Operation Don’t Die: Update.

It’s been a while. As previously noted, much of the progress originally made was, um, un-made. I think I may be getting calorie intake under control again. What’s annoying is that I don’t actually like food all that much. I guess if I did, I could probably make eating less a bit more interesting, but as it is, I just end up not bothering to eat properly. I swear, if I didn’t have kids to try to set a good example for and a wife to guide me in setting that example, I’d probably be ten-tonne-Tessa-from-Texas by now. Another way in which my wife has saved my life.

It has, however, been too long since I stopped my regular exercise routine. New responsibilities at work tend to leave me less time, but I hope I can start going swimming at lunch times again. I went recently for the first time in ages. It’s basically whatever comes first – 30 minutes or 60 lengths (calm yourself, this is not exactly a full-length pool we’re talking about here). Previously I was making 60 lengths in less than 25 minutes and was considering going to 70. This time, I made the 60 with just a few minutes to spare and the last 15 damn near killed me. So, some ground to make up there.

Still, gives me something to do doesn’t it?

The value in repetition.

I’m a repeater. My favourite records are played again and again until they wear out and must be bought again (Definitely Maybe, Parklife, Grace, Is This It?, Different Class, Songs for the Deaf and Appetite for Destruction amongst dozens of others, if you care). Throughout my childhood I re-watched my favourite films to death (The Time Machine (1960), War of the Worlds (1953), Goonies, Gremlins, Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones) and that hasn’t changed much since I’ve got older apart from the addition of a few others – Pulp Fiction, Lord of the Rings, and Fight Club along with many more. The hours I sunk into playing through Sonic the Hedgehog, James Pond, Alex Kidd, Road Rash, Flashback and Street Fighter II and more over and over again in my teens I have no doubt would be terrifying were they ever to be added up, and more recently, I’ve been through the Gears of War campaign more than once and can see myself playing though GTA V again before too long.

There are, I don’t doubt, many people who have quite the opposite point of view; when you’ve seen a film once, you’ve seen it, so what’s the point of seeing it again? But if I love it, why would I not want to see it again? Those records, those films and those games became a support system for me while negotiating the difficulties of adolescence. They were friends, they were retreats – they were my happy place. They still are, in a way.

Books also had their place. I’d like to be able to tell you that I loved books above all those other things; that I used to spend hours, days even, lost in them. Alas, I wasn’t that bright. I did like books – I would read Roald Dahl, comics and adaptations of my favourite films. As with films, music and games, I would re-read my favourites – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, George’s Marvellous Medicine and a junior version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – that would all become dog-eared and well thumbed, and later To Kill a Mockingbird would become my favourite. This recent article about books written for children kicked off this whole train of thought. It makes a good point about the validity of children’s books, as they have to be written with repetition in mind. They have to be robust enough to stand up to kids reading and re-reading them over and over again. While as adults we certainly do re-read our favourites, they are never tested to the extremes kid’s books are – I particularly like the Neil Gaiman quote in the article about how while he can’t justify every word of American Gods, he can of Coraline. Does that mean he thinks Coraline is a better book? I doubt it, but it does sound as though he takes special care over his children’s books compared to his adult books, and it’s probably because of the retellings the children’s books are subjected to.

But I didn’t really get into reading until I got into my teens, when I found Robert Jordan, Professor Tolkien and Terry’s Brooks and Pratchett. I am in fact re-reading Pratchett’s Discworld series at the moment. I wrote this this ages ago about how you generally have differing points of view when coming back to something like a book series or TV show later in life, and a similar thing has happened with Discworld. My favourite hasn’t changed – previously it was Small Gods and so it proves to be the case still – the conceit that gods are only as real as they are believed to be and their power diminishes with their belief, leaving them to essentially die along with their last believer is such a stroke of inspired genius that I doubt Pratchett will ever top it (although he’s come close a few times). Taking the series in more general terms, however, my favoured stories were always the ones that involved the wizards of Unseen University, or Death. While they are certainly the funniest ones still, I’m much happier this time round in the company of Watch Commander Sam Vimes and witch Granny Weatherwax. I could be well off the mark here, but they feel somehow truer, as if their righteous fury at the injustices of the world is closer to Pratchett’s true view of the world and echo the points he’s really trying make under the funny. This piece written by Neil Gaiman about Pratchett and his anger being the ‘engine that powered Good Omens’ might suggest I’m not that far off the mark, after all.

As usual, I don’t really have much of a point, but I suppose what I’m getting at is you should spend time in the company of the things you love.

Why is everybody doing it wrong?

So. Let’s just say, for example that you wear a clown suit all day. You wear this clown suit because you have a deeply held belief that in the beginning of time the all-knowing Bongo squirted the heavens from his holy plastic flower water pistol, and humanity came into being when the all-knowing Bongo threw the sacred custard pie. You absolutely have the right to hold that belief close to your heart and wear that clown suit. I have a right that is equal to that however. I have a right to find your belief ridiculous. And I have a right to say so. I have a right to point out the existence of the all-knowing Bongo flies in the face of all known science, logic and reason. I have the right to publish my opinion on your belief where I want, be it on a blog like this one that almost nobody reads, or in a satirical magazine sold somewhere in Europe.

There is something I don’t have the right to do. I don’t have the right to make personal attacks on you because of your belief in the all-knowing Bongo. I have no right to desecrate the place where you pray by re-enacting the hallowed step ladder routine. I have no right to curtail your rights in any way or see you in any way other than a fellow human because of your religious beliefs. Your religious beliefs, however, are very different. They are nothing but fair game. There is no creator myth that I do not find inherently nonsensical, be it the all-knowing Bongo, or the stories that sit at the heart of Christianity, Islam or Scientology, or any other religion that purports to know how everything we know and are came to be. That doesn’t mean I can’t find you to be a complex and brilliant human in spite not sharing in your belief. In the words of Tyler Durden, you’re not your fucking khakis. Nor are you your religious belief. It’s not a difficult thing to recognise. And yet, our insistence on putting people into ready-made boxes will never cease.

But. And it’s a big but. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that gives you the right to murder, least of all that preposterous religious belief of yours. There are times when it is possible to see the reasons behind murder – to understand, although not excuse, the reasons. And then there are times when it is not. Whatever is it that makes a person think that a death sentence is an appropriate response to drawing a cartoon that takes the piss out of their religion? It’s like those times when a kid responds to an argument they know they’re losing by completely over-reacting; screaming, hitting, knocking shit over. That’s what they are. Children in adult’s bodies who, having never learned the life skills of empathy and debate, have heard something they don’t like and happen to have a lot of guns.

That’s the really poisonous thing about religion. When looking at it in any depth, sooner or later you have to come face to face with the fact that the whole thing comes crashing down if you don’t force yourself to believe something that is simply so illogical, so damn unlikely, with nothing in the way of observable proof, that all you can do is blindly have faith in something that is almost certainly untrue. I can’t begin to imagine how difficult it must be living with that impossible paradox forming the heart of how I define myself. Of course, I don’t imagine it would cause me to walk into a school and start shooting children like those rotting pustules of cat sick. It feels like the Spanish Inquisition might have if they all had automatic weapons.

I recognise that religion isn’t the cause of all wars, merely the excuse, that if it didn’t exist we’d find some other thing to justify all the despicable things we get up to, but I do fucking despise the way it’s used by the mindless faithful to commit these terrible crimes. And then what do we do? We use it as an excuse to persecute members of the same religion who had nothing to with these atrocities. Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day. It might seem a little extreme to suggest that the current way in which people of a certain faith are casually discriminated against by too many people in this country, given a veil of credibility by a lying, fetid press, because of some acts of violent cowardice by other shit munching fuck farts in the name of that same religion could lead to something as horrifying as a holocaust, but the more you learn about the one that took place in Germany during WWII, the more you see that casual discrimination is exactly how it started. It’s the thin end of the wedge, and it pays to remember that.

People are people, whatever else they may be, whatever box they’re put in, whatever label they’re given because of their colour, gender, age, sexuality or faith. Forgetting that puts you on a very slippery slope that ends nowhere good.

People: not all bad.

I’m not unaware that this blog will often contain rants about the stupid and ridiculous things people do for the most stupid and ridiculous reasons, which, frankly, can sometimes get a little depressing. Sometimes it’s worth making a conscious effort to remember that we are responsible for brilliance.

There is a lump of matter in our skulls that can think its way beyond primal survival instincts and contemplate its own mortality and place within the cosmos. It can ask and answer questions about not only its origins, but the origins of the universe within which it finds itself. We can place ourselves in the shoes of those who are less fortunate and help them.

Complex and sophisticated languages, music, architecture, storytelling and many other forms of creation and expression. Not only the ability some have to create, but the ability of others to appreciate it. To respond on a deep emotional level to another person’s creation and either understand what it was they wanted to say, or take an entirely new interpretation of it beyond the creator’s original intention.

People you wouldn’t look at twice on the street are transformed into desirable, sweaty sex gods/goddesses if they’re standing in front of you playing music that fills your head with noise and your bones with vibrations. Moving pictures or written words become real and important because we have an imagination within which they become tangible things.

I know there are a many people in the world who aren’t in any kind of position to appreciate these things the way I can, and I know there are many things that aren’t right in our world – hell I usually moan about most of them right here, but we still have potential. Maybe we’ll realise it before we go under.

Black Friday – another step along the road to madness.

So in previous years, it seemed to me that Black Friday and all that it entailed was an American thing. I could always enjoy stories of fights in queues and punters being maced all for the sake of grabbing the last 50-inch plasma TV in the shop for a third of the usual price, and then feel slightly superior in that typically English way that makes so many others hate us.

But this year, the UK press and UK retailers have managed to induce Black Friday madness in earnest in our fair isles. There goes my snobby smugness – we in the UK are now as possession obsessed as those ‘Mericans ever were. It’s another step along the road to spelling colour without a u, allowing any inbred mook to own a gun and shoot black people, or voting for the party actively trying to be the dumbest in elections (although with UKIP's recent frightening gains, we might already have that one in the bag).

All hail our headlong rush into oblivion!

Some of the ways in which having kids has ruined me.

When people talk about their kids, it’s often in the kind of way that makes me want to puke. Not the declarations of love and happiness – that’s normal, but the suggestion that they are something other than regular kids. You know, not every kid is a world class genius sports star in waiting. Sorry to disabuse you of whatever notion you might have had. Of course, I too get ridiculously proud whenever one of my girls does something cool like spell a tricky word or ask a perceptive question, so I can’t really rant too much about that.

The honest truth is there are some things having children has made worse, not better. My bank balance. Traffic jams. The already crippling overpopulation problems. Also, my enjoyment of fiction, in all its forms. I cry far too easily now, and I’m blaming my kids. Jeopardy or tragedy involving children or even young adults, with a focus on the lost potential of a young life lost. Depictions of cruelty to, disregarding of, or annoyance with children (not that I don’t get annoyed with them. So I’m a hypocrite. Shoot me). Now that I have an intimate knowledge of just how dependent children are on constant, unconditional love and acceptance to develop through their early years, these things shown on film or TV, or written into books leave me a wreck. That never used to happen.

Seeing them becoming more sophisticated with every year on the one hand makes me eager for some of the things I’m looking forward to sharing with them, while on the other makes me increasingly fearful that an inevitable misstep will leave them going down a different path to one I wish for them. It’s sometimes enough to make you sick with fear, this crushing feeling of responsibility. It can also lead to a determined resoluteness to do your absolute best for them, come what may, which can be freeing, although too often is restricting instead.

Quite a few of the people I know who are also parents will talk of what they might have made of their lives had they ignored this biological imperative to reproduce. Where they might have gone, what they might have done. This, I am certain, does not make them unfit parents, but more realistically human. For sure I’ve missed out on some probably fantastic experiences because I had children. It is okay to lament the loss of this other life.

But. Like the majority of those other parents, given the chance not to have them part of my life, no matter what other eventuality might persist, there is nothing that could remotely tempt me. To watch day by day as these individuals take shape, with their own thoughts and their own ideas, is incomparable. It makes living with the sickening fear born of the creeping feeling of inevitability that you're bound to do something that messes them up irrevocably worth it.

A chequered history of opinion.

I recently looked back over a number of previous posts on this blog and it feels odd how when you’re removed from a specific post, in particular the feelings and circumstances that caused you to write that post, by years or sometimes only months, it isn’t always easy to remember how you felt when you wrote it. Some of them I’m still quite proud of; some are written pretty decently and get the point I was trying to make across fairly well. Others...well. Others come off like off-the-cuff ramblings about who knows what. I sound like, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a dick.

In spite of this embarrassment, I’ve decided to leave them where they are, like so much Internet flotsam and jetsam (thanks to an old Internet friend by the name of Flower for that quite charming turn of phrase). Not only that, but for the moment I think I’ll continue with the odd burst of nonsense. Frequency of posts has been declining for some time due to other time commitments (some important, like my wife and kids, some not, like my Xbox), but I will try to keep to a once a month minimum. I know how the whole of the Interwebs hangs on my every word, after all.

I guess the point is that everybody changes, and looking back on this page serves as a sort of catalogue of mine.