A cycle of anger and guilt.

It's been a tough week for a colleague of mine. He's experienced just about the worst thing that can happen to a person. His 18 year old son has died, apparently by his own hand. I don't know any of the details, and it's not my place to enquire, just like it's not my place to reveal anything else about it to you. This single fact alone is enough to portray the magnitude of his personal tragedy. What I've gone and done is what almost any person tends to do - try to understand how he might feel by relating the experience to my own memories, but nothing has ever come close (and I fervently hope nothing ever will).

The only remotely relatable experience is a Boxing Day over 15 years ago when we heard that my 15 year old cousin had died of a previously unknown heart condition. Now, this was terrible news and dreadfully upsetting, but I was only just into my teens and didn't see Simon that often, so I was unable to grasp how my uncle must have felt, just like I can never understand how my colleague feels. Recently another cousin of the same family died due to drugs related problems - the uncle in question having now lost both sons has only a daughter left, a daughter who has herself recently given birth to a daughter - funny how life keeps going round like that, isn't it? In a similar vein, my grandad passed away just before my first daughter Katie Erin was born, and now that her sister Emily Karen is on the way, we've lost nan.

What's difficult to come to terms with is how angry I was at the pointlessness of my cousin's death. He was young, strong, smart and full of potential, and all he's done is cause untold grief to those who he loved and who loved him the most. While not on the same scale, there was a minor resurfacing of this anger when hearing the news of my colleague's tragedy. It seems careless to me to leave behind your loved ones with such a gaping hole in their lives. But, on further reflection it seems callous of me to judge them in such a way - in Christian's case, he never intended for the drugs to kill him, so he's worth remembering with love, not anger, and in my colleague's case, who am I to feel this way without having the slightest clue to this young man's circumstances and feelings?

So, guilt inevitably follows anger, but I can't stop these feelings any more than I can stop the events from taking place at all. It's a shite state of affairs probably best not ruminated on for too long. One thing that these tragedies do for certain is to convince me to squeeze every last drop out of life while I can, which is as good a lesson as any to take away, I guess.

Gaga is good. Sort of.

It may be because I'm a touch pissed at the time of writing this and it was playing in the bar I was in earlier, but I've been thinking about Lady Gaga. I'm kind of surprised that more people haven't seemed to have got the point of her. There are a lot of people that love her to ridiculous extremes, there are people that consider her another pop clone showing tits and ass to get records sold, and there are people that consider her to be a dude. All of these viewpoints (except possibly the last one) miss the whole point of Gaga.

First off, she's a writer, and regardless of whether you like the singles or not (I for one could frankly do without them, but can't seem to get them out of my head for ages after hearing them), the fact that she penned them immediately puts her in a category above Britney et al. Infuriatingly catchy choruses married to the smoothest production possible, they are shining examples of everything great or hideous about pop, depending on your point of view.

But the point is, Gaga herself knows this. There are many insidious touches that hint of the skewed double meaning, not least of which is the way she goes completely out of her way to make herself look as hideously freakish as possible, while being a genuinely beautiful woman. The point is that pop music is so driven by image and sex that most 'artists' in the genre are ugly talentless caricatures of beauty and sex appeal - the difference is Gaga chooses to be this way. The concept is never clearer than in the video for 'Bad Romance' - the single that cemented her place as world leading pop icon, with a chorus so catchy the only way it will ever leave your head is if you skewer it out with a screwdriver. She appears freakishly distorted to the point where she is so skinny she would be dead from starvation, and is shown being pretty much whored out to an emotionless onlooker. There was the MTV performance in which she essentially died in a pool of her own blood to attempt to sate the appetite of the ravenous masses.

She is clearly much, much more intelligent than she is often given credit for, using her not inconsiderable talent to subvert the very genre she has conquered so effortlessly. For that, she deserves more than to be written off as another soulless pop bimbo - whether you like her records or not, she deserves your respect, however grudgingly given it may be.

Survival of the ignorant?

I'm worried and aggravated. I'm afraid for my planet and my species. I'm afraid it's squandering its enormous potential.

Somehow, recently, I got into a conversation about evolution. You know: Darwin, natural selection, Origin of Species; all that stuff. Living only 12 miles away from where Darwin was born, I guess it's inevitable he comes up in conversation occasionally. The two people I'm talking to are not religious - not Creationinsts, catholics or any other faith, and yet it turns out that they don't 'believe' in the theory of evolution (the inverted commas are because it's not a matter of belief - you don't 'believe' in gravity or DNA, you accept the obviousness of the truth, and evolution is the same). They don't buy creation either, and claim they are waiting to discover 'The Third Way'.

Some of what they say is tongue in cheek, but the underlying unwillingness to accept the theory is serious. As I begin to question the reasons for this, I soon find that it's because they don't actually know what evolution is - all they have is a vague misconception about what it might be, clearly illustrated by the fact that one of them doesn't understand why apes are still around if humans evolved from them (we didn't is the short answer, and the long answer is far too long to go into here), and the other doesn't know how a fish can give birth to an air-breathing lizard (again, it's doesn't is the short answer). I mention that what they think evolution is actually isn't, and offer to lay out the theory and the proof in a simple written form to help them increase their understanding. Once they have that knowledge, they can then debate it properly and decide for themselves whether or not to accept the theory. At least they'll no longer have the misconceptions. They both promptly decline this offer saying they don't care as it won't change their lives in any way.

Now, this is the heart of the matter - this is why I'm afraid. They would rather go on believing their misconception regarding what evolution actually is than attempt to learn or understand. These people are not morons - they posses both intelligence and common sense. They simply aren't interested in knowledge they can't see a material use for. To me, this is unfathomable. I am amazed every day by the natural world, at the way everything fits together so perfectly. That amazement is possible because of my understanding of how it all came to be - because of my understanding of evolution. That a person of reasonably high intelligence would rather watch Eastenders, X-Factor, Masterchef and any number of mind-numbing TV shows than actually increase their understanding of, well, anything at all is frightening.

Is this the norm or the exception? Is no-one curious anymore? Are we collectively so entangled by the mundanity of everyday celebrity culture, soaps and TV talent shows? If so, then we are lost, doomed to fade away into lethargy and entropy.