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 249: Other sounds

Ouuef. Blaaarp. Other sounds. Not feeling too hot today, for some weird reason. Got work at five, not supremely up for that. But it should be a quiet night, and then I’ve got two glorious days off.

So, yeah. “A few bevs”, when you’ve not been drinking for 250 days, can very quickly become “probably too many bevs”. I mean, I don’t feel horrendous today, just incredibly tired and run down, and like I need to remove my brain and bathe it in cold water while humming lullabies to it soothingly.

But it was lovely to be out with people, to remember the energy of that world of “out” that I haven’t been inhabiting for eight months now. The bodies pressed together, the shadows, the softly flowing spirits (both kinds).

It was good to do for a special occasion, and it was good to realise I don’t want to do it again for a very long time. It’s a mode of being, going out, going to late bars, boozing, that has its upsides, for sure, but it is for people younger than myself, with still the feel of their lives stretching infinitely in front of them. It’s not what you want to be doing at my age, when you start to be happier getting an early night and being productive tomorrow than rushing headlong into action and excitement wanting to catch the stars in your coruscating tumbler but only eventually finding bleary morning, sickness, an empty bank account.

Anyway, I’ve brewed coffee today, made leek and potato soup, had it with a brown roll and two satsumas, drunk tea with lemon and honey. I’m treading gently, carefully, healthily.

Last night was the end of 2018, and a last spritz of silliness. Today is the beginning of the new year.

...... 

Music: Fan the Flames, by Sheer Mag. Holy shit. I love this. Grungy, lo-fi garage punk, with a bluesy 70s dad rock lead guitar vibe under the vocals. Chunky, melodic, sexy, stupendous. Holy shit. I can't. It's great.

Day 247: The needle and the damage done

File this one under: a bad day. Don't feel I can do this. I'm ragged. Physically, mentally. Down to the bone. A cosmic horror has got my soul shoved into the grindstone of the universe, and it is grinding, crushing until all that is left is bloody stump.

I felt better at work this morning, with drugs in me I felt the worst of the flu was over, and pub was quiet, and it was nice to joke around with Zoe and Liz, take it easy, have a laugh.

Then we were not quiet, and I could not handle it. I was dizzy, faint, couldn't concentrate, every step was exhausting, I was on an uneven keel. Got to 5pm and I grabbed my coat and bolted, left the pub a mess and everyone struggling, which, like, I hate to do, but I haven't called in sick the last three days, so you get what you get. Came home and made Earl Grey, got into bed, passed out.

Now it's 11pm. I haven't eaten. I'm working the close tomorrow with minimum staff, because last year was quiet, but I'm worried this year won't be quiet, and I'm running at 40 or so percent right now...

And, more, I'm just struggling right now. I'm lost. I feel I'm going nowhere with the writing, it's all I can do to force myself to write this little blog every night, but I'm building no momentum, working towards nothing, it all feels harder rather than easier day by day.

I guess that's not true. Guess I am improving, though it never feels like it in the moment. It's always struggle, but that is life, you feel caught in marshland, slippery stones under foot, the way ahead hazy, but you look back, and you have journeyed from where you were.

And the writing has improved. I don't feel the anxiety of people seeing me imperfect and unguarded that I did. I'm better at putting up rough pieces and moving on. And those pieces, all first drafts, which everyone involved in creativity agrees is the stage to be loose, to make mistakes, to get it wrong - some of those first drafts have actually been very good. Sometimes there is energy, and there are intriguing sentence constructions, and I can feel the music, and I am borne along. And when there are not these things there are still words, one after the other, forming some kind of structure, and it is always worthwhile to have done that. On the worst days there is still this.

And maybe that cosmic horror isn't grinding down my soul, but my ego. The process is unbelievably painful, exhausting, but the shards that fly off are in the end everything that wasn't me. And maybe the cosmic horror is not a horror, but God, disguised, as all horror truly is, and he is simply trying to make me small enough to fit through the eye of a needle.

Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

......

Music: Don't Delete the Kisses, by Wolf Alice. Oh, man, I adore this electro indie 80s throwback stuff. Driving rhythm, breathless vocals, aching longing etched in neon moonlight. Gorgeous.

Day 244: Leaky

Back home. Christmas all done for another year. I’ve unpacked my presents, sorted my room, now sat shivering with full-on lurgy, viscous liquid leaking from my nose. Head is swimming, brain bubbling somewhere around a thousand degrees. Tried doing a cryptic crossword but I’ve got no brain power - Mrs Simpson’s spread (5) was easy, as was Truce for review of Erica’s fee (9), but what’s Only heads can negotiate a lock on this? (5)? Or B, C or D, for example, in harmony (9)? I can sense the answers out there, floating muddily in the quagmire of my consciousness, but I can’t wade out far enough to find them.

I’m going to get in bed and read that Welcome to Night Vale novel Mike bought me; somehow the ghost stories of sentient houses, faces in the desert, doors to other dimensions, and predatory street sweepers seem appropriate for my current state of mind. I’m pretty much in Night Vale already, I only need the gentlest of nudges.

Oh, and it’s CONSONANT, right? “B, C and D, for example”. And “in harmony”. Consonant.

Work tomorrow morning. Don’t even.

……

Music. Missed this the last few days, being on my phone and all (“all” = “writing at 1am in bed just wanting to get it done and get to sleep”). Today: Burning, by The Whitest Boy Alive, one of the bands Jamie introduced me to. Jangly, upbeat guitars, tinged with a low octane insouciance. Like Los Campesinos!, played on a slowing tape deck at the bottom of the ocean.

Day 238: Helical

Town before work, Christmas shopping. Walking on the wet cobblestones of the shopping precinct, Van Morrison whispering down from speakers in the walls. Look up into the echoing cold above the store fronts, above the Christmas lights, at the empty rafters, the unadorned fixtures; dirty glass, smeared bird droppings, two pigeons fluttering. Paint chipping grime encrusted interstitial spaces, forgotten and lonely, sighing down, mocking all human endeavour. Hurrisome noise fading into oblivion.

Coffee house, hanging tangle of fairy lights, golden lamps, shoppers ducking in away from the crowds. Chinese student on Macbook. Bearded rumpled man with Lenovo laptop. Girls in hoodies slurping iced lattes out of red-and-white helical striped straws.

The smell from the fishmongers, pungent and warm. The chintz of moulded merry-go-round horse, whinnying round to nowhere. John Lewis perfume department, escalators, coruscating glassware, and the threadbare corners of carpet, the sneaker-smudged varnished floors, the wooden veneers cracked and peeling.

Take in these moments, these truths, the quiet thusness of the world before the lashing hell of the bar shift, swirling cacophony of cackling jostling humans, sallow, slack-jawed faces, clamouring for salvation, rushing into mindlessness, the very opposite of what any of us need.

Back tomorrow morning for ten more hours. Then ten more hours Sunday. Then I’m off for Christmas. I can’t wait.

……

Music: If you want me to stay, Sly and the Family Stone.

Day 237: Spider-Verse

Better day. Morning with my dad, talking global warming and politics over coffee, setting the world to rights, then to the cinema, nothing on except Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which turned out to be brilliant, an irreverent and self-knowing animation by the team behind The LEGO Movie, similar in feel, with a healthy dose of Pixar’s The Incredibles mixed in - the world building was spectacular, the set-up so much fun, rich, filled with sight-gags, and barrelling along with colour and vibrancy, although the second half was more generic, there was more joy in stating and exploring the premise than in telling the paint-by-numbers hero's journey, but still, it was really great - then after the film an evening wander around the Christmas market with the lights all shining, then I came home for a meal with the housemates, Phace had cooked the kind of food that brings you back from the dead, reinvigorates your spirit, warms you all the way to your core, and we sat around the table eating second helpings and listening to funk and soul and blues on Spotify, the two of them drinking wine and Buck’s fizz, me on the Sicilian lemonade, as the night passed languorously and the moon moved across the sky.

Tomorrow is Mad Friday and is going to be the worst. Going to get some rest now, then get up tomorrow and put my head down and deal with it. See you on the other side.

Music: I Forgot to be Your Lover, by William Bell. Smooth, soulful, sonorous, beautiful.

Day 236: Spiders

Kelham Island with work lot, met them after my shift ended at 10. They were getting trollied, the first bar was warm and close and good, but by the Irish bar on West Street I had spiders down the spine, got an Uber home by myself, sober, lonely, came back to my PC and a cup of Earl Grey.

Social anxiety was spiking. Bars at midnight are not made for sobriety, everyone losing themselves in a rush into something, me stood on the outside, cold. And I’ve been feeling icky and weird of late. Christmas is really taking it out of me, every shift at work is horrendous, and I don’t have any time to give to writing, and I feel stretched so thin, my mental health is suffering.

Ung, not a good day. Remember all the things. Remind myself of all the things. I never learn. It never goes in. Nothing changes. No. That’s negative voices. Inner critic. He can fuck off.

Keep going. Final hurdle, and then four days off for Christmas, and then January will be quiet. I can make it.

……

Music: Night Shift, by Lucy Dacus. I like it when the fuzz guitar kicks in.

Day 235: The sleet and the mud

Oof, feel bleak, and I don’t want to write a word. This happens to me, I feel depression coming on and I write a post about it as if I had it dealt with, had something figured out, and then the next day it is there and worse again, and the day after worse than that.

I really don’t want to have to write right now. I’m tired and I’m glum.

I had a good evening though. It was good, wasn’t it? I met Steve and Alan after work and it was like old times, nights out drinking years ago. I had three non-alcoholic beers, then a Pepsi, then I had a third of beer, just as a Christmas treat with old friends. Shhh. Anyway, we laughed a lot, we talked a lot, we talked about when we were kids, we talked about Alan being a father, we talked about politics and parents with cancer and love and about dumb, stupid things. It was sad, and funny, and good. It was a good night.

Now I am home and feeling flat. I missed tea, didn’t even think about it, because I went from a busy, stressful shift to standing on the other side of the bar with Alan and Steve, and then six hours had gone by. And I missed lunch, because it was a busy, stressful shift. Just had a bowl of cereal now when I came in. No energy to make anything more.

I’m OK. I feel flat but that is OK. I don’t have much to write, but I can’t switch on my writing brain at will. I turn up, and sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not. There are days when you score goals from the halfway line, and days when you grind out nil-nil draws in the sleet and the mud. But you turn up to every match regardless.

Even if I had a year’s worth of nil-nil draws, or of stinging losses, it would still be a beautiful and worthwhile achievement to have played them all. And I don’t, I’ve got plenty of winners in here among the rest.

And I’m proud of them all. Proud to be playing, day after day after day.

That’s all the victory I need.

……

Music: Vessel of Love by Hollie Cook - some insouciant, sun-kissed reggae pop to bring the evening to a close. Lovely.

Day 233: Soup

Another long day, in an hour early to take pub photos, stayed half an hour late because every fucker came in for Christmas drinks. Then down to Sarah and Jordan’s with Lizzie. Zoe and Em Fitz there as well; goofing around. Cat’s Pyjamas for curries that all mysteriously tasted like Heinz tomato soup, even the poppadom dips were tomato soup, creamy soup everywhere, not what we wanted, it wasn’t the cat’s pyjamas, it turned out, not even the bee’s knees. Then back to Sarah and Jord’s, smooshed on sofas under blankets, all legs on thighs and heads on shoulders, Zoe’s arm round Lizzie, Liz stroking Zoe’s hand - Steph home later from her bar, Jord downloading a copy of The Grinch to assuage Liz’s petitions. Rufus asleep on the floor, his face mushed into his bowl, his fur dragging in his water. Steph on the beanbag. Jord trying for tornadoes with his vape smoke. And Sarah decorating the tree. Everything warm, snug, comfortable; my shrivelled heart, like the Grinch’s, starting to beat back into life.

……

Music. I dunnoooo. I’m running on fumes here. Anything. Umm. Dancing in the Moonlight, King Harvest. Did you know the Toploader song was a cover? It is. This original version is a whopping seventeen times better. That’s just scientific fact. Listen and find out for yourself. It’s indisputable.

Day 232: Take the praise

Ohhhh buddy I super need to do some writing and get myself to bed. It's been a busy old day. I'm trying to stay awake to write this but sleep is prowling the perimeter of my mind, the guards are edging closer together, exchanging worried glances; it's only a matter of time...

Been a good day though. I'm doing damned well. I've been on opens the past two days, another tomorrow, and I've been going in an hour early to get stuff done, social media photos and the like, and I've been getting up half an hour earlier than even that, just to be up, to give myself a more leisurely rise.

I mean, all that means is that I've been getting up at half seven to be in work for nine, which is what half the world does every day, but...

You know, no. That's a thing I always do, minimise positives about myself, deflate any sense of accomplishment, explain away better times as fluke or mistake or what everyone else already has anyway.

It's skewed thinking, is what they teach you in cognitive behavioural therapy, and we'll have no truck with it tonight.

It doesn't matter if everyone else on the planet finds it easy to get up early (although they don't). What's important is that it's something with which I struggle, and I've been doing loads better of late.

I've been up, I've been working hard, I've been eating fruit and cooking proper meals for tea, going in to work early and staying late to help with Christmas, writing my blog, reading, playing small amounts of the videogames I feel it's worth completing, not looking at social media, staying on top of washing and cleaning, getting early nights.

And when depression has come calling I've been better equipped at dealing with him. He has been holding less and less sway over me.

That's good. I've been doing good.

So take the praise, even if it is from myself. Don't look back. Don't panic. Don't sabotage myself. Keep doing what I've been doing, quietly, steadily, and trust that inch by inch, month by month, things are changing. And let that change happen.

......

Music: Missing U, by Robyn. Sleep-wolves leaping barricades. Guards down. Blackness sweeping in. Robyn good, pop good, pulsing synth-tinged dance pop never sounded so bittersweet. This track is classic Robyn. That's good. We like Robyn. We go sleep now. Byeeeeeeee x

Day 230: Meditation

Here's one I've been meaning to write for a while now. I've begun meditating again, and I want to say something about it.

I’ve been meditating off and on (mostly off) for a decade now, and I want to talk a little about my process, and what I see as its point, because I think there’s still a fair amount of confusion about these things.

Meditation is a programme of training to help you pay attention to the present moment on purpose. Paying attention to the present moment on purpose is where we want to be. It’s like “being strong” in bodybuilding terms. It’s the end goal.

Meditation is the lifting of the weights. It’s how we get our minds strong.

Here’s how I do that:

I kneel on the floor upright and alert. I kneel on one cushion, and put another between my calves and thighs, to stop my heels digging into my bum. I rest my hands in my lap, palms upward, one on top of the other.

If I could get into the lotus position, or half lotus, or a similar pose, then I would do that. These are very stable positions, if you possess the flexibility for them. Conversely, if I couldn’t kneel then I would sit upright on a chair. If I couldn’t do that I would lie down. What’s important is that you feel comfortable, but alert, that you can breathe deeply, and that your posture embodies a willingness to face this moment, not slouch away from it.

Next I take a few deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, because this is a nice thing to do. If I’m feeling particularly stressed I might do a body scan, which involves focusing on my toes, then the balls of my feet, my heels, my ankles, shins, calves, knees, up through my body, spending a little time with each area, gently, in no rush, noting where there is tension, letting the tension go if it feels appropriate to do so.

And then I start meditating. And what, precisely does this occult, mystical process involve?

It involves paying attention as I breathe in and out.

That’s it. Sometimes I count my breaths, once after every out-breath, up to ten, and then start again from one. Sometimes I focus on the sounds around me instead, letting whatever comes to my ears be the object of my attention, holding it in loving awareness, simply watching it, allowing the sound to exist. Sometimes I repeat a neutral word, like “flower”, or “river”, over and over again. The object of attention doesn’t hugely matter; it is the attending to it, with mindfulness, that is important.

I pay attention as if this out-breath, this sound, this word, was the gaze of a lover, or a newborn child, or a treasure brought forth from the deep. I pay attention to this mundane moment of my life wholly, and lovingly, and with unquenchable wonder.

And what happens when I do this, when I attend to my breath, or to a repeated phrase, with watchful, loving, mindful awareness?

I get distracted. The voice in my head starts up, chundering on, and I lose myself in thought.

This usually takes a second or two to happen.

I get distracted. I cough, renew my focus, bring attention back to the breath. And I get distracted. I kick myself - you dummy - I shift my weight, get comfortable again, bring attention back to the breath. And I get distracted. I realise I’ve been thinking about… something or other, down twisting rabbit holes of thought, for minutes. I get annoyed. I feel anger rising. I quash the anger down. I feel despair that I’m spending my meditation time quashing down anger, that I can’t obey even the simplest of instructions, that I’m not a venerable Zen master cloaked in billowing robes immovable as a rock. I picture myself, kneeling on a dusty cushion on a carpet I should have hoovered weeks ago, and I… dammit, I bring attention back to the breath. And I get distracted. On a dusty cushion on a carpet I should have hoovered weeks ago. And I haven’t washed my sheets. Or done last nights dishes. And then there’s that presentation for work next week, I haven’t even started that. I sag. It’s hopeless. No. It’s not hopeless. I force myself to focus. I do it. I sit up straight again. I wrench my awareness away from negativity, bring attention back to the breath.

And I get distracted...

This happens. It happens to me. It happens to meditation teachers. It happens to billowy-robed Zen masters. And it will happen to you.

This is meditation. Bringing your attention back is meditation. If your attention didn’t need bringing back then you wouldn’t need meditation. If you could magically lift a car in one hand then you wouldn’t need to do bicep curls and press-ups.

Maybe Superman can just be strong without effort, because he's a special alien. And maybe there are super-meditators who are equanimous and tranquil as the morning sun’s first shining rays, with minds like softly bubbling brooks. But the rest of us need practice.

Meditation is practice. It isn’t having a calm mind. It is the training of calming your insanely fractured and ever-leaping mind. And it takes a lifetime. You don’t do ten press-ups and then find yourself able to lift a car forever afterwards. You do ten press-ups every morning, and gradually, over many months, you find your strength improving, your physical grounding in the world becoming more vibrant and active and alive. And if you stop doing those daily press-ups, you lose it.

Of course some people become obsessed with bodybuilding, and spend every hour of every day lifting enormous weights. There are good things that can come from this: being part of a community of like-minded individuals, developing a life with structure and routine, setting and achieving difficult goals - and there are bad things that can come from this: obsession, addiction, the feeding of the ego, the irony that the singular fanatical drive to be strong in many ways only shows that underneath it all you are so very weak.

Similarly, there are people for whom meditation becomes their all. They join clubs, post in groups, obsess over correct posture, argue about schools of Buddhism, pay large figures to attend intensive meditation retreats.

And if you want to do this, more power to you. It’s not wrong. But be aware that the necessity for meditation is the necessity to assuage ego and overthinking, and devoting yourself to the cult of meditation can increase your vulnerability to precisely these problems of ego and overthinking.

(But then so can everything. I have to be aware that my ego is playing the game here, playing at being modester-than-thou. We all have egos, and they all do ego things. Meditation is in fact a great way of watching the ego, accepting it, and not taking it too seriously.)

What I’m saying is: don’t worry about not being fully invested. You don’t need to shave your head and sit in zazen, just as you don’t need to bench-press like Hulk Hogan. In many ways doing so can make you less whole. Ten press-ups and five minutes meditation a night is a fine way to live.

So, then. Sit down. Bring your attention to your breath. Every time your mind wanders, bring it back. When you notice yourself feeling pathetic at how many times your mind wanders, simply ask, are you still lost in thought right now, or are you bringing attention back to the breath? When you find yourself thinking how bored you are, simply ask, are you still lost in thought, or are you bringing attention back to the breath? When you’re thinking about how you’re going to bring your attention back to the breath, simply ask, are you still lost in thought, or are you bringing your attention back to the breath?

There is only the bringing of attention back to the breath. Everything else is distraction. You will have a mind full of distractions. These are your weights. Lift them. Bring attention back to the breath, over and over and over again.

This is meditation.

Next time: but why?

...... 

Music: kinda want to do some dirty Run the Jewels hip hop, for the incongruity, but no. Let's go with the lilting, soaring Tibetan folk of Tenzin Choegyal and the Metta String Ensemble. It's no Run the Jewels, but it's pretty good.

Day 225: Quotidian imperfection

Absolutely demolished again. Decimated. Destroyed. Christmas is not a good time to work in a bar. Not when you want to be writing but you have to earn money to be able to write and you spend so many days working to earn the money that you have no energy left when you come home with which to write.

Pttch. Rubbish.

Spent my evening checked all the way out, watching Always Sunny, nodding in and out of consciousness. Kept meaning to either wake myself up enough to do something worthwhile with my night, or at least get to bed and nap properly before winging off this blog, but instead I just sat there, head lolling, as three, four episodes swam by.

There’s something quietly tragic about adult life at times, isn’t there? The solitary moments aware of how much more you could be, all the ways in which you don’t live up to your potential, all the ways in which you have settled for … whatever this is.

A glass of red when you’ve already made your way through two bottles this week. Another Deliveroo meal because cooking = sadness. The tupperware in the bin; slick with oil, it’s too much, too much, to run soapy water and wash the stained tubs and take them down to the recycling in the dark. Realising it’s a Saturday night and that means nothing to you, the distant cries of cavorting crowds only intrude upon another rerun of Friends on Netflix. The One Where You Were Alone. Rain lashing outside. The room dark, the wind attacking the windows, a chill creeping down your spine. Cold all through your body, right down to the marrow, as you sit and think on how there’s nothing more than this.

Nothing more than this. Yes. Quotidian imperfection. Brain running on fumes. Bumbling along, making the best of things, not at this moment defeating life or imposing yourself onto it, but simply living it. And that is all right. The yammering TV set, the storm raging outside, you meandering through another night.

The humblest, least impressive moments are the ones most in need of your love. It’s easy to love the exciting times. They make you love. It’s here, in this dim streaked light of now, that you have to do the work of loving. The work of living.

Breath in and out. Be good to yourself. All is well.

...... 

Musique? Sycamore Trees, performed by Chrysta Bell. Yes. This is what my soul needed. The return to Twin Peaks was my favourite thing about television in 2017, terrifying and unsettling and enigmatic and often times awful. But often times transcendent. And always fascinating. Here David Lynch's sometime muse Chrysta Bell sinuously slinks and wails through a version of the song originally performed for the show by Jimmy Scott. Utterly delicious.

Day 224: Structural integrity

Better get this written quickly before my brain disintegrates entirely. Turns out three hours sleep isn’t enough to sustain you for a 10 hour shift when we’re this close to Christmas and the pub is heaving all cocking day long.

It’s 11pm now and I’m just home; I’m back up at 7am for the open.

Oh hello, though, two cheeky semi-colons in two paragraphs? Ambassador, with these luxurious punctuation marks you’re really spoiling us!

So… yeah…. Loss of neurological efficacy has begun. Brain integrity at… 54%, and falling fast!

Try to reroute some… Blork. I’m too tired to do that bit. Imagine I’m doing a funny bit transposing the tiredness of my brain into the trope of a damaged Star Trek ship. Make a joke about the egregious use of lens flare and how the bit must be being directed by JJ Abrams. You can do it. I’ve got faith.

I’ll just sit here and finish my Lady Grey. Mmm. Lady Grey - for the times when drinking Earl Grey just isn’t effeminate enough!

I'm joking. Man is what man does, and this man here luuuuurves his delicate Lady Greys. And Jordan Peterson can suck it.

I was only going to do a short post last night. It was past midnight. And then I started writing about God and that, and next thing it was 3:30am and I realised I’d done it again. And then lying in bed I kept letting go of my body and letting the sounds of the falling rain envelop me and letting my brain go loose… and immediately some thought would come to me about a blog post to write or something that needed noting down, so I’d sigh and sit up and turn on the light and grab my notebook and write the thought out - because experience says you’ve always forgotten by the morning, and the idea has gone forever, and this is the job, whether you want it to be or not. And so I’d get it down, close the notebook, turn off the light, lie back down, listen to the rain, feel the weight of my body, close my eyes… and, Phoooosh, another wildly important thought that I knew I had to jot down.

Or, not even wildly important. Most of them end up as nonsense. But you have to plant enough seeds that some of them sprout, and if you refuse to plant the seeds that probably won’t make it you end up with none that make it. So you have to treat each one as if it’s the only thought in the world, be serious about it, give it the room it needs, give it nourishment, dig out enough soil, pop the seed in there and cover it up.

And then you read back the next day and think, What the hell was I on last night?

But you have to do it. You have to do it.

So my brain, I guess enlivened by the God chat, had shaken it’s schema of understanding, and now bits of detritus were floating downstream into my consciousness unbidden, and it was my job to scoop them out and clean off the mud and put them in a safe place for later.

Mixing metaphors there. But I kept thinking of things to write until half six in the morning, is what I’m saying. And then I was up at half nine for work. Yuk yuk yuk.

OK. That was some words. I've done my words. That’s me out. Last of brain’s structure is collapsing, the warp core is flickering, time to crash this bastard into San Francisco and have an anticlimactic fist fight on top of a hovercar, or something.

I’m outtie.

……

Dammit, music. Unnnnn. High Horse, by Kacey Musgraves. She sounds like the cast off from an excised first-draft stanza of Jabberwocky. "All kacey were the musgraves, and the mome raths outgrabe."

The Guardian reckons this is the 18th best song of the year. It’s… not for me. I’m, uhh, not the target demographic. And I’m watching the music video, and I never watch music videos any more, I don’t think I’ve even been on a music channel on TV since about 2007 (or been on a TV, for that matter), and isn’t it just so fucking astonishing that if you want to be a singer, in 2018, and you’re a woman, part of the bargain to get famous is still that you have to strut around in hot pants and little dresses and plunge tops, fluttering your lashes, in full makeup, prancing coquettishly? Maybe it’s because I was expecting this to be Radio 6 music, because I found it on the Guardian, and it's Radio 1 music. But, like, what’s being an objectified acquiescent little plastic doll got to do with singing? When did we conflate using vocal tonality and rhythm as an artform with being an object of titillation for adolescent boys? Oh my God, it can fuck off. That whole music machine can cock the fuck off. I’m going to bed. Good night.

Day 222: Mushy

Short one today. Just home from work, brain gone mushy, did a lot of writing during the day but nothing to put up here yet.

How am I doing? Let’s check in. I’m in that stage, I’ve been in it before, where I feel like crap, but I’m not worried about feeling like crap. I guess I’m depressed, anhedonic, my brain isn’t producing/reacting to healthy amounts of serotonin and dopamine - but that’s fine. I’m busy, and I’m building positive habitual behaviours, and I’m doing doing better at recognising patterns of negative thoughts when they arise, and bringing attention back into the present, and letting the negative thoughts trundle on with the last of their internal energy, and then dissipate, and disappear.

I’m in a good track for writing of late, accepting the roughness and imperfection of what comes out of my head, and not concentrating on the ways I know it doesn’t work, but simply letting what is in there come out, in the form it wants to take, and not sweating the rest.

This is good. This is the way. I must carry on like this.

….

I forgot to do music yesterday. So I’d better find some good music for today. How about… Aluminum or Glass, by Negativland? OK, this isn’t new; I probably came across this a decade ago, but I love it the most. “Heightened reality vignettes” is one of those phrases that just pops into my head at the strangest of times, apropos of nothing, and makes me smile. Song is wry, cynical, intelligent, and oddly rapturous. Aces.

Day 220: Wires

‘Ello. I’ve been writing and reading and watching and thinking a lot today, about Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin, about their lord and saviour Dr Professor Sir Daddy Jordan Peterson… about the alt-right, about the difficulties in holding together a worthwhile yet highly complex system (our fairly liberal democracy) versus the ease in which said highly complex system can be undermined by those seeking simply to destroy (harder to keep many spinning plates in the air and keep the plate spinners focused and fed and happy than to run around tickling under armpits). I’ve been thinking about the kinds of attention we bring to things, and how they, the kinds of attention, actually manifest different realities - or rather manifest inherently different aspects of perhaps the same reality. I’ve been thinking about logic, and the limits of logic, and how often we use logic to justify gut feelings - on abortion, trans rights, hot button topics - that we often come to initially from a level far below logic. How logic can at times be a perspicacious tool to cut through our prejudices, and at others simply a way of reinforcing prejudice, depending how we wield the tool, whether we turn it on ourselves, or use it only to dismantle our adversaries, and keep a strange blind spot for our own assumptions, à la Steven Crowder.

So I’ve been thinking about a lot, but it’s all rough and nebulous at the moment, so I won’t talk about it anymore today.

I’ve also been introducing Mike to The Wire, which show is, quelle surprise, one of my favourites of all time. Watching early episodes back I’m again thrilled by the complex clockwork world David Simon et al have created, a world of hierarchies and structures, of police departments and judicial systems and newspapers and political networks, and of the parallel and often times more brutal, often more direct, equally as valid organisations of the streets.

But also how this is not a cold, mechanical world Simon has constructed. Talking of types of attention and ways of manifesting reality - there’s an essential humanity to The Wire, an inherent compassion, used to populate these opposing structures with real people, with characters who, from the most minor to the most major, from the lowliest corner boy “sucking on a 40, yelling ‘5-0’” to the highest police commissioner, are all imbued with genuine life. Simon sees people. He has a keen eye for order and arrangement and framework, and it is often this that gives the show its dizzying verisimilitude, but underpinning this ordering of discrete information is a deep and profound well of empathy, of understanding, of love. The Wire, as Simon has often stated, is a Greek tragedy of the modern American city - and it can only be such because he cares so much.

If you have not yet watched it I would urge you to do so. Easy-going? No. But over the course of its five seasons I unquestionably became a deeper, wiser, better person. Get to it.

……

OK. Music. Let’s go with… Love, by Lana Del Ray. I’ve never sought Lana Del Ray out. This came on on Spotify playlist, and I found myself digging it. Her voice is really sensuous, no? Voluptuous, even. It’s like drowning in a tempestuous ocean of 80% cocoa fairtrade dark chocolate. Silken and sunless and purring with an edge of danger. I likes.

Day 219: Failing forwards

Home from work. What do I feel like inside? I feel like dust and emptiness and garbage. And what does that feel like? Mmmmmm. It feels horrible. OK, and what does that “horrible” feel like? … Uhhhnnnn. Hmmm. Well, no, I feel... panic and stress and exhaustion, I guess. Why panic? Because I haven’t done a blog post and it’s so late and I need to get to bed and I’ll stay up and ruin tomorrow trying to write something tonight that no one will read anyway and I’m grinding myself to the bone and this isn’t healthy and I can’t sustain it…

OK. Woosh. So… why not just end the blog post here then, I’ve done a few words, why not post it up and go to bed?

Because I have a responsibility, and I have to try, even though I’m not living up to it.

Is that the panic? Maybe. That I’m striving so hard to produce so little of worth. That I’m struggling and kicking so hard just to keep from drowning, and barely any energy can go into, like… what I am able to shout when my mouth is above the surface of the water. The writing is so…

No. I’m not sure that’s true.

I don’t want to post up what little I’ve got and go to bed because… because I don’t want to fail. I don’t want to be a failure. I don’t want to be seen as a failure. I want to write until I have something impressive to show for myself.

Ung, that’s so ugly. But it is true. What did Eugene Gendlin say?

“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.”

I’m afraid of failure. I’m terrified of failure. Maybe to such an extent that it is getting in the way of my ability to be successful.

So... why not try failing, on purpose, with a glad heart, and see what happens? Just write a really crappy post, the crappiest, the loosest, shortest...

… Although, well... In teasing out that idea I’ve now written a respectable amount… and I’ve got the Gendlin quote in there, that added some intellectual cachet. And I guess the whole striving-to-fail idea is a kind of cutting of the Gordian Knot, which isn't very much like failure at all.

Wait. Am I feeling disparaged by that? By the fact that even my attempt to fail is failing? Jeez. Self-defeating much? If the post is a success then it’s a success, and that’s great. And if it’s a failure than I get to fail on purpose, and explore my fears, and conquer them, and that’s great.

Everything is great!

Phew. Glad I got that sorted out.

......

Music? Music. Uhh. Singularity, by Jon Hopkins. I love Hopkins’ 2013 album Immunity, full of glitchy and driving and transcendent ambient-techno wonders. This new single… Yeah. I like it. I prefer the opening moments, brooding and oppressive, to where it ends up. Maybe less insistent than the stuff on Immunity, but maybe it’s the kind of thing best reserved for a full album coming through your headphones as you pace unknown city streets in the depths of night, as opposed to highlighting one song as a video on YouTube. I shall listen more.

Day 218: Fish soup

An unfortunate upshot of my recent blogging about YouTube was the discovery of the videos of Steven Crowder. In case you don't know, and I hope you don't, Crowder is a staunchly right-wing YouTube personality and ex-Fox News presenter who has risen to prominence through his vociferous video put downs of liberals, social justice warriors, cucks, whatever those people call anyone on the left. Videos titled “Crowder dismantles two idiot feminists!!!” - that kind of thing.

Yeah.

The videos that brought him to my attention were his series Change My Mind, where he rocks up at college campuses, sets up tables displaying inflammatory statements such as “Rape Culture is a Myth” or "There are only two genders", and then asks passers-by to “change his mind.”

The purpose of the videos is ostensibly to open debate, to allow for freeform conversations between people of differing views, and to see whether any common ground can be reached.

I say ostensibly, because it’s all a ruse. In fact Crowder - whose name, by the way, is only one letter away from Chowder, which, incidentally, is a dish I find to be pungent, distasteful, yet inherently lacking in substance - has no intention of having his mind changed, and nor is there a likelihood of that happening. He prepares and researches extensively before showing up, makes himself certain of the beats surrounding his axiomatic premise - such as that murder is wrong, therefore abortion is wrong - memorises all of the common arguments against this premise, along with rebuttals to them, finds data to support his positions - preps himself as much as possible, and then unleashes himself, as an experienced presenter familiar with performing in front of large crowds, upon stuttering and nervous college kids who haven’t yet fully developed their opinions.

The point of the videos is to assert his dominance, to make liberals look inherently foolish and illogical, and to entertain his army of obsequious fans. An army, by the way, that, despite Chowder at least paying lip service to civility, drown his videos in comments of the most repugnant bile, an endless, utterly boring stream of invective; transphobic, homophobic, racist, just really shitty stuff. Chowder I think would claim to not speak for these people, while refusing to denounce them, saying they go too far but their anger at left-wing idiocy is warranted. I don’t know, I don’t want to put words in his mouth. That’s the impression I get.

But back to the videos themselves. There is actually plenty to give you pause for thought. Chowder is bright, he has thought a lot about his positions, you have to get up early, and be lightning fast, to go up against him. He makes a few points that made me see the fallacies in my own arguments.

Which is fine. I genuinely appreciate having my beliefs tested. Opposing views hammer against the hulls of your beliefs, and either the beliefs weather the blows, in which case you have renewed faith in them, or they become punctured by too many holes, let in too much water, and then you get to let them sink and go find a bigger boat.

I don’t have a problem with having my mind changed. It can be hard, sure, to detach your beliefs from your ego, from your sense of self, but it is one of the best lessons you can be taught. Be open to it. Let whatever is old and illogical die and fall away, and whatever is useful develop and grow. Opinions evolve. This is not weakness. It is life.

Thing is, I don’t get the impression Chowder is much into this. For us socialist lefties? Sure. For himself? Not so much. He has his ulterior motive, and when this is in danger, when he's not getting the results he wants, I've seen him steer the conversation back to entrapping his victims, or even to saying he's getting nowhere with them and forcing them to leave.

His stunts with Change My Mind feel like… what? Like a semi-pro boxer setting up a ring on the high street and goading members of the public to come in with him as a way to get some exercise, and then beating the shit out of them. Is he a good boxer? Not particularly. Is he better than someone off the street who’s had no training and doesn’t know how to move their feet and hasn't even stretched today? Of course.

For the show to be what it purports Chowder should announce to the campus that he’s coming, what it is he’s going to be talking about, and what his premise will be, thus affording his opponents the same ability to research and construct arguments that he affords himself. To not do that is cowardly, and cheapens the entire show.

What's worse, Chowder frequently confuses the fact that he's allowed to say whatever he wants with the question of whether he should. Does he have the right to go onto a campus and loudly proclaim to women, many of whom admit to him that they themselves have been raped, that there's no such thing as rape culture? Yes, he has that right. Is it an appallingly cruel move? For sure. He frequently mocks the idea of being "triggered", yet either he doesn't understand how post-traumatic stress works - in which case he's a fool - or he doesn't care that his arguments are literally harming people afresh, making them re-experience their trauma as if it was happening right then - in which case he's the worst human being imaginable.

There’s so much more I want to say. I’ll say it another time.

For now: music. Let’s go with… Transgender Dysphoria Blues by Against Me! 

"Your tells are so obvious,
Shoulders too broad for a girl.
It keeps you reminded,
Helps you remember where you come from.

You want them to notice,
The ragged ends of your summer dress.
You want them to see you
Like they see every other girl.
They just see a faggot.
They'll hold their breath not to catch the sick."

Laura Jane Grace's pained anthem is everything punk rock should be. Soulful, scrappy, righteous, tearing itself apart with fury. The best refutation to the miserly small-minded thinking of alt-right Youtubers that I can imagine, argued not with bar charts and secondary school logic, but with the primal immediacy of music itself - an immediacy that dives below intellect and touches us on a level far more profound than that linear re-presentation of reality can comprehend. Music isn't an after-the-fact attempt to measure reality, like intellect; music is reality. 

What does this reality say? Fuck you, Steven Chowder, you stinky fish soup cunt. That's what.

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.

Day 170: Solemn

Home from a quiet Sunday close, a night like any other, unremarkable, routine, dull. In my room now listening to chillhop, my room a tiny speck of blazing light on the shores of the vast dark cosmos, my computer monitor bleeding coruscating light, the lo-fi vibes drifting gently, my desk cluttered, my clothes scattered, the darkest dark waves outside the window. One planet alone, winking into nothing. Are there other souls out there on other planets, in other realities, sat mushed against rainslicked windows, gazing out, dreaming of more?

This is the kind of evening that used to be made for whisky. Thick rimmed tumbler, scolding pleasure, the biting amber flames warming all the way down. The romance, the nostalgia, the promise of more than could ever be delivered. And it never was delivered, that sadness when you felt you had peaked and the wave had crashed back and you had never quite got there. But in that moment, with the spirit flowing, the bottle still weighty, the edges softly rounded, you could have sworn there, just for an instant, that you were close, that for a heartbeat you'd been running parallel, that your stream was beside the universal, that you could have reached out your hand and touched eternity. But now it was over and you were still corporeal and your goopy human bones were aching with the beginnings of hangover, and there was nothing to be felt but soil and matter and silt. And on, to the next time.

None of that tonight. Mug of black tea and posting on my blog (though I don't feel like it, though the words aren't alive like I want them to be), and then sober sleep ready for the next day. No making a beast of myself to forget the pain of being a man. Just working solemnly, quietly, to make being a man a touch less painful.

By the smallest of degrees I think it is working.