Day 129: Test Card F

If my girlfriend has a flaw, and she does, it’s that she doesn’t remember the girl and clown playing noughts and crosses on the tester card on early morning TV.

You know what I mean, right? You’re not insane. You’ve been alive longer than one singular moment. You’re seen a television at least once before. You’re aware of the concept of television.

Back when the channel would go off at night the BBC would show a colour-tester card with a picture of a girl playing noughts and crosses with a clown, and it would be-

-In fact, no. I’m not explaining this. You should know this. You should know.

The thing is, I’ve got such nostalgic memories of that tester card. As a five-year-old kid there’s not much time that is your own. You’re taken places, supervised, taught, watched, talked to, trussed up.

But first thing in the morning there’s a space of time that belongs only to you, and that time yawns and stretches outwards for an eternity. You wake up naturally, fresh, excited, and you creep down the rungs of your bunk bed, careful not to wake your baby sister below, keeping your weight on the mattress until you’re past the second rung, which squeaks, and then you cross the thick carpet and reach up for the handle, turning it gently, not breathing, and then you’re out on the landing, closing the door behind you, and you avoid the creaking floorboards, ease down one step, then the other, then the next, creeping until you’re in the living room, and the door is shut, and you have the television remote, and the whole universe is in your hand.

And soon there will be Transformers, and Thundercats, and Bucky O’Hare; Ghostbusters, Alvin and the Chipmunks, BraveStarr, Duck Tales, Turtles. A million other shows about space battles and magic and lasers and adventure, and each one will be so real, and you’ll go into them all, fall into them, live out the daring, the danger, pump your fists at the theme tunes, dream of getting the toys, and for a few hours, a lifetime to your tiny inchoate self, you will own the world.

But first there are the edutainment programmes, the pre-school programmes, with the counting and the puppets and the unmistakable stench of boredom. No robots here. No glinting steel. But it’s better than nothing, and it’s part of the routine, the pre-match warm-up, the carrot sticks that you know you have to eat that will make the fish fingers and alphabetti spaghetti taste all the sweeter.

But before even that, right now, there is the tester card, immutable and unmoving, its utilitarian greys and adult grids giving way at the corners to blossoming explosions of colour, the central smiling girl and the whimsy of the clown and the game they are playing embodying to your childhood self concepts that you can’t quite name, the virtue of patience, the zen of the present, and a restful excited poise that spreads from inside you until it blankets all things, and all things hum internally with something that is you.

And then the tester card disappears, and the cartoons begin.

And that is why, ladies and gentlemen and others of the jury, my girlfriend is a moron. Thank you. Good night.

Day 128: I love dogs

Another slow, fatiguing day at work, and a short evening, as I have to be in bed soon to be back at work for 7am tomorrow for delivery again. Ah well, once I’m up it’s fine, I like riding the bus down first thing when it’s quiet and the air is clear and the low morning light is piercing in through the windows. And the delivery shouldn’t be too large and there’ll be plenty of time to potter about and eat French pastries and drink coffee before it’s time to set the bar up.

Watched Isle of Dogs with the housemates this evening. I loved it. I mean, Wes Anderson hasn’t made a film yet I’ve not enjoyed. This one doesn’t quite reach the heights of Grand Budapest Hotel; it’s a smaller, more conventional story (although breathtakingly told), but it looks sublime and it’s so funny and the filmmaking is about as confident as you can get. And there are dogs in it, and the dogs are da cutest wess dey are.

It has all the hallmarks of a Wes Anderson film. There’s the deadpan comedy. The mournful 60s vibe to the soundtrack and the beating drums to push forward the narrative. The moments of surreal, incongruous violence, expressed so matter-of-factly. The purposefully cheap looking model shots. The truck shots following along the sideways motion. A poignancy that is all the more affecting for the aloofness of the surrounding tone. Tragedy and comedy held in balance so that each deepens the other. Bit parts for Bill Murray and Ed Norton and Jeff Goldblum and Harvey Keitel.

So Isle of Dogs was classic Wes Anderson, is what I’m saying. It was funny and touching and bizarre, though also utterly conventional, as a Wes Anderson film. The supporting characters could have had more development, and the ending wrapped up a little too easily, but, look, Wes Anderson is a filmmaker who has perfected his approach by now - you know what you’re getting, but you know you will like what you’re getting. He explores similar feelings again and again, through similar cues, but each time the experience is fresh, each time you’re happy returning to his brain for another go round.

Other things I liked: the conceit that the humans spoke Japanese but the dogs spoke English, and how the Japanese was sometimes translated intrinsically, within the world of the film, by an exchange student or whatever, while other times it was left for the audience, and the dogs, to be baffled. I liked the aesthetic, it reminded me of Akira and other 80s anime. I liked how it played with mythical storytelling tropes. I liked how one of the symptoms of the dog flu that had ravaged the canine population of Japan was sneezing, which they used to pull the rug from under serious situations at regular intervals. Right at the apex of an important speech, or in the silence after a pivotal reveal, one of the dogs would let out a cute little sneeze, and then the film would move on, as if it hadn’t happened. I laughed every time.

That’s all I got off the top of my head. Gotta go sleeps now to be bright functional technically alive for the open tomorrow.

Toodles x

Day 127: All Cronenberged up

Oi oi! I’ve got bugger all to offer today. I was at work and it was a horrible Saturday with the pub filled with horrible weekend dad lads and screeching hen parties and ageing rockers for a festival down the road, and I got home at six and slumped in my chair and my feet were throbbing and my head caning and all I could do was sit in front of Zelda and poke about in little glowing tree-lined grottos and collect shiny doo-dads and climb outcrops and paraglide down through the air watching the world tiny and indistinct below me grow larger until it engulfed me, and then I turned the Switch off and went to buy and cook tea and while I was eating I watched an episode of Rick and Morty, the one where they Cronenberg up the world, make a real Cronenberg of it, and I made notes on the episode's story structure, the hero’s journey for each character, how the writers toyed with the format of serial television, some neat metatextual stuff where they both adhere to the rules of the paradigm while satirising and even transcending them.

Rick and Morty can be cloyingly cynical, that cynicism where everything is sneer-worthy and it becomes posture, watching it can be tiring, depressing, even, how it always has to stay one step ahead of the curve, has to prove its superiority with every syllable (maybe I’m just identifying it with some dark parts of myself, there) - but at the same time the show is wicked-funny, bracingly unsentimental, and so au fait with story structure that it regularly provides complete hero journeys for each of its cast members that are as solid as anything else you’ll see on Netflix, while simultaneously mocking the whole process.

I don’t worship the programme - I think unguarded sentiment, simple sincerity, is as important as the obsessive misanthropic intellectualising that Rick and Morty embodies, sometimes more so in these dark times, but I respect the hell out of it. Comedians and storytellers at the top of their game, those guys. Well done.

Blarg, and those are all the words I can squeeze out of my tired old brain tonight. Everything is gooey mush now. A right old Cronenberg. 

Niiiight! x

Day 126: Coaxial cables

Well, I never showered. Mike messaged me as I was necking coffee in my boxers to ask whether I wanted to "do something" before he went to work, so I threw on clothes and walked round, and we drank more coffee, chatted about literature and politics and videogames, mostly videogames, and then we went geocaching, as is Mike's wont, and explored city centre backstreets and parks full of unconscious homeless people and cathedral grounds pocked with bird shit, and we ate sandwiches and made jokes about being depressed, and then Mike went to be a twilight file clerk and I went home, and I took photos on the walk back, got in and edited the photos, sat down to write.

And after putting down some thoughts about Zelda on the Switch I forced myself to engage with the story structure notes, and I remembered that I was stuck on the next bit, it wasn't clear in my head how it flowed, and I didn't know how to explain it in my own post.

Even yesterday this was a sign that I was a moron and a failure, but today I just went away and read up on the stuff that confused me, made notes, thought about the plots of films that overtly follow the hero's journey and how they dealt with the areas that I didn't have straight.

And it's weird. When creativity is stuck just go and work anyway. When the well is dry just do what is necessary to fill it back up. I've learnt that lesson so many times before, and forgotten every time.

And yesterday I would have seen that as a sign that I'm a moron and a failure, but from today's perspective it's fine. Every time I forget, the lesson is easier to pick up again the time after. Every time I fall it becomes easier to rise.

Negative thoughts are strengthened pathways in the brain. Neurons that fire together, synapses that have thickened their coaxial cables though use. Except they're not called coaxial cables, because those are the things that connected your TV to your antenna before Netflix, but it's a word like that, and it's late, so let's just go with it. The thickened synapses are like deep grooves worn into the ground. And when the rain of thought falls that water will run down the grooves easier than it will run across open land. So changing your mind, learning new patterns of thought, is about going down again and again and chiselling out new channels. And at first these new channels are very shallow, and the water quickly starts running back into the old riverbeds. But then you go back and dig the new channels out, and it's less effort than the first time, and you dig them a bit deeper. And then the water goes back into the riverbeds. And then you go down again and dig out the new channels...

I'll forget everything I'm saying here, and I'll feel blue again. I'll lose hope. But I'll keep remembering, and it will get easier. And one day I'll look back and find that I can barely make out those old ossified riverbeds, while the roaring rapids of healthy thought will be connected to a hydroelectric dam powering machines that change the world, and I'll dip the coaxial cables into the water and short-circuit my house and the power will go off and then I'll never be able to have a shower.

See how by referencing my mixing of metaphors and the lack of symmetry in the post I get to both show that I'm aware of those problems and provide a sort of solution to them? Writing is great.

Day 125: The right path

I’ve been drifting of late. Going to work, coming home exhausted, feeling a miserable and stubborn thing inside me refusing to engage with my writing, so I’ve spent the evenings instead watching Netflix or playing Zelda or napping, and as the night has gone on I’ve felt worse and worse, and finally forced myself to write a few paragraphs, and then stayed up too late, got up the next day on four or five hours sleep, repeated the whole process.

Isn’t it odd how we can work out precisely the course of action that will be unhealthy for us - and then go and do it anyway? How sometimes it’s like we’re wanting to punish ourselves, or wanting to prove to everyone what screw ups we are? How when your self-esteem is low enough you simply can’t accept that you are capable of creating value, can't accept that you are worthy of love. It doesn’t compute. You have to sabotage your life until external reality corresponds with the ruined reality inside you, because that makes sense.

Well, I’ve done that for so many years now. I guess it’s time I started working on it. I’ve got a day off tomorrow, and I plan to spend the time showing myself some self-care, doing the things that need to be done - showering rather than staying in the t-shirt I slept in, getting exercise rather than sitting slouched in my office chair all day, changing my sheets, putting on washing, working on that bloody story structure post and the film reviews…

Instead of lowering my external reality to make it line up with how I see myself I can put that energy into raising my inner reality up. Even when I’m tired and my mental health is bad and I’ve got very little to give, I can still treat myself kindly, I can still go ten steps, two steps, half a step in the right direction, rather than curling into a ball and letting myself roll backwards.

Now for step one: get some sleep.

x

Day 124: Episode

Man I didn’t want to get up this morning, left it till the last minute, finally got myself moving and onto a bus in time to make it to work for 7, then sat around for hours waiting for deliveries to turn up. Classic work. The day passed slowly; it was uneventful, ate away at my brain. Didn’t go further into depression but didn’t come out. Just maintained. The time passed. Came home and fell asleep, as I always seem to do after early opens at the moment, woke up not knowing who or what I was, went to buy tea and ate it watching Jiggs play Zelda in the living room. Then came upstairs and watched some Rick and Morty and made notes on story structure. Dan Harmon uses the concept of story circles, which he adapted from Campbell’s hero’s journey, to plot his TV work, so Rick and Morty and Community are great examples of classic story structure to research. Plus because they’re satisfactory stories, and they're funny, they’re easy to watch late into the night when you feel crappy and you’ve got no energy for anything else.

Work again tomorrow morning. Shouldn’t stay up any longer. Might watch one more episode though...

Day 123: Slow

I’m going to finish that story structure stuff one day - that stuff that was only supposed to be preamble to discussing the story structure of Bourne Identity, which was itself only supposed to be a brief scribbled thought before I went on and watched Bourne Ultimatum, which films were only supposed to be easy thrillers to watch and review while I had nothing else right that moment to write about.

Depression always slows everything down, it’s like being encased in mud, your whole being, your thoughts get sluggish, your plans thicken and congeal, even rising from bed takes a decade, a shower takes an aeon, you focus all your energy down into an interminable battle to get one foot in front of the other, to take a single step.

All while a voice is bombarding you with criticism, with self-loathing, telling you how weak you are, how wretched, all the reasons you’ll fail, all the reasons to undo that eternity of struggle and just climb back into bed.

But, hey, considering all that I didn’t do badly today. I got up and showered. I made coffee for me and Jiggs. Chatted with Phace. I spent a few hours preparing a training session about Belgian beer to give to the staff at work, walked the 40 mins down to town, overcame the social anxiety clinging to me like a blanket, gave the training, sat with the staff afterwards and drank coffee while they drank beer, went with them for two-for-Tuesdays burgers at a nearby bar, came home before 10 and watched some filmmaking videos on YouTube, forced myself not to go down into negative thoughts, not to let the depression overtake me.

I reckon that’s pretty good. I’m going to think about how much better that was than it could have been, and take solace in that. Like I said yesterday, things are improving.

And now I’m going to bed because I’m at work for 7am tomorrow for the delivery. Toodles x