On the Character of Love

Yes, that's right folks, I'm getting cynical about love. It's a sad day when this happens, but I think it happens to us all eventually.

Love is not a entity which knocks on your door like Despair. Love stands aloof and distant in a crowd. It has one of those faces which looks gorgeous from a distance. Huge eyes, sharp features and a sleek sinewy body. But when you get up close you realise that those eyes are a little too big and there is something unsettling about its beauty.

It moves like that ninja cat on youtube, getting closer when you turn your back or even blink. Before you realise what's happened it's pounced and rational thought has left the building.

There's this whole thing about how you're meant to trust the one you love. How can you trust someone when you can't think straight?

Once Love is in town it brings paranoid in its train and a crippling fear that something is going to go wrong. Yeah, of course there's all those warm fuzzy feelings following along with Love.

An evening in with Love goes something like this:

Remember that Love follows you around. Once it's got you it doesn't pop in and out like Hope and Despair.
Love sits quietly on the settee while you watch Doctor Who, it nurses the same glass of beer throughout the whole episode. It's quiet and undemanding. Just sitting quietly with its overly big eyes and elegant physique.
Once the show is over though, it starts to get a bit more chatty.
It subtly suggests ways in which the person you love might not want to be with you anymore.
It's easy to ignore though because its voice is soft and face beautiful but its persistent. It plays on your mind until its following you round the house shouting in your ear about how you're going to be traded in for a younger better specimen. Eventually a touch of rationality creeps back in and batters Love back for a while.
Then, when it's dark and you're all alone in your little bed Love creeps in next to you and starts laying out intricate scenarios about how your own love might die and how you'd feel about it.
It's only when the person you love is around that Love stands there with a little genuinely happy smile on its face and gives you a nice warm hug.

Muse and Lame Cunts

WARNING: VERY ANGRY POST

Right, I feel it necessary to clarify how I feel about Muse. This is not anything like what I went through as a teenager about Metallica or Aerosmith.
Seeing Muse play live is like a religious experience. The man made world is basically pretty beige and shit but then Muse play and a wonderful world of beauty and awe springs into being.
Mankind is still creating magnificent things - that's what listening to Muse tells me. It's not past with the death of Oscar Wilde, not everything has turned to shit with the stupid insipid Beatles and lame as fuck Pink Floyd. Disinterested, heartrending beauty is still being produced in the modern world, doesn't that just totally shake your world? It does mine.
It's dangerous though. That music speaks to me and says fuck the normal lame-o life, fuck a miserable day job and routine, beauty exists, revel in it.
That's how profoundly the music of Muse speaks to me and down right nearly shouts at me when I see them play live. I want to start a revolution right then and there.

Now, on to the Lame Cunts part of this little rant. Excluding the Mooneys (that includes you, Nick big time) everyone I know is a lame cunt. I'm absolutely sick to death with being surrounded by lame cunts. How do people lives with themselves being so prematurely middle aged and dull?
No one has any fight in them. No one has a single fucking ounce of passion. Everyone is completely brainwashed by the media and CAN'T FUCKING SEE IT. It drives me round the twist.
Sex has been completely corrupted by porn. Relationships have been completely fucked by Bridget Jones and Sex and the City. Friendships have been murdered by the same programmes. Everything needs to fit into categories now. We are living a cocksucking sociology lesson.
My emotional response to Muse is overblown, over dramatic, extreme and real. Fucking real, dammit. I'm sick of being fed the way I am supposed to react to things. FUCK THAT!!! Too many people are sucked in by this shit. Everyone I know in fact, bar the Mooneys. Why are we Mooneys so resilient to this? I really don't know.
Isn't it a difficult and lonely life when everyone has been brainwashed except you?


(Nick, you're lucky to have your kids untainted on your side of things.)

Oddness

Do you consider yourself odd? No? Me neither. I don't think many people do but I've been called odd on many occasions and by many people. Maybe I am odd.
What is odd though? How do you define odd without defining normal? Ever tried defining normal? It never works.
My favourite band, Muse, are generally considered odd. Certainly Q Magazine likes to get in a froth about the gorgeous Matt Bellamy being odd, but they're still one of the biggest, most popular bands in the world. So surely, being odd doesn't mean being unpopular. Well, it does in my case apparently, but let's not dwell.
I had a friend come to stay with me at the beginning of the week and I got the impression that he thought Brighton was an odd place. Being from Birmingham I suppose he's used to things being useful and practical rather than beautiful and a pain in the arse (no pun intended).
We certainly have some people that would be classes as odd by others and we do have shops that sell nothing but cup cakes or fashion for dogs which is probably unusual, but odd?
There are negative connotations with 'odd'. My mum says people don't like me coz I'm odd. No one would say I was 'unusual' in that context, would they now. No, they'd say 'odd'.
So what makes something odd rather than just unusual? Where does the negativity come from?
I think people who queue up to get into Yates or Walkabout are odd so maybe there's a touch of distaste in finding something odd. Even weird is better than odd, I think. I'll certainly admit that my beloved Muse are weird but I'd never say they were odd. There's almost something cool and interesting about weird, but not odd.
Odd is distasteful and something to be avoided. That last sentence sounds odd, it stops too abruptly or something.
So, all I can really conclude about oddness is that it's like weirdness but with a touch of distaste added in it becomes something negative rather than interesting.
How odd.

To Feel or Not to Feel

For Nicky and Darren

Here's a question I recently discussed with a boy I know. A beautiful boy, I might add.
Is it better to feel pain than to feel nothing at all?
I recently broke up with my boyfriend of three and a half years and it hurt. It hurt lots. When I thought about the relationship in retrospect I realised that it generally hurt quite a bit and often but I don't regret a minute of it. I don't regret it because it's these painful experiences that make life real. I know people say they're character building and all that shit, but I don't really know about that. All I know is that these things we feel are real. They aren't informed by society or the media, they're our real reactions to a situation or person.
According to some theorist dude called Fredrick Jameson, we are suffering from media saturation to the point where everything we see and hear is perceived through a media filter. For example the type of people we find attractive are often the people that the media tells us are attractive by putting in these fanciable roles in films and stuff.
At least when we feel pain we know it's real and it's not what we think we aught to feel because of some subliminal pressure to feel a certain way. Another example of this is the way people get all sentimental over things, like babies or views of fields and cows. Do these things really mean anything to us? They may to some people but they certainly don't to me and I get called a misery or a cynic because I don't go all gooey over these things. I can't help it if they mean nothing to me and I'm not brainwashed enough to think I feel something.
The bottom line of this argument I had with this beautiful boy was whether it is worth allowing yourself to feel something even if it results in pain.
I say it is because feeling nothing is the pits.
Sure, if you don't allow youself to feel something profound for a person you won't get your heart broken but what's the bloody point of being alive if you don't allow yourself to feel?

Story Heroin

This whole writing addiction never works how you expect it to, does it?
It's easy to see how the people in the olden days thought there were such things as Muses and that they were fickle and fanciful.
One minute you get a big craving to write something and the next minute you want to write something else.
I don't even seem to be able to stick to the same genre or even the same medium. Short stories, novels, scripts and articles are pouring out of me like word spew at the moment. The start of them are but then the fickle Muse moves on without finishing the story. That's where the hard work part comes in, you have to force yourself to finish these things and it's hard. It's especially hard when you have a shit job to work around.
I thought a real writer could write anywhere. I heard all those stories about Stephen King writing in the laundry room of a hospital between washing sheets covered in blood and maggots. Yes, maggots apparently, poor old Stevie.
I can't write anywhere though. I can't write at work, it seems to suck the inspiration out of me. It's like a place my Muse refuses to enter.
You have to wonder if this whole writing thing is a gift or a curse. It drives you round the twist if you can't write but society doesn't allow people to just sit and write. If one more person says the word 'productivity' to me I'm going to hit them.
Where did the obsession with being productive come from? Sounds bloody Victorian to me.
Why can't people simply be?

A Little Story

I wrote this little story to go in a magazine. They said it had to be what they call flash fiction which just means that it must be very short.

Toy Bird

The screeching of grinding metal sounded like a car crash. Wood splintered as a metal wing sliced through a bed clad in a ‘Doctor Who’ bedspread. The creature staggered and hit a wall, shaking the floor. The two little girls in the wardrobe screamed. The bird lashed out with shining silver talons and tore huge chunks out of the pink carpet.
“What is it?” Lucy screamed and gagged with the overpowering smell of static.
Glass shattered.
“It was my little metal bird,” Beth said as she clung to an armful of clothes.
“What?”
The wardrobe shook sending the already squashed girls slamming into the side.
“It was just a little bird, but it got big.”
“How could it get big?”
A crash as something big fell over and smashed.
“What was that?”
“What are we gonna do?”
Wood crunched as the wardrobe fell against the wall and the girls screamed again.
“What’s happening, girls?” A voice yelled from downstairs.
“MUM,” Lucy shouted.
“Don’t,” said Beth.
“MUM.”
The scraping of metal against metal was getting louder and painful. Static smell was giving them both roaring headaches.
“Lucy? What’s happening?”
Their mum was at the door now.
“Don’t come in here, mum,” Beth shouted at the top of her voice.
Another crash as something fell on the side of the now diagonal wardrobe.
“What are you doing?” Lucy said.
“If mum comes in here, it’ll get her.”
“Lucy, Beth, open the door. What the hell is going on?”
Fits were drumming on the door. The screeching of metal was being punctuated by a thudding and a creaking of wood.
“The wardrobe’s breaking,” Lucy said.
“What’s that terrible noise? Let me in.”
A side panel in the wardrobe suddenly bowed inwards. The clothes rail jumped out of its holdings and smacked Beth across the side of the head, she whimpered.
“MUM,” bellowed Lucy.
“Lucy, Lucy, the door’s stuck. I’m going to try and break it down,” but the last words were lost in a roar of grating metal. Wood cracked as a flash of metal burst through the wardrobe door.
Beth grabbed the clothes rail as a shining silver wing slashed through the wardrobe door and opened a glaring red wound across Lucy’s chest. She clutched her chest, tears in her eyes and looked up at Beth.
With a thud the bedroom door burst open. Beth lunged forward through the wrecked wardrobe door and drove the clothes rail as hard as she could into the creature’s eye.
Their mum saw something very large and shiny with whirring eyes, a hooked beak and shining steel feathers before it vanished. Beth saw the bird shrink to its original size in a fraction of a second before she grabbed it with trembling hands and flung it through the broken window.

Irish Wabi Sabi

Here's a strange thing. I watched that show about wabi sabi and afterwards I went onto Ryan Air's website to see how much flights to Ireland would be and ordered a book by Roddy Doyle on Amazon.
What was it about wabi sabi that gave me an urge to be in Ireland or to think about Ireland?
I suppose Roddy Doyle is the master of capturing something wonderful in the lives of working class Irish people without falling into Dickensian sentimentality.
It also sort of makes sense in the way that I feel a lot closer to my Irish family than my English family, even though I don't see them often.
None of this really explains what made me suddenly associate wabi sabi with Ireland. I know that something strange happened when the Football World Cup was held in Japan. I was in Ireland at the time so obviously the event was covered from an Irish point of view and it was very interesting to see how well the Irish and the Japanese got on. The uber-polite formality of the Japanese initially seemed at odds with the ramshackle warmth of the Irish. However, a love of simple innocent pleasures like singing songs, dancing and drinking in good company is shared by both peoples and meant that they got on swimmingly. My uncle told me some great stories that he'd heard on the TV - he said that a load of Irish had gone into a bar full of uptight Japanese businessmen and by the end of the night one of the businessmen had got up on a table and sung 'Molly Malone' in perfect English. There was also an incident of a group of Ireland supporters going into a seemingly stuffy Japanese restaurant but not being let out of the place until they sung a song for the locals.
I don't know why, but these sorts of stories make me proud to be even half Irish.
Sitting here watching the Commitments, and having read the original Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle, I realise how wrong Marcel Theroux got it when he saw a rickety little cottage in the countryside to be the epitome of wabi sabi. He would have really benefited from a glimpse at an Irish wabi sabi where you can see beauty in the way people live in tower blocks, having illegitimate babies and running chipper vans. Roddy Doyle saw it. He saw that wabi sabi was about living your life in the best way you can given the circumstances and not worrying about a load of superficial bollocks.
The director of the film The Commitments (can't remember his name), which differs massively from the book, realised it too. He saw the magic in a wonderful moment on stage even if it does go a load of nowhere.
These people saw the beauty of a fleeting moment that would never happen again and the context didn't matter. They knew that it wasn't just some poxy pastoral dream but about togetherness in a great moment that doesn't require a stunning setting or even a spiritual awareness. Really wabi sabi and particularly an Irish wabi sabi is about a simple beautiful passing moment regardless of context or what circumstances created that moment.
As I always say we skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels across the floor, I was feeling kinda sea sick, but the crowd called out for more
That's very profound Jimmy, what does it mean
I'm fucked if I know, Terry.

The Dark Side of Wabi Sabi

I just watched that show where Marcel Theroux (however you spell his name) went to Japan to find out about Wabi Sabi. Even at the end of the show I got the distinct feeling that he still didn't get it and that he'd never get it. It reminded me a lot of the time I tried to explain Aestheticism to a boy who had taken the module because he didn't know what else to take. The boy didn't get it and after four hours and many cup of coffee of me explaining it to him, he still didn't get it.
Put in the simplest terms, I think both wabi sabi and Aestheticism are concepts you have to feel rather than know on an intellectual level.
This made me think about the connections between the two artist principles. At a glance they seem to be almost polar opposites. Wabi sabi is all about simplicity, usefulness and imperfection whereas Aestheticism is all about uselessness, artifice and an attempt at perfection.
However, I couldn't help but make the comparison. They both seem to be artist movements which have bled over to become a way of life.
At the heart of both there is a maxim of living in the moment and disinterestedness.
I was reminded of Plato's Symposium where he talks about beauty and seeing beauty in common things to reach a kind of state of beauty nirvana that he couldn't describe.
Compared to the context of austere zen Buddhism and the discipline of tea ceremonies, the setting of the Symposium in a kind of party populated to by drunk beautiful young men seems to make the Western concept jaded from the start.
Saying that, something Marcel actually managed to spot was the love of artifice and hedonism of modern Japan. So it looks like both these movements have a similar flaw and it lies in the heart of existentialism. To the zen monks this means that you have to live each moment striving for some kind of sublime purity but to the average person it means bugger everything and enjoy every moment in whatever way you feel is best.
A similar phenomenon occurs in aestheticism where the urge to experience as much of beautiful life as possible becomes increasingly extreme until it leads to all kinds of debauchery (a wonderful word if you ask me) and crazy goings on.

Observations

Isn't it sad when people don't notice things that could brighten up their day?

I was temping in Central London one summer and worked with a woman who had never noticed that the London Centre of Tricology was on Wigmore Street even though she'd walked past it everyday for the last 14 years.

I spotted it on my first day there and remarked that maybe the street should be renamed Wig-no-more Street but she didn't laugh, or even titter.

Walking down the street the other day I saw a white chihuahua sitting up on the front seat a moving car. On closer inspection I saw that it wasn't a chihuahua, it was a white cat, sitting up looking around without a care in the world. I was in a foul mood but that made me smile. Sometimes we need these things to remind us that the world we live in isn't mundane and dull, it's a fricking mad house.

One of the cleaners where I work was talking to me yesterday and mentioned that his next door neighbour had worked for the military doing something secret to do with bomb testing. I also work at other sites and recently received a lecture from a security man telling me that I mustn't repeat anything I heard or saw on their site. If I did then I would get done under the official secrets act. Apparently the company made flight simulators and weapons guidance systems for the military. How exciting does that sound?
I didn't see anything exciting though, I just sat on in a windowless gym and watched fat men sweating all over the cross trainers all day.
Initially I found the situation depressing, but when I think about it I have to laugh. There was me, sitting and feeling sorry for myself in a boring gym and next door there were people working on top secret military projects. It through into sharp relief the feeling I have always had that there was something exciting and possibly wonderful that existed along side the dull and mundane that dominated most of our lives.
This makes me feel that even though I'm a cynic to the bone and share a beer, cider or glass of wine with Despair most nights, nothing can extinguish the pilot light of hope that there is an exciting life out there and one day I'll find it.

Just stop licking pigeons

Sorry, last blog was a bit crap.
Don't you love it when people repeat crap they hear without thinking about it?
I used to share a house with a man who was a master of this. Once we were discussing London pigeons and he said that he hated them.
I have nothing against pigeons.
He said they were bad because they carried diseases.
Now, I don't know about you, but I certainly don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone or have even heard an urban legend about anyone who has caught a disease from a pigeon.
What would you have to do to catch a disease from a pigeon? Eat it? Kiss it? Lick it?
I just thought I'd share that little nugget of nonsense.

Conspiracy Theory

Is anyone else sick of hearing the words, "Well, at least you have job". I am, big time.
It makes me wonder if this whole credit crunch thing is just a nasty ploy to make us all grateful for our crap little jobs and miserable little lives.
Sorry, I just have to go and get despair another beer, he's in for the long haul. He drinks Stella, by the way, and smokes rollies.
There, he's happy now, all sprawled out on the sofa.
Isn't it incredible how happy people are when they don't have to go to work? Do you remember that Monday when everyone in the south east of England was snowed in and couldn't get to work? It was like Christmas down here in Brighton. No, better than Christmas, it was like Pride or some other street festival.
At 7.30 in the morning there were adults out playing in the snow and taking pictures. The atmosphere was nothing short of glorious. So many people were smiling and laughing. There were dogs jumping around in the snow and full grown men making snow men.
It's rubbish that work brings people down so badly. It's a fact that we work the longest hours in Europe and what a miserable bloody bunch we are.
Is it a coincidence that this credit crunch seems to have hit America, Japan, Germany and the UK harder than anyone else? All the scarily hard working countries in other words. I'm sure placing like Spain and France are suffering too but it seems strange that these countries get along perfectly well taking it easy and we find it necessary to work silly hours and make ourselves miserable.
Does this sound like a conspiracy to anyone else? The only thing I can't figure out is who exactly benefits from all this because the rich buggers don't seem very happy either.

Insights into the character of Despair

It has just occurred to me, as that heart sinking sensation of despair tries to creep over me, that if despair was a person, as it was personified by Spenser in the Faerie Queene, it would be a cheeky cockney guy. He'd knock at your door and say "Hey mate, let me in, will ya? Come on, you know we're mates, let me in and we'll talk about this business idea you've got."
You know that if you let him in then you're buggered, you'll never get rid of him. He'll banish every whiff of hope for the future.
Hope, on the other hand, is a geeky little girl with glasses and ankle socks and she will be saying "Don't listen to him, don't let him in, things will be fine. You're not asking for much, you're not trying to be Alan Sugar, just trust in me and everything will be great."
Nice, right? But Del Boy Despair isn't going to let that go, he'll come chiming in with, "Nah, you don't believe that. How many times have you listened to that silly cow in the past? And what's happened? She's let you down and you've flung the door wide open and let me in. We've hung out and had a good time right? You love wallowing with me when Nerdy Hope lets you down."
Hope says, "Yes, but things will be different this time. Honestly." She's sounding a bit desperate now though.
Despair says, "Come on, let me in, you know I'm right. You just want to lie down with me at your side and wallow. You know these things never work out, don't even bother trying. Why do that to yourself? If you quit now and let me in it'll be a lot better than waiting til later when everything's gone Pete Tong."
Hope has one last shot, but she's sounding ragged and tired now, "No, you have to listen to me. Don't give up, don't give in. Just trust in me and everything will be fine."
Despair is swaggering around out there now, he knows he's going to be let in very soon. "Have I ever let you down? Where's that bitch when everything falls apart? Legged it, that's where. I'm always here for you though, just let me in now and let's have a good old wallow. Yeah, that's what you want."
Now, just at this point, where I'm seriously considering letting despair in, my Internet radio station decides to play that Morrissey song that goes "I was looking for a job and now I've found a job and heaven knows I'm miserable now".
Thanks for that Last.FM.
Come in, Despair, I'll put the kettle on.