Day 174: Process

Post-work curry and card games with the housemates. We played Gloom, which I won by giving my gothic family oozing boils and animal bites and poisoned pies, and then killed them off by losing them on windswept moors and having them torn apart by vicious mobs. Chloe’s family took some dark turns as well, but thankfully I’d brought her beloved pet dog back to life, cured its ills, and then sent it back into a pleasant endless slumber, so she didn’t quite have the negative self-worth points for a victory.

Card games are great!

……

Been thinking about these film and game reviews I’ve been doing here intermittently over the previous months. My usual process when reviewing something would be to take notes for days, weeks, months, to jot down everything that came into my head, explore the thoughts, sometimes make sure I’d covered the main bases - so for a film had I made notes about the look, the themes, the script, the performances, the score? For a videogame what did I think about the mechanics, the visuals, the audio design? I’d write about what I thought the piece was trying to get across, whether it was successful, what other works it reminded me of. Where it fitted in the genre, the landscape.

That’d be the sort of foundations to lay if I was struggling, make sure I had notes on those major points, and I could pretty much build upwards and then lash together the structure of a review from those columns. But more regularly the notes would naturally begin to turn into more coherent writing, into a through-line, and I’d find myself organically working through a first draft.

Writing can be engineering, assembly, but it can be looser art as well - even for prosaic stuff like criticism, review writing. You can plan a plot, lay foundations, build your central pillars, attach floors between them, in an organised, regimented fashion - or you can pull random Lego blocks from your mind and start building and see where your internal desires take you. My process tends to be some combination of the two.

However it happened, though, I’d end up with a first draft. And I’d be full of enthusiasm and energy at this point, feeling like I was making great points, lost in the discovery of the thing.

Then I’d get up the next day (or two weeks later, often as not) and read back what I’d put, and despise every word. What felt so exciting in my head would never have come across on the page. It’d be masked by confusing sentence structure, meandering asides; I’d start a section making one point, and end making another. The bit that sounded so cool in my head would, it’d turn out, be subconsciously stolen from a better writer. I’d have got on my high horse about some failure of the filmmaker or game designer, but with hindsight I’d see I’d mistaken their intention, and my whole argument was invalid. I’d have mixed metaphors. Misused semicolons. Sentences would fizzle into nothing.

So then: despondency, insecurity, certainty of lack of talent.

But I’d try a second draft. And bits would get fixed, but other bits would break. I’d get enthused about something brand new and go off on a thousand-word tangent, and then have to decide whether to ditch the original thrust, or pare down the tangent and find a way to integrate it into the whole. I’d clip the overgrown mixed metaphors, and then build brand new ones.

So it would go, back and forth, wrestling with some thing that was always utterly broken, inherently disappointing, that was never going to work .I’d sit staring at the screen wondering what the hell ever convinced me I had any ability to write. I’d redraft, rewrite, tidy and fix and glue. I’d wonder if whatever was initially living and beating in those first notes had been killed and dessicated and stuffed in the editing, and now shuffled like a corpse. I’d think about abandoning the whole piece, and sometimes actually would.

But often, after a month, a few weeks, a few days, depending how much I was working, how much I was drinking, how good my self-esteem, a finished article would begin to take shape. I’d sense a rhythm that wasn’t there before, a cohesion and … I guess the sense of a gestalt. Something that was not now disparate parts but a living whole. Something that breathed as one. And that would be great, but there’d still be all the polishing. Reading it through repeatedly, working on the musicality, the flow, looking on the synonym section of Dictionary.com, trimming every ounce of fat. Making it ornate and also making it not a word too long. Strong, confident, elegant. This is often the difference between something that’s acceptable and something that shines, and it’s a part of the process I really enjoy. Stick on ambient music, fade out the wider world, get lost in the zone.

And only when all this was done would I send it off or put it up on some blog or other, would I let it be seen.

...Which is why this daily blogging thing is such a departure for me. The process for the reviews and articles on here has been: Oh fuck I’ve got two hours before I go to work, quick, write down anything I can think of, smash out some kind of structure, Christ none of it works, what’s my point here? Uhhh find a point. That’ll do. Tape it together, tear that wobbly bit off, hit publish, done.

And, to be honest, it’s been great. Like, yes, all /this/ I’m writing here is half notes, half mad first-draft. It’s coming straight from my head onto the page and that’s how it stays. But that’s great. It’s not the meticulous full process, but I know I can do that. My problem was doing it more than a few times every six months. I was trapped by the perfectionism, terrified of anyone seeing through the facade.

Yet every day of this blog is through the facade. Some days a miracle happens. But mostly it’s messy and ragged and unfinished.

And what’s the consequence of that?

Nothing. Not a thing. I just get to try loads of pieces, get to develop willpower and dedication, throw out sketches faster than ever before. And I get to work on rediscovering the joy of writing - the joy beneath the finishing, the feedback, the polish, the joy that has nothing to do what other people think, the joy that I had completely lost.

So that’s lovely. I mean, I can’t help get frustrated the days when it doesn’t come together, which I suppose is human nature. And it’s a pain when it’s 2am and I can tell I could write the shit out of a paragraph if I could leave it for an hour and rest and come back, and instead I’ve got to grind out some garbled nonsense and then go to bed disappointed.

But, hey, it’s all experience. And it’s a lot of fun.

And now it’s 2am and I’m done with /this/ garbled nonsense, and ready again for bed. Ta ra x

Day 173: Tears in the snow #2

More fevered late night words about Blade Runner 2049! More! More!

 OK, jeez. All right.

So we know I think this is a film that shouldn’t have been made. But within that there is much in the themes, the tone, the cinematography, in many of the performances, to love.

But there’s an awful lot that’s a frustrating mess, as well.

The plot is not good. It’s paint-by-numbers, derivative, it barely rises above the cliches of the genre. And its engine is so often powered by plot necessity, by cool ideas, by moments, than by character. The characters end up doing implausible things because the plot dictates, rather than the plot being dictated by an exploration of character.

Look at the scene right after Ryan Gosling’s Officer K has discovered, so he believes, that he’s the chosen one, the child born of a replicant, that he is truly alive, and thus has, as he says, “a soul”. The next scene is him returning home - where his holographic girlfriend, Joi, has ordered him a prostitute who she will lay her visual presence on top of so it will feel to K like he’s having sex with Joi, not the sex worker. What the hell is this scene doing here? It doesn’t fit tonally, at all - it’s a heated moment of event and consequence, when we should be given stillness and space to process, along with K, the revelation about his apparent newfound existence, and the ramifications that that will entail.

But the scene is needed from a plotting point of view, so that the sex worker can plant a bug in K’s jacket, so she can follow him later - and maybe because it’s a scene that someone somewhere thought was cool, like a discarded Black Mirror concept - and so there it sits. It tanks the pacing - it’s like a musical composition that right after all the themes mingle and rise and crash, that instead of cutting to silence and then building up slowly, it comes straight in with something unrelated. It utterly ruins the rhythm, the flow - and ultimately the emotional heart of the piece.

This is a film of events - this happens and then this happens, and then that leads to this - rather than of emotions. Apart from the excellent beginning and end it never really rests within its scenes, never sits in them and lets them breathe, lets them develop organically, lugubriously - it’s a film that doesn’t give you space to exist within its world.

It’s too busy trying to tell a story, and it’s a prosaic, pedestrian story at that. There are sins of convenience and coincidence everywhere, subplots that go nowhere, uninteresting side characters, an antagonist in industrialist Niander Wallace who, for all the shots of him submersed in shadow, declaiming biblical-sounding lines (like him from the first film, innit!), is just another dull bad guy, ever monologuing, with ill-defined motivations (he wants the secret of the replicant baby so he can produce replicants faster than he can assemble them, because his slave-labour workforce has taken him to nine worlds, but “a child can count to nine on its fingers” … and so… I guess that is not enough?).

I mean, it all just about works. The film holds itself together. But there’s this feeling of the scriptwriters assembling a wobbling tower, with elements only existing in order to hold up something above, whole floors that are required to be there by the overall structure, but that serve no purpose by themselves. It feels mechanical, something assembled, rather than something grown. The first film, of course, also had moments like this - but it was so clear that the plot was only the bones upon which to hang the meat of the work, the art of it, that it barely mattered. Yes, the plot shunted itself forward with Deckard doing some “zoom and enhance” on a photograph he stumbled across, or finding a barcode on an artificial snake scale that could only come from one location - but when that was just an excuse for some moody noirish staring out of windows as elegiac blues played, who gave a shit?

And then we have Deckard.

Deckard is Blade Runner 2049’s elephant in the crumbling neon cityscape. Someone decided Deckard, the protagonist of the first film, was going to return. Harrison “Pay Me Enough” Ford signed on, and the filmmakers became lumped with an utterly iconic character to whom they were never going to do justice - because how could you? - who wasn’t going to be the protagonist in this film (Harrison “Act for a Buck” Ford only wanted a new loft extension, he wasn’t committing to more than a few scenes), but nevertheless was by his very existence going to pull the emotional weight of the film towards himself when he turned up. Deckard has the gravitational pull of a planet, as does Ford, and it’s hard to know what to do with a story in which all does not revolve around them. As with Star Wars VII, the scriptwriters come up with a workaround, and it suffices, but it’s intrinsically flawed.

There he is, old Deckard, stepping from the shadows, blaster raised (like in the first film, natch), saying things the filmmakers hope are iconic, but which are not iconic. And there’s Ford playing him, making his face do a bit of acting, deploying his expert’s chops, while back behind the eyes there he’s dreaming about that new conservatory he’ll be using the paycheck to build for himself.

And he puts that special-edition futuristic bottle of Johnny Walker - available for sale to coincide with the film’s release - down on the counter with a twist, so the label faces outwards towards us, and sucks that corporate cock, and takes his whore-money all the way to the bank. That damn talented, couldn’t-give-a-shit shill!

I don’t blame him at all. But it’d be a better film without him.

And then, finally, I want to talk about Blade Runner 2049’s trouble with women. Joi, Officer K’s artificial girlfriend, is a doe-eyed, objectified, sexualised, subservient image of feminine perfection, the cute supermodel with the long lashes and foreign accent, doting on the male protagonist and providing for his every need. Now, this is the point of the character, and it’s a rug pulled out from under K - she’s like this because she’s been programmed like this, to keep K mollified; she only tells him he must be the chosen one and that he’s special because her routines make her tell her owner “everything they wish to hear”.

That’s a fine plot point, a good idea, but you can’t get past the fact that the film also gets to shoot the actress singularly with the male gaze, showing her in cute outfits, wearing dresses with no bra in the rain, staring up at K, and by extension us, with fluttering orgasmic eyes, perfect and deferential - at one point slinking naked on all fours, cat-like, porn-like, projected as an advert a hundred feet tall across the rooftops. Yes, this scene is mocking K for his foolishness at believing Joi belonged only to him - showing that she will put out for whoever pays for her package - but this is not exactly female empowerment. Her existence is nothing beyond satisfying him, the revelation being that she in fact satisfies anyone - and for K this is a cold and lonely discovery, but for Joi… well, who cares? She’s not important.

The film takes power from K, but still gives the audience their male power fantasy - and neatly has its cake and eats it too.

There are other moments that leave a sour taste. The salacious stuff with the sex worker, a screenwriter’s wet dream, adding no real meaning to the narrative. The extreme violence perpetrated on the female replicant by Wallace in his introductory scene, traumatic, repugnant, upsetting - and unearned, I think, by the film. It’s shorthand to show how dastardly the villain is, but it’s like it’s deployed in this throwaway manner, shocking as an image but never explored, its consequences unfelt, unburdening itself of responsibility when the responsibility was there.

So that’s all I got tonight. I’m running on fumes now, I don’t think much of this makes any sense, but it’s all good. Got my thoughts down, had fun, found more in the film than I would have done without writing.

Blade Runner, as the Director’s Cut, was a weird and unfathomable poetic dreamworld, sensuous and elegant and esoteric - and Blade Runner 2049 has filmmaking motivations similar to that in some ways, but it is also much more a piece of entertainment, a product, with elements that run counter to the purity of the artistic vision. I wish there was more time spent hanging out with K, exploring how it feels to be a replicant who retires other replicants - getting lost in the mists of this world, going on a journey with the characters, rather than seeing what happens to them. But still, in the face of everything egregious the film could have been, had every right to be, it ends up often affecting, powerful, playing on some of the magic of the original, some from the source novel, and just a little that is all its own.

Day 172: Tears in the snow #1

I've been watching Blade Runner 2049. Actually I watched it yesterday, but then Fran came round and I had no time to sit and compose my thoughts, so I had to write about wild mind monkeys instead. I had fifty different things to do today, but found an hour to sit in a coffee shop and make notes. Now I've got a little time to try to form the thoughts into a blog post. Who knows how coherent or flowing it'll be, but I'll do what I can... [Spoilers ahead, I would imagine]

So Blade Runner 2049 is a film that was not crying out to be made. Fans wanted it, certain executives no doubt wanted it, but artistically there was nothing about the first one that required further exploration. It was perfect and final, open, ambiguous, and anything added to it would necessary detract from the purity of the expression. The theatrical release, in fact, famously mashed the film, with an egregious voice-over narration added to explain the moments better left unspoken, and a tacked-on happy ending that didn't fit with the tone.

The director's cut (and later "final cut") removed all that, and pared the film back to its bolder, more mysterious vision. And there the story should lie.

But now here's a sequel, that through its very existence must take that gorgeous possibility soup of the original's ending, in which opposites exist together, and questions remain thankfully unanswered - is Deckard a replicant? What happens to Rachel? Does Gaff let them live? - a sequel must take this soup and boil it down into one single outcome, create a new canon, and remove all ambiguity. It's like taking a piece of art that you love and saying "I don't care about your interpretation, actually we're telling you that it means /this/." And what they say is just the work of some hip young screenwriters, and is never better than the unlimited potential that froths and swirls in your head.

It happened with Star Wars, both the prequels and sequels, and it's what happens here. Of course, they attempt to retain some ambiguity - the Deckard-replicant question, the most tiresome and uninteresting part of the whole thing, gets nodded and winked and nudged and coughed at, and never properly answered. Which, like, who gives a shit? But other stuff is tied down. Rachel, it is revealed, was programmed with an extended lifespan (like in that cheesy theatrical V.O., which for me ruins the whole fucking point - that we don't have much, but we have this; "it's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?"), and her and Deckard escaped, and she became implausibly pregnant with Deckard's baby, because she was a super special replicant, and Deckard sent them away and went into hiding so none of them were discovered, but then Rachel died in childbirth, and the baby... well the baby drives the plot of the sequel.

The filmmakers work so hard to get this all to hold together, and to use it to carve out space to tell their own story. In many ways they're successful, but, Christ, can you feel the plot straining on its guy ropes, and you never overcome the sense that everyone involved is making the best of something that inherently shouldn't exist.

But, hey, saying all that, you can still watch the original and then turn it off and leave it there. And you can still watch this and see it as its own beast, and keep it separate from that thing you love. And there is much here to admire.

The opening is excellent. Gone, yes, is the sumptuous fiery nightscape that begins the original, but in its place - after the obligatory callback of the close-up of the eye - is a soaring journey over the grey desolate gloom of protein farms and industrial installations stretching into the mists - swallowed by the mists - the structures of a humanity not forging new life from the flames but clinging to the edge of a dying rock in the emptiness of space.

It's bleak, it's low-key, and I love it.

Down from the establishing landscape shots our first intimate moment is of a rubber-gloved hand scooping maggots out of a murky pool. This is life, the film posits: maggots crawling in the murk. Whether human, insect, replicant, or computer AI, life for all of us is the same: cold and lonely and meaningless, yet we cling to it still with everything we possess. We crawl, we know not why, even as our planet fades beneath us, and if pressed we will kill others to keep ourselves alive. Killing in the world of Blade Runner is not savoured, it is repugnant and sad, yet everything does it, when there is no choice.

So it is with Officer K, the replicant protagonist played by Ryan Gosling. He is a Blade Runner, a bounty hunter tasked with tracking down and "retiring" the older models of replicant who were not as obedient as he himself is. He retires them by shooting them with his gun.

Officer K has found an older model in the film's opening - the owner of the gloved hand, a replicant that has been hiding out for twenty years as a protein farmer, played with physicality yet a gentle weariness by Dave Bautista - and Officer K is here to do his job.

He does it. He does not enjoy it. But if it wasn't him it would be someone else, and he would just be killed for not following orders. Such is life.

It's a good scene, with themes from the Philip K. Dick source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, that were less explored in the first Blade Runner film, and it works well through Denis Villeneuve's direction. The cinematography is exquisite, the colour work is affecting, the framing is great, there's superb chiaroscuro, a good rhythm, good sound design, excellent performances, it all works a treat.

Any time the film is exploring this theme, of existence as something filled with pain to which we nevertheless cling, it is strong. There's another related theme about K wanting to be special, to be unique, to be the chosen one, the hero, and then finding it all was a lie and he's no one, he's not the baby that was born, but a replicant made in a lab - and this theme is great as well. We all believe ourselves to be special - we have been the centre of everything we've experienced, after all; the world literally revolves around us - but in truth we're flecks of dust, meaningless maggots - we crawl to stay alive, because that's all we know, and then we die.

Yet beneath the shifting forms of life and death, beneath the almost incessant pain, is there not something shared that binds us together, something deeper to which we are drawn. "Kinship" the murderous Roy Batty cries at the conclusion to the first film, as in his dying moments he reaches out and saves the falling Deckard's life. The story of Blade Runner 2049 ends with Officer K sacrificing himself for another, bleeding out in the snow, alone and unnoticed, yet having for a brief time truly lived.

I am reminded of that classic haiku by the Buddhist poet Issa:

This dewdrop world -
May be a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet...

And now I must leave that there, because I'm in for the delivery at 7am tomorrow, and once again it is past midnight. But I think I'll jot down some more thoughts if I have time tomorrow (though I'm busy until late evening), about the engine of plot, Harrison "Will Act for a Paycheck" Ford, and the film's problem with women.

Until then x

Day 171: Monkey

Oh I don’t want to write tonight. My inner child is throwing a paddy. Fran is over and we’ve eaten Indian takeaway and watched the first four episodes of Fleabag, and now all I want to do is lie in bed and watch more Fleabag and go woozy by the radiator and play on my phone. But I can’t I have to do my writing.

I don’t want to do my writing! I want to march up and down the street banging pots and pans with a wooden spoon. Tra-la, tra-la, boom boom boom. I want to build a den or a treehouse or possibly fly in a hot air balloon. I want to show Fran my curry belly and burp in her face.

But I gots to do my chores. My chores. Stupid chorey chores. Stupid dupid chorey chores.

Writing is tough because you can’t let your inner monkey-kid be in charge, because then you’d do nothing but eat ice cream in your pants and nap through the day. Monkey-kid is a bad project leader. Very disorganised and flakey and unpredictable. Poor time-management skills. Poor self-discipline. Not one for routine.

But he’s also where all the playfulness and curiosity and energy comes from. Without him anything you create would be dry as chipboard. Without him you’d only ever make what you set out to make. There’d be no spontaneity, no exploration, no bizarre midnight tangents. No creativity, in other words.

So you have to find a way to get monkey-kid along for the ride, and to give him space to play, to scamper, but also make sure he knows he’s not running the show.

How do you do that?

I DUNNO.

I spend many days letting monkey-kid lead me off into procrastination and misadventure, and then it’s 1am and I’m forced to scribble down some nonsense and post it to my blog. But I guess at least I’m doing that, which means at least once a day I’m taking control and telling the monkey-kid who’s boss, and yanking him back by the tail every time he tries to slink away. But also you’ve gotta just… indulge him a little. Tell him that he’s not having all his own way, but within your way he can have whatever control he requires. He’s a horse that you’re riding (a monkey and a horse and an inner child? Yeah whatever) and he has to go to the field to which you lead him. But when there he will be allowed to gallop and canter and trot, to let off steam, to be the wild horse that his wild horsey heart desires.

You’re not enslaving the animal within, you’re taking it to places it could never have gone by itself (your human brain can lead that horse around rocks and ravines it couldn’t navigate alone) - and it in turn is helping you.

It’s a relationship, between different elements of the self, and you have to find a way to nourish all the parts.

So I don’t bang pots and pans, I do my chores - but in my chores I get to write about banging pots and pans, and that turns out to be almost the same.

And now the chores are done for one more day and it’s time for Fleabag.

Fleabag is good. Very good. Both me and the monkey-kid approve.

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.

Day 169: Stubborn

Oh hello there. Hello hello. I am very self-conscious right now. I'm finding writing is making me very self-conscious. Well that's just the way it is. Got to put those words down. Got to put up this blog. So write and write and power on through regardless.

I was working today. I was at work. It was... no, let us not talk of it. Afterwards I came home from work, and that was good, except I was tired from the work, and my brain had turned to gravy. But that was also the fault of me staying up till half two last night editing more photos, which I didn't mean to do but then I did it, and then I'd done it and there was nothing I could do. 

Oh well. I've cooked a meal this evening, with actual vegetables, so I'm pleased with that. I've edited more photos. Put photos on Facebook for my family who don't have Instagram to see. I did my Instagram post for work earlier, and I did one for my own page after that. Did a gratitude list. I'm doing this writing now.

Small steps. One foot in front of the other. Don't look down, don't get dizzy, just keep on concentrating a foot ahead. Yes. It's a kind of vertigo I suffer from. Writers' vertigo. As soon as I start writing I feel myself to be dangerously high, and I watch myself writing, turning myself inside out for the world to see, and my head swims and I get wobbly and I panic, and suddenly I can't move forward or go back, I'm paralysed, like stage fright, like the fear at the edge of a cliff.

But I've got over this, in the past, time and time again. I was doing much better with it, then recently I was doing worse, and now I feel myself ready to face the problem again. I'll keep going, and it will get easier, as it always does.

There are things, and if you do these things you can succeed. It's true in anything. In learning the trombone or building a rocket ship or setting up your own meringue business.

For me right now writing is a thin mountain path beside a fiery abyss. Well then I simply focus on my feet, lift one up, find a good spot ahead on the ground, put my foot down, transfer my weight, repeat with the other side. Over and over, and eventually I'm back into bucolic meadows.

If you're struggling with mental health, this is my only advice to you. Find very simple tasks that you can complete, and complete them. Make a plan for how to go to the shops. Lay out the steps for getting through the shower. Create a foolproof guide for getting out of bed.

My mental health is not that bad at the moment. But trying to write, to tread the treacherous journey upwards climbing the mountain of self, has been difficult. There's been a sandstorm of self-consciousness howling at every turn.

But I can still put one foot in front of the other. I can still slowly, stubbornly stumble on.

The storm will abate. It will cease. And until then there is only this. Do the things. Keep on going. Repeat and repeat and repeat.

I hope that whatever your things are you are able to find the strength to do them, and that you are able to carry on.

Day 168: Triviality

My leg is itchy. I have an itchy leg. The computer’s fan is whirring. The traffic is going by outside. I’m home, I’ve been sat up for hours editing photos. The initial idea of buying a camera was to have something that I’m patently not good at, something to do just as a hobby for myself, to have fun with, as a counter to the stress and perfectionism I feel with writing. But of course I’ve very quickly assimilated the basic rules of photography, started taking it way too seriously, rapidly run up against the wall of my own limitations, and found myself fundamentally disappointed in my lack of talent, in the same way I am with writing, and with everything I do.

Which is so dumb! I’ve had a camera for less than a year now. I barely ever take it out. And my pictures aren’t bad at all. Most of them are bad, but I guess most of most people’s are like that, and there are usually a few from a day out that I end up liking after they’ve been edited. And that’s not cheating; maybe there are prodigies who take gorgeous shots every time, like prodigies who can play classical piano before they’re out of nappies, or who can sit and write pure poetry straight onto the page. But for the rest of us mere mortals it’s always a numbers game - creativity involves a whole lot of creation, and a whole lot of sifting through the rubbish. You vomit out rivers of puke every day, and then you wade through those rivers looking for diamonds. That’s just the job. So get over yourself and pull on the wellington boots and stomp into that sick

I’ve been feeling icky and greasy and gross again today, spotty and ugly, sweating in old grey clothes on the train. But I’ve tried to not pay that any mind. So what? I’ve said to that negative voice. Oh soooo whaaaat? Who gives a fuck? Maybe I’m the grossest person alive. Maybe not. Maybe I am. But what difference does it make? Is worrying it might be true going to do a single thing to change it? No. So might as well just get on with living. Put warm compresses on my eye to try to head off an infection. Unpack my bags. Do social media for work. Put a pic on my own Instagram. Edit photos from the trip.

And now do my teeth and go to bed and get up for the open tomorrow. Just get on with it. Stop letting something as trivial as thoughts hold me back. Fuck those thoughts. They’ve got no power here.