Day 254: Petals

Life is suffering, but sometimes you get to have coffee. That’s my mentality today. I’m tired, sluggish, my brain doesn’t want to grind up into high gear.

There are fibrous strands and bright curls of clementine peel, pips from an apple, on a plate balanced on the books piled on my PC unit. The managers’ WhatsApp group on my phone is silenced for eight hours. My coffee is steaming. I’m solving a cryptic crossword.

Looking at a cryptic crossword.

Not much solving going on.

“Plant that’s yellow, say, with an orange head [7]”.

I tab to Google and type in “yellow plants”. I’d have thought the clue was pointing to a plant, and the yellow is part of the solution, maybe the “say” means it sounds like yellow, with the “o” from orange at the end, or the beginning, or something. I don’t know. But I tab to Google and type “yellow plants” anyway. Why not?

My brain won’t get out of the slow lane.

But then I’m looking down the names of yellow plants on a website that Google has presented to me, and next to the names are little photos of flowers. And I’m looking at the photos of the yellow flowers, and I feel a feeling.

A genuine feeling.

I feel… gladness. I look at the flowers and I feel glad. I feel my heart swelling. The delicate flowers, the lush, swaying petals, brushing against one another, so frail, so intricate, blooming across the land. Through the meadows. Peeking from between tumbled gaps in dry-stone walls. Reaching above shrubs layering the forest floors. Our world is filled with flowers.

And in that one rushing moment I feel a warmth, a connection to nature, a joy at the kinship we share with all living things.

What is happening to me? Who am I becoming? Quick, pass me the booze, call my dealer, blast the PlayStation. Go buy me a sharer bag of spicy Doritos and an extra large Mars Bar. I’m fading away. Who is this impostor replacing me?

Flowers. Jesus Christ. I’ve been sober too long. I’m actually starting to appreciate reality for what it is, starting to see the intrinsic beauty in life without the need to artificially heighten the experience through chemicals and simulation.

How terrifying.

At least I’m still addicted to coffee. You can claw my coffee mug out of my cold, dead hands.

......

Music: Don't Falter, by Mint Royale, with Lauren Laverne. Did you know Lauren Laverne used to be in a pop-punk band? I didn't. Here she is singing with the late 90s/early 00s electronic outfit Mint Royale, after her own band's breakup. Sounds like walking down a tranquil London street away from the bustle of the main roads, with the sun shining and hope in your heart. Sweet.

Day 253: Swing and miss

An addendum to yesterday's post, in which I said that inspiration is like a deer in the woods. If you are quiet, and patient, and still, sometimes the deer wanders up, graces you with its presence. But sometimes it does not. And whatever you’re working on you have to just work anyway, regardless, and accept that it will be as it will be. Most times the work isn’t inspired, it’s dull and pedestrian and uninteresting, but you have to accept it anyway, and move on.

But this is difficult. It really is, and especially at first, when you lack experience. It’s tough to be someone who has the acumen to discern quality in a particular field - which you presumably do, if you’re enthusiastic enough to try your hand in that field, be it cupcake baking, dollhouse cabinet building, poetry writing - you presumably love cupcakes, let’s say, and know a good cupcake when you taste it - and it is tough, at first, to sense that the cupcakes you yourself are baking are objectively not good cupcakes.

Allow me to jump analogies, from deer to sports. Because you can lie there, in bed, after a hard day baking, covered in flour and frosting and sloshed egg white, and think about the tray of bland, unrisen muffins cooling on the side downstairs, and you can feel really bad about yourself. 

You can imagine yourself as a sportsperson, a batter, maybe, trying out for a team; these cupcakes you've been baking are your big opportunity to prove yourself, and you imagine the coach watching from the sidelines, clipboard in hand, and here you are on the field striking out.

Even if sometimes you swing and connect. Even if you’ve hit the occasional home run. Mostly you’re missing. Your hitting average must be depressingly low. No team would hire you. Maybe you just don’t have what it takes.

But this the wrong way to think about it.

You’re not at try-outs here. You’re not in the game winning final minute.

This is just one of many practice sessions on a dreary Tuesday afternoon in the rain. You have to do it, and a million more like it, before you’ll even know how good you are. Romanticised assumptions tell you that people with hidden beautiful gifts get noticed, and have to only display those innate gifts, and they win fame, attention, call-ups to world cup teams, positions on next year’s Bake Off.

But the truth is that it’s all a lot of work. For everyone, regardless of talent. And most of the work involves failing, and learning, and adjusting, and failing again, over and over and over. Batters spend all day every day swinging at balls. Not to prove their talent. Just to practise. To dedicate themselves. Have you got any idea how many footballs Beckham would bend in from outside the box in ceaseless training sessions, ingraining the muscle memory, honing the movements? How many of those do you think went in? Not all of them. Not nearly.

How many free kicks did Beckham score, in actual matches, out of the total number he took? Some of them.

And what’s more, art is not sport. The primary drive is not competition. There aren’t rigid rules within which precise skills may be tested. Art is more exploratory, imprecise, curative, playful. You are not aiming to best others, but to share with them. Whether you share through words, fabrics, musical scales, or cupcakes, you’re dedicating yourself to an act of communion.

So when you’re next lying in bed, sugar and dough beneath your fingernails, feeling the day has been for naught, remember that this is the job. Your cupcakes will sag. You’ll strike out. Why not give yourself a decade or two, and then see if that’s still the case. And if it is, but you still enjoy what you do, then who the hell cares?

We’re all only going to die.

So get down to the oven, to the pitch, to the page, and do your work, whether you hit or miss or fall. There is nothing more for it.

...... 

Music: This Is the Day, by the The. An upbeat new wave classic, imbued with optimism, but with a hint of melancholy twisting through the core. Gently profound. Lovely.

Day 252: Deer

Here's something about creativity that I should know, and yet am continuously learning: it cannot be forced. Creativity is a deer in the woods, picking gingerly through the thicket, and yelling at it will only scare it away. Telling it when to turn up is an exercise in futility. Anger and frustration only drive it deeper into the bush.

The best you can do is create a large and tranquil space within yourself, put out food, ensure there is running water, and then wait. Maybe the deer will be along. Maybe it won't.

If the deer does arrive then you can only be relaxed, let it do its thing, and accept that it is going to leave whenever it wants. Maybe you need it to stay for a full day, but it wanders off after half an hour, and does not return.

This is the nature of the deer.

You're not hunting it. You're not capturing it. You simply want it to come and sit with you. The energy and beauty that the deer bestows upon you only works when the deer is free. Creativity cannot be made to happen.

But of course this doesn't mean you have to wait to be productive. Oh no. The deer might well come and go as it pleases, an animal spirit beholden to no mortal laws, but you, if you are serious about creativity, have to make commitments.

Whether you're painting, writing, sewing baby jumpers, or baking meringues, you have to be able to work whether or not the deer of creativity, of inspiration, deigns to grace you with its presence.

How do you go about this?

There are many tricks. Bum on seat, that's always vital. Get to where you need to work, and put yourself in position. You have to be in that woodland glade, ready, or there's zero chance of meeting the deer.

Schedule your time. Turn off your phone, disable Wi-Fi on your laptop, create a block of time that is for this activity only. Don't leave until the time is over. If two hours feels impossible, do twenty minutes. Do ten minutes. Do sixty seconds. Building a routine of sixty-second blocks, a number of times a day, for a number of months - and sticking to it - you might be shocked by what happens. And you may well find after forcing yourself down to the glade that you've become lost in the sunlight and birdsong, you've met a few deer, and your alarm has long since sounded and fallen silent. Ingraining the habit of getting going is a powerful thing indeed.

Picture where you want to be in the future, say, winning the local meringue baking contest, and try to spend every day moving closer rather than further away from that goal. Go to bed closer than you were when you woke up. Even if only by an inch.

Go for a walk every day. Eat a satsuma. Get enough sleep. Try the Morning Pages. Three sides of free-writing every day, no excuses. They work.

There are many tricks. For me, though, the hardest one to learn has been this:

Get over yourself.

Just get the hell over yourself. Because the truth is that most of what you create, when you sit at your desk, stand at your easel, lean over your stove, will be rubbish. It will be not good. Most of the time the deer will not turn up, there will be drizzle falling, and you'll come home cold and damp.

This is the nature of the deer. This is the nature of the work. This is the nature of life.

Fight it all you want, but it won't change. So best get the hell over yourself, and get on with making things anyway.

You simply cannot put energy into getting that damned deer to do a damned thing. So forget about it, and put your energy into all the rest. There is much to do.

......

Music: Sister Cities, by Hop Along.

Day 251: Insignificant

My friend Mike is round to watch The Wire. "Wire boys, oi oi oi!" That's what we chant at each other. And we say, "Good Wiring," afterwards, or, "All Wired up now", or something.

We're not intrinsically cool, Mike and I. But we're happy, so whatever.

We're not happy. Of course we're not happy. Don't be silly.

Today, Mike is not happy because of his headphones.

He comes round wearing these headphones. I've not seen them before. "Nice headphones," I say, meaning it.

Mike says: "They make my head look enormous, don't they? I mean, my head is already enormous. And then you add these awful things on top. It's ridiculous. I'm very self conscious about it all." He is smiling, but he also means it, also.

So I make jokes about his massive head for a while. But you know what? I didn't think Mike had a massive head, or that his headphones were massive. Of course, if Mike wanted to present me with this narrative, then sure, I'd run with it, because humans like ready-made narratives, and this one involved someone being the butt of a joke, and that someone not being me. That's always a plus.

But if I'd seen Mike in the street, and not known him, here's what I would have thought: "That man is wearing headphones." And then I would have gone back to thinking about myself, and all the incredibly important things happening to me, like whether my head looked stupid or over- or under-sized in any way.

Or perhaps, paying the absolute maximum amount of attention possible to another human being, directing all my awareness outside of myself, I might have thought: "Does that man have better headphones than me?"

And I would have studied the man, and the headphones. And if the answer that I arrived at was, Yes, the man did have better headphones than me, then I would have felt miserable for a while, and pondered how unfair it was that I had cheap tiny crappy headphones while everyone else in the world, in the entire goddamned world, had giant powerful beautiful headphones.

If, on the other hand, I concluded that, No, my headphones were best, then I would have immediately dismissed the man from my thoughts, and gone back to the integral work of worrying about whatever it was I was I was worrying about. The weird shape of my head, probably.

What I'm saying is that we ALL think we have stupid heads. We ALL think our accoutrements, technological, sartorial, show us up to be impostors and unfathomably pathetic losers. We ALL worry that, walking around in the spotlight, at the centre of the universe, everyone is watching us and sees all our faults and blemishes, that all those bit part actors on the sidelines are staring in at us and pointing and laughing.

But to everyone else WE are the bit part actors. WE are the ones who might point and laugh. To them, it is they who are the centre of the universe. We are as entirely meaningless to them as all those faceless nobodies in the street are to us.

And they are, aren't they? Nobodies. God, how they shuffle and lurch towards us, down the high street, wearing their puffer jackets, their tie-dyed ponchos, their luminous wellington boots, their pin-striped suits. Ceaseless throngs of them. Shoving, sweating, burping. In Armani. In charity shop throws. In torn bin bags.

Whatever. We don't care. We don't give a shit. Get out of our way. We've got important business to attend to, we're incredibly stressed here, distracted, off in the glorious unique temple of our skulls, at the precise, we're certain, centre of the universe, so vital, so necessary, worrying about the things that truly matter, such as our flabby knees, our oddly hanging scarves, everything we own, wear, possess, are.

It doesn't matter, does it? It doesn't matter whether Mike has a big head (and he does, objectively; it is gargantuan). It doesn't matter whether your jeans are tight around your hips. Whether your breasts are small, or large, or wonky. Whether your tongue lolls out of the side of your mouth when you laugh, or your feet slant inwards when you walk, or you have a double chin when you are turned to profile in unguarded photographs.

You're simply not as important to others as you think you are. You don't matter to them, to me, at all. You're entirely insignificant.

And I very much hope that brings you comfort.

......

Music: Sixtyniner, by Boards of Canada. Don't /think/ I've listened to this really early stuff before. It's lush. Wide, expansive, intricate, intriguing. Lush, I say. Lush.

Day 250: Wednesday Reviews - The Bourne Ultimatum

Going to start reviewing a film every week, on Wednesdays, writing a little something, a few paragraphs or whatever, see how I go. This week, I’m going to finish the trilogy that I started watching months ago, with The Bourne Ultimatum. Gotta get my £3.50 worth out of that CEX DVD purchase…

This is the third film in the cerebral spy series starring Matt Damon as secret-agent-with-amnesia Jason Bourne, with director Paul Greengrass returning, after second film The Bourne Supremacy, to again inject his stylish brand of swift cuts and shaky cam that helped define the feel of the series.

It’s slick, polished, but it has lost character from the second, which had lost character from the original. The filmmakers know what they’re doing, it rattles along confidently and capably, the story beats are where they need to be - with plot elements ossifying into tropes, series cliches - but it’s not fresh and intriguing like the first film.

There’s far less motivation, for a start. Bourne is getting flashbacks to his birth as a shadowy CIA operative, and wants to uncover the truth of who he is, how he came into being. Despite the closure presented by the previous film, with CIA bad apple Brian Cox flushed out and brought to light, the agency, now personified in David Straitharn’s Deputy Director Noah Vosen, isn’t ready to give Bourne a pass. “As far as I’m concerned,” Vosen declares in an early expositional scene in Langley, “Bourne is still a threat until proven otherwise.”

And so they’re right back at it. Bourne racing and ducking around a handful of global locales - London, Madrid, Tangier, New York - looking for answers, using his mouse-like powers of evasion, while the big clumsy cats of the CIA hunt him with all their gadgets and intel and manpower.

Bourne has an early cohort in Paddy Considine’s Guardian reporter, which, like, if you were going to make a mood board of Bourne films, the Guardian’s masthead would be right up there, along with the Eurostar, the Berlin public transport system, and a beat-up boxy old Citroen or something, to define the iconography of the series. As a fully paid-up Guardian supporter, I’m fine with this.

Joan Allen is back as Pam Landy, the sympathetic voice of reason inside the CIA, again stern and fair and unwilling to kowtow to the powerful men around her. She argues with Vosen, stands her ground, sounds great while doing so. But she’s got less to do this time out, and sadly Julia Stiles, the only other woman on the cast, has an even less active role, relegated to pouting at Bourne’s war wounds and cutting her hair to look like his dead girlfriend. No, the film doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.

It does look fantastic, again, though. Washed out day scenes, moody, lugubrious night scenes, lots of greens and blues and oranges and yellows, continuing the tone from where the previous film left off. Greengrass knows what he’s doing with action, filming movement and pace and excitement, with the overall emotional impression given precedent over any clear details. Cars crash, windows smash, bullets zip, bodies roll, and you don’t have time to think about each event, you’re just caught up in the ride. You always know who has the upper hand, what the micro goals are, how they’re being achieved - you know the story of the action - but pause and consider what you just watched and you realise it’s pretty dumb.

Dialogue follows a similar approach, zinging back and forth, forcing plot transitions, but not meaning a hell of a lot if you stop to analyse.

And this is maybe the film’s biggest weakness. It just doesn’t have the heart of the first film, the soul, the core. It ticks the boxes, goes through the motions, and does so probably the most capably of the three, but in essence its existence is predicated upon the thought: “people liked this thing, let’s give them more of this thing”, rather than a drive to make something inherently intriguing and worthwhile. The story is not a story worth telling, when taken on its own merits, but simply an engineered excuse for the audience to have more of the bits they enjoyed the first two times. Which, yeah: sequels. But that’s why sequels are bullshit. Never give people what they think they want. Give them what they could never imagine.

There’s a late car chase, feeling forced and overblown, and then a rushed conclusion, and then we’re thrown into that iconic Moby track, the credits roll, and the trilogy is over, with, despite the noise and agility, more of a whimper than a bang. The Bourne Momentum, is the name I’d give to this one, with all the strength of the first outing being enough to slide the franchise through two sequels, just about to the end of this one, but with the momentum used up and no more thrust added. 

After this they waited five years, then tried a different tack with The Bourne Legacy. I'll watch that next week, and report back.

……

Music: Mother, by IDLES. Aggressive, activist indie punk from Bristol. Brazen and bold, it asserts its intent, does its thing, and gets out. Good stuff.

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 248: A pirate

Oh man, I’m beat. I’m just home. Went out after the close, I had a whisky, and then a few more after that, and spent a great evening with Zoe and Lizzie and James and Dan, whom I never go out with, and, OK, I broke the rules, but they’re more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. (That’s a Pirates of the Caribbean reference there, because it’s New Year [winky smiley face.])

So, yep. It was a tough old shift, but I made it through, and then I let my hair down a little afterwards. I think that’s fair enough. And I came here to write my blog.

2019 is going to be good. I’ve got high hopes for 2019.

All the loves xxx