Day 186: Vines

Blessed day off. But I slept late, then did nothing until Mike came round to play on the PlayStation. He wanted to see the cowboys on Red Dead. We ate French pastries and drank coffee, while in the game Mike rode my favourite horse off a cliff. Dammit Mike.

After he left I started feeling sad, the sadness descended like evening mist, blanketing everything, and I just sat doing missions on Red Dead and slumping further down in my chair. I finally turned the game off and decided I had to get moving and get out of the house. Then I sat for a while longer. Then I remembered I hadn't done social media posts for work, so I sorted that...

...And then next I knew two hours had passed and I was submerged in classic Vines compilations on YouTube, utterly lethargic, and weirdly nostalgic for an iteration of the Internet that is now dead, which is a strange thing to be nostalgic about.

I flat out couldn't leave the house by this point, so I convinced myself it would save money to just eat cereal and brioche and a banana for tea, which I guess it did, but it didn't exactly feel like I was living my best life. As a compromise I put a load of clothes to wash, which I'd earlier decided to leave till tomorrow, despite having worn the same jeans for about eighteen days now. So I washed the clothes, ate dinner à la depression, and slouched back to YouTube.

Now the day is over, I'm back at work tomorrow, and my room smells of wet underwear. But at least my horse survived the fall.

I'm going to write today off as a non-starter, throw it in the bin, start again in the morning. Bubye.

Day 185: Big moustache

My friend Alex has bought Red Dead Redemption 2, so now all we’re doing is messaging each other about the game.

“These controls are awful!” he says. “How am I supposed to get immersed in this massive world if everything is a press and hold and another button press and you need to grip the controller in a Vulcan death grip to even get your gun out?”

“I think it’s meant to be slow and deliberate, to make you feel like you’re struggling through an oppressive environment,” I say.

“Well it’s ruining it for me. I’m turning it off.”

Alex, in certain situations, has less patience than I do.

But the more of the game I play, the less certain I am in Rockstar’s design prowess. While the world they have created is astounding, I’m not so sure these controls aren’t just the work of a studio that has always had a problem with inelegance in their game design. I like that you have to hold buttons down and it’s slower and more measured. But all the fiddling with button combinations, the lack of clarity in the interface, just makes me confused, and makes my character get up and down from his horse, open and close his satchel, accidentally shoot store owners instead of trade with them. That’s not immersive, it’s the opposite.

- - -

The next day, while I’m at work, Alex messages to ask how you get a big moustache. I’ve told him my cowboy has a big moustache.

I go and hide in the cellar and sit on a barrel and write a reply.

“Mate it’s easy. You just go to your camp and select your tent with the right stick clicked down. You hold in the left trigger, bring up your context-sensitive radial dial, push left to highlight trimmers, hold X and press and hold Square while releasing the trigger. You’ve now got your trimmers selected. Go to your mirror and focus on it with R2 - make sure you don’t have your gun drawn though or you’ll shoot the mirror. Now hold Triangle to enter the interact menu, scroll across…”

Alex puts three laughing emojis in reply, and I feel like I’ve really achieved something with my life.

- - -

That evening I message Alex asking if he’s done many missions.

“Nah not really. I keep getting distracted. Have you robbed the doctors’ in Valentine?”

“No. Have you had a fist fight in the mud?”

“With the fat fella? Yeah. Have you killed any famous gunslingers?”

“Not yet.”

“I killed one and stole his boss gun.”

“Well I want to do that! Have you done the mission where you get the enormous rippling veiny black horse and then you have to sell it to learn how to buy new horses? And the only one you can afford is a mangy Skegness pony that makes your feet drag along the ground while you’re riding it?”

“Yeah haha.”

“It’s very disempowering.”

“How do you get clean?” Alex asks. “I’m dead dirty.”

“Press and hold triangle near a body of water. Push gently on the stick towards the water while clicking L3”

“Haha. No. Is that really how?”

“Yeah but you need to be lightly tapping X and toggling your second inventory dial and highlighting your stamina core with R1 as well.”

“Get to fuck.”

- - -

Already I can see how our playtimes are going to differ. Alex is shooting up bad bastards and blowing safes and becoming the fastest gun in the West, while I’m collecting bagfuls of flowers and brushing my horse a lot and standing on hills watching the night sky and taking all the baths.

But each to their own. I do think the interaction with the world is clumsy, wooly; that the systems are a hodgepodge jostling one another, lacking the synergy and grace of those in, for example, Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But the sheer width of the world, the amount of things to do, the different experiences for which the simulation allows, makes up for any mechanistic clunkiness. Enough width, it turns out, is in itself a kind of depth.

Seriously, though - look at this horse. I could fit it in my pocket it’s that small!

Day 184: Turning up

Another better day, although work sucked hard, but I ate the fruit I planned on eating, I cooked the veg; I edited the photos... did social media for work, put up a pic on my own Instagram, food shopped, talked to my housemate, drank tea, listened to sumptuous piano music, wrote silly messages to my friend…. and now I’m here writing my blog. I haven’t wasted time on Youtube, scrolled down Facebook (well, a little at work, and on the bus, and just for a moment when I got home...); I haven’t succumbed to negative thoughts or fallen into lethargy or despair. Another day upright, living, doing what needs to be done. Treating myself with a bit more kindness, practising self-care.

Don’t have much more tonight, but that’s OK. I should be proud of myself for the smallest victories. Because why not? What’s being happy about tiny steps going to harm? I haven’t written a novel today, forced myself to create anything of lasting worth. But I’ve turned up, and I’ve been present, and when you suffer from depression that’s huge in itself.

Gently does it, don’t excoriate myself for not being stronger than I am. What will that help? Breathe out. Concentrate on the positives, on gratitude - that I’m here, that I’m experiencing any of this at all. Don’t slip backwards, hold my ground, and tomorrow is another day.

And now, with all my jobs done, there's time for a little ride into the wilderness on Red Dead Redemption, a little moonlit ranging across wooded hills, over canyons, with wolves howling and birds taking flight, and the first morning mist thick in the valleys, and day coming cold and hard.

I mean, look at this game. How can you not want to lose yourself in this game?

Day 183: Six months

Another busy Saturday shift. Another long bus ride up the hill, eyelids dropping with head bumping gently against glass. Played an hour of Red Dead when I got in, tramped around the first town, looked at new revolvers I couldn’t afford, thought about buying an engraving for my current pistol, hung out in a saloon, squelched through mud, went to a church, took in a show, had a fist fight… then let my character lie back in a bath in the town’s hotel, the drip of water, muffled voices through the wall, moody cowboy blues playing lugubriously in the background.

I’ve had rejuvenating carrot and ginger soup for tea (back in the actual world), with plump brown rolls and lots of butter. I’ve eaten an apple and an orange for dessert, and drunk a mug of steaming blackcurrant tea. I’m going to put this up, and then get an early night, for the first time in far too long.

I’m trying, trying to go easy on myself, to resist the gravitational pull of negative thoughts. To carefully direct myself away from their orbits, to learn to rest in the empty space outside of harmful routine.

Day 183. Somewhere between yesterday and today I reached the halfway point; I have now been doing this for six months. It never feels like it but I have made real progress. I am better than I have been in a long time.

Keep going. It will get worse, and harder, and easier, and harder, and better. And gradually, gradually, life will change.

Day 182: Red Dead

What I didn’t mentioned yesterday was that on the way back from the Van-Shallows I may have stopped by GAME, which may have been open for its midnight launch of Red Dead Redemption 2, and I may have picked myself up a copy of the game. And then I may have played halfway through the night, and been exhausted and grumpy and made a million tiny mistakes at work today.

But what you gonna do? The game is the biggest release of the year - the latest opus from Rockstar, creators of the Grand Theft Auto series - and it demands to be played. Red Dead is Rockstar’s Wild West series, initially pitched as “GTA with cowboys” - although where the former series has always been about unfettered adolescent energy-release, stealing cars, driving at top speeds, mowing people down, Red Dead has staked a claim as a more sombre, mature affair. Yes, there are gun fights, but they are clumsy, brutal affairs, scraping, staccato interludes punctuating slower-paced, thoughtful riding, hunting, simply existing in the kind of huge and untamed wilderness that most of us now only experience in simulated form on our computers.

So I’ve only played a few hours with the game - I came home this evening and did another hour, before passing out and waking up only now - but so far Red Dead Redemption 2 is stunning - oppressive, overwhelming, an order of magnitude better than its predecessor.

What I like most is that its systems are as opaque as the snowstorm your gang of outlaws ride into to evade pursuit after a heist gone awry in the game’s opening hours (it’s very Reservoir Dogs). The gang hole-up in abandoned cabins in the Grizzlies, the game’s caricature of the Rockies, to wait out the winter. The snow falls thick all around. A constant gloom lies across the white. Sounds are close, muffled. Your character struggles through snow drifts and forces his horse up mountain paths as spidery light filters through the trees above. Inside the cabins wood creaks, fire crackles, and the voices of gang members come hushed and coarse.

And this tone is borne out by the mechanics of the game, the verbs of play, and how they are deployed. Changing weapons is unintuitive, time-consuming, fiddly. You store weapons in your horse’s satchel, and must swap them out as you proceed. Interacting with the satchel, and most prompts, involves a long hold of a button, rather than a press. You do not simply have health and stamina gauges, but “bars” surrounding “cores” which deplete and require eating of provisions and sleeping in beds to refill. Your character has a life of his own, the thumbsticks of the controller feel like they’re yanking him to where you want him to go, somewhat against his will. He is old and tired, and moves at his own pace, sluggishly, deliberately. So too the horses, which are beasts to ridden, not controlled directly.

It’s all esoteric, obfuscated, difficult, un-fun - and glorious. It is game design to engender a mood, one of isolation, oppression, existence in a hostile world.

My biggest concern with big-budget game design, with videogames in general, is that it all exists only to mollify us into unconsciousness. An opiate for the masses. A mother’s soft hand on our cheek. “Shh, quiet, here’s the next objective, just press this button, well done, have a million experience points, a level-up award, you’re so special, you’re so perfect, shh, shh, suckle this, bathe in this, go back to sleep… and when you wake up you can buy some add-ons in the in-game store.”

Fuck that. I mean, there’s a place for easy entertainment after a long day at work. There’s a place for warm baths. But it seems to me the vast majority of us are giving our existences in jobs to corporations that do not love us, our money to brands that view us with predatory gazes, all to come home and be jerked off into restless slumber by reality TV and superhero action movies and mainstream videogames. Striving in your day job to, I don't know, bring water to villages in developing countries, or be a nurse, or a teacher, then coming home to a deserved rest is one thing. But many of us - myself included - use entertainment as a drug that only serves to keep us in shackles.

So, all of which means I’m super excited about a huge blockbuster videogame, one that I'm sure will end up being among the biggest sellers of all time, that right from its opening moments offers an experience more thorny and less entertaining, and more grown-up, than any of its contemporaries. It's all the more absorbing for it.

Or maybe I’m just trying to justify why I’m a man in his thirties still playing electronic games. Did it work?

Day 181: Filling up

Home from a day with the Van-Shallows, playing videogames with Jake, nattering with Missy, getting my hand and jumper and zip and bag straps gnawed by Hagrid. The pup is splitting his time between chewing everything in sight and weeing on the floor at the moment; Jake and Missy looked tired.

We drank cups of tea, hung out in the front room around their drawings and baubles and trinkets, watched old episodes of Friends on Netflix.

We didn’t have anything exciting to say. Anything new to do. We sat and spent time. Missy went out to her GP appointment, came back, went to her play rehearsal, came back. Jake and I ate pizza and looked for a co-op game to play together on the Switch.

It was a nice day. I’m really struggling to stay on top of my mental health at the moment, but stay on top of it I think I am. It’s a beast that’s thrashing beneath me, inside me, and I’m trying to give it the room to thrash while not letting it take control. (I have a different analogy for mental health every day. That’s because it shifts forms every day. And because it’s a great shrouded thing that has to be approached from many angles to get even a loose idea of its shape, its heft.)

I had moments today when I felt like everything was empty of joy and worth. When I thought about how I’ve got so little vibrancy inside me to write with, to interact with friends with; that there’s nothing in my heart or in the wider world but habit, routine, and ash.

But those are only thoughts. Scary thoughts, but only thoughts. Not reality, but judgements about reality. Sometimes I think they’re true, and then later I see that they were nothing but shadowy spectres, dissolving in the light of awareness.

I’ve seen that before. So I allowed that that was a possibility today. "I feel that everything is broken, but that doesn’t mean that that is so."

And other moments, more moments, I played with the dog on the sofa, shot Rabbids on the Switch with Jake, laughed with Missy about Joey’s antics on Friends.

We drank more tea. The night swept in. Another day passed on Earth. Not the best day. Not the worst. But another that my negative thoughts did not win.

The brighter column is filling up.

Day 180: Gloom

Loose in soft skinned motionless shadow the room bends and churns. Wind rattles the skylight’s frame’s bare pine. One bulb spills its soupy glow.

I sit in the gloom and play on videogames. My phone by my arm mumbles with notifications for work’s social media accounts, bought interactions calling into the void.

My desk: 47 pence in coins, a bar blade, a coffee mug, my camera, a LEGO dinosaur, keys, cotton wool pads, dust, drugs, empty space.

My mind: post-migraine syrupy emptiness, lethargy, an inability to feel content.

I can hear the housemates downstairs home from the cinema, I can hear the wind outside doing its thing. I should sleep soon. I shouldn’t stay up halfway through the night. Frosty spectral hours with pulsing screens and walled-in noise and in the stretched deep-lidded fatigue the voices stop. The anxiety stops. Too tired at 4am neck dropping in front of phone light to be depressed.

But this is not a solution. Not a way through. Only holding pain in stasis. Only getting comfortable at the bottom of a pit.

I shouldn’t stay up halfway through the night...

Day 179: Who???

Dear The Liberal BBC,

I have been watching the opening episode of the latest series of your popular family science-fiction fantasy programme Doctor Who, and I wanted to write to you to tell you how disgusted I am.

I am very disgusted. I am very disgusted indeed.

I consider myself a reasonable man. A cultured man. But this episode has made me sick to my stomach. Beside myself with fury. Chewing on my knees with chagrin.

How dare you? I ask. Do you not understand that tradition holds value? That things mean what they mean, and to trample that in some rushed pursuit of the "youth" demographic is to laugh in the face of everything that our society, nay, our United Kingdom, holds dear.

I keep hearing that it's not a big deal. That's what they keep saying to me on buses, in Greggs, outside the library where I'm stopping people in the street to tell them. They say I'm overreacting. But where will it end? That's what I want to know.

I'm just a humble man, I suppose, who thinks that some values are worth fighting for - because once you let this slip it won't be long before hardworking folk like myself have nothing.

It's "Hathersage." "Hah-the-sidge". Not "Hath-er-sage."

Nothing clues a Sheffield audience in to the fact that you've hired actors from London for your Sheffield-based series and told them to put on a northern accent like filming them mispronouncing the word "Hathersage" (during a scene on a train that looked suspiciously like a London train, might I add!).

And I'm pretty sure the same woman called Grindleford "Grinford". It's not a fanciful imaginary place, you know? It's where we go for our chip butties from famously cantankerous cafe owners after walking the dog down Padley Gorge, I think you'll find. This stuff matters to us.

Now, I liked the rest of the episode. I thought Jodie Whittaker made for a fabulous Doctor, full of humour and humanity and vivacity and heart, and by the end of the episode she completely and comfortably embodied the role. But unless something changes to make your overpaid television executives start taking my fair city and the names of its village environs seriously, I'm afraid to say I shall not be watching your channel any further.

Sort it out!

Yours,

A Disgruntled Yorkshireman

Day 178: Who taught you meteorology?

“Thunder only happens when it’s raining,” sings Stevie Nicks in Fleetwood Mac’s inimitable 1977 hit Dreams. But the truth is that thunder does not only happen when it’s raining. That is not how thunder works, Stevie Nicks! In actual fact dry thunderstorms are a major cause of wildfires in the American Southwest, occuring when mid and upper level moisture, drawn into the region from the subtropics, forms convection currents in the intense summer heat, producing cloud to cloud and cloud to ground lightning! At least according to the /askscience Reddit, which I trust a damned sight more than a band whose most famous work is the hearsay and conjecture filled album Rumours.

A trifling mistake, though, you say? Well it turns out that the more you look, the more you find that popular music is riddled with such factual inaccuracies, spurious and oftentimes slanderous statements furthered by irresponsible artists lost in the avaricious pursuit of poetry and rhyme. Here are the first ten examples I found. You don’t want to know how deep this rabbit hole leads…

1. “The change has come, she’s under my thumb...” - Under My Thumb, The Rolling Stones - Now, people can’t fit under other people’s thumbs, even when the thumbs belong to that famously beef-handed cockerel-man Mick Jagger. Unless there exists a race of faerie folk that Jagger has been keeping locked in mason jars in his garage, trading crusts of bread and another day’s supply of oxygen for spoonfuls of the creatures’ magic dust, which the preening septuagenarian imbibes to provide him with the requisite energy to continue his campaign of printing red lips on pieces of tat and selling them at disproportionately marked-up prices as an alternative to writing any good music since 1978. Is that what you’re telling us, Mick Jagger? Is it?

2. “We could be married, and then we’d be happy…” - Wouldn’t it Be Nice, The Beach Boys - No, The Beach Boys. No, it wouldn’t be nice. You would not “hold each other close the whole night through.” You would lie in bed pretending to read on your Kindle while actually seething with fury about how your wife undercut the punchline to your story at dinner with the McCallisters earlier in the evening, screeching in that moronic tone of hers, “No you didn’t! You only thought of that in the car later!” without even a basic grasp of the demands of storytelling and entertaining a crowd. Meanwhile, your wife would pretend to be reading on her phone, while actually scanning the Instagram feed of the bloke from her office who regularly works out (your three press-ups once a month don’t count) and holds her gaze in the coffee room in a way that makes her feel like an object of more allure than the comfy yet de-elasticated winter socks you've started picturing when you think of her face. And then you both turn away from one another and fall into another lonely, dissatisfied slumber. Because that’s what marriage is, isn’t it?

3. “I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song, I’m twenty-two now, but I won’t be for long…” - A New England, Billy Bragg -  Billy. I'm a big fan. But are you telling me you took a break of a year between writing the first and second lines of this breakout hit? I like the lines and all, they’re good lines, but it’s no wonder you’ve never achieved the heights of pop success with a productivity rate like that. Get the content out, Billy, or YouTube's algorithm is going to eat you alive.

4. “There are nine-million bicycles in Beijing, that’s a fact…” - Nine Million Bicycles, Katie Melua - Katie. Katie, Katie, Katie. I love you. I love your mellifluous name. I love how unperturbed you look about being dragged by your ankles away from a quiet picnic with your lover and across the entirety of the globe. But no one knows how many bicycles there are in Beijing. Do us all a favour and admit that your song is fake news. This declamation as unquestionable certainty of something about which we can at best only hazard a loose guess is precisely the kind of irresponsible songwriting that I’m talking about. You’re paving the way for Trump and the return of fascism, Katie Melua. I hope you know that.

5. “What’s my age again, what’s my age again?” - What’s My Age Again?, Blink 182 - I mean, you say your age is 23, right there in the song. But those Dickie’s board shorts and primary-coloured sweat bands aren’t fooling anyone, Mark Hoppus. You’re the oldest man alive. You’re even older than Mick Jagger. You’re even older than Tom Delonge, whose head is staying the same size while his face gradually shrinks into nothing. Even in 1999 you were old. Now it’s just pathetic. Put on an M&S sweater and learn how to do cryptic crosswords and let it go. You'll feel so much better.

6. “Played it till my fingers bled, was the summer of ‘69…” Summer of ‘69, Bryan Adams - In these lyrics Canada’s answer to Ryan Adams, Bryan Adams, claims to buy an electric guitar, learn to play, form a band, hang out at the drive-in, and fall in love, all in the summer of 1969. But during the summer of 1969 Bryan Adams was nine years old. Now, I’m not saying that one of his bandmates didn’t quit the band, while the other got married - I’m just questioning Ottawa’s matrimony laws that led to a primary school child making it to the altar.

7. “Well I stand up next to a mountain, and I chop it down with the edge of my hand…” Voodoo Child (Slight Return), Jimi Hendrix - That didn’t happen, Jimi. You took some bad acid and rolled your trousers down to your socks and squirmed on the grass shouting “Earthworm Jim doesn’t need his spacesuit to have a good time”. It was embarrassing for all of us, and we try not to talk about it. Please stop bringing it up.

8. “You don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on… You don’t have to be rich to be my girl…” - Kiss, Prince - The artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince was romantically linked with many women over his lifetime, including Madonna, Kim Basinger, Carmen Electra, and a sixteen-year-old dancer to whom he became a guardian until she turned nineteen, at which point he put her on birth control and threw her in the sack. All of these women were either beautiful, rich, or both. Words are easy, Prince. We can all say things. It's your actions that count.

9. “Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?” - Ironic, Alanis Morissette - Anyone who thinks rain on your wedding day is ironic has obviously never spent much time in the UK over the summer months. “Isn’t it a depressing inevitability?” more like.

10. “I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear…” This Charming Man, The Smiths - No you wouldn’t, Morrissey. Who do you think you’re kidding? Fresh wardrobe or no, you’d stay in your room and eat four bags from a six-bag multipack of Lidl-brand pickled onion “Monster Claws”, scroll way further than the acceptable amount down the Facebook photos of that girl you used to work with, and write in your journal about how you’re not racist but you just reckon that all Chinese people have weirdly malicious eyes. The same as you do every night, Morrissey. We’ve got your number.

Day 177: Windscreen

It's past midnight. I've been asleep. I got in from work, turned my computer on, then passed out. It was 10pm when I awoke, lost and lonely, knowing I needed to eat. I cooked a pizza and ate in front of YouTube, my plate lit by the glowing screen.

I find it hard not to waste my life when I’m tired like this. I get tired really easily, because I’m always depressed in the background, and then I get more depressed because I’m tired and I don’t have the energy to fight off the negative thoughts. It’s like dirt on a windscreen, being prone to depression is like having windscreen wipers that don’t work. Everyone has dirt splash up at the windscreen of their consciousness all the time, but people with good mental health have an inbuilt ability to wipe their consciousness clean as they move through life, allowing them to see out at all the beauty in the world. And there is a lot of beauty, and it makes the dirt that splashes up worth it, and these people know from experience that the dirt never sticks around, and the tough times don’t last.

But if you’ve got faulty windscreen wipers then the dirt starts to accumulate. This dirt isn’t necessarily worse than for anyone else - although the windscreen wipers may have initially been damaged by too much dirt early on (in fact this is the number one cause).

So depressed people have to reach out of the window continuously and rub off the dirt. It’s difficult to reach. It’s cold. It’s hard work. You clear the windscreen and almost immediately it needs clearing again. You look at those other cars and they seem to function so effortlessly. And nothing for you happens easily. It’s all a slog.

It’s exhausting. And here’s where I’m at now. You’re working long hours, you’re trying to do as much as possible (less than most people, a lot for what you’re used to), and it’s so hard to find the energy to reach out and clear that windscreen of the dirt. So you drive along in the gloom behind a filthy pane of glass, and everything you see is clouded, murky, undefined. You go slowly, in low gear, gripping the wheel, and still objects loom from the fog, and you have to swerve to miss them.

All your attention goes on just staying on the road, and it’s even harder to find the energy to reach all the way up and outside and scrub the windscreen of that ingrained muck (knowing if you do it’ll just be back soon anyway). So you resign yourself instead to just coping like this.

Eating oven pizzas. Dozing in front of YouTube videos. Sleepwalking through work.

And of course without forcing yourself to clean that windscreen the dirt only gets worse. The view out darker, lonelier, any beauty impossible to see. And so it’s even more effort to simply stay on the road. And even harder to clean the windscreen. And the dirt gets worse…

So I guess it’s good at least that I recognise this? Good to be aware of myself on these terms.

The writing helps, sometimes a lot, sometimes only a little, but it is building structure and routine. Many days (most) it’s not a full wipe of the windscreen, but it’s at least bringing my awareness to the glass, checking in with myself, remembering where I keep the cloths and soap.

I just need to stay the course. Keep turning up. And be aware that this is not an easy ride. This is not a nice thing to go through. It's no surprise I don't achieve as much as some people, that I'm tired absolutely all the time. But others have it far worse, and in a trillion ways I'm lucky, getting to drive this vehicle of being through life.

So a reminder: go at the pace I need, relax the fingers on the wheel, keep cleaning that glass.

Day 176: Howling

In bed. Home from a ten hour Saturday shift of three deep at the bar, monstrous crowds jostling, reaching for you, yelling at you, clawing, pawing, cackling, howling. Pour and serve and note and till drawer and change and thank. Pour and serve and note and till drawer and change and thank. Pop a bottle. Empty mint leaves from the sink. Pour and serve. Scan fifty people and work out who is next. Have forty nine people screech at you that they've been waiting longer. Correct staff mistakes. Float the tills. Wash glasses. Pour and serve and change and thank. Cut fruit. Run upstairs to connect a new barrel. Run downstairs and grab glasses on the way. Have men in identical shirts and bald heads yell orders at you while you head back to finish pouring your pint. Want to scream at them all to fucking die. Pour and serve and change and thank. Pour and serve and change and thank. Pour and serve and change and thank. Pour and serve and change and thank. Serve two groups at once. Pour three pints at once. Clear glasses from the front bar while filling the Pepsi. Pour an extra cider because you hear your colleague needing one. Wipe the bar top while the cider fills. Cash off your order with one hand. It's never enough. More and more and more and more. Screaming cacophony. Everyone taking from you. Stemming the tide. Standing in the breach. Slack jawed blurry eyed sallow skinned complacent slabs of meat spitting orders at you. Uhh excuse me. This San Miguel is flat as a fart. I'm not drinking this. Swallowing down the anger, breathing slowly out. No worries, let me sort that for you. Uhh I saw that you just poured it into a new glass. I wanted a fresh drink. Swallow down the anger. It just needed refreshing. It had been served in the wrong glass is all (by an exhausted inexperienced staff member, because every lager glass in the building was being used). It should be fine now, but I'll be happy to do a fresh one if it is flat. Well, we'll see. Huffs and head into the crowd. There goes one of the richest most lucky, what, 10% of people on the planet, middle class and white and English, drinking freely on a Saturday night, and just so very thrilled to be alive. Ten, fifty, a thousand more like him. Who's next? Pour and serve and change and thank.

Limp home and collapse in the dark and body gone but mind still keyed into that bar zone, can't turn it off. Falling asleep and wake with a jolt, realising you haven't finished the Tuborg, you need to reach for a gin globe. Then realising you're in bed. Drifting off, then jolt awake, you need to pass the change back. No, you're in bed. Drift, and jolt. Over and over. Mental torture, while muscles yowl in fatigued pain.

And back tomorrow for Sunday morning shift, brain mushed like roadkill. But at least now, for a few brief moments, there is only silence, and the empty whiteness of the page.

Day 175: Recuperation

Quiet day of housekeeping, of cleaning, of recuperation and regaining lost energy. Took apart my PC and blew the dust from the insides with a can of compressed air. Did the same with my keyboard, then cleaned the outsides with damp cotton wool pads. Edited photos for social media for work. Put clothes to wash. Bought drain unblocker from the shops, poured it down the drain in my shower. Hung out clothes. Hoovered the floor.

Been feeling low - my mental health is a step forwards, a step back at the moment. I have a day feeling better by a few degrees, then the next day I feel worse again. It’s like I’m trapped in limbo. Like nothing really changes. Yet it is changing slowly. Steps forwards and steps back, so I seem to be getting nowhere - but over the months I am shuffling forwards. I can’t sense the movement, but, like the growth of fingernails, like the rising of mountains, it is happening.

Some things can’t be seen, yet are there nonetheless. Trust in the process. Keep on not drinking. Do the writing. Gradually the landscape will change.

Going to get an earlier night tonight, I can feel a cold coming on and want to be rested for work tomorrow. At least I’ve got plenty of clean clothes, a tidy bedroom, breakfast for the morning in the cupboards. I’m not soaring right now, but I’m doing OK.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Day 174: Process

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

Card games are great!

……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what’s the consequence of that?

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

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

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

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

Day 173: Tears in the snow #2

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

 OK, jeez. All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then we have Deckard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 172: Tears in the snow #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until then x

Day 171: Monkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you do that?

I DUNNO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 170: Solemn

Home from a quiet Sunday close, a night like any other, unremarkable, routine, dull. In my room now listening to chillhop, my room a tiny speck of blazing light on the shores of the vast dark cosmos, my computer monitor bleeding coruscating light, the lo-fi vibes drifting gently, my desk cluttered, my clothes scattered, the darkest dark waves outside the window. One planet alone, winking into nothing. Are there other souls out there on other planets, in other realities, sat mushed against rainslicked windows, gazing out, dreaming of more?

This is the kind of evening that used to be made for whisky. Thick rimmed tumbler, scolding pleasure, the biting amber flames warming all the way down. The romance, the nostalgia, the promise of more than could ever be delivered. And it never was delivered, that sadness when you felt you had peaked and the wave had crashed back and you had never quite got there. But in that moment, with the spirit flowing, the bottle still weighty, the edges softly rounded, you could have sworn there, just for an instant, that you were close, that for a heartbeat you'd been running parallel, that your stream was beside the universal, that you could have reached out your hand and touched eternity. But now it was over and you were still corporeal and your goopy human bones were aching with the beginnings of hangover, and there was nothing to be felt but soil and matter and silt. And on, to the next time.

None of that tonight. Mug of black tea and posting on my blog (though I don't feel like it, though the words aren't alive like I want them to be), and then sober sleep ready for the next day. No making a beast of myself to forget the pain of being a man. Just working solemnly, quietly, to make being a man a touch less painful.

By the smallest of degrees I think it is working.

Day 169: Stubborn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 168: Triviality

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

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

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

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

Day 167: Stay the course

Another evening packed full of cats. Liz and Jamie have gone to bed, I'm sat up watching the kittens prowl, watching them squeeze themselves into shelves on the bookcase, watching them sit in the sink.

A day out exploring London and taking photographs with my uncle today. The light wasn't great but we had a wonderful time, wandering, snapping, chatting.

I've been feeling pretty uninspired with my writing recently, like I've simply got nothing to say, and no idea how to say anything even if I did. But this trip has been a nice refilling of the well, seeing family, walking, being taken outside myself. When I get home I want to get more serious about writing again, not do it last thing at night, tired and distracted, but put what time I have into working hard at it.

I need to find what makes me enthusiastic and curious and impassioned again, because the last few weeks I've struggled to care about anything. I've been going through the motions, without anything burning inside. My skin has been worse, as it always is in winter, and I think one of my eyes is getting infected again, and my self confidence has been low. I've felt ugly and slimy and yucky, I've wanted to wear dull baggy clothes and slink into the shadows.

So I guess that's a clue what to work on, where to start looking for what to get curious about. All our problems are simply avenues we've not fully explored yet - suffering always holds a lesson.

So I'm not going to feel bad that I've been feeling like this. I'm going to bring the light of awareness to it and shine it into those murky corners. I'm going to write more, work harder, not accept this state of affairs. 167 days blogging is amazing. Simply having turned up all those times is a victory in itself.

Stay the course. Keep going. Redouble efforts. It will get better again.

Day 166: Unique

London - Liz and Jamie have gone to bed, and I sit writing by lamplight as the kittens chase one another across the carpet and the fridge splutters and grumbles and a television set plays in the next flat along.

The city is overwhelmingly vast, as it always feels when I first arrive. Too many lives, too many happenings; how is there space in the universe for all these thoughts? All these people believing they are each of central importance, buying their bagels, choosing their handbags, fretting over whether to take that job offer, how to wear their hair next weekend, who's going to notice the spot on their chin. Each a shimmering ocean of complexity, a cosmic spiral of atoms, and a hundred thousand of them all pouring forth down this road. Mad. Wild. Unfathomable. Too much to take in.

Day of newborns today, baby Cleo and boisterous kittens. Held Cleo for a long time, her tiny head pressed against my chest, her breath quickening and slowing as she dreamt. Ju and Dan look tired. Eyes strained, movements slower, getting only an hour or two in shifts a few times a night. Cleo only sleeps in their arms, they have to sit up fighting drowsiness through the long lonely hours of the night. And operations, and specialists, and anxiety over every single thing. And the happiest they've ever been in the lives.

And now kittens with heavy eyes, play fighting ending, clambering up to the sofa and between my legs. Curling into one another, Rey (no, Arya) licking affectionately at Arya (no, Rey)'s ear. Fuzzy cloud-soft fur, twitching whiskers, stretched belly-gangled bodies flopped in sighing savannah sleep. A million billion cats and people, all atomic identical emptiness, and each one unique.

Day 165: Beauty

A much improved day today. Met my mum for coffee and we wandered around the city with our cameras, taking photos, chatting, enjoying the bright and glorious October sun shining down onto the trees of red and gold. Stood a long time in the amphitheatre behind the station, watching the sun getting low and the shadows lengthening, then walked down past Park Hill Flats and over the bridge and up the tram tracks blinded by the dipped-down sun blazing under the Earth. We ate bread and oils in Strada, talked of many things, compared photographs, and then walked to my mum’s bus stop together. She hops on and off buses these days because she’s got her free bus pass, and it’s less bother, and it’s better for the environment, which she cares a great deal about. She’ll often just walk, stopping in all the charity shops and antiques emporiums on the way, despite the fibromyalgia and the vasculitis and everything else.

She told me today that people keep offering her their seats on buses, which freaks her out. She always declines, because “why should she have a seat when she doesn’t need one?” (why shouldn’t she?!), except last time the young girl who offered felt embarrassed because of my mum’s refusal, so now my mum is going to start accepting the offer just so there’s no chance of the offerer losing face.

That’s her. Me old mam. Trooping on with a cataract in one eye, chronic fatigue (“I barely notice it anymore”), an autoimmune disease, cheerful and kind and ever empathetic, utterly gorgeous, only ever taking anything for herself (apart from a glass of red some nights, and her shows on iPlayer) if it’ll end up easier for someone else, smiling and concerned and wanting nothing more than the world in harmony and good books and wild flowers growing and little birds chirruping and gentle evenings trundling on.

It’s hard to feel depressed on a day spent with such a beauty.

And tomorrow: London and sister and kittens and cousins, and a teeny new baby to meet. All is good.

Day 164: Auburn

OK, I don’t feel as bleak today. I had a long old day at work, after an early appointment to have my stitches removed, bus ride to Dore Surgery with sun’s morning rays penetrating through the leaves of the trees and casting long shadows on the ground. Brilliant orange and auburn and green leaves. Haze from breath in cold air.

And work wasn’t good, I had a migraine splitting my skull that was only assuaged with codeine and paracetamol and ibuprofen all together, but I enjoyed taking photographs for social media, enjoyed chasing and being chased by Arron around the bar, goofing about with Zoe. And finally it was time to go home and I sat on the bus in a stupor listening to Regular Features on my headphones, too stoned tired to take in the premise of the jokes, just letting the familiar cadences of the voices wash over me.

And now I’m going to play classic Mario on my Switch in bed, and pass out, and sleep until I feel like getting up tomorrow. I don’t know when I will feel like getting up tomorrow.

And then three-day trip to London to see my cousin’s new beautiful baby and see my family and take photographs round the city and escape from monotony here. And long train journeys to play Switch and read my book and eat chocolate flapjack from M&S and write in my notebook.

I cannot wait.

Day 163: Centre

Home from a night out for Katie’s leaving do. Took my camera and took photos all night, gave me something to do that wasn’t drinking. Came home on the bus with Michael, he took me round to his and filled up a tupperware with leftovers from his tea because I told him I hadn’t eaten tonight. I thanked him and wandered off into the cold night. Then the housemates were in when I arrived home, Phace had cooked asparagus and onions and herbs in some roasted concoction I don’t even understand, gave me some to put on my mac n cheese from Michael. Sat and chatted. Chloe came round after her close, we listened to music and sat around, then I came upstairs and left them to it.

Don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t have any words these past couple of days. Sentences are coming out slow and plodding. Been finding it difficult to hold conversations, have nothing at all to say to anyone, have nothing that I can get excited about. It’s like the bottom falls out of every topic as soon as it is brought up. Like the bottom falls out of everything. And I’m just plodding off into the cold night, not able to care either way.

It’s depression. That’s all it is. I’ve been here before. It passes. It’s nothing to worry about. I got through the outer anxiety of the storm a couple of days ago. This is the deathly calm in the centre. But it too will pass. And the sky will be clear once again.

Day 162: Blinking

Cold city gleaming down the hill. Frost on the windshields. Puffs of breath. Streets black and crisp in the night air.

I’ve been editing photos since getting in from work. Listening to Chopin. Watching easy videos on Youtube. No energy for anything more. I don’t feel depressed, I don’t think, but I don’t feel great, either. Another day on Earth. Got work first thing tomorrow, then Katie’s leaving do.

Pssch, I don’t know. Got no words inside me tonight. Been sat with the cursor on this blinking away for hours now, keep tabbing away and procrastinating more.

Guess I’ve got to refill the well, is all. So I’ll carry on listening to soft elegant piano music, I’ll ready some poetry, then get into bed and get some rest.

All is good. All is as it should be. Just keep on going.

Day 161: Mini-Frankenstein

I had a mole removed from my shoulder this week. The doctor wasn’t worried about it when I asked him to take a look during a check-up, but he said my surgery offered a private service that would remove it if I wanted to pay, for peace of mind or for cosmetic reasons, though he reiterated that there was no need to take it off at all.

I’ve got lots of moles. I don’t mind the smaller ones. The larger ones have always made me self-conscious - at least since early adolescence, when my body became something awkward and ungainly, secreting smells and sprouting hair and spots, and I started to hate the way my moles marked me out as different - fat, dark targets all over my skin.

In theory I’m one for learning to accept one’s physical form, for loving yourself as you are, rather than paying vast sums to questionable plastic surgery clinics that convince you perfection is but one operation away. I rarely wear aftershave, don’t get my hair cut often, and I’ve long since grown weary of designer tags on clothes. I’d rather spend my one life concentrating on literature and art and the beauty already inherent in the world, in all its flawed crumbling glory, than on manipulating my appearance and persona to win some kind of approval from the countless morons all desperately attempting to win approval for themselves, all of them scrambling towards some unattainable ideal sold to them by brands owned by ugly CEOs getting rich off desperation.

But in practice it’s not always so easy, and when my doctor mentioned the mole removal service, far cheaper than the private clinics - and with a comfortable amount of money in the bank saved from not drinking and working with Steve and a tax rebate - I decided to book myself in.

The doctor who performed the surgery was old, experienced, and awkward in his bedside manner. He spent the majority of the time I was with him explaining that there might be a very small scar, initially red but fading to white, if not fading completely - repeating this over and over, until I told him that I’ve suffered from moderate acne all over my body since I was 15, and one more scar to add to the tapestry wouldn’t cause me even a moment’s thought.

The doctor nodded and looked at me a long time, then coughed and looked away.

As he was preparing his scalpel he asked me to take my top off. I hesitated, and then mumbled whether I could keep it on, “because of the acne.”

“Ahh, yes. Got some self-consciousness, have you?”

I mumbled yes.

“Well, I can probably reach the mole with the neck of your shirt pulled to the side. Yes. That should be fine.”

He turned away and continued fiddling with his tools.

He barely spoke through the rest of the procedure. I lay still, the local anaesthetic numbing my shoulder, doing nothing for my sense of shame, until I became bored, and found myself wondering whether I should make small talk, like at the hairdressers, or whether the doctor needed silence to work. I didn’t want to distract him while he had a scalpel inside my skin.

But it was over after ten or so minutes. The worst part was the noise. I could only feel a faint tugging of the skin in my back, but as the operation was happening close to my ear I could hear every slice into my flesh, every squelching sound, the scrunch of stitches being pulled through the skin, the gently horrendous rustle of the sides of the wound being drawn together. The sounds, untethered from any sensation of pain, made for a surreal, and disquieting, experience.

When it was done the doctor applied a dressing, told me to keep it on for three days, and bundled me out of the examination room with an invoice to pay at reception.

And that was that. The dressing is off now, I’ve got an inch-long line of red skin on my shoulder crisscrossed with dark stitches, what Fran is calling a “mini-Frankenstein”, and an appointment on Monday to have the stitches removed.

Since a couple of kids at school pointed the mole out, and one guy I hated made fun of it repeatedly, I’ve tended towards wearing tighter-necked t-shirts or collared shirts that covered it up. And now finally it’s gone. I don’t know if having it removed was exactly the right course of action, but it’s one I’m pleased with. It’s much easier to not care about your appearance when there’s nothing egregiously different about it.

Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got to say for the moment. I’ve been feeling low again today, but I’ve not let it get in my way. I’ve washed clothes, bought food from Unwrapped, walked to town with Mike, done writing, played Switch, and cooked a healthy tea. Got an open shift first thing tomorrow, joy of joys, so I’ll leave this here.

Take care x

Day 160: Storm

I can feel myself getting depressed today. I can feel it coming on. Everything is slower, more difficult. I'm wading through sludge, there is black tar between objects. My thoughts are dragged downwards into negativity. I force myself to think something positive, and immediately a weight is tied to it and it plummets down through the clouds into frustration and despair. The flowers of thoughts begin to sprout and immediately curl into weeds and rot and die as ash.

It's tiring. Getting from one thing to the next takes so much effort. Nothing flows. There's no buoyancy, no accomplishment, no reward. I must drag myself by my fingernails into the next moment, and all that is waiting is the need to drag myself again to the moment after that.

My soul has no poetry. Words are leaden and crusty and weak.

So I do what has to be done. I write long lists of reasons to be grateful. I shower, put on clean clothes. I do three loads of washing, clothes and towels and sheets. Drink water. Eat food. Walk around the houses as the sun goes down.

And I don't ask too much of myself, I accept that when I'm like this I can only get a basic post up on my blog.

It's so disheartening being like this, falling into this mindset every couple of weeks, every week.

But what does arguing with reality get me? Nowhere. Better to stay completely still, be very calm, do the things that help even though they don't feel like it, avoid the things that make it worse though they whisper of momentary relief.

Stay still. Accept this. Let the storm within me bluster, rage, and pass.

Day 159: Piddling

Piddling rainslicked snarl of a night, cruel bar shift dragging on, bin juice on hands, smeared juice on jeans, mind roiling with the beginnings of a cold. Finally home to Earl Grey steaming and Chopin soaring and desk and keyboard aflame in whirring darkness.

I notice these things. I feel the moisture in the cool night air. The streetlamps casting pools of light upon the wet ground. The pressure of my gluteal muscles against the chair. Debussy over my television’s cheap inbuilt speakers. The clutter around this attic bedroom.

I am here. I am in here. In flesh and thought and blood. I’m skeleton and toes and regrets and heartbeats, I’m a failing flickering memory of a dream.

OK, that’s all I got. That’s all the words that are inside me on this cruel coiling October night. That’s good. Well done, Robbie. Well done for saying some words. I’ve been doing this blog for ages now. I’m not ever going to stop. I have no idea where it’s going. It’s going somewhere though. It’s a toboggan ride at midnight, only steering round a tree at a time. That’s as it should be.

Sleep now. Off tomorrow and there are towels to be washed and a shower to be scrubbed and bed sheets to be changed and foodstuffs to be purchased. Will the thrills of adult life never end?

Day 158: Gratitude

Here are some reasons for me to be grateful, because it always pays to train your mind into recognising what’s great in your life. Going down to the soil of the brain and carving little plots and filling each one with a seed of gratitude. 

• I’ve got money in my bank account
• I can afford a trip down to London to see my cousin's newborn daughter in October
• I can afford a long weekend to Berlin with Fran in November
• I can afford a fixed 50 lens for my camera
• I ate three pains au chocolat for breakfast this morning
• I drank lots of strong black coffee
• I’ve been able to lie in bed for hours and play Super Mario Bros. 3 on my Switch, which has been fantastic
• I’ve got a roof over my head
• I’ve got two lungs, two kidneys, a heart, digestive tract, liver (bombarded with less poison these days)
• I’ve still got some hair left on my head, and lots on my face
• Got ten fingers, and ten toes
• Got this sweet mechanical keyboard, and this gaming mouse with EXTRA BUTTONS
• No work for the entire rest of the day
• There’s a chill to the air outside but these sturdy walls keep me warm
• Been listening to, and appreciating, classical music, which appreciation of music I was not able to do when I was in the depths of depression, it was all just harsh noise, meaningless, cold, cruel, empty
• I’ve kept this blog up for 158 days, I don’t think about it now, it’s just what I do, and it’s often only half an hour at the end of the day, but I’m still doing that, turning up, over and over, even for a short time, and that must be helping to slowly build a sense of responsibility and dedication and willpower and pride inside me, even if at glacial speed. Glaciers can be powerful forces, they crush and smoosh everything in their paths. So keep turning up, buddy-roo, keep putting little snowflakes, unique, glittering, some beautiful in their symmetry, some wonky and broken - keep putting them one on top of the other until there is an unstoppable wall of ice moving forwards
• The low pale light gleaming in through the skylight window hitting the wall turning the blacks of the poster there to silver and gold
• Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians playing on Youtube
• Stompy steel-toe-capped boots that Steve bought me for my man work with him, now to be reappropriated as excellent winter/delivery-day boots for many months to come
• I’ve got plenty of clothes. I mean, I’ve got hardly any clothes compared to many of my friends, but I’ve got way more clothes than lots of people on this planet, which is the only planet we know of that has any people on at all, and there are an infinitude of empty atoms twirling in the cosmic void that possess no clothes at all, so I think on balance I’m up
• And hey, anyway, the fashion industry is now the second worst polluter in the world, after only the oil industry, due mostly to the trend of recent decades towards disposable fashion, buying outfits for a tenner made in Bangladesh by basically slave labour, then chucking the outfits away after a month and buying new ones, because you’ve been manipulated by high street retailers who want all your money and tell you lies and make you feel worthless to trick you into handing it over. So it’s a good thing I’ve got three-year-old shirts and stretched t-shirts and jeans with the knees all worn down, is what I’m saying. Everything you dislike about yourself is something great, seen from another angle
• I’m grateful that Fran is in my bed not commenting on how loud my EXCELLENT mechanical keyboard is as I clatter the keys down one after the other after the other - but I probably shouldn’t push it too far, by which I mean I'm going now, goodnight!

Day 157: Blancmanging

The sky is a fiery black phantom; silver clouds shiver across aphotic night. Foul-limbed birds slumber in crooks of trees. Cars howl down murky lanes. Street sweepers trudge the crunching gravel. I limp doorward, synapses stuttering from onset migraine, nauseated, senses overloaded, concepts jostling and vomiting up into consciousness, mind a fetid roiling marshland, vision blancmanging, but shift ended and heading for home.

Day off tomorrow. Day off. Blessed day off. Going to stay in bed. Play my Switch. Read Naomi Klein. Pour over New York Times. Get up eventually just to make coffee, walk to the shop for croissants in grubby clothes. Wait around for Fran and then order takeaway and watch noisy television in bed. Get takeaway on the covers. Put takeaway leftovers aside for later. Do glorious elastic excessive nothing, and nothing, and more of nothing, and lie in tangled blanket lair.

But first: sleep.

Day 156: Bollard

Sat on a cold stone bollard outside the expo centre, under a brooding sky, waiting for the go-ahead to start packing down the display. John in the cab of the van checking whether his Ryder Cup bets have come through. Steve wandering in his cut-off shorts. His father off on a reccy somewhere. A dark bird flapping against the wind. Cords tied to metal pipes snapping in the breeze. Concrete and rusted iron girders. Splintering wood. The sounds of private jets taxiing on the runway. Transits and artics snaking into the distance ahead and behind. Marching mashed potato clouds clumped one against the other. Sombre land, utilitarian, sad.

…

Echoey hall emptying of use. Clatter of dropped boards, metal plates. Plastic Coke bottles kicked into aisles. Workmen in hi-vis carrying bits of stands in twos, threes. Clank of ladders. Men in groups, strolling. Other men by themselves, leant on pallets, hunched on the floor, bent over their phones. The scriiitch of duct tape pulled from the roll. Gathering darkness outside the loading bay doors. The melancholy of evenings, of eternal afterwards - after weekends, after Christmases, after all excitement and action completed, the central illusion abandoned - the illusion that the event would save you, would show you something you don’t already know, would provide the glamour and sense of belonging that you have for all of your life lacked. But there is only this. Ripping up cheap carpet and flinging spent screws to the ground. Vinyl stickers torn from their displays. Vans loaded, detritus abandoned, and workmen driving off into dusk without once looking back.