to make of what you’ve read.

I mean, it all makes sense on the page, and sounds meaningful and powerful and strong. But I’m struggling to transfer any of that from the book into my experience of real life. It’s like it’s encoded with wisdom, but wisdom for an alien lifeform that processes information differently to myself.

Maybe I’m just not smart enough. But I think I get most of it, that’s not the problem - I feel the depths that he’s mining. They’re just cerebral depths, always discrete and unrelated to the heart.

I’ll carry on reading, regardless. Many important works of art only fully connect with me once they’re done, once I’ve experienced them and taken in their whole and felt my own whole being shift to accommodate what they express.

I was just looking for, but couldn’t find, a quote about viewing art. Can’t remember who said it. The gist is that we don’t see art, we see according to art. It changes our viewpoint, changes us, in a very real sense, as we consume it. So far seeing according to Underworld is a lonely, removed way of seeing. But perhaps there will be immense worth in that, once I’m through.

Anyway, that’s enough of my evening spent tapping away. Now it’s time for bed and book.

...... 

Music: Barracuda, by John Cale.

Day 280: Glow

I'm doing better again. Basically back to my old self. By which I mean neurotic, exhausted, wracked with negative thoughts, utterly lost and confused - but trundling along pretty well, all things considered. Certainly I'm not in the pit of vipers as I was a few days ago.

It's good to be out. It is. To breathe freely. Not to feel the universe pressing down, pinning me to the spot, crushing me.

I didn't cope with this latest fall into depression as well as I would have liked, but I did cope better than I have in the past. I messaged people close to me, I took a single day off work, I tried to be kind to myself. I still spent far too long hiding from the pain by scrolling social media, watching mindless nothings on YouTube; I ate loads of junk food, stayed up too late, fell asleep to the glow of Netflix past 3am, lounged in bed till after midday - but I have definitely done worse. It was only a few days, and although the depression hurt, I didn't fall into despair to such an extent as I have done, and I came out the other side easier than before.

All of which is good. But it is late again, was working a long shift today, and in tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

So I'd better get some rest. Toodles.

Day 279: January in blogging

Hullo chickadees. I'm going to start a monthly round-up of my blogging, collecting all the better, or at least more interesting, pieces, both as a way for me to see where I've been and where I'm going, and for you to check in on the highlights if you don't have the time or inclination to follow me daily, but still have a vague interest in what I'm writing.

Lovely. Here is this month's:

Day 251: Insignificant - A post I wrote to help people feel less self-conscious by reminding them how tiny and stupid and meaningless they are. Also I got to make fun of my friend Mike's enormous head, which to be honest I'm at times surprised fits through my kitchen door when he comes round to watch The Wire. But though his head is enormous (and oh, how!), his life is tiny, and stupid, and meaningless - and I very much hope that this thought brings him solace.

Day 252: Deer - Creativity, I posit here (not exactly originally), is a deer in the woods - you can't go stomping after it ordering it to do what you ask. It will only flee. You have to creep up slowly, gently, wait patiently, and if you are lucky then the deer will wander up to you and nibble strawberries by your feet. Do deer like strawberries? The Deer of Creativity does! Also, you're not hunting the deer in this analogy, so get that macho predator instinct out of your head. You're asking the deer spirit to bless you, and it has to be alive and free to do so. I like this analogy a lot.

Day 258: Storms of tarantulas - Some thoughts on the Welcome to Night Vale novel, and the difficulties in delineating worlds of the imagination.

Day 259: Dried fruit - A post about challenging self-critical thoughts, told through an analogy about making portraits of celebrities out of bits of dried fruit. I don't know what comes out of my head some days.

Day 261: Cherry - About the two kinds of happiness, and how to find peace beyond the attempt to sate desire, told through an analogy about eating iced buns. I don't know what comes out of my head, etc.

Day 264: Wednesday Reviews - Roma - I've started writing film reviews once a week. Took me a while to find my feet, to remember how the form should flow, but I was happy with this one. It was a great film, as well. You should definitely check it out on Netflix if you get the chance.

Day 267: Shrapnel - Notes on how emotional pain is related to physical pain, how the same neural mechanisms fire for both, and why we let down the vulnerable in our society when we fail to recognise this truth.

... And then I got ill. Researching into mental health issues, thinking about my own struggles with such, a mass of negative thoughts that I had been ignoring since Christmas, trying to power through, suddenly came crashing in, and knocked me on my arse. It's interesting looking back and pinpointing the moment it happened, how you can sense I felt I had in some way opened the door to it, allowed the negativity room to manoeuvre, and how much guilt and shame and hopelessness spread through the whole of the following week after it leapt.

Day 270: Rumination - I wasn't well here, but I managed to post about rumination, the constant obsessive worrying about problems without ever actually solving them. Being anxious about why you suffer, rather than thinking about how to overcome suffering. This was exhausting to think about, and to write, but it helped give me insight into something that affects me every single day, and I'm trying to be more aware of it arising at the moment.

Day 272: Implicit - A little post I squeezed out about the role of character in film, how a scriptwriter must be like an animation artist, sketching telling details of a person above the surface to imply a whole mass of depth unseen below, and why for this reason they must be experts in feeling the shape of people, the shape of behaviours, hopes, fears, dreams. Want to come back and flesh this thought out sometime.

Day 276: A different realm - The day or two before this post were my worst this month, completely overcome with depression - but here I gave myself permission to feel as I did; I called in sick to work, treated myself kindly, and began the process of recovering. Weird that this was only three days ago. Truly feels like another time, another me.

Day 277: Back on track - Making sense of the previous week's depression, paying attention to the precise symptoms, making plans for dealing with them when they arise in the future. If you struggle with mental health yourself you may want to read this and see whether any of it strikes a chord, and whether any of the strategies may be of use to you in your own private battles. I hope so.