Jesus F Christ on a kayak, am I tired? I am tired. That was rhetorical. I am really tired. I have been working for 11 straight days now, long bar shifts and days building trade displays with Steve. I’m working with Steve again tomorrow, and then I’m working a close on the bar on Monday, and then after that I finally have a goddamned day off. Except I’ll be doing this blog of course, which I have to do every day.
Want to. The blog I want to do every day. I don’t have to. I chose this. It’s good. It’s all good. I signed up to help Steve. I literally signed a contract to work in the bar. And I guess I sign something of a tacit agreement every day to stay alive by… well… staying alive.
I could just die. We can always do that. But every day that we don’t is another day of saying, you know, I choose this. Whatever this is, I choose it over nothing at all, which is the only serious choice I ever get. Well, that and the… I dunno. I was going to make a joke about some meaningless decision and pretend it was important. Gareth Gates vs Will Young. I dunno. Just invent a joke that you enjoy and tell it to yourself there. That’ll do.
I can’t even… I don’t even… What is… what? I can’t see straight. The monitor is bombling around in front of my face.
Bugger this for a game of five-a-side hopscotch, I’m off to bed. Seven hours before I need to be up to get ready for work with Steve.
Waaah waaah waaah. I chose this. But I’m still going to cry about it. Waaah.
Sunday, 30 September 2018
Saturday, 29 September 2018
Day 154: Interstices
Walking to a coffee shop before work, the September sun low in the sky, the sun shining through leaves that are turning red and bronze in the air that is empty and infused with the first brittleness of an autumn reaching out its clawed hands. The leaves cast complex shadows that dapple across the brick facades of the university buildings; beneath the buildings is a lattice of shadow on the ground stretched through an iron walkway's open interstices. Throngs of students jostle and wait. One brown leaf on the ground, two more, mushed under foot. A beggar crumpled against the wall of an express supermarket. Chinese students with face masks clenched over mouths.
In the coffee shop the lamplight is warm. The customers wear olive green and navy and black. They talk, type on laptops, cradle their phones. Coffee cups clatter. The din of conversation is pleasant. A group of female students in a cloud of cloying perfume debate about boys in their lectures, about who doesn't do the washing up in their houses, about how to edit Bitmoji avatars. The lampshades are opulent. The girders are polished metal. The tabletops worn varnished teak.
From the table of perfumed students, incongruously: "Is any of this real? Are we living in a dream world?"
...
Work is the screaming maw of an insatiable beast. All commotion. All noise. Swallowed for hours into the dark, not knowing which way is up, struggling to breathe.
On my break I pass another homeless man on my way to the shop. He is sat with his legs out, against the wall, shuffling this way and that. He is trying to get his behind onto a thin strip of cardboard, warmer (moderately) than the cold stone of the ground. The cardboard strip is so small. He's trying to find the placement that causes the least pain. Every option causes some pain.
I think about him as I walk on, and returning I offer him one of my cookies. He nods. I open the packet and hand him two. He tucks them into an inner fleece pocket. I don't know what to say so I leave.
The ground is hard. It is cold. The leaves are falling and they are red and bronze and brown.
Everything you have ever seen is made of universe. All matter is patterns moving at speed.
Know this. Sense this. Walk on.
In the coffee shop the lamplight is warm. The customers wear olive green and navy and black. They talk, type on laptops, cradle their phones. Coffee cups clatter. The din of conversation is pleasant. A group of female students in a cloud of cloying perfume debate about boys in their lectures, about who doesn't do the washing up in their houses, about how to edit Bitmoji avatars. The lampshades are opulent. The girders are polished metal. The tabletops worn varnished teak.
From the table of perfumed students, incongruously: "Is any of this real? Are we living in a dream world?"
...
Work is the screaming maw of an insatiable beast. All commotion. All noise. Swallowed for hours into the dark, not knowing which way is up, struggling to breathe.
On my break I pass another homeless man on my way to the shop. He is sat with his legs out, against the wall, shuffling this way and that. He is trying to get his behind onto a thin strip of cardboard, warmer (moderately) than the cold stone of the ground. The cardboard strip is so small. He's trying to find the placement that causes the least pain. Every option causes some pain.
I think about him as I walk on, and returning I offer him one of my cookies. He nods. I open the packet and hand him two. He tucks them into an inner fleece pocket. I don't know what to say so I leave.
The ground is hard. It is cold. The leaves are falling and they are red and bronze and brown.
Everything you have ever seen is made of universe. All matter is patterns moving at speed.
Know this. Sense this. Walk on.
Thursday, 27 September 2018
Day 153: Back
Back home now, exhausted and feeling low. After four days with no space from people, working a job I didn't know how to do in a team of experienced professionals, sharing hotel rooms, sharing all mealtimes, I was craving locking myself in my room and being alone. Craving not having to act in any particular way, not having to stay busy, just getting to pull my boots off and unbutton my tight work trousers and collapse.
But as soon as I did that I felt myself deflate. It’s like I unzipped the politeness and niceness and good mood that I was wearing because I had to, and what was left underneath was nothing, just blankness.
Oh I don’t feel good. Crappy and tired and irritable and goopy. I’ve not gone out for food, we had a big lunch and I can’t be bothered to eat anything else. I’ve sat and looked on the Internet, watched Killing Eve on iPlayer, which everyone was banging on about on Radio 2 every time we were in the van, that and Bodyguard, which I’ve not seen either, but that one is now is so popular that I hate it on principle, and Killing Eve sounded the more interesting of the two. I’ve watched two episodes now, and I like the characters, I like the actors, I like the moments of verisimilitude juxtaposed with the more outlandish elements, but the narrative isn’t wholly gripping me so far. It’s silly, I’m not sure I believe it, and at its core it’s not much different from a million other cat-and-mouse agent-and-criminal stories. But then maybe I just don’t like it because I’m feeling depressed and I don’t like anything when I’m feeling depressed.
Meh. Not got anything else tonight. Maybe another episode and then a big sleep will help. Back at the pub tomorrow. Gash.
But as soon as I did that I felt myself deflate. It’s like I unzipped the politeness and niceness and good mood that I was wearing because I had to, and what was left underneath was nothing, just blankness.
Oh I don’t feel good. Crappy and tired and irritable and goopy. I’ve not gone out for food, we had a big lunch and I can’t be bothered to eat anything else. I’ve sat and looked on the Internet, watched Killing Eve on iPlayer, which everyone was banging on about on Radio 2 every time we were in the van, that and Bodyguard, which I’ve not seen either, but that one is now is so popular that I hate it on principle, and Killing Eve sounded the more interesting of the two. I’ve watched two episodes now, and I like the characters, I like the actors, I like the moments of verisimilitude juxtaposed with the more outlandish elements, but the narrative isn’t wholly gripping me so far. It’s silly, I’m not sure I believe it, and at its core it’s not much different from a million other cat-and-mouse agent-and-criminal stories. But then maybe I just don’t like it because I’m feeling depressed and I don’t like anything when I’m feeling depressed.
Meh. Not got anything else tonight. Maybe another episode and then a big sleep will help. Back at the pub tomorrow. Gash.
Wednesday, 26 September 2018
Day 152: Builds
Another day down. We were grafting in the man mines until 1ish, and then it was a lot of standing around, finding little jobs to do, waiting on various people, touching up paintwork, flattening vinyl stickers, that kind of thing.
Steve and his dad are good at their jobs. It's a running joke that for years when Steve told me he worked as a joiner with his old man I pictured them knocking together bird boxes in the garage of the family home. In actuality they're a hugely popular firm who make enormous displays for the country's biggest tool manufacturers.
The amount of work that goes into the shows is staggering. Clients are met and requirements hammered out. Designs and plans are mocked up on 3D modelling software. The clients choose from options, changes are made, iterations iterated upon. Months are spent cutting wood, measuring, sanding, assembling, painting. Graphics are printed. Banners made. Pieces are labelled. All the bits are loaded onto the vans. The tools. The barrows. The tubs of wires and plugs and screws and palettes and pipes. The vans are driven halfway across the country, everything is unloaded, carried to the stand space.
The stand finally goes up, often for the first time fully since it was conceived, with all the stress of worrying whether it will actually work. But they've done it so many times, have the experience to know what it'll be like, how many pieces to build the walls out of, how to structure the supports, how to raise them, where to feed the wires.
And hooking up all the electrics, daisy-chaining the bulbs, running extension leads.
And inevitably a million tiny things go wrong, and they have to take each one in their stride, brainstorm solutions, get to work against the clock. To be able to shrug and laugh enough to not let the pressure crush them, but to take it seriously enough to always solve the problems. I guess this mindset is key to so much.
And they gouge chunks out of their shins, and scrape their hands, and bruise their arms. They get cramp in the legs and end up massaging themselves in the hotel bathroom in the middle of the night.
And finally they drive home, for a night, or two, while the show is actually on, and then drive back for the evening of the last day, when the public leave, and start disassembling it all, break it down rapidly and effectively, pack it all back in the vans, and take it home.
Abd over the busiest period they're doing three or four shows a week, Steve somewhere in the country, his dad somewhere else.
I mean, I'm utterly fucked, shattered and sore, and I've only worked a handful of days, doing the easier jobs, not worrying about design or organisation or anything with any responsibility.
So I'm impressed, I'll admit. The skill and strength and stamina is impressive. There's no way I could do it.
Although I am still better than Steve at Mario Kart, and that's what really matters. So at least I've got that.
Passing out now, in the hotel bedroom, with Steve snoring in the bed beside me and QI on in the background. Last day of the build tomorrow, then two days back at the pub, then coming back for break down, then a day working at the pub, then finally I've got a day off. Christ I'll be ready for it.
Steve and his dad are good at their jobs. It's a running joke that for years when Steve told me he worked as a joiner with his old man I pictured them knocking together bird boxes in the garage of the family home. In actuality they're a hugely popular firm who make enormous displays for the country's biggest tool manufacturers.
The amount of work that goes into the shows is staggering. Clients are met and requirements hammered out. Designs and plans are mocked up on 3D modelling software. The clients choose from options, changes are made, iterations iterated upon. Months are spent cutting wood, measuring, sanding, assembling, painting. Graphics are printed. Banners made. Pieces are labelled. All the bits are loaded onto the vans. The tools. The barrows. The tubs of wires and plugs and screws and palettes and pipes. The vans are driven halfway across the country, everything is unloaded, carried to the stand space.
The stand finally goes up, often for the first time fully since it was conceived, with all the stress of worrying whether it will actually work. But they've done it so many times, have the experience to know what it'll be like, how many pieces to build the walls out of, how to structure the supports, how to raise them, where to feed the wires.
And hooking up all the electrics, daisy-chaining the bulbs, running extension leads.
And inevitably a million tiny things go wrong, and they have to take each one in their stride, brainstorm solutions, get to work against the clock. To be able to shrug and laugh enough to not let the pressure crush them, but to take it seriously enough to always solve the problems. I guess this mindset is key to so much.
And they gouge chunks out of their shins, and scrape their hands, and bruise their arms. They get cramp in the legs and end up massaging themselves in the hotel bathroom in the middle of the night.
And finally they drive home, for a night, or two, while the show is actually on, and then drive back for the evening of the last day, when the public leave, and start disassembling it all, break it down rapidly and effectively, pack it all back in the vans, and take it home.
Abd over the busiest period they're doing three or four shows a week, Steve somewhere in the country, his dad somewhere else.
I mean, I'm utterly fucked, shattered and sore, and I've only worked a handful of days, doing the easier jobs, not worrying about design or organisation or anything with any responsibility.
So I'm impressed, I'll admit. The skill and strength and stamina is impressive. There's no way I could do it.
Although I am still better than Steve at Mario Kart, and that's what really matters. So at least I've got that.
Passing out now, in the hotel bedroom, with Steve snoring in the bed beside me and QI on in the background. Last day of the build tomorrow, then two days back at the pub, then coming back for break down, then a day working at the pub, then finally I've got a day off. Christ I'll be ready for it.
Tuesday, 25 September 2018
Day 151: Echoes
I'm tired. Being a man is tiring. We put up a lot of wood today. Lifted a lot of light boxes. Hefted a lot of... No, that's all the names of Man Things that I know. Wood and light boxes. And lightboxes aren't even that manly, although when they're three metres long and being hoisted four metres in the air, they feel pretty manly.
Toolbars. That's another thing. Didn't really do much with them though. Twobeh. That's one. That's just wood again, but when it's thin planks of wood you call it two-by-four, or you just call it twobeh, so all the other men know you're in the gang.
Lunchtime is good when you're a real man. You get sandwiches and cheese and onion crisps and a can of coke and a little bar of Dairy Milk, and let me tell you, us real men looove our little bars of Dairy Milk.
What else do we like? We like the crisp morning frost on the windshield of the van before we drive out of the hotel car park when the sun is still rising and the sky is golden. We like how the voices echo in the empty convention centre early in the day. We like the repeating corrugated ceiling strips that go back and back into the distant mists, endlessly, making the hall look like the cavernous hangar from some dystopian science-fiction film. We like hanging tools from our belts. Taking the weight of a large lightbox above our heads with three other men, and knowing that none of us will let the others down. Being at the top of a ladder with a view onto the unpainted tops of all the displays, seeing people in high-vis vests scuttling about, feeling the energy and concentration in the air. We like working with our hands, the honest joy of a job grounded in the physical world done well. The smell of the wood. The strange mindfulness, tranquility, of the work. Looking at our achievements at the end of the day and thinking, We did that, that was us.
But most of all we like little bars of Dairy Milk. Oh boy do we love them.
Steve is out of the shower now so going to get ready and go for tea in the hotel restaurant, then some cheeky Switching, then a bloody good sleep. Aces.
Toolbars. That's another thing. Didn't really do much with them though. Twobeh. That's one. That's just wood again, but when it's thin planks of wood you call it two-by-four, or you just call it twobeh, so all the other men know you're in the gang.
Lunchtime is good when you're a real man. You get sandwiches and cheese and onion crisps and a can of coke and a little bar of Dairy Milk, and let me tell you, us real men looove our little bars of Dairy Milk.
What else do we like? We like the crisp morning frost on the windshield of the van before we drive out of the hotel car park when the sun is still rising and the sky is golden. We like how the voices echo in the empty convention centre early in the day. We like the repeating corrugated ceiling strips that go back and back into the distant mists, endlessly, making the hall look like the cavernous hangar from some dystopian science-fiction film. We like hanging tools from our belts. Taking the weight of a large lightbox above our heads with three other men, and knowing that none of us will let the others down. Being at the top of a ladder with a view onto the unpainted tops of all the displays, seeing people in high-vis vests scuttling about, feeling the energy and concentration in the air. We like working with our hands, the honest joy of a job grounded in the physical world done well. The smell of the wood. The strange mindfulness, tranquility, of the work. Looking at our achievements at the end of the day and thinking, We did that, that was us.
But most of all we like little bars of Dairy Milk. Oh boy do we love them.
Steve is out of the shower now so going to get ready and go for tea in the hotel restaurant, then some cheeky Switching, then a bloody good sleep. Aces.
Monday, 24 September 2018
Day 150: Road
Quick one this morning. I’m on the road with Steve for four days from today, staying in some Premier Inn just inside the M25 while setting up the biggest trade show of Steve’s calendar. Work trousers and tape measure and crawling sense of insecurity masked by boisterous banter at the ready!
I’m not going to have much chance to write, so these posts will only be short ones until the weekend. I’ll have to type them on my phone, probably in the hotel room after long and tiring days, so who knows what they’ll be like.
Anyway, I’ve had my croissant and fruit smoothie (us working men love croissants and fruit smoothies), packed my bag, got my Naomi Klein book (us working men love reading Naomi Klein), and I’m ready to go.
Hopefully I'll get time for some cheeky Switch gaming on the drive down as well. Us working men love cheeky Switch gaming.
See ya!
I’m not going to have much chance to write, so these posts will only be short ones until the weekend. I’ll have to type them on my phone, probably in the hotel room after long and tiring days, so who knows what they’ll be like.
Anyway, I’ve had my croissant and fruit smoothie (us working men love croissants and fruit smoothies), packed my bag, got my Naomi Klein book (us working men love reading Naomi Klein), and I’m ready to go.
Hopefully I'll get time for some cheeky Switch gaming on the drive down as well. Us working men love cheeky Switch gaming.
See ya!
Day 149: Switch impressions (cont.)
So yesterday I ran through my gaming habits and the titles I've been playing on my Nintendo Switch. Now for the hardware itself...
I couldn't imagine a better console for the type of gaming I do these days. After a long shift I can play it for twenty minutes in bed. I can play it in the passenger seat of Steve’s van while he drives us to some exhibition centre at some ungodly hour of the morning. On my days off I can drop the Switch into its dock and play it in higher resolution, with the Pro Controller, on my TV, sat languorously slumped in my chair.
It is an elegant, robust piece of kit. It exudes style, unlike recent Nintendo products that have felt like cheap plastic tat. The lines and curves are still playful, yet seriously so; it feels expensive, exquisite, carefully manufactured.
At heart the Switch is a rugged tablet, housed in reassuringly thick plastic. The screen is a capacitive touchscreen, like phones and tablets, and unlike Nintendo’s previous Wii U and 3DS, which used far cheaper and clunkier resistive touchscreens. Its resolution is 720p, which is lower than most phones, but absolutely high enough for gaming. Nintendo’s approach here is for more colour and complexity in their game worlds, running at lower resolution to maintain smooth frame-rates and extend battery life, and it is the correct choice. At 1080p the games would have to pare back their textures and effects to such a degree to get the experience playable that it wouldn’t be worth it. The display is bright and clear, and games look fantastic in portable mode; it all works a treat.
But so what’s the difference between the Switch and a small tablet or large phone, apart from access to all Nintendo’s proprietary software, including its exclusive games? Well have you ever tried playing properly involved games on a phone? Not puzzle games, casual games, things where you prod lazily at the screen and wait while your villagers harvest more minerals or your garden grows. Complex 3D environments that you must navigate, real-time combat systems with nuance and depth?
It’s a mess. Poking a finger at a flat panel with no feedback is not a recipe for control. Think of how many mistakes you make while typing a sentence on Whatsapp. Imagine if every one of those mistakes resulted in the death of your playable character. The margin for error is too high, and there’s not enough variety in what you can do.
Nothing beats physical controls. Buttons and joysticks. So with the Switch you get two halves of a physical controller that slot onto each side of the tablet, turning it into something more akin to a very high-tech Gameboy. The Joy-Cons, as the controls are called, can be slid off and held independently of the unit and of each other, with the screen balanced on its kickstand, on a tray table or a kitchen counter or whatever you’ve got nearby. And best of all they can be turned 90 degrees and each held as a tiny rudimentary controller in themselves, giving you access to two-player multiplayer wherever you go.
But so what’s the difference between the Switch and a small tablet or large phone, apart from access to all Nintendo’s proprietary software, including its exclusive games? Well have you ever tried playing properly involved games on a phone? Not puzzle games, casual games, things where you prod lazily at the screen and wait while your villagers harvest more minerals or your garden grows. Complex 3D environments that you must navigate, real-time combat systems with nuance and depth?
It’s a mess. Poking a finger at a flat panel with no feedback is not a recipe for control. Think of how many mistakes you make while typing a sentence on Whatsapp. Imagine if every one of those mistakes resulted in the death of your playable character. The margin for error is too high, and there’s not enough variety in what you can do.
Nothing beats physical controls. Buttons and joysticks. So with the Switch you get two halves of a physical controller that slot onto each side of the tablet, turning it into something more akin to a very high-tech Gameboy. The Joy-Cons, as the controls are called, can be slid off and held independently of the unit and of each other, with the screen balanced on its kickstand, on a tray table or a kitchen counter or whatever you’ve got nearby. And best of all they can be turned 90 degrees and each held as a tiny rudimentary controller in themselves, giving you access to two-player multiplayer wherever you go.
The Joycons look lovely, elegant little boutique items, and they’re nice and clicky, and the joysticks are good. They’re not up to the standard of a proper controller, and, yes, you can’t get round the fact they’re a little cramped - but compared to other portable console controls they’re in a league of their own.
And when you’re by your TV it doesn’t matter, because you drop the Switch into its dock, with AC adapter and HDMI lead, and it becomes a home console, played over your TV, using the Pro Controller, which I prefer to the Sony PS4 controller, and like about as much as the Xbox One offering.
The Switch is underpowered as a home console next to the PS4 and Xbox One, certainly so compared to a £1500+ PC, but the parity feels closer than between the Wii and PS3. And anyway, the Switch is a different beast. I’ve got my PS4 for the two or three major releases (the games industry calls them triple-A games, like Hollywood blockbusters, your Call of Duties and Grand Theft Autos et al) each year that I’m not too overcome with boredom to actually play, and for all the more interesting indie and lower-rung titles the Switch is more than up to the task. And of course there are the Nintendo games, Zelda and Mario and the like, that you can only get on the Switch, so the question of comparable power is moot.
So yes. I love my Switch. Nintendo need to really push the indie angle for the machine to continue to be a success - their own release schedule is too sparse, and too beholden to established franchises. If they threw a load of money into new IPs I’d be over the moon, but the prospect of yet another Mario Tennis and Mario Golf and Mario Party and Mario Screams into the Void for Twenty Hours Straight doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement.
I want every worthwhile indie game to come to Switch, as soon as possible after its release on Steam, and I want the larger studios to dedicate teams specifically to Switch development, to create titles faster and cheaper than triple-A, with more focus on experimentation and unique mechanics than on ray-tracing water reflections at 4k resolutions on the supercharged Xbox One X.
And I want Nintendo’s back catalogue of SNES and N64 and Gamecube games to come out on the Switch’s eShop, or even as freebies for subscribers to the online service. At the moment we’ve got a handful of NES games from three-and-a-bit decades ago, that don’t even play well on the Joycon’s little buttons (and they’ve mapped the controls for Super Mario Bros. 3 wrong for the Pro Controller, which you can’t grapple sideways like you could the original NES pad). I want Super Metroid and I want Metroid Prime and I want them now!
But in honesty there are ten or fifteen beautiful looking indie games I’ve already got my eye on for a download when I’ve played through what I’ve got - Celeste and Golf Story and Thimbleweed Park and Night in the Woods and Stardew Valley and Sonic Mania and Axiom Verge, and on…
And I’m going to be playing Breath of Wild until I’m 90 anyway, so screw it.
And when you’re by your TV it doesn’t matter, because you drop the Switch into its dock, with AC adapter and HDMI lead, and it becomes a home console, played over your TV, using the Pro Controller, which I prefer to the Sony PS4 controller, and like about as much as the Xbox One offering.
The Switch is underpowered as a home console next to the PS4 and Xbox One, certainly so compared to a £1500+ PC, but the parity feels closer than between the Wii and PS3. And anyway, the Switch is a different beast. I’ve got my PS4 for the two or three major releases (the games industry calls them triple-A games, like Hollywood blockbusters, your Call of Duties and Grand Theft Autos et al) each year that I’m not too overcome with boredom to actually play, and for all the more interesting indie and lower-rung titles the Switch is more than up to the task. And of course there are the Nintendo games, Zelda and Mario and the like, that you can only get on the Switch, so the question of comparable power is moot.
So yes. I love my Switch. Nintendo need to really push the indie angle for the machine to continue to be a success - their own release schedule is too sparse, and too beholden to established franchises. If they threw a load of money into new IPs I’d be over the moon, but the prospect of yet another Mario Tennis and Mario Golf and Mario Party and Mario Screams into the Void for Twenty Hours Straight doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement.
I want every worthwhile indie game to come to Switch, as soon as possible after its release on Steam, and I want the larger studios to dedicate teams specifically to Switch development, to create titles faster and cheaper than triple-A, with more focus on experimentation and unique mechanics than on ray-tracing water reflections at 4k resolutions on the supercharged Xbox One X.
And I want Nintendo’s back catalogue of SNES and N64 and Gamecube games to come out on the Switch’s eShop, or even as freebies for subscribers to the online service. At the moment we’ve got a handful of NES games from three-and-a-bit decades ago, that don’t even play well on the Joycon’s little buttons (and they’ve mapped the controls for Super Mario Bros. 3 wrong for the Pro Controller, which you can’t grapple sideways like you could the original NES pad). I want Super Metroid and I want Metroid Prime and I want them now!
But in honesty there are ten or fifteen beautiful looking indie games I’ve already got my eye on for a download when I’ve played through what I’ve got - Celeste and Golf Story and Thimbleweed Park and Night in the Woods and Stardew Valley and Sonic Mania and Axiom Verge, and on…
And I’m going to be playing Breath of Wild until I’m 90 anyway, so screw it.
Sunday, 23 September 2018
Day 148: Switch Impressions
I love it. Adore it. It's where I do all my gaming now. I've settled into the groove of a casual, yet discerning, gamer over recent years, a groove in which I'm entirely comfortable. And the Switch fits this perfectly.
I know a fair amount about games, I stay au fait with the industry, and when I play I am alert and thoughtful and curious. But I do not play a lot. I'm not addicted. I don't game every second of the day, play right through the nights, wired on energy drinks and sugary snacks, have the constant bags under the eyes of a hardcore gamer. I don't consume games voraciously and unthinkingly.
I work a physically demanding job, with early starts and late finishes. I write this blog every day. At the moment I'm helping my joiner friend set up trade shows on my days away from the pub. I read books. I watch good films. I take photographs. I meditate, I try to bring myself into the present moment as much as possible, try to be mindful, to pay attention to my life as it is happening, even when my life is painful or boring or difficult.
I have plenty to occupy me, is what I'm saying, and my gaming habits have to fit around this. There was a time when I was depressed and out of work and my acne was really bad, and I would play World of Warcraft with my friend from uni for eight or so hours every day. More recently when I was drinking too much and smoking too much and not writing, I would use games like junk food, buying bright alluring new titles like a fat kid let loose in a snack shop. I'd binge on the openings to games as a way to distract me from my unhappiness and loneliness, play until that wore off - usually after the first hour or so - and then grow bored and stop playing and go back to being miserable until the next New Thing came along.
But these days I'm hiding from less, allowing myself less to use drugs or videogames or the like to self-medicate when I'm unhappy. I'm not attempting to game the pain away.
I still like games, I still like having them in my life, but they're like photography now - something I can do here and there, when there's time, and not get too obsessed over.
So the Switch is great for me. I've got only a handful of games - Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey, Hollow Knight that I've recently downloaded, Mario Kart for multiplayer - and when I get the chance I'll have a little play on one of them.
Breath of the Wild is great for days off, for running around a big open world fighting monsters and collecting apples and climbing mountains. It's like a warm bath. I completed it on Wii U, and now on Switch I'm picking through it slowly, finding it easy, poking about every nook and cranny, turning over every stone, letting my brain go slack while I glide off into the wilderness. It's fantastic.
Mario Odyssey is a decoction of fun, and scales beautifully. You can play for two minutes or two hours, and it's pretty much the same experience, just stretched. You run around in levels that are large playgrounds, and in every direction you find something bouncy or squishy or colourful or surprising with which to play. Maybe there's a bird flapping around with something shimmering in its wings, so you scramble up trees and leap at it to catch whatever it's got. Maybe there are girders hanging above empty space, so you jump across them as they crumble in order to reach the shiny reward at the end. Or you play maracas with DÃa de los Muertos skeletons in an Aztec desert. Or you twang up tightropes above a cartoon city. Or possess the body of a gloopy lava enemy and use its residual heat to warm a pot of stew for the race of animated forks who inhabit the level. I think it's important in life to keep an element of childlike wonder, to work to retain that simple joy we find from the world around us, from pulling and twisting and running and jumping, and Mario provides this better than any other game. Long may he reign.
Hollow Knight is exacting and frustrating and scary and glorious. It asks you to descend deeper and deeper into forgotten catacombs in which you become terrifyingly lost, and to push onwards until you map the space and overcome obstacles and emerge victorious. It is a difficult game, with bosses that force you up against your own failure, huge monsters with powerful attacks that crush you time and time again, with sometimes long, frustrating slogs from the checkpoint back to where you died, and it's like the game, in that Dark Souls tradition, is shoving your weakness and lack of skill in your face, saying, Look, you are not good enough - but saying it with zero attitude or malice, simply stating the fact, a Zen master hard and implacable, presenting you with the problem, offering you the chance to, in the parlance of the form, git gud. You watch your anger spewing out of you as that screaming demon smashes you apart for the fiftieth time, you watch the toddler within you wailing, sobbing that it's not fair, and you think... wait - it is fair. It just is what it is. This is the game. What do you want? Mummy to come and make it better? A bottle, something to slurp, a hand to pat your head and swaddle you in blankets. You're an adult now. No one is coming to save you. So breathe out that anger. Analyse what went wrong. Try again. Watch for the enemy's attack patterns. Let familiarity drain fear from the encounter. Practice, train, try, try, try. Git gud. And eventually you'll land that finishing blow, right into the boss's skull, and blood will rupture in torrents, and the corpse will crash to the ground, and you'll stand there tall and mighty, master of this arena, knowing it was all you. No one gave you this to pacify you. You earned it. You overcame. It is a good feeling.
Mario Kart I have not played much of, fifteen hours or so, but it is foolproof multiplayer fun. Staying in a hotel room with Steve the night before an early morning set-up, we lay on our beds clutching our respective Switches and spent a couple of hours with the game's battle mode, collecting coins and popping each other's balloons (they are not euphemisms!!!), and it was like being thirteen again and having a sleepover, and it was brilliant. Also I won four out of five tournaments, so therefore Mario Kart must be a Very Good Game.
It's mega late now, after a gruelling Saturday close at the pub, so I'll stop there, and tomorrow I'll discuss the Switch as a piece of hardware, and its strengths and weaknesses. Nice.
Saturday, 22 September 2018
Day 147: Lost in Hallownest
I’m lost in Hollow Knight. The obvious way forwards, what game designers call the critical path, has dwindled to nothing; I met a character who put a marker on my map, back in an early area, but nothing happens when I go there, I think I need to defeat some bosses or collect some doo-dads to activate whatever it is, and there’s nowhere else obvious to go next.
There’s a new area on the other side of the map, filled with exploding jellyfish and spasmodic electrical crackling charges, but I don’t seem to be able to get far into this zone without butting up against pulsing black fibre barriers blocking my way that clearly require an ability to traverse that I do not yet possess.
That sentence was weird. There are barriers in my way. I can tell I’ll need to acquire an ability to get past them.
But I’m not sure whether I get that ability from this new area, whether there’s just a room or a passageway I’m missing - I can’t even use the map for this section to check for potential routes, because the map vendor is blocked by one of the black barriers - or whether I need to go somewhere else entirely and then return here later.
I remember there being sections of ground that shook when I crossed them in other places in the game, and I recently learned how to smash through weak floors, so that’s something to try - but I’ve got no idea where those sections were, so short of retracing my steps through the entirety of the game I’m not sure what to do. I could look the solution up, but in a game about mapping the darkness and bringing order to chaos, it feels like reading walkthroughs on how to do this would turn the experience into drone work or something. I want to play a game. I don’t want to tick items off a checklist. I’m an active being, not a passive consumer.
So I guess I’ll head back into that labyrinthe and see what I can see. It feels like a lot of ground to cover - literally the ground, I’m literally going back over the cave floors looking for the bits that shake as I walk over them - but it’s not a huge world, and I’ve got plenty of skills now that make traversal fun - dashes and wallclimbs and whatnot - and I could do with farming the easier enemies for the money they drop to put towards buying upgrades for my character - so it’s not so bad.
And, hey, it beats putting that time towards learning a musical instrument or studying a foreign language or volunteering for a charity, right?
Getting lost in imaginary mazes while roleplaying as an insect knight wielding a pin sword fighting cartoon bug baddies: exactly how I envisaged I’d be spending my thirties.
So I guess I’ll head back into that labyrinthe and see what I can see. It feels like a lot of ground to cover - literally the ground, I’m literally going back over the cave floors looking for the bits that shake as I walk over them - but it’s not a huge world, and I’ve got plenty of skills now that make traversal fun - dashes and wallclimbs and whatnot - and I could do with farming the easier enemies for the money they drop to put towards buying upgrades for my character - so it’s not so bad.
And, hey, it beats putting that time towards learning a musical instrument or studying a foreign language or volunteering for a charity, right?
Getting lost in imaginary mazes while roleplaying as an insect knight wielding a pin sword fighting cartoon bug baddies: exactly how I envisaged I’d be spending my thirties.
In fairness, it pretty much is.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
Thursday, 20 September 2018
Day 146: Raining
It is raining and I stay indoors. The rain beats against the windows. It runs in waves down the tiles of the roof. Raindrops slither rhythmically along the telephone wires. I sit and watch out of the window. Down the hill distant buildings loom from the glowering fog. A student walks by on the street, her head bowed, her hands in her pockets. It rains and it rains. The patter against the tin coating on the lip of the window. The channel into the drain at the side of the road. All the cars have their windscreen wipers wiping at full speed. The wheels of the cars splash up water as the vehicles pass. A fine spray wets my face from the rain hitting the open window.
I have work with Steve soon, the pack-down of the display we put up yesterday. Before then I stay inside, watch game design videos on YouTube, play Hollow Knight, feel nicely glum. The rain falls, and my thoughts fall with it, splishing sploshing on the ground.
I have work with Steve soon, the pack-down of the display we put up yesterday. Before then I stay inside, watch game design videos on YouTube, play Hollow Knight, feel nicely glum. The rain falls, and my thoughts fall with it, splishing sploshing on the ground.
Day 145: Hollow Knight again
The genre never exactly went away, but there's been a definite renaissance over recent years, with fledgling indie developers finding the concept well suited to small-scale game production, and mechanics from the genre filtering into more modern titles, with Dark Souls especially transposing the sense of isolation and the journey into the unknown into the shell of a 3D combat RPG.
In fact, of late it's like metroidvanias have become the pulled pork of videogames. Or, no. The Belgian saisons of videogames: a cult style thrust into the spotlight as the current in vogue choice for buyers who want to seem more discerning than the mainstream. Not quite the dry-hopped fruit-bomb IPA of the gaming world, but only a few rungs below.
Do you know what I'm saying? Not the spiced pumpkin latte, but perhaps the flat white.
So Hollow Knight, a Kickstarter-funded metroidvania from indie devs Team Cherry, is nothing if not obvious. Add in elements popularised by Dark Souls (borrowing from the thing that borrowed, thereby closing the circle) - such as the exact same death mechanic, the slow process of channelling your healing ability, a succession of punishing boss encounters, an overall sense of haunting loneliness and melancholy, and neutral characters met amidst the desolation who offer enigmatic, poetic, forlorn words in your ear - and you've got precisely the videogame that a 2017 videogame concept generator on the internet would spill out as a maximum amalgamation of cliches.
Except who the hell cares, when it's done this damn well? Yes, on paper it sounds laughably generic, but in reality it steps so confidently, speaks in its own assured voice, gets the basics so right, that it comes fiercely alive.
Hollow Knight is a microbrewed hipster saison so classy that it gives Saison Dupont a run for its money. It is pulled pork that you actually want to eat. It is a metroidvania almost as good as Super Metroid on the SNES, and in some regards it is better.
The wistful, elegiac soundtrack is wonderful, always of-a-piece, yet with each area completely distinct. Ambient noises are beautiful, scuttling limbs, buzzing wings, sounds muffled through walls of dirt, the plop of water droplets, the hiss of toxic lakes. And the visual design is just sumptuous. There’s the sense of regret and isolation and lamentation of Dark Souls, but none of the dirge. The drained and deathly blues and greys of the first few areas are perfect, but soon give out to lush and verdant caves, glittering crystal caverns, decaying fungi patches. The world of Hallownest is beautifully realised, and not half as isolating as it first appears. There’s a vibrancy and sense of life beneath the surface, uncovered as if turning stones in a forgotten shed to reveal a teeming insectoid realm.
The game feel is great. Your nail, your character's little sword, has a vicious, snappy swipe to it. Movement is precise, jumping has the right amount of float. There’s a dash that you can perform in mid-air, and a wall-climb that’s as satisfying as anything in Mario, not least because you have to wait a number of hours before you find it, going the long way round, then when you’ve got it those previous obstacles turn into an open playground. The sense of progression is well managed, with lots of backtracking through older areas, and what starts as a ghost town on the surface slowly comes to life as you meet or rescue denizens in the depths who begin to populate the abandoned buildings up top. This parallels your own journey of development, upgrading your strengths and abilities, coming back to once-feared enemies and now dispatching them with ease. But pushing forwards you always feel strained, your nerves taut, facing an unknown constantly more difficult and stressful than you want it to be. Which is exactly right.
I’m maybe a third, halfway, through the game currently, so I can’t say for certain, but so far Hollow Knight has been one of the better gaming experiences I’ve had of recent years. It’s good enough that I’m playing it right now in preference to Breath of the Wild, and I’ve yet to finish that on Switch.
Man, that’s a hell of a game though. Bravo Breath of the Wild. Bravo Hollow Knight.
Tuesday, 18 September 2018
Day 144: Hollow Knight
It is, however, perfect background noise for when I'm playing on my Switch. I've been playing a lot of Hollow Knight recently - a sumptuous, confident, mechanistically elegant metroidvania set in a haunting underground insectoid world of dripping leaves and squelching moss-lined walls and noxious fungus patches and little hissing pools of fetid water.
... But what's a "metroidvania"? It's a genre of videogame that takes its name from two iconoclastic series of the 8- and 16-bit eras - Nintendo's Metroid games, and the Castlevania series by Konami.
Metroidvanias typically involve exploring a strange and hostile environment with a mixture of platforming and combat challenges. You enter a new area and it's a maze, rooms with lots of exits, and you want to make sense of the space, gain dominion over it, but it's too large. There's maybe a path to the left, a path to the right, some ledges you can climb with another path higher up, and a bizarre well in the corner in a structure like a dragon's neck. Which way should you go? You venture a little down one path, and it opens onto a new room, with yet more pathways off from it. Is this even the right way? You head back, try another path. It winds downwards, past enemies, and you have to leap across little platforms to avoid a fall to your death. You make it across, but then this way too branches into multiple rooms, all with their own exits. You go down one, down another, you're hopelessly turned around, lost, anxious. And you haven't forgotten that higher path in the first room. Should you have gone that way?
And these aren't welcoming passageways, either. They're creepy, slimy, littered with skeletons and strange alien symbols. The music is imposing. It's like you're descending into a creature's lair, into the underworld, down into the catacombs of your own subconscious mind. You hate it. You want to head back to the surface and to safety.
But you force yourself to press on. You pick a path at random, and push forwards, facing whatever is in your way. You leap chasms, fight nasty enemies, travel ever onwards. And gradually you make sense of the space. Most of the potential routes actually finish in dead ends, or in obstacles you cannot yet surmount - canyons too wide, ledges too high, lakes of lava or barriers of stone you are too weak to break - but that you will need to return to later.
So mostly you find yourself channelled in one direction, with perhaps optional side journeys with a risk-reward factor you have to weigh up, a little loop through a difficult section with extra health or ammo at the end, and a drop back onto the main path after that. And maybe the main path is like a larger version of this loop, with a fearsome boss at the end, and some new ability offered if (when) you defeat the boss - boots that let you climb up walls, say, and you use the boots to climb up out of the room in which the boss was housed, and you find yourself appearing back out of the dragon-neck well in that very first room, having completed a circuit, descended into the unknown, faced your fears, and returned with treasure.
And now those boots will let you access some of the routes that were previously inaccessible - and the whole loop begins again, and slowly you start to map out the world, bring order to chaos, defeat bosses, hoover up trinkets, and the strange becomes the familiar, and you make this inhospitable world your home.
And then you push far enough and you find a passageway that looks different from the others, with strange flora growing from it, and arcane etchings on the walls. You go through, and you're in a brand new zone, and the enemies are larger, you haven't fought them before, you don't know their attack patterns, and you don't recognise anything, and you're lost, and scared - and the whole process begins anew.
And on you go, deeper and deeper, or higher and higher, to the centre of the game's world, to the final boss, and to victory over whatever in the universe glances out at you from the dark and makes you want to hide under the covers.
And that's a metroidvania. A hybrid of platformer, exploration, role-playing and action-adventure game, traditionally in 2D, about navigating a complex maze and upgrading your abilities so you can push further into that maze.
I was meaning to talk about Hollow Knight, but as ever I've waffled too long in the preamble, so I'll have to do that tomorrow.
Early night now because working with Steve again in the morning.
Ta ra x
Day 143: Egg do
Poorly again today. Got my shift covered and been resting up. Woke up with a side ache and my insides feeling dull and scooped out, like when I have an allergic reaction to egg (I’m allergic to egg, if you didn’t know). Not sure whether that’s what’s happened, or it’s just dodgy food that has triggered a similar reaction, but it’s not pleasant. It feels like acid is burning through the surface of my intestines, like my body is eating itself.
It’s not so bad now, just feel tired and weak. Memories of so many times I had a reaction as a kid - “an egg do” - that’s what my Mum used to call it. “We need to get Rob home, he’s having an egg do.” And then I’d spend the next 12 hours in agony, clutching my side and howling, throwing up over and over, everything in my stomach, and the stomach lining, and I’d drink water, and then throw that back up, and for a minute after being sick I’d feel slightly better, and then the pain would return, and it would be like a hot poker slowly burning out from my left side, inexorable, relentless.
Tangled on the sofa in damp sheets brought down from my bed. Up all through the night, watching late night telly with my Mum, all her programmes that were part of her adult world. Northern Exposure. ER. American shows with swearing and nudity, but I was allowed, because I was begging for something to take the pain away, and my mum couldn’t take the pain away, and she didn’t know what to do. Then too late even for television, and going through all the VHS tapes, Die Hard, Speed, anything frantic and violent and loud. For a few seconds as John McClane was running over broken glass spraying bullets from his machine gun I’d almost forget the pain - then I’d remember, and be sick again, and Mum would have to pause the tape. The old washing up bowl, sky blue, scratched - “the sick bowl” it’d be in the argot of our house, or just “the bowl”. “Rob’s having an egg do, better get blankets and the bowl, and put Die Hard on.” Vomiting bile into the sick bowl, crying, knowing there were still so many hours of it left. Putting my head on my mum’s lap, asking her to tell me a story about our family, the exploits of my uncles in their ne’er-do-well past, or how Grandma and Grandpa met, or just to read to me from something, from one of the many books crowding the house. Trying to focus on my breathing, to do breathing exercises, to let all the muscles in my body relax. The journey that pain takes you on, alone, into yourself. To let the pain go and let the pain go and let the pain go. Drifting gently out. The world stretching, the elasticity of darkness seeping in. Then waking in sweat and agony, exercises forgotten, scrunching handfuls of flesh in my side and screaming, please Mum please Mum please won’t you make it stop.
Not pain like that tonight. A lifetime ago. Now just hollowness, a dull ache, tired and low.
Need to go rest now. I wonder if Die Hard is on Netflix...
It’s not so bad now, just feel tired and weak. Memories of so many times I had a reaction as a kid - “an egg do” - that’s what my Mum used to call it. “We need to get Rob home, he’s having an egg do.” And then I’d spend the next 12 hours in agony, clutching my side and howling, throwing up over and over, everything in my stomach, and the stomach lining, and I’d drink water, and then throw that back up, and for a minute after being sick I’d feel slightly better, and then the pain would return, and it would be like a hot poker slowly burning out from my left side, inexorable, relentless.
Tangled on the sofa in damp sheets brought down from my bed. Up all through the night, watching late night telly with my Mum, all her programmes that were part of her adult world. Northern Exposure. ER. American shows with swearing and nudity, but I was allowed, because I was begging for something to take the pain away, and my mum couldn’t take the pain away, and she didn’t know what to do. Then too late even for television, and going through all the VHS tapes, Die Hard, Speed, anything frantic and violent and loud. For a few seconds as John McClane was running over broken glass spraying bullets from his machine gun I’d almost forget the pain - then I’d remember, and be sick again, and Mum would have to pause the tape. The old washing up bowl, sky blue, scratched - “the sick bowl” it’d be in the argot of our house, or just “the bowl”. “Rob’s having an egg do, better get blankets and the bowl, and put Die Hard on.” Vomiting bile into the sick bowl, crying, knowing there were still so many hours of it left. Putting my head on my mum’s lap, asking her to tell me a story about our family, the exploits of my uncles in their ne’er-do-well past, or how Grandma and Grandpa met, or just to read to me from something, from one of the many books crowding the house. Trying to focus on my breathing, to do breathing exercises, to let all the muscles in my body relax. The journey that pain takes you on, alone, into yourself. To let the pain go and let the pain go and let the pain go. Drifting gently out. The world stretching, the elasticity of darkness seeping in. Then waking in sweat and agony, exercises forgotten, scrunching handfuls of flesh in my side and screaming, please Mum please Mum please won’t you make it stop.
Not pain like that tonight. A lifetime ago. Now just hollowness, a dull ache, tired and low.
Need to go rest now. I wonder if Die Hard is on Netflix...
Monday, 17 September 2018
Day 142: It was the fish what done it
Ill tonight. Stomach is doing somersaults. Think I’ve eaten some dodgy food. Lying in the foetal position breathing slowly through my mouth while Fran watches The 100 on the computer, with the desk slid sideways and the TV twisted round so she can see it from bed. It’s loud; Fran can never hear the voices. “Can we just turn it up another two? I think the voices are especially quiet on this one.” The amount of programmes that have been mixed with voices especially quiet, you’d be amazed…
Fran eats breadsticks and Cheddars which she keeps calling Mini Cheddars to annoy me, and gets crumbs on the bed. They’re not Mini Cheddars. They’re just Cheddars, the big ones. I flick away crumbs, and we talk about God.
Fran: “Maybe we’re born an infinity number of times over and over but we forget every time and only God remembers, up there laughing at us.”
Me: “But is God born an infinity number of times? What’s he doing? What’s his deal?”
Fran: “No God is just watching it all.”
Me: “But I never get when they say that. God just is and that’s that. Why not just say we just are and that’s that? Why invent another layer of complexity? If you don’t know what God’s deal is then just admit you don’t know what our deal is and leave it there. It doesn’t explain a thing! It’s very--
Fran: “--Darling, shush.”
We stop talking about God.
I drift between asleep and awake and Fran makes a pizza and I try not to be sick. Fran draws a picture of us together and she shows me as I lie in bed. I’ve got a beard in the picture. She’s smooching me on the cheek.
Fran puts the picture down. I pat her hair and kiss her on the forehead, from my prone position wrapped in covers, like an infirm old priest. Just my luck if there was a God, and he was punishing me for not believing in him, although my money is on the dodgy fish.
Ahh, but who put the fish there?
God. OK. But who put God there? Who put him there? It doesn’t explain anything! It’s utterly superfluous! It’s already insane that all this is happening. Just leave it at that.
Fran can’t shush me on my own blog. I love having my own blog. I love not believing in God in a dumb way (I believe in us though. I do believe in us). I don’t love eating dodgy fish. But you can’t win them all.
Fran eats breadsticks and Cheddars which she keeps calling Mini Cheddars to annoy me, and gets crumbs on the bed. They’re not Mini Cheddars. They’re just Cheddars, the big ones. I flick away crumbs, and we talk about God.
Fran: “Maybe we’re born an infinity number of times over and over but we forget every time and only God remembers, up there laughing at us.”
Me: “But is God born an infinity number of times? What’s he doing? What’s his deal?”
Fran: “No God is just watching it all.”
Me: “But I never get when they say that. God just is and that’s that. Why not just say we just are and that’s that? Why invent another layer of complexity? If you don’t know what God’s deal is then just admit you don’t know what our deal is and leave it there. It doesn’t explain a thing! It’s very--
Fran: “--Darling, shush.”
We stop talking about God.
I drift between asleep and awake and Fran makes a pizza and I try not to be sick. Fran draws a picture of us together and she shows me as I lie in bed. I’ve got a beard in the picture. She’s smooching me on the cheek.
Fran puts the picture down. I pat her hair and kiss her on the forehead, from my prone position wrapped in covers, like an infirm old priest. Just my luck if there was a God, and he was punishing me for not believing in him, although my money is on the dodgy fish.
Ahh, but who put the fish there?
God. OK. But who put God there? Who put him there? It doesn’t explain anything! It’s utterly superfluous! It’s already insane that all this is happening. Just leave it at that.
Fran can’t shush me on my own blog. I love having my own blog. I love not believing in God in a dumb way (I believe in us though. I do believe in us). I don’t love eating dodgy fish. But you can’t win them all.
Sunday, 16 September 2018
Day 141: Singing to get out
It is Saturday so I pour pints of San Miguel. I serve Jagerbombs and double vodka Redbulls and tequilas with salt and lime. I wipe the bar top. I float the tills. The change box is out of 50ps. I get 50ps from the office. I wipe the bar top. I serve pink gin and tonics. Rhubarb gin and tonics. House gins with lemonade. I stack glasses. Wash glasses. Put glasses away. I refill toilet roll. I wipe the bar top. I serve dry white wines, rosé wines, glasses of prosecco. I top up stouts. Correct staff till mistakes, refloat the tills. I wipe the bar top. I pour Tuborgs and Budvars and pints of keg flow bitter. Half bitter shandies. Half lagers and lime. I make coffees. Take coffees to tables. Collect glasses from the floor. I shake espresso martinis, churn mojitos, look up the spec for raspberry chews.
A keg beer runs out so I go upstairs to clean it. I put the line on water, go downstairs to pull it through. Gas sputters out, and nothing more. I go back upstairs. The inflow pipe is above the surface of the water in the water butt. I move the butt closer, unravel the hose, attach it to the tap in the sink, fill the butt with water, fill the bucket for line cleaner. I go back downstairs. The bar is busy, so I serve. I pull the line through to water. Go upstairs and switch the pipe to the line cleaner bucket; downstairs to pull it through. I wait. I serve. I pull through more line cleaner. Wait; serve. Upstairs I switch the pipe back to water, downstairs and pull it through. Upstairs I heft a Beavertown Lupuloid keg into place, find a coupler that fits the keg, look for the spanner, find the spanner, unscrew the product and gas lines from the old coupler, screw them onto the new one. The coupler is wet and the spanner is wet and my hand slips, and I jab myself in the arm. I yell. I get the coupler attached, clamp it onto the Lupuloid keg. I fill the float with beer. I go downstairs, look for the Lupuloid lens. It isn't in the plastic wallet for upcoming beers. I look through all the alphabetised drawers. Nope. It isn't on the shelf in the spirit cupboard. It isn't on the shelf in the office. I look in the tub on the bar, I look underneath the tills. I can't find it. Kieran finds the Lagunitas IPA lenses, says we've got a keg of that upstairs. So I go upstairs and unclasp the line from the Lupuloid, put it back to water, pull it through. I find a coupler for the Lagunitas, unscrew the product and gas, screw them onto the new coupler, attach them to the keg, fill the float, downstairs and get the lenses, the gasket stickers, stick them to the front of the fonts on the delta bridges, pull through the beer, put buttons on the tills on the computer in the office, send the new layout to POS.
Then I serve. I wipe the bar. I collect glasses. I serve. And then it is my break and I walk to the shop in the cold air of evening.
There is a green tree in the pavement that has dropped yellow leaves onto the ground. The yellow leaves are pale and they are crisp on the ground. A paving slab is cracked and juts jarringly out from its neighbour. Above me the stone facade of the central library looms. The neon signs shine purple and pink. The light creeps from the evening. The bark on the birch trees is peeling. A group of men pass laughing into the night.
I see these things. I feel them. The pressure of my feet inside my old trainers. The clouds spread flat across the sky. The irregular pulse of traffic down at the main road.
Everything vibrates with its own internal energy. Everything is the same one thing singing to get out. The delicacy. The majesty. This is the one and only moment in which each of us lives. We walk through this moment together. It is our home.
I take a breath. Hold it inside.
Then I walk back into the babbling din of the machine of the pub, the murmuring disturbance, groaning, wailing, where all is noise, all clamour, all fuss. I walk back inside, and I pick up a glass, and I get to work.
A keg beer runs out so I go upstairs to clean it. I put the line on water, go downstairs to pull it through. Gas sputters out, and nothing more. I go back upstairs. The inflow pipe is above the surface of the water in the water butt. I move the butt closer, unravel the hose, attach it to the tap in the sink, fill the butt with water, fill the bucket for line cleaner. I go back downstairs. The bar is busy, so I serve. I pull the line through to water. Go upstairs and switch the pipe to the line cleaner bucket; downstairs to pull it through. I wait. I serve. I pull through more line cleaner. Wait; serve. Upstairs I switch the pipe back to water, downstairs and pull it through. Upstairs I heft a Beavertown Lupuloid keg into place, find a coupler that fits the keg, look for the spanner, find the spanner, unscrew the product and gas lines from the old coupler, screw them onto the new one. The coupler is wet and the spanner is wet and my hand slips, and I jab myself in the arm. I yell. I get the coupler attached, clamp it onto the Lupuloid keg. I fill the float with beer. I go downstairs, look for the Lupuloid lens. It isn't in the plastic wallet for upcoming beers. I look through all the alphabetised drawers. Nope. It isn't on the shelf in the spirit cupboard. It isn't on the shelf in the office. I look in the tub on the bar, I look underneath the tills. I can't find it. Kieran finds the Lagunitas IPA lenses, says we've got a keg of that upstairs. So I go upstairs and unclasp the line from the Lupuloid, put it back to water, pull it through. I find a coupler for the Lagunitas, unscrew the product and gas, screw them onto the new coupler, attach them to the keg, fill the float, downstairs and get the lenses, the gasket stickers, stick them to the front of the fonts on the delta bridges, pull through the beer, put buttons on the tills on the computer in the office, send the new layout to POS.
Then I serve. I wipe the bar. I collect glasses. I serve. And then it is my break and I walk to the shop in the cold air of evening.
There is a green tree in the pavement that has dropped yellow leaves onto the ground. The yellow leaves are pale and they are crisp on the ground. A paving slab is cracked and juts jarringly out from its neighbour. Above me the stone facade of the central library looms. The neon signs shine purple and pink. The light creeps from the evening. The bark on the birch trees is peeling. A group of men pass laughing into the night.
I see these things. I feel them. The pressure of my feet inside my old trainers. The clouds spread flat across the sky. The irregular pulse of traffic down at the main road.
Everything vibrates with its own internal energy. Everything is the same one thing singing to get out. The delicacy. The majesty. This is the one and only moment in which each of us lives. We walk through this moment together. It is our home.
I take a breath. Hold it inside.
Then I walk back into the babbling din of the machine of the pub, the murmuring disturbance, groaning, wailing, where all is noise, all clamour, all fuss. I walk back inside, and I pick up a glass, and I get to work.
Saturday, 15 September 2018
Day 140: Lemonade
Evening drinks with Maria, who’s back in the country to do her master's degree in Manchester, and is in Sheffield for the weekend. I meet her and Zoe in Head of Steam, then we walk through the drunken revellers and street hustlers to Devonshire Cat. Just like old times. We order two lemonades and an orange juice, and four bags of crisps. Find a small table and sit with our heads bent in low, talking about work, and being young, and being old, and the nature of time, and our first memories, and the cartoons we watched as children. Maria tells us about Polish breakfasts and Polish weddings. Zoe says it feels like we are at a school dance, with the cool kids off dancing while we sit in a corner eating crisps. Zoe and Maria are both very beautiful, and I think much cooler than most everyone in the building, so the idea that the three of us are the unpopular ones makes me smile. Of course I feel I am that way - but I don't much worry about that.
And for me the evening is the kind of evening I wish I was having as a teenager. Not desperately trying to fit in somewhere I don’t. Racing to escape myself. But simply sitting and watching the gentle candles flickering in their pots. The fairy lights climbing the windows. Chatting with friends, enjoying this brief moment, then saying goodbye, and watching it go. Not minding that it doesn't last, that I'm sober and there is of course the usual boredom, and self-consciousness, and sadness of the night. I am getting better at resting in that moment, letting it be, accepting whatever it is that arrives.
I’m back home now, with a mug of tea and the silence of my bedroom at the top of the house. The lamp's bulb's light is reflecting in my phone screen, showing up all the small scratches in the glass. The bathroom fan is clicking. The computer is whirring. I can't hear any other sounds.
I’m back home now, with a mug of tea and the silence of my bedroom at the top of the house. The lamp's bulb's light is reflecting in my phone screen, showing up all the small scratches in the glass. The bathroom fan is clicking. The computer is whirring. I can't hear any other sounds.
And now this moment is ending, and here comes the next.
Friday, 14 September 2018
Day 139: Toes
Mulchy quiet Thursday shift at work. The customers are not drinking. The fish are not biting. One man stumbles in off the street, after we watch him leaning against a taxi and laughing to himself. He can’t understand why we won’t serve him. But then he forgets what year it is and why he exists and he zig-zags away, his jelly legs sketching wide parabolas into the night.
I count a till and then sit hiding in the office, reading poetry on my phone. I feel small and nicely crumbling in the messy room in the big pub in the wailing world in millions of miles of nothingness. I feel on fire in my toes. I feel like putting on a comedy pirate hat and leaping headfirst into the void between life and death with a smile on my face.
Rhianna comes in and I don’t say anything about the poetry or the toes. I make jokes about some dumb thing, and she makes dumb jokes back, and we sit and stand there, humans separated by two skulls, and flesh, and empty air. And then I go and count the fruit stock.
When the customers leave Pat and Lizzie close the bar and Rhi checks upstairs, and I leap on a table to prove to God how tall I am. I grab Pat to pick him up but he doesn’t want so I rub his belly and let him go.
I’m made of curling chrysanthemums, my fingertips paint the air. I cash up the last till and watch Nina Simone saying goddamns on YouTube, and electricity sparks from her eyes to mine.
We have such vastnesses inside us. We are made of worlds of gold. And each treasure trove sits glimmering, seen by no one, touched by no one, and then collapses to sand.
What a ride!
I count a till and then sit hiding in the office, reading poetry on my phone. I feel small and nicely crumbling in the messy room in the big pub in the wailing world in millions of miles of nothingness. I feel on fire in my toes. I feel like putting on a comedy pirate hat and leaping headfirst into the void between life and death with a smile on my face.
Rhianna comes in and I don’t say anything about the poetry or the toes. I make jokes about some dumb thing, and she makes dumb jokes back, and we sit and stand there, humans separated by two skulls, and flesh, and empty air. And then I go and count the fruit stock.
When the customers leave Pat and Lizzie close the bar and Rhi checks upstairs, and I leap on a table to prove to God how tall I am. I grab Pat to pick him up but he doesn’t want so I rub his belly and let him go.
I’m made of curling chrysanthemums, my fingertips paint the air. I cash up the last till and watch Nina Simone saying goddamns on YouTube, and electricity sparks from her eyes to mine.
We have such vastnesses inside us. We are made of worlds of gold. And each treasure trove sits glimmering, seen by no one, touched by no one, and then collapses to sand.
What a ride!
Wednesday, 12 September 2018
Day 138: Story Structure Notes #4
[Part One]
[Part Two]
Stories are codified maps of rejuvenation and rebirth. They’re not power fantasies - about the nerdy kid becoming a superhero and being able to beat up his bullies - although Hollywood often focuses on this most satisfying aspect of the journey. For the circle to become complete the hero must dive to the depths of the lake and steal the glittering pearls - and then bring them all the way back up onto the land so that the pearls may benefit the people on the banks who were left behind. The hero touches the eternal when meeting the goddess, overcomes the power structure of the old world represented in the father, wins some ultimate boon, and then must take that boon back so that the external world may be enlightened in the same way that the hero just was.
There is no room for ego in this - although of course there is plenty of room for ego in the tensions of whether the quest will be successful. The hero fights against their ego continually. But stories are always stories of oneness. The external world, as it falls into disrepair and disease, births the unlikeliest of seeds: a peasant orphan, a lazy hobbit, a young girl scared and clinging to her parents’ coattails. This individual then journeys to the heart of the world’s problem - growing into extraordinary power as they do so, and then uses that power to bring back some trinket or wisdom that will set right the disease of the world.
The first step on this return is often a refusal. For the inner sanctum, at the bottom of the circle, mirrors the status quo of the ordinary world at the top. There is safety and comfort in both. Often times, then, the hero fights down to a state of bliss and blessing, and finds they do not want to leave. The love interest’s bed is too perfect, the Arkenstone under the mountain too wondrous. Often the hero will have to be reminded of their responsibilities to the external - that they weren’t adventuring for themselves, but for the poor suffering townsfolk all across the land. With great power comes… well, you know.
Once the hero sets off, there can be a road of trials back out of the chaos realm - again mirroring the road of trials down towards the middle. It is often here, in fact, where the atonement with the father happens. The meeting with the goddess is delicious and empowering, and then forcing themselves back away from this perfect point the hero is faced with everything rigid and aggressive for which the structure of the ordinary world stood.
Let’s say a fairytale land is being tormented by a dark lord atop his tower. The hero adventures away from the safety of her village (crossing the threshold), fights her way to the centre of a magical forest (road of trials) where she earns the blessing of the spirit of the woods (meeting with the goddess). She is now the most powerful warrior in the land. But she can’t stand around and enjoy being swooned at by attractive lads (refusal of return). She’s got a responsibility. So she fights her way to the black tower, duels with the dark lord, and in defeating him frees the land and all its inhabitants.
Or perhaps the power structure, the father, of the story’s world is seen as not inherently evil, not in need of overthrowing, but just in need of being refreshed. Perhaps the king’s daughter falls ill, and only a magical elixir guarded by a sacred but dangerous dragon can save her. The hero journeys all the way to the dragon’s lair, steals the elixir, but awakens the dragon in the process. The hero has no desire to kill the dragon, a divine beast who protects the world, so the hero runs. The road of trials back up from the bottom of the circle will now be what Campbell refers to as a Magical Flight - fleeing the manifestation of the chaos world all the way back to the threshold between realms.
Or perhaps when the dragon awakens the hero charms it - plays the flute given to him by the goddess, or uses cunning and wiles to trick it, or bests it in battle to win its respect. Now the magical flight will take the form of a delightful ride, with the hero as emissary, borne on the wings of the beast that is now transformed into the most dazzling of allies. Spirited Away has a gorgeous version of this, with Chihiro being carried back to the boundary between worlds by the dragon Haku, who is in turn transformed mid-flight by Chihiro who remembers his true form as the spirit of the Kohaku River - and thus the final trappings of darkness are shed and the adventure almost ready to be ended.
There are many different ways for the formula to play out. What matters is that the chaos world, the opposite of the ordinary life from the beginning of the story, must be penetrated to its core, and some aspect of it brought back into ordinary life, thus transforming not just the hero but their world as well.
This is done by a return crossing back over the threshold. The magical world is left behind, and the regular world rejoined. In Spirited Away, after one final test is passed, Chihiro’s parents are returned to her, and together they cross the river and walk out of the abandoned theme park, the spirit world fading around them, and they find their car where they left it, buried beneath dust and leaves. Dorothy clicks her heels three times and awakens out of Oz. The hobbits travel back to the Shire. John McClane descends from the Nakatomi Plaza, his inner cowboy having defeated the shadow self/brother of that blonde terrorist, having atoned with the father embodied in Hans Gruber, and having realised his selfishness in his failing marriage. The journey into the unconscious is complete, and the revitalised McClane is ready to step back into his role in society down at street level as a cop and a husband.
This is the change Campbell refers to as Master of Two Worlds, and Freedom to Live. Neo, having achieved god-status and transcended the danger of Agent Smith, can step between the Matrix and the real world at will. He is master of both realms, and will use this power to rebalance the relationship between man and machine. In children's films where a put-upon kid from the real world is thrust into a magical world, this last section is regularly visualised with the kid back in their town/school/home, facing whatever was initially causing them harm, and defeating it with ease. The school bullies don’t realise they’re now picking on the chosen warrior and champion of the galaxy. The diving board that was too high to jump from is now nothing for one who has flown on dragon wings. Your step-father is not so scary when you’ve duelled in single combat with the Lord of Darkness himself..
The boon has been won, carried back over the threshold, and is now used to revitalise the kingdom. Normality returns - but a normality somehow changed, enlarged, now containing a drop of the chaos world that at the beginning of the story had been drained dry. The two worlds often must remain separate, and there is a sadness at leaving the magical realm - allies met usually cannot pass back across the threshold, all that was unknown and exciting must now be integrated into the everyday - but the worlds are not removed from one another as they were at the outset. An element of the ordinary - the hero - has penetrated to the core of the magical, and brought back an element of the magical - the Ultimate Boon - into the ordinary. As I said in that post about The Matrix, it’s like yin and yang.
And that, really, is the essential quality of a completed story: balance. There’s no necessity for a happy ending, let alone a happily ever after - but for the hero’s journey to be complete the ordinary world at the conclusion of the quest should be deeper, fuller, and more honest than it was at the outset.
In actual fact, this honesty in really good stories usually transcends the simplistic moralising of Hollywood. The cosmic cycle repeats through destruction as much as it does rebirth. If there is a God then he is a murderer as much as a creator. There are vicious beasts in the basements of the unconscious. But behind this ferocious rising and falling of forms there is something everlasting and untarnished. The hero’s apotheosis generally requires some conception of this - an ability to stare directly at the furnace of existence and face the fact that we all are swallowed in the flames - but through this to comprehend that we are not just what is swallowed but also what swallows: the furnace, the flames, the ever-nourishing energy of life.
So the hero’s journey isn’t necessarily palatable, but its complete cycle should ultimately be a comfort. We are led into dark forests, and then we are led back out again. We have faced that which was hardest to face - pretty universally the fact that we’re all someday soon going to die - and through that awareness of death we have found the courage to live anew. The cycle is complete. The story, for the moment, is over.
Day 137: Don't try
Eep. I’ve written a lot explaining the final segment of the hero’s journey - which by the way is mostly to get it straight in my own head - but it’s not finished. I left it and went out for my staff do, on which I obviously wasn’t drinking, but I was enjoying being out with everyone and getting caught up in their youthful excitement (it’s literally a couple of months since I was smashing shots and staying out all night with them - dunno where I’m getting this sense of superiority from) … And but I figured I could finish up the story structure post when I came home, but now I’m back and my head is spinning (the energy of late bars is weird when you’re sober) and after looking over the post realistically it needs another hour or two of work, and I’m in for the delivery tomorrow morning, so bugger that noise - I’m gonna fire off this quick missive and hopefully have time for the story stuff tomorrow.
I love story structure. It’s so great to feel excited and curious about something again, when in the depths of drinking and depression I was feeling a real apathy and lack of affect. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still sad a lot of the time, still flat a lot of the time, but there are more and more moments of lightness, of light. I dig the film reviews, and I dig the analysis of story structure. Funnily enough these seem to be the least popular of my posts, but that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I think it’s important to not chase what you think people want, which chasing never takes you anywhere interesting, and instead to explore where your heart tells you you should go.
I've got a notebook here, and I need to sketch every day and follow my nose, and enjoy where it takes me.
Here’s a great quote from the photographer Peter Marlow, which I saw recently on the street photographer Joshua K. Jackson’s Instagram page:
I’m trying, guys. I’m trying.
I love story structure. It’s so great to feel excited and curious about something again, when in the depths of drinking and depression I was feeling a real apathy and lack of affect. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still sad a lot of the time, still flat a lot of the time, but there are more and more moments of lightness, of light. I dig the film reviews, and I dig the analysis of story structure. Funnily enough these seem to be the least popular of my posts, but that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I think it’s important to not chase what you think people want, which chasing never takes you anywhere interesting, and instead to explore where your heart tells you you should go.
I've got a notebook here, and I need to sketch every day and follow my nose, and enjoy where it takes me.
Here’s a great quote from the photographer Peter Marlow, which I saw recently on the street photographer Joshua K. Jackson’s Instagram page:
“Be yourself, get up early, and don’t try too hard, as whatever is trying to come out will come out eventually without any effort, learn to trust your instincts and don’t think about what others will think or about the process too much. Work hard but enjoy it.”
I’m trying, guys. I’m trying.
Monday, 10 September 2018
Day 136: Men
It's hard work pretending to be a man. You put on heavy work boots and thick work pants, pockets covering pockets which are in turn filled with more pockets, and in all the pockets there are screws, and you have a drill hanging from your belt, and you're bending down and stretching up and lifting things and carrying things and climbing ladders and screwing and hoisting and plugging and taping all the long day long.
And there are so many men, other men in work boots and work pants, their bellies hanging over their belts, thick arms and leathery hands; belching, joshing, ribbing; talking about cricket; asking you to check the transformer, like you have a clue what a transformer is, or does. And the end bit of your drill keeps falling out and you don't know how to make it stay in, you sit there trying to hide what you're doing from the view of the men as you fiddle with your drill, but you know they can see you, and your end bit falls out again, and it doesn't matter that you've read Camus or that you appreciate the abstract impressionism of Mark Rothko or that choosing between "who" and "whom" is the easiest thing in the world to you, because you can't drill with a drill, and you're not a man, and you want to give up and cry.
And you go to the toilet and there are men shitting in all the stalls. Men coughing, men shifting their weight, men playing Jewel Quest at full volume on their phones. Men shirking responsibility, men taking moments to themselves. All sat bowed, vulnerable, separate but together, communing with the gods. Plops, grunts, the unrolling of roll. The lighting harsh. The blues and the greens. The echoes of the room. And you go in a stall, and you shit, and it is good.
And the day passes. And you graft. You do everything there is to do. And after a day of grafting you get in the van and Steve drives you up the motorway, and you are empty in that glow of honest exhaustion, and you smell the sawdust in your hair, rub the blisters on your hands, feel the ache in knees and thighs, and the sun goes down, and BBC Radio 2 plays, and you are a man, in a manner of speaking, and you are fine.
And there are so many men, other men in work boots and work pants, their bellies hanging over their belts, thick arms and leathery hands; belching, joshing, ribbing; talking about cricket; asking you to check the transformer, like you have a clue what a transformer is, or does. And the end bit of your drill keeps falling out and you don't know how to make it stay in, you sit there trying to hide what you're doing from the view of the men as you fiddle with your drill, but you know they can see you, and your end bit falls out again, and it doesn't matter that you've read Camus or that you appreciate the abstract impressionism of Mark Rothko or that choosing between "who" and "whom" is the easiest thing in the world to you, because you can't drill with a drill, and you're not a man, and you want to give up and cry.
And you go to the toilet and there are men shitting in all the stalls. Men coughing, men shifting their weight, men playing Jewel Quest at full volume on their phones. Men shirking responsibility, men taking moments to themselves. All sat bowed, vulnerable, separate but together, communing with the gods. Plops, grunts, the unrolling of roll. The lighting harsh. The blues and the greens. The echoes of the room. And you go in a stall, and you shit, and it is good.
And the day passes. And you graft. You do everything there is to do. And after a day of grafting you get in the van and Steve drives you up the motorway, and you are empty in that glow of honest exhaustion, and you smell the sawdust in your hair, rub the blisters on your hands, feel the ache in knees and thighs, and the sun goes down, and BBC Radio 2 plays, and you are a man, in a manner of speaking, and you are fine.
Sunday, 9 September 2018
Day 135: Ascended
Much of the problem is that in a lot of contemporary stories, i.e. films and TV, the actual vital element of the quest is often hidden. In Back to the Future the quest is for Marty McFly to go… well… back to the future. He’s trapped in the past and must find a way to return home. But that’s not really the story. The story is that his ordinary world has fallen into stagnation because his father couldn’t stand up for himself, because the whole family lets life happen to them, rather than they happening to life. And Marty must journey over the threshold into a magical kingdom, a pastel-and-bubblegum 1950s, and penetrate to the heart of the cancer, and rejuvenate his teenage father, and his world.
So many of our stories are like this, hiding the true meaning in subplot, or beneath layers of imagery, and you can only fully see and understand the tropes like meeting the goddess and apotheosis by peeling back these layers.
It can also be tricky because mainstream cinema, with its three-act structure, tends to deform and contort Campbell’s perfect circle somewhat, to provide the most satisfying emotional payoff for the audience. The first act is usually the time to establish the protagonist and their ordinary world. Show them bored at work, bullied at school, trapped in routine, in an unhappy marriage, whatever is the status quo. Then comes the call to adventure, and the act ends with the crossing of the threshold. So a quarter of the journey, in a third of the film.
The second act is usually the road of trials, meeting a gang of plucky sidekicks who will help them out and villains who will try to thwart their progress. A snappy training montage.
Then the stuff at the bottom of Campbell’s circle, everything I was discussing yesterday, gets drawn out across the end of act two and much of act three. Take The Matrix. Neo meets a sort of goddess in the Oracle, roughly halfway through the film. But the truth she imparts actually takes Neo a lot of screen time to fully process and assimilate. He goes on a final trial - to rescue Morpheus - and then must face the father/power-centre in Agent Smith, and even touch defeat and death, before he reaches apotheosis, a rebirth into godhood. Then the final quarter of Campbell’s circle (which I’m going to break down in a post soon) is squashed into the very last moments of the film.
I guess the circle is the archetype, it’s every element progressing to the next with minimum effort. You’d perhaps have a dull story if you timed it out too precisely. By stretching that emotional core down at the bottom of the circle out across much of the latter half of the film, you build to a crescendo that delivers a powerful climax, floods the audience’s brains with chemicals of release, then a rapid comedown of denouement leading out to the end titles and the lights come up and the audience leaves still aglow in that post-coital wash of happy and exhausted emptiness.
OK I’ve got to go soon, I’m off for the rest of the day and all of tomorrow to help my friend with some manual labouring work - but let me just have some more of a think about The Matrix before I go…
So the Oracle is the goddess, she represents the vital energy of the Matrix’s cosmos. What Neo learns from her is that he isn’t the One, that he’s not special, that he’s close but no cigar. But really, I think, what he learns is that prophecies are bullshit. He learns that there’s no external force separate from himself that is going to imbue him with power and turn him into a hero. There’s no magic sword for him to lift that will transform him into a hero.
But he decides he’s going to go rescue Morpheus anyway. Screw all this noise. He doesn’t need a prophecy - he doesn’t need what is in fact yet more structure foisted upon him from the outside. If he wants to face what is too terrifying to face, if he wants to go on the true journey into the centre of the dark fortress (although at this stage he’s still only going in to get his friend and get back out) then he’ll damn well do it by himself.
This is a vital moment of self-discovery. That it is our own individual will that drives us. That you can feel like your ship is buffeted on the winds - either through a robot simulation that controls your very perception of reality, or a prophecy that forces you into the framework of a hero - or you can stand at the wheel sailing that ship. This is the second most important discovery Neo makes, and it is accompanied in the film by a great visualisation of him coming into this power. Guns. Trenchcoats. A hotel lobby that gets utterly, insanely, decimated.
But then what’s the most important discovery? It’s after Neo plucks Morpheus from the clutches of the evil that cannot be faced, gets him to safety, and then, instead of running, turns back around. The evil that cannot be faced will destroy anyone who is not ready, but Neo is ready. Agent Smith stands before him. Neo crouches into his fighting stance, crooks his finger, beckons. Bring it.
The embodiment of every dark aspect of the subconscious, everything that we fly from, and the hero who has become master of his own destiny: these two stand and spar. The flurries come too fast for us mere mortals to track. Any of us would be torn apart. But the hero remains, matches blow for blow, drives the darkness back.
He earns a respite, and now is the time to flee. These are the voices of his allies, the mere mortals, the last remnants of his ego, telling him to run. He does so, and it looks like he will escape, and then he turns a corner and there the evil stands, waiting, and pierces him through the heart.
Because here is the final and most important discovery. The hero who finds their own agency, who begins sailing their own ship, what they discover in the heart of the deepest darkness, the truth that most cannot stand to look upon, is that the ship and the ocean upon which it sails are one and the same. The hero is the darkness, and the darkness is the hero. Self is Other, and Other is Self.
Neo cannot die to Agent Smith and the forces of eternity, because Neo has realised that he himself is those forces of eternity.
He rises, the doors of perception cleansed, seeing reality as it truly is, in all its splendour (and late-90s computer graphics). He doesn’t even have to duel with Agent Smith any more, there is no fight, the thing that cannot be faced is nothing, is chaff to the wind. Forms rise and fall. All individuals die, but only as waves on a sea that is eternal. Neo is the waves, but Neo is also the sea. Death and life, these are but mutually-arising concepts signifying something greater and beyond their two extremes. Neo has touched the realm of this beyond, touched and become it. He is ascended.
So many of our stories are like this, hiding the true meaning in subplot, or beneath layers of imagery, and you can only fully see and understand the tropes like meeting the goddess and apotheosis by peeling back these layers.
It can also be tricky because mainstream cinema, with its three-act structure, tends to deform and contort Campbell’s perfect circle somewhat, to provide the most satisfying emotional payoff for the audience. The first act is usually the time to establish the protagonist and their ordinary world. Show them bored at work, bullied at school, trapped in routine, in an unhappy marriage, whatever is the status quo. Then comes the call to adventure, and the act ends with the crossing of the threshold. So a quarter of the journey, in a third of the film.
The second act is usually the road of trials, meeting a gang of plucky sidekicks who will help them out and villains who will try to thwart their progress. A snappy training montage.
Then the stuff at the bottom of Campbell’s circle, everything I was discussing yesterday, gets drawn out across the end of act two and much of act three. Take The Matrix. Neo meets a sort of goddess in the Oracle, roughly halfway through the film. But the truth she imparts actually takes Neo a lot of screen time to fully process and assimilate. He goes on a final trial - to rescue Morpheus - and then must face the father/power-centre in Agent Smith, and even touch defeat and death, before he reaches apotheosis, a rebirth into godhood. Then the final quarter of Campbell’s circle (which I’m going to break down in a post soon) is squashed into the very last moments of the film.
I guess the circle is the archetype, it’s every element progressing to the next with minimum effort. You’d perhaps have a dull story if you timed it out too precisely. By stretching that emotional core down at the bottom of the circle out across much of the latter half of the film, you build to a crescendo that delivers a powerful climax, floods the audience’s brains with chemicals of release, then a rapid comedown of denouement leading out to the end titles and the lights come up and the audience leaves still aglow in that post-coital wash of happy and exhausted emptiness.
OK I’ve got to go soon, I’m off for the rest of the day and all of tomorrow to help my friend with some manual labouring work - but let me just have some more of a think about The Matrix before I go…
So the Oracle is the goddess, she represents the vital energy of the Matrix’s cosmos. What Neo learns from her is that he isn’t the One, that he’s not special, that he’s close but no cigar. But really, I think, what he learns is that prophecies are bullshit. He learns that there’s no external force separate from himself that is going to imbue him with power and turn him into a hero. There’s no magic sword for him to lift that will transform him into a hero.
But he decides he’s going to go rescue Morpheus anyway. Screw all this noise. He doesn’t need a prophecy - he doesn’t need what is in fact yet more structure foisted upon him from the outside. If he wants to face what is too terrifying to face, if he wants to go on the true journey into the centre of the dark fortress (although at this stage he’s still only going in to get his friend and get back out) then he’ll damn well do it by himself.
This is a vital moment of self-discovery. That it is our own individual will that drives us. That you can feel like your ship is buffeted on the winds - either through a robot simulation that controls your very perception of reality, or a prophecy that forces you into the framework of a hero - or you can stand at the wheel sailing that ship. This is the second most important discovery Neo makes, and it is accompanied in the film by a great visualisation of him coming into this power. Guns. Trenchcoats. A hotel lobby that gets utterly, insanely, decimated.
But then what’s the most important discovery? It’s after Neo plucks Morpheus from the clutches of the evil that cannot be faced, gets him to safety, and then, instead of running, turns back around. The evil that cannot be faced will destroy anyone who is not ready, but Neo is ready. Agent Smith stands before him. Neo crouches into his fighting stance, crooks his finger, beckons. Bring it.
The embodiment of every dark aspect of the subconscious, everything that we fly from, and the hero who has become master of his own destiny: these two stand and spar. The flurries come too fast for us mere mortals to track. Any of us would be torn apart. But the hero remains, matches blow for blow, drives the darkness back.
He earns a respite, and now is the time to flee. These are the voices of his allies, the mere mortals, the last remnants of his ego, telling him to run. He does so, and it looks like he will escape, and then he turns a corner and there the evil stands, waiting, and pierces him through the heart.
Because here is the final and most important discovery. The hero who finds their own agency, who begins sailing their own ship, what they discover in the heart of the deepest darkness, the truth that most cannot stand to look upon, is that the ship and the ocean upon which it sails are one and the same. The hero is the darkness, and the darkness is the hero. Self is Other, and Other is Self.
Neo cannot die to Agent Smith and the forces of eternity, because Neo has realised that he himself is those forces of eternity.
He rises, the doors of perception cleansed, seeing reality as it truly is, in all its splendour (and late-90s computer graphics). He doesn’t even have to duel with Agent Smith any more, there is no fight, the thing that cannot be faced is nothing, is chaff to the wind. Forms rise and fall. All individuals die, but only as waves on a sea that is eternal. Neo is the waves, but Neo is also the sea. Death and life, these are but mutually-arising concepts signifying something greater and beyond their two extremes. Neo has touched the realm of this beyond, touched and become it. He is ascended.
Right. And on that note I'm gonna post this bad boy up, and go ascend to the role of lifter of heavy objects. See ya!
Day 134: Story Structure Notes # 3
[Part one]
[Part two]
OK let's do this. We're talking story structure. The hero's journey and the monomyth. So I've looked at how stories are a descent from an ordinary world into a magical realm of subconscious imagery and chaos, to attain some goal, and then a journey back, bringing something of the darkness up into the light, integrating it into the status quo, using it to heal the wounds of the ordinary world and set a new normal.
After the Call to Adventure and the Crossing of the Threshold, after a succession of challenges faced along the Road of Trials, the hero finally reaches the deepest, most mystical point of their quest.
This is the stage, at the bottom of the circle, that Joseph Campbell refers to as the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father.
The hero, representing the striving of the discrete, impermanent Self, has journeyed to the beating heart of the cosmos, and here touches something everlasting and boundless, and learns that they and it are one and the same. This universal energy, growing from the tree of life, flowing from the spring of life, is symbolised in the Goddess, an archetype of all that is desired and blissful and nourishing. In meeting with her, possibly joining with her, the hero discovers that her grace is also their grace, her lifeforce their lifeforce, whether they be lowly pig farmer, downtrodden beat cop, or nerdy high-school kid.
After, or instead of, this meeting, the hero may face whatever represents the highest power structure of their story's universe. This power is symbolised in the father - in the ogre terrorising the village, the sorcerer atop the black tower, the head terrorist, the main bully, the T-Rex, the director of the CIA, or the uber-macho cyborg Terminator sent back from a hellish future on a mission to erase the hero from existence.
The hero faces this, and reconciles with it - through peace and understanding, or sticks of C-4 and a hydraulic press. But either way, the old power is dissolved, and the hero takes up the new.
It should be noted that the goddess doesn't have to be a woman, and the father doesn't have to be a man. These symbols have been used because our stories have grown out of sexist, or at least patriarchal, societies, and for straight men nothing represents nourishment like motherly goddesses, desire like nubile goddesses, and existing power like father-gods. But it doesn't have to be that way.
The point is that in the inner sanctum the hero finds either (or both) the opposite of everything that was stagnant at the outset of the journey, or the centre of the rigid structure that was causing the stagnancy. The first is flowing, living, chaotic. The second is firm, unyielding, ossified. A fountain, or a dragon guarding a fountain. And in this space, having shattered the old world order, the hero floats, weightless.
In Garden State, Zach Braff's character Andrew Largeman begins the film trapped in stasis. Bored, failing at adult life, numbed by antidepressants, it takes a literal call to adventure, on his telephone, informing him of the death of his mother, for Andrew to begin a journey to break apart that stasis. Returning home for the funeral, he stops taking his medication, and enters a world of shifting symbols and uncertainty and adventure. He encounters allies, and is tested in the trials of navigating the road into adulthood. He meets a woman, Sam, played by Natalie Portman, who in some ways functions as an ally, but in her romantic relationship with Andrew also represents the goddess, the selfless loving aspect of the universe that Andrew has been denying himself since as a child he caused the accident that paralysed his mother, which paralysis would ultimately lead to her death.
So Andrew and Sam and some old school friends sit around a fire at the heart of the movie's narrative. It's late at night. Andrew has been stripped of the trappings of his ego through his trials, and stripped of his literal clothes through some impromptu pool partying. He sits by the flickering fire, wrapped in a blanket, and when someone asks just what happened to his mother all those years ago, anyway, he finds he is finally ready to talk.
He tells the story of the horrendous mistake he made as a kid, a little kid, too young and innocent to be held accountable, he now sees - and the power structure of guilt and regret and a pain too hot to go near is finally and fully melted, crumbled apart, and Andrew and Sam are left, as the other friends conveniently slip away, to commune with the universal in the most tried and tested way a man and a woman have yet found.
Later, when Andrew confronts his father, standing up to him, forgiving him for the fact he could never forgive Andrew for his childhood mistake, it is mostly a formality. The atonement has already occurred within Andrew, and this is but a playing out.
In Clueless, which is the best teen comedy ever made, fyi, the protagonist Cher's meeting and atonement comes when she faces the fact that it is she herself who has been "clueless", that she has been focused on her own petty needs and ego rather than on the people closest to her, and that scuzzy, annoying, awkward-dancing Paul Rudd is the man her heart has desired all along. These truths were always there, underneath all else, waiting to be discovered - but it took Cher a long road of trials to prepare herself for finding them.
The next steps of the hero's journey, again related, again not necessarily separate, are termed by Campbell as Apotheosis and the Ultimate Boon.
Apotheosis is the hero's transcendence into immortality. Touching the living energy of the universe, recognising the truth of Being, the hero comes to embody the very power they sought. Whether through a meeting with the glory of the goddess, or a smashing of the structure of the father, the hero ascends to become not a ship tossed on the seas of life, but the tumult of the ocean itself.
If the hero is in an action film, now is when they force themselves up from a major beating and go kick ass - think Neo reborn and dodging Agent Smith's blows with ease at the end of The Matrix. If they're Luke Skywalker they turn off their targeting computer and discover they know when to fire their missile through oneness with the Force. In Hook the apotheosis is the moment the miserly lawyer, who had been repressing his childlike joy and sense of wonder, finally finds how to fly, and becomes Peter Pan. It's the point the hero steps into the role they were always born to take, the mantle they were born to wear, when every false garment of ego has been shed and they stand bright and shimmering and coursing with eternal life.
And this is great for them, but the hero's journey is not about getting to be a badass, but healing the ills of the world. The Ultimate Boon refers to some element of the state of weightless power that may be snapped off and brought back across the barrier from the depths of the magical realm and into the ordinary world. It is the pearls of wisdom, the elixir of life, the golden fleece. If the hero's journey was a search for a missing princess, then the boon is the princess herself - because sadly women are often relegated in stories to an embodiment of everything that was vibrant and living in a kingdom that has been lost. The princess is a symbol, she lacks agency, she is not a human but a pointer for, I don't know, a branch aflame with the graceful fire of the chaos world that must be brought back to light the darkness of the home, let's say. And there's nothing wrong with being a symbol, now and again, but if all I ever saw of my gender in thousands of years of stories was as a stand-in for a magical twig, I'd be pretty pissed off as well.
Anyway, the Ultimate Boon is about completing the hero's cycle. As in the Taoist symbol of yin and yang, the hero must return or smuggle back from the depths some spoonful of darkness into the light. The healthy light world contains a dash of darkness, the healthy life a touch of death. In a gorgeous parallel, the hero is the single fleck of the ordinary that may penetrate the inner sanctum of magic, and in return a single fleck of the magical - the Ultimate Boon - may be brought back into the ordinary. And in such a way balance may be restored, and the truth remembered that beneath the illusion of the separateness of all things, whether order and chaos, life and death, or Self and Other, everything is in fact one.
But bringing this boon back is easier said than done. Next time I'll finish this series off by looking at the Journey Home...
[Part two]
OK let's do this. We're talking story structure. The hero's journey and the monomyth. So I've looked at how stories are a descent from an ordinary world into a magical realm of subconscious imagery and chaos, to attain some goal, and then a journey back, bringing something of the darkness up into the light, integrating it into the status quo, using it to heal the wounds of the ordinary world and set a new normal.
After the Call to Adventure and the Crossing of the Threshold, after a succession of challenges faced along the Road of Trials, the hero finally reaches the deepest, most mystical point of their quest.
This is the stage, at the bottom of the circle, that Joseph Campbell refers to as the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father.
The hero, representing the striving of the discrete, impermanent Self, has journeyed to the beating heart of the cosmos, and here touches something everlasting and boundless, and learns that they and it are one and the same. This universal energy, growing from the tree of life, flowing from the spring of life, is symbolised in the Goddess, an archetype of all that is desired and blissful and nourishing. In meeting with her, possibly joining with her, the hero discovers that her grace is also their grace, her lifeforce their lifeforce, whether they be lowly pig farmer, downtrodden beat cop, or nerdy high-school kid.
After, or instead of, this meeting, the hero may face whatever represents the highest power structure of their story's universe. This power is symbolised in the father - in the ogre terrorising the village, the sorcerer atop the black tower, the head terrorist, the main bully, the T-Rex, the director of the CIA, or the uber-macho cyborg Terminator sent back from a hellish future on a mission to erase the hero from existence.
The hero faces this, and reconciles with it - through peace and understanding, or sticks of C-4 and a hydraulic press. But either way, the old power is dissolved, and the hero takes up the new.
It should be noted that the goddess doesn't have to be a woman, and the father doesn't have to be a man. These symbols have been used because our stories have grown out of sexist, or at least patriarchal, societies, and for straight men nothing represents nourishment like motherly goddesses, desire like nubile goddesses, and existing power like father-gods. But it doesn't have to be that way.
The point is that in the inner sanctum the hero finds either (or both) the opposite of everything that was stagnant at the outset of the journey, or the centre of the rigid structure that was causing the stagnancy. The first is flowing, living, chaotic. The second is firm, unyielding, ossified. A fountain, or a dragon guarding a fountain. And in this space, having shattered the old world order, the hero floats, weightless.
In Garden State, Zach Braff's character Andrew Largeman begins the film trapped in stasis. Bored, failing at adult life, numbed by antidepressants, it takes a literal call to adventure, on his telephone, informing him of the death of his mother, for Andrew to begin a journey to break apart that stasis. Returning home for the funeral, he stops taking his medication, and enters a world of shifting symbols and uncertainty and adventure. He encounters allies, and is tested in the trials of navigating the road into adulthood. He meets a woman, Sam, played by Natalie Portman, who in some ways functions as an ally, but in her romantic relationship with Andrew also represents the goddess, the selfless loving aspect of the universe that Andrew has been denying himself since as a child he caused the accident that paralysed his mother, which paralysis would ultimately lead to her death.
So Andrew and Sam and some old school friends sit around a fire at the heart of the movie's narrative. It's late at night. Andrew has been stripped of the trappings of his ego through his trials, and stripped of his literal clothes through some impromptu pool partying. He sits by the flickering fire, wrapped in a blanket, and when someone asks just what happened to his mother all those years ago, anyway, he finds he is finally ready to talk.
He tells the story of the horrendous mistake he made as a kid, a little kid, too young and innocent to be held accountable, he now sees - and the power structure of guilt and regret and a pain too hot to go near is finally and fully melted, crumbled apart, and Andrew and Sam are left, as the other friends conveniently slip away, to commune with the universal in the most tried and tested way a man and a woman have yet found.
Later, when Andrew confronts his father, standing up to him, forgiving him for the fact he could never forgive Andrew for his childhood mistake, it is mostly a formality. The atonement has already occurred within Andrew, and this is but a playing out.
In Clueless, which is the best teen comedy ever made, fyi, the protagonist Cher's meeting and atonement comes when she faces the fact that it is she herself who has been "clueless", that she has been focused on her own petty needs and ego rather than on the people closest to her, and that scuzzy, annoying, awkward-dancing Paul Rudd is the man her heart has desired all along. These truths were always there, underneath all else, waiting to be discovered - but it took Cher a long road of trials to prepare herself for finding them.
The next steps of the hero's journey, again related, again not necessarily separate, are termed by Campbell as Apotheosis and the Ultimate Boon.
Apotheosis is the hero's transcendence into immortality. Touching the living energy of the universe, recognising the truth of Being, the hero comes to embody the very power they sought. Whether through a meeting with the glory of the goddess, or a smashing of the structure of the father, the hero ascends to become not a ship tossed on the seas of life, but the tumult of the ocean itself.
If the hero is in an action film, now is when they force themselves up from a major beating and go kick ass - think Neo reborn and dodging Agent Smith's blows with ease at the end of The Matrix. If they're Luke Skywalker they turn off their targeting computer and discover they know when to fire their missile through oneness with the Force. In Hook the apotheosis is the moment the miserly lawyer, who had been repressing his childlike joy and sense of wonder, finally finds how to fly, and becomes Peter Pan. It's the point the hero steps into the role they were always born to take, the mantle they were born to wear, when every false garment of ego has been shed and they stand bright and shimmering and coursing with eternal life.
And this is great for them, but the hero's journey is not about getting to be a badass, but healing the ills of the world. The Ultimate Boon refers to some element of the state of weightless power that may be snapped off and brought back across the barrier from the depths of the magical realm and into the ordinary world. It is the pearls of wisdom, the elixir of life, the golden fleece. If the hero's journey was a search for a missing princess, then the boon is the princess herself - because sadly women are often relegated in stories to an embodiment of everything that was vibrant and living in a kingdom that has been lost. The princess is a symbol, she lacks agency, she is not a human but a pointer for, I don't know, a branch aflame with the graceful fire of the chaos world that must be brought back to light the darkness of the home, let's say. And there's nothing wrong with being a symbol, now and again, but if all I ever saw of my gender in thousands of years of stories was as a stand-in for a magical twig, I'd be pretty pissed off as well.
But bringing this boon back is easier said than done. Next time I'll finish this series off by looking at the Journey Home...
Saturday, 8 September 2018
Day 133: Sleep is for the sheep
Well, I fell asleep. Home from work, wanted to sit at my desk with a mug of Earl Grey, ambient music playing, and settle into some writing, not knowing where it would take me, go on an adventure, get done early and have the rest of the evening to relax. But then I fell asleep, and napped through until now.
I think I’m coming to see that the way I live is not healthy for me. Like, obviously. But specifically my sleeping patterns. Pretty much since being a teenager I’ve turned myself into a night owl, but I don’t think underneath I naturally am a night owl. Just by accident I've listened to a few podcasts recently that have discussed sleep, and they’ve all said that people fall into categories of when they should sleep. Some people thrive off going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 5am. Some people work better late at night, and should go to bed at 2am and get up at 10pm. We are not all the same, and there isn’t one perfect sleep schedule that suits us all.
I stay up ridiculously late, then sleep as long as I can the next day. Partly from working in bars for years, but I was doing it before then as well. I’m not naturally productive at night, but I can force myself to be. I’ve written many posts at 3am, eyes bloodshot, the house around me silent.
But as a child I’d wake up very early, 5 or 6 in the morning. I never had a problem getting up for school, I didn’t use an alarm and would rise quickly and get into the bathroom without internal strife. As a teenager I loved sleep, and would stay in bed all day if I could, but this wasn’t because I couldn’t get up, more just that it was so lovely being warm and safe under the covers.
But then I started drinking regularly, and at uni I had few 9am lectures, and I got into the habit of staying up later and later. There were plenty of drug-fuelled all-nighters, bleary days rising at the crack of dusk. I went through a period educating myself on classic films, reading Roger Ebert’s list of important movies, buying stacks of them on DVD from Play.com - and I’d watch them by myself with a joint and a bottle of bourbon, starting late in the evening, ploughing through a couple a night in a magical liquid realm where the edges of things blurred and the world was my own and Tartovsky and Scorsese showed me what cinema could do. It was like the mirror of my six-year-old self getting up at dawn to watch cartoons by himself.
... I want to write quickly here because it’s past midnight now and the point of this post was supposed to be that I’m going to try going to bed earlier and rising earlier and seeing if it makes a difference - but this sleep schedule seems to me indicative of a larger movement in my life: away from my natural tendencies and purposefully towards a crafted persona as someone edgier, cooler, less utterly lame, than I saw my younger self as being, looking back as a teenager.
And I know why. I was bullied for a long time in secondary school, for being wet, weak, nerdy, for being a mummy’s boy, for reading The Lord of the Rings and wearing Debenham’s own-brand clothes and being axiomatically, unfeasibly clueless.
And I think so much of what I did in my later teens and early twenties was an attempt to reforge myself as my peers (I felt) thought guys should be. I started skateboarding, listening to punk music, smoking weed, turning away from all responsibility. And I think staying up all night and sleeping all day was at least partially tied to that.
And, yeah, probably that is the story of every teenager ever. I guess what I’m thinking now is that I never really found my way through that. I never went too far in a few wrong directions, got lost, and then discovered an equilibrium and a place that I was comfortable being me. I’m still looking.
But then, maybe that’s also more common than I assume.
But anyway, I think much of what I’ve been doing recently has been reappraisal. Returning to long forgotten modes of being and reevaluating them now as an adult. I’ve been drinking all my adult life, drinking too much, and basing much of my identity around alcohol. To a lesser extent also with marijuana, other recreational drugs. So I’m experimenting with stopping completely. I spent so many years hiding my love of nerdy things, the less macho aspects of myself, hiding the things I thought people wouldn’t like. So now I’m trying to be more open about all that, even as it makes me itch with embarrassment. I never used to talk about the struggles with acne I’ve had since I was fifteen, so I’m forcing myself, slowly, to write about that.
And I think a good next step is to try going to bed early and getting up early, see if that works better for me. Just to be curious.
I think I’m coming to see that the way I live is not healthy for me. Like, obviously. But specifically my sleeping patterns. Pretty much since being a teenager I’ve turned myself into a night owl, but I don’t think underneath I naturally am a night owl. Just by accident I've listened to a few podcasts recently that have discussed sleep, and they’ve all said that people fall into categories of when they should sleep. Some people thrive off going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 5am. Some people work better late at night, and should go to bed at 2am and get up at 10pm. We are not all the same, and there isn’t one perfect sleep schedule that suits us all.
I stay up ridiculously late, then sleep as long as I can the next day. Partly from working in bars for years, but I was doing it before then as well. I’m not naturally productive at night, but I can force myself to be. I’ve written many posts at 3am, eyes bloodshot, the house around me silent.
But as a child I’d wake up very early, 5 or 6 in the morning. I never had a problem getting up for school, I didn’t use an alarm and would rise quickly and get into the bathroom without internal strife. As a teenager I loved sleep, and would stay in bed all day if I could, but this wasn’t because I couldn’t get up, more just that it was so lovely being warm and safe under the covers.
But then I started drinking regularly, and at uni I had few 9am lectures, and I got into the habit of staying up later and later. There were plenty of drug-fuelled all-nighters, bleary days rising at the crack of dusk. I went through a period educating myself on classic films, reading Roger Ebert’s list of important movies, buying stacks of them on DVD from Play.com - and I’d watch them by myself with a joint and a bottle of bourbon, starting late in the evening, ploughing through a couple a night in a magical liquid realm where the edges of things blurred and the world was my own and Tartovsky and Scorsese showed me what cinema could do. It was like the mirror of my six-year-old self getting up at dawn to watch cartoons by himself.
... I want to write quickly here because it’s past midnight now and the point of this post was supposed to be that I’m going to try going to bed earlier and rising earlier and seeing if it makes a difference - but this sleep schedule seems to me indicative of a larger movement in my life: away from my natural tendencies and purposefully towards a crafted persona as someone edgier, cooler, less utterly lame, than I saw my younger self as being, looking back as a teenager.
And I know why. I was bullied for a long time in secondary school, for being wet, weak, nerdy, for being a mummy’s boy, for reading The Lord of the Rings and wearing Debenham’s own-brand clothes and being axiomatically, unfeasibly clueless.
And I think so much of what I did in my later teens and early twenties was an attempt to reforge myself as my peers (I felt) thought guys should be. I started skateboarding, listening to punk music, smoking weed, turning away from all responsibility. And I think staying up all night and sleeping all day was at least partially tied to that.
And, yeah, probably that is the story of every teenager ever. I guess what I’m thinking now is that I never really found my way through that. I never went too far in a few wrong directions, got lost, and then discovered an equilibrium and a place that I was comfortable being me. I’m still looking.
But then, maybe that’s also more common than I assume.
But anyway, I think much of what I’ve been doing recently has been reappraisal. Returning to long forgotten modes of being and reevaluating them now as an adult. I’ve been drinking all my adult life, drinking too much, and basing much of my identity around alcohol. To a lesser extent also with marijuana, other recreational drugs. So I’m experimenting with stopping completely. I spent so many years hiding my love of nerdy things, the less macho aspects of myself, hiding the things I thought people wouldn’t like. So now I’m trying to be more open about all that, even as it makes me itch with embarrassment. I never used to talk about the struggles with acne I’ve had since I was fifteen, so I’m forcing myself, slowly, to write about that.
And I think a good next step is to try going to bed early and getting up early, see if that works better for me. Just to be curious.
Maybe I'll find with all these things that I was happy where I was (though I doubt that). Maybe I was made to drink beer and stay up all night, and be a weird mix of intellectual and stoner and dropout and pansy and nerd. Who knows? I sure as hell don’t. But it’s worth getting curious about it, I think, shaking it all up, seeing what happens.
So, yeah, all of which means: I'm going to bed right this second. Good night.
So, yeah, all of which means: I'm going to bed right this second. Good night.
Friday, 7 September 2018
Day 132: BlacKkKlansman
Released to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the fascist rally in Charlottesville - during which a white supremacist rammed his car into counter-protesters, murdering one, and then Donald Trump made snivelling, sycophantic excuses for the neo-Nazis - the film, detailing the true story of a black cop infiltrating the KKK, leaves no question as to the parallels it draws between then and now, nor of whom it blames.
A number of Klan members make reference to the need to "make America great" again. During a scene where the protagonist derides as implausible the thought of a lying racist buffoon becoming president, Lee could only be more on the nose if he walked out from behind the camera and winked at the audience. And the ending of the film dissolves into real footage from Charlottesville, and Trump's cowardly response, with such force that it left me gasping back tears. BlacKkKlansman is not playing. It sees the problem, and it's making damn sure that you see it, too.
But it's an odd film. The subject matter is shocking, yet the storytelling itself is safe, even formulaic. John David Washington (son of Denzel) plays Ron Stallworth, an undercover cop who bags an invitation to the Colorado Springs chapter of the KKK, using fellow officer Adam Driver as his white stand-in during face-to-face meetings.
What follows are the plot beats of every cop movie you've ever seen. The outsider rookie having to earn his place in the department. The disapproving commanding officer. The tense first undercover meeting. The moment it seems like the subterfuge is blown. The distraction at the last moment. The one member of the gang who has his suspicions... And so on, right up to the neat yet expected climax.
There's a love interest, played with nerve and verve and strength and cool by Laura Harrier, but it's a depressingly traditional role, and she ends up with little to do. In a film so concerned with equality, it's a shame that there's not more parity between the male and female characters. Passing the Bechdel test would have been a good start.
So the main thrust of the script is familiar, deploying a successful but well-worn version of the Hollywood structure, even if Lee's energetic, playful direction, and the excellent performances, elevate the material.
Yet in a way it feels like this is the point. The comfortable plot is really only a delivery method for the film's message. Lee is raging, and he wants you to rage, too. The bright, cartoony world of BlacKkKlansman, where good guys are heroic and bad guys get their comeuppance, makes a number of stand-out, tonally different scenes all the more shocking for their incongruity. You enjoy the story, you settle in, and then Lee reminds you that, hey, black people have been being shot and burned and hanged and raped and mutilated and run the fuck over by obscene, white-man-driven muscle cars for as long as we all can remember, and the recent surge in popularity of the far-right is only the intrusion into quiet middle-class life of an ugliness that has never once disappeared for people of colour.
The film is an appeal to emotion, a piece of rhetoric, and it is unapologetic about that. It uses storytelling and filmmaking techniques to make you empathise with its characters, to care about them and hope they win out, and even as the fictional narrative sees them succeed, the real world, messy and complicated and terrifying, comes rushing in, mocking you for enjoying such an easy ride.
There's a black power speech that Stallworth attends early on where Lee films rapt black faces singled out in the spotlight, staring up contemplating the struggles each of them has faced for no reason other than that they were born black in a white America, and it's like a stinging slap to the audience, with the accompanying shock of tears.
Later on Harry Belafonte has a cameo as an ageing civil rights activist who relates the true life story of the lynching of Jesse Washington, horrifying, repugnant, and he's as good as talking directly to us. He discusses social feelings of the time, the release of The Birth of a Nation, holds up real photographs of the crime. Once again we're skewered in our seats, given zero room to wiggle free. We were in the safety of a predictable story, but suddenly this is all too real.
And then there is the ending, and the final documentary footage, and all the neatness of what has come before is upended, and we are left paralysed, shocked, and broken.
In BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee uses the main weave of the film - solid and structurally sound and, yes, hilarious - to lay a comforting blanket for us to rest upon, and then he yanks it out from under us. "Liked these people, did you?" he asks. "Well this is what America has in store for them."
And the credits play, and you walk out of the cinema blinking in the late afternoon sun, and you feel sick, you feel dizzy. But most of all, you feel angry.
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