Day 39: Small-talk

Mike and I are in the pub after the Regular Features show. We've made some awkward small-talk with the hosts, and are now lurking by the bar being weird. There's a woman beside us standing by herself, but not by herself like I'd be standing by myself, drowning in anxiety, feeling blood pumping in my head and a heaviness in all my limbs. This woman is just leaning there looking relaxed. I assume she's either a space alien unconcerned with human social mores, or she's Friends with the Band. The band, in this case, being four games-journo types who do a comedy podcast rooted in nerd culture.

The woman turns to us and starts talking. I'm not sure her exact opening gambit. She's just all of a sudden in a conversation with us.

Mike and I reply for a bit, trying to seem normal. After a while the conversation inevitably, as this is the live performance of a podcast that we are currently attending, turns towards podcasts.

"What other podcasts do you guys listen to?" the woman asks.

"Oh, you know," we stammer. "Just, ooh. Loads. umm. Where to even begin? Just all the usual ones."

Mike manages to conjure up a podcast he has in fact been listening to, which the woman obviously knows, and they talk about that for a while. It's something to do with the radio show of a fictional town filled with Lovecraftian goings-on, with fake adverts and musical interludes by hip unsigned bands. It sounds amazing. I hate Mike.

The conversation falters, and Mike turns to me. "This guy listens to the more serious podcasts though."

Thanks, mate.

"Oh, yeah," I say. "I mean--"

--At this point I've got two choices. I either tell the truth, which is that I don't know anything at all about podcasts, though I've been listening to Regular Features for a long time. That I've heard the odd gaming podcast before, and recently I've listened to a few others in an effort to broaden my horizons, but really I don't know anything, but that's fine, that's just who I am, and maybe this woman could point me towards some interesting ones to try out, if she knows her stuff...

... Or I could -- and do -- say: "Well, most recently I've been into the Jon Ronson -- do you know Jon Ronson? He's an excellent journalist and writer and presenter, he did the Psychopath Test and the Men Who Stare at Goats and things -- well I've been listening to his series called the Butterfly Effect, which is about pornography, but it's not salacious at all, in fact the point he makes early on is that if you take the sexually-explicit content out of it the story quickly becomes very strange, and interesting, and funny, and moving. It's an exceptional piece of work, you should really give it a listen."

I mean that's mostly what I say. In reality there's more stuttering and sweating.

"That sounds great," the woman says. "What else have you been listening to?"

Fuck. I literally know three other podcasts. One is a daily bulletin of the New York Time's most salient story that day, which will make me sound like an unmitigated prick if I bring that up right after I just used the word "salacious" in a sentence. The second is the Adam Buxton podcast, which everyone in the world has heard of. The third, and most appealing option, is a show that keeps watch on President Trump and all the batshit crazy schemes he's been up to. This is probably the one with the most hipster cachet (just), which is obviously what I'm after, but name-checking it would have the following issues: I've only listened to half of one episode and couldn't say anything about it, I don't actually remember the podcast's name, and I heard about it through an interview with Jon Ronson, on the Adam Buxton podcast, which if these strands all came to light would show the pathetic fragility of this house of cards I'm attempting to build.

Basically I listened to one episode of a famous podcast, and this is the nexus from which all my paltry knowledge springs.

Luckily, at this moment we are interrupted by the woman's partner returning from elsewhere -- turns out the woman wasn't alone after all -- and after introductions and whatnot the conversational initiative falls naturally to me, and so I say, "But what podcasts do you guys listen to?" and then I just nod sagely and pretend that each one is the singularly overlooked fish to have slipped through the otherwise tight net of my vast and comprehensive knowledge.

And then the woman wants to go spontaneously be in conversations with the hosts, and so she does, and Mike and I have escaped. We look at each other sheepishly and shrug.

- - -

Why am I like this? Why do I try so hard to trick people into liking me? Why not just accept that who I am is good enough, that if I'm always aiming to be the person I assume others want me to be I'll never end up as anything but a rapidly cracking shell? That all anyone truly wants in a conversation is a genuine human being, flawed and imperfect like themselves, and that Hannah (which was this woman's name) was I'm sure nervous in her own way and drinking a little too much wine and worrying about making a good impression, and I would have made her feel a lot more comfortable by letting go of my dumb ego and being interested in her, appreciative of her, rather than trapped in my boring skull bombarded by ricocheting thoughts all focused on my own tiny unimportant self.

I mean we're just all going to fucking die. It does not matter. Not any of it. So why are we like this? I'm asking you. Why?

Day 38: Cracks

Grey streets repeating in morning mist. Turn offs to Leicester, Mansfield, Nottingham, Chesterfield, falling into uneasy sleep coiling through back roads in midnight towns and waking up to more roads, not knowing if the same or a different town. The cruelty of coach journeys in the dead of night. Not asleep, not awake, beset by all the insecurities of life. Neck twisted in headrest, one trainered foot wedged between wall and seat.

Pulling into the peeling sheds of Sheffield Coach Station sometime after four, rubbing bleary eyes, stumbling down steps onto cold concrete of morning. Grasping for phone; a surge on Uber, walking windswept streets waiting for prices to fall as in cardboard corners the homeless slumber on.

And finally a driver, middle-aged, sweet smelling skin and water bottle rolling on hoovered mats and incongruous dance music pulsing out. The car winds up the hill into morning as mind stretches blank against the window's waiting pane.

Key under pot left by Fran and up the stairs she's snapped covers cleanly over a tidy bed. Hearts scooped in reflections on dusty mirrors, whispered notes folded onto pillows, this is a giving form of love I struggle to repay. Old hoary insides splinter at the touch of gentle kisses, for so long know only to harden as cold winds lash towards the cracks.

But I'm trying, trying, and as lids touch in the centre and the world falls inwards maybe there's still something within the fractured wood beating softly to a rhythm of its own.

Day 37: That London

00:07, on the coach home from London. Mike is listening to music on his tablet beside me. He's on the way to drunk and in high spirits. I'm sober and feeling a bit goopy.

We've been to watch a live performance of a podcast we both listen to, called Regular Features, which is a collection of mostly ex and current games journalists making each other laugh with a combination of high brow and scatological humour. It has a small core listenership, of mostly women with coloured hair and shuffling men in check shirts carrying satchels, and obviously Mike and I love it.

We got the coach down at 10am, a torturous journey of safety alarms continuously drilling into our brains and toilets not being flushed and splashing everywhere when we turned a corner. So, every National Express journey ever then.

We spent the day shuffling around London with out check shirts and satchels, eating brioche and being shat on by geese. Turns out cotton wool is not the best cleaning material with which to remove bird excrement from your suede trainers (sorry Mike).

The show itself was great, but very intimate, and I felt nervous. I get sweaty and terrified in performance things with a small audience. I think it's partly my mirror neurons firing with sympathetic anxiety for the performers, and partly that there's more chance of my own involvement in the show.

Case in point: Gav Murphy started proceedings asking if it was anyone's first time, and I put my hand up. He asked what I was looking forward to most, and I felt a cavernous space opening before me, an absolute emptying of my mind, a desire to run a million miles away. I muttered something about "All of it," to which Gav replied that I hadn't given him much to work with there. They moved on. I sat for the next ten minutes just utterly despising myself.

But the show was funny. Joe's feature was about a flat-Earther he'd run into on a stag do. Steve's was about Westworld sex robots. Gav did a bit about infiltrating a coal mining remembrance group on Facebook. And Log, who I half love and half am in love with, got the group to perform a smutty panto ostensibly written by Jim Davidson as Log himself narrated from the point of view of Davidson as if providing DVD commentary, a broken man looking for catharsis in a world he couldn't comprehend. It was great.

Afterwards Mike and I hid in the corner of the pub below the theatre and watched the performers coming down to the bar. We were about to skulk off, too shy to interact - - literally we were standing up to go -- when I caught the eye of Gav turning towards me, and we did a little nod at each other, and then next moment we were shaking hands and he and Joe were thanking us for coming and asking how we'd liked it. Then they were amazed, and a little apologetic, to find we'd come all the way from Sheffield to see them. And then we were in the group chatting to people, albeit awkwardly.

We met a lovely girl with coloured hair called Hannah, and her partner, whose name I forget, and the four performers, who were all sweet. Gav was kind and shy in person. Joe and Steve were clever and confident, and Log was soft and lovely and brilliant, exactly as I'd imagined. They were all disarming.

But I don't know. There's something about seeing in the flesh the people that you aspire to be that can, if you have low self-esteem, make you feel really shitty. Like, they all write so well, and work or worked for amazing publications, and are so intelligent and dedicated and brave. And then here's little old me.

I've been feeling I've been doing well writing this blog, but next to these guys it's all just rubbish. 

But maybe it's about that thing of not trying to be someone else. Work really hard and you might just about be able to be yourself. So why not focus on that, and let other people focus on being themselves. 

I like writing this little blog. It's better for me than not writing it. Beyond that, who cares? It'll go wherever it's meant to go.

It's so late now and I can't write any more words. I'm going to get some sleep on the coach now. Until tomorrow. 

Day 36: Taking stock

I've been feeling down on myself today -- will there ever be a day when I'm not? -- so I think I should just pause right here and take stock.

I've been sober for 36 days. That's incredible. Not a drop of alcohol. I've not had anything to drink in all that time. I've saved myself from so many expensive nights out, so many wretched hangovers, from groggy days wasted in bed drowning in self-loathing getting nothing done and then as the light fades popping the lids off a few chilled bottles to get over that dripping sadness, thus setting in motion the whole process once again.

But no. Instead I've felt all the negative feelings -- and I've felt them a lot -- and just forced myself to carry on through them. And slowly, I think, I've begun to change the habits of over half a lifetime.

And I've been blogging daily for 36 days. Sometimes I've felt like I was flying, and felt touches of the enthusiasm and excitement that I used to feel for writing, and I've produced pieces that I've loved. Most days I've had to struggle to force something out, and it's not been great, but I've done it, every day, and I think I'm getting better at accepting that and moving on. And not putting all my sense of self in the work, of letting whatever is in my brain come out, and knowing that sometimes it'll be nothing, occasionally it'll be something. This is still such a struggle for me, but it's getting easier. I know it is.

And regardless of results, I've come and done the work every single day. I saw Margaret Atwood on Twitter recently replying to a woman saying she'd wanted to be a writer for 49 years and still wasn't one. Margaret Atwood said this: "If you are writing things you are a writer."

For a long time I wasn't writing things. Now I am writing things. They're not all great. But I am proud of every one.

Anyway, I have a girlfriend on my futon waiting patiently for me to finish this so we can watch trash TV together and eat orange chocolate and get an early night, so no offence, but I'm going to go do that instead of this.

I'm off to London all of tomorrow to watch a live performance of a comedy podcast, so I'll probably just do another short update on the bus home.

But I will do it. And I'll be proud.

Day 35: How not to cook an aubergine

I'm feeling low and down on myself and crappy after work, like the writing is all lame, I'm wasting my time here, everything is a waste of time, just want to do nothing -- so to hell with that voice, I'm going to set myself a target of going to the shops for some real food and cooking it and writing about it and then going to bed.

I've been eating badly recently. Had very little time between working and getting the blog posts done, and I've let my diet slip. Been ordering takeaways, eating at work, buying ready meals, soups, snacks, whatever requires the least time and effort. Nuke something in the microwave, eat it in front of my PC screen, get back to writing.

This can't always be helped. But I've got the night off tonight and I really should cook a decent meal for once.

The recipe

I write out my the plan in my Google Docs, feel instantly better, and so go play a level of Rayman Legends on my Playstation to reward myself. Then I finish the level and it's 20:00 and I'm falling asleep at my desk, and, dammit, can't I just order Domino's?

No! Let's do this!

I pick pretty much the first veggie recipe I find on Google that isn't curry or chilli or risotto, because I make those all the time, and so end up with a root vegetable, smoked aubergine and walnut ragoût.

I don't know what a ragoût is, but it sounds swish. I reckon I can find most of the ingredients in my local Sainsbury's. Fine. Good. Go.

I walk out into the warm evening air and up to the high street and into Sainsbury's. I get sweet potato, butternut squash, carrots, onion, cherry tomatoes, aubergine, walnuts, lemon. I can't find fenugreek seeds, and I don't even look for pomegranate molasses -- what the hell are pomegranate molasses? -- and I sack off the goats cheese because it tastes like goats, which is to say repulsive. There should be some alternative in the fridge. The recipe asks for mint and parsley, but fresh basil in the best I can do. Whatever. Basil is fine. I'm done.

I spend £7.40, which isn't bad to say the meal should stretch to two or three days. Shopping is much cheaper when you're not buying four bottles of craft beer every time you go.

The cooking

Back home and it's 20:44 and my eyes are drooping. Gotta get this done.

I stare down at the ingredients. Old impenetrable butternut squash stares back up at me. Do I have the energy to peel all these bastards and cook them all up? I don't. I don't know what I'm doing. I feel crap.

Ung, just get to work. Chop Mr Onion and Mr Garlic, they're nice easy fellas, you know where you stand with them. Fry them up with cumin seeds and ground turmeric. Good stuff. Now get going with the big daddy veg. Can't find a peeler so hack at the skin with a knife.

My hand slips chopping the carrots and I slice open my finger. I bleed everywhere.

Life is so hard when you're suffering with depression. You get so fragile. The tiniest setbacks feel gargantuan. It's so much effort just to fight to keep your head above the water, and any wave, even one that mentally healthy people would ride with ease, feels like it will drown you.

I've cut my finger, and I look down at the carrots and they're chopped too small, the recipe said to do 2cm cubes and I've done thin quarter slices. Why have I done that? They're going to cook wrong. And the recipe doesn't say whether to halve the cherry tomatoes or put them in whole or what. I don't know how to do any of this. I'm so tired. I want to lie on the kitchen floor and cry.

But I push through. I plaster my finger. Finish the chopping. Check a similar recipe that contains tomatoes, decide to halve mine. Put everything to simmer. Add some garam masala, because why not?

I crumble the walnuts and dry roast them. I char an aubergine over an open flame on the hob. The recipe doesn't really explain this, but I mean it's a vegetable and some fire, how complicated can it be?

Except when the skin seems sufficiently crisped I cut it open lengthways... and it's still rock hard inside. I'm supposed to be able to spoon out the soft smoky flesh, but there's no way that's happening. Did I do it wrong? Just not long enough?

I put it back under the flame, but now moisture is escaping from the slit I made in the skin, hissing and dripping all over the hob. Eeeee. Life.

I keep flaming the bugger, and eventually, about six hours later, the flesh does finally become soft enough to scrape out, though the skin is burnt so much I'm worried it's going to set alight.

I scoop the aubergine guts into the food processor along with the walnuts, lemon, and... there's no soft cheese. Bugger. I bung some cheddar in, the hell with it, and a few tablespoons of water, zhuzh it up, spoon the sticky paste into the stew, add salt and pepper. I wash up, chop basil, throw that in. I'm about done.

I've made a pan of vomit. It literally looks like puke. It is thick and lumpy and beige, oh-so-beige. It smells pungent. It's a disaster.

The eating

Resigned to my failure, I splodge a few ladlesful into a bowl and sprinkle some more basil on top sadly -- because why not tie a bow round my turd? I butter some rolls and take the meal upstairs to my room.

I nibble a forkful tentatively.

It's... actually not that bad. I try some more. It's... well... it's banging!

It's banging. A genuine success. The toasted notes of the walnuts combine with the gentle spices and the comparatively sweeter vegetables nicely. The tomatoes add a plump pep to the dish while the lemon cuts through the nutty thickness. The basil softens and lifts.

OK, it's not going to win awards, but it's a decent meal with loads going on, it's fairly well balanced, and it's healthy and hearty. And, crucially, it's not a bowl of vomit.

I'm taking that as a victory. Imperfect, but much better than not doing it. Much like this blog. And life in general, I guess.

Day 34: Do Androids Dream of Cardboard Glasses?

Eesh. I've burnt myself out. Couldn't get up until 1pm today, just could not do it, and when I did my entire brain felt like some kind of horrendous fat slab of ham that had been left out rotting in the sun all day. So I took some paracetamol and codeine and disappeared into virtual reality.

A beer rep brought us a goodie bag of pins and bar blades and whatnot yesterday, including this Google Cardboard-style VR headset into which you slot your phone. The idea was to scan a QR code and use the headset to go on a virtual tour of the company's brewery -- but as a long-term gamer and technology enthusiast I saw it as my responsibility to liberate the device and investigate what the world of VR has to offer.

Here are the loose impressions that my fat ham head was able to discern thus far:

Google Cardboard Demos:

So here's the premise. You download the Google Cardboard app onto your phone, launch it, then slip your phone into the headset, which is just a cardboard case with two magnifying lenses glued inside. Compatible apps and videos split your phone screen into two images, identical but for showing the scene from subtly different perspectives, which tricks your brain when looking through the lenses into combing the images into one 3D picture. Then add tracking of your head's movements by the app, and automatic adjustment of the in-game camera accordingly, and it's as if you were in the world in the headset, looking out on a virtual landscape existing around you.

The demos that come installed with the Cardboard app are very limited, but provide a pleasing introduction to the form. There's a polygonal arctic tundra environment in which you can chill with a fox and fly with some seagulls and watch a whale breaking the sea's surface and crashing back down. There's a narrated tour of the Palace of Versailles. And then you can load Google Earth -- which, let me tell you, when you get to be a boundless celestial god swooping around your home planet just as the codeine in your system begins to kick in, becomes quite the ride.

I flew around New York like Spider-Man, some mountains somewhere by accident, then went to my mum's house and looked down from the air at the limits of my childhood adventures spread below me: the path to my friend's where we'd sit on the Sega dreaming of secret missions, the back garden with the tyre swing and the drop down to the woods in which we'd play soldiers, the quiet suburban road that stood in for loading bays, football pitches, Dunya grounds. I remembered the campaigns, the victories, the feuds and the tears; saw us as children soaring with our arms out as the afternoon stretched before us... It was strange, the enclosure of the glasses, the transportation to another place set my imagination alight. It was nice.

Lanterns:

A pleasant little retreat to a Japanese lakefront, on which you stand and look around at trees, hills, sky, water, listen to the lapping of the stream, watch joyous paper lanterns bob downriver and float off serenely into the air. Nothing much to it, but it's quiet, calming and lovely. Meditative is the word used most often when describing such pieces, and this one lives up to the term.

Minos Skyfighter VR:

But I mean who doesn't want to fly in a spaceship blasting enemy ships with your lasers? Everyone wants that. Sadly, despite looking fantastic, this game is a bit naff. The only interaction on the headset is a button on top that clicks a pressure pad onto the screen, so all apps have to be designed to control with a single screen press. In this one your viewpoint is locked to the front of the windshield, so looking around steers the ship, which means you can't peer about your cockpit to look at the gearstick and furry dice and all. It sounds insignificant, but that stuff really adds to the sense of actually being in the simulated location.

Might function better with a wireless controller, but I couldn't get mine to work so who knows? The game itself is a series of basic dogfights -- feedback is flat and effects are basic and there's a limp, weightless feel to it all: crash into an enemy vessel and you both just pause there, trapped together in space, until some momentum squeezes you free.

Androids Dream:

My favourite thing in VR so far. A short tour of a Blade Runner-inspired cityscape, it opens with you reclining in the passenger seat of a cruising hover car, looking out at flaming gas vents, grandiose ziggurats and towering neon billboards as a Vangelis-like score builds around you and dials flicker and thrum inside the cockpit. Unlike Minos, here your craft is ostensibly piloted by an Edward James Olmosy dude beside you, leaving you free to glance about inside the car. If you're sitting on a chair while you play, and you look down at your virtual legs in the car's seat, the sensation really is uncanny. There's a real presence to it all, you want to reach out and touch the controls, the chipped windscreen, your pilot's immaculate moustache. The whole thing lasts about two minutes, and I've sat through it ten times so far. Could only be bettered by the pilot being more animated: if he turned to you as you turned to him and nodded and asked if you know what a turtle is -- man, I'd be so happy I'd wee.

Conclusions:

Yeah, it's a tricky one, VR. For the full experience you need to invest thousands in a true headset, a juggernaut PC to run it off, sensor bars, motion controllers... and it all needs setting up, configuring, just so you can spend an evening twisting yourself in cables in your bedroom bumping into your bookcase. The costs are too prohibitive for this high-end experience to make it mainstream, meaning there's not enough demand for it to be worth the studios investing in serious applications, and you're left with a whole bunch of ridiculously expensive tech demos and virtual tours.

Then down at the other end here you've got the cardboard headsets that anyone can afford, powered by phones that we all have already, with no set up, no fumbling with wires -- except a cheap pair of cardboard glasses are uncomfortable to wear (I've cut and bruised my nose badly from strapping the thing to my face all today), the lenses are low-quality, you get light spilling in round all the edges, and the phones that process the data are underpowered, meaning low-poly, poorly-textured cheap and cheerful applications, fun as a gimmick but with little lasting appeal.

And yet you try on a virtual reality headset yourself, even one made of cardboard, and you're instantly transported. You're in another world. It really exists, not as a flat picture on a screen but a tangible reality built around you, close enough to reach out and touch.

Give it a few years, perhaps, when we've got feather-light headsets made of nano-fabrics with 16k displays in each eyepiece, running wirelessly and powered by chips in our skulls, altruistically issued to everyone by a benevolent tech giant, and perhaps we'll all be meeting up on glorious alien beaches for simulated cocktails as imaginary fireworks explode across purple heavens... while the outside world crumbles around us from the pollution produced by the manufacture of all this outlandish technology.

Or maybe that has already happened and we're living right now in a virtual reality. That would explain why I constantly require recalibration after extended periods of motion, why I sometimes watch myself take actions as if I was controlled by a third-party uncertain of the conventions of this life, and why my limbs never quite seem to sync with the movements of the rest of my body.

Day 33: Bioluminescence

It's a hot, still night and the cars aren't moving and my tummy is rumbling and I have nothing to get up for tomorrow. I'm going really easy tonight. No pressure tonight. Loved writing that last post, the most alive I've felt in ages, but it took everything to grind it finally out. I'll burn myself out with too much of that. I don't want to burn out I want to be a glowworm in deep caverns converting enzymes from the dirt and matter around me into light. A soft light, a pale light, but one that shows the way down into depths we could never find alone.

Wrote yesterday's piece during the day, then went to work at 5 for the close, back at 1am and sat in my room at the top of the house on the top of the hill with a ginger and lemon tea typing frantically to get the post finished before bed. Hit publish around 4am, a few hours sleep and back up for the pub open this morning. Worked through till 5.

So here I am tonight with a pot of Sri Lankan ready meal and my feet snug in slippers and no forcing anything to come. I will be the branch that doesn't push away its blossom before it's ready nor cling to the blossom when it's time for it to fall. I'll be a copper pot stained in silence. I'll be runner beans saved for winter. I'll be a cabin creaking lonely in the rain.

No energy to make a theme around this, rewrite the post with this as the through-line, but here's something I think I'm learning, in case it's of any use to you: It is so much better to tap meaning in your life from a process than from results. Find something that is worthwhile to do, that sets your bones singing with the holy music, and force yourself to do it over and over, to please no one but the solemn ghosts. When not one other human gives a shit: just go and do it. When they love you and throw parades in your honour: go and do it. Success brings as many difficulties as failure, it's all the bubbling river, there is nothing that matters save the work.

I'm too tired to write. There's nothing coming out. That's fine, I'm happy, I'm going to go and pass out in bed.