Bombing the Bad Guys

"...if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. No one will pay attention because no one will be interested, because, more or less a priori, of these issues' monumental dullness." 

--David Foster Wallace, "The Pale King"

The House of Commons will meet on Wednesday to discuss whether our military should begin launching airstrikes into Syria. A few days ago David Cameron, through his Facebook page, posted the text to a statement he gave to the House in which he outlined his views on the matter (spoilers: he's up for it). The post is here. But you are not going to read it. There is no way. It is 3,148 words long, of which most are constructions explaining what he has just said or what he is about to say ("I said I would respond", "I have done so today", "I want to answer all relevant questions", "Let me deal with each of those questions", "Let us be clear", "Let me turn to"), as well as a bunch of phrases where he says things like, "we can significantly extend the capabilities of", when he just means, "we can help".

Fucking YAWN. We have sneak-peak trailers of probably ultimately disappointing superhero films to be watching here, Dave. The speech does pick up after a while, but only because ol' Moon-Face starts getting a weird hard-on for describing missile launchers and bombs and bullets all named by men who'd I'd guess didn't have such a hot time of it as kids -- "We have the Brimstone precision missile system", "RAPTOR -- the reconnaissance airborne pod for our Tornado aircraft -- has no rival", "Reaper drones" with their "high-precision missile systems". All right, mate, put the Call of Duty box down before you jizz yourself.

But the thing is, underneath all this obfuscation and bluster and army porn, what he's saying is really important. So I've rewritten his speech for him. This isn't me going off on one, this is the actual (more or less) contents of his argument, translated into language real human beings can understand:

Mr Speaker, I want to explain why I think we should bomb Syria.

Firstly, I believe ISIL poses a threat to us. They have attacked Ankara, Beirut and Paris. They are terrorists. They do terroristy things. They're bad guys. We should stop the bad guys -- and doing this involves bombing Raqqa, because that's where they all live.

But why should we be the ones to do something about these bad guys? Well, because America and France are doing it, and they want us to join in. And because we have the bombs to do it -- the same bombs we used in Iraq, which as you'll all recall worked perfectly there.

Most importantly, though, we should be the ones to stop the bad guys because we want the bad guys stopped, and therefore it is only fair and morally decent for us to be the ones to stop them.

So why is it time to stop them now? Because they did a bad thing in Paris, and therefore we're now in more danger than we have ever been before. Also the bad guys are thumbing their noses at us telling the world we can't hurt them in their, like, secret volcano base in Iraq and Syria (okay, maybe we didn't completely fix Iraq) -- and when the bad guys say this it makes bad guys all over the world flock to this secret volcano base and twiddle their moustaches and laugh at us mockingly.

Also we should bomb the bad guys in Raqqa now because we have bombed them out of Iraq (okay, look, we didn't fix Iraq at all, and the bad guys made a volcano base there, but recently we've done really well at getting them out) -- and, basically, it's like we squeezed a spot, and the pus was all pushed into a neighbouring pore, and so now obviously we need to squeeze that pore. Don't ask me where the pus will go then. Into the tissue of democracy, I guess.

Some people have asked me whether bombing the bad guys will make the bad guys more likely to come after us. Well, they are already coming after us! If a wasp has already stung you it makes sense to beat its nest with a rolled-up newspaper, no? And we have the best rolled-up newspapers known to mankind, let me tell you. We have the Raptor, the Wyvern, the... ahhh yeah... the Lizard-King, the... the TriceratOOOOOOPSOHGOD... Umm, excuse me...

Where was I? Yes: is bombing Syrians legal? Well, sort of. Basically, all the powerful countries got together last century and decided it would be legal to bomb bad guys if it was in self-defence. And luckily that's vague enough to apply to pretty much anything we want it to. And as we're the ones making and upholding these rules anyway, who gives a shit?

Now, although I said before that it was morally decent of us to be the ones to stop the bad guys, we're not going to actually send any of our people to do it. We think it best that the actual people risking their lives be Syrian rebels and Kurds and moderate Sunni Arabs. What we will do is stay a long way behind these people and press buttons to drop bombs on the bad guys. And this will be, I believe, really helpful.

Getting the bad guys with bombs is only part of our strategy. We'll also foil plots, and do things about the nasty words the bad guys say about us. We'll also talk to countries near the bad guys, and give aid to the Syrian people who are being murdered in their thousands (who there's like zero chance of us harming with our bombs), and in the long-run we'll look at making these people's homes safe.

How much effort will we put into this? A lot. A lot a lot. Do not even worry. We're going to do loads, and eventually we'll get rid of Syria's president, Assad, who is a bad guy on a scale the ISIL bad guys can't even hope to reach -- in fact he's the real bad guy, the M. Bison if you will, except confusingly he's not aligned with the ISIL bad guys, and we don't know what we're going to do about him, and it's all really convoluted and complicated and difficult, so let's move on.

What's the end goal for us then? Well, we're going to chip away at the bad guys for a while, and we reckon eventually they'll just sort of collapse and be gone from the world forever. Now, we're not naive: we know this will take a lot of chipping away. So if you come to me next year and say it hasn't worked yet, I will say that I did tell you it would take a long time. And if you come to me in a decade, well, same thing. You really cannot touch me on this, because though I am saying it is what we should do I am also admitting it might take forever to work. But eventually it will work, and Syria will be free, and ultimately Assad will be got rid of. I'm sure of this.

Another question I'm asked is whether us bombing bad guys will have any repercussions in the incredibly convoluted intra-religious conflict of the region, wherein Sunni and Shi'a Muslims have this whole thing going on not unlike Protestants and Catholics, only actually worse, if that's possible. Well let me just say: no. No no no. It's Us-versus-Them and it's also Them-versus-Them, but ultimately it's Good-versus-Evil, and I can envisage precisely zero problems arising from this viewpoint in the decades and centuries to come. Just chill, please.

So then, the crux of it all. One question. Should we bomb the bad guys?

Well. Plenty of people are saying we should try other means, for example closing the bad guys' supply routes, cutting off their methods of weapon accretion, helping stabilise the surrounding region so suppressed Sunnis don't feel as if a radical extremist group is the only sympathetic shoulder to which they can turn. But to this I say: well, actually you're right. But that all takes a long time. We need to do something now! We need to do whatever is immediate, regardless of whether it will help or just make things way way worse in the long run. And you know what is immediate? Bombs. Brimstone. Motherfucking RAPTORS and STEGOSAURI and FIRE-BREATHING GOLEMS and shit. We can unleash these bad boys tomorrow. Today. Right now! Let's get going. Huzzah!

***

Does all this sound good to you? Because it is essentially what our prime minister just said to the major legislative body of this country. Which makes it what he just said to us. Do you agree with him? Do you see any holes in his logic? Do you, perhaps, kind of want to know more information before you agree to rain fire down upon a country of mostly not-terrorists, many of whom, despite empty assurances to the contrary, will be killed, in awful and bloody and painful ways? Not that I am telling you what to think, here -- just that I reckon you should.

Faking It

Character sketch for the fiction course...

Laurie sat, legs crossed, reclining slightly, left hand cupped beneath the bar, right hand ripping at the corner of a bottled-lager-branded beermat, sienna hair falling over bare shoulders, drinking her Martell brandy, thinking how you couldn't compare. Comparison was the mother of... It was a path to... It fucked you all kinds of up, is what it did.

Not that she was comparing with the best of them. Not with those... things. The undulating ones over there on the dance-floor, those shimmering sirens for whom the surrounding men were practically spasming-out in orgiastic fervour. They were welcome to it. I mean obviously, if given the... but you had to be realistic. She'd let them have the beauty and the glamour and the riches, if they'd let her have an ordinary life.

Ordinary. But you couldn't compare. Each life was unique, uniquely felt. You couldn't lay one on top of another and say the peaks here are higher, the troughs there not so deep. From the inside, each life was terrible enough.

Still though. To be an averagely attractive woman. A bit fat, even. She'd take fat. A plain, plump girl -- someone who'd maybe had to wait until second year of university to lose her virginity, but had (lost it), to perhaps a computer programmer living on her floor, who'd played drums with zero rhythm and had moved on top of her with even less, who'd spent three months of evenings curled beside her watching his little portable television as the two of them gradually realised how little they had in common.

Laurie would have taken this. She would have taken this gladly. But you couldn't. You couldn't.

She swirled the nubbin of ice in her glass, brushed the hair from her broad face with a move she thought of as "defiantly feminine" -- which sounded nice but did not, in the end, assuage the feelings of ugliness and ungainliness that bubbled up at her -- and she considered the possibility of being taken home tonight.

49.05 percent of the country's population was male. Of this number, maybe 20 percent might see Laurie on first appearance as anything more than a twisted monster, an aberration, a faggot. Maybe one percent of this number, maybe less, would see her not as an object of pity or sympathy but as a woman in her own right, someone they could legitimately be attracted to.

There were, at best guess, 80 people in this bar, which did not exactly stack the odds, the fucking piece of shit fucking god fucking damned odds, in her, in, fucking...

She wrenched her thoughts away. She ordered another brandy from the barman who was trying not to look, she tore at the bar mat, she drank the brandy. The worst was in truth behind her. She no longer felt at war with her own body. More like a refugee making camp in a war-torn land, hanging fairy-lights around the barbed wire, laying rugs at the bottom of trenches, doing the best with an alien landscape that would never quite be home. If she sometimes still thought briefly of open skies, of a short plunge and then endless expansive peace, the borders of her being marked by the stars themselves, well, that wasn't so uncommon.

She was not, she had been assured, mentally unstable. Rigorous psychological evaluations prior to the multiple medical procedures on which she had spent all her savings had made certain of this fact -- though of course she allowed secretly to herself that maybe she was just good enough at faking it. But then wasn't that, when it came right down to it, the best any of us could say: that we were good enough at faking it?

Laurie (née Daniel) Staples, 28, alone once again on New Year's Eve, composed and demure and, yes, beautiful in a sequinned azure dress, drinking overpriced brandy and contemplating the smudged and fiery walk home by herself to a flat without central heating or companionship, did not then feel it but was, in this moment and for all moments after it, loved.

Full

Another wee thing from the fiction course. Can't be bothered doing anything with it so I'll just leave it here for your delectation...

The businessman sat down two seats ahead. The collar of his expensive coat was turned up and flecked with droplets of what moments before had been snow. Thinking himself alone, I presumed, for I was hunched as usual into my seat and mostly hidden, the man took out his phone and held it to his lips. He began speaking rapidly into its screen. "You are in for it this time," he said. "You are ruined. I will ruin you. I will smear you into my carpet. I will squelch you. Eviscerate and obliterate both, believe you me. I am the heel, you are the worm. You will rue the day. Oh you will rue... I will spank you. Be prepared. You are in for a spanking. You dirty, you repugnant... I will fondle your toes. I will cause you to whimper. I will call into action the largest of my toys. You putrid blemish. You worthless, squirming--" The man's phone at this moment buzzed and his ringtone played. "Hello?" he answered. "No. Kevin: no. I have left the office. I am distinctly suburbs-bound. What you're asking of me would be quite impossible. I don't care how important. My schedule for the next evening is, I regret to inform you, capital-F-in-largest-filigreed-font full."

Slouch

The high-street was dark and the snow bunched beside doorways and you could see the puffs of breath from the shoppers bustling home, but as I ordered my tall black and looked for a seat I felt none of the sadness that these conditions usually engender in me.

My surprise grew when I shrugged off my coat in front of the three remaining customers and the two baristas, and instead of anxiety at being seen I experienced a great welling of comfort melting the corners of the room and drawing our plucky group together. This was a sensation many years ago I would have associated exclusively with my first brandy of the night.

The boy brought over my coffee and I thanked him. He gathered up the gratitude and took it into himself, so it felt, and then he went back to leaning on the counter and watching the clock. I cannot normally abide this, clock-watching by employees in the service industry, betraying, as it does, the employees' contempt for their surroundings, of which (it doesn't take a genius to extrapolate) I as a customer am clearly a part. But here I felt no bile rising. To the contrary, looking at this boy, I was struck by the notion that my sense of well-being was in fact emanating from him; a notion that, once examined, I saw to be true.

I watched the boy. He had full lips, black hair, a complexion that would have been olive-skinned had the sun ever figured out how to reach this godforsaken city of ours. The boy's eyes were fierce and bright, his body lithe in angled insouciance. He made a joke to the girl wiping tables, his dark-haired and gently-muscled arms very much there in the space between boy and girl, and the girl laughed. The other patrons smiled. I smiled. We were all old friends. We all felt marvellous.

After a time the boy slouched off to bring in the outdoor furniture, and I figured it out. It was this slouch, its nonchalant air of cool and confident rebellion. A subtle rebellion -- no manager could have brought it up without sounding insane, for in all other regards the boy appeared sufficient -- but rebellion nonetheless, a way of giving everything officially asked of him while still holding something back. He gave his manners, his attention -- his time -- and what he held back may only have been tiny, but it was vital. His slouch belonged to him, they could not have it, and this mattered. And because it mattered the boy could remain, through banality and tedium, himself. And because he could remain himself, he could be happy.

Yes. This kid wouldn't complain if asked to bring in a beer garden in the rain. He would let co-workers take their breaks before him. He came to shifts on time, awake, alive.

He was back, now, clearing a customer's plate, calling the man dude without affectation (I have never got the hang of this word, its roundness sounding so vulgar and American in my mouth). He had the key to it all, this kid, to every stinking thing, and I loved him for it.

I would wait until he was behind the counter again and then hand him my empty mug. The nod he would give me, the small moment we would share: this would solve everything.

Places

Hello, jambalayas. Here's a little exercise from the online fiction-writing course I've been doing recently, just because I know I've not been giving this blog the attention it deserves. The exercise was about describing our ideal writing environment, and then an environment in which we'd find it difficult or bizarre to write. Second guy is a bit of a cheap Bukowski clone, but whatevs. 

Picture it: the quality of sunlight when you share the world with only insects, the nascent light filtering through the glass, the cottage still cold. Coffee sings on the stove. Karen is asleep upstairs, you can just bet doing that thing with her feet skewed out from the tangle of sheets, splayed like a spider. Let her lie. Down here the computer is on, but only so Stan Getz can play to the empty morning. You open your notebook and leaf through pages, breathing in the smell. The carpet is freshly hoovered, the floor clear. Open space in the middle, jumble around the edges: like your mind. The desk is wooden and ancient; it remembers. The chair is modern, though tempered by cushions Karen has knitted in Yorkshire wool. Post-it notes, colours sucked by time, plaster the walls. A newspaper-clipping photograph of a lonely Greek island. Smudged ash of incense on your arm. Soft pencils. Old mugs. The cat home from crepuscular wanderings, paws damp, eyes bright, mewling to be fed. Everything else in here is books.

***

Carl was three or five beers down and looking at an ice-cream cone upended and melting into the mud. Nothing sadder. The neon of the Screamer flashed in the distance as its left arm dropped. A maddened, robotic giant, beating the ground in forlorn death throes, Carl always thought. The smell of rancid burgers wafted.Yelps of kids, guffaws of teenagers scaring their dates. The grass was trodden away here behind the stall, and Carl's plastic chair was digging into the dirt. The magic of the carnival was gossamer-thin at best, but back here the veneer was non-existent. The utilitarian sadness of the insides of attractions, unfinished pine and leaking sand bags and old tins of paint. Carl slugged his beer, leaned back. The grease and astroturf and ticket stubs and scum of candy-floss were ugly, yes, but they were his ugliness, as intrinsic to him as the hair on his toes or the brush of acne along his brow. He needed it all, needed the dirt to write his dirty stories, so beloved of those small publishers in Europe. The glow from the burger van washed across the cheap notebook, and Carl bent to it. He'd be here all night.

The Importance of Lower-Back Support

15:14. I lie in bed, my back pressed into pillows allergen-proofed yet providing inadequate support to my lumbar region, and I squint to focus through gummed eyes at my laptop's watery screen. I drink coffee and read. My hair needs a wash. My ankle is grazed where I have itched it with the toenail of the other foot. A Nescafe jar by the bed smells of stale spliff, ash. Disgorged cigarettes and Rizla packets torn into Escher shapes amass beside the lamp. Graphic novels and Don Delillo on the carpet. Hand-me-down curtains strangle out the weak October sun. The clock blinks. I lie back.

Later, I roam the flat with a carrier bag, snatching up the detritus of drug use, evidence of my apathy, trying to hide the truth from myself in cleanliness and time. So many steps back. Well maybe that's the direction the universe wants me to travel. Look at it this way.

I press a warmed wheat-bag to my inflamed eyes. I do the dishes. Outside, plants droop to the cracked concrete, a nodding row of phlox purple and dandelion yellow and dirty white, like team-shirted lads on a Saturday night bent to a curbward spew. Across the road, a crackle of barren branches claws at the murky sky.

I want so many things. To run faster than a meteor can strike. To feel willowy folds and believe in touch again. I want truth that will survive the searing journey to morning. No pithy apophthegm, no Zen-like satori, ever manages to stay true into that moment waking groggy to the insubstantial reality of myself. What beats that ever-drowning cloud of grey? That cold lake into which we all must submerge? Hope, Neil Gaiman says. Hope.

Remember that the OCD perfectionism, the ideal, is a construct, that all we have to truly live in is this reality, imperfect and crumbling and wondrous. We can only do our best. There's no win-state to steer towards; there's only now, ever and always, waiting patiently for us. The anxiety doesn't dissolve, but it does melt at the edges a little. We might not win, but we can sure lose with style.

I sit in my cheap desk-chair that has travelled with me since university a decade past, worn down and groaning (the chair), and I push my hips back. I place two cushions behind me so that the chair, imperfect and crumbling though it is, will provide imperfect yet adequate support to my lumbar region. I sit up straight and I type...

Wednesday Thursday Reviews

Yes, it's late. The world is full of disappointments. Suck it up.

You know how occasionally you haven't seen a thing that most people have seen? A film or TV show? It happens. Life is short, the world is large, and distractions abound. The usual way of it is that someone will be quoting from the thing you haven't seen, while let's say chuckling doltishly to themselves, perhaps dribbling a little spittle down their chins and rolling their overly-moist eyes up into their skulls and rocking on the spot through the sheer delight of remembering something they liked. And you'll have to interrupt them and say, "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I haven't seen [whatever the thing is you haven't seen that most people have seen]." And they'll stare at you, and then reply, eight octaves too high, in a voice fairly drowning in incredulity, "You haven't seen [whatever the thing is]?" And you'll say, "Uhh, yeah, as I just said, I haven't seen [whatever the thing is]." And they'll stare at you some more, and then say, "You're seriously telling me you've never seen [whatever the thing]?" And you'll say, "Yep, that's what I'm saying." And they'll say, "What, like, never?" And this will go on for four and a half hours. And finally you'll say, "Look. This isn't some elaborate ruse. I'm not trying to trick you. Why can't you understand? I've just never seen [whatever], is all. Okay?" And they'll glance around, momentarily lost in an alien world where nothing makes sense to them any more... and then they'll recognise a friend in the distance, and they'll shout, "Kev, here, Kev, you will never bloody believe what this person hasn't seen!"

Anticipating a veritable slew of such lively back-and-forths with the release this week of a big-budget Mad Max videogame, and the knowledge that I'd never seen a single shoulder-padded, leather-lined, gas-guzzling minute of any of the Mad Max films, I went away and watched all of them. Every one. So now I'm just like you. We're the same. We're all morons together.

Here are some words from my brain about the different Mad Maxes:

Mad Max 1 (aka Mad Max)

This film is weird. For something called "Mad Max" it isn't very madmaxian. I don't know anything about Mad Max and even I can see that. There are barely any shoulder pads. There's not much sand, and what sand there is is on a beach, for Gibson's sake. Max hardly even gets mad -- and when he does he proceeds to get shot in the knee and then run over. Maybe it was the tightness of his leather trousers clouding his judgement.

There are lots of cars, and a smorgasbord of gay bikers, so it's not all bad, but still this is a disappointing experience.

People tend to think of this first film less in its own right and more as the piece that spawned a series, filtered through public consciousness, and influenced every post-apocalyptic movie, book, and videogame that came afterwards -- but it was also the inspiration, via its final scene involving a gruesome death trap, for the entirety of the Saw franchise, so good fucking going, I guess, guys.

Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior)

Better. Dwindling resources, car fetishes, a hellish wasteland picked clean by a mankind eking out a grim existence in its final twilight days. It's like a Friday night in insert-name-of-smallish-town-near-your-town-here. Hey-o!

The film is frequently silly, often camp, and firmly a product of the 80s, but it's interesting nonetheless. Co-writer/director/creator George Miller has an idiosyncratic style that starts to shine through the more of these you watch. I can never tell whether he's better or worse than I expected him to be. In some ways Road Warrior is utterly in thrall to common action-movie tropes, in others it cynically subverts them. The plot is mostly clichéd and predictable, but then something you hadn't anticipated will happen and you'll find yourself knocked for six. There are frequent elements that aren't quite satisfying -- stretches without Max that would be referred to in screenwriting workshops as POV issues, story beats unfolding without fanfare, misalignments of the archetypal hero's journey -- and you're never (or at least I wasn't) sure how much it's intended.

The end result, though, is a film that's unlike any other genre work of the period, and vastly more intriguing than the bland written-by-committee fare of today, polished pablum where every script element performs exactly as expected and nothing ever surprises. This at least is markedly its own beast.

One other thing I liked: Max is rarely heroic, but when he is his heroism is real, i.e. it entirely eschews fame or recognition or reward. This makes him come across stranger and sadder and ultimately more human than his action-film counterparts, those strutting suave cool guys whose hair styles and demeanours and entire performances are exactly that: performance, an act, bravery designed to be seen, theatre intended to be maximally appealing to us the audience sat safely at home watching the good guys always triumph, allowing ourselves to believe this is what the world is like. Max isn't about that. Max survives, he does what he has to, and if his humanity is occasionally awoken and he helps others then he doesn't do it with a cocksure grin and a glint of whitened teeth and an adjustment of his cufflinks -- he does it after weighing up the cost to himself, looking inside to see whether he actually still cares about people, and then helping them for their sake, not his. In the wasteland, we sense, people become who they really are.

Mad Max 3 (aka Beyond Turnerdome)

Larger than Road Warrior but also less focused, more child and box-office friendly. The one where they went Hollywood, essentially. If the previous films' plots were predicated upon some weird internal logic that you could never tell whether it was actually logic or just inexperienced filmmaking, but screw it it was interesting, then Beyond Turnerdome feels like a film made with extensive input from the suits. Max meets a gaggle of kids who're basically the proto-Lost-Boys from Hook (seriously, what with Hook and Waterworld, and like every Saturday morning adventure cartoon, my childhood owes far more to Mad Max than I was aware), and it's hard to believe all these children weren't inserted to help skewer the succulent PG-13 market -- especially as the film progresses and you realise no one is dying, or if they are it's mostly off-screen where maybe they fell off the cliff into some water and they're all right, who knows, don't think about it kids.

The set design is gorgeous, though edging into self-parody. The plot has its moments, and the proto-Lost-Boys were at least unexpected, but there are inconsistencies and contrivances everywhere. Characters are forever collapsing in the middle of nowhere and then conveniently being stumbled upon and saved when they're on the verge of death. The good guys get themselves into situations they could never survive, but then by some fluke they surely couldn't have been planning for do end up surviving. And all roads apparently lead to Barter Town, the lavish main setting but what would realistically only be an insignificant blip in an endless desert were it not for having cost so much to build and maximum screen time needing to be squeezed from it. The chase scene is rubbish as well.

Though on the other hand, the shoulder-pad quotient is through the roof, and it's got Tina Turner in it. A solid 3/5 Gibsons.

Mad Max: Fury Road (aka Mad Max 4?)

The last chronologically, but the first I watched. I didn't understand any it of out of context, so I went back and watched it again after the others. It's good. It's really good.

It's one long chase sequence, essentially, a high-speed, white-knuckle blast of bright, kinetic action, the camera soaring and swooping around clunky Frankensteinian vehicles hurtling across the desert spitting fumes, careening into one another, exploding in gorgeous orange blooms against a fiery Valhallan sky. Fury Road's world is an unforgiving one, filled with the twisted and mistreated, almost everyone in some way damaged, deformed, suppurating, broken. It is quite the marvel, a vision exquisite in its grotesqueness.

And again those same Miller touches, the idiosyncrasies in plotting, the subversion of tropes, producing, as with Road Warrior before it, an action film dazzlingly different from its contemporaries.

The Max of this film is barely introduced before he is captured, bound, shaved, muzzled, and branded; his trusty V-8 Interceptor is destroyed, and he is left rotting in the fortress of a cult leader whose front-line-fodder band of war boys use Max as a universal donor to refill their sickly and presumably irradiated blood.

This sense of weakness, disempowerment, emasculation is hardly a typical way to showcase your protagonist -- and nor is it the shocking abuse that justifies the later bloodlust of a revenge thriller: Max does finally escape, but only to fall into more mishaps, to struggle onwards, to continue doggedly surviving.

Dialogue is sparse, characterisation minimal, but with the confidence of something that knows the right word or action can imply so much more than a million clumsy words or actions can state. Charlize Theron is brilliant as Furiosa, the fleeing lieutenant that the cult leader sends his war boys -- and by extension their blood-bag, Max -- to reclaim. Furiosa has a stump for an arm, a shaved head, grime all over her; nothing about her is glamourous or sexualised. She looks precisely as old as Theron is (late-30s considering the few years the film spent in post-production), and she radiates beauty, strength, depth, and occasional vulnerability. Tom Hardy is a good Max, skittering and twitchy, a man reduced to an insect-level existence, living moment to moment, yet sometimes finding scraps of his old humanity not yet peeled away by the blowing winds and burning sands. His Australian accent is the pits, but that's my only complaint.

There's an excellent three-way fight between Furiosa and Max and the emaciated war boy who Max is chained to (played with wide-eyed lunacy and a touch of sweetness by About a Boy's Nicholas Hoult). The upper-hand belongs to one, then the other, then another, no one is quite sure whose side anyone is on, and it's all filmed to be violent, clumsy, slightly humourous, and hard to predict. And this is the larger film, too. A riotous journey, brutal, unique and unrelenting. A fitting return: the best of the lot, I reckon.

Now I wonder what that videogame is like...

A Little Update

Hello jalapenos! How are you all doing today? Just a quickie from me while it's still technically Friday and I've still technically not broken my promise -- those politicians' promises are the best, huh? -- to tell you that I'm working on a few things and at least one should be up very shortly, but I don't want to compromise anything by putting it up half finished just to adhere to some arbitrary rule I've made for myself. The deadlines are important, they really help me, but they're there for me, I'm not there for them.

I've been doing a little diary to challenge negative assumptions like I decided last week, and it has been beneficial, but I realised I didn't need you all to see it. I've been using the diary to digest my thoughts, decoct the positives, and purge the rest. Which, obviously, is nice -- but, like most digestive/defecatory processes, isn't necessarily something I should invite the neighbourhood round to watch.

So my plan was to put up one of the actual things I've been working on. Only it's been a busy week -- I've been designing and writing a newsletter for my old pub, doing the Wednesday review, as well as working on the aforementioned upcoming pieces -- and basically nothing is ready. I could've lashed one together and put it up warts n all, which was tempting, but sometimes you've got to look at what you're building and say, not yet, you deserve better than this. It's never an obvious choice, there's always a level of weighing-up involved in deciding whether it'd be better to get the confidence from finishing something and moving on, or spending time on getting the thing right. Up till now I've needed the confidence, and needed to move onwards.

But these pieces are more for other people than for myself, I think, and so it seems the right thing to do to wait and get them right. Though that's obviously building them up to be good, which if I know my brain (I do; I'm it), will create whole stacks of pressure and make me second-guess every word I write.

But, shh. It's been a good week. A really good week. I'm settling back into my meds, I feel I'm over something of an initial bump, and sailing out into relatively open waters. Though that metaphor will work better if we pretend I said I was passed some initial jagged rocks, and sailing out into &c. So, yes, that. Open waters. And I may not know where I'm sailing, exactly, or how long I'll stay afloat, or whether I'm tying the knots properly -- but for the moment I'm just enjoying the sea spray in my face and the wind at my back and the familiar feel of the tiller beneath my hand.

And if a few seagulls are shitting on me from up high, well, what you gonna do?

Bon voyage. 

Wednesday Reviews

The Wolverine

Hey, pachinkos! Am I calling you traditional Japanese betting games involving rains of metal balls there to insinuate you're all nothing but endless gaping maws into which our culture's wealth is squandered? As a memento mori to remind us that, despite our best efforts to catch them, the moments of our lives slip through our fingers like so many tinkling orbs? Or maybe I'm implying that you regularly get fondled in harshly lit back-alley amusement arcades by desperate old men with pocketfuls of loose change? Actually I was doing none of the above, but merely introducing the theme of Japan as a soft lede for this review of 2013's Tokyo-set superhero film The Wolverine. And though that wouldn't have been enough to work by itself, all this meta commentary has just about provided the necessary opening. Who said you can't have your cake and eat it, too? You just have to be able to put up with a cake that tastes faintly of self-loathing. But then doesn't everything, eh?

So, The Wolverine. After subjecting myself to the soggy, insipid mess of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (or X-Miaow, for sort of short) last week, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm some kind of perverted sadist for rushing headlong into this with nary the time to wipe the tears from my home-made latex Wolverine costume. But I'm not. This film is an attempt to right the wrongs of X-Miaow, directed by James Mangold (of Cop Land and Walk the Line fame), with a story inspired by a much-loved comic book run from the 80s -- and it's only bloody brilliant.

Well, it's all right. It's way more involved and assured -- from the opening shot you feel safe in  Mangold's experienced hands -- and it's made by a bunch of people you can just tell all actually give a damn about doing justice to the character and underlying mythos.

Where X-Miaow tried to colour in the gaps in the canvas of the established cinematic canon, and ended up smudging the lines, drawing over bits that were better to begin with, then spilling a pot of paint all down its trousers, The Wolverine opts instead to rip its character from the old canvas and dump him in a new scene and see what happens. It's typical fish-out-of-water stuff as the gruff, no-nonsense Wolverine gets transported to a Japan dictated by custom, tradition, and the ever-looming presence of the Yakuza -- and the contrast between character and setting is used to paint the clearest portrait of old Claw-Hands yet put to film.

Mangold has fun with the tropes, as does the ever-enthusiastic Hugh Jackman, archly beefed up here for his, what, like sixtieth outing as Wolvy? The character fits as comfortably on Jackman as the familiarly faded denims; you can tell he relishes the role, clearly enjoying himself while working hard to stay true to the source material.

The film begins with a weathered and world-weary Wolverine living rough in the mountains, having hung up his claws and abandoned the superhero life following the events of X-Men 3. But though one particular memory weighs heavily on him, and was certainly the catalyst for his change, this is not the whole picture. More, we get the sense of an old soldier who has experienced too much killing, a man sick of who he was born to be and the only thing he knows how to do, worn down, past caring, not so much consciously running away as having simply accumulated too much shit and finding something deep and automatic within himself has snapped and lead him away from everything he knew. It's Paris, Texas, essentially -- only as far as I remember Harry Dean Stanton never killed a grizzly bear with retractable adamantium claws.

When a feisty Japanese girl with mad katana skills arrives to tell Wolverine that an old friend in Tokyo who is dying wishes to see him one last time, we recognise the herald calling him to adventure. An adventure, we know, that will force him to confront the pain he has been hiding from and offer him an opportunity to rediscover his raison d'etre.

It's pulpy stuff, for sure, but deftly handled, and as Wolverine's plane touches down in Tokyo we find ourselves drawn in.

Sadly, the film doesn't maintain the purity or cohesion for its duration. The plot ceases to make much sense approximately two minutes after arriving in Japan, and the early grittiness gradually gives way to primary-coloured villains, dastardly double-crosses, and the seemingly obligatory CGI-heavy action scenes so overblown as to shatter any suspension of disbelief the actors have worked to engender (though in fairness one fight above a moving bullet train does provide some satisfying physical comedy).

The thing holds together -- there is a nice scene about Nagasaki recovering from the Bomb, and an unexpectedly tender romance -- and the pace picks up after a convoluted second act for a suitably climactic showdown, but here, again, the better character-based drama is overshadowed by secret mountaintop lairs and armies of samurai and battles with ten-foot-tall chrome warriors wielding magma swords.

The film has done enough for us to stay invested to the end, but it's a shame that something that began like an accomplished graphic novel would turn out to be more of a children's comic. A well-constructed comic, replete with sufficient pay-offs and successful character arcs, but one that in the end finds far less to say than it made you hope for.

But maybe I'm asking too much. This is still a boisterous and enjoyable superhero movie that never takes itself too seriously while taking its duty to its fans very seriously indeed. The characters are believable -- the inclusion of a number of female leads who exist outside and above their relation to the male characters shouldn't need to but does deserve mention -- the script is tight, and Mangold directs with a steady hand. For better or worse, you can tell everyone involved in the production of The Wolverine really cared about bringing to life the story of an indestructible metal-clawed mutant. And their passion will make you care, too.

And that's enough superhero films for me for the moment, I reckon. See you on Friday! x

On Obstacles

Hey, poppadoms. Sorry this is late (like you're sat hammering F5 on your web browser of choice staring in increasing panic at your clock going, "Where the hell is that update from Rob, anyway?"). But still, apologies. It's been a tough week. In typical fashion I got the forms I needed to register with the doctors' near our new flat in plenty of time, then proceeded to fill absolutely none of them in until it was too late to sort an appointment before my meds ran out. Which meant: no antidepressants for a few days. Which meant, it turns out: really bad things. Anyway, I'll let the diary tell you. Onwards!

Monday

12:35 -- You know in the Redux of Apocalypse Now when the French woman on the plantation says to Willard, in some let's-be-honest painfully clunky dialogue, "There are two of you, don't you see? The one that kills... and the one that loves"? Well, that's like me, except rather than killing, the fundamental duality of my nature is expressed in a shadow side of me that wants to do nothing but sleep.

I'd set my alarm for 08:00, put it on other side of the room so I'd have to get all the way out of bed for it (the good me clever like that) -- then next I know Morning Rob is in charge and he's having none of my shit. "I'm running this ship now, boyo." He stumbles across the room cursing, gropes for the phone, jabs at the screen until the banshee death-wail desists, stumbles to the bathroom for a piss, then stumbles back into bed, muttering to himself all the while. Then darkness. Then it's hours later and I realise I've totally buggered up the first day of my diary. Then, instead of getting started, I sit in bed on my laptop drinking coffee and looking up quotes from the Apocalypse Now Redux.

13:10 -- Been reading about Updike's Rabbit Redux. Not sure I liked Rabbit, Run -- there was something cynical and cold about it to which I couldn't connect. Anyway! Going to work on an essay for next week's post now.

15:32 -- Did some writing, but also read a Guardian list of 100 greatest English language novels, felt bad about not having read any Hardy, or Dickens, or Poe, or... &c, then ate wraps and made more coffee. Back to work now.

16:18 -- Thinking. What I wrote in last post about pesky demon of procrastination -- maybe first step in defeating him is accepting him. So I slept late today. So what? My usual response would be despair, that it proves everything I fear about myself, that I want to do something worthwhile with my life but I never will. And that leads to shame, then self-loathing, then a black depression that lasts for days and blankets everything. So why not instead just go easy on myself and feel nice and let it go? What's so tough about that, Robbie-boy?

Immediate thought crashes in: You're making excuses for being lazy and weak, making light of it, revelling in it so don't have to take responsibility and can carry on like this. When you gonna grow up?

But hang on. If I don't take that voice as gospel (always take that self-critical lashing voice as Honest Truth) but instead look at it impassively, analytically, then not sure I was making excuses. Wasn't I instead saying that the milk is already spilt, no use wasting time feeling worthless for knocking it over, instead just clean it up and be happy and move on?

Maybe actually it's voice saying "when you gonna grow up" that's keeping me from growing up. Piling on self-loathing talking so venomous because it's scared of change.

Urg, I don't know. To be perfectly honest I feel like dirt. Like dredged canal waste. Like those spirals of mud that have been chewed up and secreted by worms. I've run out of antidepressants because I'm stupid. I've not registered at the docs' yet and it's going to be who-knows-how-long before I can get an appointment. Goddammit.

18:40 -- Done what I can for the day. Off now to watch X-Men Origins, thinking of writing reviews of stuff on Wednesdays. At the least the film will be dumb noise to lose myself in. Need that.

Tuesday

10:44 -- I've done it again. Staggered to phone, switched alarm off, crawled back into bed. I thought writing this diary would create accountability, incentivise me to get up, but of course I can just sleep in and then come here and apologise. Blurg. I really hate mornings.

11:00 -- Okay, let's focus on positives. I've had cereal. I've got coffee. I'm here. I'm musty and hollow and unhappy, but I'm here.

Can feel a spot coming on on my chin, one of those buried-deep ones that you know is going to hurt like all hell. Closing my window. The days are getting colder, the nights drawing in. Is summer over already? Feels like we only had about three pleasant days. Yeah. Anyway. Off to write about stupid X-Men film that was stupid.

11:15 -- Quick thought: strikes me that these posts are getting worse, but that's maybe a good thing. Need to throw away every desire to write well, to impress, and rediscover joy of writing for its own sake. Never used to post anything on old blog that gave away what I was really like -- except it always in the end did, and I'd hate it anyway. Cast off all conceptions of myself, demolish desires, build back up from basics. Might lose a few people's respect, bullshit people on FB might think I'm weird, but also lose all fears of that. Go into darkness but carry on going. Do the blog every week for a year. If still shit after that, at least I finally tried something. Yes. Yes.

16:08 -- Been writing all day. Also reading loads of Wikipedia pages on X-Men and Marvel characters and film writers and directors and loads of stuff. Re-watched scenes from film for quotes and whatnot. Paused few hours ago, did weights, went for a walk, made lunch, drank coffee. Then more writing. Turned into good day.

17:26 -- More writing, then took forms to doctors' and registered. Was easy. Got an appointment for tomorrow morning. Feeling good. Well, feeling acceptable. Hurray.

Wednesday

11:46 -- Been to the docs', got more meds, got some baby shampoo for eye infection I've had forever, done some writing on the X-Men review, and, perhaps most importantly, Co-Op had special offer on Special K cereal. What a day this is turning out to be!

Also, it's summer again. Blue skies, clouds ambling about, insects at work. Why was I so maudlin yesterday morning? Though it does worry me that I had no meds for a few days and I've been feeling so much better. Are they actually helping? Maybe I'm just forgetting how bad things were before I went on them. I don't know.

17:13 -- Rushing to get film review done. These constant deadlines are good. Same old desire to slack off, but no time. Like lifting a weight, like turning a screw. Just gotta -- nnnrrrghh, tighten the muscle, strain, and do it. Either that or carry on how I was living, working chain pub and drinking too much and spending days off in bed staring at nothing feeling like been fuckin hit by an oil tanker or something. To hell with that.

18:49 -- Review is done and posted. Don't look back. Enjoy having done it, meet friends for drinks tonight, and move on.

Thursday

13:27 -- No desire to do this. Charlie and I stayed round friends' last night, woke up this morning to work stress Charlie had to deal with, not nice at all. Missed my tablet last night because of staying out drinking, right after getting more meds as well. Stupid, stupid. Like I'm purposefully doing the dumbest stuff. Why am I like this?

Need to get back on meds, start getting up early again, sort myself out. Just... I don't know. Last night's post seems so awful now. Disgustingly, painfully crap. Why did I put it up?

14:17 -- Everything feels so fragile at the moment. I'm writing all this stuff and it seems so shit and I'm swinging between feeling like it's what I have to do to make progress and like it's all an awful embarrassing mistake. Thought it was a good idea but I was mistaken and everyone is laughing at me or else bewildered like what the hell is that weird guy doing, or else couldn't care less, that I'm shouting into a void and old voidy is staring back silent waiting for me to expel all air from lungs then going to swallow me up anyway. No sound, no art, no love beats that void.

Urg. Shh. I've enjoyed writing the previous posts. I have. Especially the X-Men one. So what if it was loose and rambling? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Don't know. I can write that. I can't believe it though. The positive thought is there and I just can't hold it. Feel so lost. I'm sorry, I don't know. I'm having a panic attack or something. Can't catch breath. Everything is too much. Had the worst nightmares last night. Drowning in distant lightless caverns, groaning walls, peristalsis throb of furious insectoid bodies... then racing angles, tall worlds at every turn, foamy shores of crab-like movement, basin dripping in empty room, bone dissolves and blooms in lichen and explodes and blooms again. Galaxies, lives rushing by, and something of myself awake, aware but without control, one eye watching trapped in terror racing down pulsating clay passageways through electric sandstorms wanting to scream but able only to realise what it was seeing and all the silent horror was but the contents of its own brain.

And I awoke soaked in sweat. Lay in bed thinking over and over that this is what it'll be like when I die. Tried to calm myself but that part of me very small, far away. Most powerful people on Earth, wisest, richest -- none of them know the answer. All of us are alone, I thought. Fell asleep again and don't remember dreaming but must have because when I woke up I'd been crying and my eyes were wet.

Friday

08:54 -- Is this the first day of the week I've been up before 9? I think so. Yesterday was bad. Spent afternoon and evening playing GTA: San Andreas, something old and comfortable, falling into familiar routine, driving back and forth down streets I know so well, finding solace in the systems, warmth in the simple digital rules, hiding from something terrible and unnamed. First antidepressant back on was awful, all evening last night nauseated, confused, misplaced, like a wraith watching my life from the outside.

Don't feel much better now. Nausea has receded but everything still feels cold, bleak.

09:28 -- Just burnt my coffee. Got to it before it boiled over, but the taste is gone. Can't cope with this. Want to fling mug against wall. I know it's stupid. I know I'm overreacting. Can't get a foothold though.

Is the act of writing this diary making the depression worse? Making me concentrate more on it? Or do I always go through these days and now I'm just letting people in on it? I DON'T KNOW.

Sunday

15:40 -- Been at my mum's since Friday looking after her dog. Not been writing. Come back to this now and looked it over, need to put it up. Conclusions? I'm all over the place at the moment. I guess I have been for a long time. This week especially bad because of missing antidepressants, but I think there's a constant battle like this going on even on the meds, though guess the meds have been giving me just enough space to plant my feet and fight back. Been on them eight months now. Think I'd forgotten how bad things were before them -- this week has reminded me.

Plenty of acceptance and change looking back at this diary as well though. Problem is that reach a sensible conclusion (like spilt milk thing), then sort of lose awareness, fall into ingrained negative thoughts and it's only later looking back that realise it's happened. Like I put on Tuesday that I needed to focus on positives, then I immediately listed a load of negatives! It'd be comical, if it wasn't so obviously not (also just realised: might not be a coincidence that all this happened the week I'd said I would write a diary. Like something in me attempting to sabotage myself).

But in the end I got through the week. I wrote a post on Wednesday and I've written this one now. I had a few of my worst days for a long time, but I'm still here, tapping away on my keyboard, listening to the patter of rain against my window. I've not quit yet. That has to mean something. Hold onto that. I don't know where I'm going, but I know I am still going.

And, in fact, screw it. What I'm going to do for next week is carry on writing a diary, but every time I'm negative I'll force myself to come up with an alternative interpretation for reality that is a bit nicer. I won't say that's the truth or anything, I'll just jot it down, like an exercise, and move on. And I'll do film reviews and stuff on Wednesdays so this isn't all self-involved (though personally speaking pretty necessary) navel gazing. See you soon, then. Love love.

Wednesday Reviews

I'll put that diary up on Friday, but for now here are some musings about a film I watched, to keep you occupied...

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Deadpool, then, eh? Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool. All anyone seems to be banging on about these days. But what is a Deadpool? For the uninitiated, he's the star of the leak of a teaser for a trailer for a new Marvel film that's coming out, and the internet is very excited about him and which of his quirky catchphrases he'll be repeating when the real teaser for the trailer for the new Marvel film is finally released. On tenterhooks myself, I tell ya. But not personally knowing quirky-catchphrase one for this Deadpool chap, I thought I'd investigate X-Men Origins: Wolverine, an X-Men spin-off prequel (sprequel? prequoff?) from 2009, in which Deadpool features as a side character and has his origins explained. 

Except after sitting through two hours of flaccid, cliché-ridden dirge I went on Wikipedia to discover that, although the upcoming Deadpool film stars the same actor, playing the same character, in the same cinematic universe, the film-makers have completely re-imagined his back-story for the new film, making the crap I watched even more irrelevant than it already blatantly was. Which is nice.

X-MO:W (does that work?), then, tells the story of a young Wolverine (he's the angry one with the metal claws) and how he became Wolverine. Except that was sort of already covered in previous X-Men films, and what's added here doesn't make any sense if you think about it too much. It's like they've taken a rather nice painting -- no Monet, but I thought Bryan Singer's X-Men films had heart -- and tried to colour in the gaps, but ended up going over the lines here and there and smudging some of the original work. At best you'd say the new stuff has no real reason to exist; at worst it ruins your impression of the original.

We open with Kiddie-Wolverine running away from home with his brother, who possesses similar powers of regeneration and cool slashy attacks. This is all in Olden Times, by the way, for it turns out Wolverine is dead old, and over the opening credits we see a montage of the brothers fighting back-to-back (that's their thing) in the American Civil War, the Trenches, the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan, and Vietnam. The two leap about, bop baddies on the heads, shrug off bullets -- it seems war is loads of fun when you've got bone claws and can't be killed.

Apparently Brother-Wolverine likes war a little too much, though. We can tell because he keeps gunning people down he doesn't need to while grinning maniacally. You're supposed to slash their faces off while looking miserable, you muppet!

It all goes too far -- and too Casualties-of-War -- when Broverine attempts to rape a young girl in Vietnam, then viciously attacks the G.I.s who tell him that's not such a hot idea. Wolvy rushes to Brovy's defence -- Brovy's a nutter but they're bro-bears, what you gonna do? -- and so they're both carted off to face the firing squad together. Which set piece might prove more dramatic if we didn't already know that neither of them gives a shit about being shot. "Wake me up when it's done," Broverine whispers. Yeah, ditto.

So the credits end, and we're into the film proper, as a shady military dude comes to visit the boys in prison (hey, they survived the firing squad!). Military Dude says his name is Stryker, who we remember as the bad meister from X-Men 2, only here he's younger and not played by Brian Cox (the actor, not the physicist -- though there's an idea for casting!). Stryker asks what the firing squad was like, and Wolverine replies that it "tickled", and they all have a big laugh, and the brothers go off with Stryker to join his mutant black ops squad, and the traumatised Vietnamese girl and the dead G.I.s are conveniently forgotten. Casualties of war indeed.

The black ops squad is called Team X (they love their Xs!), and is comprised exclusively of Glowering Men. There's the one who likes swords (this is Deadpool, but he's not Deadpool yet, he's just called Wade), there's the Chinese one, the big one, the one who's Merry from The Lord of the Rings -- whose singular role in the gang is to fly the plane with his mind, which is cool and all, but I reckon a regular pilot would have been cheaper -- and there's William.

Sorry, "will.i.am". This is tricky, because on the one hand his name is his property and it's a bit harsh on him to refuse to call him whatever makes him happy, but on the other hand it's a bit harsh on the fucking English language to spell your name all in lowercase with full stops everywhere, so I don't know.

Anyway, William can disappear and reappear somewhere else, which I'm sure I've seen at least six mutants do in these films already, and he also likes cowboy hats.

Team X engage in some Witty Banter in the back of the plane for a while (during which time I imagine Merry being like, "Haha yeah good one, well yo' momma is so fat she-- oh shit I forgot I was meant to be flying this plane, we almost crashed into the ocean there, haha, oh well, jokes"), then they go assassinate a bunch of Nigerians. They're (Team X are) after a chunk of meteorite that later turns out to be the stuff Wolverine's metal claws get made out of, but no one in the film seems to care much, and neither do we.

Wolverine decides to abandon the gang here because of all the assassinating, which I guess he didn't sign up to this black ops squad for, and goes off to become a Canadian lumberjack and fall in love with a hot Native American girl instead. Which is fair enough, really.

All goes swimmingly, for a time, until Broverine reappears and murders Native American bae, but not before bae can spout some faux-ancestral folk tale about a mythical wolverine that TOTALLY WON'T BE SYMBOLIC LATER ON.

Wolverine gets pretty miffed about what's happened to bae, so goes to find Broverine and duke it out -- though, just to reiterate once again, neither of them can die. They punch each other for a while, neither of them dies, and then Broverine leaves. Wolverine gets taken to hospital with multiple stab wounds, the doctors think he's going to die, but then he doesn't die.

Stryker comes to visit Wolverine in hopsital and tells him he should let him inject his body with metal from the meteorite so that it'll fuse with his (Wolverine's) skeleton, because that's the only way they can defeat Broverine. It's pretty clear the real reason is so that Stryker can do Nefarious Things, but maybe Wolverine has taken a few too many knocks to the head because he looks at Stryker stood there trying not to like cackle evilly to himself and shrugs and goes, "Yeah, sure, whatever. YOLO, eh?"

So Wolverine gets a shiny metal skeleton instead of the stupid bony one the rest of us have to make do with, but then while he's still strapped in the injecty tank and unconscious Stryker is suddenly all like, "Cool, now to erase his memory and extract his DNA in order to make an even more powerful mutant," -- except Wolverine is only pretending to be asleep, and he leaps up and is all: "Oh, thou Icarian fool, blinded by hubris, unable to feel satisfied with the perfectly adequate super-regenerative metal-bodied mutant you possessed, you wanted more -- but now, just as Icarus's wings were melted by the sun, so shall your face be melted by my kick-ass adamantium claws, bitch!"

... Which is to say, he breaks free and slashes some guards and runs away to hide in a barn.

Look, how much more of this do you need? X-Miaow (for thus it shall be named) is not good. It slouches on for another hour of insipid dialogue, nonsensical plot twists and surprisingly incompetent CGI-based action scenes. Wolverine discovers that Broverine and Stryker are in cahoots, and goes off with William and another mutant we don't care about about in order to set things right. William gets killed and the newly-introduced mutant does nothing at all. Wolverine has a fight with Wade, who's now called Deadpool and has everyone else's powers (gets retconned though, so nm). Wolverine doesn't fare too well (though, again, can't be killed), but then Broverine turns up and they fight back-to-back (like at the start!) against Deadpool, because Broverine doesn't want anyone killing Wolverine but himself. Deadpool gets decapitated, all the characters who survive into the other films leave, and then Wolverine gets his memory wiped so the plots of the other films can make any kind of sense.

It's all just so limp, so long and loud and dull. The script is the main offender, carelessly derivative and filled with characters flatter than the pages they've been pulled from. The direction is tolerable but uninspired -- Gavin Hood keeps all the elements together but displays little love for the source material, giving the impression of moving from Tsotsi and Rendition to this popcorn-fare not because of care for the character, but because it was a job.

A good superhero film should explore bold themes of heroism, redemption and sacrifice, with costumes and villains and explosions all supersized to match. There's little of that here. Wolverine isn't even heroic. The only time his actions are motivated by anything other than revenge or self-interest is when he lets some mutant children out of a cage Stryker has imprisoned them within. But Wolverine is stood right there at the time -- he doesn't even have to find a key or anything, he just slashes the cages with his claws. It's the equivalent of a multimillionaire giving a fiver to charity.

All of which is a shame, because there is the shadow of a better film hiding somewhere within this detritus. According to Hood, he wanted to make Wolverine a war veteran suffering PTSD, but executives dismissed the idea because they thought it would bore the audience. How sad, because I can totally see how that would have worked. Wolverine as a mutant murder machine, used as a weapon in America's wars for a century, physically indestructible but slowly accumulating the psychic burden of so much killing. The film following his struggles to free himself both from the shackles of government control and from his own violent, primal urges. These struggles would be neatly embodied in Wolverine's relationship with his brother, a mutant who embraced and revelled in his nature where Wolverine repressed it. The two would periodically clash in snarling, frenetic duels where the brother's savagery would initially give him the edge, until Wolverine learned to accept his inner rage and integrate it within his greater being, becoming both the Animal and the Man holding its leash, able to use his violence without being used by it.

Sadly, the suits that sign the checks decided to go in a different direction. Their approach wasn't a failure, at least from a commercial standpoint -- the film more than made back its budget -- but then we're judging the film as a product to be bought and sold rather than as a story with the power to speak to something inside us, to make us better people. Earning a few dollars for your studio is hardly the worst thing in the world, but it's not very heroic, either.

Sipping SoCo with Ma Homies

Writing that last post in a week was tough. I had to get up at 8:30 every morning and write all day -- well, until tea time, with a break for lunch in the middle -- like I was bloody Hercules or something. And even with this gargantuan effort it still wouldn't have been enough if I hadn't also had the two years I'd spent beforehand drawing up aborted drafts and taking notes and scribbling mad gibberish late into the nights.

This post, in comparison, has definitely been written in a week. More specifically, it has been written in a day. Even more specifically, it has been written today, between about 11am and whenever this goes up.

I would like to offer two reasons for this. Firstly, I suffer from a debilitating case of perfectionism, and I'm trying to learn to let go of that, to embrace the craft rather than the goal, to focus on getting regular posts up rather than spending months building delicate, belletristic articles that end up not working anyway and making me want to cry.

The second reason is that I'm lazy -- extraordinarily, inordinately lazy. Honestly, in the time it's taken me to write the previous three paragraphs I've alt+tabbed away from this fourteen times, checked Snapchat twice, and read the entire life story of a Game of Thrones character too insignificant to have made it into the TV show. I used to play videogames to bunk off, which at least made my procrastination fun, but writing a blog about games killed the appeal of that. These days I mostly just mash at my phone screen, eat bowls of cereal, and drink coffee.

The trouble is that my brain has already worked out that it can trot out an adequate post today in the time it has left. Not a superb post, but one that will suffice. Like the way a tennis player can extrapolate a ball's movement into the future and conduct myriad muscles to ensure their racquet finds the optimal position for return, so my brain just automatically gauges the precise amount of effort required to slouch through life not going high enough to have to try, but never quite dipping low enough to fail completely. In Year Six I wrote a project on explorers that was supposed to take a month, but I did it in the last two days, and I still got four stamps for it -- not the five that the class swots got, but the four that proved I could have got five if I'd wanted, but that I hadn't wanted, because I'd been too busy being a ten-year bad-motherfucking-G (read: watching Rugrats). I've pretty much been doing the same thing ever since.

Of course, I'm self mythologising there, and, like those Southern Comfort adverts where they try to convince you that it's tattooed DJs and trendy models partying in loft apartments in Brooklyn who refer to the drink as "SoCo" rather than, umm, literally no one, not only is this excruciatingly embarrassing but also patently untrue. I want to sound like never trying gives me the careless insouciance of Jeff Bridges in the Big Lebowski, joint in one hand, White Russian in the other, ambling through comedic escapades with nary a worry, when in reality deep inside I'm... I dunno, probably Philip Seymour Hoffman. Or the sweaty private eye, maybe.

Procrastination, the kind that I partake in, isn't about enjoying the moment, but hiding from it. I don't fiddle with Windows settings and scroll listlessly down my Instagram feed and drink ungodly amounts of coffee because I actually want to; I do it because it's easy.

But difficulties in life are unavoidable. By trying to hide from them you only make things way worse in the long run. Trust me on that.

So maybe it's time I did something about it. For next week's post I will write a diary of my attempts to defeat this dastardly demon of procrastination, and hopefully the pressure of knowing all six of you will be reading will embarrass me into getting up and giving it a go each morning. And if not, at least I'll have time to read up on those lesser known Game of Thrones houses. 

***

Other stuff I've done this week:

- Watched Jodorowsky's El Topo. The first of his work I've seen. Imagine spending a weekend ploughing through nothing but spaghetti westerns and episodes of the Mighty Boosh, then taking far too much acid and going on a spirit quest, and you're maybe halfway there. For much of the film I was confused and bored, but towards the end my brain gave up trying to make any sense of it and I found I was really enjoying it. More interesting than all the toss on Netflix, at any rate.

- Played King of Tokyo with my friends. I love board games. They're proof that, contrary to what modern society tells us, you don't need alcohol to have a good time, only a bunch of mates, a spare afternoon, and a flat surface upon which to roll your dice. Sadly, on this occasion we all drank way too much alcohol and the game was a wash-out, but the thought was there.

- Got a haircut. Shout-out to James Higgins at The Gentleman Fox for making this lumpy potato head almost aesthetically bearable. They do nice local beard oil as well! Huzzah.

Here Be Dragons

your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
    - Charles Bukowski, The Laughing Heart

Hell is not punishment. It's training.
    - Shunryu Suzuki

Good writers, I always felt, were like heroes of classic mythology. Their role was to descend into the dark caverns of the mind and return bearing shimmering pearls of wisdom that would heal and rejuvenate mankind. While most of us were content in our villages, buying new rugs for our huts, arguing about the failures of the local chieftain, or bemoaning the lousy speed of the wi-fi, writers would journey out into the wilderness on lonely quests, passing gatekeepers of social convention, battling the supernatural monsters of our subconscious fears, and duelling with the shadow-selves of their own egos. If successful, the writers would return with knowledge of the mind's antipodes and recesses, with treasures wrested from the jaws of beasts, and, perhaps most importantly, with words of encouragement to aid us on our own expeditions -- for we all must journey into the unknown, and even a village is still the wilderness, only populated by other huddled travellers.

It's easy, already, to see how I might have set myself unrealistically high standards for my own attempts at writing. (It's also easy to see that I spent too much of my childhood reading The Lord of the Rings, but what can you do?)

***

My teenage years had been listless and unfocused -- I'd tried to pass myself off as a skater and stoner, with little success -- and at the age of 21 I was coming to the end of a degree in games computing that I'd stumbled through half asleep. Basically, I had no clue what I was doing. Then, all of a sudden, I discovered literature. Hemingway and Kerouac, mystical old Herman Hesse, madcap Hunter Thompson, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, the short stories of Raymond Carver -- the words were voices calling to me from some distant place, awakening and galvanising something inside me. The herald had arrived, and he was beckoning me to adventure.

I bought a new pencil and a leather-bound notebook and a bunch of How To Be A Writer guides. I filled out the notebook, brainstormed ideas, made hesitant and self-conscious attempts at exercises from the guides. And then I spent four years smoking weed and playing videogames.

I did write, but I felt it was all garbage. I never finished anything, and I never let anyone see what I was working on. If I was an adventurer, I was one tip-toeing out of my village under cover of darkness, making it as far as the nearest tree line, then shitting myself at the shadow of an owl and legging it back home.

I was now officially a graduate, and rising at four every morning to pick shopping for online customers in a hulking, half-deserted Tesco store. The world of my childhood was starting to feel less like a village, and more like a prison.

I kept telling myself I'd set out on a proper expedition soon, I just had to buy a better compass first, hone my blade a little more, practise tying a few more types of knot. But instead of doing those things I mostly just played games, smoked spliffs, and got drunk.

***

My 25th birthday found me unemployed, living in my mother's house, and more lost than ever. I was disgusted by everything I wrote, but I couldn't bear to quit. I felt that the words were in me somewhere, I just wasn't able to get them out. I had reached my lowest point, But then, instead of cracking, I managed to take what turned out to be two of the most important steps of my life: I went to the doctors' to ask about getting cognitive therapy, and I started a blog about videogames.

The therapy was great. I had suffered from degrees of depression and social anxiety since my early teens, but had always boxed them up, terrified of anyone discovering how weak and wretched I really was inside -- which of course fed back into the depression, making it all the worse.

My therapist helped me to see how I was creating and reinforcing my own negative assumptions about reality, and taught me some simple techniques for creating healthier conceptions of life. When I went to parties I was to concentrate on other people and whether they were okay and what I might do to help them have a good time, rather than on the image of myself as red faced and sweaty, my lip curling in a grimace of embarrassment, my eyes darting about the room in a way that was unnerving and creepy and just all kinds of gross.

And I started a blog. I'd wasted so much of my life playing videogames, it seemed fitting to put those hours to good use. A games blog was less ambitious, more manageable, with no weight of expectation behind it; and whatever the subject matter, writing was still writing.

My attempts at fiction had failed, I felt, largely because I'd been afraid of heading into darkness. The deep caverns of creativity might have been lined with gold, but they were also patrolled by terrible beasts, and I hadn't yet felt able to face them.

Writing about games was like setting off into a relatively safe, albeit backwater and kind of stinky, land -- a terrain of rolling valleys and gloopy marshes where I could practise my skills and strengthen my muscles, a landscape populated by the odd (and they were odd) fellow traveller I could wave at and compare equipment with. There were even a few shuffling zombies to fight, if I fancied it.

And what's more, this land of games blogging turned out to be a small corner of the wide realm I'd always wanted to explore, and digging down through its crust would take me to those same demon-infested caverns of which I'd been so afraid. Only this time I had a cover story.

The games pretext was my Trojan Horse, a delivery method for more personal writing. I'd, like, wheel an article down through cold stone passageways until the walls would open out and a glittering cave would stand before me, guarded by let's say two orcs. "Hey Gimkrack, hey Boltface," I'd call cheerily. "How're the wives? Yeah, I hear that! Huh? Oh, this? This is just a little Command & Conquer review, nothing to worry yourselves about. Yeah, boring, I know. Well, take it easy, say hi to Patti and the kids for me." ... Then when the monsters were asleep my troops would come spilling out and start telling stories about my parents' divorce. Or something like that.

***

For a while, and for maybe the first time in my adult life, I was content. People started reading my blog. Other bloggers linked to me, I got essays republished on larger sites. I found myself followed on Twitter by games journalists I'd admired for years. I did some work with a games designer who'd just become one of the industry's indie darlings. I felt like the heroes in my field were budging up to make room on the pedestal (well, the upturned wheelbarrow, this was still games journalism) for me. The gatekeepers, it seemed, were standing aside. The way ahead was open.

Unsurprisingly, I bottled it. The more popular my blog became, the more it began to matter to me how I was being perceived. I started watching my reader stats, which I'd always pretended I couldn't give a motherfuck about. I found it was vital to me that I was liked, seen as intelligent. I scoured my previous posts, desperately searching for any mistake that would give me away, prove to others what I myself feared: that I was a worthless imposter.

I had dug too greedily and too deep, and a balrog of self-loathing had escaped from some flaming pit that the therapy had sealed off but not cleansed. My burnished armour melted. My magical sword shattered. Suddenly I wasn't the knight I'd been masquerading as, but the scared little pipsqueak who'd been hiding inside all along.

I ran away with my tail between my legs. I abandoned the blog, buried myself in shifts at the chain pub in which I was working, gave everything up. My depression returned, heavier than ever. I drank more and more. The years went by...

***

I think, looking back, that I have always been terrified of the unknown. For most of this decade it's like I've been stood facing an enormous doorway, the entrance to a wider world, the threshold of myth. A gatekeeper has been stood by the doorway. "You may enter," he says. "But know that the land beyond will tear apart all who are not worthy."

Over the years I have tried many things. I have run back to my village, which was no longer warm and comforting, but cold and terrible and dead. I have coated myself in various armours -- the elegant yet flimsy robes of the young artist, the hardy, cumbersome plate of the games blogger -- in an attempt to protect myself while passing the doorway, but the demons on the other side have always burned away my protection, and I have been forced to retreat.

But now I'm wondering if maybe I've had it backwards all this time. If the armour wasn't protecting me, but holding me back. I always felt that I needed to shield myself because underneath I was still the lonely, acne-scarred kid who was bullied at school and had no friends and would be seen as a loser if anyone knew what he was really like. But maybe if I'm looking for acceptance from outside, it's never going to come. Maybe it's not wearing armour that makes us worthy, but being brave enough to take it off.

So this is me. Small, vulnerable, imperfect: just like everyone else. And I think that, finally, I may be all right with that.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and step forwards. The journey begins now.