Adults ruin everything.

There’s an argument that says kids need a father if they’re going to grow up to be well-adjusted adults (a quick aside - have a look at politics, popular journalism (for want of a better phrase) and our celebrity culture. How many well-adjusted adults do you see?). And I know it is, in some way, true-ish (although not really). Kids tend to go through a phase when they’re trying to understand this weird world they find themselves in where they have a very basic and strongly defined understanding of male (short hair, deep voice, willy) and female (long hair, higher voice, boobs), and having this understanding backed up by real-life examples helps them in this. I remember Emily going through this and being terribly confused that the shop assistant in Sainsbury’s had short hair, yet was female. This was embarrassing for the young woman serving us and awkward for us, but Emily wasn’t doing anything deliberately wrong, she was only trying to get to grips with the world.

But I don’t think this means this is the only proper way to bring up children; two parents, one a manly man, the other a womanly woman. Like learning anything from scratch, you start with the basics and build colour and complexity on from there. So, slowly, Emily learned that men can have long hair, and that women can have short hair. Now she and Katie know that same-sex relationships aren’t unusual, and that having two mums or two dads isn’t really that different from having a mum and a dad (because it isn’t).

The idea that anything other than exposure to entirely straight relationships will somehow mess kids up is bonkers – if you present to children that being straight, gay or trans is still being a person and one is no less natural a state of being than the other, then that is the message they will take on board. The ingrained gender stereotyping that causes people not only to judge others, but also to unconsciously pass that reaction on to children is what causes them to adopt the same attitude. In some cases it’s rather more conscious, but it’s arguably the ones that declare they’re not judgmental on the surface and show by their actions that they are lying that are the biggest part of the problem. While blatant on-the-surface discrimination has reduced over the years (perhaps not including the past 18 months or so, but like the evidence of climate change, it’s the longer-term data you need to look at), I still observe a lot of just-under-the-surface judgement in many places, by many people who would be outraged if you even suggested such a thing went on. It’s that more secret, less honest prejudice that causes this to be perpetuated over generations.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, kids grow up feeling happy and secure with people who love them and provide a safe environment, and if that person happens to have stubble and wear a dress, it makes no difference to the kid until they pick up the behaviours and prejudices of adults.

So long 2016…

Good riddance bitch, you’ll not be missed. In fact, just to piss you off, I’m gonna work on remembering pleasant and positive things from the last year, because the EU vote and the Trump ascendancy have only just begun and if I remember you for those events, then future years are just going to be impossible to face up to – best case scenario; we’ve got years of suffering the consequences of those terrible decisions, worse case; we’ll descend into fascism and war. To imply I’ve suffered from depression at any point last year wouldn’t be true and could be insulting to anybody that genuinely suffers from it, so I won’t. But there have been times I’ve struggled to focus on something other than the anxiety all this is causing, and it gets difficult to shake off. Decades of wealth transference to the rich elite, leaving communities to struggle on without investment, without help, convinced by a lying press that lurching to the right and blaming those who aren’t responsible caused this. The fact that after repeating the catchphrase ‘Drain the Swamp’ on the way to election, he’s now putting Goldman Sachs in positions of power would be hilarious if it didn’t mean unnecessary hardship for so many and the reversal of decades of progress.

But I’ll be fucked if I’m going to let that define my year – those fucking parasites have brought death to our home towns for years, and they’ll continue to do it for years to come. I’m sick of swallowing the fear they’re feeding. I know the people I share my neighbourhood with, whatever skin pigment they have, whatever they pray to, whomever they love, are not the cause of this. I know there’s room for more of them, if only the wealth wasn’t siphoned off elsewhere; if the system was actually given a chance to work as it was supposed to.

So I’m going to remember the year for the good stuff. And if only you focus, you’ll have some good things to remember too. At least, I hope you will. I’m going to remember it for my friend’s wonderful wedding, where I got to dress in a posh suit, spend a few days in the company of many happy and lovely friends and acquaintances in an atmosphere of joy and love. I got to spend the evening in glasses and shoes that light up. I’m going to remember it for a week spent in Wales with the people I love most in the Universe and did nothing but have fun and relax in unseasonably gorgeous weather, by the end of which I think I was possibly more relaxed and content than perhaps I’ve ever been. I’m going to remember that I have books, music, film and video games as well as good friends and loved ones to enjoy them with. I’m going to continue listening to David Bowie and Leonard Cohen, to laugh at Victoria Wood and Caroline Aherne, and to watch movies that were all the better for the presence of Alan Rickman and Carrie Fisher, because that’s how you pay tribute to them, not with misery. And I’ll remember it for the million little moments of bliss that make up any year, little moments that become all the more important in years that come with as much bullshit as that one did.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:

The Boss: Death to My Hometown: “Get yourself a song to sing and sing it ‘til you’re done. Sing it hard and sing it well, send the robber barons straight to hell, the greedy thieves who came around and ate the flesh of everything they found, whose crimes have gone unpunished now, who walk the streets as free men now. They bought death to our hometown.”

Am I missing out?

It is well documented that I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to being scared. I don’t like horror generally, and sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on some great stuff. Well, let me rephrase. I know I’m missing out on some great stuff, but sometimes I wonder if I should care more about it.

There are some things I give not one shit about – the Saw franchise, for example. It can be as ingenious in its gory traps as it wants, but I’m someone it just isn’t going to be appealing to anytime soon. However, there are some things that perhaps I should make more of an effort to try, despite my fears.

I can get behind horror in a sci-fi setting a little more easily – I love Alien for example, and I might be one of only a few people that looks back on Event Horizon with fondness. I was scared watching those films, but still enjoyed them – in fact watching Alien for the first time all alone on ITV one Saturday night while my parents were out, eyes wide and heart hammering almost out of my chest as Ripley, Jones in hand, raced for the dubious safety of the Nostromo’s escape pod while lights flashed and smoke poured will always be one of my fondest film-related memories. But more standard horror is something I have tended to avoid, and continue to do so. Watching the Japanese language Ring trilogy left me feeling really quite traumatised (I swear I could see Sadako in every fucking shadow for months afterward) and while I can say they are decent films (the first one is genuinely excellent), I have no desire to watch them again anytime soon.

So I guess what it boils down to is that I need to find the good stuff and avoid the crap. Easier said than done when I’ve generally avoided the genre for so long. I think I’ve found two places I might be able to start, though. Being married to a librarian is a truly brilliant thing – I’ve found China Miéville and Anne Leckie, kept up with Brandon Sanderson’s latest releases and picked up classics from H. G. Wells, J. G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut. Thanks to Rach, I recently read Weaveworld, a fairly old novel written by Clive Barker – he of Hellraiser fame. Hellraiser and its sequels is probably a prime example of the kind of thing I tend to avoid. Weaveworld is one of those books that just boggles the mind – not only the imagination and the story, but the prose. Barely a page went by in that book that I didn’t find a passage, or a line, or a few words that made me take a breath and just admire the craft of an absolute master of words. The only other two authors I’ve found to be comparable in terms of that gobsmacking use of language are the aforementioned China Miéville and Stephen King. What is striking is that there are many moments of horror in Weaveworld and in Miéville’s work, and I’ve heard tell that King might dabble in horror from time to time as well. I couldn’t tell you for sure because the only books of his I’ve read so far is the Dark Tower series.

There’s got to be something in that, right? The three most gifted authors I’ve read have strong horror threads in much of their writing, with Barker and King famous for specialising in it? I’m clearly more comfortable when my horror is mixed with other genres – the sci-fi of Alien, Weaveworld is fantasy, The Dark Tower is also fantasy, with a large dose of western and Miéville is, frankly, beyond categorisation. Maybe I can use Barker and King to cross over into more straight horror?

Games are the same. I have tried to get through Bioshock a number of times – the premise is wonderful and the game is clearly quality – generally thought of as pretty much the best of the last generation. But when I play it before long I find myself a little too creeped out and I move on to something else. I want to play it. I want to finish it. I want to move on to Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite, but I want to get through Bioshock first.

So maybe that’s where I’ll start. Pick up another Clive Barker or Stephen King book. Finish Bioshock. Maybe then I’ll find the guts to keep going and see what I’ve been missing out on. Maybe.

Another species?

I’ve sometimes been feeling lately like I’m a different species from this sapient race I keep reading about and hearing about that, faced with an oncoming cliff edge, rather than trying to apply the brakes or even swerve, have elected to accelerate. I’ve still only heard one remotely sensible reasonable explanation for voting to leave the EU, and with the election of President Fucktrumpet over the water, it just seems that we are absolutely determined to burn our world down around us.

While some people have been celebrating these things, other people have been trying to make excuses for them and still others have been watching them unfold with a horrified look on their faces. We’ve heard lots of people giving their own opinions on who is to blame. Jonathan Pie thinks the left are at fault. Others blame the voting public (and the non-voting public). Yet more blame media bias. Something to me seems obvious – this clusterfuck has been brought on by a combination of all these things and more.

It’s true when you tell a pro-lifer they’re stupid and full of shit they tend not to want to debate you. It’s true if you call someone worried about unchecked immigration a racist prick it is unlikely to change their mind, or even make them stop to think. It’s true we need to engage with people who think differently. The problem is I’m not sure evidence and facts really work as well as they once did. Lies are told blatantly and repeatedly by the press and the powerful, but they don’t seem to care because by the time it is inescapable, they’re already on to the next lie.

But. While the best thing for the press in all its current forms would be to piss off up its own wretched arse, it is only partly to blame. Farage, Trump, Murdoch and co are only partly to blame. You can’t have a proper democracy without an informed and engaged populace. It is undeniable that some people are wilfully ignorant and purposefully deaf to attempts to engage. People that can be presented with hard evidence of climate change and claim that it’s just a Chinese hoax and that burning more coal is obviously the answer (seriously, America, what were you thinking?) It is every person’s responsibility to ensure they are aware of all sides of the debate, to at least make an effort to see the other side. To be open to the possibility that just because you’ve always voted one way, it doesn’t mean the current incarnation of your party has your best interests at heart. If you ensure your only source of news is the Daily Mail or the Guardian because they fit best with your worldview, then you are part of the fucking problem. Stop being part of the fucking problem and get yourself a balanced view of the world from multiple sources that aren’t just interested in reporting events through their own distorted ideological prism.

It isn’t really a case of left and right – few politicians have turned out to be quite so Tory as the warmongering, bank deregulating Blair and Brown show, and Hilary Clinton was so far up Wall Street’s arse she probably couldn’t smell her own rank hypocrisy. If you want a genuine change, this is not what you vote for. Of course, the change that President Fartfeathers represents is entirely the wrong sort, and, given the choice, I’d take the more of the same that Clinton would have been and the minimum wage that Nu-Labour introduced over the legacy of needless austerity we’ve been living with recently any day.

I know it doesn’t do you any good to spent lots of time stressed and anxious about what you can’t change, but this year it has been particularly hard, and I can’t really see things improving much any time soon. Maybe I can find a way to move to a little town overlooking a mountain lake or something. Maybe the people who are more like the species of human I remember are all hiding out there.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:

Pixies: Caribou: “This human form, where I was born, I now repent.”

Why is blue blue?

Emily, who is currently 6, is very inquisitive about the world. Like many kids her age, she asks many, many questions of her parents. Some of them are funny, some are cute, some are difficult to answer. She recently asked one that was particularly tricky – in her words: “Why does green have to be green and blue have to be blue?”

Well. How do you even start to answer that so a 6-year-old will understand it? How do you talk about the visible spectrum of light and wavelengths? How do you approach the idea that what you see as blue or green may not be what someone else sees – she’s too young to watch The Matrix, after all. I’m not even sure I know the answer. Needless to say, when we tried to answer her she looked at us, uncomprehending, and the longer we talked, the more her look became glazed.

When it had become inescapable that we were failing to answer her question, I asked her if we’d just confused her. She nodded. I then asked her what she thought the answer was. “God decided.” Of course. I might have known. Emily and her big sister Katie are still at that age where ‘god did it’ is an easy go-to answer for something they don’t yet understand.

They’re not alone – as a species we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. It’s a part of us I don’t think we’ll ever truly lose, no matter how much horseshit I consider it to be. I think that’s the case because we’ll never know everything – some things I think will always be a mystery to us. And as long as there’s something we don’t know, there will be something for folks to point at and say ‘god did it’ as if the very fact that we don’t yet know something is somehow proof of god’s existence. Even though, to quote the excellent Tim Minchin, “Every mystery ever solved has turned out to be not magic.” Every riddle we unravel reveals two more behind it.

This is the way religion has insinuated its way into the lives of men, women and children for generations; it seems like an easy answer for people who want to know how the world works. The way to overcome it is to learn more, to know more. This is why I always try to answer my kids’ questions, and never discourage them from asking them, even though sometimes you really want them to just shut the hell up and give you 5 minutes to think; even though I have the tiniest bit of sympathy for the parent referred to in Neko Case’s Nearly Midnight, Honolulu. Katie is already questioning the logistics of Father Christmas making it all the way around the world in one night, and I don’t think the stock answer of ‘it’s Christmas magic’ will work for much longer. This unquenchable curiosity will, I hope, one day dislodge from their mind this acceptance that ‘god decided’ everything they don’t understand and they start looking for a better answer.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:
Neko Case: Nearly Midnight, Honolulu: “You’ll hear yourself complain, but don’t you ever shut up please kid have your say.”

Operation Don’t Die - Update.

We went and bought a bike. Now there’s even less of an excuse for being in the lazy unfit state I’m in. Not only that, it was bought under a ‘Cycle to Work’ scheme. Dammit.

Still, being fitter is a good thing, right? The sore arse bone I get from the saddle will fade in time, right? The cramps I get in the legs will ease up the more I do it, right? I gotta say, even when I actually did regular exercise it never became anything other than awful.

But, if I want to be less blubbersome (and I do), I need to persevere with it. I do prefer the swimming to the cycling, but if I’m relying on the bike to get to and from work then it will be unavoidable, and not just something I have to find the time to fit in like the swimming was.

I was always cursed with bikes growing up; I’d only have to look at it and it would get a flat tire, but so far, so good, and we’ll see how much difference cycling to and from work makes.

Laters.

On the pursuit of wealth.

The best things in life may be free, but everything else, up to and including the second best things in life, costs a bloody fortune. And if it doesn’t, you can bet that some bugger somewhere is trying to figure out a way to make it. It’s going to be hard to make it sound like I’m not just coming from a place of jealousy, but I really don’t mind that people and companies make ludicrous sums of money. Good luck to ‘em, if it makes them happy.

I do mind when the deliberate actions they take impact directly on people who are not rich just to protect their already-ridiculous-and-still-increasing profit margins. Governments inflicting austerity measures on people, with the loss of amenities all across the country while resolutely failing to try to collect masses and masses of unpaid corporation tax, while also trying to convince people you should manage a country’s economy the same way you manage a household budget. A press that relentlessly bullshits its readers and focuses on stirring anger and hate against others who have the fucking cheek to, wait for it, be born or have parents that were born on the other side of a line on a fucking map, because it sells more papers. Companies that aggressively market milk formula in a third world country as an alternative to breastfeeding, leading to the deaths of a significant number of babies due to the unclean water the formula is made up with and other issues (hi Nestlé! Fuck you Nestlé!). Businessmen who will bully and cheat smaller businesses out of money owed just because they can (an example of such a person being the fucktard who is the current Republican Presidential candidate). We’ve got to the point now that the effects of climate change are beginning to be unavoidable, and yet there is still a huge push to deny it is even happening (I’m actually impressed Brian Cox didn’t deck this fucking prick) amongst our elected leaders everywhere, and even the ones who admit it’s happening seem pretty powerless to do a damn thing about it. The opportunities and the progress we’re going to lose over the coming decades because of this deliberate cuntery is heart breaking.

All because being really ridiculously rich or turning over stupidly high profits isn’t enough. They’ve got to be even richer, make even more, pushing our species and our planet’s ability to support us to the brink in the process. I don’t regret having children, but I regret the desolate future I’ve brought them in to. The so-called 'American Dream' is no longer a romantic ideal (if it ever was). It is simply economic wealth at the expense of everything else, and it is poisonous, and has infected many developed and developing countries all over the world, to the detriment of all.

How can this be changed? What can be done? This is the kicker. Everyone thinks you need money, and it is reinforced everywhere. And because that’s what everyone thinks, it means you kind of do need the money. You need money to make headway against it. Even if you’re content, like me, to do the best you can on a smaller scale and live by your own set of values ("Do the good you see in front of you" to once again quote Pratchett), you still need it. Even two working people on, for the area, not terrible salaries, can’t afford a place to live. You could see the confusion in the face of the mortgage advisor when we explained we’re not interested in a Shared Ownership on a newly built shoebox in the middle of a number of other identical shoeboxes, with the intention of climbing the property ladder, but we just want to find a place to settle, comfy enough to set up a home and not move on every few years. We can afford it – over a decade without a single missed rent payment is proof of that, but saving a monster deposit? That we cannot do. So we’re stuck, with a choice between staying put and continuing to rent or moving into the Shared Ownership shoebox. Renting it is, then.

Who decided that living life this way was a good idea? Because it smells like bullshit to me.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:

Hives – Without the Money: “Without the money, there’s nothing you can do.”